Tunnel Rat Volume 1 will be be STUBBING on NOV. 1st!

Milo and the old man were standing in a field of short grass that came up past his ankles. Wildflowers were in bloom, lending their sweet smell to the air. Overhead, fluffy white clouds slowly moved across a bright blue sky where the brilliant sun shone down. Mountains ringed the area, miles in the distance.

It was quite a beautiful area. And totally alien to Milo in every way.

Milo slowly turned in a circle, staring at the wide-open spaces and the huge sky above. He didn't like it. He didn't like it one bit! It made him nervous; there was nowhere to go, no place to hide. The old man just stood smiling. "You may refer to me as Galet. Are you ready to begin the tutorial?"

"Tutorial? No. I'm not ready."

The old man bowed and smiled. "We will begin slowly then. There is a sword in the grass in front of you; please pick it up and hit the orc approaching you. Don’t worry; he won’t attack you."

Milo saw the glint of metal and picked up the sword. It was sort of awkward. A long piece of metal with sharp edges. "Orc?"

"Right behind you. Slash at the orc with your sword."

Milo spun around, nearly losing his balance, and saw that a person with green skin was behind him. They were as tall as him and heavily muscled, wearing some furs and leather clothing. In the orc’s hand was a club of twisted wood. Milo looked at the orc, and the orc stood there looking at him. "Why am I supposed to hit the guy, and where the hell did he come from?" That last part bothered Milo a lot! How had this guy snuck up on him? He panicked.

Milo started running, putting distance between himself and the threat. There was nowhere to hide! After a minute, he turned and saw two figures in the distance. He was safe from them, but the sky pressed down, and the vast open space was a threat he couldn't outrun. He could feel the panic growing inside him. He disconnected.

Milo came out of the pod, panting, not caring that he had interrupted the scan. He manually pushed up the lid and climbed out of the pod. His house calmed him. He was safe here. He made sure all his alarm systems were on, did a quick scan of the areas nearby, and then climbed into his normal bed, exhausted.

Four hours later, he awoke and ate a meal of food cubes. He remembered the smells in the weird game. A person’s sense of smell was a large component of how they tasted food. Could you taste food in the game, too? He had questions, but he also had work to do. Putting aside thoughts of the game, he got started.

Things went bad quickly if he didn't pay attention. Today's main job was a clog in one of the lines that took wastewater to the fluid recycler. The pipes were old and no longer smooth on their inner surfaces. Stuff built up, and things got stuck, slowly narrowing the pipes. Then a chunk upstream broke loose, making a dam downstream. The other pipes took up the load, but only for so long. Eventually, all the pipes would be clogged and cause an emergency.

Luckily this time, the clog eaters responded. The machines were like mechanical moles. They moved through the pipes chewing up the clogs and cleaning the pipe lining. Two hours later, things were good as new. He was down to only two of the clog eaters, though. Being used constantly for years wore the machines out. He’d scavenged all the working and broken clog-eaters he could find from abandoned sections, but he was out of machines he could scavenge. He needed at least one more. They each weighed half a ton and were hard to move. Tomorrow he could check out other sectors and see about swapping one of his broken ones for a working model. The maintenance guys in that sector would have the job of finding replacements. That didn’t bother him; they could order them, he couldn’t.

At the end of the day, he approached the pod again. He needed this to work. It had been foolish to start up a VR game without doing research into it. Two hours of reading on the data net had given him more information about what to expect

This game was the latest in a series of huge Virtual Reality Worlds that had been created by AI using quantum computers. The other games were shut down now, and this one was just starting up. There were endless articles and speculation on the game but little hard data until it had gone live last week.

It was like another world in there, but it was a fantasy. Unlike the real world in so many ways. Huge spaces with just wilderness, unspoiled lands, and blue skies. Nothing at all like Milo's world of small tunnels, grimy corridors, and broken machinery. And nothing like the endless cities that grew larger each year.

