by L. E. Price
But not here.
Inside the palace of the fallen goddess of peace, amid plush velvet divans and marble statuary, an orgy was in full swing. The guests chose partners, pairing off in couples, threesomes, or more, finding cozy nooks or vanishing through doorways hand in hand. Chamber music laid a satin blanket over whispers and groans of desire.
It was the perfect setup. The rogues had taken a fallen paradise and carved out a little paradise of their own with real sex for sale and a guest-list of eager customers who would come back, month after month, desperate for one more taste. Better than real, Jake thought. Guilt-free, disease-free, perfect bodies — human, or whatever fantasy species you’ve always dreamed of getting it on with. A half-naked dwarf let out a throaty laugh as he sauntered past, leading a woodland nymph by the hand. Over on a marble bench, a porcelain-skinned elf rose and fell on the lap of a minotaur, impaling herself with a full-throated cry of pleasure.
“We are shutting this shit down,” Prentise growled. “Now.”
Jake leaned close, keeping his voice down. “One step at a time. We have to be smart about this.”
“Oh?” she pointed across the room. “So that’s something you’re okay with?”
Tim was here. He drifted across the room, wide-eyed, like a kid discovering porn for the first time. He barely noticed Jake was onto him, not until Jake’s hand clamped down on his wrist.
“Hey,” he sputtered, “what gives?”
Jake hauled him to the sidelines, where he and Prentise boxed him into a corner.
“What are you doing here?” Jake demanded.
“I…well…followed you. I knew something was up, after last night, and my guild actually had a bunch of Goseris keys stocked up. I saw you meet with the chick at the barn, and…” Tim stood up on his tip-toes, trying to watch the action over Jake’s shoulder. “This wasn’t what I was expecting. She asked if I knew what I was getting into, and wow—”
“You need to leave,” Prentise said.
“Hey, I paid, same as you did. I’ve got every right to be here.”
Jake wasn’t worried about Tim’s morals. He was more worried that the kid had accidentally wandered into the same criminal enterprise that got his friend mind-napped and his teacher killed. Subtle wasn’t getting the job done. Time for shock and awe.
“You’re underage,” Jake said.
Tim drew himself up, pushing his shoulders back. “Hardly, sir. You speak to Rolen the Blue, defeater of tyrants, wooer of maidens fair—”
“Your name is Timothy Miller. You’re a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Barrymore Arcology, Academy Three.”
His jaw dropped. “How do you…who are you?”
“At the moment, the guy who’s trying to save your life.” He looked to Prentise. “Get him out of here, then fill him in. Completely. At this point, I think that’s the only way to keep him safe.”
“Agreed,” Prentise said.
“While you’re at it, get in touch with Woody as soon as he’s done streaming, and let him know what we found here.”
“What about you?”
Jake gazed across the room. Another robed figure glided through the orgy, quietly supervising.
“This may be our one and only shot at getting more intel. I’m going to dig around and see what I can find.”
“Hey,” Prentise said.
She touched his arm.
“Be careful,” she said. “You know what these people are capable of.”
He knew. He wasn’t worried about his physical body: if they came to his office again, he had a motion detector, a quick-release ejection circuit and a gun within easy reach. On the other hand, if they caught him here and mind-jacked him the way they’d done to Trevor…he didn’t want to think about that. Or what could happen in a simulation capable of modeling pain and trauma beyond anything a living human could endure.
The fuzzy-edged softness of the fantasy world was gone. Now they were playing by Nightmare Box rules.
31.
Jake played it cool, easing through the party like he belonged there, keeping his head on a slow swivel. Obviously, not all of the rogue gamemasters knew him; otherwise, assuming this wasn’t some kind of a trap yet to be sprung, the ticket-taker never would have let him into the party.
But all it would take was one. One to recognize him, and rally the troops.
A few people reached toward him in passing, languid fingers brushing his arms, his shoulders, inviting him to the dance. He eased past them with apologetic nods. “Sorry,” he said, “meeting someone.”
He spotted a familiar face. Merisaude was headed in the opposite direction, dressed for the occasion in a wasp-waisted leather corset and a pair of thigh-high boots. Given the coiled horse-whip dangling from her belt, he could guess the kinds of thrills she went for. He didn’t judge. He didn’t make eye contact, either, careful not to blow her cover. They passed each other without a word.
Jake made his way down a labyrinth of back rooms. The place was built like a maze, nested warrens of rooms stripped of their monsters and traps, now playing host to sweaty, hungry bodies in the torchlit gloom. He froze as a cloaked figure crossed his path, drifting across a T-shaped intersection. It was a woman, judging from her frame, small and limber, possibly the ticket-taker herself. He waited for the space of a breath, giving her a little time to get ahead of him, then set off in silent pursuit.
