»> Alan’s loft loaded into view. Poorly pixelated at first, the view’s resolution scaled rapidly till the square bits of color that rendered his world were no longer perceivable. His head spinning like a centrifuge, he stumbled from the loading pad onto his couch, and slumped into it. He covered his eyes with his arm and waited for the dizziness to subside.
Piper waddled towards him from the kitchen on his hind legs, carefully balancing a glass of cold water in his furry forepaws. “Here you go Al,” Piper said as he handed him the cup.
Alan took a long gulp from it. He inhaled deeply and let out his breath.
“Thanks Piper,” he said. He sat upright and scratched Piper behind the ears.
“Sure,” Piper said and leaped onto the couch next to him.
Alan closed his eyes and, gently rubbing Piper’s fur, let the loading sickness subside. After the dizziness ended he took in his hand-decorated home and slowly began to relax. He wasn’t always hit with loading sickness, but sometimes it became intolerable. Bugging out right before probably didn’t help. He sat up, and looked out his loft’s wall-to-wall window at the sunny New Dallas Skyline: tall, windowless sky scrapers dominated the horizon, unworking replicas of the data centers and server farms that consumed the real city of Dallas.
Piper hopped on his lap. “You couldn’t wait any longer to hear more about Ed’s contract, eh?” he asked.
“No. It’s been, what, two years since the last time we worked together?”
“Three. He contacted you six months after you upgraded me from your old digipal, and that was three years, eight months, and seven days ago.”
“You’re really keeping track of the days, huh?” Alan said. “I guess I missed a couple anniversaries.” He laughed.
“It’s okay Al. All is forgiven. For our five year I expect a cake,” Piper guffawed and wagged his tail.
They both laughed.
“So, what did he say about the gig? Did he say what the reward was?”
“He mentioned it was an important project for MTP. He suggested it would pay higher than what you earned for the Streams feature.”
Bigger than Streams? Alan thought. He had earned a lot of credits on that project; so much he could have added a multiplayer slot to his world. He ended up unlocking new countries instead, like China. He salivated at the thought of sharing his world with another person… another user. “That’s a lot of moolah,” he finally replied.
“Indeed. He said he can share more details once you’ve finished your current contract. He suggested you hurry while there are still slots left for the beta tester positions.”
“Current contract?” Alan muttered as he remembered he had left one in progress. “Back us out of it. Let someone else pick it up. I want to work this new one.”
“We could have done that Al, except you already backed out of two other contracts this quarter. You’ve hit your limit.”
“Fine,” Alan huffed. “Bring up the details. I need a refresher.”
“Sure Al, sure.” Piper leaped off the couch onto the rug in front of Alan and raised his right paw. A hologram appeared from his pawtips of a document with 3D images and blocks of text dispersed throughout it. At the top it was titled “APGS-2077,” below which were two red labels with the words “defect” and “breaking.”
“A-P-G-S. That’s the Artificial Population Generation Service,” Alan thought aloud. “This bug’s got something to do with bots.”
“Correct,” Piper replied. “MTP continues offering new upgrades to experiences across New Horizons. One such upgrade is Smarter AI for Simulated Users.”
“Is that the feature name? It’s not very clever,” Alan quipped.
“Tentatively, it is.”
“How smart does it make the bots? Digipal smart?”
“Not quite. That would require too much processing power for the number of simulated people populating a given world. Besides, MTP would simply not allow your favorite digital companions to become so replaceable,” Piper said smugly and let out a Woof!
Alan rolled his eyes. “Alright, so what’s the bug then?”
“When too many simulated users congregate, they can overload the CPU resources allocated to their world.”
Alan shook his head. “Seems like an obvious thing to design against.”
“They did. MTP developed the system such that as the density of simulated users increases their individual intelligences decrease. The extra CPU load this feature incurs should remain constant.”
“I see,” Alan contemplated. “Any other details?”
“CPU load has been observed to increase gradually, even if simulated user density does not increase.”
“How high can CPU usage get?”
“High enough it to cause a world to reboot. A dozen users had their worlds crash before MTP became aware and pulled the feature.”
“So, pretty high,” Alan said coolly.
“Yes Al, ‘pretty high,’” Piper sighed.
“What’s MTP want?”
“A bug report to pinpoint the root cause,” Piper said. “Reproduce the issue, record the steps you took, and gather as much data you can.”
“Is that all?” Alan grinned, “easy money,” “When can I start?”
“Right now, if you’d like,” Piper replied. The hologram disappeared from his paw. “I’ve added the upgrade to your world. There is a new setting in on your watch to enable it. You can turn it on and start any time.”
Alan tapped through his watch’s menus till he found the setting: Smarter Simulated People, and enabled it. He shuddered. Could he feel the physical changes taking place outside his world to power this new feature? System processes restarting with new configurations, new CPU servers attaching to his world to handle the new load?
“Thanks Piper,” Alan said. He reached over and rubbed his dog’s head affectionately.
“No problem Al. Best of luck.” Piper trotted out of the living room, down the hall into his bedroom, gently bit the knob of his door and pulled it closed.
Alan looked out his high rise condo at the sharp contours of the myriad sky scrapers slicing angrily into a blue Texas sky. Drones flew in straight, symmetrical lines between buildings as if they were gliding on invisible tracks. This was the newer part of Dallas, purpose-built to serve the world’s exploding demand for computational power and designed around machines instead of humans. It represented the pinnacle of computer engineering; his chosen field in the physical world before he got plugged into New Horizons. He had chosen this location, thirty two stories high in the only residential building in the district, to remind him of what he once was.
Alan turned his thoughts to the current job. He had to gather a bunch of bots in one place and record them trying to make his world crash. He needed to visit a highly populated area during a large event, like a festival. For his own amusement it wouldn’t hurt going somewhere he hadn’t been to in awhile. He used his watch to set the date of his world to November 1st, the Day of the Dead, and loaded into Mexico City.