Logging out did not go smoothly for Milo. He had expected to immediately leave the game and wake up in his pod. Instead, he was back in the tutorial again, in the room where he had selected his character. The old man who had been tutoring him was standing patiently in front of him.
"Welcome, traveler. Our apologies for the inconvenience, but there are some irregularities that are interfering with your log-out process. Perhaps we can have some polite conversation while we wait for the problem to be fixed?"
Milo couldn't bring up any options and couldn't log out. This was annoying, he was wasting time, and he had things to do. He should have been running a check on the wastewater pipes going to the recycling unit today and then going up to the level below the roof to check a connection to a solar power array that looked like it was on its last legs.
"Oh, no worries. I'll handle it on my end." His tail was connected to both the pod and his normal systems. He simply shut down the connection to the game from there, opened the pod, and got out. Time to get to work on a few things.
"HOW THE HELL DID HE DO THAT!??" Sydney was banging her fist on the table and frantically running scans for the player she had just lost, but he was out of the game. Samantha sighed and took off the VR helmet she had used to play the part of the tutor, Galet
Sydney was incredibly annoyed. They had just lost the player they needed to talk to.
The player who absolutely should not have been able to log out of the game on their own.
“Somehow, while in character creation, he bypassed the normal system and selected something that wasn't on the normal menu. Samantha was in the role of his tutor then, with Wally looking on from outside."
Dr. Steven Duran, her boss, was looking over Sydney’s shoulders. "Wally said he was slippery.”
Sydney sat back in her chair, folded her arms, and glared at the screen. "And then he dumped the problem to us poor flesh and blood people. Why didn't the big-bad super computer solve his own problems."
Steven got two cups of coffee, dumped four spoonfuls of sugar into one, and sat that one in front of Sydney. She grabbed it and drank down most of it immediately. Steven slowly sipped his black coffee, wondering again when Sydney would finally spontaneously combust from an overload of caffeine and calories.
"Because of the rules."
Sydney pouted, upset at being outsmarted by the player. "I hate those rules. If you have a super-smart AI with the resources of a massive quantum computer, why not let him do everything? He built the game; why does he have to stay 'Hands off.’"
"He created the game and generated the world, but he can’t micromanage it. For us, it was a week, but Genesis evolved for the equivalent of half a billion years before he slowed down the time dilation. Players are a very recent addition to the world. The Engine and The System are running things now. We mere humans can suggest quests, storylines, and special events to the System, but the Engine is what runs the show. Wally watched it all evolve and guided it a bit with suggestions, but he doesn't want to play God in the world, and the corporations want limits on him in the game. So, we have human admins, aided by some very smart sub-intelligences in the game that are set up to monitor everything."
"Wally is working to shut down the illegal connections from outside. We have to try and catch up to this player, or others, in the game and see if we can make them talk or cut a deal. And I'm not surprised this one is slippery once you learn about him. He’s a unique case and probably the mastermind behind the whole operation.”
Sydney finished her coffee, even the slurry of sugar at the bottom. "What is special about him?"
Steven transferred files to her. "Welcome to a higher security clearance. Wally just approved you, and it comes with a 10% raise. We only know about this person from the medical records the pod is sending over. Tell me what you think."
Sydney scanned the records, then looked at them again, then a third time. "Oh my god...that is not normal. I don’t have the medical expertise to really judge, but this guy is like something out of a bad movie. Those ports are directly fused to his spine; they removed a lot of bone to do it. Who the hell does that to himself?"
"No one. That work was most likely done before he was born, with more operations taking place several times in his first year. His nervous system was also subjected to a process that replaced most of it with some interesting biotech. If it was done when he was older, he'd be crippled or dead. His growth rate has been slowed, and many of his biological processes are not normal. We aren’t sure of what he can do, and we don’t know how it was done."
"Sounds like you're familiar with this. You've seen it before?"
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Steven had a momentary bit of anger show on his face before he controlled it. "I read the reports but didn't see the bodies myself. Nearly thirty years ago, there were raids on three illegal biotech operations doing similar alterations to children. All of them died within the first year. There were records of a 4th group of 25 children that another research group had succeeded with. The unknown client paid off the labs and took the children. The labs weren’t discovered until months after that."
