You've spent almost two years finding your way to this location. Today is the day...

When, as requested, you complained to Wonder's of Edutainment customer service by yelling out your window, somebody yelled back "Hey, bucko! Go yell at THEM if you got such a problem. Egg their office or something if you're so angry, I dunno. Just stop taking it out on me, geeze!". Following this wise advice has led you on a journey unimaginable. You've crossed streets, searched for sign posts, and met many interesting people who wouldn't stop to help give you directions.

But, finally, you've made it. The headquarters - and only remaining building - of Wonders of Edutainment. The entire corporation shut down about 3 years ago, in 2059, an event that happened literally overnight. Everybody thought it was some weird kind of pyramid scheme falling apart. The CEO was never seen again, along with ten thousand dollars (from a government funded Art In Video Games grant). But today you will finally get answers.

You walk around the decaying building, looking for an entrance. The front door has been effectively sealed off from previous attempts to get into the building- shards of partially broken glass, a car stuck in the wall, remnants of a battering ram. Certainly, other people have had pressing reasons to get inside. Hopefully you'll finally be the one to figure out a way in...

Ah-ha! A side door, barely visible. There is no handle, no sign, no tiny door-window, but by tracing your fingers along the wall here you feel the merest outline of a rectangle gap in the metal. There must be something here! Hopeful that it can be pushed open, you cautiously place your hand on the middle of the door. Nothing gives. Oh, but of course!

You brought with you today a strange, flat piece of material that was hidden inside a cardboard layer of the parcel you received two years ago. Finding no writing on it, you tried shining it under a lamp (testing for lemon ink), shooting x-rays at it (searching for embedded layers of graphite), everything and anything, but no results. The mysteriousness of it made you believe it'd be important for your journey, and so you took it with you today. Now let's see what happens when-

The moment the sheet touches the wall here, it seems to react, and a rectangular section of it moves back an inch, then slides horizontally into a recess in the interior wall. You've done it! You will be the first person to step inside the office of WoE this side of the decade.

Taking a look inside, you quickly realize that this is a small, self-contained room. A storage capsule, if you will. For, what is inside? A single desk, a single chair, and a single computer, still plugged into a single, but massive, battery. Seeing nothing else to do, you seat yourself in the (surprisingly comfortable and clean) chair, and push the power button on the computer. The display immediately fills with information:

"Hello Sergio Cornaga. Yes, this message is for you. I hope you will read it some day... It's been difficult, programming this secret computer in my secret room to make sure only one person, our only one customer, will be the first to find it. Yes... You, Sergio, were the only person to ever buy a game released by my company, Wonders of Edutainment. I'm very grateful for your support in pre-ordering the second edition of World Of Explore. Without that, it would have been impossible for any of what we accomplished to see the light of day.

"Well, I'm sure you want to know what happened. You might remember that our paid reviewer advertised a major feature of the Pro version: being able to change your character on the fly, as some kind of hyper-realized transhumanist possibility. Well, I don't think you could get here without having played the Pro version for yourself and wondering why this essential selling point never came to fruition. I will explain everything here, with the time I have left.

"After we added six new areas to the game (yes, SIX! not THREE!), somebody at our parent company, [the computer displays a series of unparsable symbols], decided to follow up on an off-hand comment we made up for a press release, before we had any plans for what to do next. I don't even remember that happening in the first place but, it's in the archives, anybody can read it, so perhaps I just forgot... And well, we had to design our game according to the shareholders, of course. So we started programming a UI for changing your player character's limbs, while the game runs.

"Revolutionizing the visual ludisphere in such a ground-breaking way was going to ensure our success, not only as an educational games developing company, but as a force for positive change in the world. I wanted people to understand that they could become whomever they wanted to, to truly realize their self. My... benefactors thought differently. They wanted us to become a massive profit generating machine. We were to split the game up into tiny bits: now the Pro Edition would only have half the new areas, and players would need to pay five times the original price to be able to customize themselves in the Custom Edition. In a way, this ended up being for the best.

"The problem was, the avatar modification was too good. Our code worked both for World of Explore as well as reality. Increasingly, everybody in the office started changing themselves, on a daily basis. You could have snakes for hands, or a coffee machine for a head. Harmless stuff, mostly. But people kept pushing it further and further. One day, as a sort of planned prank, half of my employees turned themselves into monkey-elephant hybrids during a business meeting, but their new animal instincts took over and sent them on a rampage, destroying nearly ten thousand copies of the Pro Edition we had in the warehouse.

"This sort of thing, by the way, is why no employee has come forward for an interview since my company's closure. They all became strange creatures, every single one of them, in the end. On the night of May 23, 2059, they just vanished. I don't know where they went or how they got there. I know none of them have left the building, but neither are they still here...

"I tried reaching people from [those strange symbols again], if they knew where my employees went, or what they were planning to do with the only remaining copy of Pro Edition, or how I could possibly afford packaging the Custom Edition by myself, but they never responded. I did, however, find a memo that was clearly not meant for me. I don't dare share the knowledge, lest you be in trouble for knowing it, and I'm sorry that you will likely never get an answer to that.

"At 11pm, on May 23rd, I knew what I had to do. I deleted all of the code for the Custom Edition, and tried my best to wipe out knowledge of its existence from this world. I left the building, locking the doors behind me, along with what cash was left from our grant. I've seen the news, I know everybody thought I stole it for myself. But I used it only in making sure that you, Sergio Cornaga, dang well got your copy of Pro Edition. It's not much, but it's something. I just wanted there to be one good thing to come out of this nightmarish disaster.

"I don't know what you'll think of this, or me, or World of Explore after reading this. Oh, and don't try to find me, I can't risk attention being drawn. Goodbye.

Signed, Wonders of Edutainment CEO"

Wow! You resolve to not tell anybody else about this. It's just too weird.