The room was small, measuring exactly three by four meters. The temperature inside was maintained at a constant eighteen degrees Celsius, the optimal value for cooling the hardware spread across two metal tables.
A faint smell of ozone and heated dust hung in the air. In the center of the room stood a reclining chair where someone was lying. It was a tall youth with blue hair falling into his eyes and a relaxed expression on his face. His name was Tori.
Tori was unique in two ways. First, he owned hardware that didn't exist on the open market. It was a modified military neuro-link, originally designed for the lag-free remote control of drones in combat zones. Second, his mind—capable of processing raw data without the need for a visual interface—was at the very edge of human limits. Because of this, he had been dedicated to programming since childhood and excelled at it absolutely.
That was why he decided to enter Project Ouroboros.
If anyone were to ask Tori's friends—he basically only had two, both online—why he decided to hack one of the most dangerous games on the planet, they would say it was "typical of him." He always had to test the limits and prove he was the smartest person in the room.
But the truth was far more prosaic and painful.
An image from last week suddenly flashed before his eyes. His mother and father begging a man in an expensive suit, promising him the world just to give them a little more time. The man only looked at them coldly, kicked his father in the stomach, and remarked that they had exactly one week. Otherwise, they could start saying goodbye to their kidneys.
Tori blinked and tried to banish those memories. His hands began to shake slightly as he reached for the first sensor.
'Here we go,' he whispered to the empty room. His voice sounded hollower than he intended.
Ouroboros wasn't just any ordinary MMORPG. Tori had first heard about it two years ago on an IRC channel, where someone with the handle "SerpentEater" claimed to have access to a game that "changed the rules of VR gaming." At first, he thought it was just a scam advertisement for a game that didn't even exist.
Then, however, he saw the screenshots and the entry price tag. Subsequently, he began to dig deeper and discovered the game was indeed real, as were the large sums people paid for game data and rare accounts.
The game had been globally banned three years ago.
The reason wasn't necessarily its content, but its very nature and the reason it stood out so much. It bypassed your brain's safety protocols directly. If an enemy hit you in a standard VR game, the system sent a gentle touch signal to the brain. But if they hit you in Ouroboros, the system simulated brain tissue damage with such precision that players commonly fell into clinical shock.
Tori had seen a report about this game and its victims on television some time ago. The report featured a man in a hospital, shaking and screaming, though physically unharmed. Beside him was another victim, a woman huddled terrified in a corner because she thought she was on fire, even though her skin was without a single blemish.
And yet, thousands of players went there. The game ran on a decentralized network of infected devices worldwide—from smart refrigerators to car control units. That was why it was impossible to shut down.
Tori was just about to log into the game. He had no intention of completing tedious quests or fighting other players for illegal cryptocurrencies that served as in-game currency. In fact, he didn't even plan to play the game for long. He enjoyed programming more than the gaming itself.
He just wanted to test his own custom-written script. The script's goal was to bypass the standard avatar creation process, skip the annoying server queue, and inject his consciousness directly into the game's physics engine. He wanted access to the world's raw data before the server could render it for other players.
He had spent five nights on the code. He drank fourteen energy drinks and went through seven iterations of the injection protocol.
Even though Ouroboros was banned, it was still an extremely popular game among the wealthier and crazier. And it had very good security. If Tori obtained and sold that source data, he could make a tidy sum. Perhaps enough to save his parents and never have to listen to his mother's muffled crying through the wall again.
He attached eight needle sensors to his temples and the back of his neck. The needles penetrated twelve millimeters under the skin to connect directly to nerve endings. Tori took a deep breath and felt the adrenaline pumping through his veins.
Tori's heart rate slowed to forty beats per minute, and his breathing became shallow. Monitoring programs on the real-world screens reported successful suppression of the physical body's motor functions. He closed his eyes, and his mind plunged into darkness and silence.
This state usually lasted seven point four seconds before the server assigned the user a three-dimensional avatar mesh and filled it with textures and physical properties.
