Connection Unknown: Chapter 5 Part 2 of 3 (Patreon)

Mary laughed and patted him on the back and kissed his cheek, rising from her chair as well.

“You got my glasses?”

“Uh, front counter?” Stuart closed an eye in the act of thinking.

“You need more RAM, my man,” Brad said.

“I need more coffee and less hangover.”

“Have fun in the cave. I’m going to be out in the garden reading!”

“Thank you, dear.” Stuart moved to the counter near the front door and Brad followed.

“And congratulations on destroying Orion’s Belt Enterprises. I know it was you—what happened?” Mary crossed her arms, one hand holding her coffee cup as her eyebrow raised.

“Well, you see—” Stuart started to say.

“He makes us sound more guilty with every word. What happened is that someone connected a game or a demo to the servers and used half of our code to do it. So it had to be someone from our team.”

“Oh! Are they trying to scam you?” Mary’s posture loosened.

“No, no, nothing like that. They aren’t taking any money from us. Actually, the funds are routing into the corporate accounts of OBE. We’re not sure what the hell is going on, but we’ve got to deal with the more immediate problem.”

“Which is?”

“Oh, we’re probably gonna get the shit sued out of us by the shareholders and the people who are shorting the stock ’cause they’re losing like trillions of billions of thousands,” Stuart said.

“Thankfully you don’t do the advanced math,” Mary muttered. “Why are they going to sue you?”

“’Cause we should have died last night. Instead, we’re sixty-eight percent shareholders of the company, and most of the remaining shares have been bought out by individuals instead of investment brokerages. So the few remaining shareholders are going to scream murder and those who sold their positions will as well.”

“But they sold them. There’s no way that they can get them back, right?”

“You’d think. Really, it comes down to who has the stronger lawyers and greater corporate strength,” Brad said.

“I’m glad I just have to deal with quotas from the greenhouse farms.” Mary shook her head.

Stuart had found Brad’s glasses and put them into his hand. He walked to Mary and held her shoulders. “Look, dear, we’re going to take them on and we’re going to beat them.” He looked into her eyes. “Well, I’m going to be on lookout and Brad is going to beat them up in an alleyway, hopefully a dark one.”

She scowled and swatted at him with a smile. “Well, go and beat those corporate assholes in your lair.”

“Hey, it was a cave!” Stuart said as she kissed him.

“Well, lair sounds more like you’re going to actually plan something. Cave is for when I know you two are screwing around playing a game or trying to hide from others and do your projects.”

They kissed again and Stuart tilted his head for Brad to follow.

“Come on—to the lair.”

Brad followed him down the hall.

“I’m going to regret calling it that, aren’t I?” Mary called after them.

“Sorry—can’t hear you. Just going into the lair to plot out my sinister, sinister revenge!”

The house was shaped in a soft U, with the living room, kitchen, and front door at the bottom of the U. The left wing held the bedrooms; the right held two offices and the “lair.” In the open area in the middle, a terraced garden with steps reached down to a tree line. From the house and first few terraces, they could look out over the blocks of green towers, cultivating and growing food for the Maxxel system and all who passed through or traded with them.

Being a corporate-run system, there were a fair number of traders willing to do so.

The lair was a dark-paneled room. On the right were three top-of-the-line sleeves and inner net-suits. There was a bathroom with a shower in the back right of the room. A desk faced the door, with the wall behind filled with books. The left wall was ceiling-to-floor glass with a sliding door to the side.

The wall left of the door into the office was covered in more books, two chairs, and a couch.

Brad closed the door, cutting off any noise from the rest of the house.

“Okay, so, getting sued—already got the messages from Waris.”

“She doesn’t take her time,” Brad growled.

“No, still an asshole. Brad, what are we going to do? This is getting big.” Stuart tapped something on his keyboard and threw it up at the window. The room dimmed and the window turned into one large screen as the lights above the suits brightened, as if some museum display.

“We’re nearing three hundred thousand people now.” A graph appeared on the screen. It showed a slowly declining line that bumped up a few thousand, then a few tens of thousands and then took off like a rocket.

“That is the number of people on the servers.” Stuart threw out a similar climbing graph. “That’s the price of our stock right now, and this is our corporate accounts.”

They had been cleaned out the other day.

“Fifteen million credits and climbing. Shit.” Brad rubbed his head.

“Yeah, server has had to increase several times. The backup servers are starting to come online.” Stuart threw out technical information.

“Farm One? Bring it back online?”

“Can we?” Stuart asked.

“If we leased it to the corporation, then we could use it. I haven’t wiped the formatting yet. What about these lawsuits—what do they want?”

Stuart sat in his chair with a sigh and moved from side to side.

Being diehard gamers had kept them in good health. They were fit and trim, even as their smart clothes gave them food reminders. Brad found it amusing that gamers, just a few generations ago, had been looked down on for being weak and overweight from their sedentary lifestyle. Now gamers were some of the fittest people in the human sphere.

It also made them antsy sitting in one place for too long. Stu shifted back and forth in his swivel chair.

“They are filing that we gave them false information, that we didn’t complete our duty to keep them informed of what was happening within the company. They’re suing us for the increased value of the stock at their original amounts of stock that they held.”

“So roll back the clock to when they had the most shares and we have to give them the new stock price? That’s not how the fucking market works.” Brad threw out his hand.

“They’re going to lean on it as much as they can.” Stuart linked his hands behind his head and bounced back in his chair.

“Can they do that?”

“Well, we’re going to have to ask a lawyer—an expensive one, at that—and we need to start talking to them now.”

“Who do you know?”

“Got this buddy, Joe—you met him, some gala thing, that godawful release of that mirror-something movie?” Stuart waved one hand as if grasping the thoughts together, the other working his keyboard.

“How good is he?”

“Good, and he’s a straight shooter.”

“All right.” Brad pulled out his glasses and put them on. He flicked his emails onto the window screen, putting the glasses on his head as he went through the message filters. He found the lawyer’s letter signed by several of the previous board’s majority shareholders.

Stuart hadn’t missed a thing; he was a people person.

“Hey, Joe! How are you doing?”

—“Yes, yes, caught us by surprise too. Say, would you be available for a chat? Work chat?”

—“No, nothing that bad.” Stuart chuckled. “Just want some outside opinion and representation.”

—“Uh huh, yeah.”

—“That sounds reasonable. Okay, are you sure? We can do this on Monday.”

—“Awesome. I appreciate it. See you in an hour.”