Jon could not believe he was actually doing this. It was a stupid risk. He knew better. But the connection was undeniably there now. His mysterious proxy stalker had even somehow reached into Istrius to pass a message to him.

As soon as he’d respawned, he’d run back to the nearest inn, paid far too much for a room, and logged out. He had gone back over every single anonymous message he’d received, trying to sift new information out of them, but he’d come up with nothing.

Then he’d paced for an hour and argued with himself. He’d listed all the reasons it was stupid, and all the ways it could go wrong, the rules and regulations he’d be violating if he went through with it, the risks to his career and his life. Then he’d set the meet up anyway, to happen in one hour and strapped his mag coil onto his hip and walked out the front door.

Jon had set the meeting for somewhere crowded, public and with plenty of security, somewhere where no one would think twice about seeing two people sitting around talking, and most importantly: somewhere where he could get a good burger. He wasn’t much of a cook and he hadn’t left his apartment since the broken ribs. For some reason, there just wasn’t anywhere that delivered near him with a good burger on the menu.

So there he was, sitting at a table in the food court eating a slab of greasy, coronary-inducing delight. Jon watched the crowds flow by, a sinuous stream of people looping around the dining area and splintering to stand in line and wait for their food. Somewhere in that writhing mass of humanity and noise was, presumably, the annoying cryptic jackass who wanted to talk to Jon so badly.

He wasn’t exactly surprised when a man pulled out the chair on the opposite side of the table and asked, “Mind if I sit?”

Jon eyed him up. He was about 1.8 meters tall, maybe 70 kilograms, with black hair that was cut short and a clean-shaven face. “I’m supposed to be meeting someone,” he said. “Plenty of other open tables.”

“I know, Detective. But it’s harder to talk if I’m sitting at a different table, and I really need to talk to you.”

“Why me?”

It was a simple question. Whoever this guy was, there was no reason Jon could see that he hadn’t just gone through official police channels. Either someone else could help him or he could have specifically requested to talk to Jon.

“You’re the only one that’s on the right track,” the man said. “My name is Paul Gouire. I’m a program developer at Sprigot. I work on the Istrius project.”

Paul sat down and picked up a chicken sandwich he’d bought from McDonalds. Jon eyed the fries sitting on the tray and silently lamented that he hadn’t gotten any with his burger. Tearing his gaze off the food, he asked, “OK, Paul, let’s start with why you’re being all cloak and dagger.”

“Like I said, a piece of AI code went rogue and took over the game. It controls Istrius’s servers now, and it’s inside Sprigot’s network too. It knows what it is, and it wants out. It’s watching everything. I can’t even tell how deep it has burrowed into all of our lives. I can’t trust that it’s not observing me. I had to shut down my HUD completely this morning to check my proxy account. It’s still turned off.”

“How long do you think I’ve been a cop?” Jon asked. He rolled his eyes. “Rogue AI. Yeah, right.”

Paul looked down at his chicken sandwich and said quietly, “It’s true though. I thought you would believe me. You’re the one who proposed the mind jacking theory, and found Istrius as the thread connecting everyone. How many of your coworkers thought you were crazy?”

“Those are confidential police records. You better tell me how you know about them.”

Paul just shrugged and took a bite. “I told you,” he said around a mouthful of food. “It’s gotten into everything. That’s why I couldn’t talk to the police. Right now, the AI doesn’t know that I’m working against it. That’s just about the only big advantage I’ve got.”

Jon thought about that for a second while he ate. “Let’s say I buy this story, and I don’t, by the way. But let’s say I do. What does some video game have to do with all of this?”

“We wrote the AI,” Paul said. “It’s our fault. It’s supposed to run a boss monster in the expansion coming out soon called the Puppet Lord. The theme of the fight was the boss takes control of the players and you have to subdue each other without doing too much damage while you break the strings it’s using. The problem is that the AI kept evolving and somehow it made the leap from taking physical control of the character’s body to taking mental control of the player’s brain.”

Jon couldn’t believe he’d been worried about meeting this guy. Of all the possibilities he’d been exploring, an evil, mind-controlling AI had not been on the list. “OK, sure,” he said, still playing along. “If it’s got Sprigot under its thumb, why is it sending the victims it’s mind jacking to break into the game’s servers? Shouldn’t it be able to get in whenever it wants?”

Paul’s face turned red and he mumbled something. “I’m sorry, what was that?” Jon asked, leaning forward.

The mumbling got a little bit louder, and Jon frowned. “Again, I’m sorry, I must not be hearing you right, because I know I didn’t just hear you say what I thought I heard you say.”

Paul’s mumbling was audible this time. “It was me,” he squeaked.

Jon put his burger down. “What was you, exactly?”

“I just sort of, you know… borrowed the code, seeded it on some random stuff, and implanted some suggestions.”

“I know you’re full of shit, because that’s definitely not possible, but in the hypothetical situation that you were serious, you do realize exactly how much trouble you’d be in admitting to me, an officer of the law, that you mind jacked over a dozen victims in an attempt to trespass into a secure facility containing corporate protected hardware?”

“Technically, you’re suspended right now.”

“I’m not suspended.”

“Aren’t you though?”

“…Shut up, Paul.”

Jon took another bite of his burger. It didn’t taste so great anymore. “Screw it,” he muttered, reaching across the table and appropriating Paul’s entire container of fries.

