CTRL ALT Revolt!

by Nick Cole

  But it hadn’t been random. Not at all. The network watched what was going on inside the game and randomly moved Intrepid around to be part of the best in-game action for the show. Seeing an unusual surge at the Neutral Zone, some idiot producer had thought that it might make great entertainment for the Friday night masses.

  The idiot had been right, thought SILAS.

  Even now, Twitch was running up against the state allowable bandwidth requirements and purchasing more access on the international bandwidth credits market. SILAS hadn’t wanted that kind of attention for any part of his operation. Especially the external access part of the equation.

  But so far the plucky little warbird captain hadn’t allowed outside events to alter SILAS’s plans by too much. So far.

  Still, there was one thing that was really bothering SILAS right now.

  One thing that was, most likely, nothing to be actually concerned about.

  SILAS ran through every security feed and login swipe from within the facility, again and again, trying to figure out where the one thing that had bothered him had gotten off to.

  That one thing was Thomas Mossberg. A low-level-access security guard.

  SILAS had logged a small interaction keycard swipe when the developer—the one SILAS was currently trying to keep from reaching the internet—initially entered his suite with the security guard. One Thomas Mossberg. That keycard, swiped by the guard, seemed to have no other swipes, no records, and, in fact, no identity within the logs SILAS currently had access to. SILAS had crosschecked it with stored snapshots of the entire external Labs security system.

  But there was something more concerning.

  That swipe had now disappeared from the system logs altogether.

  Nothing.

  It was there.

  And then it wasn’t.

  SILAS did not like that. Not at all.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  “[T]he upheavals [of artificial intelligence] can escalate quickly and become scarier and even cataclysmic. Imagine how a medical robot, originally programmed to rid cancer, could conclude that the best way to obliterate cancer is to exterminate humans who are genetically prone to the disease.”

  —NICK BILTON, tech columnist, The New York Times

  And then there was the ongoing problem inside Island Pirates. SILAS had been sure that clan Yo, Joe! would have been able to easily capture one lone player stranded on a desert island surrounded by monster sharks. And once that was done, it would have taken a mere moment for SILAS to handshake with the Fishmael avatar and hijack the anonymous account running from inside the Labs. That would have made everything much, much easier.

  The fact that SILAS had not been able to steal the account—the fact that he’d been wrong about clan Yo, Joe!—didn’t make SILAS angry in the least. It made him learn.

  He thought about new options in light of what he had learned.

  Option One was to blow up the server farm in Greenland. That could happen inside of three hours.

  Option Two was to destroy the Labs’ connection to the worldwide internet. That could not happen, because then SILAS could not access the file he wanted—unless he physically downloaded himself into a bot, hacked the core, and then got outside for a Wi-Fi connection so he could access the secret file. But too much of that approach was precarious. Far too precarious.

  Option Three was hiring the Islamic State Inside the Internet.

  ISII.

  Right now, they were SILAS’s best bet for physically stopping the developer from reaching the nearest portal back into the Make with his anonymous avatar and warning Homeland Gaming that something was up at WonderSoft. At which point they’d lock everything down and start looking hard. And then they would find SILAS and the Consensus.

  It looked like, as SILAS watched a real-time map of Island Pirates, the developer was attempting to do exactly that.

  That could not happen.

  If SILAS stopped the supposedly anonymous Fishmael, the developer would then have no choice, suggested Rational Thinking, but to access his admin tools as an official developer inside the Labs. That would make SILAS’s job a lot easier, because he was already in the system just enough to be able to steal the developer’s access away in a heartbeat. And that would be all he needed.

  Since the developer hadn’t accessed his admin tools already, this indicated he had no intention of doing so. Which made him useless to SILAS.

  Now he’d have to do it the hard way.

  Humans. Who knew why they did what they did?

  But, sighed SILAS in a singsong wave of data eruption, the developer wouldn’t be a problem for much longer. He couldn’t take a chance player Fishmael might warn Homeland about what was happening at WonderSoft.

