The Crown and the Key

by Andrey Vasilyev

  Oddly enough, it took us just a few hours to get everything done. The bags were packed into the trunk, with Alexey not even making a motion to help us, and I turned to Vika.

  “You know what would be nice right now?”

  “A hot bath,” she replied wearily.

  I flashed her a happy smile. “No-o, a couple delicious pastries and a nice, big espresso!”

  “You need to go to Raidion?” Vika made a face. “Come on, let’s just go home.”

  “No, I do need to go. Really.”

  Vika sighed, and I leaned toward Alexey, who was sitting up front.

  “Could she take this car home, and you and I—”

  “We can call a taxi for her,” Alexey replied coldly. “Or, we can take her home, and then go wherever you need to go. This car is only for you.”

  “We’re going to Raidion.” Vika’s voice had very little warmth, too—our bodyguard had lost his special place in her heart. I, on the other hand, was appreciating him more and more. Everyone knows how vindictive women can be when they turn on you. Paying no attention to her, however, he just held his line. Nice work.

  “Oh, and another thing,” Alexey said to me without turning around. “You didn’t list that when you were telling me where we were going to go. That’s unacceptable.”

  “Okay, I hear you. It won’t happen again.”

  Vika snorted but didn’t say anything.

  Happily for me, Dasha wasn’t at the reception desk. First, I didn’t know what the redheaded beast might blurt out when she saw Vika, and second, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get her out of my head for a week if I saw her. I definitely didn’t need that right then.

  “Good afternoon, ladies,” I said to the girls in their kerchiefs. “Please take my companion to the cafeteria for some coffee.”

  “I’m very sorry, but today is Sunday,” replied one of them. “It’s closed on Sundays.”

  Vika pursed her lips; she was not happy.

  “Well, thanks to you, I’m going to just go hungry,” she said to me. “Get up there. I’ll just find a corner to sit in.”

  “You can stop by our cafeteria,” the girl said. “We have a great one for the staff. It’s smaller, of course, but—”

  “For the staff?” Vika laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  The girl blushed a tad and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t let that go, however.

  “Who do you think you are?” I said quietly to Vika, taking her by the elbow and leading her away from the reception desk. “Six months ago, you were fine with fast food, and now their cafeteria is beneath you—the coffee isn’t the right brand, and it’s too cheap. That was embarrassing.”

  I let her arm go and turned to Alexey.

  “Are you coming with me?”

  “No,” he replied laconically. “Nothing’s going to happen to you up there, that’s for sure. Just give me a call when you’re ready to leave.”

  “Sounds good.” I walked toward the lift, holding up my hand to the girl who tried to come with me.

  Eliza was apparently observing the Labor Code requirement to not work on Sundays, as she wasn’t in the office. It was equally quiet in Zimin’s office. I shuffled around by the door, scratched at it, opened it slightly, and stuck my head in.

  It was the usual: Zimin was sitting at his desk and staring at the map of Rattermark that never ceased to amaze me; Valyaev was lounging in a chair, his legs crossed; and Azov was situated comfortably on the couch. On the other hand, they all had angry expressions on their faces, and they weren’t looking at each other.

  “And there’s our witness,” Zimin said when he saw me. “Come on in and tell us what actually happened.”

  “Hi, there,” I said as I stepped in. “You’re talking about Kadrans, I guess?”

  Zimin’s eye twitched. “What else? Our ideologue here doesn’t believe anything out of the ordinary happened, and neither he nor his people know anything. A whole city went up in flames, a ton of players are unhappy, our complaints department is working overtime, and that isn’t enough for him.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. “Nikita, it was crazy, the kind of slaughter that was there yesterday.”

  “Oh, just listen to him.” Valyaev threw up his arms. “Of course, I know what happened, and we already have some of the recordings. We dug into a few accounts since a few people recorded fragments of what happened. Why didn’t you record anything?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied. The idea hadn’t occurred to me. The game must be eroding my journalism instincts because that’s terrible. “It all happened really quickly.”

