Unlike the players that got pretty log-in screens filled with images of what they would encounter in Infinite Worlds, Jeff just got another black screen. One of the “perks” of being a GM.

The black faded into the vision of a square room with vine-covered but boring stone block walls, and a floor and ceiling comprised of a slightly different non-vine-covered stone block. They were a bit bigger but just as boring. No doors or windows. No furniture. Just a big symbol, prominently displayed on the wall before him.

The HRD logo: a gray boulder surrounded by a bright yellow sun.

He saw the Break Room, as he and the other GMs had started calling it, at least once a day, sometimes as many as three or four. He’d give anything to log in by the Oakfair bank like the human players. Or even the frozen and unending tundra of the Icewalk Plains over this stupid, drab room. And the colorless Plains were considered the ugliest zone in the game.

Whatever. It’s a job.

Tap, tap, tap. His fingers moved within the TerraMount, but he barely realized it. He was in the game now, and if IW did one thing well, even for a GM, it was full-immersion.

His interface lit up.

In keeping with the rest of his experience, the screen was unadorned; none of the fancy design work done for the players’ menus appeared. It just displayed the incoming problems, each with a unique case number attached. Those meant nothing to Jeff, just a combination of timestamp and User ID Tracking Numbers. The listing afterward was his first concern—the zone in which a problem had been reported. This would give him an early opportunity to identify the issue.

He’d been at this long enough to know which problems most commonly arose in each zone. Even if he didn’t, Infinite Worlds was run by a series of concurrent AIs. The game was simply too big for just one management system. The AIs provided the quests and lore, controlled the NPCs (Non-Player Characters), developed the world’s weather patterns, and ultimately tailored each experience to the player.

Because of that, there were bugs. Lots of them.

But there were always bugs. The tech was new. Not VR tech. That had been around as long as Jeff could remember. His grandfather used to tell stories about the early headsets, and Jeff and his brothers would sit around laughing. But now, the tech was advancing rapidly. What Dan Shaklee and HRD were doing was something brand new, never seen before.

The TerraMount systems were state-of-the-art and designed solely for use with HRD games. Right now, that meant Infinite Worlds. All of their other experiences were all but abandoned when IW hit the market. But new also meant untested.

The players didn’t seem to mind. They understood. As long as their problems didn’t go longer than fifteen minutes.

Zones were level-controlled, and each had their own little quirks. Most players never realized this, but the GMs did. They knew every zone like their own backyards. Or in Jeff’s case, his balcony. He knew which ones had the most glitches—the areas where a player could get stuck—where the faulty quest responses were. The ones that, for whatever reason, the techs couldn’t fix. Oh, they had excuses, and Jeff was tired of them. Their job was to fix those glitches permanently, and they were failing.

The GMs got fifteen minutes to fix an issue, or they were toast, but the tech-heads could sit on a known problem for weeks on end, and no one cared? Of course, they didn’t; the GMs would swoop in and make everything all right again.

But… Jeff had a job because of their incompetence.

That was probably one of the jokes the fixers made in their little hidey-holes. “We’re giving them job security.”

He groaned at the thought and returned his attention to the list before him.

The first case was labeled as 613467.9801, Northern Green Meadows.

A starter zone. The halfling race, to be precise.

Most likely a glitch. A newbie got stuck in the bad tile behind Farmer Hitchens’s Barn. Jeff mentally clicked on the problem.

And bingo.

The bottom left corner of Jeff’s vision was filled with bright green text from USER_9801, aka Dark Blade.

Help! I was running and froze. Can’t move.

Dark Blade, Level 3 Halfling Rogue

Same tile, at least once a day. This was one of the areas he’d been begging the tech-heads to fix. For weeks.

He tried not to grumble, but it was impossible. The tedium of doing the same thing day in and day out was wearing. He hit a small icon of a spinning blue gem next to the case number.

The dull stone room vanished, everything in his vision becoming white. Soon, he was surrounded by a field of green grass. The bulk of a thick brown tree trunk provided shade against the hot sun above with its dense canopy of leaves.

That was another thing. The TerraMount let you feel the weather like you were really there. It made for some interesting time spent in the lava mines. Thank HRD for pain-level inhibitors.

Pretty much the stereotypical red barn rose to a severe point a dozen yards to his left. Around the corner, he could just see the halfling. Upside down. Feet pumping. Glaring up at Jeff in surprise.

Jeff had to force himself not to laugh.

It was difficult. The scene was absurd. But the last time he’d laughed at a player’s misfortune, it had cost him some ranking when the player returned a poor survey.

The halfling wore rough leathers, a shortsword in hand. Brown hair, plump face, furry feet, large and round black eyes.

