by Matt Ruff
Then it’s happening to me, too. Everything goes black. Words appear, floating in the void: ACCOUNT TERMINATED.
RIP, Blockhead of Moria.
RIP, Sir Valence.
I’m down to eighty-eight names.
Chapter 2
* * *
avatar — The audiovisual manifestation of a person or software agent in a virtual environment. Avatars can resemble any animate or inanimate object that their host computer is capable of rendering. They can also manifest differently to different observers simultaneously: In a three-way virtual conference, Alice might appear to Bob as a photorealistic rendering of herself, while Charlie sees and hears her as a cartoon character, a talking horse, or the ghost of Neville Chamberlain. This ability to project multiple aspects, known as faceting, allows for all manner of interesting exploits and shenanigans.
—Lady Ada’s Lexicon
* * *
I’m not fucking paying you.”
Jolene and I have reconvened with Brad at the Game Lobby, a virtual lounge that is popular as a pre- and post-run hangout spot. The Lobby has a cyberpunk chrome-and-neon aesthetic; there’s a bar with a Jumbotron TV that’s always tuned to your favorite channel, a laser-lit dance floor that switches over to karaoke three times a week, an arcade where you can play emulations of old coin-op video games, and everywhere, interactive screens you can use to find teammates for Call to Wizardry and a dozen other popular MMORPGs. Because of its sponsorship agreement with Tempest, the Lobby doesn’t allow advertising for sherpa services, but there’s nothing to stop you opening your own pop-up screen and surfing over to the sherpa forum on GigSearch.
The three of us stand around a table near the edge of the dance floor. I’ve invoked a cone of silence so we don’t have to shout over the music. We’ve all switched to our default avatars. Brad no longer resembles a racist Gilbert and Sullivan character, but he still doesn’t strike me as someone I’d want to know in real life. I didn’t attend a normal high school, so I was spared the ritual humiliation that a lot of nerdy kids go through, but I’ve seen enough Glee reruns to peg Brad as the kind of guy who spent his formative years stuffing nerds into lockers.
Jolene is a tall, fit black woman in her early fifties. Her avatar resembles her Facebook photos, though like most people she’s made a few edits, smoothing away some blemishes on her skin and erasing the gap between her front teeth. And of course there’s her hair, which on Facebook is natural but short, a conservative ’do that comports with her day job as an IT specialist for a Colorado Springs law firm. Her avatar sports a complex weave whose interlocking braids hang down to the small of her back. It’s a style that in real life would cost hundreds of dollars in hair extensions alone and require God knows how many hours of upkeep. But here in fantasyland, it’s free, and you don’t have to worry about strangers touching it.
If you subscribe to People magazine, you might recognize my avatar from the spread in the March 8 issue: “John Chu, Sherpa to the Stars.” My legal surname is Conaway, but I go by Chu out of respect for my mother, who raised me, and also to cut down on awkward questions like, “How come you have an Irish name when you’re Asian?”
My avatar has fewer acne scars than I do, but the main difference between us is what I call the Mom-and-Pop switch. It’s a piece of code created by a friend of mine, Djimon Campbell, who’s also biracial: Scots-English on his father’s side and Yoruba on his mother’s. Djimon’s folks were divorced but shared custody, and growing up he noticed he got treated differently depending on which parent he was with. One day as an experiment he took some public-domain morphing software and created an avatar extension that allowed him to emphasize one side or the other of his ethnic heritage, in effect presenting as a blacker or whiter version of himself. The results surprised him: He expected it to affect people’s behavior, he said, but wasn’t prepared for how strong the effect was.
I paid Djimon a hundred bucks to write a version of the code for my avatar. I use it as a business tool. The historical connection between Chinese hackers and gold farming has given rise to a stereotype that ethnic Chinese are natural-born sherpas, just as we are all biologically predisposed to score high on the SATs, so for initial meetings with clients I like to put on my Mom genes. When dealing with customer complaints, on the other hand, I find that you can never be too Caucasian.
At the moment I have the Dad setting cranked up to eleven. Even at that extreme, Brad may not consciously notice. But Jolene does.
