by Alyson Belle
His moans and groans had turned into frenzied grunts of need, and as our passion crescendoed, Lefay suddenly flexed his newfound muscles and snapped the ropes that tied him in place! I might have expected him to toss me aside and make his escape, but instead his hands leapt to my back, caressing my sweet curves and grasping at my soft flesh while I rode him harder than ever.
“Oh Lefay…” I moaned.
“Call me Lee,” he demanded, in a harsh, strained voice.
He stood up from the chair in a sudden movement, carrying me along with him as though I weighed less than nothing, and slammed me against the inn wall while he continued to fuck me. Now, Lee was in charge. He held my fragile body pinned against the cool plaster while his thrusting hips slammed his sweet dick inside of me again and again. I was too lost in ecstasy to care. I hugged his chest tight and sank my teeth lightly into his shoulder for purchase, and when my orgasm came, all my muscles tightened while my hands raked across his back. Pleasure rolled through me, causing my whole body to shake, and my whimpering convulsions drew a climax out of Lee as well.
His hot seed burst inside of me, filling me up and leaking out over both of us, and he bucked again with a final, deliriously happy groan as I slumped against him, panting.
“Does this mean you’ll help us now?” I asked him with a smile, caressing his soft white hair while he held me effortlessly aloft, softening inside of me. “If you help us escape, you can do this as much as you want. No judgment. No mocking.”
He made a choking noise, looking guilty, but then nodded.
“Just don’t stop fucking me like that, and you have yourself a deal, Courtesan.”
Chapter 8
As we thumped back down the steps to the common room of the inn, we found Saintly and Topper in an animated discussion. Saintly’s drunken slur had finally dropped away, so I assumed he was finally clear-headed enough to help us out, and it sounded like Topper had been catching him up on all of the details of what we knew about Vierdimin’s game hack now that he was in a more sober state. The men broke off and stared up at us in surprise as I led the bashful-looking Lee to their table and took a seat.
“That was fast,” Topper remarked, taking in the newly male dark elf with a confused side-eye that practically dripped with unasked questions. “I was just about to leave to do the rounds—I figured you’d be in there for hours interrogating her… him? I assume that’s Lefay…”
“This is Lee,” I simply said. “Lee is going to help us out now. Any questions?”
Topper and Saintly glanced at each other and shrugged while Lee coughed into his hand and muttered, “Vierdimin is going to kill me for this.”
“Hang on a minute,” Saintly said. “So let me get this straight—you’re a dude in a chick’s body, but he’s a chick who apparently is now a dude, and… well, we heard you both fucking up there. You fucked the dark elf onto our side? Jesus, how do you people keep this straight? I have a hard-on just thinking about all of it.”
Lee’s cheeks turned a deeper shade of purplish-blue and he stared at the tabletop uncomfortably, but I just shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s none of your business. We’ve come to an understanding. The point is that he’s with us now. Cool?”
“That’s an awful lot of trust you’re asking us to put in someone who we tied up 20 minutes ago,” Topper said.
“Do you have a better option, Topper? Now you don’t have to go canvas for players and just hope you bump into someone who can cast a divination spell. It’s not like he can fake the spell. Just trust him on this one.”
“Nobody works for Vierdimin because they want to,” Lee said quietly. “We do it because we’re scared. I still don’t think you can beat him, but I’d like to see you try.” Then he leaned back in his chair and rolled his shoulders, his eyes drifting over to take in my body again. “I can always say you coerced me later if it comes down to it.”
Topper’s mouth screwed into a skeptical frown. “Still… you just flip sides after a good fuck? And as a glamoured dude? I don’t get it.”
Something like anger flashed through Lee’s eyes. “You don’t have to get it, dude. Just accept that I changed my mind, okay? It’s between me and Lacey. Now tell me what you want me to do before I change my mind.”
Topper stared at Lee for a long moment, but finally he sighed and leaned forward, resting his mailed hands on the table.
