Ready Player None

Chapter 5.3 - Wyett "Sharp Dressed Man"

The presentation hall was packed. As you'd expect for a company that was in charge of all simulated entertainment for the planet, meetings like this were held in-sim. Real-world business travel was a thing of the past.

A majority of the crowd was suitably dressed in business casual, but a fair number of folks had checked in wearing whatever they had on when they received the administrative summons. I saw mech-warriors, ninjas, bulging-muscle types, and a depressingly large number of blonde/pink/blue ponytails scattered throughout indicating that the Harley Quinns were here in force. What would we ever do without them?

As for myself, I was quite dashing in a single-breasted creme Italian suit with white silk shirt, no tie, and lots of hair product. There was always a chance I'd get plucked out of the crowd to come on stage. I may have been the blackest of sheep, but I had the right last name, and my boyish looks gave a certain currency to a governing board averaging 70 years old.

Unlikely to happen today, though. Today was not a promotional meeting; it was a roast, with a group of harried system administrators on the spit. In the spirit of the luau about to commence, I summoned a nice, red apple, and waved down to the four unlucky souls sitting at the report table, several feet below a semi-circular array of board members looming over them. Everyone who was going to be here was already present and waiting, which meant the board was potentially about to begin moving forward with the process of starting the meeting. Momentarily, anyway.

Jen popped into the seat next to me, and stole my apple.

"What have you done with the real Wyett?" she asked. "He would never be on time to an unscheduled board meeting."

She wasn't wearing her normal outfit, either. She had chosen "up-hair corporate with glasses and nice legs." One of my favorites, and not far off from her actual appearance. Jen must be looking for a promotion out of the administrative assistant.. Hell, these are my thoughts, I don't have to censor them for HR.. out of the secretarial pool.

"The real Wyett is very concerned about the recent attack on our system, and wants to see first-hand which corporate underlings are going to be sacrificed as compensation to the gods," I said, in my very concerned voice.

She shook her head in mock exasperation, and asked, "You really are just a broken toy, aren't you?"

I took advantage of the moment to steal back the apple, biting into it quickly before it became a contest. Actually, it was already a contest, and I just won it. The room comm line rumbled to life, with my grandmother asking everyone to quiet down. They did so, very quickly.

Nana's voice was remarkably strong, possibly augmented, but also possibly not. "You've all been called here because the OASIS was just attacked. A vast amount of coding was replaced by unknown assailants, and we have been told that we currently have no options to revert the system back to its previous state. Is that correct, Ms. Ellis?"

The poor little Deirdre-piglet proceeded to answer in great detail, as various board members interrupted her by raising the height of the fire with torturous questioning. Others cackled gleefully while rotating the barbecue pit handle with their own interrogations. It was all sounding quite delicious.

Jen signaled that she needed to communicate privately.

I enabled a visual filter on my avatar, so that anyone watching would see me listening intently to the official discussion, and not chatting away about who knows what. I probably should run that filter as a default.

"What's up?" I asked.

She prattled on for a bit about various things, then mentioned something that caught my attention.

"Oh yeah, Wyett, you asked me to find out anything I could about those two folks on Morde that you added to the the guild-wide kill list. Weirdest thing, I actually saw one of them a few days ago."

"Did you kill them?"

"No," she answered, smiling reflexively, thinking I was joking.

"Why didn't you kill them, Jen? It's a kill on sight list, and you just said that the 'sight' part happened, so where's the 'kill'?"

"I didn't kill her, because I was ghosting my daughters avatar as she was meeting up with some new people, and my daughter is only level 4, and your kill-on-sight list includes thousands of people, including pretty much everyone in the guild. I'm on there five times, I think. Maybe six. We use it more as a guide of who might be nice to know."

I chose not to answer such rank insubordination.

"Anyway, the girl talked about her brother, and after some basic sim research, I confirmed that he was the other person on your scary list. Since I couldn't kill them..."

She paused, waiting for affirmation. Yeah, like that's happening.

Jen continued, affirmationlessly. "...I showed some initiative and dug a little further. On the surface, there wouldn't seem to be much to uncover about them. Siblings, live in Sacramento Highlands, a community of a few hundred. Level 45 and 38. Kate, real name Ekatarina, isn't noteworthy. Very few system accomplishments. But her higher level brother, named Aleksandr, does have an exceedingly strange system usage pattern that I have never seen before."

"I don't think I care. I just wanted to make sure they weren't going to mess things up in the temple, but at those levels they wouldn't last 10 minutes," I said, dismissively.

Jen didn't let go. "That's just it. The summary access logs show that his account has visited some tremendously difficult zones for very long periods of time, including system-wide tournament activity. It doesn't line up with a mere level 45. If you will authorize the access, I can try to pull more detail for you."

A busy Jen was a less-bothersome Jen. I answered her by sending over a 3-day delegation of higher system access; not as high as mine, of course, but enough to authorize any data gathering she wanted to do. It would all be hidden by the uproar over the system changes, anyway. "Go for it," I said.

"Cool! I'm on it!" she replied, blinking out immediately. Never get between her and something she wants. For the unknownth time, I was glad she was on my side.

The meeting seemed to be winding down, or was possibly just taking a breath. Clearly, I had been paying attention the entire time, as anyone who had seen the thoroughly-engaged look on my avatar's face would know. Regardless, I quickly scanned through the transcript, just to see what I would have missed if I had theoretically spent the entire time talking to someone else.

Wow. The top level administrators were all demoted? No one can authorize any changes; everything has to be submitted to a single approval account that doesn't currently exist? That's incredible, and kind of exciting, in a watch-the-world-burn sort of way.

Well, that was that, I had learned what I came here to find out. There would be no reversal of the OASIS code. The Anniversary Party was going to happen, therefore I had to be there, therefore I needed to find a ticket.

Let the Hunt begin.