by L. E. Price
“And we have our answer,” Tim said.
“Lollers,” Woody said. “Good at being assholes. Bad at just about everything else. How’d the meeting with you-know-who go?”
Jake kept his voice down, scouting the crowd for any sign of Merisaude’s entourage. “Better than expected. One hitch. We need keys, key fragments, whatever we can scrounge up for the realm of Goseris.”
“How many and how fast?”
“Twenty, by tomorrow night.”
Woody let out a long, low whistle. On his other side, Tim gave Jake a curious look.
“The portal to Goseris isn’t open this month. What do you need ‘em for?”
“Inside tip,” Jake said.
“Bull. Nobody gets inside tips. Even the gamemasters don’t know which of the fallen paradises are going to open until the day it happens; it’s pure random chance.”
“Humor me,” Jake said. “How about the Crewe of Dreams? You guys sitting on any spare keys? I can pay.”
“He means I can pay,” Woody added.
The glint in Tim’s eye told Jake that he wasn’t going to let it go. The kid was smart, too smart and too inquisitive for his own good.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “Where’d this alleged tip come from? And why do you need the keys by tomorrow night? What’s tomorrow?”
“Friday,” Jake said. He held his silence on the rest.
* * * *
The next morning, Jake returned to find bright blue skies and a crisp wind ruffling his hair. A fresh airship sat docked at the pylon in the distance, and this one looked safe to ride. He hoped so, anyway. A pigeon swooped in with a message from Prentise, telling him to meet her at their usual place.
She was perched on the edge of a dusty wooden pew in Hurst’s cavernous and silent town hall, fingers dancing across an oblong black window that hovered along her left forearm. She glanced up, gave him a nod of greeting, and went back to work.
“How do we look?” he asked, ambling over.
“One second, just have to finish lining up this…good. Okay, lined up another trade, that’s twelve Goseris keys and a few fragments in change. Just need to go and meet up with the sellers in a few.”
“Woody found four on the open market,” Jake said, “and the prices were inflated as hell. Sounds like Tim can scrounge up a couple more from his guild bank, but the kid’s a bloodhound. Gotta keep an eye on him.”
“I spent most of the night playing spreadsheet jockey, crunching numbers. I should have seen it before.”
“Seen what?” Jake asked.
She patted the pew beside her. He took a seat and she turned her arm so he could see the command window. A flick of her finger sent glowing numbers sliding along its two-dimensional face.
“We found one half of the pipeline,” Prentise said. “We know that once a month, people in the know are buying up realm keys. They ferry them to the ‘ticket-taker’ and hand them over in exchange for…something.”
“The main event, Merisaude called it. This thing we supposedly have to see for ourselves.”
“Last night I found the other half. I polled the three top RMT sites and parsed the last six months of data, using the keys we know were previously in demand—”
“I figured it out,” Jake said. “You’re an accountant in real life.”
She bared her teeth at him. “Funny. See these spikes?”
Red lines surged on a graph like blood-flecked mountains, each coming to a needle-thin peak.
“What am I looking at?”
“Sales,” she said. “All from the same tiny cluster of anonymous accounts, all on the first day of the month when the new fallen paradises open up. Now, that’s to be expected: naturally, players are going to want to buy those, right? But look at the volume. Keys and fragments are ultra-rare drops; usually when you see a player selling them on an RMT site, it’s in tiny quantities.”
“What about guild members, pooling their finds in a shared bank?” Jake asked.
“Guilds use their keys. What we’re seeing here, if I’m right, is the far end of this pipeline. People give off-month keys to the ticket-taker, who sits on them until the realm in question opens up and the demand suddenly soars.”
“Then they sell them for real money at a premium.” Jake rubbed his jaw. “Keys go in, clean and untraceable cash comes out. And like Rickey said, the pattern isn’t really random: they know a few months ahead of time which realms are going to open up. Exactly the info you’d need for maximum profit. So now we know why they’re doing it—”
“It’s a money-laundering scheme,” Prentise said.
