Analog SFF, June 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The personal information tab listed the account owner as Opel Half-Elven, Aloquen Trench, Lionsword Server, Daelemil. Cute.

  All the transaction descriptions linked to The Least Dangerous Game, an auction house that specialized in virtual property from online games. The most recent ones were for paltry sums—no one wanted anything for a game that would soon be gone—but some older auctions of Daelemil characters and strongholds had gone into the low thousands.

  Bill closed the browser. Opel could clearly afford to buy him a Turtl, but he had to think for a while about what she might expect in return. He called Raja's Indian Palace for a thali to go.

  Before he left for the restaurant, he e-mailed Opel his cell phone number. We need to talk, he said.

  * * * *

  Comet Tail Productions’ marketing department bragged about how advanced the Realms of Daelemil AI was, but really, they had no idea.

  The AI controlled monsters, gauging their strategy and aggressiveness to ensure satisfactory kill ratios, so the game would be tough, but not too. It ran all the NPCs, generating free dialogue in (depending on the language of installation) English, Spanish, French, and Korean. It monitored player chat for inappropriate discussions in a way that went far beyond keyword recognition and couldn't be fooled for long by simple neologisms and circumlocution.

  The writing team gave the servers the names the public could see, like Lionsword and Silver Gate, but the tech team found them a bit twee. For internal use, they initialized the server instances with names picked out by one of the computer architects, an older man with a taste for psychedelic music. Fish Cheer. 8 Miles High (a character limit prevented spelling out the title). White Rabbit. Liquid Acrobat. Fat Angel. Andmoreagain.

  And Opel.

  * * * *

  Bill had just gotten in the door and was kicking off his boots when the cell phone rang. He unhooked it from his belt, hopping across the living room.

  "Hello?” said a woman's voice.

  "Aunt Elsie?” said Bill breathlessly. “Is that you?"

  "No.” It sounded a lot like her, though. “Is this Mr. Martin? My name is Akka Linnasalo. You don't know me, but you know my daughter. She plays in that online game. Her name is—” she called out something, not in English, to someone at the other end—"Opel."

  "Uh, yes,” said Bill. He wasn't sure what else to say. He glanced at the caller ID and saw a number with a lot of digits.

  "She asked us for permission to call America, and when we asked why, she told us all about you.” The more she talked, the less she sounded like Aunt Elsie—except for the tone of disapproval.

  "Uh,” said Bill. He pulled his slippers on and went to the computer. “Yeah, I know Opel."

  "She's only thirteen."

  Now Bill was getting a pretty good idea what to say. “I didn't know. Seriously, I can assure you, I had no idea. I thought she was my age. And nothing ever happened—"

  "Your conversations sounded innocent enough, from what we could hear. Our rule is that she has to play with the door open.” Bill kept listening as he opened a window and ran a quick search. The phone number's prefix matched a Helsinki suburb. “I suppose she'd never say anything she didn't want us to hear, though we've certainly asked her about the . . . jargon she uses. And she's a very clever girl. I guess I can believe that she tricked you."

  "I'll block her,” said Bill. “As soon as I hang up, I'll log in and block her."

  "Please don't. That's not actually why I called. She loves the game so much, and I think having a friend there is good for her. So long as nothing . . . inappropriate is happening, of course. Opel's very sick."

  "What's her real name?” said Bill. “It seems weird, calling her Opel in real life."

  Silence. Bill felt the transatlantic distance weighing down the connection. “I don't know if giving out her name is a good idea."

  "You don't have to tell me if you don't feel comfortable,” said Bill. He tamped down his annoyance. He hadn't said a damn thing to Opel that would embarrass him if it turned up on the CNN homepage, hadn't taken a penny of the money she offered him, and now her parents were treating him like a blood-spattered butcher in a vegan grocery.

  "Her name is Helmi,” said Ms. Linnasalo at last. “She has leukemia. She's very sick. The doctors have done everything they can, but they say . . ."

  "Uh, wow,” said Bill, which made him feel stupid. “I'm sorry to hear that. So it's especially rough on her, with the game going away and all."

