by Alex P. Berg
Carl’s eyes widened, and he blinked. “Um…right. I suppose I should’ve expected something like that. To make a long story short, it appears you’ve been in some sort of artificially induced Brain coma. I first became concerned when after ten hours logged onto the Princess Gaming servenets, you still hadn’t disconnected.”
“This is when I went in to interview Lars Busk’s friends, right?” I said. “The ones who were playing Marked 4 Death?”
“That’s right,” said Carl.
“How long ago was that?” I asked.
“A little over a week.”
A week? Wow. “Alright. Sorry to interrupt. Keep going.”
“I gave you a little more time,” said Carl, “but within short order you’d lost control of your bowels. I tried to get ahold of Paige to force you out of the simulation, but much to my surprise, I couldn’t. Electronic communications to Paige went right through unanswered, just as our communication attempts to Lars had. The only difference of course is I’d assumed Lars had been ignoring our Brain missives. I knew Paige wouldn’t do the same.”
Not under normal circumstances, said Paige.
Hey, girl, I said. It’s good to hear your voice again. You’ve been mostly absent.
That’s an understatement, she said. I wish I could tell you what happened, but the fact of the matter is I’m as lost as you are. I only recently managed to reboot. Last thing I recall is trying to exit the Princess simulation after speaking with TriumphCat. Hopefully Carl can fill us both in on the rest.
“Well, after unsuccessful attempts to rouse the two of you, I thought to check the Princess Gaming servenets, and sure enough, you showed up as online and in game,” said Carl. “That’s when I knew something was afoot. First, I contacted Princess themselves, but their customer service representatives told me it must’ve been a glitch on our end, as their own internal records showed me as online but inactive. That’s when I contacted the police.
“Luckily, Officer Sanz was more than happy to listen to my story, and he didn’t dismiss it out of hand. He came over as soon as he was able with Officer Applestone in tow. So began a flurry of calls to various GenBorn technical support lines during which Applestone attempted a number of maneuvers to try to force you from the simulation—or wherever it was you were. They all failed. Your Brain had totally shut down, taking you with it.”
“I suspected a malicious attack,” said Flavia, turning her head toward me, “but of which kind, I wasn’t sure. I’d never seen anything like it. We detected wireless activity originating within your Brain, but we couldn’t track it, and none of the more fundamental elements of your Brain architecture responded to external probe. It was kind of cool in a mysterious, unnerving sort of way. Glad to see you’re okay, by the way.”
“Thanks,” I said. “So what happened then?”
“Soon after, it became apparent you’d need medical attention,” said Carl, “so we brought you here to Pylon Alpha General and started to monitor you. We tried a number of different strategies, but none of them worked—until now.”
I took a deep breath. “Wow. I suspected as much. Eventually, anyway.”
Carl tapped his head. “So…what exactly went on up there? If Paige was as incapacitated as she claims, you’re the only one with knowledge of your mind’s events.”
“You want the long version, or the short version?”
“The long, eventually,” said Carl. “I’ll settle for the short first.”
“I came out of the simulation,” I said. “Or at least I thought I did. But not long after I’d exited, a guy by the name of Dirk Kriggler dropped by and—well, I said I’d stick to the short version, so let’s just say he led me on a long, strange, unbelievable quest. Eventually, the sheer number of improbable events I encountered led me to realize what I thought was reality couldn’t be. That’s when it dawned on me that I must still be in the simulation.”
Carl smiled and glanced at Flavia. “It sounds like our plan worked then.”
“Your plan?” I said. “What are you talking about? I told you, I figured it out. I forced the simulation’s hand to kick me out.”
