Hell's Glitch (initial draft)

2:15 Speculation

The high ceiling ballroom was alive with the chatter of several designers who were all hard at work helping the testers who fought through the game under their watchful eyes. Thomas and Alex both sat in silence for several moments watching the three testers and mulling over everything they'd just witnessed in Sam's game. Well, Thomas mainly watched the code to make sure all was functioning smoothly.

"How's everything look?" Alex asked, hoping for a return to normalcy, well as normal as this alpha test could get anyway.

"I'm not seeing anything out of the ordinary, so it looks like Sam is legitimately in the clear ... for now at least."

"Good," Alex said with a long sigh, rubbing some tension from her brow. "So what do you think?"

Thomas noted her hushed tone and furtive glances. She wanted secrets. Probably more than he knew.

"I don't really know what to think, all things considered."

"But you know something about all this, right?"

He searched her eyes for any sign that she might break and reveal the things he told her. He didn't get that sense from her and beyond that he wanted to tell someone at least some of what he pieced together. He settled on talking about the glitch fiend, Ronny.

"That glitch fiend, Ronny, is known as Ronove in Soloman's Lesser Key, which contains descriptions of the seventy-two rulers of hell. I say that, because his appearance matched what Ronove was said to look like and now that I think of it, so did his abilities. The other birdlike fiend that Sam fought earlier was probably Malthus."

"So you know about this sick shit and you believe it?"

"The old Death Planes games got me heavy into some occult stuff in my teens. There was occult symbolism everywhere in that game, but no, I never said I believed in any of this. I'm just keeping an open mind."

"So what do you think then? Are we dealing with real demons or what? You told me earlier that you thought we were."

"Ronny was very convincing now wasn't he, but now I'm a little more skeptical due to Milner's reactions to all this. This may just be a rouse on his part, to illicit some sort of reaction."

"So you think these glitch fiends are probably A.I.'s too?" Alex asked.

"It's definitely a possibility, more likely than demons anyway. What does strike me as odd is how personal the dialogue was from Ronny to Sam. It really was like he knew him, I mean, Milner does have access to each tester's mind, but does he have the technology to extract thoughts and have his A.I. read them in real time?"

"It's honestly very probable. Just think of how much of the system operates on each tester's instinct and will, such as the menu systems that they can open with their thoughts."

Thomas bit the tip of his thumb, "Good point."

"And don't you find it odd how Milner reacted to that at the end, just abruptly cutting Ronny off from what he was saying to Sam?"

"It was honestly probably just to conserve Sam's system resources," he explained.

"I don't know ..."

Thomas noticed one of the guards patrolling around the room was now floating towards him and Alex. He ducked down and whispered to her, "Listen, you can't discuss any of this with anyone else. If Milner gets wind of our little discussion, we're both dead."

"I know that. There is one other person I might tell this to, but she's trustworthy too. She already knows about Milner's demon fetish."

"Whatever, here comes a guard, so shut your mouth."