by Bruce Bethke
FRANK: (Shuts off sound. Heaves a tremendous sigh of relief.) “Well.” (Looks around, nodding.) “Good job, crew. We made it. Thanks.” (Suddenly all business again. Points at Pyle.) “Pyle, go see if you can give T’shombe a hand with damage control.” (After Pyle leaves: quietly, to Rubin.) “Abraham, what the hell happened to you in there?”
RUBIN: “I…”
FRANK: “Save it, mister. I want a complete report on my desk by 0700 hours tomorrow, explaining—”
As I said, the normal procedure for bringing up the network is a delicate and dangerous operation. There weren’t any managers or marketing people down there to watch us that day, though, so we skipped the normal procedure and instead sent T’shombe over to the console terminal in the hardware room, to key in the one-word command (“start“) that actually starts everything. Then she joined me and Bubu in Frank’s cubicle for a few minutes of creative loafing. I believe the topic was early ’80s TV sitcoms and why they sucked so badly, but since I was still wearing Huggies during the time frame in question, I adopted my usual posture of hanging around in the doorway and feeling vaguely left out.
The discussion ended abruptly when the network completed its startup procedure, the auto-login routines fired, and every workstation in the department erupted in a fit of frantic beeping and flashing yellow EXTREMELY URGENT! messages.
Frank did an ExecuGlide (that’s when you kick off the floor and ride your swivel chair backward across the carpet) over to his terminal and acknowledged the message. A bright red-and-green flashing-bordered message window (known to professionals in the industry as the classic “Christmas at K-Mart” interface) popped open on Frank’s screen, an automatic confirmation-of-receipt message was created and transmitted to God-and-Thompson-&-Ritchie-know-where, and six more audible alarms went off.
Bubu yawned with excitement. “Anything important?”
Frank adjusted his bifocals and scanned the message. “Nah. Just the Duffer again, telling us the e-mail system is down and we should bring it back up.”
Bubu dug his fingers into his beard and scratched his chin. “I see. The e-mail system was out, so he sent us an e-mail message telling us to fix it.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Bubu nodded. “I wonder who he calls when his telephone doesn’t work?”
T’shombe leaned into the conversation. “I bet he writes his bank personal checks to cover his overdrafts.” The three of them chuckled. I wasn’t quite sure what was so funny about that last one, but figured I’d better join in the chuckling anyway.
That drew their attention. Frank spoke up. “Say, Pyle? You wanna go do something about—?” He pointed around, in the general direction of all the other beeping workstations that were still waiting for someone to acknowledge the message.
“Sure.” I pushed off the cubicle wall and trudged around a circuit of the department, stopping at each workstation to receive and delete all those messages.
The MDE e-mail system, you see, suffered from a classic case of Corporate Vision. Once upon a time, someone high up in the food chain had envisioned that middle managers would only use URGENT messages for matters of extreme life-or-death importance, and even then, only rarely. Therefore, since the contents of URGENT messages were by definition excruciatingly critical, it was decided that the best way to ensure that employees actually read the messages was to require them to physically press a key in order to acknowledge receipt of delivery.
This was hardwired into the system. No way to bypass it or intercept it in software. Even Charles Murphy had to decouple himself from his interface dock, drag his one functional arm up, and flail away on a QWERTY keyboard until he chanced to hit the Ctrl-V “Verify” key combination.
I hung at the entry to his cubicle and watched him a minute. Poor bastard. I’d worked with him long enough to know how pig-headed he could be about doing physical things himself, but still, I wanted to help him, if only I could have figured out some way to do so without insulting him. Life with cerebral palsy must be a real bitch.
But, enough on that fun topic.
