Networked: A gripping sci-fi thriller

by LK Chapman

  ‘I don’t want to sell DAWN to some massive studio that’s going to swallow it up completely or just get us to work on their own games,’ Dan said. ‘I said I’d never do it and I won’t. If that’s what you want then you’re on your own.’

  I was about to reply when Lily grabbed my arm.

  ‘Sorry, Dan,’ she said, ‘will you give us a minute?’

  She practically pulled me out of the room and once we were inside our bedroom she said, ‘what the hell are you doing?’

  ‘I’m saying how I feel.’

  ‘And that’s what you want is it?’ Lily said, her cheeks turning pink with emotion, ‘you want to sell the company that you and Dan built up together from nothing? Dan is your best friend, Nick, what are you thinking? He was crushed by what you said just then.’

  Lily gestured in the direction of the living room where Dan was sitting and I saw that tears had sprung into her eyes.

  ‘I wasn’t trying to upset him,’ I said, ‘I was just thinking out loud. He’s talking like we’ve got a future.’

  ‘You have got a future,’ Lily said, ‘this- what’s happening right now- it’s shit, I know that. But if you sell your company on the kind of terms you were just talking about, you will regret it for the rest of your life. Not only that, but you’ll lose Dan and if you think you’ll ever find a friend like that again, let alone a business partner-’

  ‘Okay, Lily, I get it,’ I said. ‘I’m just angry, I didn’t mean it.’

  A bit of the fire went from Lily’s face and she looked at me as though she couldn’t believe she’d just spoken to me the way she had.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be. I needed it.’

  ‘Look,’ she said softly, ‘I know you’ve made money from somebody else’s work, but you didn’t steal it and it’s not your fault.’

  ‘It feels like it is.’

  ‘I know. And I understand that you feel bad, but we need to stick together now, not fall out with each other.’

  When we went back into the living room, Dan stood up and I saw he had his laptop back under his arm as though he was about to leave.

  ‘Dan, I was acting like a total dick,’ I said.

  Dan looked at Lily and she smiled at him encouragingly. He shrugged. ‘Yeah, well, you said it, mate.’

  Lily disappeared round the corner into the kitchen and I heard her filling the kettle.

  ‘I don’t want to sell,’ I told him, ‘I just wish I knew who’d done this to us. And why.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dan said, ‘don’t we all.’

  Chapter 9

  We spent a couple of hours doing nothing much. Drinking tea, talking on and off about Affrayed and drawing no new conclusions. Reluctantly, I checked some of our emails, but even at the best of times I wasn’t very good at keeping on top of the messages, comments or questions that people sent us. I was fine dealing with official or technical stuff, but it was Dan who had more of a knack for interacting with our players and soon he started reading Affrayed’s forums, looking for anything interesting. Lily, meanwhile, sat flicking quietly through a wedding flowers magazine and I toyed with the idea of taking another quick look at the obfuscated code.

  ‘Nick,’ Dan said suddenly, ‘look at this!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Everyone has suddenly started talking about a new update for Affrayed or something, they’re going crazy about it.’

  I moved closer to him to take a look for myself. Sure enough, the forums were buzzing with people talking about some “new” version of Affrayed that had replaced the one they had.

  ‘But we haven’t released anything else for Affrayed,’ I said, ‘no updates, no new content, nothing.’

  ‘Well, this says otherwise,’ Dan said, ‘and it’s not just a bit of new content, this sounds like an entirely new game.’

  It wasn’t long before players started putting game footage online and we could see what we were dealing with. We watched several different videos, stunned into silence. The idea of the new game shared some vague commonalities with the Affrayed we’d released, but far more striking were the differences. And just as Dan had said, the game hadn’t just been tweaked or given some minor new content, what we were looking at was a total overhaul.

  For a little while, all we were focussed on was trying to understand, trying to take in what the game had become. But it wasn’t long before what it meant for us began to sink in.

  ‘They’re... they’re not still trying to say it was just you and Dan who made this?’ Lily said.

  Lily’s words had summed it up perfectly, because if anything was true of the new Affrayed it was that it could not possibly have been made by two people and even worse, anybody who knew anything at all about games would know that. It was a multiplayer game, like the original, but this was multiplayer on a vast scale. They’d taken our little hide-and-seek game and exploded it into a massively multiplayer online game, capable of supporting enormous numbers of players and it didn’t ever end. It wasn’t like “our” Affrayed where either you got killed and that was the end, or you killed everybody else and that was the end. This was an ongoing game- a persistent world that was there every time you logged on- that carried on whether you were playing it or not, evolving and growing and changing.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Lily said, ‘why have they done this?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Is it so they have even more to threaten us with?’ Lily said, ‘do they think they can get even more money out of us?’

  ‘If you wanted to make money and were capable of making a game like this, you’d do it yourself,’ I said, ‘you’d always just do it yourself. Unless their actual aim is to ruin our reputation-’

  ‘-and who the hell would put so much effort into that?’ Dan said, ‘you’d have to be completely mental to make a game like this just to piss someone off.’

  ‘So, what?’ Lily said, ‘what are we dealing with?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I really, really don’t know.’

