Tunnel Rat

Milo got out of the pod and got to work. He had four hours until he could go exploring again.

He paused at that thought; when had the game become so important? Sitting and thinking, he went over what he had done in the last two years. He had a near-perfect memory, and much of what he did was repetitive. It didn't take long to see that the fear of being found by someone had faded into the boredom of his day-to-day activities. He felt more alive when he was taking chances: dropping several stories down a chute and catching himself on a crossbar with his tail...stealing the pod from Kaminski...making raids on the unused sections for machinery...and exploring new parts of the decaying habitat.

But now he had a strange city to explore, caves that went forever, and secrets to find. He was still running through tunnels, hiding and scavenging, but it was so much better! The food tasted better; the exploring was more fun. Even the fights were fun once the sheer terror he had felt at first started to fade.

He even had a friend he talked to! Harry had shown him how to make mushroom powder and infusions and taught him the recipe for beetle stew. The stinky old troll felt non-threatening. Which he couldn't say about anyone in the real world.

He realized he was wasting time. That was five minutes gone, and the answer was obvious. He needed to get rid of Kaminski and crew, not be caught doing it, keep Section E running, and play when he could. A plan was coming together where one of his problems could solve some of his other problems.

Kaminski's phone had given up all of its secrets. He had all the codes and knew who he was contacting. It was time to see what he could find out. Kaminski's employer was a large corporation; that much was obvious from the security of their systems. The phone codes only got him so far, but from there, he could build something to get him inside.

As he probed their firewall and tested the security, he got an odd feeling. This was a familiar set-up. This was the security that he and his friends had worked with when they were hacking into systems for Kaminski and stealing for him. It had gone through some changes, but Milo knew things about it. Like the back door that Nimez had set up. Within seconds he was past the firewall and inside their system. He quickly set up a second back door, just in case he had triggered something.

Hours later, the game forgotten, Milo knew a lot more about things going on now and things that had happened decades ago. Old memories were cascading in his brain, triggering suppressed feelings. Anger at the men who stole his family, the fear of being left behind, the terror of surviving in the tunnels of the habitat until he learned enough to control his new world. And hatred at the people that had caused it all. He'd found information on his family, but they were long gone.

Behind the snarl of dummy corporations and false fronts was Victor Seimovich. Victor and his family owned 53% of Nechayev Corporation. This, in turn, owned the corporations who owned the labs that financed the secret experiments that had led to dozens of children being bought from their families and experimented on.

Milo's group had been successful early on. They weren’t bought; they were made. Other groups, who hadn’t been created in artificial wombs, hadn't. The other groups had more medical problems, were harder to control, and weren’t as good as the fourth group that contained Milo. The groups that took too long to earn money or who didn't develop as fast were terminated. Killed. Murdered. Milo's group was making money; they got to live. They'd been so successful that someone had sold their information to another corporation. Kaminski had spirited them away just before the raid on the habitat.

From there, his family had been set up in one location after another. Work increased. They hacked systems, stole the money, then packed up and moved again. This got harder to do as the children grew older. They needed more medical attention for their imperfect bodies and mutated nervous systems. Things went wrong, and people died. Eventually, Kaminski had five of his family left. They were twenty years old but looked like ten-year-olds. He was happy to see that Ordo and Nimez were two of them. The others were Adam, Bork, and Zephron.

There was a large file on what went wrong one night and how the very profitable group four died. Many heads rolled after that. The five of them had tried to escape. Guards were bribed with money sent to secret bank accounts, security codes opened gates, and they made it out of the facility in a stolen vehicle. They didn't get far. There was an extra Nechayev security patrol they were unaware of, and it caught them as they were escaping. The security vehicle didn’t know who was inside, and after a high-speed chase, they were destroyed. The report was sketchy, but a rocket-powered grenade had destroyed their vehicle, killing everyone inside. Whether it was on purpose or not, it didn’t matter. His family was dead. He hadn’t seen them in years, but he’d always hoped that, somehow, he would find them and make contact. Not now.

Milo sat and cried for an hour and then got back to work. He told himself they'd died long ago, and the only thing left was some petty revenge on his part. Well, not petty. He was going to hurt them. And in a bit of irony, his family was going to help. They must have been planning on stealing all of the money from Nechayev Corp, its subsidiaries, and Victor Seimovich and his family. They had set up plans to move the money, hidden offshore bank accounts, cryptocurrencies, and even a thousand pounds of gold held in a Swiss vault. All Milo had to do was pull the triggers.

