Spiteful Healer

Chapter 268: Down the Rabbit Hole

Several Real World Months Earlier…

An older gentleman was sitting calmly in a large, deep brown chair with a tall backing and deep blue cushions sewn into it, located inside a rectangular office room. His chair pulled up to a long rectangular table that matched the room's shape and went down the center. Many less prestigious chairs lined the table in front of him. All seats were occupied by individuals of various ethnicities and genders, wearing formal business attire.

Behind him, several screens could be seen floating in the air, partially transparent. They displayed all manner of numbers, charts, and graphs—statistics centered around the profits, player base, and performance of Shattered World Online and the company that ran it, Averon.

The man himself was in his mid-40s. He had short dark brown hair with strands of gray sneaking in near the front and sides. He was clean-shaven and fit, with broad shoulders that filled out his black-and-white suit and tie. His head was tilted slightly downwards towards the table, where his fingers were interlocked to form a single fist as he listened intently to another individual speaking at the table.

“The fact is, if you cannot guarantee the safety of our investments in your virtual game world, there’s no way we can consider it. We’re demanding that any virtual establishments we choose to open in your world’s major hubs be protected by your game rules so that they cannot be laid to waste by any players seeking to do evil. It’s not an unreasonable request to make.” The man, a few seats away, finished speaking to the gentlemen at the end of the table.

Once he was sure he’d finished speaking, the older gentleman, who went by the name of Nicholas, looked up to meet his eyes and gave him a momentary deadpan stare.

“If you want protection for your virtual establishments, you must acquire it yourself. Hire bodyguards or mercenaries. That is the cost of doing business within the Shattered World. I will not modify the rules of my game and sacrifice its integrity to accommodate corporate interests. If you cannot establish yourselves within the Shattered World by adhering to the harsh realities of it, then it simply isn’t a place for you. There are plenty of other businesses who have transitioned to opening shops and selling relevant goods and have had great success, without any intervention by any Game Masters.” Nicholas replied as calmly and politely as possible.

“I’m sure there are, but I’ve seen the numbers - more than half fail. Their supply chains, or the establishments themselves, fall victim to what you would call ‘bandit’ players. You allow these players to run rampant in your game world, and if you aren’t willing to do something about them on our behalf, we can’t possibly consider investing in growing your virtual economy.” The man replied.

“Yes, he’s right.” A businesswoman from another investment company chimed in, motioning to several of the floating monitors behind Nicholas. “Look at this, this island has had almost every player-owned business wiped out. All due to a single player who has come into the possession of a powerful artifact. Puagas, they call it.” She explained while pointing out the graphs and charts that supported what she was saying.

“It’s all part of the game world’s design. Where there is light, there will always be darkness. As I explained initially, this all falls within our player behavior model. Nothing has gone out of our expected range.” Nicholas replied while using his wrist implant to move several screens forward and enlarge them for all to see.

“On average, we anticipated that 30 to 40% of the player base would align themselves with light-based forces and play within the confines of the laws of the Kingdoms they choose to reside in. That number currently sits at 42%. Our predicted 10% of players leaning towards the dark gods and evil forces currently sits at 6%. The remainder, a section of the player base that leans towards neutral by committing minor crimes while simultaneously doing good and, therefore, not leaning heavily in either direction, sits at 50%. With 2% of the player base unable to be properly categorized yet by our systems due to their lack of interactions within the game world thus far.” Nicholas explained. He then waved a few more screens around.

“What transpired within Puagas, while unfortunate, is still well within our projected numbers. In a way, we can be thankful, as the dark aligned players are being drawn towards that island, leaving the other islands relatively free from their destruction. You’d only need to worry about petty crimes, something you have to manage in the real world as well. I think it’s well within your capabilities to handle them yourself.”

“But this isn’t the real world.” The original man spoke up once more. “It’s your virtual world. You can take away those threats and let our businesses thrive. It’s profitable for b-”

“I will not give you an unfair advantage. I will not compromise the integrity of the game world. Everyone plays by the same rules. The AI that handled the main design of the world has followed the parameters we set for it nearly perfectly, and has done so in a way to keep the world balanced to our liking. The intricacies behind its decisions are, in some situations, far beyond even my comprehension. Going in personally and tweaking values to rebalance the game world is irresponsible at best and catastrophic at worst, as we wouldn’t know just how far-reaching such changes would be. We will not modify the game rules unless it is related to an exploit, bug, or malfunction. That’s my final decision on the matter.” Nicholas replied, his voice slowly getting louder and more authoritative.

