by Matt Ruff
Tonight that won’t be a problem; I’m feeling plenty stupefied. PayPal has just sent me confirmation of a deposit of one hundred thousand dollars. A part of me is wondering how Darla could have faked this, while another part is trying to figure out if it’s too late to avoid reporting the income to the IRS. If I’d believed for a moment I might actually get the money, I’d have handled it differently.
I’m almost at the bar when a Chinese woman catches my eye. The avatar looks a lot like my aunt Penny; it’s not her, but the woman smiles as if she expects me to recognize her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Do I know you?”
“That’s a good question, John,” she says. Her accent is British, with just a hint of Cantonese. “Let’s find out. Do you have another of those red key fobs?”
The question takes a moment to process. Then, feeling as though I’ve downed a bucket of virtual martinis, I hold out my hand and conjure another copy of my public encryption key.
She doesn’t take it. “It’s not for me,” she says, “it’s for you.” She points at the little blue speaker pin on her blouse. “Try it.”
I aim the red key fob. Press the button.
“It’s me,” the blue pin says, in my voice. “John Chu.”
“There you go,” says the woman. “I suppose we must be twins.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m you, John.” She laughs. “Or maybe I’m someone with ‘extraordinary capabilities.’”
“What do you want?”
“I want you to take the job. You’ll really be working for me, of course; I’ll pay you twice what Smith’s offering you.”
“Two hundred thousand dollars a week? And what else are you going to want, for that?”
“One thing at a time. For now, just tell Smith yes.” All the humor goes out of her expression and she gives me a look that is terrifying in its seriousness. “Don’t disappoint me, John. You won’t like what happens if you do that. At all.”
She smiles again. Winks.
Then she’s gone.
Chapter 3
* * *
memory palace — A virtual architectural space used for storing data. The original memory palaces were purely mental constructs: Ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians would populate an imaginary structure with mnemonic images and then “walk through” the space in the course of giving a speech. Although this old-school art of memory still has its enthusiasts, modern memory palaces tend to be digital and optimized for VR.
—Lady Ada’s Lexicon
* * *
The People article described me as a “third-generation gold farmer,” which is technically true, but for a lot of readers conjures up a false image of a Chinese immigrant kid whose grandpop played video games in a Beijing internet café. In fact the Chus have been American since long before there was an internet, or video games. Or video.
My great-great-great-grandfather, Chu Yi-wei, emigrated from Guangdong Province in 1871. He helped build the Northern Pacific Railway and started an import/export business in Seattle. In 1886, Seattle’s white Knights of Labor rioted and tried to run the entire population of Chinatown out of the city. The local militia intervened at the last minute, but Yi-wei decided to play it safe and left town anyway, taking his family and his business to San Francisco.
It was Chu Yi-wei’s great-grandson, Joseph Chu, who first got into gold farming. Grandpa Joe was a graduate student in mathematics at U.C. Berkeley. In his free time, he played a primordial MMORPG called Ultima Online. The game was popular enough to support a side economy in which players exchanged virtual treasure for real-world cash. Grandpa used the money he earned selling gold pieces and magic items to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Judy Chen.
My mother was born a year after Grandpa and Grandma got married. One night two years after that, they left Mom with a sitter and went to their favorite dim sum house to celebrate their anniversary. During the meal, a neo-Nazi named Charles Clayton came into the restaurant. California law at the time banned semiautomatic “assault weapons” like the AR-15 rifle, so Clayton had armed himself with a pair of pump shotguns, loaded with a type of heavy slug that is normally used to hunt elk. He had fired both guns empty and switched to a backup revolver when he found my grandparents hiding under a table.
My mother was sent to Hawaii to live with the family of my great-aunt Tamara, who was a cryptographer for the Navy. Mom grew up on the base at Pearl Harbor. She learned how to program at an early age and played her fair share of computer games, though her tastes ran more to Sim City and Civilization.
It was my father, David Conaway, who was that generation’s gold farmer. Like Grandpa Joe he was a grad student, but in English rather than math; his pursuit of a doctorate was mostly a way of buying time to finish the epic sci-fi/fantasy novel he’d been working on since freshman year. Dad considered his online gaming a form of research for the novel. He did a lot of research, earning a nice chunk of change selling gold in the process—though his profits were dwarfed by the size of his student loans.
The summer before his dissertation was due, Dad flew to Hawaii, ostensibly to unplug and get some writing done, but really to bum around the beach for a couple months. Mom, who’d joined the Navy straight out of high school, had just completed her first term of enlistment and was trying to decide whether to reenlist or go to college. It was the wrong time for her to get involved with anyone and Dad was one of the worst romantic choices imaginable, but as Mom later explained to me, she’d done everything right in her life up to that point and was overdue for a screw-up. Also, contrary to the stereotype about basement-dwelling video gamers, Dad was hot.
