Trust No Robot Read online

I got out of the car and headed into his apartment complex. A grey building with a new age feel. Bricks and glass scattered around in art type fashion. It was a bit sterile for me but whatever, people had all kinds of taste. On the walk in I tuned into a feed on Afghanistan. Maybe Nick was supporting our work there through his work at DARPA.

  “..revolution seems certain now. The latest report is that the UN is standing by but no action seems to be forthcoming and the US is in talks with England about possible next steps to minimize loss of life. Afghanistan has been a hotbed of terrorists and failed overthrows for decades but in the last year Mohammed Ajar has been raising support among certain groups. With the election being cancelled on Friday due to concerns about rigged machines it seems like Mohammed is taking a more direct hand in taking control of the key structures in country to solidify power…. “

  What a fuckdown that place is. I can’t imagine living in a place that bombs constantly fell. “uggh, middle east sucks..” I mumble as I grab the access code from his file and enter into his apartment.

  Zena

  Killing soldiers was like a meditation retreat. After 30 minutes of it I felt like I was in a trance. Kill, punch, shoot, kill, punch, shoot, drone drop. What struck me ½ way through was that this was all wrong. Something with the gameplay didn’t add up. I couldn’t put my finger on it but after 10 years of playing every day I knew gameplay and something had shifted right before we walked into the square and the zombies came at us that didn’t quite add up.

  I’d killed soldiers before, that wasn’t an issue but I was surprised that this number was put up against our team. It didn’t really flow with how the rest of this game had played out.

  Another 10 minutes of kill, punch, shoot and drone some bombs and it was mopped up.

  “that was strange, didn’t expect that many” I texted the team.

  “fucking good fight” replied thief.

  “let’s head to the castle” greenie quickly replied.

  “agreed” I texted and pointed to an old school hummer. We jumped in and found a stockpile of ammo. There was more to battle today to be had. We were traveling very fast to the east and the gum trees and cows looked like sticks and blurry dogs until you focused on them. I’d have to comment on the soldiers tonight on the blog and see if anyone else had hit that area in the game. Seemed like sloppy AI programing to me.

  While we were traveling I hit pause letting the team know I’d be right back, unplugged and had a bio break. Then slammed a bar down my throat and plugged back in. I thought more about the town attack, it wasn’t strange that there were soldiers at that level, but it was that in gameplay there are plateaus you hit. When you finish a major assault and successfully accomplish a goal, the game adjusts and gives you a moment to recoup as you strategize. It also does that to reward you. Intermittent reward was part of the key to keeping people addicted to the game. This is all designed to give you the Pavlov’s dog endorphin hit of winning a battle or climbing a mountain. It is the unspoken consistent thread in gameplay that every designer adheres to. Games are a lot more complex these days and you could run afoul of other random players which were unpredictable, but that wasn’t this situation, those were game droids inserted. Anyway, weird.

  Had a bank of of messages backed up. My mom worried about me and not having a life outside of my VR gear. She was always worried about me since Max and I broke up and he moved out. I texted her that I was out with a girlfriend and would call her tomorrow.

  Unpause.

  We were getting closer to the castle, shit that thing looked big and ugly. We stayed in the shadows as we moved slowly towards it. Drone air cover gave me a constant reading if we had enemy soldiers in front of us or if we had an open route.

  Ruf

  Ruf sat in the bar and waited for his next assignment. This job was a lot of waiting.

  “and in world news, we believe Afghanistan has an uprising underway. We see the current government taking action to quell the marching and looting, but there are indications that this could be direct oversight by Mohammed Ajar.. “ played in the background as Ruf flipped open his pad and jacked into his finance portal. He was busy saving, every extra month in this group got him closer to his exit. The dream was to get out of the service in the next 6 months and open a security company legit like. Something where he managed teams that guarded people and maybe set up the home security systems and would get to choose his assignments.

  Ruf raised his finger slightly to the cute barmaid “another please”

  He got the beer and pulled up deathworld on his overlay. Deathworld started about 7 years back allowed you to jump to the location of a memorial of the ones that have passed on. A virtual headstone with video & tweet overlays. Ruf gps jumped over to where his friend John had died last year and gave left a message about how John saved his life at least 5 times over the years and then added on the end “No one gets out alive”.. He left it anonymous, but any of his old team would know it was him when the stumbled across it.

  Zena

  Unplugging for the night. We paused and said our goodbyes. It was alway hard to tell where people were in the world. Something told me most of this team was US or Europe based but it was always hard to tell. It wasn’t really kosher to ask too many details. But if he/she was in Asia, they were up at some strange hours. Most game krewes worked out of the same timezones but not all. Often you would see lower level gamers be able to find a krewe that was closer by, but if you wanted talent you would have to go outside for it. Timezones became a bit like packs.. which was fine for many, but to find top players you had to be committed to go outside your timezone. I guess attract, attracts alike.