Jeff couldn’t begin to understand why anyone would ever willfully choose to play as a halfling. That thought probably showed on his face as he glared down at the little guy.

Dark Blade was clearly not amused.

“About time you got here,” Dark Blade complained.

Jeff wanted to tell Dark Blade how stupid his name was, but exhibited self-control. There was nothing worse than players who went with those style names. So unoriginal, so non-immersive. Dark Blade? Fine… but what’s your character’s name? Oh, and you know what’s really intimidating? A three-foot-tall-cherub-angel-looking thing with a knife. So dark. So… bladey.

Jeff glanced at the timestamp again. Ten minutes past since the first report and Mr. Blade had reported it every thirty seconds since.

Dammit. Why had none of the other GMs responded? They couldn’t all be that busy. He quickly called up the list and confirmed that it didn’t appear very extensive. No matter the reason, Dark Blade was now his problem, and he had to fix it.

Soon.

“Get me loose,” Dark Blade said. “I’m on a timed quest.”

“Of course you are,” Jeff muttered to himself.

“What?” Dark Blade said.

Jeff ignored him. Players thought GMs were all-powerful, able to rewrite the game’s code at will. That was far from the truth. They were powerful, sure. Definitely more powerful than even the highest level player, and could do some amazing things when viewed from a player’s eyes. But all-powerful?

Nope.

Stuck tiles were the worst. Bad code. The whole game was made up of tiles. Trillions of them. Each with lines and lines of code telling them how to look, how to behave and work with adjacent tiles, and so much more. It was the ‘how to work with adjacent tiles’ that was the issue now.

And it wasn’t just one tile. The square that Dark Blade was stuck on was twenty tiles wide and twenty tiles deep. About six inches square.

A measly six inches.

Which made it remarkable how often a player ran over this exact spot. That, of course, was the problem. The faulty code couldn’t process other lines of code—players—as they passed over it. Every other tile… fine. But not this little square. It liked to trap them. Torture them like a monster in its own right.

The solution was finding the missing line of code and filling it in.

GMs had the power of creation. Because they could see the code that made up the world, they could manipulate it. Temporarily, of course. It didn’t stick. A momentary fix that would revert back to its original programming the instant another line of code interacted with it. Only the tech-heads or the AIs themselves could actually fix code.

Jeff was a patcher. Quick fixer.

“Come on, hurry up,” Dark Blade said.

Jeff ignored him again. He no longer saw grass or sky, only lines of blue numbers and letters—some complex language he couldn’t actually understand. But he didn’t need to.

He found what he was looking for. Spots of black in the lines of blue. Broken code.

He used his limited power to fill in the gaps. It was just a bridge. Yellow numbers and letters appeared where there had been black, designed to stand out against the continuous blue. The action would also send an alert to the tech-heads, but they’d ignore it like they always did.

Dark Blade, however, saw something completely different. He saw Jeff, a figure in a dark green hooded robe, waving a hand in the air, tendrils of yellow smoke drifting out from his fingers. Warmth would spread through Dark Blade’s body as the tendrils enveloped him. Paralyzed limbs would now move, a slow inch at a time. And they did. He stumbled forward, no more momentum to carry him running, then dropped headfirst to the grass.

He grunted, and Jeff lowered his arm. The smoke evaporated.

“You are now free,” he intoned, his voice deep and sagely. He started to say the rest of his required script, the part where he apologized for the issue, hoped the player continued to enjoy the game, requested him to leave a review, etc.

But Dark Blade was already gone.

Without a thanks.

Sighing, Jeff used his GM powers and manipulated his own code, causing himself to disappear. GMs were required to stay invisible unless summoned. They were to wander the world, acting as voyeurs and watching until an issue arose… or they could hang out in the boring old Break Room.

All HRD’s way of manufacturing mystery when a GM appeared out of nowhere like some grand wizard.

Pulling up his interface, Jeff mentally clicked the case number for Dark Blade’s complaint. The full report appeared, and he marked it complete at thirteen minutes and seven seconds. Mentally, he typed out his after-action report.

Player hit the bad patch behind barn (see loc. stamp for ID marker). Released Player.

Note: This tile has been reported for the same issue many times. Recommend prioritizing fix.

Satisfied, he sent it on its way, knowing it would be ignored, just like the auto-report. Problem solved.

An easy start to a day just like any other.

* * *

Players hated the GMs. Okay, not all the people… and not GMs, exactly. They hated the position. The dark green hood. The magic powers. All of it. But most importantly, they hated the fact that GMs were needed in the first place. That meant there were problems. And people hated problems.

