Bugs and Loopholes: A LitRPG Adventure (Beta Tester Book 3)

by Rachel Ford

  Two of the gems paused their retreat. The fourth – the one governed by the remaining turret – continued on its way. Jack ran again, as fast as he could go. This time, he leaped from the top stair. Maybe, he figured, with the potion to soften his landing, he’d survive.

  He didn’t. Jack died, and remained dead while Jordan and Shimmerfax dispatched the wisps. It was waiting there, immobile and helpless, that he realized that pulling the levers twice had doubled the wisp population.

  It was a long, slow fight, and Jordan almost died. “Would have,” she told him, “if not for Shimmerfax. Man, I love those battlecorns. Can you imagine if they were real?”

  Jack couldn’t, nor did he want to. But he refrained from commenting, and Jordan made her way over and resurrected him with a spell.

  Despite the catastrophic end-result of his experiment, Jack didn’t consider it wasted time. The premise, he thought, was still solid. “We just need to figure out the limits: how far can I jump without dying.”

  They experimented with soft landing potions, resurrecting him as needed between trials. Jack didn’t activate the gems for this. That would come once he figured out his limits, but there was no sense battling wisps until they needed to.

  He could fall from just under three-quarters of the way up. He experimented until he worked out the exact stair he could jump from: five steps up on the fourth flight from the middle. It took his health meter down to a measly one hit point; but he survived, and he saved the maximum time possible.

  This established, Jordan refreshed his supplies, and they all took up position. Jack gave the command, and they followed their plan: they all pushed the levers, and he raced down until he hit the requisite step. Then, he jumped to the cavern floor below. Every bone in his body shattered, but he survived with one hit point to go.

  The one factor he didn’t anticipate, though, was the wisps: one of the ethereal monsters gravitated toward him, shooting out a frosty spark that barely grazed him. Barely grazing, though, was enough to kill a man with a single hit point.

  Jack repeated the long wait while Jordan and Shimmerfax cleared the field. Then, she rezed him, and he tried not to express the annoyance he was feeling. “Just a fluke. Let’s try again.”

  They did, and this time he pulled out a healing potion to have at the ready as he plummeted. He scarfed it down as soon as he hit the ground. The wisp was waiting as before, but he’d moved first; and his health skyrocketed back to full before the frosty hit.

  He pushed past the wisp, running like the wind. The cavern floor passed in a blur, and then flight after flight of stairs fell away. He reached the halfway point, then the three-quarters mark. He raced onward, until he had two flights left, and then one. Now, he was counting stairs rather than flights of stairs. At the same time, the clock kept racing toward zero.

  Fifteen.

  Three seconds.

  Ten.

  One second.

  Eight.

  The timer hit zero. Desperate, Jack finished his climb, and threw himself into the lever. But he knew what would happen: the fourth gem crept toward the center, but the other three kept crawling back to their starting points.

  They tried again and again. They thought through every possible squandered second. They tested how far Jack had to be away from the lever to work it. Jordan spawned every boost she could think of, and leveled Jack’s agility to max. He was still four stairs, a landing, and the turret’s distance too short.

  She tried too. They spent hours strategizing, and hours working doggedly, refusing to give in. They made no progress, and finally Jordan’s shift came to an end.

  “Listen, Jack, like I told you before: we will figure this out.”

  He nodded glumly, for the first time doubting her. Not her intention or her commitment. He knew that, if there was anything she could do, she would. Jack doubted that they’d be able to beat this bug.

  “I won’t be on for two days.”

  “Wait, why?”

  “I’ve been working twelves. The weekend guy is going to take over.” When she saw his crestfallen expression, she explained apologetically, “It’s not my choice. I have to. Company policy, and labor laws.”

  He nodded. “I’ll see you after that, though?”

  “Monday morning, bright and early.”

