The Dragon's Revenge Page 4

  ‘I’m not a stranger, though,’ he said patiently, smiling. ‘You know me from school.’

  ‘All the same. I have to get home.’ I started forward again and was surprised to hear a car door open. With a glance back, I could see Watson on the pavement.

  ‘Does the number eight one three mean anything to you, Tom?’ There was steel in his voice.

  That stopped me, mid stride, with a shiver that brought out a cold sweat all over my body. What did he know about my loot roll?

  ‘I hate to bring this up, Tom, but we could ban you from Epic. You broke the EULA when you used that macro. And your Taunt macro.’

  Damn. Damn. Damn. Holy swords of Mov. I was in trouble. The joyful world I’d been living in a moment earlier was suddenly impossibly far away.

  ‘What do you want?’ I managed to say, but I don’t think I hid the fear in my voice.

  ‘A chat.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘What will the community say if we release that log?’

  I hated Watson and I hated myself.

  ‘Come on,’ his voice was gentler. ‘I’ve got an offer for you and I think you’ll like it.’

  My mum is something of a dissident, a rebel. Getting pregnant with a Vietnamese man, for instance, was a bit unorthodox for someone living around our way. And so too was dumping him before I was born. That streak is in me too. As I stood on the pavement, my mind vacillating between two very different courses of action. I nearly walked away. Sod Watson. Sod his threats. No one blackmailed me. I’d done bad; I’d take my lumps. There were other games.

  The problem was, there really wasn’t anything else as immersive as Epic. The next best games felt like lame cartoons in comparison. And then there were my friends. My fans. I didn’t want to disappoint them or lose them. I might even be banned before I had a chance to talk to Raitha. If I could only talk to her (him) Raitha would understand.

  Despite my anger and a fierce desire to just take off, I found myself in the car. To be fair to him, Watson seemed to understand. He didn’t make any patronising remarks but gave me a moment.

  The car smelled new. My seat was reclined and the air conditioning was cool. ‘Well?’ I asked at last.

  ‘Yuno Industries have got a problem with Epic Two.’

  ‘Oh?’ Whatever I had expected him to talk about, it wasn’t this.

  ‘The game is supposed to be launched next month, as you know.’ Watson looked at me earnestly over his glasses. ‘But we’re in deep trouble.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We made some of the top bosses AI. Well, one of them, Mikarkathat, has gone completely off script. I mean, way off. She’s organised an army of her own and has conquered a third of the world. Newhaven has been sacked and wiped out of the game.’

  Newhaven? That was a city that most players started out from in Epic, especially those playing a human character. I had begun there. How could you destroy such a city? It was packed full of high-level guards and NPCs.

  ‘How is that possible?’ I asked. ‘Won’t the guards and merchants and guild masters respawn?’

  ‘It seems not.’ Watson shook his head. ‘Not when the buildings are all gone. And in any case, the dragon has stationed a part of her army there, four hill giants. If someone does manage to log in, they will be taken down at once.’

  ‘So where do newbies begin now?’

  ‘There are several alternative towns. But we are worried they might not last for the coming year, not with the progress Mikarkathat and her army are making. And that’s not all, not by a long way.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We can’t rewrite the dragon.’

  Watson paused, as though to check he had my attention. He certainly did.

  ‘Did you try shutting down the game? Or just taking her out of the code?’

  Watson blew out a disconsolate breath. ‘Sadly, Epic Two is a distributed computing project. It’s running on millions of computers all over the world. Someone thought this was a smart move, creating huge redundancy and computing power from volunteers so as to ensure the game never crashed and that wherever you were in the world, there wouldn’t be much lag.

  ‘The difference in the AI was amazing. When the game was just on our own servers, the NPCs were either fully scripted, or, if they used Natural Language Processing to try to understand what they were hearing, got it wrong about half the time. By contrast, when we drew upon the network of millions of users, well, they scored nearly human accuracy, even when talking to sarcastic or deliberately misleading players.

