Excerpt: Anything Not Saved Will Be Lost

Sam had connected to the servers from the computer in his home office. There were more boxes here like the ones there had been at the other office. Sam stepped away to let Ky sit in the computer chair. She pulled out the USB drive and inserted into Sam's computer.
“We're looking for a large data transfer to your severs at a specific time,” said Ky, tapping some keys. “Oh, this is different then what I'm used to looking at.”
“Yeah, these are game activity logs,” said Sam. “They tell me everything that happens in the game. I can watch everything from here.”
“Alright, I think I've matched up the time of the data transfer to this item on the game activity log,” said Ky, pointing to the screen. “What does that mean?”
“Hmm,” said Sam. “Looks like a player created a book object. Must be a paper mill character, or something along those lines.”
“Okay, what do you do with a book object?” asked Ky.
“Well, they can hold text files,” said Sam. “They're used a lot for in-game guides, and things like that, but the hope was that players would eventually start writing histories of game events, and things like that.”
“But, theoretically, they could hold any textual information,” said Ky, beginning to piece things together.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” said Sam, with an interested expression. “We would hope the players would try to stay in-game, but, really--”
“So the data I need is written in a virtual book in a fantasy game world,” Ky said, flatly.
Sam nodded his head slowly. “Looks like that might be the case.”