CHAPTER THREE

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

A heavy fist continued pounding on Jason's bedroom door.

Jason groaned and took off the Overdrive virtual reality headset.

He glared angrily at the door, then sighed.

There was no way he could pretend he hadn't heard anything. Wass would just keep banging and banging until Jason opened up.

On top of that, there was just something about real-life noises that irked him.

When Jason was in the Overdrive server, it was natural for there to be banging and pounding in the middle of a battle. Those noises sounded like a rightful part of the world.

In real life, Jason was a professional gamer sitting inside an Overdrive simulation pod.

Nobody should distract him by banging and pounding against the door.

Jason touched the red lever at the base of the cockpit, but the door did not open with its familiar clank. Unfortunately, it seemed like the entire cockpit had been powered down.

Jason's lip curled contemptuously.

How typical.

Ed Wass, the supervisor of One Star Bosses, must have yanked out the entire cord without thinking of the consequences.

The idiotic man was banging as hard as he could, but Jason couldn't open up.

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Bang!

Jason tried manually pushing the door open, but it wouldn't budge.

The situation had gone from dumb to dumber.

Unfortunately, Mr. Wass's enormous fists were nailing the pod door in place, and Jason wasn't strong enough to push it open.

The man continued barraging the door with punches. Eventually, slight dents began forming in the door.

Jason's eyes widened in slight disbelief.

He'd heard rumors about this before, but he'd never seen it in person.

Wass was truly impressive when it came to throwing fits.

The Overdrive pod was made of a high-quality plastic alloy, yet Wass could smash it apart without any real issues.

Clang!

The door finally gave in, crumpling in on the hinge.

Jason hastily covered up his face as the door smacked against his head. The thick piece of plastic bounced back, revealing the scowling face of Ed Wass.

Wass was a very muscular man with comically broad shoulders. His upper torso looked almost like a triangle, but he had bizarrely long and thin legs reminiscent of an ostrich. It was sort of surprising to see him move around.

Behind his back, the other Player Killers often joked that he'd gotten hired by the Overdrive Corporation because his body sort of resembled a Mechs more than a human's.

His face looked even stranger than his body.

Wass had a very strangely round head covered by a dramatic mustache. Combined with his perpetually red skin and angry frown, he almost looked like an evil version of the Pringles man.

Of course, people knew better than to mock his appearance to his face.

Wass was always on the lookout for insults. In fact, he'd once gotten mad at Jason because he'd thought Jason had called him Mr. Ass instead of Mr. Wass.

Of course, the man had just misheard. He was chronically angry and chronically on the lookout for attacks against his authority.

Jason stepped out of the pod and winced.

Wass hadn't just knocked open the door of Jason's plastic pod.

He'd also charged straight through the door of Jason's bedroom.

The front of the white door was covered with scuff marks from Wass's sneakers.

One Star Bosses lived inside an Overdrive gaming complex, a set of interlinked apartments located in downtown San Francisco.

The company had directly copied the format from professional gaming teams. Gaming houses allowed players to easily coordinate practices and scrimmages while providing various additional benefits like free food and housing.

It was obviously good value, especially in a place like San Francisco with such a pricey cost of living, but at times like these, the downsides were terribly obvious.

Jason had absolutely no privacy.

Wass lived two doors down from him, and he had the right to enter Jason's room at any time.

It was in the contract highlighted in bold print.

Jason hadn't been happy signing the deal, but he hadn't really had a choice. He couldn't have gotten a job playing Overdrive otherwise. He'd chosen to stomach it at the time, and he was usually happy with the decision...

Except for times like this.

"Who?! What?!? Why?!?! What?!?!"

Wass was too pissed off to speak full sentences.

Spittle flew everywhere.

Jason hastily fell back inside his pod, pulling up his sweater to make a mask over his mouth. Normally, he liked playing Overdrive in his pajamas, but after a few Wass tantrums, Jason now played dressed in a heavy sweater and sweat pants.

Wass's constant spitting was extremely unhygienic.

The angrier Wass got, the growlier his voice became. It sounded like he was chomping boulders with his throat.