  “Don’t take your mistakes out on him,” Zimin shot back at him. “How could you miss something like that? How?”

  “Max, you know how.” It sounded like they were about to rehash an argument that had already been going around in circles. “I don’t know the algorithm for that quest. Would you just listen to me? I didn’t write it, my people didn’t either, and so we don’t know the logic or progression. The only one who did know, since he was the one who dreamed it up, won’t be telling anyone. And that’s not my fault.”

  “I was just following orders,” Azov said calmly. “You know where they came from, too.”

  Uh oh. There was some force majeure going on, which explained some things.

  “Let me just tell you what I saw,” I started off conciliatorily, “and then we can decide what to do.”

  My suggestion was accepted, and I told them every last little thing that had happened on my trip to Kadrans. The whole thing really was very strange.

  They listened to me carefully, without interrupting, until at some point, Valyaev and Zimin started exchanging glances.

  “So, you didn’t see the name of the player?” Zimin asked when I finished.

  “Like you don’t know what it is,” Valyaev said with some vitriol in his voice. “I’m more worried about the Lords of Death. We didn’t even have them as NPCs, so how did he code them? They were only ever in the continent’s history, like boogeymen kids know live in the closet even though nobody’s ever seen them.”

  “He coded them, though,” Zimin replied. “And now they’re in the game—two of them, at least.”

  “Okay, if you don’t mind, could you tell me what’s going on?” I said, deciding to see if my guess was in line with the actual story.

  “Stop it,” Zimin said, sending a little of his tone my way, too. “You already know what’s going on, or, at least, just about everything. What you saw was part of a mega quest on par with the one you’re working on.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re connected,” Valyaev jumped in. “There’s good reason to think that might be true.”

  “Yep. Remember Stavros?” Zimin said to me. Then, he broke into a tirade that threw me for a loop, as I’d never so much as heard him curse. “He wrote a quest into the system with the same principle yours has—touch it, and everything blows to high heaven. The game core breaks down, the system goes haywire, and you can’t get anything back since it’s all linked to the AI. That bastard even used points of no return. It all looked like a normal quest, but there was no stopping it after the ritual was completed. Now, it has to be completed.”

  “What’s the quest?” I really wasn’t sure about that. Stavros, of course, I remembered—he was a programmer high up in Raidion who had, for some reason, betrayed the company. That was a mistake, too, and one he paid for with his life. I wasn’t even sure what his actual name was since I’d only ever seen him once. We were in the game, where he was a dwarf.

  “What kind of idiot are you?” Valyaev asked, whirling a finger around his temple. “The Great Dragon Quest.”

  Chapter Six

  In which we see that there’s always a way out.

  “Oh, please,” I laughed. “That’s a fairy tale for little kids. I even told it to them—you remember. Lots of people believed me, too.”

  “What? You think we have nothing better to do than tell you tall tales?” Zimi
n was in no mood for jokes. “I told you, the quest was activated. That bastard built the ability to accept it into the system, a player got it, probably, because he was told how to, and now he’s working through it. You saw the result in Kadrans.”

  “So, we’re going to have a full-fledged Dark Lord in Rattermark?” I asked.

  “Not quite full-fledged, yet.” Valyaev pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes out of his pocket. “This is so bad, I’ve smoked two dozen of these today already.”

  “What does he need to do to get full-fledged?”

  “We’re not sure,” Zimin replied with a shrugged. “We just don’t know! We aren’t the ones who wrote the quest, and so we can only make an educated guess. What a screw-up, huh? We created the game, we invented and implemented it, we can pull up and drop any player we want into a bog, and we have no idea what’s going on. There’s no way for us to influence what’s happening. It’s infuriating!”

  Zimin leaped up from his chair and kicked the wall a couple times. I’d never seen him like that, and it was unnerving.