They forked over a hefty monthly subscription fee for a product with faults—that’s not to mention the cost of the TerraMount gaming rig in the first place.

But as much as players hated GMs, most GMs hated the players too. And it wasn’t just because GMs weren’t allowed to play the game. Jeff couldn’t even keep track of how many of his calls were due to players abusing the system or exploiting a known bug. They hated bugs until one could be used to get the infinite gold from the town bank, or endless epic drops, or instant level gains by killing one-hit skeletons. The list went on.

It used to be that this kind of behavior got players banned, or at least suspended, but when Shaklee said “customer experience,” he meant it. Players were free to do just about anything they wanted as long as it didn’t cost HRD money or interfere with another player’s experience in a negative way.

That meant the glitch in Icluacar, the Night Elf starting zone, where spawn-killing a Level 8 Lesser Giant only took one clean hit, was perfectly fine. Didn’t hurt anyone. Besides, they only spawned every forty-five minutes, and no one was gonna waste an entire day for 30 XP an hour.

But if a player used a known bug to bully or steal from another player? That would be punished. It actually made Jeff’s job more difficult, trying to determine which players crossed this imaginary line that seemed to float and drift.

His next call was one of those…

The loud, bitchy guy standing in front of him was twisting Jeff’s last nerve. It was his final case of the shift—a shift that had ended five minutes ago—and he would not be getting any kind of overtime. HRD considered their policy more than reasonable, given the fact that they’d purchased each GM’s TerraMount system. And really, there’d have been no way Jeff would’ve been able to afford it otherwise. But it only worked for HRD games… which was now only Infinite Worlds.

A light groan subconsciously escaped Jeff’s lips at the revelation.

“Look, bro,” the paladin—a guy named Crush—was saying, drawing Jeff back to the moment.

Human, Crush had customized his character to the biggest sizes possible for the race. Everything was big. Height, arms, chest, legs. He should have been a barbarian instead of a paladin, but a pally had been determined early on in beta as the best class for a raid leader. They could tank for short periods if needed, heal for short periods if needed, and had some other utility functions. It basically allowed the raid leader to be in the thick of things, but not so much that they couldn’t see the big picture. This guy, Crush, had designed his character to match his name.

A heavy-armor-wearing class, Crush was decked out in very high-end armor. All likely from the previous raid dungeon, soon to be upgraded from this one. It matched, which meant he’d collected all his pieces first. Probably fully outfitted himself before letting others get them all. None of it looked really functional, but it did look cool. Wide wings flared out from his helmet, the face open except for a wide nose guard. Broad, flat pauldrons, heavy-looking gloves and boots. He carried a warhammer and heater shield. He looked every bit the part of a paladin, but the name and attitude didn’t fit the class description.

“Not a role-player, then?” Jeff said, silencing the chuckle that was forming.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Jeff practically whispered before pulling up Crush’s overlay menu.

Raid leader for a guild called Infinity Killers. One of the top guilds, if not the top, at least for the moment. Very efficient guild. Especially at raids. Out of the twenty dungeons currently featured in Infinite Worlds, they’d been responsible for fifteen of the First Kills—the first time a raid boss was defeated. It gave Infinity Killers a reputation, and one they worked hard to maintain.

Which meant that the one time a glitch threatened their raid, they were pissed.

“We don’t have time for this,” Crush said and motioned behind him to where thirty-nine other players crowded close. Each represented the game’s different classes in specific numbers, which the guild’s leadership would have determined to be the best combo for facing the raid boss. Optimal performance. Maximum stats. All high-level. The very best the guild had to offer.

This was gonna be a first-time kill, they hoped. They’d already wiped three times. Their fourth attempt—and they would have wiped this one too, since Jeff could see in the logs where they’d messed up—had been halted by the current glitch.

They’d been waiting so long that the dead members had been resurrected, and everyone was all healed up.

All ready for another go at the raid boss.

If he would just unfreeze.

“We woulda had him,” a mage named Redspell growled.

Following the mage’s pointed thumb, Jeff eyed the name tag above the demon’s head: Delgorathinarad the Bloodied.

One of the few good perks of being a GM was that he got to be involved in some of the early development of the expansions. He’d voted “no” on the new raid boss’s name. He’d been outvoted.

It was a stupid name.

So was Redspell. And Crush. And Dark Blade, for that matter.

The whole guild was like that. Not a role-player among them. Just there for the in-game fame and renown, which translated to glory on the message boards. Which, in their probably-insignificant-real-lives, was likely their most significant accomplishment. Maybe the only one.

