by Rachel Ford
And despite himself, Jack had to smile. It was a bright, beautiful day, full of sunshine and bird song and gentle breezes. Unfair game mechanics notwithstanding, it felt like a great day for digital life. “Alright, Migli,” he said, “where to next?”
“We should probably grab some supplies before we head out. We don’t want to venture off into those woods unprepared.”
He knew it was something the character was programmed to say, a reminder for the newbie player. But it still rankled. “Yeah, I’m a little in debt. To you. So I think we’re going to have to skip that.”
“If you’re low on coin, you can probably talk to the villagers. They might have work for a fearless adventurer like yourself.”
He groaned. “Are you pulling my leg? I have to go waste time on side quests?”
But it wasn’t a choice he had to make at that moment. The game froze, and Migli turned around to talk to him. “This is your wakeup call.” The dwarf – Jordan – laughed at their own joke. “Time’s up, man. You want to call it a day, or keep playing?”
He sighed. His progress so far wasn’t substantial. But at least he was out of jail. And the truth was, he didn’t quite feel up to running around on side quests. “No, I should head home and get some sleep before my meeting.”
“Cool beans. Alright, well then, I’ll run you through the exit process, and you’ll be on your way.
“Okay, first, let’s talk bugs. You flagged the speech one. Anything else?”
“I mean, the monetary system is kind of hosed. In the medieval world, it took forever to make clothes. So they’d be worth a lot more than one piece of gold.
“And what’s with small items weighing so much? My sword should weigh a lot more than a few pairs of pants.”
Jordan was silent for a few moments. “Okay, so that’s not a bug. That’s just a complaint. We’ll get to those under impressions in a minute. We’re still on bugs now.”
He rolled his eyes but said nothing.
“Anymore bugs? Actual bugs, I mean?”
“One of the brigands I killed in the forest, I couldn’t take his boots.”
“Ah, good. Noted. We’ll check that one out.
“Okay. So, let’s talk user impressions. Anything stand out to you about the gameplay, or world?”
“Yeah, I already told you.”
“So the weight system was actually a design decision, to discourage hoarding. Nobody needs fifteen pairs of pants.”
“So instead of making it harder to collect them you artificially inflated the weight of items?”
“Like I said, design decision.”
He scoffed. “Not very realistic.”
“Neither is actually stopping someone from being able to collect fifteen pairs of pants, if that’s how they want to spend their time. That wouldn’t be in keeping with our ‘free will’ gameplay style, would it?”
“So instead of limiting options, you just punish the player for exercising his free will?”
“Something like that. Anyway, do you have any impressions that don’t revolve around your desire to hoard used trousers – which, by the way, is also not super realistic. Imagine some dude just walking around the forest with a hundred pairs of pants.”
“Wow, it’s up from fifteen to a hundred now?”
Jordan sighed. “Do you have any other impressions?”
“Yes. My tech supervisor is a real pain in the backside.”
“I’m going to take that one as a compliment, considering the source. Anything else?”
“I hate the profanity filter.”
“Cool story. Anything else?”
He considered. “Yeah. Despite the bugs and the stupid mechanics – and you – this place is amazing. I really feel like I’m here. Like, this is probably the single most incredible experience of my life.”
“Huh. I don’t know if that’s a sad statement about your life, or really high praise. But either way, the bosses will love to hear it.”
“You know, for a customer service rep, you kind of stink.”
“I’m a level designer, actually. The Studio didn’t want to hire extra people. So instead of building levels, I’m doing this.”
Even through the digital filter that converted Jordan’s real voice into the dwarf’s, the resentment seeped through. “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. For both our sakes. I don’t know if you worked on any of the levels I’ve been through yet, but if you did, well, you must be good at your job. They’ve been pretty amazing.”
“My levels come later on, but my whole team rocks. So, thanks.”
Jack nodded. He felt, in the moment, like maybe he and Jordan had gotten off on the wrong foot, but that it didn’t have to be that way long-term. It’d be a long beta test if it was. “No problem, dude.”