“Sure, a hands-off approach is nice and all, but… I’ve seen how that goes in the long term. You’ve let one dark group of players completely take over an island. What’s to stop them from going to take over the next one? And the next?”

“Other good players, obviously.” Another man in a business suit chimed in on Nicholas’ behalf.

“Hah. You overestimate gamers.” The businesswoman scoffed.

“I agree. If this is your approach, I predict that anyone who's invested in your virtual world will lose their investments in due time. And with that in mind, we’ll not be opening any virtual establishments within your major hubs in Savringard, Lanusk, and Arallia.”

“So be it. I’m sorry you feel that way. Any other questions?” Nicholas shrugged nonchalantly and stood up from his chair. He got no response, so promptly bowed as politely as he could to the group. “Very well. Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen. I must be on my way.” He added, then hit a few buttons on his wrist implant. Once he had, the office simulation that he’d been in ended, revealing him to have been sitting in a smooth, slick silver Simbox that opened up.

In the real world, he wore an all-white, form-fitting Simulation suit that showed off his fit, muscular form. Impressive, given his older age of 49. He swung his legs over the side of his Simbox inside his real-world office. His box was set to the side beside a large wooden desk with a huge shelf built into the wall behind it. The shelf was filled with gaming paraphernalia of all sorts. Miniatures, consoles, and game boxes, with posters lining the empty walls to the left and right of all manner of creatures. Some 3d, some 2d - some monstrous, some muscular, and plenty of beautiful female characters in questionably revealing outfits. The room was dimly lit, as he liked it, giving a nice cozy feeling.

He’d hoped to get up and head over to his desk, where multiple computer monitors were waiting for him, their screens lit up and illuminating the shelf behind the desk. Instead, though, he saw two eager young men waiting for him, wearing casual attire and standing with their backs straight across the room from his Simbox.

He’d recognized one of them as his Chief Offensive Security Specialist, Mike. He was on the larger side with a receding gray hairline. The other, a much younger employee with short spiky black hair and a scrawny build, he’d never seen before in his life, though.

“Damn investors, like parasites. I have to play nice and pretend I actually care if they try to play our game. They really think they deserve some special treatment.” Nicholas grumbled as he stood up and walked towards his desk. Neither Mike nor the young man replied but just listened. “They still don’t realize I made this game world to escape that mentality.” He shook his head to himself, taking off his Simulation suit’s gloves and setting them down on his desk before turning to face the two men. “What is it, Mike?”

“We’ve got a problem,” Mike replied, giving Nicholas a serious stare.

“How bad?” Nicholas asked.

“I’ll let this young man explain. He’s the one who discovered it.” Mike motioned to the younger boy beside him, no older than 25 years old. With both Nicholas and Mike’s eyes falling on him, he suddenly got very anxious. “Just tell him what you told me and how you found it.” Despite this prompt, the young man remained frozen with wide, glistening eyes as he stared at Nicholas.

“Uh, sorry. Sorry sir, it’s just… I’ve studied your work in school. It’s, well, I never imagined meeting you.” He quickly became flustered. “I mean, the world you created with Samantha, it’s just… it’s so incredible. I’m such a huge fan!”

“What’s your name, son?” Nicholas asked him politely with a forced smile.

“Uh, me? I’m Ryan.”

“Alright, Ryan. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Nicholas stepped forward and shook Ryan’s hand, who complied excitedly with glowing eyes. “Now, tell me what it is you discovered.”

“Right, okay, sorry, sir.” Ryan nodded back at him furiously. “Do you mind?” He then motioned to the computer screens on Nicholas’ desk.

“Go ahead.” Nicholas welcomed him to them with a hand gesture.

“Okay, so…” Ryan rushed over to the monitors and connected his wrist implant to them with a few taps, then made sure 6 of the 9 screens rotated to face the three men in the room. He focused on his implant for a bit, mumbling to himself as he carefully put various information and in-game footage from the Shattered World on display.

“The first thing that set me off was this.” He motioned to the center screen, where a clip of Makaroth was paused. “I’ll play the clip so that you can understand it fully. Honestly, I’m not surprised no one else caught it…” Ryan explained as he hit the play button.

A clip began to play of Makaroth battling a raid boss alongside several of his guild members. The boss, a giant scorpion with glowing red skin, was enraged and frantically stabbing its stinger around within a confined beige-walled cavern. The sound of the clip overtook the room as all three men watched it intently, observing the battle unfold.