She disappeared behind a tall ivory door, the wood inlaid with carvings of doves in flight. It hung open a crack. Jake heard muffled voices from the other side. He crept close, knees bent. Ready to run, or fight, if he had to.
“Three?” a man said, his voice like syrup poured over gravel. “You let three new customers in, completely un-vetted. Are you joking? Is this some kind of a laugh to you?”
A soft thrumming sound accompanied his words. The gallop of impatient fingers on wood.
“They had keys to trade,” she said. “They obviously knew what the deal was, so what’s the problem?”
“The problem? What’s the problem? Beyond our recent security issues—”
“Which are dealt with,” she said.
“You are aware that people have been hired for the express purpose of poking into our business, yes?”
Jake chanced a peek. The thrumming was a man’s ringed hand, drilling rhythmic against a desk. The two rogue gamemasters had their hoods peeled back, and now he knew where he’d heard the ticket-taker’s voice.
He’d seen her on his first night in Dutton, at the Dented Chalice, though he never got her name. She was the petite teenager in the flower-petal dress, laying the Lollers to waste with a torrent of deadly magic. One of the four members of the Elect. And the man behind the desk was one of her partners, the tall gaunt sorcerer with his greasy black hair slicked into a severe widow’s peak.
The Elect. Everybody’s heroes. Everybody’s champions. The greatest players in Paradise Clash.
The greatest cheaters, Jake thought. The Elect were gamemasters in disguise, and while there was no questioning their prowess — he’d seen them fight, after all — now he had to wonder how much of their fame and fortune came from their access to the game’s inner workings.
Now all Jake had to do was prove it.
“You’re worrying about nothing,” she said. “I’ve read Woody’s field reports. He’s clueless, and so is that PI the family hired. They’ve got nothing. Rickey was the last loose end, and he’s been snipped—”
“Not here,” the man hissed. His anxious finger-drumming kicked up a notch. Louder, faster. The sound set Jake’s teeth on edge.
Cybele’s words drifted back to him, words punctuated by the ghostly memory of a kiss on his cheek. And do not trust the drumming man. He poses as an ally, but he means to see you fail. He will kill you if he can.
“Go,” he said, “find our new guests, and bring them to me. I want to get a good look at them.”
The teenager put her hands on her hips, dubious.
“And if they’re…other
wise indisposed? I mean, this is a sex party.”
“Make them follow you. Use the deep magic if you absolutely have to. If all three aren’t standing in front of my desk in the next fifteen minutes, I’m locking the entire palace down—”
That was all he needed to hear. Jake was off and moving before the girl had time to pull her hood back on. Doubling back the way he came, padding quiet at first and then breaking into a run, heading straight for the only way out.
* * * *
“The Elect?” Woody said for the third time. “But…are you sure? I mean, sure-sure?”
A flurry of messages had been waiting for Jake when he emerged through the arch of stone on portal hill. The pigeons circled, wheeling in the air, waiting for him to pluck one strip of parchment after another. Most of them were from Woody.
“Two of them. And as tight as they seem to be, I don’t think that’s the kind of secret they could keep from the other two.”
He looked across the taproom of the Dented Chalice, back to the empty table where they’d been sitting that first night. He, Woody, Prentise and Tim had the place almost to themselves at this hour. It was late, late enough for Jake to feel the fatigue from his real body seeping into his virtual bones. A warning flashed in the corner of his vision, telling him he had twenty minutes before the auto-logout timer would activate.
Tim looked shell-shocked. Jake thought that was more than reasonable. Finding out his buddy with laryngitis was actually in a brain-locked coma, and that his teacher had been murdered by remote control, would do that to a person. Prentise just looked ten shades of pissed, like a rattlesnake on a bad morning.
“We have to take this to the feds,” she said. “The Grid Regulatory Authority was built to handle situations like this.”
“There has never been a situation like this,” Jake countered.
“We know that the Elect are gamemasters who have figured out how to hide their status—”
“We think that,” Jake said. “We don’t know it, not one-hundred-percent. They’re either gamemasters or they’re outsiders who pulled off the hack of the century.”
“Not a chance. With that kind of access, they have to be employees. This is an inside job. The GRA can sweep in, raid the company, confiscate the servers, and find out exactly who those accounts belong to.”
“And if the situation was any different, I’d agree with you. But these people have a hostage. As long as Trevor’s mind is trapped in this place — as long as they can do god-knows-what, maybe even kill him or leave him brain-dead with the flip of a switch — we have to play it safe.”
