by L. E. Price
“You know, same as I do, what kind of safety protocols those things operate on. That wasn’t an accident. It was an assassination.”
She paused, going pensive, and Jake could hear her thinking.
“What?” he said.
“We can’t trust Woody.”
“Woody’s a good guy. Earnest. I don’t think there’s a duplicitous bone in his body.”
“That’s not the problem,” Prentise said. “I’m not worried about what he’ll do, I’m worried about what he’ll say and to who. You work for the Kensington family. He works for SDS.”
“And?”
She rolled her neck, joints popping.
“And if these ‘dragon hunters’ accidentally uncovered some kind of price-fixing conspiracy, something that could tank the company’s reputation — and its profits — they are not on our side.”
“Not entirely sure about that,” Jake said.
“Meaning?”
He hadn’t told Woody about this, and until now, he hadn’t really questioned why. It wasn’t because he thought Woody wouldn’t believe him. It was because Prentise was right: something in his gut told him he didn’t want any chance of Woody letting it slip to SDS.
“When I first got here,” he said. “You know Cybele, the priestess?”
“Everybody knows Cybele.” Prentise put her hands to her heart, and dropped into a lilting, pitch-perfect imitation of the NPC’s voice. “’I have seen many adventurers pass through these halls, but you…there’s something special about you.’”
“She kissed me on the cheek.”
Prentise cocked her head. “The hell you say.”
“And told me to ‘beware the drumming man’.”
“That…doesn’t happen,” she said. “Cybele follows a script. The same script. Every time. Even if there was a one-in-a-million chance of some random deviation, someone would have found it by now.”
“Yesterday, while I was in Dutton, waiting for Woody to show up, a washer-woman read my palm. She warned me to watch out for deep magic. Which, I’m told, is a thing from development—”
“That got stripped out before the game went live, yeah.” Prentise eyed him. “You’re serious. Two NPCs went off-script, just for you.”
“You tell me: what could cause that?”
She rubbed her chin, musing. “An insider. A developer, inside SDS, with access to the game’s code and some way of covering their tracks.”
“SDS may be the bad guys here,” Jake said, “and right now, they’re my number-one suspect, but we’ve got a friend on the inside.”
“They could be a little less cryptic.”
“Don’t know how much they can stick their neck out for us. I keep thinking about that Abomination.”
“Like I said,” she told him, “they can spawn anywhere.”
“Random and rare, right. But that one showed up at the perfect moment when we needed leverage on Merisaude. All the same, it wasn’t a free gift: we still had to beat the thing, fair and square. And if we’d lost that fight, we’d be right back where we started. If we really do have a guardian angel, they can only help so much.”
“It’s on us, then.” Prentise looked to the farmhouse. “Freeze him out. Don’t tell Woody a word about this. He’s a nice guy, but we need to compartmentalize. We have to make sure he can’t leak anything back to his bosses. If we have a guardian angel inside SDS, we have an obligation to keep them safe.”
There was something about Prentise’s language, her cadence, that struck a chord in Jake’s memory. Or maybe it was just the iron resolve behind her words, the tone of a woman who was used to taking command of an investigation.
“You talk like a prosecutor,” he said.
“You talk like a cop.”
“I’m not a cop,” he told her.
“I’m not a prosecutor.” Up ahead, by the barn, a lantern flared to life. “And here we go. Showtime.”
The faint light bobbed, swaying in the grip of a shadow. The shadow took on form and substance, dusky skin and violet silk. Merisaude clutched the lantern in one hand and her ram-skull staff in the other, alone and away from her guild of admirers. The hood of the lantern cloaked her face in shadow, but Jake could read her body language like an open book.
“She’s nervous,” he whispered.
“Merisaude doesn’t get nervous.”
“So, is she worried because of whatever she’s up to tonight, or because she knows we’re watching her?”
“You heard her at the church,” Prentise murmured. “She wants insulation. Deniability. She’s worried about what’ll happen if she gets caught.”