“—and that leaves two questions. One, who’s behind it? And two, what are they giving these people in exchange for their hard-earned loot?”
With a flick of her fingers, Prentise snapped the window shut.
“Great questions,” she said. “Let’s go find out.”
* * * *
Deals were made, pouches of gold and platinum were passed under tavern tables, and the collection grew. As the day rolled into darkness, the last few faintly-glowing key fragments joined the pile in a rustic leather knapsack. Jake shouldered it, guarding the hoard as he and Prentise converged on the outskirts of Starcrest Farm.
It felt like old times. Jake was rusty, but his instincts kicked in like muscle memory. The last time he’d made an undercover buy, it was in a back alley, trading marked cash for a bindle of pure heroin. Different circumstances, different world. Same skill-set.
Soft lantern light flared inside the open mouth of the barn. The ticket-taker was here.
The faceless figure’s hood tilted as Jake and Prentise walked in. Her voice was soft, young, with a familiar tinge: like somebody Jake knew, trying to disguise herself with an accent. A southern lilt clung to her words but it wasn’t authentic. A bad TV actor’s version of a southerner.
“Think y’all are in the wrong place,” she said.
Jake peeled back the flap of his knapsack and showed her what he’d brought. The keys and jagged fragments shone, engraved runes taking on a cherry-neon glow.
“On the contrary,” he said.
“Should be careful walking around with treasure like that,” she said. “Good way to get robbed.”
“Then maybe you should take them off our hands,” Prentise said.
“We haven’t met.”
“Then let’s be friends,” Jake told her. “After all, we’ve got friends in common.”
“Do we, now?”
He gave the knapsack a pat. “Would we be standing here with the price of admission otherwise?”
“And what’s this mutual friend’s name?”
Giving up Merisaude would be the easiest way in. It’d also put a target on the woman’s back. Instead, Jake gave Prentise a sidelong glance.
“What was her name, again? Annie? Annie something…”
“Annie Nonymous,” Prentise said.
“That was it. Nice girl.”
The figure wasn’t impressed. She stood in stony silence.
“I get it,” Jake said. “You’re taking a risk, dealing with new people. Risk’s a mutual thing. But we’re here, we’ve got the keys, and we’re ready to deal. You really want to walk away from easy money? Besides, think about the future.”
“The future?” she asked.
“Our anonymous friend told us all about the main event. We want in. And if we like what we see, we can get our hands on more keys. A lot more. Each and every month. Consider this the start of a long-term business relationship.”
Her tone softened, just a little. “You sure you know what you’re getting into?”
“We aren’t tourists,” Prentise said.
The figure held out one satin-gloved hand. Jake gave her the knapsack. She plopped it onto the table beside her. Her hand vanished inside the folds of her cloak.
“Tell your friend,” she said, “to keep her mouth shut going forward. We approach prospects, they don’t approach us. Fortunately for you, well�
�you’re here, you have the payment, and I have a pair of tickets left. Don’t make me regret this.”
Her hand reappeared with an offering: two realm keys, spread out in her fingertips like a pair of rough stone chopsticks. These were different from the ones they’d collected. Runes encircled carvings of a dove in flight, glowing faint sapphire.
“The portal will open for exactly five minutes, at the stroke of midnight. You miss your shot, not my problem. No refunds.”
Jake reached for the keys. She played tug-of-war with him, her grip surprisingly strong as she held them fast. He couldn’t see her face under the hood, but he could feel her eyes boring into him.
“Just in case your chatty friend didn’t make it clear,” she said, “we have a good thing going here. You rat us out, you make noise, you bring attention to us in any way, shape or form, and there will be consequences.”
Maybe like putting Trevor Kensington in a coma, Jake thought. Or slicing Mr. Rickey’s throat with a hedge trimmer.
