by Natalie Grey
Gracie sat back in her seat, frowning, but a smile was tugging at her lips. As much as she wanted to be, she could hardly be too upset about this. This put her over the amount she needed for the month for rent and gave her a bit extra to buy donuts at her favorite place this weekend.
“Hot damn,” she muttered.
She was still smiling when she caught a whiff of herself. After the fighting, she did not smell pretty. She hustled off to take a shower, aching and muttering complaints about getting older.
But she couldn’t stop smiling.
Jay was sweating as Sam walked him down the hall to Chris’s office. All of a sudden, his choice to bunk off and play games during work hours seemed completely indefensible. He could see all of his petty justifications about how he was supposed to be play-testing and hearing from the players vanishing into thin air.
He was going to get fired.
Chris looked worried when Jay was shown into his office. He was probably trying to figure out how to fire someone. After all, what with being in the midst of launch, they weren’t exactly rolling in workers. They had a lot to fix and run, and even with a well-staffed company, there weren’t enough employees to do everything.
He braced himself, and felt his jaw drop when Chris said, “How many people know about that bug?”
Jay scrambled for an answer.
“There were three others in your group,” Sam prompted finally. His voice was soft. “Does anyone else know?”
“Not that I…I mean, it was weird, but—”
“It’s expensive is what it is.” Chris swiveled his monitor around. “That glitch gave an achievement of $150 per player.”
“What the hell?” Jay leaned over the monitor and tabbed through the data. “That wasn’t the quest we—” He broke off, clearing his throat. He wasn’t supposed to be on quests.
Chris hadn’t noticed. “I’ll need a full report,” he told Sam as if Jay wasn’t in the room. “All of the mod powers your team has, and have all of them run that quest. Some in chosen groups, some in PUGs, some solo if it can be run solo. Match as many of the variables as you can from Jay’s run and then iterate. See if any of the rest of them can get that glitch to go. We need to get ahead of this thing before the C-suite hears about it.”
“It’s not a super-big deal,” Jay said, holding out his hands placatingly. He heard Sam hiss a quiet warning but didn’t pay attention. What was the problem, after all? “Some endgame content got triggered, but like the monthly dungeons, it must have adapted to our level. We’ll figure out the connection, and no one will ever know. I say we just leave the money in those players’ accounts. $150 is chump change for—”
“You don’t get it,” Chris interrupted. He grabbed his monitor back, stabbed a few keys, and then turned it so roughly that it tipped over. “It’s put this player in the top ten globally.”
Callista. Jay stared at the avatar and fought the urge to grin. She was going to find this so funny. Some statistical glitch, some—
A thought, not quite formed, made the smile fade.
He still wasn’t quite sure why he was worried when Chris said, “Do you know how this game got funded, Jay?”
“I…no.” Fuck, he should have a better answer to that.
“By our sponsors,” Chris said in a much-too-pleasant voice. “Lox Graphics. Gr8p Drink. Brightstar. Every one of them is sponsoring players and guilds, and every one of them wants their logos splashed all over the top ten. Now we have a player who’s glitching their way into the list. Placement on this list is expensive, Jay. If they don’t get placement, they don’t fund us. They don’t fund us, we shut down. So go write that report and figure out what’s going wrong so we can fix this before they start pulling their ads. Now.”
Jay backed out of the room, nodding silently.
Sam didn’t join him, and Jay could hear his immediate boss trying to persuade Chris. The words were indistinct, but the tone was similar to someone trying to calm a horse. Sam was putting his job on the line to defend Jay because Jay had opened his fat mouth.
For the first time, he felt slimy as he sat down at his desk, and the slimy feeling wasn’t from the sweat that was coating him after that impromptu fight.
He’d loved the idea of the global rankings. He hadn’t even blinked at the idea of sponsorships. After all, tons of companies sponsored StarCraft players.
But those companies weren’t demanding that StarCraft’s developers change the game so their sponsored player would win. This…this was different.