Manipulating the bank accounts had been easy once he found a complete set of the programs he had used as a child. All of the illegal tools were there. Milo transferred everything he needed from the Nechayev storage and set up a few surprises. Seimovich didn't trust any type of data storage that someone could steal. Nothing was stored externally. All the data was securely stored. Milo wasn't going to touch it. He might hand it over to the authorities later. But it was easy once he was inside to change the access to it. Better than erasing the entire database, he just hid it.

He also wanted to shut down Kaminski. To his surprise, he found out that Kaminski was small fish. Nechayev had dozens of operators like him setting up illegal pod farms. Each one using a new Mark VII pod slaved to hundreds of older MK II and MK IIIs. The people inside those pods were working within the game. Mining gold or iron, hunting for magic items, and running some dungeons over and over every day. At this stage in the game, all of the raw materials and low-grade items were worth quite a bit of money. There were deals in place with three corporations that had financial commitments and were in competition in the game world. Milo didn’t care about the details; he just wanted to shut things down.

There was one very interesting tidbit that he saw in those plans. They needed one person to move things in the game undetected. There were only a few classes that could easily and reliably do this. Imperial Couriers were one of those, but it had proven a tricky class to use as they had huge demands on their time and couldn't just disappear to smuggle goods. Pirate captains could hide a large number of goods in hidden holds, but that required both a ship and crew and could only go certain places. Dwarven bootleggers had a storage device to move alcohol. By far, the best was the Smuggler, a type of rogue that specialized in moving goods in secret. They had an ability called Smugglers Stash.

Several of the pods had been modified using info stolen from the game developers. Smuggler was available to whoever first used those pods to create a character. Several were being used. Their only downside was that they were obvious. Some players and NPCs could see that a person was a smuggler, not a normal rogue. At that point, they drew a lot more attention if they were making regular runs.

Kaminski had been given the task of testing out the smuggling capabilities of a special type of character. They had the same ability but far greater stealth skills. They were also unknown at this point in the game because to earn the class, a player would have to stumble into the right circumstances and then complete a long and difficult quest known as The Eye of Wonder. By stealing Kaminski's MK VII pod, Milo had also stolen the way to start the game as a Wererat Scout.

Stolen novel; please report.

Nechayev was bypassing all the expenses other corporations were having to put out. They didn't provide the workers with MK VII pods, didn't pay them, just used them up and tossed the bodies in a recycler.

That was going to end tonight. Milo was pretty sure he could use some of the systems in the MK VII pods to alert the authorities and keep himself anonymous. He started to set up the programs he wanted to use and ran through the MK VII system again. To his huge surprise, he found that his own pod had already been talking to someone! His medical scans had been forwarded to the worldwide database to set up his treatment plan.

He sat still for a minute, pondering the implications. He should have known. That was its main priority and why he had wanted the pod, in the first place, to cure his problems. He'd missed that the pod did this automatically whenever a person was using it. So, while he was cleverly hiding his gaming connection, the pod was doing its best to yell, "Hey, the sneaky guy over here doesn't get the vitamins he needs!"

The second surprise was the update system. An update had recently been added to his pod. That triggered his suspicions. A half-hour later, he realized just how lucky he had gotten, starting with Kaminski being careless with his phone. It was ironic. Milo had looked at the pod's systems to start building a program to alert the authorities to where the other pods were. Meanwhile, that exact type of program had been loaded into his pod.

In some ways, it was convenient. He had far less work to do now, and he knew just who to send the information to. Whoever it was trying to catch him had already been tracking people using the pods illegally. Who better to alert?

Milo carefully made sure his own pod wasn't going to betray him again. Then he transferred the "Here I am!" program to all the other MK VII pods. When that was ready, he started on the banks. He didn't miss his four-hour mark by too much.

He planned on logging into the game, checking on his camp, and then coming back to start all the fun just as the sun was coming up outside.

Sydney was looking forward to the fun starting. She was ready this time. She may not have all the info just yet, but she had enough to scare him and run a bluff. She knew he was using the Wererat Scout because of the ability to smuggle goods. They had a good idea of where the in-game activities were taking place and in what cities. This 'Milo' happened to be operating out of one of those.

She wanted to get him talking. To that end, she had a table full of the best cheese in the game. With his race’s addiction, she doubted he'd scramble to get into the game until he'd stuffed himself. And by then, she would hopefully have slammed the door on him. Samantha was in her role as his mentor, and Steven was watching remotely. Wally was watching because Wally was always watching.

