Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  TURNING HIS ATTENTION back to matters inside the plane’s cabin, Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course), created by a microdepartment operating out of the Seattle office, which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours: notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines, untoward spikes in commodity prices.

  TORGAI MORTALITY HITS 1,000,000% MARK

  (compiled from reports by Gazette correspondents Gresh’nakh the Forsaken, Erikk Blöodmace, and Lady Lacewing of Faërie)

  Torgai Foothills—The mortality rate in this unexpectedly war-ravaged region today skyrocketed through one million percent. Local observers attributed the unusual figure to an “epochal” influx of outsiders, compelled, by as yet unexplained astral phenomena, to pay tribute to a local troll. The visitors or, as they have come to be known to locals, “Meat,” are laden with tribute and hence make tempting targets for highwaymen (the one million percent benchmark is considered by analysts to be an important psychological barrier that separates a war-ravaged inferno from a chiliastic gore storm).

  Steadying himself on an eight-foot wizard’s staff as he waded through a knee-high river of blood washing down the market street of Bagpipe Gulch—a community that once prized its status as the “Gateway to Torgai”—Shekondar the Fearsome, a local alchemist, denied that the trend was a negative influence on the town’s image, insisting that the influx of “Meat,” and the bandits, land pirates, and cutthroats who had come to prey on them, had been a boon to the region’s economic development and a bonanza for local merchants, especially those who, like Shekondar, dealt in goods, such as healing potions and magically enhanced whetstones, that were in demand among the newcomers.

  In the Wayfarer Inn, a popular local watering hole situated on the precipitous road leading up out of Bagpipe Gulch into the foothills, a more nuanced view of the situation could be heard in the remarks of a muffled voice barely audible through a wall of corpses stacked all the way to the taproom’s ceiling, and identifying itself as Goodman Bustle, the barkeep. Suggesting that all the visitors and attention might be “too much of a good thing,” the voice identifying itself as Bustle complained that many customers, citing as an excuse the towering rampart of decaying flesh that had completely blocked access to the bar, had departed the premises without paying their tabs.

  The compilers of this document all sported advanced liberal arts degrees from very expensive institutions of higher learning and wrote in this style, as Richard had belatedly realized, as a form of job security. Upper management had grown accustomed to reading the Gazette every morning over their lattes and would probably have paid these people to write it even if it hadn’t been an official part of Corporation 9592’s budget.

  The phrase “as yet unexplained astral phenomena” was a hyperlink leading to a separate article on the internal wiki. For it was an iron law of Gazette editorial policy that the world of T’Rain as seen through the screens of players must be treated as the ground truth, the only reality observable or reportable by its correspondents. Oddities due to the choices made by players were attributed to “strange lights in the sky,” “eldritch influences beyond the ken of even the most erudite local observers,” “unlooked-for syzygy,” “what was most likely the intervention of a capricious local demigod,” “bolt from the blue,” or, in one case, “an unexpected reversal of fortune that even the most wizened local gaffers agreed was without precedent and that, indeed, if seen in a work of literature, would have been derided as a heavy-handed example of deus ex machina.” But of course it was one of the Gazette staff’s most important tasks to report on player behavior, that is, on things that happened in the real world, and so such phrases were always linked to non-Gazette articles written in a sort of corporate memo-speak that always disheartened Richard when he clicked through to it.

