by A. J. Markam
They were all running somewhere, or talking to people, or going in and out of the crumbling building. They all looked like they had a purpose or a mission. I was the only one standing around like a dumbass.
Over by the main road, my buddy from the cemetery was talking to a soldier in full armor. The soldier’s face looked like a skull with beef jerky pulled tightly over the cheeks. Even weirder, he had a yellow, glowing exclamation point hovering over his head. It was about six inches tall, and it stood out from the darkness like a nightlight. Out of curiosity, I stepped closer to check it out.
As the new guy from the cemetery suddenly ran off, the soldier turned his head towards me.
“Greetings, Korvos,” he said in a voice even deeper and more gravelly than mine. “The town of Othril has need of you. Night spiders have infested the forest and are hatching their eggs in the bodies of our people before they can be reborn as Revenants. Will you aid us in our quest to rid the forest of them?”
Suddenly a box appeared in the air in front of me. It looked like parchment, with words written on it in calligraphy.
New Quest: Rid the Othril Forest of Spiders
Night spiders have infested the forest and are nesting in the bodies of revenants. Slay 6 spiders.
Reward: 100 XP / 50 Coppers / Cloak of the Undead
And underneath that were two buttons, ‘Accept’ and ‘Decline.’
My first reaction was, Why do they need help stomping some granddaddy longlegs?
I had no idea what ‘XP’ meant, but I guessed that ‘coppers’ were money and not police. Money was always good in my book.
I was just about to click on the ‘Accept’ button when I heard the flapping of leathery wings and a roar from the sky above.
I did my little girl/Barry White scream again and stumbled backwards as a monster soared down and thudded on the ground nearby. It was a lion, though the weirdest damn lion you’ve ever seen in your life. It had huge black bat wings, glowing red eyes, and a massive scorpion tail that curled up behind it in the air. Seriously, the stinger was the size of a grapefruit with a four-inch knife sticking out of it.
On the monster’s back rode a woman in midnight-blue robes with an ebony staff strapped to her back. She was tall and slim with a beautiful face – high cheekbones and full lips – with glowing white eyes and pointed ears. Her hair was crimson, her skin was a purplish-pink, and there were delicate spiral tattoos on the sides of her face
She got down off the monster and looked straight at me. “You can just say ‘I accept,’ you know.”
The voice sounded familiar. Crazy familiar, in fact.
“…Agent Alvarez?” I said in my gravelly voice.
“Of course. I told you I was coming for you.”
“What’s the idea of making me into a dead guy?!” I yelled.
Her mouth curled up the tiniest bit at the corner. “Hey, you chose it.”
“I didn’t know I was gonna be a freakin’ dead guy!”
“It’s a good class. You’ll be able to fit in with the orcs very well. Assuming they decide to hire you, that is.”
“How come you sound like you, and I sound like I’m gargling razor blades?”
“Oh, that’s just in your settings.”
“My what?”
“Your settings – for the game?” she said, like it should’ve been obvious.
“What settings? I don’t see any settings.”
“Just say ‘Settings.’ Or think it in your head.
I spoke the word out loud, and suddenly another window appeared in front of me that also looked like parchment. There were a whole bunch of words written in a list: Character Options, Sensory Options, Display Options, Exit Game, and more.
“It should be under Character Options,” she said. “Look for something about ‘character voice.’”
There it was – Use your own voice instead of character voice, with a checkbox next to it. I tapped the square, hit the ‘Apply’ button at the bottom of the screen, and the list went back to the main menu.
“Okay, so what did that – hey, it worked!” I marveled. Suddenly I was talking like myself instead of little girl Barry White.
“Of course it worked.”
Something occurred to me. “Wait – how did you know it was me if I was using that crazy voice?”
“Your character ID nameplate. I never even heard your voice.”
“My what?”
She sighed again for what must have been the hundredth time. “Go into the Display Options. There should be one that says something about displaying IDs.”
I did what she said and selected ‘Display Character Nameplates,’ and suddenly translucent words appeared over the heads of every single person I could see. Things like Vadirostok <12 – Hall of Champions>, Mirtlonia <7 – Inglorious Bastards>, LuvBunnyApocalypse <15 – League of Extraordinary Gentlewomen>. Most of the people running around had their names in light blue, while the soldier’s in front of me was in green: Sentinel Lasterov
Agent Alvarez’s name was in light blue, too: Arkova. She didn’t have any words inside the brackets, though, just <42>.
“Arkova? What kind of name is that?”
“One I made up,” she snapped.
“What are the numbers and words underneath everybody’s names?”
“Their levels and guilds.”
“Guilds?”
“Like clubs for adventuring and going on raids.”
“What are you, anyway?”
“A fire elf priestess.”
“Ohhhh, so you are Catholic! Shouldn’t you be a nun, though?”
She scowled so hard at me that I backed away.
“NO, I’m a priestess in the fire god Barvok’s religion.”