“Okay…so, last thing on my list…we just have to do a vitals check. Make sure your body is ready for the switch to flip.”
He listened to the dwarf murmur that heart rate looked fine, blood oxygenation was good, and so on. “Alright. I think we’re good to go. I saved the game for you already, so you can end whenever you want.”
“I don’t actually know how to do that.”
Jordan sighed. “Richard was supposed to walk you through that. So, since we’re testing, I need to okay it on my end first. Regular users won’t have that step. But once I signal that it’s all right, you can say ‘Return to prime universe.’ As long as it’s your voice print, that’ll trigger the system to kick you back to your real body.”
“So I can go ahead whenever I want?”
“Yup.”
Jack threw a glance around the virtual village, and he smiled. “I’ll be back, Dragon’s Run.” Then, he said, “Okay, I’m going to do it.”
“Cool. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“Really?”
“Yup. Part of the job: monitoring your body in the capsule.”
If Jack was entirely honest with himself, the idea of his body being monitored by a stranger while his mind was elsewhere felt a little…creepy. Still, as annoying as Jordan was, he seemed like an alright guy. So he shook the feeling off. “Alright. I guess I’ll meet you in a minute. Return to prime universe.”
Chapter Five
Jack blinked. The village hadn’t gone anywhere. Neither had he, for that matter. “Uh…Jordan? How long does this take?”
“Huh. It should have happened already.”
That wasn’t the kind of answer he wanted to hear, so he shrugged. “Well, maybe it just takes longer the first time.”
Jordan’s noncommittal hmm didn’t do much to put his mind at ease. So he tried again, “Return to prime universe.”
Nothing happened. The game stayed paused, and he stayed in the game.
“Let me just double check my settings on my end,” Jordan said.
Jack sighed, fully prepared to lay his mini-heart attack at the other man’s feet. “Way to scare the stuffing out of someone.”
Jordan laughed at the same time he cringed.
“Come on, dude, you see what I mean about this darned filter?”
“If you cussed less, it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“It’d still be a problem. But what about getting out of here? What did you miss?”
Jordan hemmed and hawed for a long moment. “I don’t know…I don’t see anything out of whack…that doesn’t make sense.”
Jack felt the gnaw of anxiety in the pit of his stomach. “Dude, what the heck’s going on?”
“Hey, Jack, give me just one second, okay? I need to get someone else on the line.”
That was precisely the kind of thing he didn’t want to hear, and he demanded a full explanation. But Migli stayed frozen in place, the avatar having been momentarily abandoned while the tech worked.
Jack swore and ended up sounding a bit like a madman rambling on about biscuits and truckers.
And he waited. He waited for what seemed a very long time. Then an aggravated voice piped into his thoughts. “Hello?”
&n
bsp; It was the Beatles guy. “Dr. Roberts?”
Migli sprang to life at the same time. “We can hear you, Dr. Roberts. Can you hear us?”
“Yes, I can hear you. What’s the problem?”
“We ran into a little…hiccup. Jack’s having some problems returning to reality.”
“I’m stuck in the game,” he put in.
Dr. Roberts scoffed. “Impossible.”
“That’s what I thought too. But we tried. I checked my settings, and he –”
“You have something set wrong. No one gets stuck in the game.”
Jack was pretty sure he heard Migli growl under his breath. “Okay. Well, I need your help figuring out what’s set wrong, then.”
Dr. Roberts huffed and puffed and complained about the hour. He complained about the speed of his remote access portal. He complained that he knew this beta testing program was going to be a giant pain in his backside. And Jack was pretty sure Dr. Roberts hadn’t meant to say “backside” any more than he had.
But eventually, the doctor got logged in. He went through Jordan’s settings one by one. “Hmm. That’s right. Looks good. Right. What in tarnation?”