  In this case, the explanatory memo supplied the information that the Torgai Foothills were the turf of a band calling themselves the da G shou, probably an abbreviation of da G[old] shou, “makers of gold,” where the truncation of “Gold” to “G” was either due to the influence of gangsta rap, or because it was easier to type. They had been running the place for years. All pretty normal. There were many little enclaves like this. Nothing in the rules prevented a sufficiently dedicated and well-organized band of players from conquering and holding a particular stretch of ground. The “Meat” were there because of REAMDE, which had been present at background levels for several weeks now but that recently had pinballed through the elbow in its exponential growth curve and for about twelve hours had looked as though it might completely take over all computing power in the Universe, until its own size and rapid growth had caused it to run afoul of the sorts of real-world friction that always befell seemingly exponential phenomena and bent those hockey-stick graphs over into lazy S plots. Which was not to say that it wasn’t still a very serious problem and that scores of programmers and sysadmins were not working eighteen-hour shifts crawling all over the thing. But it wasn’t going to take over the world and it wasn’t going to bring the whole company to a stop, and in the meantime, thousands of characters were racking up experience points slaying each other in Goodman Bustle’s pub.

  CORVALLIS KAWASAKI PICKED him up on the tarmac of the Renton airport. He was driving the inevitable Prius. “I could have had a friggin’ Lincoln town car,” Richard complained, as he stuffed himself into its front seat.

  “Just wanted to bend your ear a little,” C-plus explained, fussing with the intermittent wiper knob, trying to dial in that elusive setting, always so difficult to find in Seattle, that would keep the windshield visually transparent but not drag shuddering blades across dry glass. They were staring straight down the runway at the southern bight of Lake Washington, which was flecked with whitecaps. It had been a choppy landing, and Richard felt a bit clammy.

  Corvallis had grown up in the town after which he was named, the son of a Japanese-American cog sci professor and an Indian biotech researcher, but culturally he was pure Oregonian. No one at the company knew exactly what he did for a living. But it was hard to imagine the place without him. He shifted the Prius into gear, or whatever it was called when you pulled the lever that made it go forward, and proceeded at a safe and sane speed among the parked airplanes, dripping and rocking against their tie-downs, and out through a gate and onto something that looked like an actual street. “I know you’re going to see Devin tomorrow and mostly what’s on your mind is the war.”

  He paused slightly before saying “war,” and he said it funny, with a long O and heavy emphasis.

  “Woe-er?” Richard repeated.

  “W-O-R,” C-plus explained, “the War of Realignment.”

  “Is that what the cool kids are calling it now?”

  “Yeah. I guess it works better in email than in conversation. Anyway, I know you’re going to be prepping for that, but also you need to know that there are some interesting technolegal issues coming up around REAMDE.”

  “God, that sounds like just the sort of can of worms that I retired to get away from.”

  “I don’t think you are actually retired,” Corvallis pointed out mildly. “I mean, you just flew in from Elphinstone and tomorrow you’re taking a jet to Missouri and from there—”

  “It’s a selective retirement,” Richard explained, “a retirement from boring shit.”

  “I think that’s called a promotion.”

  “Well, whatever you call it, I don’t want to ‘drill down’—is that the expression you use?”

  “You know perfectly well that it is.”

  “Into nasty details of REAMDE’s legal consequences. I mean, we’ve had viruses before, right?”

  “We have 281 active viruses as of the last time I checked, which was an hour ago.”

  Richard drew breath but C-plus cut him off. “And before you go where you’re going, let me just point out that most of them don’t actua
lly make use of our technology as a payment mechanism. So REAMDE is not just another virus. It presents new issues.”

  “Because our servers are actually being used to transfer the booty.”

  “Turns out,” Corvallis warned him, “that federal law enforcement types haven’t yet bought into the whole APPIS mind-set, and so they aren’t real big on terms like ‘booty,’ ‘swag,’ ‘hoard,’ ‘treasure,’ or anything that is evocative of a fictitious Medieval Armed Combat scenario. To them, it’s all payments. And since our system uses real money, it’s all—well—real.”

  “I always knew that that was going to swing around and bite me in the ass someday,” Richard said. “I just didn’t know how or when.”

  “Well, it’s bitten you in the ass lots of times, actually.”

  “I know, but each one feels like the first.”

  “The creator of the REAMDE virus has made some … interesting choices.”

  “Interesting in a way that’s bad for us?” Richard asked. Because this was clearly implied by Corvallis’s tone.