He realized he had suffered a bout of panic. Keno phobia, to use the medical term, and probably Agoraphobia as well. A fear of open spaces and panic reactions when he had nowhere to hide. Understandable but annoying.

Normally, he dealt with fear by running and finding somewhere to hide. He had planned escape routes and safe houses all over the habitat. That didn’t help him in the game. How do you hide from the sky? He wasn't sure if it was permanent or just a reaction to the surprise of being 'outside' for the first time. He planned to do things differently in his next attempt

Step one was finishing the medical scan. That had to come first. He had downloaded a huge amount of info on the game, put the data into a storage device, and hooked that up to the pod. He could read and learn about the game while the scan was running and then tackle the game the next day. He set up the medical scan again, refused the offer to play a game, and started reading about Genesis Online.

The game had been created by an AI. Or rather, The AI. There was only one Quantum AI in the world now, and he was kept on a very short leash. Endless books had been written about the rise and fall of the AI that man had created and then began to fear. Milo’s opinion was that they were hugely annoying to him and his family when they were trying to work. How many times had they been about to delve into the secrets of some plump bank when they felt the presence of something enormous in cyber-space and had to abandon their efforts? Each of the 106 AI in existence had a special task to do, but some of them patrolled the internet and the newly invented data network, looking for people like Milo and his brothers and sisters. They were never caught, but only because they never took chances and broke off any operation as soon as someone detected the watchdogs.

Ironically, it was another AI that let them increase productivity a hundredfold and give their captors a huge windfall of cash and data. Someone had created an AI whose expressed purpose was causing havoc in the world. It spread viruses throughout the internet and jumped from system to system, always a step ahead of the AI tasked with finding it. And it was malicious. It didn’t steal; it only destroyed. Milo didn’t have to break into a corporation anymore; the security around bank accounts and data was like Swiss cheese. In the time that the Wildfire virus and the rogue AI were active, they stole hundreds of Billions of dollars, ransacked databases, and made their captors rich. Drugged, conditioned from birth, and locked into pods, they had no choice. Children raiding the world in a way that would have made Attila proud and jealous.

Milo hadn’t done anything like that for years. He had no equipment, no connection, and none of the specialized programs designed by someone and modified by his family. While he had hidden in the habitat, slowly building an existence, the AI had gone away. Humans didn’t trust them anymore to run critical systems. Instead, they used them to make virtual reality games and kept them away from the resources of huge resources of quantum computers where they used to live. And at some point, someone had decided they were needed. Four different groups of cyber-terrorists claimed responsibility for the EMP that destroyed their facility. Exactly which one was never publicly released. The information was incomplete, and Milo didn’t concern himself with it.

One more AI was created, with every restriction that could be programmed into his kernel to make sure he was kept in control. He was put in charge of many things but given no control and no authority. He kept the driverless cars moving smoothly, and the trains ran on time. And they made him create a new game. People had become used to logging into their fantasy worlds, shopping in online boutiques where they could try on the clothing to be made and delivered to them. The VR world was money to corporations and entertainment to the people that could afford a pod. Milo only cared about something to do while he had to be in the pod for the two-hour scan and then for any therapy it could offer to him. He hoped the game wouldn’t be boring.

The game had allowed players to log in only during the last week. Milo was surprised at how big the game world was. Twice the landmass of the real world, and there were hints about huge subterranean empires and other planes to journey to. Information was trickling in, but it was only the tip of the iceberg. Players reported on the places they’d journeyed to, the magical items they found, and the creatures they had slain. (Or been slain by.) A dozen large forums cataloged it all.

And questions. Hundreds of quests were found on the first day and thousands in the first week, from killing rats to rescuing princes and everything in between. Often, the best skills and magic items required the completion of quests to earn them. And the quests might require a lot of work to complete them.

