Read Ultimatum: The Proving Grounds for Free Online

got a station set up for you in the pit. These people have their job to do, but right now we have ours as well.” He started walking and waved for them to follow. The others dressed like it was laundry day starting moving, so Toby moved with them.
    Claire moved up to walk beside Paul. “How are things going here?”
    “We managed to get the websites and forums down. Miller had access and we couldn’t lock him out, so the next best thing was to call the service provider. Then we set all the members on staff who were not logged in to working on a grassroots campaign to get support for our side. Fan site forums, social media outlets, the works. Places we can talk to the fan base without Miller getting a word in. We couldn’t point out what he did without risking his finger on some damned doomsday button… but we made a case for supporting the empire we need to build.”
    She nodded. “Right, you were talking about that when I left.”
    “We still have people watching the church in game. We came up here hoping to get a word in with the feds, but they don’t seem terribly interested. As far as they’re concerned, our only job is keeping Miller occupied.”
    Claire frowned, but she nodded. “So no change on that front.”
    “We’ve still got three logged in GM accounts, as well as a few more than two dozen members on staff who have access… at least while it amuses Miller for them to have access. We have the programming leads scouring the code to see how he got in and how to get him out, but it’s a losing proposition. If it’s anything on our end it would take a server outage and a patch to change it, and that would probably set Miller off. So the feds axed that plan.”
    Toby rubbed at the back of his neck. “Bummer.”
    “Indeed. So we’re back to playing along with Miller’s game for now, though he asks the impossible and he knows it.”
    “Impossible?”
    Paul glanced back over his shoulder as he called the elevator. “He wants us to beat the hardest content in the game, which he has monkeyed with since we last saw it, and do it in a week. He kicked all of our characters back to level one and into starter gear to level the playing field. We designed the game to take months of effort to work a character up to max level, and we’ll need gear on top of that. What’s more, we’re as mortal in there as anyone else, aside from the three GM accounts. We die and we’re locked out. You die, Mr. Morant, and we all lose. And your character doesn’t log out like ours.”
    “That does sound a little tricky.”
    “Yes. ‘Bummer’ is certainly the word.”

4
    It took two elevators to get all of them back to the first floor where the “Pit” was set up. “This is where quality assurance works every day,” Paul explained as he held open the door, “but it’s also the place where we have the most VR stations running, so it’s advantageous for us to work from here so we can communicate inside and outside the game.”
    The room inside was pretty big. Bigger than Toby’s apartment by a factor of six or eight. It may have taken up half the floor. Computers lined the walls around the outside while the center was open, aside from pillars. Each pillar had four computers set up around it, and each of those had one section of the floor marked off with tape. Each was smaller than his storaging room, but there were quite a few.
    Claire hadn’t been lying about how many VR setups they had. Six pillars with four stations each… twenty four. Dang.
    The “Pit” likely got its name from the fact that all the windows were blacked out. Natural light could play hell with monitors… and sleep cycles. He worked in the back room of the print shop without windows because it was easier to convince his mind it was still light outside and he shouldn’t be tired yet. They probably tried to work the same way. Claire had mentioned the long hours earlier.
    The only place the room changed from either rows of computers or VR