Jay sat at his desk while his shift bled away and the rest of his team left. He was still working when Sam walked by on his way out. Sam lingered for a few moments, but Jay was so immersed that he didn’t look up and say hello.
When he finished the report, Sam was gone
That was good, because he had a hunch he wanted to test now that his team was gone and the next shift was coming in. After all, none of them knew who he was. No one would ask what he was working on. Jay shut the door of his office and began digging through the game files. He found Callista easily and began to trace her very first steps in-game.
She’d started out, gone to the pool, killed the wolf…
His eyes narrowed. They were feeling grainy now, and a little dry. He was swaying in his seat, but he kept digging.
It was three hours into the next shift before he spoke, and he said only four words.
“Son of a bitch.”
Chapter Ten
Jay bounced his feet nervously as Chris tapped his fingers on the desk. Chris was pissed, he could tell, and he didn’t like that. Chris was one of those people who liked being angry. They almost enjoyed it when their employees disappointed them because they just loved to give dramatic speeches and exercise their power.
Normally, that bugged the hell out of Jay, and it was one of the reasons he did everything in his power to steer clear of Chris. He didn’t want to say something he would regret. Something that would cost him his dream job.
There were bad eggs everywhere, right?
Right now, he was too tired to be annoyed, though. He’d gone home and tried to sleep, which had been a wasted effort. By the time he’d eaten the fast food he’d gotten on the way home and showered—he reeked, frankly—he was so tired that he couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned while gray light filtered around the edges of the shades, then finally got up and went back to the office.
Sam was running late, and Chris was getting more annoyed by the second. Finally, they heard Sam’s voice in the corridor, and he rushed into the room, laptop bag bouncing against his side.
“Sorry, sorry, the drive-thru was super slow, and my daughter didn’t want to go to daycare this morning...” His voice trailed off as he took in the mood in the room. “Everything okay?” he asked finally.
He was braver than Jay would have been. With Chris, that was practically poking the bear.
“I don’t know yet,” Chris said in a tone that conveyed the considerable patience it took to deal with someone as disappointing as Sam. “Jay didn’t want to start until you arrived, and you just got here.”
Oh, good, this was going to be an equal-opportunity beat-down. Jay gave Sam a strained smile that said, “Let’s just get through this.”
Sam gave a tiny nod and settled into the other guest chair. “So I’m guessing you figured out what was going on, then?” He didn’t look at Chris.
“Yeah.” Jay cleared his throat. It was scratchy, as were his eyes. “So, here’s the deal. There was an Easter egg quest that this player found. It grants a pretty big ranking boost for completion, which is shared with anyone in the party, and it kind of…goes off randomly.”
“What,” Chris said, “does that mean?” He was really warming to his angry mood and bit off each word crisply.
Jay sighed and rubbed his scalp. It was itchy. All of him was itchy. He was not young enough to pull all-nighters anymore, apparently.
Wasn’t twenty-six too young to be feeling the first sting of
aging?
“So, when she went to defeat the ghosts at the Bloodchoir Temple, for instance, the boss who actually appeared was totally different than the one who should have, given the quest they were on. I think it’s all going to happen like that.”
“You…think?” Chris looked like he was going to flip the table.
Jay was beginning to feel the same way. He’d been up all night tracking this quest through the code, and even though he’d barely managed to find any of it, he’d done a much better job than Chris would have.
“The quest isn’t documented,” he explained as patiently as he could. “In a normal quest, I’d be able to look at the fights and conversations and see what gets triggered by each successive completion.” He shrugged. “Well, in a normal quest, I wouldn’t have to. We’d have documentation about what the quest did, what stages it had, and where to find the bits of it. If I wanted to, it would be easy to find the code. In this case, none of it seems to be…indicated correctly. I know how she started the quest, and I was there during the boss fight, so I had some information to work with, but even with that, I couldn’t tell you where any of the code is to say what’s coming next.”
