17 Hit the Road, Jack! : Hit the ‘Government Is Trying to Overtake Things’ !

*Attention all players, a new game mode will be implemented soon. All NPC employees will be moved to this new game mode. Servers are up for taking. Good luck. *

Squeam had plenty of connection routes to its mental space, and it was an almost infinite space in the first place (requiring only programming), so it wouldn't ever re-write the game with patches.

Rather, it would simply move the game to a new place inside this space, while letting the old world behind.

This way, the old world would keep existing, all game avatars and etc as well. The old world, by its time, could then be purchased from Squeam, piece by piece or whole.

These old worlds were already a main sensation amongst youthful, prodigal sons, since they would become rightful owners and could do whatever they wanted there - like re-building the world from zero or something like that.

Also, since the game would have been sold, Squeam wouldn't be in control of it at all, or responsible for what happened there. It would charge a heavy monthly fee for the usage of its mind-travelling devices and dedicated connection, so, most of the cases, people wouldn't buy the world whole, but rather pieces of it - creating bizarre places were in one side you had a futuristic city and in the other a bustling jungle.

There were more than a few of these worlds already, as Squeam had launched 30 new versions of the game so far, but few remained in their original owners' hands.

Once someone was seen doing criminal things on these worlds, and that happened a lot, especially with low-scale drug and vr-drug dealers, as long as the law dictated so, Squeam would cut the connection from the responsible owner and, usually, re-claim the world for itself based on Contract Policies.

Sometimes, however, the Law dictated that the perpetrators' possessions should be given to the government, specially if they didn't had enough money on hand, so the world would be given to the government.

Many governments had small worlds for themselves already, without even the need to pay for them upfront. They just needed to wait until a small criminal syndicate brought one and then seize it for themselves.

Of course, that didn't mean that these governments knew how to use these little worlds. The problem with governments is how slowly they move and adapt to the times. Up until now, some kept trying to sue Squeam or charge taxes upon its products, like "pay 10 million for every minute of people being logged in this thing of yours!", but they just failed miserably all the while.

Not only was it difficult going against Squeams' lawyer team, cutting of Squeam from a country was naught impossible. It was just too big of a corporation, with too many fingers in too many places!

Not only that, since it was quite addictive, once the governments around the world took notice of Another World Project, hundreds of thousands or even millions of its citizens where already hooked on it.

Trying to cut it out by force would bring not only a sharp decline in popularity, but even civil unrest - just like the prohibition in the 1920s'.

Squeam had the world in a leash. So, as the governments seized small worlds to themselves, the price of one in the market kept increasing every time.

Of course, not all worlds where used to illegal things, and some even had become separate games owned by Startup projects and the like (the fact that the 'Squeam Startup Sponsoring' subsidiary was a main investor would always be a clause under the confidentiality contract, though).

Also, even inside the official Another World Itself, there would be some illegal things going on, like a guy hiring his Neuroset to teens, people meeting to make deals or things like this.

Some game devs had been allocated to search for this people amongst the A.I. filter list, and even special adventuring squads, the "detective squads" had even been formed in order to catch real world criminals inside Squeams' main game. Some had Interpol people on them, while others where just common people who liked to play detective and, once a while, make a profit out of it.

Regardless, what this meant was that Another World Project was, basically, a reinvention of the internet as it was in the 1990s´.

A no-mans' land, but now under strict control and vigilance of a private corporation, rather than the U.S. army.