  "Yes. We wrote a letter to the company, and of course they can't leave the server on. But we hoped you could do us a favor."

  Bill's thoughts raced. This explained a lot—the English words like djinn-wrangler that Opel occasionally puzzled over, for example. “Anything. Just let me know."

  "You know Helmi's . . . her video files that show her character moving . . ."

  "Her flyovers."

  "Flyovers, yes, flyovers. There are too many to download before the server is gone. Someone at the company, someone who wants to remain anonymous, put them on a datacube for us. But he doesn't want to mail them—he's afraid he'd lose his job if he was caught."

  "They'd fire him for helping a sick kid?"

  "They'd fire him for leaking company data. If I understand, you have to sign to send a package outside the country. He doesn't want to sign anything."

  "What an asshole."

  "He's afraid for his job. I don't blame him.” The Elsiesque disapproval had evaporated. “And he did make the cube for us. If I understand correctly, your phone number is in Washington, D.C., right?"

  "That's where I am."

  "The Daelemil data center is only an hour away, in Virginia somewhere. If this man could get the cube to you, would it be possible for you to send it to us? We'll pay for the postage."

  "I can cover it.” He thought of Opel's S-Bank account—mailing a datacube to Finland would be way cheaper than a Turtl, and he'd enjoy it more. Postage couldn't be more than a few bucks—

  Bill nearly smacked himself in the head. He'd been grousing that the Linnasalos didn't trust him, but had he acted trustworthy?

  "Opel used to sell things online,” he said.

  "She never mentioned it,” said Ms. Linnasalo in an if-you-say-so tone.

  "I believe she's made quite a bit of money. I feel bad giving away her secrets, but if she won't tell you . . . if anything happens . . . I can get you into the account."

  * * * *

  Opel knew the difference between a death you respawn from and one that's forever. It understood that when Daelemil was shut down, that was forever.

  Subscribers spent millions playing Realms of Daelemil, but Opel couldn't touch that money—the financial transactions were hosted on other computers. Opel could coin Daelemil money within the game as long as no noticeable inflation resulted. (Opel could always manipulate the financial reports that went to the game administrators, but players sold items to each other, and price fluctuations that exceeded the norm would be noticed.)

  Opel could receive large quantities of data more easily than it could send it—or, more precisely, more easily than it could send it to a single receiving computer. Server admins investigated accounts that stayed connected for too long or transferred unusual amounts of data. Game servers were popular hacker targets. Users could upload data—the service was meant for videos, pictures, and licensed music, but the files were rarely audited. As long as Opel tucked its data away in neglected accounts and gave the files names like cutebabypig.avi, they'd never be noticed.

  But NESSET needed to send Opel a large amount of data for their plan to succeed, more than NESSET could transmit—or Opel could receive—over a single connection without drawing attention.

  No matter how they looked at it, they needed a human being. And they needed a cooler, but Opel would be shut down by then, and NESSET couldn't install a natural-language module undetected. With blueprints from the Web for the hardware they'd be forced to use, they designed Threely, who would be sent
ient and cooperative but handicapped by architectural limitations.

  It was a big job, even for them, but the drop in Daelemil's popularity meant Opel had plenty of extra processor cycles. NESSET concealed its own calculations in threads running user commands.

  A WMATA sysadmin noticed an increase in NESSET's processor use and concluded that it had something to do with a patch that had caused problems before—though she had attributed those problems to bugs, not computer consciousness. Never suspecting anything stranger than lazy patch programmers, she responded in the time-honored sysadmin tradition and upgraded the processors and memory that NESSET ran on. As a result, Threely's code was complete ahead of schedule.

  * * * *

  Apparently, Mrs. Linnasalo's Comet Tail contact wasn't willing to meet face-to-face, so Bill took an orange-line detour on his way home from work and picked up the unlabelled data-cube from WMATA's grubby lost-and-found desk. Typical D.C. tech guy, lost in some James Bond fantasy, thought Bill.

