Massively Multiplayer (16 page)

“It’s not that easy,” Wolfgang said uncomfortably. “When I found this, I performed a new search looking for patterns like this one. Desk, open ‘Suspects-two.’” A neat gray rectangle snapped open in the air between the two programmers, shunting the graph aside. Within the new box was a list of names, locations, and access times, with small scroll bars indicating that the directory extended well beyond those in view.

Janet sighed unhappily. “How many?”

“Over eight thousand,” Wolfgang said. “In over thirty countries. Unless this is a ridiculously widespread smuggling ring, we’re looking at something else entirely.”

Chen’s brow furrowed. “Why isn’t this job ever simple? What do we do now?”

“I’ve been thinking that what we need now is to subdivide the—“

They were interrupted by a sharp dinging sound from the desk, accompanied by a small flashing ruby light. Wolfgang sighed and touched it with an outstretched finger. A smaller rectangle opened to one side of the directory, displaying a picture of a young woman with wavy hair. A text box identified her as one of the line programmers who regularly worked the floor of the central game operations center upstairs. “Yes,” Wolfgang asked.

“Mr. Wallace, we’ve got a little something you might need to take a look at up here. Could you come up to station twelve?”

“Can it wait? I’m kind of busy. Maybe you could send it to my desk.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wallace, it’s a little, uh, visual. It really does display better up here, sir. And you left a standing order to be notified if an internal architecture flaw seemed to be effecting user experience. We’re getting some weird content. I could put a hold on it for...”

“Nooooo,” said Wallace slowly. “I’d better take a look. I’ll be right up.” He closed his desk display down with a wave of his hand, then stood and eyeballed Janet Chen. “Do you believe in coincidence?”

“Sure,” Chen said. “I got into this company because I liked the idea of magical occurrences. That doesn’t mean I think it’s true this time. Besides, I don’t get nearly enough chances to actually play anymore, or even watch on the big screens upstairs.”

Wolfgang clucked his tongue in sympathy. “And to think, you wanted things to be ‘simple.’”

The eighth floor presented it’s usual combination of grace and chaos. Line programmers monitored dozens of holographic stations around the room, sampling the flow of events inside the game world, inserting new routines, objects, actions, and events in order to keep the world of Crucible both operational and novel. Against the far wall, the large flatscreens displayed scenes which the server computers had determined might require human attention. Soundproof doors radiated from the main floor to individual workrooms where actors and programmers could work in concert, when needed.

Right now, however, Wolfgang’s attention was drawn to station twelve on the main floor, near the base of the stairwell leading down from the observation platform on which he stood. Several programmers, including the woman who had contacted his office, had clustered there and were gesticulating at a floating display, wearing various expressions of confusion.

The open-framed steel steps rang under his bulk as he made his way gingerly down the steps and over to the work station. Closer, he could see that the display was a patchwork of small blocks, accompanied by strings of glowing red letters.

“It’s got to be legacy data that crept in when we went through the update.”

“You’re out of your mind! Look at the seaming! This was intentional.”

“By who? And how? And
why
?”

“It’s a duplication artifact, I tell you! Run a check for congruence!”

“Folks,” Wolfgang said, clearing his throat, “if you could all calm down for a second, and show me what’s going on...”

Abashed, the knot of people cleared the way. He nodded to the woman with the wavy hair. “You. Can you please show me what’s up? And everybody else, pipe down. You can stay if you have any insight into this, but otherwise, please back up a little.”

“Thank you for coming, Mr. Wallace. I’m sorry to disturb you with this, but it’s...” the programmer gestured helplessly at the worried faces around her. “We’re all baffled.”

“Take it slow,” Wolfgang advised her.

“Yes sir. Well, the short version is that we have a bunch of what appear to be unregistered geographic detail zones showing up within the game.”

“Clarify that for the hardware engineers among us,” Janet Chen suggested over Wolfgang’s shoulder.