Jason grimaced inwardly.

Confrontation and arguments were a total waste of time.

On top of that, raised voices and high emotions made it very difficult for Jason to understand what the other party was saying. Moving from a conversation to an argument was like drastically raising the difficulty setting in a game.

"What..did...you...do...THIS TIME!!!!"

The man waved his phone back and forth. The enormous man wore an extra-large phone he clipped to his belt. The massive device was covered in a thick phone case, and it was almost the size of a tablet.

However, Wass's muscular arm effortlessly turned the unwieldy device into a bright red blur. Jason was forcibly reminded of a mischievous boy shaking a can of Coke to prank his friends.

Random thoughts and comparisons were always bubbling into Jason's mind - his brain was always subconsciously linking together things he'd seen.

When he was in the Overdrive server, the immediate links were always helpful.

He saw a frame like the Sicko and instantly remembered its weaknesses.

He caught one of his opponent's stray mannerisms and promptly matched it with other players he'd beaten before.

He recognized and categorized the tiny little eccentricities and weaknesses his opponents displayed as they battled his AI minions on the way up to the Towering Crag.

In real life, these random connections were less helpful.

They usually involved noticing strange things about other people's appearances or behavior.

Back when he was a kid, Jason used to say these comparisons out loud, completely oblivious that they would offend people. When he was in junior high, Jason finally learned his lesson the hard way after a girl with an unusually thick neck beat the crap out of him for comparing her to a Thwomp from the Super Mario franchise.

Those thoughts were especially dangerous around Wass, a brusque man who took himself far too seriously.

Wass's constant punishments for One Star Bosses who offended him were technically illegal, but nobody at Overdrive HQ cared what Wass did.

All that mattered was that he got results.

A few players had banded together to complain about him just a few months ago, but they'd immediately gotten fired and replaced.

There were countless people like Jason who were eager to have full-time jobs playing Overdrive, and all of them were willing to stomach indignities to pursue their dream.

On top of that, One Star Bosses had weak machines.

They weren't expected to win, so they didn't need particularly impressive control skills.

As far as Jason could tell, he was the only player who won his matches more than thirty percent of the time. The number seemed low, but it was actually a significant mark of pride.

The sheer technological gap between the Red Minerva and his opponents meant that any win was a minor miracle.

Thus far, Jason had never faced an opponent he thought he couldn't beat on even terms. His inability to upgrade the Red Minerva was his opponents' only salvation.

Jason did his best to submerge his stray thoughts as he waited for Wass to finally stop yelling.

All he wanted was for the conversation to move on.

It was clear that Jason was in trouble, and the enemy pilot's last words had provided a fairly good hint about what was going on.

Jason was disciplined whenever he played in an overly eccentric manner that Wass considered unlike an AI.

It seemed like his torture strategy had once again pushed him across the limits.

Wass's yelling grew louder and louder.

By now, Jason had enough experience to know that Wass would scream for another ten or so minutes before they finally got onto the important topics.

Trying to hurry him along would only make things worse, so instead of saying anything self-incriminating, Jason simply stared blankly at Wass.

Eventually, Wass gathered himself enough to tell Jason the whole story.

The furious supervisor stopped shaking his phone, then let out a long and rattling breath.

Wass's face was still beet red.

Whenever anything happened, no matter how minor, Wass would turn so furiously red it seemed like his head would blow over the top like a volcano.

It did not seem like a particularly healthy way to live.

"This guy...is on the Overdrive board! Do you know how much trouble you almost got me into? He says his five-year-old son was terrorized by a One Star Boss? He says you trapped him inside his machine?"

That wasn't true at all.

While Jason had trapped his opponent in their Mech before initiating the torture strategy, he couldn't actually keep his opponent on the server.

The Crusher was totally disabled and couldn't even self-destruct, but at the end of the day, Overdrive was just a game. If his opponent was upset about getting stuck inside the game, they should simply logged off.

Of course, it was possible that his opponent's age had played a factor.

The young boy had clearly panicked and forgotten about the manual reset.

