The catering staff covered and wheeled away the last remaining trays of food that were set out on the long conference table. Julian carefully extracted a neglected bottle of champagne from the table and slipped it into his button-up plaid shirt. He strode away, tucked his paper plate under his arm, and struck a precarious balance between keeping his pilfered goods from falling to the floor and opening the door to the server room.
Half the office staff and all the journalists who had shown up had finally cleared out about an hour ago, which was 7 hours into the preview event. Julian could finally shut down the remote viewing cameras taking up valuable processing resources and shunt them elsewhere. It was kind of a shame, because it looked like someone was about to trigger the big World Boss event they had planned. Oh well, they can kick rocks. Julian was coming up on hour 18 of putting out fires, and his boss and his boss' boss were both plugged into Starchaser with 24 more of the highest-ranking developers on their team.
Julian did not like to work this hard. He had missed the buffet and celebratory toast because their player database had overflowed and nearly taken a whole region down with it. Did Arin really think that there wouldn't be more than 1024 characters on the preview server? One of these players had already made 16. This was all on top of fourteen weeks of crunch to get this endless, hellish development cycle to a place where it could, barely, support less than 1% of 1% its expected player base.
Julian grumbled at the small debug monitor as he ripped a lukewarm chunk of meat off a turkey's drumstick and washed it down with champagne straight from the bottle. Oh hey, he raised the bottle to the screen in a salute, they spawned the World Boss after all. He held the drumstick in between his teeth as he typed in a handful commands and quickly routed a dozen empty zone servers to support Haven's Crossroads as it began to fill with players teleporting in. Synchronization numbers are looking really good, too.
The major innovation of the game was that it harnessed the processing power of the human brain to produce convincing AI NPCs and generate dynamic quests on the fly, extending all the way to creating region wide events that coordinated processing power between every player participating. Nearly 8 years of development had gone into trying to find a way to produce results like that on traditional hardware, and they had completely failed. They could get it working for one player using a ten-million-dollar quantum computer on loan from Google, but that seemed like it would probably be a non-starter for the average hobbyist consumer.
The idea for harnessing brain power had come after what must have been, Julian assumed, the weirdest Dungeons and Dragons game of all time. The game's director, Arin Sorano, had taken to hosting the famous roleplaying game with his department heads during the doldrums of showing up to "work on” a completely stalled out project. The sessions were rumored to last for up to 14 hours at a time. The technical lead, Jens Lindeman, emerged from one of these grueling games with an idea to "harness the imagination" and that insight quickly turned into their revolutionary mind-reading VR pods and saved their game from the jaws of cancellation. They were expensive systems, but they competed surprisingly well with the $4000 VR systems that Apple and Sony had been selling hand-over-fist for the last 10 years.
Julian had been getting paid to goof off at work for more than two years when Jens had his revelation, so he wasn't exactly thrilled to have to work on server architecture code again after such a sweet free ride. Now, he was eating cold hors d’oeuvres while he scrolled through a list of 1000 players hitting 100% neural synchronization with the game. Well, 999. One of them was hovering around 52% in the character creation scene. That... seemed a little high for someone in a glorified menu, he mused. Scratch that, 998. Someone else had just logged out.
The projections suggested it would take anywhere from 8 to 40 hours to hit 100% synchronization, so this was an excellent showing. The World Boss was pretty sensational, Julian admitted to himself. The number of effects they could render when that many players engaged with content in such a concentrated area was probably building upon itself exponentially, making the fight feel more realistic and therefore increasing synchronization. He folded his paper plate in half and shoved it into a small office waste basket before kicking off his desk with both feet and rolling over a diagnostics terminal. Resource usage had finally flattened out, and the event was a nice miniature stress test, so it seemed like the preview event would probably end without another major crisis. He had time to stash another case or two of that champagne in his car before the catering company noticed.
He leaned around the buzzing wall of servers and shouted down the line at the other poor schlub on preview maintenance duty, Derek, "Hey, Derek, don't let the building burn down, I'll be back in 10."
The man didn't even look up from his phone. He just raised one thumb into the air.
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Bill, piloting his character Quietus, whooped as he travelled backwards through a realm of blurred shadows and narrowly avoided being crushed under the boot of the rampaging Titan wreaking havoc across the blue and white marble plaza. A handful of players crumpled under a powerful blow to his right and he ordered their spirits to coalesce and return to their bodies. This was the coolest shit he had ever seen. The game had been a little hard to get used to at first, but throughout the night he had gone from tripping over the hem of his robes to flowing through combat like a trout through rapids. He was in the zone; the whole Warband was. The boss’ health bar was practically melting away under a storm of coordinated attacks.
A hail of meteors crashed into the city streets and the players near them turned to deal with them perfect unison. A Guardian class on his left snared a golem rising from the debris and flames with a massive chain. A healing specialized Oracle across the way flung up a golden barrier and a storm of shrapnel melted to ash on contact. A group of swordfighters duck and weaved, rolling across each other's backs and performing flamboyant somersaults as they carved away at the Titan's leg. Bill had always enjoyed big group content like this, but the things he had done in Knights of Terra looked like ants fighting over a gummy bear compared to this. He held up his staff and channeled a beam of sickly purple fire into the Titan's thigh, watching with satisfaction as white "110"s and the occasional sharp yellow "220" flaked away from leg like confetti.
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The boss turned, swinging his blazing sword through the crowd. Nearly everyone was able to run into the safe zone around the boss' legs, but a cluster of 50 or so people seemed to lock up in place mid-sprint. Their expressions were momentarily blank, and their posture drooped before they were swept away on the edge of the sword. That was weird. Some kind of stun?