“You undoubtedly did,” said Flavia, turning toward me in her chair, “but you had help. After our initial failures, we sat down and came up with a new plan of attack. Based off the details of the Busk case, Officer Sanz and your friend Carl came up with a theory that closely mirrored what you just described. I’d already suspected your Brain was the subject of a malicious attack, and since it had occurred while you were in the Princess simulation, it made sense the sim might be keeping your conscious mind prisoner. While I couldn’t restore your Brain through normal channels, I did find a backdoor, possibly the same one through which the attack occurred, that let me inject my own code. I won’t go into the technical details, but basically, I delivered an inversely correlated adaptive probabilistic servenet hacking function into your Brain and hoped for the best.”
“Say what now?” I said.
“Officer Applestone fought fire with fire,” said Carl, “attacking the malicious code with more code that would function to make the improbable probable.”
“Like you shooting a man?”
Carl’s eyes widened. “I shot someone?”
“In the reality I experienced, yes,” I said. “But I’d like to think I would’ve ferreted out the truth of the matter on my own sooner or later. Kriggler was too much of a caricature, as if he’d been pulled from one of the old private detective vid docs I’m so fond of, and my skill with a firearm was unheard of. It reminded me of playing Marked 4 Death on the easiest setting all over again. Speaking of which, we should check on Lars’s friends and his girlfriend, TriumphCat. If I was targeted with a malicious hack, there’s a good chance they were, too. I spoke to them about Lars’s disappearance, and I shared my suspicions.”
“So you think this is all related to Lars’s death?” said Carl.
“I don’t see how it wouldn’t be,” I said. “Lars dies while hooked into a Princess Gaming servenet that registers him as online even after death, and then I suffer the same fate—all except for the death part. It has to be connected.”
“You remember the names of the avatars you talked to?” asked Flavia.
Paige reminded me, and I passed them along.
“Thanks,” said Flavia, standing up. “I’ll have teams check into these. In the meantime, I’ve notified Officer Sanz you’re awake. He should be here soon. I suspect he’ll have a slew of questions for you.”
“I wouldn’t expect it any other way,” I said.
Flavia nodded and exited the room. Carl stayed in place, continuing to shower me with his warm smile.
“Have you been here the whole time?” I asked.
“Where else would I go?”
His smile infected me. “Thanks, pal. I appreciate it.”
“Of course,” he said. “I’d do anything for you. You know…except kill a man.”
“Yeah, I’m happy to leave that one behind me in the simulation,” I said. “But now that the officer’s gone, be straight with me. What’s the status of Lars’s investigation? I’m assuming it’s being treated as a murder?”
“To my knowledge, yes,” said Carl, “but I’m not being kept in the loop. You’ll have to ask Officer Sanz, and I’m not sure how forthcoming he’ll be with answers.”
“Questions, yes. Answers, probably not. Although, he might be more forthcoming if I apologize and give him a full statement. I did that in the simulation, but I guess I haven’t done it in real life yet.” I sighed and leaned back into the cushions behind me. For hospital issue, they weren’t too bad.
“Rich?”
I glanced at Carl. “Yes?”
“I know you’ve been locked in your own reality and that environment may not have been conducive to thoughts of the events here in the real world, but during the times I haven’t spent worrying, I can’t help but wonder why someone would murder Lars. He didn’t
have anything of value to take. Any power to speak of. Any relationship squabbles, unless there was one with his online girlfriend. So if he was murdered—why? And why go to such great lengths, including making an attempt on your life, to cover it up?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Carl. I actually did think about that in my simulated reality. Dirk Kriggler, the PI, initially came to my apartment because he’d been investigating a similar case. That’s how he managed to convince me to tag along with him. Honestly, I wouldn’t have followed him if not for the similarities between his case and Busk’s. In fact…”
Carl waited a moment for my response. “In fact, what?”
I blinked. I’d heard of life imitating art, but what if in this case, it was the other way around?
“Carl?” I said. “Has anyone bothered to check into Lars’s finances?”
