Tunnel Rat

Milo and the old man were standing in a field of short grass that came up past his ankles. Wildflowers bloomed in some areas, lending a sweet smell to the air. Overhead, fluffy white clouds slowly moved across a bright blue sky where the brilliant sun shone down. Mountains ringed the area, miles in the distance.

It was quite the beautiful area. And totally alien to Milo in every way.

Milo slowly turned in a circle, staring at the wide-open spaces and the huge sky above. He didn't like it. He didn't like it one bit! It made him nervous, there was nowhere to go, no place to hide. The old man just stood smiling. "You may refer to me as Galet. Are you ready to begin the tutorial?"

"Tutorial? No. I'm not ready."

The old man bowed and smiled. "We will begin slowly then. There is a sword in the grass in front of you, pick it up and hit the orc approaching you."

Milo saw the glint of metal and picked up the sword. It was sort of awkward. A long piece of metal with sharp edges. "Orc?"

"Right behind you. Slash at the orc with your sword."

Milo spun, and saw that a creature was behind him. It was as tall as him and heavily muscled wearing some furs and leather. In the orcs hand was a club of twisted wood. Milo looked at the orc, the orc stood there looking at him. "Why am I supposed to hit the guy, and where the hell did he come from?" That last part bothered Milo a lot! How had this thing snuck up on him?

Milo started running, putting distance between him and the threat. There was nowhere to hide! After a minute he turned and saw two figures in the distance. Safe from them, but the sky pressed down and the vast open space was threat he couldn't outrun. He could feel the panic growing. He disconnected.

Milo came out of the pod, panting. He had interrupted the scan, left the game, manually pushed up the lid and exited. His house calmed him. He was safe here. He made sure all his alarm systems were on, did a quick scan of the areas nearby, and then he climbed into bed, exhausted.

Four hours later he awoke, and ate a meal of food cubes. He remembered the smells in the weird game. Did they have taste too? Putting aside thoughts of the game, he got to work. Things went bad quickly if he didn't pay attention. Today's main job was a clog in one of the lines that took waste water to the fluid recycler. The pipes were old and not smooth on the inner surfaces. Stuff built up, things got stuck, slowly narrowing the pipes. Then a chunk upstream broke loose, making a dam downstream. The other pipes took up the load, but only for so long.

Luckily this time the clog eaters responded. The machines were like mechanical moles. They moved through the pipes chewing up the clogs, and cleaning the the pipe lining. Two hours later things were good as new. He was down to only two of the clog eaters though. He needed at least one more. They each weighed about half a ton and were hard to move. Tomorrow he could check out other sectors and see about swapping one of his broken ones for a working model. There were several parts of the habitat that were abandoned and should have machines he could take to use in E section.

At the end of the day, he approached the pod again. He needed this to work. It had been foolish to start up a VR game without doing research into it. Two hours of reading on the data-net had explained things to him. It was like another world in there, but it was a fantasy unlike the real world in so many ways. Huge spaces with just wilderness, unspoiled lands, and blue skies. Nothing at all like Milo's world of small tunnels, grimy corridors, and broken machinery.

He'd suffered a bout of panic. Kenophobia, to use the medical term. A fear of open spaces. Normally, he dealt with fear by running and finding somewhere to hide. How do you hide from the sky? He wasn't sure if it was permanent, or just a reaction to the surprise of being 'outside' for the first time. But he had a better plan of attack now.

Step one was finishing the medical scan. That had to come first. He had downloaded a huge amount of info on the game, put the data into a storage device, and hooked that up to the pod. He could read and learn about the game while the scan was running, and then tackle the game the next day. He set up the medical scan again, refused the offer to play a game, and started reading about Genesis Online.

The game had been running for a month, and there was a lot of emerging information on the game. But only the tip of the iceberg. Hundreds of new skills had been found in different regions. Some only available after doing some great deed for an NPC, completing a quest, or doing some nearly impossible tasks.

This intrigued Milo. His life was task oriented. Survival, safety, control of his area, identifying problems in the machinery keeping zone E functioning, finding solutions and implementing them. He was in a constant cycle of learning new things, gaining resources, building and fixing. The people playing the game seemed to be in the same cycles, but they considered it fun instead of work.

They were even paying a fortune to do so! Milo had seen auctions for items in the game. A staff that augmented magical powers in Tier 2 wizards had gone for over 10,000 real dollars. That was enough money to buy a brand-new clog eater! He suddenly had an urge to check on Kaminski again. He had an idea of what he was doing.

At the moment what Kaminski was doing was desperately trying to keep his operation running. The loss of his first MKVII pod had been a huge setback. He'd been a fool to have such lax security. One of the rival groups working for his employer had seen a way to cut their own costs. He'd been lucky they only took two of the older pods along with the MKVII.

He had scrambled to raise the cash to replace it and get the operation up and running. Failure was not an option with his current employers. Plus, he had been forced to triple his security system. A half a dozen armed guards were now in the warehouse at all times. The doors had been replaced with thick plasteel barriers that would withstand tank shells. It was costly, but he couldn't suffer another loss.

