“What?” Winters uncorked the phial and chugged back on the elixir, to see his current health bar shoot up to full glowing green.
Health Restored!
Despite her reservations, Winters watched as Jay, alongside Sari and Crusher, used the elixir to restore her character to health, leaving two on the table.
“It’s just that this Story we’re on is getting strange. What the Red Hand did back there – glitching through the scenery? That’s a fault, right?” Jay said. “Or a Control Mod.”
Control Mod! Winters slapped his forehead in surprise. That was precisely what he had read in that scroll, Efen’s Curse! “What do you mean, Control Mod? What is that?”
“A Control Modification,” Crusher explained. “It’s a rumor really, but some of the online message boards around Aldaron claim that the Moderators, Odge, (or the Controllers of the game, get-it?) that these Controllers run their own modifications as and when they see fit.”
“Of course they do.” Winters thought of all of the little tasks that must go into keeping Aldaron running. Updating the servers, sending out data packs to the various VRM headsets all over the world. “Why is that such a bad thing?”
“No, I don’t think you understand.” Jay rapped her knuckles on the table. “All of the regular stuff – the weather, the NPC dialogues, the random monster encounters – they all run on a low-functioning AI, or artificial intelligence. They’re not given orders to do something out of character by a Controller, they have to obey the laws of the game, right? Just like we do.”
“Okay…” Dean tried to follow.
“But a Control Mod is a modification where a lot of players have a pretty strong suspicion that a Controller has directly stepped in and re-written a part of the game, just for their benefit, or for kicks, or to punish a player or whatever. It’s completely unethical,” Jay said.
“They wouldn’t do that. Why would anyone play Aldaron if Odge could just step in and squash your character anytime they wanted?” Winters almost laughed. Of course, he knew that they could – because Odge coded the thing, right? They could turn all of them into walking cupcakes if they wanted. Winters smirked at the thought.
“Well, Odge claim they have multiple firewalls and secure virtual environments to play in, and numerous non-intervention contracts and what have you,” Jay explained. “But still…. It would be bad news if it happened.”
“There was that case of the Cyrus Virus last year?” Crusher pointed out, causing Sari to laugh.
“Ah. I’d forgotten about him. That guy was a jerk. He went around attacking any player weaker than him. Generally, that kind of stuff doesn’t matter, or doesn’t happen too often as the other characters form a guild or join an adventurers’ party or something, but Cyrus would grind out experience by waiting around at the King’s City gates, jumping all the newly spawned characters and bashing them,” Sari said. “Easy kills, hardly any XP – but once you’ve done it a hundred or so times, it totes up.”
“So - what happened?” Winters shrugged.
“He died after being attacked by a mysterious swarm of bees,” Sari burst out laughing.
“How is that mysterious?” Winters said. “Even I can summon a familiar animal.”
“Well, this swarm appeared after he stumbled in the street and fell through a wagon transporting jars of honey to market,” Jay pointed out, starting to grin.
“A curse?” Winters said.
“And when he was trying to run away from the bees, he managed to run straight into a bear trap.” Crusher was trying not to laugh.
“What was a bear trap doing in King’s City?” Winters felt himself starting to join in the grin. This Cyrus Virus guy sounded like he had it coming to him, after all.
“A visiting zoo had set it out to protect the public from its animals.” Jay laughed out loud, before her grin faded and was replaced by a much more somber look. “All of how Cyrus Virus died sounded to a lot of us like a Control Mod. A whole series of strange accidents, where the story around him seemed to change, and new elements of the game were programmed – hacked, or modded –at the last moment.”
“Ah.” Winters thought of the way the Lady of Efen had suddenly appeared, and then disappeared, just as the Red Hand had done. “So, what are you trying to say? That this Red Hand is a Controller?”
“Maybe.” Jay shrugged. “He’s an epic-level hero, alright.”
