Vampires in Space

As Used on the Moon

"As used on the moon." Malcolm mused to himself, but audibly.

"What?" Heather asked. We both heard him perfectly well. Even if he did not mean for us to. Vampire hearing. The 'What?' was pro-forma Vampire performance art. You get used to doing that over time. It becomes a habit. Part of hiding from humanity.

"I was just thinking of a possible advertisement. About our games. 'As used on the moon' tagline. I'm not in advertising, but seems like they might use something like that. Seems like something they would say. Advertising never considered this. Setting aside all the isolation and everything, which they would not want out there, but the fact that our games are up there. In space. I don't think they ever thought about that angle. Stuff like 'Going to take a tour of the moon? It's an entire day of travel each way! Need to fill the time? Play ...' err ... whatever game we are promoting at the time"

Heather frowned at the idea. "Most space first-timers look out the ports at the stars. Back at the Earth. Things like that."

Bob looked aside like he was looking out a port at the stars and space. "I did. Definitely. Amazing views. But: we all understand it's advertising, not reality. Well: You may not completely. Now that I think about it, you don't advertise. "

Heather accepted that but said "We don't have an advertising department. Technically, we can't stop you from saying anything about your games being up on our facilities. It is true. They are. However, and as you alluded to, you might want to think about the next part that logically happens. What if a gaming reporter asks us about that for a gaming news feed? And we end up having to tell them that for safety reasons we keep your stuff isolated and don't allow it to touch anything critical and production. You know what happens next. The intrepid reporter asks why we keep your software isolated. We have to admit it's not unlike the hospital situation. That your games have historically known issues with privacy, stability, and other bugs? The CIs you use to augment your programmers for QA are sloppy, to say the least. Not catching the simple errors."

"At least simple to the hackers and their arsenal of tools. Hackers do not worry about restrictions on Computer Intelligence. They are already breaking the law. What's a little extra smart CI to them?" I added for flavor.

Heather gestured. The screen changed. Now it displayed data about reported errors and hacks per game title. She pointed at the categories and numbers. "Some of that is not public information. You may not have all of that. Known only in the security profession or in dark corners of the Internet. Our security team is the best in the business, bar none. In the CI versus CI world of building a wall to have the hackers tear it down, you have a lot of penetrations. A lot of affected customers. In addition to you not being able to deploy illegal intelligence in your computers, you have budget issues. Public company problems. That means in game development there is always a pressure to rush to market. A project has a timeline and a budget so you fix the easy and obvious stuff, but that leaves vulnerable code chains for the hackers and their CI minions to find. Us isolating you might not come up... But it might. You'll have to be ready to spin that. I am not against you telling the truth but do not ask us to lie. In our world, Global products are isolated to places without financial or personal data. In the old terminology, we would call that air-gapped, but it's the entire gaming network that is isolated. Cross-connect it anywhere, on purpose, or by accident, and alarms go off like crazy. The entire gaming network is instantly shut down until we isolate the issue, fix it, and connect it again."

"It does not happen that often. People that shut down the gaming network are pilloried but those who were mid-game." I said.

"Hmmm." Malcolm did not think of that.

It is clear Bob is the technical one of the two of them. He understood the isolation aspect far more than Malcolm had. What Heather was heading off here was the fact that when we play one of the Global games, we do it on our displays via adapters, and the games get an extra dimension of reality to them. Games made by Global played on our screens look and play better than anything they can do on Earth. Fully immersive. Added elements injected in real-time by CI analysis of gameplay. Far beyond what the old gaming headsets used to be. We do not want that known. That would drive demands for our displays, we'd put some of the more expensive earth-side display makers out of business. We would need to find ways to slip our technology into Earthbound manufacturer's products. Fast. We are not looking to be dominant in yet another area. In Vampire's continued existence risk versus reward calculations, we do not need more money. We need more time. We therefore do not want the attention.