Chương 103: CDM 2, Chapter 39: Sustainable Growth

Nathan and I went to Milly's for beers. I had spent another late night watching drone footage, and I needed the respite. The excitement and anxiety of the Dungeon Divas' Nad-Nade debut compounded how tired I felt.

"Any inside scoop on the CDM lawsuits?" Nathan asked.

"Another drone getting shot down has to have everyone riled up."

"Nope. I heard they would take a long time, and that was it. I keep expecting to walk into work someday and the RAID room is locked up for good."

"That won't happen."

"You don't think it's a possibility?" Nathan shook his head.

"Government surveillance never moves backward. Once it's happening, it never stops happening."

"There's no chance the plaintiffs win the suit?"

"That's irrelevant," Nathan answered.

"They'll just do it in secret somehow. It won't actually stop."

"I feel like I'm swapping conspiracy theories with Cortez."

"I'll bet anything you want."

"No, thank you." Accepting my admission of defeat, Nathan leaned back to savor his victory as he looked around the bar.

"We're going to have to find a new spot if the building sale goes through."

"If? It sounded like a sure thing before." He sighed.

"Renting those pumps counted as a 'significant change in my financial situation.' The mortgage guy was real pissed at me for doing that."

"We should make it back from the ad revenue at this rate." He shook his head, leaning forward again to scroll on his phone.

"Doesn't matter. I could put that money back today, but that doesn't change the fact that it was gone."

"I'm sorry." Nathan shrugged.

"We'll see how it goes. It's not like I can take it back. If it falls through, we'll find something else. It will be a pain, but we'll figure it out. Hey, umm… Now that you and Meg are level 10s, are trolls on the menu?"

"We haven't really talked about it." He spun his phone to face me.

"Supposedly, this is from a doorbell camera on Atwood Street, right off of Forbes." The relevant part of the footage was only a few frames long. By the time the motion sensor triggered the camera, the figure was already at the edge of the recording area. In one frame, I was nearly certain it was a troll, but in the next, I could make a stronger argument that this was a tall person in a black hoodie.

"Half the comments say it's definitely real, and half say it's definitely fake," Nathan added as he took his phone back.

"I've been thinking about the conversation we had about 'stunts,' and I think you had more of a point than I realized."

"How so?"

"If that's all the channel is, then yeah, we'll get stuck having to top ourselves every time we put something up. We should play with alternate formats to see if we can hook viewers in other ways."

"Like hunting single monsters instead of nests?" I asked.

"That's only part of it," Nathan replied.

"Think about those ghost hunting shows. Yeah, we're all waiting for them to stumble into a wraith and get fucked up, but most of the episodes are about the process. They're trying to solve a mystery, basically."

"That's really interesting."

"The snag I haven't figured out is how we know what to go after. If there are trolls living under Pittsburgh and we found them, the views would be nuts, but we could also spend a bunch of time chasing a dumb lead that isn't even real."

"I agree that's a gamble, but in this particular case, I think it might be worth checking out," I said.

"Why do you say that?" Speaking softly so as not to be overheard, I replied, "I may have seen a maybe-troll in some drone footage. Same area of the city."

"And with the doorbell footage, we don't have to admit to ever having seen that other data point." I nodded.

"My thought as well."

"Bro, playing detective sounds fun as hell."

"I think so too, but the timing sucks. I'm in the middle of a case, and I don't have enough time for the channel as it is."

"Good thing we have like six boxes of energy drinks at our apartment. I know it's rough, but maybe going hard now while the iron is hot is our best move. We rest later." I was so tired already, but Nathan was right about the limited-time nature of our situation. Our upload cadence was already far slower than the average YouTuber, many of whom released new content daily. Even crawlers like LootLootLouis and Valcuree stuck to that frequency.

They had a team to help, sure, but they found a reason to post every day, even if it was something banal like shopping for a new sport coat. My real life wasn't that interesting, and it wasn't like I could share anything about my work with the CDM.

"You've obviously thought about this a lot," I said.

