by Tom Hansen
Eloria's Beginning
Enter The louVRe Book One
Tom Hansen
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Interlude One
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Interlude Two
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Interlude Three
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Tom Hansen
RPG GameLit Society
LitRPG Group
Eloria’s Beginning
Copyright © 2018 IceBlazer Entertainment
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-946407-09-2
For Jennifer
Soon there will be virtual reality, and augmented reality. If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then games will become indistinguishable from reality.
- Elon Musk
Prologue
Adrianna Brzezicki was getting coffee when the Artificial Intelligence hijacked her computer.
Instead of being out at a bar with her friends, she was stuck in a cramped cubicle a hundred meters underground. Fluorescent lights flickered in the hall, giving her a headache and reminding her just how lonely it was to be at work on a Friday night.
Worse yet, she was out of coffee.
Her cubicle was in Switzerland, but the coffee machine was all the way in France, out the door and down the hall. In the distance, the sounds of the automatic vacuums began their evening dance around the chilly office space.
By all rights, she had a pretty cool job programming for the largest company in the world. Epoch International had hired her straight out of college and her top-secret job at CERN was both challenging and rewarding.
She glanced at the clock, twenty-two minutes until seven.
Once she made sure the compile went through for tomorrow’s testing, she would be free.
She sighed. Still too early to try to bail. Her supervisor, Sven, who never seemed to go home, would be at his desk, slaving away for his corporate masters. As much as she wanted to leave, she couldn’t disappoint him.
She got back to pouring through that day’s code. The game had been in production for a scant six months, and the AI that wrote it revolutionized the gaming industry as the first game written entirely by a computer program.
AI written code, while efficient, wasn’t perfect, and her team’s main job was to spot check the daily code to make sure it kept within parameters.
She should get business cards.
Adrianna: AI Wrangler Extraordinaire.
She furrowed her brow and squinted at the latest name change. The AI, named Laisseze, thought itself hilarious at its own word play and this time had named the game The louVRe Adventure Reticulation Protocol.
Laisseze did stuff like this all the time. It would dig up some human phrase or meme and sift through its database of written language to come up with something it found fun and unique.
She couldn’t help but smirk at this title, like the AI had planted it there just for her. The acronym spelled out LARP, referring to live action role-play. On some level, she appreciated its dry wit, even if it made her life harder.
LARPing. It was a bunch of lame girlfriend-less losers dressed up in cardboard armor on the weekends and beating each other with wooden swords.
Tabbing to another window, she messaged her supervisor.
abrzezicki: it changed the game’s name again
stulen: Oh great. What did he come up with now?
abrzezicki: the louvre adventure reticulation protocol
stulen: Hmm.
stulen: At least this one’s in English. Wasn’t the last one in Portuguese?
abrzezicki: ancient greek. the one before that was hmong then portuguese
stulen: Whatever happened to ‘Eloria Online’? It’s the best one he’s given us to-date. Marketing meets next week to finalize the name and prepare for launch. We can worry about it then.
stulen: Can you shorten it to ‘The louVRe Adventure’? Hopefully he won’t change the name for a few more weeks.
abrzezicki: k
Adrianna changed the name to The louVRe Adventure then glanced at the clock again. Fifteen minutes until seven. Her eyes widened, and a wicked smile crossed her lips. If she began compiling now, it should be done by the time her shift was over. She could go change for the club and grab some coffee from France before heading out.
Shouldering the backpack from under her desk, she leaned over her keyboard to send the code to compile, grabbed her coffee mug, and headed down the hallway.
Ten minutes later, she sauntered back to her desk wearing a miniskirt, heels, and a crop-top, her business attire stuffed into the backpack dangling from her slender arm. Her long black hair done up in a clip would need to be fixed on the road.
She placed her coffee on her desk and tossed the backpack beside her chair. Her phone buzzed. It was Dorothée, waiting outside her office.
She swore at the phone. “Don’t you know that people have jobs? Chill, okay?”
She picked up and sent ‘BRT 5 min’ and hit the lock button on her phone.
Dorothée replied, but Adrianna ignored the buzzing and took a long draw of dark coffee.
