Dylan Merchant

"I CAN FINISH IT. IT WOULD BE NICE IF MORE THAN ONE PERSON AT THIS DAMNED COMPANY ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD HOW HUGE THIS COULD BE. I'LL FINISH IT MYSELF IF I HAVE TO. DO YOUR BORING DAILLY GRIND DRONE WORK AND I'LL DO THIS MYSELF BECAUSE I'M APPARENTLY THE ONLY PERSON WITH CREATIVE VISION HERE."

- One of Dylan's leaked ChitChat messages.

"Yes, I'm THAT Dylan. Hi."

- Dylan's Hypnospace page description.

Dylan Merchant is the primary antagonist of the video game Hypnospace Outlaw. He is the COO of Merchantsoft and the lead programmer of the Hypnospace service. After the player joins the HSPD Enforcer team, he occasionally messages them to comment on their progress.

History
Dylan co-founded the software company Merchantsoft alongside his brother, Adrian. Among other things, they created the Sleeptime operating system HypnOS, which taps into the user's brain with a special headband and allows them to browse the internet as they sleep. While Hypnospace proved successful, it faced competition from the similar service CyberWorldZ, a more geek focused OS with better graphics and more games. In an attempt to surpass them, Dylan began work on Outlaw, a HypnOS exclusive game in which the player drives a car around and captures outlaws with a beam.

Dylan focused intensively on creating the game, ignoring the increasingly poor state of the Hypnospace community. He planned to get the game out before the planned New Year's update, despite the very buggy state of the game and Merchantsoft employee Samantha's heeding to delay the game and focus on the update after testing the latter gave her "the worst headache of my life".

In addition, speculation began that the Hypnospace headbands are detrimental to the users' health, prompting Merchantsoft to commission a study to silence the rumors. While the Beefbrain hoax the study was intended to debunk turned out false, the study in turn uncovered that the headbands keep the users in the first stages of sleep, thus not giving them enough rest. The heads at Merchantsoft buried these reports and developed a false one in-house.

Throughout the game, Dylan interferes with the player's enforcement duty twice; once by sending them a beta of Outlaw, which outright bricks their headset, and again by angrily banning them after they attempt to report his FLIST page full of illegal music downloads.

Come New Year's Eve, the Year 2000 update is released, with Outlaw v0.99.9 separately downloading around the turn of the millenium. However, the addition of Outlaw triggers a major glitch in the already unstable coding of the Y2K update, causing all the headbands to unnaturally crash, injuring many and killing up to 6 people excluding whoever the player banned.

The scare surrounding the hardware's ability to severely injure prompts a full recall of the Hypnospace headbands and causes the downfall of both Sleeptime networks. Dylan immediately covers up the evidence of his programming causing the crashes, blaming the user Tim "Randall" Stevens' relatively harmless "Mindcrash" hack which occurred around the same time, and landing him in prison for 6 years.

Following the timeskip to present day, the Hypnospace Archival Project begins, a mission to backup all of Hypnospace for modern viewing. The player is recruited into the project, and not long after, HAP member Chelsea (who is actually ex-Merchantsoft employee Samantha Clausson) tasks the player with finding evidence that Dylan caused the Mindcrash.

After locating the medical reports and leaked ChitChat messages from amongst Merchantsoft, Dylan joins the HAP team, soon revealing he joined to confess his crimes. He does this through Outlaw 1.0, a stable build of the game in which the player captures all of the Mindcrash victims. With each one captured, the game claims "*Username* has ASCENDED" and downloads an apologetic eulogy for them to the OS. Both the Outlaw game and Hypnospace Outlaw itself end with the player capturing Dylan, and the in-game dialogue indicating he has accepted his punishment. His fate afterwards is unknown, with the ascension animation and him having an unused eulogy file implying he may have killed himself.