That sounded like a devil cult to me, but I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to make her mad. Instead I asked, “So, uh, are you one of the good guys or the bad guys?”
“It’s not really a case of good guys or bad guys. It’s more like two sides that are warring against each other. There are villains and heroes on each side. Shades of gray rather than black-and-white.”
“Fifty shades, maybe?” I asked, wiggling my eyebrows – which probably looked weird, since I didn’t have any eyebrows.
She just glared at me. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”
Now it was my turn to sigh. She was one tough nut to crack.
I decided to go back to business. “Are you on the same side as the orcs?”
“Yes, or I wouldn’t be able to appear here.”
“Really?”
She cocked her head to one side. “How much exactly do you know about this game – or any MMORPG?”
I was like, What does candy have to do with orcs? “Any M&M what?”
“Never mind, that was my answer. We need to start with the basics. Have you found your display yet?”
I looked around. “…I don’t… think so?”
“Think ‘Display’ in your head. You can say it, but try to get used to thinking commands rather than saying them.”
Display, I thought.
Suddenly the air around me was filled with more windows. One in the upper left of my vision showed two long, horizontal bars – one green, one yellow. Next to them was a big number ‘1.’
Down around my waist, there was a strip of 15 squares, most of them empty. The very first one on the left had a single dagger in it. The last one on the far right had a picture of a bloody mouth.
“I see it – I think,” I said. “What is it?”
“There should be two bars in your upper left. The top one is your health points – basically, the amount of damage you can take in a fight. Below that is – you’re a Rogue, so I think it’s your energy. Energy points determine how fast you can attack. Down lower there should be a bar with a lot of empty squares in it. Do you see it?”
“Yes.”
“Those are your abilities. Everybody starts off with a simple attack – yours is w
ith your knives.”
“What’s with the bloody mouth?” I asked.
“In your action bar?”
“Yeah.”
She thought for a second, then got an aha expression. “That’s because you’re a Revenant. One racial characteristic you guys have is you can regain hit points quickly by eating people after you kill them.”
I stared at her. “WHAT?!”
“I’m not saying you have to, I’m just saying you can. Use it or don’t, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“Are all my abilities going to be that gross?!”
“No, of course not. Mostly they’ll be combat-oriented. As you level up, you’ll get more of them.”
“Level up?”
“Everybody starts out at Level 1, with very basic abilities. Right now, you’re very weak – compared to higher-level players, that is. To get to the next level, you need experience points, which you get after every quest you successfully complete and every enemy you kill. You also get money and loot.”
“Loot?”
“Stuff that drops when you kill a monster – things like weapons, armor, and clothes.” She looked at my current get-up disdainfully. “Which you need right away. Anyway, the goal is to get to higher and higher levels and get better armor and more skills so that you’re better at what you do.”
“Which is…?”
“Right now, not much of anything. But eventually you’ll select ‘Lock Picking’ as your primary skill.”
“What am I supposed to do now, then?”
“You got a quest from this guy, right?” she asked, jerking her thumb at the dead soldier. He hadn’t said a word since she’d flown down from the sky on her bat-winged lion monster.
“Yep. Well, I mean, I haven’t hit ‘Accept’ yet.”
“What’s the quest?”
I frowned. “Can’t you see the window?”
“No. Only you can see your own windows. That goes for quests and your character stats.”
“Then how’d you know I got a quest?”
“You were hunched over like you were reading something and were about to punch a button. It wasn’t hard to figure out. Say ‘I accept,’ and let’s go do your first quest so you can start building up experience points.”
I looked back at the window, which hadn’t disappeared yet. “Is that with XP stands for? Experience Points?”
“You catch on fast,” she replied sarcastically.
“I accept,” I said out loud, and suddenly the window disappeared.
Also, the glowing yellow exclamation point above the guard’s head turned into a ghostly white question mark.
“Uh… okay, I did it.”
“What’s the quest?” she asked.
I snorted in amusement. “Kill some spiders.”
“Alright, let’s go, then.”
I looked around. “Where are we supposed to go?”
“Look at your map.”
“My map?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “God, you really are a complete noob. Say ‘Map.’”
“Map.”
A window with a map that looked like a hand-drawn parchment scroll appeared in front of me midair. It showed an aerial view of the town – I knew because I could see hand-drawn versions of the buildings just a couple hundred feet away, with names like ‘Othril Inn’ and ‘Magistrate’s House’ penciled in above them. There was also a glowing dot, which I assumed was me, and a drawing of the woods with a larger, glowing circle over the trees.
“Are we supposed to head for the glowing circle thingy?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Okay, let’s go.”
I took a few steps in the direction of the woods and watched as my map moved ahead of me, like a pair of invisible hands were holding it out in front of me. The map turned translucent, too, so that I could see through it as I moved – but it was still kind of distracting.
“How do I get rid of the map?” I asked.
“Say ‘Map’ again.”
As soon as I said it, the map disappeared.
