Chương 126: CDM 3, Chapter 2: Startup Life

Project Unsung Heroes Status Report #757221983 Off-Schedule Audit Report Reason: Director Request Conclusion: No Irregularities Recommendation: No Action Summary: Despite the significant costs of maintaining Project Unsung Heroes, the research definitively shows that its existence has spared the United States government catastrophic loss of life and property at a scale that is difficult to accurately calculate while also extracting a return greater than its annual budget.

Furthermore, these results have been achieved with exceptional OPSEC. Our audit found no evidence of private or public suspicion of the Project's mission or existence. It is our conclusion that the compensation for Unsung Heroes, while sizable, is a worthwhile investment for the Center for Dungeon Management, and we therefore recommend against cuts to any person or thing associated with the Project. I thought about that memo often.

If it weren't for that chance discovery, I wouldn't have started hunting wild monsters, and if that didn't happen, the Dungeon Divas would never have existed. In hindsight, my desperate need for direction in my life had been a blessing. At the time, I was keenly aware that betting on the Unsung Heroes was a blind jump, which is not how you want to make career decisions, but I had no other ideas.

My plan to springboard from the CDM to a crawl team had fallen apart, which came on the heels of my admitting my college degree was a dead end as well. That memo combined with a few vague nudges from Enforcer McDouglas gave me something to work toward, and I clung to it. And I still didn't know what the Unsung Heroes did. Did that really matter anymore, though?

If the Dungeon Divas' momentum continued, even if just for a few years, I could pay down my loans and establish the kind of stability I had dreamed of since leaving the church. I didn't need to be rich. I just needed to not be afraid every time I got a bill in the mail. My phone rang.

"Hey, so… I don't think my GPS took me to the right place," Enforcer de Saint said.

"Red brick building with newspapers all over the windows?"

"... yes."

"Door's unlocked. That's us." The door to the guild house opened, and de Saint timidly poked her head inside.

"Hello?"

"Come in. You're in the right place." De Saint shut the door and looked around. No matter how many times I interacted with de Saint, her height always caught me by surprise, and then I'd feel bad for her. She tended to hunch as if she hated sticking out, as if she were ashamed to be as tall as she was.

"No offense, but you guys live here?" she asked, pulling her beanie off of her shaved head.

"It's under construction. Nathan is talking to some builders upstairs but should be down in a minute. Want anything to drink?"

"I'd murder a tea if you didn't mind." The hot plate was at the far end of the room next to the fridge. The floor was empty enough that we could keep talking despite the distance if we raised our voices a little bit.

"You guys bought this place?" she asked.

"Nathan did. The second and third floors are going to be apartments. This floor will be business space."

"And you couldn't wait to move in?" I passed de Saint a hot cup of tea and sat at the kitchen table with her.

"When I got arrested, police trashed our place searching it. It was pretty disheartening, so we said fuck it and moved in early."

"My house got broken into once when I was a kid," de Saint said.

"That shattered the idea that home was somewhere safe for me. No matter what my parents did to make us feel secure, I never got that back. I get it."

"That sounds awful."

"In a weird way, it's a compliment that they thought you could kill Kielar." I laughed.

"That's one way of looking at it." Nathan's feet stomped down the stairs.

"Welcome to our kingdom."

"There's water in the kettle still if you wanted a cup of tea," I said. He spun on his heel to go back to the hot plate. A moment later, Nathan joined us at the table. De Saint got out her laptop.

"I have a prototype up and running. It automatically searches for goblin keywords, then splits the results into two feeds, one for news and one for social." The two feeds loaded side by side on the screen.

"If the content is worth saving because it has something useful or interesting, you can archive it. If you review it and don't find anything good, marking it as read takes it out of the queue. Eventually, I want to add options to blacklist certain sources and to categorize material by type or location or whatever." Though all of us–me, Beth, Megan, and Nathan–liked de Saint, she didn't know about the Dungeon Divas or our hobby of hunting wild monsters.

To her, this was a nerdy project that was fun by virtue of being novel and challenging. For us, this crowd-sourced bestiary project was a way to learn more about the monsters we hunted. Too little had been written about their habits in the wilds. Knowing more could potentially save our lives someday.

"This is really cool," Nathan said.

"It's super basic," de Saint replied.

"I have a wiki set up too, but we need to standardize organization and formatting. After just a few days of scraping, we're going to have a massive amount of content to manage. After a few months, it will feel impossible to wrangle, so figuring out our process early will make life much easier for our future selves."