  “Well, that depends on whether we want to be the avenging sword of the Justice Department, here, or sort of cop out and say it’s not our problem.”

  “Go on.”

  “The instructions in the eponymous file just state that the gold pieces are to be left at a particular location in the Torgai Foothills. They do not say that the gold is to be mailed or transferred to any one specific character.”

  “Obviously,” Richard said, “because in that case we could just shut down that character’s account.”

  “Right. So the way that the virus creator takes possession of the gold is by simply picking it up off the ground where it has been dropped by the victim.”

  “Which is something that any character in the game could do.”

  “Theoretically,” Corvallis said. “In practice, obviously, you can’t pick the gold up unless you can actually get to that location in the Torgai Foothills. And in order to turn those gold pieces into real-world money, you have to then physically get them out to a town with an M.C.”

  “Not ‘physically,’” Richard corrected him. “You guys always make that mistake. It’s a game, remember?”

  “Okay, physically in the game world,” Corvallis said, his tone of voice suggesting that Richard was being just a little pedantic. “You know what I mean. Your character has to be capable of surviving the journey from the drop point, through the foothills, to the nearest town or ley line intersection, and to an M.C.”

  For, as C-plus didn’t need to explain to Richard, virtual gold pieces in the game could not be converted into real-world cash without the services of a moneychanger—an M.C.—and you couldn’t find those guys just anywhere. For techno-legal reasons Richard had forgotten, they had limited the number of moneychangers, inserted some friction and delay into the system.

  Richard said, “So the creators of the virus were leveraging their physical control of the—goddamn it!” For Corvallis had gotten a mischievous look on his face and raised an index finger from his steering wheel. Richard corrected himself, “They were leveraging their virtual, in-the-game-world military dominance of that region to create a payment mechanism that would be more difficult for us to shut down.”

  “As far as we can tell, they are using as many as a thousand different characters to go into that region and pick up the gold and act as mules.”

  “All self-sus, no doubt.”

  “You got it.”

  “But how are they extracting real money from self-sus accounts?” Because the usual way of turning your pretend gold pieces into real money was to have it show up as a payment to a credit card account.

  “Western Union money transfers, through a bank in Taiwan.”

  Richard got a blank look.

  “It’s an option we added,” Corvallis explained. “Nolan’s always looking for ways to make the system more transparent to Chinese kids who don’t have credit cards.”

  “Fine. Where is the drop point?”

  “Drop point?”

  “Where are the victims depositing the ransom money?”

  “Interesting question. Turns out that there’s not just one place for that. The REAMDE files are all a little bit different—apparently they were generated by a script that inserts a different set of coordinates each time. So far we have identified more than three hundred different drop locations that are specified in different versions of the file.”

  “You’re telling me the gold is scattered all over the place.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They anticipated we might make moves to shut them down,” Richard said, “so they spread things out.”

  “Apparently. So it’s analogous to a situation in the real world where caches of gold have been scattered all over a rugged wilderness area, hundreds of square kilometers.”

  “If that happened in the real world,” Richard said, “the cops would just cordon off the area.”

  “And that is exactly what cops of various nationalities are asking us to do in this case,” C-plus said. “Just write a script that will eject or log out every character in the Torgai Foothills and prevent them from logging back in. Then go in there and collect evidence.”

  “By ‘go in there’ you just mean run a program that will identify all gold pieces, or piles or containers thereof, in that region.”

  “Yes.”

  “And are we telling them to fuck themselves?” This seemed the obvious thing to do, but Richard wouldn’t put anything past Corporation 9592’s current CEO.

  “We don’t have any choice!” C-plus said.

  Richard was struck mute with admiration at the way C-plus had answered the question while imputing nothing except helplessness to the CEO.

  Corvallis went on, “REAMDE has affected users from at least forty-three different countries that we know about. If we say yes to one, we have to say yes to all of them.”