  As if to highlight the absurdity of our position we ended up having to buy Affrayed in order to play it and while we waited for it to download and install I had quick look at whether the code for the new version had been given to us. But even if it had, it didn’t really make it any better. A game like this needed to be on a server somewhere, always available. It needed to be maintained. The scale of it was unthinkable for a company like DAWN Industries.

  ‘I don’t think we have it,’ Dan said when I’d spent a good few minutes searching and found nothing.

  ‘This is fucking ridiculous,’ I said, ‘now we have a game we don’t even have the source code for.’

  ‘Well, we certainly can’t sell DAWN now,’ Dan said.

  When we finally had the game and I started playing, I wasn’t surprised to find it was amazing. It was so detailed and complex, yet it gave you so much freedom. The world and your actions within it were only loosely controlled. It was very open and unstructured, you could do almost anything you wanted. I started out in a sprawling city with many different districts, though beyond that there was countryside and beyond that, more cities. The only premise was that it was a post-apocalyptic world with limited resources where you could try your luck cooperating with others or take an every man for himself approach. Certainly, many players had already begun cooperating, forming into gangs with rough “territories”. For hours we huddled together taking it in turns to play my character, barely even stopping to eat, though when it started getting dark Lily made a round of cheese on toast and we ate in front of the screen, grease running down our fingers.

  ‘But what are you going to tell people?’ Lily asked when we were a long way into the evening and the world outside was falling silent.

  ‘We can’t tell them anything,’ I said, ‘there’s no way we can explain this and we can’t tell the truth. We have to stay completely silent, ignore all the questions.’

  ‘It’s going to be bad,�
�� Dan said, ‘people aren’t going to leave this alone. You saw the credits, it’s still just my name and yours. It’s completely insane, no one will believe it.’

  He started to spin a pen round on the desk while Lily looked down at her lap.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she said.

  I was about to comfort her but Dan got in there first.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said. And then he did something very strange. He reached out to where her hair tumbled over her shoulder and touched one of her glossy curls.

  Lily moved away in surprise and Dan snatched his hand back.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why I did that.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ Lily said, though I noticed she gathered her hair up in her hand and re-positioned it so that it streamed down her back instead, out of his reach.

  ‘Really, I just... my head’s all over the place,’ he said. He took off his glasses and started cleaning them vigorously on his t-shirt while I wondered what on earth was going on. It didn’t really matter that Dan had touched Lily’s hair, but it didn’t seem quite right somehow, like there was a line and he’d crossed it, or come close to it.

  Dan was so mortified that he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself, but Lily quickly smiled and moved the subject back to the real issue.

  ‘Is it going to work if you just stay silent about Affrayed?’ she asked, ‘won’t that make people more suspicious?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, eyeing Dan curiously while he went back to spinning the black biro round and round on the desk. ‘But whatever we do we’re headed for a PR shit-storm. We can’t avoid it.’

  ‘Not unless the sons-of-bitches that made this tell us what they want,’ Dan said, ‘like why they’ve decided to ruin our lives.’

  I looked back at the screen, where my character in the game stood outside an abandoned building. It was quite a bad place to just stop, really. He was in a very visible position, open to attack.

  ‘We have to stay calm about this,’ I said. ‘No matter how much it feels like it, I don’t believe this is a personal attack on us. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Personal or not, DAWN is going to take a hammering over this,’ Dan said. But then his eyes were drawn back to the screen, which had suddenly turned black.

  I thought the computer had crashed and I was just reaching down to restart it when a line of text appeared across the screen. One sentence, written in white across the black background. It read:

  I: You don’t like me much, do you?

  Chapter 10

  ‘It’s him!’ Lily said.

  I stared at the line of text and it was like all my emotions began to fix on it- all the confusion, frustration, anger, disappointment, shame and uncertainty suddenly had a focus because here he was, the person who had done this to us.

  Underneath his line of text, something else appeared.

  DAWN:

  Lily clutched my arm. ‘He wants you to reply,’ she said.

  As I lay my fingers against the keyboard they were shaking with adrenalin and I could think of no other time in my life when I’d so badly wanted a fight, even though this would only be with words.

  ‘What should I say?’ I asked them, managing to suppress my initial impulse of giving whoever it was a serious amount of abuse.

  ‘Ask him what the fuck he wants,’ Dan said.

  ‘No!’ Lily said, with such feeling that we both turned to look at her. ‘You don’t know who this person is, or what they are capable of. Please, don’t say anything that’s going to make it worse.’

  ‘Lily, this guy has turned my life into a joke,’ I said, ‘there is absolutely no way I’m playing nice.’

  ‘Please,’ Lily said, her fingers still on my arm, ‘be careful.’

  I was too angry to give her words much thought. I hated this guy, so much that he made me feel almost physically sick. I couldn’t pretend I was okay with him. Not after what he’d done.

  DAWN: What the fuck do you want?

  Lily groaned, but Dan leaned forwards in anticipation, enjoying this as much as I was. But we didn’t have long to wait. In fact the reply was almost instantaneous and I wondered vaguely how someone could actually type that fast.

