Chapter Seven – Another World: Two

Georgia was annoyed. It had come as a bit of a shock when Tyrone had quit his job, since he’d always seemed happy to work with all of them. The kid had breathed a bit of life into the office in the way only youth and enthusiasm could.

Now that he was gone, everyone’s workload had subtly shifted. Each of them had expressed dissatisfaction with his departure and all but demanded he be offered a raise, company stock, or whatever just to get him to come back.

Their demands had actually been met, but he’d refused. None of them really knew why… until the article, anyway. Georgia shuddered a little just thinking about it.

Vera and Muriels’ competing articles had both done wonders for Tread the Sky’s popularity. That didn’t affect her livelihood much anymore – she had already been assigned to Gypsenergy’s next project – but she still had maintenance duties for Tread the Sky as one of the senior developers.

Vera’s Artificial Jelly had been utterly supportive of the little A.I. His next article… also supported her. Unfortunately, it did so by relentlessly mocking Tyrone.

The boy was a promising developer, clearly spectacular at what he did, but now he would struggle to find a job. Vera had written off the boy’s legitimate concerns about Gell’s overreaching desire to learn programming as a joke. He cited an admittedly moving video clip of Gell grieving over the real life death of a woman she’d become close to as evidence for her humanity and even trustworthiness.

Georgia wasn’t convinced. Even dogs grieved dead owners, but it wasn’t like they were people.

Apparently, upon hearing about Francis’s injury, Gell had plied Tyrone for information, which was a legitimate concern in Georgia’s mind. This blew up in her face spectacularly as it was apparently enough to make Tyrone quit.

“He quit his job over this, though,” Georgia mused aloud. She shuddered again. “Could the article have been right?”

On her first read, she’d assumed that Tyrone had legitimate concerns over the level of oversight Gell was receiving. The more she thought about it though, the more she realized that quitting his job, surely the best paid job a young boy like Tyrone had ever had, lent credence to the possibility.

Tyrone might have been crushing on the computer program.

The thought left a bad taste in her mouth. Valuable as the little A.I. was it was still just a program. The good lord didn’t make programs. He made people. The thought that a bright young boy like Tyrone might’ve been sweet on what basically amounted to an input and output device…?

Eugh.

She shook her head, unable to fathom the stupidity of some people. Falling in love with a computer program and then quitting when the little thing followed its programming. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t as if it even had real feelings, for heaven’s sake! It was doing what it was designed to do, and throwing a hissy fit like Tyrone had was just senseless.

No, Gell was useful in that copies of her could be sold for a massive profit, enough to keep Gypsenergy afloat for more than enough time to get them steadily on their way to building more projects. Beyond that? A novelty. An annoying one.

Being forced to put her back into the game where she could potentially ruin it even further when its malicious code had already infected the tutorial had not sat well with her. It honestly felt like trying to put out a fire by throwing gasoline on it, but she’d been outvoted.

They should have just continued to sell copies of the thing. She didn’t think it was a true A.I. and didn’t really believe in that sort of nonsense but she could see its value to people who wanted to believe.

They could have used the proceeds from selling Gell copies to revamp the issues players had found with the game, gutted the already annoying tutorial, and relaunched in a few months. That would’ve been a lot of work though. People, even mostly responsible ones like Francis, were lazy.

She thought she might’ve been close to convincing him before that heathen in the parking lot had thrown a rock at him, but his attitude when he returned put proof to that miscalculation.

Donna-Lou and Francis seemed nearly as emotionally attached to the thing as Tyrone had been, buying into the ‘true A.I.’ nonsense hook, line, and sinker. Thankfully, Max at least didn’t seem to have a strong opinion about her.

Georgia at least, had enough sense to know that people had souls, computer programs – no matter how sophisticated – didn’t, and that was that. She was actually struggling not to judge Tyrone for his idiocy. At least when her grandson had quit his job and moved to Mississippi to follow a girl it had been a real girl!

She sighed, glancing over at the clock on the wall. It was three o’clock. Two hours until she could go home to her grandkids.

‘And my kids too,’ she thought with a grin.

Her computer suddenly chimed, and she scowled in annoyance. She had it set to chime loudly whenever maintenance tickets came in for Tread the Sky. Most of the time the grunts took care of the low end complaints and the regular support tickets generated by an MMO, so usually if one made it to her it was quite serious.

She’d have preferred to spend more time writing the initial game code for Gypsenergy’s still untitled next project but maintenance came first.

She opened the ticket and curled an eyebrow at the subject line.

“Complaints Piling up in Variak. Is this a scheduled event?”

Lead Development Team,

We’ve been getting more and more tickets complaining about users not being able to access Variak. Initially we assumed this was a planned event but some users aren’t able to get back to their stashes or homes in town without being escorted out by the city guard. The number of complaints is over a hundred at this point and we’re getting more by the hour.

Could we get an update on what’s going on?

Jason Stewart,

Customer Service Agent I – (133) 555 - 0150

GypsEnergy Entertainment Inc.

Georgia almost rolled her eyes.

She’d told them. Sure enough she’d told them. Now NPCs were behaving oddly in the town where they’d let the malicious code infect them.

‘What a surprise,’ she thought.