  “And then our company is being micromanaged by the United Nations,” Richard said. “Awesome.” He was way too old to use this all-purpose adjective sincerely but was not above throwing it into a sentence for ironic effect.

  “The legal issues are just fantastically complex,” C-plus said, “given all the different nationalities. So I’m not here to tell you that we’ve got an answer. But it helps that each individual event is a very small crime. Seventy-three dollars at current exchange rates. Under the radar as far as serious criminal prosecution is concerned.”

  “I have a headache already,” Richard said. “Is there anything you actually need me to do? Or are you just…”

  “Just cluing you in,” C-plus said. “I’m sure that the PR staff will want some quality time with you before you go on the road.”

  “They just want to tell me to shut up,” Richard said. “I already know that.”

  “That is not the actual point. They just want to be seen as having done their jobs.”

  Richard fell silent for a while, wondering whether there was any way that he could delegate to an underling all meetings whose sole purpose was for the people he was meeting with to demonstrate that they were doing their jobs. Then he realized he should have just stayed in the Schloss if that was what he really wanted.

  Half an hour later they were at Corporation 9592’s headquarters, chilling out in a small conference room with an over-sized LCD video screen. Corvallis offered to “drive,” meaning that he would operate the mouse and keyboard, but Richard asserted his prerogative, dragging the controls over to his side of the table and then logging in using his personal account. All his characters were listed on the splash screen. Compared to some players, he didn’t have that many: only eight. Even though he understood, intellectually, that they were just software bots, it made him feel somehow guilty to know that they were all sitting in their home zones twenty-four hours a day, executing their bothaviors, and waiting for the master to log in and exercise them.

  He scanned the list of names and decided, what the hell, he would just unlimber Egdod.r />
  Egdod was the first player-character that had ever been created in T’Rain, not counting a number of titans, gods, demigods, and so on that had been set up in order to build the world and that were not owned by any one player. He had his own personal home zone, a towering fortress of solitude constructed on the top of one of T’Rain’s highest mountains and decorated with artifacts that Egdod had looted from various palaces and ruins that he’d had a hand in conquering. Egdod was so famous that Richard could not even take him out of doors without first concealing his identity behind a many-layered screen of spells, wards, disguises, and enchantments whose purpose was to make him look like a much less powerful, but still way-too-puissant-to-fuck-with character. Even the simplest of these spells was far beyond the powers of all but a few hundred of T’Rain’s most powerful denizens. Richard had written a script that invoked them all automatically, with a single keystroke; otherwise it would have taken him half an hour. Each spell triggered its own custom-designed light show and sound effects extravaganza, the latter propagating through the building thanks to the oversized subwoofers with which this conference room had been supplied, and so awareness that Egdod was being aired out spread through neighboring offices by subsonic vibration and then throughout the rest of the building by text message, and curious employees began to congregate in the doorway of the conference room, not daring to cross its threshold, just wanting to catch a glimpse of the event, in somewhat the same spirit that navy veterans would gather on the shore to watch the battle-ship Missouri being towed to a new berth. Which was not to imply that a warship of that class would have stood much of a chance against the firepower of an Egdod. A direct hit from an ICBM might have mussed Egdod’s hair—which, predictably, was white, in a God of the Old Testament do. Richard longed to swap it for something a little more against-the-grain, and when Egdod was in disguise, he always did. But once in a blue moon, Egdod had to appear in his true avatar to kill a god, divert a comet, or carry out some ceremonial function, and at those times it was necessary that he look the part. As the successive magic wrappers were laid down, however, this awe-inspiring figure and his harbingers and vanguards, his encloaking energy-nimbi and meteorological accoutrements, got stripped away and snuffed out, and finally Egdod himself altered his appearance to that of a somewhat pixieish, vaguely elven-looking young female with spiky dark hair. At this point the crowd in the doorway dispersed, except for a few who wanted to linger and get a view of Egdod’s fortress from inside.