The Sapporo Outbreak

by Craighead, Brian

  "Here, our professional game testers and a cross section of the public - some wearing iSight glasses, many more wearing iSight lenses - experience an area of the game only accessible inside one of our centres. This special game space is what we call our 'walled garden' - and inside the 'garden' testers can take part in new scenarios, enter new areas of the iSight virtual world and employ any new features. All tests take place inside specially constructed research rooms filled with extremely sophisticated monitoring technology. All of this allows us to accurately measure the reaction to, and so the likely popularity of, any enhancements to the game."

  Santos cast a long, slow gaze over her colleagues.

  Harper appeared to have disengaged completely, all semblance of focus had gone. Instead, his head jerked unnaturally from side to side like a bush turkey, alert and treading cautiously through the undergrowth. His natural curiosity overwhelmed by the endless supply of floating bubbles appearing before him. More facts. More quirky insights. Lots of self-promotion. All of it greedily devoured by the wealthy, tall security executive.

  Conversely, Skinner seemed to have entered a heightened state of awareness, methodically scanning the surroundings like a bank robber surveying his next target. Even Sakura seemed distracted, merely reciting some well-worn script - or rather reading from a floating bubble visible only to her.

  Only Hill, the nervous buttoned-up lawyer seemed to be concentrating intently as the beautiful young hostess spoke.

  "Excuse me Miss Sakura, but why spend so much time and money on testing at this scale? I understand the game is enormous but surely constant, round-the-clock, round-the-world testing of a game is overkill?"

  Sakura turned toward Hill, a look of mild surprise on her face.

  "Mr Hill, I understand why this might at first glance seem excessive, but you have to remember that every day over a million new players - real and digital - enter or leave the game. The game's artificial intelligence engine is constantly evolving the world in response to the interactions of hundreds of millions of players. The iSight game is like a massive, ever-changing living organism. We need to test constantly because the game itself never stops evolving."

  "I understand - but how can you possibly hope to test every possible new change? Every new... evolution?"

  Sakura smiled and nodded graciously as if this was at last a line of questioning worthy of a response.

  "Good question Mr Hill," Sakura smiled and scanned the group while speaking. "What these labs are really testing is how accurately the game is simulating human behaviour. A great deal of our testing and research focuses on the human or social elements of the game -which helps us create virtual personalities that act as realistically as possible. We monitor how players interact with other players - real and virtual - and how they respond to different situations. We watch how players respond during simulated conflict, or when the situation demands they compromise. It's truly fascinating to see how different players behave in the extreme worlds we create. As players immerse themselves in game scenarios, interacting with both real and virtual players in the controlled environment of these test rooms, we track the testers' reactions through sophisticated monitoring equipment."

  Suddenly intrigued, Santos responded. "That's fascinating. It sounds more like a series of psychological tests, rather than just pressure testing a new online game."

  Sakura smiled. "In many ways, you are correct Doctor Santos. To ensure players truly immerse themselves in the game, we need to create a complete 'suspension of disbelief'. We want players to feel that the game is as close to reality as possible. We've seen the impact this has. The more real the game feels the more real the emotions are that the players experience. And - frankly - the more addictive the game becomes. Mr Tanaka has been very clear that our goal is to deliver an online gaming experience which is almost impossible to separate from reality."

  Sakura paused for effect, beaming with pride as she continued.

  "We feel iSight3 does just that, and our game testers agree. Now - I'm afraid I really must insist that we press on. Please follow me through to the immersion labs where you will see testing in progress." With that, Sakura strode through the lounge area and into the long wide corridor leading into the game immersion area. Harper and Hill walked two paces behind.

  Santos moved to follow but felt Skinner's tight grip on her bicep as he pulled her in tightly. When they were close enough that their noses almost touched, he nudged her on the stomach, and Santos looked down to see a hastily written note on the back of his business card.

  Clark confirms - we have a BIG problem.

  Take your lenses out now!

  Will explain later

  #

  10pm Wednesday, Seattle Washington (INFECTION)

  Music, loud and raucous, leaked out from the single-story student bar and into the cold dark winter's night. A blanket of thick fresh snow smothered the sound as it spread over the sidewalk and street. The road had disappeared, swallowed up by the winter's fall. The street lights flickered and blinked through the thick wet snowflakes as they drifted through the night air.

  To the right of the bar stood a three-story green timber house. As with many buildings in Seattle's Lower Queen Anne, the building had been immaculately restored and converted into apartments - in this case, one per floor. The first and second floor apartments were in complete darkness, their blinds drawn. Snow lay thick and undisturbed on the wooden decks leading to the apartment door. The only sign of life in the entire building was a flickering light glowing from the third-floor window overlooking the corner of First and Roy Street.

