by L. E. Price
Dutton was a cipher. If he was on the level, he could be exactly the source Jake needed to crack this mystery. And if he was a member of the Elect, Jake was almost definitely walking into a trap. Jake patted his hips, feeling for the reassuring weight of his tonfas.
Right. Different world. His empty fingers closed on nothing but air.
* * * *
When Jeff Dutton cashed out, he cashed out big. All of SDS’s original founders retired rich, if they retired at all, and he’d poured his stock options into rehabbing an old mine network. White plastic walls sheathed old stone. Beyond vaulted doors and a tangle of airlocks, all overseen by silent, anonymous security cameras, disk-shaped bots scoured the halls and kept the ivory tile pristine. Jake felt like a germ in a healthy body, a foreign contaminant.
A woman in a prim white dress — Jake wasn’t sure if she was a maid, security guard or both — served as his tight-lipped escort. She walked him down corridors beneath hologram ceilings that projected images of a blue and cloudy sky. He could almost forget, breathing filtered and faintly pine-scented air, that he was somewhere under hundreds of tons of ancient rock.
A door whisked open ahead of them. A greenhouse waited beyond. A long gallery of plant-beds and blooming flowers lined stainless steel trestles, under hot tripod-mounted lights. Jeff Dutton worked with his hands; he was in his sixties, balding, professorial, his casual flannel protected by a dirt-streaked gardening apron as he squinted and snipped at a flowering bush. He looked up and gave a wave.
“You must be Woody’s friend.”
“Jake Camden,” he said.
“I’d shake your hand, but—” Dutton held up his soil-caked hands, turning them to show dirty fingernails. He looked to the woman. “Thanks, Irma, I’ll be fine.”
She left without a word. The door whispered shut at Jake’s back, and he drifted across the greenhouse floor.
“This is…impressive,” Jake said. He’d almost thought the flowers were fake, at first, too bright and colorful to exist outside of a simulation.
“Every retiree needs a hobby. That’s what my therapist says, anyway. More of a full-time job these days. I was never good at not working.”
“I hear those immersive sims are popular, you should try one.”
Dutton gave Jake a lopsided smile. “Very funny, Mr. Camden. Woody didn’t tell me you were a humorist as well as a detective.”
“To be honest, I’m a little surprised. I figured a guy who spent most of his life in virtual space would have a more…technological hobby.”
“There was a time,” Dutton said, “when I would have lived in a sim, given half a chance. Shed my mortal coil and committed my soul to the sunlit glades of a virtual world. Well, as much as I could. I assume you’re familiar with the law.”
“People who make the game can’t play the game. Not without a gamemaster halo and auditors watching your every move.”
“Precisely. But that didn’t matter; hell, I just loved building things for people to enjoy. I’d spend hours watching players explore, adventuring across lands I’d created. I still remember the moment it hit me, the realization that Paradise Clash wasn’t just a game. We had built a world.”
“What changed?” Jake asked.
“Do you play, Mr. Camden?”
“Jake. And I never had before, but I started, as part of the situation I’m here about.”
“What do you think of it?”
“It…wasn’t what I expected,” Jake said. “You’re right. It feels like a real world.”
“Do the lines ever blur?”
Jake thought about the train ride. “You mean, do I ever confuse the game with real life?”
“Yes.”
“I might have worried about it a little.” Jake gestured to his arm. “When I started, every time I logged out, I’d give myself a jab with a pen. Since you can’t feel pain, not real pain, in the game-world. It reminded me what was real and what wasn’t.”
Dutton chuckled. A soft, deflated sound, tinged with sad amusement. Then he tugged back the left sleeve of his flannel shirt.
Faded dots of ink decorated his wrist.
“Every morning,” Dutton said, pulling his sleeve back down. “To make sure I’m really awake.”
“It got into your dreams,” Jake said.
Even as he spoke the words, they sounded strange on his lips. It. Like Paradise Clash was a sentient thing, a creature that could infect its own creator’s mind. Dutton answered his question with a question.
“So, what did Lars do?”
Lars Basset, SDS’s chief executive officer and one of the only founders still sailing the ship. Jake hadn’t met the man — Anton, the corporate lawyer, made it clear that he was to be the one and only point of contact with the company — but he recognized the name.
“Did Woody tell you I was coming to ask about Lars?”
“No,” Dutton said. “Woody told me something had gone very wrong in my game.”
“Hundreds of people work for SDS.”
Dutton snorted and picked up a gardening trowel. “Call me bitter over old times but believe me. Whatever’s gone awry at my company, Lars is to blame. He always was.”
Jake wasn’t sure about that. He’d considered Lars as a suspect for all of thirty seconds before tossing the idea aside. He’d have the access and the authority to pull off what the Elite had done, but the crime was too small. Prentise crunched the numbers: their key-selling scheme netted a handsome income, plenty to split between four people and provide a comfortable, even cushy lifestyle, but Lars Basset was worth billions. Considering his company would be finished if — or when — the truth got out, it was too much risk for a drop-in-the-bucket reward.
“You’re not a fan,” Jake said.
