Massively Multiplayer (11 page)

“Hernandez, right,” Bernardo sniffed, unconsciously hitching his thumbs about his belt. Motherly women made him slightly nervous. Oblivious of the danger to his future, he soldiered on with the little speech he had prepared in the elevator. “I’ll want morning financials, in brief, every morning, eight sharp, with tea, not coffee. I might want a department head, or a figure, or a meeting at any time, so don’t wander off – my last secretary had a bad habit of it. Lunch hour is yours, but back at one sharp so I can watch our markets. And tea then too. No coffee, right?”

He nodded at her, with what he thought was just the right shade of brusqueness to usher in what he thought should be a decisive new era in Archimago’s history, marched past Wolfgang and into the safety of the recently vacated Presidential office, and shut the door.

Mrs. Hernandez’ smile wilted visibly, and a glint of something steel touched her eyes, like the first hint of winter frost. A test had been offered, and it had not been passed. Wolfgang Wallace, who had outlasted three Presidents himself partially because he knew very well who actually ran things, noted her expression with slight dismay. Perhaps they shouldn’t bother redesigning the letterhead quite yet.

In the world of Crucible, things were heating up, perceptually speaking.

In Brazil, a twenty-two year old security contractor suffered from a slow connection. It took almost twenty minutes for the new updates to download to his computer, time he spent adding to his already enormous collection of five-dimensional pornography. When the download completed, however, and he experienced what Archimago’s team had done to his favorite netvironment, all thoughts of rampant sex with underage starlets fled his mind. Well, alright then, most thoughts of rampant sex with underage starlets. Some thoughts, anyway.

In Peking, an Environmental Technician with China’s third-largest shipping firm awoke early in order to download the new version of Crucible using his company’s superior connection speed. When he finished, he spent almost four minutes simply gaping at the textures of the rice paper in his avatar’s virtual room, admiring the play of light through the open window, and another six minutes dropping things on the floor just to hear the unique sound each one made before the shouts from the street drew him outside.

In Ireland, an agent of His Majesty’s Agricultural Patrol, unlimbered herself from the harness of her personal gyrocopter after a difficult day scouring the hillsides for the greenhouses favored by small-time drug growers. Gratefully plugging herself into the station’s free virlo, she was soon strolling through green hills, a broadsword forgotten at her hip, gazing at the textures on stones and leaves slack-jawed with amazement. You would have thought she had never seen a tree before in her life.

At precisely one o’clock sharp, Pacific time, Bernardo Calloway stepped out of his office and was both gratified and strangely put out to find Evelyn Hernandez already on duty at her desk, clacking away on her old-fashioned keyboard as though she’d never left. “I’m off downstairs to see how the rollout’s going,” he announced.

Mrs. Hernandez, in a fit of generosity, decided that the new ‘boss’ deserved a second chance. It was an important day, after all, and perhaps the man’s irritability was simply a byproduct of sincere stress over the rollout. She offered him another smile, along with a flimsy printout containing a report detailing the successful integration of the new coding into each Crucible server, with times and supervisors’ names attached.

Bernardo, who had been about to ask for just such a document was flustered. It would be impossible to establish a proper working relationship with the woman if she went around anticipating his needs. Deciding to salvage what dignity he thought the situation demanded, he nodded curtly as if he had expected no less, and marched towards the elevators.

He never said “thank you.” He never noticed how Mrs. Hernandez’ gaze followed him, her eyes growing colder with every step.

On the eighth floor, things were happening. Very loudly.

“Western Server Three is
not
handling the load! We need at least five-hundred more dedicated ports, preferably a thousand – no, I don’t care if Athens asked first.”

“Coffee please!”

“Rollout is complete for new areas in the Brokenheart, the East Sea, and the Glass Range. I am bringing the fog down now.”

“Will someone please tell me what just happened to the names registry for the Asia servers? How many logins before that thing locks up, anyway?”

“Does
anyone
have any more coffee?”

