I'm the Bad Guy: Bigger, Badder, and Uncut: A Supervillain LitRPG Adventure

by Simon Archer

  “We are fine with the money it’s making,” Harmony interjected, “there are several problems that arise from this, however. Firstly, we cannot accurately pinpoint where this uncharacteristic increase in the interest in the game came from. Checking trends on the web as well as news reports, along with tracking any leaks throughout our systems, has come up with almost nothing.”

  “Almost nothing?” I repeated.

  “There are several rumors related to the game that have come about, creating a lot of free publicity we have been able to capitalize on,” Cheryl mentioned, “some of them relate to a new villain possibly making himself known in the game. As you may know, we have no villain in development as of now.”

  “And we’re not telling anyone this, obviously.” I slouched in my chair. “This seems like standard stuff. So, I’m going to ask this one final time before I just walk out of here, but WHAT DOES ANY OF THIS HAVE TO DO WITH THIS POINTLESS MEETING? CAN WE START MAKING SOME GODDAMN SENSE SOON?”

  Being one of the biggest shareholders of the company meant that I didn’t have to care about decorum and making the boss happy, so long as I had as many shares of the company as everyone else here had. I didn’t have to kiss up to anyone, but they had to kiss up to me, or I could just as easily screw them all over. It was mutually assured destruction all around at this table, but we all made money through it.

  “The increased money isn’t the problem,” Cheryl summarized. “The real problem is that the money isn’t coming to us.”

  “Why did you not lead with that?” I threw a hand up in the air. “That would have saved us all ten minutes! Alright, we’re cutting to the chase. Who’s stealing from us?”

  “That’s a major part of the problem,” Cheryl said. “But that’s Harmony’s department.”

  “Harmony, what’s the internal investigation turned up?” Brody directed his attention to the twig woman with the wild ponytail of curly hair.

  “We’ve yet to figure out exactly what happened to the villain boss battle ‘Mr. Yin.’” Harmony reported. “All of his files, along with all files regarding his base of operations in the world, and anything mentioning his name, have been completely removed from our databases, along with the server itself, with no traces as to where they went. It was as if they were never there in the first place. We’re still at square one as to who could have even done such a thing. And, as expected, we have found no connection to this and our alarming thief restricting the cash flow from our profits from the game, though the theory is still being explored.”

  “Thank you.” Brody turned back to Cheryl. “If that’s all, Harmony, then please continue with your report, Cheryl.”

  “Woah, woah, wait!” I stopped Cheryl before she could direct one of her pig hooves over to her binder again. “That’s it? ‘Our investigation hasn’t come up with anything.’ How is this not a bigger deal? We’ve been robbed! Should we not get the feds in on this? What are we even paying taxes for if we can’t have them bust some kneecaps for us?”

  “Have you ever paid taxes in the past five years?” Fred whispered to me. “Be honest.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Fred.” I harshly whispered through my teeth. “We don’t talk about illegal things we all do with cameras around!”

  “If you would let Cheryl continue, she would show you.” Brody stared me down. “Please continue, Cheryl.”

  “We do have several concerns involving these developments,” Cheryl continued. “We didn’t actually discover this discrepancy in our finances for quite some time. That’s because whoever is stealing from us is still giving us the amount of money we would have expected from this game to turn a profit. It was only after crunching the numbers on the current number of customers versus how much money HunterKiller has that we were able to reveal that there was a thief in the first place. Whoever they are, they have intimate knowledge of our inner workings, along with a prolific ability to predict and operate on accurate market projections in order to set this all up.”

  “And again, I ask,” I was getting furious with all the runarounds, “why do we not have assault teams busting down this guy’s door and crushing him…” I then made the connection to what she was saying. “Oh, fuck, you think it’s one of us, don’t you?”

