Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  Csongor considered it. You would think that by this time he and Yuxia and Marlon would know everything there was to know about one another, but the rigors of the voyage had left little time for getting acquainted; Yuxia knew that Csongor’s father was deceased, but little else about his family. “My mother is a nice lady with high blood pressure who has little strokes all the time. I will send her a note saying I’m out of the country on business, but I can’t possibly tell her what has been going on—it would be like throwing her off a bridge. My brother is in Los Angeles working on his dissertation and I talk to him maybe four times a year.”

  Yuxia seemed taken aback that any family could be so small and poorly organized.

  “What I really want to do is some research,” Csongor said. “I want to see if there is any information about a black, English-speaking Islamic terrorist whose code name or real name might be Jones.”

  I’d like you to have a look at the pistol that Mr. Jones is holding up to my neck, Zula had said on the pier.

  “For all we know,” Csongor went on, “there are pictures of Mr. Jones up on the Internet, and if I can identify him by name, then I could consider going to the authorities and telling them ‘So-and-so was in Xiamen a couple of weeks ago and he has a hostage.’”

  “Which authorities?” Marlon asked.

  “I have no idea,” Csongor said.

  “Whoever cares,” Marlon suggested.

  They dove into the food, almost literally, and did not speak much for a while. It was the finest meal of Csongor’s life, and he cursed himself for not having bought ten times as much of it.

  “Do you want to get in touch with your family, Yuxia?” Csongor asked, when he was able to speak again. This created a pang that was obvious on her face and that left both of her companions somewhat aghast. “It is all I think about,” she said eventually, “but I want to wait until we are somewhere that feels safer.”

  Csongor went into the bathroom and found Yuxia’s and Marlon’s damp clothes strung up all over the place. All of them had been wearing the same garments for two weeks, rinsing them occasionally in salt water. He turned on the shower and climbed in fully clothed, using bar soap to squeeze lather in and out of the fabric, then stripped down and left it all on the floor of the tub while he washed himself, letting the soapy water run off his body and down into the clothing, treading on it with his feet. Finally he spent a minute squeezing rinse water through them, then turned off the shower and began toweling himself off. He was a hairy man, a living advertisement for the body waxing industry, and it seemed as though his pelt was capable of holding a liter of water. He wrung out his clothing as best he could and hung it up wherever he could find a place, but despaired of its ever getting dry. But under the sink was a hair dryer stashed on a little ledge, which he pulled out and used to dry his underwear, then his trousers—which he had long ago cut off at the knees to make into shorts—and then his shirt.

  After he was dressed, Yuxia and then Marlon rotated through the bathroom, drying out their clothes and putting them on, and then they went downstairs and across the street to NetXCitement!, where they devoted a little time to getting themselves situated. The standards and practices here were radically different from what prevailed in a Chinese wangba, and this took Marlon a bit of getting used to. Here there was no need to show ID, and there were no PSB cops hanging around to keep an eye on things. The place might be large by the standards of this provincial town but it was tiny compared to a Chinese wangba; it had no more than twenty terminals, plus counter space where perhaps another twenty patrons could plug in their own personal laptops. And instead of being filled with Chinese teenagers mostly playing games, it played host to a smattering of old white men mostly looking at racy pictures.

  Having negotiated these cultural rapids, Marlon claimed the fastest and most expensive computer in the place, on the grounds that running T’Rain consumed a lot of memory and processing power, and Csongor rented a run-of-the-mill one nearby.

  There was yet more culture shock as Marlon discovered that T’Rain was not even installed on his computer and that he would have to download it, a procedure that in some precincts would have consumed a great many hours. Here it took twenty minutes. For whatever reason, NetXCitement! had an extremely fast Internet connection.

  Meanwhile Csongor had been thinking about Yuxia’s predicament. “I think I know of a way you could send a message to your family without giving away our location,” he said.