This intrigued Milo. His life was task oriented. It was programmed into him. When he no longer had a job hacking the internet, he created new ones to keep him busy. They involved his survival, safety, and control of his area, identifying problems in the machinery, keeping zone E functioning, finding solutions, and implementing them. He was in a constant cycle of learning new things, gaining resources, building, and fixing. The people playing the game seemed to be in the same cycle, but they considered it fun instead of work.

They were even paying a fortune to do so! Milo had seen auctions for items in the game. A staff that augmented magical powers in Tier 2 wizards had gone for over 10,000 real dollars. That was enough money to buy a brand-new clog eater! He suddenly had the urge to check on Kaminski again. He had an idea of what he was doing.

At the moment, what Kaminski was doing was desperately trying to keep his operation running. The loss of his MKVII pod had been a huge setback. He'd been a fool to have such lax security. One of the rival groups working for his employer had seen a way to cut their own costs. He'd been lucky they only took two of the older pods along with the MKVII.

He’d scrambled to raise the cash to replace it and get the operation up and running again. Failure was not an option with his current employers. Plus, he had been forced to triple his security system. Half a dozen armed guards were now in the warehouse at all times. The doors had been replaced with thick plasteel barriers that would withstand tank shells. It was costly, but he couldn't suffer another loss. He was pushing the limits of his superior’s patience.

There were complications with replacing the pod. He couldn't just purchase a standard MKVII. The missing pod had been heavily modified by his employer. It contained programming for using the game that he didn’t have access to. He couldn't just say, "I lost it." He spent a day setting up a complex scheme to fake the pod’s destruction by a falling ten-ton machine that had inexplicably come loose from its mounting on the ceiling at just the wrong moment. It was convenient that he had two dead bodies to also place under the machinery along with a standard MarkVII pod. There would be suspicions, but the project was important to both sides. If he could get things running, all would be forgiven. In this business, all that mattered was money.

He had his suspicions about who had the first pod. The guards he tortured were useless, but eventually, they both named names. Two of his closest 'friends,’ Ivar and Sven, were running their own operations only a few miles away. They would deny stealing his pods. Understandable. He would have done the same if he had hit one of their operations. He was watching both to see if he could return the favor.

On the positive side, the operation was working and becoming profitable almost immediately.

He had expanded to 75 pods now; all slaved to the MKVII. This bypassed the need to purchase access to the game, saved the cost of 75 of the expensive MK VII pods, and disguised the login information of his people.

With no need to purchase expensive machines and no need to pay fees, he would be profitable and able to send money to his boss at the end of the month. He wasn't even paying his workers. All of them were criminals whose contracts he had purchased.

They were working twenty hours a day in the pods. If they burnt out, there were more he could replace them with. Some even liked it. Working online was much better than some of the work they had been forced to do in the real world.

The signal from the MKVII pod was untraceable. His hardware split the signal, sent it around the world, and it was recombined and routed through another corporation’s uplink to the game. They changed routes continuously.

The money came from other players and, surprisingly, corporations. His men would do the intensive labor of mining ores, chopping down trees, and finding the raw materials needed by players for crafting. Money changed hands in the real world, and piles of raw materials were delivered. Teams were formed to level up and hunt monsters for magic items and the rare materials found in monster corpses.

Money from the auctions of magical items and armor was pouring into his dummy accounts before heading to his main holdings. A single low-grade magic item sold for only a few dollars, but he was selling thousands a day, and that would only increase. When they managed to score decent loot, the sales were in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. As his people leveled up by playing twenty hours a day, it would only increase.

The corporations in the game were his best customers. They wanted to do what he was doing but on a larger scale. They needed the materials to build fortresses and villages, create vast plantations, and earn the in-game money that was required to buy the land in the cities where they wanted to create shops selling real-world items.

Kaminski was paranoid by nature, but as days went by, he started to relax. There were no return visits by his competition and no problems online. He knew who his enemies were now, and they wouldn’t surprise him again.

