Cat's Quest

by Roman Prokofiev

  But why would they need slaves? Pandorum occupied the mysterious Astral Plane, a place between dimensions. Working as mercenaries in alliance wars, receiving tribute from enslaved worlds, and farming strange Astral anomalies generated a colossal income. Why would they want to capture slaves?

  The solution was plain to see. The Pandas had never said it outright, but the curious players still figured everything out and drew their own conclusions. Problem was, the Astral Plane was otherwise uninhabited. Well, almost uninhabited, taking account of local predators and the mobs spawned in strange anomalies. The developers had never planned for it to become inhabited, so the lands there could not be conquered...and there were not really any lands, as such, to begin with. Still, Pandorum had managed to settle there and was fixing the designers’ mistake. To play, level up reputation, get quests, and recruit pawns, Pandas required NPCs: quest givers, cooks, vendors, craftsmen...

  It was a bold experiment. The NPCs transported by the mercenaries into the Pandas’ stronghold in the Astral Plane ended up staying there and joining a new faction. Over the past month, as the players observed, Pandorum had performed a dozen other slave raids. They had clearly streamlined the process.

  The latest information calmed me down. At least, it meant that nothing especially bad would happen to Weldy. After getting the slaves to the Astral Plane, Pandas freed them and tried increasing reputation with them. One thing had bothered me back in Eyre: many NPCs had their clothes torn. Still, even that turned out to have an explanation. The mercenaries needed to free the neck slot, and thus tore away everything that occupied it—amulets, pendant, necklaces—so they could put the slave collars on. Sexual assault was impossible in Sphere, as any form of sex required consent between the player and the NPC, or the system would not allow it — a strictly enforced rule. As for NPCs’ “availability”, that depended solely on their personality, So, what was I to do?

  I still felt tense after the failure of the previous day. Why did I succumb to that fit of rage and attack the Pandas? The emotions I felt were nothing more than a child’s resentment after seeing his favorite toy taken away and broken.

  Who was Weldy to me? What did I feel for her? A slight affection, sympathy, desire to use her to my own ends? I liked talking to her and watching her reaction, even if it was the reaction of an advanced program and AI, indistinguishable from a real person.

  Weldy was my friend, I realized. I did not have many friends, but I would never abandon them. Everything I did the day before was both right and wrong at the same time. Right, because I was true to my nature and stood by my beliefs. Wrong, because I should have used brains instead of brawn. Ultimately, I was not a warrior or a fighter; that was not my strongest side. I was just a newbie with an OP item. But even an OP item in weak hands was powerless to save the world, as I had just found out.

  I slapped my forehead. Think, Cat! Use your head, you know you can do it!

  An incoming voice call appeared on the private channel of my messenger. It was Alex, and judging by his status, he was in-game.

  “Hey, Alex!”

  “Hi, Cat. How’re you doing?”

  “I’m...fine. How about you? Have you saved the castle?”

  “Of course. The Pandas were just messing with us. When our allies got there, they retreated.”

  “Were you playing for long yesterday?”

  “Until four AM. Listen Cat, there’s something weird going on in Sphere, could you log in? We need to check something out.”

  ENTERING THE GAME...

  And like in a bad dream, instead of being transported to a lush, colorful world of Sphere, full of diverse scents, the system showed me the following message,

  YOUR ACCOUNT WAS BLOCKED.

  GO TO PROFILE?

  In my profile, a letter from administration unfolded over the entire screen, softly rustling. It was styled after old-time parchment, had cracked borders and a wax seal. In dry official language, I was informed that my account, ID such and such, was blocked by administration for violating the User Agreement, paragraph such and such, subparagraph such and such, according to so and so. The decision was final not subject to appeal. In short, I was banned for using the flaming sword, the thing I was so afraid of yesterday. A month and a half of effort had just been swept down the drain. Great! Am I going to have to look for a new way of feeding myself? The only upside was that the situation with COSMOS had taught me to move money into real life as soon as possible, leaving just a little for routine expenses in Cat’s account.