“All right. Fine. So let’s talk through this again. I just caught Saintly up to speed, and I explained my theory to him: That Vierdimin is hoping the game gets shut down due to public pressure so that he can shunt us all over to a private server he’s prepared, where he’ll have full, godlike powers in game—powers he doesn’t have now—to do whatever he wants with us. Forever.”
His last word had a chilling finality to it, and the weight of it seemed to suck all the air out of the room.
“What do you think?” I asked Saintly. “Topper filled you in. Is that even possible?”
If anyone could gauge the likelihood of such a scenario occurring, it would be one of the devs who coded the game. He should know the game backwards and forwards, so if Vierdimin was abusing some kind of loophole in the code, shouldn’t Saintly know?
But Saintly looked thoughtful and paused for a long time before answering. “I… don’t know, actually. Maybe. It’s a really sophisticated hack, and honestly, I’m not sure how he’s doing any of these things. He’s using some GM powers he just straight-up shouldn’t have access to, but it seems like there are limits on it… since you can’t modify game code while the game is running without a recompile, that shouldn’t be possible. And it certainly shouldn’t be possible to lock us all in game like he did.”
“Wait a minute,” Topper protested. “What about client-side hacks? People have been hacking games for decades since the data streams from a central server to a local client and then makes a round trip. Couldn’t he have modified his client?”
A lot of their conversation was going over my head—I’d never been a programmer or even much interested in it, but I’d been a gamer for long enough to get the basics of what they were saying. It sounded like they were suggesting that Vierdimin was doing some kind of manipulation on the programs on his local computer, and somehow that affected the game itself… or something. I was glad that Topper and Saintly knew enough to piece this together, even if I didn’t.
“I just want to know how to fix it,” I said. “Who cares how it happened? How do we undo it?”
Saintly huffed. “Well the first step of undoing it is understanding what we need to undo, man. Come on. You think code is magic? There’s a logical order to all this. Somehow Vierdimin broke that order, and he totally shouldn’t have been able to. And Topper, in response to your question, no… I don’t think he could have hacked the client side code. Give us a little credit. We’re running a billion-dollar business here. All of the calculations are done server side and streamed to the client. All we get back is input and a representation of the player’s body-state.”
“Wait a minute… what about the local data files?” Topper asked.
“Like the zone code and stuff? Sure. That’s all static. There’s no reason not to store that locally. If it differs from what we expect, the client gets bounced, and it’s all checked when the game loads. But there’s still no way for him to modify live code while messing with the zone files.”
“Hm.” Topper said.
They both paused, apparently stumped. I looked helplessly at Lee.
“Do you know anything about the Lich or his plans that could help us out here, Lee?”
He chewed his lip for a moment. “Not really. You’ve all pieced together about as much as I have, but the Lich doesn’t share his plans with anyone. Information is delivered on a need to know basis. He told us his plan was to turn the game into a playground where we could live forever, as gods, which sounded like a pretty good deal until I got to know the dude a little better.” He shivered. “I don’t think I
’d want to spend eternity with that guy, now. Sliding us over to a private instance is the only way I can think of that working, too. It’s the only place he could have server code prepped that would give him the full, unlimited GM powers he wants.”
Saintly nodded along with him while he spoke, and I was impressed by how much everyone seemed to know about the tech behind the game. Even Erlix had done more research than I had. I made a mental note to learn more about it as soon as we all got out of this mess.
“Oh!” Lee exclaimed. “There’s one other thing. That staff… the one you want me to locate for you? I think it’s important somehow. He got really excited when it dropped, and it was shortly thereafter that he started producing all these crazy items and things.”
Saintly sat up in his chair so abruptly that he knocked an empty mug over on the table. “Shit. Shit shit shit. You said it was the Lv. 80 Staff of Matter Manipulation, right?”
All three of us nodded, and then Saintly got up from the table, stomped around the room, and released a string of expletives a mile long.