Chris stared at him for a long moment, and Sam cleared his throat.
“In something the size of this game,” he said delicately, “we have to have very strict naming conventions for dialogue, quest chains, et cetera, or it quickly becomes impossible to find anything. If the dialogue and achievements specific to a quest aren’t tagged with the quest name—which is I think what Jay is saying, right, Jay? Right—so if they aren’t tagged, they’d be almost impossible to track down.” His brow wrinkled.
Jay knew what that wrinkle meant. “I was able to find some of the conversations by searching the database for certain strings from the boss fight. Unfortunately, the things I found followed no naming conventions I could see and were in sections I couldn’t navigate to, so I couldn’t find the rest of the quest. And,” he sighed, “it’s done with conditions, not with scripts.”
Chris’s face settled into a stony mask, and at last, Jay felt a wave of anger. Chris didn’t like being reminded of his lack of skill in coding, which would be annoying enough on its own. He worked at a game company, for Christ’s sake! But more than that, he’d had numerous opportunities to get more competent with the code. He just hadn’t ever taken them.
“What Jay means,” Sam said, breaking in with a worried look at Jay, “is that the code doesn’t say where things go next. Instead, whatever happens next, happens because certain other conditions are met. So if a quest has part A and part B, instead of part A finishing with instructions to go on to part B, part B is set to happen when part A finishes.”
Chris looked at Sam, then at Jay, then back to Sam again. “So?” he asked finally.
“So there’s no way to know what’s coming,” Sam replied. “It could be anything.”
“Not. Good. Enough,” Chris said.
Jay snapped. “Look, from what I’ve seen, it was written by Harry Kouper. It looks like his stuff. And...” He cleared his throat.
“Yes?” Chris said much too nicely.
Jay decided not to mince words. Nothing here was secret, not exactly. “This was the sort of thing Harry did,” he said with a shrug. It was part of why Harry had gotten bought out after a long and increasingly vicious power struggle with the other two founders of Dragon Soul. “A prank like this?” Jay said. “Well, it’s hard to know if he would do it just because he thought it was funny or to screw things up for us down the line, but it really does sound like him.”
Even Chris knew enough to know that much. He sat back in his chair, uncharacteristically quiet for a moment.
“Well, at least you found out what we are dealing with,” he said after a moment. The words didn’t have his usual sarcastic bite to them. He was genuinely grateful. “When I tell the Ds—”
He broke off as Jay and Sam exchanged a quick look. “The Ds” meant the other two founders of Dragon Soul productions, Dhruv and Dan. Harry and Dhruv had been freshman-year roommates at MIT, and Dan had transferred in their junior year from RPI. They’d begun working on Metamorphosis Online from the dorms, and the game was littered with references to Boston and their various colleges and classmates.
Chris still wasn’t talking, and Sam motioned for Jay to stay silent as he took the plunge. “Dhruv and Dan are best placed to fix this,” he told Chris. He could see that Chris was worried about bringing up a problem and not a solution. “They might recognize an internal joke—or whatever—sooner than an outsider would. They are more familiar with his code. They’d want us to bring this to them immediately.”
He’d messed up in suggesting what to do. Chris gave him an unfriendly look. “Yes, and in the meantime? We just punt it their way and tell them to deal with that and the mess in the rankings? Which Jay did not fix, by the way.”
Jay swallowed. He’d completely forgotten about that. Following the trail had turned into an obsession as the night wore on, and between what he knew for certain and his hunches—hunches he hadn’t shared and wasn’t intending to—he’d forgotten to undo the ranking.
He cleared his throat. “The only way to fix the rankings would be to make a manual adjustment, which wouldn’t be...”
Chris raised his eyebrows when Jay paused.
“Well, it wouldn’t be fair,” Jay said. The words sounded lame even to him. “If she’s noticed her ranking, and she logs in and sees that we’ve adjusted it? Well, I mean, she did complete the quest. She earned those points.”
