Massively Multiplayer, page 12
The third day after the rollout of Crucible 4.0, Bernardo Calloway was sequestered in his offices, having left strict instructions with Mrs. Hernandez that he was going to go over the growth models based on the new user data, and that he was not to be disturbed.
In fact, he was secretly celebrating with a very old bottle of scotch, which had arrived that morning by courier from his father, Vitus Calloway, who was off inspecting some of Vital Enterprise’s industrial holdings in Eastern Europe. The elder Calloway’s devotion to the family fortunes had not excluded attention to his newest acquisition, however, he had assured his son in a lengthy v-mail dictated from the back of his infamous electric-blue limousine. “I am very pleased at the reports I’ve received from our digital entertainment division heads, who assure me the reviews have been fabulous. Looks like you’ve outdone yourself, Bernie my boy. I understand our development partners – chosen by you, I know – are doubly pleased at how discreetly their role in the new product has been handled. I’m sending a bottle of the finest from our club on Whitby Island – toast one to me, dear boy. Capitol work! Top drawer! I’m very proud indeed.”
“Very proud indeed.” Bernardo savored the words even more than the liquor as he re-watched the video. That line about the “discreet” handling of the update’s third-party material was excellent proof that the old badger had been paying attention to Bernardo’s ideas after all! His initial enthusiasm for the project had met with skepticism from Vitus Callowy’s established industry advisors, who had assured the elderly executive that there would be too much resistance from the gaming “establishment” to his proposals. But he had won them over. Apparently, he’d won it all.
“Gaming establishment!” Hah! The digital realm was hardly the place to talk of traditionalism and institutions...why, they whole thing was all about new, fresh content, the more unusual the better, wasn’t it? And if they failed, so what? Who would they alienate, a small segment of the market, the ‘geek’ consumer? Who cared?
Eventually, his arguments had persuaded his father to put him in charge of this project, a gamble that showed some confidence but which also entailed a good deal of risk if the experiment failed. But it hadn’t failed, had it. The “experts” on the gaming industry had been wrong, and he had been right. He had been right all along. The gamers were so busy oohing and aahing over the smells and sounds they were downloading that they didn’t really notice what it was they were looking at.
Nobody suspected a thing.
The scotch really was very good.
Evelyn Hernandez had devoted almost two percent of her attention to Bernardo’s imperious order that visitors be dissuaded from disturbing him. It seemed unlikely any would try. In the days since taking over the company, the younger Calloway had managed to alienate every division of the company other than the Acting and Content departments, which he apparently found beneath his notice entirely. He scorned the administrative pool with his imperious tone, distanced himself from the programming department, annoyed maintenance with endless requests, and confounded the financial division with demands for dozens of new reports, often bafflingly cross-indexed with the performance of dozens of other companies, most of them not even in the software industry.
It was this last which troubled Ms. Hernandez, and which occupied the remaining ninety-eight percent of her attention.
The immediate object of her scrutiny was a message which had appeared on her desktop this morning. The communiqué, a plain two-dimensional text message, had contained an embedded executable which delivered itself to her printer, generated a hardcopy, and immediately erased itself, eliminating not only the message and any hint of its sender, but wiping from the desk’s memory any indication that it had ever existed. It was a capital violation of her privacy and her professional sphere, and would normally have drawn down all sorts of dire consequences save for two factors:
In the first place, in the absence of any header information, Ms. Hernandez had no idea where to direct her wrath.
In the second place, the information contained in the printout was actually very fascinating. It listed some sixty or seventy companies, ranging from well known restaurant chains, to manufacturers of shoes and soap, to financial concerns she had never even heard of but which, upon brief research, she recognized as holding companies for popular brand names. Next to each company name was a series of figures and dates and what appeared to be a jumble of random letters. The world’s largest shoe manufacturer, for instance, was next to a date last March, a notation of some millions of dollars, and the word “gh_1257_lf.” Further down was a popular brand of makeup – Ms. Hernandez bought their products all the time – four dates, more dollar amounts, and words like “umFctCa12_r7” and “umFctAs33_r3.”