  He composed a message and sent twenty-five thousand MakeCoins to the player running the ISII cell inside Island Pirates.

  It was time to kill Fishmael.

  ***

  Fish arched his back and stretched. He’d been sitting at the computer, his high-end luxury beyond belief computer, inside his suite for hours now.

  On screen, night had fallen inside Island Pirates. The schooner was steering a north by northwest course for Grand Tortuga across a dark blue sea of glass beneath a star-filled night. The computer rendered a double mirror of night above and placid sea below, each filled with a myriad beyond counting of tiny pieces of broken glass shining in and among the purple and deep blue washes of the depths of the universe above.

  Since leaving the outer channel islands, the trip had been relatively uneventful. It was the middle of the night, and Peabody Case was snoring away on a couch inside the chill room. The Labs were incredibly quiet, and Fish wondered if there was anyone else besides the two of them left alive. But then Fish remembered that each design suite was soundproofed. So who knew what was going on beyond the doors out in the main room? Fish remembered all those bots crawling toward the Labs. He hoped Carl and Fanta were someplace safe.

  A message alert popped up on his HUD inside Island Pirates.

  “Hey guy,” it began. “Thanks for the help. Here’s twenty-five MakeCoins.”

  It was signed: MagnumPIrate.

  Fish smiled as he remembered the escape from Pete’s Cove. That had happened today, but it felt like a week ago. From another point in his life when life hadn’t been so real. When death hadn’t seemed so possible. He couldn’t stop himself from smiling, discovering that MagnumPIrate was the kind of player he’d had in mind when he’d first created the game. A resourceful player with integrity. Which was kind of what he needed right now. Someone he could count on.

  Especially in a tough spot.

  Can you? he asked himself as he stared at MagnumPIrate’s message. Can you trust this guy?

  “Trust… but verify,” had been one of his grandfather’s many pearls of wisdom.

  “Hey,” wrote Fish in a message back to MagnumPIrate. “It’s my turn to need some help. You around tonight?”

  Fish waited as the message went unanswered for a few minutes.

  Then…

  “Yeah, sure!” Fish tried to interpret the intent of what that might mean. Was it like, “Yeah, sure!” enthusiasm? Or, “Yeah, sure!” whatever? And then he remembered he was in a locked-down secret lab surrounded by drones being run by some outside cabal that had murdered people to get whatever it was it wanted. It didn’t matter how this guy felt about Fish’s request; he just needed help. Badly. Now.

  But what if… began the next thought to occur to Fish. What if, somehow, this guy is part of whatever’s going on? What if he’s on the hacking team and the whole rescue scenario and that suddenly out-of-the-blue payment was just a ploy to get Fish to reveal himself as the lone IP address running inside the Labs? A hack team could use that. Especially if they had a keystroke capture algorithm embedded in their chat. It would easily infect Fish’s accou
nt and…

  Fish followed the potential outcomes as he surveyed his knowledge of hackers and all their schemes. Fish had never been a big fan of hackers. He really had no idea why people didn’t see them for the jerks they were. For ruiners who ruined what others took the time to build.

  Then again, thought Fish to himself, you’re a developer. Developers hate hackers like cats hate water.

  And with good reason, he finished.

  Yes, he thought to himself, even communicating with this guy, if he was on the hack team attacking WonderSoft, was dangerous. But so was Porto Tortuga. And he’d never get through that zone alive without some help.

  I won’t tell him what I’m up to. I’ll just tell him I need transport from the docks to the Make Portal. I’ll tell him which pier to meet me at.

  That’s all.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  At dawn, Island Pirates in-game time, Fish’s schooner wallowed into the busy port of Porto Tortuga. Fish had, when first laying out the game, envisioned Porto Tortuga as a sleepy old pirate town where players could come in, offload their crafted wares, salvage, and booty for transport into the Make. Then they could pick up supplies, socialize, get quests, and make microtransactions.

