Chương 303: Chapter 291 - Interlude 29.1

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"Can he do that?"

"Do what?"

"That!" he gestured vaguely in the direction of the giant screen that showed the fucker being sucked into a portal. When the alert came that the fucker once again started moving, he really hoped that it wouldn't be that important. Then they reviewed his actions, looked at the backend data, and one of his assistants went to change the counter. 0 DAYS SINCE THE FUCKER DID SOMETHING He took a fortifying sip of his coffee and took a deep breath. Slowly, he turned to one of the nearest screens.

"Selene, anything else that needs our attention?" The face of the AI, who seemed to be delighted, appeared and shook her head.

"Nothing, boss. A few Tier One and Two situations, but the other teams can handle it. Nothing but this in your jurisdiction." He thought about it for a second.

"Anything on your end? Code injection? Glitter Code? Actual hacking attempts?" The AI's head shook itself.

"Nothing more than a few script kiddies trying their luck. Already contacted their mothers, or in one case, their little sister." He sucked in a little air.

"Harsh." She shrugged.

"At least it's not the police."

"True," he said, while raising his coffee cup as a salute.

"Anything else you can tell me?" Selene spent a few moments emoting, thinking, which he knew meant that she was doing some checks, running searches – or sometimes annoying him – so he continued to sip his coffee while making a note to have more made. Glancing at the back of their office, he already saw one of the junior technicians hard at work, supervising half a dozen coffee machines as they churned out liquid gold.

'Good man. Woman. Needs a raise…' were the thoughts that flew through his head as Selene finished her search.

"Once again, it came up negative. Nothing but the pure potential of human creativity!" she announced cheerfully. Too cheerfully… His eyes narrowed, ready to say something when Selene spoke up again.

"Oh, look! A distraction!" Upon her words, the scene changed on the big screen showing the fucker conversing with an NPC he didn't know.

"Man, I wish she would step on me…" came the surprisingly audible whisper from one of the technicians to the side. Almost mechanically he turned toward the woman, who simply leaned forward and began to type something on her keyboard with extreme speed, her eyes refusing to move from the screen while starting from her neck a red color began to overtake her usually fair – they spent most of their time indoors; not much time for tanning – skin as people who heard her declaration tried to compute it.

He blinked, took another sip of his coffee, decided to ignore that forever, then turned back to the screen.

"Who is she?" Selene spent a moment looking at the embarrassed woman as if she had found her newest toy, before she redirected her attention to his question. Instantly, the screen split down the middle, with one side displaying the in-game interaction and the other listing the details of the NPC and location. He spent a minute parsing the details before posing a question.

"Can he even do that?" At this point, it wasn't a question of possibility – the fucker seemed to know every secret – but approval. They had set up the game to be a long-lasting one. The fucker approaching an NPC that was supposed to be an end game one, was weird. Even if it was by accident. It was always accident with the fucker…

"I checked. All the flags were set off properly. He may have stumbled upon the NPC, but it was legitimate."

"Legitimate, my ass! I'm pretty sure he planned all this!" he declared vehemently. Selene just nodded.

"Yeah, but can you prove it? Because I can't. Neither can two dozen PIs, three government departments, and one very determined Cryptoanalysis Department. Jeff is still in therapy…" He grimaced at the thought of what that man went through when he was given those notes. Apparently, breaking them was easy. Surprisingly so. Jeff was some kind of genius wunderkind who ate codes, secrets, and such things for breakfast. But then they found the second layer. Which was gibberish. Thus came the downward spiral…

"Right. He can do that, because the fucker somehow always finds a way… Great. Just great…" he complained. Then he took another sip, noted that the coffee had run out, but before he could mention it, somebody took the cup and replaced it with a fresh one. Sending the man a thankful smile, he scratched his five o'clock shadow and hummed thoughtfully.

"Any fallout for the non-fucker population?" Instantly, a dozen people started to type before one of them spoke up.

"None, sir. If our…target keeps to his usual behavior, then we can expect to count this as a training realm, not the start of the related quest chain."

"Usual behavior…" he mused out loud before glancing at Selene, who simply responded to the unasked question.

"According to my current calculations, the chances are 74. 9% of that happening."

"Reason?" Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"If we assume," she began, emphasizing the if word, "that he actually knows what he is doing, then we can extrapolate that he also knows what this place is. If that is true – once again, an assumption – then we can safely state that there is a rather sizable chance that he would avoid triggering the quest chain with an entire army of blood mages gunning for his head." Then she grinned.

"There is also a chance that he actually found this place accidentally, and he has been just making things up as they happened."

"I honestly don't know which is worse…" Selene's grin just widened.

"Uh…that's weird…" came the hesitant exclamation from somewhere in the room. They had been watching the fucker do things that gave headaches to everybody, as some of them were clearly impossible, even with the equipment they pioneered. Granted, that never stopped the fucker, but something about the sound the technician let out worried him. A pit formed in his stomach, and his mind was already making up worse and worse scenarios.

"Report!" he called out, swiveling around with his chair, staring at the reason for his current, rapidly growing, anxiety. The man visibly swallowed, pressed a few buttons, and the view on the screen was overridden, showing a few graphs and readings he couldn't place. Still, one didn't become a leader without dismissing their subordinates' worries and findings, so he stepped closer and tried to interpret it. After a few seconds, he spoke up.

"I give up. What am I looking at?" Another button press and a very colorful representation of a brain appeared. He watched, slightly mesmerized, as the colors ebbed and flowed, before his eyes widened with realization.

