Fayroll [04] Gong and Chalice

by Andrey Vasilyev

  “It’ll be great to get some sleep,” Fattah said. “See you.”

  His figure melted away in front of me as he logged out. I stood there for a second, lost in thought, before walking toward the barracks.

  My comrades didn’t make for a pretty picture. The brothers were in especially bad shape, their clothes practically drenched in blood. Ur was sharpening his sword, his head bandaged, and Lane was lounging on his cot as usual.

  “Well, my friends, are we living?”

  “Oh, Hagen,” Ur replied, looking up at me. “I’m glad you’re alive, too.”

  “I have no idea how you pulled that off, though,” Ping said as he cradled his right arm. “I saw how hard that thing hit you.”

  “Brutal,” Pong gasped. There were rags wrapped around his entire left arm. “That was nasty.”

  “It happens,” I replied meaningfully. “But I’m here to tell the story. Lane, how are you?”

  “Better than Torn and Garrak, not as good as the Sultan of the East,” he responded phlegmatically.

  “Could I have a word with you?” I waited until he jumped down before walking out the door with him.

  “We have five days off,” I started.

  “I’m aware,” Lane replied with a nod. “The price is the same: 600 gold.”

  I looked at him askance, surprise written over my face.

  “Hagen, I prefer to keep the talking to a minimum. You need me, and probably Ur, to take you to some other field so you can pick some more flowers. If the money’s the same as last time, that won’t be a problem. Deal?”

  Of course. Cheap and effective.

  “Perfect. I’ll be here tomorrow after lunch, and the same goes: not a word to anyone.”

  “Don’t worry, we can keep our mouths shut. It’s in our best interests, too,” Lane replied as he headed back to the barracks. That wrapped up everything I needed to get done that day, so I left, figuring that my squad mates could get by without a goodbye.

  ***

  I woke up because I couldn’t breathe, and the first two things I saw were Vika’s beautiful, crazy eyes. She had my nose squeezed between her fingers and was smiling evilly.

  “What are you doing?” my muffled voice asked.

  “You were sleeping forever,” she replied innocently. “It’s morning, the sun is shining, the roosters crowed a long time ago. Time to get up!”

  “You can make the roosters into soup for all I care,” I grumbled. “Why do I have to get up? The car won’t be getting here before ten.”

  “What car?” The smile disappeared from her face. “Why?”

  “What car? I don’t know, probably something nice. It’ll be coming to take me over to Zimin’s office, though I’m not exactly sure why. His highness would like to chat with me about something. I hope it won’t be too tricky.”

  “And here I thought we’d be going to work together,” Vika replied, scrunching her nose in frustration.

  “Man can plan, but God decides. I’m afraid Maxim wouldn’t take my absence too kindly if the only argument I had was that you wanted us to go to work together.”

  Vika sighed again. “I know.”

  ***

  The car was, in fact, a nice one, the roads were clear for once, and I was standing outside Zimin’s office at 10 of 11, where I kept a cautious eye on his secretary. Her bright red nails got me thinking that I might be her next innocent victim.

  “Kif, hi!” Valyaev said as he popped out of the office next door. “What are you just standing there for?”

  “I was told to wait here, since our meeting’s at 11,” I complained, glancing at the secretary for effect. “That’s what she said.”

  “Eliza, you need to relax.” Valyaev went over to the majestic, bloodthirsty woman and flicked her nose. “Max and I like this guy, and you know that. What kind of problems are you looking for?”

  “We have a schedule to keep,” Eliza replied, completely ignoring the untoward attention her nose was getting. “But if you don’t want everything done correctly and on time, then you’re welcome to do it yourself.”

  “Let’s go.” Valyaev opened the door and pushed me into Zimin’s office. “Max, Eliza had him waiting outside the door.”

  “At least she postponed our young friend’s date with death for another ten minutes,” Zimin replied. He was looking out the window, his back to us.

  Chapter Ten

  In which the hero spends most of his time talking through tough issues.

