“Miss Zula? I apologize, I see that you are very tired,” Ivanov said. “But. You work at same company? Is possible?”
And the Iowa-girl response, of course, was always yes. Especially to a polite, older man in good clothes who had come such a long way.
For some reason she was remembering a moment when she had been something like fourteen years old, the apex of the crystal meth epidemic in Iowa. She had been home alone and had looked out the window to see a strange van coming down the road, very slowly. It had made a couple of passes by the house and then pulled into the driveway that led to their equipment shed. A couple of men had gotten out of the van, looking around nervously. Not knowing whether they might have come on a legitimate errand, Zula had made a phone call to Uncle John (as she called her second adopted dad), and Uncle John had extremely calmly talked her through the procedure of locking every door in the house, getting a shotgun and a box of shells, and hiding herself in the attic. His matter-of-fact instructions had been accompanied, and sometimes drowned out, by dim roaring, screeching, and thumping noises that, as she later understood, had resulted from his driving at a hundred miles an hour while he talked. Zula had barely gotten the attic stairs pulled up behind her when a lot of disturbing vehicular noises had ensued from outside, and she had peered out a gable vent to see Uncle John’s car in the middle of the front yard at the end of a long set of skid marks that completely surrounded the house (for he had orbited it once, checking for signs of forced entry) and John hobbling around it on his prosthetic legs to crouch behind and use it for cover while across the way the van screamed out onto the road with a door hanging open. A cloud of what she took for steam was rising from the side of the shed where they kept the anhydrous ammonia tank. A few minutes later the sheriff’s department was there in force, and Zula felt it safe to emerge from the attic. John yelled at her that she did not have permission to come down yet. Then he hugged her and told her that she was his wonderful girl. Then he asked about the whereabouts of the shotgun. Then he told her again how magnificent she was, and then he ordered her to go upstairs and not come out until he gave permission. She went upstairs and, peering out a window, saw what John did not want her to see: the ambulance men putting on their hazmat suits and placing a large brown wrinkled thing into a body bag. One of the thieves, startled, perhaps, by Uncle John’s sudden advent, had made a mistake with the anhydrous ammonia line and been sprayed with the chemical, which had sucked all the water out of his body.
It was in that moment, but never before and rarely since, that she had perceived a kind of subterranean through line, perhaps like one of those ley lines in T’Rain, running from her people in Eritrea to her people in Iowa.
“WITH A PHONE call,” Zula said, “I might be able to get more information about the Troll.”
Ivanov continued to gaze at her in an expectant way and, after a few moments, raised his eyebrows encouragingly.
“Then,” Zula added, “you could be on your way.”
Ivanov’s face stopped moving, as if hit by a blast of anhydrous ammonia.
“To continue solving your problem,” Zula added graciously, “or whatever it is you need to do.”
“A phone call,” Ivanov said, “to whom?”
“The company has a privacy policy.”
Ivanov’s face screwed up. “This sounds like bullshit.”
“There are rules,” Zula said. For Uncle Richard had explained to her, at the beginning of her employment at Corporation 9592, that most of the people she’d be working with were burdened with Y chromosomes and that what worked at Boy Scout camp should work here. Boys, he said, only want to know two things: who is in charge, and what are the rules. And indeed this worked magically. Ivanov nodded. “The company has information about names, addresses, demographics of its customers,” Zula continued. “But it doesn’t release that information. You don’t play the game under your own name—your real name. There’s no way that I, as a player, could ever track down the true real-world identity of the Troll or any other player.”
“But someone,” Ivanov said, “someone at company knows.”
“Yes, someone always knows.”
“Maybe rule gets broke sometimes, a little.”
“Generally not but…” Zula truncated the sentence since Ivanov was already making a this is bullshit gesture.
APPARENTLY SOMEONE WENT out for supplies, since their Russian was suddenly punctuated with phrases like “venti mocha.”
“Peter,” said Sokolov; the first sound he had made in a long time.