“I was thinking about that, too. My first night in town, I ran into a little spat with one of the Elect—”
“Elitist assholes,” Prentise muttered.
“My thoughts exactly, but Woody warned me to make nice. He told me that social cred is more important than gold around here; piss off the wrong person, and you’ll get frozen out. Nobody to play with.”
“You think that’s what she’s afraid of?”
“That’s the problem.” Jake nodded up ahead, as Merisaude approached the open mouth of the barn. “For a nobody like me, that’s a threat. Her? She’s got her own guild, the ear of a god, and a cult of die-hard fans. And she likes being hated by everybody else.”
“She’s a villain,” Prentise said. “And a popular one. Everybody loves a good villain.”
“Exactly. Who could threaten her social capital? Nobody. She’d wear being snubbed as a badge of pride and her fans will just love her that much more.”
Prentise followed his trail of thought. “She’s not worried about in-game consequences.”
“But if she knows these people have reach in the real world…”
“For instance,” she said, “the kind of people who can reprogram a gardening bot and kill a man for stumbling within a hundred yards of the truth.”
“Exactly,” Jake said.
A second light answered the first, washing the belly of the barn in a warm, orange and shifting glow. A figure in heavy black velvet robes stood beside a rough-hewn table. The lantern flickered at the new arrival’s side, flame dancing in a sudden gust of cold and clammy night wind.
Gloved hands extended to greet Merisaude, poking from long, draping sleeves. Jake couldn’t tell for certain if the velvet-swaddled figure was a woman or a thin-set man; the space under their drooping hood was a well of inky darkness.
Merisaude set her lantern down next to its counterpart on the table. Then she unsnapped a hip-pouch on her drooping silver-chain belt, rummaging inside. Prentise spread her fingers; a black oblong window blossomed between them, and a steady thrumming cursor matched the pace of Jake’s heart.
“Now,” Prentise murmured as she activated the item tracker, “let’s find out who your mysterious friend is.”
Merisaude produced the jagged shard of a realm key, runes glowing strident and luminous green upon its polished marble face. She pressed it into the cloaked figure’s open and expectant palm. Instantly, fresh data scrolled down along Prentise’s command window.
ObjID 08d01a77d (”realm key — Goseris”) -> PID 27b82d19e (”Merisaude Trine”)
ObjID 08d01a77d (”realm key — Goseris”) -> PID ??? (playerID NOT CONFIGURED / NOT FOUND)
“The hell?” Prentise breathed. “That…that shouldn’t be possible.”
Merisaude continued with the handover. More keys, more fragments, each one disappearing into the folds of the stranger’s robes. Dozens of them, a fortune in rare treasure. When she passed over the fragment that had traveled through Prentise’s hands a day earlier — and been captured in the item tracker’s database — it gave them the exact same error. Player not configured, player not found.
Jake was watching to see what the figure would give her in return. Nothing. Nothing but a word he couldn’t hear, as it leaned forward to whisper in Merisaude’s ear. She nodded, once, and took up her lantern.
“What does it mean?” J
ake whispered.
Prentise stared at the window. Then to the silent, motionless figure.
“No PID,” she said. “That’s not a player.”
“What, it’s an NPC?”
Another gust of cold wind rolled over the dying fields, making the wheat-stalks shiver all around them. The lantern on the table guttered and died. The light vanished, and the robed figure vanished along with it. Merisaude turned to go, holding her lamp high, standing in the barn alone.
“An NPC normally can’t take an object from a player,” Prentise said. “It might look like they do, like if you sell something to a shopkeeper, but the code handles it differently: technically, the object is deleted the second you hand it over. If the object is needed later, the game re-creates an identical copy on the spot. Saves on memory.”
“Normally,” Jake said. “So, could one be custom-coded to work differently?”
“If you had top-level access to the game, sure, hypothetically it wouldn’t even be that hard.” Prentise stared at the empty barn. Merisaude walked out under its leaning eaves. “That’s one of two possibilities. The other is…that was a gamemaster.”
Jake narrowed his eyes.
