Beyond the Boss

by Drew Seren

  BEYOND

  THE BOSS

  The Adventures of Horc:

  Book 3

  by Drew Seren

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Except where actual places are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious; any resemblance to living persons or places is purely coincidental.

  See what Drew Seren is up to.

  Visit his website www.drewseren.com

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  Copyright 2018 © MysticHawker Press

  http://www.mystichawker.com/

  ISBN: 978-1-945632-36-4

  Edited by Robert Brownson

  Cover design by Silver Circle Images

  1

  Ignoring the leaden feeling of his arms, Alan Gosling shoved against the strangely heavy lid of his gaming pod, trying to move it out of the way. No one had responded to his initial tapping. He knew his pod had been moved from where it his house had fallen in on it after the tornado destroyed his neighborhood. There should be someone around. Techs, staff, someone. A hiss sounded and the lid of the pod finally opened; and the unresponsive game menu above him went dark. Fresh air flooded in on him, making him shiver from the cold in the strange room.

  “What’s going on?” His voice was hoarse as it rattled out of his dry throat. He’d never had a dry throat when coming out of his pod before. He normally emerged refreshed after a few hours of gaming.

  A woman put a hand on his shoulder and tried to push him back into the pod. “Mr. Gosling, you need to take it slow. You’ve been physically inactive for a while now.”

  “No.” Alan shook his head and tried to sit up. The bright room swam in his vision and, as much as he didn’t want to, Alan sank back into the pod and let the ergonomic pillow embrace him. He hoped his head would clear soon. He wasn’t supposed to be there.

  “Here.” The woman slowly came into focus. Between her voice and her brown hair cut into a bob cut, she could only be Miranda, Horc’s sometimes guide, and more often irritating link to the real world and updater. “You need a bit of sugar and caffeine to help you focus.” She pushed a cold plastic cup into his hand.

  “I don’t need something to drink. I need to get back in there.” His throat was almost too dry to force out the words. He’d never been in a pod for days on end, and his body wasn’t happy about it. Sitting back up slowly, as to not make the room spin again, he brought the cup to his lips. The bubbly liquid tasted more like a thick syrup than soda, but it did help the dryness he was suffering.

  “I’m sorry you can’t go back in. We’re locking down the servers to keep players out. The AI is just too dangerous at the moment.” Miranda walked away from the pod and glanced at a monitor on a table a few feet away. “There are still way too many players in there.”

  “That’s why I have to go back in,” Alan objected. “I have to help them get out.” He had friends in there and he didn’t, couldn’t abandon them.

  Miranda shook her head again, her short hair dancing around her neck as she turned and walked back to the pod. “Nobody’s ever spent as much time in game as you just did. We need to run some tests to make sure there aren’t any lasting effects.”

  Alan finished off his drink and set the plastic cup on the side of his pod. “I don’t have time for tests… my friends don’t have time for me to undergo testing.” He thought about the people still trapped in the game. Sure, Greensleeves, who had become Bigdaddybear, Baladara, Tufkakes, and a few others could still log out, but Slasher and more were locked by the AI. They had no idea if the AI had figured out the loophole they had exploited to get captives free. If it had, they were going to have to work out something. But that was for the designers like Miranda and Rick to work out from the outside. He needed to be in the game helping people stay alive until they could log out. It was true that he’d been stuck in there for almost a week after the tornado destroyed his house and made his pod malfunction, but he wasn’t about to sit around waiting for something to happen when he could be in there helping his friends and co-workers.

  A phone rang nearby. Miranda reached into the pocket of her white lab coat and pulled out a smartphone. She tapped it and held it up to her ear. A frown crossed her face. “Yes, we got him… He seems fine, but we won’t know until we run tests… He’s wanting to go back in to help people get out… I have to object…” she turned away from Alan and took a few steps away from his pod.

  Alan strained to hear her side of the conversation.

  Miranda tensed and clenched her hand that wasn’t holding the phone. She paced farther away, although her voice rose and Alan caught words like “No… Can’t… die… my… responsibility…” She all but shouted the word “Fine” then she yanked the phone away from her face and acted like she was about to throw it before jamming it back into her pocket.

  She sighed heavily, then turned back to Alan. “I would like to do a basic physical on you quickly before we return you to the game.”

  Alan grinned. “Thank you.” He swung his legs over the side of the pod, then realized he was naked. He always striped down to go into his pod, but so much had happened, his state of undress had slipped his mind.

  As if anticipating his needs, Miranda picked up a pair of scrub pants from a table next to the pod and handed them to him. “I’ll try to make this as fast as possible.”

  “I appreciate this.” Alan pulled the pants up. They were a little tighter than he liked, but weren’t so snug as to cut off his circulation.

  Miranda walked over to the terminal on the desk and hit a couple of keys on the keyboard.

  When Alan put his feet on the cold tile floor and started to stand, his legs went weak and he grabbed hold of the side of the pod to keep from falling.

