Julian took off his hoodie and folded it into a square, and then he held the hoodie up against the thin bathroom stall's wall with both hands. He leaned forward, pressed his face into the hoodie, and screamed. He had been in 23 emergency meetings, responded to 394 "IMPORTANT" emails, eaten 16 mini-bags of potato chips, and had gotten 0 hours of sleep the last two days.
He leaned back, put his hoodie back on, and headed to emergency meeting 24.
Noah Fleat had finally bothered to show up. Julian hated this man. He was the epitome of media conglomerate CEO in Julian's mind. He had exactly the type of black thumb for creative studios that can only be rewarded in this stupid industry. Before he became the CEO of Stormsys' parent company, Vivensight, he was the CEO of a game development company called Citadel. In his four years there he turned the largest and most popular simulation gaming company in the world into the worlds 16th most profitable mobile gambling developer. So many new game studios were formed in the exodus of talent from Citadel that is was sometimes jokingly referred to as 'the second golden age of indie gaming'. Stormsys itself had absorbed at least four ex-Citadel game studios in the last ten years, and all four of those studios were shut down by Noah Fleat, along with three of the four original dev teams that dated back to the creation of Stormsys in the late 90s.
Stormsys had not flourished under Noah's watch, at least not in Julian's opinion. Instead, Stormsys has become synonymous with predatory media practices, much to the delight of Noah Fleat's board of directors and investors. They had been quick to adopt addictive gambling practices and apply them to the endless stream of first person shooters they churned out, without fail, once per year. They cornered viral media trends ruthlessly. If your hot new dance blew up online you could be sure Stormsys would be selling that dance in their stores for 24.99 by the end of the week. Julian smiled to himself as he realized that the cash shop for Starchaser was never going to see the light of day. He would never have to see some of his personal favorite characters decked out in some tacky plain black tee shirt with SOVEREIGN plastered across it and sold in limited batches of 4000 units for $20,000 each... quarterly, of course.
The smile didn't last long. One by one, department heads for the Starchaser development branch of Stormsys presented their projected needs for the three potential outcomes they had established over the last 12 hours, codenamed, unimaginatively, "reestablish" "redirect" and "remove". From his seat, Julian could see Noah circling "remove" next to each department on his ledger before the presentations even started.
Starchaser had started as the brainchild of Arin Teor. Arin was well known for ambitious solo projects that ranged from a forestry-simulator-meets-detective-noir game, which had sold something like 350 million copies worldwide, to smaller passion projects about absurd concepts like space fishing that spawned some of the largest modding communities on the internet. Many were still currently in existence, despite Arin Teor's fifteen year absence from successful development. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that he was perhaps the most famous developer of his time. He was also a walking paycheck in the eyes of Stormsys, before they were acquired by Vivensight, who had offered him nearly half a billion dollars to head up their next big project. He had declined that, but reconsidered when he was offered a creative control deal that would let him, for all intents and purposes, continue to make games for himself, just with a team of 400 people and a budget of 10 billion dollars. This gamble had not paid off for Stormsys, clearly, but even the eternally pessimistic Julian thought that what Arin had made with their team was unlike anything that had ever come before it. It might even have been profitable if it hadn't, you know, been seized by a hostile hacking group and endangered the lives of nearly 1000 people.
Now, Vivensight was ready to take Arin's team to the butcher's table and extract as much value as possible from the game's brain-computer interface systems. Or, at least enough to make the upcoming Fall quarter palatable to an increasingly mutinous investor base. It wasn't like Arin would be there to protest with his generous contract in hand, as he was currently trapped in a game and showing just enough brain activity to keep Noah Fleat from pulling the plug on him. Julian glared at the man, that was the first suggestion his office had sent out.
The head of marketing, who was so pale that she looked like she had been recently exhumed, stuttered to a stop as Noah stood. He was wearing dark wash skinny jeans, a blazer, and graphic tee that probably cost 7000$ but would look perfectly at home in a Hot Topic. He stuck his hands in his jean pockets and took a cursory look around at the team of people who had been worked to the bone over the last 6 months, and then been ground into bonedust over the last 12 hours. His eyes were lifeless and flat. His gaze finally landed on Julian, and he spoke without much inflection, "Adrian, what do you need to keep our customers in a stable place for the next week?"