“Yes ma’am. Everywhere in the game is divided up into logical zones: by the seven countries, for starters, then by sub-regions, like counties or states within a country, then by specific geographic features, like a range of mountains, or a town, or a river. This division makes it easier to for the computer and for human operators to alter the statistics for an area: the weather, the flora and fauna, the rate of population growth, and so on. It also makes it easier to back-up and copy data, just like the file and sub-file system on any computer.

“The smallest division before you get into individual objects like trees or houses or rocks is the geographic detail zone. That might be a specific inlet on a bay, or a particular street in a town, or a cave in a mountainside. It’s the type of place we generate encounters for end users. Normally – no, always, universally, absolutely – these detail zones are placed by the design division, which clears it through system architecture, and then it gets fed into an update. And these zones are always tacked on to the outer fringes of explored territories in the game. It’s one of the ways we create a linear experience for users, since new characters always begin in known towns and branch outwards as they progress, and experienced characters get the benefit of new areas to explore.”

“And now?” Wolfgang prompted.

“Yes, except for now. These,” the programmer turned and gestured at the blocks of light floating above her workstation, “are areas which we’ve discovered don’t fit. They aren’t listed in the general geographic database. There is no record of them in any of the design documents we’ve seen, and there’s no memory allocated for them in the system. For the most part, they’ve appeared in the middle of developed zones, between or within existing geographic details. And we have no idea what the hell they are.”

“How did you discover them?” Janet asked.

“We didn’t,” the programmer muttered defensively. “We weren’t really looking for them because there’s no reason for them to be there. A few of us found some mention of supposed new areas popping up within developed zones, in some of the reviews of the recent update, but we figured they were mistaking the new content for new areas. Then, this morning, the Central Monitor on the Western server tracked a group of high-circle adventurers into a ruin, where there wasn’t supposed to be anything but volcanic ash. The CM program keeps a lookout for events or conflicts which might alter the game’s general history or storyline, so it threw the scene up onto the big screens here and squawked for help.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, Brad Singh – that’s him over there – caught the squeal and pulled it down to his desktop, thinking it was a standard quest node: a place for a story to be related which would start some players on an adventure. But he couldn’t find any background listed for this ruin in the database, and he figured out it wasn’t even supposed to be there.”

“What did he do?” Wolfgang asked.

“Nothing. He tried, though. He called up one of the Catalysts from downstairs and they went into one of the workrooms. The actor – Martin something – manifested as a guardian spirit and made up some great stuff about those who would defile a dead city needing to face the dead themselves...really good impromptu work, it rhymed and everything. But we couldn’t access any addresses within the zone, so we couldn’t insert him. Eventually the adventurers got into an argument over some loot and started PK-ing each other. Knives in the back, spells flying around, you know how bad the player-killing can get in the really high circles. Survivor limped away. Bloody mess.”

“And then?”

“Well, we figured there might be something to the reviews we’d been reading, so three of us hacked up a quick search for areas that didn’t match the design database, and saw where things had been shifted around by the incorporation of new areas into existing zones. That’s where we got this.” She indicated the display again. “And then we called you.”

“Why me, particularly,” Wolfgang asked, though he was pretty sure he knew the answer already.

“Because this effects users directly,” she answered promptly. “And I know you care a lot about...um, I mean, there’s a standing order to contact you. You know. If an apparent system error is effecting players.” She trailed off lamely, blushing, apparently a little embarrassed by her momentarily over-familiar tone with the man who was, after all, head of the entire systems department.

Or was it something else? Wolfgang raised an eyebrow. Interesting. He decided to file the observation away for later contemplation, then rescued her. “What are these?”

She turned back to the floating display with clear relief. “These numbers next to each block are the number of users who’ve accessed each unauthorized zone since the rollout, which is the earliest recorded data we have.”

“Range?”

“Varies. There’s a new street in the capitol of Ghallad that over sixteen-hundred users have walked down. This one over here is a cave on a mountain in the middle of nowhere, that no-one has seen at all.”

“Can you limit user access?” Janet asked.

“We tried,” the programmer admitted. “But to place a barrier around something, you need a way to address it, and these areas don’t have any address. We can’t block off the surrounding areas without disrupting the system.”

