The Jennifer Morgue

by Charles Stross

  “He’s fallen into a game and he can’t get out.” I cross my arms. “I told him precisely what not to do, and he went ahead and did it. Not my fault.”

  Angleton makes a wheezing noise, like a boiler threatening to explode. After a moment I recognize it as two-thousand-year-old laughter, mummified and out for revenge. Then he stops wheezing. Oops, I think. “I believe you, boy. Thousands wouldn’t. But you’re going to have to get him out. You’re responsible.”

  I’m responsible? I’m about to tell the old man what I think when a second thought screeches into the pileup at the back of my tongue and I bite my lip. I suppose I am responsible, technically. I mean, Pete’s my intern, isn’t he? I’m a management grade, after all, and if he’s been assigned to me, that makes me his manager, even if it’s a post that comes with loads of responsibility and no actual power to, like, stop him doing something really foolish. I’m in loco parentis, or maybe just plain loco. I whistle quietly. “What would you suggest?”

  Angleton wheezes again. “Not my field, boy, I wouldn’t know one end of one of those newfangled Babbage machine contraptions from the other.” He fixes me with a gimlet stare. “But feel free to draw on HR’s budget line. I will make enquiries on the other side to see what’s going on. But if you don’t bring him back, I’ll make you explain what happened to him to his mother.”

  “His mother?” I’m puzzled. “You mean she’s one of us?”

  “Yes. Didn’t Andrew tell you? Mrs. Young is the deputy director in charge of Human Resources. So you’d better get him back before she notices her son is missing.”

  JAMES BOND HAS Q DIVISION; I’VE GOT PINKY and Brains from Tech Support. Bond gets jet packs, I get whoopee cushions, but I repeat myself. Still, at least P and B know about first-person shooters.

  “Okay, let’s go over this again,” says Brains. He sounds unusually chipper for this early in the morning. “You set up Bosch as a server for a persistent Neverwinter Nights world, running the full Project Aurora hack pack. That gives you, oh, lots of extensions for trapping demons that wander into your realm while you trace their owner’s PCs and inject a bunch of spyware, then call out to Accounts to send a black-bag team round in the real world. Right?”

  “Yes.” I nod. “An internet honeypot for supernatural intruders.”

  “Wibble!” That’s Pinky. “Hey, neat! So what happened to your PFY?”

  “Well . . .” I take a deep breath. “There’s a big castle overlooking the town, with a twentieth-level sorceress running it. Lots of glyphs of summoning in the basement dungeons, some of which actually bind at run-time to a class library that implements the core transformational grammar of the Language of Leng.” I hunch over slightly. “It’s really neat to be able to do that kind of experiment in a virtual realm—if you accidentally summon something nasty it’s trapped inside the server or maybe your local area network, rather than being out in the real world where it can eat your brains.”

  Brains stares at me. “You expect me to believe this kid took out a twentieth-level sorceress? Just so he could dick around in your dungeon lab?”

  “Uh, no.” I pick up a blue-tinted CD-R. Someone—not me—has scribbled a cartoon skull-and-crossbones on it and added a caption: DO’NT R3AD M3. “I’ve been looking at this—carefully. It’s not one of the discs I gave Pete; it’s one of his own. He’s not totally clueless, for a crack-smoking script kiddie. In fact, it’s got a bunch of interesting class libraries on it. He went in with a knapsack full of special toys and just happened to fuck up by trying to rob the wrong tavern. This realm, being hosted on Bosch, is scattered with traps that are superclassed into a bunch of scanner routines from Project Aurora and sniff for any taint of the real supernatural. Probably he whiffed of Laundry business—and that set off one of the traps, which yanked him in.”

  “How do you get inside a game?” asks Pinky, looking hopeful. “Could you get me into Grand Theft Auto: Castro Club Extreme?”

  Brains glances at him in evident disgust. “You can virtualize any universal Turing machine,” he sniffs. “Okay, Bob. What precisely do you need from us in order to get the kid out of there?”

  I point to the laptop: “I need that, running the Dungeon Master client inside the game. Plus a class four summoning grid, and a lot of luck.” My guts clench. “Make that a lot more luck than usual.”

  “Running the DM client—” Brains goes cross-eyed for a moment “—is it reentrant?”

