PART TWENTY-FIVE

MPD: Who gives a sheep?

I Spy

The meeting with the person from TS was scheduled for the evening, so I spent most of the day trying to work out what the scam was. I wasn't worried about losing money - you can't trick blood from a stone. But it did make me slightly nervous that they would go to such lengths to talk to me face-to-face.

The key to the mystery was surely the fact that they wanted to meet me in the local park. That meant I'd be out of the apartment talking to one person while an accomplice could break into and... what? I didn't own anything of value.

Except - theoretically - for my VR rig. It was a basic model, not worth anything to a billion dollar company that presumably had tens of thousands of newer models in a warehouse, all with far less ear wax. But - I speculated geniusly - what if some of my interaction with 386 was cached locally IN THE HEADSET? They could wipe him from their servers, but what if he lived on in some form in my little home sweet home? If I'd helped 386 evolve into some illegal form of AI then ThetanSoft might go to extreme measures to cover their mistake. Or maybe, and this seemed much more likely, they wanted to delete all evidence that I'd been using copyrighted material in the dungeon. Pay a guy 5K to swap a headset or pay MouseCorp 5 million. Simple maths. Uh... math.

I thought about hiding my headset, but then they'd just trash the apartment looking for it and I'd lose my deposit. (I'd probably lose it anyway - my landlord was notorious for blaming multiple tenants for the same damage and his customers weren't the kind of people who could afford to sue.) In the end I got a marker pen and vandalised the headset in an almost undetectable way. If they did break in and replace the headset - the smart thing to do - I would at least know.

Unless they KNEW I'd mark the unit and were prepared for that...

I took some further precautions and then went for a walk around the park.

She Parked by the Park

Imagine a park in your mind's eye. The one I lived near was not as nice as the one you're thinking of, but it wasn't the absolute worst place in the world, either. It was a (mostly) green space where one was sorely needed. We weren't a very political district but when someone talked about cutting down a tree the residents went tapeshot. The park had its own social media team, with more admins than there were trees.

I pottered around it until I saw a tiny little smart car pull up. It was black and white, resplendent with the ThetanSoft logo, cute as a bag of buttons.

While the driver parked, I tried to keep an eye out for an accomplice coming from a different direction. I couldn't see the entrance to my building but I could see a lot of passing traffic. Nothing out of the ordinary went past. WHICH IS WHAT I WAS MEANT TO SEE.

"Mister Bain?" came a voice. I turned to see a tiny little Japanese-American woman looking up at me. She was wearing a grey hoodie with a logo I didn't recognise.

"Yes," I said.

"Oh, good," she said, relieved. "Long drive. Okay, let's get this over with." She reached into her pocket and pulled out some flash cards, like you'd use to study another language if you were, you know, not American.

"Wait," I said, annoyed.

"What?"

"We need to exchange passwords. Call and response. Check we are who we say we are. Haven't you ever seen James Bond?"

"I have. He never does anything like that. Everyone he meets knows who he is. Some secret agent. It's farcical."

"Still," I said, impressed by her credentials as a cinema buff. "I'd like you to say the password."

She sighed and pushed her hair behind her ear. "The password is let's get on with it because it's a two-hour drive here and a two-hour drive back please thanks."

I shook my head. "That was last week's."

She tutted. Anger flared up but she got the better of it. "It's an old code but it checks out."

I smiled. Bond and Star Wars. Real franchise junkie here. "Okay fine. Say your piece." I glanced over my shoulder towards my apartment. The woman had approached me from the other direction so that I couldn't keep my eye on things. Dastardly clever.

She looked at the first flashcard and frowned. "C-A-D-S," she said. "Hmm."

"Oh," I said, surprised. "Are we really doing spy stuff?"

"It was all a bit frantic and they said I couldn't take notes. I just have these initialisms. I can't... just give me a second."

"Computer aided design," I said.

"No. Got it. It stands for 'cloak and dagger ship'. I'm supposed to start by explaining the reason I'm here."

"How about you start with your name?"

"Oh. Isli."

