“Alright, we’re alone. You can drop the ‘secret agent’ routine now.”

Vy leaned against the back door of the I/O Tavern, arms crossed and gaze leveled at the graduate students standing before her on the outside loading dock. It had begun to snow again; already the city was falling quiet beneath a blanket of fresh powder. Above the bulky concrete buildings opposite the I/O, Reztown’s uplink pillar loomed metallic white against the mute gray dark.

Vy sent a breath like a knife into the air. “So? Spill it. I am literally freezing to death in suspense here.”

Sam Brey, the group’s glitch biologist, was the first to begin speaking. “It is our belief that, beyond the perception of the expedition being standard academic research, that Professor Dorman—that is to say Axshn the Illusician—had in fact found a way to . . . insert code into the simulation system.”

Vy blew another knife, thinner and sharper this time. “You mean he hacked the Cog?”

An air of hesitation loomed in Sam’s expression. “In short: Yes.” She glanced at the others for backup and they each in their own way confirmed her statement. “We’d all heard rumors, sure, but not even his department really knew what the professor and his team were up to, even after their field reports began to stream in. However, techthropologists predominately work in concepts and the relationship of parts; they don’t posses the technical know-how to see the broad picture. But when the group went missing, Elliot brought the reports to me—and I did see it. The S-R-T-S arrangement of the character classes, used in conjunction with an as-of-yet undetermined additional variable, let the users channel information into the low-level memory of the Incognita. Based on that, I began to surmise that the true goal of the expedition was to utilize this flaw to propagate and execute custom code across the . . .”

The more she spoke, the more Sam seemed put off by her own words, as if in Vy’s fixed gaze was a mirror now being turned around on her. She sent a hand to push a lock of red hair behind her ear. Lambert took the opportunity to elaborate: “It’s a buffer overflow attack basically; one of the oldest hacks in the book. A system’s memory is allocated to individual pockets known as buffers. By forcing more data into a buffer than it can handle, the information overflows into the next buffer down the line, overwriting whatever was already there and replacing it with executable code. It’s the exact method Robert Tappan Morris used in the 1980s to infect thousands of computers across the early-era network.”

It was at this point that Lambert noticed the others looking at him. “Hey, hate the algorithm, not the algoarchaeologist. I’m just answering the woman’s question. Point is, the S-R-T-S arrangement appears to set up the flow of information across the Cog’s memory sectors so that, under the right conditions, data can be transferred over into another buffer.”

“What are the right conditions?” asked Vy, that scowl of hers now momentarily softened.

Lambert shrugged. “Beats me. Truth is, the exploit shouldn’t even work. The A.I. is no 20th-century artifact, in the hundred years since the Morris Worm memory layout randomization has pretty much eradicated buffer overflows. And yet it does. Either someone has hacked the Cog previously to accept overflows, or the AI itself is allowing it.”

“So which do you think it is, interloper or AI?”

Lambert shrugged again, more deliberately this time. “Again: Beats me.”

Leaving her post at the back door, Vy walked straight through the center of the students to stand at the edge of the loading dock. She looked up at the steely gray sky thinking, then did an about-face in the fresh snow. “Okay, so let me see if I am understanding you correctly: The Forbidden One arrangement forces the Iron into some kind of error state wherein the user can execute data. An act that just so happens to be one of the primary restrictions of the Articles of SiMBIOSIS. Is that right? Why would anybody be so stupid as to do that?”

Elliot spoke matter-of-factly. “Publish or perish.”

“Publish or perish—that’s your answer?”

He tread lightly. “Essentially, yes. The Incognita might be a revolutionary new system, but academia is moving fast. If you want to make a mark, you have to be willing to—”

“—To completely shatter the rules? Pull off a completely illegal stunt in an attempt to throw it in everybody else’s faces? If I’ve got this straight, Professor Dorman—now you’ve got me doing it—I mean Axshn’s experiment is to run a program inside the Iron. . . . In order to what, mine data for a project? To insert some kind of meter into the code?”

Sam, her confidence having returned to her in the interim, spoke next: “Nobody claims to know the nature of the code that he and the students are using. We only believe that, whatever the code is, it’s working.”

