The Code is Mightier than the Sword

Chapter 3b: The Realm of Infamy

The two men entered the house through the kitchen and then took a left down the stairs to the basement. Jason stopped in awe at the setup they had. The basement was finished with thick carpeting and painted walls. A massive computer desk sat in the corner, with an athletic black woman sitting at the keyboard, typing furiously and looking between three large screens. On the wall next to her hung a 100-inch TV playing what looked like a fantasy movie. Jason had watched almost every fantasy movie ever made, but he didn’t know this one, and with the production quality he was seeing, he couldn’t believe he would have missed it.

Jason moved around the black leather couch before the TV to examine the image closer. A knight scaled a cliff face, fighting the wind and precarious handholds while a large bird of prey kept attacking him. Eventually, he successfully beat the predator away with his sword, clipping the creature’s wing, but he almost fell to his death in the process. After finding a secure purchase again, he continued up the wall but hadn’t made it more than 20 feet before another bird attacked.

“This is the game,” Jason said finally, figuring out why he hadn’t seen it before.

“Yes,” Conor confirmed. “And that is your character, Sir Wilhelm Stark, twelfth-level paladin. He’s one of the best Gracie has ever built.”

Jason looked back at the woman behind the keyboard. She had three monitors to work with, but none of them showed the image on the big screen. Instead, two were just constant data streams, while the other looked like an internet page filled with stats and charts. “Is she playing?”

“Not exactly,” Conor clarified, taking a seat on the couch and inviting Jason to do likewise. “Sir Willie up there is being run by an Artificial Intelligence that Gracie programmed. One of those screens shows the decision trees he is constantly following. The AI is designed to process information like a human brain, so the game thinks that our paladin is being controlled through a VR set. Most areas and modules are only accessible by VR. The older modules are all backward compatible, but everything built into the game now needs a VR set to process. Or you need someone as smart as my sister to figure out how to cheat the system.”

“Your sister . . .” Jason left it hanging, knowing that Conor had to be expecting the question.

“You want to know how an old, pallid-faced Irishman is the brother to a beautiful black woman?”

“It crossed my mind.”

“I married his brother,” Gracie spoke up from the keyboard, proving her multitasking skills went beyond monitoring three screens simultaneously. She did pause her keyboard activity for a moment to turn and regard the two men. “Welcome, Jason. Conor has told me a lot about you. I hope you like the character I’ve built for you.”

“Thanks,” Jason replied, unsure who he should be questioning. Gracie made it easy by returning to her screens and resuming the game. “But what exactly do you need me to do?”

On the screen, the knight had made it to the top of the cliff and found a jagged mountaintop covered in snow. Wolves and spiders attacked him as he navigated through a maze-like collection of rocks and crags. “You said you wanted me to solve a puzzle, but that looks like normal combat to me, and he is doing fine.”

“This is the fifth stage of the module. The sixth is private, we can’t see it happening, and when we send an AI player in, their decision tree breaks down. They don’t know what to do, and we can’t direct them. We’ve sent half a dozen AI players into the sixth stage, and we can’t get anywhere. After about half an hour-”

“Thirty-six minutes,” Gracie clarified, calling without turning around.

“Which is about half an hour,” Conor grumbled at the correction, “the game kills our character.”

“So, you reload and try again. You’ve only done the level half a dozen times. Is it new?”

“It’s a few months old,” Conor said, “but we don’t just respawn. When you die in VR mode, your character is dead, and you must start over. If you die playing from a console, you respawn at your last save point, but in VR, there are consequences. As we’ve discussed, you can do some pretty horrible things in this game, and if the worst thing that could happen to you is just respawning, things would be much worse than they are now. It takes Gracie a couple of weeks to get the characters up to level 12, which is the bare minimum even to attempt this module. From most online discussion forums, people try to get to level 15, but that would take over a month.”

“So, what’s so great about this level that you need me to pass it – that the US government is willing to pay me a hundred grand to pass it?”

“Have you told him nothing?” Gracie asked.

“The prize for this level is supposed to be a level 50 item,” Conor said, ignoring his sister. “That doesn’t mean much to you now, so understand that it would be the most powerful object in the game. Right now, the people using the game to run their criminal enterprises are stockpiling all of the valuable equipment. They have all the best weapons, magical items, protection devices, strongholds, NPCs, and so on. The more powerful they get in the game, the harder it is to disrupt them.

“If two powerful arms dealers want to meet in the game, they want to do so in a secure location where they know they will not be spied on. In the beginning, CIA agents would get in the game and make massive suicide runs against an arms dealer’s stronghold and occasionally be successful in disrupting their activities and possibly forcing one or more of the criminals to start their character over. Using her AI, Gracie can build a level 12 character in a couple of weeks, but a normal player takes a month or more. And that is just to get to level 12. You don’t have a real sense of security until you hit the high teens or 20, which could take six months. Right now, we have information that a small group of German arms dealers is close to cracking this module, and if they get their hands on this item, the power will shift dramatically. In the real world, it would be like our worst enemies getting nuclear weapons with no risk of sanctions or international retaliation if they use them.”