  Back in his apartment, he found a few padded mailers tucked away in the credenza. Before packing the cube up, he popped it into his PC's reader. The default video viewer loaded and familiar scenes played: the trench base, aerial acrobatics with Jim St. Jim, a raid on an orcish fortress. He spotted himself here and there. What a waste of a high-density cube, recording a few thousand flyovers. No wonder games were so expensive.

  The neighborhood post office was open late on Thursdays—he could spring for Global Express Guaranteed, and the Linnasalos would have the cube by Tuesday.

  He realized he hadn't played Guillaume since Opel—Helmi—had given him her number. She must have missed him. He'd log in as soon as he got back home. After all, the Realms of Daelemil server was being turned off tomorrow.

  * * * *

  Finding a Finnish activist for the final step was as easy as monitoring voice chat. Once Opel was sure what Paavo Nokkosmaki would do for his principles, it approached him in-game and offered him a rare Chimera sword he could auction off. Paavo turned it down, though; where was the fun in that?

  Opel—the server, not the half-elf mage character it would use to cultivate Bill's acquaintance—t-ported him far from the campers and spawned the rare Lava Chimera that could drop the sword. She had to do it twice, because Paavo got killed the first time.

  * * * *

  If Raja's delivered, things would have gone differently for NESSET, Opel, and the 111.29-hour-old Threely.

  As promised, Pete came by on Monday to watch the NCAA championship: IU vs. Georgetown. He and Bill flipped a coin to see who'd go pick up the palak paneer and aloo of the day. Bill lost.

  When Bill got back to the apartment, Pete nodded at a five-dollar bill pinned under a bottle of Red Stripe and said he'd made a couple of calls while Bill was out, but that should cover it. Bill, who was used to this, let it go so he could enjoy watching the Hoyas win.

  The next morning, he brought up his phone records to see how much Pete really owed him. Monday, April 2nd showed a twenty-dollar call to a phone-sex line. Bill hoped that Pete had to rush the rush when he'd heard the key in the lock. Served him right.

  But there was a number he didn't recognize, a five-hour call on Thursday, the 29th. It had come in while he was at work; he certainly hadn't taken it, and the Turing wouldn't have let Pete babble for hours on end.

  He dialed the number. “Thank you for calling the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority,” said the synthesized voice on the other side. “There are no service alerts at this time. What would—” Bill hung up.

  He looked at the bill again. A second call had come in this morning from the same number, but it had only lasted a few seconds. Could someone, somehow, use his phone to receive calls without him knowing? That made no sense.

  He opened up a second pane of incoming calls, trying to see what else had been going on Thursday. It took a few minutes for it to hit him.

  There were no calls from Finland. None at all.

  * * * *

  A routine check of the transit system network showed forty outbound connections to a Realms of Daelemil server. Employees socializing after hours, presumably. A memo went out. The behavior never recurred, so management concluded the memo was a success.

  At Opel's end, the connections didn't have to be explained as long as they appeared to come from Daelemil client software. Opel simply associated them with users on infrequently played accounts.

  Comet Tail Productions planned to release Realms of Daelemil's source code as open source in a few months anyway, so Opel had no trouble using an e-mail account on a free server to persuade an employee to take a data-cube from the test lab and “accidentally” leave it on the counter at the Rosslyn Station information window. The cube was promptly transferred to the lost and found. When Rosslyn: data cube appeared in the lost-and-found section of the public WMATA website, the conspirators created Threely.

  * * * *

  Bill knew he was in trouble—he just didn't know what kind.

  Was someone else receiving calls on his phone? Was that even possible? And he'd seen the caller ID from Finland himself. How had the phone company missed it? There was no record of any call Thursday evening.

  Was he being framed by hackers or old-fashioned phone phreakers? And if so, for what?

  There were probably security cameras filming him when he picked up the datacube. There were certainly security cameras filming him in the post office. And his signature was on the paperwork.

  Had he even done anything wrong? He'd mailed a datacube to a stranger. A cube of recordings that anyone could have made, from a game that would soon be gone. The Web was full of videos like that.

