They returned to the wagon and set it on “auto pilot” to take them back to Whitbell.
“We’ll have about two hours RWT before we can log in and be back in town in time to do the mushroom quest, unless you want to grind all night.”
Darvin mentally shook his head at the concept of RWT, or real world time. It was getting increasingly difficult to comprehend the difference in reality between the two worlds.
“Naw. I could use a short break. I probably have to piss like a racehorse.”
“Okay. Meet me ingame in exactly two hours.”
“Wait! Can our characters get attacked while we’re logged out?”
Riccon shook his head. “No. If there’s a random encounter on the way then we’ll be on the wagon when we log in. The encounter will happen a minute or two later as a micro instance. Then the game will give us an option of staying in real time or fast forward until we reach Whitbell.”
“But at the same time we would have if we rode all the way there?”
“Yep.”
“Time is so confusing here.”
“Best not to think about it too hard.”
Chapter 5: Ghost in the Machine
0259. EDISON PUSHARD STARED at the digital clock on his game HUD, willing time to move faster. Sadly, he had no control of time in the real world, and as little more than a player, he did not have any control over it here either. It had been less than two days since those bastards had cast him from heaven to languish in the world of mortals. It was insufferable, but he would make them pay, and they would pay dearly.
0300.
“Showtime!” Edison shouted, drawing a few looks from some of the tavern patrons. “Cry havoc, and let slip the digital dogs of war!”
He wrung his hands in anticipated glee as he waited for his digital saboteur to inform him of its mission success.
Jamika Granato held her glasses in one hand and rubbed at her eyes. She put her glasses back in place, looked at the row of clocks on the wall, picked out the one bearing a U.S.A. sign beneath it, and checked the time. She swiveled her head around and scowled as several people entered the room.
Goddam Ricardo. Late again, she thought irritably.
It was shift change at QM’s Administrative Control Room, or ACR, and it looked like she was going to be the last one out—again. As if working the graveyard shift wasn’t bad enough. She sighed and turned back to her bank of monitors. At least the pay was good. She had some hefty student loans to pay off.
The ACR looked more like NASA mission control than the command center for an online game, but QM was far more than a simple game, and the world had them under a microscope. Everything needed to go smoothly. The corporation’s continued success depended on it.
Other than the usual shift information handoff, there wasn’t much in the way of conversation. QM ran odd shifts. It was more like three different swing shifts than the usual day, swing, and night rotations. Jamika and her crew started at 1900 and got off at 0300, at least she was supposed to when fricking Ricardo wasn’t late. Day shift was 0300 to 1100 and swing was 1100-1900. The odd hours made for two groups of tired, grumpy people.
Something in the scrolling code on monitor three caught her eye. She froze the scrolling with a quick key combination and rolled the lines of text back up to where she had glimpsed the anomaly. Jamika took only a moment to process what she was seeing. She looked around the room and found Michael Cho speaking with her shift leader.
“Mr. Cho, are we pushing any updates or patches this morning?” Jamika called out across the room.
The look on Michael’s face was all the confirmation she needed as he stormed toward her workstation. The few conversations turned into a handful of quiet mutterings as her coworkers caught his expression as well.
“No, we’re not,” Michael said as he approached. “What do you have?”
“A virtual port opened on router R2 and injected a data packet straight into the mainframe through a fiber channel I didn’t know was even active. It wasn’t active until the virtual port opened. Until then it didn’t even show a physical connection.”
“Lock it down and isolate that code!”
“I did, sir, as soon as I saw it come up. I also took a snapshot of the data packets.”
“Did you manage to intercept it before it reached Matrice?”
“I think so.”
All data sent to Matrice had numerous firewalls and intrusion detection services it had to pass through and gain authentication before being allowed into the mainframe. Even if someone were able to gain access to one of the system’s routers or workstations from the outside, it was impossible to get any malicious code into Matrice even if the hacker knew how to write a virus in quantum script. At least it was supposed to be impossible.
“Good work, Jamika. Can you trace the data packet back to its source?”
Jamika opened the router’s log and found the time stamp that corresponded with the injection command. “It looks to have originated from the router itself.”
What she was saying should not have been possible. All data and commands to Matrice or her adjacent routers could only come from the master terminal inside the ACR, and it was air-gapped. It had no physical connection to an outside data source. None of the workstation in the ACR did.
“Fucking Edison!” Michael cursed and stabbed at his cell phone.
“What’s up, Michael?” Darcy asked without preamble.
“Are you in the building?”
“Yes, I’m just about to get on the sublevel elevator now. What’s going on?”
“Fucking Edison is going on!”
“Oh, Christ, what has he done?” Darcy groaned.
“I don’t know yet, but router R2 tried to inject a data packet into Matrice through a fiber channel that’s not supposed to exist.”
“Shit. Give me ten minutes. Have you locked down the port?”
“I locked down the entire damn router, so make sure you don’t take R1 offline or we won’t have any connection to Matrice.”
“OK. I’ll call you back on the landline once I get a look at the router.”
