The Woman Who Stopped Traffic

by Daniel Pembrey

  Which was when Ben Silverman had his epiphany. That maybe Dwayne Wisnold and his inner circle had absolutely no desire to cede further control of their company, through an Initial Public Offering or anything else. No matter what the business model turned out to be.

  * * *

  Ott picked up on the third ring: “What’s up, buttercup?”

  “Ray Ott! Got time to talk?” Natalie said brightly.

  “Always,” he said, which of course wasn’t quite true. “Been a while!”

  “It has, it really has. How –”

  “How’s the Caribbean?” he said, as she asked about his own travels. “Sorry!” they said in unison, like two awkward teenagers on a date.

  She waited for him to talk.

  “I didn’t do much last year. Actually, I did do the Tour de France – or part of it. And shipped the Porsche over for some hill climbing through the Alps. Yes. It was nice to get back to the Pacific Northwest.”

  “I miss the Northwest too! I appreciated your email earlier. I can only tell you how weird that whole fake Clamor business was.”

  “It’s OK, Natalie. I know about the circumstances of your departure from here. I don’t suppose that surprises you – that I talk to people, who talk to people. I’m just sorry that someone else knows, and wants to hurt you. They did a pretty good job. It really looked like you’d gone tilt! I imagine you’re trying to find out who’s responsible?”

  “Not right now. Believe it or not, I’m doing some consulting work for the company, in the run up to its IPO.”

  “Clamor?”

  “Yup.”

  “Isn’t Tom Nguyen over at that shop? – Say Hi to him from me.”

  “He is; I will.”

  She brought Ray up to speed on the investor presentation and the systemic trafficking problems Clamor faced: “I’ve been through the user database and run a bunch of reports. There are almost four thousand trafficked girls in the system. The higher bit is that every one of the profiles I’ve looked at links to a Russian website – secure-password protected, 256 bit key symmetric encryption from what I can tell.” She summarized various other technical aspects of her study.

  “This has to be one for law enforcement, Natalie. What’s the end goal here?”

  “I’m trying to build a complete picture of what’s going on around the company, among management and investors. Things are not right. The former head of security just died in mysterious circumstances!”

  “OK,” he said, “one of the things I’ve learned over the years here at the mother ship is that if you ask the question ‘Why?’ often enough, you eventually get to a real answer. What are you really trying to accomplish, Nat? C’mon, it’s me you’re talking to.”

  She sighed. “The consulting brief they gave me is looking like a big box-checking exercise, to reassure investors. And I’ve realized since leaving Redmond that I need a cause: something to serve. For a while, it seemed like spiritual inquiry. Only now I see that I have these real, practical skills I can use to help other people. My old job gave me a lot, Ray. It gave me financial security, but it also gave me a level of expertise and insight that is powerful. And I can put that to work, to help others.”

  “Help who?”

  “First of all, the people here at Clamor. The former head of security is dead – and I’m the closest to a replacement they got, the top priority of that role being the safety of staff and key stakeholders. No matter how the formal scope of my consulting brief reads.

  “Beyond that, I want to help protect these women –”

  “Natalie, there are law enforcement agencies to take care of that.”

  “I can help.”

  “You quite possibly could, and as the father of two teenage girls I’m all for crucifying the bastards behind that stuff. But you’d be up against some strong, dark, forces. What about your own safety?”

  “Can we talk about the data puzzle at hand?”

  “Okay, okay. I think I get the gist of where you’re trying to go. So you’ll need to widen your study. Where’s the embedded intelligence? See, this is where you tend to get your blind spot, Nat. You tend to look downstream, when you should be looking upstream, to the source. And you need to sort that out.”

  For a moment technical, yogic and other, more personal thoughts collided in her head.

  “Don’t take it personally, Nat. We’re just having a conversation here. Hey, what about that piece of software you wrote while still in college? That clever website mapper that got you recruited here in the first place?”

  It was an application she’d written for her undergraduate science degree, allowing her to understand the relationship between known points in a network.

  “But that’s precisely it: I don’t know the specific web addresses.”

  “Then let’s come at this from another angle. How do search algorithms work? How does Google decide on its search results?”

  “They index the web, –”

  “But how do they establish relevancy?”

  “Of course, by cataloguing how many users visit a given page. No, the significance of the pages users are linking from –”

  “And so?”

  “I need to look at these profile pages in terms of where traffic is arriving from –”

  “Bingo. Originating website addresses.”

  She was disappointed not to have thought of something so blindingly obvious herself. She said: “Sub-domains of Clamor?”

  He thought. “Or beyond.”

  “Ray, I owe you a latte – or ten.”

  “Pay me back in dinosaur trivia, should you come across any on your travels. I’m trying to interest my thirteen-year old daughter in the subject. Only boys – and the bathroom mirror – seem to be winning out.”

  Natalie laughed, imagining Ray’s finely tuned mental circuits shorting out on a daily basis.

  As he rang off, she was already visualizing the task. It took a while to tag the profile pages, map the upstream traffic patterns and identify the source properties. She plugged away determinedly, her head filling with mathematics and computer queries – a far cry from the incense, chanting and mysticism that seemed to have occupied her days since leaving Redmond.

