Thief in the Game Read online

  UnCert kit is just as illegal as unCert code and just as seriously punished.

  My first and most immediate business is here, with a shop where AI surveillance, cloaking and identity masking is crafted, as well as an infinite number of straightforward nuts-and-bolts code routines, mostly for applications in security. One guy in particular hacks up custom code for me. The semi-transparent avatar of Xak2144 appears. He’s wearing his Spooky Judge Dredd look which is pretty rusty. Rusty and translucent is big right now.

  “Hey.” I raise one hand in greeting. As the customs are in here, neither of us will greet the other by name. Here in Hope’s it’s a rule. You don’t use names unless they’re the names of in-game characters or publicly-known aliases. Not having a name, as such, this has suited me well and may be part of why I feel so at home here.

  Everyone here is an avatar, all faces and bodies that they’ve chosen to present. In the meatworld, Xak could be Siamese twin mermaids for all I would know about it. And likewise. Except that, in a way, I’m the only person here who really is what he appears to be.

  Xak has bare bones code and a couple of sneaky little bots ready for me. “The NuRow switch logic you ordered isn’t connecting yet. It’s taking a little time.”

  “You always say that. You can’t really do them, can you.” We always get along better if I can rib him a bit. And he always obliges by not having a part of my order complete in time.

  Xak is a veteran developer. He worked for USMilCorp and is rumored to have built key parts of their surveillance infrastructure.

  “I’ll pay my share of the next period of communal surveillance, too.” It doesn’t do to let anyone know that I have access to practically unlimited juice, even here, so I only pay for things in amounts or instalments that seem reasonable. Different people pay different regular dues, but all of us who are regularly here and value the seclusion from the outside world pay toward the running of the incursion detection and monitoring systems. The main function is for the network to alert us if anybody comes near who seems even faintly official.

  My system is somewhat enhanced and hyper sensitive. I think Xak knows that I have it tuned, almost tailored, for The Gabriel. He probably thinks I’m either a paranoid fanboi or a stalker. That’s okay with me. I don’t mind him thinking that.

  Along with my security updates, he’s made some devices I can use in gameplay. He packages up the algobots in cypher wraps and password protection for me as I card his payment. It’s always good to spread some juice. Keep it moving. He loads my cryptowrapped goodies to a cloud zone for me. I don’t have any physical hardware, but he doesn’t need to know that. Nobody does. And here in unCert City, asking questions would be a serious an offense.

  He nods, happy with the juice that I give him, and I’m very pleased with my haul of illegal interfaces, code patches, and bots.

  Now, as fast as I can, I want to get to my own little hideaway, my piece of dataspace in the deepest midst of Hope’s. My refuge where I keep my stuff. My notes and data are backed up in there.

  All the parts of my own memory that I’m able to clone are dupe copied, along with salvaged copies of parts that become detached, some of which I still hope to reconnect. I live in constant fear either of losing parts of my memory, which happened several times, or maybe worse, of having it found.

  And what I dread even more is the discovery making its way to The Gabriel.

  With all of those treasures I keep several copies of that ancient haul of The Gabriel’s server code. The software, the neural mapping, and the routing charts that sucked me out of my body and splatted my weightless self out into the net in the first place. And with them, my own attempts to reverse engineer and repurpose that fateful construction.

  UnCert City has alleys in warrens, back-ways in labyrinths, a tight and untidy scrabble of businesses, hucksters, conspirators’ lairs, plots, ad hoc gaming mashups, and irregular meeting places that always seem to have been recently deserted. But, like myself, people in unCert City don’t usually want to be seen.

  After the unruly backlots of all of the makers is a huge zone of freeform art. Installations and virtual sculpture. Experimental bots, agents, neurobots, and pets. We furtive and anonymous folk who use and frequent the innermost parts at the core of Hope’s inhabited zones all contribute generously to the art zones as well as the technicals.