  Surprisingly, nothing inside blanched. I was probably so used to the idea that playing with Raidion would end something like that, that I didn’t even feel scared. In my head, I started going through what Zimin could have against me: I lied a little about the landlord’s crown…I drank at work…I kind of felt bad for Stavros…

  Just then, something snapped against my chin. It was Valyaev’s hand. “Got you!” he laughed.

  Zimin joined in as he turned away from the window. “Sorry, Kif, I couldn’t help myself,” he said, holding his arms out. “That’s a favorite joke of mine, and it always works.”

  “Very funny,” I muttered. “You scared me half to death.”

  “Kif, Kif,” Valyaev said, wagging his finger reproachfully, “how could you think of us like that? Who do you think we are?”

  “I’m more interested in hearing what our friend has on his conscience,” Zimin noted reasonably. “He was obviously trying to think of why we’d be looking to kill him, so there must be something. Confess your sins and repent!”

  “I’m basically a priest.” Valyaev rolled a paper up into a sort of hat, put it on his head, plastered a compassionate look on his face, and bent deeply at the waist, obviously imitating someone. “In the name…ha-ha…in his name, I command you to repent of your sins and save your soul, or it will be cast into the pit of hell!”

  I frowned.

  “Come on, you have to know where to draw the line. Anyway, let’s stop with the jokes.” Zimin tapped Valyaev’s back with a bent finger. “Why did we ask him to stop by?”

  “Oh, right,” Valyaev tossed the paper in the trash and sat down, the smile instantaneously vanishing from his face.

  “Kif, old boy,” he continued penetratingly, “what made you join the Free Companies?”

  “Or who?” Zimin chimed in, also sitting down. Neither of them offered me a chair.

  “I just needed to,” I replied with complete honesty. “I needed to get to the South since that’s where the last part of the quest is. The Wild Brigade was the fastest and cheapest way to get down there that I could think of, and—”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Valyaev cut in, looking at Zimin. “I’d bet my right arm on it. We overthought the whole thing.”

  I had precious little idea what they were talking about save for the fact that I’d apparently managed to give them the right answer.

  “And it’s a good thing, too,” Zimin replied with satisfaction. “I knew Kif was one of us. You’re one of us, right?”

  “Who else’s would I be?” I shrugged. “I work for you, that’s what you pay me for. What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just that you ended up over on that side of the Crisna, and we thought that was a bit strange. But what’s done is done. It was our oversight, really; we never imagined anyone would spend almost two million euros to hire all the Free Companies. I guess some people out there are more ambitious and well-to-do than we thought.”

  “Seriously. But that won’t be happening again. The Free Companies, among many other things, are how we make our money, but we’d rather lose a little income than create that kind of imbalance in the game. From now on, you won’t be able to hire more than three of the companies at a time. And even that will depend on what you need them for.” Valyaev pulled a cigar out of a small box on his desk, snipped off the end with a miniature guillotine, and lit it.

  “Kif, what are you still standing for?” Zimin gestured me toward the chair across from him. “Sit down, and grab a cigar if you want. They�
��re fantastic, real Cohiba 56s, straight from Liberty Island.”

  “Yeah, there’s no mistaking their tobacco.” Valyaev breathed out a cloud of smoke, savoring every puff. “And they get better every year, which is impressive.”

  “I can’t argue with you there,” Zimin responded, picking one out for himself. “I remember seeing how the Cubans make their cigars; I couldn’t put one in my mouth for the next five years.”

  Valyaev chuckled. “Yeah, that was funny. But why didn’t you drink rum that whole time?”

  “Who knows what they mix in there if that’s how they make their cigars,” muttered Zimin. “Plus, rum without a cigar is like tequila without a Corona. Something’s just missing. You can have a cigar without rum, but rum without a cigar is absurd.”

  I took a look at the cigars and ended up declining. Without really knowing how to smoke them, the exercise would’ve ended up in a fit of coughing and lost respect in the eyes of my hosts. Weakling, they would have thought.