  But it was worth it. For one originating website address returned over and over.

  CHAPTER 13

  Ben Silverman stood in his bachelor apartment on La Cresta Terrace in Russian Hill when the phone rang. The open fridge door cast a lurid glow across his dishevelled state. His tie was knotted somewhere down towards his navel. In one hand sat an oblong-shaped bottle of Bombay Sapphire, in the other, a litre bottle of tonic. Reconciliation seemed to lie in the automatic ice dispenser.

  He picked up.

  “It’s me,” Natalie said. “How did your meeting go? I trust that Multiworld is now locked and unloaded.”

  He realized that he hadn’t even got round to discussing Multiworld with Wisnold and Bob Swaine. “Not quite,” he said.

  “Well, I think I’ve got somewhere with the trafficking. I may have located the primary source of visitors – to the kind of profile page we saw up on the big screen last Friday.”

  “U-huh,” Ben fumbled around in his kitchenette, looking for ground coffee and filters. His voice sounded thick and slurry, even to himself.

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “That’s a strong accusation, Miss Chevalier.”

  “Ben, this is not a game. Well actually, it is a game – the originating website that is. A multiplayer online fantasy role-playing game called MultiQuest: Dark Ages.”

  “A what? What is this, Dungeons and Dragons?”

  “Not exactly, but it is based on the Arthurian legends. I’m trying to figure out what that has to do with trafficked underage girls. The best I can come up with is the historical setting. You’re an English major, right? Wasn’t King Arthur supposed to be around in the fifth century? But written about by Mallory in the fifteenth? In any case, he came after the Romans but before the Reformation.
Which means the cult of the Virgin Mary and virginity must’ve been – must be – strong, in this world. Plus, life expectancy was low, and everything happened young: marriage, giving birth…”

  “Whoa! Natalie,” Ben said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “This is far from being a normal day already. Where is this going?”

  “Is there a way to background the game’s owners? Through your bank’s research department? The homepage shows a logo in the footer saying ‘Further Online Gaming’, presumably the corporate identity.”

  “You mean could I research it.”

  “Why thank you for offering,” she said in her most southern voice.

  “Hold on,” and he finally found the dusty coffee maker, on top of the cabinets. His voice was low and confidential as he came back on: “There is this whip-smart Korean kid who just joined on as an intern.”

  “An intern,” she repeated sceptically.

  “Good kid: writes topnotch research notes. Really cuts through the crap. Winston Ma. Total gaming nut.”

  “Can you get hold of him?”

  Ben checked his Breitling: ten o’clock. The first drops of black gold were dripping into the glass coffee pot.

  “Don’t see why not. Some of these interns have been found leaving second jackets on chairs, sneaking off early. But he never seems to leave the place. Ever! Let me call him separately. I wanna explain what this is about.”

  “I’ll await your return call with anticipation, Mister Silverman.”

  * * *

  From the game’s website, she could launch MultiQuest for $30 and a commitment to pay $24 a month. It sounded like a lot, still. She keyed in her credit card details and faced a series of choices about the character she wished to assume in the game. She chose ‘Enchantress’ – and a magnificent white steed called Phariance.

  And that was it. She was in the game. An antique scroll unfurled across the screen:

  She was now looking at the back of herself, wearing a nondescript brown cape, astride Phariance, in what appeared to be a dense section of forest.

  The graphics were astonishing, with infinite shades of greenery. She could detect absolutely no delay in the way action unfolded on the screen, the horse’s rising and lowering flanks feeling entirely natural to her. There was a slightly fish-eyed effect to the view, with the low-hanging branches passing more swiftly at the outsides of the screen than in the center. Horse and rider proceeded on through the trees, her mount occasionally thrashing against underbrush. Then she heard a voice.

  “Helloo, new-comer!” it said.

  Strange, she couldn’t see anyone… She tried looking down. The point of view rotated and lowered dizzyingly.

  An orc stood beside Phariance’s rear hoof, no taller than the horse’s fetlock, looking up at her reproachfully from beneath a pudding-bowl helmet.

  “Will ye be needing any skulls cracked today?” the orc asked, his voice clear in the laptop’s speakers. He tried to scratch his head while apparently forgetting he wore a helmet.

  “Why, not today thank you,” Natalie replied politely.

  “Acchh,” the orc said, turning away huffily, almost colliding with a tree stump.

  After a while, some semblance of a path appeared – at first nothing more than a vein in the underbrush, vanishing altogether in places. Every so often, the horse brayed as though counting off horse distances in its other-worldness. Then the path widened into a sun-bathed clearing filled with gorgeous flowers: giant yellow orbs, purple dotted spires, like foxgloves yet more arresting, swaying in the late afternoon haze. Suddenly she saw that hundreds of elves populated the clearing. They hid behind plant stems, or stood on tiptoe with arms stretched round tree trunks at the clearing’s edge, faces clamped to the bark. Some of the more oblivious ones danced round in rings. They had soft, winsome, sad features – the scene was absolutely delightful. As Natalie and Phariance began to traverse the meadow, a couple skipped up and started patting the underside of the horse, getting them to stop. “You need to see the woodsman!” they chirruped. “Don’t be out on this path after sundown. This whole vale is overrun with warlocks and malevolent faeries after nightfall! Go and see the woodsman!”

