by Matt Ruff
And yes, I am aware of the absurdity of this train of thought. We’re talking about someone who tried to blow up my life and my business. Who tricked me, tased me, and threatened to kill me. Who threatened Anja’s life too, and nearly got Jolene killed, and started a panic in a crowded building that could easily have killed or injured many more people. Ostensibly he did all this to get even with me for lying to him, but really he did it to entertain himself. For the lulz. Mom’s right, Darryl is a sociopath—and as sexual turn-offs go, what’s a little facial hair, compared to that?
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just shallow.
Done with his stroll, Darryl sits in the public-school chair and looks directly at me for the first time since he entered.
“Darla,” I say, to break the ice.
“Perv.” He smiles, but it feels perfunctory. Then he says: “I’m bored shitless.”
As he would be. There are no video games in prison, of course, but inmates in the SHU don’t get television, either. They are allowed reading material, but in a jailhouse version of the old desert island meme, they are limited to a maximum of five books at any given time. And if they tire of their current selection and want to swap out titles, they can’t just run down to the prison library; they have to make a written request to the warden’s office. The response time is measured in months.
“My mother can get you out of here,” I tell him. “Agree to cooperate, and you’ll be moved to a medium-security facility, with extra privileges. If the information you provide is valuable enough, you’ll eventually be released to home detention, though you’ll still owe restitution for the medical bills of that cop who got shot.”
“What are they going to want for that?” he asks. “The bank in Burma?”
“To start with. They want to know how you hacked in, and everything you learned when you did.”
“I can give you that. No problem.”
“Also, your hacker friend Orville. Is his last name Slusarski?”
“He never told me his last name. But there can’t be too many Orvilles who know how to tunnel past a Burmese firewall.”
“The NSA wants to talk to him,” I say. “They want to know where he is.”
He shakes his head. “I can’t tell you that.”
“Because you don’t know, or—”
“I’m not going to rat out Orville. He always played fair with me, and I’m no backstabber.”
“Darryl, come on. You really want to stay in here?”
“Ask me something else.”
There is nothing else. Finding Orville Slusarski is a top government priority, and Mom has made it clear that this point is non-negotiable—that it is, in fact, the only thing of real value that Darryl has to offer. But I do have some questions of my own that I’d like answered.
“The girl in the videos,” I say. “The one you modeled your avatar on. Who is she?”
He grins like he was expecting this question. “You know those videos are fakes, right?”
I nod. Mom’s tech people figured it out: The girl’s image was added into pre-existing footage. The technique is basically the same one used to skin and reskin avatars; the editing software is widely available, and popular for making internet memes. Doctoring video crudely is easy, but to match the image to the background so that the fakery is hidden takes significant skill, along with lots of time and processing power—way too much effort for a typical prankster. But Darryl’s not typical. “That was originally me, in the paintball video,” he says. “And in the balloon. Most of the other clips were found footage, cool stuff I saw on the net that I thought Darla would be into.”
“But the girl,” I say. “Who is she?”
“Why do you want to know? So you can stalk her on Facebook? It’s me you had the hots for,” he says, and in his smirk, in the set of his shoulders as he leans forward, I see Darla again. I feel her. But the beard still doesn’t do it for me. He picks up on this, and I can tell he’s disappointed. “She’s nobody,” he says, sitting back in the chair. “I mean, literally nobody. I made her up, used morphing software to create a composite from a bunch of different images. Tweaked it for days, until I had it just the way I wanted. Then I put together a backstory for her, started building her Facebook page. I’d done that sort of thing before, made puppets, dozens of them, but Darla, she’s my masterpiece.”
“Why? What for?”
“You know why,” he says. “Don’t tell me you never pretended to be someone else online. It’s fun, playing Darla. Getting people to believe in her and watching how they react. There are the ones like you, who fall head over heels for her, and that’s fun in one way”—he winks—“and then there are the others, the assholes who try to grief on her, and that’s really fun. That never gets old, taking someone who thinks they’re a badass and teaching them who the real badass is. Darla, she’s perfect for that.”
