The CEO of the company was looking at the SourceForge profile of the game. He was a big, fat, bald, loud man.
"How the hell have they managed to pull this off?" he boomed.
"I guess they are good developers," quipped the head of the games division.
The CEO threw a chair across the room in a bout of anger and ranted "I always say that we need better developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers! Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers."
Another employee, who was in charge of the drone division, barged into the room then.
"Boss! It's a catastrophe!" he exclaimed. "The drones went crazy and are tearing everything apart!"
"Jeez! Don't you see that we have ears here?!" admonished him the CEO. "Besides, what have I told you about plausible deniability?"
"I don't think it matters much now."
The other man didn't know what they were talking about but then he saw from a window a crowd of people running away. He didn't wait for anything and ran to a nearest elevator.
"Coward!" yelled the CEO and threw another chair.
"Sir, we need to evacuate."
"No, we need to go there and contain it!"
"But how? They aren't responding to orders."
The CEO pushed a secret button and a secret panel in a wall slid open. There was a massive power armor hidden there. In fact, it was more like a big robot with space inside for a pilot. Only, the front part of its armor was missing to make space for a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor. It definitely looked like... well, like an opening in the otherwise impenetrable armor.
"Help me get in there," ordered the CEO.
Bella was observing the whole thing from a ventilation shaft. She contacted Emmett.
"Change of plans," she told him. "Don't cut the rope, just loose a few screws a little. He's bringing in more weight that we have anticipated."
When the CEO got inside the robot and turned its computer on, he had to wait for quite a while for the OS to boot. While he was waiting, he reminisced bitterly how Steve Jobs convinced one of the developers working on the Macintosh project to speed the machine's startup up.
"Can I go now?" asked the head of the drone division.
"No, I need you to open the doors for me."
The CEO made a few mouse-clicks and the robot started moving. The head of the division opened the door of the office but when the CEO tried to walk out, the robot's head caught on top of the doorway.
"Sir, the robot is too big to pass through," informed the head.
The CEO leaned out from his cockpit and grunted something. He made some more mouse-clicks and the robot waved its hand, clearing the way.
"Call the elevator!" he ordered when they got there.
"Are you sure it will be able to carry you?"
"Hey, I'm dieting, just so you know. And it's going to carry both of us just fine."
"You want me to come with you?"
"It's your division."
Bella, Edward, Emmett, and Rosalie were waiting on top of the elevator already. Once their enemies were inside and the elevator got moving, they nodded at each other and jumped on spot. That was the last straw. The cabin tore off and plummeted down.
The CEO was cushioned by his armor so he survived, though he was banged up badly. More importantly, the monitor still worked even with being damaged partially. However, the other man broke his neck in the fall.
The CEO clambered out of the elevator and stumbled into a dark basement. Strange, he had never seen this floor. Pressing the bottom button always took the elevator to a floor above this one.
He switched the robot's lights on and took a look around. Among the dust, he spotted four penguins. The rational part of his brain was telling him that they were only pictures on T-shirts. Still, he couldn't see heads of the wearers very well because they were wearing black ski-masks so it looked quite scary.
"I have four words for you," yelled the CEO. "I. Love. This. Company!"
He started clicking his mouse while yelling "Yeah!"
When it was over, Emmett remarked, "Well, he died bravely."
"If you can say that about getting a heart attack from getting overexcited," sneered Bella.
They left the compound and observed the situation unfold from afar. The drones started to self-destruct at a specific time, just like they had been programmed.
Jasper picked them up afterwards and they drove out of the city as quietly as they had arrived.
Representatives of big search engines, video-sharing platforms, social media, and such assembled in an Illuminati-style meeting.
"Well, gentlemen, this will effectively hamstring them," proclaimed a representative of a big search engine. "Leaking the technology to them was a gamble but it blew in their faces more spectacularly than we have ever hoped. Their founder is trying to mitigate the calamity but at this moment, it's only a question of time. They will have to join tour fold. I dare say that they'll even join the Linux foundation one day. And with their HQ destroyed, they may even relocate to Silicon Valley where we are strong. Then, there will be no one left to oppose us! Hahahahahahaha!"