  Natalie thanked them for their warning and continued on her way. She just couldn’t get over how exquisite the graphical rendering was: insects and dragonflies illuminated with breathtaking intricacy in the late, faltering sunlight…

  Her phone rang. It was Ben: “Hey Natalie, I’ve got Winston on the line.”

  “Great. Good to meet you, Winston. So you’re still at the office?”

  “Sure am. These guys keep me busy!”

  “Sounds like it. Winston, Ben tells me you know all about online games. We wanted to pick your brains about a fantasy role-playing game called MultiQuest. D’you know it?”

  “Oh man, MultiQuest.” He sighed. “Is that gonna be a smash. It’s new, still in development officially, but soft-launched into the gaming community a couple of months ago. You tried it? Un-believable.”

  “I have tried it, and I may already be addicted.”

  “I defy anyone not to be. The developers bought a Hollywood Computer-Generated Image shop a year-or-so ago. As you may know, these ‘immersive worlds’ take hundreds of people and years to develop. Games used to lag the graphics of big Hollywood movies by several years – but not so MultiQuest. It’ll add some costs to their model but boy, are they gonna clean up.”

  “Extraordinarily low latency too,” Natalie marvelled. “Almost no delay. It is like watching a movie.”

  “Yep, the game runs on peer-to-peer computer networks instead of central servers. Bet it overtakes EverCrack in its first year. It may even beat out Wow within two.”

  “Ever-what?”

  “Sorry. EverQuest is Sony’s flagship online fantasy game. It was the first real smash. Has millions of players now. They learned from Ultima Online’s mistakes. Ultima, you understand, was the granddaddy of them all. It did all the heavy lifting in terms of the reputational and resource systems that make these games so compelling. The things you accumulate as you progress through them, that is.”

  It occurred to Natalie that these resource and reputational systems may explain the twinkling set of symbols lined up along the top of her MultiQuest screen.

  “The media labelled it EverCrack because it was instantly addictive to so many kids. But EverQuest was soon beaten out by World of Warcraft, which now has twelve million players. More.”

  “Wow indeed.” Ben had difficulty believing the number, larger than the population of many countries. “But isn’t this just Dungeons and Dragons taken online?” he asked.

  “You tell that to some of these players, they may kill you. Actually, two Korean characters got into a vendetta spiral in one of these games, and one of them did end up killing the other. No, to many of these players, games have become their real lives. In Japan, there’s this phenomenon called Hikikomori. Withdrawal. Young men not leaving their rooms for months or even years at a time, living their lives through their computers. And it’s big business.”

  “How big?” Ben asked.

  “Wow charges fifteen dollars a month, one-eighty a year. Like I said, they have twelve million players and counting. That’s two billion dollars in revenue to Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s owners. And once the game is developed, operating costs are low. These worlds are self-governing. There’s hardly any customer service support. We’re talking huge profit margins here: ninety percent plus. You can put a ten times EBITDA multiple on that puppy any day of the week.”

  “What are you guys saying?” Natalie interjected.

  “That this World of Witchcraft game may be worth twenty billion dollars,” Silverman said, stunned.

  “Warcraft,” Ma corrected him. “And MultiQuest charges its players over fifty percent extra. And it’s destined to attract massively more players, believe me boys ‘n’ girls!”

  Phariance had brought her to the edge of a bigger clearing, more like the flood plain o
f a river valley this time. In the distance, mountains rose above the tree line into jagged, snow-dusted peaks. She thought she could make out a castle – and chimney smoke rising from below, up into the pale blue sky. A bird with a wingspan of what seemed like dinosaur proportions sailed leisurely across the sky. She thought to tell Ray that she’d found something dinosaur-related for his daughters when another voice came out of nowhere. Natalie turned to see an old man beside a waterfall, leaning on a crooked stick. Must be the woodsman. He was telling her, with volume turned down, to make for the village ahead – and to get there by nightfall. She clucked her tongue and the voice recognition module responded just as though she’d pushed Phariance on with her legs. Fantastic!

  “But is this for real?” Silverman was asking Ma. “Are people really spending all this time in these gaming worlds?”

  “You’d better believe it, Ben. Like I said, people are conducting their whole lives through these games now: joining guilds, trading game currencies against the US dollar, buying and selling virtual swords and land and other powerful or rare items – in the real world, that is. Just check out the relevant trading categories on eBay. Real or unreal, these interactive parallel worlds are becoming bigger and more compelling by the week.”

  “Winston, could you find out who’s behind this game?” Natalie asked.

  “MultiQuest? A private dev shop called Further Online Gaming.”

  “But who’s behind that. Who owns it.”

  “Sure. I can try.”

  “Look everywhere,” Silverman told him. “D ‘n’ B, Lexis Nexis, Venturesource. Oh, and if you happen across a company called Multiworld on your travels, let me know, would you?”