Reamde: A Novel

by Neal Stephenson

  A can of something went up in a great whoosh of flames that forced him back out of the room and into the place where they mixed the ANFO. He began to push the door closed. All the windows in the space behind him had been destroyed by stray rounds, and the fire, ravenous for oxygen, was sucking a torrent of air through them. The wind got its teeth in the door and slammed it closed. Small round holes began to appear in it, and splinters flickered around the room.

  THE AMOUNT OF noise emanating from the apartment above was literally shocking in the sense that Marlon and his friends reacted to it in a physical way, as though giant hands were squeezing their viscera. Their instinct was to squat down on the floor. A line of craters appeared across their ceiling. It took them a surprisingly long time to get it through their heads that these had been made by bullets.

  If strangers had begun pounding on their door, they might have reacted a little more quickly. They had always speculated as to what they might do if the virus project led to a police raid. Most of that discussion had been in the same vein as “What if Xiamen got taken over by zombies?” Because the odds that the PSB would trouble itself over the activities of a nest of virus writers were not much higher than those of a zombie plague. But they had talked through it anyway and agreed that departing via the building’s main stairway was out of the question. The cops, or the zombies, would be there in force. More important, it was not nearly clever or cool enough; it was lacking in hacker flair.

  Power in the building was undependable, and so they had uninterruptible power supplies—UPSes—on their computers, to provide battery backup during blackouts. The UPSes had alarms that would squeal whenever the power was out; this was a warning to shut down the computer before the battery died.

  This morning, Marlon had been awakened by the sound of several UPSes buzzing and squealing. Nothing terribly unusual about that. Usually, though, when the power went down, it stayed down for a while, and the squeals continued. But not today. Today there had been a brief outage, lasting well under a minute. Enough to wake Marlon up. But a few minutes later there had been a whole series of brief ones that had made the alarms squeal in a repetitive pattern: groups of three beeps, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.

  Someone had been trying to send them a signal. He had no idea who was doing it, or what the message was, but something about it had triggered every paranoid nerve in Marlon’s body. He had thought back to their evacuation plan. He knew his roommates quite well and thought it likely that they had arrived at the same state of mind.

  If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.

  They really didn’t want to know, or to be bothered by, their neighbors; and so they had always tried to do unto their neighbors in exactly the same way. This was a fixed policy of Marlon’s. He was the oldest, at twenty-five. He had been living in places like this for about ten years, or ever since he had dropped out of middle school to become a zhongguo kuanggong, a Chinese gold miner, and to pursue the trade of dailian, or level grinding, in World of Warcraft and selling high-level characters to clients in Omei: Europe-America. At first he had only bunked—not worked—in places like this. Every day he’d get up and dribble his basketball through the streets of Xiamen to an office building that housed a medium-sized gold-mining operation: seventy-five computers used in shifts by a couple hundred miners. But since anyone could do this from any computer on the Internet, there was no reason to work for a company that would take part of your earnings, and so after a couple of years, he and a dozen other zhongguo kuanggong had split away and set up their own group in an apartment where all of them had worked and most of them had lived.

  This had lasted for less than two years. Marlon’s current group—the ones in this apartment—had been launched out of a slow divergence that became too wide to be papered over between two factions. One got more conservative over time as some of them got married and began to seek a more stable lifestyle. They began to see a steadier and safer return in the domestic market, where they could diversify among a number of China-based games, predominantly Aoba Jianghu, so that they would not have to worry about getting cracked down on by Blizzard, the company that ran World of Warcraft and that made active efforts to put gold miners out of business. Marlon’s faction, on the other hand, thought they saw bigger opportunities, albeit with higher risk, in concentrating on WoW for the foreign market.

  Or at least that was what they argued about; it was the ostensible reason for the split-up. But really it boiled down to pride. Some of the miners were ashamed that they were living in crowded apartments and doing this kind of work for a living. They wanted to get out, or if they couldn’t get out, to change the essential nature of the work. Marlon’s group, on the other hand, was fine with what they were doing. They saw it as no worse than any other occupation, even better than most; they were making a product and selling it to a market, they didn’t have to put up with asshole bosses or dangerous working conditions, and they were ever alert for ways to seek new opportunities.

  Thus the split and the move to a different apartment. At about the same time, T’Rain came along. They jumped to it, liking the fact that there was less risk; it had been created by the founder of Aoba Jianghu, it was designed from its tectonic plates upward to be friendly to the da G shou, as they now called themselves: the Makers of G(old). And they had been very happy with T’Rain for a while.

  But along with less risk came more management, in a sense. It was harder for them to make a big strike when their moves were being so meticulously watched, analyzed, and controlled by number crunchers in Seattle.

  Either that, or they’d gone into it with the teen illusion that they could somehow make a big strike, and then they had grown up.