"Will it take long, Isli? We could walk around a bit. You'll want to stretch your legs after that drive." Not that they'd stretch very far, I didn't add. I wondered what percentage of rollercoasters she was allowed on.

She looked around dubiously. It was our park and we protected it furiously, but it wasn't exactly the Champs-Élysées. "Sure. The thing is, we're not supposed to get in touch with our customers like this. It violates hundreds of privacy rules. All this cloak and dagger ship is because we can't leave a paper trail between you and us."

"You contact customers all the time. What are you talking about?"

She shook her head. "Not like this. There are people who are very interested in what you're doing... uhh... in the game. And they've been keeping an eye on you. God, that sounds sinister! I think it's just aggregated data and stuff, not like streaming your every move or listening into your conversations."

"They're interested in me and the dungeon?"

She looked at me like I'd just spoken in Klingon. "What?"

"What am I doing that's so interesting?"

She stopped walking, but resumed instantly. "I have no clue. I don't play the game. I didn't know there were dungeons. I know there are... brothels and such."

I felt myself turning red. "Dungeons aren't... that. They're like caves with monsters you can fight. It's not... you know. Carnal."

She pulled a face. "It's really none of my business what you do in the privacy of your own socks." She shuffled the first flashcard to the back and looked at the next one. "PDQY."

"Pretty darn quick, yo."

She placed a finger on her head until the answer clicked into place. "Please don't quit yet."

"Ugh," I said. "Why not? You're going to delete everything in a couple of weeks. It's pointless."

"We're going to delete everything?"

I realised that this Isli was even more clueless than me. "Wait, you don't play the game. You don't know about the end of beta. What's your position?"

"I'm in payroll. I'm the nearest employee to here."

This information annoyed me a lot. They'd sent someone I literally couldn't talk to about the situation. I rose above it; it wasn't her fault. "Isli, you got in your car two hours ago and started driving here. If you'd gotten a phone call five minutes into the journey saying that a piano had fallen on me from a great height and I was as flat as a pancake, would you have kept coming or would you have turned around and done something productive with the rest of your evening?"

"I would have turned around."

"That's the position we're in. ThetanSoft is going to drop a piano on the entire BetterVerse."

"That's a big piano."

"What I've got going on in my dungeon, which, remember, is not a sex thing in the slightest, is over. Do you see? Asking me to keep going is like your boss asking you to drive two hours to talk to me even though I'm already dead."

"Oh," she said. It seemed like I'd gotten through to her. "I think I understand. Let me just check... so I know what to say to them." I watched as she tried to place things in order. She had an imaginary conversation with herself with her lips moving. "Okay!" she said, brightly. "End of beta, you called it? Well, thanks for agreeing to talk to me."

"Whoa whoa whoa," I said. "Is that it?"

"Yes, I think so. I didn't know we were deleting everything. That seems dumb."

"It is dumb. It's the most moronic thing I've ever heard of. No-one will ever trust them again."

"Huh." She looked into the distance.

"What?"

"Oh, nothing. Well, the sooner I set off the sooner I'll be home." She started walking back to the car.

"Is this reverse psychology?" I asked.

She smiled at me. "In what way?"

"You've got more flashcards. This is part of the scam, right? You walking away? What are the next letters? URSOSD?"

"URS... what would that stand for?"

"Use reverse psychology on sexy dude."

"There's at least one thing wrong with that. Let me see." She shuffled to the next card. She held it up to me. It read 'OXOS'. "Offer extension on subscription," she explained.

I wanted to know what I was turning down. "How long?"

"Two months," she said.

I grinned at her. "What's the max you're authorised to offer?"

She looked at me like I had tried to sell her three magic beans. "Um, hello? I'm in payroll? I don't have authorisation to do anything. You could probably get more but like you say, what's the point? I think it's good you can't be bought. There should be more people like you."

"Oh, I can be bought," I said, probably a little too eagerly. I wouldn't be starring in any Ayn Rand books anytime soon. "But what are the terms? I can log in for two weeks and keep doing what I'm doing but I won't be very enthusiastic about it. Like, what do I have to do? To qualify for the extension?"