  ‘I was there when our engineers made the pitch, so I’m to blame as much as anyone. Marketing loved the idea, because it created a massive community behind the game, even before launch. Accounts loved it too, of course, all that free computing power. No one asked the obvious question: what if we need to take the game offline? It just didn’t occur to anyone that we might have a problem so big we needed a restart.’

  ‘Interesting.’ It had never occurred to me that a huge company like Yuno, with its reputation for being smart, could make such a howler of a mistake.

  ‘You could say that,’ muttered Watson dryly. ‘Or you could say enormous, sodding disaster. We are a month from launch and a rogue AI is taking over the game.’

  ‘And you want my help?’

  ‘Right. You’ve killed her in Epic. There are differences. Mikarkathat is an ice dragon in Epic Two, but basically the challenge is the same and I believe you can kill her again.’

  ‘That Mikarkathat raid took place after four years playing the game and I needed the help of a hundred and thirty other players.’

  ‘Right again. You’ve good social skills. That’s also why we want you to be part of the solution.’

  ‘But you’ve only got a month.’

  He knew that, I knew that. So what was the plan?

  ‘How often did you actually play the game? On average, over those four years?’ When Watson was getting down to business he didn’t smile so much.

  ‘I don’t know, four hours a day.’

  ‘Three and a half. We have the figures. If you were to play for fifteen hours a day, that would speed progression up by a factor of at least four.’

  ‘One year then.’

  ‘We can give you a guide. We know all the quests, their solutions, the best drops. That kind of information, we reckon, could accelerate your progress by a factor of six.’

  ‘Two months.’

  ‘Right.’ Watson nodded earnestly. ‘Two months of intense play and you’ll be capped at a hundred.’

  ‘Not seventy-five?’

  ‘Epic Two is capped at a hundred, but the time investment is about the same. Players love the sense of achievement in levelling up so we gave them more of it.’

  ‘And you are recruiting, what, a hundred players for this project?’

  ‘Three hundred.’

  I whistled. ‘You know, maybe you are looking at this all wrong.’

  ‘Maybe…?’ Watson waited for me.

  ‘Maybe you should make it public. This is an exciting challenge. Why not come clean? I bet you’d get millions on board with a challenge like this. To level up and defeat the dragon and her army. It’s exciting.’

  Watson drew a deep breath and let it out contemplatively. ‘We’ve thought about it, of course. And I’m not closed-minded about the idea of going public. It’s a plan. But the finance and legal people don’t like it. It’s impossible to know what kind of experience we are offering players with that dragon on the loose. If your respawn point gets run over by the evil army, is that it? Is your favourite character gone forever?

  ‘And there’s another issue too. The “AI have rights” crowd would be all over us.’

  ‘All right. So, what’s your offer?’

  With a deep-throated chuckled from his large body, Watson rummaged in a compartment to his right and passed over a contract of about twenty pages. He ticked off the main points.

  ‘First, you sign the non-disclosure. This remains
private, always, or you can be sued for all monies paid to you plus damages to the company. Second, you come to San Francisco for three months to play Epic Two: we’ll pay your travel and living expenses and three thousand dollars a month. If anyone kills the dragon in those three months, all the players get a ten thousand bonus. If you are on the raid when it happens, twenty thousand.’

  Funny, the money. Because I’d have done this for the thrill alone. Imagine: San Francisco and a dream team of game players on a dragon hunt. I ought to be paying him. Still, I tried not to show too much eagerness.

  ‘Is this what everyone is being paid?’

  ‘No. Some of the players are staff members, they are getting their usual salaries, plus the bonuses.’

  ‘What’s the most that one of the other non-salaried players are getting?’

  ‘Five thousand a month.’

  ‘I want that.’

  ‘They didn’t cheat at Epic.’

  ‘Sod you, Watson.’ All at once a veil of rage and shame dropped over me and I reached for the door handle. He could go sort out his problems without me.

  ‘Wait. We’ll pay you four thousand a month.’

