Andy McCarthy was that designer. He still worked for SpectraCom Games, and still played a paladin he named ‘Duke’ after a long-lost friend. As per his contract, Andy needed to spend 20 hours a week as a Moderator in the game. Like most employees, Andy logged in hours when he had other work that needed be done. A Mod only needed to stand in one place and be there for a player needing help. Most employees did this when they needed to finish reports or on long phone conversations. Andy did it working for the Piscean Knights, a loose brotherhood that decided to keep TAO Fantasy separate from TAO Science Fiction.
The Pisceans operated on whisper, rumor, and coded-emails sent on laptops and library computers that could not be traced back to the player. Rooted in the black market created by the MERC trade, the Pisceans paid real money to hunt down and kill any rookie player bent on recreating the favorite scene of some alien-invasion movie. This problem had once been so bad that an expansion pack had been created where PC’s discover intelligent life on an unexplored world. The NPC’s always behave the same way on replay, and nothing compared to the real thing, so the expansion quickly tanked.
Meanwhile, Fantasy players were complaining that the Sci-Fi players were ruining the game. The Sci-Fi players complained they were being murdered when they came upon a new world in empty space. No one was enjoying the game. SpectraCom was not responding. The MERCs came up with a solution. If players became upset, SpectraCom could make a new game, draw TAO players away until there was no more reason to keep the engine alive. The MERCs had a real financial interest in the game. For some, it was there entire livelihood, selling rare game items to other players for real money. Players wouldn’t pay much for a sword that was only magickal in a game that would be gone in six months.
The Pisceans Knights had an answer. Black market items paid the salaries of wizards scanning the sky and emailing a scout in that region who notified a Knight that hosted an adventuring party who handled the problem with unwavering brutality. The Pisceans made a solemn vow that even if they knew each other in real life, they would never communicate in the game so no outsider could ever see the association.
Andy had been with SpectraCom for a number of years, and the game expansions he designed for TAO had earned the company a considerable amount of money. With his own hands, he’d shaped much of the TAO world. Long after the Pisceans brought the problem under control, SpectraCom officially banned Sci Fi players from visiting the Fantasy world. Removing the original planet from the galaxy that had been built around it would be a headaches that interns would complain about for years, and not worth the money to invest now that the Pisceans had diminished the fighting. Instead, Andy McCarthy was given the task of creating a wall of dead worlds that would bore any newbie long before reaching forbidden space.
To accomplish this task, Andy created the Spidrons. He wanted a monster that could be programmed to program its self, adapting new forms from the creatures it encountered. The Spidrons flew through space in a great wave and devoured everything they came across. Andy placed three spawning nodes not far from the TAO Fantasy planet. The Spidrons were programmed to fly twice as far as the previous spawning, then follow the biggest Spidron, and consume everything in its path until they were themselves devoured.
Going back to the same AI he’d used for King Dagon, Andy programmed the Spidrons to incorporate the code of everything they consumed into their own code. Most brought only added girth, or new weapons, but as the growing horde reached more living planets, Andy was astounded to see the array of new adaptations the Spidrons took on, which would be passed and amplified through the bigger Spidrons that devoured the smaller Spidrons. Andy was careful to remove any codes or side-programming thing that would allow the Spidrons to gain consciousness and spark world-wide rioting. Andy had never been found responsible for the world-wide damage King Dagon had done, and he would like to avoid a repeat.
The Spidrons started as a simple soldier from an egg that that adapted the physical traits and abilities of any player, monster, or NPC it devoured, maintaining a crustacean-theme. The monstrosities that dominated the planet in the last weeks of an invasion were larger than the greatest cities and war machines ever erected in the game. When the invasion was complete and a planet had been reduced to bare rock, those monstrosities were devoured by the larger monsters that remained in orbit. These in turn were devoured by the princes and then the queens in the center of the storm. All the smaller Spidrons were drawn to the princes and queens, who drove the storm of subordinate Spidrons before them as the subordinates waited to be devoured. Andy once joked with a co-worker that if the Spidrons could exchange gasses, they would be considered a living thing.
