Daily Flash Fiction

Detective Rodriguez eyed the crime scene with weary frustration. Bloodstains marked a broken struggle, but there was no sign of forced entry, no fingerprints he could pull up. He knelt, inspecting scuff marks that seemed oddly deliberate. This looked less like a mugging gone wrong than…a stage, almost.

The victim, an eccentric software millionaire, had a reputation for reclusiveness. Rumor had it his fortune wasn't in bank accounts, but in uncrackable code buried within his most recent release.

"Look at this, boss," his tech-savvy junior, Santos, tapped at a nearby laptop, the millionaire's half-finished game open on the screen. "These aren't graphics errors. This is binary scattered through the sprites. Looks deliberate."
Hours spent wrestling with ones and zeros led to more code disguised as music files, even hidden in the pixel arrangement of background trees. This wasn't a game, it was a maddening trail of clues. Finally, they managed to extract an address.

They didn't raid an underground safehouse; they found an obscure bookstore, filled with dusty first editions and vintage cipher equipment. On a hidden shelf sat a cracked leather journal. Handwritten across the yellowing pages was: "It's written in code."

Beneath that, more code. Decoding led to a series of bank accounts across several havens, a fortune cleverly siphoned through the guise of software purchases. It seemed the killer had been far closer to the millionaire than expected – and far greedier. The victim hadn't just played games, he'd left the clues to his own murder within one.