  “I was expecting some muscle weakness,” Miranda said, grabbing a rolling chair and swinging it close to him. “Take a seat while I wait for my assistants to get in here.”

  Alan grabbed the arms of the chair and hoped it didn’t roll as he eased himself into it. His arms felt like they were going to give out too, but they weren’t as weak as his legs. He managed to get into the padded seat. Although it wasn’t overly graceful, his plop would’ve been a complete sprawl if the chair had moved when he’d been trying to land.

  Seconds after he straightened in the chair, a door opened, and two more people in white lab coats hurried in.

  “Sorry, Miranda, we didn’t get the notification he was out,” the man said with a thick Texas accent. Hearing it reinforced to Alan that he was near the office, and not whisked off to some other state.

  “We were getting lunch,” the woman added. Her light brown skin tones marked her as of Hispanic descent, although her accent was pure Middle American. “I thought we had time for a bite before he woke up.”

  “So did I,” Miranda replied as she turned from the cabinet she’d walked over to. She dropped a couple of things on a rolling metal tray like Alan had seen at the dentist’s office during his recent cleaning several months earlier. “He’s recovered quickly and will be going back in.”

  The man stopped and stared from Alan to Miranda. “Going back in? That isn’t safe. We don’t know what a week in the pod has done to him.”

  Miranda sighed. “Not my call. He wants to go help save his friends.”

  After running a long-fingered hand through his short red hair, the man shook his head. “Dude, you’re a sucker for punishment, aren’t you?”

  Alan flashed him
a smile and shrugged. “My mom told me that for years as I was growing up.”

  “We’re going to get some vitals and blood work,” Miranda said, without looking in Alan’s direction. “Do what we can to keep him alive, and that’s all we can do.”

  Alan was torn. He hated being pushy enough to upset someone, but they all needed to understand that he had friends still stuck in Halfworld and he wasn’t about to give up on them when they needed him.

  “Look, there’s a couple of things we need in there, beyond just getting me back to the party.” Alan held out his arm as Miranda approached with a blood pressure cuff.

  “Like what?” Miranda wrapped the cuff around his upper arm. “Hold still.”

  “Right before I got yanked, we realized we’d stopped getting XP. We need to be higher levels to take on the AI, particularly in its dragon form.”

  Miranda pursed her lips as the cuff reached its tightest point then slowly began to release. She didn’t say anything until it was over. “Not really my area of expertise. I’m a pod technician. I make sure things don’t malfunction to the point of killing people, and you came very close to dying, Mr. Gosling.”

  “You need to talk to the game designers about that,” the man said. “We can get them on a conference call with you so they can see what they can work out.”

  “But we have to make sure you’re fit first,” Miranda snapped.

  “We need blood.” The woman stepped close with a syringe.

  Giving blood was something Alan hated, but he held as still as possible while turning his head so he didn’t have to watch thhe needle enter his skin.

  Alan rubbed his arm, careful not to dislodge the Band-Aid covering the hole in the crook of his elbow. He’d stayed still and quiet as they poked, prodded, measured, and weighed him. Miranda might’ve been referring to it as a cursory exam, but it was the most thorough physical Alan could remember having in his life.

  “Okay, you can talk to the developers while I get the tests results,” Miranda said.

  “I’ve got the conference call set up for you,” the male assistant said from the desk.

  “Thanks.” Alan still didn’t know the names of either of the two who’d come in from lunch to help Miranda, it made them almost like NPCs.

  He managed to walk over to the terminal and settle into the chair. His legs were feeling stronger the longer he was out of the pod. Miranda seemed pleased by that, but there wasn’t much else she was pleased about from what Alan could tell.

  There were four windows up on the monitor. Three of them had people facing the cameras, while the other showed an empty chair.

  “We’re waiting for Rick to get back,” the large pale man with gray hair said from the upper left box. “Since you’ve already met him, why don’t we do introductions while we wait? I’m Paul Rivers from the LA office, head of AI development.”

  “I’m Lilly Goldstein,” the blonde woman in the lower right box said. “I’m also out of the LA office, chief NPC programmer.”

  “And I’m Neal Punjabi,” the dark-haired, dark-eyed man in the upper-right window said in a thick Hindi accent. “Project coordinator. I must tell you, Mr. Gosling, we are so very sorry for the malfunction of your pod, and your ordeal in the game.”

  Alan shook his head. “The pod saved my life. From what I’ve heard, if I hadn’t been in it, the house would’ve collapsed on top of me, so I’m not mad about that. What I am worried about is the AI malfunctioning.”

  “Actually, it’s not exactly malfunctioning,” Rivers said. “It’s one of the most advanced AIs ever programmed. It’s supposed to learn. We just didn’t anticipate it learning negative things.”

  Alan chocked back a laugh. “Negative things is one way to put what it’s learning. You do realize that it’s locked our party for XP. It’s kidnapping players and forcing them to fight in an arena, and now has taken some of those kidnapped players hostage so you won’t be able to shut down the game. I think that all qualifies as negative things.”

