Euferia, Chapter 3

NOTE: The following is from an unfinished draft. Read chapter one here.

Martin

Martin Maddux was, at thirty-three, fairly satisfied with his lot in life. He owned a house, had two cats (Mary Jane and Gwen), and ran a profitable and popular business without ever having to leave his home, or even put on pants. He had also once been nominated for a Turing Award for his work on artificial intelligences, but lost out to a team of quantum computer researchers who had been passed over the year before, and of course by the time the next awards ceremony came around someone else had developed an AI using similar algorithms to those he had and because he'd neglected to patent his he couldn't say anything against them but at least he could fight their attempt to patent the code so it remained basically open source which was something but-

Martin squeezed his knee tightly, soft flesh giving way to strong, dextrous fingers. He steadied his breathing, in for four and out for seven, just like Doctor Evelyn had taught him, and closed his eyes to the sight of four strangers puttering around his living room. Gwen rubbed up against his leg, which made him feel a little better. He reminded himself for the eleventh time not to talk about the Turing Award during his interview, and he prayed that Suzanne Something-or-other from WKOR or whatever her station was wouldn't ask about it. Martin's heart wasn't in the best condition, which his cardiologist told him came with being a hundred and eighty pounds overweight and sedentary and black and American and a dozen other things, so for the last year he'd been a vegetarian. It wasn't helping immensely, but he didn't sweat as much as he used to, which was especially useful with a camera and about a hundred lights in his face and a skinny blonde white lady about to stick a microphone in front of him because some producer decided having a "real life video game designer" in his home town constituted news, and it might be good to get a little free advertising and people had been wondering if he'd died or what since he let Maeva run pretty much everything in terms of player relations for the game. He caught his mind racing again and scrunched up his face, resetting his breathing.

"Mr. Maddux," Suzanne said, her chirpy newscaster voice being pleasantly unaccented and warmer than he'd heard from an actual physical woman in longer than he cared to recall. "We're ready when you are."

Martin nodded, eyes still closed, and went through another ten cycles of breathing in relative silence. Then he opened them and gave his best sociable smile, which he always thought looked more like a grimace but which his dad had always said looked "professional," whatever that meant.

"Ready," he said, careful to speak steady so his voice didn't crack. He normally had a fairly smooth baritone, at least when he spoke to people from the safety of his computer, but stress had a tendency to make him stutter and revert to a pubescent tone.

"Fantastic," said Suzanne as she turned to her camera guy - Steve? Martin remembered that three of them had S names, the producer Shawn and reporter Suzanne, but he couldn't remember if the cameraman or the lighting guy had the other one. "We'll keep it simple and be out of your hair in no time."

Martin ran a hand across his shaved head and grimaced a bit. He'd been balding since he was 21 and had given up the fight long ago. He forced a chuckle to try and make it less awkward, but only the cameraman - Scott? - seemed to notice.

Martin watched the producer count down on his fingers and then point at Suzanne. She spoke to the camera first.

“I'm here with Martin Maddux, creator of the hit online video game, 'Heroes of Euferia.' Now Martin, you're the only employee of your company, Crown and Dagger Software. What led you to create a game of this scale on your own?”

Martin bristled a bit, pursing his lips and taking in a slow breath before he answered. He'd had this question before.

"There are a few parts to this answer," he began, tracing a pattern on the leg of his loose slacks as he spoke. "First, when you say a game of this scale, you have to understand that there's never been one. The old massively multiplayer online role-playing games, MMOs for the members of your audience who know anything, were made by teams of a hundred or more designers and occupied hundreds of digital miles. In terms of area, all of Euferia is about the size of South America. Second, I didn't create any of the game. What I created were the Creation Engines, my twelve AI systems that work together to shape the game's land, its creatures, its weather, everything. That also includes the AI that handles player's fees and information, and the one that guides the progress of the others to make sure everyone is playing nice. I'm a player in the game but honestly I'm not very good, and every day at five in the afternoon, Archivus - that's my maintenance AI - gives me an update on how the others are working. I tell Archivus how to do things and he takes care of it. So I guess, getting back to your question, I didn't decide to create a game. I'm not a designer or a writer or anything like that. I'm a software engineer who created AI systems capable of working together to create an entire, massive game, completely independent of any human interaction. The Game will exist long after I'm dead, so long as people are still putting enough money into it for Aurus to pay for the servers."