"I've put a little bit of thought into that," I said.

"Anatomy is where most of the research lands right now, so that's one category for dividing information. I think we should also capture habitat, behavior, diet, reproduction, and tactics for hunting that type of monster. In all cases, we'll find information that confirms what we already know, but I think it's worthwhile to flag outliers and contradictions as well." Nathan rubbed his head.

"I still think this is worth doing, but shit guys, we're talking about enough work for a team of researchers, not for a few schmucks doing it for fun."

"The initial burst of capturing what's already there might skew the workload," I replied.

"That's not a small task, but after that, I think it will level off into something manageable." Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings. De Saint nodded.

"Only so many articles about goblins can come out in a week."

"But the ultimate goal is to log all monsters."

"Not from the jump," I assured him.

"Goblins, trolls, giant water moccasins, bugbears, and then the weird stuff like ghost salamanders and werewolves. For monsters like those last two, my thinking is more about charting a potential trend than doing something as thorough as the other monsters in the first batch."

"I get goblins and trolls," de Saint began, "but bugbears and giant snakes?"

"The bugbear outbreak in West Virginia is on my mind, and a few people get swallowed by giant water moccasins in the northeast each year. I feel more strongly about the bugbears, though. If they aren't contained, they could become like goblins where they pop up all over." Nathan leaned back.

"Yeah, okay. That does make a lot of sense."

"I agree," de Saint added as she clicked to another screen.

"This is another feature I came up with. If we're doing all this work to aggregate news coverage on monsters, we might as well dump them into a feed that other people can access. If this is something we decide to monetize, people returning regularly for links to new stories would be good for traffic."

"I would subscribe to something like that without hesitation," I said.

"That's really cool." She smiled proudly.

"Are we moving forward with this? I can turn the prototype into something more stable, but like we were saying, this project isn't small. I've started enough side projects to know that they always crash and burn because I'm the only one who was committed to seeing it through. No offense to you guys."

"Dude, none taken," Nathan replied. I nodded that I agreed with Nathan.

"It's obvious to me that 95% of this is you building and maintaining the tool. If something breaks, we can't fix it, so we'll call you. We're not much more than basic data sorters in this plan, which isn't bad necessarily, but yeah, the workload isn't balanced at all."

"Tedious work and I get along pretty alright," Nathan said.

"I don't mind that being my part, but I do feel bad that you're on the hook for most of this, Rainy." Enforcer de Saint's full name was "Rania de Saint Gillies." At the CDM, everyone called her "de Saint" for short, but Nathan wasn't a fan of that, so he gave her a new name instead. Rainy stuck. Nathan shot me a glance as de Saint thought. We both knew this conversation would be much easier if we just outright admitted to being the Dungeon Divas.

De Saint wasn't that close of a friend yet, though she soon could be, and the two of us couldn't decide to reveal our secret identities without Beth and Megan's input.

"I'm in this for the long term," I said.

"I also understand if you don't want to do all of that work by yourself because you've had bad experiences before. How about before we go further with this, take some time to think about what you'd like out of us as partners. We can't become developers, but we don't want this to feel unfair either." Nathan pointed at me.

"That." De Saint chewed her cheek as she thought.

"Okay, yes. That's a good plan. Thank you for being understanding. That in itself is a good sign. I'm used to 'we split ownership 50/50 but you do 100% of the development.'""Yeah, fuck that," Nathan replied.

"So you're cool if we pause here?" I asked.

"Just want to make sure we are on the same page." She nodded.

"Same page." Nathan smiled.

"More fun topic: How's your enchanter build coming? I have ideas for enchanting businesses too, but we'd need 70/30 terms for that, in my favor. Being an idea guy is hard work, you know?" De Saint laughed.

"It's not coming along at all. I still like the plan, but with unreliable gate rankings… Yeah, I'd rather not level than make those risks."

"Dude, right? That's scary shit. Have you caught wind of a potential solve yet or theories you like?"

"The best solution I've heard so far is more drones," she answered.

"Send a robot in first and rate the gate from the inside with visuals, but that has a ton of problems. Like, you'd need a new fleet on the scale of RAID to do that, and no one knows if a drone would trigger something like the bloodlocked gate Dorion saw with the ogres. If it does, crawlers aren't locked in, sure, but they also can't get to the monsters to close the gate."

"Super messed up," Nathan agreed.

"I saw some articles about finding something other than mana to measure when they rank gates, but no one can figure out what that might be."

