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

Stuart hung up and looked at Brad. “Joe’s on board, going to give us normal rates. He’s excited to work with us, and he’s rather pleased about us giving Waris the middle finger. He’ll be over in an hour.”

“Okay, call Daniella, the accountant, and make sure that we’re good to use the money from OBE to rent the servers from our backup corporation. I’m going to make a short list of people who know the account information of OBE and the code well enough to meld SW with Orion,” Brad said.

“Okay.”

They set about their tasks. Stuart made calls. Daniella would work the books. And he got Farm One online and prepared Fran, Dan, and Fizzle, the three other server farms they had built up.

An hour later, there was a knock at the door.

Stuart and Brad dismissed the screens. Light flooded in through the window once again as the lights dimmed.

Mary opened the door for Joe. He wore chinos, polished shoes, a polo and sweater vest, in a way that made him look comfortable instead of like he should be on a golf course.

His hair was silver and gunmetal, with shoots of white, and he had a weathered, practiced smile.

“Thank you, Mrs. Martin. Boys, seems you’re having fun in here.” He raised an eyebrow at them both with a good-humored smile, like someone in the know.

“Tea, coffee?” Mary asked.

“Coffee, please, and a water if that wouldn’t be too much,” Joe asked.

“Of course. Boys?” She turned to the rest of the room.

“Might as well get the carafe of coffee. And water, please, hon?”

“All right.” Mary smiled and closed the door behind her.

Joe let out a laugh that filled the room as much as his presence. “My guys! Holy hell, you pulled their suit blazers over their heads and kicked them down the stairs! I’m hearing your old board members are raving, just absolutely losing it. I saw the news this morning when I woke up and nearly had coffee all over my cereal. Guys, you are legends!” Joe laughed, just living in it.

“Legends who are also being sued,” Stuart said.

“Well, obviously.” He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “Wait—wait, you have this all wrapped, right?”

“Not quite,” Stuart said.

“We would like to pay you for some legal counsel,” Brad interrupted.

“Ah, yes, once hired, then anything between us stays between us.” Joe looked at them both.

“I would like to hire you on, privately, jointly between mine and Stuart’s families,” Brad said.

“One second.” Joe turned his wrist over and wiped his hand up. A projection appeared above his wrist and he punched in some information.

Brad got a message; he reviewed it, filled in the information and paid Joe.

“Done.” He looked at Stuart.

“Done.”

“Okay, so what are we dealing with?”

“We got this from our shareholders this morning.” Brad sent the email to Joe with a flick.

Joe pulled it up and started reading.

“Toss it on the window if you want,” Stuart said.

“Thanks.” Joe did so, the room dimming again.

He spoke into his watch as he read through the document.

“Okay, how much do your shares equal?”

“Thirty percent.”

Brad raised his hand and gestured to Stuart. “Thirty-eight percent.”

Joe nodded and looked away from Stuart, holding his chin and studied the screen. He opened his mouth as there was a knock at the door.

He wiped it away as Mary walked in with a tray of two carafes, some Danishes and cups.

“Let me know if you need anything else.” She put it down on the table next to the reading chairs.

“Thank you, Mary,” Brad said.

She nodded and headed out quickly, closing the door.

“I should ask, this information—shareable between us, family?” Joe asked.

“For now, I would say between us and Mary, not to the children and no one else,” Brad said and looked at Stuart.

“I agree.”

“Okay, so employees?”

“There’s just us two,” Brad said. “Coffee, water?”

“Please. Black,” Joe said.

“Just water, please,” Stuart said.

“That makes things easier. Infrastructure?”

“The office floor.” Brad poured.

“What about the servers?”

“We’re renting them from another corporation, which we also own. The accountant said that would be fine,” Stuart said.

“Okay, yeah, that should be okay. Accounts?”

“They hold the income earned from Sphere World currently.” Brad passed him water, and moved to Stuart, giving him a water as well.

“Thank you,” Joe said.

“So the basis of the argument the shareholders are making is that you withheld information or led them to think that the company situation was different from what they thought it was. Did you make any noise about working on another game?”

“We’ve talked about working on a new game for years.”

“Anything recorded, about any new projects? Any projects you proposed to them, even faintly similar to Sphere World?”

“There’ll be something,” Brad said, pouring coffee.

“Okay, it comes down to two things then: them proving you tried to lead them astray or didn’t tell them. While we need to prove that you gave them that information or tried to.”

“Thank you.” Joe put the water on Stuart’s table and took the coffee and sipped.

Brad drank from his cup as well.

“Okay, so how do we do that?”

“I’ll need access to your internal email server. I also need information on the new game, development notes, communications between you on it, and we need to know who was on the development team,” Joe said.

“Well…” Stuart looked at Brad; he nodded. “We didn’t make the game.”

“An outside studio?” Joe asked between them.

“No. We were shutting down the servers yesterday—cleaning our hands of it—and then we find out the number of people in the lobby and game are spiking. They weren’t in Orion’s Belt—they were in Sphere World. First time we had ever seen it.”

“What? How?”

“Someone, probably one of our team members, must have been making the game in their spare time. The code was similar to ours. They’d meshed it into the new game to take the server load and network to piggyback our servers and slip it into the lobby. They also knew our account information, so we’re getting all these deposits,” Brad said.

“Do you know who?”

“No. We need to pull apart the code to figure out where the game is being hosted. Then we can backtrack to the person who put it up,” Stuart said.

Joe snorted and smiled. “Well, you did the right thing, buying up stock to give you the majority of shares. The people shorting the stock are going to lose some serious money. We can write up a good Samaritan contract—basically, you both sign a contract with whoever actually owns the game. How the hell did they get access?”

“There’s remote log-ins, though it would have had to be someone a bit higher up.”

“Why do they have log-in access still?” Joe asked.

“We bonused everyone out. Some are retiring, but most are coming with us on our next venture. We shifted all the servers over to the new company and bought them from OBE. Everyone has the same log-ins and information—supposed to make things easier.” Stuart smirked.

“Okay, so yeah, best to sign that good Samaritan contract. State that you don’t claim anything from Sphere World and you are holding the money in your accounts in trust. You need to find whoever made this game and make sure they get it back. First, you will need to take the company private. That way, you will have increased control. Then do the contract and basically divest yourself of it internally. This is going to be a best court battles I’ve ever fought. I’d like to shake the hand of whoever made Sphere World, and you two gentlemen hit this out of the park. It’s going to roast those bigwig ass-hats.”

“Aren’t you scared about the shorting fallout?”

“The markets are a betting pool. They were betting more shares than you had that you were going to fail, made up basically three company’s worth of shorted stocks. I don’t care for people who do that. You got everyone in the board wiped out. Couldn’t have happened to a better group of people.” Joe smiled.