  The artzone may be the oldest part of Hope’s, and it’s said to have been the first area to have been colonized. Free-thinkers, the SoftLiberados and the cults certainly find expression here, as well as enthusiastic tourists looking for the perfect home in the datasphere.

  Keeping the makers and the art community in business around the outside of the center helps to distract, detour and deter casual visitors. Prying eyes, real or virtual, tend to get lost before they get through all of the bots, dancers, artworks and multi-dimensional installations. A familiar installation reads the sensations from users’ simsuits and displays the data as colors, patterns and sounds.

  As I pass through the interacting sounds and textures, there’s a rumble. Everything stops. A machine intelligence is here. Not just someone’s game mech or a chatterbot on the loose. This motion, this disturbance is from is one of the big AIs. A megacorp, a MilCorp or a government. Or worse. The vibration is intense. Everybody, everything stops moving and remains still.

  The whole zone holds its digital breath. Everybody, everything is silent and still. Made of data, the machine intelligences can’t see patterns in data that doesn’t move. That’s the belief and it’s been borne out time and time again. It can’t work for me, though. I can’t switch off or disconnect. I can’t stop my thoughts.

  Refuge

  MOST OF THE CORE, the center of Hope’s, is a thriving online counter-culture. Enthusiasts must have put thousands of hours into the playable re-creations of vintage gaming mashups, like the wargaming Mall of Duty, dystopian epics Soylent Hill and President Evil, a truly bizzare place called Zombocom and a big-pixel music and mayhem environment called Juke Nukem.

  A place called Third Life has popstars, porn stars, parties, Ponzi schemes, entire communities, virtual cities of people inventing their own ways of life and ecostructures. And, most of us believe, being preyed upon by unscrupulous operators who are there to gouge juice from the eager and gullible. But they seem to love it, so good luck to them all.

  The nooks and crannies in between these masses of noise and fury are home to truly solitary fugitives. Obsessive recluses, either by temperament or, like me, from need. Here is my bolt-hole, my refuge. Here is where I recuperate and back-up. It’s not enough and I have no idea how safe it really is, which is why I need something more. Something solid. A physical drive out in the meat and rust world. For now, this is what I’ve got.

  The passage of the AI sizzles like the jagged brush of an electric current. It must be many times worse for everyone here who’s connected by a simsuit or jacket. Connected with a physical body. Given how much the vibration disrupts me, it must be pretty painful for anyone who didn’t disconnect. I feel as though the charge, the current is sweeping over me, scanning through me.

  I try hard to keep a still, mediative, empty mind. To not give it back a signal. Nothing for it to be interested in.

  The whole of Hope’s comes to a stop. Suspended, paused until the buzz passes away. Then a wait, for good measure. In case it turns back. The last thing anybody would ever want is to be interesting to a machine intelligence.

  When the thing, whatever it is has passed, the stillness remains. The caution. The unspoken, nameless dread. A place like this is where you come to not experience that. the intrusion makes it a double force cold shock.

  Here, where real-world digital citizens come for safety and seclusion, I’m at a disadvantage. Everyone else here really is virtualized. Visitors from the solid world. As tourists, they can all set and change their appearance almost at will. It doesn’t take much to pull a character from a game or a virtu, customize it, clothe it. Arm it. Mos
t weapons won’t do much outside of the game they’re built inside, of course. They’re no more real than the clothes people choose, or even the bodyforms, come to that. Almost half the people here are invisible---at least they are to each other.

  Most people who are visible appear as superheroes, famous warriors, historical, fictional and game characters. But not me. Well, I do manifest as a game character, but not one that anyone would choose as a display. At the same time, it’s not an appearance you would want to be inconspicuous, either. Especially not down here where people are likely to appear as Wonder Woman, Jason Bourne, Jabba or Jar-Jar, or Huey Duey and Louie.

  Here, ironically, I’m probably more visible than I am anywhere else on the net. I just have to rely on the idea that nobody is likely to be looking for me.

