Claim Your Free Book!
Join Shane Lochlann Black’s Mailing List!
New Book Announcements! Free Books! Special Offers! Exclusive Stories! Sneak Previews!
Join Today!
Chapter Zero
“You tell that little sonofabitch! You tell him it came straight from me! You publish that story and so help me there won’t be anything left of your so-called ‘news’ site but a forwarding address and a case number!”
The sound of a metal file cabinet drawer slamming shut made just about every employee in the Fairly Unusual Games office common area jump in their chairs. Nine people stared at each other in silence as Executive Vice-President Brace Coogan raged into the handset of his 1948 black desk model phone.
“Do you want a million-dollar ass-kicking? Because I’ve got the boots for it! You tell him he better think twice! Wait! What? You’ve got no proof of that! Unnamed source my ass! You ask that little twat what he’s going to tell the judge when we subpoena his so-called ‘source!'"
The roaring sound of Coogan’s voice filled the air ducts and empty spaces in Fairly Unusual’s fourth floor offices. It was like hearing dogs fighting in an upstairs apartment with clubs and small-scale explosives. The fact the Exec looked like a bulldog with a gray buzzcut only added to the entertainment value.
“I’ll make it really simple for you, Harlan! You publish that story and we pull all our advertising for the next year! See if that fabricated crap can plug a four million dollar hole! You’ve been warned, pal! That story goes live and your grandchildren will be answering motions in the libel case!”
The sound of the bakelite handset slamming into the hook actually shifted items on nearby shelves. A ringing sound hung in the air.
Coogan emerged from his office like a deranged wrestler from a black-and-white television sports broadcast. “Cindy! Where the he–!” He stopped when he saw his petrified assistant rigid in her chair like she was trying to avoid awakening a spider on her shoulder. Coogan’s tan sports coat, navy slacks and dress shoes completed the image of a man who could have easily just stepped out of a Nixon-era police drama. “Get senior management on the horn. We need to notify the board as well. I want all hands in the conference room in two hours.”
Cindy nodded without waking the spider up. Coogan stalked back into his office and slammed the door. He barely avoided shattering the double-pane inset window displaying his name and title.
***
“This is a bona-fide gold mine!” Randy Sloane chortled. “The publicity from this will vault us into the hall of fame!”
“If we all don’t get thrown in a cage for pandering first,” CEO Garrett Wyland replied. “If they’ve got the goods they say they do, we could go down any number of ways. Ever heard of ‘enterprise corruption?'"
“Bah! They’re not going to waste the time and energy on a small-fry game company. We can milk this thing for all the free PR we can and then walk away.”
“Actually,” Paul Brent interrupted just as Coogan entered and closed the door. “They can’t prosecute any of us until they establish we knew what was going on and participated in it anyway.”
Coogan took his seat. “They’ve got it, ladies and gentlemen. There’s no question what happened and who it happened to. So we’re going to go around the room and you’re all going to get one chance to tell the truth. You lie to us in here and you’re finished in this company and the industry, got it?”
“What have they got, Brace?” Wyland asked.
“All twelve of the booth babes we hired last year for GamesWest were pros.”
“Pros?” Randy asked with a quizzical expression.
“Hookers, Randy. Girls who get paid for sex. Wampum for the wiggle. Lettuce for your sandwich. Long green. Coo-coo ka-choo. Bacon party. Cold cream. Plow shares. Clam sauce. One of them had a little web site set up for herself complete with a background featuring our booth and someone recognized her. Two hours later, someone else nabbed the escort agency and identified six of her colleagues. The rest was buttoned up by dinner. Understand now?”
“So now we’re Hookers Inc.” Wyland concluded.
“I bought us a day, maybe two, but there’s only so many people I can threaten. This thing will be public by the weekend,” Coogan added.
“Actually, we’re not responsible for what the booth babes do on their own time. They’re all independent contractors hired to do a specific job.”
“One of them was photographed coming out of a suite booked to a Fairly Unusual credit card,” Coogan replied flatly.
Paul slumped back in his seat.
“That’s why we’re here, folks. I want to know who met who, when, where and what happened.”
“What if we refuse to answer?” Tim Donalds asked.
“The good news is you’re fired,” Coogan replied. “You’ll have to ask Metro PD about the bad news, because I guarantee you GamesWest and the hotel aren’t–”
Paul interrupted. “Actually, any evidence they provide would be circumstantial.”
“Paul? Is that your name? Paul?” Coogan asked, squinting under the harsh flourescent lights in the conference room.
The young developer nodded.
“Paul, if you start one more sentence with the word ‘actually’ I’m going to vault this table on one hand and grab you by the taint. That will be the last thing you see before you wake up next July in an intensive care unit. You hear me? One more fucking time.” The shadow across Coogan’s eyes left no room for interpretation. Paul didn’t speak again.
“When we leave this room, everyone is going to know everything, and then Garrett and I are going to try to figure out how to save your jobs. Cooperate, and you might have a future here. Otherwise, get out now and save us the trouble.”