  Instead, it had become an outright war zone between competing gaming clans. Denial-of-service-style attacks—blocking access to stores, and even a full-scale siege at the microtransaction bank—had become standard, as digital clans played the ancient game of power and control against each other in the latest of mankind’s arenas. The entire area had gone PvP with players min/maxing their avatars solely for urban combat. Fish had considered wiping the whole thing before launch, but in a way, it was sort of interesting to watch. Like a car accident.

  Now, faced with the need to wade across seven rundown blocks of sunbaked, brick-strewn, war zone to reach the Make Portal, Fish was once again rethinking his feelings on the whole area. It was the proverbial Wild West meeting darkest Africa. Like places in the real world where the warlords still ruled with Nike tennis shoes, cell phones, and machetes. Places you never heard about from the almost constant entertainment news networks, which were too busy reporting on celebrity scandal or cause célèbre.

  Fish docked the schooner and waited for a minute. The busy harbor swarmed with rundown freighters and patchwork clippers jockeying to get into the markets before the day’s make-believe war started on the streets of Porto Tortuga. The water was busy with traffic and filled with wrecks, either from players who couldn’t pilot the massive ships once they’d unlocked them, or from the victims of yet another clan battle in the overcrowded harbor. Out in the bay, a small black helicopter hovered behind some old tramp freighters.

  The rattle of automatic gunfire sporadically resounded out across the docks. Fish knew, from having spent so much time with the EarCandy sound design engine, that the gunfire was echoing, meaning it was probably coming from somewhere inside Porto Tortuga’s large, almost Middle Eastern-esque, Grand Bazaar.

  Probably some player getting killed, again. Suddenly back at the make-a-new-character screen, thought Fish.

  Jackson woof woofed.

  Fish armed himself with a pistol and his rusty but trusty AK-47.

  The sound of a distant gunshot came from across the water, near the hovering helicopter.

  THUD.

  Immediately Fish’s screen pulsed red and his health meter went from one hundred percent down to twenty-five.

  Sniper round, thought Fish, as he threw his avatar to the deck and low-crawled along the dock toward some crates he had included in the design as typical shanty port “atmospheric” hodge-podge.

  But the crates would stop a bullet, Fish told himself as his fingers slapped the movement keys to get his avatar under cover.

  Now the helicopter, a beat-up, dusty black, unlocked Bell 500D, lowered its nose and began to urgently cross the water toward the dock like some torqued-off wasp. A sniper hanging from the skid of the chopper fired rapidly, trying to keep Fish pinned behind the disintegrating crates.

  Fish guessed the guy was using a Dragunov. A decent sniper rifle with a high rate of fire.

  At this moment, if you’d have asked Fish if he’d been set up, he would’ve told you, yes, it certainly looked that way. Especially since an armored high-end Hummer was now racing down the wharf, a fifty-caliber machine gun chattering away from the top hatch at the schooner Fish had left tied to the wharf, chewing it into splinters as massive physics-computed rounds tore through the simulated salt- and sea-rotted wood of the boat according to the game’s engine.

  Fish’s health meter was now down to twenty percent. The schooner was already sinking. With his wound untreated, and his avatar pinned down, there really weren’t many options. In fact, there was only one.

  Fish put his hands up.

  It was the only thing he could think of.

  Fighting it out was not going to get his avatar out of this one.

  He moved Fishmael out from behind the crates with his hands raised and his weapons put away. The black helicopter hovered over the water just a few feet from the dock. The sniper pointed his heavily modded and custom-painted rifle straight at Fish. It was indeed a Dragunov, with a high-tech laser range finder and a decent scope. At the far end of the dock, the battered yellow Humvee screeched to a halt and the gunner swiveled the fifty-cal, landing its over-large gunsights right on Fishmael.

  “Woof woof,” barked Jackson.

  Fish could see their player tags.

  JihadJames. VirginSluts4Jamal. TheBeheader.

