Chương 108: CDM 2, Chapter 44: Terms

I sat in my car in the parking garage with the heat blasting and my phone on speaker. Beth and Nathan joined the call from our apartment, and Megan found an excuse to sneak away from harvest inspections for 15 minutes.

"They're offering a 12-month contract," Beth said.

"We have a minimum number of videos to hit each quarter, and there's language about ad length and product placement for each of those. We get a base rate, and we make more based on how much product we move. Chrissy says there's also the potential for projects on top of this contract, stuff like the Taiwan trip, but none of that is guaranteed."

"What do you think of the offer?" Megan asked. Beth laughed nervously.

"I have a Christian high school education. I'm not even sure I'm reading everything right." Nathan interjected, "I think we can all agree we don't know what the fuck we're doing. Before we sign anything, we should spring to have an attorney look at this."

"Agreed," Megan and I said in unison. I heard Beth exhale in relief. I should have considered how much pressure I was putting on her with her manager role. She was only eighteen, after all.

"The way it reads to me," Nathan continued, "the money is pretty good. We'd be able to cover simple expenses and do two or three big stunts a year, but Beth had a good idea there. If we see a cool opportunity, we could just ask them for the money. Always a chance they say yes."

"That's a good point," Megan echoed.

"We should talk more about Beth's role in all of this, actually," Nathan continued.

"Between her apprenticeship and bartending, our manager doesn't get a lot of time to manage. If she was pitching sponsors instead of pouring beers, we could take all this a lot farther." In the background, I heard Beth try to argue with Nathan. He hushed her and shrugged her off. My best friend was looking out for my little sister. I loved that guy.

"I agree with that too," Megan replied.

"Dor?"

"If Beth wants it, I'm good with it," I said. I heard the smile in Nathan's voice.

"Good, good. Another big thing that stuck out to me was the terms on cross-collabs. It sounds like we can't really refuse to participate in something if they ask us to."

"For free?" Megan asked.

"Not for free," Nathan answered.

"The contract does say 'terms and compensation to be negotiated on a case by case basis,' but we also agree to a minimum amount of notice. If they tell us a month ahead of time, we basically have to make it work, or we violate the agreement." Sighing, I grumbled, "The CDM will love that." Megan chuckled.

"I think we roll the dice on that one. If it becomes a problem, we figure it out then. Dor, I know that sounds irresponsible, but I-""I agree with you."

"Really?"

"Yeah. None of this is risk-free. That clause by itself isn't enough to get me to walk away from this. If the rest of it's fair, I'm good with taking that gamble."

"Are there other parts of the agreement that worry us?" Beth asked.

"Nathan is shaking his head, by the way."

"None here," I said.

"Me neither," Megan added.

"I'll look into finding an attorney," Nathan volunteered.

"I reserve the right to call for backup, but I don't mind giving it a try."

"I should get back to work," Megan groaned.

"Yeah, I should too," I added.

"Beth, Nathan–thank you."

"If machines take over the world, Kimmy will be the leader." Laughing, I hung up the phone. Nathan texted me before I could turn my car off.

"this means the guild house is full speed ahead, right? we gotta figure out what to call it. diva domicile is lame. diva dungeon sends the wrong message. is there a word for a castle that starts with a d?"

"Lol. I'll think on it."

"bro, congratulations. don't forget that this is an awesome thing. you should be super proud."

"Team effort."

"take the W. don't make me fight you." Back inside the CDM, the countdown for the S gate closure continued. New Year's Eve was tomorrow, and the crawlers had made a decent amount of progress from where they were on Christmas in terms of mapping each room and the unique impact of each control column. Martin Kielar and friends seemed increasingly more irritable, however. A couple days ago, they had to admit on stream that a tragedy occurred.

A guild spokesperson read Army approved talking points that explained the basics of the terrible accident. The specifics were light, but they were direct. The dungeon worked in a way we didn't anticipate. A dungeon mechanic led to the deaths of harvesters, researchers, and their escorts, and the loss of life was extreme. A few minutes later, someone identified the timestamp for the button press that killed the victims. That clip turned into a meme as well.

Panel 1 - The username ToddtheModBod was accompanied by a fedora cat avatar with a speech bubble that said, "We should accept all submissions, not just ones about Pittsburgh." If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. Panel 2 - George Baker pushing the tragedy button. That meme was pretty niche and referenced a major moment of drama in the yinzhittinbilldins subreddit.

ToddtheModBod thought any car hitting a building should be welcome, and the Pittsburgh purists hated him for it. That subreddit, by the way, became a cornerstone of my friendship with Nathan. When a new picture popped up, we reacted with fanfare. As expected, the tragedy cast a shadow over the dungeon excitement–the horrific deaths had the shadow, not that specific meme–and the looming deadline of a dungeon surge didn't help. So sad for Kielar. When I returned to my desk, Cortez said, "Dempson was looking for you."

So I turned right back around to go to the investigation floor. I found Investigator Dempson in his office. He offered me a chair.

"Find anything interesting in the harvester files?" he asked.

"Honestly, sir, no. I've read a bunch of it, but I don't understand most of what I've read."

"It's an overwhelming task, isn't it?" I nodded. Dempson handed me a folder.

"The first few pages are from an intake log," he explained.

"These crews have equipment moving in and out all the time, and the guy stuck in the guard booth logs all of it. The pages after that are invoices for services rendered." The invoices were long, and they were detailed. At a glance, a single invoice could consist of 8 or 9 pages.

