Paradise Clash: Bounty Hunter

by L. E. Price

  Blunt weapons increases from 164 (competent) to 171 (competent).

  They moved west through the barren fields. The endless field of wooden crosses stretched onward, the posts leaning, creaking in the musty wind as more opponents — bigger now, bloated with moldy straw and dark magic, tore themselves down from their perches and shambled to the attack.

  Codex entry: Dire Scarecrow unlocked (15% completion).

  Congratulations, adventurer! You have attained level nine.

  “Need to try something,” Prentise said. “Gnarl. Come here for a second.”

  Woody ambled over. She plucked a tuft of witchgrass from her pack and handed it to him.

  “Okay,” she said, eyes fixed on one of the floating rectangles. Data streamed in pumpkin orange. “Now pass it back to me.”

  He did. She nodded, hmming softly as she read the feedback.

  “Whatcha got?” Woody asked.

  “Something. Still working on it. Putting the pieces together.”

  Jake’s elevation to level ten came with a burst of golden confetti and the arrival of a dirty-feathered pigeon. It dropped from the overcast sky and landed with a warble of surprise on an empty wooden cross. Then it strutted from side to side on the splintered wood, cooing at Jake until he unfurled the message tied to its leg.

  “Congratulations on reaching level ten,” the parchment read. “You have unlocked the BOUNTY SENSE ability, and contracts are now available from bounty-broker NPCs. You can also use the MESSENGER command. Check out our premium store for upgrades to your basic carrier pigeon!”

  He folded the parchment. It disintegrated in his hand, turning to a shower of digital dust, and the pigeon flew off for parts unknown.

  Prentise snapped one of the hovering windows shut, then another, dismissing them with a poke of her gloved fingertip. She clambered to her feet, more of the black rectangles following her as they orbited her shoulders.

  “And you got all of these apps from a dragon hunter?” she asked.

  “I didn’t say where we got them,” Woody replied.

  She gave him a look. “Come on. Only dragon hunters obsess over texture seams and the exact count of colors in a given texture. This is some deep nerd-math nonsense.”

  “We were more interested in the marketplace stuff,” Jake said, sheathing his tonfas as he wandered over to join them. “That’s your wheelhouse, right?”

  “Right. And you were smart to reach out. Market Master is how I organize all of my trades, so I was able to follow your dragon hunter’s spreadsheet action. He was following the movement of realm keys and key fragments. Specific ones, on specific months. Here’s the thing: those are the hottest commodities in the game. If you want to raid at the highest levels and get the best gear, you need realm keys. The entire top-tier economy revolves around them.”

  “What does that have to do with the sea dragon?” Jake asked.

  “Nothing, which is why it’s curious. Anyway, you’re talking massive volumes of transactions, every single day. Your hunter was looking for some kind of signal in all that noise. Needle in a haystack. The exact same needle, as it happens, that’s been keeping me awake at night lately.”

  She rummaged in her satchel. She dug out a jagged shard of white marble shot through with green veins, about the size of her thumb. As she held it up for Jake to inspect, the veins took on a luminous glow, shedding ghostly tracers of light that faded in its wake.

  “This is a key fragment for Kryptos, fallen god of justice. I’ve had four buy-orders for Kryptos keys in the last week. People looking to scrounge up as many as they can.”

  “And that’s weird?” Jake asked.

  “Each month, three portals open. Kryptos isn’t one of them this month. His realm hasn’t been open since late last year.”

  “So maybe they think it’s due? Like a slot machine that hasn’t paid out in a while. I know that’s not how probability works—”

  “But that’s how a distressingly large number of people do think it works, right.” Prentise shook her head. “Here’s the thing. You can’t predict which realms will open. Human beings are incapable of genuine randomness: eventually, over time, a pattern will always emerge. I’ve studied the order of realm openings since they first put that feature into the game. It’s not a human-generated pattern, period. They wrote a piece of code to make that decision, and it’s straight-up impossible to know which ones will be picked on the first of the month. It’s like ‘knowing’ a winning lottery number.”

