Dungeon Duel (Rogue Dungeon 5) - Chapter Twenty-Nine

The bombing started while Randy was typing furiously at his workstation. His books slumped on the shelf, everything from Rational Database Theory and Applications to Refactoring slipping sideways, the perfect model of the way this defense of three dimensions was suddenly going. He gritted his teeth and fought the urge to straighten them, forcing himself to stay focused on getting through the hackers’ security protocols. Right until Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software tumbled off the shelf.

He couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed the abused book from the floor, straightened its pages, and set it carefully on the desk.

He knew most of those manuals by heart and couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually reached for one of the thick tomes. But there was a comfort in having them near at hand—a reminder of all he knew and what he’d accomplished. Code, as confusing and complex as it could be, was also fundamentally rooted in a logical string of operations. At least, that was the way code was supposed to work. Randy loved clean code—straddling the line between simplicity and elegance, avoiding needless complexity so that any developer could read and decipher its meaning.

Those books, so neatly arrayed, were built upon the bedrock of those fundamental principles. They were Randy’s touchstone.

But the jumble staring him in the face was the opposite of clean code. Not necessarily bad code, but intentionally convoluted and distorted. It was more than merely messy, it was the equivalent of a hoarder’s nest. Upon first glance Randy would’ve called it spaghetti code—but he would’ve been wrong. It was a purposeful labyrinth of seemingly illogical bits and pieces, all hiding and obscuring artful ciphertext that Randy couldn’t even begin to sift through. It would take weeks or months to untangle—if he could do it at all.

“Right, thanks.” PwnrBwner stalked back into Randy’s office and tossed his phone on top of Design Patterns.“That was our buddy with the guard. It’s like you thought, they’re bombing the Heralds.”

“Good,” Randy muttered, zeroing back in on his task. There was just so much information to sort through. And now, in addition to the shutdown protocols, contingencies had been added so that once a creature or player affected with the anomalous code returned to Hearthworld, its logout button locked, forcing them to remain inside. Silva had been serious about trapping them in the game and deleting the interdimensional anomalies from Earth.

PwnrBwner leaned over his shoulder. “You getting anywhere?”

“No.” Randy pushed up his glasses, trying to stay polite. At the moment that felt like a Herculean task. “And the fact that you keep asking isn’t helping. I already have a literal ticking clock in the corner of my screen, letting me know I’m going too slow. Did you talk to Arjun or Katia? Are they making any progress?”

“Nothing.” PwnrBwner leaned against the doorway. “What the hell do we do here, man? What if you can’t fix this?”

Another run of bombing shook the building. The books on the shelf slid farther.

“Okay,” Randy said, standing up. One at a time, he took the rest of the books off the shelf and stacked them neatly on his desk. A row of perfectly straight spines, now horizontal rather than vertical. That was still order, even if it was amidst chaos. “What if we assume the shutdown is impossible to stop in this timeframe? If there was a bomb about to explode in Frontflip and no one could find it, we would stop looking and start evacuating.” He lifted his glasses and massaged his dry eyes. “Prevention to mitigation. Think. There’s basically a firewall between Roark’s people and Earth, and anyone affected by the anomalous code will get caught up in it. But there isn’t a firewall between Hearthworld and the third dimension, Traisbin.”

He grabbed a tablet off the desk and started scribbling notes onto its whiteboard app.

“Step one, we don’t let anybody who became his Vassal in the game go back into Hearthworld—if they do, they’ll be stranded. Brain death is almost certain when the servers implode. Step two, we get word to Roark that he needs to get his people to Traisbin by any means necessary. Step three, he can’t lose the World Stone. It’s not soulbound anymore, so it can be taken off his corpse. Step four…” He hesitated. “Someone’s got to alert the players who didn’t get the maintenance message that they need to log off immediately.”

“How do we do that?” a feminine voice asked.

Randy’s head snapped up. “Helen Rose. When did you get here?”

“Just as you were getting to step two,” she said, frowning. “I’ve got the largest seedFeed of any gamer on Hearthworld, and almost ninety-five percent of my subscribers have my notifications set to ping them while they’re playing.”

“Damn, dude,” PwnrBwner said, with an impressed whistle. “That’s even better than Bad_Karma’s numbers.”

She tucked a blonde-and-magenta strand of hair back. “It’s better than the company’s player notification system by almost double.”

“Duh.” PwnrBwner rolled his eyes. “Who’re you more likely to mark as SPAM? A hot gamer chick or the fifteenth notification from Frontflip about the new expansion pack this week? I didn’t even finish junior college and I can tell you that.”

“The problem is you can’t get in,” Randy said, frustrated. “You were Vassalized outside the game, so you don’t have the anomalous code.”

“Even if I can’t log in to the actual game, I can start a live feed at the Hearthworld log-in screen. I could send out the notification that I’m streaming, then tell everybody who joins what’s going on and that they need to log out asap.”