  In any case, after the da G shou been at it for a couple of years, they had begun to get resigned to the fact that they were going to be grinding away at this possibly for the rest of their lives, and they had developed a strain of resentful ideology. Clever Chinese people had created this gold-mining industry and sustained it in the face of Blizzard’s most determined onslaughts, but the makers of T’Rain, using Nolan Xu as their running dog, had co-opted them and turned them into a resource extraction colony.

  During the WoW days, it had been common for the zhongguo kuanggong to fall victim to griefing attacks—relentless persecution in the game world—from players in Omei who had found it amusing to KoS (Kill on Sight) any character they suspected of belonging to a Chinese player. The in-game identities of these griefers had become well known. Marlon and several of his comrades had formed an all-Chinese guild called the Boxers: a powerful, nay unbeatable gang of raiders who would hunt down their enemies and grief them to the point where they’d have to liquidate their characters and create new accounts under assumed names. The Boxers had gone dormant when everything had moved over to T’Rain. More recently, though, they had revived it. In its new incarnation, though, it didn’t have to settle for roaming around and griefing the griefers. Instead it carved out a chunk of territory in the Torgai Foothills region and defended it against all comers, slowly expanding and improving it. REAMDE was only the latest—but by far the most lucrative—moneymaking scheme that they had launched from their rebel enclave. They had easily been pulling in enough gold to get a lease on a bigger apartment—maybe even an office suite—but Marlon, the grizzled veteran, who had seen many such schemes come and go, had been slow to make any such move. This place was a dump, but it was a cheap dump, it was conveniently located with respect to a wangba with an easily bribable cop, the landlord didn’t ask questions or give them any hassles, and there was no compelling reason to move. Many of the other tenants seemed to view the place in the same light.

  Until the high-velocity rounds began to pass down into their apartment from above, Marlon had never troubled himself to think about the pos
sible drawbacks of having neighbors who shared his attitude about what constituted suitable real estate. He had the vague sense that the apartment above them was crowded, but that was frequently the case in buildings like this one. From time to time, as they climbed the stairs to play basketball on the roof, they would see people who seemed to be waidiren—“not from around here” types, internal foreigners—and perhaps even waiguoren—non-Chinese. If the wind was blowing the right way, they would sometimes get a whiff of chemical odors, but it was difficult to pin down their origin.

  But now those chemicals were dribbling down into their apartment through bullet holes, and the dribbles were on fire.

  Marlon stared in fascination at a puddle of burning acetone that was forming on a pile of magazines. Then it penetrated his awareness that the other guys, the younger ones, were looking at him wondering what to do.

  “Zombies,” he announced, and turned toward the nearest window.

  The windows along the front of the building had shallow balconies projecting no more than a meter from the wall; these were fully caged in iron grids as a security measure, but some of the grids had swing-out hatches. These they kept padlocked. But one of the outcomes of their zombie-attack planning sessions had been a decision that the keys to those padlocks should be hung on nails, far enough inside the grids that no burglar could reach them, but close enough to be easily found in the event of a panicky departure (a little more realistically, they were worried about being trapped inside the building in the event of fire). There were three hatches, three padlocks, and three keys. Marlon noted that one was already in use by a member of the group, so he grabbed his closest roommate by the arm and pushed him over to another and made sure he understood what to do. Then Marlon proceeded to the third, which was in the kitchen, and took the key and unlocked the padlock and swung the hatch open.

  He stuck his head out the window. It seemed a long way down to the street. A van was parked down there—the gangsters’ ride? Never mind. Incredibly bad things were happening upstairs—fragments of glass and plaster were raining down right in front of him—and his apartment was on fire. Younger da G shou, boys he felt responsible for, were queuing up behind him. He debated whether he should be the last one to depart, like a captain on a sinking ship, or should lead them forth like a sergeant going into battle. He decided on the latter approach. Turning his back to the grid he leaned back, stuck his head out, reached up, got a grip on the bars, and swung out into the open. Then he got his feet on the bars beneath him and crab-walked out of the way, making room for the next guy.

  EVEN DOWN IN the basement, the gun battle had been shockingly loud from the get-go; but it actually kept getting louder. Zula, relegated to infuriating uselessness by the handcuff and her inability to pick it, could only stand there and wait for something to change.

  Think, Zula.

  Did skinny teenaged Chinese hackers have a lot of automatic weapons lying around their apartments?

  If so, were they so skilled at using them that they could actually put up that much of a battle against a crew like Sokolov’s?

  Peter had gotten himself free. Seeing this, Zula turned toward him, expecting that his first move would be to cross the floor and begin work on her handcuff. She even rotated her wrist into a more convenient position for him.

  He did not approach.

  “I’d better see what’s going on,” he said, after a silence. A silence that had gone on for too long. He’d had too much time to think during that silence.

  “Peter?” she said. Standing there with her wrist poised in what she’d hoped would be an inviting position, she felt like a girl in a prom dress, being stood up by her date.

  “Just going to scope it out,” he assured her.