  Inside, Lewis Dodgson sat hunched over a large, tidy white desk somehow squeezed into the apartment's front room. The desk was crowded with translucent computer monitors. Thin panes of frosted glass crowded with a baffling array of windows. Some scrolled constantly through lines of dense code, others showed intricate diagrams, their lines pulsing to some unheard beat.

  Dodgson's fingers slid, pushed, pressed and flew over the raised glass panel on the desk. He held his left index finger over the panel for a second - savouring the moment - before pressing down one last time on the panel. The glass monitors flew into a frenzy of code and numbers while a fractal diagram burst into life.

  Dodgson smiled broadly, let out a loud yawn, pushed his bare feet against the wooden floor and let his high-back chair trundle a couple of feet from the desk. He stood up, stretched and tentatively rubbed his red eyes. Exhausted but elated, the software engineer and self-proclaimed privacy freedom fighter felt a surge of pure joy pulse through his body.

  He walked past the large desk, stood in front of the apartment's large bay windows and peered into the murky winter's night. He watched as a gaggle of drunk twenty-something students tumbled from the bar's entrance and swaggered and slurred their way into the night. Although it had been only a few years since Dodgson had been a student, he felt no connection with these people. He watched, fascinated and disgusted as the students stumbled through the snow. Despite being surrounded by friends, no one was talking. Instead, they were staring down at their phones as they stumbled and slid over the icy sidewalk, desperate for a social media fix.

  Dodgson shook his head slowly.

  The world was addicted to connection. Age, location, lifestyle - it didn't matter. People were broadcasting every aspect of their lives to the world. Where they were. What they were doing, with whom. Dodgson was baffled by the casual disregard people had for their own privacy. He had seen what his clients - marketers, corporations and government agencies - did with this information. Dodgson understood how easy it was to take every tiny piece of personal trivia, every post, tweet, blog, email, picture, video and text - and quickly build a complete picture of the person. He had made a lot of money very quickly by helping the vigilant protect their data - and almost always he was helping the very organisations that were the worst offenders.

  Corporations and governments were systematically stealing everything that identified the i
ndividual. To Dodgson, it was theft on an unimaginable scale.

  And no one was doing anything to stop it.

  Until tonight.

  Right here - in his downtown Seattle apartment using state of the art security systems he had designed for those corporate and government thieves - Dodgson had sucker-punched the very worst identity vulture. He turned his back on the winter scene and walked back to his desk, surveying the frenetic activity on the large monitors. Dodgson watched as the infected code he had designed and crafted over months with his fellow ANONet hackers enveloped the WhiteStar security systems, blinding it to all his work. He watched as the rogue code snaked its way through the holes Dodgson had designed in to the system and into the iSight game. He watched the brilliant, elegant software as it exploded into thousands and thousands of replicas, then spread itself over the iSight system. The viral software burrowed and buried itself deeper and deeper into the iSight system and - seconds later - Dodgson finally saw what he'd worked for, planned for, his whole life.

  The WhiteStar security system collapsed completely.

  The new iSight 3 game, scheduled for imminent release and destined to make greedy shareholders unimaginably wealthy, was now being copied out of the WhiteStar servers and spread over tens of thousands of servers around the world. Over twenty million iSight 2 players had already silently switched over to the 'released' iSight3 version. Free to use, and free of the snooping, privacy-invading code. As soon as a copy was complete, others were spawned. Dodgson was beside himself with joy. The attack had worked perfectly - and much, much faster than he'd ever imagined. 'Must be those new quantum servers' he muttered to himself while he stared, enthralled, as wave after wave of users were automatically switched over to the free, unconstrained iSight 3 game. To those already in the game it would feel like the shackles had been lifted, and the curtain had been swept aside to reveal a dramatic new hyper-real world. A world with no constraints, one in which players were no longer monitored, controlled and manipulated for profit.

  Pre-scheduled announcements from ANONet were now triggered, publishing details of the release on social networks, blogs and sites around the world. Dodgson watched as first thousands, then tens of thousands joined the iSight 3 game for the first time.

  Dodgson checked his watch. 10:10pm. He glanced at the monitors and made a quick calculation. At this rate iSight 3 - stripped of all the insidious profiling and identify theft - would be freely available to over one billion players by morning.

  He had done it. This was a hammer blow to all those who'd trampled on individual privacy and online freedom. As the bar music drifted up through the black of winter, Dodgson had never felt more alive.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Contamination

  3pm Thursday, Sapporo, Japan

  Santos looked up at Skinner, who discretely tapped twice underneath his right eye with his index finger. Santos flicked a quick glance at Sakura, Hill and Harper as they strode into the corridor leading into the Game Immersion lab. She nodded silently to Skinner, then quickly opened her right eyelid, pressed her finger onto the iSight 3 lens, lifted it out and tucked it into the back pocket of her white jeans. She repeated the process with her left eye, and immediately felt Skinner's firm grip on her arm as he guided her toward Sakura and their two colleagues.