Peter looked up to find Sokolov nodding significantly at a webcam mounted at the top of the stairs, aimed down into the shop.
“You have two security cameras.”
Peter made no response.
“Or perhaps more?” Sokolov went on.
Peter considered it. “Three, actually,” he admitted.
“Ah,” Sokolov said.
For a few moments, Zula wondered how Sokolov could possibly have missed the third one. They were all pretty obvious: one aimed down the front hall at the street entrance; another in the shop, covering the alley doors; the third at the top of the stairs.
Then she got it. Sokolov was testing Peter.
Sokolov knew perfectly well that there were three cameras; he had gone over the whole place, seen everything. But he had said “two” just to see whether Peter would ’fess up to the existence of a third.
“Motion activated?” Sokolov asked.
“Yes.”
“Storing data where?”
“Here,” Peter said. “On my server.”
Sokolov made no sign that he had heard, but only stared into Peter’s eyes for several long seconds.
“And … on a backup drive,” Peter admitted. “Under the stairs.”
Sokolov finally took his gaze from Peter’s face and nodded. “Files will need to be erased.”
“Okay,” Peter said, sounding hugely relieved. He slapped his knees and rose to his feet. “Let’s do that.”
Watched carefully by Sokolov, Peter busied himself at a terminal for a while. In the meantime, a preposterous amount of car moving was going on. Peter’s Scion ended up parked on the street outside. Zula’s Prius was shifted deeper into the bay and Wallace’s sports car was moved in next to it, clearing the alley.
During these efforts, Zula’s phone was retrieved and presented to her, by Ivanov, as if it were a Swarovski necklace.
“ZULA.”
“C-plus, hi.”
“It’s not often that I have the pleasure of talking to someone in the magma department.”
“C-plus, that is because I am working on a side project here—long story—that Richard sort of put me on.”
“Management by founder,” Corvallis said, in a tone of ironic disapproval. Supposedly, “management by founder”—a term of art for Richard doing whatever struck his fancy—had been eradicated from Corporation 9592 a few years ago when professional executives had been parachuted in to run things.
“Yeah. So, an informal project. Call it research. Having to do with some, uh, unusual gold movements connected with a virus called REAMDE.”
“Funny. Had never heard of it until I came to work this morning. Now, it’s all anyone will talk about.”
“It exploded over the weekend. Look, I just need one piece of information.”
“Where should I look?”
“My log. Several hours ago.”
Typing. “Wow, you died a lot last night!”
“Sure did.”
Typing. “Then you unceremoniously logged out.”
“Power failure in Georgetown, the Internet went down.”
“Okay. You were having some fun in the Torgai hills, looks like.”
“Yeah. An ill-fated expedition.”
“I’ll say. So. What is it you need?”
“During the early part of it, someone cast a healing spell on me. Not a member of my group. It would have happened at maybe three in the morning our time, when m
y character was near a certain ley line intersection…”
“Well, only one healing spell was cast on you all night, so it’s pretty easy.”
“You’ve got the log entry?” For in the world of T’Rain, a little sparrow could not fall from its nest without the event being logged and time-stamped.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” Zula couldn’t help but notice the effect that her half of the conversation was having on Ivanov. He turned and gestured to Sokolov, who stepped nearer, as if the Troll were about to jump out of Zula’s phone and make a run for it.
“Who cast that healing spell on me, C-plus?”
“Hard to say.”
“What do you mean?” Zula asked, a bit sharply.
“It’s literally hard to say. My Chinese is a little weak.”
“So the name of the character is in Chinese?”
Ivanov and Sokolov looked at each other as only Russians could look at each other when the Chinese came into it.
“Yeah, and he or she didn’t bother to slap a Western handle onto it.”
This was part of Richard and Nolan’s efforts to make T’Rain as Chinese friendly as possible. In other such games, each player had to use a name written in Latin characters, but in T’Rain it was optional.
“He or she—so, no demographics or personal data about the player?”
