All day, Rick slept, getting up only for bathroom breaks. The first time he got out of bed, he needed his wife’s help, but after that, he was steady on his feet, if slow.
Alex had burned up his phone with texts and calls, as had Hector, but neither of them were the people he wanted to contact—not immediately after the manual disconnect, and less and less as he came to senses and his body felt more and more his own.
The first person he wanted to talk, aside from his wife, was Ditto. That would take a while, since the last time he’d gotten on the fancy SR array Hector had provided, it had almost locked him into a trap. Neither Alex nor Hector had come to his door, which meant for all the frantic calling, something kept them away. On the evening of the second day, Kristina led him to the basement and the welded-shut UPS. Whatever else it was, it wasn’t right. The only reason anyone would remove the manual off-switch and weld the lid on was to prevent exactly what Kristina and Ditto had tried to do.
On the third day, Rick checked his accounts. All the money was there. It was time to get ahold of Ditto.
He turned and faced his wife on the way out. “Keep the door locked. If Hector or Alex show up, don’t answer.”
She cocked her head and squinted. “They installed the security. You don’t think they have a way in?”
He nodded. “Oh, I’m pretty damned sure they do, but if they use it, they might as well admit they set me up, and I’m betting they don’t want to do that.”
She pursed her lips. “They haven’t touched the money. Why can’t we walk away and just be done with him?”
Rick sighed. “Look, honey? There’s a conversation we need to have.” He cleared his throat. “But first I need to get to a rental and have Ditto check out my avatar in the practice environment. Maybe he can—”
“Ditto can just get into your implant. He got into mine.”
Rick leaned back against the door frame next to the door and pointed around the room. “If Ditto gets in here while they’re watching, they’re gonna know I’m getting help. More than that, though, he can’t access my avatar without me going into the game, and I’m not going into”—he pointed at the SR array—“that again. Not after what happened. Even if we walk away from Hector…” He winced. She needed to know. “Even if we do that, I can’t risk getting into a compromised array and getting caught with an elicit cheat attached to my avatar. You want me to go back to running, assuming I can find another job?”
She sighed and shook her head, then leaned into him and held him. “I like who you are now. You were a crippled bird for a long time. Always hoped you’d…”
He nodded, then kissed her and walked out the door.
The train was uncrowded, giving him little to distract himself besides his phone. The texts were all the same non-committal pleas for him to get in touch. Nothing threatening, which was out of character considering he’d left the game via disconnect. They were treating him with kid gloves, and that stuck out more than any threat. He could deal with bluster, but as had been true from the day this whole journey began, Hector was always most dangerous when he tried to appear understanding; it was like a poker player’s tell.
He got off the train near Beverly and Western, then hoofed it up Vermont to where his map app had told him an SR rental spot did business.
He pushed through the door, got into a booth and inserted his card, then wiped down the end of the implant cable and ran it through its sterilization routine. Standard practice in an array shop—SR or VR—was that the routine always ran after every single disconnection, but people being people, and the shop being so public, they had the good sense to provide chlorhexidine swabs and a manual sterilization cycle. As long as you were on the clock, you could take as long as you wanted to clean the equipment. Rick swabbed the cable all the way back to the floor, then scrubbed the chair, which had no deep crevices, making it easier to clean. He waited a couple minutes for the solution to dry, then ran the plug’s self-cleaning routine one last time, since he had to wait, anyway.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.
When it was finished, he sat. “Right.” He had no small amount of trepidation at the thought of plugging back in. He’d heard stories of people who’d been improperly disconnected who never went near an array again, but he’d already had to deal with the reCon and Ditto’s exposure therapy. He reached for the door to make sure it was locked, then checked the corner camera to see that security was working. While it was possible Hector had gotten something into his implant, there was little storage there. Ditto had been limited to beaming in after placing a protocol, but that wouldn’t be enough to load an entire cheat or malware so it streamed in real time. Probably.
He plugged in, and within a few seconds, he was out.
***************************************
Rick set the game’s bots on non-aggressive, then trekked to the temple garden. Ditto had gotten ahold of him on the way, but the bot said he was cautious about discussing anything until they were in the hidden Easter egg area of the garden.
After he teleported to the platform and stepped into the sunlight, Ditto wasted no time getting to the point.
“I’ve examined the wheresit cheat, and…” The kung fu bot sighed. “There’s no way that software wasn’t meant to be detected. If I hadn’t been there to warn you, you’d have been detected immediately.”
Rick nodded. “Where did it come from?”
The bot shook his head slowly. “That was harder to determine, but what hadn’t taken as long to find out was the origin of the cheat your adversary used. He stayed in the game long enough for me to look for clues.”
“Hector?”
Ditto nodded. “It was incredibly difficult to detect. I had to upload the entire code to the server farm hosting most of the non-tournament matches. I got it done in time to get the information to the anti-cheat bot.”
Rick’s eyes were wide. “Oh boy.”
“It got ZizzZL12 disqualified after the match.”
“So he’s banned, now?”
Ditto nodded. “The anti-cheat was satisfied ZizzZL12 was the source of the initial ping, meaning it stopped looking for any further cheating once you were out of the game and it had its culprit.”
Rick let it sink in. “Hector will be pissed.” He sighed and shook his head. “I don’t get it. At the same rank, I should have been able to win him as much—hell, more money than any other random player.”
Ditto raised an eyebrow and stroked his long white goatee. “That took longer to figure out, but the cheat ZizzZL12 used traces back to Hector.”
Rick nodded. “Well yeah, if he had money on Z, then he wanted him to have all the advantages. Does the anti-cheat bot know Hector’s the source of the code?”
The bot shook his head. “I have limited access to the net, but what troubled me was how easy it was to detect the cheat that had been loaded into your avatar.” Ditto looked him in the eye. “I traced it back to another popular cheat maker and accessed the anti-cheat’s database for known hacks and cheats. None from the branch of cheats that were like yours had such an obvious detectability flaw. Whatever was loaded on your avatar would be useless to win tournament matches.”
Rick’s eyes widened again.
Ditto continued. “I can only conclude your cheat was made specifically to discredit a popular SR game cheat coder named Proscus. Lately, there have been additions to the anti-cheat databases that have been quite difficult to source. They match the general specifications and code patterns of the cheat we found on ZizzZL12. It’s likely Hector is creating—”
“That son of a bitch set me up to hype his own damned cheats.” Rick’s jaw dropped.
“Yes. I can update the anti-cheat with information to lead it to Hector Caville, but I wanted to wait until I talked to you before I did that.”
Relieved, Rick sighed. “Please don’t do that. Hector still has Kristina’s eggs.”
“Have you told your wife about that?”
Rick shook his head slowly. “No, but I’m going to. Soon.”
“I’ll wait for word. This can wait.” Ditto frowned. “For a while. If I don’t hear from you—”
“Give it a while, at least. Okay?” Rick held his head and tried to think. He was going to have to confront Hector. But first, he needed more information.