(A Virtual Room in NERV HQ)
“James, I just got off the line with one of the external group. We’ve got some real-money traders in the game, trying to farm resources, despite the fact that we made it about as easy to do that in game as it is in real life. Hopefully it is just people with more time than sense, but we need to check and make sure that they aren’t hacking or botting somehow.”
“Sure thing, Boss. You have a specific target? Because that’s a big haystack to go looking for needles in.”
Isaac laughed, “You’re in luck. One of them got sloppy, it seems, and left the guild name on the web site where they were selling in-game credits. The guild is supposedly called ‘LegitimateBusiness’. Get a team together, and go through their logs. Look for any ‘charitable donations’ or other patterns. You know the drill.”
“Got it. Look for any large donations. Think they’re smart enough to have a shell company?”
“I doubt it, but check anyway. They could be looking at doing a bunch of small transfers to a central source if they are worried about automated systems. So, if there are any patterns of donations, follow them. If they were really smart, they would have set up two or three shell companies to move money through. But, if they were that smart, then they probably wouldn’t have put the guild name in the website.”
“Right. I’ll get right on it, Boss.”
As the game master shimmered and returned to their work area, Isaac turned to the rest of the group, who were more focused on the story and tuning elements of the game world. “All right, talk to me.”
“We’re tracking the fallout of the little corporate war. Well, not ‘little’, by corporate standards, but by the scale of wars in the game world, it was fairly minor. Obviously, Yathru was expecting to fight the war on mostly economic terms and maybe a few surgical strikes.”
Isaac chuckled. “Yeah, they tragically misread their opponent if they thought Black Star was going to work like that. Roy, have you checked with the AI, made sure nothing was bugged out, there?”
The third GM shook his head. “We checked, but there was no sign of bugs. From looking at the settings, I’d say that it is down to the higher-ups in the corp not believing everything they were told. The stories did spread to Alliance space, but at the high levels people mostly thought it couldn’t happen to ‘them’.”
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Isaac sighed. “So, standard human (or humanoid, I guess) thinking? Too caught up in their own affairs to believe the ‘propaganda’? I guess that works. Check the scripts on other leaders, see if we can’t get the controlling AI to tweak them enough to take the stories seriously.”
The second GM tilted his head to the side, considering, “But why? I mean, sure, this fight was pretty one-sided, but it made for great RL advertising. We’re sure to get more players from this.”
“Sure, it is, Ted. But only in the short term. We let things go on too far like that, and it becomes a Goku situation, where the whole game revolves around Black Star, and everyone else doesn’t really matter. That’s great for a manga or anime, but crap for a VRMMORPG.”
“Right, I can see that.”
“Anyways, we want to nip that kind of thing in the bud before it really gets started. So, I want to see if there’s anything we can do to take the focus off Black Star for a bit, or at least not have any idiots go provoking them like that. I don’t care if it is bringing up someone to take the spotlight for a bit, or just keeping Black Star out of it for a while, but either way, we need to keep things from focusing on them.”
“I think we can manage to keep anyone from ‘poking the bear’, as it were, but that doesn’t mean the bear is just going to go in their cave and hibernate.”
Isaac laughed, “I’ll take what I can get at this point.”
A fourth GM raised their hand, “Sir?”
“What is it, Sarah?”
“What about Maccara? Black Star’s Greenwave attack has obliterated infrastructure and weapons on the ground. Worse, the underground facility beneath Rak’kun City has already been compromised, and the test subjects have escaped.”
Isaac took a breath, and said, “Well, I actually reached out to our favorite beta tester and corporate raider, and asked him about that, just after it went down. After all, he took such pains to sanitize all other sources of the virus so completely, and yet he just released it to go wild on Maccara? Didn’t make sense.”
“What did he have to say?”
“Basically? His hands were tied. The only possible way to ensure a nonrelease of the bioweapon would be to launch a full assault and take out the facility under Rak’kun City. He told me directly that he’s seen too many movies and played too many games to think that could possibly end well.”
Isaac took a breath, and continued. “Now, there are things he could have done, sure. He could have blown up the planet like he did in Tsk’neth. But that would have violated not only the corporate war rules that he was playing under, but also some pretty serious treaties. Basically, the whole galaxy would be bound by law to try and destroy everything he built.”
Sarah nodded. “And there’s no winning that fight, even if he’d probably make it hurt for anyone who tried.”
“Exactly. In Tsk’neth, the zombies had already spread completely, and he used some legal posturing that he recorded and broadcast to the appropriate bodies to ensure that it wouldn’t blow back on him. He didn’t have that option at Maccara, it seems.”
Ted chuckled. “So, he punted, and left the decision to the Alliance, all while Greenwave makes it impossible to get in there and get samples. And it is too early to know just how far things will spread. Depending on how easy it is for the virus to infect animals, the outbreak could even be limited to a single continent. Without air power to move around the world, you dramatically slow the spread of the virus, if nothing else.”
Isaac grinned. “Yep. And Maccara is too public for sneaky weapons tests, since the Gateway is there, so blowing it up later on, when people aren’t looking, isn’t going to fly. So, he dropped it in the Free Worlds Alliance’s lap, and is letting them deal with the headache.
“Now, Terry, what have you got for me on Cagliostro?”