How was he here? He had died at the bandits’ hands nearly as often as his family had. Sometimes the adventurers had saved them, although he had died in the fight. Other times he lived and they died. On a few occasions, like the one the night before, they had all died. Those accursed adventurers had acted as if it was a sport. He had no doubt. The one last night had even shot him in the leg with an arrow so the bandit could kill him.
Had he truly died just a few hours ago? How was he here if he were dead? It was all so strange, and he couldn’t make heads nor tails of what was happening. The only thing Jandar knew for certain was that his family was dead because of those adventurers, and they needed to die for what they did.
Jandar pulled on his clothes, packed a bag of essentials, donned his heavy leather apron, and picked up his smithing hammer. It was said that the high goddess Matrice granted the adventurers immortality. That they would return to life if killed. He did not care. If he could watch them die just once and return some of the pain they had caused him, great. If he could kill them over and over, even better.
Ben’s avatar appeared next to him just a couple of minutes after Eddie had logged back in. Darvin grinned at Riccon from across the table as he got his bearings. Transitioning from the real world into the game took some getting used to.
“Dude, that was epic last night,” Darvin said.
“Technically, it’s the same night, RWT,” Riccon replied.
Darvin looked out of the black window behind Riccon. “Weren’t we supposed to return closer to morning so we could pick up the mushroom quest before heading back to Ambercross?”
Riccon turned in his chair and saw it was still night out. “Huh. Yeah, that was the plan. The only reason we would have logged into an earlier time was if we ran into an encounter.”
“Do you think we’re about to have an encounter?” Darvin asked and felt for the hilt of his sword.
“At the inn in Whitbell? I can’t see how.”
Darvin glanced around the room. There were a handful of people sitting at the tables. Even as he looked, more players were walking down the stairs from the rooms they had rented, probably before logging out.
“Hey, is everyone in here a player?” Riccon called across the room and received several confirmations in reply. “Everyone is logging in at the same time ingame. That means we’re all in the same micro-instance.” He studied the room some more. “Anyone seen the innkeeper or any of the other NPCs?”
Someone, a warrior by the look of him, said, “I saw the nightshift barman leave with some other dude a little while ago, but he hasn’t come back yet.”
“This is really weird,” Darvin muttered.
The inn’s front door crashed open, and a man pushed a barrel on a hand truck into the common room. It was Jandar, the blacksmith’s apprentice.
“He’s not supposed to be up yet,” Riccon said.
A couple of other players must have recognized him as well. They approached him, asking if he needed help in an attempt to trigger the bandit quest.
Riccon saw the fury and hatred in the NPC’s eyes when he said, “Yeah, I have something you can do. Say hello to the bandits that killed my family when I send you all to hell.”
Jandar kicked over the barrel of tempering oil, its contents sloshing against the closest players’ boots and spreading across the floor. The players cried out and jumped away.
“What the hell is your problem, dude?” the warrior who had spoken to Riccon demanded.
Jandar grabbed the lantern hanging from a peg near the door. “My problem is you lot being alive!”
The furious smith threw the lantern in the middle of the oil still spreading across the floor. It ignited with a whoosh of flame and intense heat. Those standing in the pool screamed in pain and horror as fire crawled up their legs, too panicked to reduce their pain inhibitors. Jandar backed through the exit and slammed the door.
Riccon and Darvin leapt from their chairs and sprinted for the door, but it wouldn’t open. He thought the pounding coming from the other side was someone trying to break it down, but he realized with dawning horror that they weren’t trying to get them out; they were nailing it shut to keep them inside.
“What the fuck is going on?” Darvin shrieked.
“Hell if I know! That goddam blacksmith has lost his shit!” Riccon looked around the room and spotted a clear path to the kitchen through the fire. “Turn off your pain inhibitors and follow me.”