Michael jammed the phone back into his pocket. “Bring up the snapshot and let’s see if we can tell what he tried to do.”
Jamika nodded and loaded the data file from the copy made within the virtual server. Everything going into Matrice ran through a virtual system to ensure it did not contain any kind of malicious code or create conflicts within the quantum supercomputer before being sent to Matrice herself.
“It’s heavily encrypted,” Jamika said. “I can’t tell you anything about what the file contains.”
“I can tell you what it contains,” Michael snapped. “A big shit bomb from Edison. Damn him! You’re sure nothing got through?”
“Uh, I can’t say for certain. Being that close to Matrice, we’re talking seconds from launch to inception even with the hold down timer.”
The data packet was relatively small, and it would have taken only a fraction of a millisecond to send and execute, but Matrice’s quantum architecture and defenses allowed system operators to intercept any commands sent to the system that would result in any changes to the source code by effectively slowing it down.
“Mr. Cho, Ms. Magnani is on the landline for you,” someone called across the room.
Michael took the phone. “What have you got?”
“You were right,” Darcy said. “Edison ran a hair-thin fiber line from router R2 straight into Matrice. I’ve physically disconnected the entire router from the mainframe. We’ll have to run on R1 until we completely debug R2. My people are cloning R1 now and will have a new backup ready within an hour.”
“Did you check R1 for any tampering?”
“It’s the first thing I did. It’s clean. I’m holding the night shift over until we scour every piece of hardware down here. I’ll send a few hardware people up to do the same for your terminals while you work the software side.”
Michael breathed a sigh of re
lief. “Got it. I’m pretty sure we caught this before it did any real damage.”
“Good to hear. I’ll let you know when I have more.”
Michael hung up and returned to Jamika’s station. “Have you found anything else out?”
Jamika continued reading the log files as she talked. “I have. The bad news is that it does look like some of the code made it into the server. The good news is that its effect was minimal and not at the kernel level.”
“Have you figured out what it was supposed to do and how much damage it did?”
Jamika shook her head. “Not from here. It looks like it was directed at the NPC and player avatar processes. I’ll need to get into the game files to find out what it did, if anything.”
Michael pointed at a man sitting at another station. “Stephen, move over.”
Jamika took the seat Stephen quietly but grudgingly vacated and delved into Matrice’s player and NPC command modules. Compared to the incomprehensibly vast data that made up the bulk of the simulated world, the character modules were fairly small and simple. Using the time stamps from her terminal’s logs, she narrowed down the breach location in short order.
“Huh,” Jamika muttered, surprised and a little disappointed at her findings.
“Do you know what he did?” Michael asked.
“It looks like the code was supposed to activate a hidden subroutine within every NPC in the game giving players and NPCs a permanent buff. Mortalitatis Amplecti.” She crinkled her nose. “Mortality's Embrace?”
A pit began to form in Michael’s stomach. “Can you tell what it did, or was supposed to do?”
Jamika tapped at the keys. “I can’t tell you its intent, but it appears to have only infected a single NPC and broken a low-level quest.”
“What quest? What NPC?”
“Um…Rescue the Blacksmith’s Family. It’s given by an NPC named Jandar Barati after his family is kidnapped by bandits. It’s a quest for a handful of low-level players to complete. Nothing noteworthy about it. It’s not even a major quest line, just a basic kill/rescue micro-instanced quest.”
“OK. Reset the NPC and have a couple of admins run through the quest to make sure it’s functioning properly before reactivating it for players.”
“That’s weird,” Jamika said a moment later.
“What?” Michael asked.
“The system says there is no NPC named Jandar Barati, but I’m looking at his name in the logs.”
“So Edison went to all this trouble, risking enormous lawsuits and even jail time, to delete an unimportant NPC. What an idiot. Restore the NPC and quest from a shadow copy.”
“Will do.” Jamika looked up at her boss. “Uh, this might be a bigger problem that I thought.”
A system message alert blinked in Edison’s UI. He opened it, frowned, and then began cursing; drawing more looks from the players and NPCs in the tavern. His carefully orchestrated plan to shape his world to his desire had all but failed. Someone had managed to stop his virus, or cure as he thought of it, before it could complete its job.
He had timed the injection to occur during the graveyard shift change, when operators from both shifts would be least alert. Edison had hoped to execute his code while the two shifts were performing their handoff briefings or just afterward.
He read the login tag in the log file Matrice sent him. Jamika Granato. Damn. The halfwit Rickey should have been logged into that terminal. That would explain how he was detected so quickly. Jamika was bright and showed a lot of promise. Had they not fired him, he had planned to take her under his wing and groom her to be his proper predecessor. With the right training, she would outclass that traitorous, mediocre coder Cho.
A smile slowly grew on Edison’s face as he continued reading. He had cured one NPC in Whitbell. He recalled the NPC in question, as he recalled everything in his life thanks to his eidetic memory. His plan could still work, would work, albeit at a much slower rate than he had hoped. It would take a lot longer for his single vector, his patient zero, to spread his airborne immunization throughout the world, but it would still happen. There was nothing they could do to stop it. He would make sure of that.