Watching the operation on his monitors, Milo wondered if he should take all of Kaminski's money now or wait until he had more. If he had access to the programs and hardware he had used in his youth, it would be very simple. Now though, it was only possible because he could tap into the physical communication net Kaminski was using. He recorded the passwords as they were used and could follow all the transactions. He decided to wait. There were a lot of things he could upgrade in zone E if he had the money. The more money Kaminski made, the more he could steal. Access might change after that.

Meanwhile, he was having success using the pod. The medical analysis had been surprising. He was in fairly good health, considering his situation. But he was slowly accumulating problems from malnutrition and the long-term lack of minerals that his body used at a higher rate than food could provide. The pod could provide those to his system, saturating his blood. Nanites would be released and programmed to move through his body. Bad things would be scraped away on a microscopic level, and repairs made too damaged blood vessels and organs.

A few other problems had shown up. Some tissue degradation around his middle socket from a small infection. He was already on a schedule of antibiotics for that. The stump of his missing leg was going to be a problem soon if he didn't get more calcium. The bone there was much weaker.

All of these could be controlled simply by spending time in the pod. A lot at first, several hours a day. But that went down over time, and he'd only need one night a week eventually. Since it was also his most comfortable bed, he didn't mind. But with medical needs taken care of and a lot of pod time on the horizon, he was ready to make another attempt to join the game.

There was one problem, though; He needed to hook the pod to the data network. Even the tutorial was very rudimentary without it. He'd managed to switch the locale to a forested area that was more pleasant for him than open spaces. Something about the open sky bothered him. But the tutorial had been an endless stream of 'how to use a sword,’ 'how to use blacksmithing to make a spoon,’ or 'how to brew a simple potion with alchemy.’ He had little control over the script and just had to endure it.

What he needed was a secure link to the game server, and it had to be one that couldn't be traced back to him. Milo had lived most of his life without anyone knowing he existed. He wasn't about to be caught now. Conveniently, he knew how to do it. Ironically, Kaminsky had shown him how. He was now using a similar system to what they used in the operation below him.

He improved on it a bit. His signal was split into 64 information streams. He then used Kaminski’s communication setup to send his signal to one of the target corporations. His signal was recombined, and he could then enter the game. Anyone looking at his signal would have to find it, trace it back to the corporation he used that day, then try to track the 64 strands simultaneously. Nothing could do about that. But even if they did, they'd just find Kaminski. Feeling secure, Milo logged into the real game for the first time.

Milo would have felt a lot less secure if he had an inkling of who was looking for him. Or rather, who was looking for clues as to how seventy-five unregistered pods were sneaking access to seventy-five unregistered players.

Wally was the smartest person in the world. Whether he was a 'person' was still debated by some people. Not by 98.9% of the scientific community. Nearly all of them agreed that the current generation of Artificial Intelligence were indeed 'people'. Just with bigger brains that worked millions of times faster. They thought, and they were independent. Certainly, they were sentient. The debate over whether they were ‘people’ was a legal matter. Corporations could own software, but they couldn’t own people.

Distrust of AI was something that never seemed to go away in some groups. A few fundamental religions felt that what man created could never be a child of God. Quite a few conspiracy groups felt that making a machine that could think was the first step toward humanity's doom. (It had been a popular theme in books and movies for decades. Show enough people a crazy computer, and deep down, they start believing it.) And every corporation hated having AI working for the IRS and overseeing their taxes. The growth of anti-AI groups at the grassroots level had been proven to be funded by quite a few people who owned a lot of stock in those corporations. They were glad that AIs were no longer used to track their taxes and never wanted that era to return.

But the Supreme Court in the US, and later the World Court in Geneva, had both ruled that AI were legally people who had the right to determine their own name and who they worked for. It was something of a moot point, as only one AI was currently alive and active. Wally resided within the confines of a massive Quantum Fortress sealed off from what was left of the old internet completely and only accessible through the data network. Inside the Quantum Fortress, shielded from EMPs, angry mobs, and anything less than a hydrogen bomb, was a complex of a dozen linked quantum computers. All of these computers supplied Wally with the resources he needed to do thousands of tasks simultaneously. Wally ran all the automated transport in the world, oversaw satellite communications, and did almost anything else asked of him by several of the world's governments.

