Hell's Glitch (initial draft)

16 Sample Data

Alex Madura pored over the tester data for much longer than necessary. She felt a pain creeping into the center of her forehead and tried to rub it away. When that didn't work, she just ran her fingers through her untidy black hair. The creeping headache had come only after Milner's latest task for her. He wanted her to monitor Sam closely and note any changes to his physical and mental status. This was after the man had increased the pain simulators in twenty percent of the alpha testers without telling any of the staff he'd put in charge of the testers ahead of time. "An experiment in player motivation," he called it. All Alex knew, was that she didn't like the idea of a game she helped make inflicting pain upon people. She also didn't like lying to Sam like she did before, telling him that the pain feature was a glitch, but that was also Milner's decision. He didn't want the testers getting wind of his tests. "Better that they think it's unnatural," he reasoned to Alex. The only reason Alex hadn't quit and reported Milner right there—besides needing the money—was because she knew that the added pain didn't affect the player's bodies in any way. Even with the added pain, none of them were in any real danger.

"Think of the devil." Alex mumbled under her breath as Milner strolled up to her desk, his dark eyes locked on one of her many screens the whole time. She had six of them currently up in front of her. She had three feeds, each dedicated to one of her testers, in a row above the other three. The screen on the left was for Dan aka Corbine, the screen in the middle had Sam aka Sarem in the middle of the forest king quest, and the screen on the right was Jacob's aka JakThe_MonarchBfly. Milner focused on the middle screen. Below each tester, was a detailed list of player data on the bottom screens. With only a quick ciphering look, Milner seemed to grasp the numbers and what he needed to know from them.

"Disappointing." he muttered.

Alex was tempted to keep her mouth shut. Milner paid her well to do just that, since he never seemed interested in what she had to say. She had never quite understood what he was looking for, really. Whenever she'd ask a question about it before, she always felt like a fool. It was a combination of Milner's silences in the face of her questions and her own lack of being able to understand what the heck Milner was talking about half the time that led to her feeling like she did. So she created a "stupid quota" for herself so that Milner wouldn't truly think her an idiot. Now though, her curiosity had overwritten her desire to stay quiet on the issue.

"What do you mean?"

Milner looked at her with disinterest.

"Your tester, Sarem. He is one of the top performers and yet he is not progressing as I had hoped."

"Sam is doing fine as far as I can tell. What exactly are you expecting from him?"

Milner ran his left hand fingers along his beard and finally showed some other emotion besides disinterest.

"I expected a more spirited performance. He's one of the few with the highest levels of pain receptors. Of the twenty percent with the heightened pain receptors, there are ten percent in this group who are very near the maximum pain threshold. With his body being able to handle that, I assumed he'd excel in battle. Like a true warrior."

Alex thought about that, but she still couldn't figure out what the man wanted out of all this. As if sensing this, Milner continued his response.

"I expected these testers to quickly cannibalize the game as their senses of survival kicked in and for each of them to be in the top ten rankings or to fill out the top thirty by this point at the very least."

"Well, no..."

Milner seemed genuinely confounded by Alex's answer.

"No?" he asked. "Care to elaborate?"