“But there might be something to what you’re saying,” Winters said, pulling from his inventory the scroll he’d taken from the Scroll Library of the Elves, Efen’s Curse, with all of its strange annotations. “I found this with the elves. It’s weird, and it seems to back up what you’re saying…”
Crusher, Jay, and Sari took a while to run through what the scroll said, reading the notes suggesting Efen herself was modded.
“Look at this bit,” Crusher indicated.
‘Our Queen changed even quicker after that. She could compel people to talk, she could order them like puppets if she wanted to [Character-Override Protocols]’
“Or this…” He pointed further up.
‘It was that crystal, I have come to be sure of it. It did something to her, it twisted her soul and turned her into something the world had never seen before. [Control-Modded Character???]’
“Whoever did this thinks Lady Efen herself has been hacked by the Controllers,” Crusher said seriously. “You know, Winters … that might even kind of fit in with what we’ve been saying, you know, about this whole storyline.”
Winters nodded. He knew he shouldn’t have been able to find this storyline, as a beginner-level character some days ago. But now he was racing towards Level 10 and above, and he was involved in one of the most world-shattering stories in the entire game!
“And, mage – you know what the first thing was that the Red Hand said when we picked him up? That he was glad to see you, Dean Winters,” Crusher said uneasily.
“But none of this is making any sense! Why? Why me? What are we seeing? Secret stories? Hacked characters?” Winters groaned. “Who would do all of this? And why us?”
“I would do all of this,” said a voice from the door, as it swung open to reveal the slumped form of the Red Hand.
Chapter 22: Green Code
“What did you do?” Jay said, immediately rising from her seat at the table. “What is this place? How did you get us here?”
Crusher flashed her an annoyed look. “Easy, Jay – let the man speak.” Winters could tell that Crusher placed the Red Hand in higher esteem than the explorer did. “Here.” The dwarf pulled out a chair and threw him one of the healing elixirs. “It looks like you could do with this.”
“Thanks.” The Red Hand caught it, draining the healing mixture in one swallow. Afterwards, Winters saw that his character appeared visibly healthier. “I did. It’s getting harder and harder to patch for those.”
“I knew it! You’re patching the game!” Jay muttered. “That’s cheating!”
“Hey!” Crusher hissed at her, but Winters could still see the dwarf pull on his moustache in worry.
“Well, it’s the only way I’m alive right now.” The bandit didn’t seem bothered by Jay’s outburst as he accepted the seat at the table. “The Controllers have patched me, this avatar, meaning I won’t regenerate my health from food or rest. Every time I log onto the game, my status is exactly the same as what it was before…”
“What? But that’s…” Sari burst out, appalled. It was one of the many ways that ensured players kept on coming back to the game, after all; knowing that each time they rested and started again, their avatar would have regenerated.
“It’s a Control Mod, and it’s true.” Red pulled down the scarf covering the lower half of his face, revealing an Asian man with sharp features and a dusting of stubble. “I guess you could say I’ve annoyed the wrong people, because that is not all they’ve done to me.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s a cheater.” Jay�
�s frown deepened, and Winters’ thoughts immediately went to the story of Cyrus Virus. Were the Controllers that vindictive to punish a player they thought was cheating, or being unfair? Undoubtedly, it seemed.
Red shrugged at the muttering, like he had heard it all before. “They’ve set the Archons on me.”
“Holy crap…” Crusher breathed.
“The Archons? Who are they? Winters asked nervously. Whoever they were, they didn’t sound good. At all.
“They’re the Guardians of the Darkling Gates, right at the end of the Far Realms,” Red said. “In the game, they’re the Lords of the Darkling hosts, but they cannot fully manifest in Aldaron until all of the Gates are down. You only very rarely encounter them, and that is only if you’ve reached hero level.”
“Like you have?” Crusher nodded at him.