  ‘It’s not the money.’ I turned towards him and he pulled away, obviously seeing something in my expression that surprised him. ‘It’s the blackmail. I’m not going to live under that cloud, Watson. If I sign up, you have to fix those logs. Delete them. I’m not having you or anyone else come back to me time after time with that stupid mistake.’ I could feel tears coming, tears which I fought against. As steadily as I could, I continued. ‘Put that in the contract. And you can make it four k while you are at it. And something else. If I’m raid leader when we kill the dragon, I get a million bonus.’

  ‘Five hundred thousand.’

  ‘Seven fifty.’

  ‘Six is maximum.’

  My laughter surprised him. ‘Watson, you are just making this up as you go along. You’re high up at Yuno. You probably have a free hand and a large budget to make this happen. Don’t tell me there’s some kind of maximum on the raid leader bonus. We are in new territory here, right?’

  His look was cold and unresponsive. ‘Six, but I’ll throw in sweeteners. One trip for your mum to come visit. A car while you are in San Francisco. A phone with plenty of credit.’

  ‘All right, put them all in the contract and I’ll sign tomorrow.’

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘You want me on the plane tomorrow, huh?’

  ‘The project has already started,’ said Watson sombrely.

  ‘Have you already got all the three hundred players?’

  ‘No. Just our staff members at the moment.’

  ‘There’s one more thing then. I’d like you to make the same offer - four thousand a month - to my team in Epic. Raitha, Sapentia, Braja and Grythiss.’

  Watson nodded. ‘Makes sense. I’ll contact them.’

  ‘Are we done then?’ I pulled on the handle to open the door.

  ‘I’ll call over shortly with the revised contract.’

  It was a little Big Brother how they seemed to know so much about me, well, my address, my route home and my game logs. Still, I fairly skipped back the rest of the journey.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ I slung my bag over the knob at the bottom of the banister rail and hurried through to the kitchen, from where there was a delicious smell. Tomatoes and garlic cooking in oil. The table was ready: bread, a glass of milk for me, water for her, knife and fork each and an old, wooden salt shaker.

  Taking my seat, I watched my mum stir the frying pan. As so often when she was back from work, she looked tired. In fact, I associated the dark green nurses’ uniform with my mum in poor form. At the weekend, in her jeans and hoodie, she was always better company.

  ‘I’ve been headhunted by Yuno. They are going to pay me four thousand dollars a month to play Epic Two at their headquarters in San Francisco.’

  ‘San Francisco?’

  ‘Yeah! Isn’t that amazing.’

  ‘You’re only seventeen.’

  ‘Don’t worry. They’ll look after me. And it’s only for three months.’

  ‘Three months?’ She gave me a sharp look. ‘What about your exams?’

  ‘They don’t matter. They are only mocks.’

  ‘Tom!’

  ‘You know what I mean. It’s not like they count for anything other than practice.’

  ‘Three months is a lot of work to catch up.’

  ‘Only six more weeks of school though. And I will catch up, I promise.’

  Bringing the frying pan over, she scooped some of the mix onto my plate. Then, catching my eye, gave me a rueful shrug. ‘Two days until my pay comes through, we’ll get something nice then.’

  ‘It’s fine, Mum, thanks.’ And honestly, it wasn’t bad at all. With a bit of salt and a slice of bread to soak up the juices, it tasted delicious. I just wished there had been more of it.

  ‘This guy from Yuno, Mr Watson, came to school today.’ And as she efficiently devoured her own portion, Mum listened and nodded while I told her about my day. ‘Matt O’Keefe came up to me at lunch and told me I was a smart kid.’

  ‘Matt O’Keefe, huh? What would he know about being smart? That bollix normally makes your life a misery.’

  ‘Exactly. That’s what I’m telling you; everyone loves me now. And all because of Epic.’

  ‘Three months.’ Mum shook her head. ‘That’s a long time, I’ll miss you.’

  ‘I won’t miss you.’ I tried to joke, but as soon as it came out I felt terrible. ‘I’ll be too busy.’ Mum looked sad. ‘Anyway, they are throwing in a trip for you as a sweetener, you can come at the halfway stage.’

  ‘I’d love to see San Francisco.’