  He tried to put up a brave face. None of this was her fault, he knew that. And she didn’t need to suffer just because his life was over. She wasn’t the reason he’d be stuck in a videogame for the rest of eternity. So he smiled and told her to have a good weekend.

  Her troubled expression belied her words as she said, “I will. You too.”

  Then, she left, and Richard took over. Jack didn’t call the intern this time. He set his alarm for Monday morning, and wiled the long hours away, at first doing nothing, and then trying to figure out how to game the system.

  He hauled stones up to the turrets and pressed the lever. Then, quick as he could, he pushed the great boulders in place behind the lever, hoping to prevent it from returning to its original position.

  When the sixty seconds elapsed, though, the lever started a slow, casual drift back to its starting point, pushing the enormous boulder.

  So Jack tried again, enlisting Shimmerfax to haul the biggest rocks he could find. The lever shifted them aside like twigs. He filled the space between the lever and the turret wall with boulders, packing the area so tightly an ant would have had a hard time finding a path through. The lever strained for a second, then splintered the nearest boulder.

  Jack gave up then, and tried to sleep. When his fitful episodes proved more trouble than they were worth, he rose and ate. It wasn’t until he found himself talking to Shimmerfax that he started to worry. “Speak to supervisor,” he said. He wasn’t sure who would be on now, Richard or one of the weekend people. So far, he hadn’t actually met the weekend team. He hadn’t interacted with the supervisors regularly enough for that.

  A disembodied voice rolled through the ruin. “Jake here. You’re Jack, right?”

  “Hi Jake. That’s right.”

  “Nice to meet you. What can I do for you?”

  It seemed strange to talk about meeting a voice that came from everywhere and nowhere, but Jack did anyway, returning the greeting.

  “What can I do for you?” the other man repeated.

  “Just checking in to see if Nate made any progress.”

  “Nate? Oh, he’s one of the developers, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry, man. I have no idea what he’s working on. I’m here from marketing, just filling in. I don’t really know the dev team.”

  “Can you ask him?” Jack asked, a little annoyed by the obviousness of the question.

  “I mean, I could. But he doesn’t work weekends. He won’t be in until Monday.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sorry.”

  It wasn’t Jake the marketing guy’s fault any more than it had been Jordan’s, but he felt a surge of anger at him all the same. Rather than unleash it, though, he got off the line.

  It seemed an eternity, but finally Monday morning rolled around. Jack waited an excruciating five extra minutes, then called, “Speak to supervisor.”

  “Jake here,” the same disembodied voice called.

  Jack frowned. “Wait, isn’t Jordan supposed to be in?”

  The other man yawned. “Yup. She is, but Avery called her in to a meeting right away. I’m covering…” He yawned again. “Until she’s done.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anything I can do for you?”

  “No. Just – tell her I want to talk to her when she’s done with her meeting.”

  “Will do.”

  Jack signed off again, and waited, and waited, and waited.

  Finally, a voice came on the line: Jake’s. “Hey, Jack? Jake here. Just letting you know, Jordan’s meeting wrapped up. She’ll be on in a minute.”

  Jack did his best to sound grateful for the intelligence, rather than impatient. Jake
disappeared. Then, finally, Jordan’s character spun up. “Jack.”

  Again, he could hear the worried tones in her voice. “Jordan, everything okay? What was the meeting with Avery about?”

  She laughed, a quiet, bitter sound. “Well, he found out about us questing together.”

  “How?”

  “Nate told him.”

  Jack scowled. “That son-of-a-bitch,” he said, though it came out as, “That stinker.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Supposedly, he was just asking for advice about the bug.” She shook her head. “But he was being a…well, a stinker.” The ghost of a smile passed over her lips.

  “So what did Avery say? Are you in trouble?”

  “Officially? No. He actually commended me for ‘innovative thinking’ and putting ‘so much effort into taking care of our work family.’”

  “Oh. Well, that’s good.”

  “Yeah. But he’s also ‘concerned’ by our lack of progress. He called it an innovative approach, but went on about knowing when to cut losses for a failed strategy.