Sydney was anxious to confront Milo. She wanted to tell him she knew exactly where he was and have people ready to arrest him. Let him squirm for a little bit, and then cut a deal with him. Make him rat out all of the people he was working with so they could shut down the entire operation.

Milo logged into the game and was surprised to once again see his mentor from the tutorial, and the little halfling, Sydney, waiting for him. But he was delighted to see what they were having for breakfast. Cheese! Cheese dip! Cheese Danish! and many other dishes he didn't know about other than they had cheese in them. Sydney motioned to him to join them. "Hiya Milo, grab a seat; we can talk while you get some grub."

Milo didn't have to be told twice. He sat and started on the Danish. "Thanks, really nice of you. This is one of the best parts of the game."

Sydney smiled and crunched down some bacon. "Sure is. I rolled up a halfling just so I could enjoy the food. I can eat breakfast three times before having a double lunch and still not gain a pound."

Her eyes narrowed. "But we need to talk. I know what you're up to and where you are living."

Milo didn't believe her. "That's hard to take seriously. I just set up camp, and I think you'd have a hard time getting there."

Sydney slapped her forehead in exasperation; this guy was goofy to talk to. "No, not in the game. In real life. I'd like you to stay and talk a bit. Maybe we can work something out. Don't try to go anywhere; there are going to be people ready to arrest you. Let's talk about the pod you are using illegally."

Milo froze and then began thinking very fast. Far faster than any normal human. This wasn't part of the tutorial; they were tracking him in the game, probably based off of the data from the connection for medical data. The back door that he'd been unaware of. But they didn't know what he was doing in the game and couldn't stop him from logging in and out. They'd tried, though. It hadn't worked, he realized, because of his tail. Since he kept himself plugged into his own systems, he could log out with a thought, and they couldn't stop him. So, Sydney had tried a different route, updating his pod with the "Here I Am program." And she thought that would work.

"What am I doing illegally?" Milo cut a huge slice of something white, gooey, and smelly. It was so good.

"You accessed a character class that shouldn't have been available to you for one! This tells us you stole information on the game, most likely by bribing a developer."

Milo shook his head. "I wanted a character with a tail. I found one. Not my fault it was available. I can honestly say I didn't know. You should really let people play ratkin and Wererats, in my opinion. Very cool race."

The conversation wasn't going the way Sydney wanted, but she was really just stalling. "We know you are part of a ring that is putting hundreds of people into the game illegally."

Again, Milo shook his head. "Not me. I play alone. But I'll admit that I do know people who have put over 20,000 people into the game without going through the normal system. They have a couple of hundred early model pods slaved to each MK VII. And it's killing people. You should catch them and shut them down."

Sydney's jaw dropped. "Why do you think I'm talking to you? Look, we're prepared to deal. Leniency for you, in exchange for information on where to find these people. "

Now Milo was interested. "Really? Ok, how about this? You promise to not interfere in my gaming, and I get to keep my pod. Then we shut down the illegal operations and tip off the authorities. Or are you the authorities? It’s hard to know who to contact sometimes. Everything is really grey in the real world. Oh, and by the way, nice job on the update program. Really useful."

"You found the update? Dammit." Sydney tried to check the program. She should have his location by now. Nothing happened. They were back to square one.

Milo smiled. "You tried the update, I see. That's the last time you can back door into my pod. That connection is now severed. So, unless you figure out how to crack my 64-channel algorithm, you aren't finding me. Do we have a deal? Unlimited gameplay, free pod. In exchange, I give you what you want."

Sydney was so confused; how was this guy staying ahead of her? "That's it? You don't want protection from prosecution. You don't need a new identity so your old boss can't find you? Just the game?"

Milo shook his head. "Nope. Why should I? I already don't exist. No one knows who I am or where I am. No one cares a bit about me. My family is all dead, and I’m all alone! It's a miracle I'm even alive. I stole the pod from some bad people because I need it to help me to continue to stay alive. Just let me be. Leave me alone!"

And with that, Milo disappeared.

Sydney put her head on the table. And then, her location program went off in 37 different places from around the globe, telling her where to find 37 illegal MK VII pods, along with 20,000 illegal early model pods and 20,000 people abused into using them.

Steven was typing furiously and yelling, "WALLY!". The large screen lit up in front of him, with Wally's avatar on it. "Good job Steven; your team cracked the case wide open. I have teams of law enforcement en route to all of those locations. It's going to be a very busy morning for us and a very bad morning for a lot of other people."

Kaminski barely reacted as the door to his operation was battered down, and uniformed men with guns and warrants swarmed into his building. He should never have come back here. This building was bad luck for him.

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