The two raced for the kitchen’s back exit. Riccon tried to open the door, but it would not budge. He and Darvin both threw themselves against it, but the wood was thick, the hinges strong, and it would not give way. Smoke clawed at their lungs and flame licked at their backs. Most of the screaming in the common room had stopped, and all they could hear were their own cries and the crackling of unforgiving fire.
You take 15 points of damage from fire.
You take 19 points of damage from fire.
You take 25 points of damage from fire.
You take 35 points of damage from fire.
You have died.
Darvin saw his friend’s charred body collapse and brought up his UI.
Players are not allowed to log out during combat. Find a safe area and try again.
“Shit!” Darvin cried before the flames consumed him.
Jandar stood outside the burning inn next to the innkeeper, the night barman, and the surly cook as they all watched the flames devour the building and the monsters inside. A crowd had gathered, many clutching buckets and pots of water to put out the flames, but Jandar had ordered them away from the inn and directed their efforts at the nearby buildings to ensure the fire did not spread.
“What have you done, Jandar?” Darrell, the innkeeper, asked.
“What I had to do,” the blacksmith replied, his voice flat.
“I still don’t understand it all.”
“Neither do I, but I know what they did and what I had to do. I’m sorry about the inn. I hope you can salvage enough from those adventurers’ bodies to rebuild.”
Darrell took a deep breath and let it out. “Don’t worry about me, son. I’ll be fine. What are you going to do? Murder is murder, and word of this is bound to spread. They’ll come looking for you, and not just the law. They’ll likely send the Templars. Maybe put a bounty on you as well, and you know how those adventurers love to collect bounties.”
Jandar shouldered his pack and hefted his hammer. “Let them come. Let them all come, especially the adventurers. I’ll burn them all.”
“You’ve got a demon in you boy,” the innkeeper sighed.
Jandar turned and started walking away. “They put it there, but they’ll pray to Matrice they hadn’t.”
Eddie stared at the UI as he tried to make sense of what had just happened. NPCs, while having a certain level of autonomy, were scripted, especially ones that carried quests. He wondered if they had changed the blacksmith’s quest since beta, made it a chain quest. Had letting him and his family die in order to get the sword triggered a new quest line? But the apprentice smith was killed in the cave.
If that was the case, it made for a rather big plot hole. Unless he was now a revenant. Maybe he had risen from the dead to seek retribution, and now they had a new quest to find and destroy him. That made sense, especially when you took into consideration the sword’s special bonuses against sworn enemies and upholding oaths. Only one way to find out.
Eddie’s eyes traveled around the UI, flicking through different screens with a thought. Where the hell is the revive option? He backed out to the main screen and opened his character pool. There they are.
Dire Justice: Templar. Level: 57 Status: Unavailable.
Riccon Greybow: Arcane Archer. Level: 8. Status: Dead.
He selected Riccon, but the Enter Game icon was still greyed out.
“What the hell?” Eddie snapped. “Damn buggy release. System, activate voice control assistant.”
“Voice control assistant activated. Hello, E
ddie. How can I help you?” a feminine, slightly robotic voice asked.
“Select Riccon Greybow and enter game.”
“I’m sorry, Riccon Greybow is dead. Would you like to create a new character?”
“What? No. Revive Riccon Greybow.”
“Riccon Greybow is dead. Would you like to create a new character?”
“Goddam stupid buggy early release!” Eddie shouted, “No, you stupid silicon bitch! Revive dead character and reenter game.”
“Dead characters cannot be revived. Would you like to create a new character?”
Eddie pounded his fists against the soft surface of his mattress. “Damn it! Contact support!”
Eddie waited less than a minute before a chat box opened. Another nice perk to having been a beta tester was prioritized trouble tickets.
GM2024: Hey, Eddie, what’s the problem?
Good, someone who remembers me from beta.
CodeMonkey69: I died and the system won’t let me revive my toon.
There was a short pause before the support tech replied.
GM2024: Riccon Greybow?
CodeMonkey69: Yes.