  We had a good team now and had managed enough tours together that we really had a groove going on. I just wish I didn’t have my regular life to come back to. My mom and sister were all the family I had and my life was anything but exciting and attractive. Working 9-5 in a cube calling creating spam all day. That was a tough way to earn anything. I always came home feeling icky, and wanting to wash off something I felt, but couldn’t smell. I had a shit apartment which cost way too much down near Fells Point. It has been gentrified which made it mostly safe, and the local pub Wharf Rat was a good place to hook up from time to time when I felt the urge to tinder up, but I rarely got there as I didn’t have a lot of of extra coin to spread around.

  Anyway, at least I could afford high speed and had a decent rig I could game with. I made my way to the fridge, grabbed some cold pizza and a beer and fell into the couch. I flipped on my overlay and netflixed a mindnumber while I ate. I was asleep before the show finished the episode.

  Miles

  Miles was trying to get his head back in the game. After the conversation with the detective it was very hard to get back into debugging code. Miles kept running over the last time he saw Nick. He was replaying his conversation..

  “Miles, can you please stop being a dick? I need to see the latest output” Nick was hovering over the desk and not really looking at Miles but over his head

  “Look, I don’t care what you look at. All I’m saying is that the batch is still processing and it is probably an hour before complete” Mile said taking another look at the progress. Fucking analytics takes time and this was exabytes of data. The whole point if Miles job was optimization and that took time to find the bottlenecks.

  “Ok, then ping me as soon as this finishes. I’ll be standing by. I need to inspect this to make sure the pentagon integration is humming” as Tory walked out towards his side of the floor.

  This system had been online in beta for about 6 months. Miles was brought in after launch. He really didn’t understand the entirety of the project. He just knew that the data being brought in and crunched had to be the biggest in history. They had 5 Watson R3’s crunching and it still wasn’t stable. Miles knew a lot more about the program than his first day on the project 4 months ago, but he was still learning. The project was tied to gaming systems modeling and then shipping to the Pentag
on into their AI. But the Watson’s were really only high end analytics machines capturing, and packaging and he had idea what the analysis at the Pentagon was all about.

  Nick was a dick but he was also a genius. He had been doing AI and probability models by the time he was in Jr. High. Part of Miles hatred for the guy was driven by jealousy.

  Miles picked up the phone and dialed Nick “Hey, seems like we are waiting on the source data. It is crawling slow. I saw this last week and we waited for like 4-8 hours before the AI corrected it.“

  “un-huh” Nick grunted.

  “Well, it isn’t processing on our side that is holding this up, if we are waiting for the source to complete some process before we can finish it isn’t something we can control” Miles was just trying to cover his ass. He didn’t want Nick telling Jim the delay was on his side.

  “I get that, just let me know when it is finished’ Nick said and then hung up.

  Mile snapped back to present and for the first time decided he needed to see the details of what was being sent to the Pentagon. Tomorrow I need to dig into that.

  Zena

  Waking up in my shoebox in Baltimore, I felt like a grub. I stumbled into the bathroom and made my way through the shower. Fresh water, teeth brushed and a comb through my cropped black hair I almost felt real again. It was Saturday midday and it had been a long Friday night in game. I still had all weekend ahead of me before the Monday morning alarm rang and back to work in cubicle world. I walked back over to my fridge and pulled out some eggs and juice. 10 minutes later I was sitting in front of my screen looking at messages that had come in eating an egg sandwich.

  Mom, ex-boyfriend, Mom, Margret my sister… I churned through those and then sent a message to the team to see what movements were being made, timing to reconnect. We had unplugged after finding a secure hidden place need the castle and all agreed to reconnect in the morning. It was a bit past that now but we really didn’t unplug until 4am, so morning is relative.

  “let me know” came back from the thief

  “need ½ hour” the barbarian texted in

  “.5 hour for me too” came greenie’s message 2 minutes later

  It was always interesting dissecting messaging. I had studied English and hack English in school and there were people that could figure out where you were from based on your texted like a persons accent.

  “sounds good, 2pm ET login.. c u then” I replied

  It was just enough time to walk to the café, get an Americano and get some decent caffeine in the blood before starting the marathon to the castle.

  On the walk I started thinking about last’s night's gaming. It really was getting under my skin about how the game was shifting rules. If you start throwing zombies out of windows and mixing shit up everyone would stop playing. Gameworld did have some rules and we had barely escaped that, it made no sense to layer that into the game as there wasn’t a prize after that fight, just a fight. Where was the reward? That was the most basic concept of gameplay… Mission, reward, mission reward, mission reward. Why was the AI going against basic game principles? The latest games I had been playing were the team strategy games. Of course there had to be unpredictability in a game to make it challenging. There had to be randomness, but it needed to tie to a theme or reasonable set of circumstances in the gameworld, otherwise you might as well allow people to hack cheats in the game like back in the old days.