  “But these buyers,” Jake said. “They all think they’ve got the lucky ticket.”

  “And that bothers me. Bothered your hunter, too. Apparently, these binge-buys have been going on for months, concealed in the flood of everyday transactions. Which brings us to the custom data-scraper he had in his stash. Had to run it through a translator to convert it from Russian, but it’s not hard to use.”

  She banished all the windows but one, twirling the last black rectangle like a basketball on the tip of her finger.

  “Every item in the game has a reference number, so the database can keep track of it. Players have one, too. Check this out.”

  Jake leaned close and studied the window, its tight and blocky text displayed in murky orange light.

  ObjID 07b03c29d (”tuft of witchgrass”) -> PID 39a38c11b (”Prentise Roquelaure”)

  ObjID 07b03c29d (”tuft of witchgrass”) -> PID 18b97d44a (”Gnarl Grimguts”)

  ObjID 07b03c29d (”tuft of witchgrass”) -> PID 39a38c11b (”Prentise Roquelaure”)

  “It’s a tracker,” Prentise explained. “First, you register an object to the app. Then it skims the game data to follow it and records the last five players who have held that object.”

  Jake nodded slow, putting it together. “He noticed the weirdness in the market results. He was going to use the tracker to follow the money and see where those keys were really going.”

  “That’s my guess. There wasn’t any data, though; my guess is, he just got this thing and hasn’t had a chance to play with his new toy yet. Who is this guy? Can we talk to him?”

  Jake and Woody shared an uneasy glance. They’d reached the limit of what they could tell her.

  “He’s unavailable,” Jake said.

  Prentice eyed him, taciturn now.

  “I’ve got an idea,” she said. “Two of those buys I’ve got lined up? They’re going down tonight. I’ll use the app myself. I’ll make the deal, track the keys, and we can see where they end up.”

  A soft voice chimed in Jake’s inner ear: Game time elapsed. Five minutes to mandatory one-hour logout.

  Jake tapped his earlobe. “I’m out of time. Look, is that thing…traceable? Is there any chance you’ll get caught using it?”

  “Are you kidding me?” she said. “SDS can pull your account privileges for using third-party apps. If I thought there was any chance in the world they could sniff me out, I wouldn’t take the risk. No, it’s safe, totally client-side; it just scrapes for data that our decks already receive, but the game normally filters out.”

  “Be careful,” Jake told her.

  “Will do. Woody?”

  The shift to his real name felt significant. Woody caught it too, his eyes widening a little.

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “I’d appreciate a brief word in private.”

  Jake left Woody to his impending interrogation. The barren fields faded in a wash of white that turned to inky darkness, banishing Jake to the real world.

  19.

  Sprawled on his couch, Jake traded one set of aches for another. The muscle-burn from hours of fighting was suddenly gone, replaced by a razor-edged twinge along his back. He pushed himself up and tugged the magnetic clamp from the implant below his ear. The game deck whirred, lights shifting from bright green to a dull, sleepy amber.

  The storm had passed while he was in another world. Faint drizzle plinked at his windows, his office a well of shadows. He didn’t bother turning the lights on. His stomach growled. Simu
lated food couldn’t nourish his real belly; for that matter, he was craving ale that could actually get him drunk.

  One thing still nagged at him. The washer-woman. For the second time since his arrival in Paradise Clash, a computer-controlled character had tossed out their scripted lines and gone rogue. First, the welcoming priestess Cybele, granting him a kiss on the cheek along with her omen about a “drumming man” who posed as an ally but wanted Jake dead. Now he’d been granted a second warning. A warning about deep magic.

  Searching for references to the drumming man had come up empty. Maybe he’d be luckier this time.

  “Eva,” he said, “run a grid search for me. Find web pages cross-referencing ‘Paradise Clash’ and ‘deep magic.’”

  His virtual assistant didn’t keep him waiting. Her response chimed in his ear. “Fourteen references found. Would you like me to forward them to your tablet?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Jake worked better on a full stomach. He pushed himself up from the couch, wincing at a fresh twinge of backache, and grabbed his acid-pitted overcoat from the rack by the office door.

