Having thus performed damage control to the best of their ability, the company execs desperately needed to know what had happened.
The manufacturer of the console was quickly cleared of any responsibility. Every other game that had been built for their machine played as designed. There were no adverse consequences, no hidden dangers. Only Durgeon Invasion: Part IV had somehow compromised the console’s electronics to the point where the keyboards used by the trio of deceased players had caused a lethal jolt of electricity to shoot through their young bodies. The possibility of something like it happening had been discussed, discreetly, throughout the industry for many, many years. Decades, even. But the prospect had never advanced beyond a far-fetched theoretical possibility. No one had actually, seriously believed that a computer keyboard or joystick could carry enough juice to electrocute a person even if that individual was resting all ten fingers on a board that was sopping wet.
Finding out what had happened was not going to be easy. The keyboards and computers of Landsford and Chang had been thoroughly fried, their hard drives slagged. But while Goldberg’s machine had similarly caught fire, his older sister had retained enough presence of mind to douse it with the contents of a family fire extinguisher. It was badly impacted, but maybe not irretrievably so.
That was the hope, anyway, of the two company engineers who were busy making final connections to the hard drive they had resurrected from the blackened machine. If they could recover all the information leading up to the fatal electrical discharge, they might learn what had happened—and why.
Annalee made the final connection, then walked back around the wide work bench to lean over Roget’s left shoulder. “Power it up, Paul. Take it real slow.”
“How would I know to do anything,” he muttered as the middle of the three big flat screens that formed a semicircle on his desk came to life in front of him, “without you around to tell me?”
“Sorry. Pardon me if I’m just a little nervous.”
“No reason to be nervous,” he chided her. “Anything untoward starts to happen, any kind of serious surge, it will automatically trip all power to the test bed the instant it manifests itself. Which won’t help us learn what happened, but will protect your makeup.”
She pinched his ear. Lightly. Roget was a little bit of a man, and a little bit of a genius. Not a loins-melting combination, but not wholly unattractive, either. It suited her that he was a coworker much more than a potential date. They worked well together.
“Game is coming up,” he murmured. She shunted casual musings aside as, all business now, she concentrated her full attention on the screen.
There was nothing remarkable about the image that solidified. It was a standard screen shot from the game, one of thousands of similar visual options written into the Durgeon Invasion program. Soldiers dying, smoke rising, trees falling. Except that this particular scene was the last one that had appeared on Martin Goldberg’s computer monitor the instant before his death. Had Tyrone Landsford and Lewis Chang also died while viewing the same game screen?
An uncharacteristically tense Annalee checked the left and right monitors. “Console power consumption is normal. Absolutely normal. No sign of a spike, contained or imminent.”
“Let’s play, then.” Roget grasped the linked joystick that was no different from the standard store-bought one that came with this particular iteration of the gaming console and proceeded to manipulate it with one hand while hitting keys and buttons with the other. This continued for some ten minutes before he called a halt and looked back up at her.
“There’s nothing amiss here. If this unit hadn’t been pulled from a burning computer you’d never know there was anything wrong with it. The game progresses normally.” He turned back to the screen. “I can play, switch sides, or play against the machine.” He shook his head tersely. “I don’t see anything wrong with either the game or the console.”
“Neither did Martin Goldberg,” she murmured, “before he was electrocuted.”
“At least we have it narrowed down.” Roget pressed his left forefinger to his lips as he speculated aloud. “Three teens died while playing this game. Everyone else continued to play it until it was shut down or otherwise disabled. What made those three different?”
“Parents didn’t pay their electrical bills?” she suggested coolly.
“Very funny.” He sat up straight. “We’re going to have to go through the whole game bit by bit, screen by screen, from the beginning, exploring all the options in order to …”
“Paul, do you know how many options Durgeon Invasion: Part IV has?”
“I know, I know. But I don’t see any other way. We’ve already run an incongruity search on unburned copies of the game and found nothing. So we’re going to have rerun the scan manually on this copy, one option at a time. Each character, each battlefield scenario, each device, even the weather in the game. Something triggered those lethal electrical blowbacks. The company needs to know what it was.”
“Not to mention the company’s legal department.” She walked to a nearby desk. Like Roget’s it was overflowing with components. “You start on that one and I’ll launch a fresh copy over here.”
They were at it for days, picking apart Durgeon Invasion: Part IV from D to V. Breaks from work were full of jokes, cold pastry, and strong coffee as they discussed anything but their current project. Periodic nervous memos from Corporate were ignored: their work could not be rushed. After the first week, Company stopped pestering them. Annalee had briskly assured their anxious superiors that results would be announced as soon as they had any to announce.
They were four-fifths of the way through the game, having processed thousands of options, and had arrived close to the point where the unexplained electrical faults had occurred, when a frowning Roget looked over from his desk and announced to his colleague almost apologetically, “Annalee, I think I might have something here.”
She was out of her chair and at his side immediately. He could have ported his discovery over to her, of course, but since they actually worked side-by-side in the office it was one of those uncommon circumstances in contemporary tech where actual physical person-to-person communication was able to function more efficiently than the electronic variety.