“When we started the company, ethics were a cornerstone of our platform. We brought on psychologists to study the game’s impact on its players, consulted specialists in a half-dozen fields. I’ll be honest, part of that was just covering our own rear ends; no one wanted a repeat of what happened to YourWorld.”
“A virtual wild west.”
Dutton dug into a pot of soil. “More like a virtual red-light district. I don’t know what those people expected; not like we don’t have all of human history to learn from, after all. Anyway. We also did it because it was the right thing to do, plain and simple. Our players weren’t just customers. Their minds were literally in our care. They trusted us to take care of them, to protect them.”
“And Lars?”
“Lars saw nothing but walking wallets. He tried to cut corners, constantly. I assume you know the history? How we built our game on top of the systems we’d leased from the military?”
“The Nightmare Box,” Jake said. “You worked on the sensory code.”
“Most of my job, when we laid the early foundations, was burying the sensory code. Rewriting it for an experience that wouldn’t give our players PTSD. Lars was always pushing me to hurry up, to skip over the necessary testing; he did that to all of us, which is exactly why ninety percent of us took our payout and walked once Paradise Clash hit it big.”
“Burying,” Jake said. “But the code is still there.”
“Oh, it’s all still there. Rewriting the game from the ground up would have taken years, years our investors didn’t have patience for. I wanted to, we all did except for Lars, but he was the money man so he had the final say. Don’t misunderstand, Jake: Paradise Clash is the Nightmare Box. The same underlying engine, just layered with patches and more patches, all held together with duct-tape and glue. Not that we admitted that to the press. Would have raised uncomfortable questions. I told Lars we were courting trouble, that one way or another, this would come back and bite us on the ass eventually. Amos damn near turned whistleblower over it, until Lars threatened him with the mother of all lawsuits.”
“Amos Beiler. Is that why Amos doesn’t give interviews? I understand he’s kind of a hermit now.”
Dutton stopped digging in the soil. His gaz
e went distant.
“Amos…was affected more than most.”
“Affected?”
Dutton gestured to his sleeve. To the ink-marks.
“The man was an absolute genius, a phenomenal mind. Also, prone to indulging in certain chemical pastimes.”
“Drugs,” Jake said.
“Hallucinogens. LSD, mushrooms, various chemical blends of his own creation. Said they expanded his mind. One night, he called me in a…not a panic, exactly. But there was something fevered about him. Something ecstatic and terrible.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that he found God,” Dutton said. “And I don’t mean he suddenly got religion, I mean, he went into the game, dove deep, and he…found God.”
“Literally,” Jake said.
“I told him to be logical. Paradise Clash is nothing but lines of code, electrons firing, all made by man. Made by us. No room for existential mysteries between the ones and zeroes. It was only a simulation. A game.”
“What did he say to that?”
Dutton looked Jake in the eye. He offered a wan, distant smile.
“He said, ‘It’s turtles, Jeff. It’s turtles, all the way down.’”
33.
Dutton went back to churning soil. He reached for a packet of seeds.
“Amos left the company, not long after that. I understand he mostly paints, these days. I’ve tried to reach out to him, now and again, but we don’t really talk.”
Jake felt unsteady on his feet. The greenhouse lights bored down on him with the force of a summer sun, and dots of sweat bristled on his face. He needed to steer the conversation away from the edge of a philosophical cliff. Back to something substantial, something real.
“If I understand correctly, all the original code, it’s all still there. Like, if someone really wanted to override the pain-limiters, they could do that.”
“I can’t imagine why anyone would,” Dutton said, “but yes, it can be done. They’d have to wade through a solid year of my own work and dig workarounds first.”
Or you could do it yourself, Jake thought. Dutton wasn’t high on his list of suspects, but he wasn’t off it yet either.
“Is that something a hacker could do from outside the company?”
Dutton snorted. “Not a chance. SDS’s security protocols are the best in the business. The Grid Regulatory Authority makes damn sure of it, too.”
“Can’t have players messing with Vegas odds.”
“Exactly,” Dutton said. “Though they word it more along the lines of ‘protecting consumer trust’. It all comes down to money.”
“Most things do, in my experience. So, anyone tampering with the game to that extent would have to be on SDS’s payroll. An inside job.”
“They’d need unfettered access to the company servers, plus a way to escape the automatic auditing systems, and that’s a massive project in and of itself.”
“A gamemaster.”
Dutton shook his head. “No way. That’s like a blackjack dealer trying to rob a casino: gamemasters are the employees who get watched more than anybody else. No, it would have to be someone far higher up the food chain. Someone calling the shots, who can make the rank-and-file look the other way. That’s why Lars was my first guess. Beyond that…it’s an interesting problem. Everyone watches everybody, all the departments are interconnected. That’s by design, to make the game harder to alter without oversight. Maybe someone in SDS’s security department could pull it off.”
“What about four people, working together?”
He tapped his chin, leaving a smudge of dirt behind. “Theoretically, that might be the safest way, if they were all highly-placed employees in different departments. It’d be easier to cover each other’s tracks. All the same, they’d be looking at hard prison time if they were ever caught; the GRA comes down on whispers of hacking with an iron fist.”