Bernardo observed it all for several minutes from the wrap-around observation deck, near the elevators. Despite the aura of chaos, he could see that things were going just about as well as possible with a project of this size. Privately, he had cautioned his father against going ahead with the update immediately after a complete change of administration, but the old man had been adamant, suggesting that the event had been so highly hyped to the gaming community that to delay now would cause incalculable public relations damage. Bernardo knew better. His father loved a show, and last night’s theatrics, coupled with this morning’s proceedings, constituted a showstopper.

Well, let the old man have his fun. Bernardo had not wasted his time at school, and knew with the confidence born of one who has never faced a serious challenge to his authority, that he could manage. The long-time employees might glance nervously up at him from time to time, uncertain how their new management figured into this, possibly the most technically demanding job they’d ever done, but he had plenty of his own people seeded down there, programmers and development leads who’d worked with him in previous divisions of Vital Enterprises. They’d let him know if anything were to go seriously wrong.

“And that’s three, and four, and five...all six of the new servers are now up, and ports are open.”

“Has anyone caught reviews yet?”

“I still need at least three hundred more ports on Western Three!”

“Coffee! Now!”

So far, they’d brought him nothing more troubling than reports that the rollout was too popular, and that additional hardware would have to be brought online to meet the demand. But there were some issues which would no doubt crop up later, and which Bernardo wanted to get a handle on now. He motioned over one of the programmers, a thin little man familiar to him from previous projects.

“Well then. How does it all look, Paul? Is, um, all the new content updated now?”

“Oh yes, absolutely, Mr. Calloway. No problems at all.”

“And, um, we haven’t received any, um...attention? I mean, regarding...it?”

Despite his resistance to his father’s dramatic ways, Bernardo couldn’t help the significant pauses in his question. He was, after all, up to something rather clandestine.

The programmer caught Bernardo’s guarded tone, and nodded in a way designed to convey assurance. “Not yet, Mr. Calloway. So far, it seems the end users are decidedly enthusiastic in their response. Our share is up, and all the reviews have been very positive. ‘Unprecedented degree of realism,’ I think I saw on GameTeknet. CompCast gave us five stars. UselessNet is withholding judgment, but they wouldn’t really ever give a mainstream product a positive review.”

Bernardo smiled perfunctorily. “Yes, yes, I’m sure the game thingy is quite nice and all, but what about the
update
.” He raised his eyebrows significantly.

The programmer looked confused. Dash it all, Bernardo thought, where was the fun in acting out a spy thriller if you had to spell everything out? He rolled his eyes in exasperation just as the programmer’s face lit up in recognition.

“Oh! The...er...
update
. Right. The, um,
extra
bits.”

Bernardo rolled his eyes and sighed deeply.

“The put-through is matching projections, and we’ve gotten some good early indicators of the influence which even—“

“Ahem!” Bernardo coughed loudly, then indicated the ranks of programmers, all busily attending to their duties, but well within earshot.

“Eh? Oh. Right you are, sir.” The little man lowered his voice. “As for the issue of, er, the extra functionality, we’ve received no word, either from end users or from the staff here who were unfamiliar with the full scope of the update. Dahlsim or I will certainly let you know the moment anyone brings it to our attention.”

“Excellent.” Bernardo wiped his brow, feeling sweat he hadn’t known he was generating, exhaling a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. “You do that.”

On the sixth floor, Wolfgang Wallace was looking over the bug report for the first day of the new rollout, when Janet Chen, his chief assistant, knocked on his door.

“Wolf, you got a minute?”

Wolfgang gestured her in and, on a second glance at Chen’s troubled features, thumbed the key on his desk which shut the door. “What’s up?”

Janet looked down at the floor. “Is there anything, um, unusual about the data format for the new updates? Are you guys using a different compression algorithm or something?” Wolfgang shook his head.

“Then there’s something very odd about these.” She handed over a small smartsheet which crawled with numbers. In the upper right corner was a bright green bar graph topped by a thin red line.