  ‘Take a holiday then. Yuno will pay for everything. Come for a fortnight.’

  ‘I couldn’t take that much.’

  ‘Nine days then, two weekends either side of a week off.’

  ‘Maybe.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe that would work.’

  There was one piece of bread left, the crust. That’s all we had until Friday. I eyed it.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘No, you,’ I protested. ‘I’m fine, that was great.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Picking up the crust, I drew my knife across it a couple of times until I could tear it neatly. Then I gave her half. She smiled at me then got up and brought the frying pan over. After I’d soaked my piece of bread in the remaining - tasty - oil within the pan, I gave the pan back her and she did the same.

  ‘The money is good.’ Mum rested her elbows on the table. ‘But it’s not as important as your education.’

  ‘You’re going to let me go, right?’ In fact, she wouldn’t be able to stop me, but I’d rather not have to do a runner. It would upset us both too much.

  ‘I suppose so. Remember your promise though. You’ll catch up over the summer, even if it means cutting down on your gaming.’

  ‘It won’t. Anyway, I do promise, honestly.’ And I meant it. Six weeks wasn’t so bad, I could probably do that in three, given how slowly we got through the curriculum as a class.

  Our doorbell rang. With a look of surprise and a gesture towards her hair, Mum stood up. Normally, she wore her hair up tight in a bun at the back, partly for work and partly because she didn’t like how the dark roots in between her thick blonde - almost peroxide white - tresses looked when her hair was down.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum, you look fine. It’s only the Yuno people, they said they’d be around with the contract.’

  And it was. Well, just the one.

  ‘Mr Watson, my mum, Stacy Foster.’ I did the introductions.

  ‘I’m delighted to meet you, Stacy.’ Through his beard, Watson gave a smile so charming you’d never imagine him capable of the steely tones I’d heard when in his Mercedes. ‘You should be very proud of Tom; he’s a remarkably bright young man.’

  Watson suddenly became interesting to me and not because I took his flattery at all seriously. It is
probably obvious to everyone but the very young that people are not always what they seem. Or rather, they act according to motives that they are not always aware of. This thought had struck me like a revelation last year. I’d been talking to Mr Smyth, who used to employ me as a paper boy. He’d really barked at some kid who he suspected (probably rightly) of stealing a handful of Percy Pigs. Then Mr Smyth had turned to me and was instantly kind and solicitous about my progress in school. The difference? It was my mum! She was outside and I suddenly realised from a glance he took towards the window that Mr Smyth fancied her. His politeness to me reflected his feelings for her. Feelings that he might not have even been aware of.

  Ever since then, I’d studied the people around me: the other kids in my class; my teachers; my mum. And I prided myself on the fact that I could tell the difference between the kind of person they believed themselves to be and the kind they actually were. In my mum’s case, for instance, she thought she was a bad mother. That she should do more to help me with school, feed me healthy food, stop me playing too much Epic. But the truth was, she was a very, very good woman, trying her best in tough times.

  Watson, however, had me stumped. I had absolutely no idea what manner of man he was. When I’d seen him in front of the class, I’d thought him a flat. A bit of an oaf. A cuddly rabbit in front of a pack of wolves, trying to entertain its way out of trouble. In the car, or just before, when he’d blackmailed me, I’d seen he was actually a sharp, ruthless. You wouldn’t see that now though; he came bumbling into the house, thanking Mum, apologising for intruding, saying he wouldn’t be long.

  There were three chairs, all battered looking, around our rectangular wooden table. Once we were each sat down, Watson delved into his black satchel and produced two wads of paper.

  ‘Yuno’s contract with Tom Foster. I’m sure Tom’s told you all about it.’

  ‘Well, a little.’ Mum folded her arms. I hoped she wasn’t going to be difficult. ‘But he hasn’t been home long.’

  ‘I’ve brought this too.’ Watson hadn’t stopped smiling. ‘It’s a non-disclosure for you. I’d like you to sign it - you are promising not to talk about this with anyone else - then you two can speak freely to each other and also you can come to San Francisco to see Tom.’