The message itself, by the way, was also a prime example of typical MDE corporate style. Walter Duff had sent it, priority URGENT and CARBON COPY ON RECEIPT demanded, to every user account in the entire A&F Division. There would be people in overseas subsidiaries receiving copies of that message. There would be carbon copies of that message echoing back to Walter Duff’s workstation for years to come, as people accidentally strayed into dormant user accounts and were forced to Ctrl-V out of that message before they could regain control of their workstations. MDE would wind up archiving thousands of carbon copies of that message, in gigabytes of otherwise useful data space, and that message would go on to join the millions of other idiotically archived e-mail messages which preserve for future generations the urgent details of early twenty first-century football pools, Girl Scout cookie drives, and off-color jokes-of-the-day.
Forget diamonds, chum. It’s e-mail that’s forever.
As soon as I acknowledged and deleted the last copy of the message, a new one came through and locked up all the workstations again. This one wasn’t quite so idiotic, though: staff meeting in the A&F conference room in thirty minutes. So I ran around the department freeing up the workstations one more time, while Bubu decrypted and launched our LocalNet copy of Slaughter. Then we all went back to our respective cubicles, strapped on our videoshades and datagloves, and got down to the deadly serious business of deciding who would stay behind and babysit the file servers while the rest of us got numb butts in the meeting.
For the six or eight people out there who’ve been living in a yurt in Outer Mongolia lately and have never played Slaughter, this is what virtual reality was really designed for, and here’s how it works:
You, and a handful of your closest buds, jump together into a 3-D virtual reality scenario, like a ruined castle or a state unemployment office or some other similar hellish place. Once there you’re supposed to find each other, link up, and along the way explore the scenario, collect treasures and weapons, and survive vicious attacks by zombies, demons, postal clerks, and other depraved and murderous creatures. Then, after you find all the goodies and kill all the baddies, you make your way to the exit and convert all your loot to hit points for the next round.
At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
The way everyone really plays it, of course, is the way that gets Tipper Gore’s Secret Service-issue Kevlar pantyhose into a tight Gordian double clove hitch. And that way is, you teleport into the scenario, latch onto the biggest effin’ weapon you can lay your mitts on, and then go “hunt up” your friends.
Less splitting of the loot that way, and you get a lot more personally involved in the game.
Earphones in, headset mic live, videoshades synced and datagloves engaged: I tapped through the attract scenes and menus, pulled my favorite player/character out of storage, and jumped into the game. Reality melted and ran down the walls…
It was the castle scenario, again. I was standing in the foyer, listening to the rustle and scratch of flea-bitten rats scampering across the dry stone floor at my feet and the squeal of rusty hinges turning as the front door slowly closed behind me. No point in trying to back up; the door was always locked by the time I turned around. I did a quick scan left and right, just to make sure I was alone and that we were only playing at “Level 4: Ankle-Deep In Blood.” (Bubu accidentally fired up the game at “Level 5: Brian De Palma On A Bad Day” once, and I got skinned alive by a pack of mutant cannibal Cub Scouts before I’d made it ten feet.)
No company. Good. Ignoring the temptation to grab the flickering torch from the socket on the right wall (doing that triggers the trapdoor and makes for a very short game), I slipped into the shadows along the left wall and made my way toward the great hall.
Just before the entrance arch, I paused. Doing the great hall from the foyer could be a little dicey. If the ogre was awake, he’d be just inside the entrance, to
the left. Standard procedure with the ogre was to dash into the room, get his attention, then dash back out, hide, and wait for him to lumber past looking for you. And then, of course, to stick the shotgun in the small of his back and splatter his guts all over the opposite wall. The exploding intestines graphic was way cool.
Trouble was, following this course of action required having the shotgun, and at the moment, it was still hanging on the wall in the trophy room. If I’d come into the castle through the garden gate or the scullery entrance I’d probably have been okay, but as it was, I was probably hosed.
Which left Plan B: run like hell across the great hall, hope the ogre is asleep when you start your move, and try to get to the secret door behind the tapestry in the gallery before the ogre catches up with you and converts your brains to guacamole. I waffled between plans for a moment.
Aw, what the hell, I decided, it’s only a game. I edged up to the archway, listened a moment for the ogre’s heavy footsteps, and heard only the whisper of wind through ancient fluttering miniblinds and the distant screaming of nonplayer characters being dismembered in the dungeon. Taking that as a good sign, I drew a deep breath, punched my hands forward, and lit off into a balls-out sprint across the hall.
