Scott had spent two weeks after returning from Algeria catching up on various projects. Mainly, he just broke down tasks and assigned the work to others. About half his day was spent in one on one discussions with the programmers who worked for him. Scott hadn’t been able to focus much on the game company, since everything else going on seemed much more important. Mexico had so far been unable to cut off their internet access due to some hidden fiber cables they had run, so Scott handled a few video meetings with team leads. They seemed to be freaked out that Scott was one of the commandos on the news, not to mention his company stealing a spaceship and the news saying they were a terrorist organization. He had the impression they were afraid Scott would send assassins or kidnappers if they complained or didn’t finish their work. Scott never wanted to rule his company through fear, he had to admit it was effective. His managers all nervously denied wanting to quit and seemed eager to promise they would catch up on various deadlines.
Scott rubbed his forehead, and tried to explain, “You don’t need to work overtime. Please, if working here is too stressful now, you are welcome to leave the company with no hard feelings.” Somehow, that made his employees even more nervous.
This day was off to a rough start, but Scott powered through and decided to catch up with the employees who were onsite in the office. If anyone was scared, it should probably be the people who had moved to Proteus. Scott was curious how people here were reacting to the news that they had stolen a rocket and were now basically at war with the United States and Mexico. Surprisingly, the people living here seemed more calm about the situation than the remote employees. They were not bombarded with US news, and mostly were confident that the current situation would be resolved. Scott wondered where they found this confidence, but he tried not to act nervous and ruin it.
He spent half an hour with a group of artists who had made some amazing concept art of locations that would be in the game. It was a relief that at least some people were still enjoying working for him. Maybe artists weren’t as accustomed to getting a steady, generous paycheck, and could overlook the whole inconvenience of working for a terrorist organization. Or maybe their minds were so buried in the fantasy world they were creating, they were oblivious to the outside world. Scott complimented them on their work, and he couldn’t wait to see what it looked like in their game engine after their content generators converted these into 3D models and populated the finer details. They were still training the tools and sometimes had weird results, so human interaction was required to fine tune the process. Training the content generator involved creating multiple iterations with different seeds, settings and code versions. The design leads would then rate the results in various categories. The algorithm took the feedback, made adjustments and then created more options focusing on the areas that received low scores. After multiple iterations, the designer signed off of the content and a version of the generator was archived as a candidate for future tasks. The output quality of the tools had improved a lot in a few weeks, but their processing time increased as they improved. They were running into bottlenecks with server resources.
The company had planned to add about $3 million more of additional hardware, but the blockade effectively canceled their order. This was a problem for many of their projects, as they were cut off from a wide variety of supplies that they didn’t manufacture internally.
The Mexican Army had surrounded their beach house and factories with soldiers. On land, no traffic was allowed to bring supplies. By sea, the Mexican navy had set up a loose blockade. Their underwater drones managed to warn off the ships to keep a fair distance, but they could not get a cargo ship out for trade or supplies. Scott’s dad at least had made it home with his disabled ship towed by the Moryana (their second cargo ship). Their carrier ship was getting an overhaul to have a more military focus. Their exploration submarine was able to arrive or leave at will, so they had some capacity to interact with the outside world.
Mexico seemed unaware of their activity at Xibalba despite the extensive construction. Scott wondered if the oversight was because permits had not been granted. Since they did not expect any work had been started, no one had come by to investigate. Even though they were building pyramids a few hundred yards from the main road the soldiers used to get to their beach house, the jungle hid the view and anyone who might have spotted the work from the air had not made the connection that they owned this property. Trinidad and Hisashi had locked up their facilities on the other inland location, and they managed to get all their employees and some equipment out on air trucks. They were busy setting up new facilities in one of the new sections of Proteus.
Scott had been worried that these men would be angry that their businesses had been shut down, and they were labeled as leadership in a terrorist organization. Trinidad did not seem worried and was focused on building an even larger factory and expanding what he would produce. He seemed delighted to be adding weapons to his list of manufactured goods, but he also seemed unfazed by a potential war, claiming that the destruction would cause an increase in demand for his products.
Hisashi was outwardly calm as usual. Zaliha and Matt worked with him the most and claimed he seemed excited about building a space program. Scott wasn’t sure excitement would look any different from anger or boredom on the man’s face. He would never play poker with that guy.
Scott thought he must be the only one freaking out.
Adriana had told him they wouldn’t starve. The first large scale harvest of saltwater rice would come in soon, and they had plenty of seafood, including huge tanks of mutant fish that tasted almost like beef or chicken. The variety of food would not be great, but they could survive. She had also mentioned starting a large hydroponic farm to grow food that they hadn’t adapted to underwater conditions. So they could survive indefinitely under the current conditions.
Scott decided that the blockade was not his problem to solve, but he could spend a few hours adjusting the content generator code to place value on code efficiency when it was scoring results. He figured they should at least try to choose iterations that had similar quality results using less server resources.