“What kind of consequences?” Jake asked.
“Keep your mouth shut, and you won’t have to find out.”
She let go of the keys.
“Enjoy the show.”
30.
Night-wind whistled in Jake’s ears as he sprinted at Prentise’s side. They tore across the desolate wheat field, carving a path southeast.
“Where are we headed?” he panted, starting to get winded.
By comparison, Prentise was a marathon runner. Ragged but lean, sharp as her nose, barely breaking a sweat.
“Portal mound,” she said. “They’re all over the place. Doorway into the fallen paradises. If you’ve got the key.”
“Speaking of.” He held up the pair of keys. Their engraved doves washed his hand in pale blue light.
“Ameryil. Fallen goddess of peace. Ill-advised choice for a game all about a war between the gods.” Prentise shot him a sidelong glance. “She didn’t last long.”
“I assume this is not one of the three that are officially open this month?”
“Nope. Shouldn’t be any way to get in. At all. Literally impossible.”
A shooting star tumbled from the sky. It burned down in a hard white arc, an ember from a dying candle. Jake watched it plummet to the earth ahead of them, landing behind a grassy hill. A soft, radiant glow washed over the hill on the tail of a warm breeze. A doorway of stone stood atop the mound, its open archway leaning, crumbling with the weight of age.
“And yet,” Prentise said.
The keys trembled in Jake’s hand, tugging him along like magnets. The space inside the doorway became a rectangle of soft ivory light.
He passed one of the keys to Prentise and gripped the other tight as they ran up the hill. They stood side by side in the doorway’s glow. The full moon dangled above them, full and ancient, the color of bleached bone.
“Ready?” Prentise asked him.
“Ready,” he said.
The key melted in his hand as he passed through the doorway. His mind melted with it. The world dissolved into a kaleidoscope of swirling color and he felt his stomach lurch, the ground dropping out from under him as he plunged down into a well of darkness, faster and harder than a roller-coaster. Then he was twisting, spinning, bodiless, out of control with the roar of thunder in his ears.
* * * *
The world came back. Not the same world.
Stars still hung in the midnight sky, but sparser and brighter, a web of glowing constellations joined by razor lines of golden light. No moon, but a banquet of distant planets in a rainbow of colors. A rainbow like the one along the midway he stood upon, carnival booths painted with a riot of reds, yellows, purples, sprayed in garish circus-tent stripes. All of it under a net of steel catwalks, more hooded figures like the ticket-taker patrolling fifteen feet above. People were blinking into existence all around him, travelers from other portal mounds, most of them looking as wobbly and disoriented as Jake felt.
A stilt-walker passed him by. A belch of light blurred his vision as another performer, clown-faced and clutching a burning brand, swallowed fire and spat it out like a dragon’s breath.
“The hell is even going on here,” Jake mumbled. Prentise was a more seasoned traveler. She was already sharp-eyed and awake, and she held his shoulder until he was steady on his feet.
“This isn’t right,” she said.
“No kidding.”
“No.” She pointed to the carnival midway, the catwalks above. “This isn’t right. I’ve been here before; some friends in a raiding guild let me tag along when this place opened up last year. You see that Roman-looking villa up ahead?”
He craned his neck. Doric columns rose up in the near distance, supporting a white marble portico.
“What about it?”
“That’s Ameryil’s palace. This spot, where we’re standing, is supposed to be the open garden where you come in. None of this stuff is supposed to be here. And what is supposed to be here — namely, an attack formation of giant, twisted dove-monsters — isn’t.”
Jake raised an eyebrow. “They turned off the monsters?”
It was turning into a party. People swirled all around them, surging up the midway and toward the fallen goddess’s palace. A spontaneous cheer went up from the crowd.
“This isn’t a hack,” Prentise said. “This couldn’t have been done by someone outside the company. It would have to be someone inside SDS, with unfettered access to the game’s source code.”