Standing behind him she bent close to stare at the middle of the three oversized monitors. “What’ve you got, Paul?”
“Probably nothing,” he told her with typical modesty. “It’s a small abnormality. On the face of it, it seems harmless enough. In fact, it involves a face. But it’s still an anomaly. At least I think it is.”
She frowned. “What do you mean, ‘you think it is’? Either it’s an anomaly or it’s not.”
“One would think so, wouldn’t one? Even if it meets the criteria we’re looking for, I still don’t see how it could have anything to do with or how it could trigger a serious, let alone lethal, electrical fault in the console itself.” Sitting back and folding his small hands over his stomach, he gestured at the screen.
Annalee scrutinized the sidebar. It was a typical character sidebar, one that popped up whenever the gamer selected a new individual to put in play. The character design was appropriately detailed, the uniformed image facing outward properly martial.
Valentin Sharffen. Rank: Major General. History …
It took her about a minute to process the entire character description: longer than usual because the character had a resume that was more extensive than average. That was to be expected for the character background of a senior officer. It was written in standard DA game prose, straightforward and without embellishment. She was troubled by it before she had finished reading.
“I know every character in the game, all four versions, including those designed to end up as dead bodies within five minutes of play.” She shook her head. “I don’t recognize this one.”
“Neither do I.” Raising his left hand to rest it against his chin, Roget squinted at the center monitor. “But there it is.
Full background, all the usual appurtenances.” Swiveling his chair, he indicated the monitor off to his right. “And there’s the applicable code. I’ve highlighted it in red. Fully developed, no glitches.” Tilting his head back, he looked up at her. “Seems like a nice, useful, charismatic character. There’s just one problem with it.”
She nodded slowly. “We didn’t develop him. Gcube has nothing to do with him. He’s entirely new to me.”
“And me. So we have an impossible game-related triple fatality, and in the game scenario at least one of the three dead kids was playing, a character who shouldn’t be there.” He smiled thinly. “Suggests possibilities, wouldn’t you say?”
She pursed her lips. “Unavoidably. But what kind, and how? Durgeon Invasion isn’t open source. Even if Goldberg or all three of those boys had the combined talent of three of the best programmers in the world, they wouldn’t have had access to the development code, and they wouldn’t have known how or where to start. A trio of geniuses might have been able to formulate the character, but they couldn’t have ported him into the game. You can’t tether a program to one that doesn’t accept external modification.”
“What about somebody inside the company? Somebody in Gcube development?” Roget hypothesized.
She considered. “Sure. A programmer with too much time on their hands could have built the character, coded it, and pushed it out as an upgrade or an add-on. But that doesn’t explain why a straightforward single-character upgrade would cause the gaming console to deliver a fatal electrical charge to a trio of total strangers.” Hesitation altered her tone. “Unless our theoretical rogue programmer is a psychotic murderer.”
Roget fidgeted in his chair. “We don’t know what those kids were doing that might have caused the problem. If a rogue programmer inside the company pushed the upgrade, it might have gone to hundreds of consoles. The recall came immediately after the three fatalities.” He glanced up again. “I’m supposing that none of the other players managed to duplicate the action, the necessary sequence of events within the game, that caused our trio of deaths. Maybe there was something about the dead boys’ multiplayer gameplay at that particular moment and in that particular instant of the game that generated the problem. Or maybe our rogue programmer only pushed his new character code to a few consoles.”
She was pacing behind him now. “What if there is no rogue programmer? What if the game itself generated the character? You know it has the ability to do that, to advance gameplay in unexpected and unanticipated ways. It’s part of what makes—what made—Durgeon Invasion such a best seller.” Halting, she indicated his center monitor. “But I’ve never seen a game-generated character this fully developed. Usually they’re just loosely described cannon fodder. And that still doesn’t explain why or how just inserting a new character into the game caused the electrical problem. We upgrade DA with new characters and battlefield scenarios on a regular basis. What’s so special and/or dangerous about this piece of code?” Advancing, she leaned over to squint at the brightly lit screen. “Admittedly this is an initial, cursory look-over, but I don’t see anything radical embedded in the sequence. It looks like clear-cut character code to me.”
Roget nodded. “Same here. When we break it down maybe we’ll find something unusual.” He gestured at the monitor. “First step is to see how the game plays without the unauthorized new character.” The finger on his right hand knew where the Delete button was without him having to glance at the keyboard.
“Don’t do that, civilian.”
Paul Roget had been in the gaming business for more than ten years. He had seen much, presided over important developments, been on panels that postulated possible future innovations for the industry. So had Annalee Henshaw. But this was the first time their jaws had dropped at anything they had seen on a monitor, and they dropped in unison.
“Holy mother of motherboards.” Roget was unaware he was whispering.
“Characters are programmed to respond verbally to player input.” His colleague murmured softly as she stared wide-eyed at the monitor. “The only programming I can recall that can produce a negative involves battlefield maneuvering and choices. It doesn’t come up—it can’t come up—in response to a perceived physical gesture on the part of the gamer. Kinetics are reserved for battlefield play on the part of the players.”