  * * * *

  Jake had a few vices. He avoided most of the harder ones. He’d seen too many addicts crashed out on a flophouse cot, mind melted from some street chemist’s bathtub concoctions, to ever go that route himself. He’d never say no to a good bottle of scotch, though. Or a bad one. When it came to milder vices, his favorite was just down the block from his office: a double-wide trailer with rusted and frozen shutters, converted into a six-seater restaurant. The neon sign above the door, shielded from the corrosive rain by a scalloped steel awning, used to read Takashi’s. The light burned out months ago and Takashi never bothered replacing it, so now it was just a sooty cursive-squiggle in the dark.

  The chef greeted him with a spatula wave as he pushed through the door. Jake rubbed his boots on the welcome mat, eyes adjusting to the hard yellow light from the heat lamps behind the bar. He could smell the food even before he took his rebreather off. Raw fish, miso stock, broiled beef, mingled with traces of sea-salt and freshly chopped herbs. All the meat was a cheap soy-based synthetic with an oily taint riding on the edges of the aroma, but Takashi had a gift for turning dodgy ingredients into culinary art.

  During the dinner rush this place would be standing-room-only, with a line waiting outside if the weather was clear. Late at night, Jake almost had the chef and his grease-stained smock to himself. Two old men sat at the bar, the kind of old that comes early, from working your fingers to the bone. They were sharing a cheap tablet, grousing over the nightly news, and they gave him a nod in passing as he took a stool at the opposite end.

  Takashi rubbed his glistening fingers on his apron. “Jake! What you want?” It all came out as one word: Whatchuwant.

  “Whatever’s good.” Same greeting as always, same reply as always. It was nice to have a little stability in life, a habit to look forward to.

  He laid his pad on the battered chrome lip of the bar and called up the search results Eva had found for him. First on the docket was a breathless puff-piece from a few years back, trying to sell readers on the then-prototype version of Paradise Clash. Jeff Dutton — Dutton Village’s namesake — took time from working on the sensory-immersion code to share his vision of the game’s magic system.

  “Nothing is more important than selling the fantasy,” he told the interviewer from Sim Horizon. “We want players who choose a magic-using class to feel just like the wizards from your favorite books and movies. You’re going to be casting spells, you’re going to be waving a physical wand — well, what feels like a physical wand. You’ll be memorizing magic words and gestures to amplify your spells. The more you put into the system, the more you’ll get out of it.”

  “You’re going beyond ‘left click to cast fireball,’” the interviewer said.

  “Way beyond. Thematically, we’re developing three schools of magic, each of which works differently. Sky magic, the powers of air and motion and flight; forge magic, spells of fire and war; and the deep magic, which calls upon mysteries hidden far beneath the land and ocean.”

  Mysteries hidden far beneath the ocean, Jake thought. Just like the one the dragon-hunters are after.

  A plastic bowl, dyed like old stoneware but glossy under the hot yellow lights, slid next to Jake’s pad. Noodles simmered in broth, and flecks of greasy synthetic pork floated on the ramen sea along with shavings of forest-green herbs. Takashi slapped a broad spoon and a folded paper napkin down next to the bowl. The chef paused, gesturing to the screen.

  “You playin’ those things now?”

  “Nah,” Jake said. “Background research.”

  The meaning didn’t translate. Takashi tilted his head.

  “For a client,” Jake said. “Job I’m doing.”

  “Ooh. My son, he’s always playing those things. Says I should open up a restaurant in there. Sell imaginary food for imaginary money. I tell him, soon as he figures out how I can spend imaginary money on real rent, let me know.”

  The chef lingered, like he always did, until Jake had his first taste. He loaded up his spoon and gave an appreciative slurp. The broth was warm, rich, spiced to perfection, and the pork tasted like a fond memory of the real thing.

  “Perfect,” Jake said.

  Takashi flashed a yellowed grin, gave him two thumbs up, and went back to cooking.

  Considering Woody’s explanation of magic didn’t line up with the article, something had clearly changed Dutton’s mind. Another search result gave him the answer, culled from a forum thread.