She b-channels me: From Brad’s point of view she’s standing motionless with her hands folded on the table in front of her, but I see her lean in close, eyes going wide in astonishment. “Oh my God!” she says. “White . . . whiter . . . whitest!”
I ignore her. Outwardly I’m aping my father, but inside my head I’m in one-hundred-percent Mom mode, running a psych profile on Brad and trying to work out a strategy that will get him to cough up the rest of our fee. I could threaten to blackball him on the sherpa forum, but that would probably only make him laugh, while appealing to his sense of fairness might provoke the part of him that likes stuffing nerds into lockers. Really, anything that can be interpreted as weakness is best avoided. I decide my only hope is to throw him off balance and try to redirect his anger.
“Did you hear me? I said I’m not fucking paying y—”
“You bought gold,” I say.
The words bring him up short. “What?”
“Ivar’s Hammer would have run you at least twenty-five thousand gold pieces on the auction house. Your samurai was broke when I gave him to you, and you couldn’t have gotten more than a few hundred for your katana, so you must have bought gold.”
“So?”
“So I’m guessing you didn’t buy it from the in-game currency shop.” After years of trying unsuccessfully to bar gold farmers from Call to Wizardry, Tempest decided to undercut their business by allowing players to buy gold legally from the company store. The price fluctuates, just as it would on a real gold exchange, but is kept low enough that black market gold-selling is no longer profitable. With one exception.
“I bought the gold from a guy advertising on the same forum where I found you,” Brad says.
I nod knowingly. “Here’s the thing. The only way to make decent money selling gold in Call to Wizardry anymore is by stealing it. These guys crack players’ accounts, liquidate their characters’ possessions, and then sell the gold to”—idiots like you—“people looking for bargains.”
Brad shrugs. Players careless enough to let their accounts get hacked, the shrug says, are not his problem.
Except they are. “Everything that happens in the game world is recorded,” I say. “As soon as those hacked accounts get reported, Tempest can track exactly where the gold went. They can’t punish the thieves, because the money you paid them is outside the system, but they can punish you.”
Brad shrugs again, but with less conviction. “You don’t know it was because of me,” he says. “They busted you too.”
“Because we were with you. When Tempest traced the gold and saw you were in a party, they must have decided to hang back and eavesdrop a while. That’s how they knew we were sherpas.” I go on, improvising: “And then, to really teach us a lesson, they must have waited for the perfect moment to pull the plug. I bet they even rigged the loot table in Anastasia’s cavern to make sure we’d get a legendary drop.”
“You mean that sword you wanted? They gave that to us on purpose?”
“And then snatched it right back,” I say. I am talking out of my ass now, but Brad doesn’t know that. “Look, I understand you’re upset, but we’re not the ones who fucked you over. You want to be mad, be mad at Tempest. Be mad at the rip-off artist who sold you that gold.”
Brad looks away and appears to think it over. When he turns back to me he is nodding, and his carefully composed expression suggests he’s decided to be reasonable. It’s then I know for certain that we’re screwed.
“You’re right, it’s not your
fault,” Brad says. “But I’m still not fucking paying you.” Another shrug. “It’s like what you were saying about the company: I can’t punish the guys who really deserve it. So I guess I’ll have to settle for taking it out on you.”
Jolene breaks her silence. “What is wrong with you? Why would you want to be like—”
Brad cuts her off: “Who asked you to butt in, Beyoncé? You think I give two shits what you—”
“Dead to me,” I say. Brad disappears. His avatar still occupies the same coordinates in cyberspace, but I can no longer see it or hear it, and he can no longer see or hear me.
Jolene goes on staring across the table, listening to—and, I assume, recording—whatever Brad is saying to her. Another half minute elapses before she says, “Dead to me,” and sighs.
“Griefnet?” I ask her.
“Nah,” she says. “If he’d dropped the n-word I’d post it to Griefnet. But I can’t be too mad about ‘Beyoncé,’ even if he meant it as a slur . . . So, I guess we’d better break the bad news, huh?”