It’s hard to get the true feel of running when you have to move your POV character by dataglove. I understand Nike now makes a datashoe interface, but you can only use it with the World’s Most Boring CD-ROM game, Jogging Simulator.
Somewhere behind me, the ogre saw me and roared. (Nice stereo spatial imaging.) I heard heavy iron-shod feet thundering across the floor behind me, and the swish of an enormous nail-studded Louisville Slugger cutting through the air, not unlike the time Darlene’s father caught me and her on the rec room couch in their basement. At least this time I didn’t have to pull my pants up while I ran.
Made it across the great hall without getting my brain pulped, grabbed the rotting banner at the archway and used it to take the corner in a slide, cleared the pit of fire-lizards in one huge gravity-defying leap and made a quick right turn in midair to land in the entry to the gallery. Somewhere behind me, I heard the ogre pause a few seconds to club the fire-lizards into submission. Now the tapestry that concealed the secret door was in sight, and if I could just hold on for a few more seconds—
The tapestry rippled, moved, and suddenly this blond Viking giant emerged from the secret passage, wearing nothing but a fur jockstrap, rawhide boots, and a pointed iron helmet with horns on it. His broad chest made Schwarzenegger look anorexic; his bulging thews and thighs looked like goddam tree trunks. This guy was definitely not one of the standard Slaughter menaces, and for that matter, he wasn’t a normal player character, either.
I didn’t have much time to worry about it. The ogre was thundering up behind me; this geek was standing in front of me, a psychotic smile on his face and a broadsword the size of King Kong’s dick in his hands. There was space enough for one small step to my right.
I took that step. The blond giant twirled his sword like a drum majorette’s baton and shouted, “Crom!” There was a soggy whack! and the ogre’s head came sailing over my shoulder, followed shortly by several other large chunks of its body. The blond giant, I decided, was probably on my side.
He surveyed his work on the ogre. Then, apparently satisfied with the results, he turned to me, smiled, and raised his broadsword and started twirling it again. The gleaming steel made a sound like an electric weed-whacker as it described that glittering arc of crimson death. I revised my earlier opinion and tried to back away. He advanced, and for just one moment passed into direct torchlight and I caught a clear glimpse of his face. I had time enough for one shocked gasp of recognition.
“Murphy?”
And then the vorpal blade went snicker-snack, and my head went bouncing gaily down the hall, and the virtual world started to melt back to reality again—
Control-Option-E.
Didn’t know about that, did you? There’s a debugging mode in Slaughter that some sloppy programmer at Perigee Products left user-accessible in release 2.x. Hit the Control-Option-E key combination at just the right time—for example, after you’ve been toasted, but before the system has cycled back to the startup menu—and you can jump into “audit” mode.
Doing Slaughter in audit mode is kind of like—forgive me—being a ghost in the machine. You can move around, you can walk through walls and doors, you can see and hear everything the other players are doing, but they can’t see or hear you. You can also move hidden objects, if you’re feeling sadistic, but I generally tried to resist the urge to do that. Nobody else in the department seemed to know about the audit mode, and I was in no great hurry to tip them off.
However, I did have a real strong desire to find out how Charles Murphy had managed to transform his player character into Conan the O’Brien. So I echoed his movement commands to my player, slaved my point-of-view to follow three steps behind his, and followed him around for a while.
Frank was next on the chopping list.
Charles turned out to have a really extraordinary knowledge of the secret doors and hidden ways. There was a branching passage off the tunnel behind the tapestry; I’d always assumed it to be a dead end, but Charles reached up, poked a brick in the ceiling with the tip of his sword, and a ceiling panel slid open to reveal a ladder up to the next level. He sheathed his sword and caught the bottom rung of the ladder in one preposterous leap—I guess there are some advantages to being seven feet tall—then darted up the ladder as the panel slid closed beneath us, to emerge from a trapdoor underneath the table in the library.
