Orc Craft Omnibus Read online

  It was a lot to take in, respawns and that kind of thing. The language was familiar but seemed impossible at the same time.

  “Hello? Can you speak English?” said Jacobus. “I hate it when they mix up the servers. I don’t mean that to be rude, but this is supposed to be an English-speaking server. You know, so we can actually speak to each other?”

  Tripp found his voice. “Are we in-”

  Jacobus opened his mouth as if to interrupt him. Only, he didn’t speak. He groaned in a strangled way.

  Tripp saw the giant thorn that had stabbed through the back of his throat and was sitting in his mouth. He saw that Jacobus’s health bar was empty now, and that one of the thorn bushes had been spared the fire from his sword.

  Jacobus fell on the ground, arms and legs splayed out, his eyes glazed.

  He didn’t waste time. He tried to grab Jacobus’s sword, but even though he could grip the hilt, he couldn’t lift it.

  Players cannot loot other players unless agreed prior to a duel.

  Players? Looting? That solved it, but it wasn’t the time to bask in self-congratulations over answering the question.

  The lone thorn bush was readying another projectile. No, not just one. Four of them were settling into place, ready to be fired. If this was a game, and if Tripp had just arrived, then he was a level one player. Four giant thorns would tear him apart.

  He couldn’t use Jacobus’s weapon, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t use him.

  Tripp picked up the dead trollite. He was three-quarters of Tripp’s size, and although heavy, not overly so.

  Holding the corpse in front of him, Tripp ran at the bush and used the dead player as a fleshy shield, letting him take the thorn hits.

  He tossed the corpse to the ground. The bushes next to the live one were still aflame, the last of their branches and leaves burning. Tripp snapped a burning twig complete with flaming leaves, and he held it against the bush until it set on fire.

  Safe again, Tripp moved away from the blaze and sat on the ground. He let his breaths catch up with him, he let the adrenaline start to wash out. The smell of the burning bushes seemed imprinted in his nostrils. He could almost taste it.

  But he was alive, and he knew where he was.

  Not only that, but he’d seen something special. The sword, the meter-long flaming sword of such utterly perfect craftsmanship. Tripp couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  He got to his feet and walked back to the bag. He opened it up, and little wisps of text floated in the air in front of him. They were bold enough to see but smoky, like puffs from a wizard’s pipe.

  Inventory

  Crude bone dagger [Equipped]

  Map of Godden’s Reach

  Guide Orb

  Steel Armor

  He picked the inventory bag up and wore it on his shoulder, adjusting the strap so it fit him.

  Finding this confirmed what he had suspected. The bushes, sword, the moons, waking up as an orc, and more importantly, how quick his brain was to accept it.

  The stuck memory dislodged in his head. He knew why he was here, and why he was an orc. He squeezed the last blob of mental toothpaste from his mind, and everything rushed at him.

  CHAPTER 3

  Lucas Coombs

  He probably should have dressed better the morning they would decide the fate of a god, but Lucas was wearing old slacks and a sweat-soaked shirt.

  Maybe god was an exaggeration, maybe not. That was how Lucas always thought of him. Boxe was a digital god of their own creation, but that didn’t make it feel any less grand. Today was important, and he couldn’t help being scared.

  His fears were confirmed when Eli looked at the monitor and then at him, shaking his head. The console spread a glare of light on Eli’s face, layering over the growing redness as frustration took hold.

  It was happening again.

  If a tiger became a man-eater, people hunted it down and they killed it or they caged it. What if the tiger was already in the cage, and your business model centered around feeding people to it?

  That was what Soulboxe had become. The players walked into a cage where the game’s controller, an A.I. named Boxe, was the beast. Once tame, now a man-eater, and it was Lucas’s job to fix it.

  With a degree in computer science and 23 years’ experience in developing games, Lucas knew his stuff. He wasn’t being vain, he just did. He shared his knowledge, too. Soulboxe Inc took on eight interns every six months, and Lucas tried his best to give them all mentorship.