They’d been together a little more than a month when Mom found out she was pregnant. Dad, in a grand gesture towards taking responsibility, asked Mom to marry him; Mom said she needed to think about it. She’d been careless but she wasn’t stupid, and her instincts were telling her that this wasn’t someone she could depend on in the long run. She probably would have turned him down no matter what, but two things happened that made the decision much easier.
The first thing was that Dad cheated on her while he was waiting for her answer. That destroyed any lingering illusions she might have had about his suitability as a husband.
The second thing was that Mom got a visit from a captain with U.S. Cyber Command. The captain was recruiting for a new covert anti-terrorism task force called Zero Day, and Mom’s service record showed that she had the aptitude and skill set they were looking for. It was a dream assignment, one that Mom assumed her status as a soon-to-be single parent would disqualify her for. But when she told the captain she was pregnant, he didn’t even blink. Zero Day was different, he said, a twenty-first-century organization designed to deal with twenty-first-century realities, more forward-looking even than Cyber Command. Child care issues didn’t faze them. Also, Great-aunt Tamara, now a rear admiral with Naval Intelligence, had personally recommended Mom for the job. So it was hers if she wanted it.
Mom said yes to the captain and no to my father. When Dad came back around, begging for another chance, Mom ghosted him, vanishing into thin air as only a member of covert services can. She took me with her.
I spent my childhood shuttling from top-secret command post to top-secret command post. I wasn’t always sure what continent I was on, but that didn’t matter; like the other kids whose parents worked for Zero Day, my real home was the internet.
It was a good time to be a digital native. After decades of overhyped promises, fully immersive VR was finally becoming a thing, and the tech Zero Day had access to was a generation ahead of what was available on the commercial market. We had great tech support, too, and bandwidth was never a problem.
Of course our every move in cyberspace was monitored, to make sure we didn’t blab about what our folks did. We couldn’t really talk about ourselves, either, so we made up fake autobiographies to use with online friends and acquaintances. That could get weird sometimes, but trying on different identit
ies is something all children do, and for us it was a form of patriotism.
I suppose it’s no surprise that I gravitated towards role-playing games, though for me it’s always been as much business as entertainment. Selling gold was my version of having a paper route, and the adventurers’ guild I founded with the other Zero Day kids became an early prototype for Sherpa, Inc.
At seventeen I left the Zero Day nest and moved to San Francisco, where I’d gotten early admission to Berkeley. My plan was to go for a double major in computer science and business administration, then found a game company and create my own MMORPG. I did attend a few classes, but much of my freshman year was taken up by the same sort of research that had so obsessed my father.
Since it seemed we were more alike than I’d realized, I decided to track Dad down. I found him in Los Angeles. After Mom left him he gave up on his novel and made his way to Hollywood, where he eventually established himself as a screenwriter.
He was happy to meet me, and after some initial awkwardness the feeling turned out to be mutual. In the three years since, we’ve gotten to be good friends. Dad doesn’t farm gold anymore, but he does play Call to Wizardry, and we’ve got a standing monthly game night.
My father has told me many times how sorry he is that he wasn’t there when I was growing up. He says he wants to make it up to me, and I believe him. Though he hasn’t taken credit for it, I’m almost certain it was him who gave Janet Margeaux my contact info: He was a script doctor on her Catwoman reboot. And if I were looking for investors for my game company, or needed an emergency loan to help cover my tuition debt, Dad would be my first call.
But he’s the wrong parent for my current situation. I don’t need an ex–gold farmer; I need a god gamer, someone with a top-down view who can see the big picture and help me figure out what’s going on. Someone with power and access to special codes, who, if things get desperate, really can change the rules.
My mother keeps a memory house on MySpaceII. It’s got a number of unpatched security vulnerabilities, so even if you’re not on the approved guest list, it’s a simple hack to come inside and check out the virtual mementos that collectively tell the story of my mother’s life—or rather a story, since a lot of it is fiction. While you’re poking around, the house will be getting into your business, too: back-tracing your internet connection, grabbing any unsecured files off your computer, and running a threat assessment. If you’re an ordinary identity thief, you’ll probably be left alone (although, spoiler alert: the tax returns in the office filing cabinet are fakes, with a randomly generated address and social security number). If the house decides you’re a Real Threat, your info will be forwarded to a Zero Day counterintel agent with the power to make you unhappy.
I’m on the guest list, so I don’t need to hack in. I come right in the front door, wave to the picture of Grandpa and Grandma on the fireplace mantel, and proceed to the back bedroom that would have been mine if this were a real house I’d grown up in. I open the secret door that only I can access and step into what looks like the reception area of an ultramodern office suite.
A Korean-American woman in a Navy ensign’s uniform smiles at me from behind the reception desk. Her name is Maggie Kim, and I’m not sure whether she’s human or a software agent. “Hello, John,” she says. “Your mother is on a call right now, but she’ll be free in a few minutes.”
