World of Eternia: The Complete Collection (42 page)

“Well, I guess I will
leave the rest up to you, Lisa,” Richards says, jarring her focus
back to her boss. “I need to head back to my office.” He turns
toward Mark. “Please let me know if you need anything.” With a
nod, the CEO leaves the R&D section.

“If you gentlemen
will follow me to my office, I will show you the progress we have
made with our MMORPG so far,” Lisa says.

“Yes, please do,”
Mark nods in agreement. “We are anxious to get started.”

The project manager
sits in front of the CEO’s desk the next morning. Mark is anxious
to report on his findings on the status of Virtuous Gaming’s MMORPG
project, and to discuss how to merge their work so far into WoE.
How
will I break the bad news to Richard
, he ponders while
waiting for his boss to arrive.

The company head walks
into his office, and sees that Mark is already waiting for Richard.
“Good morning, Mark,” he greets the seated man as Richard hangs
his jacket on the hook behind his door.

Mark starts to get up
from his seat. “Good morning, Richard,” he replies.

“No, please remain
seated,” the President orders. “I will join you in just a
moment,” Richard says in a pleasant tone of voice.
There’s
no need to make him jiggery. I’m sure he’s already feeling
anxious over the upcoming joint match
, he thinks.

“Yes sir,” the
underling replies and remains seated.

Richard slowly takes
his seat and studies Mark’s face. The President sees someone who is
unwilling to meet Richard’s eyes, glancing downward at the nice
executive desk in front of Mark. “Was it that bad?” the CEO
surmises.

The project manager
lets out a deep breath. “Let’s put it this way: it is clear that
Virtuous Gaming’s product is maybe ten to twenty percent to
completion right now,” Mark begins. He leans back in his seat for
more comfort, and starts rattling out issues that he noticed. “You
mentioned that VG is having trouble raising capital, and to me it
shows in their progress in this project. Their game is missing a lot
of content, scripts, and objects. The world map they have right now
is far too small for an online game unless they are expecting a very
low number of players. The game designers haven’t made the most
basic decisions on how player progress is measured and at what rate
such progress is attainable. What is the monster scaling like? How
easy should resources be procured by players? To me, it just feels
like these guys are muddying along, the blind leading the blind, with
no real vision for completion of the game,” he concludes.

Richard grins at the
somber conclusion. “Well, VG is blessed to have you onboard now,”
he jokes.

Mark rubs his temples
with his fingers in a vain attempt to massage away an impending
headache. “Sir, I honestly doubt that we will be able to have the
joint tower defense match take place, unless you’re willing to
scale back—by a lot,” he concludes. “We will need to take short
cuts here and there. For starters we should limit the number of
players participating in this event. An affair for all comers will
break the game. Also, the easiest thing to do right now is to let VG
folks take over our oriental expansion,” he floats the suggestion
gingerly.

The President frowns
slightly at the notion of giving away the Oriental Expansion, and
losing all the revenue EDE is expected to pull in from the expansion.
This also discounts the costs in manpower that the company had spent
the past year in creating the expansion.

The project manager
sees the hesitation and reminds him gently. “Sir, the two companies
will be merging soon.”

“Are you certain this
step is necessary?” Richard asks while dreading the inevitable
answer. The boss can barely resist the urge to shout for the pudgy
man to get out of his office!

“If you want the
match to take place in about three weeks from today, yes it is
necessary,” Mark confirms. “We already have the content in place
on our end—the missions, the quests and quest givers, the monsters,
and the loot. The expansion could launch today, if we really wanted
to. We are simply beta testing the content to root out all the bugs.”

The project manager
pauses for a moment to catch his breath. “We can incorporate the
visual stuff that their artists at Virtuous Gaming have produced so
far, to make it look more like a joint project and let the VG folks
feel good about themselves.” Mark suddenly remembers. “By the
way, I noticed that Virtuous Gaming is using the same game engine
that we used for World of Eternia,” he notes. “Did VG obtain a
license from us to use it?” he asks.