Charles was still crouching under the table, hiding, when Frank slipped warily into the room. The library was generally a harmless place, with a small treasure or two sitting in the dark corners and a low-powered revolver hidden inside a hollowed-out book entitled Mississippi River Law. But there was also always the possibility of a zombie grad student lurking in the stacks, and the French windows did open out onto a courtyard balcony that was home to half a dozen real horrors, so Frank kept his eyes on the balcony and his back to us as he sidled into the room.
Bad choice.
When Charles made his move, it was with amazing viciousness. I’d been expecting him to leap out, draw his broadsword, and give Frank the Veg-O-Matic treatment. Instead, he waited until Frank was standing in front of the east window, then leaped out and pushed him facefirst through the glass. Sliced to ribbons and bleeding badly, Frank was still screaming with shock and surprise as he landed in the boiling acid fountain.
That death scene was particularly messy, grotesque, and drawn out, so I decoupled myself from Charles and hung around awhile to watch it. Cool.
The internal message for character termination in the acid fountain turns out to be, “It’s soup!”
After Frank was done, I went back to haunting Charles, and found him in a footrace with Bubu to see who could get to the trophy room (and the shotgun over the mantelpiece) first. Charles won easily and just about cut Bubu in half with the first blast, but since there were five more shells in the gun I guess he decided it would be a crime not to use them. There were still recognizable chunks of Bubu left when I cut myself loose from Charles and went off to see if maybe I could help T’shombe.
For a few minutes there, it looked like she actually had a fighting chance. She’d skipped the upper levels (smart move, in retrospect), jumped down the shaft into the catacombs, and by the time I caught up with her had already found the BFG-2000 assault pistol. I used my ghostly abilities to arrange for her to find the belt of ammunition around the next corner, but while I was off scouting for the red key that unlocks the door out of the catacombs, she blundered into the wrong tunnel and got jumped from behind by a giant slavering pig-demon.
And thus having scientifically determined that Charles was best qualified to stay behind and attend the meeting by remote telepresence, the rest of us formed up, hit the bathrooms one last time, then trudged off to the A&F conference room.
The meeting. The A&F conference room was—well, your basic conference room. Large, tastefully decorated in shades of gray, with pale mahogany and brushed-chrome accent bits here and there. Subdued recessed lighting around the perimeter; at least a half-dozen unshielded split-leaf philodendrons sitting brazenly out in plain sight, in ceramic hanging planters along the walls. (These T’shombe eyed suspiciously and gave a wide berth.) The room was designed to seat 100 comfortably; we had about 120 people in there, if you count management as human. Most of the other departmental delegations had arrived before us, so we tried to slip in quietly and fade into the standing-room-only crowd at the back of the room, but the Duffer recognized T’shombe’s cleavage as it came in through the door and waved us down to four empty chairs in the front row.
Clearly, this meeting was going to be a Big Deal. Not only were the stacking chairs set out in neat, attentive, church-pewlike rows (as opposed to their usual semirandom distribution). Not only were all six surviving A&F department managers seated at a long, white-draped table at the front of the room, like so many game show contestants. (Bubu leaned over and whispered, “Alex, I’ll take Famous Bladder Infections for $500.”) Not only was there a portable lectern and microphone set up at the precise corporo-political center of the table.
But the whole panel, lectern, and table affair was set up on top of the portable dais, and getting that thing assembled was a union job that took at least eight weeks’ advance notice and two rounds of contract renegotiations. Clearly, Hassan had been living with the mark of death upon him for months.
(One might ask: why, with modern multimedia technology, was it necessary to actually herd the whole division together into one room in order to have management speak at them? One may as well ask why telecommuting has been coming Real Soon Now for the last twenty-five years, why companies continue to have bitter and suicidal interdepartmental turf wars, and why business magazines still publish starry-eyed articles about the paperless office of the very near future. The answer, of course, is, “We’re not paying you to ask questions. Shut up and get back to work.”)