I look around idly while I’m waiting. My picture hangs on the wall beside an American flag and a photo of the president; the Janet Margeaux People issue tops a stack of magazines on a side table. This room is a kind of avatar, capable of manifesting differently to different observers, and I assume these details would not be visible to anyone else. Mom wants me to know that she loves me and is proud of me, but given the nature of her work, she can’t risk letting other visitors learn what she cares about.
“John,” Ensign Kim says, “she’s ready for you now.”
I don’t have to move. The room morphs around me, becoming Mom’s office. “Hey, kiddo,” Mom says. “What’s up?”
She is standing in front of a window that looks out at a mountain range in twilight. Even before I spot the second moon in the sky, I know the view is fake, selected at random from a library of thousands of imaginary vistas. If you need to know Mom’s physical location, she’ll tell you; if you don’t, she’s not giving away free clues.
But there are limits to how much you can conceal from people who are close to you. My mother has always been a morning person, and the chipper tone of her voice tells me she’s only been awake for a couple of hours. It’s close to midnight here on the West Coast, so assuming Mom got up at the crack of dawn like she always does, that would put her somewhere in Europe or Africa. But the kind of circumstances that would require her physical presence in Africa would also keep her from getting a good night’s sleep, and she sounds well-rested. Europe, then: probably the Zero Day base in Berlin.
Her smile tells me something, too. Once when I was a kid I asked my mother whether it bothered her to kill people for a living. She said she didn’t have a problem with killing people who deserved it, but added that her job wasn’t really like that. Mostly what she did was study people, to learn why they acted the way that they did and figure out how to convince them to act differently. And when she did need to hurt someone, she preferred to get them to do it to themselves, by tricking them into making bad choices. When my mother smiles the way she’s smiling now, it means that one of her subterfuges has worked; somewhere in the world, some Real Threats have been coaxed down a wrong path and are now either dead or wishing they were.
It’s a good mood to have caught her in, and I try to make the most of it. “I need your help with something,” I say. I tell her about my job interview with Smith and Mr. Jones. Her eyebrows go up at the mention of the hundred thousand dollars, but when I get to the Chinese woman in the bar I can see her turn skeptical. “You don’t buy it.”
“That this woman you bumped into is some sort of government agent? It sure sounds like she wants you to think that. But.”
“What about the part where she forged my encryption key?” I say. “Is that— Can you guys actually do that?”
This is one of those questions that my mother will never give a straight answer to. She turns it into a hypothetical: “Suppose someone did figure out a way to subvert public-key cryptography. Do you really think they’d brag about it just to impress you? It’s a dramatic gesture, but it doesn’t make sense.”
“She had my private key, though.”
“That doesn’t mean she forged it. She could have just hacked you and stolen it.”
“I practice safe computing, Mom. I learned it from you.”
“I didn’t teach you everything,” she says. “And there are always exploits. Tell me, do you know anyone who might want to pull a prank on you? Someone you trust, or trusted, enough to run a piece of software they sent you without checking it out first?”
Darla, I think. But. “I don’t know anybody with a hundred thousand dollars to blow on a prank.”
“The money’s interesting,” Mom acknowledges. “Have you tried spending it yet?”
“No. I thought I’d better talk to you before I did anything.”
“What account is it in?”
I tell her, and she gets this distracted look that means she’s either b-channeling someone or checking a pop-up screen. Then her avatar’s eyes refocus on me and she says, “Very interesting.”
“What?”
“The money is real,” Mom says. “And it was transferred from a bank in Burma.”
If you pay any attention to the news you know that Burma has become notorious lately as a money-laundering haven for Chinese and Southeast Asian mobsters. “So it’s like a numbered account?”
“All bank accounts are numbered. Burmese accounts are designed to keep their holders anonymous, even from people like me.” She thinks a moment. “All right. You’re going to take the job.”
“I am?”
“Special features. So you’re going to be watching my back on this?”
Mom smiles that smile. “I can use a new project,” she says.
Part Two
Online Games
When interacting with other players, a little kindness goes a long way.
—Call to Wizardry loading screen tip
Chapter 4
* * *
meet cute — A scene in a romantic comedy where a couple meet for the first time and realize they are attracted to one another. Such scenes are traditionally meant to be endearing, but modern versions of the meet cute often include behavior that in real life would be grounds for a restraining order.
—The New Devil’s Dictionary
* * *
Fuck you, perv,” is the first thing Darla ever said to me.
It was in the Jurassic Swamp, right after she beat my ass the second time. Newly resurrected, I lay on the ground with my armor in tatters; at higher gib settings, you could see bone fragments and bits of intestine scattered all around me. Darla was an orc that day—a green-eyed orc, with long blond hair—and she loomed above me with her scimitar, ready for round three. When I asked her if she’d like to make some money, I guess it must have sounded like a weird come-on.
“Fuck you, perv.”
“Wait!” I said, before she could kill me again. “I didn’t mean it like that. My name’s John Chu, and I run a sherpa crew, Sherpa, Incorporated? Maybe you’ve heard of us?”