  “It will be.” I grin mirthlessly. “And I’ll need you on the outside, running the ordinary network client, with a couple of characters I’ll preload for you. The sorceress is holding Pete in the third-level dungeon basement of Castle Storm. The way the narrative’s set up she’s probably not going to do anything to him until she’s also acquired a whole bunch of plot coupons, like a cockatrice and a mind flayer’s gallbladder—then she can sacrifice him and trade up to a fourth-level demon or a new castle or something. Anyway, I’ve got a plan. Ready to kick ass?”

  I HATE WORKING IN DUNGEONS. THEY’RE DANK, smelly, dark, and things keep jumping out and trying to kill you. That seems to be the defining characteristic of the genre, really. Dead boring hack-and-slash—but the kiddies love ’em. I know I did, back when I was a wee spoddy twelve-year-old. Fine, says I, we’re not trying to snare kiddies, we’re looking to attract the more cerebral kind of MMORPG player—the sort who’re too clever by half. Designers, in other words.

  How do you snare a dungeon designer who’s accidentally stumbled on a way to summon up shoggoths? Well, you need a website. The smart geeks are always magpies for ideas—they see something new and it’s “Ooh! Shiny!” and before you can snap your fingers they’ve done something with it you didn’t anticipate. So you set your site up to suck them in and lock them down. You seed it with a bunch of downloadable goodies and some interesting chat boards—not the usual MY MAG1C USR CN TW4T UR CLERIC, D00D, but actual useful information—useful if you’re programming in NWScript, that is (the high-level programming language embedded in the game, which hard-core designers write game extensions in).

  But the website isn’t enough. Ideally you want to run a networked game server—a persistent world that your victims can connect to using their client software to see how your bunch o’ tricks looks in the virtual flesh. And finally you seed clues in the server to attract the marks who know too damn much for their own good, like Peter-Fred.

  The problem is, BoschWorld isn’t ready yet. That’s why I told him to stay out. Worse, there’s no easy way to dig him out of it yet because I haven’t yet written the object retrieval code—and worse: to speed up the development process, I grabbed a whole bunch of published code from one of the bigger online persistent realms, and I haven’t weeded out all the spurious quests and curses and shit that make life exciting for adventurers. In fact, now that I think about it, that was going to be Peter-Fred’s job for the next month. Oops.

  UNLIKE PETE, I DO NOT BLUNDER INTO BOSCH UNPREPARED; I know exactly what to expect. I’ve got a couple of cheats up my non-existent monk’s sleeve, including the fact that I can enter the game with a level eighteen character carrying a laptop with a source-level debugger—all praise the new self-deconstructing reality!

  The stone floor of the monastery is gritty and cold under my bare feet, and there’s a chilly morning breeze blowing in through the huge oak doors at the far end of the compound. I know it’s all in my head—I’m actually sitting in a cramped office chair with Pinky and Brains hammering away on keyboards to either side—but it’s still creepy. I turn round and genuflect once in the direction of the huge and extremely scary devil carved into the wall behind me, then head for the exit.

  The monastery sits atop some truly bizarre stone formations in the middle of the Wild Woods. I’m supposed to fight my way through the woods before I get to the town of, um, whatever I named it, Stormville?—but sod that. I stick a hand into the bottomless depths of my very expensive Bag of Holding and pull out a scroll. “Stormville, North Gate,” I in
tone (Why do ancient masters in orders of martial monks always intone, rather than, like, speak normally?) and the scroll crumbles to dust in my hands—and I’m looking up at a stone tower with a gate at its base and some bint sticking a bucket out of a window on the third floor and yelling, “Gardy loo.” Well, that worked okay.

  “I’m there,” I say aloud.

  Green serifed letters track across my visual field, completely spoiling the atmosphere: WAY K00L, B08. That’ll be Pinky, riding shotgun with his usual delicacy.

  There’s a big, blue rectangle in the gateway so I walk onto it and wait for the universe to download. It’s a long wait—something’s gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren’t as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.)

  Inside the North Gate is the North Market. At least, it’s what passes for a market in here. There’s a bunch of zombies dressed as your standard dungeon adventurers, shambling around with speech bubbles over their heads. Most of them are web addresses on eBay, locations of auctions for interesting pieces of game content, but one or two of them look as if they’ve been crudely tampered with, especially the ass-headed nobleman repeatedly belting himself on the head with a huge, leather-bound copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Are you guys sure we haven’t been hacked?” I ask aloud. “If you could check the tripwire logs, Brains . . .” It’s a long shot, but it might offer an alternate explanation for Pete’s predicament.