“I thought gamemasters had to have big glowing halos,” he said, gesturing above his head, “and fanfare, and—”
“And code that tracks every move they make, so the game logs can be audited by the Grid Regulatory Authority on demand,” Prentise said. “Yeah. Supposed to. And if someone found a way to get around that, it doesn’t even matter what they’re doing with the keys. They’ve committed a laundry list of felonies from the data breach alone. The entire integrity of the game is shot.”
“And SDS?” Jake asked, though he already knew the answer.
“If the truth got out? They wouldn’t survive.”
People were murdered for lower stakes every single day. Jake watched as Merisaude paused near the barn door. She cast a long, slow stare across the blighted fields, as if searching for her hidden audience. Then she turned, lowering her lantern, and walked off into the darkness.
* * * *
Jake’s logout timer chimed just ahead of a plunge into warm darkness. Then he opened his eyes, finding himself sprawled out on the cracked leather cushions of his couch. A midnight storm hammered the paper-shrouded office windows.
He tugged the magnetic clamp free, cable retracting into the game deck. The deck’s lights went amber, slipping into sleep mode. He needed to be in sleep mode, too, but he wanted to jot down a few case-notes on his tablet first. Sometimes he could see connections better that way, casting them in black and white.
“Eva, lights,” he muttered as he pushed himself to his feet. The overheads flickered to life, stubborn and slow.
There was a bullet on his desk.
Just a single shell, a squat .357 round with a copper nose, standing upright like a rocket in the heart of his desk blotter. Jake didn’t own a .357.
He shot a glance at the closed office door. Another at the half-open bathroom doorway and the shadows beyond, dark as the midnight well beneath the hooded figure’s cloak. His instincts kicked him out of shock, straight into action; he dropped low and slapped one hand under the coffee table, making the game deck bounce. His Jazzer was there, pinned to the underbelly with two strips of duct tape. He grabbed the bulbous sonic gun’s grip, ripped it free, and went on a search-and-destroy mission.
The bathroom light clicked on. He ripped back the half-square curve of the shower curtain with his finger on the trigger. Empty. So was his closet, nothing inside but a row of clothes dangling from cheap plastic hangers. There was nowhere else in the office to hide. He checked under the desk just to be certain, on his way to the front door.
The hallway outside stood empty. Nothing but a cold and lonely linoleum span, stretching left and right under spots of hard white light, as the storm’s muffled thrum cascaded against the sagging roof.
He crouched down and eyed the lock. No signs of scratching or abuse around the keyhole. Didn’t mean it hadn’t been picked. Just meant his intruder knew what they were doing. He stepped back inside, shut the door, and locked it again anyway.
A crawling sense of violation, of helplessness, twisted his stomach into a cold knot. They’d been here while he was in the game, lost in an electronic hallucination. They’d opened his door, stood over his comatose body, watched him. Then they’d departed, leaving a message behind.
The message couldn’t have been clearer. They’d had him, dead to rights, and they could have put that bullet on his desk or in his brain with equal ease. The only reason you’re not dead is because we decided to let you live, that tiny copper-tipped rocket was telling him. Walk away.
Jake put his shoulder against the desk. The rusted casters groaned against the yellowed tile as it slid, inch by protesting inch, across the office floor. One last heave, his shoulder burning, and the desk hit the closed door with a hollow thump.
He stepped back and dusted off his hands. Not exactly the pinnacle of security, but the makeshift barricade would keep him safe until morning. Safe enough to sleep, even if he had to do it with one eye open.
26.
The morning sun shone through the rotten-egg smog and spun the sky over Philly into dirty gold. The Triangle woke with the dawn. It had been some kind of park once, the open-air market bounded by crumbling brick posts and corroded brass plaques, their words lost to history. Now carts rolled along bumpy stone walkways, wheels and double-layered boots splashing through steaming puddles of muck. Plastic awnings rattled into place and merchants in shrouds and gas masks, looking like ragged mutant roaches, put their daily catches on display.