“It’s transparently a load of crap generated by a bot or something,” Corvallis said.
“Credit card?”
“It’s a self-sus.”
Another one of Richard and Nolan’s innovations. In most online games, you had to link your account to a credit card number to cover the monthly fees. Not so Chinese teen friendly. But since T’Rain had hard currency money plumbing built into its guts, this too was somewhat optional; if your character was turning a profit, for example, by selling gold, you could pay your monthly fee by having it deducted automatically from your character’s treasure chest. These were called self-sustaining accounts.
“Is there any way to get any hard information at all about who runs that character?”
Zula didn’t like the effect that this had on Ivanov’s face.
“I can give you the IP address that they were connected from.”
“That’d be fantastic!” Zula said, hoping that she was really selling its fantasticness to Ivanov. She gestured for something to write with. Sokolov wheeled and plucked a Sharpie from a mug on a side table. Perhaps it was a bit odd that he knew the location of every pen in the room better than Peter did, but maybe it was his job to spot everything in his vicinity that could be used as an improvised weapon. Sokolov bit the cap off and held out his palm for Zula to write on. She took the pen and rested her writing hand on Sokolov’s, which had taken a lot of abuse and was missing the end of one finger, yet was as warm as any other man’s.
“Ready?” Corvallis asked.
“Shoot,” said Zula, then cringed at the choice of word.
Corvallis, speaking extremely clearly and crisply, recited four numbers between 0 and 255: a dotted quad, or Internet Protocol address. Zula wrote them down on the palm of Sokolov’s hand. Ivanov watched with spectacular intensity, then gave her a wondering look.
He knew what it was.
It was the same sort of thing that Csongor had used to detect Wallace’s lie and route him to Peter’s place. And having seen it work perfectly once, Ivanov supposed it could not fail to work again.
“Thanks,” Zula said, “and my next question—”
Typing. “It’s one of a large block of addresses allocated to an ISP in Shyamen.”
“Come again?”
Corvallis spelled it, and she wrote it on Sokolov’s flesh: X-I-A-M-E-N.
This triggered furious but comically silent activity among Ivanov and his minions.
“You can google it yourself,” Corvallis said, and Zula—who was, in spite of everything, still being watched intently by Sokolov—resisted the temptation to say No, I can’t. “Formerly called Amoy,” he continued, in a singsongy voice to indicate that he had googled it. “A port city in southeastern China, at the mouth of the Nine Dragons River, just across the strait from Taiwan. Two and a half million people. Twenty-fifth largest port in the world, up from thirtieth. Blah, blah, blah. Pretty generic, for a Chinese city.”
“Thanks!”
“Sorry I couldn’t get more specific.”
“Gives me something to work on.”
“Anything else I can help you with?”
Yes. “No.”
“Have a good one!” And he was gone.
The word “Bye” was hardly past Zula’s lips when Sokolov had pulled the phone from her hand. He knew how to work it and pulled up its web browser and googled Xiamen.
She had been vaguely aware for a while of some gratifying smells in the room: flowers and coffee.
Ivanov, smiling, approached her with a vast bouquet of stargazer lilies cradled in his arms. They still bore the plastic wrap and barcode from the grocery store up the hill. “For you,” he announced, bestowing them on her. “For because I made you cry. Least I could do.”
“That is very sweet of you,” she said, trying through all her exhaustion to sell it.
“Latte?” he asked. For the T-shirted man was at his side with a cardboard tray crowded with cups from Starbucks world HQ, whose colossal green mermaid loomed over Georgetown like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
“Love one,” she said, and she didn’t have to lie about that.
Since the visitors were now all busy, she carried the flowers into the kitchen area and laid them on a cutting board so that she could cut the ends off the stems and put them in water. Idiotic. But it, like so many of her nice-Iowa-girl impulses, was like a brainstem reflex. It wasn’t the flowers’ fault that they’d been purchased by gangsters. The latte was enormously pleasurable, and she popped the lid off and threw it away so that she could sink her lips into the warm foam and gulp from it. Peter owned no vases, but she found an earthenware water pitcher that would support the flowers and filled it with water. Then she set about the messy business of tearing away the plastic wrappers and the rubber bands that held the flowers’ stems together.