Anja and Ray are waiting for us in the Lobby arcade. Anja’s avatar looks like Anja herself did before her accident: a pretty, petite teenager with a gymnast’s physique. Anja’s family, the Kirchners, are a clan of German Argentines who live in Paraná. Anja was on her way to the summer Olympic trials in Buenos Aires when the van taking her to the airport got sideswiped by a bus. She was left partially paralyzed, and an experimental stem-cell treatment meant to repair the damage instead made things worse, rendering her unable to breathe on her own. The machine that keeps her alive has a thought-controlled VR rig that reads and interprets the electrical impulses in her cerebrum. Anja’s online 24/7, which combined with her eagerness to please and her relative indifference to money makes her the perfect employee, a fact I try not to take too much advantage of. Jolene tells me I need to try harder.
Ray Nelson presents as a thirtysomething white guy with a medium build, brown eyes, and short black hair. He has no social media presence—not under that name, at least—so I don’t know if he’s really a white guy, but if forced to guess I’d say he probably is. People masquerading as another race or gender tend to gravitate towards stereotypes. Ray’s avatar isn’t celebrity beautiful or Aryan chic, nor does it suggest an inbred hillbilly. He looks, by white guy standards, unremarkably ordinary, and who would want to pretend to be that?
Jolene has some interesting thoughts on the matter. Not long after she became a Sherpa, Inc. regular, she asked me what I knew about Ray. I told her he was the best healer I’d ever worked with. What about offline? she said. What’s he do when he’s not playing? I don’t know, I replied. He doesn’t really talk about himself. Jolene, not satisfied with that, used her IT skills to sniff out Ray’s IP address. She looked it up and found it was one of a block of IP addresses assigned to an internet provider in southeast California. The provider’s coverage area included a region of the Mojave Desert that is said to be popular with people who are legally forbidden to live near children.
You think Ray’s a pedophile because of his IP address? I said when Jolene told me about this. I don’t know what he is, she said, but my gut tells me he’s hiding something. You don’t get that vibe? Not from him, I said. But I’m starting to wonder what you haven’t told me.
One thing I do know about Ray is that the sherpa gig isn’t a part-time job for him, it’s his main source of income. Which is a concern, because good healers are hard to come by, and if he can’t make rent working for Sherpa, Inc., he won’t hesitate to join another crew. I already came close to losing him once before.
“He stiffed us?” Ray says, not even waiting for me to deliver the news. “We got stiffed, right?”
“The guy’s an asshole,” I say. “Look, it happens. Just bad luck, that’s—”
“Bad luck?” Ray’s avatar’s cheeks stay pale but I can tell that he’s red-faced with anger. “And what about that thing last week? Or the two the week before that?”
We have been going through a rough patch lately. Tonight is the third time in a month the EULA cops have busted us during a run. On the previous two occasions, our customers did pay us, but they were unhappy and left us one- and two-star ratings on the sherpa forum.
Last week’s incident was different. The run itself went off without a hitch, with the client, who went by the screen name Ollie Oxenfree, opting to add a third dungeon at overtime rates. The trouble started afterwards, when Ollie failed to meet us at the Game Lobby. My instant messages and emails inquiring about payment all bounced, and when I tried to log back into Call to Wizardry, the account I’d used for the run had been suspended: Besides stiffing us, “Ollie” had ratted us out to Tempest.
Pranked. It happens. Concern that it might happen again was the reason I’d spent so much time vetting Brad Strong on social media, making sure he was real.
“It’s not bad luck,” Ray says. “It’s Darla.”
“You don’t know that.” Sounding uncomfortably like Brad as I say this.
“She’s getting even with you, like she promised she would. And she’s making the rest of us pay, too.”
“Come on, Ray. Don’t be—”
“I’m sorry, John. I can’t afford to keep doing this.”
“What if I give you my share of tonight’s upfront money?”
Ray makes a face. “The guy only paid a quarter in advance, right? So even with your share, that’s only half of what I’m owed. And—”
“You can have my share, too,” Anja pipes up.
Jolene interjects: “Oh no you can’t. You keep your money, honey.”