  He had been clicking around on the computer he’d rented and found that it was so riddled with spyware, trojans, and viruses as to be nearly unusable. And so he had begun a project of rebuilding the machine from scratch. He divided its drive into two partitions, a big one and a small one, and reinstated its existing bootleg copy of Windows, and all of its other bootleg software, viruses, and so on onto the big partition. Then he set about downloading Linux onto the small partition. This entailed a seemingly endless number of reboots, during which he had plenty of time to explain matters to Yuxia. “We’ll get Tor running on this thing,” he said. “It will anonymize all of our IP traffic, provided we use the right browser … as long as you don’t come out and tell your family where we are, no one will be able to trace us using IP addresses.”

  The news that she’d soon be able to check in with her family had powerfully affected Yuxia. Csongor was preoccupied for a time with explaining to her why the procedure was taking so long, why he had to keep rebooting the machine, why he insisted on opening up many small files filled with cryptic Unix jargon and making small edits to them, what it meant to get Tor configured and installed. When he finally got the machine up and running a fully secure, firewalled, anonymized installation of Linux—a feat for which he might have charged a commercial client lots of euros—he handed the machine over to her and then got up and strolled five paces over to where Marlon was just in the final phases of getting T’Rain online.

  “How does it work?” Csongor asked. “Your character goes to this place—”

  “He has been there the whole time,” Marlon said, “waiting in his HZ for me to log in again.”

  “Okay, but anyway he has vassals?”

  “About a thousand of them.”

  “Wow.”

  “Only twenty, thirty actual players,” Marlon said, “members of the da G shou. But each one has a few toons—”

  “Toons?”

  “Characters. And they have vassals—low-level toons who are basically nothing more than robots running around the world. Anyway. I am the LL—Liege Lord—of all of these. Any gold that they have hidden, I can see, I can pick up—it belongs to me.”

  “So your toon can go to this place—”

  “Torgai.”

  “Yeah. Where you live. Where the Troll lives.”

  “He doesn’t have to go there. He’s there already. His HZ is in a cave, in the middle of it.”

  “Okay, so he can pop out of his cave and run around and see gold that would be invisible to anyone else. He can pick that gold up and put it in his bag.”

  “Maybe. If he can go outside at all.” Marlon had, Csongor noted, opened a browser window instead of logging immediately into T’Rain. He seemed to be scanning Chinese-language chat rooms. Csongor could not read the text, but it was obvious from the artwork surrounding it that this chat room was all about T’Rain; it was some kind of board where players hung out to exchange information and opinion, and the Chinese text was studded here and there with “LOL,” “FFS,” “w00t,” and other staples of text messages.

  “Why would you not be able to go outside?”

  “Someone might be waiting for me. Or the whole place might be conquered by an army who came to grab all the gold. They would pounce on me as soon as I came out of the cave.”

  “Can’t you hide yourself? With invisibility spells or something?”

  “It depends on their power. If you let me read for a minute, I can find out what has been happening around this place.”

  Having b
een given the brush-off, Csongor went back over to check in on Yuxia, who was composing a message in a browser window. He was eager for her to finish so that he could do some anonymous browsing of his own, but she was taking her time about it. As well she might. How would she go about explaining herself to her family?

  “Remember,” he suggested, “even if the cops in China can’t trace your location, they can read your email. So don’t tell them anything you wouldn’t want the cops to know.”

  “I am not stupid,” Yuxia said levelly.

  Doubly brushed off, Csongor drifted back to Marlon, who seemed to have made short work of his reconnaissance. “We are lucky,” he said. “It is all total chaos there. No one has hegemony. Perfect for me.”

  “Sounds dangerous.”

  “I can fight off bandits and raiders,” he said coolly, “just not an army.”

  With that he launched the T’Rain application proper and typed in a username and a password. A gallery of characters was displayed on the screen, all blinking and breathing and scratching themselves. Beneath each one was a parchment-textured scroll labeled, apparently, with its name. Most of these were written in Chinese. Csongor’s eye was drawn to one of these, which he had seen before, depicted in the original ransom note. It was a troll. Its name, neatly printed in Latin letters, was REAMDE.