28
I sat in the back of a police cruiser, gliding along a remote road located somewhere between thirteen and fourteen hundred kilometers south of Pylon Alpha, near the Cetie equator. Leafy palm fronds shadowed our car while thick walls of underbrush rose up on either side of us, threatening to overtake the road if the traffic lessened for even a day. While the self-healing pavement resisted the effects of the sun, rain, and heat remarkably well, there was only so much it could do against the relentless assault of biology.
Our car jostled as we travelled over an overzealous root that saw the road as a new, hostile territory to be conquered. Ahead of us, the tall SWAT van which we followed rammed into a low hanging tree branch, sending it swaying and bouncing. I startled as a half-dozen bangs sounded out, all while orangish yellow fruits bounced off the roof of our car into the surrounding jungle.
I glanced behind us as we sped past. “Did we just get…mangoed?”
Carl, who sat across from me, seemed thoroughly nonplussed. “One of the many dangers of living in the tropics, I suppose, up there with disease and enormous bugs.”
Officer Sanz, who rode next to me in the car, was similarly unimpressed. He continued to gaze out the window silently, as he’d done for the past half hour.
“Sanz?” I said.
He turned. “Yes?”
“I don’t think I’ve had a chance to thank you for letting me tag along on this excursion.”
The officer cracked a smile. “Oh, you’ve had a chance. Several.”
I snorted. I’d become so used to his official guise, I’d failed to realize the guy might actually have a personality. “Let me rephrase that. Thanks for letting me tag along.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “To be fair, we probably wouldn’t have broken this case without your help.”
“Really?” I said. “You mean that?”
“Absolutely,” said Sanz. “If you hadn’t been attacked by a malicious piece of code, we probably never would’ve classified Busk’s death as a homicide, and without that we wouldn’t be where we are now.”
“Oh,” I said. “I thought you were going to praise me for suggesting you look into Busk’s finances. Because without that, we wouldn’t be here.”
Sanz shook his head. “No, actually. As soon as we opened a murder investigation into Busk’s death, we looked into his finances by default. It was simply a matter of time until we sifted through the data and realized…” Sanz stared at me and his face softened. “I mean…sure. Thanks for the suggestion. It really put us on the right path.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” I said.
“Not as bad as you.”
We took a turn around another patch of overgrown shrubbery, and Sanz took a Brain call.
“Sanz here. Affirmative. Yes, I understand. Copy that.”
He signed off and elbowed me in the ribs. “The SWAT leader says we’re almost there. Do you remember the conditions we agreed to when we allowed you to come?”
“Yes.”
Sanz lifted an eyebrow. “I was allowing you a convenient opportunity to recite said conditions. You know, for confirmation purposes.”
“Oh. Given our previous banter, I thought we were taking each other literally.” I smiled. “But, since you asked…it’s simple. Carl and I stay in the car while you and the SWAT team enter the compound. Once you give me the all clear, we can come out.”
Sanz nodded. “Good. Stick to that.”
“Really, though,” I said. “If the intelligence we’ve gathered on this guy is accurate, you don’t need to be worried about my safety.”
“One, you’re putting too much faith in intelligence. Two, you think I’m worried about your safety?” Sanz snorted. “I want to make sure you don’t get in the way.”
I smiled again. “You’re still a terrible liar.”
“Get over yourself.” He nodded toward the front. “Here we go. Stick to the plan.”
Our car passed through a stone gate largely covered with ivy and transitioned onto a brick roadway. The chaotic jungle fell back, replaced instead with an environment just as green but several orders of magnitude better manicured. Palms stood isolated from one another, interspersed with ferns, philodendrons with large, triangular leaves, and bright green grass. Soon they gave way to a large circular driveway with an extravagant fountain at the center, and beyond that, a fantastic tropical mansion painted in white and cream featuring tall columns and a wraparound patio.
The SWAT van stopped at the front steps. Its back doors flung open, and a dozen armored police officers poured out. Our car came to a stop behind them, and Sanz darted out to join them.
