Freezing Shadows, Book 4 Epilogue

Epilogue: Elsewhere

(MetaTech Virtual Headquarters, Shadowmen Control Room)

Demi Turner took a breath, and said, “All right, everything is looking good on this end. Sally, anything you can see in your area?”

Sally Navarro shook her head. “No, boss. Just some new updates from the Brotherhood storyline. People have started running into the bugs.”

Demi smiled. She’d been waiting for this. They’d specifically kept the bugs out of the beta, so no one would know about them ahead of time. The Brotherhood of Unity, and the forces behind it, were part of a long-term plot for the game. Not a ‘big bad’, so much as a threat that rears its head every so often, or a lot of small fires that could grow into conflagrations if they weren’t put out.

Of course, the problem with even small fires was that they could still be deadly. Especially if you weren’t prepared for them. The bugs were dangerous under normal circumstances. If you didn’t have the magic or gear to fight spirits? They could easily tear through whole teams.

“Where have the contacts happened?”

Sally looked at her screens, and said, “I’m seeing Hong Kong, Moscow, Cairo, Cape Town, Barcelona, Toronto, Rio di Janeiro, Atlanta, Tenochtitlan (what used to be Mexico City), Chicago, and the Yakima subserver.”

Demi raised an eyebrow. That was unexpected. “The other ones I get, because they’re all major servers. But the Yakima subserver? What gives?”

“Pulling the logs now. Looks like a Brotherhood retreat was raided. Mix of a player team and some Devastation Angels. Whole compound cleaned out.”

“Damn. Did the Angels let them walk away, after?”

“Logs say yes. Hmm. It was your dragon-fighting team, looks like.”

“Please tell me that there wasn’t a ‘lucky’ confluence. I don’t want to have to go checking through the AI code to make sure it isn’t biasing the game towards certain players.”

“Well, you could say it was lucky, yeah. But not on your boy’s part. One of his team wanted a go-gang leader as a contact in character creation. She filled out the contact generation form looking for an all-female bike gang to make friends with. With her being in Seattle, the AI picked the only all-female bike gang in the area, the Devastation Angels.”

“Ok, that explains how they were able to get the Angels involved. But why did they draw them in?”

“You won’t believe this, but it looks like she reached out to her contact in Seattle, to see if there were any of the Pasco branch’s girls out near Yakima. They wanted to get the lay of the land, since they were in tribal lands, and that was the closest thing to a local contact any of them had. Turned out that they crossed paths with one of the AI-generated plot threads, with the Angels hunting bugs so they could make more Angels.”

“All right, that’s within expectations, at least. We did set it up so that any concentration of bugs might draw the Angels in. But they still have limited numbers, right?”

“Yes, the Pasco branch had twenty-one hybrids, two flesh-forms, and they called in a dozen true forms from other branches. Spirits cheat like that.”

“What kind of opposition did they run up against?”

“About twice that much. Plus, the logs say that a Queen was summoned at the end. Casualties… light. A few Angels didn’t make it, and were disrupted, but all the players made it through. Full sweep of the hive, including the shaman and Queen.”

Demi frowned at that. “I know this is the same team that fought a dragon, but really? Did we tune the bugs too easy?”

“No, looks like they had those capsule rounds with insecticide in them. The nasty, industrial stuff that the German megacorp ‘just so happened’ to develop for ‘insectoid paracritters’. Turns out, some of the true forms from the hive were spotted, but were thought to be paracritters, like those devil rats and demon rats. So, they had rumors of insect paracritters, and armed themselves accordingly.”

Demi frowned. “The German mega? The one run by a dragon?” Sally nodded, and she took a breath. “All right, that’s fine. It will give potential hooks for players looking into this, and wondering why the insecticide was so effective. What about the other groups that met the bugs? How did they fare?”

“Heavy casualties, almost universally. Yakima was the only one that didn’t have at least fifty percent casualties. Cape Town and Cairo had sole survivors. In Hong Kong, Atlanta, and Chicago, the teams were completely wiped out. Moscow and Barcelona have a few captured, being prepped for investiture. When that happens, the characters will ‘die’. Even if the bodies are going to keep moving around.”

“Just so we’re clear, why the huge discrepancy?”

“The other groups were in urban areas, so they were more careful about letting True Forms roam around. Looks like there were some rumors about ‘mutants’ in the area, but no paracritter reports. Several of the groups also went in light, since they were trying to infiltrate, rather than going in guns blazing. And the Atlanta and Chicago groups didn’t have any magicians or adepts who could do magic damage. Hong Kong’s magician got shredded by a true form on the astral, never managed to get back to their body.”

“All right. Keep an eye on things. We want the threat to be scary, especially for unprepared teams, but we don’t want the bugs to be invincible. That would just make people avoid those storylines, or quit the game.”

“Don’t worry, boss. We’re on it. There are also a few non-player groups talking about how some of their normal contacts have ‘disappeared’ or changed, so things are filtering out into the community.”

“And the bug ‘clean-up crews’?”

“They look to be—” Sally cut off as a new alert appeared in front of her. “Oh, well, the Cairo sole survivor just got removed from play. One of the Scarab hybrids took her out on the street, just before dawn. Two other players witnessed it, before the ‘random attacker’ got away. And there look to be matrix attacks trying to remove any information posted in-game. I think we can expect some healthy paranoia from anyone who meets the bugs from here on in.”

“And the Seattle team?”

“Looks like calling in the Angels and getting a clean sweep gave them some cover. Any bugs that are going to check out the remains of the hive will find a lot of Mantis activity, and the buildings are burning, so evidence is going to be scant. And the Seattle team hasn’t posted anything in the in-game Matrix about it, so they’re probably going to get away with it.”

“That’d be that guy’s influence, probably. While we didn’t give any clues about the bugs in the beta, we did some corporate shenanigans to show people that if things get purged from the Matrix, that’s bad news. He probably warned his team not to go spreading the word.”

“Oh, yeah, I remember the stir that the BlackJet plotline caused on the forums. Former rock star turned vampire, and all the shenanigans. Was he on that team?”

Demi chuckled at that. “In one of his former characters, yeah. Died on that run, so it taught him something about not picking fights just because someone was ‘other’. I watched the replay of that one. He saw fangs, and started blasting. Only survivor was the hacker who was in the van on overwatch, and drove off in a hurry.”

“Explains why he was willing to look the other way on the Angels, I guess. And he imparted some of that wisdom on his team.”

“Well, that’s part of the reason we had the beta, beyond looking for bugs. We have some ‘veteran shadowmen’ in the player pool, who can educate new players organically, without us being heavy-handed with it. Fosters community, and makes things seem more real.”

“You sound like a PR person.”

“I’ve spent too much time with Lilia and her PR gremlins, and not enough with the coders. Sue me.”