Jason nodded, able to fill in many of the gaps Conor didn’t mention. It was almost a game within a game. It was your classic cat-and-mouse setup of espionage and information smuggling, but the side that could play the RPG game the best would get the upper hand in the fight.

“Someone on the outside created this quest that I am about to attempt, right? It was written and added to the game by an independent designer. User-created content.”

“Yes,” Conor said.

“Then why don’t these gun runners just hire a coder to design a super easy quest and have the prize be a level 100 item.”

“Gandhi wouldn’t allow it,” Gracie said over her shoulder.

“Who’s Gandhi? I mean, besides the historical figure.”

“Gandhi is the advanced AI the two designers have set up to oversee the game,” Conor said. “Remember, one of them is from India. I think GANDHI is supposed to stand for Google Automated Nano-Dano-Hano Intelligence. I don’t know. It is one of those acronyms where they picked the final word before choosing what it stood for. Like Marvel’s SHIELD. No one even thinks of it as an acronym anymore.”

“But Gandhi monitors all the module submissions,” Grace said. “If the module is too easy, it gets rejected with advised improvements. If it is too difficult, same thing. If the prize at the end is too good, it gets modified. For whatever reason, Gandhi greenlit this module with a level 50 item at the end.”

“You say that like you don’t think he should have,” Jason observed.

She shrugged without turning around. “Well, no one has passed it yet. If it goes on for another month, it will break Psycho’s record of half a year, though no one really ever did solve that module.”

“Psycho?” Jason asked, looking at Conor.

“Another module you don’t need to worry about,” Conor said, tossing a frustrated look at his sister for overloading their recruit. “This module is hard. We’ve passed the first five stages six times now, but there were many failures before that, and we needed to develop the cheat of letting an AI control a character to do it. If we were doing it in VR like I assume everyone else does, it would take even longer.”

“So, others have tried this and gotten to the final stage? What do you know about it?”

“Crystals,” Conor replied. “There is a puzzle involving crystals. You are the second person we’ve tried to use to pass this, and all he can remember from the trial is that there were a bunch of crystals of different colors, and he had to arrange them in a pattern. He failed twice and told us he didn’t want to try again. The first time he failed, he didn’t remember anything. He thought something had gone wrong and that he hadn’t even logged in or walked into the final cavern. But he was in there for about 30 minutes and remembered none of it.

“The second time, he was in there for about three hours, said he failed, and that the punishment was to work through this simple mirror puzzle that made him extremely dizzy. He feared going in a third time and didn’t think he would be able to solve the problem anyway since he was so disoriented that he couldn’t even describe it properly.”

“So, it’s not a sudoku.”

Conor laughed. “I doubt it, but if you couldn’t solve that, we weren’t going to waste our time on you.” He turned to look at Gracie and then at the screen. “How close are we?”

Jason also looked at the TV and saw the paladin killing a frost giant with bodies of dead enemies lying everywhere in the snow.

“Almost there, maybe another fifteen minutes,” Gracie reported. “Our guest should probably use the bathroom first.”

“I don’t think I have to go,” Jason said. “Plus, you said after 36 minutes, if I don’t solve it, I fail and get booted back out.”

“Remember what I said about playing it safe,” Conor said. “We go by the rules, and you should assume it will be at least 16 hours every time you enter the game.”

“Then I should eat too,” Jason advised.

Conor shook his head. “We have IVs to feed you fluids and nutrients if necessary. Some people have played for 48 hours straight before. As I said, it is addictive. But definitely use the bathroom.”

Jason shrugged indifferently and got up. As he shifted his position, he felt his stomach churn and almost ran to the bathroom. He was gone for an embarrassing length of time, and when he returned, he did not look happy. “That pill you gave me. The one you said was a muscle relaxant. It wasn’t, was it.”

Conor tried not to laugh in the face of the angry man. “If I had told you what it was, would you have taken it?”

Jason shook his head.

“Right, and then we would be in this situation where we are ready for you to go in, and you would still need to take the pill, and we would have to wait 20 minutes for it to work. I’m sorry I lied to you, but I’ve done this before, and some lies are necessary.”

Jason didn’t want to ask about what else the man was lying about. His anticipation for this experience was growing exponentially, and he felt that if he really understood what he was getting into, he might not do it. He looked at the screen and saw the paladin facing off against two enormous winter wolves with a huge orc standing behind them, casting spells. It looked like a shaman.

“This is the final boss of this level,” Gracie said. “As soon as the second wolf is down to half health, the orc will cast his last hex and join the fight. It should be only a few more minutes after that.”

“Good,” Conor said. “Let’s get you ready.”