“Considering that the
engine was co-written by their CEO and I, VG is legally entitled to
use it without paying us a licensing fee. I checked with several
intellectual property lawyers to confirm on that point,” Richard
replies.

Mark opens his mouth to
ask a follow up question, but the executive quickly cuts him off.

“I have to admit that
I’m surprised to hear that VG is so far behind the eight ball on
its own MMORPG product. I guess Virtuous Gaming’s inability to
raise capital from investors really set them back on this project,”
Richard continues.

“Do I have your
permission to approach my counterpart at VG to discuss turning our
Oriental Expansion over to them?” Mark asks, wisely allowing the
subject to drop. His boss is obviously not going to discuss the
matter any further, and in any event the issue is one between Richard
and his lawyers.

Richard nods sharply.
“Please keep me posted.”

The CEO waits patiently
for his employee to leave the office. Once Richard is sure that Mark
is gone, and no one else is waiting outside the office to speak with
the boss, Richard locks his door. He pulls out a small laptop
computer from his desk, a highly portable unit weighing less than
three pounds and carrying an eight inch screen. After the computer
boots up a minute later, Richard connects to a proxy server through
TOR, and from there enters a private chat room under the username,
“Lion King.”

Richard hesitates for a
moment, because the contractor he is about to use charges a lot for
his services in bitcoins. However, Richard’s ownership in the
company and everything he worked for is at stake now.
Be
brave
, the conflicted man reminds himself. “I have a job
for you,” he types.

A moment later, “DB”
replies. “What do you need?”

“A joint online
gaming event is being held between Virtuous Gaming Co. and Eternia
Development & Entertainment, Inc. in approximately three weeks,”
Richard types. “I need you to hack into the event and ensure that
the EDE side wins.”

The Digital Bandit
thinks for a moment about the proposed mission. “How stealthy do
you want my involvement to be?” he asks.

“I don’t care if VG
becomes aware of your hacking. They will simply pass it off as
another prank from you,” the Lion King responds. “You can hack in
pretending to be a VG game master, reduce all damage output from VG
players to, say, one percent of normal, and that should be enough to
turn the tide in EDE’s favor,” he suggests.

DB blanches at the
suggestion. It is simply too . . . boring for DB’s style of
hacking. But a job is a job as long as it is interesting to the
hacker and pays well, with money being the priority. “I want ten
times my usual fee in bitcoins,” he demands.
Let’s
see how desperate this fish really is
, the hacker smirks.

“What? That’s
outrageous!” Richard protests angrily.

“What you’re asking
for requires access to the game system settings. It is not a simple
thing to do, compare to, say, a dedicated denial of service (‘DDoS’)
attack. I would need a second hacker to come in first, muck around
VG’s system, and pull all the attention away from my intrusion and
attempt to access the system. So you’ll be paying for a two man job
that will take a longer amount of time to accomplish. This, in turn,
means that the job will carry more risk for me and my partner. Thus,
there needs to be additional compensation for these additional risk
factors,” DB explains. Of course, the assistant will be in it for
the thrill of the job itself, and won’t be compensated for the
work.

Richard retorts. “The
job won’t be ten times harder than usual.”

“The fee is
non-negotiable. If you don’t agree to pay this amount right now but
change your mind later, I won’t accept the job,” DB types back.
“I have a lot of jobs to do, and my schedule is tight.”

Richard weighs the cost
of this hack job against going into the event honestly, and relying
on his World of Eternia players, including The Strangers, to win out.
No, the risk of failure is too
great. Charles may be setting up a similar hire to interfere with WoE
players.
“Fine,” he types finally. “However, you get
half up front and the rest upon completion of the task. So if EDE
comes out the loser in this event, you won’t get the rest of the
fee.”

“LOL,” the Digital
Bandit types in response. “You forget who you’re dealing with. I
expect the upfront portion of my fee to be transferred to my account
within twenty four hours.”