“Then, if she submits a ticket, we tell her that the original boost was a mistake,” Chris told him as if explaining something to a particularly stupid child. “We’ll deal with it. Better to play it as a glitch than to let people know there are a bunch of hidden ways to manipulate the rankings when we don’t even know what they are.” He gave Sam and Jay scathing looks. “I’ll handle this.”
“Wait.” The word came out automatically.
Sam and Chris looked at Jay, which was awkward. He didn’t actually have a follow-up. There was no plan at all.
So he made one up on the fly. “Let me look at the rankings and come up with a good PR-sensitive way to address it, and an idea of the adjustments we’d need to make. We can tag her account so that any big ranking boosts get sent to one of us for approval, maybe.” He was still scrambling, but ideas were coming to him now. “If Harry did this, there might be more. There might be more even if it wasn’t him. We know programmers like to hide little bits of code. My team might have to handle this again in the future, so we should come up with a plan. Just tell Dan and Dhruv about the report—I’ll send it to you—and that we’re working on the rest of it.”
“Are you sure?” Sam asked him. “You need to go home and get some sleep.”
“No.” Jay wasn’t sure why he was so adamant about this, but he was. “I’ll have the report to you tomorrow night,” he told Chris. “I’m going to go get some caffeine and start working.”
He left without being dismissed. He needed to get out before he snapped.
At his desk, he slumped into his chair and groaned. He wasn’t even sure what was upsetting him about this. He just knew that the phrase “I’ll handle this” had put his hackles up.
It didn’t matter, he decided finally. He’d find the solution. He’d figure it out.
Because if his hunches were correct…
He wasn’t going to think about that yet. His hands were shaking as he put on the VR suit. This was crazy. He was doing something crazy, and the Ds might figure out what was going on and stop it all in its tracks. He wasn’t sure if he hoped they did.
The world calmed him, though, as it always did. He stared out at the gently waving grasses and the spread of stars across the night sky and felt his tension melt away. When he was here, the rest of the world didn’t seem real.
There was a ding in his headset, and a second later, he got a voice chat request. His heart started to thud.
&nb
sp; “Hey,” he managed.
“Hey, yourself.” The Aosi voice, all echoey and epic, made the informal language sound hilariously out of place. “Can’t stay, actually. Glad I caught you.”
“Oh? Why?”
“To…tell you I can’t stay?” Gracie sounded a bit confused. “I just didn’t want you all to be waiting for me. I’m sorry.”
“Oh. Right.” Jay fought a smile. She’d actually logged in to tell them she wouldn’t be here. She cared. “Well, have a good night.”
“Eh.” She didn’t sound too enthused. The flicker of boredom actually worked pretty well with the Eternal Perfect Being voice. “We’ll see. But you all have some fun.”
Jay was still trying to figure out how to tell her that he probably wouldn’t when she logged off.
He sighed. At least this gave him time to figure out what the hell to do about this mess.
In the living room, Gracie stripped off the VR headset and nearly had a heart attack when she saw Alex lurking in the corner of the room.
“Jesus fuck, you scared me. How long have you been standing there?” It couldn’t have been long. She’d only just put on the headset.
“I just got home.” Alex blinked at her attire. “Is this, uh… You know what? I’m too tired to be witty. What’s with the fucking dress?”
“Oh. Right.” Gracie looked down. “Uh, date.”
Kyle had suggested an upscale restaurant for dinner and hadn’t been willing to take no for an answer. Fortunately, Gracie had found some clothes lurking in the back of her closet, bought for her by her mother, who was eternally optimistic that if she could just get Gracie to look the part of the preppy corporate climber, the personality would follow.
Alex made a fart noise and gave her a thumbs-down.
“I know,” Gracie said, throwing her hands up. “And…” She checked her texts. “He was supposed to be here to pick me up like twenty minutes ago, and nothing.”
“Because he’s a douche,” Alex said.