Jason did feel a little bad about that.

There was a loud thud as Wass pounded the pod again.

"What do you think would happen if people started asking more questions? This time, it was someone on the Overdrive board. But next time, it could be a big investor's kid! An AI that traps players in their machines? We'll get investigated, and then we'll be exposed!"

Hiring players instead of using AI for certain map bosses was a very tenuous situation for the Overdrive Corporation.

Technically, the existence of players like Jason was public knowledge. The Overdrive Corporation wasn't exactly lying to people. Their public statements said that most of the game was controlled by their highly advanced AI, but there were additional missions that were enhanced with human individuals.

When businesses and investors read the report, they assumed the company was referring to superstar Fortress Masters and Player Killers, celebrities like Vile or DISTINCTIONMAN with large followings who acted as influencers driving others to the game.

In reality, most hired pilots were behind-the-scenes grunts like Jason. They were stopgaps hired to make missions harder for the experts who knew how to bait and outsmart the imperfect Overdrive AI.

Jason had actually heard that these sort of situations were quite common.

A lot of artificial intelligence systems involved a ton of human input.

For example, various apps designed to recognize specific objects, such as an AI that could identify different kinds of food, required lots of human information feeding and modifications before they could finally act reliably. Jason had recently read a conspiracy theory that many CAPTCHA tests, which required identifying things like traffic lights, stop signs, and roads, were discreet training for automated driving.

On top of that, developing a genuine artificial intelligence took a ton of money.

A lot of times, it was an easier and cheaper stopgap to just hire cheap labor.

A good example was the Facebook video review process.

Although the company made the sex and violence censorship process seem automatic, teams of contracted viewers watched most videos before allowing customers to view them. Exposés about Facebook's hidden content moderation team had caused a great deal of controversy.

Based on all the NDAs he'd had to sign after taking a job as a One Star Boss, Jason suspected that the Overdrive Corporation would be in the same boat if anyone exposed his existence.

Wass gnashed his teeth.

"What did you do this time?"

In this case, Jason genuinely felt like his behavior had been identical to an automated robot.

Wass had no right to complain.

Jason had initially disabled his opponent with precision.

After that, he'd fought with unyielding determination, steadily snipping through his opponent's wires no matter how long it took. No AI would deliberately throw a match just because it would take a long time to win.

He decided to explain himself.

"I couldn't cut past his armor, so I tried tearing him apart from the inside. It took a while, but that was what an AI would do - grind through for the win. If he'd wanted, he could have just logged off."

Wass scowled and looked thoughtfully at his phone. He clearly had no idea what Jason was saying. The Overdrive Corporation had hired Wass solely because of his abilities as a disciplinarian.

Jason had long figured out that the best way to get out of trouble was confusing Wass with in-game descriptions. The man was loathe to admit that the One Star Bosses knew something he didn't.

Unfortunately, Wass soon recovered from his confusion.

He pulled up a series of notes from his phone and scowled.

"Not going to work this time. You have over fifty complaints!"

Wass's face rapidly started turning red again as he started reciting the list of Jason's prior offenses.

"Instance 32 - Unfun game experience. Player collapsed the entire mountain. The enemy Mech wasn't fatally damaged. Instead, they eventually ragequit instead of trying to push through all the rubble."

It took a second, but Jason immediately recalled the match, almost like he was sitting in the cockpit again.

His opponent hadn't been a Giga Mech that time. It'd been a swift and highly mobile opponent with a pair of massive metallic wings and a pair of beautiful custom beam rifles. The sheer gap in speed meant that Jason had no chance of catching his opponent in a head-on confrontation. Instead, Jason had sprinted across the caverns, allowing his opponent to inflict terrain damage all across the plateau. Every so often, he'd discreetly struck the rocks at critical points with the Red Minerva's own blades.

At the end, the entire thing had collapsed, and both players had plummeted down to the bottom, with countless stones above them.

Jason had used the Red Minerva's climbing skills to get back up.

For that match, Jason had selected the Red Minerva's standard equipment - a set of built-in anchors and climbing ropes along with palm-generated beam sabers that acted like a climber's piton.