  “Would you mind if I just smoked a regular cigarette?” I asked the two jokesters.

  Zimin nodded, blowing out another cloud of smoke. “Tell me one thing, my friend,” he said to me, “what are your plans for the game after you beat the dryad quest? We don’t have any doubt that you’ll do just that, of course.”

  “None whatsoever.” I shrugged. “What plans can you have? Well, besides sending that neural bath of yours back to the warehouse with a cry of ‘freedom!’ As long as it does end with the dryad quest…”

  “I love this guy,” Valyaev laughed. “Max, you don’t want to give him to me, do you?”

  Zimin looked at him reproachfully before turning back to me. Valyaev snorted and continued. “Everything in life, my dear Kif, comes to an end sooner or later. That includes all quests, and you can believe me there. So I’m wondering what you’re thinking about doing next.”

  “Keep publishing the paper—quests end, though the game doesn’t—well, I mean, as long as the corporation doesn’t shut the paper down,” I replied seriously.

  “We won’t be doing that,” Valyaev assured me. “People read it; I’m sure you’ve seen the ratings. By the way, I’m glad you brought that up since I want to discuss it with you. I already called your fat, old boss to say that we’re going to be increasing circulation and probably the size as well. People like the Times, and soon, it’ll be making more money than the rest of the paper put together. You wouldn’t believe how many site visitors we’re getting. We’ll need to expand your staff, too. I need to tell HR to find you another couple people.”

  “Agreed,” Zimin responded, gesturing with the hand holding the cigar. There was a ring on his finger that I hadn’t noticed before. “Kit, tell Nikonova to take care of that and run the calculations so we can bump up the circulation and double the content in a couple weeks. Kif, can you handle that?”

  “A couple people isn’t enough,” I replied, cursing to myself. “We’ll need four. Though I wouldn’t double the content since that means we’ll have to water it down and lose quality in the process. Let’s just take it up another 50%.”

  The bosses looked at each other and thought quietly for a second.

  “Sounds good,” Zimin said, breaking the silence. “There are twelve pages now, right? Let’s go to sixteen.”

  “And three people,” I added quickly. “We really do need them, since everyone’s busy as it is.”

  Valyaev quickly agreed. “Not a problem. If you need three, you’ll get three.”

  “Anyway, that’s this side of your life. What are you going to do in the game?” Zimin wasn’t letting the question go easily.

  “Nothing,” I replied with a sigh before catching their eye and muttering an addendum drearily. “Probably.”

  Zimin smiled thinly. “Excellent. You think fast. Let’s put that conversation off, though we’ll leave it open. How about some cognac? Or maybe rum? I think I still have some.”

  “Max, let’s stick with cognac; I can’t imagine our young friend likes rum. You in, Kif?” Valyaev winked at me.

  I glanced at the two of them again before waving in their direction. “Ah, why not?”

  A small bottle of cognac appeared on the desk as if out of nowhere, and it was accompanied by a small dish full of lemons as well as three snifters. I didn’t recognize the name on the bottle.

  “Chateau de Montifaud,” Valyaev said as he poured the amber liquid into the snifters. “It’s good stuff, though I prefer Frapin.”

  “I like this better.” Zimin took a glass and dipped the end of his cigar in it. “If you don’t like it, don’t drink it.”

  “Ha, when have I ever declined a free drink?” Valyaev laughed.

  I had no idea what he didn’t like about the cognac; I’d never tasted anything better. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure…

  We sat there for a little while as the liquid fire seeped its way into our blood.

  “I have a question,” I said, deciding finally to broach a topic I’d been wondering about for a while. “It’s about how the game works.”

  “Well, if it isn’t confidential, go for it,” Valyaev said complacently.