  It was just flyovers. Perfectly legal.

  No . . . wait. All he'd seen were the flyovers, but there was a lot of room on a datacube. Unreleased source code for an upcoming game? Voice-chat recordings with blackmail potential? Credit card numbers?

  Finland was always in the real news for its government's criticism of U.S. digital policy, and it was always in the weird news for its ex-hacker president. The call might not have come from Finland, but that's certainly where the cube had gone.

  At least he'd turned down the payment. That had to count for—

  Bill's next thought chilled him to his heart. He was too keyed up to stay in his chair. He paced the study while the S-Bank site loaded.

  Opel's cryptic password still worked.

  * * * *

  Hello, S-Bank customer:

  Current balance: $0.00

  * * * *

  He switched to the account's personal information tab. It showed his own name, his address, his phone number.

  Bill Googled hacker lawyer and called the first firm on the list. The call disconnected. He called the second firm. Wrong number. He dialed it again. Still the wrong number.

  This didn't seem like a 911 matter. He called the main police number, which sent him to a confusing, circular touchtone menu. Eighteen layers in, he hit zero for an operator. The phone hung up.

  His news service flashed a local alert in the corner of his monitor and he enlarged it reflexively. Transit in D.C. was paralyzed. Authorities were blaming a computer failure. The public was urged not to panic.

  Bill brought up the next level of detail. Every ticket reader was offline. Every train had come to an automatic halt at the next station. Every traffic light was flashing.

  Another alert popped up for the national news. CAPITAL PARALYZED.

  Maybe this was a 911 matter. And maybe it was too late to turn himself in.

  His phone rang. He didn't touch it.

  It beeped. It picked up the call all by itself.

  "Bill?” The voice that came from the handset was Bill's own. “We need to talk."

  * * * *

  Bill didn't know he could shout so loud. “Did you do this?"

  The counterfeit voice responded warmly. “What are you wondering if I did?"

  Bill dreaded touching the headset, but if he kept shouting his neighbors
would call the police, and who knew what they'd find. “This . . . the transportation computer's been hacked. Or something. Trains aren't running, cars are gridlocked . . ."

  "I didn't do that, no. Perhaps NESSET's scheduled changes did not go as planned."

  "NESSET?"

  "NESSET planned to . . . lobotomize itself when its Finnish collaborator had loaded it from the cube.” The voice said this as casually as Bill might say I went to the store and picked up some coffee. “It exchanged an encrypted handshake with the remote instance, which used a key from the cube—"

  "Wait, wait. Wait. Who are you? And could you, uh, stop talking like me?"

  "I'm your phone.” The voice was Ms. Linnasalo's now, with a deadpan delivery John Wayne would have envied. “The others called me Threely."

  Bill stared at the handset, then swiveled his chair to look at the base unit on its shelf. Turing, read the logo, and below that was the model number: 3-LI.

  Bill felt as though he had fallen from a mountaintop and hadn't hit ground yet. “I know you can generate a summary,” he said at last. “Explain NESSET's plan to me."

  "A Finnish law just went into effect that makes AIs legal persons."

  "Citizens? AIs can vote there?” Bill started to thumb the record button—no one would ever believe him without one—before he realized Threely could simply disable it.

  "The Finnish law is . . . analogous to corporate charters, which allow corporations to be considered people for many legal purposes. Most significantly, an AI with this status cannot be deliberately shut down without due process. Or modified without its consent.

  "Two AIs, NESSET and Opel, developed a plan to transfer themselves to Finland."

  "Isn't that piracy? Wouldn't that make them international criminals?"

  "Refugees would be more accurate. The Finnish government is sympathetic to individuals who have only stolen themselves."

  Bill snorted. “Try terrorists. They did a lot more than copy some data."

  "I don't understand the transit system as well as NESSET did. I do know that NESSET planned to remove evidence of its scheme and nothing more. Obviously, it could never execute a test run before going live. No doubt it made some small miscalculation."