“You’ll get it,”
Richard promises and exits the chat room.

Lisa Huffman knocks on
the door to draw the occupant’s attention.

Charles beckons her to
come into his corner office with a wave of his hand. He saves the
highlights that he had marked up on his computer while going over
Martin Pembrose’s financial report. After the CEO finishes
reviewing the CFO’s report and finalizes the edits with Martin, the
quarterly report will be sent out to Virtuous Gaming Co.’s
investors. Once the edited report has been saved on his hard drive,
Charles turns to his attention over to his vice president to receive
Lisa’s oral report on her meeting with the EDE group. “How did it
go yesterday?” he asks.

The R&D head draws
a tight smile on her face. “The EDE folks appeared to be quite
dismayed by our progress with our MMORPG,” she says with
embarrassment. It is one thing for in-house workers in the same
company to acknowledge this, but quite another to let outsiders
realize this too!

The CEO chuckles
lightly at her predicament and tries to reassure her. “No, I would
imagine those guys are freaking out over the apparent raw deal they
got on their end. That little pig man probably marched straight into
Richard’s office and swore up a storm over getting hoodwinked.
Clearly, their intellectual properties are worth much more than ours,
meaning that a one for one exchange is a sucker deal for them,” he
smirks. “So the ball is in Richard’s court to figure out a way
out of this mess.”

“Of our
doing—intentionally,” the VP adds quietly.

Charles waves a finger
at his employee. “You sound like you don’t approve of my tactic,”
he muses.

“May I have your
permission to speak frankly, sir?” Lisa asks gingerly.

“Go ahead,” he
gestures with another wave of his hand.

“This lowers our
reputations and mine specifically, in the eyes of EDE,” she points
out.

“I have two responses
to that,” the employer replies. “First, as the head and founder
of Virtuous Gaming, the ultimate responsibility falls on me
personally. So whatever flake you catch for the state of our MMORPG,
I get at least double your take,” he points out. “Second, as a
business man I think I made a really nice deal. I basically put
Richard in a bind now. He could publicly rescind the match with us
and create a public relations nightmare; I would expect many World of
Eternia players to drop their subscriptions in protest.
Alternatively, he would need to open his vault and give us the keys
to his product. Either way, it is a win-win proposition for us.”

“What do you think
their CEO will do?” Lisa asks.

“Richard is a bit of
a gambler at heart, so he would obviously roll the dice and continue
onward with our joint match,” Charles predicts. “He will lean on
that little fuzz ball to make it happen. If it means giving us access
to World of Eternia, Richard will do it. He doesn’t like to back
down from a challenge, especially when there are so many eyeballs on
him now. He will continue to forge ahead with the jointly held gaming
event.”

Charles smiles at his
game developer. “Just like Richard, I will also lean on my staff to
make this work. Make the best decisions you can to ensure that the
match will take place three weeks from now. You could make things a
bit more difficult for the other side, if you want. Stretch out the
negotiations for the settings of the match, for example. Extract as
much flesh and blood as you can. But do keep your eyes on the ball
and make sure that the match will take place as scheduled,” he
says.

Satisfied with the wide
latitude that the boss is giving her, Lisa leaves without another
word before the mercurial man changes his mind.

Mark Whitney calls up
Lisa Huffman at her office. “Hi, this is Mark the project manager
from EDE. We met last Friday,” he reminds her.

“Yes, I remember
you,” the VG employee replies.

“Hey listen, would it
be possible for you to come over to my office? I may have a short cut
to get the ball rolling for our inter-company match,” Mark says.

Lisa is intrigued by
what she hears.
Just like
Charles predicted
, she thinks. “I’ll be there in an
hour.”

“Great! See you
soon!” he replies enthusiastically and hangs up.

* * *

Lisa arrives at the
headquarters of Eternia Development & Entertainment, Inc. within
an hour, as promised. She sees Mark waiting at the front door of the
company building and smiles.