“Tell me about the deep magic,” Jake said.
Dutton’s eyebrows lifted in surprise.
“That’s quite the change of subject.”
“Humor me. Why didn’t it make it into the final game?”
“Well, first and foremost, it was a lousy system. Imbalanced, poorly thought-out…at the end of the day, it just wasn’t fun, and well, for a game designer that’s the kiss of death.”
“Was that the only reason?”
He waved an idle hand. “It was early days, we were still trying to figure out what we were actually capable of. A lot of grand plans fell by the wayside. In my case, I was experimenting with the code, trying to come up with magic that really felt magical. Which led to a lot of interesting experiments, but most of them fell flat or only halfway-worked. The process highlighted some instabilities we had to fix behind the scenes.”
“Instabilities?”
“Or just sloppy design work.” Dutton paused, like he was looking for a way to put it in layman’s terms. “The Nightmare Box tied a player’s ID to a physical object, stored in a virtual room. I won’t muddle you with the technical details, suffice to say it was the most inefficient way they could have handled it. Real lazy. The first deep-magic effects worked through the PID handler, and that led to some serious glitches. Like when Amos tried my first attempt at a teleportation spell.”
“What happened?” Jake asked.
Dutton chuckled at the memory. “The spell worked fine, but then he couldn’t log out.”
Jake’s heart skipped a beat.
“What was stopping him?”
“A couple of process threads overlapped and the game got confused; it basically treated him like he was simultaneously logged in and logged out, and the conflicting instructions became a logjam. I had to go into the account management system and manually boot him out that way. He was…not happy with me, but it showed how much work we still had to do. I mean, can you imagine if that happened to a player?”
Jake could. “What if it did? In theory. What if that glitch was somehow replicated today?”
“Easy,” Dutton said. “Like I said, a gamemaster would have to go into account management and eject them by hand. It’d take thirty seconds. The player wouldn’t be in any danger, it’d just be a potential nightmare for public relations. ‘Player trapped in video game’ is not a headline anyone in the industry wants to see.”
“What if the player was hidden from the account-management system?”
“Not possible, not as rigorously as we tested that thing. Someone would have to…”
Dutton’s voice trailed off. He set his trowel down. His voice went soft.
“It happened, didn’t it?”
“Technically,” Jake told him, “I’m not saying anything happened at all.”
“No, because SDS’s lawyers would crush you into dust. I understand, believe me.” Dutton studied Jake. “But it happened. A player’s gone missing inside the game.”
Jake gave him the tiniest, most deniable nod.
“Are they demanding a ransom? Is that what this is, an abduction?”
“We’re speaking in the realm of the theoretical,” Jake said.
“Of course. None of this actually happened. We’re only discussing possibilities.”
“I believe our theoretical player uncovered evidence of criminal activity inside the company. Honestly, I don’t think there was much of a plan: the conspirators panicked, they couldn’t get at the player in the real world — he’s an arcology resident from a triple-A family — and decided brain-napping him was the next best thing. They needed to shut him up, fast; they weren’t thinking about step two.”
Dutton fell silent for a moment, his brow furrowed, lost in thought.
“All right,” he said. “All right. I can’t speak as to how they hid him from the account management system; there are a dozen ways someone with top-level access could pull that off, and twice as many ways to cover their tracks. But if they’re using my old deep-magic effects, I can tell you how it works.”
“I’m all ears,” Jake said.
“They’d have to replicate the original bug. In effect, they’d need to start by tying your captive player’s ID to an object.”
“An object,” Jake said. He curled his hands, like he was cradling an invisible lamp. “An actual—”
“An actual, in-game object, yes. Exactly how the Nightmare Box did it. The problem is, it can be literally anything. Anything from a moon to a speck of dust. Then they’d have to encapsulate the PID with physical contact.”
“You’re saying, the object, whatever they used, had to actually touch the player?”
Dutton’s head bobbed. “Exactly. It wouldn’t take long, just a second would do, enough for the system to register that it was in his possession. Once that’s done, all they’d have to do is execute my old teleportation code, point it at the object, and presto: no option to log out. One very unfortunate bug, turned into a weapon.”
“How could we undo it?”
Dutton started to pace. Up and down the aisle, soil-caked hands clasped behind his back like a mathematics professor unraveling a problem.
“A few options, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves. First, you’d have to identify the object. Then you’d have to find it, and the kidnappers could have taken it anywhere in the virtual world.”
Or beyond, Jake thought, given how the Elect had turned a sealed paradise into their private pleasure-den. As a matter of fact, he had a pretty good idea where they were hiding it. Figuring out what he was looking for, that was harder…then a flash of insight ignited with a spark of hope.
“We have an item tracker,” Jake said. “It’s a utility program — technically illegal, but it flies under SDS’s radar. It tracks PIDs and shows who last held a given object.”
Dutton gave him an uncertain look. “All right.”
“If we retrace his steps, just before he was kidnapped, wouldn’t that tell us what the item was? We’d just have to look for an object that some other player gave him, and then went back into the hands of that same player.”