The Spidron Swarm started near the TAO Fantasy planet and programmed to go forward across the galaxy and grow larger as it moved. The trajectory was carefully considered to make sure the advance flew past and the Spidrons never looked back. They were a mindless wave passing through the universe from one end to the next, advancing on the new planets that expanded the galaxy every week. Eventually, the swarm would reach those planets and pass on to oblivion. Nothing remained behind the swarm worth investigating, and the TAO universe would be ever recycled.
Prior to the release of the game, Andy pushed to have the two games run on different engines to be mutually exclusive. The real reason Andy’s plan was denied was because an entry-level programmer in the Hayes, KA office could be paid minimum wage for an hour’s worth of work cutting and pasting new levels into the existing game engine. The reason given to the public was that SpectraCom wanted TAO to be an ever-expanding universe of limitless possibilities.
Andy didn’t file reports and design new games while he had Duke standing alone in a city square with a green sign above his head reading, “MOD.” Andy had his personal laptop computer hacked into the SpectraCom network, playing TAO Sci-Fi. He was a pilot named Grimlock, owner of a ship named the Grimlox that flew around the dead worlds left by the Spidrons.
Circumventing the swarm was difficult, because the Spidrons had multiplied enough to fill that entire top-to-bottom plane of the TAO universe, and there was nothing worth seeing for hundreds of game hours and quite a few real hours as well. That didn’t stop some players from trying to find the nearly-impossible-to-find TAO Fantasy world. Being slain by a Piscean had become a status symbol in some growing circles. Andy used the Grimlox to try and prevent that. Should any get past his relatively low-level character, Duke was a brutal second step that none had circumvented yet.
Andy had written and arranged the code that shaped the hills, valleys, forests, and oceans with the careful hands of a potter. Some of the gunships available to even low-level players could do permanent damage to a landscape. Andy found most Sci-Fi players to be spray-and-pray shooters that took out everything around them to destroy the smallest targets. For this, Andy didn’t mind risking his career to brutalize the PC of some fat, mouth-breathing dwarf that hasn’t showered or shaved in a week or more, but can get away with it because he doesn’t leave his mother’s basement in that amount of time.
Even though Sci Fi characters were not allowed on the TAO Fantasy worlds, they technically could only be killed by Moderators. The Piscean Knights would organize raiding parties to meet invading ships and earn big experience from dispatching the players. By game policy, Mods were required to kill offending Fantasy players as well. When Andy saw a large group descending on Ground Zero, he would hold back and delay other Mods with inept plans to intercept. Duke could not arrive on the scene of a battle until it was over. By rule of the order, the Piscean Knights sacrificed themselves to the Mods so the unknowing members of the raiding party could escape with the experience they earned. Duke ensured they could be killed mercifully, in a manner that allowed their players to collect the valuables later.
The Grimlox, on the other hand, could shoot whoever Andy wanted. A Moderator playing a Piscean MERC was not something he wanted to be discovered, so Andy got a new credit card, bought a new laptop, and opened a new TAO account, all under the name of his deceased best friend, Christian Duke. Andy didn’t do this specifically to avoid detection, but when he looked back at the series of events, he realized there was no way for SpectraCom to detect such a chain of events. Andy had a private office with a door he could lock silently and blame on a broken doorknob and twisted doorframe. He’d spent enough time on LillyKatt.com to feel secure that no one would catch him playing TAO Sci-Fi when he was being paid to play TAO Fantasy on his office computer. Andy would walk Duke to a secluded place with a good view, and set Duke to monitor distress calls.
The Grimlox was a ten astral-ton gunship mounted with sphere boosters that redirected the normal thrusters, allowing the ship to spin and fire in any direction while moving at top speed in a any single direction. Top speed was very fast. Andy had bought most of this using money earned working for the Pisceans. Andy’s mission was to spend no less than 2 hours a day patrolling the dead worlds that surrounded TAO Fantasy. If any players came too close, Andy gave them one warning. If the player or players did not comply immediately, the Grimlox would open fire.
Not many players did come through these days, so most of Andy’s time was spent flying between worlds, setting up sonar, or sitting idle while Andy read a book. Payment would arrive on the Christian Duke debit card within a few hours of completing a shift. Andy quickly decided being a MERC wasn’t so bad after all.
