Gamers and Gods: AES

by Matthew Kennedy

Farker opened Max's office door. “What is it, Max? Can it wait? I'm kind of in the middle of something important.”

  “As important as saving your job? We got containment on the Abernathys, but I see from your email to me that there are two more casualties.”

  Farker entered and shut the door behind him. “That's what I'm working on. So far all the link beds involved are Simulonic models. I have the Problem Finder checking their schematics. The SQUIDS aren't the problem, as far as I can tell; they're standard components, so it must be something in the monitoring subroutines.”

  Max glared at him, blinking as a wisp of cigar smoke went into his eyes, diverted by the door closing. “SQUIDS? What?”

  “Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices.” Seeing Max's expression, he translated. “The doohickeys in link bed pillows that form the mental connection to the UNET. Looks like the Cooper polymers are well within tolerance, so it must be the software.”

  “I thought you said our software wasn't to blame!” Max growled.

  “I meant, the software in the link beds. There's a chance that power surges could short out some of the couplings, but my money's on the drivers. Could also be that Simulonic got sold a bad batch of memory crystals. Cosmic rays might have glitched the firmware after they installed it.”

  Max bit clean through his cigar. Farker watched it fall and start to burn and melt a little spot on Max's carpet by the desk. “Stop trying to baffle me with bullcrap!” Max barked. “What are we doing to stop this before it goes class action on us?”

  “Well,” said Farker calmly, making an effort not to escalate the tension in the office, “you're going to send out teams to try to get containment on the latest victims, Karl and Rachel. So far all of the affected people were in Realm of Egypt, so no other Games are affected by it.”

  “Aw, hell, I knew it!” Max moaned. “Any acquisition deal that looks too good to be true, usually is. Did they unload a botched Game on us, or stick a metavirus in, for one of our competitors?”

  “I don't think so. Try to relax,” Farker advised him. “I'm putting together a team to go into the Realm, find and fix whatever's wrong if it turns out not to be the link beds that caused this.”

  Max was sweating in the room's air conditioning. “If it's the link beds. Why hasn't it affected any other of our Realms? It's gotta be a metavirus!”

  “No way. Self-modifying mutating viruses were a pain in the old mainframe days, true, but hypercomputers are too smart for that.” He paused. “The problem is either on one end of the connection or the other. If it's on our end, it's a problem with Realm of Egypt and we'll find it, document it for the lawyers, and it's a pass-through lawsuit – it'll be Triskelion's headache. If it's on the other end, it's a link bed recall issue, then it's a problem for Simulonic. Either way, I think our jobs are safe.”

  Max had a calculating look to his eyes. “Are you sure it couldn't be between the Realm and the beds? What if it was a problem with the UNET itself?”

  Farker was surprised by the question; he hadn't even considered it. Maybe Max wasn't a complete dullard in a suit, after all. “Out of our hands,” he remarked. “If they got lost in the sauce before they came to us, or after they left us, then, again, it's not our fault and not our problem...although it might be harder to prove.”

  Max's eyes swiveled. He must have finally smelled the burning plastic fibers, Farker thought. He watched the man pick up the end of his cigar, glare at it sullenly, and drop it into his 'I AM THE BOSS!' ashtray. Farker counted to ten.

  “Fuck it!” Max exploded. Then he slumped back into his leather chair. His beady eyes bored into Farker. “Whatever this is, fix it. And if you can't fix it, Farker, you better hope to God you can prove it isn't our fault. At Simulonic, Triskelion, or PanGames, some heads are going to roll for this. Count on it.”

  Some might have already, Farker thought grimly. If whatever Am-heh is doing can't be reversed, then those people are already dead. But he confined himself to saying “I'll get back on it. Try not to worry.”

  He left Max's office in a hurry before the CEO could think of a comeback and headed for the stairwell, not wanting to run into fellow employees in the elevators.

  He almost changed his mind when he opened the door and began descending. PanGames had a pretty good building, but in typical fiscal efficiency the staircases were not climate controlled. He was perspiring by the time he reentered the coolness of his lab.

  Striding in, he glanced at the wall screen and froze. There were five skull-and-crossbones icons on it now. Am-heh had eaten another avatar. He had been about to get back onto Tweedledum and log in, but now he found himself hesitating. Getting nervous, Farker?

  He dropped into the room's only chair. “Finder, is MOUSETRAP ready?”

  The emotionless voice responded “Affirmative. Where do you want to deploy it?”

  “Realm of Egypt, where else? Box in every NPC in the Realm, any avatar that isn't a Player with an account with us, then iterate through them, deactivate the one called Am-heh, and then un-box the rest of them again.”

  He waited. It ought to work. With any luck, the whole process would take less than a second at hypercomputer speeds; the user complaints should be minimal.

  “Iteration complete. Sorry, Farker, it did not work.”

