Alex believed that was the most sane decision he had ever made in his life. Even after running from the mess, he remained up-to-date about the ongoing chaos on the internet.
As he predicted, a few more of the seniors got bribed and betrayed others to support the players.
Many realized their mistake, but it was already too late to run at that point. A few of them got into lawsuits and ended up in jail for months. Those were still the lucky ones, as a hunt started on social media about all the employees of the company.
Many hackers and shady people joined the fans and started leaking the employees' whereabouts, along with their family status. This led to trolling and threats against employees and their families.
This was also when his family broke all contact with him. Well, he did not blame them or anyone else but himself. It was his incompetence, after all.
At that time, his naive self was not strong enough to live alone, hiding from the world. He tried to contact them through different methods, only to find that they had discarded all the phone numbers he knew of.
He even saw their social profiles supporting the fans in the protest. He thought they were pretending to support the crowd for their protection. It was only later that he found out about his brother-in-law investing all the money in the Star Guild.
So what he thought was a temporary separation turned into a permanent one. He still remembered the last call he got from his mother, six months after that final.
"Hello?"
"Ah, hello, son."
When he heard her voice after so long, he was in disbelief. The first thought that came to his mind was that it was some fake person, but how couldn't he recognize her voice?
When the realization sank in, he barely controlled his tears and talked to her for hours. Ah well, it was not them talking but him pouring out all his stress on the phone.
Most of the time, she just added a word or two to comfort him. He could feel she was a little tense on the phone. Well, he felt guilty for causing all these problems for her.
But during the conversation, he noticed her subtly inquiring about his whereabouts. At first, he dismissed it, thinking it was because she cared about him. He tried to shift the conversation, but one time, two times, she kept asking the same thing one way or another.
If it had been six months earlier, he would not have hesitated to say that, but during those six months, he had seen a lot. But no matter what, he still trusted his family; after all, they were the only people he could rely on in hard times.
For their safety, he gave them a proxy address.
In six months of hiding, he learned many tricks to mislead any hacker, even if they got a lead on him.
To be true, making money was not a big issue for him. Sure, he could not get a job, but nobody could snatch the skills he learned.
With a stolen laptop and fake bank accounts, he was all set to earn through freelancing, but the real problem was the construction site.
The place he lived was where most of the mid-range workers lived. To blend among them, he also joined a construction site. That was a much harder thing for him than earning money.
In those days, he also rented multiple apartments around the city, some with his name and ID, while others had fake IDs.
He gave his mom a nearby proxy address so they would at least know his general location. That was the last time he ever talked to her.
His heart went on fire the next day when he saw his proxy address and all his academic details circulating on a few less-known pages.
Alex felt the bus tumble over a big hole, jolting him out of his thoughts.
He rubbed his forehead; there was no point thinking about those times.
After that incident, there was no family left for him. Everyone became a stranger to him. He was sure someone within that house had sold his information on the web.
The only reason he didn't get caught was because of his inferior status in the firm.
When the address was wrong, no one bothered to search for more information about him. After all, he was just an intern, and people were more interested in the senior staff.
From that day on, he discarded all his false hopes of getting some outsider's help. The only one he believed in was him and him alone.
All this drama ended with the tragedy of six senior employees committing public suicide by jumping from the top of the building, where they had spent more than half their lives.
They did it to protect their families from the masses. When he saw that news, he couldn't help but smile at the nonsense. They did it to protect their families—what a joke! He didn't believe that.
For a moment, he would still believe they did it out of helplessness; after all, even the government was not ready to help them. Well, it did not matter to him.
He was thankful for their sacrifice, and he even mourned for them by staying silent for 10 seconds.
Their actions calmed most of the enraged fans. Despite that, there were a few hardcore haters still out there, looking for and leaking the current whereabouts of the employees, but it wasn't a big threat.
Even a few of the guys who ran with him had their whereabouts leaked, but they didn't face problems relocating.
Their biggest saving grace came a year after all this drama started. It was the start of HUNT 5—a new era of dream reality that took the world by storm, even bigger than last time.
This new version of the game reduced the gap between the imaginary game world and the real world. Unlike the virtual game, this new version works by creating a dream world by inserting a nanocapsule inside the player's brain.
It was so in high demand that even rich people had to wait more than months to insert the capsule into their brains. In the last 3 years, more than 2 billion people have gotten the dream capsule inside their brains.
Today he was going for the same.