Jake was a roach himself, one of the teeming faceless hordes that flooded the square in hopes of finding a deal. He stared out at the crowd through the UV tinting of his goggles, and the leather overcoat and hood of his Outsider’s Special bulked up his frame and concealed the bulges of his arsenal. His Jazzer rode on one hip, his tactical baton on the other, and he still couldn’t help feeling outgunned. He’d been threatened before, plenty of times, and last night wasn’t the first time someone had put a literal gun to his head.
Never like this, though.
Some men might take that as their cue to walk away, to wash their hands of the whole mess. Jake was pragmatic. He knew what he was good at, what his strengths were. Walking away wasn’t one of them.
Neither was sticking his head in the sand and hoping for the best. He needed to take action, shore up his defenses, and make sure last night couldn’t repeat itself. An early-morning call to Woody laid half the groundwork. He was searching for the rest in the Triangle, drifting under the din of conversation and catcalls in a dozen languages, merchants waving their salvage and shiny trinkets in hopes of attracting a magpie.
There were food stands here and there, rolling boilers kicking up plumes of steam and layering the rotten-egg air with faint spices. Soy bars, ramen, arcology meal-boxes that had fallen off a truck somewhere, kabobs lined with dubious chunks of meat or charred tofu. One of the vendors waved a beefy arm to catch his eye.
“Jake! Jake! You look hungry!”
Jake’s voice was muffled, robotic under his rebreather. “How can you tell?”
“You move like a hungry man. C’mere, I got kabobs, fresh, good stuff, my mama’s recipe—”
“Pigeon or rat today?” Jake asked.
The vendor spread his arms wide. His own rebreather covered most of his face, a drab olive plastic curve, but his smile reached the eyes behind his goggles. “Hey. Pluck the wings off, pull the feathers, same animal.”
Jake couldn’t argue with that. He’d had both, in lean times, and it all came down to how you cooked and spiced it. Protein was protein. All the same, his stomach was rumbling for the lamb stew at the Dented Chalice. Too bad you couldn’t live on dreams.
“Maybe I’ll catch you on my way out,” he said. “You seen Rica around?”
The kabob-man pointed to the north point of the Triangle. Jake fo
llowed the fingertip, making his way between rows of carts like they were games on a carnival midway. Most of the regulars peddled anything they could scavenge; others, anything they could steal. If Jake had been in the market for scrap copper, construction tools or satellite radios, he would have been all set. His destination was up ahead on the right, a double-wide booth lit in wasp-yellow neon piping.
So was the proprietor. Rica was a devout member of the Church of the Divine Transmogrification, and she wore her creed bolted into her flesh and bone. Her full-face mask, lit with dancing golden LEDs, was affixed by screws drilled into inflamed honey-brown skin. Pipes and tubes snaked in and out of her purple PVC gown and plugged into the skeletal harness on her back, making it impossible to tell where the meat ended and the machine began. Her LEDs bounced like popcorn as she spotted Jake, irises of her artificial eyes swiveling wide, and she raised a steel-gauntleted hand. Her fingernails were stripped clean, replaced by five USB ports with black cords that vanished under her skin.
“My favorite customer,” said her voice, cresting on a smooth wave of electronic modulation. “Where you been, Jake?”
He bellied up to the other side of her booth.
“Out and about, around and around. What’s the good word?”
“Keepin’ it true, hey. Speaking of true and not-true, been hearing a birdie chirping about you.”
Jake jerked his thumb behind him, toward the kabob stand.
“Careful,” he said. “That bird flies too low, Morty’s going to catch it and cook it.”
Rica’s laugh was a crystal chime on a rolling wave of static.
“Man can cook, though. Hear you’ve been running with an arcology crowd.”
“Working for, not running with. Very big difference.”
Rica’s LEDs turned a darker amber, the mask echoing her mood.
“BIP, Jake.”
“Meaning?”
“The Black Iron Prison. The Grand Illusion. Just because you’re only visiting, doesn’t mean they’re not sucking you in. Somebody said you’ve been talking to a game streamer.” She said game like somebody else might say poison.