"How do you picture this working?" Nathan's eyes were on the television over the bar. He didn't respond.

"Psst."

"Oh, sorry, dude. Look at that shit. Japan landed on the moon with a remote craft and then rendezvoused with the main ship."

"Is that a big deal?" Nathan laughed.

"Very big deal. The main ship stays in orbit to maintain momentum. Getting back to it means some crazy timing and precision."

"I didn't know you were following that closely." The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Ever since our talk with Lenny, I can't help but read the stories when they pop up." By Lenny, Nathan meant Leonard Resmith, the owner of Bluewater Security.

"For as much shit as he talked, there's like zilch on interdimensional travel. There's tons of armchair theory bullshit, but the science has been treading water for a while."

"No progress whatsoever?"

"The last step forward was the repeater tech streamers use," Nathan answered.

"We've figured out how to push a signal out of a gate, which is cool, but it's really far from creating or controlling our own gates." My phone rang. It was a CDM number. I had only had one beer, and with the time between now and the crawl, I would be plenty sober. But it wasn't a gate offer.

"Enforcer Gray, apologies for interrupting your time off," Enforcer Chapman said.

"We have an all-hands-on-deck situation. We're calling everyone into the office."

"Now?"

"That's correct."

"Got it. On my way." When I hung up my phone, Nathan asked, "What's that about?" I shrugged.

"Don't know yet. I guess I'll see you when I see you."

"I'll take care of the rest of your beer," Nathan offered. A fresh pint had recently appeared in front of me. He slid it toward himself before I could answer.

"Thanks."

"It's what a good friend would do." I expected a giant meeting in the CDM lobby like we had for when the Butler dungeon gate blockade went up, but we were all directed to report to our usual posts. The more surprising development, however, was that security at the door confiscated everyone's personal phones and issued a stern warning about leaving the building with documents or storage devices. We would be searched on our way out, they said.

"Is this your first S gate?" Cortez asked as I slipped into the RAID room. Megan and her partner were already present.

"That's what you think this is?"

"We got one when I was an intern. I recognize the process." Before I could ask more, Chapman appeared.

"Thank you, everyone, for reporting in so quickly. Over the next few days, assume that anything you hear, see, or read is not for distribution. This is serious, and anyone who doesn't treat it as such will find themselves looking for work or even court-martialed. Am I understood?" We nodded.

"Our satellite system automatically updates the crawler portal with new gates. Within minutes of the satellite reading the mana signature, it's in our system. S-ranked gates are the exception. Those don't hit the system until Chief Director Akinwale approves it, giving us a head start on managing all of the chaos that comes with an S gate appearing in our jurisdiction." Chapman went on to explain that before bidding for the gate went live, the CDM secured it and the surrounding area.

No one would need to be evacuated unless the gate had some form of contagion element, but once news broke that an S gate had appeared, reporters, vloggers, and gawkers would descend on the area.

"We are deploying multiple units to this location," Chapman continued.

"Our job is to monitor the gate and the surrounding area. Our desired radius is 200 yards, so we'll have to leave some gates unmonitored with so much of our fleet being out of commission. You have full authority to override coverage to E and D gates. If we get to a point where we have to leave a C gate unmonitored, alert me immediately." Next, Chapman gave us our assignments. Cortez and I were on the half of the team that stayed in the RAID room.

The other half, of which Megan and de Saint were a part, joined several other enforcers on the ground. The gate opened on the edge of Arsenal Park, which was on the north end of Pittsburgh, near the zoo. We had one drone there, thanks to RAIDs automated deployment and navigation, and as soon as I turned that feed on, I knew this S-ranked gate was already an unkept secret. The gate itself was four stories tall and looked like a toothy chimpanzee with its mouth opened wide.

The face was carved out of wood, and the black of the dungeon entrance filled its maw. People had already begun to gather. Police and enforcers pushed them back and behind barricades, and no doubt every person present put pictures of the giant monkey mouth up on their social media. The CDM hadn't confirmed it was an S-ranked gate, but the unusual nature of the gate stuck out, and the public would quickly see that the CDM presence was larger than anything we deployed for an A gate or below.