“Cool,” I nodded in approval.
As Agent Alvarez – uh, Arkova – started off, I glanced back at the lion monster she’d left behind. “Hey, what are you going to do with your… uh…”
I stopped, turned around, and stared in shock.
The lion monster was no longer there.
Arkova stopped, too. “My what?”
“That thing you flew in on – where’d it go? I didn’t hear it fly away.”
“The manticore. It didn’t fly away – it disappeared because I dismissed it.”
“Dismissed it?”
“I can summon it when I need it…”
She waved her hand. Suddenly the air shimmered, and the manticore appeared in front of us in an impressive special effects display. A tiny ball appeared, then began to unfurl and unfold, and grew into the full-sized monster in two seconds. It was like watching a stop-motion video of a crumpled ball of paper but in reverse, so that the paper goes from a tiny object to a full picture without any lines or crinkles.
The monster roared, and I stumbled backwards in alarm.
“…and I can get rid of it when I don’t need it.”
She waved her hand again, and the manticore faded out.
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “Where’s mine?!”
“You don’t have one yet.”
“How do I get one?”
“You have to reach Level 20 first. Then you can buy one, though it can’t fly until Level 30.”
“You bought it? How many coppers was it?”
She laughed. “It would take a hell of a lot of coppers to buy one of those.”
“What’d you buy it with, then?”
“Gold. Speaking of which, we need to talk about money, since that’s the main reason you’re in the game in the first place.”
We started walking through the forest again.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “I thought I was here to infiltrate the Russian gang.”
She scowled at me, then looked around sharply as though checking to make sure no one had overheard. “From now on, you refer to them as orcs only. Absolutely NO mention of Russians. Got it?”
“Okay,” I said, taken aback.
Satisfied that no one was close enough to hear, she turned back to me. “Yes, you’re trying to infiltrate the orcs, but in order to do that, you need to be a safecracker. And you’re going to have to be good enough at it to be able to steal a lot of gold.”
“That’s what I’m stealing? Gold?”
“Gold, diamonds, rubies – whatever they’ve got.”
I frowned. “Who really cares if it’s just made-up computer graphics?”
“That’s the point. It’s not.”
I stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Remember everything Agent Dobbs said about quantum computing? That was one of the biggest breakthroughs: they can create objects in the game…”
Here she gestured at the trees around us – and by extension, I guess, the game itself.
“…that exist independently of the artificial intelligence that runs everything. Gold is created by the game as loot and rewards for quests. But it’s not tracked – by design. They know how much there IS at any one moment, but they have no idea where it is. They did it to compete with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The game makers say they just wanted to create a piece of entertainment, but they kind of backdoor-introduced a new currency – and nobody would have used it in the real world if one central computer could take it away on a whim.
“What happened to the orcs when we did the global crackdown on the Silk Road is that they lost hundreds of billions of real-world dollars. We even seized their Bitcoin and cryptocurrency accounts. So what they did afterwards was move all their financial transactions online, inside this game.”
“But what good is that if you can’t spend the gold out in the real world?”
“But you can – sort of. Once DarkW
orld reached two million users, they got the money listed as a virtual currency on the New York Stock Exchange. Now the user base is over 50 million people worldwide, and DarkWorld gold is traded like any other country’s currency. There are players in DarkWorld who actually make their living playing it.”
Now I was starting to get excited. “They said I’d get 50 coppers for killing spiders – how much is that worth?”
“About half a penny, give or take.”
“HALF A PENNY?!”
“A hundred coppers equals one silver, which is basically a penny. A hundred silvers equal one gold, which is trading at roughly $1. It’s gone up to as much as $2, then crashed, but it’s been holding at $1 for a while now. A monthly subscription in the real world is $500 a month, so you have to make 500 gold in the game to break even. Which isn’t easy unless you’re putting in at least 20 hours a week at a high level.”
“I’m not going to kill any spiders for them if it’s only worth half a penny,” I grumbled.
“Yes you are. At this point you only care about experience points. That’s it. The money doesn’t get anywhere remotely good until you reach Level 30 or so.” She scowled disapprovingly. “Which is why thieves and safecrackers have come into vogue in the last couple of years.”
“There are people making a living at this?” I marveled.
“Sure. There are some people bringing in 4 or 5000 a month.”
I whistled. “Wait – does that mean you make money doing this?”
“I just do this for fun. My day job doesn’t exactly allow for a lot of recreational time, so I almost never cover my expenses.”
“Okay, this is cool and all, but what does it have to do with Ru– uh, orcs? Are the orcs making 4 or 5 grand a month or something?”
“No – they’re basically conducting black-market transactions inside the game using the currency. They get paid in game money for real-world things like drugs and arms deals. It’s estimated that they’ve amassed a couple hundred billion dollars in gold through their illegal activities.”
I stared at her. “You have got to be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
“You want me to steal hundreds of billions of dollars worth of gold?”