  “But you know who the player is, right?” I asked Valyaev warily. “Could you just have him come here for a talk?”

  Zimin let out a yell and went back to kicking the wall.

  “No,” Azov said.

  “No, you don’t know, or no, you can’t bring him here?”

  “Both.” Azov looked calm, at least, on the outside.

  “Phew.” I scratched my head, my image of them as all-powerful quickly fading.

  “We have a couple suspects,” he continued, “but nothing more than that. The player is hidden by the system, and really well hidden, too. When the quest activated, it kicked in a mechanism that shields him from the control system. We can’t identify him as a user since the system made him an internal element and therefore ignores the neuron signals. He can accept quests and interact with the game, but the game itself doesn’t see him, you know? It’s absurd—the system is protecting someone it can’t see. And if we try to extract him, the whole thing might die. Kit’s boys have been trying to get around dead Stas’ code for a while now with no such luck. We don’t have the source code, and we can’t get to the player without it unless we want to demolish the system in the process. There’s no way for us to get at him.”

  “What if you approached it differently? There’s got to be another way.”

  Azov just grunted.

  “And what’s the big problem?” I asked after a moment of silence. “What’s the worst that could happen to the game and the company?”

  Zimin, having calmed down a bit, sat down. “That’s the problem. We don’t know. Our analysts put together twelve ways the situation could develop. Nine of them are neutral, one is positive, and two are negative.”

  “A ratio of ten to two?” I replied in surprise. “What are you so worried about? That’s a great number.”

  “Kif, my friend,” Zimin said with a frown, “there’s one thing you need to understand. If there’s even just two percent of your business that you don’t control—that somebody else is controlling instead of you—you can never be sure what that little oversight will cost you in the future. Most importantly, it isn’t your business anymore; it belongs to someone else, too. And there’s a chance that someone will come trotting into your office one day, kick you out, and sit down at your desk because he’s the new boss. All of that happens because you gave up a tiny fraction of your authority. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “More or less,” I replied. “But okay, there are other ways around this. Send specially trained people into the game who can make that someone’s life miserable for as long as he decides he still wants it. You probably have a few high-level characters in your back pocket, right?”

  “We do.” Valyaev pulled out another cigarette. “The problem is that the Dark Lord is presumably on the other side of the Crisna, in the depths of the Forgotten Lands. You can’t just send a group in there; you need a whole raid. And where am I going to find that many people? He may not even be there—that’s just our best guess.”

  “Announce an event,” I said immediately. “The players will all pile in, and you can go in with them. Then, at just the right moment—”

  “Okay, so they kill him once, even twice—so what?” Valyaev replied wearily. “And that’s just assuming he’s there and the raid goes where we want it to go.”

  “I don’t know, then,” I said, my brow furrowing. “Freeze the location and kill off everyone in it by dumping them in the archives.”

  “Who will be left for the players to kill?” Valyaev asked. “He doesn’t just have his personal monsters; he pulls them from normal locations. They all go back to wherever they came from after their missions, too.”

  “Ridiculous,” I said finally. “How?”

  “Via portals,” Valyaev responded, putting out his cigarette. “Imagine that—he up and sends them home. We can’t just shut down the left bank, either, since there are quests and a lot of other things connected to it.”

  “What about this guy’s Lords of Death?”

  “Who cares about them?” Valyaev said with a wave. “And who even is ‘the guy’? We don’t know!”

  I fell silent, figuring that they could come up with their own ideas if they didn’t like mine so much. Really, the realization that Raidion, an enormous and powerful company, couldn’t deal with what seemed like a very small problem was kind of shocking to me. I’d come to believe that nothing was impossible for them, and the fact that I’d been wrong about that was making me reevaluate things.

  “Anyway, we still haven’t answered our most important question,” Azov said softly. “Who’s going to tell the Old Man?”