There he was, towering fifty feet over the players. The demon, bright red leathery-looking skin, dark claws like claymores bursting from his fingertips, just stood there. He was a humanoid—two arms, two legs—but he had giant, translucent, sinewy bat wings, and feet that ended in hooves, legs like a goat. He was also naked and bore proof of being a male. That thing could have been a weapon all its own. But he had those too. One hand held a black metal club and the other, a small shield. Well, small for anything his size.

He was terrifying.

And he was currently frozen in the act of bringing that club down on a spot where Jeff assumed the group had been before he went all carbonite-casing. It actually saved a lot of them from certain death.

Yet, they were still bitching.

They had no idea how lucky they were to be allowed to play. There were times when Jeff had considered quitting just so he could play. But then, the gentle kick to the gut that he’d have to return the TerraMount VR rig snapped him back to reality.

And no, they did not “almost have” the raid boss, as Redspell had said. They would’ve been annihilated about fourteen seconds after Delgorathinarad the Bloodied brought that club down…

“I’m working on it,” Jeff said, looking up at the demon.

Instead of the image that the players saw, however, Jeff was looking at a swarming mass of code. There was a lot of it, and it took a while to sort through it all.

This was the first time that Delgorathinarad had glitched like this. Whatever the Infinity Killers had done, whatever steps they’d taken that were unique to this attempt, it’d messed the raid boss up pretty severely.

No way could he get through it all. As it was, he’d been trying and failing, and the guild’s constant prattle wasn’t helping.

He needed assistance.

Ignoring their angry mutterings, he opened up his connection to the AI responsible for this area. He knew that the communications between him and the AI would be monitored, so he had to be careful what he said.

GREETINGS, GM DRISCOLL.

The AI’s words floated across Jeff’s vision.

Zone AIs were called Principalities. This one was a dungeon prince.

Talking with a Principality was always an odd experience. Jeff was thankful it didn’t happen often.

“Please reference case #613485.8892, Fallen Three-Eye Cathedral,” he said mentally to the AI. To the players, Jeff would just be standing there like a statue. If they were still talking, he wouldn’t hear them. The connection to the Principality had muted his surroundings.

ACKNOWLEDGED.

Communing with the Principalities had to be a rare occurrence. The AI’s computing power was already near-maxed with the game itself. While their conversation ensued, the area governed by this AI would be a laggy mess… Which would result in reports of poor “customer experiences.”

PROBLEM AREA IDENTIFIED. LOCAL NODE XYT57823XQ…

Jeff waved his hand, stopping the AI, no doubt drawing confused looks from the players.

“Thank you,” Jeff said, interrupting. He really didn’t care where or what the problem was just as long as it was fixable. “Prepare and apply a hot-fix.”

ACKNOWLEDGED.

A hot-fix would only work for this one instance and time. The devs back at HRD HQ would then have to work on a permanent fix and install a patch into the game. The players would download the latest patch, or have it happen automatically as many did, and they’d never run into the same problem again.

Hopefully.

While the Principality reviewed the game logs to see precisely what Infinity Killers had done differently during this attempt to make the raid boss go corrupt, Jeff returned to the game.

The guild was mid-a-plethora of complaints.

Ignoring them all, he said, “We’re working on a hot-fix.”

“What BS!” one of the players in the back yelled out. “This expansion was in development for a year and in Beta for three months. There shouldn’t be any bugs.”

You’ve been alive for at least twelve years, and you’re still a tool, Jeff thought.

It was true; the expansion had been in development for a year, since before the game itself had actually been released. Another thing Dan Shaklee was focused on, his never-ending “customer experience,” meant that HRD had to keep putting out expansions so there was always new content coming. Most games waited two or three years before their first DLC. Not Hard Rock. The day that Infinite Worlds launched was the day the expansion was announced. And, they were already hard at work on the next one.

Which was needed as guilds like the Infinity Killers tore through the new content quickly.

Other guild members agreed with the complainer, but Jeff switched back to the Principality in time to see the next prompt.

FIX DEVELOPED.

“Good,” Jeff said as the AI’s message filled his vision. “Implement.”

ACKNOWLEDGED.

Immediately, the giant demon moved. It shimmered, blinking and emitting a strange static noise. Then it burst into life, the club smashing down hard, sending shockwaves of dirt and raw energy.

Everyone screamed and stumbled as the ground trembled. Especially Crush, which Jeff found highly amusing.

The demon roared, turning all heads.

“Not fair, dude!” Crush yelled, drawing and readying his weapon. He then gave orders to each player.