Ten seconds passed.
Fifteen seconds passed.
Eighteen seconds passed, and Tori still saw nothing.
His heart, which the system had slowed to a resting state, suddenly began to pound.
'What's happening?! The script was supposed to take less than one second!'
The script, which was supposed to transfer his consciousness directly into the zone with the highest processing priority, hit a server security patch. The game system detected an unauthorized entry vector. Instead of disconnecting him—which would have led to an immediate neuro-link reboot and a massive migraine he would have been recovering from for three days—the server attempted an automatic error correction.
The system read Tori's data.
[Entity ID 894-Alpha. Status: Active. Position Request: Coordinates X:1450, Y:30, Z:8900.]
The problem occurred during physical body assignment. Tori's script had intentionally deleted the library of humanoid models to save milliseconds during loading. It was an elegant solution in theory, but a disaster in practice.
The server, facing a paradox—the entity is present but has no defined shape—made a logical decision based on its architecture. It assigned Tori's ID to the nearest available dynamic system at the given coordinates.
That system was not Tori-the-player, an NPC character, an animal, or even a physical object.
He became a sub-system of the dynamic weather. Specifically, a local atmospheric model of air mass movement.
Tori woke up abruptly, but the term "waking up" wasn't accurate at all.
He didn't open his eyes. He had no optic nerve, cornea, or cerebral cortex to process photons. He lacked hearing, smell, and taste.
The first reaction of his mind, which still functioned on the foundations of human logic, was pure panic. He was in absolute blindness and paralysis. He saw nothing but empty, infinite darkness.
'It's not working. It's not working. It's not working,' he thought.
Tori imagined his body in the real world lying on the chair. Veins full of metabolism-slowing drugs and a brain disconnected from motor functions. If he didn't log out correctly, he could fall into a coma.
'MY GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!'
He wanted to scream, but he had no mouth. Wave his hands, but he had no hands. He tried to open eyes that didn't exist.
This state, however, lasted only a fraction of a second before his consciousness began to interpret the new input data that the server was sending directly to his neuro-link.
The system was sending him a wealth of data on pressure, density, temperature, vector, speed, and so on.
His programmer's brain, trained to analyze raw values, latched onto this information like a drowning man to a rope. He began to sort through it, looking for anything useful.
After a moment of rummaging through data and frustrated thinking, he realized something... his existence in space.
His "body" spread across an area of hundreds of square meters. He perceived that his upper part—or rather, the area with the highest altitude—had a lower temperature, exactly -2 degrees Celsius. His lower part, just above the ground's surface, was warming up from the textures of the virtual soil to 14 degrees Celsius.
He began to "see" the world through contact echolocation. He perceived every point where his gaseous structure touched a solid object. Beneath him, he felt millions of tiny, parallel obstacles—it was a meadow with grass. Each blade of grass created microscopic resistance against his pressure.
A bit further away, he felt massive cylindrical obstacles with a thick, uneven texture on the surface. These were clearly trees. However, he didn't see their color, nor did he know if they had green leaves. He only perceived their collision models and how they broke apart his mass as he tried to maintain uniform pressure.
'Okay, okay, calm down,' he told himself, though even then he wasn't entirely sure.
His uniqueness lay in the fact that he didn't go insane. An average person, faced with such a massive sensory overload and loss of body shape, would likely have triggered an emergency disconnect immediately or lost their mind.
Tori, however, quickly understood the physical model of his new existence.
He was an entity defined by the equations of thermodynamics and aerodynamics within the game engine. In short, he was the wind. He wasn't a player, but ordinary wind.
A part of his mind, the rational part, immediately began to calculate the possibilities.
'So, if I understand this correctly, I'm the wind? Fucking wind?'
Then it flashed in his mind. 'But wait... if I managed to sell this account... which of those rich snobs wouldn't want to play as a weather god? This is more unique than any legendary avatar. This isn't a bug; it's a fucking feature!'
Scarcely had a smile touched his non-existent face when reality caught up with him...