Katelyn Mills 29F (Futa, Programmer/Hacker, Goddess)

You smile as you put the finishing touches on your masterpiece.

Not the character you'd just created; that was just what you came up with for a world that was clearly going to be full of hentai tropes. Not that you were displeased with it, but it wasn't your real work.

It all began on that fateful day. An asteroid, heading for Earth. Direct collision course; no possibility of survival. The planet would be uninhabitable by anything but the hardiest life for millennia afterward, and humans were far from hardy enough to make it. Humanity was doomed.

And then, almost as soon as the asteroid had been sighted, came the saviours: an extraterrestrial race, offering humanity technology that would allow them to store and simulate every sentient mind on the planet with far lower power demands than anything humanity could have invented in thousands of years.

A gigantic worldwide project commenced, drawing in specialists from every area of IT. For someone who'd been struggling to find stable work since you graduated from university, the project was like a godsend, especially since there would be ongoing demand for continued maintenance after the simulation was fully active.

At least, so you thought until you were called into a meeting with your manager only a month into the project.

"Sorry, Katelyn," he said abruptly. Everyone felt the urgency of the moment; many on the project had mostly abandoned the niceties. "You're a great programmer. But you're not much of a team player. If we're gonna get this done on time, we need teams that work well together, and you're not fitting in."

All you could do was sit there dumbly and nod.

"Look," he went on, "there's going to be plenty of work over the next year or so for a talented dev like yourself. We're going to have the sandbox environments rolling out in a few weeks"--you knew that, that had been the first priority--"and there's gonna be a lot of businesses wanting to make sure their systems still work after the upload. I know you want to help here but you're just going to slow us down, as good as you are. You'll get the full suite of benefits for project employees, of course."

You just nodded again.

"Finish the day. I know you've got that bug fix half-done. But then pack up your desk and go home."

You nodded again, feeling empty. Sitting back down at your computer, you wrote code in a half-stupor, sending the finished product off before leaving.

At least the severance was damn generous.

Getting back to your apartment and flopping down at your own computer, you played some video games for a while until your friend Tina, whom you'd known since school and had been working at the same site as you, was off for the day.

"Bastards fired me," you sent.

"Fuck, you too?" she replied.

That made you blink.

"They said I wasn't a team player," you told her.

"Haha same," came Tina's reply.

"Hey," you suggest, getting the germ of an idea from what your former manager had mentioned, "I've got an idea for how we can make bank over the next year. Meet me for dinner? Usual place?"

"Be there in twenty?" Tina suggests.

"See you soon!"

While waiting for your meal, you make your pitch.

"Look, what do you say we start our own business? There's going to be a lot of demand for folks who can work out the kinks"--Tina giggled at your choice of words, fitting since the simulation's visual style had been decided and people were already making erotic concept art of how they'd look and what they'd do in it--"in the current systems so that they'll keep working. Sandbox environments'll be deployed soon and I read through the contract, there's a clause in there that gives folks like us fast-track access to certain resources so that we can continue to aid the effort even from the outside."

Tina nodded. Despite your shared irritation at not working on the project itself, both of you were firmly committed to aiding humanity's survival in whatever ways you could. And if you could make bank along the way, so much the better.

"What do you have in mind?" Tina asked.

"We should be able to get all the approvals necessary to start our own small consulting firm in the time it takes to get the sandboxes out there. I already have a reference letter from my manager talking up my talents--and if it's just the two of us that whole 'team' thing isn't going to be so relevant."

Tina nodded again. "I got one too. Nice work on that bug fix, by the way."

"Nice work finding it," you say in return.

"So you're saying, what, one dev, one tester, out to make sure the trains run on time in a year?"

"Something like that," you say, smiling.

The plan, everyone knew, was that after a short period of acclimation life should largely go back to normal. Oh, there were a few professions that would probably not be nearly as necessary, like medical professionals. There were already retraining programs being devised to take advantage of their skills. But importantly, even though everything would just be bits in a computer, it was still expected that people would hold down a job, spend money on goods and services, and so on. That meant that businesses needed to make sure that their payroll systems worked, and that banks needed to make sure that their operations would still function.

With the fast-track process that governments were contractually obligated to give you, you and Tina had your new business up and running just as your services became relevant. The fact that both of you had worked on the project and had glowing letters of recommendation shot you near the top of the list when you started sending out solicitation messages and companies started looking for specialists.

There were plenty of businesses--some old and adapting, some new--just like yours, of course, but there was far more than enough work to go around. Everyone was paying high rates to make sure that nothing would go wrong, and soon you had a few ongoing contracts that would keep you and Tina firmly in the green until the uploads began in earnest.

With about a month to go, the brain scanners were sent out and the body scanners were deployed around the world. Privacy of thought was an absolute guarantee in the simulation--it was even fully implemented in the sandbox--so you had no hesitation in slapping the brain scanner onto the back of your neck. With three weeks to go, you stood in line to get your body scan. Most people would just have that uploaded as their model for the simulation, with maybe a tweak here and there to fix some small imperfection. Those who wanted to make bigger changes had access to the basic, yet still extensive, character creator that was freely available to the public.

People like you and Tina had access to the much more sophisticated creator that was made available only to people who'd worked on the project.

Given what wasn't in the basic program when you'd looked at it, you could only roll your eyes when you saw the sorts of things that were available in the one you got. Never mind giving yourself tits, cunt, dick and pointy ears; with this thing you could be a full-blown taur or lamia.

You quickly made your new body: much larger boobs, sensitive pussy, foot-long dick, and four phallic tentacles to go under your arms. You showed it to Tina; she laughed and showed you what she was going to be, a four-breasted lamia with elf ears.

With that done, you got to work on your real masterpiece.

You hadn't pointed it out to Tina, but you'd noticed a few flaws in the sandbox over the previous year. You knew it would have to be really damn accurate to what the finished product would be, so you were pretty confident that any custom code that would exploit those holes in the sandbox would work in the final version. So you got to work on writing a virus.

Given your experience, it actually wasn't that difficult to write. The real challenge was embedding it in your character image in a way that wouldn't get picked up when you uploaded it.

Unlike most people, whose upload times were randomly drawn, you got to pick yours, and you decided to go in the first wave, both to give yourself more time to acclimate and to make sure your worm worked. If it didn't, you were pretty sure that you'd just be stuck as a tentacled futa, and there were worse things to be when the entire world would probably end up devolving into a hentai porno.

Your virus was pretty simple in what it did: it created a new level of program access above all others, and assigned it to you, and only you, upon upload of your consciousness.

That access would allow you to override any and all aspects of the simulation, giving you, in theory, complete control of every aspect of it. You could override every safeguard, overwrite any data, reallocate any resources.

If your virus worked, you would become humanity's god.