sleep.
CHAPTER 3
'No, you see, you have to press the circle on the right controller then the left controller. Like this.' I picked up the megamace and cracked halcor over the head with it. 'Then if you press right right1 and left right1 at the same time you can kill him. See.' I continued to bludgeon halcor over the head with the megamace as his skull cracked open and blood and brains scattered and splattered everywhere. The huge dragon collapsed onto the castle floor knocking over the giant stone pillar, which had been concealing the Ancient Ruby that was the key to the doorway of Planet Xios.
'Cool!' the barely eighteen-year-old Sequencer wannabe, Miles, exclaimed as if he had discovered the secrets to the universe. Well, it was kind of a secret to his universe. When they're fresh to The Realm, it's like crack, and you get hooked for many months on end. The Realm is a heck of a game platform. I remember back when I started it that I was hooked for the first two semesters at college. That's why I nearly got booted out for bad grades and was placed on probation with my scholarship. But I didn't want to lose my meal ticket away from home, so I put down the controllers and picked up the books. Well, sort of.
Miles had come to the shop asking if I could show him how to get to Xios. He had been begging me to show him for months. I told him he had to try first. Neat thing about The Realm that is unlike video games of the past, there are no cheat books that you can buy to figure out how to slay a beast or open a doorway. Oh sure, there are some pirate Framework sites out there that give tips, but as soon as one mentions The Realm the copyright police shut 'em down. RealmSoft was smart in that they registered and/or bought all rights to the concept. If you want to learn how to do something inside, you have to go inside and buy it from a RealmSoft vendor on the streets of Realm Central City. For example, the tips I discovered and sold were posted in Central City and I was paid a royalty credit to my account with RealmSoft for each tip sold. If the pirate sites outside get caught, RealmSoft not only litigates but they also change the laws inside The Realm. Neat business, huh? RealmSoft has a shakedown on all us Sequencers that we can do nothing about, since Sequencing is so damned fun and we're all addicted to it.
So I had been showing Miles here how to trip from one planet to another, specifically to Xios. Someone must have told him there was a Node on Xios. It wasn't me, but I will, for a price. The buzzer on the door
'He's over there.' Robert pointed at me.
I handed the controllers over to Miles, 'Okay kid, I gotta take care of something else, it looks like.' Miles palmed me twenty bucks and went back to playing the game. I slipped the twenty in my pocket nonchalantly and greeted the suit. 'Can I help you with something?'
'Hi, I'm Larry Waterford. I dropped off that old game system for repair a couple weeks ago.' He held his hand out to me and I shook it.
'Which one? We get a lotta stuff in here.' I shrugged my shoulders at him.
'Here's the ticket the fellow over there gave me when I brought it in.' He handed me a bin number.
It was the ancient system that I had spent so much time on. 'Oh yeah, I remember this one all right. It gave me quite a fit to fix. Well, actually the console was not in too bad shape. I just replaced a capacitor and tuned up the motherboard and added a new fan. The games on the other hand were all scratched up.' I scratched my head and tried to remember where I had put the box. 'Ah yes, here it is under here.'
'So you couldn't get the games to work, then?' he asked.
'Oh no, I didn't mean that. I cleaned them and resurfaced them and all of them worked but this one here.' I pulled out the broken disc and showed him. 'You see these two cracks here go all the way through the disk. I tried everything but couldn't save this disk.' I rummaged through the box for the new version I made him.
'Oh well,' he interrupted. 'At least some of them still work.'
'Hold on, I wasn't finished yet. As I said, I couldn't get this disk repaired. So, I copied it and hacked the encryption code into my Sequencing system at home and found where it was damaged. I rewrote the game code where it was scrambled, re-encrypted it, and then copied the file back onto this disk here.' I handed him the disk. 'It plays great! You can't even tell where I spliced the code.'
'You mean you reverse-engineered the game and fixed it?' Mr. Waterford asked.
'Uh, yeah if you say so.' I just shook my head and handed him the box. 'If you have any more problems with it, just bring it back to me. But it should work fine for a while. Who knows with those old systems like that.'
'I hate to ask this, but what do I owe you?'
'Let's see.' I took the ticket and scanned it. The computer rang up the total repairs and parts. 'That looks like eight dollars for the parts, thirty-five for the labor, taxes, blah blah blah . . . comes to forty-six dollars and forty-four cents. All our services come with a thirty-day guarantee and you can buy a ninety-day one for fifteen dollars. You interested?'
'Not really.' He shook his head no.
'All right then, forty-six forty-four.'
'Just one more question,' he said, and paused.
'Shoot.'
'Uh . . . how did you find the bad code and how did you know the difference in the good code and the bad code? There must've been millions of lines in there for a video game.' He seemed perplexed about what I had accomplished, as if it were too much for any good Sequencer.
'Oh that. It's really kinda simple. I generated a couple of different codes for that. One of the codes was a couple of Agents that would crawl through the code from beginning to end, the other would allow the Agents to run the code in small increments. This enabled the Agents to make an assessment of when blocks looked similar to other blocks, if there were random or unusual blocks, and if they would execute feasibly or not. Then the Agent would highlight the code in my text editor. Simple stuff for any Sequencer—besides I already had the Agent codes. I just had to modify them some. All in all it took about a week and a half to finish the code breaking and repair.'
'What software did you use for that? Telescript2 or Obliq2 or LotusScript4 or what?' This guy must've known something about Sequencing but he sure didn't look or act like a Sequencer.