"When the authorities raided them, they found dozens of the 'failures' preserved for study. They planned on continuing after they acquired more newborns. Life in the habitats is hard. Someone offers to pay you a lot of money for a crippled child, and some will take it. Some of the children were actually gestated in the labs, in artificial wombs. They think that’s why the fourth batch lived past birth."
Sydney sat back, stunned. "Wow, what assholes. So, what was their big plan?"
Steven shrugged. "The lab was just making money and trying to perfect the process. The unknown client took all the data on batch #4. This player, Milo, is the first lead to what in over two decades. Also, the only clue we have to how thousands of people are logging into Genesis and bypassing our systems. We have to find out how. Genesis is just a game now, but over time it will become a hub for financial transactions and commerce. We can’t have leaks like this. It’s thousands of dollars now, millions next week, and billions next year."
"Right, so time for me to get back to work. I think I know how he got away this time."
"Oh, how?" Steven liked to dump jobs on Sydney. She got frustrated and then started solving the problem.
"He has three ports he can use to directly hook into systems. Look at the medical scans; all three are active. He's got connections to two prostheses. One of those can plug into the medical pod itself in seconds. I bet he was crafty enough to have extra controls. He doesn't care that we blocked him from logging out; he just did it himself."
Steven smiled. "Good. Very good. So now what do you think you can do? You have a chance every time he logs in and out to try and get his attention. Once he slides past, we can't track him in the game. Wally has some idea about matching log-in times to the time players enter the world. Difficult with tens of millions of players. He needs to build some new tools."
Sydney grimaced. "Working on that part. Make yourself useful and make another pot of coffee."
Unaware of the commotion he was causing, Milo was hard at work. Out of the game and sitting in his home, surrounded by screens that showed him different machinery, Milo was making sure the habitat functioned. Work went well for the most part. Milo was running into his usual problem of not having enough parts. There was only so much he could acquire by raiding from the dead sections. He really needed over a mile of new communication cable, four new air recycling systems, and numerous other machines and parts. He wondered again about the money Kaminski was earning in the game. Time to check-in.
Kaminski had been busy. He had 125 of the older pods up and running now. Milo got a batch of food cubes and started eating while watching what was going on. The food cubes tasted bad. Not spoiled-bad, just normal-bad. He'd eaten some bread from his pack in the game and had a meal with Harry. The taste had been so much better than what he was chewing now.
As he was watching, a pod in Kaminski’s area started flashing. The man inside was helped out but couldn't walk. He was placed on a gurney and taken to a makeshift infirmary. Several other people were in the same dingy room. Another person was led over to the pod and installed to take the sick man's place. Something wasn't right. Milo set up several monitors to show him the entire operation and watched it at four times the normal speed while doing his work on Section E.
One more person was wheeled in on a gurney from a flashing pod. Milo looked closer at the condition of the people in the pods. Most of them looked to be in advanced stages of malnutrition or had some neurological disorder. Those weren’t healthy people in those pods, and they were getting worse.
He needed to do research on what Kaminski was doing. What was happening to these people?
It didn't take much digging. The lawsuits about the damage many of the early pod designs had done to millions of people were easy to find. It had taken decades to prove and get the pods taken out of use. Every year, more people who had used those pods developed disorders in their nervous system. Using the old pods was bad. Using them for days at a time was risking your life. The pods Kaminski was using were going to end up killing people. Looking closely at the early model pods, Milo could see they’d been in use for a long time, showing signs of neglect and hasty repairs.
This situation was way outside of Milo’s experience. He had hidden all of his life. The thought of people being hurt bothered him. But the thought of having the authorities searching all over his section terrified him more. He set up his system to start recording everything that Kaminski was doing. In a few hours, most of the techs would leave, and just the guards and one tech would be in the rooms all night. He made plans for an excursion down to their level.
Until then, he’d go see where some of those old tunnels went and find a way back to Harry.