While Scott was working, he received an odd request from Nadia. He was supposed to talk to a certain employee in the gaming office, then help Matt with a ‘special’ project. She emphasized that he should pretend to know what Matt was talking about when he was approached. Scott was a huge fan of her work, but he admitted that he was struggling to understand Nadia’s strategy. Stealing the rocket had been very public, and they had angered their main neighbors and customers.
What worried Scott was what the next attack would be, especially now that SPAI had them high on the list of enemies. Scott had listened in on the debrief with Theofanis, and he had nightmares about an army of robots swarming their base. On top of this, their initial plan to build a space program to counter a Russian attack had been complicated by their inland property getting seized. Their new plan was to use a swarm of robots to assemble an artificial island near the underwater mountain of mine tailings. The tailings were mostly large blocks of stone, so they would build a foundation as a series of large stacked arches reinforced with their plassteel. Their stolen rocket was sitting in the floating port area, but once they had the island built, they would build a launch pad and refueling facility there. Scott wasn’t involved in analyzing the software for launching and landing rockets, but he heard that it would be ready at least a month before they could finish the new spaceport.
Scott went over to their terrain and natural systems expert, Timur Delgova, who he thought might be the Russian spy. Nadia had indicated he should talk to him, but hadn’t told Scott what to expect. He decided to play it safe and check out what Timur was working on. Mr. Delgova described to Scott the weather and water cycle improvements he was working on, and Scott once again found himself really hoping they didn’t have to execute this guy. The man seemed very excited about how he captured the full water cycle and handled variables of terrain, atmosphere and plant cover. It might have been boring, but Scott was able to watch examples of the effects produced in their game engine. He had spent a couple of minutes just staring at an amazing looking waterfall.
“Hey Scott!” Matt greeted him. Scott pulled off the VR helmet he was wearing. “Oh, hi Matt. I was just checking out Timur’s awesome work.” Scott replied.
“Yeah, it’s really great. You should see the hurricane effect,” Matt closed his eyes for a second and had an odd smile. “Um, anyway, I needed to get your help on our other project.”
“Other project?” Scott asked dumbly. Oh wait, is this what Nadia warned him about? “Oh! Yes, of course. I’ll just follow you then.”
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“Right, just follow me to the other servers we are setting up.” Matt headed away towards the room they had set aside for the new servers that never arrived. To Scott's surprise, they had a couple racks of equipment installed. He closed the door. “Did we get some of our new servers?”
Matt explained, “No, we recycled these from our SpaceX heist. They had a bunch of mission log data from an earlier generation rocket. We didn’t need them for our space program since we just wanted to launch a satellite quickly, so we just dumped it onto old-fashioned tape drives. After this emergency launch, we plan to make our own spaceship design for future missions.”
“So are we using these servers to speed up the content generator learning cycles?” Scott asked, puzzled.
“Wow, you are clueless! Solomon and Theofanis built something that looks like a simplified version of SPAI, although it isn’t programmed to go murder hobo on all our enemies. We’re hoping our Russian spy takes the bait and uploads his hacking program. Nadia’s plan is to help the Russian’s learn about the real SPAI program. We’re giving them a ‘big secret’ that this is a forward satellite branch of SPAI operations, then point them to where the main locations are. We also added some hints about missions they are launching that will hurt Russia. We don’t know what SPAI has planned, but Nadia is very imaginative. If she really wanted to overthrow a government, I wouldn’t bet against her.” Matt explained. Scott wondered why no one told him about any of this.
“Are you wondering why I know this and you don’t? It’s because you’re a terrible actor!” Matt laughed. “You would have been telling Timur to avoid the secret server room, ‘wink’. He would have figured out instantly you were feeding him a line.”
“Hey, I’m not that bad!” Scott protested. “Also, I’m sad Timur is the spy. He’s the only team lead ahead of schedule and his work is amazing.”
“Well, you should stay away from him. Better yet, don’t hang out in the office at all until we finish this.” Matt said, concerned that all his hard work would go to waste if Scott gave away their secrets.
“OK, I won’t risk it.” Scott agreed. Honestly, I’m not the one who gives away all our secrets. That was Barry!
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Scott followed Matt’s advice and left the gaming office. He asked Adriana out to dinner, but she once again told him she was too busy with work. Scott still had a crush, but he was starting to wonder if he should find someone with more spare time to focus his attention on. He went back to work on some gaming projects. It helped take his mind off the blockade and impending attacks. After talking with the teams, he was actually getting pretty excited about what they were building, and he wanted to play with the NPC AI code. He spent about two hours having conversations with AI characters, occasionally sending ratings on various features to improve the training. Their odd statements were amusing, like when an NPC farmer insistently offered to plough his field. After a few iterations, Scott was able to convince the farmer he didn’t have a field, so the man asked if he wanted to smell his tomatoes. Scott was still chuckling when he received a call from Timur Delgova. The Russian Spy.
“Hello?” Scott answered.