Our first job was to establish a grid of drones around the area to ensure that we had total coverage. RAID was supposed to be able to do this automatically as part of an S-ranked protocol, but it never triggered. We tried to initiate it manually, and the support team admitted there was no actual button to manually activate a drone grid. So Cortez and I flew them into position by hand.

I was a bit worried about how the battery management loop would work with so many drones at one gate–RAID usually replaced one drone for another, not one among many–but that seemed like something smarter people than I would have thought of already. Cortez agreed. While we flew the drones, the other duo on shift with us painstakingly made sure that the privacy blackouts were as precise as possible.

This footage would get a lot of scrutiny even if everything at the gate went smoothly simply by virtue of this being an S gate. Since this was a residential area, they had a lot of area to black out but soon encountered a wrinkle. Even with snow falling, any building with a flat roof had people on it. They wanted a better look at the gate, and they wanted to watch the chaos unfold on the streets below. That was private property, but we were permitted to monitor any gate-related activity.

Did a curious crowd count as gate-related activity? Their actions were motivated by the presence of a gate, and they had the potential to interfere with the activity around it. If these were protestors on private property, for example, we would record them. These weren't protestors, though. These were local residents with space heaters, lawn chairs, and coolers of beer. Chapman ruled that spectating fit under the definition of a gate-related activity.

If someone wanted to shoot down a drone, they would have their pick around the S gate. Maybe we could actually catch someone in the act. We hoped that wouldn't be an issue here, though. The more attention the gate attracted, the higher the risk of a downed drone crashing into a crowd of people. When the S gate hit the online portal, the system went down almost immediately.

Very few outfits could afford to bid on an S-ranked gate, but if I still had my phone, I too would have been one of the people who logged into the system just to look at it and then keep refreshing to see where the bidding was. The system was back online 4 minutes later. The portal said the gate would be open for 15 days. Unlike every other ranked gate, the length of time an S-ranked gate stayed open varied. This was a fairly middle-of-the-road length of time for S gates.

What the gate looked like, where it was located, and the length of time it would be open were all anyone knew about the S gate, so the bidding war that broke out was based on very little intel. No S-ranked gate was bad per se, but guilds wanted long open times and no unusual mechanics. For example, the S-ranked gate with the jumpscares and the star dragon that LootLootLouis ran a while back was one of the more ideal formats. Traveling deeper into the dungeon was a simple walk. Doors didn't lock.

Teleporters didn't dump you in strange places. A regenerating monster didn't produce an unending stream of threats for the duration of the dungeon. And the environment itself was relatively unhazardous. There was no extreme heat or wind, or even rain, like I saw in the ogre gate. You could more easily bring a harvest team into the dungeon with those conditions, and then the longer the gate stayed open, the more profitable the harvest. I am not aware of anyone ever "finishing" an S-ranked harvest operation.

They scramble to get as much out as they could and try to make the most of every minute of open gate time available. Bidding for this gate would end in 6 hours, at which point the winner would immediately send crawlers into the dungeon. I had heard that the bigger guilds have their teams on standby long before bidding concluded to avoid any unnecessary delays. In Pittsburgh, that was usually a wasted effort. The last 7 S-ranked gates in our region were bought by the Dungeon Delvers Guild.

Their Pittsburgh chapter was big, but they also had the backing of a national organization. That meant deeper pockets and far more talent. All of their top crawlers were probably flying into town already. Word around the office was that the Dungeon Delvers would take it again. They had the runway to outspend everyone else and weren't afraid to use it. Any buzz about other teams prepping was just noise, people trying to cash in on the fanfare even if they weren't running the gate themselves.

With the initial burst of activity behind us–all of the drones were in place, as were our people on the ground–Cortez stood from his chair.

"I'm going across the street for an energy drink," he said.

"Want me to get you one?" I had drunk so many energy drinks in the last several days. The very suggestion made my stomach turn.

"Tea, please."