The receptionist fakes a smile. “I’m sorry, but we don’t disclose guests’ names—”
“Could be,” a woman’s voice says from behind your shoulder. You begin to turn. “Did CapG services send you?”
“Uh, yeah,” you say, finishing the turn—
“Oh I’m sorry,” apologizes the receptionist—
“Well, you’re late.” She looks like a librarian. Mousy hair, black plastic spectacle frames, and a sternly disapproving expression. “Like the rest of this circus,” she adds, taking some of the sting out of the words. “Come on.” She turns and stalks towards the lobby staircase, not bothering to wait for you.
Ah, fuck it. She can bitch all she wants for a thousand an hour. A thousand an hour! Jesus, they’re paying me a thousand an hour for this? You follow her in a hurry.
She pauses at the top of the stairs, on the mezzanine that looks out across the city towards the international conference centre from behind the cunningly designed false frontage. “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Jack. Jack Reed. And you are Elaine Barnaby? From, uh, Dietrich-Brunner Associates?” Who are you and what do you do?
“Two out of two.” Her smile is less insincere than the receptionist’s, but you can tell it’s concealing the core message: Who is this slob, and is there some kind of mistake? “You’re not like the normal run of consultants CapG send us.”
You shrug. “That’s because I’m not one of their normal consultants.” She starts moving again, up the staircase towards the first floor like she’s got chromed pistons inside those trousers instead of legs. She probably cycles everywhere. You manage to keep up, but you’re breathing heavily by the time she barges through the fire doors and into a corridor on the second floor. “Much farther?”
“Just in here.” She waves you towards an office door, which unlocks with a clunk as she approaches. “Sit down. I want to get some things straight.”
Ah, right. This is where your thousand-euros-an-hour mirage evaporates on contact with the white heat of reality. Well, it was nice while it lasted. “Yeah, well, this job smelled funny from the first. I mean, CapG isn’t a game-development consultancy, so I was wondering why they were looking for someone with my skills. So I guess the disconnect was with the requirements you sent out?”
Barnaby shakes her head, then pushes a stray lock back behind her ear. You notice that she’s got very fine, fly-away hair. “One moment.” She flexes her hands, airboarding—there are subdermal chips in each of her finger joints, she can probably type two hundred words per minute without RSI. It’s an office world input method, not a gamer interface, but…“Let’s see. You’re a senior developer, formerly employed by LupuSoft, working on games that run on Zone-Phones. Right?”
Ding! You nod, still having trouble believing in it.
“Cool!” she says, a big fat grin spreading across her face like sunrise in the arctic spring. It’s a happy smile, too wide for that narrow face, and it makes her look unexpectedly attractive. “I wasn’t sure they’d find one in time.”
“But.”
“I need a Zone programmer,” she explains, “because I’ve got to audit a bank that’s located inside Avalon Four.”
“Audit a bank?” You know that’s got to be what Mr. Pin-Stripe was talking about, but it didn’t quite register at the time. “Inside a game?”
“Yes.” She picks up a leather conference folio that was sitting on the table and opens it. “It’s been robbed.”
“The bank. Robbed…?” All of a sudden the solid ground under your mental feet has turned into a solipsistic ice-sheet. “Hang on, that’s impossible. I think.”
“Right.” She nods, vigorously. “That’s what everyone I spoke to at Hayek Associates said. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”
“Let me get this straight. Hayek Associates are a stabilization house, aren’t they? And they’ve been stabilizing Avalon Four—”
“A stabilization house would be a company that manages the in-game economy, wouldn’t it?” She’s making odd gestures with her hands, and for a moment they distract you because it looks like knitting, only nobody would use a two-hundred-millimetre needle.
“I think we’re using divergent terminology, but yes. I say ‘second-tier industry subcontractor,’ you say ‘bank.’ But the thing is, if it’s properly designed, robbing the bank should be impossible.”
“Why? It’s a database server, isn’t it? Someone grabbed a bunch of entries from a table and deleted—”
“Not exactly.” This is giving you a headache. “Zone games don’t run on a central server, they run on distributed-processing nodes using a shared network file system. To stop people meddling with the contents, everything is locked using a cryptographic authorization system. If you ‘own’ an item in the game, what it really means is that nobody else can update its location or ownership attributes without you using your digital signature to approve the transaction—and a co-signature signed by a cluster of servers all spying on each other to make sure they haven’t been suborned.”
“So it’s not physically on a server?” You can see her trying to keep up. “Could someone forge the signatures?”
“Not really.” You’re racking your brains now, because the authentication architecture of Zone isn’t something you’ve really studied, but a couple of old university courses are raising dusty echoes in the back of your head. “It’s based on the old DigiCash protocol, invented by a cryptographer called David Chaum, back in the eighties and early nineties. He figured it could replace credit cards on the Internet—it was designed to allow anonymous transactions but prevent fraud, and cryptographers had been whacking on it with clubs for twenty years before the Zone consortium picked it. The signature mechanism is very secure—you’d need to suborn the root keyservers for the entire Zone game space…”
You trail off into silence. Whoops, you think, and kick yourself. Suddenly a grand an hour doesn’t seem like very much money at all. Ms. Barnaby is looking at you with an expression you last saw in primary third, when Mrs. Ranelagh didn’t deign to notice your wee waving hand in time to give you a toilet ticket.