“Um hi Scott. Can we meet in person?” Timur asked nervously. Scott suddenly wondered if he was safe being alone with this guy. He took a peek at Glitch_HR. Timur had incredible programming and simulation skills, but his assassination rating was very low.
“Are you still there?”
“Oh, sorry. I was in the middle of something.” Scott realized he hadn’t said anything for nearly a minute. “Yeah, we can meet up.”
A few minutes later, they were in a small conference room. Scott had grabbed his light Kevlar clothing and a hidden tranq gun. Just in case.
Timur looked pale and his eyes darted around, then spoke rapidly. “I’m just going to say it. I uploaded spyware on your servers. I’m really sorry if I caused you problems. They are threatening my family back home,” he continued in a rush. “I heard from other people here that you were able to rescue people and their families from some bad situations. Maybe I could help you feed bad information to my country, so you could undo some of the damage, and you could help get my family out of there.”
Scott took a moment to collect his thoughts. “I think I need to talk about this with some people here. I’m sorry, but I just got back from a rescue run and honestly, I don’t think I can handle another one.” He set up a quick video conference with Melinda and Solomon Rhodes, while Matt joined them in person.
After explaining that Timur had confessed and was asking for help getting his family out, Scott was happy to leave decisions to others.
“First of all, we knew you were the spy after the first time you uploaded spyware,” Solomon announced. “We’ve been watching your activity ever since.”
“I wanted to use this to get some revenge on the Russians, but Nadia convinced me that it was more important that they focus on the real enemy instead of escalating things with us.” Melinda added.
“Real enemy?” Timur asked, confused. Scott wondered why she was telling a confessed spy about one of their plans. It seemed like something Barry would do.
“Yes, Nadia and I figured out the Russians learned of a project called Strategic Planning Artificial Intelligence several years ago. They seem to have made a mistake thinking Scott’s HR software was actually part of this top-secret project, and they spent a lot of money trying to reverse engineer it. They actually wrote a lot of the code which we used to build our companies. They were trying to replace what they thought were missing or encrypted sections of the code, when in fact it was just gibberish pulled from random code samples. Their group hired some very talented contract programmers like Theo, who replaced my garbage code with something that actually worked, leveraging their extensive data collection network. Their activity triggered a chain of events including several attacks on their network, a kidnapping, and a military attack on our base. Anyway, at this point we have a nasty feud ongoing with the Russians, but their real target should have been SPAI.” Melinda explained.
“We pointed them at the real SPAI. They’ll still try to blow us up again, but we’re hoping they first focus on the program that is actually a real threat to their country.” Matt added. Timur watched all this with obvious confusion.
“I’m very confused. You are not really a US military research project?” Timur asked. He obviously didn’t watch the news, or he’d know the US was busy telling everyone that Genysis was a terrorist organization.
“Right, so I’m telling you this, so you can understand a bit more about us. That whole unlikely chain of events starting with the Russians panicking about a US artificial intelligence project was the foundation of the successful companies we built,” Melinda summarized. Timur had tilted his head a bit in confusion, but she continued. “Anyway, Nadia convinced me that giving Russia the real information they wanted from the start would get two of our biggest enemies fighting each other. I’m telling you all this because we might need you to say certain things next time your handler contacts you. In exchange for your help, I’m sending a small team to retrieve your family. Sotera ‘Gorrila’ Chapa nearly finished his rehab from a surgery that went a little bit wrong, and he’s eager to go on a mission against the Russians. We can’t act too soon, or they will know we discovered you were spying, but he will be ready when the time is right.”
“I haven’t seen Sotera around for a few months. What did you do to him?” Scott asked.
“I didn’t do anything,”
“That mad
“Regardless of your accusations, that woman is a genius, and you can hardly complain about her testing things on others before trying it out on you.”
“Yes, please, let’s get through this,” Matt said. “Timur, Scott or I can answer your questions later about our company. For now, we have a list of things we need you to mention next time you talk to your handler. This should be very helpful to the people holding your family. This is intel they spent millions trying and failing to acquire, so it should keep them happy. There is only one small fact in that list which is not true. This one lie points to the conclusion that the whole chain of events was put in motion by the actions of an advanced AI, instead of a group of college kids and a disabled homeless lady. It’s actually much more believable than the real story!”
Scott thought about this, remembering all the times Glitch_HR guided the people they hired and the skills they focused on. Are we sure an advanced AI didn’t build our companies?
“I’m terrible at lying. It’s kind of the reason I confessed everything to you today,” Timur said. He was reading the list Matt had given him.
“So, can you guess which statement is not true?” Matt asked.
“Not really. I’m just worried that I’ll get nervous knowing something is wrong, and they will think I’m lying.” Timur said.
“That’s easy enough. You just say you heard a meeting between company executives discussing this list. This is completely true. You admit you don’t know how much of it is accurate and recommend they check the facts. Everything important can be verified, so you don’t have to lie at all.”
Timur looked relieved. “Yes, I think I can do that.”
Melinda thought with satisfaction that the first step of Nadia’s counterattack was in place.