Seeing large movement while she was doing this, she glanced up to see two of the men carrying a long, heavy, plastic-wrapped bundle out of the adjoining apartment.
She was on the floor before she was fully conscious of being light-headed.
WORLD OF WARCRAFT had been the toweringly dominant competitor in Corporation 9592’s industry for what seemed like forever, until you checked the dates and realized that it was only a few years old. Richard and Nolan had passed through several phases in their attitude toward it:
1. Abashed denial that they could ever even dream of competing with such an entrenched power as WoW
2. Certainty, growing into cockiness, that they could knock it off its perch in a coup de main
3. Crushing realization that it was impossible and that they were doomed to abject failure
4. Cautious optimism that maybe life wasn’t going to totally suck forever
5. Finally getting their shit together and coming up with a plan
Somewhere between Phases 4 and 5, Richard holed up at the Schloss during Mud Month—the weeks following the end of the ski season—and wrote out some ideas that had been brewing in his mind since the deepest and most lugubrious weeks of Phase 3. Reading them, Corvallis had identified this as an “inflection point,” which was another of those terms that meant nothing to Richard but that was—to judge from the vigorous shifts in body language it elicited in meetings—of infinite significance to math geeks. As far as Richard could make out, it denoted the hardly-obvious-at-the-time moment when, seen later in retrospect, everything had changed.
For a while the memo had rattled around the office like a dried-out whiteboard pen. Then Richard, with a bit of jargonic assistance from Corvallis, had given it an arresting title: Medieval Armed Combat as Universal Metaphor and All-Purpose Protocol Inter face Sc
hema (MACUMAPPIS).
Since Medieval Armed Combat was the oxygen they breathed, even mentioning it seemed gratuitous, so this got shortened to UMAPPIS and then, since the “metaphor” thing made some of the businesspeople itchy, it became APPIS, which they liked enough to trademark. And since APPIS was one letter away from APIS, which was the Latin word for bee, they then went on to create and trademark some bee- and hive-related logo art. As Corvallis patiently told Richard, it was all a kind of high-tech in-joke. In that world, API stood for “application programming interface,” which meant the software control panels that tech geeks slapped onto their technologies in order to make it possible for other tech geeks to write programs that made use of them. All of which was one or two layers of abstraction beyond the point where Richard could give a shit. “All I am trying to say with this memo,” he told Corvallis, “is that anyone who feels like it ought to be able to grab hold of our game by the technological short hairs and make it solve problems for them.” And Corvallis assured him that this was precisely synonymous with having an API and that everything else was just marketing.
The problems Richard had in mind were not game- or even entertainment-related ones. Corporation 9592 had already covered as many of those bases as their most imaginative people could think of, and then they had paid lawyers to pore over the stuff that they’d thought of and extrapolate whole abstract categories of things that might be thought of later. And wherever they went, they found that the competition had been there five years earlier and patented everything that was patentable and, in one sense or another, pissed on everything that wasn’t. Which explained a lot about Phase 3.
The epiphany—if this wasn’t too fine a word for some crazy-ass shit that had popped up in Richard’s brain—had occurred in a brewpub at Sea-Tac. Richard had been marooned there for a couple of hours after his flight to Spokane had been delayed by a collision between a baggage truck and the plane: a strangely common occurrence at that airport, and one of those folksy touches that helped to preserve its small-town feel. Sitting there quaffing his pint and gazing at the shoeless and beltless travelers penguin-shuffling through the metal detectors, he had been struck by the sheer boringness of the work being performed by the screeners of the Transportation Security Administration: staring at those bags moving through the x-ray machines, trying to remain alert for that once-in-every-ten-years moment when someone would actually try to send a gun through.
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