“But what about the players who did become vassals in-game?” PwnrBwner asked. “I think my local crew is all here, but what if there are more?”

Randy nodded, coming to a decision.

“Send them to the Vault of the Radiant Shield.” He flipped up the tablet’s stand and set it on top of the stack of perfectly straight books. “Anyone inside who’s infected with the anomalous code will have to go through to Traisbin if they want to live.”

There was a long, silent pause, tension hanging in the air like morning fog.

“That’s insane,” Pwnr finally said, missing some of his usual gusto and bluster. “One, we don’t even know if that will work, and two, even if it does, it’s as good as a death sentence. Maybe your brain survives, but your body here will be a vegetable. We can’t ask people to do that.”

“What other choice do we have?” Randy asked, feeling the walls press in around him. Roark may have left Pwnr in charge as the Arch-Overseer, but this was a problem the gamer couldn’t fix. Randy was the only one with a prayer of stopping the shutdown, and even he couldn’t pull it off in the timeframe he had. “This is the best possible option.”

Another long pause.

“Fuck,” Pwnr said solemnly. “I don’t like this, nerd.”

“Me either, but he’s right,” Helen Rose said. “It is the only way. Should I send a message to the Griefer letting him know about the broken soulbinding before I start my feed?”

“Yeah,” Randy said. “Definitely. As soon as you can.”

“I’m on it.” She squeezed his hand, then turned and jogged off toward the VIP lounge.

PwnrBwner squinted at him. “What’s the deal, nerd? You’re not saying something important.”

Randy took a deep breath and let it out.

“The Griefer is fighting a war right now,” he said. “He might be locked in a battle with Lowen as we speak. He’s not going to be checking his messages for word from us. If all we do is message him, he could die without finding out that the World Stone’s not bound to him anymore. And if he dies, there’s no guarantee he’ll respawn before the countdown timer runs out.”

“You’re saying somebody’s got to warn him not to die in person.”

Randy nodded. “Or take the World Stone before Lowen does if Roark’s already dead.”

PwnrBwner shook his head. “Yeah, but nobody except players with the bad code can get in, and if they go in they can never get back out. You just said whoever’s in there when Hearthworld shuts down gets turned into a vegetable for the rest of their life.”

“In this dimension,” Randy said, cupping his chin. “But think about this—the Griefer went from Traisbin to Hearthworld and came out on Earth with a body. Same for all of the mobs like Kaz who’ve come through to Earth. They started out as nothing but lines of code and were given physical form when they stepped into our world. If that’s true, it’s possible the inverse is true, too, that someone from Earth could upload their mind to the game and come out in Traisbin with a new physical body. Then when the shutdown happens, their Earthly body goes into a vegetative state, effectively killing them. But it doesn’t matter because they’ve already left that body for a new one.”

PwnrBwner scrubbed his hands down his face.

“Oh my God, this is some galaxybrain shit. So you’re saying somebody’s got to die?”

“Here. But they’ll live on in Traisbin.”

“But you don’t know that for sure.”

Another bombing run rattled Frontflip on its foundations, knocking a few of the books slightly askew. Randy straightened them with careful, precise movements.

“Not with one hundred percent certainty, obviously. But it’s possible.” He took one last look at the perfectly straight spines. “It’s going to be me. I’m going in.”

“You don’t even know if this’ll work! Say you’re wrong, and you fucking die. Then what, Randy?”

“This is bigger than just one person,” Randy replied, staring PwnrBwner down. “Worlds bigger. It’s the classic trolley car thought experiment. Sometimes you have to sacrifice one person to save a whole lot more.”

For a few long beats, PwnrBwner just stared at him, a mixture of anger and disbelief painted across his face.

“You freaking hero,” he said, shaking his head. “If they don’t build some kind of monument to you for this, it’ll be total bullshit.”

That surprised a chuckle out of Randy. “I don’t think they build monuments to awkward computer nerds.”

“They should.” PwnrBwner eyed the countdown clock, ticking away. They were rapidly approaching three hours. “Okay, you go help Roark and save the Hearthworld mobs who can’t get out. Me and the Poser Owners’ll sweep up the rest of this shit on Earth. Your boss might be a dickface, but he’s not wrong. There’s a bunch of people out there who have no idea how to handle themselves against video game monsters.”

“Speaking of heroes…” Randy stuck out his hand to shake. “It’s been an honor being a hero with you… uh, I don’t think you ever told me your real name.”

PwnrBwner smirked and shook his hand. “It’s Scott.”

“It’s been an honor, Scott. Go save Earth. And don’t die.”

PwnrBwner—Scott—snorted.

“Dude, I kick ass at this. Gaming is my number one skill, and that’s really saying something, considering I basically piss excellence at everything I try. But yeah, it’s been an honor and all that crap.”

Randy laughed.

“Seriously,” PwnrBwner insisted. “Stay alive in there. You won’t have time to ride out the player respawn window.”

“Don’t worry,” Randy said, a smile creeping onto his face. “I’m something of a gamer myself.”