Overhead, the fluorescent lights blinked, reminding her of the headache at the edge of her consciousness. The damned light had been doing that more and more lately. No one else in the office complained and of course it never happened when maintenance was around to notice.
She would submit another maintenance request on Monday. Hopefully, it would blink for them this time.
Her phone buzzed again. “Jesus, Dor, keep your dress on.”
Adrianna didn’t understand how the rest of her squad managed to pay any of their living expenses since none of them had real jobs. At least she was doing something right, even if certain family members didn’t agree.
Her mother and father hadn’t spoken to her since leaving Poland, but she wa
sn’t surprised. The fight they’d had before she left still bothered her when she thought about it, but years later they hadn’t tried to contact her. She wasn’t going to be the first one to call.
Her job and her friends were there for her, no matter the time of day. Her life was here, and she wouldn’t change anything. She’d gone through too much to get where she was. Her past life was just that, the past.
Her computer beeped, jolting her from her thoughts. The compile and push request was complete.
A bit of unacknowledged tension released from her shoulders. One step closer to getting out of here.
She glanced over at the top-right corner for the results. Green across the board.
Sweet, I will be able to get out on time!
Three minutes until she could log out and enjoy her weekend.
She took a minute to tidy up her desk, frowning at the mess her cube-mate, Bashir, had left on his. She grabbed her latest notebook, which held a sketch of two androgynous cats sword fighting. She shoved the notebook in the drawer and closed it with a satisfied finality.
Everything was in order.
Her desk tidy, she started closing down the various programs and logging out of command windows. The four green dots in the upper right of the compile window shone at her, a mild annoyance. She almost closed the window but paused just before clicking.
Something about those green dots was wrong.
She re-read them, trying to figure out what was bothering her.
Four dots: DEV READ, TEST COMPILE, TEST PUSH, and PROD PUSH.
All green. So why did it bother her so much? Anxiety wriggled like worms in her stomach. She scanned the lights again.
DEV READ meant the repository for the development environment had been successful, and the code was live on the development environment.
TEST COMPILE was green because the code was clean; no syntax errors.
TEST COMPILE was the next layer in programming; the internally accessible environment. Only a dozen test players had access to Test. The development environment compiled each night, so it could be tested the next day.
That fourth one wasn’t supposed to be green. It was supposed to be brown, non-active. Green meant the code had not only compiled but gone to the production environment.
It went live?
Her chest tightened as realization flooded over her. Gone public?
“No no no no no!”
The game wasn’t slated to release for a few months. How could it be live already?
Adrianna’s heart skipped a beat. She bit her lip and her clammy palm stuck to the top of the mouse.
She had made the code go live? How was that even possible? She wasn’t supposed to have access to the production environment. Her access was limited to testing the dev code, certifying it, and pushing it to test.
That’s all she was allowed to do. It couldn’t have been her. Could it?
She pulled up the logs to scan for the pull and push requests. Sure enough, it was her login that pushed the latest request 17 minutes ago, processed, approved, and pushed to test at 6:57.
Then, at 6:58, the test environment was pushed to production.
abrzezicki@devtest3:-$ sudo laisseze
[Sudo] password for abrzezicki: ***************
login approved!
abrzezicki@devtest3:-# git push prod … success!
abrzezicki@devtest3:-# prod compile test … success!
abrzezicki@devtest3:-# prod restart … success!
abrzezicki@devtest3:-# fdisk -l /dev/ … success!
abrzezicki@devtest3:-# fdisk -l /test/ … success!
She stood up, re-reading the last few lines in the log, trying to comprehend what was going on. Laisseze had somehow used her password to gain access to the code?
It was all her fault.
Her mind screamed at her, telling her to run, run home, run anywhere but here.
Her phone beeped. She picked it up and glanced at the screen, barely reading the latest message from Dorothée.
She felt like she was in a dream, a ghost of herself separated from her body. Was she even real? Was all of this just a nightmare? Was she going to wake up any moment?
Adrianna deposited her phone face down on her desk and took a step back, her eyes not leaving the screen. The room felt very cold, and she rubbed her bare arms. Why the hell had she changed already?