  He had that same look about him, the same tone of voice, as the night they had driven back from B.C. He was in full dodging mode.

  “Whatever is going on up there,” Zula said, “it has nothing to do with hackers. This is something bigger than that.”

  “Back in a sec,” Peter said, and walked to the base of the stairs. He hesitated for a few moments, unable to meet her eye. “Whatever,” he muttered. He hunched his shoulders and began walking up the stairs.

  MARLON COULD SEE four other da G shou clinging to various grids like spiders, looking for ways down. There were only three left in the apartment.

  Moving around this way was not difficult. At least 50 percent of the building’s frontage consisted of grids just like the one Marlon was hanging from. The only aspect of this that was remotely problematic was finding ways to make the transition from one grid to the next. In many cases, this was made considerably easier by other features that had been attached to the outside of the building: awnings, brackets for external airconditioning units, bundles of cables, plumbing, downspouts, and quasi-European architectural bric-a-brac, cast in concrete.

  Looking straight up, Marlon could see the bundle of wires that ran above the street to the building across the way. He could clearly make out the blue cat-5 cable that he and his partners had added to it when they had moved in. If he could climb up to it, he could shinny across the bundle to the opposite building. That seemed unnecessarily risky, though, when he could just climb down.

  The window above him, on the fifth floor, exploded and showered him with glass. Marlon closed his eyes and bowed his head and let it rain down all over him. Then he began moving sideways as fast as he could, because the glass breaking was not just a one-time event: someone was up there systematically demolishing the window with a hard, heavy object. Risking a quick look up, he glimpsed that object and recognized it as a rifle butt. He moved sideways as rapidly as he could. His roommates were emerging from the same hatch he had used and looking his way; their instinct was to follow the leader. Marlon waved them furiously in the other direction, making significant glances up at the flailing rifle butt, and they quickly took his meaning.

  People were screaming down on the street. He ignored them.

  A shot sounded directly above him, then another, each one threatening to knock him loose with its shock wave. Metal flew, and he understood that the lock on a window grille had been shot out from the inside. Not knowing what this might portend, he began moving faster, more recklessly, and in a few moments reached the building’s corner. Below him, a narrow side street plugged into the large one that ran along the front. One floor below, an awning had been constructed sufficiently far in the past that the corrugated metal was thoroughly rusted and holed. Which was a good thing; he’d have slid off a new roof. This one would afford plenty of friction and numerous handholds. Marlon used the window grids to descend to that level and then used an airconditioner bracket and a downspout as handholds to make the move around the corner and get onto that awning. Following that horizontally for about ten meters he came to the midline of the building’s side wall, which was marked by a vertical column of small windows that shed light onto an internal stairway. Running parallel to that was a vertical cable bundle, very thick and dense, with many handholds. Marlon sank his fingers into it, got a solid grip, and then planted his shoes against the brick and began to walk down the side of the building like a human fly.

  As he was passing the window on the second floor, he nearly lost his grip. A face had appeared briefly in the window, so close that he could have reached out and touched it had a dirty pane of glass not been in the way. It was the face of a white man, round, heavy, dark hair slicked back, the skin flushed with excitement. It was only there for a second. Then it disappeared as the man proceeded down the steps to the floor below.

  But even through the glass and above the noise, Marlon could hear the man bellowing a single English word: “YOU!”

  Curiosity, for Marlon, had now become a more powerful force than self-preservation. He’d been planted in one location for a few moments and now turned his attention back to the wire bundle, looking for his next set of handholds. He wanted to get down to the level below and see who YOU was.

  But his attenti
on was drawn by renewed movement in the window: another face, dimly seen through the dirt on the window, descending the stairs, rounding the turn at the landing. But this one was different in several ways. To begin with it was a dark-skinned face, something rarely seen in these parts. A couple of the other da G shou had mentioned seeing a black man in the building’s upper hallway, and Marlon had made fun of them for watching too much hoops on television. But there was no denying that Marlon was now seeing a black man, and a fairly tall one at that. He was carrying a rifle that Marlon recognized, from video games, as an AK-47. But unlike the first man, he was moving carefully, even furtively.

  Rounding the turn on the landing, the black man turned his back to Marlon, descended a couple of steps, and crept to a halt.

  Marlon had remained frozen through all of this, not wanting to draw notice by making any sudden movements, but now he let himself down so hastily that he lost his grip and found himself briefly dangling by one hand before he was able to regain his grip and plant his feet again.

  Coming in view of the first-story window, he saw the first man, the big white fellow, standing with his back to Marlon, confronting another white man who had apparently been coming up the stairs from the basement. This second man was young, slender, with longish hair and a heavy beard-shadow. His facial features were difficult to make out, but it was obvious from his body language that he was in a state of terror so advanced that he had become physically unstrung. He was leaning back against the wall of the stairwell as if getting that extra inch of distance from the big man would somehow improve his situation. He had turned his head down and to one side and was holding his hands up in front of him.