  As she stumbled forward, blinking rapidly to ease the sharp stinging sensation in her eyes, she felt a lurching sense of discomfort, a nausea bubbling in the pit of her stomach. She felt disoriented, unnerved. As the pain in her eyes quickly subsided, Santos realised with a start that she missed the iSight lenses. She felt exposed, naked and unsafe without them.

  Fixing his eyes on Sakura and the two men ahead, Skinner whispered, "How are you feeling?"

  Santos grimaced. "Terrible. I can't decide whether to throw up or pass out."

  "Yeah - I know what you mean. I felt the same thing. It passed in a few minutes, but I hate to think how it would feel if I'd been wearing the lenses for a few days."

  Santos glanced up at Skinner. "It's scary. Right now, what I really want to do more than anything is put the lenses back in. I don't feel safe without them."

  "I know what you mean Eva. I'm still struggling without them. For a start, this building doesn't make any sense without them. I miss the signs, the colours, the fake artwork - even those endless little bubbles floating on top of things. Now everything seems so ... bland."

  Santos looked at Skinner. "Ben. What did Steve say? And why did we have to remove these lenses?"

  Before Skinner could reply, Sakura's voice, polite yet with a noticeable edge, interrupted.

  "Excuse me Doctor Santos, Professor Skinner. Would you mind coming in a little closer? We are about to enter the immersion labs. It would be a pity if you were to miss any of this."

  #

  Skinner and Santos muttered apologies as they hustled to a stop behind Harper and Hill. Sakura fixed a curious gaze on the pair before addressing the four consultants.

  "I'm sure you are all quite exhausted by now, and will be pleased to hear that this will be our last stop on today's tour of the facility."

  A familiar pause and polite smile followed, before Sakura continued.

  "Here you will see iSight3 players - some paid and others volunteering - immerse themselves in different characters, enter different regions of the virtual world and play out different scenes. Everything they do, both in the rooms and in the virtual world, is monitored by Dr Tait and his team in the fifth floor NOC."

  As she talked Sakura led the group further down the central corridor dividing the east and west of the building, slowing to a stop between two very large rooms. Through his iSight 3 glasses, Hill could see the room to his left coloured a bright green, and the words 'iSight3 - Conflict' splashed over the door. To his right, 'iSight 3 - Competition'. The corridor stretched ahead of them past other rooms before coming to a solid wall. Behind them, the corridor stretched back in the distance, eventually leading out to the lounge area. Other corridors stretched east and west.

  They were standing in the dead centre of the research lab.

  Santos tuned out Sakura as she began another corporate sales pitch on the quality of the research conducted. She was fascinated by what she could see through the large tinted window, which she assumed to be some sort of two-way mirror. Around twenty predominantly Japanese players - old and young, male and female, gathered in large and small groups. Some sat around thick sofas circles, others stood and a few walked briskly around the room as if out on a morning hike. All of them were moving in a slightly unnatural, exaggerated manner. Most were talking animatedly - some to other players while many seemed to be deep in conversation with thin air. As Santos watched closely, it seemed clear from the body language of the players that many were engaged - or at least believed they were - in an argument of some sort. Most seemed light hearted and interspersed with smiles and nudges while a few others seemed a little more pointed. One or two - interestingly to Santos, both talking to what she presumed were 'virtual players' - appeared to be escalating into more serious disagreements.

  It looked bizarre. Almost comical. It was like watching actors rehearse their lines before opening night. And yet something about the scene disturbed Santos.

  She narrowed her focus to the two players 'arguing' with an invisible friend. They seemed agitated, almost angry, arms flailing in the air to emphasise a point. In just the few seconds that she'd been watching, it seemed to escalate. Suddenly, several other players sprang to agitated life, shouting obscenities loudly enough that she could hear them through the thick glass window.

  Two greying middle-aged men were shouting aggressively at each other. The slightly shorter, podgier of the two suddenly swung at the other, a wild and slow haymaker that missed by a distance. Watching this scene unfold, Santos briefly wondered if this was another one of Tanaka's stunts. It would be just like Tanaka to hire a few actors to stage a scene that made light of the board's safety concerns. She quickly dismissed the thought a
s the fight escalated. Two well-dressed middle aged men brawling - it seemed ... surreal.

  To Santos, it looked like a situation rapidly spiralling out of control. She could feel Ben Skinner move next to her, staring in at the same scene of anger unfolding in front of them.