“Yes?” she asks, compressing so much data into the twenty-four-bit monosyllable that if you could patent the algorithm, you’d be set for life.
“Well, uh, I…wow,” you manage. “Why did you want me?”
She unwinds by a fraction of a degree. “You’ve got the same background and experience as the programmer who’s missing from Hayek Associates.” Programmer who’s—shaddup, Jack. “Everyone else is focussing on HA’s business-level organization, they dumped the gaming stuff on me, and I’m not really an expert.” She gives a little self-deprecating laugh that raises the temperature back above zero. “So I asked for a native guide.”
Ah. That explains it. Well, no it doesn’t, you realize, but it goes at least a third of the way towards it. “What do you do?” you ask her.
“I’m a forensic accountant.” She pulls that prim, mousy, librarian face again as she taps a bunch of papers in her folio into line.
“Oh. Well, ever done any gaming?” There’s always a chance. Some of the deadliest GMs you ever ran into back in your table-top days were accountancy clerks by day.
“Not that kind. Why, do you think…?”
You glance at the blank white walls of the conference room. Perfect. “Now’s your chance. Do you have a line of expenses?”
“What are you suggesting?”
It’s still only a vague thought, but…“We could go have a sniff round Hayek Associates, but we’ll only get the cold shoulder, and, besides, they’ll be logging everything you do. I think we ought to go have a word with this programmer of theirs—”
“Can’t do that, he’s missing.”
“Missing? When?”
“The police say he disappeared, probably over the weekend.” She makes it sound like he pulled a sickie. You shudder. There’s a lot of money in a hack on Zone’s DigiCash layer, but enough for that? “We c
an’t get access to HA’s offices until the police finish whatever it is they’re doing, so we’re stuck sitting on our thumbs for today, anyway.”
“Oh. Well then.”
“Well?” She looks at you expectantly, and you realize she can’t be all that much older than you. The librarian act is elaborate camouflage. Behind it, who is she really?
“Well, if that’s the case, can your expense budget run to a taxi out to PC WORLD and a pair of high-end gaming boxes?”
“Yes, I think it would,” she says slowly. “What have you got in mind?”
“A guided tour of Avalon Four, from the inside, so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Are you game for it?”
Limbo. In mythology, it used to be where the dead babies were stacked like cord-wood, awaiting a bureaucratic salvation. Limbo: the dusty front porch of hell. In Zone terminology, Limbo is the hat-check desk.
You’ve configured yourselves for spatial proximity, so you step into reality next to the unformed noob. The noob’s not got as far as adopting any specific species or gender, so they’re present as a humanoid blob of mist floating above the marble floor of the temple. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes. You mean through my headset?”
“That’s right.” You take a look around while she’s fiddling with her senses. The temple is vaguely classical, Doric columns and marble floors around a raised central area with your traditional altar, columns of flickering light rising from it towards the airy dome of the ceiling. There’s a ghostly choir improvising atmospherically in the background. “Found the controller yet?”
“I think so—” The noob jolts violently, then sprints across the floor, slamming face-first into a pillar. “Ouch! What just happened?”
“I think you set your acceleration too high.”
An hour later she’s still fiddling with her hair, and you’re wondering if maybe you would have done better to give her an off-the-shelf identity: Answering occasional questions and helping the noob work out who she wants to be is intermittently amusing, but it’s not exactly getting the job done. On the other hand, you’ve got to admit that those asp-headed dreadlocks are very cool indeed, and more to the point, she’s not going to be able to do her job if she doesn’t at least have some idea of why people invest so much time and effort in their characters. “I think we should get moving,” you suggest.
“You think?” The noob turns to look at you and, to your surprise, raises an eyebrow: Obviously she’s been exploring the somatics while your mind was wandering. “How does this look?”
“It looks fine.” For a first attempt. The tools for creating a character in Zonespace are a lot finer and more subtle than those offered by the older MMOs, but by the same token, they’re harder to use well: Some people make a tidy real-world living just by fine-tuning other players’ avatars. What Elaine has come up with is a passable attempt at an anime medusa, with brightly textured skin like vinyl, big brilliant eyes, and colourful clothing. “Okay, to start with, you’ll need this.” You hand her a short-sword that she’s skilled up for. “And this.” A chain-mail vest, slightly rusty. “You wear them like so.” The noob nods. “And now you either need to learn how to navigate—there’s a tutorial garden outside the door over there—or I can teach you.”
“Which do you recommend?”
She’s either being very patient or she’s actually enjoying the novelty of it all. “I’d do both. Stick with me for now, then go online yourself tonight and mess around with the tutorial.”