  Marlon double-clicked on Reamde. The image grew to fill the screen, taking on resolution and three-dimensionality as the others faded and flattened. Reamde spun around, turning his back on them. They were now looking over the troll’s shoulder. He had been sleeping in a cave and had just now stood up to look about his surroundings. In a quick series of preprogrammed movements, Reamde pulled on clothes, armor, weapons, and boots and slung a bag over his shoulder. Then, responding to commands from Marlon’s fingers, he broke into a trot, headed down the cave toward the exit: a starry night sky, showing through a rough aperture. A few moments later Reamde stepped out into the world of T’Rain.

  Day 18

  “Bingo,” Corvallis said. “He is on the system. He just stepped out of his cave. It looks like he’s going to be active for a while.”

  It was 8:23 A.M. Richard was standing next to his Land Cruiser beside the runway at Elphinstone’s tiny airport, watching a Cessna climb into the sky and bank south. He had just stuffed John and Jake into it and handed a couple of ancient C-notes to its pilot.

  Just twenty-four hours ago, John and Richard and Jake had landed here. A single day of sitting around had been quite enough, so John had volunteered that he might rent a car and drive Jake back across the border and spend a little time with Jake’s family in Idaho. Richard—hoping it didn’t seem as if he were rushing his brothers out the door—had called a bush pilot of his acquaintance and made it happen on about thirty minutes’ notice. The roar of the Cessna’s takeoff run had drowned out the sound of Richard’s phone ringing, but he’d felt it vibrating against his butt and whipped it out moments before it had gone to voice mail.

  “Do we know where he is?” Richard asked.

  “Still working on that, but we think the Philippines.”

  “That would kind of make sense,” Richard mused. “The shit hits the fan in China, he gets out of the country, lies low for a while, finally pops his head up when he needs cash.” The Cessna was just a faintly droning mote in a cloudy pink sunrise. He let his bottom slam down into the ragged seat of the Land Cruiser.

  “Shit,” Richard said, glancing back and forth helplessly between his phone and the gearshift lever. “I can’t drive stick and talk on the phone.”

  “Probably just as well,” Corvallis mused, “on those twisty mountain roads.”

  “Just keep track of what he’s up to, okay? Don’t do anything that would spook him.”

  “I’m not even logged in,” C-plus said. “Just tracking him with database queries.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Mostly looking for his friends. Putting a posse together.”

  “So that he can go and gather gold,” Richard said. “I’ll be at the Schloss in half an hour. Call me if that seems warranted.” He hung up, stuck his phone into his jacket pocket, then opened the door and dumped tepid coffee out of his travel mug and got that stowed. There was some crap on the dashboard; he swept it off onto the floor, where it was going to end up anyway. Then he peeled out of the parking lot and began to haul ass in the direction of the Schloss.

