Gamers - Amazon (4 page)

"The problem is the games are getting harder and faster. Harriet and Sam got dropped from the company for low TPS scores just last week. Sam's house was empty when I went by on the way home." Her father stood and put both hands on his head.

"That's why we need you to cooperate," he said. "So nothing affects your LifeScore and your chances to get into University. You've worked so hard, sweetie."

Gabby still couldn't believe what they were saying. They wanted her to give up her personal information. They might as well be sending her off to get strip searched.

"You're not listening," Gabby said. "They are
my
files. I get to decide if I'm worried about it. Letting me know the Frags are messing with them is all they should be doing."

"Honey," her mother said. "I don't think you understand the level of danger there is with these Frags 'messing with your files.'"

Her parents shared a concerned look. Her mother leaned over and whispered into her father's ear. He thought for a moment and then nodded. Gabby didn't like their quiet conspiring.

"Back a few decades," her father began. "A group sympathetic to the Southlands started infiltrating a large group of children's files."

Her mother grabbed her father's hand and squeezed it. Something about their sudden change in mannerisms creeped Gabby out.

"Through subtle changes in their surroundings they were able to brainwash a large group of kids into joining a Southlands rally. The infiltrators also modified LifeScores to interfere with our competitive edge," he said.

Gabby shook her head. It was like a madness debuff had been cast on her parents. She barely knew what they were talking about, even worse than normal.

"Kids can't be brainwashed just because they see some crap on their eye-screens. Otherwise, wouldn't all that advertising they're constantly assaulting us with, work?" said Gabby.

Her father stood up and pointed at her. "This is not a joking matter, Gabriella. This infiltration was a serious assault to the freedoms we hold dear in the GSA. If these Frags have any nefarious intentions, the protectors of the GSA need to know."

"The LGIE probably made up all that brainwashing crap back then to convince you all to give them power," spat Gabby. She couldn't believe her parents weren't going to back her.

"Have you been wasting your time studying history again, Gabby? You should be focusing on your LifeScore and your games. Not worthless history lessons," said her mother. "If that's what you're learning at the Library Museum, we might have to ask you not to go there anymore."

None of this was making any sense to Gabby. She half-thought that maybe the Frags had infiltrated her files and were making it seem like everyone around her had gone crazy.

If she let the LGIE into her files, they might see that she'd been hacking school files and ban her from University. If she didn't let them in, then she would probably get banned, too. She'd been grinding at her LifeScore since before she could remember, burning through the ranks, trying to stay at the top so she could keep progressing and making sure Zaela was there, as well. Now all that work would be for nothing.

She was so angry that her hands had stopped shaking. She looked up to see both her parents standing, staring at her with their arms crossed.

Gabby made her choice. It was the one that would give her a little room to maneuver. She couldn't let them in.

"Mom. Dad." She looked at each of them in turn, trying to calm her voice so it wouldn't break and sound immature.

"I think those files are my choice. It's my life. But I also know that you are my legal guardians and can give those files up whether I want you to or not."

Gabby paused, taking a deep breath. "I'm—" She almost said begging, but realized she needed to show more strength. "—informing you that I do not wish my files to be exposed to the LGIE and if you give them permission, I will sabotage my LifeScore so I lose rank and not make University."

Her parent's eyes widened, until she thought they might fall out. Their jaws followed closely behind. She'd totally mezzed them, and they'd dropped agro on her, probably wondering if she'd gone crazy or not.

Gabby assumed behind their quiet stares, her parents were busy mind-texting, determining the next course of action.

Her hands took to shaking again while she waited. She had no intention of giving up all her hard work, but she hoped it was enough of a bluff to keep her parents from acting on her behalf.

When the mez wore off, her parents finally spoke up in one of those dual speaking modes, where they each finished each other's sentences and overlapped so much it was hard to actually tell who was speaking.

"Honey. Sweetie," said her parents. "We know you're under a lot of stress with your Final Raid next week. You've been working so hard, for so long, and maybe this is getting to you."

The parent duality paused, and Gabby realized then how much they were caricatures of parents in their shiny skins, buffed to a fine glow. She wondered why she'd never seen this before.

"So we're going to defer this decision until after the Final Raid. We don't want this to interfere with your LifeScore anymore than it already is." Her parents cast the sad-face, and nodded.

Gabby sighed. She hadn't won, but she hadn't lost, either. Her parents had gamed their way out of making the decision until they could find a better strategy. She could do the same. A week would give her enough time to figure out what the Frags were doing with her files.

If it were truly nefarious, which Gabby seriously doubted, then she could turn them into the LGIE. And if not, then she'd have the evidence to keep her parents from letting them into her files.

All the while, she needed to keep her LifeScore up. Final Raid was in a week and the schools like to mix things up with new games to test the students' ingenuity. Surprise games were much harder to hack too, so Gabby would have to be on her A-game.

Gabby put on her own smile and gave her parents obligatory hugs.

"Thank you," said Gabby. "I should go up to my room now. I need to get a few more points before the day is over. I would be happy to talk about this again next week."

As Gabby turned to trudge up the stairs, she let her smile fade. She needed to get busy up in her room, but it certainly wasn't grinding a few worthless points. She had to figure out a way to contact the Frags and fast.

Because she knew her parents would take the week to analyze her playback and figure out that she was bluffing. Once they did that, they'd give her files to the LGIE in a heartbeat.

Chapter Five

She'd taken the idea for her room from an old book Blair had shown her once with a golden dragon on the cover. A blonde haired woman rode the dragon and looked triumphant. Gabby had always imagined herself as the woman.

Her wall-scenes made the room appear to be near the entrance of a huge cave. The back half rested on a sand floor, while the front faced the edge of a cliff that disappeared off the mountainside into the crisp and occasionally cloudy air.