“The bigger bitch,” I say.
“Always.” He smiles for real this time, enjoying himself.
“What about that day we met in the Jurassic Swamp?” I ask next. “Was that just a coincidence, or did you—”
“Come looking for you on purpose?” He laughs. “What are you thinking, that I saw one of your ads and said to myself, ‘Gee, this one sherpa guy who sounds exactly like all the other sherpa guys must be super interesting, I guess I’ll go pretend to bump into him by accident’?”
“OK, never mind.”
“Aw, don’t be hurt.” He laughs again. “Who knows, maybe it was fate. I went to the swamp that day because I was bored and wanted to blow off steam, so I was definitely looking for someone to mess with, and there you were . . . I could tell how much you loved it when Darla kicked your ass, and when you offered me that job, I was like, OK, sure, let’s see what kind of fun I can have with this. But then,” and he hesitates, before continuing in a more serious tone, “then you showed me that eye thing, that mod you use, and your Mom-and-Pop switch, and there was just something about that, that made me think, I don’t know, that maybe we were . . .”
“What? Kindred spirits?” I’m not buying it.
“I know you think I’m bullshitting,” he says. “But it’s true. I felt a connection, and I know you did, too.” Scowling: “Of course if I’d known I could never trust you, I’d have cut your ass dead right there.”
“That probably would have been the smart move,” I say. “But if you had done that, you’d never have gotten the chance to play Mr. Jones.”
“True.” He brightens.
“What was the plan, with Jones?” I ask. “Did you always intend me to think he was Kim Jong-un?”
“It was never that specific. I assumed you’d figure out where the money came from—I was going to have Ms. Pang drop a clue-anvil on your head, if you didn’t—so it made sense that Jones was some kind of powerful Asian dude, someone the PRC security ministry would be interested in. A dictator with a creative itch was an obvious choice, but I was open to other possibilities. A Chinese government official or spymaster gone rogue, or a drug kingpin, or even a pirate.”
“Why would a pirate want to study MMORPGs?”
“I don’t know. But that was the genius part of the plan—I didn’t need to know, any more than I needed to know exactly who Mr. Jones was. I had you to figure it out for me. I knew you would, once the money got your imagination rolling. All I had to do was plant the seed, and let Mr. Profiler do the work.” He grins. “It was amazing, watching you connect dots that weren’t even there.”
“Yeah, you really had me going. Well played, I guess.”
“Oh, come on, don’t be like that. I was pranking you, sure—I was mad—but don’t pretend it wasn’t fun for you too.”
“Fun?” I say.
“OK, maybe not all of it . . . But solving the mystery? Thinking the Supreme Leader of North Korea had picked you to be his personal sherpa? Come on, that was fun.”
I want to tell him he’s wrong, but I remember how it felt, catching Mr. Jones out on the Juche calendar, and
laying out my theories for Mom. “I suppose it had its moments.”
“Moments!” He snorts. “It was the best fucking game you ever played. The best game I ever played, too.”
“Well, I’m glad we both had fun, Darryl.” Thinking as I say this that it is likely to be the last game he will play, for a long while.
He reads the thought in my expression. I watch him mull it over in silence.
“So,” he says. “About Orville . . .”
“Yes?”
“What if I don’t tell you exactly where he is, but I give you a really good hint? Enough for the NSA to figure it out on their own.”
“Why not just give up the location?”
“I told you, I’m not a backstabber. But Orville likes to brag about how much smarter he is than the people he used to work for, always one step ahead, so as long as I leave him a chance to see it coming, it’s not like I’m actually betraying him.”
“Darryl.”
“The odds will be stacked in your favor, don’t worry. But I’ve got to leave him an out. A small one.”
“Five percent?”
“Hey, that’s all I’d need . . . So what do you say?”
“It’s not my call,” I tell him. “But I can talk to Mom about it, I guess.”