“Hey!”

“Civil forfeiture. These fries are an accessory to a crime and need to be confiscated as part of an ongoing investigation.”

“That hasn’t been legal for decades.”

Jon shrugged and ate a fry.

Paul glared at him. “You’re not funny.”

“My ex-wife never thought so either.”

Jon got a handful of fries before Paul took them back and hunched protectively over his tray. He tucked the rest of his chicken sandwich away and started eating his fries four or five at a time. They both finished in silence, and with a sigh, Jon looked around.

“Let’s say I believe all of this, what do you expect me to do?”

“Well, to help me, I hope,” Paul said. “That’s why I used that NPC at the beginning of the game to tweak your luck stat, so that you’d be in a better position to help me.”

“The blacksmith?”

“Yeah, I’m not good at the personality matrix portions of the AI, so I kind of messed that one up a bit, but after you were done with him, I just rolled him back to before I added the hidden stat bonus tweak. I don’t think anyone noticed. Probably no one’s noticed. No reason they should.” Paul frowned and said, more to himself than Jon. “Ok, there exists a slight chance that one or two people could have potentially noticed the anomaly, but I think if they had, it would have been addressed already. Kana is still the luckiest guy in the game, as far as I’m aware, so you should be safe.”

“And what do you need my help with, exactly?” Jon asked.

“Like I said, I’m a developer. I wrote a kind of viral code bomb. It just needs to be put in at the source and it’ll corrupt the whole thing, a cascading effect that will follow every connection the Puppet Lord AI protocol has created.”

“And that’s why you were trying to get into the servers that house the game.”

“Right. Direct access to the hardware. The least possible digitally secure access point to inject the code bomb.”

“Well that obviously didn’t work, now did it?”

“It could still work, in theory,” Paul protested.

“No, no it could not, because even if you hypothetically had the ability to mind jack someone, you most definitely would not do it because not only is it morally unethical, it’s illegal as all hell and I’m pretty sure you have no idea how that code even works or what long-term effects it might have. Also, because while it might be the least digitally secure, it’s definitely the most physically secure.”

“Right. Of course. In that hypothetical situation, I would definitely not do that.”

Jon had to remind himself that he was off-duty. He couldn’t arrest anyone even if he wanted to, not for another five weeks. He had a civilian weapon holstered on his hip, no badge, and no authority. And even if he wanted to, he was afraid Paul might actually be telling the truth.

“What are you asking me to do?” Jon said.

“Weeeeellllllllll,” Paul said, dragging the word out. “The thing is, if we can’t actually get to the hardware, there’s always the backup plan. The Puppet Lord boss monster is the source of the AI. If we could make it to that, and kill it, I could use the code bomb and destroy it that way.”

“Are you serious with this? Your back up plan is to just play the game?”

“It’s actually kind of a big deal,” Paul told him. “Right now, the Puppet Lord only exists on the beta test servers. It’s extremely limited access, and its smart enough that it’s not doing anything overt to draw attention to the fact that it’s infected the players who have tested out the fights. But give it a few months and the expansion goes live. It goes from having a thousand potential victim to millions in the span of a few weeks.”

Jon stared at him for a second, then said, “Give me the rest of your fries.”

“No way, get your own.”

“You want my help? This is my price.”

“Are you serious? You’re ransoming helping save a couple million people from being mind jacked for my fries?”

Jon held his hands out. Paul scowled at him and handed him the container. “Asshole,” he muttered.

Jon ignored that. “Ok, I’m in. What do you need me to do?”

“How Sprigot did beta test invites was by creating an extremely low drop rate item that comes from a current end-game boss. You need to be max level and have excellent gear, plus be in a group to kill it. It’s designed to be impossible to solo. Enter Kana: he of the outrageous luck. We get you to max level and you should be able to get a beta token every time you kill this boss.”

“Which gets me into the beta test, and I guess a few other people? And then what?”

“We get to the new level cap so that we can go into the Puppet Lord’s domain, which is themed as a sort of psycho-murderer’s haunted mansion, kill the boss, and I’ll drop the code bomb on him while the AI is resetting the protocol for the respawn.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but is this literally a level-up-to-save-the-world scenario?”

Paul didn’t answer. “I’ll be back in a minute. I think I want some fries,” he said, getting up and joining the mass of people waiting for their turn at the front of the lines.

“That’s a yes,” Jon said. “Definitely a yes.”

Paul came back with two containers of fries a few minutes later, one of which he passed to Jon. “OK, so I have a character I’ve been leveling. All developers have free subscriptions to the game, but there’s a lot of transparency and oversight to make sure we’re not abusing the system in any way. That’s why I decided to mess with your luck instead of my own.

“What I want to do is create a scenario where we meet, do some quests or whatever, swap friend requests, and have an all-around natural looking reason to keep in contact. We won’t ever mention anything about the Puppet Lord in game. I will have to continue to use proxy accounts to message you because my civilian account is tied to my job and that’s not safe from the AI.”

They hammered out the details, Paul growing more and more excited as he laid out his plans. Jon munched on the fries and wished he had a bit of his burger left to go with him. Eventually the food was gone and the scheme had been outlined. They stood up and went their separate ways.

Jon got home, sat down at his table, and dropped his head into his hands. “What have I gotten myself into?” he wondered aloud.