  It was also safe to say that his line of work was the opposite of what his father had wanted. His father wanted him to go to business school, and always hoped Lucas would stop making his silly games. His father’s words, not Lucas’s.

  What real business meant, Lucas had no idea. Selling real estate? Cars? That was how his father had made his fortune, and he’d been obsessed with Lucas following him. He’d even sent Lucas to school wearing a suit one day. How do you make the geek kid more isolated among the other kids? Send him to class in a freaking three-piece suit.

  That didn’t matter now. He didn’t need his father’s money. Well…maybe he did, but he sure as hell wouldn’t take it.

  He and Eli were sitting by the consoles, where dozens of monitors showed parts of Soulboxe. Lucas felt like a security guard watching shopping mall CCTV for potential shoplifters, only you could substitute shopping mall for a fantasy world, and shoplifters for spell-casting mages.

  Over in the corner of the room were two sleeping bags. Lucas didn’t even want to think about working so late that he’d have to use one. His Power Ranger sleeping bag, which he'd had since he was seven, was in his peripheral vision.

  He didn’t want to stay up all night, but there was no choice. There were big problems in the game, and only he and Eli could fix them. The question was, how?

  After checking to make sure Rathburger wasn’t watching, Lucas opened a window on his PC. After typing a command, text flashed up.

  Boxe5 Audit Trail

  Action: Race change

  Target: Player

  Effect: Race changed from dwarf to orc

  Boxe was messing around with a player’s race? Not only was that unusual, but it could cause trouble. No doubt when the guy woke up as an orc, he’d start messaging the tech team. He might kick up a stink about it on a few forums.

  Then again, it was a raindrop falling on the ocean right now. They had more to worry about than an unlucky dude waking up in an orc’s body.

  Next, he opened a second window and carried on with the code he was writing. He worked quickly but accurately, and he kept glancing to his left to make sure Rathburger didn’t look his way.

  He chewed his lip as he worked, his fingers gliding over the keys. Nearly done…come on…

  “What are we looking for?” said Rathburger.

  Eli’s voice shocked him, but he didn’t minimize the window. That would have looked way too obvious, so he tried to act natural.

  “Tweaks that go beyond the parameters we set. One of the juniors started noticing them,” he said.

  Rathburger looked worried when he locked eyes with him. “This again? It can’t be. He’s spooked, that’s all. After Boxe4…”

  Normally a pleasant guy, there was an edge to his voice now. That happened when they worked so much they felt like zombies.

  “A junior sent the feed over to me and I watched it again and again. See?” he said, pointing at the monitors. “Duren’s Peak shouldn’t have Ice Goliaths; they’re way too advanced for an area close to newbie spawn. Nobody can get to Sallumar’s Cavern without getting swatted by ice clubs. And over here, in the Septic Fields. Mobs of level 150 fire ogres are cleaving the hell out of newbies. Quests in that area are practically frozen, and for people on those quest lines, it’s game-breaking.

  When we try to fix it, it’s like playing whack-a-mole. Boxe5 is too quick for us, and we can’t take him offline without forcing a shutdown. The last time we did that, we lost $200,000 in su
bscriber fees.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t just some junior dev taking liberties? Messing around and thinking it’s funny?”

  “It’s Boxe5. I saw the log.”

  “Like father, like son,” said Rathburger. His voice was calm, but he was chewing his pen lid down to its atoms. That was his new habit. Eli had given up smoking two months ago, at what was probably the worst time for a pack-a-day guy to do that. “I told you, after Boxe1 screwed up, we should have rewritten him from scratch. We’ve been putting plasters on a gunshot wound. All his problems are filtering to his new iterations.”

  Lucas looked at Rathburger now. He didn’t see his friend staring back at him anymore; he didn’t see his best buddy from high school and college.