  “What for you mean, didn't work?” It should have been foolproof! It was a relatively simple program, a process of elimination. List all the IDs in the Realm. Discard all that are not avatars from the list. Discard all that are not NPCs from the list. Discard all NPC IDs whose name attribute is not 'Am-heh'. Then terminate the only one left. “Tell me what happened.”

  “No program errors,” Finder informed him. “After discarding all unwanteds, the set of IDs became a null set. No execution processes were terminated.”

  Could something be fooling the criteria? he wondered. Maybe the anomaly was too buggy to look like a NPC. Maybe it just couldn't tell Am-heh from the Player avatars. “All right,” he said, trying not to grind his teeth from irritation. “Try it again, but this time leave all the avatars in the list, even if they are not NPCs. Box all avatars, then iterate through them and terminate the one named 'Am-heh' and un-box the rest. So let it be written. So let it be done.”

  “Override accepted...execution complete. No processes were terminated.”

  “Oh, come on! Are you trying to say he isn't an avatar either?”

  “Negative.”

  “Then why wasn't he terminated?”

  “No avatars with that name currently located in Realm of Egypt.”

  Farker's mouth went dry and he felt queasy. Could Darla have been in the wrong Realm when she found him? “Are you saying that he found a way to move to another Realm?”

  “It is possible,” the Finder admitted.

  Oh fuck. “Display diagnostic grid.”

  The array of 64 indicators appeared on the wall screen. Sixty two of them were green. Realm of Heroes was yellow. Realm of Egypt was green. Realm of Bushido was yellow and flashing.

  Got you, you son of a bitch! “Execute my last program in Realm of Bushido, instead of Realm of Egypt. So let it be written. So let it be done.”

  “Override accepted.” There was the briefest of pauses. “Execution complete. No processes were terminated.”

  Farker slammed his fist on his desk in frustration. He glared at the wall screen. Realm of Bushido was still flashing yellow. Then a thought occurred to him. He hoped desperately it was wrong.

  “Finder,” he said, “are avatar names conserved in Realm transitions?”

  “Not necessarily. Translation protocols may override any equivalent phonemic pattern in case of uniqueness conflicts.”

  Farker groaned. “You're saying it's my fault you can't find him?”

  “What do you mean?” It was one of Finder's polite ways of saying it did not understand a question or command.

  “When we installed the speech translator, the intent was to make it so people could talk to each other.
Are you saying it affects avatar names, too?”

  “Naturally,” the Finder told him. “The name 'Am-heh' is unusable in Realm of Bushido. It sounds like 'Ami' which is a female name written with the characters for 'Asia' and 'beauty' and it is also a word meaning 'my people'. It is a popular name in Japan. It would be surprising if no one had selected it as a name for an avatar in Realm of Bushido.”

  Farker briefly wanted to shoot himself. “So now his name is randomized and we don't even know who to look for. Crap!”

  He drummed his fingers on the desk. “Do you keep a log of name translations? Show it to me.”

  “Unable to comply. Records of forced name changes are only buffered long enough to ensure reversibility in case of system malfunctions during Realm transitions. The buffer is cleared following successful transition to the new Realm.”

  “DAMN IT!” he exploded. It was his fault! If the bastard ate someone's avatar in Bushido, their blood was on his hands now. If he had acted faster, before Am-heh had left Realm of Egypt, the jerk would now be just a region of memory containing instructions that would never be executed. Fat chance of that happening now.

  Wait a minute. Why had Am-heh left Egypt?

  Was the choice of Realm of Bushido random? If so, the lucky bastard had picked a great way to anonymize himself. But he didn't believe Am-heh could have known about the translation conflict protocol. He must have had another reason for choosing that realm.

  Farker tried to push away his anger at himself and think. What had attracted Am-heh, a chthonic underworld god from ancient Egypt, to the realm of medieval samurai? He had a bad feeling about this.

  His eyes wandered as he thought, drifting over the furnishings of his lab. This was all spinning out of control. Would he ever have a job this good again?

  There, on the bookshelf was a scale model of the HMS Victory, a gift from Lord Westinghouse after the Realm of Brittania went online. Here, on the desk in front of him, a stone head of Tlaloc found in the ruins of a Toltec temple in Yucatan. It wasn't the original, of course, but a perfect replica given to him by the CEO of JUGAR for his work on the Realm of Mexico deal.

  Slowly he swiveled in the chair. And there it was. Behind him, on the wall, in its clear display case was his handmade replica Samurai katana with its round iron chrysanthemum tsuba, or sword guard, presented to him personally by the CEO of Masahiro ('justice prospers') Software for his work on Realm of Bushido.

  Am-heh had gone from Egypt to a sword fighting Realm.

  He was looking for Darla.

  Chapter 36: Darla: “you must anvil or hammer be”