Rabbits(64)

“Should we open a bottle of wine?” Chloe asked, after the movie ended.

“Maybe in a bit,” I said.

Chloe shifted and stretched, and as she was stretching, she sank into the middle of the couch, into the soft spot between the two cushions. I had to grab her to stop her from falling over. Our faces were suddenly less than an inch apart.

“You seem a little tense,” Chloe said, moving even closer.

“I’m fine,” I said, which wasn’t completely true. I’d started shaking.

And then, we were kissing.

Chloe tasted like summer, her lips full and soft, her skin warm against my face.

The two of us pulled away at exactly the same time.

“Holy shit,” Chloe said.

“Yeah.”

Chloe snatched the remote control from my lap. “Wanna watch another movie?”

“Sounds good,” I said.





22


    THE BYZANTINE GAME ENGINE


Chloe and I were startled awake at eight thirty the next morning by my phone vibrating on the coffee table. The two of us had fallen asleep on the couch.

I answered the phone and put it on speaker. It was Sidney Farrow.

“Hey,” I said, doing my best to sound like I’d been up for a while.

“Do you have time to meet later today?”

“Sure, anytime.”

“I’ll be there in an hour. I think I found something.”

“Great.”

“Can you tell Chloe?” Sidney said.

“Um…yeah. No problem.”

I hung up the phone and rolled over to find Chloe staring at me with a concerned look on her face.

“What happened last night can never happen again,” she said, deadly serious.

I opened my mouth to speak when she burst into laughter.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Your face.” Then she jumped up. “I’m going home to take a shower and change. I’ll be back.”



* * *



—

Sidney Farrow showed up at my place about an hour after she’d called. Chloe walked through the door a few minutes later.

“I did a lot of digging,” Sidney said, “but I wasn’t able to find anything on any of the testing module servers, the design database, or any of the machines running bytes for my new game. But then, yesterday morning, a technician I asked to flag anything connected to Baron’s ID code found some files that had been uploaded by somebody using that code.”

“What files?” Chloe asked.

“It looks like Baron uploaded a few things to the company’s internal general folder on the day the woman who’d had the seizure was taken to the hospital. An encryption protocol is automatically activated whenever someone using a Byzantine ID uploads something, so I needed to get them decrypted.”

“What were they?” I asked.

Sidney handed me her phone.

The first file was a screen capture. It looked like it had been taken from some kind of news show. There were two talking heads: standard anchorwoman and her male counterpart. Running along the bottom third of the screen was a crawl displaying headlines covering the news of the day, most of them related to a hurricane building somewhere off the coast of Florida.

“That’s a scene from my game,” Sidney said.

“No way that’s computer generated,” Chloe said, leaning in for a closer look. “It’s too…real.”

“I told you the Byzantine Game Engine was amazing.”

Chloe was right. The image was photorealistic. But aside from the fact that the game looked exactly like real life, nothing stood out. It was just two news anchors talking and smiling into the camera while the day’s headlines ran along the bottom of the screen. Nothing appeared to be Rabbits-related.

“Do you have another version of this scene anywhere, or a copy of the scripted dialogue?” I asked. “There might be something in there that’s relevant.”

“The BGE doesn’t work like that,” Sidney said. “Those news anchors could be talking about almost anything.”

“But somebody must have written and recorded the dialogue,” Chloe said.

Sidney shook her head. “The key to Byzantine is Hawk Worricker’s advanced AI. The characters learn as the players play. The BGE’s voice synthesis engine sounds completely human. It’s uncanny, literally. No two people playing the game will ever have the same experience.”

“That sounds…impossible,” Chloe said.

“I know. It’s my game, and I have no idea how it works. Byzantine is…truly next level.”

“Is it some kind of random world generator like No Man’s Sky?” I asked.

“No Man’s Sky is a cave painting compared to Worricker’s game engine.”

“How do they make it look so…real?” Chloe asked.

“Outside of the initial world-building and developing my half of the original AI’s programming and learning matrix, I have no idea,” Sidney said. “There are whispers about quantum computers, but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“I can’t believe they locked you out of your own game,” Chloe said.

Sidney shrugged. “That was part of the deal. I was put in charge of creative, and they got my code. The Byzantine Game Engine—and whatever else they’re doing up in The Tower—is strictly off-limits. How the BGE does that magic shit is a proprietary WorGames secret.”