The second most interesting thing about the list was that several of the companies on it had shown up in the strange requests Bernardo Calloway had been making of the Financial Department over the past three days.
The most interesting thing about it, however, was that several more had shown up in Bernardo’s newest requests, issued today, well after the printout had launched itself from her desktop to her printer and then erased the evidence of its existence.
Which meant either that someone had suddenly developed the ability to predict the future, or they had somehow known of the tie between these companies and Bernardo Calloway’s odd requests. That implied that there were records somewhere which would explain the mystery currently effecting Archimago, the company Evelyn Hernandez had loved like a child. Why else would they have sent it to her?
She had little idea of who her unknown benefactor might be, or how they had stumbled upon this information. Nor did she care very much. What she cared about was figuring out just what was going on at her company. The key, she was certain, lay in the confused strings of apparent gibberish appended to each item in the list. She had no idea what those meant, for now, but she was going to find out.
Deep in the shadows of the great trees of the Snarle Wood, a young scout of the Southron army paused in his journey to admire his shoes. He was oblivious to office politics and corporate takeovers and shadowy communications. He was thinking, instead, about how nicely trimmed his new scouting boots were. Probably nobody else in the guild had boots this nice, and the new environmental effects meant they even felt nicer than the regulation boots he’d been issued when he volunteered for this foray to map out enemy defenses. It made him a little self conscious about the fact that back in RL, he was wearing tattered sneakers which he’d received as hand-me-downs from his older brother. Maybe he’d bug his parents into a trip to the mall to buy a new pair.
At the easternmost extreme of an unnamed cave entrance in the snowy northern wastes of the Stellar Empire, a troop of hunters rested, their ragged breath fogging before their faces. Several of them knew quite a bit about office politics and corporate takeovers, but such thoughts were far from their minds at the moment. One of their number sprawled at full length on the cave floor while another patched her wounds. The chatted quietly while the healer worked, hands deftly dipping into the pouch of herbs at her waist as she sought the combination which would undue the poisons the giant blind-worm stingers had injected into her fallen comrade’s body. She would live, but the ugly mottling of her skin might be a permanent reminder of their folly in not wearing close-fitting helmets on this expedition. It was a pity, too – her friend’s skin had looked so luminous under the new graphics system. If only cosmetics could achieve such a glow in real life, she might have a steady boyfriend instead of spending all her time patching up the wounded in netvironments like this one. Maybe she’d go shopping for some after she logged out.
In an alleyway near the walls of Al-Sahel, a man lurked. He knew a great deal about office politics, corporate takeovers, and shadowy communications. He was a professional lurker. At the moment, he was lurking while waiting for his contact to arrive, at which time he would hand over a great deal of money and receive in return a certain key to a certain temple which contained a certain holy relic worth a great deal of money to an enterprising lurker with no scruples. He was bored silly with the waiting, so he spent his time admiring the sheen of the moonlight off his knife. It was a nice bit of programming, very subtle and very precise reflections, little bits of light trapped in minute pits on the steel in a way which reminded him of the glint off of a car he’d been coveting for weeks. Maybe tomorrow he’d go down to the bank and talk about making a down payment. He was a successful businessman, after all, as well as a successful gamer. He deserved a little reward.
In his sixth floor office, Wolfgang Wallace was crunching numbers again, but much more interesting ones than the bug reports which had consumed his attention the day before. After several hours of confirming scans, he sent for Janet Chen.
“Janet, come in. And shut the door.” She did so, already guessing from Wolfgang’s tone that this was related to yesterday’s odd discovery.
“First things first: we’re not looking at data smuggling.” This should have been good news, but somehow Wolfgang’s tone wouldn’t let Janet relax.
“You sound pretty certain.”