Jeff was tempted to let Delgorathinarad the Bloodied wipe the Infinity Killers. They deserved it. No doubt, if Jeff would’ve had the time to really research what had caused the glitch, he’d have discovered that some member used an exploit, a hack, to influence the fight, and that was what corrupted the raid boss.

Wouldn’t really have been against any rules, anyway.

Though he had to admit, he couldn’t imagine a guild like Infinity Killers, who lived off their reputation, using a cheat. And as much as he was tempted to watch them all die, he waved his hands and manipulated the code that was the raid boss and the players.

Jeff didn’t actually need to use his hands to mimic spell-casting, but he enjoyed it. If he couldn’t role-play as a player, he’d do it as a Game Master.

The demon disappeared, a glowing red oval replacing him at the far end of the room. A summoning portal. From within the scarlet haze, a wizard, dressed in dark black robes trimmed in silver, appeared. When spoken to, the NPC—which was the quest prompt for this particular raid boss—would activate a cut scene.

All forty guild members faded as well. Seconds later, they muttered curses as they reappeared at the arched stone entry to the courtyard.

Jeff could’ve done it a hundred ways, but he chose to use the code of their Recall Stones, just redirecting its effect to the next room. The method was effective and gave the players a loading screen they were familiar with.

“What the…” Crush exclaimed, looking around.

“I’ve reset the Encounter,” Jeff said as he floated over to them. The best part of GMing… the thing that probably made everyone wish they could be one… was floating. No walking, just hovering a foot off the floor, and floating. It was a simple manipulation of the code, but it was a cool effect. Like magic.

“I’ve restored whatever potions you may have used in the faulty fight,” Jeff informed them, his hovering form filling the doorway. “I’ve also added durability back to all your gear.”

The guild murmured as they all opened their character screens to review their armor, weapons, and check inventory.

“Thank you,” Crush said through gritted teeth.

“You’re welcome,” Jeff replied. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”

“No,” Crush said, already turning to his guild and barking out orders.

It sounded like they were going to attempt the same strategy.

The one Jeff knew wouldn’t work.

They did, and they found out the hard way.

Jeff had activated his GM invisibility and stayed behind to watch.

He wasn’t sure why. Perhaps he was just curious, having never seen Delgorathinarad in action, but something about the Infinity Killers had drawn his interest.

They were annoying asshats, but they were good at what they did.

He watched them wipe on the reset attempt, just like he’d predicted.

There was still another ten minutes before the raid reset. They would have to go through all of the many monsters before confronting Delgorathinarad the Bloodied again.

They made good use of the time.

As they were corpse-running back to their bodies, reconvening in the room, healing and resting to regain Health and Mana, they went over strategy. Jeff had expected Crush, and probably Redspell, to dominate the conversation, forcing a plan down the throats of the others, but instead, he was surprised.

The two made suggestions, listened to other ideas, and answered an array of questions.

Genuinely curious if this new approach would work, Jeff continued his voyeurism.

And saw Infinity Killers get another First Kill.

The shining body of the demon lay on the ground where it had fallen, sparkles rising all around. The guild was working through some complicated system of points to determine who got the loot. Undoubtedly, someone was posting their streaming video of the kill all over the message boards, confirming their First Kill status. Not that they really needed to. The game broadcasted a public message at the top of the chat stream as soon as it had happened.

Still invisible, Jeff floated to the corpse. Some of the guild had already logged out, using their Recall Stones to travel to bind points or one of the many towns. Most were going to leave the game and return to whatever passed as real life. Others would spend some time at the auction house to see if whatever loot they’d acquired was worth selling.

“That looked fun,” Jeff said aloud, his voice confined to his VR rig due to his invisibility. As far as the game was concerned, he said nothing.

He really did miss playing. The quest chain looked challenging but also intriguing.

Of the forty Infinity Killers, only Crush and Redspell remained.

“That was a little underwhelming,” Redspell muttered.

“Yeah,” Crush agreed. “Didn’t seem like they tried that hard with this one. Not very challenging. It reminded me of the Hardikolin fight.”

“Yep—a re-skin, probably. See you tomorrow?” Redspell asked.

“Same time as always,” Crush answered, and both disappeared.

Jeff stood in a now empty room. It would remain like that until triggered by another group of adventurers.

“Not that challenging,” Jeff muttered.

It made sense, he supposed. After playing the game for a hundred levels, it would be difficult to find anything new. Hard for the devs to come up with entirely original coding. Plus, it would take much longer than HRD allotted between expansion packs.

He looked around one final time, picturing himself charging into the room with a guild of his own. Confronting the wizard, killing him, and the wizard summoning the huge demon with his final breath. An epic fight.

“Damn, I really would like to play this game,” Jeff muttered and disappeared.