Makaroth’s group, at the time level 50’s, was struggling to handle the boss and were losing members one by one as the guardian class player of Makaroth’s guild had gotten taken out, leaving no one to take control of the creature’s behavior. It wasn’t long before everyone had been killed except Makaroth.

“You’re not winning that easily.” Makaroth gritted his teeth and drew out his greatsword, glowing with blue magical energy. The scorpion let out a violent hiss and roared at Makaroth, and Makaroth eyed his health bar to see that he was one hit from dying to the boss. Makaroth carefully dodged the scorpion’s stinger, charged past it, and slashed his sword into the boss's head, landing the finishing blow and killing it with him, the only player still standing.

“Quite an epic moment,” Nicholas commented as Ryan paused the clip. Nicholas turned from the screen to look at Ryan carefully.

“A little bit too on the nose, don’t you think? Something felt off about it, but as no one else had fought this boss, it was hard for me to say anything was wrong with just the footage. So…” Ryan waved his fingers around and drew attention to several other screens, where raw text data and game log information began zooming past. A secondary view of the battle was then pulled up using the AI’s perspective of the Elite Scorpion.

“I looked into the boss's Elite behavior and found this.” Ryan pulled up what he was getting at. A line of code that stood out from the standard AI’s protocols in controlling an AI elite monster, which blocked the boss from dropping below 1 health.

“The hell is that?” Nicholas squinted at it. “That shouldn’t be in there.”

“No. Someone put it in there, but look…” Ryan then ran the AI’s point of view of the encounter backward, and the line of code vanished from the boss's protocol. “It wasn’t there before the boss got enraged. And, when we go further…” Ryan fast-forwarded the encounter until the last moment after Makaroth’s last allied member died. Immediately after, the protocol was removed, unlocking the scorpion’s health and allowing it to die.

“Someone added a protocol into that raid boss so that it couldn’t be killed until only Makaroth was left alive to kill it on his own,” Ryan explained.

“I couldn’t really understand why someone might want to do that, but then Ryan said…” Mike began to explain, but Nicholas needed no further explanation.

“They manufactured a theatrical moment,” Nicholas said, scratching his chin. “That’s the number one streamer, right?”

“Right.” Ryan nodded.

“Alright. You’ve got my attention, Ryan.” Nicholas said as he took over the displays with his wrist implant and gathered information. “The only people who could have made direct modifications to the AI code on the fly like that are our employees. We could isolate our search to determine who worked during this event, but that still leaves us in the hundreds. Regardless, a change like this is forbidden for Game Masters. Samantha should have caught it.” Nicholas hit his wrist implant a few more times until a floating white holographic head of a beautiful female appeared above all of the screens.

“Samantha, somebody modified the AI behavior of one of your Elite Boss NPCs. You didn’t flag this or detect it?” Nicholas asked the floating head.

“I did not,” Samantha replied in a robotic female voice.

“They managed to do it without you noticing. I want you to figure out how they did it.” Nicholas asked her.

“Yes, sir, I’ll begin computing possibilities right away,” Samantha replied before the floating head vanished from the office. This drew the three men's attention back to the list of employees that Nicholas had pulled up.

“It’s also possible they did it while off work, without being clocked in, so long as they were still working from this building where the mainframe is located,” Ryan explained, which gave pause to Nicholas’ search.

“If we want to find out who did it, we’re going to need to be able to narrow our search parameters,” Mike said.

“You’ve got a way to do that?” Nicholas raised his eyebrow at the pair.

“Well, I dug into it further after I found this event and have made quite a few connections. This isn’t the first time it’s happened, and there is a pattern. It’s not always Makaroth, but it is always one of the VGN streamers.”

“VGN?” Nicholas asked.

“Virtual Gaming Network. It’s a newer network that began rising in popularity with the launch of our game. They picked up several unknown names and have been managing to dwarf the popularity of other previously well-known networks and streamers due to the performance of their contracted players.” Mike explained.

“The more I looked into it, the more suspicious it all became,” Ryan said as he began pulling up information on two screens. “On each island, VGN contracted a player with an incredibly high play time, a streamer with low popularity but high activity. Look at Feng on Lanusk, Yumily on Arallia, Makaroth on Savringard, and even the Hatred wielder Seraxus from Puagas. There’s at least one on each of the major islands, except for Kalmoore, which lacks any major Great Prophets or Landmarks.” Ryan explained while fidgeting with his implant and pulling up a few more screens.