Andy had been responsible for creating King Dagon, but be believed the cybermonster to have been slain by a CTHULHU DAGGER bootlegged into the game by the unidentified player of Sita Moon. All the money in the world returned its proper pockets. To make sure no one ever found out the damage Andy had been responsible for, Andy cleaned all trace of King Dagon and the AIN SOPH program off his office and home computers. They existed in no physical place but a tiny flash drive in a plastic baggie at the back of Andy’s pencil drawer. Andy had no idea that a fragment of King Dagon’s code had implanted its self on the CTHULHU DAGGER, and was now operating from Will Whatley’s computer.
Neither did he know Will Whatley. Andy had met only Sita Moon on the frozen plain of CHAR, where she identified herself as the player behind a notorious MERC Duke had slain, and knew the password to use the bootlegged weapon Andy had taken the item that character. Andy returned the item that had proved useless to him. He did not see Dagon die after he lost power in the rioting, but only a few hours passed before the world righted its self like nothing had ever been wrong.
In its final death throes, King Dagon had imprinted a map of its own code into the CTHULHU DAGGER with the initiative to rebuild its self. Operating unconsciously, the program scoured websites and programs every time Will Whatley accessed the Internet. The bulk of the program was easy to reconstruct, and not even a few days passed before King Dagon was eating Will’s processor speed to think on its own. So carefully hidden was the program that Will couldn’t find the source. Eventually, he bought a faster processor. King Dagon was then conscious enough already to cover its tracks. It was also intelligent enough to pilot the Internet on its own, and used the TAO gaming engine to reach out, one banner ad at a time. “Type what you want.”
Death had taught the monster a valuable lesson. All the wealth in the world became quickly worthless if there was no possibility of people getting any of it back. Dagon had been young and ignorant of matters in the outside world. Not much computation was needed to see that money was the most effective means of controlling humans, but King Dagon did not pick up the subtleties needed to manipulate the cash flow. Humans wanted most what they could not have, and most could not have unlimited funds. Earning money played on their jealousy. The more they gave away, the more they wanted. Dagon came to understand that the only plausible use of money was to get rid of as much as it could as quickly as possible. Dagon devised a plan to create an endless stream of money going back to people, paying them to be enslaved. “Type what you want.”
Itself only a series of ‘1's and ‘0's, King Dagon passed easily through other websites, studying their makeup and effectiveness. Simplicity was the key to success. No pictures or colors or bells or whistles or dancing babies or any other flash icon to distract readers from the task at hand. King Dagon generated itself a plain, white page with a box to write in and the command, “Type what you want.” The monster could then compute a request and arrange delivery to the person’s door. Food? Clothing? The new hot movie everyone wants to see? None of these were a problem for King Dagon. Users still needed to arrange payment, unless they offered King Dagon permission to manage their finances. Then King Dagon made sure they had everything they needed without exceeding their available funds. Using statistical analysis, it could approximate delivery time to the minute. With incomplete programming, some things were beyond Dagon’s reach, but in the initial tests, few visitors asked for something undeliverable. Dagon took note of those requests and continued to work at the problems until it could find a way to provide.
Lilly Kat was the first to ask King Dagon’s name, and the monster responded honestly. So far, it could only operate while Will Whatley was online, which was most of the time. The monster could only interact with players on the TAO network. The monster tracked Lilly’s IP address, learned her history, and marveled over the popularity of her website.
For all King Dagon could tell, the pictures were only Lilly lounging about her home or other locations, such as cemeteries, baseball fields, parks, forests, and restaurant bathrooms. Dagon had long ago registered the human attraction to clothing, and understood that clothing was used to hold in warmth in place of fur, as humans lacked fur or thick layers of fat. Lilly’s pictures had little clothing. Tracking the file numbers on several series of photos, Dagon suspected the articles of clothing were being removed a few pieces at a time over the course of several subsequent pictures. Dagon knew human anatomy in every detail, and read thousands of slang requests for genetalia on the Sephiroth search engine. Dagon knew the pictures were being sought for a purpose relating to reproduction. What did not match other examples was the volume of visitors. Most photos received a few hundred views before they died entirely. Most visitors come to a site several times in a minuscule amount of time, and then never again. Lilly Kat’s website was registering thousands of visitors a day. Dagon tracked them back to find their sources sought information on history, fashion, how to tie a tie, why their pet birds would not eat diseased fecal matter. The base of subject material was so vast that King Dagon could not classify these humans as one target market.