“I am pretty certain. The unaccounted bandwidth usage you were noting is too diverse for useful smuggling. Data smuggling relies on quick, massive, covert bursts of data, usually hidden in large batch processes, to avoid detection. The distribution pattern we’re seeing here is much more spread out, a continuous trickle of tiny data blocks. It’s the difference between driving a truck through a stone wall versus ten million ants slowly picking apart a tree, a gram at a time. In the second place, the whole point of data smuggling is to transmit data on a hijacked line to a single receiver, or sometimes a small group of receivers. The type of stuff that gets smuggled – industrial secrets, formulas, business plans, media – loses its value if it becomes widely available, or even if it becomes widely known that it has gone missing. This unaccounted data is spread evenly across the whole system, available to every single user.”
“Maybe it’s encrypted,” Janet suggested. “The data is always present, but opaque, invisible to the end users except for a few designated receivers who have a password which allows them to decrypt what to everyone else looks like hash.”
“That was my next thought,” Wolfgang agreed, “so I ran some checks to see whether the leakage was as universal as it looked at first glance. I blew up your graph about ten-thousand-fold, and ran a quick search for anomalies. Here’s what I got.”
He opened a file in the air over his desk. There was the graph which Chen had supplied. Pointing a finger, Wolfgang zoomed the perspective in sharply on a small segment of the display. This close there were clear, though slight, dips and rises in the line which represented the unaccounted data. The view sped to the right until it reached a sudden vertical slash, a peak that extended far above its neighbors.
“What am I looking at, specifically,” Janet asked.
“This is your data from yesterday, distorted to accentuate the extra bandwidth, and then segmented by receiving port.”
“By port. So each one of these lines is a single user.”
“Exactly. And this one,” Wolfgang tapped the sharp vertical line, “is accessing that data at about a thousand times the rate of ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the others.”
“Well, there we go then,” Janet grinned. “That’s your receiver. Call InterPol’s digital crime division and give them his address.”
“It’s not that easy,” Wolfgang said uncomfortably. “When I found this, I performed a new search looking for patterns like this one. Desk, open ‘Suspects-two.’” A neat gray rectangle snapped open in the air between the two programmers, shunting the graph aside. Within the new box was a list of names, locations, and access times, with small scroll bars indicating that the directory extended well beyond those in view.
Janet sighed unhappily. “How many?”
“Over eight thousand,” Wolfgang said. “In over thirty countries. Unless this is a ridiculously widespread smuggling ring, we’re looking at something else entirely.”
Chen’s brow furrowed. “Why isn’t this job ever simple? What do we do now?”
“I’ve been thinking that what we need now is to subdivide the—“
They were interrupted by a sharp dinging sound from the desk, accompanied by a small flashing ruby light. Wolfgang sighed and touched it with an outstretched finger. A smaller rectangle opened to one side of the directory, displaying a picture of a young woman with wavy hair. A text box identified her as one of the line programmers who regularly worked the floor of the central game operations center upstairs. “Yes,” Wolfgang asked.
“Mr. Wallace, we’ve got a little something you might need to take a look at up here. Could you come up to station twelve?”
“Can it wait? I’m kind of busy. Maybe you could send it to my desk.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Wallace, it’s a little, uh, visual. It really does display better up here, sir. And you left a standing order to be notified if an internal architecture flaw seemed to be effecting user experience. We’re getting some weird content. I could put a hold on it for...”
“Nooooo,” said Wallace slowly. “I’d better take a look. I’ll be right up.” He closed his desk display down with a wave of his hand, then stood and eyeballed Janet Chen. “Do you believe in coincidence?”
“Sure,” Chen said. “I got into this company because I liked the idea of magical occurrences. That doesn’t mean I think it’s true this time. Besides, I don’t get nearly enough chances to actually play anymore, or even watch on the big screens upstairs.”
Wolfgang clucked his tongue in sympathy. “And to think, you wanted things to be ‘simple.’”