“Fucking fucking fuck, that motherfucking no good intern. I told him to double-check his goddamn code and not be so lazy, but did that kid listen to me? No. He’s a fucking idiot hacker who wouldn’t know real code if it slapped him in the face.”
He sank back down into his chair, arms crossed, in an angry huff. I shared a concerned look with Topper.
“What is it, Saintly?” I asked.
He sighed. “We hired an intern last summer. A real fresh kid. The CEO’s nephew—Ronny. Thought he was a hotshot, but he was lazy as fuck. He complained to his uncle we were giving him all the shit assignments—which we were, because his code was so damn buggy—but the CEO raised a big stink and made us give him a real project. We put him on high-end weapon design since it seemed like the code where he could do the least damage. Apparently not! The concept for that staff is an item that can change the physical reality of the world around us at the will of the caster, but not players, mobs, or anything living. Because it messes with the live game, you have to be really careful with the code and provide catches so that no one can fuck something up and crash the game when they’re manipulating world objects. I told him to get a review for his item, but he didn’t, and the code went in untested. When I looked at it later, it looked off to me, but I was busy and didn’t delve too deeply. But now… obviously he missed a catch. My guess is that it’s not altering an instanced, separated copy of the item like it’s supposed to… it’s altering the item where it sits in the game code. Alter it in just the right way, and the code can bleed into other items. A stray semicolon can totally change the program… and it’s live code. No need to recompile.”
I blinked at him. “And… what the hell does that mean? In English, please?”
Saintly rubbed his eyes and puffed his cheeks out, like he was trying to explain this to five year old and was very frustrated about it.
“Okay, so… when the staff changes stuff in the game, it changes the actual code that defines the item. Someone with a good idea of what that code looked like, or a good assumption from a background in programming, could modify the attributes in such a way to gain access to other things without changing the server-side code. Things they shouldn’t be able to have access to, like the GM powers that froze your friend Jazzus over there. It sounds like Vierdimin got ahold of Ronny’s stupid staff and is doing exactly that. Fucking hell.”
I’d have to take his word for it. It seemed insane that a simple glitch could have such far-reaching power! I could tell from the look on Topper’s face that he was just as skeptical as I was.
“Is that really possible?” Topper asked. “I know a little about coding, and it still seems like you’d need to have some kind of injection to let you access different parts of the code.”
Saintly nodded. “You would, but you could prepare that for insertion via a local script once the staff opened a backdoor for you. Anyone who knew about the loophole could have something ready and do the kinds of things your Lich Lord is doing. At least the high-level server controls prevent him from doing anything crazy right now—even with a back door, he can’t have full GM powers or wear ultra-powerful stat-enhancing GM gear without a GM account. Once we’re on a private server, he won’t be subject to those rules anymore. Your fancy, 32-charisma score might be impressive, but its peanuts beside GM gear. That shit tricks out your stats like crazy. I’m going to strangle that kid Ronny if I ever see him again.”
“Great,” I exclaimed. “So that’s it then. We know the staff is key to his powers and probably his control over the game. So we just need to get the staff away from him! If we take his key away, he can’t issue any of the commands any more, right? So all we have to do is kill him and shard the staff.”
Everyone else lapsed into thoughtful silence, but I was psyched! This was the first real good news we’d had since this whole crazy adventure had started. We finally had a clear way to stop Vierdimin: Players dropped their gear when they died in PvP, so all we had to do was kill Vierdimin. With Lee’s help we’d be able to find him, and we could close his backdoor and stop his plans before he moved us all to his private server and became an unstoppable deity inside of Fantasy Realms Online. He couldn’t hurt me at all, and I had evocation magic now! I could toast him. We just needed to get me close enough and prevent him from escaping.
“But wait…” Lee said. “How is he keeping us here in game? Are you sure that closing his backdoor to the code is enough to release us?”