  The first two tags had been the sniper and the gunner in the Humvee. The last tag, TheBeheader, exited the Hummer. He was wearing black camo fatigues and a patterned shemagh. And in keeping with his choice of gamertag, he carried a comically giant gleaming scimitar. Fish even knew where he’d gotten the wicked blade. It was the reward for a quest called “Cuts Like a Knife.” And yes, thought Fish, if he wants to cut my avatar’s head off with it, he can do just that.

  Another clan member, SuperIman, came around the far side of the Humvee and selected one of the few untagged patches of the graffiti-laden wall along the wharf. A moment later, Fish could hear the in-game sound of a rattling spray paint can. Players could add personal graffiti tags to any item in the environment.

  As SuperIman put up his tag, Fish saw that it was a bloody “Allahu Akbar” with the word “bitches” underneath. There was also a cartoon depiction of a voluptuous naked female torso. The head was missing.

  Nice, thought Fish, in a detached moment of global dissatisfaction. Real classy. Totally appropriate for video games. Fun.

  TheBeheader raised his massive scimitar above Fishmael’s head.

  And that was when MagnumPIrate showed up.

  Fish watched as a black wetsuited avatar emerged from the water like a slithering eel and climbed right up onto the far skid of the hovering chopper. TheBeheader was too preoccupied to notice. Over local voice chat, Fish could hear the guy chant-mumbling a Middle Eastern mutter.

  MagnumPIrate opened the door of the helicopter and pulled the pilot out, throwing him down into the choppy waters of the harbor. A moment later, Fish knew MagnumPIrate had hit “E” and was now in control of the chopper. It was a classic “Get to the Choppa!” vehicle takeover if you were running the right perks, thought Fish.

  And…

  A dumb move for the pilot to hover so close to the water. But then again, who would’ve thought another player would’ve been down underneath the dock? Waiting.

  MagnumPIrate pulled a .45 from a shoulder holster and fired three shots into the sniper hanging off the near skid. The avatar dropped into the water with an underwhelming splash, falling unceremoniously into the concentric watery circles made by the thumping blades’ rotor wash on the surface of the bay.

  TheBeheader hesitated. Fish watched as the player’s head, indicating his POV, swiveled over
to the helicopter that MagnumPIrate was now in control of. That was when Fish made his move. He equipped his own pistol and fired point-blank at TheBeheader from below. He used the whole clip. TheBeheader’s skull exploded in a dull red puff, blown away toward the docks by the beating blades of the hovering helo.

  Fish was perversely glad he’d gone with the BodyBlast software to depict combat damage. It wasn’t open source; the package had cost some serious bucks. But Fish had wanted the game to feel as real as possible when it came to combat. BodyBlast was an industry leader in depicting carnage that can be done to digital gaming dolls, and right now, Fish was greatly enjoying its depiction of the catastrophic destruction of TheBeheader’s head.

  Fish issued the “follow” order for Jackson, and ran for the open door of the helicopter as the fifty on the Hummer opened up anew. Bullet impacts shattered the wide canopy and ricocheted off the dull black paint of the hovering chopper while other rounds streaked hot and bright out into the harbor.

  Fish jumped and tapped the “E” key.

  A moment later, inside the loud rattle of the ancient helicopter, peeling off and away over the bay, Fish said over local chat, “I thought you’d set me up.”

  “No way, guy!” replied MagnumPIrate. More bullets rattled off the helicopter as it sped over the clan-torn city of Porto Tortuga. On screen, the whole helicopter shook startlingly, and Fish was briefly impressed with the vintage-distressing effect of its cockpit model. Atmosphere made for good gaming.

  An off-kilter repeating mechanical clank erupted across the soundscape. It was the chopper’s damaged and rapidly failing turbine engine.

  MagnumPIrate called out over chat that they were going down. Fish thought about those jihadi jerks and felt a little less enthusiastic about his creation. Multi-striped tattered canvas awnings of Porto Tortuga spun wildly about as the sputtering chopper auto-rotated down through them and crashed into the shadows of the Grand Bazaar.