  “I can’t figure out why some NPCs act so strangely. Actually, no, that’s not it. Why do they change as the game goes along? Not all of them, and not even key NPCs—the thousands of ordinary ones. I mean, König Harald, he makes sense; he’s a special NPC with his own scripts and logic, obviously, all thought out. It makes sense that he’s pretty multifaceted, seeing as how he has a quest line, plus the fact that he’s just an important figure. But why do I have more and more fun talking with Gunther, Flosy, or even just now with Lane? When I first met Gunther in the forest, he was like a round, tin coin, but by the time we parted ways in the North, he could have run for president. And his quest line obviously wasn’t unique; I could have gotten it from any other of the knights of the temple as long as I had the reputation in hand. It’s like they progress, their personalities expanding and gaining depth, and their backstory unfolding. There’s even a point where I start thinking of them as people!”

  Valyaev grunted, while Zimin looked at him triumphantly and rubbed his pointer finger and thumb together.

  “You won fair and square, Kit. Kif, well done.”

  Pulling a clip well-endowed with money out of a jacket pocket, Valyaev started counting off 5,000-ruble bills. When he got to twenty, he handed them to Zimin with a parting shot. “But I’m drinking the rest of your cognac!”

  “You can take it with you for all I care if we don’t finish the bottle,” Zimin replied magnanimously, splitting the pile of money and giving me half.

  “Your share of the winnings.”

  They sure do like to bet. I only hoped they made a habit of betting on me—I won either way.

  “Kit, explain what’s going on,” Zimin said as he grabbed the bottle, clearly intending to pour us all some more.

  Valyaev waited for him to get to his snifter, cleared his throat, and got started. Everything turned out to be much more complicated than I expected.

  Just like in all the other games, different simulators drove all the NPCs—that much I knew. Obviously, the simulator for a non-quest farmer or little white rabbit was as simple as it gets. To make things simpler, those simulators were just a little better than the computer for chess that demolished the last world champion who agreed to face it fifteen years ago. That wasn’t long before the Great Leap Forward and right about when Moore’s Law was proven false. Everyone still remembered the computer going 18-0, with the exclamation point being a thunderstorm that fried the leader’s electronic guts.

  There were hundreds of millions of those primitive II simulators in Fayroll.

  VIP NPCs like the könig had powerful, individual II-VIP simulators. They had beaten 970-990 Rozov-Turing tests many times over in random samples made up of thousands of different volunteers. (Who are Rozov and Turing? Unfortunately, I was too cowed by Valyaev’s excited gestures to ask.)

  In other
words, they had the ability to imitate someone unable to leave a room (claiming to be sick, locked up, an athlete, an astronaut, etc.), meet people online, make friends with them, and not give them the least inclination that they weren’t actually people.

  In some cases—about 3-5% of the results—people even fell in love with II simulators. In 1-2% of the cases, the simulators could make their biological friends change their entire way of living…

  But the most interesting part was that they were ordinary NPCs—quest starters.

  About thirty years before, right when mobile networks were starting to appear, users would call and complain if they couldn’t get coverage. If important people or simply a large enough number of people complained, operators would put up a new cell tower to boost signal quality. Fayroll used a similar principle, only the other way around.

  To start off with, quest NPCs got a simulator a dozen times more powerful than the primitive model. But if the program noticed a particular NPC chatting with the same players over and over again, it permanently boosted that NPC’s II simulator by a factor determined by a number of conditions—for example, how long the players interacted with it, the level of the quest the players were completing, and the players’ VIP coefficient.

  I, as it turned out, had a VIP coefficient of 9.0, which was very high. Valyaev responded to my inquisitive look by saying that the program evaluates what players do, their age, and their education. People who did intellectual work got a much higher level than players who were physical laborers—the program’s final intelligence depended on who it talked with and for how long. Because of that, people with degrees got a higher coefficient than students. And, just to make sure nobody felt left out, the program made sure there were things everyone shared—balance was sacred.

  With all my trips with von Richter, the global and continental quests in the North, and before that also in the West, I’d pushed all the different coefficients involved almost to the maximum.

  That made it no surprise that Gunther’s simulator had reached the VIP II level. Flosy’s simulator was already pretty powerful as well.