Jack started to sweat now. He hadn’t done that so far, but now, he was sweating. He guessed there was some difference between physical stressors and mental. Because this was definitely a nervous sweat. “So, uh, worst case scenario…what are we talking about here, guys?”
Nobody answered him. In a minute, Dr. Roberts said, “We need to get one of the programmers on the line.”
The programmers proved a lot more responsive than he had. Someone joined the call in half a minute, his voice projecting eerily throughout the simulation. “Hey, Nate here. What’s up?”
“Nate, we’re having some trouble getting Jack back to the real world.”
The newcomer laughed, and his disembodied mirth sent a shiver up Jack’s back. “You having too much fun to go home?”
“No, not really. Right now, I’m not having much fun at all, actually.”
“Uh,” Jordan said, “I think he’s starting to freak out, actually. His temperature’s rising, his heart rate is spiking. And…oh yeah, I see sweat all over his body.”
“Ew,” Nate said.
At the same time, Jack protested, “I’m not freaking out.”
“Bologna,” Dr. Roberts said. “You’re producing enough stress hormones to give a bull elephant a heart attack. You need to calm down, Mr. Owens.”
He scowled. “Thanks. Super helpful. How about you get me out of this gosh darned contraption, and then I’ll calm down?”
“Gosh darned?” Dr. Roberts repeated incredulously. “How old are you?”
“It’s the profanity filter,” Jordan explained.
“Not really the point, dangnabbit,” Jack snapped.
“See?” the dwarf shrugged.
Dr. Roberts sighed, a long, exasperated sigh. “You got anything, Nathan? Some of us don’t get paid by the hour here…”
“Nate. And not yet.”
“Great.”
“Bleep,” Jack added.
Nate laughed. “Okay, I used to kind of hate that filter. But I have to admit, it’s pretty funny.”
“Tick-tock…” Roberts said.
“I’m just referencing a couple of things. Give me a second.”
It seemed to Jack that he’d had quite a few seconds already. Indeed, the seconds were piling up into minutes, and minutes into tens of minutes. Pretty soon, it would be half an hour. He swiped away the sweat at his temple with his sleeve. “Did someone turn the temp up or something?”
Nobody answered him, and he paced up and down the street. His boots rang out loudly against the cobblestones. The once whimsical town, with its quaint buildings and now-frozen NPC’s, rather mortified him in the moment. Maybe it was the way they were stuck in place, arrested mid-motion.
One scolding mother faced an impishly grinning child, a finger jutting out and a word frozen on her lips. The little boy’s smirk was similarly fixed to his features. He shivered at the eerie grin.
He shivered at Blake Stoutheart, his arms outstretched with silks spread across them. He’d been mid-speech, hawking his wares, when the game paused. The words had stopped, but his mouth hung open soundlessly anyway.
He shivered at the arrested movement of the village watch, and the horses who had frozen mid-prance; at the children and mothers, fathers and merchants, thieves and pickpockets who had been walking and skulking and lurking all around him…who now sat there, stiff and motionless, like wax statues.
He was almost hyperventilating by time Nate’s exclamation, “aha!” sounded.
He breathed out a long, haggard sigh of relief. “It’s about time. You figured it out?”
“I think so. You know that patch? The one to stop the dialect switching?”
“Yes.”
“It looks like that might have frozen at ninety-nine point eight percent.”
“What the heck does that mean?”
“Well, it didn’t fully install. So it looks like you might be stuck because it’s in the middle of an installation.”
Jack breathed in and out. “Okay. So, once the installation wraps up, I’ll be alright?”
Nate hemmed and hawed for an uncomfortably long moment. “Maybe. But that was a small patch. It should have already installed.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let me look through the installation log.” A long, tense minute of hmm’s and huh’s passed. Then, he said, “Well, I was right: something definitely hosed that install.”
He didn’t seem to be about to elucidate further, so Jack prompted, “And? What does that mean for me?”
“Well…I think we better roll it back. Let you get out of there, and then install it.”
That was a surprisingly reasonable answer, so Jack nodded. “Okay. Good. Let’s do it.”