“Yeah, I guess… But these Archons are traveling through the Three Realms now, hunting me. I have my own personal demonic army out to get me.” Red shook his head wearily. “It started with this.” The others watched as Red tugged off his gauntlets, revealing the red skin of his right hand, a memento of how he had legendarily attempted to snatch the Red Ouroborax.
“The Ouroborax, you see, they’re special.” Red looked at Winters, who hurriedly pulled the Green one out of his pocket. It looked like a large shard of crystal, only it didn’t glow, and, if anything, it was a sullen gray-green. Winters was very careful to make sure he used his gloves to set it on the table before them all, just in case.
“They’re not just magical items, they’ve got Command Codes written into them – they permanently rewrite your character,” Red said, waving his hand. “It doesn’t matter what healing I use, it always stays there.”
“Sounds pretty cool, actually,” Sari said gingerly.
“You’d think, huh?” Red reached over to the green crystal with his bare hands, and everyone stiffened, expecting the same flash of light and reboot that had happened before.
But no. When Red picked it up, it didn’t seem to burn its color onto his hand, or do anything in fact.
“This one has been activated, so it won’t rewrite you, thankfully. Here.” He threw it towards Winters.
“Crap!” The mage caught it in shock, his heart pumping as he waited for something to happen. It was like juggling a hand grenade, but nothing happened.
“You see?” Red grinned. It seemed, Winters thought, even if Red was the most hunted – and haunted – character in the game, he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. Yet.
“It took me ages to work out how to activate it, but finally I got a tip: by submerging it in the holy pool at the Shrine of Oak,” Red explained.
“Was it … that thing that caused the system reboot?” Jay said, her earlier tone of accusation turned to something like awe.
“Bingo.” Red nodded. “That’s what I mean when I say they’re Command Codes, as well as magical items in the game. Each Ouroborax reboots and rewrites a section of the game’s deep code.”
“But why? Why on earth would anyone want to do that?” Jay gasped.
“Because they had to,” Red said simply. “I should know, I helped program a lot of it.”
“Wait…” Crusher said, his dwarfish eyes going wide. “You’re a Controller?”
*
“Not anymore. I was, I suppose. I prefer the term ‘code-monkey’. I worked for Odge, and I helped design the game,” Red said matter-of-factly
“Well, I guess that explains how come you can do all of this stuff….” Sari the Enchanter said.
“Yeah, I’ve kept a few tricks, as it were…” Red smiled recklessly. “But that’s only because I have to.” He cast a more pointed stare at Jay. “You see, if I don’t mod the game in this way, then I’m going to die. And maybe a lot more people will, too.”
“What!?” Winters gasped.
The Red Hand waited for a moment, before taking a deep breath and beginning his story.
“I was a freelancer when Odge first commissioned Aldaron,” the young man’s voice wove into the room. “Aldaron was just an idea, a few levels, and a framework by some Silicon Valley gamers. Odge bought it out, then massively expanded it. They hired loads of freelancers like me to help code the servers and the game architecture and what have you.
‘“You see, they had this idea that it could be the spearhead of their new VRM technology. Virtual reality, right? It worked. Aldaron has become the biggest VRM game on the entire planet. But back then, back in the early days – what Odge was doing was different.”
“The VRM-Alpha?” Winters said, remembering what Marcy the nurse had told him. The new wave of Virtual Reality consoles. They fired pictures straight into your brain.
“Exactly. Odge could see it would have huge potential for just about every aspect of life – if they could get it right. And that meant funding, and that meant having a test product. Aldaron was their test product,” Red said.
“So … what was the problem?” Dean said uneasily, aware of the fact his physical body was somewhere out there – wearing a very real, very physical medical unit of the same VRM-Alpha.
“The prototypes were the problem at first. They were basically doing invasive surgery, but with radiation,” Red explained. “The consoles are firing energy wavelengths right into your brain, right? Stimulating your neuro-cortex. You don’t want to know what happened at the Jesse Creek facility. Let’s just say not a lot of mice made it out alive.”