GM2024: I’ll try from my end. That’s odd. Can you tell me how and where you died?
CodeMonkey69: Whitbell. A friend and I had just completed the bandit quest there, doing it to get the Oath Keeper sword. We logged out for the return trip, and when we logged back in the damn NPC who gives the quest is back in town, goes bat shit crazy, and burns the inn down around us. He nailed the damn doors and window shutters closed!
GM2024: That’s weird. NPC name?
CodeMonkey69: Jandar something.
Eddie waited over a minute before GM2024 replied.
GM2024: You sure about the name and spelling?
CodeMonkey69: Yes.
GM2024: Weird. I found a reference to the quest and NPC in some archived data, but it and the quest giver are no longer listed as part of the game.
CodeMonkey69: The whole damn thing is weird.
GM2024: Yeah, it is. And this is from the final release, not your beta game?”
CodeMonkey69: No. It was like 2 minutes ago. You know we can’t log in with our beta toons.
GM2024: True. I’m just spitballing ideas for why an NPC and quest would just up and vanish. Stand by. I’ll have to elevate this.
CodeMonkey69: OK.
Eddie clicked on the voice chat icon when it started blinking.
“What in the ever-loving shit was that about?” Ben screamed through the connection. “First that NPC goes psycho, and now I can’t revive my character. It just keeps asking if I want to create a new one.”
“I know. Same thing here,” Eddie replied. “I’m on hold with support now. He couldn’t get an answer and is running it up the chain. It shouldn’t take long. They prioritize beta testers as we’re the people to most likely find discrepancies and problems.”
“Yeah, we definitely found a pretty big problem. Did any of this happen in your beta game?”
“No, never, and I ran a few people through that quest to get the sword and nothing like that happened. We finished the quest, got the sword, wash, rinse, repeat the next day for new guys. The NPC died in the cave and woke up the next morning like nothing ever happened.”
“If they can’t fix this, does that mean we’ll have to start over? What about my sword, will I have to do the quest over again? I really don’t want to. It was a bit much for me,” Ben said in a low voice.
“Dude, you have to remember it’s just a game.”
“Kind of hard when you’re freakin’ burning alive!”
“Yeah, that was pretty messed up. Did you turn your pain level all the way down?”
“Yeah, but still…I don’t think everyone thought of it though. Not in time.”
Eddie shuddered at the memory of the players’ screams. “I don’t think so either. They’re probably talking with emotional support right now.”
“I almost want to call them and I didn’t even feel most of it.”
Eddie’s chat window flashed. “Hey, support is back. I’ll call you when I find something out.”
“OK.”
Eddie maximized the chat window.
GM2024: You there?
CodeMonkey69: Yeah, I’m here. I was talking to the guy I was playing with when we died. Hope you have some answers.
GM2024: Wish I did. My supervisor looked like he shit his pants when I told him what had happened. Actually, he looked more like someone else shit in his pants. Anyway, he’s running it farther up the chain. Literally. He sprinted out of the room.
CodeMonkey69: So what now? We have to reroll our toons?
GM2024: Looks like it, unless you want to wait.
CodeMonkey69: I’m almost at my mandatory logoff time. If there’s no answer by the time I get back, I guess we’ll just make new toons. At least we were still noobs and will only take one game session to get back our levels. Still, it’s like reliving almost three entire days all over again. Kind of sucks.
GM2024: Sorry, dude.
CodeMonkey69: If we have to make new toons, is there any way for you to help us out? If not XP then at least the sword my buddy got from the quest. He doesn’t want to repeat it even if you get him back online.
GM2024: That’s a tough one. They really tie our hands when it comes to interacting with players like that. Don’t want some GM helping his IRL buddies. I’ll ask my supervisor. They might make an exception in a case like this. Not sure what I’ll be able to do though. The game itself can get contrary when we interfere with the mechanics. Damn AI. I mean all hail our cyber overlords!
CodeMonkey69: OK. Thanks.
