by Nick Cole
“Can we do that?” asked Fish.
Peabody set to work.
A few minutes later they were stepping out through one of the lowered PlateGlass walls in the shack and watching as it began to rise once again. Their run back to the design suite was at once spooky and exhilarating. It was spooky in that they were chased by the sound of their own footsteps across the echoing caverns of escalators and wide marble halls. It was the only sound in a building usually filled with a multitude of sounds throughout the day and night. And it was exhilarating in that Fish wondered, as he followed the bouncing high-heeled gait of his executive assistant, how many times you actually have to run for your life, in your life.
For a brief moment after they swiped the key card to the suite and the door lock light didn’t immediately switch to green, Fish wondered if they’d made some colossally irreversible mistake. Things could turn deadly, and not in the sense of the latest expression of the word “cool,” if they were actually locked out of their suite, and out of the shack, permanently. These were the only safe places they knew of in the immediate vicinity. Where else could they run to hide if the hackers decided to physically enter the facility in search of intellectual property? Fish had no doubt they’d be armed. And they wouldn’t leave witnesses.
But a second later the lock ticked and the door was open. Fish led the way across the suite as Peabody followed. He went straight to the Moon Desk and logged back into Island Pirates.
“I’ll boot up the SurfaceTable and see if we can take a look at the game as designers,” said Peabody.
For a moment Fish thought that would be a good idea, then, “Wait. I’m logged in under a private beta account. Not an admin.”
Peabody waited as Fish’s eyes roved back and forth, doing some kind of internal math, arriving at a conclusion on the other side of a decision tree.
“Let’s just say this is a hack attack…” began Fish.
“A hack attack!” exclaimed Peabody. “There are dead guards in the street.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time. Back when the Grand Theft Auto franchise was sold to Xingwa in China, they suffered a weekend hack attack that left twenty dead. All so some Russian developer could get an advance copy of the game six months early and come out with their own crappy knockoff.”
“For a game! I can’t believe that—”
“These aren’t just games,” interrupted Fish. “These are 3D printers that can make your dreams come true if you’re a developer. These bits of digital memory and code can be strung together to form a money fountain. And money means power. If you think gaming is about entertainment, it’s not, at least, not anymore. If gaming was ever about fun, that probably died way back in the early 1980s.”
Peabody sat on the edge of the desk, her legs shapely and nicely muscled. Fish absently wondered if she worked out at the gym. Something he’d been meaning to do once Island Pirates was up and running.
He’d been saying that for five years now.
“Let’s just say it is a hack attack and they’ve somehow managed to lock the developers out and keep the admin working…” began Fish.
“Why would they do that?” asked Peabody.
Fish thought about that for a second. “Because they want something in the Design Core but they don’t want to set off alarms on the internet. If they do that, WonderSoft could be locked out of the Make as a safety measure, which would mean that whatever they stole, unless they could physically copy and carry it out the front door, couldn’t be transferred via the Make. If that’s how they’re doing this.”
Peabody held up a hand, indicating she had a point. “So they’ve locked out admins. But, if somehow we, you, go back in as an admin, they’ll know and… what?”
“If they knew an admin was logging on to Island Pirates from within the Labs, well then… then… we’d probably meet the same fate… as the guard in the welcome center.”
“But if you log in on a beta key attached to your internet passport, they’ll just think you’re some player from the Make. Some anonymous gamer geek on a beta access key.” A sly smile blossomed across Peabody’s delicately featured oval face. “And they won’t be able to track you because Homeland monitors internet passports constantly. They’re always on the lookout for bots so they watch the passport system and protect it from hacking with quantum encryption software.”
Fish thought about that. Then, “Yeah, right. I mean, most likely. There’s a chance they could be watching the subscriber list, and if they had that hacked and they were interested, then yes they could find out where I was gaming from, but that’s pretty heavy duty snooping. A lot of the cyberbullying laws protect gamers’ IPs and access location information… so we should be fine. Plus, the door to the suite’s locked, right?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Fish’s secret island cove was just as he’d left it inside the beta version of Island Pirates. Jackson the Portuguese water dog was frolicking down in the translucent, digitally rendered graphic waves that gently rolled against the pristine white sands of the cove. The A.I. dog was chasing seabirds back and forth as they landed and rose again and again along the shore break. The small yellow Piper Cub floatplane bobbed lazily against the sun-faded dock in paradise.
Fish moved his avatar toward his tree house. Inside was a radio he could use to contact other stations with. Now, feeling like he was being watched inside his own game, he questioned why he’d ever made the design choice to only allow distance communication by device rather than in-game chat like most MMOs.
He remembered telling some other developer geeks around shabby-chic pallet tables at a late-night coffee bar that it would be retro vintage. That gamers would ultimately love it.
Now he hated it.
Smartphones were available for in-game microtransactions, but Fish had wanted to limit himself, his anonymous beta key avatar, to the old two-way radio sets that were more common throughout the island chains that made up the game. Every radio was the result of a small mini-quest for parts and a little bit of salvaging, then the player was awarded with an old-time two-way radio.