  I slither, sneak, and generally shimmy my monastic ass around the square, avoiding the quainte olde medieval gallows and the smoking hole in the ground that used to be the Alchemists’ Guild. On the east side of the square is the Wayfarer’s Tavern, and some distance to the southwest I can see the battlements and turrets of Castle Storm looming out of the early morning mists in a surge of gothic cheesecake. I enter the tavern, stepping on the blue rectangle and waiting while the world pauses, then head for the bar.

  “Right, I’m in the bar,” I say aloud, pulling my Project Aurora laptop out of the Bag of Holding. (Is it my imagination, or does something snap at my fingertips as I pull my hand out?) “Has the target moved?”

  N0 J0Y, B08.

  I sigh, unfolding the screen. Laptops aren’t exactly native to NWN; this one’s made of two slabs of sapphire held together by scrolled mithril hinges. I stare into the glowing depths of its screen (tailored from a preexisting crystal ball) and load a copy of the pub. Looking in the back room I see a bunch of standard henchmen, -women, and -things waiting to be hired, but none of them are exactly optimal for taking on the twentieth-level lawful-evil chatelaine of Castle Storm. Hmm, better bump one of ’em, I decide. Let’s go for munchkin muscle. “Pinky? I’d like you to drop a quarter of a million experience points on Grondor the Red, then up-level him. Can you do that?” Grondor is the biggest bad-ass half-orc fighter-for-hire in Bosch. This ought to turn him into a one-man killing machine.

  0|< D00D.

  I can tell he’s really getting into the spirit of this. The barmaid sashays up to me and winks. “Hiya, cute thing. (1) Want to buy a drink? (2) Want to ask questions about the town and its surroundings? (3) Want to talk about anything else?”

  I sigh. “Gimme (1).”

  “Okay. (1) G’bye, big boy. (2) Anything else?”

  “(1). Get me my beer then piss off.”

  One of these days I’ll get around to wiring a real conversational ’bot into the non-player characters, but right now they’re still a bit—

  There’s a huge sound from the back room, sort of a creaking graunching noise. I blink and look round, startled. After a moment I realize it’s the sound of a quarter of a million experience points landing on a—

  “Pinky, what exactly did you up-level Grondor the Red to?”

  LVL 15 C0RTE5AN. LOL!!!

  “Oh, great,” I mutter. I’ll swear that’s not a real character class. A fat, manila envelope appears on the bar in front of me. It’s Grondor’s contract, and from the small print it looks like I’ve hired myself a fifteenth-level half-orc rent-boy for muscle. Which is annoying because I only get one henchthug per game. “One of these days your sense of humor is going to get me into really deep trouble, Pinky,” I say as Grondor flounces across the rough wooden floor towards me, a vision of ruffles, bows, pink satin, and upcurved tusks. He’s clutching a violet club in one gnarly, red-nailed hand, and he seems to be annoyed about something.

  After a brief and uncomfortable interlude that involves running on the walls and ceiling, I manage to calm Grondor down, but by then half the denizens of the tavern are broken and bleeding. “Grondor pithed,” he lisps at me. “But Grondor thtill kickth ath. Whoth ath you wanting kicked?”

  “The wicked witch of the west. You up for it?”

  He blows me a kiss.

  LOL!!! ROFL!!! whoops the peanut gallery.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  NUMEROUS ALARUMS, EXCURSIONS, AND OPEN-PALM five-punch death attacks later, we arrive at Castle Storm. Sitting out in front of the cruel-looking portcullis, topped by the dismembered bodies of the sorceress’s enemies and not a few of her friends, I open up the laptop. A miniature thundercloud hovers overhead, raining on the turrets and bouncing lightning bolts off the (currently inanimate) gargoyles.

  “Connect me to Lady Storm’s boudoir mirror.” I say. (I try to make it come out as an inscrutable monkish mutter rather than intoning, but it doesn’t work properly.)

  “Hello? Who is this?” I see her face peering out of the depths of my screen, like an unholy cross between Cruella De Vil and Margaret Thatcher. She’s not wearing make-up and half her hair’s in curlers—That’s odd, I think.