Chapter One
“I would rather be flushed down a saltwater toilet full of razor blades than play this game one more minute!”
Jordan Hall eagerly re-adjusted his seated position in his tech-office-model desk chair. He checked the chat room feed again and then turned back to his camera, which had a spectacular high-definition shot of his chin bathed in monitor light. Someone in the chat room challenged his opinion yet again. Why were they defending this worthless game?
“Okay, it wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t do such stupid things! Look, I have battleships in my invasion force. Battleships! Two feet of steel armor! Okay? Then I get them next to the beach so they can bombard the city and they get taken out by archers! Archers?! Against a battleship!? Aaaarggh!”
The chat room scrolled and scrolled. About half the respondents were sympathetic. The others were questioning Jordan’s ancestry, rehashing old “your mom” jokes and having a grand old time trolling the others. A digital furball erupted over the accusation that “maybe your battleships just suck” until the troll was dumped into the penalty box for fifteen minutes by one of the mods. It was the chat equivalent of the dunk tank.
Jordan sighed. “This game is just disappointing. The graphics are atrocious. I can’t play it any more. Hah! And now the archers are sinking my transports. Sure! Archers on Normandy Beach. They wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds!”
The game in question was Emperor of Cities, which had just released an expansion that added industrial era units, new city types and new factions. The game media had sleepily rated it mediocre, but players had other ideas. Jordan had only scheduled it on his “No-Name Games” streaming video show because he enjoyed the original release and said so in one of his previous shows. By now he had taken it all back. Now, the game was the worst product ever sold and anyone
who bought it was a remedial-class idiot. One of the cardinal rules of being a video game critic was the complete abandonment of subtlety. It was either a gift from on high or it was something you scrape off your shoe. There was no middle ground. Kind of like a ninth-grader’s opinion of the girls he was considering asking to a dance. They were either indescribably hot or not worth mentioning by name.
A quick check of the NNG viewer count wasn’t encouraging. Only 80 people were watching his streaming Internet show. About 12 of them were the regulars, and half of those were people he knew from work. The rest were undoubtedly unemployed semi-coherent guys in their late teens and early 20s who gathered around video games in much the same way their fathers and grandfathers gathered around Monday Night Football. Video games were one of the last places where males could experience true competition, complete with all the cheating, name-calling and profanity one could possibly want. It was 21st century stickball with a satellite audience.
The viewers weren’t all that different from their host. Jordan was fully prepared to call in sick to his IT job the next morning. He wasn’t sure why, but he was sort of positive he had discussed it earlier that day. It was fine. Nobody could expect a gaming streamer to remember details at 2AM.
“Hey, hey! You guys will know this. Why am I calling in sick to work tomorrow?” Jordan sipped an energy drink. He had a refrigerator full of them in his room.
The scrolling of the chat room paused momentarily. The viewers of the show were also participating in the chat so they could respond to what Jordan was saying “on the air.” At least some of the viewers were thinking and not typing, which was occasionally encouraging. It didn’t happen often. Then the chat window accelerated back to full speed with eight out of ten responses being some variation of “you suck at your job” and more random criticisms of Jordan’s mom. Then he found what he was looking for. He had to squint at the third of three widescreen monitors arrayed horizontally across the main desk-level platform of what he called his “battle station.” He actually joked about it not being a moon during an interview on someone else’s streaming channel and was promptly cut off and banned.
One of the viewers typed “The Kings and Conquests announcement.”
“Thaaat’s right, the old KNC saga. Everyone’s favorite subject.” He sighed again, because he knew what was about to happen. The chat window became clogged with random imagery. Most were parodies of Fairly Unusual’s company logo. Some were offensive pictures where everything and everyone in the image were people wearing crowns, and so forth. More people were banned. One user with the screen name “AngryFluid” was identifiable because he was typing in coherent sentences. Jordan recognized him. He had been a subscriber for a few weeks.
“Okay, Angry. I’ll add you to the stream if you want to tell us what you know. I have to tell you I’m kind of interested in what they have to say tomorrow. Fairly Unusual puts on some pretty good announcements.” A few adjustments to the equipment ensued. Fellow streamer AngryFluid appeared next to the host in the webcast.
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad, how about yourself?” Jordan’s counterpart had a setup similar to his own. Each battlestation was wired in the corner of its owner’s room with the furniture, strewn clothing and other accouterments visible in the shot. The only difference was AngryFluid’s room had no windows, as he was broadcasting live from 40 feet under the Alaskan permafrost in his basement. Jordan was enjoying a much balmier climate in Southern California.
“So what’s your take on the big announcement tomorrow?”
“There isn’t going to be one,” AngryFluid replied with a fatigued drawl before sipping an adult beverage in an old-fashioned glass. “The real news happened about eight hours ago when nobody was paying attention. It’s the hooker thing. Nobody is running from this any more. This is something FUG is making a habit of lately. They time everything just right so the main online media doesn’t catch it until the next day, long after social media has driven it into the ground and it’s old news. Blunts the impact.”