“That’s horrible!” Sari burst out, visibly terrified. Winters shared her fear. Is my brain suddenly going to melt any time soon?
“Well, it got better, thankfully. Odge managed to perfect the technology so the subjects didn’t die, and they started experiencing the images that were fired into their brains. Or so we thought. But then came the second wave of setbacks. Comatose patients. Conscious paralysis. It was terrifying, and horrible.”
Oh my God. Winters felt his heart beat – his real one – start to thunder in his ears. That was precisely what he had feared when the game had rebooted. That he would be stuck in the blackness, still awake and yet unable to hear or see anything, ever again. And no one would be able to reach out to him, either.
“Odge had hundreds of cases of really severe conditions. Some people are still in comas because of those early tests.”
“Then why didn’t they shut it down!” Jay spat out. “Surely…?”
“Because they settled out of court. Paid the families hundreds of thousands of dollars to assure their silence, and moved on. You have to remember Odge sank millions into this project, and, if they could get VRM right? Then it would be like the invention of the internet. The whole world would change. How we play games, how we interact with each other, how we do science, technology.” Winters saw the bandit’s eyes flicker to regard him. “How we treat injuries, even.”
He knows. He knows who I am and why I’m in here. Winters started to feel even more nervous than he did already (if that was possible).
“It will revolutionize the world, and that is worth billions. Hundreds of billions, maybe,” Red continued. “So, the trials continued, the research continued, more payouts were made.
“Where I come into this story is quite late, after most of that. I was paid to iron out code in the framework of Aldaron, along with dozens of others. At some point, about a year into my job, I started finding out about all of these health risks and dangers, the people paid to keep silent. I started doing some digging around, and found out the VRM-Alpha had a terrible legacy.
‘“But Odge claimed the current version was safe, now. That they had fixed all of those problems.” Red’s jaw tightened in rage. “But they were lying. You see, we all used the VRM-Alphas every day for our job. I wasn’t just worried for those people before, I was also worried for all of the people that I knew right now!” His fist thumped the table, hard. It made Winters jump.
“So, I decided to get some independent tests done, brain scans. Sleep analysis, all that kind of
stuff….” His voice broke, and he looked down at his hands, one permanently red. “It turns out they screwed with our brains, big time. I’ve got a slow-onset neurological disease, which is incurable.”
“Dear God!” Winters gasped. This is monstrous.
“They paid me off, just like the others, but I decided I wouldn’t go quietly. I decided to try and leak the news – only every time I reached out to a paper, Odge lawyers or Odge hackers had got there first. So, I decided to try and do something direct, at the source. Hack the Aldaron game.”
“But … does that mean…” Jay’s face went pale. “Are we…?”
“No, not at all!” Red shook his head quickly. “I was wearing one of the first models of the VRM-Alpha, and it seems they were the ones that were all out-of-whack. It would be really bad for Odge to release the console, only for half of their customers to start having life-long illnesses, right?” He gave Jay a sad smile.
“Odge changed everything after my prototype. You guys aren’t in any danger at all, and there haven’t been any recorded cases of severe health effects in this newest wave of VRM-Alphas, but I still don’t trust Odge. What if it just causes something ten years from now?” Red gritted his teeth. “What I am more concerned with is paying Odge back for all of the years it has stolen from people before. All of their fame and success and wealth – even if the VRM is perfectly safe now – it’s all based on hundreds of lives like mine ruined.” Red growled in frustration. “I just need proof. I need to get access to those files again that are hidden deep inside the Odge mainframe that show the results of all of those failed prototypes and tests. When I get my hands on them, I can show the world just how evil a company they are…”
Winters breathed out slowly, suddenly feeling very nervous. He was at least inside a hospital already. He could speak to Marcy, get her to run some tests.
But Red is right. Even if we’re alright, what they’ve done to him, and what they’ve done to all of those people before is terrible. Odge should pay.
Tales of the Gemsmith Page 22