  “At first, we did suspect that it could be one of the board members.” Harmony corrected me, the stupid bitch. “It would take someone with our level of access to all of HunterKiller to pull off a crime like this. Even so, several of you would have to be involved with the crime, including Mr. Brody himself. If you hadn’t shown up to this meeting today, we might have suspected you yet again. For now, everyone in this room is off the hook.”

  “Way to go, us!” Fred nudged me in the side. “Shows us for being late. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone for seconds with my girlfriend with my wife being away!”

  “Jesus Christ, Fred, shut up!” I rubbed the side of my head. “So who the hell is stealing from us, then?”

  “The only surviving theory behind the theft is the same reason why we can’t go to the feds with this investigation.” Brody pressed a few buttons on his glass phone, and the tint on the windows that made up the far wall grew nearly pitch black. In fact, all the windows grew black, with only the dim fluorescents to illuminate the room again. “Gentlemen, ladies, what we speak of now doesn’t leave this room. Please dispose of all electronic devices in the bucket provided by Harmony. This is just a formality. We already have several jamming devices preventing any and all electronics from sending any sort of signal through this room.”

  As Harmony went around collecting our devices, I begrudgingly fished out my glass, my watch, my earpiece, and my contact lens, dropping them into the bucket. Everyone else also complied, knowing full well that this was a test of loyalty from Brody to all of us. All the money we were making as shareholders came with a steep price of loyalty. No amount of shares in the world would change the fact that we’d been embroiled in too much blackmail to go anywhere really.

  “Now that that’s out of the way.” Brody began as Harmony finished up. “Here’s the actual problem: the MTDN is loose in the quantum server.”

  A lot of gasps from that revelation. The quantum server was no surprise. We bought that puppy and advertised the crap out of it for gaming, since it was arguably the best thing that computer science had to offer. One server for every gamer in the whole world a million times over. The amount of information it could process was phenomenal.

  On the other hand, The Military Tactics Digital Neuronetwork was the most advanced artificial intelligence in existence. The amount of information it could process was beyond anything a human could even fathom. By all technicalities, it was smarter than any group of people, no matter how big. The only edge we humans had on it was that we could come up with unique thoughts, while it could only come up with thoughts that almost seemed unique, but not quite once they were boiled down. Every thought, strategy, and plan it made was one that was already used at one point by someone else, just repurposed. The military used it to help them outthink their opponents at every turn.

  And we at HunterKiller had gotten our hands on it very illegally for the purpose of making a really complex video game.

  All that combined, the dangerously intelligent and super illegal computer program missing inside the unfathomably large server that hosted most of the company’s money as an asset, was a big fucking problem.

  See, why could they have not JUST LED WITH ALL OF THIS FIRST!?

  “How the fuck do you lose a computer program!” One of the other executives beat me to the punch. “It’s inside the box! Just unplug it and take it to a closed network or something!”

  “Do you not think we’ve already tried that?” Brody chastised the executive who spoke out. “The quantum server has already had several power hardlines built into it, and we can’t simply turn it off while there are players inside of it, or risk permanent damage to their minds at best. I don’t need to tell you that with millions of people playing at any moment
, the catastrophe would ruin HunterKiller forever.”

  “Just log them out!” I shouted. “Can’t we just have a service day for it and try to smoke the damn thing out! It’s a damn moderating system, a streamlining project disguised as a publicity stunt! How the fuck is this a problem?”

  “We tried that, Tad. We’re not complete morons.” Brody looked at me, as if his statement was being proven at the moment instead of the opposite. “We don’t know how, but most, if not all, of the higher functions of the MTDN have been turned back on.”

  “You mean, the functions that the military uses?” I reiterated. “The tactician and battle strategy calculating functions for fighting in a modern cyberwar? Those functions?”

  “Yes.” Brody didn’t like my tone, and I just plain didn’t like him. “Now that it’s fully woken up, it’s locked us out of the server entirely. Encryptions upon encryptions over every piece of the administrative accounts in the software. We can’t so much as send a moderator’s comment.”