  “So I was browsing the Paradise Clash wiki and there’s a whole bunch of stuff that changed between concept and release,” wrote a commenter. “What ever happened to SDS’s original magic design? Sounded cool.”

  “Sounded cool but wasn’t. I was in the first wave of beta testers. Deep magic never even made it into the game, they couldn’t get it working right, and everybody took forge magic because sky was way underpowered. Eventually they scrapped the whole thing, went back to the drawing board, and that’s how we got the eight-school system we have now.”

  Never made it in. But an NPC — or a hacker who messed with the game’s internal code and wrote that NPC’s lines — wanted Jake to be worried about it. He ate his ramen and skimmed the other search results. More of the same, confirming what he already knew. Takashi brought him a can of beer, lime green aluminum with Korean lettering and the faded picture of a chrysanthemum stamped on the can. It didn’t taste like a flower. Didn’t taste much like beer, either, more like a chemical slurry, but it gave him the buzz he was looking for.

  He was missing a piece. There was something bothering him, nagging at the back of his mind. He recognized that feeling; it usually came around when he had made a wrong assumption, somewhere along the course of a job, and steered himself into a ditch without knowing it. Jake let his thoughts drift, handing the wheel over to his subconscious mind, and found himself listening to the old men at the end of the counter as they turned their complaints from world politics to local events.

  “—so these rich kids, think they were from Holiday Arcology, came down and tried to safari on Banton Way. Smashin’ windows, flippin’ cars—”

  “They get a Banton welcome?” the other man asked.

  “Damn right they did. Whole street filled up with shotguns and tire irons. Shoulda seen the looks on those punks’ faces. One of them pissed his pants, swear to God. Made ‘em all go home in nothing but their underwear.”

  “They ain’t raised right,” the second man said, hoisting his beer.

  “All the money in the world and no class. It starts at home, that’s what I always say. I mean, who’s teaching these kids?”

  There it was. The missing piece, the place he’d steered himself wrong. Jake had been thinking about his flight on the airship, coming one step closer to insinuating himself into Trevor’s circle of dragon-hunting friends. Rolen the Blue was convinced; Magnolto was a harder sell, and
he was the one calling the shots.

  Now Jake had a hunch. He chased it on his tablet, fingers tapping out a course for Barrymore Arcology Academy Three’s website. The muffled conversation between Magnolto and Rolen drifted back to him.

  “I’ve got a test tomorrow morning and I have to get ready for it. I’ve got an hour, tops, before I have to log off.”

  “A test?” Rolen had replied. “Were you going to warn me about that?”

  “History, not comp-sci. You aren’t even in my history class.”

  He’d assumed Magnolto was telling him about a test he had to take. A fellow student, hitting the books. The truth was as close as a faculty photograph, Mr. Rickey wearing a sweater and a bow tie. Under his toothy, freckled smile, the caption read, “Mr. Rickey, Computer Science and History, Grades 9 through 12.”

  “Hey there, Magnolto,” Jake murmured into his can of beer.

  The teacher — and sponsor of the school’s immersive simulation program — was also the ringleader. He’d taken students under his wing, even built them a secret clubhouse at the bottom of a virtual sea, to draw them into his personal obsession with hunting the sea dragon.

  And now Trevor was in a coma, his mind trapped somewhere in the wilds of Paradise Clash. Jake couldn’t prove there was a connection, not yet, but it didn’t feel like a coincidence.

  He checked the time. Then he finished his ramen and his beer. He bought a second can for the road. It was too late to do anything else tonight and his office sofa was singing its siren song. Tomorrow morning, though, first thing, he had an appointment with Mr. Rickey. The man just didn’t know it yet.

  20.

  Jake couldn’t remember his dreams. Something about an airship, something about falling, grasping for something just out of his reach. He had only stepped out of the shower a couple of minutes ago, pulling on his undershirt and boxers, when a call pinged in on his flatscreen.

  “Caller ID is from Strategic Design Simulations,” his Eva said. “Shall I take a message?”