  HotCat: Alex, I have bad news.

  AlexOrder: More? Me too... Why aren’t you logging in?

  HotCat: My account’s banned because of the sword.

  AlexOrder: (censored) Wait, I’ll contact Komtur.

  AlexOrder: Here, write down this number. Call this guy, he’s a lawyer who specializes in gaming law. He might be able to help. Oh, and Komtur tells me, that whatever the outcome, the clan will pay for the lawyer. We also have something…God knows what’s happening here...

  HotCat: What?

  AlexOrder: You won’t believe me, but Sphere’s glitching. Strange messages are displaying in global chat, and the NPCs are frozen, not giving any quests.

  HotCat: What are the messages?

  AlexOrder: Wait a bit... Look, here’s a screenshot.

  I opened the image he sent. It was the global announcement channel used by admins and it displayed an uninterrupted wall of text with the same message repeated.

  BALANCE HAS BEEN BROKEN!

  BALANCE HAS BEEN BROKEN!

  BALANCE HAS BEEN BROKEN!

  * * *

  Negotiating with the lawyer, whose contact details Alex had given me, took over an hour. He was a tenacious capable guy, and defending rights of players in online games was clearly a labor of love. The growing popularity of total immersion games had led the legal system to adopt an entire new section on Gaming Law back in the forties. Of course, its paragraphs, as usual, could be interpreted in various ways, plus game developers always had legal professionals working for them—yet talking with the lawyer still got my hopes up.

  He gave me the necessary instructions and promised to file a complaint with Sphere administration. According to him, if I had obtained the sword via in-game means without violating the User Agreement, I could use it at my own discretion. The problems admins faced being unable to uphold the balance in their own game was not my concern, or, as the lawyer put it, we need not give a rat’s ass about it.

  After finishing our conversation, I visited Sphere’s official forum once again. There, I saw that all worlds of the game were glitching, and the message about balance being broken was showing everywhere. The forum was jam packed with bitching about declining NPCs, inactive quests, vanishing instances. A player even wrote that new items and dungeons had stopped being generated, everywhere at once.

  The server status turned red being abruptly turned off right before my eyes. All online players were being kicked out. Ten minutes later, it was up again, but going by the player messages, that did not help.

  Over the next half hour, game worlds were turned off and on again, more than once. Around six in the evening, a message from administration appeared on the main website.

  Dear players!

  Login to Sphere of the Worlds is temporary unavailable due to technical reasons.

  We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience caused.

  We will inform you as soon as maintenance is complete.

  Respectfully,

  Sphere of the Worlds Administration

  All hell broke loose. Millions of players kicked out into real life, like fish out of water, rushed to the official forums. Topics were created at the speed of light, faster than I could refresh the main page. Posters were threatening admins with terrible punishments, as players lamented their financial losses; some questioned the reasons for the issue, while others simply flamed. In short, people were going cold turkey. I did not envy Sphere’s community managers: that night, th
ey had a real mess to clean up. A bit later, the situation grew even more intense, and I read the emerging comments with alarm: the servers still were not up, and there was no new information. Players were asking, begging, threatening to sue, but the administration answered them with stock phrases only.

  I had to distract myself. It was getting dark outside, and ruby sparkling wine bubbled in our glasses as Alena’s head nestled against my shoulder. The two of us watched a naive but good-natured movie from the beginning of the century.

  CHAPTER 24 ROLLBACK

  Fireworks were being set off all around the city, bursting in the sky and lighting up New Tokyo’s multilevel megascrapers green, red, and blue. Cars flashed along the ringway, at the centre of the metropolis, which was mostly empty at that time of night. The cars disappeared at the ramps, crossing points, entryways, and curves of the delicate tangle of the capital’s roadways.