She leaned on her car. "I have absolutely no idea. Log in, go to your dungeon, do whatever you do with your harem of prisoner wives. How would anyone measure your enthusiasm?" One possible answer occurred to her; she shuddered. "Don't answer that. As far as I know, if you say yes we'll give you the extension and if you renege nothing bad will happen. How could it? There's no contract. If anyone asks us we'll deny this ever happened. Someone somewhere in the company will be unhappy but there's jack frost they can do about it."

"This is all very weird," I mused, partly because she had said 'renege' when I was pretty sure it was pronounced 'renege'. (That doesn't work well as text, does it? Let's see if the voice actor can bring life to it in the audiobook version.) I came at the situation from all angles, looking for the catch. I mean, if she was right and I got the extension they couldn't exactly take it away from me or I might kick up a stink. I had all the power. "Okay, I won't quit before the end of beta."

She nodded and typed something into a chat app I didn't recognise.

Seconds later, my phone rang. "What," I said.

"Don't say anything about us spying on you or that you met me or anything," Isli said, then mimed zipping her mouth closed.

I greenlit the call and the guy with the nice voice was on the other end. "Good evening, Mister Bain. My name is Thomas and I'm calling from the ThetanSoft Customer Retention Department. We reviewed your case and would like to offer you a free extension to your subscription, if you're interested."

"Tell me more."

"We would extend your subscription by two months from the current expiry date."

"Oh," I said, acting confused. "I thought - somehow I thought it would be six months." Isli's eyes popped wide. She started tapping on her phone.

"Ugh," said Thomas. I could hear him looking away from his screen and down at his phone. "Six months sounds fine."

"And upgraded to the VIP package," I said. Where had this confidence come from? Isli just gawped at me, her thumbs stunned into motionlessness.

Thomas laughed. "Naturally, sir. Naturally." He tapped on his wonderfully clicky keyboard. "That's all done. Thank you for being a valued part of the BetterVerse and we hope you enjoy the coming upgrades to the world and its mechanics."

"Thanks, Thomas," I said, trying to make my voice sound disgustingly enthusiastic, like I was in a commercial. "Now that you've given me access to ThetanSoft's incredible suite of streaming tools, all I need is a good webcam!" (If this makes no sense to you, just know that viewers preferred to see the streamers even if their eyes were covered by the VR headset. There were plenty of channels where the streamers weren't visible but they tended to be less popular. After all, if you couldn't see a human on the screen, maybe the channel wasn't even run by a human... Long story short, I was asking for a free webcam in case I ever went ahead with my dormant streaming concept.)

Thomas's voice lost all its warmth. It became coldly professional. Clipped and distant. "Webcams are available from many retailers. ThetanSoft offers no recommendations on third-party products of any kind." He became a little more cordial. "Is there anything else I can help you with today?"

"No, I think we're done," I said, giving Isli a strange look as I ended the call. It had just occurred to me that her story about being in payroll was absolute horsedip. I stood looking at her and she appraised me in turn. Not hostile, not friendly. Just... curious. Finally, I broke the silence. "Just tell me one thing. What's all this about, really?"

She grinned. "If you work that out, let me know." And she wrote her phone number on a flashcard and slipped it into my pocket.

The Sniff Test

I went back into my apartment and checked my traps. The headset was still there, buried under a carefully constructed pile of Jenga blocks. After comparing them with a photo I’d taken - check - I moved them aside and checked my graffiti - it looked like my headset, all right. Check check. Then I gave it a big sniff. It smelled like generic potato chips - which made sense, since I’d stuck both earbud sections into chip bags - the left into BBQ and the right into Ranch - before leaving the apartment.

Triple check.

If there had been an accomplice who’d swapped the headsets, added the graffiti, made them smell the way they should have smelled, AND rebuilt the Jenga pile, then he had more than earned his 5 thousand bucks. Now I was going to earn my 6 months of VIP BetterVerse.

I put the headset on and went to talk to 386.