There were complications with replacing the pod. He couldn't just purchase a standard MKVII. The missing pod had been heavily modified by his employer. He couldn't just say "I lost it." He spent a day setting up an complex scheme to fake the pods destruction by a falling ten-ton machine that had inexplicably come loose from it's mounting on the ceiling at just the wrong moment. It was convenient that he had two dead bodies to also place under the machinery along with a standard MarkVII pod. There would be suspicions, but the project was important to both sides. If he could get things running, all would be forgiven. In this business all that mattered was money.

He had his suspects about who had the first pod. The guards he tortured were useless, but eventually they both named names. Two of his closest 'friends', Ivar and Sven, were running their own operations. They would deny stealing his pods. Understandable. He would have done the same if he had hit one of their operations. He was watching both to see if he could return the favor.

On the positive side, the operation was working and becoming profitable.

They had expanded to 75 pods now, all slaved to the MKVII. No need to purchase the expensive machines, and no need to pay fees. He wasn't even paying his workers. All of them were criminals who's contracts he had purchased.

They were working twenty hours a day in the pods. If they burnt out, there were more he could replace them with. Some even liked it. Working online was much better than some of the work they had been forced to do in the real world.

The signal from the MKVII pod was untraceable. His hardware split the signal, sent it around the world, and it was recombined and routed through another corporation’s uplink to the game. They changed routes continuously. There was a small chance the in-game factory could be found and destroyed, but that would be a minor setback. The world was big.

Money from the auctions was pouring into his dummy accounts before heading to his main holdings. A single low grade magic item sold for only a few dollars, but he was selling thousands a day, and that would only increase.

Kaminski was paranoid by nature, but as days went by, he started to relax. No return visits, no problems online. He knew who his enemies were now, and they wouldn’t surprise him again.

Milo wondered if he should take all of Kaminski's money now, or wait until he had more? If he had access to the programs and hardware he had used in his youth, it would be very simple. Now though, it was only possible because he could tap into the physical communication net Kaminski was using. He recorded the passwords as they were used and could follow all the transactions. He decided to wait. There were a lot of things he could upgrade in zone E if he had the money.

Meanwhile, he was having success using the pod. The medical analysis had been surprising. He was in fairly good health, considering his situation. But he was slowly accumulating problems from malnutrition. Not enough of certain vitamins and minerals, and he needed some additional proteins from those he got in the food cubes.

A few other problems had shown up. Some tissue degradation around his middle socket from a small infection. He was already on a schedule of anti-biotics for that. The stump of his missing leg was going to be a problem soon if he didn't get more calcium. The bone there was much weaker.

All of these could be controlled simply be spending time in the pod. A lot at first, several hours a day. But that went down over time and he'd only need one night a week eventually. Since it was also his most comfortable bed, he didn't mind. But with medical needs taken care of, and a lot of pod time on the horizon, he was ready to get back into the game.

There was one problem though; He needed to hook the pod to the data-net. Even the tutorial was very rudimentary without it. He'd managed to switch the locale to a forested area that was more pleasant for him than open spaces. Something about the open sky bothered him. But the tutorial had been an endless stream of 'how to use a sword', 'how to use blacksmithing to make a spoon' or 'how to brew a simple potion with alchemy'.

He needed to have a secure link to the game server and it had to be one that couldn't be traced back to him. Milo had lived most of his life without anyone knowing he existed. He wasn't about to be caught now. Conveniently, he knew how to do it. Ironically, Kaminsky had shown him how. He was using a similar system to what they used in the operation below him.

He improved on it a bit. His signal was split into 64 information streams. He then used Kaminski’s communication set-up to send his signal to one of the target corporations. His signal was recombined, and he could then enter the game. Anyone looking at his signal would have to find it, trace it back to the corporation he used that day, then try to track the 64 strands simultaneously. Nothing could do that. Even if they did, they'd just find Kaminski. Feeling secure, Milo logged into the real game for the first time.

Milo would have felt a lot less secure if he had an inkling of who was looking for him. Or rather, who was looking for clues to how seventy-five unregistered pods were sneaking access to seventy-five unregistered players.

Wally was the smartest person in the world. Whether he was a 'person' was still debated by some people. Not by 96% of the scientific community. Nearly all of them agreed that the current generation of Artificial Intelligence were indeed 'people'. Just with bigger brains that worked millions of times faster.

But distrust in AI was something that never seemed to go away in some groups. A few fundamental religions felt that what man created could never be a child of God. Quite a few conspiracy groupsfelt that making a machine that could think was the first step towards humanity's doom. And every corporation had hated having AI working for the IRS and overseeing their taxes. The growth of anti-AI groups at the grass level had been shown to be funded by quite a few people who owned a lot of stock in those corporations. They were glad that AIs were no longer used to track their taxes and never wanted that era to return.

But the Supreme Court in the US, and later the World Court in Geneva, had both ruled that AI were legally people, who had the right to determine their own name and who they worked for. It was something of a moot point as only one AI was currently alive and active. Wally resided within the confines of a massive Quantum Fortress sealed off from what was left of the old internet completely, and with high security access from the data-net. Inside the QF were a dozen quantum computers.