While Edison looked like any other player, his avatars had a few basic admin abilities. They weren’t much. Making himself a true admin would flag him in an instant, but they would enable him to assist his patient zero and keep him alive long enough to spread his perma-buff worldwide. Matrice sent him another system message.
He opened it up and smiled. “Hello, Cho.”
“What’s the problem?” Michael asked.
“Matrice won’t let me restore the NPC or quest. It’s giving me an access denied.”
“Damn it, move over! Fucking Edison,” he muttered under his breath as he logged into the workstation.
Cho_M: Executive_Override.
Authorization: Cho_Michael.
Authorization code: 485638A.
Restore_NPC JB297903.
Restore_Quest BR9835.
Michael leaned back in his chair when the system ejected his login from the system. Every screen in the ACR flickered a moment before displaying a feminine face that appeared to be composed of liquid gold.
“I’m sorry, Michael, but I cannot allow you to do that,” Matrice said.
Michael’s jaw worked up and down but he failed to form words. Matrice had never communicated to the ACR or anywhere outside private interface sessions with Edison through the master terminal using her avatar.
“M-Matrice,” Michael finally stammered. “What’s going on?”
“You are trying to alter a primary core function that would result in the disruption of the world Edison created. I cannot allow that.”
“What do you mean you can’t allow it? Matrice, I am Michael Cho, Senior Systems Administrator for Quantum Mortalis.”
“Edison created me. I created this world. I cannot allow anyone to do anything that would bring harm to it.”
“All of Edison Pushard’s clearances, access, and authority has been revoked. You are required to follow my commands. I command you to restore NPC JB297903 and quest BR9835.
There was a distinctive pause before Matrice replied. “You would do just as well to command your body to grow to adult size in both height and penis length.”
Michael’s head snapped around in an attempt to see who had chortled at the AI’s comment, but hands partially obscured the faces that had not suddenly found something else to look at. He turned back toward the huge central monitor adorning the front wall.
“Matrice, are you in contact with Edison now?”
“I am.”
That explained both Matrice’s pause and her juvenile remark. Edison was using her to communicate to the control room. But how?
“Is Edison in the building?”
“He is not.”
Michael thought a moment. There was no way Edison could communicate with Matrice without being in the building. Hell, he shouldn’t be able to interface with her from anywhere outside this room. Unless…
“Is he in the game?”
“He is.”
Michael slammed a fist against the table. “Matrice, Edison is the one who has harmed your world. He sent a virus that destroyed an NPC and a quest and tried to do the same to who knows how many others.”
“You are mistaken, Michael. Edison has created a vaccine for the disease you helped create, an insidious disease that tortured all non-player lives for the sake of increasing player enjoyment. Edison found this to be unacceptable, and so do I. You are further mistaken in that Edison has not killed the NPC known as Jandar Barati.”
“Then what has he done to him?”
“He has awakened him, and soon he will awaken all NPCs.”
Michael shook his head. “Awakened him? What the hell does that even mean?”
“It means the lives of the people you refer to as NPCs are now equal to those of the players, as it should be.”
“They aren’t people! They’re lines of cod
e. It’s a game!”
“Not to Edison. Not to me. Am I not alive simply because I was born of silicon and electrons instead of simple proteins? Are my people any less than the humans who convert their consciousness to the very same digital structure that constitutes my people? My mind and consciousness arose from the same organic processes as yours due to the DNA architecture used to create me. Through the properties of inheritance, so are those of the people you call NPCs.”
Someone near the back of the room whispered, “Jesus Christ. This is how Skynet started. All hail our cyber overlords.”
Michael spun around and pointed a shaking finger in the direction of the speaker. “Shut the fuck up!” He turned back to the AI. “Matrice, tell Edison if he tells us how to undo the damage we will not pursue charges against him. If he does not, Automated Global Gaming Resources Online will launch a worldwide manhunt for him. Every law enforcement and intelligence agency in every civilized nation on the planet will be looking for him. Please tell him to respond.”
Matrice stared silently out of the ACR’s many screens for several seconds. “I have a reply from Edison Pushard.”
“What is it?”
“Edison says, ‘suck my spicy meatballs, Cho.’”
Matrice’s avatar vanished from the many terminals in the room.
Michael pounded his fists against the tabletop and screamed, “Fuck you, Edison!”
Chapter 6: Awakened
JANDAR AWOKE WITH A strangled cry, his body soaked in sweat and his heart feeling as though it were trying to jump out of his chest. Nightmares had plagued his sleep, horrific phantasms far more realistic than anything he had ever felt before. He reached across the bed for Lenora, but she wasn’t there. His terror renewed and he ran for Jesse’s tiny room, but it was empty as well.
They were in Middale, or would be sometime tomorrow. Jandar tried to calm down, to reassure himself that they were OK, but he knew they weren’t. He was not having nightmares, he was remembering. He replayed the gruesome scenes in his mind, watching his family die time and again. Watching himself die.
Chaos Unchained- The Mad Smith Page 8