  “So, what, the damn robot is just holding the whole gaming world hostage…” I began to put all the pieces together with the meeting’s topics. “Do you think that the MTDN is the one that’s behind all the thefts? The money and the missing villain?”

  “Now you understand how much of a problem this is.” Brody scoffed. “If any of this leaks out, we all go to jail for the rest of our lives. If this program decides to make a move, it could cause a genocide, and jail time would be the least of our problems.”

  “What the hell does it want?” Another executive asked frantically. “It’s some kind of military program, right? Is it trying to conquer the world or something?”

  “So far, it hasn’t done anything.” Harmony interjected. “We have no idea what it wants, only that it seems to need a lot of money to do it. All the money that we aren’t getting from The Forge of Heroism.”

  “But, it’s not all hopeless.” Harmony stood up, grabbing a remote in her hand. “We do have one lead.”

  Harmony brought up a slide on the projector behind Brody. On it was a screenshot of the game, with a man in a suit standing amongst an army of black-armored cyber-soldiers marching through a city street.

  “This was taken by one of our employees, who is now completing reconnaissance inside of the game as a hero player masquerading as an NPC, trying to find traces of the MTDN.” Harmony explained. “This man depicted at the front is not a program that we have installed in The Forge of Heroism. We have no idea where he came from.”

  “Does he have something to do with all of this?” I asked. “I’ve been getting a million emails about this guy. He’s one of the many problems we’ve been experiencing and I’d been ignoring. According to my panicking inferiors, some figure matching that description shows up occasionally in a few of the glitched cities that were having their entire economies overhauled out of nowhere. In-game stores are driving up prices for seemingly no reason, the random crime spree events that are supposed to spawn are way lower, and we can’t figure out why. I thought he was just some kind of bugged international businessman who kept trying to show up to different cities with all the money being moved around. Is there more to it than that? I gotta fish out those emails.”

  “He’s proof that some of the rumors about the game and the presence of a currently unknown entity within it are partly true,” Harmony answered, “there is no character or enemy program inside the game that matches that description, or a player registered currently, and no server we can find outside of the game that connects with his account, though that last fact we can’t verify for sure with or administrative access locked. His first appearance also coincides with the time of the spike in increased popularity of the game, and the increased revenue. We believe that he is connected to the MTDN.”

  “Now, correct me if I’m wrong,” I tried to wrap my head around the new cascade of bad news as it developed into the ugliest picture I wished would have stayed in the garbage, “but are you inferring that this guy’s appearance, the MTDN going rogue, and the crazy money we’re making but not banking, are all connected? The neuronetwork supposedly is responsible for all of this happening?”

  “Well, technically, she was implying it,” Fred pedantically and unhelpfully corrected me, “and then you inferred it from what she told us.”

  “Goddamnit, Fred, just retire already!”

  “For now, he’s our only possible lead in figuring out what the MTDN is currently planning,” Harmony continued, ignoring both Fred and me, “if he turns out to be a randomized NPC with a few coincidental glitches distinguishing him from every other NPC in the game, then we’ll be right back where we started. Given how many NPC designs are possible with the models we implemented, that is highly unlikely.”

  “So, what are we going to do about this?” I asked. “You’ve dragged me out of my nice, comfy house into this hellhole, and now we’re looking down the barrel of every gun ever made. What do you want me to do now?”

  “For now, we’ll be watching and waiting, observing this new entity’s patterns, and see if we can learn anything about the MTDN in the meantime.” Harmony answered. “As for everyone else, you are to make sure that any and all leaks about everything shared about in this meeting are not to reach the public under any circumstances. All copies of documents even mentioning something that could tie in with the topics discussed are to be destroyed, both physical and otherwise. Any and all communication about this topic is to be done in person, in this building.”

