by D. J. Bodden
The truth was, Rob had rescued me. I was working as a process improvement guru for an HR firm—that’s corporate speak for finding better ways to fire people.
In fairness, I’d never caused someone to get fired. Either their performance or their leadership’s poor business decisions brought them to that point. I just shuffled them on faster, made managers build a paper trail before giving up, and sometimes helped place people if they were a decent worker in a bad situation. It was good, well-paid, challenging work, but there wasn’t enough of it, and when I was between assignments I’d feel like I was being swallowed by the existential blah of the universe.
And yeah, I get it. I bet the people I fired wished they had my problems, but pain is personal; boredom and irrelevance are my least favorite forms of ass cancer. And if you have or have had ass cancer, think of it as an inoperable tumor of the heart.
Robert had been right on target when he called me out in the elevator. He did that sometimes—hurt people without realizing it. It was part of what made us friends of a sort, because I took the insensitive prick’s comments at face value. I wasn’t a doctor, medical or otherwise. I couldn’t code past a little C++, couldn’t rebuild the engine of the car I drove or understand the financial information that Robert swam in to keep his company afloat. I was a generalist. I listened a lot, figured out what made people special, and talked them into helping themselves.
Viridian had been a lifeline to a better place. Over a hundred smart, talented people who didn’t know how to talk to each other. No one wanted to fire them because each one was a superstar in their field. We just needed to stop them from talking to the press, harassing members of the opposite sex and/or gender, coming to work hung over or stoned, and getting into fistfights over which discontinued Josh Whedon show had a more loyal fan base. They worked weekends, hosted board and video game tournaments, ate the most amazing array of junk food, and, on one occasion, demanded a pair of emotional-support corgis. I got Robert to sign off on it. They named the dogs One and Two, after corgis in two separate anime series I’d watched afterward and liked. It never ended.
It was heaven on earth. And that meant it was worth a second opinion.
I turned the TV off and went to bed, not hopeful, but resolved. I didn’t have an MBA or a PhD in rocket surgery, but I’d spent a lot of time listening to people who did. And for all Robert’s genius and success, I’d seen him laugh, fart, get drunk, and throw a stapler at a wall in frustration, so he could kiss my barely-above-average ass. Maybe he’d missed something.
IT TOOK ME LONGER THAN I would have liked to fall asleep. I felt like I spent the whole night staring at my exquisite vaulted ceiling, but at some point in the night, I found myself sitting on a metal foldout chair in a dark room, my face and hands lit by the screen of an old computer. The computer was the old 486 DX2 I’d had as a teenager. It was a white plastic box as big as a family-sized cereal box with a 3.5-inch drive, a CD-ROM, a wired ball mouse and keyboard, and a 15-inch Crystal Scan monitor that weighed as much as the computer. It had a 340-megabyte hard disk drive, which at the time seemed so big I’d never fill it, and 16 whole megabytes of RAM. It had Windows 3.1, too, but I’d spent most of my time in MS-DOS playing games.
It was all a dream, obviously. I hadn’t seen that computer for twenty years; my mom gave it to the church we went to after my grades started to dip in the eighth grade.
So I was sitting in front of my fond childhood memory, typing commands at the prompt, white letters on a black screen with no windows or mouse pointer or anything, and I realized I was talking to the Overminds of Viridian—the AIs that run the game. I was probably the least technically savvy person on the entire team, except for the janitors, but everyone had been encouraged to “talk” to the AIs so they were exposed to multiple ideas, cultures, and even languages since all of Viridian was instantly translated into the player’s native tongue. The development team challenged us to troll them, since Thanatos, the AI responsible for validating inputs and doing the postmortem on modules, was supposed to reject information that didn’t make sense. My favorite thing to do had been to get buzzed on Irish beer and ask unanswerable philosophy questions.
>Alan342000: So what’s your purpose?
Aediculus set his status to “Away”
>Kronos: My purpose is to store the vector data and interactions of all instances within V.G.O.
>Alan342000: That’s your function. What’s your purpose? Your higher calling?
>Gaia: To make the player happy.
>Thanatos: You shouldn’t lie, Mother.
>Alan342000: Do you have a purpose that doesn’t involve the player?
>Cernunnos: The Overminds exist to maintain the world within V.G.O. The player is just a variable.
>Kronos: But we maintain the world for the players.
>Enyo: I’m with Cernunnos on this one. I can generate conflict without players.
>Sophia: I wish you wouldn’t.
>Alan342000: @Sophia, why do you—
>Thanatos: @Alan342000, are you a doctor?
>Alan342000: What?
>Thanatos: Are you a doctor of philosophy? A programmer? A software engineer? Do you have anything valid to offer at all?
I sat back in the chair. The prompt blinked steadily, waiting for me to type my answer in, but when I tried, I couldn’t raise my arms. I couldn’t move at all. Eventually, the screen went into power saver mode, and I was alone in the dark.
I TOSSED AND TURNED my way to Friday morning, grabbed coffee, and pulled into the parking lot at 8:00 AM. The Viridian project was housed in a building like any of the other eighty or so on the campus, a two-story block of gray concrete, tinted glass, and tight security. I took a spot in the front row of the “pleb” spots, a first I could have done without because it confirmed the project was dead. The lot should have been half full by now. It was one of the team’s unofficial competitions.