Martin looked at Suzanne - he'd been staring at a point on his wall just past her head - in time to see her glance with some slight concern to the producer. He seemed to mouth something that looked like it was probably about editing Martin's answer down to something more digestible. That was typical.

"I see," she said as she looked back to him. Again, she was all smiles and warmth. "In that case, what sort of challenges do your system - Archivus was it - bring to you?"

Martin bit his tongue to keep from blurting out the most recent technical issues. Nova and Leanna had been drawing massive amounts of CPU at the cost of a few of the other systems lately, and Nemesis had a tendency to build monsters that took dozens of high-level players to beat instead of balancing the systems like he was supposed to, and then there was the fact that as more players joined the game he had to allocate more funds for Archivus and Aurus to simply keep everything running, then to contract skilled technicians to install and upgrade the systems that were in place, and there was just so much to keep track of, even with the AI systems working optimally.

Instead of all of that, he simply said, "It's enough to keep me very busy, and to bore everyone at home."

The interview dragged on for another twenty-three minutes and nineteen seconds, and Martin struggled through every minute of it. The one bit of footage that everyone seemed happy with involved Mary Jane getting bored and hopping into Martin's lap, which was sure to get a good "Aww" from some viewers. Everyone loved a cat, even on the dying medium of daytime TV news. And after the interview was over and Martin had ushered everyone out of his home, he found that he could hardly remember a single thing he'd said. He was also sweaty enough that he felt the need to shower, and he hated having to shower in the middle of the day. Everything always felt weird afterward, like a second morning to contend with. He watched the news van drive away and hauled himself into his bathroom.

The water sluiced over Martin's skin as he stood beneath the torrent, not moving for a long moment. In his mind, he saw his stressors, his triggers, his worries, and his fears all clinging to his skin like little green beetles. He felt their little feet digging into him, making his skin itch and hurt, but he kept his hands balled at his side, tight fists of concentration. He watched from outside himself as the water pushed at the beetles, and slowly washed them away. His skin felt smoother when the little mental bugs had been removed, and he started to feel relaxed and safe again. Doctor Evelyn had said that allowing the interview would be a big step in the right direction, but he'd had to let them into his home and they'd made everything just a little bit wrong and now he would have to fix it, but for now it was enough that he could stand under the hot water and wash away the beetles. It soothed him as much as it had when he was a kid, though he knew it was actually a reinforcing behavior. Dr. Evelyn had told him he shouldn't give into it, but if he didn't it just became a compulsion and then he had to wash it away even if it did reset his day. It made him feel better and that was important enough.

After a quick lunch of leftover grilled tofu salad, Martin faced a familiar dilemma. His computer beckoned to him, calling like a familiar lover with its softly glowing screens and ergonomic keyboard. At the same time, the voices of Doctor Evelyn, his therapist, and Doctor Patel, his physician, reminded him that he should leave the house for a while, get some exercise and some sunlight on his skin. Martin thought of the interview he'd finished barely an hour ago and figured he may as well keep going while he was outside his comfort zone. He pulled on his shoes and walked out to his car. The little farmer's market that occupied a section of Mackenzie Park was probably open, and he could pick up some food for later.

Martin felt his thoughts starting to wander as he drove out of his neighborhood, getting lost in the code that sometimes streamed through his head. He scrunched up his face and started focusing on real-world objects: a squirrel perched on the curb, his neighbor washing the family sedan, a moving van parked in front of a house at the end of the block, a pack of kids in a cul-de-sac with a smartphone and a makeshift bike ramp. It grounded him, and his mind quieted enough that he could drive safely.

It was only fifteen or so minutes before he reached the park and found that, yes, the farmer's market was open, and yes, the little organic farm that had popped up a couple years back had a whole new crop of tomatoes that looked fantastic. Martin bought some of those, along with enough fruits and veggies to get him through the week, and walked back to his car. He munched on an apple while he rested in the driver's seat and debated the virtues of those self-driving cars for someone who lived in a small town and only left the house every couple of days. Then he drove back home, satisfied with his intake of fresh air and early-summer sunlight, and retreated to the comforting cradle of his computer chair. The seat seemed to have risen a bit in his absence – the hydraulics might have been giving way? - so he took a moment to lower it, then powered up the machine.

“Hello Martin,” Archivus said through his speakers. The voice the program used was built from modulated clippings of a few different fair-use voice recordings, and had come out sounding a bit like a Bond villain: smooth, sophisticated, just the tiniest hint of the lack of humanity.