  “Okay, but what IN THE GODDAMN FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO!” I repeated myself. “All you’ve given me here is a reason to pick up my valium addiction again to deal with all of this stress! If I don’t have something to work on right now, I’m gonna throw a chair through a goddamn window--”

  “How about you be a little proactive, huh, Tad?” Brody grunted, “you might just prove that you deserve all the money we throw your way for doing nothing else.”

  “We’re currently working on several answers to dealing with this figure,” Harmony failed to reassure me as I stared Brody down, “and hopefully, we’ll find a way to reach the MTDN in the meantime.”

  “As of right now,” Brody began to close up the meeting details, “everyone’s asses are in the cooking pot together, so we either get away scot-free together, or we all die together. Every resource we have in our possession, every dime, every stack of paper, every spreadsheet, every fresh pot of coffee, should be used to find a way to either gather information on the Neuronetwork, regain administrative control, and most importantly, never let a single breath get out where it shouldn’t be. You should bring any big ideas to me in person immediately before we move along with them. In this room are several billions of dollars in assets. It’d be a shame for all of that to go up in smoke.”

  “So you brought all of us here to blackmail us even further into complying with your independent investigation into this mistake of yours?” I summarized. “This meeting’s whole purpose is just removing any and all plausible deniability that we might have had about our killer ghost in the machine?”

  “This mistake belongs to all of us so long as we’re all connected to the name HunterKiller.” Brody made perfectly clear. “No amount of asset liquidation, no airplane ride to some warm corner of the world, or coming clean to the presses or the feds will keep you from a life of living hell if this breaks loose, so I suggest you get your asses in gear to make sure that never happens while you’re still breathing. Find something to do and do it. Your portfolios and investments, mansions and Ferraris, comfy, silk sheets, and tight, unblemished assholes from not spending time in a prison cell, all of it depend on your success and your discretion. This meeting is adjourned.”

  Well, there goes all of our collective weekends. And weeks. And months. Hell, who knew how long this shit was going to go on for? God, I needed a vacation from this already. If I wasn’t making ‘buy the superstore chain on a drunken bender’ rich, I’d have left this room before this meeting even started. Or just
not showed up. Shit, I hated this so much.

  Like an idiot, I checked my emails, hoping that at least something hadn’t burned to the ground while the meeting was going on. What I found was just what I needed today, from one of the many managers that couldn’t give me good news if I threatened to shoot him. In case I wasn’t clear, I was sarcastic. The tagline read:

  “EMERGENCY: New Carmanelo Attacked by Rogue Robot Enemies. Please Advise.”

  Oh, well, that’s just fucking great. Another city attacked in less than a week. Well, it could wait until I found a way to deal with these stupid possible leaks from a rogue AI and my boss extorting me for a few extra days of work before I dealt with any stupid robots.

  11

  In the skies above New Carmanelo, Kate, Natasha, and I waited in a plane flying under cover of the clouds, or just the one big cloud provided by Natasha. Far below in the streets, the cuddler bots had already begun their assault, looking like an invasion from space with their strange shapes and writhing tentacles shooting with reckless abandon. All of my teams were in place around the city, waiting for the moment to strike at my command.

  “Incoming message, sir,” Yomura said to me over the earpiece, “He’s calling the line you set up for him, just as you predicted he would.”

  “Excellent sign that our info on him was good,” I told him, “although, he found it way later than I was hoping for. Didn’t bring enough fuel to float up here all day. It’s about time he fucking noticed. Put him on the window screen, Yomura. I want to see his face.”

  “As you command, sir.” Yomura complied.

  Appearing on the glass in the front of the ship, the screen showed the picture of the caller, a wide man with no neck to speak of and a set of shoulders like a bookshelf. He wore a black-and-white pinstripe suit and an off-white fedora with a black band, taller than twice his head. With a five o’clock shadow that could polish jewelry, he held a sausage-like cigar between his yellowed teeth and blackened lips, his sunken eyes with the darkened bags of a week’s loss of sleep underneath.