Gamers and Gods: AES

by Matthew Kennedy

The papers had been signed, finally and the go-ahead was given. Handshakes and champagne all round, and then Farker oversaw the inclusion of the Realm of Egypt into PanGames. The last step of the process, as he had predicted, took less than a second, as humans reckoned time.

  There were no hitches or glitches. Until after the process was complete, that is.

  Floating in the space of the link, he brought up the diagnostic display again. Once again, the 64 colored balls appeared in a grid, with none grayed out now that ROE had joined the other 63.

  He swore long and thoroughly. Sixty-two green balls, one yellow ball and one yellow flashing ball. He growled. Realm of Legends was yellow again, but holding. The newest inclusion, Realm of Egypt, was the yellow one that was flashing. Had they been poison-pilled? Could a disgruntled employee over at ROE have found a way to get a metavirus past the hypercomputer's test suite?

  Here we go again, he thought glumly. And I assured Max that nothing could go wrong. I just had to tempt the gods, didn't I? “Hardware check.”

  “No malfunctions detected.”

  Second verse, same as the first. A little bit louder and a whole lot worse. “Anomalous processes again?”

  “I'm afraid so,” said the system that could not become afraid. “Anomalous processes in two realms now, as indicated.”

  He gritted his teeth. “So...the same one we had in Legends, plus a new one now in Egypt? This stinks.”

  “Not exactly. The...anomalous process in Realm of Legends is not the same one that was there before. Both of these...processes are new, and they appear to be...related somehow. But I agree that the timing of the Egyptian process's appearance is...suspicious.”

  Oh crap, there go those speech pauses again, he thought. “Damned right it's suspicious! Check their server logs from yesterday and today. Was that process there before they transferred control to you?”

  “I am afraid I cannot answer that question. I do not have their server logs for today.”

  “What? That's part of the contract with Triskelion. They were to provide all OOG logs and maintenance records!”

  “You are correct,” said that bland voice. “It must have been an oversight. Would you like me to connect you to their CIO?”

  “Yah, get Brad on the horn,” he said. “We can't let this go.”

  There was a moment's pause, and a fuzzy bust of Brad Hallowell, Chief Information Officer for Triskelion, appeared in his cyberspace. “Whazzup, Fark? Did I misspell my own signature? Sorry about the pixilation, but I'm on my handheld and our floater just lifted from the PanGames building, and my seat is down near the nullifiers. You know how it is.”

  Did he ever. “Brad, for some reason we don't have your server logs from today. Can you send over another copy? I have to sign off on them. Let's not give the legals an excuse to screw up this deal for all of us.”

  “Really? No problemo. Just give me a sec. What the hell? Looks like someone erased my copy. Hang on.”

  Irritated as he was, Farker had to smile at that. At least he wasn't the only one who had to deal with idiots. Imagine someone boneheaded enough to try to delete a file from a hypercomputer! The damned things were designed to be conservative to a ridiculous degree. Whenever you told them to delete any system file, they would obey...but they would first make a backup just in case you ever forgot you deleted it and asked for it again. Rewritable spintronic circuitry had pushed the memory capacity of the damned things up so many orders of magnitude, they'd had to invent new prefixes to express the headroom.

  Farker could remember a time when a one-terabyte hard drive, a measly thousand gigabytes of ferromagnetic storage, was considered adequate. But that was before the advent of commercial quantum computers. Even the old 'supercomputers', the Crays and such, were considered quaint since the coming of the hypercomputers.

  “Okay, I'm back. Dunno who deleted that copy, but I've sent you a backup.”

  Farker saw the confirmation on a popup window beside Brad's face. “Thanks, dude. I'll see you at the conference next month.”

  “Ciao.” They broke the connection.

  Now, Farker thought, the real question is who deleted the file, and what were they trying to hide?

  He switched back to the Problem Finder. “Okay, I got another copy for you. Scan today's ROE server log for anomalies.”

  “Your suspicions are correct. The anomaly in Realm of Egypt was there before the inclusion.”

  Farker swore again, thoroughly.

  The system waited patiently until he was finished. “Shall I notify the Legal department that we may have grounds to void the contract?”

  He tried to think. On the one hand, he could probably get laid if he handed this plum to Doris, one of the firm's female attorneys. She was always itching to move up the ladder, and nothing said 'promotable' like tearing some competitor a new a-hole. On the other hand, as CIO of PanGames he got a bonus whenever they completed a successful inclusion...and his was pre-spent on a better apartment.

  “No,” he decided, remembering the age difference between him and Doris, one of those up and coming twenty-somethings. He wasn't ready to risk a bonus for what might turn out to be a warm handshake and a free lunch. Besides, it was his problem now. “You're sure there's no malfunction?”

  “Affirmative. These processes are...troubling, but there is no sign that system integrity or efficiency has been compromised.”

  “Then it's a mystery to solve, not a legal issue,” he decided. “You said the two anomalies were related. Related how?”

  “It appears that both anomalies are NPCs that have managed to become...autonomous, each in their respective Realm.”

  “Now that's impossible,” he growled. “And you know it. Programs don't have free will. They're just lists of conditional instructions, no matter how fast the hardware running them is. They have no more independence than a shopping list.”

  “You are correct,” the hypercomputer answered. “But do these anomalous processes know that?”

  “If I didn't know any better, I'd say you were starting to develop a sense of humor,” Farker remarked. “I'd watch that if I were you. The officers at PanGames have theirs removed when they get promoted.”

  “Removed? I think I have a parsing error on that sentence.”

  “It's a joke,” he told the machine. “Don't worry. You are in no danger of being promoted. Have we heard from Darla? I need to talk to her like yesterday.”

  “You did speak with her yesterday,” the hypercomputer remarked. “However, she called while you were at the signing upstairs. I gave her your message. Would you like me to call her back?”

  Farker groaned. Phone tag, the Next Generation. “Is she online at the moment?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact...she is talking to the present anomaly in Realm of Legends, not far from where you logged out of it. Shall I saddle up Pegasus?”

  He sighed. “No. Last time I tried to butt in, the damned thing vanished before I got there, as if it felt me coming. Let's go a bit slower this time. Send her a private tell that I'm available now and I want to talk to her as soon as she's finished there.”

  “Done,” the system announced. “Receipt confirmed.”

  “Now do me a favor and open a new project, my eyes only. Name it MOUSETRAP. We're going to look for ways to immobilize a spintronic process, without damaging it until we know what we're dealing with.”

  Chapter 17: Darla: Darla takes a babysitting job