The eighth floor presented it’s usual combination of grace and chaos. Line programmers monitored dozens of holographic stations around the room, sampling the flow of events inside the game world, inserting new routines, objects, actions, and events in order to keep the world of Crucible both operational and novel. Against the far wall, the large flatscreens displayed scenes which the server computers had determined might require human attention. Soundproof doors radiated from the main floor to individual workrooms where actors and programmers could work in concert, when needed.
Right now, however, Wolfgang’s attention was drawn to station twelve on the main floor, near the base of the stairwell leading down from the observation platform on which he stood. Several programmers, including the woman who had contacted his office, had clustered there and were gesticulating at a floating display, wearing various expressions of confusion.
The open-framed steel steps rang under his bulk as he made his way gingerly down the steps and over to the work station. Closer, he could see that the display was a patchwork of small blocks, accompanied by strings of glowing red letters.
“It’s got to be legacy data that crept in when we went through the update.”
“You’re out of your mind! Look at the seaming! This was intentional.”
“By who? And how? And why?”
“It’s a duplication artifact, I tell you! Run a check for congruence!”
“Folks,” Wolfgang said, clearing his throat, “if you could all calm down for a second, and show me what’s going on...”
Abashed, the knot of people cleared the way. He nodded to the woman with the wavy hair. “You. Can you please show me what’s up? And everybody else, pipe down. You can stay if you have any insight into this, but otherwise, please back up a little.”
“Thank you for coming, Mr. Wallace. I’m sorry to disturb you with this, but it’s...” the programmer gestured helplessly at the worried faces around her. “We’re all baffled.”
“Take it slow,” Wolfgang advised her.
“Yes sir. Well, the short version is that we have a bunch of what appear to be unregistered geographic detail zones showing up within the game.”
“Clarify that for the hardware engineers among us,” Janet Chen suggested over Wolfgang’s shoulder.
“Yes ma’am. Everywhere in the game is divided up into logical zones: by the seven countries, for starters, then by sub-regions, like counties or states within a country, then by specific geographic features, like a range of mountains, or a town, or a river. This division makes it easier to for the computer and for human operators to alter the statistics for an area: the weather, the flora and fauna, the rate of population growth, and so on. It also makes it easier to back-up and copy data, just like the file and sub-file system on any computer.
“The smallest division before you get into individual objects like trees or houses or rocks is the geographic detail zone. That might be a specific inlet on a bay, or a particular street in a town, or a cave in a mountainside. It’s the type of place we generate encounters for end users. Normally – no, always, universally, absolutely – these detail zones are placed by the design division, which clears it through system architecture, and then it gets fed into an update. And these zones are always tacked on to the outer fringes of explored territories in the game. It’s one of the ways we create a linear experience for users, since new characters always begin in known towns and branch outwards as they progress, and experienced characters get the benefit of new areas to explore.”
“And now?” Wolfgang prompted.
“Yes, except for now. These,” the programmer turned and gestured at the blocks of light floating above her workstation, “are areas which we’ve discovered don’t fit. They aren’t listed in the general geographic database. There is no record of them in any of the design documents we’ve seen, and there’s no memory allocated for them in the system. For the most part, they’ve appeared in the middle of developed zones, between or within existing geographic details. And we have no idea what the hell they are.”
“How did you discover them?” Janet asked.
“We didn’t,” the programmer muttered defensively. “We weren’t really looking for them because there’s no reason for them to be there. A few of us found some mention of supposed new areas popping up within developed zones, in some of the reviews of the recent update, but we figured they were mistaking the new content for new areas. Then, this morning, the Central Monitor on the Western server tracked a group of high-circle adventurers into a ruin, where there wasn’t supposed to be anything but volcanic ash. The CM program keeps a lookout for events or conflicts which might alter the game’s general history or storyline, so it threw the scene up onto the big screens here and squawked for help.”
