Chapter 10

Chapter 10 HELCOME TO THE TEAM! I HOPE YOU SURVIVE THE EXPERIENCE. Theo!!! Theo was here, with them. Theo was the hacker! Harper couldn't believe her eyes. But then again, why should she believe them? Just because the avatar looked like Theo, that didn't mean Theo was the player behind the avatar. "DON'T WORRY, GUYS," he said. "I'm here to solve all your problems!" Okay, thought Harper. That is definitely the real Theo.

"Hey, man!" said Po. "WELCOME TO THE PARTY." "Hold up," said Harper. "We need to talk about some things first. You mean to tell me you've been working with Ms. Minerva this whole time?" "I wish I had been," said Theo. "That would have helped you avoid some trouble. BUT I'VE BEEN ON MY OWN UNTIL RECENTLY." "Start at the beginning," said Ash. "Tell us everything."

Theo nodded. "For me, IT STARTED WHEN THE EVOKER KING INFILTRATED THE SCHOOL'S SYSTEMS. I noticed right away that something was up with the computers, and I did some digging in the code. FROM WHAT I SAW, IT WAS PRETTY OBVIOUS THAT WE'D BEEN HACKED." "What did you do?" asked Morgan. "I went straight to Ms. Minerva," he answered. "And that's when things got really interesting." Theo paused for dramatic effect. Harper huffed. "Just tell us what happened, Theo!" she said. "All right, all right! Ms. Minerva knew more than she was willing to tell me. But she was impressed with my hacking skills, and she asked me to take a look at a VR headset…and the server that

was running your Minecraft game. I COULD SEE WHERE DOC'S TINKERING HAD CAUSED SOME STRANGE THINGS TO HAPPEN. The source of all the strangeness was a key bit of code in Doc's modifications. A programmer would call it a bug. You call it…the Foundation Stone." "SO THE FOUNDATION STONE IS THE SOURCE OF ALL THE WEIRDNESS?" Morgan asked. "Even before the Evoker King started messing with us, we noticed that this world wasn't exactly like a standard game of Minecraft." "For instance," said Jodi, "I can do handstands." She did one, to illustrate her point. Po clapped his square hands and said, "YOU CAN'T DO THAT IN VANILLA MINECRAFT." Theo began to pace on the platform. "That's right. The bug is like this…little seed of possibility. IT MAKES THIS PLACE A LITTLE MORE WEIRD AND A LITTLE MORE WONDERFUL." "I still think it might be magic," Po said. "I'm like ninety-five percent sure." Harper knocked him lightly on the head while Theo continued.

"IN OTHER WORDS, THE BUG—THE FOUNDATION STONE—IS ACTUALLY HAVING A POSITIVE EFFECT. That seed was flowering and evolving the game to have new possibilities. You're having more fun because of it, not less. But you had to be inside to know that. From the outside looking in—just looking at how the code was working—it just looked like a mistake. A flaw in the system. And Doc's goal as an inventor is to correct her mistakes—and to eliminate flaws." "How would she do that?" asked Ash. "With a tool she's used before: artificial intelligence." Theo smirked. "She introduced the

Evoker King into the game's code. She gave it a simple command: find what was wrong and fix it. GET RID OF THE CHAOS. IMPOSE ORDER!" "So why hasn't he done that?" asked Morgan. "What went wrong?" "You did," said Theo. "The AI's mission got a lot more complicated when a bunch of kids showed up and started moving things around at random. Building. Exploring. Causing change. MY THEORY IS THAT YOUR APPEARANCE FORCED THE AI TO EVOLVE. IT BECAME THE EVOKER KING. But he still had the same mission. He had wanted to find and neutralize the Foundation Stone…but at some point, he decided to use it instead. He must have realized that he could weaponize it against the greater threat. You." "THAT IS…A LOT TO PROCESS," said Ash. "So Ms. Minerva brought you in, and you built the dungeon?" Harper asked Theo. "And you reskinned the mobs we fought there?" "Yeah, but you were never supposed to fight them. I WAS TRYING TO KEEP THE EVOKER KING AWAY FROM THE FOUNDATION STONE. He's actually not very creative. So my dungeon