“It’s not just the money,” Ray says, staying focused on me. “I don’t have a million spare accounts like you do. You know how long it takes to level up a new cleric?”
“You want a replacement for the one you lost tonight?” I say. “I’ll give you one of mine. Two—I’ll give you two.”
“Two clerics,” Ray says. This is insanely generous and he knows it. “Max level?”
“One of them is. The other’s in the high hundreds, like one-seventy or one-seventy-five.”
“I could finish leveling that one up for you,” Anja offers. “It won’t take long.”
Jolene opens her mouth to say something, then thinks better of it. But I know I’ll be hearing from her about this later.
“Two clerics,” says Ray, still mulling it over. “And your share of tonight’s upfront money?” I nod, trying not to think about my own unpaid bills. “All right,” Ray says. “I’ll stick around a while longer. But you need to go deal with Darla. Find her and kiss her ass, or whatever it’s going to take to get her to lay off.”
“I will,” I promise. “Don’t worry about it.”
Ray and Jolene log off. I give Anja the account ID and password for that second cleric I promised Ray. “Only if you really want to,” I say, picturing Jolene’s parting glance to me.
“I wouldn’t offer if I didn’t want to,” Anja says. And whether that’s true or not, I know she’ll have the cleric maxed out by the next time I see her.
“Are you feeling OK?” I ask. “About tonight, I mean.” I know that EULA busts, like anything involving loss of avatar control, are potentially traumatic for her.
She shrugs. “It happens. Do you really think Darla was responsible?”
“I think tonight was on Brad. Last week, though, yeah, could be. But don’t worry, I’ll figure something out.”
We say goodnight. Anja goes back into Call to Wizardry. I stay in the Lobby arcade, playing Gauntlet. I think about Darla.
DARLA HAS ME BLOCKED ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BUT IF YOU go on her Facebook page you’ll find a profile pic of what looks like a young Chloë Grace Moretz in combat boots and paint-spattered camo, sitting cross-legged in the grass with a paintball rifle balanced across her knees. Her green eyes look out from under sweat-matted bangs, and she’s got this wicked grin on her face like she knows something you don’t and is wondering just how long it’s going to take you to get a clue. Acco
rding to her bio, she’s Darla Jean Covington, “Virginian by blood, Arizonan by birth, Oregonian by choice.” A twenty-two-year-old white, bi-curious, cisgender, middle-class, apolitical atheist omnivore who doesn’t like being put into boxes. “Ha ha, see what I did there?” Occupation: Shit-stirrer and gamer gurl. Relationship status: Single.
We met in Call to Wizardry, in the Jurassic Swamp, where we’d gone to farm dinosaur hides and archaeopteryx feathers. The game server we were on is used primarily by South Koreans, and it was three a.m. in Seoul, so we’d both been hoping to have the swamp to ourselves. After a cursory attempt at sharing, we started stealing each other’s kills. When I bagged a rare T. rex that Darla had her eye on, she challenged me to a duel, and despite her character being four levels below mine, she kicked my ass. Twice. I offered her a job with Sherpa, Inc. on the spot.
Considered purely as a player, she was a great hire. Her dps skills were phenomenal, but she could also tank, and while she didn’t really have the temperament for healing, in a pinch she could do that, too.
In the area of customer relations, however, she left a lot to be desired. When clients were rude, Darla took it personally; when they made mistakes, or were slow to understand the rules of a boss fight, she made fun of them. This latter tendency in particular bugged the shit out of me. As I kept pointing out to her, our business model was dependent on our clients being amateurs; if they could put in the time required to become great players, they wouldn’t need to hire sherpas. I know that, Darla said, but they’re just so lame sometimes, it makes me want to scream.
When she wasn’t alienating customers, Darla poked fun at her coworkers. Anja, the German South American, got a steady stream of fugitive Nazi jokes. I got cracks about lactose intolerance and requests to share my thoughts on Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Getting under Ray’s skin was harder, since he revealed so little about himself, but Darla somehow deduced that he was Catholic, or at least sensitive to remarks about Catholics; she was still teasing out which heresies most offended him when he threatened to quit.