“Okay.” She sounds sceptical. You glance sidelong out of game space and see her as she is, focussed completely on the game box’s dual screens, her glasses shutting out anything that isn’t part of the reality in front of her. Totally intent, finger-joints twitching oddly as she turns the L-shaped controller around in her hands. “How long does this usually take?”
“What? Oh, the tutorial garden outside that door over there is designed to give you the basics of how to control your body in about half an hour to an hour. Then if you pick one of the shards, there are a bunch of solo quests you can run that will train you up until you can play competitively in about a week, um, twenty to thirty hours of online time. But if all you want to do is tag along with me, then just get through the tutorial in the garden.”
“You’ve got a whole load of kit.”
“Yeah. I’m Theodore G. Bear. The G. stands for Grizzly, and I’m an ursus.” You rear up and look down your nose at her from your full three metres, then pull out the huge, brass-barreled blunderbuss you carry in your pack and sling it around your neck where she can see it: “I believe in the right to keep and arm bears.” It’s about the size of a five-pounder carronade off of one of Captain Kidd’s frigates, and it’s been personally blessed by the Spirit of the Age, which gives it a serious edge against superstitionists and darklings. You wait for the groan, then add, “The best way to do this is if I carry you, so I’m going to sit down now, and then I want you to try the mount command.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope.”
She fiddles around for a minute, then suddenly she’s sitting on your pack, which has sprouted stirrups and a natty little leather saddle. “Hey! I can ride?”
“It’s a standard skill for epic characters. Don’t try it on anyone you aren’t campaigning with, they might get pissed off. Okay, time to wander.” You stand up and head for the big double doors at the front of the temple, keeping it slow. “This is the Temple of Newborn Souls on the Island of Is, which sits in the Nether Sea just off the coast of the main continent, which is called…Hell.”
Hell lies outside the universe, and is thus largely exempt from the laws of physics. Its geometry is a Dantesque parody, for while the Nether Sea is flat, the entirety of the continent lies below sea-level, a vast trumpet bell some thousands of leagues wide stretched out across the knife-sharp line where the sea meets the swirling vacuity that forever hides this realm from Heaven.
How do you describe a continent of pain that has been hollowed out into a frozen whirlpool, forever held below the cliffs of roaring, glass-green waves that somehow flail at the abyss, without ever curling over and toppling over to inundate the red-glowing wilderness?
How do you describe the turbulent flocks of the venal, swirling like starlings in the autumn air above the muddy fields of the Somme? How to picture the power-pylon ranks of impaled, damned souls marching in synchrony across the deserts of the fourth circle? The searing black-iron skyscrapers of Dis, windows glowing with diabolical light?
It’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, of course. Bosch, as pastiched by a million expert systems executing code that procedurally clones and extrapolates a work of art across a cosmic canvas. Procedural Bosch, painting madly and at infinite speed to fill in the gaps in a virtual world, guarded by the titanic archangels of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, spinning the endless tape…
It’s funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it’s even funnier how you’re embarrassed about letting it show.
“That’s Hell. Don’t worry about it, it’s just a little joke that got out of hand.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not at all!” You lumber forward onto the stony path that meanders around the temple, heading downhill towards the beach front. “What happened was, the original set-up is where you go to acquire a body; hence, Limbo. Then a couple of the procedural content guys got bored and decided to have fun with the back-drop. This was all pre-alpha, back in the pioneering days, but they’d seen the movie”—and bloody awful you thought it was, too: an aging Patrick Stewart as Satan, hamming it up for the jeezmoid market—“and somehow managed to grab a chunk of scenery rights by a backdoor licensing deal. So we’re in Limbo, on the hill overlooking a sinkhole estate. And we’re about to teleport ourselves down to Earth, just as soon as I find the, ah—”
You find the right sacred grove, and flop down on the holy mosaic, which lights up in response: Standard Lambent Ra
diosity Tint #2, if you’re an accurate judge of such things.
“But why is it still here?”
“It’s somewhere we can banish persistent griefers.” The damned souls in this particular hell are there for violations of game law—ranging from beating up noobs and stealing to more recondite offences against virtual reality. All they can do is lie, broken and impaled upon their wheels, screaming abuse at the robot devils until their sentence is done, and they can go back to the game. “Okay, hold on. We’re going down to Vhrana.”
The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometres high scrawl across the heavens, UPDATING REALITY, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread. Someday we’re all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow. You can see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?
And then your claws click down on cobble-stones and the horizon implodes into the uneven Tudor timber-framed frontages of the high street in Vhrana.
Vhrana is the capital city of Cordua, in northern Breasil on the continent of Mu. It’s about two kilometres in diameter, built atop a mushroom-shaped dome of limestone that has come adrift from its foundations and floats about a kilometre up above the rain-forest-covered flanks of Mount Panesh. Enterprising adventurers have quarried out vast cellars beneath their picturesque guild-houses, and for a pittance you can descend through the endless passages until you come to a wicker platform overlooking the jungle. Then you can rent a bamboo-and-silk hang-glider and descend to the surface or, if you are Adept, levitate by the power of will alone.
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