A frown cracked across Saintly’s weathered face as he leaned back in his chair, arms crossed, considering Lee’s question. “Well… that part is really concerning, honestly. Full-sim VR works by reading from and writing to your brain via your implant jack. It reads your brain state, creates a representation of you in the game world, and then beams back those sensations to write them into your brain in a constant loop so you can experience the feelings in your meat-body, which is paralyzed via the same mechanism used while you’re dreaming. The tech is inherently dangerous because of the writing function. There are a ton of legal protections in place from the FDA and the government that tackle how to do this ethically for commercial applications, and we had to go through a bunch of testing to prove it was impossible to just randomly fry people’s brains due to a bug in the read/write procedure. That said, it’s possible to intentionally fuck with people’s brains any time they jack themselves into a program. The same warden program that guards the GM tools would stop Vierdimin from really hurting us as long as we’re on official servers, but it doesn’t stop him from severing the connection of our representational brain states to the login/logout server.”
My eyes had glazed over a little while he spoke, and I waved at Saintly to catch his attention. “Dude? You’re rambling again. Answer Lee’s question.”
“Right, right. Sorry. Just thinking out loud. Uh, no. I don’t think just getting ahold of the staff would be enough to release us all. You’d also have to tweak the code with his injections to unlock the login/logout server so that our brain states could be written back to our bodies. Whatever he did, it seems like it severed the connection to that server, which is why disconnecting players is just leaving them in comas. Their ‘real’ minds are stuck inside the game. Just like ours are.”
“All of this sounds really, really dangerous…” I said.
“The exposure to that kind of danger is unavoidable with the way the underlying tech works—it’s just that the government has made it very, very illegal to fuck around with it. Like go to jail for the rest of your life illegal. People don’t hack into games and mess with it for the same reasons people don’t usually murder their neighbors and take their stuff. It’s not worth the risk even for sociopaths. I don’t know if this Vierdimin guy knows how much trouble he’s in, but he’s playing for keeps. If he wins, he gets to be a god. If he loses, he’s going to jail forever.”
“So he’ll be desperate,” Topper noted. “No wonder he’s planned so
carefully for all of this.”
I shivered, regretting getting my VR jack for the first time in my life. I knew that it was dangerous when I got it, but they were so common now… I thought the warnings were like any other EULA I just scrolled past and agreed to. I’d never really thought about how vulnerable I was making myself to hackers, probably because marketers didn’t want me thinking about that.
“So what happens when the game shuts down?” I asked, as a light sweat broke out across my body. “Do we all… do we all just die?”
Saintly laughed. “God, no! Any time the game shuts down, player states are stored in local memory and restored to the bodies of the players.” Then he paused, frowning. “Or that’s what’s supposed to happen… with the backdoor hack, I’m less sure.”
Topper spoke up. “But it doesn’t matter for us, because even if we do get uploaded back into our bodies when they restart the server—and that’s a big thing to gamble your life on—from our perspective, we’d still be copied over to Vierdimin’s private server… with no bodies to be uploaded back to. Right?”
My blood ran cold as I considered his words. “You mean I’d be stuck as Lacey forever?”
“Stuck as Lacey and also as Vierdimin’s plaything,” Lee muttered.
“Fuck,” I breathed.
“If I can get my hands on the staff, I might be able to reverse the code injection that’s blocking the login server and we could all jack out before they shut the game down,” Saintly noted. “Assuming we have time for that.”
“We may not have much time,” Topper said. “The last report I got from Iciez was that things had gotten really heated politically over this whole situation. The owners will be under massive pressure to take the game offline and fuck the consequences.”
“So we need to find Vierdimin and do some damage control as soon as possible,” I said. “No wonder he’s trying to slow us down.”
“Right,” Topper agreed. “So we know the plan now. We find Vierdimin, take him down, and get Saintly the staff so he can tinker around with the code and release us before the game gets shut down. Let’s not waste any more time. Lee, I assume you don’t have Detect Object memorized—I took the liberty of buying the spell.”