Scout report

SCOUT LOG OPENING

DAY 13

CAMBRIDGE

14:37

THREAT LEVEL: UNCLEAR.

"One more thing. Can you please make sure you reset your password? You will need to do it straight away as you have shared it with me to access your account." I reminded the tenth person who had finished using me to sort out their IT troubles today.

The young lady sounded as if she was nodding on the phone and then ended the call.

This morning I had access to ten passwords. All for supposed real world things. Bank accounts and credit cards and emails. I used the term supposed because I don't like the way it is presented as the real world. But you see these real world junk were no use to me. I cant buy myself bommeraxes or reload potions with this apparent real world money.

According to some people , the real world is "out there" supposedly , as in outside your house and outside your computer and especially outside MMORPGS.

People say MMORPGS aren't the real world but I say they are.

You can do the following on MMORPGS and in "real life". It's just a short summary.

-get married

-have a pet

-have a house

-have money that is subject to inflation and sometimes taxation

-have a religion

-own a company

-become a billionaire

-have kids (virtual ones of course)

- cook

-swim

-invent

- excavate

-make friends

-make enemies

-discover new lands

-learn new languages

-become a celebrity.

-play minigames

-solve mysteries

-make music

But on MMORPGS you can also

-go on epic quests

-kill monsters

-fly in the sky

-tame some monsters

-smoke without damaging your health

-make clans that adventure and chunder across the lands

And and here's the most important thing

-You don't actually die ever.

You only die in real life, if your clans or friends make powerful enemies in game.

If you took on a mobster in real life you'd die . But in those games if the character is an NPC you just lose some items or experience points.

If you hurt another player however, and they are specially hurt, they can track down and kill you outside the game, particularly if they have the skills to do so.

Thats why they say your password is your closest guarded secret. With it I know who is cheating, who is secretly Queer (or in one case, secretly straight , but doing it for positive discrimination ), who is a druggie, a gambling addict and so on. I know how to leak people's secret and make it look like an accident.

But these are not MMORPG concerns. So I don't care about them. None of these people is a threat to me or my friends or my clan.

The reason that I got this job was to screen out people who may be a threat to my clan. Apparently another clan the Mirage Boaties were planning to hunt down my clan after one of my clan members was falsely accused of trying to hack their clan leader.

So I decided to work in the area where Mirage Boaties were said to exist with what little time they spent outside of the MMORPG Flying Doofus. I had a feeling that they were also in the UK , and more specifically in Cambridge as that's where their home servers was. Server 97 with the nearest city being Cambridge.

Obviously anyone could play on any server but this was just a hunch.

I had to screen people to see if they were a threat to my clan by having access to their non MMORPG records. I would never ever hack someone else on their MMORPG account. That's like murder or sexual assault. So the next best way of knowing what they were doing is by living nearby and hacking their supposed real world accounts.

Again obviously you can hack from anywhere in the world. But if you pretend to be an IT guy then you can infiltrate much easier.

I had been through everyone, many of them being Cambridge staff, alumni and students. These people were all morties with lives outside MMORPGS. They were rich in £ but didn't have any money online. So rich in some ways, but poor in others.

As the work died down during the day, my thoughts wandered over to my clan. They were based in Yokohama and we had only met each other a few times outside of Flying Doofus. We all played other games too.

There was my clan master. He was the founder and the leader of our clan. Top guy in our hierachy. We then had others with different roles in battle , in the game and some other positions of responsibility. But we loved each other. That was important. Even more importantly we loved MMORPG's . Some of us had even put our kids in care to play MMORPGS.

I missed playing with them. I had to be sure to use different I.P. addresses for playing and working as for all we knew our rivals also had people with my skills.

However here I was a scout in enemy territory. Far from home.

I wondered what life would have been if I had a life outside MMORPGS. It was a very scary thought.

Suddenly work finished and I was headed home.

SCOUT LOG CLOSING

DAY 13

CAMBRIDGE

18:47

THREAT LEVEL: UNCLEAR.