“There is no ‘play’ on a battlefield, civilian.” The character voice was rich, deep, and sharp. Accusatory, even, a dumbfounded Roget thought.
“Oh, now that tears it,” Annalee mumbled. “That just screws it upside down and inside out and sideways.” She was shaking her head in disbelief. “The character exhibits independent volition outside the preprogrammed auditory parameters.” Taking a step forward, she reached for the Delete herself.
“I am formally advising you not to touch that button, ma’am.”
Her hand hesitated above the keyboard, her disbelief now magnified by a factor of ten. “Is that …? Are you threatening me?”
“Christ,” Roget muttered, “now the game threatens a player?” His brows drew together. “Wait a minute. How is he—how is it—even perceiving us? In real time, no less?”
She nodded in the direction of the left-hand monitor. “Built-in cameras are on.”
Roget swallowed hard. “I didn’t activate that app.” His gaze returned to the stern-visaged character on the center screen. “This is fucking crazy. If you weren’t here, I’d be on my way to Urgent Care right now. Maybe we both should go anyway.”
“Maybe we should.” Her voice was grim. “But first …” Her right hand started to descend toward the keyboard anew, index finger extended.
“Final warning, ma’am.” The character was staring straight out at them. At me, Roget wondered? At her?
“Or what?” she snapped back. Jesus Christ, I’m arguing with a computer character.
“Just—don’t—do it.”
“Screw this.” She hit Delete.
There was an overpowering flash of light followed by several flares of lesser and rapidly diminishing intensity. Loud crackling filled the room, followed by smoke that issued from the localized server. Roget was knocked back off his chair. Annalee let out a muffled scream, clutched at her right hand, and crumpled to the floor. A moment later the overhead fire suppression system came on, knocking down the incipient blaze from the server, the three monitors, the pair of keyboards, and attendant devices, all of which were sparking, smoking, or in flames. Rising from the floor and blinking away water that continued to waterfall from the ceiling sprinklers, the analyst sought his companion through the smoke and spray.
“Annalee. Annalee!”
She was sitting on the floor, soaked, her short black hair plastered against her head and neck, holding her right wrist with her left hand. Several dark streaks showed where she had been burned. She was starting to tremble.
He helped her to her feet. “We need to get you to the First Aid station, have that looked at.”
She stared up at him, shocked in several ways, none of them comprehensible except the physical. “It—he hurt me. He hurt me.”
“Rogue program.” Putting his arm around her, he helped her up and guided her toward the hallway door. The sounds of rising commotion were starting to reach them from outside. Steve Phelps burst into the room, wielding a fire extinguisher like a short-barreled gun.
“Paul, Annalee, what the …?” He broke off, staring not at the damage but at her. “What the hell happened to your hand?”
Roget eased her past the engineer, out into the hall, and through the rapidly gathering crowd of baffled colleagues. “We’re okay,” he said reassuringly. He kept repeating it as he and Annalee made their way down the corridor. “We’re okay.”
“Hardware safeties.” There was the faintest edge of panic in her voice. “Built-in security.” She met his concerned gaze. “Otherwise we’d be as dead as those three poor boys.”
“I wonder.” He led her around a corner. “Were they engaged in the
same scenario? Were they also trying to delete the character profile?”
“We may never know. Maybe they were. Maybe it was something else.” Her voice strengthened and there was a glint in her eyes. “I do know one thing. Every returned copy of Durgeon Invasion: Part IV gets scanned before it gets recycled. If that character code is in all of them, then we have a potential ongoing problem.”
“What are we going to do about online downloads?” he muttered.
“We can push out a general remote delete. Without any—personal interaction—I don’t think removing that character code should provoke a …”
She couldn’t say it, so he did so for her. “An individualized response?” She nodded. “Maybe only a few gamers running multiplayer play got the code, or utilized it in the specific kind of sequence that would cause it to engage. Maybe only them—and us. It might not be as wide a problem as we fear.” They were almost to the First Aid office. Someone had called ahead and the duty nurse was standing in the hall looking anxiously in their direction.
“It better not be.” She winced as she lowered her burned hand, careful not to make contact with the wall. “Meanwhile you and I and the whole rest of the Gcube team have a lot of work ahead of us trying to find out exactly where that code originated.”
“Or how,” he finished as he pushed the door open.
Devin turned up the volume and adjusted his headset, trying to snug it tighter against his ears. Crapon (his stepfather’s real name was Carpon, but Devin never thought of him as that: he was and would always be Crapon) was beating on his mother again. Wasn’t the first time, wouldn’t be the last. All Devin could do was try to drown out the noise and pretend he didn’t hear the confrontation. If he tried to intercede on his mother’s behalf, his stepfather would turn his booze-fired rage on her son instead. Reaching up, he felt of the knot on the back of his head. It had gone down quite a bit since Crapon had thrown him into the refrigerator, but there was still a noticeable bump. Devin had no wish to reinvigorate it.
The Flavors of Other Worlds Page 19
