Chương 179: Chapter 414: M is for Mayhem

Four hours of meeting with Sidney and Stephen had made Milo tired and edgy. Wally had done so much as the administrator of Claw Master. But he had confidence that with the right staff and support, Sidney could take over and leave him free to pay attention to other things. She had her work cut out for her. His brothers and sister had just finished reviving their 20th retro game with a complete revision of the failed game, Morrowindcraft.

Touted as a cutting-edge combination of the classic Elder Scrolls game merged with the mechanics and graphics of Minecart6, it had failed to live up to the hype. The new lore, soundtrack, and quests were hit or miss, and everything else sucked.

The Alphabet took the best bits of Morrowindcraft, Morrowind: A New Age, Morrowind3: Goldgrab, and Morrowind4: Sort of Remastered, and added those select parts to the classic game, upgrading the graphics and experience to both full VR, or with the new Retro-Gaming Console that Claw Master was producing. So many of the old games were forgotten and languishing. They were popular in the habitats where people could only afford old games and cobbled-together systems. The swap meets were still very popular.

Brad and Butch snuck up to them each month and took part, always under surveillance by Milo or Bork, just in case. No one wanted to move back upstairs, but it was nice to visit now and then. Brad and Butch took refurbished games to trade to their friends and brought back ten times as many broken games and consoles to be fixed. Both of them were progressing in their schoolwork, and fixing the old games and computers as a hobby counted as homework, to their utter delight.

Milo thought that besides the Alphabet, there was probably no one in the habitat who knew more about retro video games than his two friends. He'd taken two steps after that thought when the obvious hit him. He explained his ideas to them, and the next day the two of them took a circuitous and secretive route from Downtown to the offices of Clawmaster. Sidney was dubious about taking on two eighteen-year-olds as her assistants in the Retrogaming Division.

She gave in after she talked to them for an hour; they beat her in 17 of the first 19 games Claw Master was offering for sale, and showed her a few of the secret levels they'd found.

"See, you have to wait for the guy at the Seven-Eleven to get shot by a murderbot, then roll behind the counter and get in the broom closet with his body before the door shuts. The closet is a secret elevator that descends to the Young Heroes headquarters. Use the palm of the dead guy to authorize the system to put you in charge. Since they're all dead, you can pick which costumes and powers you want out of the six-person team.

Makes fighting murder bots a lot easier when you can bench two tons and shoot laser beams." Within two weeks, they were promoted to Vice President of Sales and Vice President of Marketing. When Mama asked how hard the work was, they just grinned.

"Not too tough. We have to deal with a lot of guys who want to throw their weight around, but after you've dealt with all the super-smart people we have down here, everyone else seems easy. And it's not hard to convince people to buy games that are selling like crazy." Kenji was content to work in the hydroponics with his mentor, Old James. Both of them took great satisfaction in providing fresh vegetables for the table each day.

Yuri and Min took shopping excursions to some of the markets in the hab, and daringly to one outside, two blocks away. While they were able to get Milo to accompany them on their trips inside the hab, he took one look at the dull grey sky outside, eyed the distance to the market, and asked Marisa to send a bodyguard with them. Min had glared at him, "You won't get better unless you push yourself." He shook his head, "Brains don't always work that way. Part of me doesn't trust a world without a ceiling."

Min threw up her arms in exasperation.

"Well, maybe you should talk to that part then, and set it straight." She left for her shopping trip, leaving Milo standing in the doorway of the habitat, pondering the idea.

"Can I do that? Or am I like Wally, with things inside my head that I can't change?" He still hadn't figured that out a few days later, and left it to his subconscious to argue with itself. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Needless to say, when he told his siblings that Wally was encouraging them to hack his systems, they were overjoyed and started setting up rules for an orderly competition.

Without rules, they might fall into the trap of all of them making attempts at once, 22 hours a day, and ignoring everything else. Races like that had happened a few times, and it never turned out well. Efficiency went down when they needed to take off a week to recover and play board games. It was decided that each person would get a full twenty-four-hour cycle to make attempts, with no overtime. It was Algernon who came up with the new twist.

He sat for a long time, rocking back and forth and humming a tune unfamiliar to all of them. Nina made sure to memorize the notes. Where the music came from was a mystery. Algernon didn't remember doing it, and couldn't recreate the effect, but they kept all the recordings they'd been able to make. It made for soothing and strange orchestral music when used to compose classical music. When he finally opened his eyes, he had an interesting plan.

"I think we should change how we look at this. The long-term goal isn't to hack into Wally, sweet as that accomplishment would be. He wants help finding his weak points. We can certainly do that, but let's take it a step further. There are corporations and people backed by the money from corporations, constantly attacking him and each other. I propose, as the first step of our campaign, that we build a shell around Wally to monitor hacking attacks and identify the worst of them. He's worried about something.

Let's find out who is attacking from that route. The shell needs to be different from the one we have blocking access to Rhebus. No strikes back, passive only, to gather information for stage two." Zander caught up the thread.

"I get it. We see who isn't playing nice, and then we follow them home and set up operations in their systems, giving us opportunities to further monitor their attacks and see what dirty business they're up to." Bork's eyes narrowed as he pondered something, "And then we attack in several directions. We use our new friends to attack each other, along with launching our attacks on Wally from those remote locations. It preserves our anonymity and leaves less of a digital trail."

"I like it. We're helping Wally in multiple ways: Constructing a layer of protection, gathering info on the people who could cause him the most grief, and sowing chaos amongst them. They'll blame each other and waste time on corporate espionage, which we can help along. Any damage done can't be traced back to us." Nina was practically vibrating with excitement. Onyx held up a hand to make a point of order.

"You mean, 'to the Secret Society of Ninjas', or should we all wear Guy Fawkes masks like in V for Vendetta? That could be fun. If we ever need to communicate or sign our work, we could use letters." Bork was a little nervous about that.

"There is a non-zero chance that use of the letters A, B, M, N, O, and Z leaves a small clue." Onxy sighed and conceded the point.

"It does, but it's so classic, and every major group of villains leaves clues." Nina punched him in the ribs.

"Except for us. Acting like a villain gets you caught." Milo said, "We confuse the issue by using more letters. And I suggest we use digital creations of hand puppets. Clues can't be gained from their movement. I've used that against Wally. Furthermore, if we need to leave such an identifying clue, we had a number as well." He spent a moment creating something and put it on the screen.

A fuzzy pink muppet in a ninja costume and Guy Fawkes mask, googly eyes visible, bounced onto the screen and said:"Today's fun has been brought to you by the number 7, the letter M for Mayhem, and the color pink." Nina squealed, "Chaotic ninja revolutionary muppets? I'm in.

"Today is brought to you by the number 3, the letter N, for Nuthouse, and the color Black."

"A is for Anarchy, yellow, and the number 6. 7."

"B is for Bedlam, Blue, and the number 17."

"Z is for Zany, Red, and the number 1."

"O is for Omnishambles."

"Wait, that's a word?"

"Of course it is. I love to use it in three-dimensional Scrabble. It won me the world championship two years ago." Milo loved the overall idea. Wally needed help, and the Alphabet was riding to the rescue. Also, having fun and causing minor havoc in the world, but if the corporations didn't want to play the game, they should have left Wally alone.