“One other thing,” he says. “Even if I do get home detention, there’s going to be some pretty big restrictions on what I can do, right? Like, no computers?”
“I don’t know. But I suppose so, yeah.”
He nods. “Yeah, that doesn’t work for me. Not being able to go online, that’s worse than being locked up. I wouldn’t mind staying in here if I had my rig.”
“I understand,” I say. “But you know they’ve got you flagged as a cyberterrorist.”
“And that’s totally cool!” he says. Like it’s a badge of honor. “I get that they’re not going to want to just turn me loose. But maybe there’s another way to handle it, so everybody benefits.”
He pauses, waiting to see if I’ll figure it out on my own, which of course I do. We’ve seen a lot of the same movies.
“You want a job?” I say. “With Zero Day?”
“I know it sounds like a bullshit Hollywood plot twist,” he tells me. “Black hat hacker gets caught and joins the good guys. But before you get all practical on me and say it’s never going to happen, really think about it. That game I ran on you, I did that all by myself—well, except for the bank hack, but even that, I convinced Orville to tell me how to do it. And the rest of it, with you, I was playing all those different characters, sometimes two or three at the same time . . . Like, when you had your first meeting with Smith and Mr. Jones, I know you were suspicious, but did it even occur to you that the same person might be controlling both avatars?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I thought that hard about the actual mechanics of it. And I mean, yes, OK, you did fool me. But—”
“And you’re not stupid,” Darryl says. “Gullible as fuck, sure, but even with the money, I had to work my ass off to make sure you bought it. And if I could do that with you, on my own, imagine what I could do with some support. You want to run a game on the real Kim Jong-un? Have your mom give me some resources, and I’ll show her what I can really do.”
He is delusional, I realize. The prospect of being stuck in prison has made him crazy. Or maybe he was nuts all along. I think this, but I try very hard not to let it show, because I know it will piss him off and make him uncooperative. But even as I struggle to control my expression, another thought comes to me, out of left field, and before I can stop myself, I laugh.
He thinks I’m laughing at him. He doesn’t like it. All at once I see Darla again, at her most furious. “What?” he demands. “What’s funny?”
“It’s not you,” I say. “I just . . .”
“What? What?”
“It just occurred to me . . . You’re never going to apologize, are you? For any of it. You’re never going to say you’re sorry.”
“I’m not sorry,” he replies, indignant. “So why the fuck would I say I am?”
“No reason at all,” I say. And as insane as it may sound, what I feel, in that moment, is a warm and genuine affection towards him.
Oh Darla, I think.
“OK,” I tell him. “I’ll talk to Mom about the job. I can’t make any promises, but I’ll talk to her.”
“THE BABY DRAGONS POOP KRAZY GLUE?” MOM SAYS. “DID I hear that right?”
“The magical equivalent of Krazy Glue,” I clarify. “The point is, if we break too many eggs, we can’t maneuver, and then the mother dragon just kills us.”
“Why doesn’t she break the eggs herself, then?”
“Because she’s a mindless drone, not a three-dimensional chess–playing badass like you, Mom.”
“Ooh, flattery!” Mom laughs and looks over her shoulder at Jolene. “Are you hearing this?”
Tonight was supposed to be my monthly game night with Dad, but Sony moved up the deadline on his latest rewrite, so he’s got to work. On a whim I messaged Mom and asked if she’d like to give Call to Wizardry a try, and to my surprise she said sure. After hearing a basic rundown of the different character roles, she decided she wanted to try tanking, so I gave her my best paladin and took her to the transmog parlor. There’s something about the way Mom’s head looks on top of a giant suit of plate mail that makes it seem like she’s wearing power armor, so if she starts flying around like Iron Man, I won’t be surprised.
I thought about inviting Anja along tonight as well, but it’s still a bit too soon. So we’re running the Caverns of Malice as a four-person team, which is easy enough if you’ve got a good healer. And we do: His name is Roy Wilson, and he presents as a thirtysomething white guy with a medium build, brown eyes, and short black hair. I haven’t checked Roy out on social media, so I couldn’t swear under oath that he is actually a white guy, nor could I hazard a guess as to his real-world location—but I think I might hire him.