GM2024: No problem. Well, I guess big problem, but I’ll try to get it sorted out. Later.
Eddie closed the chat window, logged out, and took off the NIH. He scratched at his head as he made his way to the bathroom. What a clusterfuck of a start.
Chapter 7: Fallout
“WHAT THE HELL IS going on?” Vincent Kurtz, President of Online Activities, railed.
Michael Cho flicked his eyes toward Darcy.
Darcy picked up the cue and said, “Edison managed to activate hidden subroutines in the player and NPC code.”
Vincent sat down heavily in his chair. “I shouldn’t have fired him.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” Michael said.
Vincent looked up and glared at him. “Of course I did! I could have had security drag him down the deepest sublevel and shoot him. No one would find his body down there for years. Decades if we did it right.”
Darcy shook her head. “It wouldn’t have done any good. He wired a code injector to the router directly connected to Matrice. It had to have been on a timer, which he probably reset every day in the event he got fired or was otherwise denied access to the system.”
“Goddam paranoid son of a bitch!”
“How do you want to proceed?” Michael asked.
“Do you know how to find a good hitman?”
Darcy replied, “They’re all over the Dark Web. The challenge is finding a legitimate professional amongst the large crowd of wannabes. I’ve got a few good leads.”
Michael looked at the mousey engineer, his mouth agape.
“What? I had a bad breakup a while back,” Darcy said. “I didn’t actually do it. I just wanted to know all my options.”
“I don’t think it will come to that,” Vincent said. “Our friends in the government are none too pleased with his little act of terrorism and are shifting a good deal of their resources in an effort to locate him. He’ll be in a CIA black site tied to a chair with his balls dangling below him within a week.” He locked eyes with Michael. “What’s the extent of the damage? Do we need to take Matrice offline? And know that if your answer is yes I have a very uncomfortable chair waiting for you and your sticky rice balls downstairs.”
Michael Cho swallowed nervously. “No, I don’t think so. As far as we can tell, all he managed to do was break a single NPC and a standalone qu
est. We stopped the virus before it could spread.”
Vincent nodded. “OK. The board shouldn’t be too upset. I assume you’ve already restored the NPC and quest?”
“Uh…no.”
“No? Why the hell not?”
Michael whipped his head toward Darcy, but she was not coming to his rescue this time. It was a software issue. “You see, Edison wanted what he considered a pure world, one where the line between NPCs and players was rather thin with limited scripting. He wanted death to be permanent and for the world to grow, along with its people, naturally, with only a bit of nudging from Matrice to create possible adventures for the players.”
Vincent narrowed his eyes at the programmer. “I know that, Michael. That’s why I fired his ass when he tried to sneak it in through Matrice’s back door, and when that failed he jammed it through my back door in his clenched, unlubed fist!”
“Apparently, Matrice agrees with him and won’t let us restore the NPC or the quest.”
Vincent’s face went from red to purple. “What do you mean it agrees with him? And stop calling it a she! It’s a goddam operating system. You input commands and she—fuck! It executes them. It doesn’t agree or disagree with shit. It just does.”
“It’s more than an operating system. It’s a highly advanced AI. She—it feels—”
Vincent exploded from his chair and pointed a shaking finger at Michael. “You shut your fucking mouth! It doesn’t feel, it doesn’t think, and it doesn’t have an opinion! Do you understand me? Christ on a cracker, do you have any idea what would happen to us if the board or the government, hell, anyone outside this room, found out the AI a hundred thousand people, with millions to follow, have placed their brains in the care of felt shit? It’s Siri on steroids, nothing more!”
“Y-yes sir. I’m just saying the system has autonomous safety features built into it that prevents any damage to its core programming. That core program is the safety and well-being of its world and players. Thanks to Edison, Matrice views resurrecting players and NPCs or directly interfering with them as a violation of that protocol.”
Chaos Unchained- The Mad Smith Page 9