Meanwhile, his opponent had fatally hesitated to drop his valuable rifles. Jason had expected that. The custom weapons were a beautiful and intricate design. In reality, losing the weapons wouldn't have made a difference. They would have simply respawned after the match.

However, Jason had seen that unnecessary attachment many times before in other players with similarly elegant weapons, and he'd known that he could take advantage of it.

The other player had been able to dodge the hidden lava pit, but not the enormous storm of stones.

Apparently, the other player had considered the experience "Unfun."

Had they also sent a direct complaint to the Overdrive Corporation? Unless Overdrive board members were breeding like rabbits, surely Jason hadn't angered fifty scions of the Overdrive Corporation board.

Wass scowled.

"This player put $700 into their starting Mech and was playing five hours a day for months until they fought you. After that match, they stopped playing for a week! Do you know how much money we could have been earning from that whale?"

Wass threw his hands into the air.

"I should have seen this sooner! You have registered more bad experiences than any of my other employees! It's not even close!"

Jason blinked.

He hadn't thought about any of that.

Wass's words had opened Jason's eyes.

It wasn't just about well-connected board members.

Jason had never thought about playtime, financial concerns, or how much money people put into their Mechs.

Jason had just fought whoever was in front of him regardless of the consequences.

He supposed that Wass would get in plenty of trouble if those players took time off playing. It made sense that the Overdrive Corporation would track the playtime of these whales, or big paying players.

After all, that was what the One Star Bosses had been hired for - to improve the players' in-game experience.

Wass went on.

"Instance 33 - Unfun game experience. A longstanding whale player and minor streamer entered the stage using a Giga Mech armed with a nuclear warhead. Player spent the early parts of the map heating the stage as the Giga Mech steadily cleared past the early grunt minions. At the end, the Giga Mech suffered a nuclear meltdown before making it to the peak. This situation was repeated over a dozen times until the player finally turned off their stream."

Wass growled once again.

"A whale who spent hundreds a week on the game AND someone who brought other high-payers into the game. You shamed him in front of his fans! At the end, he sent in a message to his Overdrive rep about an overly advanced AI for a One Star Boss."

This time, Jason remembered the match perfectly.

It was a battle against a minor streamer named ProStar.

Jason disliked everything about ProStar's gameplay. The irritating loudmouth wasn't a particularly skilled pilot at all - he just spent a ton of money on his machine and used it to plow straight through the opposition.

They were Jason's least favorite sort of mapper, someone who never even gave weaker bosses like Jason a chance to play.

There'd been no ways to exploit certain weapons like the deadly Particle Dissolver, but defeating the nuclear warhead had been simple.

From the outside, Jason's move had seemed incredibly creative. In reality, it was just something he'd copied from a story he'd read.

In Jason's opinion, he wasn't actually particularly creative.

He was just obsessed with learning.

Jason's research frequently extended outside of Overdrive.

He examined other games, history, and even random trivia to find an edge, no matter how microscopic.

Wass's eyes narrowed.

"Why are you smiling?"

Jason hastily dismissed his grin.

He hadn't even realized that a smile had crossed his face.

Jason was pretty good at mentally suppressing his emotions and keeping them from affecting his decision-making, but he never noticed when he let something leak out on his face.

That was the good thing about Overdrive.

It was easier to portray yourself the way you wanted to when you got to stay behind a screen.

Sadly, that wasn't the case in real life.

Wass started grinding his teeth together, crunching so hard that it sounded like his teeth would shatter.

He sounded almost like the Crusher. Just like the defeated titanic machine, which had bitten down so hard it cracked its own teeth, it didn't really make sense for Wass to crunch down so hard.

It sounded like it really hurt.

A smile flickered again across Jason's face.

Once again, he was too late to catch it.

Anger suddenly flashed back into Wass's eyes, and his mouth set in a grim and hard line.

"Smiling again, huh? That does it. Meet me in my office."

His voice boded no disagreement, and he strode out without waiting for a response.

Jason had no choice but to go after him.