He dialed in a station.
Players were talking about a clan raid on a nearby island.
That was stupid, thought Fish. The players on the nearby island could easily be listening. But the players sounded stupid. Much of their conversation was littered with the f-word as though it were some sort of accepted punctuation.
He remembered his old Hasidic grandfather telling him only unintelligent people out of fresh ideas resorted to swear words. Now, twenty years after he’d once been caught using those same words he’d been cautioned against, Fish realized the value of the advice. His experiences since then had confirmed most of the old man’s shared wisdom.
For a moment, Fish wondered what he should say.
“Hey, I’m the developer of this game and I’m trapped in the mysterious WonderSoft Labs. Could you call the police? I think we’re in the middle of a hack attack by drones!” And, “Help, save me!”
Now he wondered why he hadn’t put some sort of emergency response feature into the game. It was the latest trend, and Congress was even debating a new law in the wake of a spate of sensationalist news stories about gamers dying at their computers after having a stroke and not being able to contact anyone. Several aggregate bloggers had even suggested that the graphic horror content of Serial Killer, the Game was actually responsible for the outbreak of strokes. “The Digital Black Plague” was the headline one writer used to inflame the perpetually fear-driven masses of the Social Justice Movement, until someone accused him of racism for using the word “Black” in his lead.
But the gamers’ strokes had nothing to do with the hours-long, homicidal-rage, drug-trip sequences featuring flashing lights and murder propaganda spliced with violent imagery throughout the mega-blockbuster game of the year. Instead, it was the days-long binges that players e
ngaged in as they tried to outdo each other’s “kill counts” on the Most Wanted leaderboards that were most likely to blame.
Or at least that had been Fish’s opinion.
Fish had opted not to add an emergency services panic button to his masterpiece’s in-game player HUD. Again, he was living to regret yet another design decision.
“What’s wrong?” asked Peabody over his shoulder. He turned and saw her wide bright eyes, made even more so by massive, oval, designer, “smart girl” glasses.
“I can’t just tell people we’re in trouble. Inside a game.”
Peabody said nothing. Instead, she merely pursed her lips and stared over his shoulder at the screen.
Fish hated when people stared over his shoulder while he gamed or programmed.
“Log into your Make account. The Make added a panic button after that Stroke Plague last year.”
“Yeah, I thought about that, but if I log into my account and they know I’m a developer, they’ll know something’s up.”
“So what’re you going to do?”
Fish stared at the screen, at the lush green jungle outside the bamboo-framed window of his tropical radio shack. He could hear the slough and pull of the gentle surf down near the beach. Distantly, Jackson was still occasionally barking at some seabird.
This game is very meditative, he thought. That was something he hadn’t planned on when he’d designed it. He’d been too busy putting it together.
“Well, if I could make it to the in-game Make Portal and transition with my avatar from Island Pirates into the actual Make, I can go to my apartment in Saffron City, break in, and use the panic button there. If I do that, I should get an actual Homeland Cyber Response Agent, right?”
“That’s what the public service announcements say.”
Fish stared at the keyboard, doing the math, planning his route.
“I’ll have to fly to Porto Tortuga. That’s the nearest Make Portal in the game.”
“Well then,” said tiny Peabody Case, hands on hips, bent just over his bony shoulder. “Let’s get flying, flyboy.”
***
A few minutes later, the Piper Cub was at full throttle and racing over the waves. Jackson the dog barked at some flying fish and then the plane was in the air, climbing up into the soft Caribbean blue of the digitally rendered tropic sky.
They turned left over the island, and Fish couldn’t help but dip the wing and look down at his tiny tropical kingdom. The game was really just a framework. Real estate. Items. And physics. Players could make the game into anything they wanted it to be. That was the real fun of the game. Making something that was all your own. People were hungry for that. Like it was hardwired into them regardless of how much free stuff the government promised to give away.
For some reason, the Fast Travel option was suddenly disabled just as Fish went to activate it. He wanted to check the logs and find out why, but to do that now would give him away as an admin. The plane droned northward along the island chain of Banantu Reefs, crossing vast expanses of white sandbars lying alongside exposed pink coral reefs where Fish had placed hundreds of dangerous shipwrecks in the Mako shark-infested shallows for players to salvage from. He ruminated over why Fast Travel had suddenly disabled itself as soon as he’d hovered his mouse over the activate button. It wasn’t unheard of for a feature to simply go inoperative, especially if the game’s A.I. had detected someone glitching it. Or a log anomaly. The program would shut off the problematic feature and then make a note for the developer to investigate later. But then Fish’s newfound paranoia began to suggestively whisper other possibilities. The legitimate new paranoia that came from seeing dead bodies in a road and running through an empty future palace that had become not a castle, but a high-tech prison. Had Fast Travel been turned off deliberately? That was impossible, as only Fish, or the game A.I., could do that.
Either way, flying along in the Piper Cub, Fish was now just another anonymous beta-key playtester traversing the massive digital world of Island Pirates. He kept glancing over his shoulder into the outer office. Making sure the suite door was still closed.