"These kinds of investigations are elaborate games of 'spot the difference,'" Dempson said.

"We're looking for inconsistencies and contradictions. If two documents say two different things, that can point you to a decent lead. In this case, the harvesters billed a total of 21 tow truck hours. Pretty standard expense. Cars need moved. Equipment gets stuck. Stuff breaks down. But the line items don't match the summary total. Six and a half hours are unaccounted for." I looked at the top of the invoice. It was addressed to the Mill Rats.

"Those lot logs? Well, the guard isn't in on anything. He's just writing down what he sees come and go. Guess what we found?"

"He logged a tow truck being out for six and a half hours." Dempson smiled.

"And look at the date for that log." The night Jonathan disappeared.

"We were looking for black market activity and found a lead for a murder investigation instead. Don't get me wrong, we're still going to hang them on a few dozen charges there too, but I wanted you to see this bit specifically." Unsure what to say, I only nodded.

"The snowball started rolling because an invoice didn't line up. Since those inconsistencies were related to tow trucks, we went through any other record that mentioned tow trucks, looking for a connection. Eventually, we found the lot logs. Now we have a shortlist of drivers to investigate. Maybe one of them confesses and flips in exchange for a deal.

That might not be evidence for murder, but maybe Kielar perjures himself, or maybe someone lower in the food chain turns over a bunch of incriminating texts or videos."

"I see."

"This is how investigations work," Dempson continued.

"The closer something is to the crime, the more buttoned-up it's likely to be. A break in a case usually starts with a small crack at the periphery, something far enough from the core that it gets less thought and attention. They knew not to log dates for the tow truck service, but this is still about money, so they billed for it. Somebody didn't think about the lot security guard."

"That makes sense. I'm sorry that I didn't find that, sir."

"Huh? No, son, you're not in trouble. This one lead took the efforts of five different people. One person pointed out the invoice discrepancy. Another remembered that we found tow truck tracks at that CK scene and confirmed that the invoice timing lined up. A third person suggested there might be other equipment records, and the fourth remembered filing away lot logs a few days prior."

"Who was the fifth person?" Dempson sighed.

"You. You called in the potential CK and clocked the tow truck tracks."

"Enforcer McDouglas noticed the tracks, sir." He shook his head.

"The point is that the one-man army bullshit looks good on television, but in practice, it's never that simple. Even in the smallest cases, that's not true. Something like this where it's us, the FBI, and DOD? You're one piece of a hivemind, and your role might only be asking the right question at the right time, then the rest of the hive runs with it. I've seen that happen hundreds of times over." I thought.

"If you ask me to look at evidence like that again, how should I go about it?"

"Very good, Enforcer Gray. You're already going in the right direction. If you haven't been assigned a specific angle to investigate, then start with where you're most knowledgeable. You and I aren't going to be the guys that puzzle out six years of tax evasion spread across fourteen offshore bank accounts. Admitting that isn't weakness. It's practical.

"When you do start investigating, don't try to see the whole picture at once. If you're looking at invoices, for example, look at one, decide if there's anything unusual or inconsistent about that one document, and then set it aside. Repeat that with the next, and then the next. Most of the cracks we find start really small, and it looks like there's no possible way they connect to the core of the case. So don't put that pressure on yourself. Hunt for cracks and build from there."

This advice sounded remarkably similar to how Domonkos explained tracking to Megan and me last fall. He said that novice hunters look at the whole forest and get overwhelmed, but a good tracker cuts out everything except for a small radius near the first print.

"Thank you, sir. I'll take that advice to heart."

"I know you will."

"What can I do to help at this point?"

"You can't do anything," Dempson answered.

"This line of investigation is a clear conflict for you. I know McDouglas played that loose before, but the risk to the case isn't worth it."

"I understand."

"Good. Besides, you're not going to have any spare time for a while."

"What do you mean?" Dempson cocked his head.

"Right, you're still new to this. I forget that sometimes. If there's any chance that an S gate won't get closed in time, we'll mobilize a full-on response. I know for a fact that crawlers are being flown in as a precaution. Any time now we'll be discussing evacuation and containment contingencies. What happened to those people is horrible, but those deaths won't compare to what we'll get if an S-ranked dungeon surges in the middle of the city like that."

The last S-ranked dungeon surge in the United States was in 1997 in North Dakota. We didn't have streaming tech at that time, so the only way to communicate with a crawler team inside of a gate was to step inside yourself. From there, it was a crapshoot if the radios were strong enough to get signals across a dungeon. Back then, the CDM was arguably more careful about S-ranked surges for that very reason. The crawlers sent to close the gate could have died on day 2 of 10, and there was no consistent way of knowing.

The CDM's reaction in this case was early enough to have contained the crisis, but a legendary snowstorm hit the state. Highways were closed. Flights were cancelled. The power grid struggled to stay online. Many of the backup resources, both personnel and equipment, couldn't actually get to the gate. The dungeon surged. A fire medusa matriarch came through with a mess of fire minions, from giant snakes to elementals to demons, but the snow slowed them down, giving the nation enough time to contain the surge.

If the gate had been full of monsters that were resistant to cold or, worse, strengthened by it, the disaster would have been far larger than it was. With this S gate, we had the benefit of knowing for certain that the crawlers were still alive, which I suspected eased concerns somewhat, but Dempson ended up being right. With two hours left in my shift, people from the Army, FEMA, local police, and state police descended on the RAID room.