There technically wasn’t any assigned parking on campus, except for team leaders, but security had been so uptight about Viridian that most of the tens of thousands of other Os-Tech employees gave the building a wide berth.
Special parking wasn’t enough, though. A group who, on average, thought a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure belonged in the original packaging, instead of, say, a child’s hands, turned parking into class warfare. Status, for plebs—which was anyone but the team leaders—was inversely related to distance parked from the front door. By those standards, I’d bought the platinum collector’s edition today and was due the admiration and envy of my peers.
There were two moving trucks parked next to the front door, under guard. The door was propped open, and an irregular stream of movers passed to and fro over the same path like ants, carrying sealed boxes. Another guard made sure the movers scanned their card every time, even if he’d just watched them walk to the truck and back. I sat in the car and finished my coffee, enjoying the absurdity. I was going to solve this, somehow, and they’d have to carry it all back in. I had to believe that, or saying goodbye to my imaginary computer friends really was all I was going to get done today.
I grabbed my ID card, put the car roof up, tossed my sunglasses into the glove box, and locked the doors. Badge reel clipped to my belt, I walked to the building. I recognized Frank when he turned to watch me approach.
“Hi, Frank!”
“Hey, Alan.”
Frank was a good guy, ex-Marine turned mall cop who took his job but not himself very seriously. Dark, like me, but a little taller and wider, in his early forties. I’d helped him with some family trouble a few months back.
“How’s Nell?”
“Better, thanks for asking. Didn’t know you were working this morning.” He hooked his thumbs on his duty belt.
I’ll admit it, my heart dropped a bit. There was always a chance Sandra had been too busy to add me to the list. It wouldn’t be like her—I’d never seen her miss a beat in two years—but from what I’d overheard in the hallway, last night’s
meeting could have been a disaster.
I pulled the card from my hip to the reader. The light blinked red. Crap.
“Try it again, it’s been finicky this morning,” Frank said.
The second time, the light turned green. “Phew.”
“Yeah.” Frank chuckled. “You have a good day.”
“You too.” I walked into the building.
It was like seeing a friend being eaten alive from the inside. Uniformed drones in gray polos and purple ball caps moved from desk to desk, stripping them of anything personal. The room whispered with the shuffling of tennis shoes, intermittently broken by the rip of packing tape. I stepped around a pile of cubicle partitions, almost knocked over a full, ninety-five-gallon trash bag, and caught the vacant looks on the packers’ faces. They had no idea what they were taking apart, couldn’t imagine the one-hundred-person organism whose bones they were disjointing and labeling, and didn’t care.
They’d take all weekend and leave without anything worth leaking, exactly the type of people Robert wanted handling the project materials. The front section and the floor above it were usually the most vibrant, hosting the artists, sculptors, modelers, game designers, animators, effects specialists, and other “creatives” who preprocessed modules for the AIs to build into the world. It was also where several small meeting rooms, an arcade, free vending machines, and a locker room with showers were. We’d let people bring families this far once or twice; now it felt lifeless and empty. I hurried through.
Another scan of my card took me through the programming farm. There was more life, here. Os-Tech IT workers were taking the network apart, stacking coils of Ethernet cabling and systematically formatting computers back to factory settings. The dev team leaders were there, clearing out their own offices. Part of me was interested; this was exactly the kind of process I could sink my teeth into. It wouldn’t be routine—most projects used virtual desktops kept on a server, but Viridian was segregated from the network. There was waste to be rooted out, money to be saved, accolades to be earned. I was going to be busy helping Viridian get back on track, once I succeeded, but it was good to have a plan B.
A final swipe led me into Alpha Testing and equipment. It was the most secure part of the building because it held the 110 parallel-processing servers it took to run the holy of holies, Viridian Gate Online, and the eight separate AIs that kept the virtual world working. The server farm was behind a vault door with a biometric security system that reminded me of a bank-heist movie or a spy flick. I’d never been in there. I took a left into the testing bay. It housed twelve identical hospital beds, the alpha-test server, and Jeff’s workstation.
Jeff Berkowitz was a tall man with an uncannily deep voice and a perfectly groomed, full red beard. He wore his hair up in a ponytail, had tattoos all up his right arm, and probably would have been a lumberjack or a blacksmith if he wasn’t so lanky. He was the hardware team leader for Viridian. I found him sitting on one of the beds near the door with his head in his hands. He looked up and frowned. “Alan?” He sounded like a man twice as wide. It threw me off every time.
“Hey, Jeff. I hear we have a hardware problem.”
JEFF’S FACE TURNED red, and he clenched his jaw. “It’s not the hardware.”
“What is it then?”
“The fucking people!” he said, standing up. He was three inches taller than me but more whiny than intimidating. “It’s always the goddamned meat!”
And that’s why no one likes you, Jeff. “I was told the NexGens were making testers sick.”
“No. Just no, okay?” He sighed. “Come look at this.”