  CSONGOR, WHO WAS no T’Rain player, was struck by how little screen real estate was actually devoted to viewing the world of the game. From what little he could see, it was quite a beautiful place, with highly detailed, realistically rendered landforms, scattered clouds drifting overhead illuminated by a full moon, and trees whose leaves and branches stirred convincingly in the wind. A bat was orbiting in the clear space before the cave’s entrance, and crickets, or something, were singing in the undergrowth. But he had to perceive all these things through a sort of rectangular porthole, not much larger than his hand, in the middle of a screen that was otherwise claimed by windows: one showing a full-length portrait of Reamde himself, with an array of statistics plotted in diverse colorful, ever-fluctuating widgets. Large-scale and small-scale maps showing where he was in the world. A sort of radar plot with bogeys of different colors moving about on it. Three different chat windows in which conversations, 75 percent in Chinese and 25 percent in English, streamed upward in fits and starts, like steam rising from boiling pots. Gridded displays that apparently depicted the inventory of weapons, potions, and magical knickknacks that Reamde was carrying on his person. A sort of roster, tall and skinny, running the entire height of the monitor on its far left, each entry consisting of a thumbnail portrait of a T’Rain character; the character’s name, sometimes in Chinese and sometimes in European glyphs; and various fields of data that, Csongor guessed, indicated whether that person was logged on, where they were, and what they were up to. Perhaps three dozen entries were packed into the list, and all but three of them were grayed out. Even as Csongor was noticing this, Marlon moved the cursor to the top of the list and clicked a column heading that caused it to be rearranged: the few who were shown in full color were all moved up to the top. He clicked on one of them and began typing in a pop-up window that suddenly appeared next to the character’s icon. The process of typing in Chinese was completely mysterious to Csongor; as Marlon’s fingers hopped all over the keyboard, a little window flashed onto the screen as some piece of software tried to guess what Marlon was trying to say and suggested possible completions. The sheer quantity and variety of data being rammed into Marlon’s face by, Csongor guessed, at least a thousand discrete user-interface widgets on this huge screen, was overwhelming to his tired brain. But Marlon seemed to have been banking his energies during their sea voyage and was at last getting an opportunity to do what he did best.

  A red bogey had been approaching on the radar display and Csongor had been worried that Marlon, preoccupied with his chat windows, was not noticing it. But then he fired off a complex command key combination that caused almost all of the windows to vanish, leaving only the ones that were relevant during combat. Something happened very fast, making no sense at all to Csongor, whose ideas as to what video-game combat should look like were, he guessed, hopelessly old-fashioned. The few times he had tried to play popular video games in Internet cafés in Budapest he had been vanquished in microseconds by opponents who, to judge from the nature of their taunting, were very young, possibly still in the single digits. Csongor now got the sense that Marlon was one of those kids who had grown up without losing any of his skills. In any case, the foe who had been sneaking up on Reamde was dead, and his corpse looted, in less time than it would have taken Csongor to reach out and get a sip of coffee from a cup next to the keyboard, and then all the windows verged back on the screen and Marlon resumed his chat.

  Csongor had been assuming that absolute, respectful silence was the correct behavior for him to be engaging in, but Marlon seemed so adept at multitasking that this now s
eemed like ridiculous, fusty, Old World etiquette. “Getting in touch with the da G shou?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Marlon said.

  “So they are okay?”

  “At least some of them.” He typed for a while. “They have been waiting.”

  “For you?”

  “For a way to get the money out.”

  “How is that going to work, anyway?” For Csongor had learned enough to know that the da G shou all used self-sus accounts, which was to say that they were not linked to credit cards. This was convenient for Chinese kids just starting out, but made it harder to transfer profits out of the world.

  “It can be arranged,” Marlon said. “There are money transfer agents who do it. Normally we work with ones in China but we can find others, anywhere in the world. They can send us money here, by Western Union.” Marlon looked up from the screen for the first time since he had logged in. “I saw a Western Union sign as we were coming in on the bus. It is only half a kilometer from here.”

  “So tomorrow morning, when they open up, we could have cash waiting for us.”

  “I could have cash waiting for me,” Marlon corrected him, “but I will be glad to share it with you and Yuxia.”

  Csongor flushed slightly but kept on talking through his embarrassment: “What is the procedure?”

  “Try to find some more of the da G shou and get them logged on,” Marlon said. “One of them can go looking for a foreign money transfer agent and the rest of us can create a raiding party and collect gold.”

  “You have never dealt with non-Chinese money transfer agents before?”

  “Why would we?” Marlon asked.

  “Let me make some contacts,” Csongor proposed, looking over at the computer he had secured earlier. Yuxia had finished typing and now appeared to be web surfing. “I can probably find one in Hungary. If not there, then Austria.”

  “Are those near—I don’t know the name—dot C H?”

  It took Csongor a moment to put this together. Then he understood it as a reference to Internet domain names ending in “.ch.”