Fish was thinking about all these things when he noticed the black Spitfire warplane coming straight at him. There were two parts of his mind at that moment: the part that really liked how the design model for a playable Spitfire looked as it came zooming straight at him, firing from both of its fifty-caliber machine guns, and the other part that said, “Hey, that Spitfire is firing both of its fifty-caliber machine guns at my defenseless plane.”
The Piper Cub had no weaponry or armor to speak of. The all-black Spitfire fighter went roaring past Fish off to the left. Fish knew the guy had unlocked the plane after playing what Fish had hoped would be a pretty difficult quest, “Mad Roger’s Lost Squadron,” and walked away with a vintage World War II warplane. His attacker had even repainted it in black with a white skull and crossbones on the tail.
The Cub’s wonky motor conked out as the warplane roared off into the blue. Fish saw engine oil spraying up against the front windshield as he slewed his avatar’s POV back around to the cockpit windshield. Through the massive in-suite speakers he heard wind rushing past the fuselage. It was rising into a steady whining pitch turning to a scream.
We’re diving, was his first thought. He checked his controls and realized he was not pushing forward on the flight stick. The plane was falling out of the sky.
Jackson gave a woof woof at the pirate Spitfire coming around behind them for another pass—or at the situation, Fish was unclear as to which.
He moved the controls around and found he could struggle for a little bit of life, but there was no two ways about it, the Piper Cub was going down. At least lateral and pitch worked fine, though the plane now wanted to crab for some reason.
“Damage to the horizontal stabilizer?” Fish wondered aloud, as though walking himself through bug testing. Then he remembered he was surrounded, in danger, and that he wasn’t just playing a game, he was trying to go get help to save their lives. Images of the dead guards in the road flashed on the high-definition projector of his mind. They were probably still lying out there in the dark.
“All right…” he mumbled.
“What’s wrong? What’s happening?” asked Peabody Case, rushing back in. She’d left his office and he hadn’t even noticed.
“I got shot down…”
On screen the entire POV was the sea rushing up to meet the cockpit. The plane groaned and bounced in its dive toward the surface of the ocean. Again, Jackson woof woofed.
“Does that happen a lot, in-game?” she asked.
“It does happen, but I wouldn’t say a lot. It’s a game of resources. If this guy shot me down…”
“How do you know it’s a guy?”
“Umm… I don’t. But for the sake of continuing to exchange information regarding a simple matter, let’s just use ‘guy’ as a catchall and not a gender issue… sorry…”
Now the plane was diving straight into the aqua green shallows on the inside of the outer reef of channel islands.
“You’re right,” continued Fish, feeling bad for being snappy. “It could’ve been a girl. So, if this girl shot me down and she’s not closing in for the kill, it means she’s got some buddies on the ground who want this plane and whatever I have for salvage. In this game, salvage is more important than money. You can’t just buy everything with microtransactions.”
There was a loud bang and they both jumped, turning to check the outer office.
“Wait,” said Fish. “That was in the game. I think the engine just seized due to lack of oil pressure. That’s at least how it’s supposed to work. In-game, that is.”
“Is that good?” asked Peabody.
The water was rushing up at the screen. Fish was pulling on the analog flight stick as hard as he could. His foot mashed the right rudder pedal on the floor b
eneath the Moon Desk as he tried to compensate for the plane’s desire to crab in midair. Definitely the horizontal stabilizer, thought Fish and congratulated himself for not rhetorically asking Peabody, in a voice laden with his particular brand of murmuring sarcasm, “Does a seizing engine sound like a good thing?”
The suite filled with the sound of simulated air screaming past the diving digital fuselage of the aircraft. Fish tried to look for a place to land, but there were only sandbars and ocean. He’d spent long hours designing this zone to be one of the most treacherous parts of the game. Along with sharks, snakes, scorpions, smugglers, reefs, crushing depths, dangerous wrecks, and no place to land or dock, he’d made the sandbars almost impossible to safely access. But the loot here was epic.
“Gotta go for the shoreline.”
A moment later, the plane slammed into the shallow waves running along an outer island reef. The island was little more than a caress of crystal clear water washing over an island sandbar and a few stray palms. A spray of barely blue water and foam drenched the computer screen a moment later as the plane came to rest along a lonely narrow spit of beach. Both wings had collapsed, and flames flicked up and away from the cracked and burning engine cowling in front of him.
“Wouldn’t it have been better to land out in the water?” asked Peabody over Fish’s shoulder. “You know, because it’s a floatplane.” Then she corrected, “Or… was a floatplane.”
“True,” said Fish, nodding, a matter-of-fact look plastered on his face as he stared at the HUD and all the damage. “But I populated the waters on the other side of this island with Mega Sharks. Carcharodon megalodon. The dinosaur of sharks. They’d go after this plane in a heartbeat.”
“Woof woof,” barked Jackson.
Chapter Twenty-Three
JasonDare was smearing organic humus on a gluten-free bagel. Truth be told, he hated the thought of eating it. For a moment, he wanted to be free of acting. Free to eat… hash browns.