“I was totting up the bandwidth statistics when I got flagged by an old watchdog program that there was a data anomaly. The green graph designates actual bandwidth usage for the past forty-eight hours. You’ll notice the huge spike surrounding the rollout, and the subsequent peaks as each time zone picked up the new content.”

Wolfgang was already nodding. “They’re huge alright, but we expected that. Hell, given the marketing, I’d be more worried if we didn’t see huge bandwidth spikes. What’s the problem? Servers and ports are still handling the load, as far as I know.”

“That’s not it. See the red line?” Janet reached over and tapped the graphic, which obligingly expanded to fill the sheet in Wolfgang’s hand. At this magnification it was clear that the green bars of the graph were over the top of the red line for the majority of the day. “That line represents the bandwidth usage recorded at the servers. But the bandwidth usage picked up on the client end is greater. Sometimes by as much as three percent.”

“And your program caught this. What’s your guess? Memory leak?”

Chen looked decidedly worried by now. “That was my first thought, but a memory leak on this scale would be...well, it would be impossible to miss. And it wouldn’t have shown up like this anyway, it would show up on the server side. And it’s not localized.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning it’s system-wide. This pattern is showing up on all our servers, consequent with the rollout. Somehow, we’re sending out more data than we should be.”

Damn. The day had been going so well.

“Wolf, you know there’s only one explanation which fits this pattern.”

The large man leaned back in his chair and puffed out a massive sigh. “Data smuggling.”

Janet nodded. She didn’t look happy to find her suspicions confirmed.

In an age which relied on the security of company and personal secrets, the illicit transfer of information had become big business. From corporate espionage to identity theft rings to black market copies of the latest entertainment netcasts, there were as many reasons to smuggle data as there were laws against it. A bit of leaked information about a company’s internal affairs could ruin their stock value, and anyone in possession of that knowledge could make a sizeable fortune on any of the international exchanges. Netcasters in possession of their rivals’ development plans could anticipate their opponents and capture their market share. Scripts, treatments, manuscripts, patent applications, designs, financial statements, software…all had their black markets. The difficulty was finding a way to transfer these intangible goods from seller to buyer, without using publicly traceable line of communication...and large commercial server hubs, like those owned and operated by Archimago, were among the most common nodes for such practices.

The data Janet Chen was showing him indicated that somehow more data was being sent out over the Crucible’s game servers than was officially being generated by the game itself, and that made it likely that someone had hijacked their system and was using it to distribute illegal data. The only upbeat side to the problem was that it was so very common that there were standard procedures for halting it.

“It wouldn’t be the first time, Janet. About five years ago, a year or two before you joined the company, the Asian server got hijacked.” Wolf closed his eyes, ferreting out details from his prodigious memory. “A lot of industrial data was being snuck in over the public net to an employee, then out over our lines. To Ethiopia of all places, if I remember. We had to shut down the whole server for about two weeks while we revamped the security, changed all the codes, the whole thing.” He opened his eyes, and leaned over the paper, spinning the graphic sideways to assess the rate of information transfer.

“Don’t panic yet, Jan. We need to know how much is getting out, and if possible, where it’s going. The police asked us a lot of questions, I remember, about the target addresses for the data. Can you track that?”

Janet still looked concerned. “I thought about that, and I was going to ask security about it, but I wanted to bring this to you first. It’s standard that smuggled data is sent out to a single receiver, right? And one of the ways they break up these hijacking rings is by locating the target?”

Wolfgang nodded. “Yes. The sender could be anyone with access to the primary servers, and with the power to authorize downloading. We run a fairly open company, so that’s a lot of people. Heck, most of the actors who work as Catalysts have that authorization. So instead, you look for the recipient of the data, and work backwards. Why?”

“Because I looked for a recipient for the extra data, and there isn’t one.”

“I don’t understand. If there’s unaccounted data being sent over our game servers, it’s got to be going somewhere.”