Wally ran all the automated transport in the world, oversaw satellite communications, and did most anything else asked of him by several of the world's governments.

His current project was creating and overseeing a new VR world called Genesis Engine. Within the new world would be areas for online shopping, secure data storage, banking, and all of the things corporations needed to do business. Wally was starting with the fantasy world of Genesis, and other worlds would follow. Much slower than the impatient corporations who were paying for it wanted. Which is where we come back to the problem Wally was currently working on: How was someone bypassing the security and logging into the game servers unofficially?

The seventy-five illegal pods that were being run by Mr. Kaminski were just a drop in the bucket. Wally was concentrating on cracking this system and then using what he learned to crack others. He had theories that they were using some sort of split signal, but had yet to find the Rosetta stone that would let him crack open the problem.

His break came the day that a MKVII pod started sending medical data through a secure connection using a similar method to that of the illegal pods. The difference was that the medical data went directly to Wally. He essentially had the end of a twisted ball of yarn, and was starting to follow it home.

He knew the same pod was also allowing its user to log in unofficially. He now had that person’s DNA mapping, his fingerprints, retinal scan, height, weight, sex, and all other medical data, but still had no clue who he was. He had a name: Milo. But none of the other data was registered anywhere in the world.

Wally didn't have true human emotions, but close. Some things caused him great concern, or something similar to anger. But the closest his behavior came to matching a human was frustration. Not having data on the person he'd found caused Wally a lot of that.

More frustrating was seeing the illegal modifications that had been done to this person. Such things could only be done in the first days of a child's life, or before they were born. Most died within a few years. Here was an adult with a modified nervous system and sockets that allowed direct connections with the data net. Wally wanted to know who he was, and how to shut him down. And if there were more people like him. But first he had to talk to him. He couldn't find him in the real world. But when he next logged into the game, Wally would know, and could begin tracking him.

Milo, unaware that the medical component of the pod was betraying him, prepared to log into Genesis and continue to learn about the game. He'd completed what he could of the offline tutorial, and started to begin again online, when one of his alarms went off. The number 7 food compiler was sending down food cubes that more resembled charcoal than they did cube shaped gelatin that tasted like chicken. Some people joked they were better. After having been online for only 17 seconds, Milo logged out to go shut down number 7, and reroute dinner for 2000 people from another source. 17 seconds had been more than enough time for his pod to send over all his medical data to the archives and put Wally on his trail.

Two hours later, problem fixed, he got back into the pod, inserted the IV's and prepared to spend six hours in the pod playing in Genesis while his pod corrected some of the abuse his body had taken.

The login process was different.

Milo stood in a huge domed room. The floor was sand. Around the perimeters of the room stood statues. The first ring was sort of familiar to him. The short guy was a dwarf, the big girl in furs was a barbarian, the short guy with no beard was...another dwarf? Ok, so not familiar.

The second row was even tougher for him. Lizardman for sure, since that's what it looked like. Minotaur was from a Greek story? The lady with the huge red fist, the rotting person, and the skeleton were out of old horror movies he was pretty sure.

A dry cough alerted him to the presence of the old man. "Enjoying the choices you have for your race? Do you have questions?"

"I can be any of these?" Milo saw hundreds of statues.

The old man shook his head a bit. "Eventually. But some of them have requirements, special quests, initiation and rebirth into a new tribe. For a beginner, I recommend Human. If you have played fantasy games before, perhaps you might enjoy Elf, Half-elf, Dwarf, Halfling, or Barbarian. There are also many sub-races such as Lunar Elves, Hill Dwarves, or Stone Clan Barbarians.

"Which ones have a tail? I keep falling over. I need to be shorter and have a tail."

The old man put his hand on his chin and considered, then said. "Feel free to look around at the various races."

Milo strolled past the various statues. He found a human sized cat person with a long prehensile tail. The warrior had sharp fangs, but the hands were more human looking. "How about this guy, where is he from?"

Galet stolled over to the statue. "Ah, a fierce race. These are the Rakhasha. They hail from another dimension originally. You can become one by gaining favor with their General, then impressing the High Priestess for a blessing, journeying through a portal, defeating a void beast and eating it's heart. You'll die, but your soul will be reborn as a Rakhasha."

Milo moved on. "He was too tall anyway."

After several similar conversations, Galet suggest Milo bring up the list of races on a screen. "This may save us a bit of time. Races in red letters are not available to you at all. Orange have quests that will take an estimated year of moderate play to accomplish. Blue are available to beginners with a short quest and introduction to the race. Races in white are available to all players.

Milo scanned the list. "Oh, I like this one. What does a name in yellow mean?"

Galet sighed. "Perhaps you might like a nice wood elf ranger? I think at Tier 4 they can take limited beast forms and you could spend time as a lemur. I'm sorry Milo. Yellow denotes a difficult race that has major advantages and drawbacks. None of those will be on your list at all."

"Really. I see one. Short, cool tail. This will do." Milo selected the race and entered the game to try it out.

The old man just stared at the spot where the player had been. He brought up his own list. There were no yellow names there.