  “And he mentioned a couple of times finding additional work for me ‘since I had so much time’ on my hands.”

  Jack scowled. “So, what did he say about fixing the bug? About getting me out of here?”

  She shook her head. “Not much. That he appreciated my efforts and initiative, but that I needed to learn the balance between taking the initiative on independent action and teamwork. That he’s got a team working on it. That it’s his fault for not understanding earlier how badly I was coping with the ‘unfortunate incident,’ and reassigning me to something ‘less stressful.’” Frustration and anger filled her words. “I don’t know what I’m going to do, Jack. It sounds like he’s going to pull me from this – or fire me. I don’t know which.

  “I mean, I guess it wouldn’t matter if they actually had some kind of plan. But from what it sounds like…”

  She cut off, flushing, like she hadn’t meant to share her impressions – not with him, the one stuck in the machine. “Maybe I’m wrong,” she said in a moment. “Maybe he’s just not telling me. It isn’t my business, I guess.”

  Jack, though, held no such happy fantasy. How often had he heard from Avery in all this? How often had he talked to the team that was supposed to be getting him out? Jordan and Richard had been his main points of contact. They were the only ones who showed anything remotely like concern lately – less so in the intern’s case, but it had been better than the CEO’s stony silence, anyway. “I’m going to be stuck in here forever,” he said.

  Jordan started to say something, presumably some kind of consolation based on her expression, but a new voice, a third voice, interrupted. “Sounds like it. And they’ll be pulling you off, Miss Knight, because they don’t want witnesses. Which is why we need to get you past this as quickly as possible. Before it’s too late.”

  They both spun around. There, standing behind them, was someone Jack had never seen before: a tall man, with a lithe, muscular frame, dark hair and dark eyes. He might have been as old as Jack himself, or a few years older. Maybe it was the oddness of his clothing – the dark armor that seemed more at home in a futuristic sci-fi than a medieval fantasy game. But something about him made a compelling case that this was no NPC, but a real person’s avatar.

  “Who the heather are you?”

  The dark haired man glanced between Jack and Jordan. “That’s right: we’ve never met.” Now, he nodded at her. “But she knows.”

  Jack turned to Jordan, and to his astonishment saw that she had gone very pale, and was staring with wide eyes. “Jordan?”

  She started at the sound of her own name, and glanced at him. “It’s William. William Xi.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Jack stared incredulously at the mystery man, the avatar of a real life person who had disappeared into Marshfield Studio’s systems years ago. William might have been their first victim. Certainly, he’d fallen long before Jack.

  William smiled. It wasn’t a mirthful look. It wasn’t even very friendly. “You found my employee file, then?”

  Jordan nodded. “Yes. Your picture – you look just like it.”

  He nodded. “Not exactly, but as close as the technology allows. I’ve had years to perfect the damned thing. Every new update, I can get a little closer.”

  “How…how is that possible?” Jack wondered. “I thought you were on ice?” Then, realizing the indelicacy of his phrasing, he flushed and stuttered out an apology. “Sorry. I meant, you know, in cryosleep, or stasis, or –”

  “It’s all the same. And yes, I am. At least, my body is. But the accident that condemned me to this hell severed my consciousness from my physical body. The body went into deep freeze. And the mind?” He gestured around them. “Stuck in the Marshfield Studio servers, until they find a way to get me back.”

  He smiled again, in the same bitter fashion, and Jack shivered.

  “But how are you in this game?” Jordan wondered. “Weren’t you in some kind of test environment when it happened?”

  He nodded. “Yes. But – well, it’s a little hard to explain until you’ve experienced it yourself. But, in more accessible terms…you live in this area, right?”

  Jordan nodded. “Nearby, yes.”

  “But you can still get on a plane, and go to another state, or another country. Right?”

  Again, she nodded.