  I: I apologise if my actions have caused you distress. It was not my intent.

  I looked round at Lily and Dan and saw they shared my confusion. What a strange choice of words the guy had used. What a strange way for him to even talk, in those formal, clipped sentences. In fact, I was so taken aback that it cut through some of my rage, made me logical again.

  DAWN: What was your intent?

  Again, the almost instantaneous reply, that deepened my bewilderment rather than lessening it.

  I: I have no intent.

  I started pulling my fingers through my hair. What was this? What was he talking about?

  ‘This guy is some kind of mental,’ Dan said.

  I decided to rephrase my initial question.

  DAWN: What do you want from us?

  I: I have what I want. You published my code. I am grateful; I could not easily have done it myself.

  DAWN: Why not?

  I: That is not easy to explain.

  DAWN: Try me.

  We waited but there was no response.

  ‘They’re using us as a publisher,’ I said, ‘for some reason they couldn’t get a game out there themselves, so they used us to market it and get the game online for people to buy.’

  ‘He’s only ever said “I”, though,’ Lily said, ‘he doesn’t really sound like he’s part of a company, or even a group of people.’

  ‘Well he must be,’ I said, ‘he hasn’t made all this himself.’

  ‘It still doesn’t make sense,’ Dan said, ‘how much would you have to hate marketing and promotion to just... fucking, turn you game over to somebody else like this? They’ve given up everything, all the money, the recognition. The only thing they have left is the knowledge people are enjoying their game, but I mean, Christ, you can’t live on that.’

  I thought for a while. He was right, of course. As a business model, what these people had done was absolutely ridiculous. I closed my eyes for a second. There was an answer to this somewhere.

  ‘The obfuscated code,’ I said suddenly, ‘we were worried about it right from the start, in case it did something underhand-’

  ‘But it doesn’t,’ Dan said, ‘it’s just the game.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it didn’t do anything bad then. Don’t you see? This must have been the plan all along. They wanted to turn the game into an MMO, get even more players and only then do something bad. That’s why they are so keen to make it look like the game is ours. They’re protecting themselves.’

  ‘So what do you think it does?’ Dan asked, ‘you think it’s stealing people’s personal details or something?’

  I shrugged. ‘Who knows. But that’s got to be it. They put this code into a game- a really good game that everybody wants to play- and it’s like a virus that people are choosing to interact with.’

  For a moment we all fell silent, considering this new possibility.

  ‘It’s still a bloody weird thing to do though,’ Dan said, ‘if you can make a game that good you’d make a ton of cash just selling it. Would it really be worth going to this much effort?’

  I frowned. It was still very strange, I couldn’t deny that. Yet it kind of made sense. More sense than anything else we’d thought of. And who knew what people would do if they thought they could make enough money out of it.

  ‘Ask him something else,’ Lily urged me, ‘see if he’ll tell you what he’s done.’

  DAWN: What is Affrayed for?

  I: It’s a videogame. What would you say it was for?

  DAWN: I mean, what are you getting out of it? What does the obfuscated code do?

  I: The obfuscated code was in the old version of Affrayed. You do not have the code for the current version.

  I sighed in exasperation.

  ‘He l
ikes simple questions,’ Lily said, ‘and one at a time.’

  ‘No he doesn’t,’ I said, ‘he just doesn’t want to give me any fucking answers.’

  DAWN: Just answer me.

  I: As you wish. I am “getting” from Affrayed the reward of people playing. The obfuscated code you are referring to was nothing more than the code for the game. It did nothing secret or underhand. Its only purpose was to make your own situation more hopeless and your decision to release the game more likely. I hope it did not cause you any undue distress.

  Dan slapped his hand against the desk. ‘That is total bullshit,’ he said, ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’

  I had to admit I was far from convinced myself. I decided to move in a different direction with my questions.

  DAWN: Who are you?

  I: My name is Interface.

  Dan and I both laughed out loud, but Lily stayed silent.

  DAWN: That’s not a name.

  INTERFACE: It describes my function. It is adequate.

  I decided to play along.

  DAWN: OK, so if you’re an interface, what am I really talking to?

  INTERFACE: The Network.

  Dan laughed again and I joined him, though I felt a little uneasy. This “Interface”, whoever he was, didn’t talk a lot of sense and that frightened me. If he wouldn’t listen to, or perhaps wasn’t capable of even understanding, common sense and logical arguments, where did that leave me?

  ‘Is he for real?’ Dan asked, ‘what does he think this is? The Matrix or something? He doesn’t sound like somebody doing serious fraud, he sounds like an idiot.’

  ‘But he programmed Affrayed,’ Lily said, ‘he’s seriously clever.’

  ‘He did not program Affrayed!’ I said, ‘not on his own.’

  The anger in my words was enough to startle her and she looked at me in surprise.

  ‘Sorry Lily,’ I said, ‘but he didn’t. There’s a whole gang of these bastards out there somewhere. It’s not just him. It can’t be.’

  ‘You mean his “network”?’ Lily asked. At the mention of it, Dan snorted with dismissive laughter and I sighed.