“Not unfettered,” Jake said.
She tilted her head. They moved with the flow of the party, walking together toward the palace.
“Think about it,” he said. “They’re trading access to…whatever the hell this is, for realm keys. Then they take the keys and sell them for cash.”
“I’m with you,” she said.
“If they have complete control over the game, why not cut out the middlemen and make their own? They could create as many keys as they wanted, or anything else that might sell for real money. Just poof it all into existence with the push of a button, easy as pie. Something’s got to be stopping them.”
Prentise frowned. She fell silent, deep in thought. Jake was thinking about his hands. They clenched and unclenched at his sides, feeling the air like an astronaut in strange gravity. There was something different here — different about his virtual body, different about the popcorn-scented air — and he couldn’t quite place it.
“Welcome,” bellowed a man’s voice from above. Another hooded figure, his face a well of shadow, spread his gloved hands in greeting. “Welcome one, welcome all, to the Carnival of Flesh!”
Another wild cheer washed along the parade route.
“That doesn’t sound ominous or anything,” Jake muttered.
“The auditing system,” Prentise said.
He glanced at her. “Hm?”
“Every immersive simulation has to have a comprehensive auditing system, so the Grid Regulatory Authority can check their records on demand. And all gamemaster actions are tracked.”
He nodded up at the catwalk as they passed beneath it. “But if these guys are rogue gamemasters, they’ve figured out how to cloak themselves. They’re flying under the radar.”
“They are, yes. But manually-created objects, especially high-value ones, would register their own red flags in the audit system. This is their loophole: they’re just rounding up keys that already exist. Trading them. But for what? Just admission tickets to a private party? Too expensive, that doesn’t make sense.”
It was starting to. Jake’s fingernails dug into the meat of his palm. He put his hands together, clasped them, and bent one of his wrists back.
He bent it back until it hurt.
The momentum of the crowd pushed them up onto the steps of the palace. Party-goers flooded in through the open doorway ahead. Jake grabbed the meat of his left arm and pinched. Hard, then harder, until his eyes started to water.
“What is it?” Prentise asked.
�
�The pain limiters,” he said. “They’re turned off.”
When Jake first arrived, Woody had illustrated the nature of sensation in Paradise Clash, delivering a sledgehammer hit that felt like a feather pillow. The foundation of the game’s code was identical to the Nightmare Box, the military’s doomed training simulator, but SDS had learned from their predecessor’s mistakes. Everybody wants to fight a dragon, Woody told him, but nobody wants to feel what it’s like to get roasted alive by one.
He remembered what he had said in response: I wouldn’t say nobody would want to experience that. I mean, I’ve worked with some weird clients. Everything you can imagine is somebody’s fetish.
There were over two hundred people in this crowd, easy. No chance they were all wealthy masochists; there had to be more to the situation. Jake had his eyes forward. Prentise was looking off to one side, catching something on the sidelines, and her jaw dropped.
“I know what this is.”
“Huh?”
She locked eyes with him. “Kiss me.”
“Wait, what—”
She grabbed him by the collar and yanked him close. Her lips were soft and warm and tingled against his, a tingle that flooded his skin and left his pulse pounding. He almost reached for her, wanting to curl his arms around her, to touch her body, moving on animal instinct. It wasn’t like he wasn’t attracted to her; she was pretty, in a rough-edged way, and she had the kind of wits he liked in a lover.
This wasn’t a lover’s kiss, though, he realized as she suddenly broke away. Wide-eyed and with a blush on her cheeks, but she hadn’t kissed him for the pleasure. It was a science experiment. The results were crystal clear.
The rogue gamemasters had turned off more than the pain limiters. The first commercial simulation, YourWorld, devolved into a hedonistic red-light district almost overnight, only to be shut down in a tidal wave of arrests and litigation. The wiser minds at SDS coded their games with the benefit of hindsight, making both suffering and sexual stimulation equally impossible.