  “You can go anywhere in your world. And, if you could afford it, you could even go off world. You could book a passenger flight to space.

  “That’s more or less what it’s like living in the mainframes. I can live comfortably in my own town, or I can take transportation to get to some other place. I can stay in the test zone – though I’d have to be insane to want to go back there – or I can switch between games. Anything inside the firewall, I can do.

  “And if I really want to put the work in, I can access stuff beyond the firewall. I’m not visiting them physically, of course. But I can view them. You know, websites and stuff.”

  He shook his head. “You have no idea how many useless websites there are out there. I do. I’ve spent years scouring the net, with nothing better to do than learn just how stupid our species is.”

  Jack blinked and glanced slowly at Jordan. He wasn’t quite sure what to make of this seemingly misanthropic stranger.

  William must have caught his look, because he laughed. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking. Is he a good witch, or a bad witch? You can relax, Jack: as long as your name isn’t Avery Callaghan, I’m a good witch.”

  “Oh. Uh, well, that’s good.”

  “Are you…well, are you okay?” Jordan asked.

  He laughed again. “Okay? Miss Knight, my consciousness has been trapped in a server cluster for the last…oh, how many years has it even been? No. I’m not okay.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry? It was before your time.”

  “I know. I’m just…well, sorry it happened.”

  Here, he lost something of the smiling, sardonic air. He nodded soberly. “Me too. You know, you’re the first people I’ve talked to in two years? Avery used to put on one of those headsets and at least talk to me, the bastard. Even after he stopped pretending they were going to get me out, somehow. Just another week, or another month, or next year.” He shook his head darkly. “But then, he stopped even that.

  “And my family…well, I never heard from them. Avery said they didn’t want to talk to me, that it was too much. But I don’t know that I believe that anymore. I’d like to think he lied – he lied about everything else, so why not?

  “Why not tell my parents that my mind was inaccessible too, that they’d put all of me on ice?”

  “Isn’t that what he told them?”

  “Not according to him. He said he told them they could talk to me. That’s what I wanted, you know. I mean, the settlement, sure, to take care of them. But I don’t care about it for myself
. What’s the point? I’m never going to get out to use it. But talking to people, that’s what I wanted. My family most of all.

  “You never realize how much you’re going to miss that, do you? They drive you crazy. People, I mean, but your family too.”

  Again, Jack glanced Jordan’s way. William seemed a little – well, manic.

  And again, the newcomer caught the look. He laughed. “Sorry. I haven’t talked to anyone in two years. I think I said that already. You probably think I’m nuts. And, if I’m entirely honest with myself, maybe I am, a little. Hard not to be.

  “But I’m not here to talk. Not that I object to it, of course. But I’ve been watching you, ever since you got stuck in the game. I heard them promise to get you out and all that.

  “And I said to myself, ‘that prick’s done it again. He’s trapped another one.’ And sure enough, here we are.”

  It almost certainly was the wrong point to focus on. But Jack frowned. “Wait a minute…how come you can swear? Is the profanity filter still working?” And, just to test it, he tried to repeat the cusses he’d heard pass from William’s lips. They came out as prickly pear and booger.

  William stared at him in confusion for a minute, then laughed. “Ohh…you’re talking about the profanity filter? Yeah, I got around that years ago.” He shrugged. “Perks of being stuck in the system, you figure out all of its vulnerabilities.

  “I thought about using that to get my revenge. Not the profanity filter: knowing the system’s vulnerabilities. I mean, I’m stuck here. I’m the perfect virus: already in the system, and always growing and learning and adapting.”

  Jack didn’t know quite what to say to that, so he said nothing. For a moment, the other man lapsed into silence. Then, he shook his head. “I decided against it, though. Even if I destroyed it all, they’ve got backups. And they can always pull the plug on me. Then I’m gone, for good. No, whatever I do, it has to be better than that.”

  Jordan flushed a little. “Um…you do realize that this is being recorded, right?”