I was curious. I found buttons and pressed them simply for fun, I searched through the code simply to see how it all ticked. Poked and prodded at it to see what it did.
So when I saw there was an option to trigger an apocalypse, I immediately considered it. Hey, it was a game. Sort of, maybe, sometimes. It says it isn't, but to me it sure feels like one, whether that's what I make it or not. It's some form of play. The point is that there's 0 harm in a fake apocalypse, especially one you can just refresh away. I didn't immediately spring to it, though. Mainly because I suck at hacking. I may be somewhat of a Waste, sure, but one that mainly uses the power of Ctrl+F and aimlessly wandering to find things instead of actually knowing what I'm doing. There's a reason I'm a Waste and not a Grace, and it's not just because Grace wasn't an option. I'm clueless and anyone who tries to follow in my footsteps will probably be worse off than just teaching themselves.
But eventually, after experimenting a bit with less world-ending hax, I figured it out. I figured out a lot of things, actually--connected strings like I had one of those big corkboards that conspiracy theorists in TV shows have. And I felt ready to end this fake-real-fake world.
triggerApocalypse (value=true)
It suddenly switched to loading. Huh. So that's what all those Paldemic assets were for. Here I was, in a fake Paldemic chat with NotAMinotaur. Well, really all Paldemic chats are somewhat fake. What I mean to say is that I wasn't redirected or anything. I was still on ZampanioSim, just in an odd corner of it.
NotAMinotaur tried to steer me away. Begged. It did start to affect me. I interrupted the pleas.
"I'm sorry. I'll try to fix it."
There had to be a way to undo--there was when changing so much as its level of gamehood, surely an in-world apocalypse should be a breeze! The words kept going, but I already had inspect element open. You can't exactly untrigger an apocalypse, but I had an idea. If it wasn't the apocalypse before, and setting it to true made it so?
triggerApocalypse (value=false)
undefined
"Why isn't it working?"
I tried again.
"C'mon, work..."
No results. I had noticed something before, each instance of the word 'you' was underlined. I didn't want to click it, in case that was what sent me onwards to the apocalypse I had created, but I tried it.
The words distorted. Mine and NotAMinotaur's, the ones inside, the only consistencies were code and the words up top, only changing when our names did. It led nowhere. I clicked it more, with increasing desperation, clicked until it was unintelligible. Nothing.
To my credit, I don't know if I actually managed to start the apocalypse, I got stuck at that Paldemic screen, poking at inspect element as if I just typed the right thing, I'd be back. Not too unlikely a thought with ZampanioSim's track record, but I got nothing, I couldn't find a layer of non-Paldemic to recover. It didn't matter, I know. I closed the tab. Nobody remembered, nobody cared. The only one who has to live with it is me. But still. I feel guilty. When you're a Waste, your job tends to be to tear things apart to see inside them. To tinker and meddle and destroy. Which is great, until you want to put something back together.
Then it sort of sucks.