  Somewhere, close by, the sharp sound of a car horn was heard, and a set of gates opened. Three large black cars drove onto the campus, illuminating the guards who came up to meet them. The huge golden SPHERE OF THE WORLDS logo on the gateway glistened in the headlights.

  A gentle cough from behind caught Yoshito’s attention and he turn away from the window.

  “Let’s go, Yoshiko. Mister Agasyan has arrived.”

  Inside the conference hall, everything was already prepared, and as he entered, everyone rushed to stand. Mister Agasyan was Sphere’s owner and senior investor, an imposing dignified man in his fifties, whose aristocratic features betrayed Armenian heritage. Well-groomed, dressed in an expensive tailored suit and fashionable golden pince-nez, he radiated confidence and inner strength that made it clear to everyone who really was in change. He was followed by a short robust Slav with an inconspicuous face wearing ordinary clothing. If you met such a man on the street, you would not pay him a moment’s notice, and he would be quickly lost in the crowd.

  “Mister Agasyan, everything is ready.”

  “All right, let’s not lose any time,” the Armenian said dryly. He sat at the head of the table, and his companion took the seat next to him.

  “We have an emergency, Mister Agasyan. We had to turn Sphere off.”

  “I’ve already heard!” The investor snapped. “They called me...from there!” He said, raising his finger, pointed upward.

  “Mister Yamato, I would like to know what happened, and what you intend to do about it.”

  “I hardly know where to start...”

  “From the beginning, Yamato.”

  The main speaker, a tall lanky Japanese man, was the lead in the Sphere of the Worlds project. He pressed several buttons on his wrist communicator, and a 3D hologram depicting Sphere of the Worlds appeared above the table—a sphere that consisted of multiple smaller spheres, like soap bubbles, flying in a blurry reddish haze.

  “OK. Today, around noon, Sphere became unstable. At first, quests, buildings, and dungeons stopped generating, and then they started self-destructing. Eventually, the procedural generator, Sphere’s main AI, crashed with a critical error. It went haywire and stopped responding to our requests.”

  The man’s voice was calm and soft, expressing no emotion. He spoke fluent Russian without the hint of an accent. Those present at the meeting knew that Yoshiko Yamato had come to Russia when he was four, during the crazy Time of Tremors. His Japanese parents perished in the horrible influx of refugees, while Yoshiko ended up in an orphanage. Still, he was too smart and strong-willed for that to shake him. At thirteen, the rising star of programming was known to the entire net, and at twenty, he was considered the prodigy of New Tokyo.

  “What have you done, Mister Yamato?”

  “You see, this was considered impossible...” Yoshiko stammered. “The procedural generator is Sphere’s cornerstone, the most reliable system you can possibly imagine. As you already know, we were unable to figure out its software architecture... But I digress. What have we done? We have tried everything we could think of, even rebooted the servers. Nothing has helped.”

  Ashot Agasyan took off his gold pince-nez and smoothed over his graying hair.

  “Have you determined the cause of the malfunction?”

  “I don’t have a definitive answer for you, Mister Agasyan. Just guesses.”

  “Guesses! Three months, Yamato! You’ve been project leader for three months! When I signed a contract with you, I honestly thought I had found the best of all professionals! You received carte blanche to recruit the cream of the crop into your team! And what do I get? Guesses!”

  The Japanese was silent, his face cold.

  “Mister Yamato, you must,” the Armenian stressed the last word, “must know, not guess.”

  “I am very sorry to fall short of your expectations,” the Japanese said in a low voice, after a pause, “but I said it, when I signed the contract, and I’m saying it now. The one thing I can tell you, is that I don’t give guarantees.”

  “After Balabanov’s death, we had nothing left,” he continued. “We weren’t given any information on the project. None. Essentially, we had to reverse engineer Sphere from ground zero, figure out someone else’s super complicated code written in a language designed specifically for the project. We had no sources, no statement of work from Balabanov’s team, no design documentation!”

