The Elias Anomaly

Four

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The day's drudgery began with recalibrating some warrior cultists. The defective bots inhabited a small island in the south archipelago of the Odas mainland. Dulcie put up a barrier gauze and set the island's quadrant to god mode.

Out of habit Dulcie checked for the quadrant's architect-sig. The island was authored by an Acting called Cyrus Ullwater whose work Dulcie had never seen before. The weather over the archipelago was pretty grey and cold, the island rocky and covered in a heathery scrub.

Some parts of the island would, of course, be specified. After all this was part of an island chain. Still, there were a number of features that were left up to the control of any architect. This Ullwater guy had a thing for rock columns off the coast and unnatural looking arches in the distance on beaches. He had designed the island like a tropical volcanic, but had just cut off the mountain to a wide plateau.

In the north west of the island, in a small natural cove were the ruins of a colony from the mainland. It was here that a sect of cult-warriors had set up a compound. Unfortunately the AI made the enemies jam on rock climbs. When players end up pursued by the bots they wouldn't climb up onto the plateau to pursue their quarry. The bots got stuck halfway up, shouting abuse at the escaping players. At least that's what the error report said.

As she approached the village Dulcie pulled out her viewscreen. The viewscreen, when it was not active, looked like a pen or stylus jammed in the top pocket of her overalls. When she pulled it out and pressed the activation button a sheet of clear material, like glass or plastic, shot out of the side of the stylus. This surface became a clear tablet about nine inches across by 6 and a half inches high.

Looking through the view screen augmented the area she saw through it with an additional display. It allowed her to perform a number of actions that Architects and Caretakers needed to perform to run diagnostics on a plex. As she approached the edge of the settlement individual chunks of environment lit up. The code was visiblie through the screen display highlights. In little floating boxes visible on the screen she could determine each item's properties. These stretched asset numbers and identification tags to length, width and XYZ coordinates.

Dulcie took a quick look at a few of the bots, which had frozen in place when she'd activated god mode. On the surface of things everything appeared to be fine. It could be that the bug report was from a user misunderstanding. That happened more often than anyone would like. Such human error ended up wasting everyone's time with the filing of bug reports as "Behaviour By Design".

Dulcie's first step was to reproduce the problem. She used the viewscreen to conjure a player bot. The dummy player followed a basic bot design, skinned like a crash test dummy, someone's idea of a joke. It had hooks into some of the player response subroutines, so other bots would treat it as if it was a player. It also had its own specialised AI that would respond to the bots as a basic player would. You could tell the player bot to win or lose any encounter with a game bot and check that the game bot acted as expected.

She told the player bot to run from the cultist bots and set the village area into debug mode. This meant it would run but that she could pause the action at will if she detected the point of the glitch. The player bot scaled the rocks and headed across the plateau. The pursuing cultists just got about two-thirds of the way up and then stopped. The confused enemies walked in circles, shouting insults.

It wasn't a problem with any one individual cultist, it was a general problem with all of them. Dulcie scanned a couple that had climbed. The viewscreen revealed nothing special in their code that could cause the glitch. However the bots didn't carry all their own code. Some of their behaviours were programmed into environmental features. This appeared to be an environmental error.

Dulcie walked back to the town square and scanned the area with the viewscreen. A particular point near the well showed up bright orange in the glass. She crossed to this and activated the context menu that popped out of the little orange oval as she came near it. There was a smooth hum and a white column emerged from the square, atop it was a keyboard and touch sensitive monitor, a dev terminal.

Sitting at the terminal Dulcie combed through the AI routines that covered all the cultist bots. It didn't take her long to find the problem. It wasn't an area problem it was an altitude one. Every set of bots had an area of operation that was not just horizontal but also vertical. There were some bots, aerial combatants mostly, who could travel high up into the sky. Most bots were restricted to activities at ground level.

The problem was that the more latitude you gave bots the more problems could arise in their behaviour. Dulcie could see why Ullwater had set a standard altitude condition on these guys. Flying cultists stood a chance of freaking people out. Nevertheless, he hadn't compensated for the height of his plateau.

In Dulcie's opinion repurposing a tropical volcanic to be a northern scrub island was a cheap, sloppy move. She was already forming her opinions of Mr Ullwater's work. These were opinions she would be careful to keep to herself. News travelled in the Cluster and Architects were famous for their egos. The last thing Dulcie needed was an Acting Architect willing her to fail her exams.

Just to see what would happen Dulcie adjusted the altitude limit of the entire group of cultists. She created a player simulator and set off a chase from the village up to the plateau. It all went okay except for a couple of things. First, the cultists seemed a little too able at scrambling up the rocks over a certain height. Some almost floated up the last twenty feet onto the plateau. More importantly once the cultists got onto the flat there was nowhere for the player to hide. This meant the player was quickly and consistently overwhelmed.

The first problem could be solved branching out from solving the second. She isolated a subset of the cultists, including the High Priest and his personal guard. In the subset she limited the altitude adjustment to them alone. Now there was only a maximum of nine cultists that would leave their compound after the player. Enough to make a challenge but not enough to make the difficulty too high.

Second Dulcie programmed the remainder of the cultists to have a fear of evil spirits on the plain. That's why they wouldn't climb all the way up. Finally she tweaked the animations and biometrics of the subset. She ensured that they got a little heavier and clumsier as they neared the top of the rock wall, like they were a bit tired out.

Running the simulations again the player bot had a much easier time of things but not, Dulcie believed, too easy. There was really only one way to tell for certain. Dulcie pulled out the profile of her Odas character, the female pirate Jessica Frayn. She readied herself to run for her life from the village of bloodthirsty cultists. After she had finished the quadrant would still need passing from QA. At least a dev test would be enough to get the adrenaline pumping before lunch.