  ~~

  My own haven, my little refuge, is nestled pretty inconspicuously between a Final Fantasy 3.6k zone and the Transformer Mutant Ninja Camel Assassins. I approach indirectly, like I always do. If any regulars see me, they probably wouldn’t be fooled for a moment. There are a couple of people I know, people who would nod or exchange a look, but I don’t see any of them today.

  Nor anyone else. That’s how I like it. I prefer to slip into my own little realm unseen and, as far as I know so for, nobody has yet watched me enter.

  When I died, when I was first detached, I floated rootless on the net. Along with access to juice, the spending kind, I collected whatever code seemed like it could be useful. Rudimentary bots, detectors and sniffers, like the code crackers that I thought I needed to get into private and secure areas.

  Back then there was nothing like Hope’s, or nothing that I was able to find, so I had to keep my digital essentials in forgotten or abandoned areas of dataspace where nobody went. Dark, unused corners of big servers that belonged to banks or utilities, usually. Panicky, I made and hid as many copies of everything as I could. That got harder as the data accumulated and grew bigger.

  What I have now isn’t so much better, but at least I don’t live in dread of someone’s old server getting decommissioned and my precious data getting unjuiced into oblivion.

  Just as I’m sure there’s nobody around and I’m getting ready to slide into the space between the two gameworlds, something moves. Coming toward me. I deflect and keep going, away from my little private space. It calls out to me and its voice is thin and very synthetic. “I know you.”

  The being has a prismatic mother of pearl sheen, quite beautiful and not at all plastic. It flickers with a smooth nanopixel mosaic. Then in the corner of my vision, my tracker pops up and the stats of the thief flash up in my view. The IP, the same hardware identifiers, all of the equipment that I saw as he spiraled away down the side of the Chrysler. I have the equipment, right down to almost all of the serial numbers and I have their address in Carbondale, Pennsylvania.

  I can easily pretend that I haven’t made the identification. It would be odd if I had. Visitors, players can acquire some of my ability to read details like hardware identifiers, but the kit it takes to do it, the code and the hardware would be very costly, at least for them. And dangerous. All of it would be totally unCert and fantastically illegal. At least it would for real people.

  The glowing being comes directly closer to me. I continue to move about as casually as I can manage away from my little lair.

  From the stats I already have I can make out their physical location in meatworld, all of the details of the hardware they’re connecting with, and their recent online history, at least through the current session and the last. The tracker records it all.

  Playing for time I say, innocently, “Really? I don’t know where you would know me from.”

  I’m surprised when the avatar holds out the flywhip. There’s no way for the character that I’m in to look or act surprised. I don’t have facial expressions. I don’t have all that much face, if it comes to that, it’s mostly in shadow, so there’s no way for the thief to detect whether I’m really telling the truth or not when I say, “That was you? I’m surprised.”

  “Do you want it back?”

  “Not especially. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Well, I can’t give it to you anyway.”

  “Oh?”

  “I already sold it. There’s a guy in here. I was just on my way to deliver it.”

  I make a guess. A lot of people in unCert City trade in stolen virtuware, but the thief’s direction sets up a hunch in my mind about which trader they’re headed for.

  “Why did you take it like that?”

  “To sell. It’s what I do.”

  “You’re not there for the gameplay?”

  “Okay, a bit of both.” Then, “I saw the way you crashed the level. Pretty spectacular. Did you go back and complete the orbiter?”

  “Yes. But I must have missed something. I got to the syringe in the jewel box, so I completed the level but there should have been more.”

  “You didn’t get the tentacled monster, I’m guessing.”

  “No. And that’s probably not all of it, though.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “The Chrysler building. That’s not there just as set dressing, I don’t think.”

  There’s a gurgling, babbling sound. It’s laughing. I look at the readout of their kit again. They’re using a voice-to-synth. Not just keying. Taking speech, translating it and then speech synthesizing. How very fancy. I wonder if they stole that, too.