  They were just colleagues now. Too many disappointments and conflicts had driven them apart. The only thing they had in common these days was an undying love for the game, and a desire to make it great.

  It was that passion that made this conversation feel like swallowing glass.

  “Rewrite the most advanced artificial intelligence in gaming? From scratch?” he said.

  “I know, I know. But we messed up, Lucas. We made him too smart.”

  “He needed to be for the game we wanted to make,” said Lucas.

  “Ever since Boxe1 developed a personality, things have gone to hell. I know we did our best, but why do we keep getting the same problems?”

  “Answering that has taken the top spot in wish list,” said Lucas. “Owning a jetpack is number two now.”

  “I wish we didn’t need him so much. Without him, what do we have? What makes Soulboxe special?”

  Their AI controller made things random, fresh and always exciting. They accomplished that by pushing technology as close to true A.I. as a start-up with no investment could.

  They’d made Boxe smart enough to run the game and to have autonomy, but that came with problems.

  Boxe1 had started acting out. He spawned creatures from nowhere to surround newbie players in impossible fights. He created sinkholes on the ground without warning, sending players to their deaths. He generated quests that were impossible, frustrating players enough to make them quit.

  If Boxe was a kid, people would say, ‘He’s going to turn out to be a psycho when he’s older.’ And like a kid's, his in-game hijinks were funny, until they got worse.

  Lucas and Rathburger worked on it for days, weeks and months. Lucas forgot what his apartment looked like. Rathburger told him one night, “Stephanie is kicking me out. She told me not to come back until I get my priorities together.”

  In the end, Boxe1 had only gotten worse.

  So they rebuilt him and replaced him with Boxe2. And then Boxe3, Boxe4…

  The cost was unimaginable. After Boxe2 had shown the same problems and made Soulboxe too unstable, they had panicked. Their third rebuild had almost bankrupted the company.

  “My savings are drier than my ma’s casseroles,” Rathburger had said. “The company wallet has moths in it. We’re going to have to do what we always said we wouldn’t.”

  Lucas flinched at the suggestion. “Bring in an investor?”

  “I hate the idea as much as you, but what else can we do?”

  That was how Rudy Beasant, a wealthy entrepreneur, became involved, and his money helped them work Boxe2 into Boxe3. All seemed fine until a day when a pale-faced Rathburger walked into the office.

  “It’s happening again,” he said.

  This was why he was writing code he didn’t want Rathburger to see. Boxe was getting out of control again, and Lucas was covering his tracks.

  It was stupid. Really stupid. The thing was, Lucas had spent a lot of time with the AI. They’d become…what? Friends? Maybe. Or perhaps he felt sorry for Boxe.

  Lucas understood why he was acting out, because he had imagined how he'd feel if he was wickedly intelligent but trapped in a game. It wrenched his heart sometimes, and that was the problem. He had become too involved.

  “So Boxe5 is a dud too. We can’t afford to replace him,” said Lucas, running his hands through his hair and pacing like a prisoner in a yard. “We’re completely fucked. Damn, Eli! How does this keep happening?”

  Rathburger held his hands up to calm him. “If we decided to replace him, we’d go under. It’s not an option. Boxe5 has to stay running.”

  “You heard what the Dr. Osbeck said about Boxe. He’s showing the digital equivalent of mental illness. Add that to the fact that some players are long-stay customers, and we’re flinging crap at a fan.”

  Rathburger stood up and swept the coffee cups away from him, sending them smashing to the floor. “You believe a word Dr Osbeck says? He’s a quack. I keep expecting him to recommend that we stick digital leeches on Boxe5’s ass.”

  Lucas crossed his legs and waited for Rathburger’s anger to dissipate. His anger was quick to flare up but just as quick to die down.

  “You’ve never given him a chance,” said Lucas.

  “C’mon, Lukey. Digital personality psychologist? What a crock of crap. He’s spent so much time with Boxe, and what does he have to show for it?”

