Gamers and Gods: AES

by Matthew Kennedy

Farker paused outside Max's office to organize his thoughts. He had put this off too long and he knew it. The conundrum called Aes had distracted him, and sending Darla to check the newest anomaly had taken a little time, but that was no excuse. He couldn't just go in there and say “Hi boss. People might be dying in ROE, but the good news is, one of the NPCs in Realm of Legends thinks he's a real person.”

  But what should he tell Max? He could not cover up the missing people. According to the Problem Finder, there were at least two users now whose avatars had vanished. Two people who were not logging out or waking up. He had to tell Max about them. Should already have told Max about them.

  If they had been among the minority of Players who logged in from hospitals, it would have been less of an issue; when they didn't log out to eat, the hospital staff would get feeding tubes into them. But the Abernathys logged in from in-home link beds, like most people on the UNET. If they didn't wake up soon, their bodies would begin to starve. Whether or not Aes was really 'alive', the Abernathys certainly were. He had to get Max to mobilize a rescue.

  But...if he told him about the anomalies (which were probably unrelated to the Players not waking up), Max might shut down both Realms, fearing lawsuits. Farker had no idea what shutting down the games would do to people like the Abernathys who couldn't log out before the Realm crashed.

  Because a manual shut down and a crash at this level of complexity were pretty similar. For example, if the Realm shut down while you were talking to a Quest-giver or another NPC, the system wouldn't bother to mark your place and resume the conversation exactly there the next time you logged in. It would remember your avatar's location, sure. But Finder said the Abernathy avatars had vanished without a trace. With no position to remember, what would happen to them?

  Reluctantly, he knocked on the simulated walnut door.

  “Enter,” said Maximilian. Farker had to smile at that. Since he didn't know who was coming, he didn't know to make me wait. He pulled the door open and entered, closing it behind him.

  Max looked up from his desk, a puzzled frown on his face. “I don't remember sending for you, Farker.”

  “You didn't,” Farker told him. “But we need to talk.”

  The CEO of PanGames leaned back in his executive leather chair and took a puff on his cigar. “That sounds like you have a problem.”

  “We have a problem,” said Farker, emphasizing the 'we'. He took a breath. “It seems that two of our customers in Realm of Egypt can't log out of the game and wake up.”

  Max regarded him, tapping ash off the end of the cigar. “Some kind of glitch in Egypt? What do you usually do in this case, shunt them off to a happy place and tell them not to worry while you fix it?”

  “It's not that kind of a glitch. Their avatars have vanished! We can't contact them. We tried calling, emailing and voice mailing. All attempts just get stored in their message buffer. Nobody's home.”

  Max upgraded his stare to a frown. “What do you mean, vanished? Wait a minute, did you say 'Egypt'? Is this some problem from the inclusion? You told me that everything went smoothly.”

  “It did. The inclusion went off without a hitch. This problem happened afterwards. Ages afterwards, in computer time.”

  Max blew out some smoke. “What do you think happened? Have we been sold a lemon? Is this some kind of corporate poison pill?”

  Farker was familiar with the term. Sometimes not everyone at a corporation that was being 'acquired' was happy about it. There were ways of fighting hostile takeovers: the 'poison pill' scheme. It was invented in 1982 by a lawyer specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Farker knew about it all right. He had made a point of looking into things that could screw with PanGames and affect his employee stock options.

  “That refers to stock purchases and hostile takeovers and it's also called a 'shareholder rights plan',” he said. “It has nothing to do with this. This wasn't a hostile takeover. Triskelion sold us their Realm of Egypt because it made good business sense. They've been planning to change over into improved food synthesis software for a year now. The deal was good for both of us.”

  “It was supposed to be. Did they sell us damaged goods?”

  “Not as far as I know. There have been no malfunctions.”

  “Up to now, you mean. Did the inclusion overload the system or something? I thought you assured me that couldn't happen.”

  “There is no overload. Our hypercomputer could run hundreds of more games without missing a beat. No, I think it's a link bed malfunction.”

  Max considered it. “If you can prove that, we're off the hook. PanGames has nothing to do with manufacturing link beds. The guys at Simulonic will crap themselves, but it's their hardware.”

  “I can't yet. What bothers me about it is two beds failing at the same time. They could have components from the same production run, I guess. We'll only know for sure if more Simulonic beds malfunction, if that's what it is.”

  “Then we should shut Realm of Egypt down, now. Tell them it's server maintenance or something. That way if it happens again while we're shut down, no way can we be held liable.”

  “I'm afraid that's not going to do the trick. If it's the link beds, as I suspect, it could happen with any of our Realms. We'd have to shut PanGames down completely to make sure they malfunctioned while logged in somewhere else. And who knows for how long? You want to lose all that revenue? If we were down for long, our customers might even start migrating to other MMOs.”

  “What should we do? Shut down Egypt?”

  “I wouldn't,” Farker replied immediately. “I don't know what will happen to the brains of the missing avatar's real-world bodies if you shut down without logging them out. And we can't log them out at the moment. It's as if the system thinks they already logged out – but we know they didn't, because the disconnect confirmation never came back from their beds.”

  Maximilian growled. “Than what DO you recommend?”

  “I'll handle the technical problems. You need to get busy on containment. The last thing we need is someone getting worried and calling a reporter. We got lucky with Mr. And Mrs. Abernathy. Most of their relatives were wiped out years ago by the W3 virus. If you act fast, we can get someone over to their house to tell anyone who comes looking for them that they are away on vacation.”

  Max considered that and nodded. “That will buy us a little time.”

  “If we don't solve this soon, you'll also need to get them to a private clinic or something. Send some people with the house sitter to switch their beds over to wireless link instead of optic cable. That way you can move the beds with them still in them, and not lose their connections.”

  Chapter 29: Aes: of Men and Monsters