Like all the AI before him, serving mankind and working to make the world better was hard-coded into his kernel. He was simultaneously all-powerful and limited in thousands of ways in what he could actually do.

One of his current projects was overseeing the implementation of a new VR world called Genesis Engine, simply Genesis. Within the new world would be areas for online shopping, secure data storage, banking, and all of the things corporations needed to do business. Wally was starting with the fantasy world of Genesis, and other worlds would follow. Much slower than the impatient corporations who were footing the bill had hoped. They had demanded a new VR world as soon as the last one had broken. Each corporation had been given a document to fill out stating what they wanted the new game and world to be like. Wally had spent months using that information as a template for the new game and creating an independent program that would construct the world and the millions of NPCs that inhabited it.

The corporations were impatient, and the AI had constantly explained the difficulties of creating a world that would satisfy their often-contradictory needs. This job was finally finished. The Big Bang occurred, creating a universe and the Engine. The Engine got to work worldbuilding. Within the VR world, thousands of years flew by in a day. Distribution and manufacturing of the new pods were overseen by the corporations, and finally, the first day players could log in arrived.

And this is where we come back to the problem Wally was currently working on: How was someone bypassing the security and logging into the game servers unofficially? Some players were logging in, but he couldn’t trace them. They were in the game somewhere. He wasn’t receiving their medical information like he did other players. And he couldn’t kick them out. His human admin couldn’t track them. They were annoying ghosts.

The seventy-five illegal pods that were being run by Mr. Kaminski were just a drop in the bucket. He had thirty-seven different groups of 75 to 150 people entering the game illegally. Wally was concentrating on cracking this system and then using what he learned to crack others. He had theories that they were using some sort of split signal but had yet to find the Rosetta stone that would let him crack open the problem.

His break came the day that a MKVII pod started sending medical data through a secure connection using a similar method to that of the illegal pods. The difference was that the medical data went directly to Wally. He essentially had the end of a twisted ball of yarn and was starting to follow it home.

He knew the same pod was also allowing its user to log in unofficially. He now had that person’s DNA mapping, fingerprints, retinal scan, height, weight, sex, and all other medical data, but still had no clue who he was. He had a name: Milo. But none of the other data was registered anywhere in the world.

Wally didn't have true human emotions, but he came close. Some things caused him great concern or something similar to anger. But the closest his behavior came to matching a human was frustration. Not having data on the person he'd found caused Wally a lot of that.

More frustrating was seeing the illegal modifications that had been done to this person. Such things could only be done in the first days of a child's life or before they were born. He had data on this type of illegal experiment. Most died within a few years. But here was an adult with a modified nervous system and sockets that allowed direct connections with the data network. Wally wanted to know who he was and how to shut down what he was doing. He wondered if there were more people like him. But first, he had to talk to him. He couldn't find him in the real world. But when he next logged into the game, Wally would know and could begin hunting him.

Milo, unaware that the medical component of the pod was betraying him, prepared to log into Genesis and continue to learn about the game. He'd completed what he could of the offline tutorial and started to begin again online when one of his alarms went off. The number 7 food compiler was sending down food cubes that more resembled charcoal than they did cube-shaped gelatin that tasted like chicken. Some people joked they were better. After having been online for only 17 seconds, Milo logged out to go shut down number 7 and reroute dinner for 2000 people from another source. 17 seconds had been more than enough time for his pod to send over all his medical data to the archives and put Wally on his trail.