Bill popped a time reversal spell to bring his soul mending skill back off cooldown and targeted a crumpled pile of a dozen player bodies. He dashed back out as the Titan stomped down on the former safe zone and glanced back at the corpses. None of them had accepted the resurrection. He blinked in their direction, blinked again, and then he nearly jumped out of his skin as another meteor thundered into the stone directly behind him. He triggered his shadow walk defensive spell on pure instinct and floated 50 feet backwards, through the meteor and a handful of players, before he dropped back into reality.
He shook his head, snap out of it, Bill, and tossed a bolt of writhing shadows onto the meteor, then chained that spell onto another hunk of animated stone rolling to a stop a dozen yards away. He turned to watch the Titan kick through another group of immobilized players and send them rag dolling through the air. He stared in disbelief. There was another pack of people standing stock still across the plaza as well. He dashed off a quick message to his alliance, "What's up with the stuns? Are we getting connectivity loss?"
A trio of quick replies came through:
>> like half the warband is down and not accepting rez, wtf guys
>> i dont see a stun, my party is just standing around
>> havent seen any disconns, ping is fine here
How annoying. The Titan was down to around 40%. We could clear this if people weren't freezing up. He took off at a run around the edge of the battle until he came upon a player hunched over, eyes hazy and fixed with a thousand-mile stare. He grabbed the slender player, some flavor of elf, by the shoulders and shook him roughly, but the man just let his head flop backwards without protest. "Wake up!" Bill shouted in his face. Nothing.
There was a loud crunch behind him and a thunderclap of steel on stone sent sharp fragments and a wave of force slamming into Bill's legs and back. He winced and whirled on his attacker with his staff up. As he wound up another beam of Shadowfire, a sensation like a thousand cracking knuckles passed all throughout his body. His fingers lost all feeling and his staff clattered to the ground. He poured his every fiber of willpower into getting his eyes to focus on the Titan closing in on him, but they refused to cooperate. He caught one last glimpse of the blazing sword sweeping towards him before his vision fuzzed out. He wanted to care about what would happen next, but he just couldn't seem to. As the world went from a hazy kaleidoscope of vivid colors to one of muted greys, he stopped thinking at all.
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Julian walked out of the elevator to the sight of a group of developers and administrative staff running across a hallway. His heart thudded. What happened this time? He jogged towards them and found at least 70 people crammed into the main conference room. Someone was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a laptop, fumbling with an HDMI cord and three different remotes. A suit to his right snatched one of the remotes from his hand and hammered the buttons. The conference room wall cycled from blue to black to static, then finally to the person's email program. The email that was open read:
from: [email protected]
to: [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]
subject: starchaser takeover
hoii ♥,
we have now taken over starchaser. do not pull the plug. you know what will happen if you do. keep the game running or there will be blood on your hands.
game is looking cool. cant wait for release. that’s all.
xoxo,
coin
Julian could feel his blood drain out of his face. He shoved past a few stragglers and booked it for the server closet. He flung the door open and ran in with a booming, "WHAT THE HELL DEREK?"
The man in the far corner startled and he fumbled his phone in mid-air for a good 3 or 4 seconds before it skittered across the concrete floor. Julian slapped his hand down on the diagnostics terminal. Servers were healthy. He turned on the player monitor. The neural synchronization measures had extended all the way off the edge of the screen. The solid while Unicode blocks they used to represent 10% synchronization had clipped completely through the text that Julian could barely see was at something like "7000%". His head started to throb. He turned on Derek, who was plodding over with a glower and a cracked phone shining in his hand. He pointed at his co-worker and locked eye-contact, "Don't touch anything. In fact, get the hell out of here and lock the door on the way out. Tell... tell..." he snapped his fingers rapidly, "Marisa! Big office, west side. Tell her to get the emergency generators online. ASAP. GO!"
Derek's eyes widened and he scurried off towards the exit. Julian scooted from terminal to terminal in desperation. Locked out of player controls... Locked out of region controls... Locked out of network communication... resource routing was mostly online, but that’s a local process...
He collapsed back onto his chair. They were so screwed. Like, straight to prison screwed. A hard crash on these systems when the player was at 25% synchrony could cause vomiting, weakness, potential long-term vertigo. At 50% they risked seizures, amnesia, short term paralysis. Above that you were asking for strokes, potentially comas. The scale wasn't even supposed to go above 100%. Julian couldn't even imagine what would happen at 7000%.
He didn't know what to do. Jens and his three best engineers were all in the game. Arin and every god damned lead dev in the company too. Maybe they could get them out with a full medical team, several months, and a miracle. They weren't getting Joe Nobody in rural nowhere out of these pods without killing someone. This was a disaster. He texted Derek with shaking hands, “tell marisa to ship out emergency pod maintenance kits to all 1000 players too.” Ah, god damn it, how many of these players lived alone?
What did these... hackers? Activists? Sadists? What did they even want? That email didn't have any demands except to not accidentally kill 1000 people. Obviously, they would keep the server up.
Julian felt a chill run up his spine. It wasn't obvious to everyone. If he didn't watch those servers like a hawk, then some C-suite hack would be in here flipping switches and ending lives without batting an eye. He hammered out a quick company-wide email detailing how absolutely, legal-nightmare, FBI raiding the building, entire company bankrupted, catastrophic it would be if anyone touched the game servers, removing all reasonable doubt, and then brought his knees up to his chest and started screaming into his sweat-drenched jeans. He knew in his heart that this was all going to fall on his head, and there was nothing he could do about it.
As he sat there, he saw the player monitor cycle over. That one player was still in the character creation menu. They were still synchronized at 52%.
He tabbed down to the player's row and pressed enter. He carefully wrote down their identification number on a scrap of paper and then taped it to the bottom of his workstation keyboard. Then, he tabbed down to "Hide Player" and hit return again.
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End of Patch 1.0