“So don’t break the eggs,” Mom says. “Don’t stand in the acid, and steer clear of the tornadoes. Anything else?”
“Nope. Just keep holding aggro, like you’ve been doing. We’ll ace this.”
“Cool,” she says. Then, grinning mischievously, she tosses her shield into the air and catches it, spinning, on one finger. It’s an impressive move—one that is not included in the paladin avatar’s default repertoire. The only way Mom could do this is by turning off kinetic photoshopping. Which means that she knows what kinetic photoshopping is, and that it can be turned off, without me telling her about it. And if she’s done that much advance research on her own, you can bet she’s read up on the boss fights for this dungeon, too.
She’s been humoring me again. But what can I say—it makes me happy when she does that. And in turn, I’ll do what I can to make her happy too, to keep things in balance between us. Which, in a nutshell, is what I know about love.
Mom tosses her shield up one more time, catches it and grips it firmly. Twirls her sword for good measure.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s do this.”
Acknowledgments
I was introduced to computer games in the late 1970s, while volunteering as a playtester for Simulations Publications, Incorporated. SPI made and sold tabletop wargames, but the company had a minicomputer that ran Colossal Cave and a text-based Star Trek simulator, and a couple of Radio Shack desktop machines that gave me my first taste of programming. It was SPI founder James Dunnigan who told me about this newfangled “role-playing game” called Dungeons & Dragons; intrigued, I ran out to the Compleat Strategist hobby shop and bought a copy, and nothing has ever been the same since. Thanks, Jim!
Julian Dibbell’s 2006 book Play Money was a useful early primer on the subject of gold farming. Karen Glass and Caitlin Foito motivated me to turn my half-baked ideas on the subject into an actual story. My depiction of North Korea and the Kim regime draws from many sources, but Paul Fischer’s book about the Shin Sang-ok kidnapping, A Kim
Jong-il Production, was particularly helpful. Other people who provided inspiration and/or technical support include Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Susie Bright, Raph Koster, Cory Doctorow, Monica and Jack Ruff, Anna Leube, Barbara Lehenbauer, Thomas Zenker, Nurri Kim, and Adam Greenfield.
As a career path, novel-writing may be even more impractical than game design. I am indebted to the people who continue to make it possible for me to earn a living this way: my wife, Lisa Gold; my literary agent, Melanie Jackson; Matthew Snyder at CAA; and Jennifer Brehl, Jonathan Burnham, and Lydia Weaver at HarperCollins. Thank you all.
Appendix
This game client software is provided under license, and remains the sole property of Tempest, LLC . . . Player acknowledges that they have no ownership right to their characters or other in-game assets such as gold, magic rings, etc. . . . In the event that Player’s account is suspended or terminated for violation of the Terms of Service, and it is later determined that such suspension or termination was made in error, Player agrees to indemnify Tempest, LLC for any and all damages, including, but not limited to, mental pain and suffering . . .
—Call to Wizardry End-User License Agreement
John Chu’s Call to Wizardry Quick-Start Guide
IN TEMPEST’S CALL TO WIZARDRY, YOU PLAY A MIGHTY hero adventuring in the storied Realms of Asgarth. Below are some useful terms and game concepts to be aware of.
CLASS: Your character’s profession, which determines your abilities and defines how you will play the game. Enjoy hand-to-hand combat? Become a warrior, paladin, or honorable samurai. Prefer to deal death from a distance? Try life as a sorcerer or an arrow-slinging ranger. Do you like ninjas? Yes, you can be a ninja. Can’t decide? Talk to us, we’ll help you choose!
RACE: The type of being you are: human, elf, dwarf, or something more exotic. The effects of race are mostly cosmetic. A dwarf cleric, for example, has the exact same healing powers as a goblin cleric, but the dwarf looks better in a kilt. Not all race/class combinations are available, but we will do our best to accommodate your preferences.