Page 8 of Tell Them Emily Sent You
THREE
HIPS DON’T LIE
AMY
August 10
“Corbin, why is there an anatomically correct naked half-elf wizard dancing on top of the inn mailbox?”I paused on the way out of the bathroom and cocked an eyebrow at the man who lounged on the bed with four pillows stuffed behind him, and a laptop on his legs.“My mother always warned the day would come when you would cast your eyes asunder, but I never thought it would be at a naked wizard.”
“Look, I can’t help the fact that I’m such a good artist that I can turn on even happily married men with my naked male dancing wizards,” came a voice from the laptop, and I noticed a small square in the upper corner with a familiar face.I tugged up the top edge of the bath towel wrapped around my torso.Since it was big enough to cover me from collarbone to knees, I simply waved before moving out of the camera’s view.“Not that I condone such a thing, especially when I was the one who married you two together into the bonds of piratical matrimony, but far be it from me to ignore the elephant in the room, and that elephant is I’m too good for the likes of you.”
“Uh-huh,” I told Holder MacReady, Corbin’s oldest friend, and the head of art for Buckling Swashes.“I only married him because he said you were threatening to force him into matrimony with a sheep.Why is there a fully nude elf?I thought you guys decided to disable the nudity option?”
“We did,” Corbin said, waggling his eyebrows at me when I slid onto the bed next to him.“But there’s a graphics glitch that Holder is trying to pinpoint.Whenever characters log off and back in while they are at an inn, their armor disappears.It’s something to do with the code checking the database to see what armor each player has acquired.”
He put a hand on my bare thigh as he spoke, his fingers stroking my leg in a manner that had me looking sideways at him.We’d had a lovely romp in the sheets during the middle of the night—we were still getting used to being in London rather than back home in California—but that didn’t mean we couldn’t indulge ourselves again.
“It’s more than just a glitch at this point,” Holder said, his voice filled with disgust.He turned to look at another monitor and started reading out a list of highly technical issues that I—the sole programming Luddite in a family filled with computer geniuses—decided wasn’t at all conducive to romance.
Corbin and Holder discussed the issues while I leaned back against the headboard and took a minute to consider my life, an occurrence that became more common as we slowly drifted into middle age.
“I think it goes beyond the database, Corb,” Holder said as he typed madly, then paused to squint at the monitor again.“It’s almost as if it’s the AI itself that is removing the armor.”
“That’s not within its purview,” Corbin said, shaking his head.
I studied his profile, musing over the fact that although we’d been married for over ten years, just the sight of him made me feel like butterflies were careening off the inside of my stomach.“Why isn’t it possible?You told me AI is growing by exponential leaps and bounds.What if it’s thinking for itself, and for some reason, it feels like it has to gather up people’s armor?”
“Our AI doesn’t do that,” Corbin said at the same time Holder shook his head and told me, “It’s limited to powering the NPCs and mobs.It can’t do anything on its own that we don’t first program into it.”
I leaned to the side so I could pin Holder back with a steely gaze.
He had the grace to grin.“OK,” he admitted.“There is the remote—and I mean seriously remote—idea that someone could pull a Paul on us, and corrupt the code without us knowing, but ever since we painstakingly rewrote all the code for Buckling Swashes, we eliminated any opportunity of a repeat situation.No one is going to get locked intoPlaceholder.Corbin made sure of that.”
“Much though I think back on our time stuck in the game with a fine appreciation of how well the virtual reality part worked, I figured we didn’t need a repeat of that, and put in three different safeguards to keep it from happening again,” Corbin told me, glancing at me when I trailed a finger down his naked back.
I smiled.He sat up straight, his eyes alight with interest.
“The truth is, I think we need to bring in Ash.”Holder made a disgusted sound and spun around in his chair to tap at a different computer’s keyboard.
Corbin’s attention was immediately averted.“Asher as in your wife’s nephew?Why?He’s not an expert in graphics or the programming suite we use.Isn’t he with the NSA or something?”