“I should note,” Dr. Roberts said, “if we’re applying on-the-go code changes, there is a slight to moderate risk of adverse effects. For the record, let it be noted that the test subject did consent to the code rollback.”
Jack frowned. “Test subject?”
“My apologies: beta tester.”
“Okay, rolling it back.”
“Wait, wait. How ‘slight to moderate’ are these risks? And what kind of ‘adverse effects’?”
“We’re in uncharted waters, Mr. Owens. Theoretically, you should be fine.”
“Theoretically, this shouldn’t have been necessary at all.”
“Exactly. So, theoretically, you may be fine. Or you may end up a thirty-year-old vegetable.”
Jack blinked, too stunned to speak. Nate apparently took the silence to be consent, because he said, “Alright, here we go.”
A sweet, metallic voice informed them, “Code version 0.3.0.25 rolling back.”
Jack gulped and braced for the worst. But nothing happened. At least, as far as he could tell, nothing happened.
“Alright,” Nate called, “we’re good. We’re back on .24.”
Dr. Roberts, Jordan and Jack all breathed a sigh of relief. “See? Like I said: you’d be fine.”
“You said I might end up a vegetable.”
“But you didn’t. So…all good.”
“Okay, let’s get you out of here, Jack,” Jordan said.
He nodded. As much as he wanted to tell Dr. Roberts off, it could wait until he was safe and back in the real world – and his telling off wouldn’t be peppered with elementary school slang. “Right. Let’s go, then.”
“Everything’s ready on my end.”
He nodded, drew in a long breath, and said, “Return to prime universe.”
Chapter Six
Nothing happened. At least, for about the first two minutes, nothing happened. Then, Jack had a full-blown panic attack that ended with his real life body being sedated. The game vanished, or he vanished from the game. He wasn’t sure.
When he woke, it was some hours later in the real world. The game world loo
ked exactly the same. But Jordan was gone. Migli had frozen in place, along with everything else.
Now, he heard Dr. Roberts and Richard, and a few voices he didn’t recognize. “Oh God. What’s going on? Did you drug me?”
“It was just a mild sedative, Mr. Owens. To prevent you from harming yourself.”
He was going to knock that damned doctor’s lights out when he got out of here. He promised himself that. “Jordan? Hey, what’s going on here?”
“Calm down, dude. You’re okay. Jordan’s shift ended.”
Jack didn’t calm down. Instead, he called frantically, “Return to prime universe. Return to prime universe.”
It was only when Roberts threatened to sedate him a second time that he managed to get ahold of his panic.
“Hello, Mr. Owens? This is Avery Callaghan.”
Jack blinked. “The CEO of Marshfield Studio?”
“That’s right.”
He could hear the smile in the other man’s voice, like he was preening at being recognized. Another time, and in another circumstance, and Jack would have been over the moon. Avery Callaghan, in his opinion, was one of the greatest minds of the century. His genius had brought a decade and a half of the best and most innovative games in the world to mankind. He was the Shakespeare of the modern era.
So in normal circumstances, Jack would have been ecstatic to meet his era’s Shakespeare. But Jack was just a humble beta tester. For Shakespeare to be here, now, talking to him meant that something was seriously wrong.
“Am I going to die?” he blurted out.
Shakespeare laughed, a touch nervously maybe, but genuinely too. “They told me you had a great sense of humor, Jack. But no, you’re going to be just fine.”
He felt a little sheepish at that. So he nodded and said nothing.
“There was a little problem with a patch. When you found that bug, our development team wanted to patch it right up for you. Turns out, they were a little overeager. They rolled out a bug.”
He groaned. Of course there was a bug in the patch meant to fix bugs. This was a Marshfield Studio game. As much as he loved them, as big of a fan of the company and its work as he was, not even Egypt during the ten plagues had more bugs than any given Marshfield Studio game at release time. And that was after months of beta testing. “So, what did this bug do?”