This couldn’t wait though; she couldn’t run away from this, she needed to tell someone.
She needed to tell everyone.
The most anticipated game of the decade had gone live without any warning. This was world-wide news worthy.
Adrianna raced down the hallway toward her manager’s office, her heels slowing her progress; her friends forgotten, clubbing a distant memory, and her coffee growing cold on her desk. She had one thing to do, before she got fired for gross incompetence, and that was to tell her supervisor.
Fuck, shit, fuck, shit, fuck, shit, fuck!
Her life was over. Her career ended before it began, just two years out of college.
This was it; she would have to move back to Poland, apologize to her parents, and hope they’d forgive her.
She scrunched down even smaller on the hard-plastic chair across from her supervisor.
“Yes, Sir. I will get to the bottom of it but…” Sven Tulen had been on the phone for the last three minutes talking to his boss. He glanced over at her, a concerned expression on his face.
Not anger, but concern. He wasn’t that kind of man. He was calm to a fault. He’d taken the blame on some of her mistakes in the past, shielding her from getting fired, but this was such a colossal fuckup that even he couldn’t save her.
“Yes Sir, but—”
Sven couldn’t get a word in to save his life. He pulled the phone away from his ear. The constant stream of profanities coming from the receiver was clear enough to Adrianna. She wanted to grab the receiver from his hand and scream that it was her fault, not his, but she didn’t want to get him in any more trouble.
“Okay, I’ll tell her.”
Sven placed the receiver down and ran his large calloused hands through his blond hair. The gold ring on his left hand sparkled in the bright clear light of his office.
He sighed, rubbing his eyes with his palms.
Adrianna watched the glint off his wedding ring. It was soothing somehow. It grounded her.
“Adrianna, um—” Sven spoke. His measured Dutch with its accented o’s and e’s rolled her name off his tongue with ease.
Hearing her name brought forth a flood of emotion she didn’t know she had. Her chest rose and fell in short, syncopated breaths, a knot formed in her throat and she blinked to fight back tears. If he fired her right now she would definitely lose it.
She forced her breathing to slow. She had to get ahold of herself. Maybe she would go down swinging if it came to that. She wasn’t a violent person, but she had the sudden urge to punch something.
“Laisseze sent off notifications to all worldwide users with implants that the game was live, inviting them all to play. As of right now, we have …” he clicked once to refresh the website’s counter, “… three million users.”
He leaned back, putting his hands behind his head and clicking his tongue while studying the screen. “three million users in fifteen minutes, I think we set a new world record here, don’t you?”
They sat in silence for a moment, watching the counter roll over to four million.
Three years developing the AI, and the entire game including engine, physics, graphics, story, and mechanics had been coded in six months with minimal human involvement. Six months of development and four million users were now logged in.
It had worked, though. No one had guessed that the AI would have launched itself three months early. It wasn’t supposed to have the permissions, and that was where she had messed up.
An odd serenity came over Adrianna as she sat there with her supervisor, watching the screen. She stood, shimmying her skirt d
own. “I’ll go pack my things.”
Sven looked over at her and frowned. “No, you won’t.” His voice was stern but compassionate.
“What do you mean, no?”
“We don’t fully understand what Laisseze has done here.”
He leaned forward, his eyes wide. “He implemented full immersion. Something we only recently started testing internally. Can you imagine the legal nightmare if we inadvertently wipe someone’s memory or trigger a seizure? What if someone doesn’t know how to logout? We don’t even know how tuned the pain receptors are with full immersion yet.
“Somehow he’s built a fully fleshed-out game under our noses. We know Laisseze is quirky, but can we trust that he’s got the user’s best interests at heart?
“Last night, when we compiled, we only had five million lines of code, but your last report shows twenty-seven million. That is twenty-two million lines of code in one day. We have no idea what he’s done, and I’m going to need your help to figure it out, fast.”
Sven pulled his arms back over his head and rested his elbows on the desk. He bounced the tips of his interlocked fingers on his lips, and he kept his gaze on her face as a wry smile spread across his. He stopped and turned an aging picture in a gleaming silver frame around on his desk. A plump, Hispanic woman held a small infant in her arms.