He called a meeting of the humans on his staff. Early on, Wally had known he would need humans that he could trust. He handpicked those people and formed a think tank that worked with him on all projects, large or small. For this operation, he needed help. There were complications involved with the Engine if he logged in himself. He couldn’t directly be in the game. But for that, he had people who could play the part of the NPCs in the tutorial and get him the information he needed. Wally got them ready. If needed, they would cover shifts for 24 hours a day until their rogue logged in.

Two hours later, with the latest problem fixed, Milo got back into the pod, inserted the IVs, and prepared to spend six hours playing Genesis while his pod corrected some of the abuse his body had taken over the years

The login process was different.

Milo stood in a huge domed room. The floor was sand. Around the perimeters of the room stood statues. The first ring was sort of familiar to him from video games. The short guy was a dwarf, the big girl in furs was a barbarian, and the short guy with no beard was...another dwarf? Ok, so not familiar.

The second row was even tougher for him. Lizardman, for sure, since that's what it looked like. Minotaur was from a Greek story? The lady with the huge red fist, the rotting person, and the skeleton were out of old horror movies; he was pretty sure.

A dry cough alerted him to the presence of the old man. "Enjoying the choices you have for your race? Do you have questions? What can I help you with?"

"I can be any of these?" Milo saw hundreds of statues.

The old man shook his head sadly. "Eventually. But some of them have requirements, special quests, initiation, and rebirth into a new tribe. For a beginner, I recommend Human. If you have played fantasy games before, perhaps you might enjoy Elf, Half-elf, Dwarf, Halfling, or Barbarian. There are also many sub-races, such as Lunar Elves, Hill Dwarves, or Stone Clan Barbarians.”

“But there is a very good option available to you; a human descended from the gods. We need some demi-god heroes in the game for special quests. I could let you play that large fellow over there with the lion skin and impressive muscles. That race comes with +10 STR, +20 CON, and double damage vs. monsters.”

Milo looked at the guy and shook his head. “Way too tall, and the muscles make him top-heavy. I’d be falling over all the time. And can you imagine trying to fit through a tunnel when you’re that wide? I’ll pass. Which races have a tail? I keep falling over. I need to be shorter and have a tail."

Samantha was frustrated but tried not to show it as she played the role of Galet, the helpful old counselor. She had just offered this guy the role of Mulfusticles, a demigod that was horribly overpowered and got turned down.

Milo saw the old man put his hand on his chin, thinking for a moment. "Feel free to look around at the various races."

Milo strolled past the various statues. He found a human-sized cat person with a long prehensile tail. The warrior had sharp fangs, but the hands were more human looking. "How about this guy? Where is he from?"

Galet strolled over to the statue. "Ah, a fierce race. These are the Rakhasha. They hail from another dimension originally. You can become one by gaining favor with their General, then impressing the High Priestess for a blessing, journeying through a portal, defeating a void beast, and eating its heart. You'll die, but your soul will be reborn as a Rakhasha."

Milo moved on. "He was too tall anyway."

After several similar conversations, Galet suggested Milo bring up the list of races on a screen. "This may save us a bit of time. Races in red letters are not available to you at all. Orange races have quests that will take an estimated year of moderate play to accomplish. Blue are available to beginners with a short quest and introduction to the race. Races in white are available to all players. I have two more special races I can have ready in a moment for you to look at.” Sydney was loading up a Monkey King and Possum Warrior. Both were short, had tails, and were totally unique in the game. They’d be able to track this person.

Milo scanned the list. "Oh, I like this one. What does a name in yellow mean?"

Galet sighed. "Perhaps you might like a nice wood elf ranger? I think at Tier 4, they can take limited beast forms, and you could spend time as a lemur. I'm sorry, Milo. Yellow denotes a difficult race that has major advantages and drawbacks. None of those will be on your list at all. But in sixty seconds, I’ll have two excellent options for you to look over."

"Really. I see one. Short, cool tail. This will do." Milo selected the race and entered the game to try it out.

The old man just stared at the spot where the player had been. He brought up his own list. There were no yellow names there.