The door to our cruiser closed automatically as Sanz and the special tactics officers rushed forward. They broke open the front doors with a swift blow from a portable battering ram and rushed into the gap, shouting orders with their pulse pistols drawn. Within seconds, they’d disappeared inside. The sounds of their entrance faded, and I was left staring at the front door.
Seconds passed, turning into a minute. I glanced at Carl. “So, uh…what’s new with you?”
“Not much,” he said. “Except while you were in a coma, I finally went ahead and got that compact fusion upgrade to my power generation systems.”
“What?” I said. “No way. You know I expressly forbade that.”
“Relax,” said Carl. “I’m kidding. The Carl from your simulation didn’t do much of that, did he? It’s how you know you’re not still in a virtual reality.”
“Don’t even joke about that,” I said. “You know that’s going to give me nightmares for the rest of my life.”
Sanz’s voice crackled in my mind. We got him, Rich. You’re free to come out.
I gave Carl a nod. We exited the cruiser, headed up the stairs, and entered the mansion. An opulent foyer stretched out before us, with twin staircases winding up the sides heading into a central room on the second floor. A pair of SWAT officers were in the process of dragging a man through the double doors at the top, a man with unruly bronze hair, a similar reddish brown beard, and wearing a set of purple silk pajamas. He sported a look of confusion on his face as he struggled weakly against the officers’ grip, all the while mumbling incoherently about his innocence and rights and the general outrage of his arrest.
I knew precisely who he was. Vicente Caetano, former Princess Gaming CEO and co-founder. With Officer Sanz at our side, or rather vice versa, we’d performed quite the investigation into him after finding out that, similar to the simulation in which I’d been trapped, the majority of the money from Lars Busk’s accounts had been removed following his death. The process of tracking down the funds had been nontrivial, but between the efforts of Flavia, a few other police technical wizards, and the banks they delivered compliance orders to, they’d eventually tracked the funds to none other than Caetano.
At first, it hadn’t made much sense, at least until we started delving into the history of Caetano and the company he’d founded. Although the man was a brilliant programmer and gaming visionary, which helped him build a rabid customer base at Princess, he’d struggled with some
of the more monetarily-oriented aspects of running a successful business, namely marketing and sales. In part because of that and in part because of his reputedly abrasive personality, Caetano had eventually seen his company turn against him. In a secret meeting, the board of directors led by then member Johnny Masters had bought Caetano out of his shares of the company in a hostile takeover, subsequently promoting Masters to the spot of president and CEO. The animosity didn’t end there, however, as the company then went through a series of legal gymnastics to not only ensure Caetano would never again have a say in Princess’s affairs, but they even stripped the man of his pension, benefits, and—gasp—deleted his avatar.
Of course, Caetano’s fortune was large enough that the loss of his pension probably didn’t inconvenience him, but that hadn’t stopped him from taking out his furor on Princess’s remaining customer base and recouping the losses where possible. As we’d found, Busk wasn’t the only one being fleeced and affected by the same malicious Brain worm that had attacked me. Sanz and his fellow officers had thus far found dozens of others—some alive, some dead, and some still unaccounted for. All of them fit the same profile. Loners, Intros, and heavy gamers that wouldn’t be missed—at least not at first. Caetano would infect them with the malicious code, plunging them into a separate simulation upon signing off and simultaneously replacing their avatars with mirror-image NPCs in the Princess servenets.
If not for Lars’s estranged mother looking to reconnect, who knows how long it would’ve taken for the gambit to be uncovered. Instead of the dozens who’d already been targeted, the numbers could’ve climbed into the hundreds, even thousands. Though Caetano was clearly responsible, the public relations crisis for Princess Gaming would’ve been disastrous, likely insurmountable. No one would ever again trust the company, and users would actively fear for their lives in the simulation, thus ensuring Princess’s downfall. While I wasn’t in the business of tracking down murderers, Officer Sanz assured me large-scale corporate revenge was a suitable motive for this sort of thing.