“Once contracted, soon after, the players began growing at an accelerated rate. They somehow acquired information on the most efficient leveling methods on each of their respective islands.” Ryan said as he pulled up charts of the viewership growth of multiple VGN streams.

“It’s possible the network bought that information through some of the dark gaming networks. That’s not that uncommon…” Mike suggested.

“Yeah, I looked into that too. I’m a part of a few of the networks myself, just to keep track of their activity. Nothing about their grinding locations was ever mentioned on those networks. They just, somehow, knew how to level extremely fast on every island. This shot them ahead of all of the competition. Pairing that with random theatrical moments like the one I showed you, of which I found numerous - VGN is now the leading network for the Shattered World Online.”

“So whoever’s making these modifications and leaking this information is clearly doing it on behalf of the network.” Nicholas began scratching his chin with a worried look on his face.

“Even if they are, they’ve already shot up in the hundreds of millions of profits due to the popularity of all of their streamers. If we want to go after them, we will need rock-solid evidence that they’re the ones behind it.” Mike explained to the two.

“Do you have that?” Nicholas turned to Ryan.

“No. Unfortunately, we need to first find out which person in our company is the one behind the AI protocol alterations. They’re also likely the ones leaking gameplay information to the VGN streamers. Once we find them, if we can link them to VGN, we’d have something.”

“Right. But if they know that we’re onto them, things will be more difficult.” Nicholas sighed as he pulled up a list of his offensive security specialists and game masters. Before he could go further, though, Samantha’s head reappeared above the monitors.

“I have discovered how the modifications were made.” Samantha declared.

“Explain,” Nicholas answered.

“Elite NPCs are run from a separate server than the game world. An Elite NPC's personality is based on their experiences and thus allows them to have realistic behavioral growth and change on their own. These changes do not flag my system, as all Elite NPCs experience them regularly. The personality of the Scorpion was altered so that it would refuse to die unless slain by a specific person, as a characteristic of who the Scorpion was. A modification was made to the Scorpion’s experience through the server that specifically controlled its Elite personality so that I did not notice the change.”

“Can you tell me who made the changes?”

“No. The information on the Elite Bosses' personalities are wiped and reset whenever they are killed, including who or what influenced them to change.” Samantha explained.

“Clever.” Nicholas shook his head towards his feet briefly.

“Can you set up a system to detect further changes like this?”

“No need. I’ve already corrected the security flaw. No Game Masters will be able to modify the behavior of elite NPCs anymore.”

“Don’t correct it yet,” Nicholas replied. “Let the flaw remain, but set up detection for it. I want you to catch the person who is responsible for making these changes. Alert me when you catch another person making changes like this, alright?”

“Yes, sir. Is there anything else you’d like me to do?” Samantha asked.

“Can you tell me if these AI modifications will have any lasting impact on the balance of your world design?”

“At the moment, no. But player behavior is still something very difficult for me to anticipate.”

“Okay. That’ll be all then.” Nicholas said, prompting her floating head to disappear. Once it had, Nicholas turned back to Mike and Ryan, and saw Ryan staring at where Samantha’s head had been with glowing eyes of amazement.

“Wow… that’s her? The AI that runs the Shattered World Online? There’s a rumor going around that she’ll show up in person whenever a player interacts with a god. Is that true?” Ryan asked Nicholas excitedly.

“You play the game yourself?” Nicholas smiled at him, avoiding the question.

“Yeah, of course! I love it! I mean, I’m only level 28, but anytime I’m not working, I’m playing.” Ryan replied.

“Great. I guess if you want that question answered, you’ll have to meet a god, huh?” Nicholas grinned ear to ear, happy to see someone so enthusiastic about his game.

“Yeah, yeah. Of course. Wouldn’t want spoilers.” Ryan nodded back at him.

“Thanks for bringing this to my attention. For now, all we can do is wait until Samantha catches their next attempt. I’ll let you both know when that happens.”

“Right. Yes, of course. It was an honor, sir.” Ryan bowed respectfully.

“Keep me updated. I want to fire the punk who did it myself.” Mike also bowed, and the two quickly left the office, leaving Nicholas alone with the screens. The list of employees remained floating in front of him.

“Someone’s trying to mess with my world.” He grumbled to himself, angrily clenching his fists - an anger he was keeping hidden while his employees were still in the office with him.