"What about the Linux community?" asked somebody. "Shouldn't we rethink throwing our support behind them? The recently deceased CEO said that his company will develop a Unix better than Linux. Maybe we should go this way."
"Don't worry," retorted somebody else. "I'm sure it won't be that difficult to find some dirt on Linus Torvalds. When the time comes, we'll make him our pawn."
"Exactly," agreed the first speaker. "We'll infiltrate Linux, make it look cool, then we'll take over. Hahahahahahaha!"
They discussed the reaction of public to the events in the HQ and how were they going to suppress any mention of the drones and how to control the overall narrative regarding the matter.
Edward and Bella ended up just like they had started - in a basement. However, this workplace looked diametrically different - it was a proper computer lab. They weren't working on a video game either. That is, Bella wasn't. At the moment, Edward was writing a post on a SourceForge forum of the sequel of their game. He explained that he hadn't written all the code personally but he reviewed it and committed it. He was willing to keep maintaining it if necessary but he wasn't going to implement any new big features and the moment somebody else touched something, it was theirs.
"By the way, have you heard about Jasper?" he uttered when he was done.
"Huh?" replied Bella without taking her eyes of her screen. "You mean about him being a consultant for the story of the sequel?"
The community was planning to make it a trilogy. Part two about the modern history of the dragon's world and part three in space. To be honest, Bella and Edward weren't sure how was the engine going to handle that.
"No, he's making an independent animated movie based on his vision of the canonical story of the game. Alice and Rosalie are working with him and Emmett agreed to help them as needed."
Bella murmured something absentmindedly and then started discussing their current project with Edward.
Before they taught their mortal enemy a lesson, they supported a certain company which had created a popular search engine. Afterwards, they realized that if this company was going to be the next big thing in the world of IT, they should undertake steps to support balance and to prevent it from obtaining a monopoly in the field. When one of Carlisle's acquaintances contacted them and told them about a project aiming to become an alternative, they didn't hesitate and joined in.
"By the way, Alice told me something disturbing about Emmett and Rosalie," divulged Edward after a while.
That got Bella's attention. She turned in her chair and waited for him to elaborate.
"They venture into public sometimes, pretending to be together. You know, like on a date. In a restaurant, for example."
Bella was horror-struck.
"And because this transformation of ours gave us these utterly useless good looks, they garner attention of people around usually. Only then they start behaving and talking normally. About changes in the code of the upcoming release of the core, personality disorders, and such."
Bella snickered despited her revulsion. Then the later won out.
"That's disgusting. I admit, I enjoy a good trolling as anybody else but this is dangerously close to socializing."
"Amen."
Edward turned back to his screen but then he turned back to Bella and asked, "By the way, would you like to take a break and play a few rounds of 0verkill?"
"Sure thing!"
The dragon observes the geeks as they geek out in their basement. He isn't there in person, of course - he uses a small bird to watch them through a basement window.
All in all, the whole situation has resolved itself quite cleanly. He suspected for a long time that the vampire venom was still out there somewhere. Now that "they" have leaked it to a company which made a terrible blunder with it, he can track it back to its source.
Even greater gain are the geeks themselves and their peculiar reaction to the venom. Old vampires were either feral or creepy and inhuman (the latter put the latter down usually). New ones are just feral, which is why the company adopted the practice of lobotomizing them and putting microchips in their heads. Now these four friends (and the dragon suspects that the remaining four would turn out equally well) are... well, creepy and inhuman once again but in a different way which can be considered as not necessarily bad by some and as hilarious to a certain degree by others.
This unexpected turn of events is the reason why the message which his agents have laid seeds of in their minds was relayed more strongly than he expected. It's part of his long-term plan of subliminal propaganda which his people conduct in case his existence gets accidentally revealed.
The dragon breaks the connection and takes off. Just as he was warned, the world has become more complicated than ever. It's probably so because there are more people than ever. But, as always, he remains optimistic.