  Rivers frowned. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Wait a minute,” Goldstein interrupted him. “What do you mean it’s put in a level cap for your party? That shouldn’t be possible. Things dealing with players accounts are controlled through a system the AI doesn’t have access to.”

  “Players accounts shouldn’t be blocked from logging out either.” Alan felt a minor headache coming on. Although he wasn’t used to dealing with programmers, he was more accustomed to dealing with corporate people who had little or no idea what was going on in their departments. If these were the heads of departments, they might not have a clear clue as to what the AI’s capabilities really were. People like Rick were the ones he really needed to be talking to.

  “We think it learned that from your experience,” Punjabi said. “We’re still trying to figure out what exactly happened in your pod to block you from logging out, but it’s entirely possible that while we were trying to figure out how to access your pod and override that function of it that the AI followed our tracks.”

  “And then applied our findings to other players’ accounts.” A large well-tanned man appeared in the empty window. He looked enough like the avatar for Rick that had driven Horc and the party from Tragiczan to the coast that Alan was sure it was Rick. “Hi, Alan, sorry I was late. I was texting with David. The party is on their way back to the mainland while we’re trying to track the AI’s dragon avatar.”

  “Did you let him know I’d be back with them shortly?” Alan wanted to wrap up the conference call so he could log back in and lend a hand.

  “You’ll be the last person we allow to log in,” Rick said grimly. “I’m trying to work out a way for an admin override on your level. If you can wait on that, I think I can give you a bit of an edge.”

  Alan hated the idea of delaying his return to Halfworld, but if a short delay would give him an edge, he’d be willing to do it.

  “He could use a little real-world rest,” Miranda said from behind him. “His tests are showing signs of stress, which is to be expected. But he’s in surprisingly good shape otherwise. The pods are working the way they’re supposed to, supporting the body even when the stay is unexpectedly extended.”

  Turning slightly, so he could glare at her, Alan added, “And he’s sitting right here, you don’t have to talk about me in third person.”

  Miranda shrugged.

  “Remington, what has your team been able to determine as far as the AI’s location in the game?” Rivers asked.

  Rick glanced at something just on the other side of the camera. “As far as we can tell, it’s actually still on the move, heading into higher level zones. These are places where lower level characters won’t be able to survive simple encounters, let alone something like the AI itself.”

  “So that’s why we need the level boost, or something to give us at least a chance of surviving.” Alan tried to think of what he would do to give characters a chance of defeating a massively powerful monster. “Better equipment would be nice, but we have to be careful with that one. In the arena there was some kind of magic there that blocked all the magic bonuses our weapons had. We were able to use potions and such, just not the magical adds on our gear.”

  A line of perplexion appeared on Punjabi’s forehead. “Why would it think to negate a magical weapon? We didn’t design it to think that way.”

  “But we did,” Rick countered. “We used every fantasy book, movie, music, or game created in the past hundred years, and then some, for its programming. We didn’t worry about some of the more morality-based works, because it’s a game. Why would we need to worry about morality in a game?”

  Alan closed his eyes and sighed. “I thought most AIs were built… ah, programed with a sense of morality. This thing is interacting with real people. You’re telling me that none of the NPCs in the game understand the basic things like not cheating players, or having consistent prices for goods, or even being honest, as long as that’s who they’re supposed to b
e?”

  “No, you don’t understand how this whole thing works,” Goldstein objected, combing her fingers through her hair, then picking up a pencil from her desk and chewing on it. “The NPCs were programmed separately from the AI. They were integrated with it. They shouldn’t be able to deviate from their base programing. Sure, they can differ their responses and actions depending on how the players interact with them. If they couldn’t, the game wouldn’t be that much more advanced than games from fifty years ago.”

  Her response explained why Horc had been able to convince Caleb Sureshot to let him keep Wolf, when all the companions caught during the quests were supposed to vanish and be returned to where they’d come from. Sureshot and the other NPCs were adaptable to a point.

  “But the AI has shown an ability to conscript NPCs to do his bidding,” Rick said. “Otherwise the Pirates in Tragiczan wouldn’t have been kidnapping people and taking them to the arena.” He paused and rubbed his chin. “And it deliberately led Horc there with quests. This isn’t good. It’s already manipulating the NPCs and we didn’t even realize it.”

  Goldstein chewed on her pencil. “But that shouldn’t be possible. If the AI was trying to manipulate the NPCs, they’d be acting up, be jerky and such. So far there’ve been no reports of that. Not to mention that it doesn’t understand programming, unless someone fed it coding books.”

  Punjabi and Rivers both shook their heads.

  “Why would any of the AI programing team feed the AI coding books?” Punjabi asked first. “It would serve no purpose and simply take up memory that could be allotted to something more practical.”

  Alan raised a hand. “Guys, this is all really interesting, but it’s not solving the problem at hand. Your AI is out of control and it could potentially kill someone. We need to get all the people it has hostage out of the game. Then the rest of the free players can log out so you can bring that game down. How are we going to accomplish this?”