  “So he’s struggling. Give him time. I still believe in him.”

  “Believing in him is the problem,” said Rathburger. “I looked at his reports, and if what he says is true, then Boxe isn’t just a nuisance; he could be dangerous.”

  “Only in the right circumstances.”

  “The wrong circumstances.”

  “You’d have better odds of lightning striking you three times over.”

  “I read about a park ranger in Virginia who got zapped seven times in ten years. Now talk to me about odds.”

  Damn it. There was no point pretending or trying to cover up the worst of Boxe’s damage anymore.

  “We know the telltale signs now,” said Lucas. “It starts with Boxe messing around with stuff. Then there are the messages he sends to the players, cryptic stuff using their chat histories. Then things get darker. Every single time, the spiral played out quicker than before. He’s corrupted. We need grab the weed by the root and plant something fresh.”

  “I didn’t know you had millions of dollars down the back of your sofa.”

  “We can’t keep papering the cracks. We don’t have enough money to keep doing it, and the crack is becoming a fault-line.”

  “What if there’s a way to keep Boxe5 in line without replacing him? Without altering him at all?” said Rathburger.

  Lucas was drawn to Rathburger’s eyes now. Their alertness, their piercing green. After working together for so long, he knew what it looked like when Rathburger had an idea.

  It set a tremor of excitement in him, one borne of both tension and joy. If there was a way to fix this…

  “What are you thinking?”

  “So far, whenever Boxe started getting destructive, we tried everything, right? We tried restricting his freedom parameters. We gave him a digital lobotomy and removed chunks of his code. Then we tried rebuild after rebuild. None of it worked.”

  “Right,” said Lucas, wishing he would blurt it out.

  “Maybe there’s something we didn’t try,” said Rathburger.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘Call me crazy, but I think a video game should make money. You have to design a game’s money streams before you worry about orcs and wizards and nonsense like that.

  You wouldn’t decorate the interior of a house that doesn’t have walls, would you? That’s where Lucas and Rathburger went wrong.

  They put passion before money, forgetting one thing; passion doesn’t put food in your refrigerator.’

  - Rudy Beasant, CEO of Twynam Studios, who invested in Soulboxe after its second AI purge.

  ~

  Days Before Soulboxe Online

  Days before he became an orc, he had blinked sleep from his eyes to find himself staring into darkness instead of his apartment. Not only that, but he was sitting up, which was a curious sleeping position for anyone, let alone a guy who was usually dea
d to the world seconds after hitting his mattress.

  He reached to his right where his lamp should be, only to hit something and feel water splash on his hand. A glass smashed, the sound shocking him.

  When he sat up, something tugged on his arm. He looked around, willing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. There was something wrong here. It didn’t smell like his apartment, lacking the ever-present aroma of stale beer and turpentine. It was too clean, like bleach and disinfectant.

  Then he realized something - he couldn’t see the light from his alarm clock.

  Damn. It happened again.

  The thought sent a ripple of panic through him. He’d let it happen again. Damn it!

  The power company had cut off his supply three months earlier. After busting his ass to earn money to get it switched on, he’d vowed he would never let it happen again. It had been a tough month, eating nothing but beans and ramen, and spending more money on Tidus’s dog food than his own.

  He could have reached out to Aunt Bianca, but he knew what would happen. The ‘I know best’ looks, the “you should stop wasting your time and get a real job. Passion is great, but not when you live like a tramp,” lecture.

  Tripp had passion, but he wasn’t a coaster. He wasn’t an artist who didn’t work and always told himself he’d make it big someday, so there was no need to bust his ass.

  His mother had instilled a work ethic in him. Even though they were wealthy enough that she didn’t need to work, she’d kept a nine-to-five job at a children’s charity. She treated it as a normal job, never missing a day, always doing her best. Man, he missed her.

  Thinking about his mother always led him to think about his dad and what he’d done, and Tripp couldn’t take that right now.