"Is that his…brain?" he asked, becoming angry. He was about to lay into the technician for breaking several company rules, regulations, and laws (but those weren't much interest to him) when another wave of realization swept through him, putting out the flames of his anger and reigniting his anxiety with a healthy dose of primal fear. There were very few reasons that allowed technicians working in his department to access a player's health data.

"What happened?"

"I-it just went into overdrive!" came the stuttering answer, just as several other researchers began to observe the brain activity. A smaller screen showed the fucker's fight as hordes of void monsters tried to eat him and his friend.

"The readings are off the charts!"

"Then make fucking new charts!" he retorted automatically.

"But somebody tell me what is happening!" He hated the fucker with the fury of a thousand suns for making his life and work so difficult, but there was more at stake here…

"Medical safeties are working!" came a report from somewhere.

"First layer has been triggered!" Scowling slowly, he spoke.

"Selene, set the medical team on standby. I don't like this…" There was no response to his order, but he knew the sassy AI heard him.

"The rest of you. Find the bug before the fucker fries his brain…or worse!"

"Yes, sir!" They watched. For hours. The fucker's brain activity was soon placed on a new chart – named the F-Brain Chart in his honor – and soon they were witnessing, live, as the one man's brain tried to actually overload the game's interface software as it tried to make sense of the signals coming from the fucker's impossible mind. Selene was all the while doing live patching of the software, shoring up shoddy architecture, finding bugs and errors everywhere, and then eliminating them with ruthless efficiency.

There were several technicians at the back of the hall, going over the data streaming in, and regularly cursing or praying. In the few seconds he could free up to talk with them, they told him that just this batch of data, if nothing else happened, would launch the brain-game interface into a new level.

'Because, of course, the fucker can fuck with the fucking interface…What is my life even…' he grumbled inwardly, while turning toward the screen containing Selene's avatar.

"How is the system handling it?" Selene frowned, the digital avatar much less expressive and detailed as usual, showcasing how much attention she had to focus on the fucker.

"It's tough. I have to patch the code while he is connected to it. It was simply not designed for that…"

"Do you think we should do an emergency shutdown?" he asked while keeping an eye on the screen where somebody helpfully put together a crude danger-o-meter. The arrow was currently resting between the yellow and red zones, vibrating slightly. Selene bit her lip, a rather human reaction in his opinion.

"We're learning too much. Currently, he isn't in much danger beyond general exhaustion. If he can last until the end of the quest, we can take the data and update the system."

"Do we actually need the data?" Selene nodded.

"Yes, sir. Just the efficiency upgrades I managed to integrate would increase safety and enjoyment across the board, not to mention the countless bugs and errors we found thanks to the overload."

"Damn… Where is the medical team?" he asked, scratching his five o'clock shadow again.

"There is an apartment that is currently empty on his floor. I managed to get them there. They're ready to act." He softly cursed to himself.

"This is going to be a giant shitstorm! I can just feel it…" Selene, once again, nodded in agreement.

"I already notified the legal and PR departments. They are…unhappy."

"Well, it's not my fault that the fucker can break the fucking equipment!" he exclaimed angrily. Before Selene could answer, one of his subordinates called out to him.

"Sir!" he turned toward them, idly noting the pyramid made of empty coffee cups.

"We finished the preliminary projections!"

"And?" he called back, a little louder than necessary, but he was angry, worried, anxious – a little hungry – and fucking annoyed. The man bit his lips, glanced at his screen while Selene let out a small Oh! Sound.

"Well, what does it say?"

"Our projections say that with the current load, there is a 67% chance of the software collapsing under the load and a 89% chance of the subject suffering an acute cerebral herniation. Or worse." He blinked in surprise. That was rather morbid.

"Timeline?" The man looked at his screen, then at the giant screen, before looking into his eyes.

"Around ten minutes…" It was rather mocking that the screen showed the countdown for the quest to have around thirty minutes left…

"I can't believe it!"

"Me neither…"

"How is he alive?"

"How is the pod still functioning?"

"Is he even human?" He listened as people spoke in a hushed tone as the estimated ten minutes passed without death or shutdown. Granted, he was also mightily surprised, but he felt, as a leader, he should show at least some amount of decorum. The quest only had five minutes or so left, and the brain activity was once again driving several people bonkers. They were already on the F3-Brain Chart… He hummed thoughtfully.

"He is still alive, Selene…" Her avatar had long since vanished from the screen; only a rudimentary circle showed that lit up when she talked.

"Only because… I'm spending considerable resources to keep him alive," came the answer in a rather robotic tone, missing all those inflections he got used to.

"Maintenance must love this!"

"We've already blown through the emergency budget for this year just with server blade replacements. They took it as a challenge."

"Can he last until the quest finishes?" he asked, barely believing he was doing this. A small pause.

"Probably."

"Fan-fucking-tastic…" Then he turned back to the screen and continued to watch the train wreck in front of him. It was hard to look away as the numbers continued to climb and more and more areas of the brain were covered with angry red color. Soon, they all watched with bated breath as the fucker unleashed the last devastating attack, obliterating the last of the monsters, before being teleported before the NPC. They all watched silently as the quest finished, and the fucker managed to log out.

Their sheer surprise and astonishment only stopped when they realized what that meant.

"Send the signal! I want him alive and able to answer questions!"

"Message sent," Selene reported, then a minute later.

"Alive, but comatose. On his way to the designated medical center." He let out a breath he didn't remember holding, then he turned to the rest of the room.

"I want a report about this situation! I also want the updates, people! I want a patch ready when the suits start to complain! Hop to it!" he yelled, then watched as the entire room jumped to follow his orders. He simply fell back into his chair and let out an exhausted sigh.

"What a fucker…"