  “Americano, 3 shots please” I ordered and my robot barista started on the order

  Watching the screen while I waited, Latest political scandal about sex and drugs, some movie star that died yesterday and some story about Afghanistan and an overthrow going on. Crowds in the street attacking peacekeepers, looting.. seemed like it was a bad time to be in that part of the world again. I never quite understood why people just didn’t leave places like that. Maybe they couldn’t, but I’d find a way. Life was too short and I was mostly a pacifist, except when I was jacked in and we were killing zombies.

  Next story was politics again. Elections coming up and it seemed pretty much locked in that whoever won was going to be an asshole and it wasn’t going to get any better.

  “here you go” the coffee came at me

  “Thanks” and I blinked and transferred money to cover the coffee

  Time to hoof it back and get ready for a few hours on the inside. The inside was so very different than meatspace. I could be myself and didn’t have to worry about rent or ex’s. I loved my gametime, but it was interesting last night. Something was a bit off. I had spent enough time jacked in that when something subtle changed I could pick up on it. It was a bit of a glitch probably. I need to remember to mention that on a blog. No time this weekend, but maybe while trapped in my cube Monday morning doing tps reports.

  Sam

  Overlay access: Call to precinct operations IT, “calling in tech support on open warrant”

  30 seconds and 3 menus later, “Bob here, what can I help with?”

  “This is Sam, can you search for warrant B2389X2?, I need help in accessing all systems”

  “ok, give me a couple to look into it” standby

  I had to get special access to work this case. I had top secret clearance but when I accepted the case I had to sign an NDA. Not atypical working gov’t assignments, but also wouldn’t stop anything if I found laws being broken. I had blinked my signature like I’d had to do many times before.

  I continued my search while I waited, “subject deep into game culture” I recorded on my siri uplink. I’d been looking through his house for about 30 minutes at this point. He was obsessed with games and also seemed to follow Afghanistan. I’d gotten access to his email and some of his research.

  I wasn’t going to get access to his siprnet email or machines but there is always bleed over. I learned that long ago. People don’t think about references or the trail they leave in life, but one thing leads to another and at the end of it all, people’s networks are much more cluttered with life than can be managed by security offices, systems and bots. Bottom line is that there is always bleed over.

  Messages from family, friends, someone looking for a beer on next Friday night. All normal stuff. But he had some servers and equipment that I didn’t recognize, that is what I needed help on.

  An hour of reviewing his social sites didn’t get me much, he didn’t spend much time swimming in social networks. On a search of his history our bot picked up that he had been searching for lawyers recently. I hopped over to his accounts and in 10 minutes realized last week he had Venmo’d 10k to a lawyer in midtown.

  Bob popped back into my brain, “Sam, you have all of the analysis back from systems”

  “thanks”, unlink.

  I recorded, “lots about game psychology and tying to AI predictive engines”, shit that sounded like I would need help to understand. I didn’t even really understand ½ of what I’d seen so far in Dr. Nick’s place but bottom line I knew he was a genius of something.

  Within 5 minutes of reviewing online behavior patterns, review of sites, messaging I realized I was way over my head. This guy was developing massive multiplayer games that was some type of overlay of a massive AI system that he had built. I couldn’t find much on that but it was more of picking up on some of the questions and task lists he had posted around that helped me put it together.

  After 4 hours of digging, the drums in the back of my brain where connecting some of the dots. I wanted to talk to that lawyer.

  Zena

  Back in the gameplay. Part of that last piece of getting the key allowed us to access the dungeons through a cave system. After we all were plugged back in, we had jumped down into the forest area which led to the cave. The trees were magnificent 300 feet high massive things. Barbarian was hacking through some of the brush in front. It wasn’t deep but there was some undergrowth.

  “here we go” thief messaged as we got to the cave

  We walked up to what looked like a hole in the ground. The grass was deep green
and I could almost smell the pollen. Almost like a rain forest vibe. Also gameplay had a building soundtrack pumping in my ears that had been building slowly for the last hour. They used every gimmick in the book to get you rev’d. I remember hearing about those 20th century casinos and how they pumped music, oxygen and kept the drinks flowing to keep people pouring their loot onto the tables. That was child's play to how gameplay worked. They had figured out all kinds of furry little gifts and treats to keep you plugged in. Now they had to introduce break points or some people would stay jacked in until they wasted away. Every 3.5 hours they force a break in play. Of course, people are people and there are stories every year of someone doublejacking games and they end up having a scisticoid embolism or the end up on a set of tubes from severe dehydration. It is like my mama always said, people are just the weirdest mammals on the planet.