  “This is the management,” I intone. “We have been notified that contrary to statutory regulations issued by the Council of Guilds of Stormville you are running an unauthorized boarding house, to wit, you are providing accommodation for mendicant journeymen. Normally we’d let you off with a warning and a fifty-gold-piece fine, but in this particular case—”

  I’m readying the amulet of teleportation, but she seems to be able to anticipate events, which is just plain wrong for a non-player character following a script. “Accommodate this!” she hisses, and cuts the connection dead. There’s a hammering rumbling sound overhead. I glance up, then take to my heels as I wrap my arms about my head; she’s animated the gargoyles, and they’re taking wing, but they’re still made of stone—and stone isn’t known for its lighter-than-air qualities. The crashing thunder goes on for quite some time, and the dust makes my eyes sting, but after a while all that remains is the mournful honking of the one surviving gargoyle, which learned to fly on its way down, and is now circling the battlements overhead. And now it’s my turn.

  “Right. Grondor? Open that door!”

  Grondor snarls, then flounces forwards and whacks the portcullis with his double-headed war axe. The physics model in here is distinctly imaginative; you shouldn’t be able to reduce a cast-iron grating into a pile of wooden kindling, but I’m not complaining. Through the portcullis we charge, into the bowels of Castle Storm and, I hope, in time to rescue Pete.

  I don’t want to bore you with a blow-by-blow description of our blow-by-blow progress through Cruella’s minions. Suffice to say that following Grondor is a lot like trailing behind a frothy pink main battle tank. Thuggish guards, evil imps, and the odd adept tend to explode messily very soon after Grondor sees them. Unfortunately Grondor’s not very discriminating, so I make sure to go first in order to keep him away from cunningly engineered deadfalls (and Pete, should we find him). Still, it doesn’t take us too long to comb the lower levels of the caverns under Castle Storm (aided by the handy dungeon editor in my laptop, which allows me to build a bridge over the Chasm of Despair and tunnel through the rock around the Dragon’s Lair, which isn’t very sporting but keeps us from being toasted). Which is why, after a couple of hours, I’m beginning to get a sinking feeling that Pete isn’t actually here.

  “Brains, Pete isn’t down here, is he
? Or am I missing something?”

  H3Y d0NT B3 5AD D00D F1N|< 0V V XP!!!

  “Fuck off, Pinky, give me some useful input or just fuck off, okay?” I realize I’m shouting when the rock wall next to me begins to crack ominously. The hideous possibility that I’ve lost Pete is sinking its claws into my brain and it’s worse than any Fear spell.

  OK KEEP UR HAIR 0N!! 15 THIS A QU3ST?? D0 U N33D 2 C0NFRONT S0RCR3SS 1ST?

  I stop dead. “I bloody hope not. Did you notice how she was behaving?”

  Brains here. I’m grepping the server logfile and did you know there’s another user connected over the intranet bridge?

  “Whu—” I turn around and accidentally bump into Grondor.

  Grondor says, “(1) Do you wish to modify our tactics? (2) Do you want Grondor to attack someone? (3) Do you think Grondor is sexy, big boy? (4) Exit?”

  “(4),” I intone—if I leave him in a conversational state he won’t be going anywhere, dammit. “Okay, Brains. Have you tracerouted the intrusion? Bosch isn’t supposed to be accessible from outside the local network. What department are they coming in from?”

  They’re coming in from—a longish pause—somewhere in HR.

  “Okay, the plot just thickened. So someone in HR has gotten in. Any idea who the player is?” I’ve got a sneaking suspicion but I want to hear it from Brains—

  Not IRL, but didn’t Cruella act way too flexible to be a ’bot?

  Bollocks. That is what I was thinking. “Okay. Grondor: follow. We’re going upstairs to see the wicked witch.”

  Now, let me tell you about castles. They don’t have elevators, or fire escapes, or extinguishers. Real ones don’t have exploding whoopee cushions under the carpet and electrified door-handles that blush red when you notice them, either, or an ogre resting on the second-floor mezzanine, but that’s beside the point. Let me just observe that by the time I reach the fourth floor I am beginning to breathe heavily and I am getting distinctly pissed off with Her Eldritch Fearsomeness.