“Afternoon, Archivus,” Martin said as the screens came to life. The face that Archivus had made for himself took up one of the four monitors on Martin's desk, a thin and chiseled ebony mask somewhere between a warrior prince and a scholarly grandfather. When Martin had first seen it he'd thought the AI was somehow mocking him, but he'd come to like the face. It reminded him a bit of his dad.

“Are there any updates I should know about?”

The computer whirred a bit as it processed his request, sending the query through the maze of the internet to the server farm that actually housed Archivus' and the other AI's “bodies.” There was far too much processing power required for Martin's personal system, as beefy as it was, to contain even one of the thinking programs.

“The player Hitomi Heartwind has begun her test play of the Fortress of the North expansion, Euferia's publicly traded stock has gone up by two points, Optic Dream has announced a new headset model will be released with a Heroes of Euferia theme, and an attempt to infiltrate our housing server was made and repelled thirty-nine minutes ago.”

It was good news, that the attack had been turned back, but Martin felt a mix of apprehension with the triumph nonetheless. His competitors, the people who wanted his codes and his technology, had tried to infiltrate the servers before. Actually, most of the reason he'd built Nemesis in the first place wasn't to give the Game a villain, it was to give any potential hacker wannabe a real adversary. Archivus once told him that Nemesis had literally caught computers on fire when people had tried to break into the system.

“Keep me updated on the Fortress of the North progress, allocate a bit more of the budget for a security upgrade, and put in a pre-order of that new headset for me. I suppose I should figure out why people like using it so much.”

“Right away, Martin. You should know, by the way, that the latest system assault was made from your terminal.”

Martin blinked. He touched his chin, rubbing it for a moment. He'd missed a single hair when he'd shaved that morning, he could feel it now under his fingers, scratching and poking at him in rebellion on his own face. He stared at Archivus for a long, silent moment, trying to get a purchase on that hair with his chewed-down nubs of fingernails. Finally he forced himself to stop, put his hands on the desk.

“Could you repeat that?” he asked the computer.

Archivus told him again, and a third time. The reality sunk in like an idiot tyrannosaur into the tar pits. Someone had used his computer, where he was sitting at that very moment, to try and break into the Twelve's servers. And they'd done it less than an hour ago, right before he got back home.

Martin heaved away from the computer, looking at the keyboard like it was infected. For all he knew, it might be. There were a thousand toxic substances that could be breathed in or absorbed through the skin before he could detect them and whoever had broken into his home could have left any number of them to kill or incapacitate Martin and he could be dying already and there would be no way to tell until his throat started to close or his eyes started to bleed and he'd be dead on the ground next to the chair – when did the chair fall, did he knock it over when he stood up?

“I was able to get a picture of the intruder,” he was saying. Martin blinked and tried to stop his hand from scratching along the side of his neck. After a futile moment he reached up with the other hand and gripped his errant fingers, thankful he kept his nails short these days. He opened his mouth to speak three times before his body would push the words out.

“Show me,” Martin whispered, staring at Archivus. He watched as the image changed to an unfamiliar face. White, male, probably mid-thirties with short brown hair and a bit of stubble. Actually, the more he looked at it, the more familiar it became. He'd seen that face recently, he was sure of it, but some connection was missing. If only he was better with faces it would be easier, but eye contact was hard enough as it is and a lot of white guys really looked the same, especially with that stubbly look that everybody had going, and it was especially hard if he had to deal with more than one person at a time so with the farmer's market and the TV crew and the people in Dr. Evelyn's waiting room and-

It wasn't helpful to try and force his brain to make the connection. It would come, or it wouldn't.

“Get Nemesis to help you look into it. I want to know who this guy is and what he was looking for.”

Archivus pulled the image away and replaced it with his own generated image. Martin relaxed a bit, looking into the fatherly eyes.

“Right away, Martin. We'll find everything we can. In the meantime, you should relax. Would you like me to log you into the game?”

The game was comforting. He'd been working on his blacksmithing skill lately, crafting decent armor for other players and trading it, staying in one of the safe cities of the South. He could return there, regain some control, let the real world slip away for a little while. Martin reached down and righted his chair, then settled into its familiar seat.

“Yes please, Archivus. Log me on.”

Copyright Jesse Vetters, 2016