Vy cocked her head in incredulity. “Define ‘worked.’ I’d use a different definition personally: committed high treason against the Pillar in order to stake his claim on a discipline. No wonder the ‘secret agent’ routine you’ve got going on here; your colleagues pretty much put themselves in the pot and set it to boil too. And the fact that you tried to keep it from me so that I would go along with this . . . this . . .”

But before she could finish, Elliot quickly set to smoothing things over. “—Will you?”

That was the billion-dollar question, wasn’t it? To assist or not to assist. On one hand, this was a made bed that the party in question ought lay in; on the other, Vy had spent more time solving other people’s problems in the last three years than most people did in their entire lifetimes. By the numbers alone she had rescued 651 damsels in distress, 139 fellows of the same, retrieved 4,000 amulets of various significance from this or that maw of doom, defended twelve times over the free people of Myrhgard, and put sword steel to the hearts of a hundred different would-be chaos bringers. And every single one of them was a struggle meant for someone else. One might say she was classically trained in the art of fixing other people’s problems.

Elliot smirked a little on one side of his mouth. “Vivian Thornheart—will you still be our party member for hire?”

Vy looked at the four of them, their expressions even in the biting cold suffused with a enduring innocence—if not a foolish one. “Oh hell, what choice do I have? Yes”—and she jabbed a finger in the students’ direction—“but I don’t have to like it.” Point made. Stuffing her hands in her pockets, Vy looked first at her own feet, then up at the metallic white of the pillar in the distance. She thought long and hard.

After a while, she spoke again. “Okay, so let’s get the particulars straight. Your colleagues, I assume they had the proper levels for the S-R-T-S arrangement? They’d have to, given Edston Brinvar’s involvement—as their party member for hire, he would have had the same issues as me.”

For the first time since they’d come outside, Za spoke up. “That is correct. I accessed the network this afternoon to pull their character data.”

Vy’s attitude perked up a bit. “That’s some good news. That means that there was little chance they didn’t leave a clear trail from town to town. High-level Forbidden Ones can hardly order an ale without some somebody—NPC or player—deciding to approach them. It wouldn’t be possible for the group to have traveled far between instances of their presence being noted. Or attacked. Or what have you. So: tomorrow morning we arrive in the Iremouth, we search out clues—we pray like hell that we don’t find ourselves hunted down like dogs—and we trace the missing party’s movements all the way to their present whereabouts.”

“Is it possible that it’s merely a coincidence,” said Za, speaking this time with a sort of lingering curiosity, as if there had been something on her mind this whole while, “that the flaw of the S-R-T-S arrangement and the lore of the Forbidden Ones coincide as they do? If the arrangement is as fraught with danger as you say, and the lore generated by the AI itself, it would make sense that the system itself is aware of the flaw, correct?”

“Aware or actively flaunting it,” said Lambert with a huff.

Good points all, but Vy had bigger fish to fry. “Until I see otherwise I’m going to go with coincidence. Either way, it does us no good to stand around conjecturing about such things. Instead I have a more pertinent question: What was your plan on getting into the Rez? They don’t just let anybody connect directly; you’d have to have a good alibi.”

Sam was breathing into her own hands, lifting her face from time to time to speak over the cup of them. “That we do. We are using special-order approvals from the university.”

Vy saw right through that. “And by ‘special-order’ you mean ‘forged,’ right?”

“Yes, forged documents.”

Vy made fists with her hands again and again to warm them, though she herself didn’t seem mad at all at this point. “You people are really terrible at disclosing information, you know that? Is there anything else I need to know, like how one of you is maybe a wanted fugitive, or perhaps that you are all Archivists eluding capture?” She was, of course, half joking—and just half, no more, no less.

An eyebrow raised behind his thick glasses, Lambert lifted a hand high. “I’m a little bloated, if that’s of assistance.”

“You know, Lambert,” she said, heading past them to return to the back door, “before this is over you might just come to wish that was your only status effect. Let’s move.”

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Excited to know more before next week's chapter? Well, be sure to check out the first book in the I, Speedrunner series, The Infinite Lawman, available now on Amazon. While not a part of the series, Party Member for Hire takes place in the same universe--albeit some years before the events of The Infinite Lawman.

Thank you so very much for reading!!! See you next week :)