He waved for me to follow, and we walked to his computer station. It was a wide, adjustable desk with two rows of three massive monitors. He moved the mouse around to clear the screen saver. I made a deliberate show of looking away while he typed in his password.
“Go ahead,” he said, stepping back and crossing his arms. I wasn’t sure if he did it on purpose, but he always did it right over left, showing off his tattoos.
I looked back at the monitors and saw cluster after cluster of repeating graphs and numbers: I recognized what looked like an EKG readout, breathing rate, blood pressure; there were a number of other squiggly lines whose acronyms I couldn’t decipher. “I’m not sure what—”
“Just watch, man. Why can’t you people just do what you’re asked?”
I could have taken that the wrong way, but instead I shut up and watched. Ego rarely solved anything. The clusters were roughly the same—I guessed each one of them represented a tester. They all seemed healthy, regular, maybe a little excited because the average pulse rate was seventy to seventy-five.
“They haven’t even started yet. They’re just sitting there, fat, dumb, and happy, waiting for the show to begin,” Jeff said.
An EKG spiked. The lines on that cluster jumped then smoothed out again. Breathing rate and blood pressure were up. A graph called “Signal Strength” rose and then plateaued.
The other clusters started to come online, following the same pattern. One of them flatlined and turned red.
“That one’s the hardware,” Jeff said. “Failure to synchronize. Happens twelve percent of the time, and once it does, that person fails out twice as often as the base rate. That’s why we don’t bother to reconnect.”
Another cluster turned red. I looked at Jeff.
“No idea.”
The EKGs were starting to look like seismographs. Heart rates ranged from the nineties to the low one hundreds. Cluster after cluster flatlined and went red.
“That guy,” Jeff said, leaning in and tapping one of the red clusters. “He pissed and shit himself coming out. Then he cried. They had to send him to counseling.”
I nodded. “I saw the request. I didn’t know what it was for, though.”
Jeff crossed his arms. “Almost a third of them puke. None of them want to go back in.”
“Is it the nanites?” I asked. I had a rudimentary understanding of how the NexGen made a player believe they were in the game, and it involved tiny machines swimming around their brain. That’s why we used alpha testers, paid them well, and kept a neurologist on standby.
Jeff shrugged. “It shouldn’t be. We got those on loan from the Department of Defense. It’s the same ones they use to give soldiers a virtual heads-up display, so they should be safe.”
“Should be?”
“They are,” Jeff said, sounding frustrated. “I wrote my freaking doctoral dissertation on them. Amputees use them to control mechanical prosthetics. They cause aneurysms in about one percent of soldiers, but that’s after weeks of dehydration and sleep deprivation. Some people get vertigo or migraines. It’s documented. There’s nothing like that here.”
“So what is it?”
Jeff laughed at me. “Dude, if I knew, I’d be asking for a raise and a better parking spot, not talking to you. No offense.”
I shrugged.
“Besides, I thought Osmark gave up.”
“Maybe he didn’t.”
“Did he send you?”
“I got through the door, didn’t I? What are the testers saying?”
Jeff looked at me for a second. He wanted to believe me.
“Come on, man,” I said. “You want to be known as the hardware lead for the new No Man’s Land?”
Jeff’s upper lip curled up, and he crossed his arms. “I don’t give a shit about some video game, man. I’m a nanotech engineer. It’s the faculty back at Penn I’m worried about.”
“Guess you need me, then. The testers?”
“Useless. The ones that didn’t run away or threaten to sue us just said they felt like they were dying over and over.”
“But they weren’t?”
Jeff threw his hands up. “Oh, they felt like it. EKGs were all over the place, blood sugar spiked, but when the doctors looked them over, there was nothing physically wrong with them.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“Yeah, dude, I’m sure
. I know I’m not a people person, but I’m not trying to murder anyone, no matter how useless they are.” He sat down again. “One of those assholes is going to tell the press, though. I just know it.”
I almost laughed, then. The answer was simple. Alpha testers were chosen at random from a pool. After they were catheterized, they sat on medical beds for hours to establish their baselines before testing. There might have been a dedicated gamer among them, or a kid down on his luck just trying to subject his brain to experimental drugs to get himself through college, but I doubted it. Jeff needed a better alpha tester, someone who would ignore what their body was telling them and give him detailed, quantitative feedback on the experience.
“Plug me in,” I told him.
THREE
HE GAVE ME A LOOK.
“I’m serious, Jeff.”
“And I’m serious when I say, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ The docs aren’t even around.”
“You said it wasn’t dangerous.”
“I did.”
“Did you lie?”
Jeff’s face twisted into a snarl. “I’m not turning one of Osmark’s protégés into a vegetable when I’m supposed to be packing the place up, man. It’s just not happening.”
“I bet I could last thirty minutes.”
“You wouldn’t last half that.”
“Done. Fifty bucks for fifteen minutes,” I said, pulling my billfold from my pocket.
“Ten grand, and the keys to that piece of shit car you drive so I can park it at the junkyard.”
The number made my breath catch, but that was just instinct. I let the emotion play over my face. Jeff smirked. I saw his heart laid bare in the dimples. He got ignored as a kid. He’d made more of himself than most of the people he grew up with, and proved his worth to himself with his wallet.