“What about deletion?” Wolfgang asked.

“We were waiting for you first.”

“Try it now.” Wolfgang held up a cautionary finger. “On a small one, far away from users. Try that cave.”

The programmer obligingly plucked the corresponding block from the display with her fingertips. “I can’t delete it directly because of the addressing problem,” she noted, “but I can delete anything which is between any other addresses.” She spoke quietly to her workstation for a moment. She shook her head “No good,” she reported. “According to the database, there’s nothing there, so there’s nothing to delete.”

Wolfgang whistled tunelessly under his breath. “What are the current theories?”

One of the observers spoke up. “These things popped up when we did the rollout of the update, so they’ve got to be related. I’m guessing it’s artifacts from the programmers who came in with the new management.”

“You have no proof of that!” declared a little man with a thick beard. “We were responsible for textures and soundscapes. All design went through
your
in-house division!”

“That’s not it,” Wolfgang rumbled, heading off the fight. “Even if the incoming program team from Vital Enterprises did design any geography, it would have shown up in the general database. The rollout was counter-confirmed.”

“What about duplication?” another voice offered. “Could these be echo effects, created by redundancy errors? That way you might design one street, but the world generator might accidentally create four.”

“Worth a shot,” Wolfgang acknowledged. “See if, oh, that one right there, matches anything in the known database.” The seated programmer ran a quick comparison between the chosen target, a large house on a promontory overlooking the sea, and the central database which catalogued the geography of the Crucible game. She shook her head.

“Nope,” Wolfgang confirmed, “there’s nothing like these in the known database, so it’s not a copying error. These are unique.”

“Are we sure they’re intentional?” a man at his elbow asked.

“I’m sure,” the seated programmer said, and Wolfgang nodded. “Look at how seamlessly the rocks on this cave wall match those of the surrounding mountain. And these trees in this grove are the same kind as those in the forest. No, this matches too closely to be data artifacts. This is on purpose.”

A babble of accusations and defenses broke out, making it impossible for Wolfgang to hear any one theory. Janet Chen had been peering closely at the numbers in the desk display, and now raised her voice over the din. “Wolf, do you notice anything about the user statistics?”

Wolfgang saw where she was going. “I just bet,” he muttered. He pushed in next to the seated programmer, who scooted aside quickly. “Mind if I use your desk for a second?” She shook her head, and Wolfgang quickly accessed his own desktop remotely through the building’s intranet. “Retrieve and open ‘Suspects-two’ to this station,” he commanded. Obligingly, the desktop opened up a gray box containing the list of users who had heavily accessed the anomalous data Janet Chen had first discovered. “Query sum, uh, this” Wolfgang said stabbing a thick finger into the tangle of glowing data, “ummm, total.” A new box opened up and Wolfgang dragged it over the file from his desk. “Query compare,” he ordered.

Every name in the box turned green.

“No such thing as coincidence,” Wolfgang breathed. “A one-hundred percent match. That’s one mystery down and about five-hundred more created.”

The surrounding programmers had quieted as Wolfgang performed this operation. “Wait a minute,” one asked now, “did you already know about this?”

“Not a clue,” Wolfgang admitted happily. “But I now know why the bandwidth has been running high since rollout. Every time a user walked past one of these shadow zones, he made a blip in the bandwidth which wasn’t accounted for by regular data. And if they actually walked down that street, or entered that ruin, or interacted with the zone, the unauthorized usage spiked. Score one for Ms. Chen.” He tipped an imaginary hat.

“That still doesn’t explain where this material came from,” Janet reminded him. “It just shows that whoever did this wasn’t too concerned with covering his tracks. Now why’s it there?”

“All in good time,” Wolfgang said, thoroughly pleased with himself. “This could be a hack, or a prank, or any number of things. The data itself would tell us what. Now that we know it’s game data, that’s going to be the easy part.” He turned back to the seated programmer, who now looked hopeful. “How close a look have you gotten at one of these shadow zones?”