"Yep. And if they do find something new, we may have to collect an enormous amount of gate data before we have a reliable ranking system again. Gates might be a gamble for a while." A cupcake sat on my desk in the RAID control room. A card next to it said, "Welcome back," followed by Enforcer Chapman's signature. In the time since I last sat at this desk, I was locked in a B-ranked gate, I killed a troll living under Pittsburgh, I killed the first recorded Earth werewolf, and I was arrested on suspicion of murder.

My two weeks of leave had turned into three because of everything, but that still seemed like too much living for such a short period of my life. I had enough time to change my user password–because I was forced to–before a Monday morning briefing began in the RAID conference room. The RAID team included three new people I didn't know, but Megan told me about them while I was out of the office. The two new women were from the Ohio office, originally, and the new man was from Virginia.

Before I could introduce myself, Chapman started the briefing.

"First of all, everyone, please welcome back Enforcer Gray. He's been on leave, and we are happy to have him with us again." Chapman saying nice things about me was uncomfortably strange. That feeling worsened when everyone clapped for me.

"We are still short 7 drones from our fleet," she continued, "so our protocol of prioritizing anything above D if we have coverage shortages is still in effect. The four replacements we expected at the end of the month have been delayed, and I wasn't given a timeline. We have a new update going live tomorrow-" The enforcers around me groaned.

I missed it, but two weeks ago the dev team released a civilian detection update that was meant to automatically distinguish between crawlers, harvesters, and civilians using an image detection algorithm or something like that. The crawler detection side of that worked and had already been in effect, but the first two hours the new update was live, every drone reported potential crashers the moment a person came into view, flooding the logs with bogus notifications and bad data that had to be corrected by hand.

"Expect more of these, so get this out of your systems now," Chapman scolded.

"Tomorrow's update is the beginning of an anti-smuggling program. The goal is to train the AI to distinguish between a normal monster harvest and a suspicious monster harvest. You don't have to worry about making that call, but you will have to make sure that the basic monster identification is correct." Thanks to Enforcer Grensmith, the CDM figured out that some harvesters hid materials inside of monster corpses. When harvesters tried this tactic, the corpse of the exterior monster changed in some way.

For example, the frost worm full of yeti pelts looked different from a frost worm with nothing stuffed inside of it. In the case of frost worms, specifically, their bodies normally bent into a sort of zig-zag when they died. If something was stuffed inside, the body of the worm would look far straighter. Eventually, drones would feed notifications to enforcers on the ground, prompting them to investigate suspicious monster corpses.

The drones already autodetected infractions like equipment lanes that were too narrow or workers who weren't wearing hard hats. In both cases, the citations we wrote were painfully nitpicky at times. Sometimes a pallet was out of position by an inch, but that was still an infraction. Sometimes a worker briefly removed their hard hat to wipe the sweat out of their hair, but if they didn't do that in a safe area, that was also an infraction.

Chapman continued, "Each of you will receive a guide for how this should be done. Please review that documentation by the end of the day and bring any questions you have to me." She visibly cringed when she checked her list of updates for the next agenda item. Sighing, she said, "One of the other RAID pilot programs was busted last week for keeping an ongoing collection of inappropriate photos and videos captured by RAID drones.

These ranged from footage of intimate moments between civilians to conversations of highly private topics that happened to be in range of a drone mic. Depending on the content stored, the consequences could involve criminal charges in addition to expulsion from the CDM.

"Now, I am well aware of the cat-counting game you all play overnight. Yeah, that's right, I know about that. I don't encourage those kinds of shenanigans, but I can see how a little harmless fun helps to pass the long hours. If you get your work done, I don't care that you tally cats. I do care if you're zooming in on a high school cheerleading practice or checking up on an ex-girlfriend. Yes, those are real examples.

I don't believe anyone in this room has such poor character as to stoop to this behavior, but if you have any drone footage you copied or screenshotted for your own entertainment, delete it immediately." That was pretty gross, but it was also expected. Mark Zuckerberg was rumored to have used Facebook to look in on exes from pretty much the start of the platform, and dozens of Facebook employees had been caught spying on women and reading their private messages over the years.

Discord, Twitter, Snapchat–They all had similar stories. If a tool could be used for creeper purposes, someone violating personal privacy seemed inevitable. Using government resources like that in the midst of intense scrutiny? I mean, we had auditors literally looking over our shoulders for days at a time, and people still did this stuff? I hoped to never be that flavor of desperately horny.

"That's all I have for you today," Chapman said, happy to be done with that topic.

"Let's have a good week."