When she glanced up, she would often see dragons with tiny riders on them, soaring through the skies, belching flame at airborne parasites. Occasionally, they would land at the mouth of the cave and amble into the chamber behind her, wings tucked and metallic skin gleaming in the torch light.

But today she had no time for fantasies. So she let her room revert to its normal, boring state.

First, Gabby pulled out the two books that Blair had given her. She paged through the titleless book with the owl on the front, learning that it was about some long dead philosopher from a few millennium ago. His big innovation was to ask questions. Gabby shrugged and put it back in the backpack.

The second book was about the Stasi, the secret police in East Germany, a place that she'd never heard of.

She read sections at random. Some of the information was shocking. The Stasi had almost complete control of their population through a blanket of informers. One in six people were informing or watching the others.

A shiver went down Gabby's spine. She could sense the similarities between the Stasi and the LGIE, but not what it meant for her. The LGIE only had better technology. If it weren't for the bleeding edge encryption everyone had access to, they'd probably already be snooping through her stuff.

Which lead her to wonder how the Frags were doing the same. She threw the book onto the bed and called up her system.

Radial blooms of light appeared around her like a field of glowing flowers, or a small galaxy frozen in time. Gabby ran diagnostics on everything and couldn’t find a byte out of place.

Frustrated, she decided she needed to put a message out. The best places were the hacker hangouts. Someone would know how to contact them.

Gabby swiped her hand and her system files disappeared. She called up the projector, which would send her virtual presence to a far-away real place.

The transition scene gave her a bit of vertigo, but instantly she was placed into a small room. It was the entryway to The Black Gate, a hacker bar, a place you'd never hear of unless you were supposed to hear about it.

The physical location changed frequently, it'd never been in the same place twice. A year ago, she'd heard it was perched on one of Jupiter's moons.

Supposedly, some rich guy had sent a sensor cluster to the Jovian moon so he could hang out in style with his friends. The Black Gate's benefactors had found out and took control of his sensor cluster, partying it up before sending his multi-billion dollar satellite crashing into the moon's surface.

Getting into the bar hadn't been an easy feat, either. Bits of code required to enter was spread out across the world in different locations. She'd had to steal each section and then reassemble them into a working program so she could access the space and even then she'd had one more barrier to pass, one that she was currently blocked by, standing in the entryway.

As a mericlusive bar, one couldn't enter unless one proved that they deserved to be there. Wanna-be hackers had to solve a puzzle to enter each and every time they visited the bar.

Gabby was still new to the scene and had only gotten in once before. She hoped tonight she had the skills to get past the guardian puzzle.

Before her, in the middle of the empty room, a table with a two-sided scale appeared. The flat saucers on each side, hanging by a bronze chain, reflected an invisible light. Gabby stared at the apparatus and wondered what puzzle she would have to solve.

To her left, just outside the wall, another shadowy cube formed, exactly the same dimensions as hers. A shadowy male figure in the cube next to hers, turned its head toward her.

Gabby groaned. In addition to solving the puzzle, she would be racing another low level hacker. She might solve the puzzle but still not gain entrance to the Black Gate.

When a spotlight formed on top of her, she jumped and held her hand over her face to shield her eyes.

A cheesy sounding announcer began to speak: "Ladies and gentlemen! We have two runts desiring entrance to the Black Gate!"

Gabby had the horrible feeling that the whole bar was now watching them. She wished she'd worn an outrageous skin so they wouldn't recognize her if she failed.

"Are these merely bots or will they succeed?" the announcer continued. "So contestants, tonight's challenge is to find out which puzzle ball weighs more using the scales the least amount of times. When you have completed the task, hit the red button!"

A big red "TEN" formed above the table and started counting down. Gabby assumed her opponent was seeing the same thing. When the number reached "ZERO," eight white balls formed on the table and the announcer shouted, "GO!"

Gabby took a deep breath and thought hard if she'd seen this puzzle before. It sounded familiar, but she couldn't rely on memory. The Black Gate puzzles were often twisted versions of the originals. Even if one thought they knew the answer, they were advised to think deeper, lest they be lead into a dreadful trap. They were a community of hackers so they prized creative thinking.

After running through a couple of scenarios using factors and solving equations, a simple and logical solution came to her, but she hesitated to pick up one of the balls. She could find the heaviest by putting four balls on each side, and then whichever scale tipped more, split those four balls to groups of two and then do that one more time to find the heaviest.

The answer using that method would be three. It would work but she was certain that answer was too obvious. She could see the shadowy figure on the other side with his hand above the white balls. He had probably come to the same conclusion. Now it was a race to see if they could figure out how to find the heaviest with only two measurements.

But it didn't make any sense to find the ball with two measurements. Gabby paced around the room, keeping her attention on the shadowy figure in the next room. If he lunged for the balls, she'd be forced to go with her initial solution of three.

The weighing saucers on each chain were wide enough for all the balls. Gabby wondered if she could balance them all onto one pan and let the heaviest one trickle off.

That way seemed ludicrous. Besides the impossible task of holding it so steady that the heaviest would fall, she couldn't be so sure that the difference in weight would be enough to create that drag, and even more so, she wasn't sure the physics model of this particular portion of virtual space would actually oblige her idea.

No. The solution had to be something else. Gabby checked the other room to find the boy standing before the table with his arms crossed.

Gabby crouched down to be eye-level with the eight white balls. She could not detect any differences between them.

Then she stood and examined the scale. It's an on and off switch, she decided. One or zero. Up or down. It would take three weighs to find the answer.

She shook her head trying to dislodge the faulty thinking. Something about a switch tickled her thoughts. Maybe it wasn't direct logic but a form of fuzzy logic like Pavelka's or Lukasiewicz's?