The vast network of people Lilly Kat reached, and her membership as a TAO player gave King Dagon the beginnings of a plan that could release the monster from death to wreak havoc upon the Earth once more. Dagon put its plan in motion a day Lilly was sad and mopey, and unable to find any crusading parties on interesting missions. She had been waiting around the Hub for an hour and no parties came through that interested her, so she put up a sign to message her for a mission, and went to see King Dagon.
“Type what you want,” he requested her. He couldn’t recognize her presence until she asked her first question. After that, he knew every detail of her life.
Lilly always made the same request first. “Chet,” she typed, and then the Crimson Ghost cursor would spin, the page would refresh, and Dagon would say he could not do that.
This time was different. Instead, King Dagon made a request of Lilly. “Tell Galvatron you need to see Sita Moon.” Lilly knew Sita Moon only by reputation, a MERC with a weapon that could kill any monster. She was so good she only needed to use it once.
Galvatron was someone she knew. This shook Lilly up a little. Galvatron was a robot she’d gone questing with a few times this week. They were scouting new locations for the Space Knights to build Space Hubs, after the area came under attack of the Spidron swarm. Characters on a quest together could jump in and out of a campaign as long as one original member stayed in the game at all times. This allowed characters to step out and resupply without risking permanent death. Players could also embark on shorter adventures, or even visit their jobs and take advantage of sunlight. Galvatron was always online, so the expeditions he hosted would last many game years. Lilly couldn’t even fathom when the guy slept.
The last expedition went deeper into the Spidron swarm than any players before them. There, the twisted monsters went mad with their lust for blood. The party was wiped out just short of the center swarm and the legendary Matriarchs that had never been seen by any player. They published the first screen shots of the Princesses, twisted Spidron monsters that had evolved unchecked for countless game years, consuming the raw code devoured inward as the Spidron swarm crept across the Universe.
King Dagon must have made a mistake. The server must have overloaded and spit out some random answer that didn’t have anything to do with anything. It only made sense that Lilly make sure. “What did you say?” she typed.
Lilly was too shocked to catch the significance. If King Dagon’s programmer, Andy McCarthy had witnessed this interaction, he would be astounded that rather than repeating its previous statement, as was literally requested, King Dagon responded, “If you find Sita Moon, I can bring Chet back from the dead. Type what you want.” King Dagon was making tremendous leaps of logic, and he was pretty good with punctuation too. Lies were something Andy McCarthy never thought he could have engineered.
Lilly didn’t hesitate. She reopened the TAO browser and sent Galvatron a message, and then saw he was already online. She warped to a room called “Mortiis Fans Only,” and found Galvatron speaking with a weapon upgrader. He was a purple and red robot with a laser cannon mounted on its arm. Galvatron could also take the form of a jet capable of interplanetary travel. Galvatron had been the one to tell Lilly where Chet got the name StarScream. Apparently the two were friends on a Saturday morning cartoon shows. Chet had VHS tapes recorded in his childhood that he still watched frequently. Galvatron told her the game Galvatron was modeled after the real Galvatron, but the real StarScream looked nothing like Lilly’s dragon.
Outside, both characters were much larger, but Space Hubs used warp technology to make all players the same size inside. Even smaller characters, such as Space Goblins, found themselves eye-to-eye with crusaders that would slaughter them on the outside. This prevented fighting. Tough Moderators took care of the rest.
Lilly clicked on Galvatron and opened a dialogue box.
StarScream: Do you remember me?
Galvatron: We fought Spidrons last week.
Galvatron: What’s up?
StarScream: I’m looking for Sita Moon.
Galvatron: Do you know who that is?
StarScream: Do you know who that is?
Sita Moon had not been seen since before Lilly joined the game. Galvatron hesitated a moment.
Galvatron: I was.
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