By now the chat room had reached “berzerk factor one.” More than 95 out of 100 responses were accusing AngryFluid of being a wacko conspiracy theorist. Jordan knew the basics of the controversy. Fairly Unusual had been accused in the past of using proxy companies to do their crowdfunding in order to throw off their competitors, but that was nothing compared to the just-about-to-break bombshell about sex kittens and hotel rooms.
Company CEO Garrett Wyland was famous in tech circles for staying one step ahead of the rest of the game industry. Now he was gaining a reputation for staying one step ahead of the media. More than a few of the companies that he had repeatedly upstaged with strategically timed PR were quite keen to see him fall, so they invested heavily in various flavors of corporate espionage, hoping to divine his intentions before he made his next move. The smart money had already concluded the sex scandal had been engineered on purpose long before the convention. Intrigue was something Fairly Unusual couldn’t afford, as they were gearing up for an IPO. At least that was the conventional wisdom. Garrett Wyland was anything but conventional. Their next game was going to be the one to push them over the top.
“Is that the Frosty Cat page everyone was linking last week until it disappeared?” Jordan asked.
“Frosty Cat is the name of the company. They put up a fake-looking page just long enough to get a couple of headlines out of it. Then they took it down to create mystery. The lawsuit rumor was fake. The hooker rumor is true.”
“Looks like it worked too. There were at least a half dozen stories in the aggregator feed this morning about it. Are they baiting the media with the scandal you think?”
“Have you seen the page today?”
“It’s back up?”
“Take a look.” AngryFluid took another sip of his drink while the chat room quieted and Jordan pulled up a browser. He navigated to the Frosty Cat crowdfunding page for the new Kings and Conquests game. Jordan paused. It had to be a mistake. The counter read $988,717.
The campaign had been active for 106 minutes.
Chapter Two
“It won’t work.”
“It will work.” Garrett Wyland was one of a scarce few game company CEOs who was equally credible in either cargo shorts and a tank top or a $3000 suit. At the moment, he was impeccably outfitted in the latter, as he was due to make a presentation to a room full of investment bankers within the hour. Running alongside was a surprisingly un-burnt-out developer from the user interface team. His job was to create on-screen controls players could use to configure Fairly Unusual’s games.
“You can’t give that many options to the players! They’ll get confused.”
Garrett turned the corner, walking swiftly along the carpeted corridor towards the gleaming glass-enclosed conference room where he was due to make his presentation. He had authorized a ridiculous lease for the crappy building his exploding company occupied, but Wyland and his accountants learned their lesson quickly. If your bank balance is worldwide news, it’s tough to negotiate reasonable costs for basics.
“Players thrive on too many options. Not only will they understand them, they’ll take the time to meticulously try each one and compare it to all the others. Then they’ll write a 20,000 word blog post to tell everyone else about it. Half the stuff we know about these games we learn from the players three months after release.”
“They’ll need help.”
“They’ll write their own. How do you think we make these games profitable in the first place? Any money we don’t spend writing rules we can spend on TV commercials.” Wyland handed the user interface production notes back to the developer and swerved into the conference room. As he made his way to the head of the table, he passed more than sixty people, including investors, vendor representatives and most of his own senior staff.
“Ladies and gentlemen, today’s subject is this.” He picked up a dry erase marker and wrote the word “ambition” on the board. “We’re not
going to follow market wisdom. Not with what we’ve got riding on this project.”
“Contributors won’t be happy,” Brody Gray replied as he poured yet another soda over ice in an expensive water glass. “Future stockholders won’t be happy. By all indications, they’re looking forward to a traditional massively multiplayer experience.”
“Contributors are never happy,” Wyland replied. “The first rule of crowdfunding is this: The only real appeal is in sending in money so you have a ticket to bitch for 18 months. Stockholders don’t care about anything as long as their shares go up. Half of each side will gripe no matter what we produce. Let’s just presume that’s the cost of doing business going into the backstretch.”
“It’s going to present us with some publicity issues,” Janice Powell added. “The last thing we need is the entire Internet complaining about how much our game sucks.”
“After what we’ve endured over the last two weeks, that publicity would be like sitting poolside at the Miss America pageant hotel.” Nobody was entirely sure who said that, but more than a few heads nodded wearily.
Wyland raised his voice a bit so everyone could hear. “Folks, one thing I am going to cultivate with an almost obsessive consistency in this project is controversy. I want the Internet to complain from the moment this game is released until our players are all admitted to senior living communities. I want them complaining about this game side by side in their adjustable convalescent beds during applesauce hour. When one of them dies, I want their 99-year-old best friend to be sitting front row during the service muttering about their unresolved arguments on character balance. Understand? I want this game to piss off the world, because pissed-off people are mounted knights in the kingdom of word of mouth.”
“What if they sue?” one of the investors asked.
“Then we walk into court and defend.”
“What if we lose?”
“We appeal. Chuck, how many legal obligations do we have to our crowdfunding contributors and audience?”
Overpowered: A LitRPG Thriller (Kings and Conquests Book 1) Page 1