  “There’s another level there, or a part of a level. Some inside the Chrysler.”

  “I guessed that.”

  “But you jumped.”

  I hesitate. I jumped so I could get your stats, matey. But I wasn’t going to let on to that. “I thought restarting the level, I’d get the flywhip back.”

  The creature looks at me. Could be the player was taking a call. They could even have gone to take a piss or get a caff drink or something. No, I could see their simsuit was still active.

  “You must be well juiced.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Xak’s bots don’t come cheap.”

  He had been watching me. I didn’t like that.

  “Is there something you want?” I’ve already got enough of what I need from the stats. This conversation is starting to make me anxious, and I’m ready to be done with it.

  “I didn’t mean to intrude. I can tell you’re annoyed.”

  “I haven’t seen you here.”

  That scratchy laugh again. “How would you know? I always look different. You could have seen me every day. Here or in other places.”

  “True,” I say. Although it isn’t true. Not entirely. My tracker would have alerted me for sure if I’d seen him more than a couple of times before. If I’m around the same person regularly, especially in different environments the tracker lets me know. I don’t think I could brush by The Gabriel and not know it, but I don’t want to risk finding out the hard way. If I’m in scanning range of someone with the same IP address or physical equipment more than once or twice, especially in different games or virtus, the tracker pings me and puts a tag on them. Like the alerts that I set up on the thief.

  “Okay.” The avatar extends a hand out toward me. “I’m Tag.” I stay silent and wait for more. “My given name is Chris, but I go by Tag. Everyone calls me Tag. Everyone except my Mom.”

  How old are you? I start to wonder. The hand is still held out to me.

  Tag says, “I’ve seen you plenty of places. You’re pretty distinctive, though.”

  I had always tried to hope that I wasn’t.

  “Especially since you have no back.”

  “What?”

  “Have you never seen your avatar from behind? It’s totally hollow. There’s nothing there. It’s like the whole thing is pressed out of a single sheet but, on the back there’s no color. It’s carbon black. It looks kind of eerie, like if you got too near you might fall into it.”

  The whole time I’d lived, existed, on the net, and I’d been in
habiting a two-dimensional thing. I had no idea about it at all. Tag says, “It’s pretty cool, actually.”

  Still, discovering that someone has taken that much interest, and that much notice of me, makes me pretty nervous and uncomfortable. Feeling nervous and uncomfortable was an unusual experience for me. Not a good one.

  After an awkward silence, Tag tries to change the subject. “You did well to get out onto the Chrysler like that the first time. You must have used one of the birds.”

  “So?”

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll go.”

  “Look, it’s alright. I’m just… I’m not used to running into people here.”

  “Here in ‘Hope’s,’ you mean, or here in virtu generally?”

  I meant in Hope’s, but I wanted to steer the conversation away from that. Even though I know that it was already too late, from what he’d said before. If he’s noticed me at this location, I needed to find a new one straight away.

  The avatar shimmers a while, then the synth voice says, “Everybody finds their way here sooner or later. Everyone who’s maybe a bit on the margins.” If you only knew how far out on the margins I was, buddy.

  It said, “I have a place of my own here…” I had a hunch he was going to say ‘as well,’ but he stopped himself. Then, “Maybe you’d like to see it.”

  I wasn’t ready to exchange intimacies with someone who seemed to get stranger and more unsettling by the minute. The translucent and slightly unstable body of the avatar may have been the least abnormal thing about him. And again, it was like he sensed it. “Maybe another time.” He looks at me. “You are kind of strange. You know that, right?”

  I don’t know how to go on without telling him that I don’t know my name. I think he’ll think I’m bullshitting, and not even in a very smart way. I ask him, “Chris. Is that Christo? Christopher? Christian?”

  “Oh, you think…” The avatar looks at me for a while longer. “Hm. You really are pretty strange. I hope you don’t mind me saying so. Well, you’ll have to get along with it one way or another. That or find a way to be a lot less strange.”