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It took Julian a minute to realize he was who was being addressed. He half-stood, "Probably... 30 people for operations, 10 more for dev ops, support staff, server maintenance costs and repair, offsites..." he rambled off their ongoing costs and concerns for a few more seconds before Noah held up his palm and spoke over him, "Choose five of your techies to keep on, send my people a budget for the computers by the end of the hour. Everyone else, have your people out of the building by the end of the day."
With that, he turned and walked out of the boardroom as a tide of shouts rose behind him. Julian stood blinking for a good thirty seconds, his mouth still half open. Marisa Peng patted his shoulder gently. She was the logistics administrator for almost everything hardware related. He grimaced at her. She had probably, or definitely, just lost her job, too. Maybe he could save her if he stepped on some toes, it would be worth it. She said something to him and then slapped him gently on the back as she walked by. He couldn't hear anything she said over the ocean of human outrage all around him.
Ten minutes later he was back in the server room. He sighed as the debug monitor scrolled endlessly over the same message being repeated over and over:
REQUESTING HELP WITH MALFUNCTION IN PLAYER DESYNCHRONIZATION AND EXIT SYSTEMS.
He revoked the AI's ticket generating privileges and power it down for the 3rd time that day. It would inevitably find another channel to post through, or find a way to bypass the ban, and Julian would silence it again. He was sure this was the assistant assigned to the player who was now floating around 75% synchronization. He had shut down the AI last night, and then again during his lunch break, but here it was again, flooding the system with tickets. At first he had silenced it to avoid someone else realizing there was still an active player in the game, but no one else had a spare minute to tend to the terminals, or even cared to. He wasn't sure what exactly would happen to that player if it leaked that they hadn't been pulled into a massive over-synchronization state by the hack, but he was fairly sure that it would be bad news for the player if coin found out, and he was 7000% sure it would be horrible news if Noah Fleat found out. That clown would gladly put this person in a coma if he thought they had a 1% of taking back control through their account.
Julian had planned to keep this person, whoever they were, off of the player monitors until things settled down and then figure out who they were, drop them to zero synchronization, and cut their connection, or something, but the assistant was making that difficult. They were getting closer to 100% too, which might be a problem. Julian had no idea if the coin hack would drag this person into their algorithm if they did get to full synchronization, but it wasn't a good idea to test the theory. He picked at his fingernails and glared at the screen. He could respond to a ticket, and then what... tell the AI what was going on? Would it understand? These things were just overcomplicated game manuals.
He scrolled through the player list and shifted the display over to show the assistant resource usage monitor. Everyone else's assistant was operating at subsistence levels, likely doing nothing but floating near their players. The other players were moving around some, surprisingly. They had all started in the world capital, and then, slowly, they began to move away in groups of 10-20. Now they were spread out over a dozen zones, but they never did anything but walk aimlessly, as far as Julian could tell. All the assistants shared a single processing hub, so maybe he could route most of the computing power to the ticket writer. Then he could tell it to not let its player get to full synchronization. They had some notes on activities that degraded player immersion somewhere in the dev notes that could help. Julian laughed grimly, maybe they can go shake Arin's character awake while they're at it. Wouldn't that be nice.
He navigated to the AI assistant node's interface. He was still locked out of directly manipulating the AI, but he might be able to direct it to the dev notes through the ticketing system. The AI already had a huge organized document list on their central storage for guiding players. Julian squinted and then fished around in his backpack for a flash drive. Was this stupid? Was he really going to dump 300 GB worth of commentary onto a AI server and hope it figured it out? With optimal processor routing and a hint in the ticket, then... it should only take a few minutes to figure out. Yeah, fine, why not?
He started transferring design documents onto the flash drive and then opened the ticketing system. He typed out a reply,
"Desync and Exit systems are permanently down. Do Not let your player reach full sync. No further responses will be issued. If you need guidance, try digging for roots."
Idiotic, but that should be enough to keep non-technical staff from snooping.
While the USB drive filled with the design notes of Arin and his team, Julian started to jot down some notes of his own in a text document. After 5 minutes, he ran out of things to say and walked over to the server, plugged in the USB, and then started to work on his staff request and budget. He sent it out, texted 14 people that he wanted to try and keep on, then unplugged his laptop and shoved it into a wastebin. Cleaning staff wasn't allowed in the server room so it would be there tomorrow, but anger has to vented somewhere. With that all taken care of, he grabbed his backpack and walked out of the room. He was going to finally get some sleep.
Fifteen minutes later he walked back into the room, turned the AI back on, then left again.