  “What about decoding the data on the backup cloud server?” asked the man who accompanied Agasyan.

  “That data is subject to complex cryptographic encryption. Breaking it is almost impossible—and we aren’t really trying. And after what happened when we tried hacking into Balabanov’s password-protected computers, we don’t want to.”

  “Andrey was always paranoid,” Agasyan said, nodding. “He was always afraid other people would steal his ideas.”

  “That may be so, but he was also a truly genius developer,” the Japanese said. “You don’t get a Nobel Prize for nothing. Unfortunately, Mister Agasyan, we haven’t been able to sort out the game’s architecture, its code. I hope this breakthrough is still to come; the solution is extremely unorthodox. In truth, all we can do now is use the built-in editor to clean up after the procedural generator.”

  “Can you explain the problem to me?”

  “I’ll try, but it will be difficult for a layman to grasp.”

  “Try me.”

  “You see, Balabanov spent many years on Sphere. He wrote a unique programming language, developed his own VR engine, then embedded and linked everything together via in-game AI. This is the product of years of work carried out by an entire team of professionals! For us, it’s layers of layers of someone else’s code, all merged together. When we start poking this jumbled mess with a stick, and sever the threads, things like this glitch happen.”

  “Based on what you say, I conclude the following,” Agasyan said. “First, Sphere is basically uncontrollable. Second, you know the cause of the glitch.” The Japanese man chuckled.

  “I repeat, it’s just a guess. We’ve reread the system logs looking for any action that might have led to the malfunction. We made a few interesting observations. As for the element of uncontrollability, you’re right, to an extent. We don’t control the project.”

  “I remember Andrey telling me that his system does everything itself,” the investor mused.

  “External interference is ineffective,” Yamato replied, nodding. “It’s better to influence the game from the inside via in-game mechanics. We’re trying....”

  “So that’s why you’ve spent almost two days in the capsule, Yamato?” The plain-looking fellow smirked.

  “Exactly, Mister Yuri,” Yoshiko nodded. Everyone present noticed his exhausted look and the dark circles under his eyes.

  “I’m afraid you’re underestimating the severity of the issue,” Agasyan said. “Robert, what’s the current situation?”

  One of the people around the table, a scrawny old man with the smart face of an expert lawyer, tapped at the screen of his communicator and signed deeply.

  “At
the moment, we have seven hundred and thirteen claim letters, twenty-three suits, fourteen requests from attorney offices of various districts, and fifty requests from other departments, and that’s just the Russian Confederation. As for interna—”

  “That’s enough, Robert,” Agasyan interrupted him. “And that’s in what time period? Ten hours of downtime? That’s just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll talk our way out of it. We also have the Zero project, Hades, Gaia! What will we do with them? Every hour of downtime could become…” He broke off, shifting his gaze to Yoshiko.

  “Yamato, we have to get Sphere into working mode again. This is a question of life and death. Mine...and yours.”

  “I understand, Mister Agasyan.” The project head coughed.

  “You said you know the reason for the glitch.”

  “I said that I had my suspicions. I suspect the following. The day before the glitch, we were trying to fix a handful of bugs. The list of issues contained one suspicious item probably intended for an update.”

  “What item?” the Armenian asked, his interest piqued. “Tell me more, Yamato. What update?”

  “We no longer have any information about the update. It vanished with Balabanov, along with everything else. As for the item...nothing special, a sword, clearly designed for an NPC. Some newbie managed to get his hands on it. We warned him not to use it, but he refused to heed the warning. We received numerous petitions complaining about his actions, and decided to remove the item from the game. Unfortunately, it was hardwired into the software module, and we did not have time to figure out all the connections. Consequently, we decided to freeze it on the player’s account by banning him.”

  “You stupid fools! If Balabanov went to such extremes as to hardwire this item into the game, do you really think he didn’t foresee that as a possibility? So you really think this item is the reason for the glitch?”