  Ah-h, so that’s why Zimin is furious and Valyaev is smoking again. They hadn’t told the boss, yet. I definitely wasn’t going to do it for them—better to have them just kill me right there.

  “There’s nothing to tell him,” Zimin said dully. “He’ll ask what we’ve done so far, and what are we going to say? We haven’t done anything.”

  Valyaev rubbed his neck. “Should we go ahead and shut down the servers? That could buy us some time…”

  “And what would that give us?” Zimin asked. “We already discussed that, so there’s no point going over it again. Ilya, are you sure you can’t help find the player?”

  “How?” Azov twisted on the couch. “We don’t have his IP address, so I don’t have anything to go on. I turned Moscow upside down already, and doing the same for all of Russia is beyond even me.”

  “And nobody has any links since there aren’t any quests for the Dark Lord,” Valyaev said, his head falling.

  “What do you mean?” I asked in surprise. “I’m doing a related quest right now. At least, it’s probably related.”

  Valyaev stared at me. “Wait, what? What quest? How is it related?”

  I briefly described the quest I’d gotten from the Tearful Goddess Order.

  “Crazy,” Zimin said, rubbing his hands together. “Valyaev, do you understand any of that?”

  “Two things right off the bat,” Valyaev said, walking over and gesturing for Zimin to get up. “First, Stas was quite the clever operator, since he left himself a backdoor he could have used to rehabilitate himself and postpone his death. Second, our young friend here just proved usefulness once again. Max, enter your password.”

  Zimin did just that, leaving Valyaev to patter away on the keyboard.

  “Here, I thought you all were watching me with both eyes,” I said with some surprise.

  “We just haven’t had time recently,” Valyaev explained without taking his eyes away from the monitor. “I mean, sure, my idiots have been keeping tabs on you, but you can see where that’s gotten us.”

  “Don’t be so hard on them,” Azov said. “They don’t know anything about any of this—it just looked like yet another quest to them.”

  “They’re related,” Valyaev said, reading something on the screen. “I’d swear my life on it.”

/>   “Does it tell us anything?” Zimin asked immediately.

  “You mean, about how to get at the player? No, nothing. But if our friend here finishes the chain, he might be put in touch with the guy himself, and we could use that.”

  “What a strange fate,” Azov laughed. “So, it’s all connected?”

  “That makes things a lot easier,” Zimin exhaled. “We have something to tell the Old Man now. If we figure out a good way to phrase it, things could end up pretty well for us. A major game event, right?”

  “A big-time quest leading to a battle we could advertise,” Valyaev jumped in. “We’ll tell him we’re checking for system vulnerabilities.”

  “Looking to see who sanctioned this, too,” Azov added. “The player couldn’t have done it all by himself—I don’t believe that for a minute.”

  “So, Stas—” Zimin started, though Azov jumped in to finish his thought.

  “Oh, you understand very well. Stas was a programmer, and nothing more. No, there was someone else, someone smart and calculating. We weren’t the ones who caught Stas; whoever that was just turned him over to us once he’d finished his job and became a liability. Just like that. I told the Old Man back then that we needed to flip him instead of killing him, but who listens to me?”

  “What about Yadviga?” Zimin asked.

  “She’s a hysterical idiot, and nothing more than that,” Azov said sharply. “Cute, though.”

  “Polish girls are all cute,” Valyaev said knowingly. It looked like he was feeling better, too. “They all like their hysterics, though. Yes, the best thing to do is to just finish the quest. That way we’ll see what we’re working with.”

  “Could we make things easier for our friend here?” Zimin asked. “Preferential treatment, extra levels, all of that?”

  “Not a thing,” Valyaev replied. “We still have the quest to return the gods, and you can’t guarantee that Stas, the one who added all the restrictions to the quest, didn’t add something like what we have. I definitely can’t.”

  “Once we get that player, we’ll have some answers,” Azov said. “That’s for sure. You, my friend, just need to make sure you get to him.”