“And in the meantime?” Prentise asked. “Look, I’m not some kind of prude. Whatever consenting adults want to do behind closed doors is their own business. But there are children playing this game.”
“I’m sixteen,” Tim pointed out.
She shot a glare hard enough to push him back in his seat. “Which is too young to be going to a goddamn orgy. And there are players younger than you; I didn’t see anybody getting carded at the door tonight.”
“And I agree with you,” Jake said. “But the parties are only one night a month, right? This is all going to be over in a few days, one way or another. If by some miracle it isn’t, I’ll call the GRA myself. All I’m asking is that we follow every lead we can first. Worst case scenario, if we can’t handle it ourselves and get Trevor back, safe and sound, at least we can build an airtight case for the feds.”
She slumped against the arm of her chair. Either he was swaying her, or she was just too tired to stay that angry. They were all tired.
“I think you just don’t trust the feds,” she said.
“I don’t trust anybody who isn’t sitting at this table,” Jake replied.
Woody leaned back. “So what’s our next move?”
“We’ve figured out their game. The four members of the Elect have — legitimately or otherwise — acquired and hidden their gamemaster access, and they’re working a money-laundering scam. People pay realm keys to attend their sex parties. They hoard the keys, wait until the first of the month when the appropriate realms open, then sell them for real money when the demand spikes.”
“Which always happens within three months,” Prentise added. “Every single time, even though some realms go sealed for a year or more between openings. Rickey was right: it isn’t random. Either they know ahead of time which ones will open or they’re controlling the process from behind the scenes.”
“We’ve unmasked the Elect,” Jake said. “Next step is unmasking them in real life. All we need is one. If we can figure out who they really are, get a face and a name, I can get at them. Trust me, I hunt people down for a living.”
“You going to leave a bullet on somebody’s desk?” Woody asked.
The violation still rankled Jake. That and the feeling of vulnerability, knowing they could have done anything to him. He wouldn’t deny that he had a score to settle, there.
“I’m not good at subtle messages,” he said. “I was thinking more like taking them up to a very high rooftop and dangling them over the edge until they tell me everything I want to know.”
“That works too,” Woody said.
Prentise gave Jake a slow nod. “What’s the plan, then?”
“We know they’ve compromised the game in ways that shouldn’t be possible, at least not without setting off red flags all over the place. I want to know how. Figure that out, and we can start narrowing down the list of suspects — which at the moment, is literally everybody at SDS who has a server-room access card, including the janitorial staff. Woody, you’ve interviewed most of the original developers, right?”
“All of ‘em except for Amos Beiler, one of the original company founders; the guy’s a hermit, he doesn’t talk to anybody.”
“What about the one who developed the sensory code?” Jake racked his brain, thinking back. “Dutton, right? They named the village after him.”
“Jeff Dutton,” Woody said.
“I read he was the same developer who created the magic system. The original prototype, the one that got scrapped early on. That true?”
“Sure,” Woody said. “He’s a nice guy, or at least he seemed nice when I talked to him. Retired rich a few years back; I guess he sold his stock in SDS and bought a ranch or something.”
“Whatever the Elect are doing, however they’re doing it, they are wrists-deep in the original code. They’re pulling out Nightmare Box stuff, all the military-sim legacy software that SDS built Paradise Clash on top of. Also, one of them mentioned deep magic, and the way he said it made it sound like they could use it.”
“Even though it’s not in the game,” Tim said.
“The sensory code and the prototype magic system were both designed by the same guy,” Jake said. “If anyone can tell us how they’re pulling this off, Jeff Dutton can. I need to have a chat with him.”
“I can see if my old contact info still works, and try to set up an introduction,” Woody said.
“Do it. Until I get back, everybody just play it cool and carry on like life is perfectly normal.” Jake glanced across the table at Tim. “That goes double for you. Don’t give anybody a reason to come after you and the Elect will probably leave you alone.”
“Probably,” he echoed.
“Don’t worry. We’ve got your back. Besides, there’s a good chance I’m about to draw all of their attention.”
“One other thing to consider,” Prentise said.
Jake looked her way. “Yeah?”
“If Jeff Dutton is the man behind the code and the techniques the Elect are using to manipulate the game…have you considered he might be one of them?”
“The thought did cross my mind,” Jake said.
32.
The 30th Street Station clung to survival by the skin of its teeth. The old rugged brick outside was plastered here and there with slabs of corroded sheet metal, bolts fixing the plates like bandages over crumbling wounds. Inside, its old glory lingered.
Cylindrical art-deco chandeliers dangled from the red and gold ceiling. They’d burned out decades ago, no money in the city budget to replace them or maybe it had just been pocketed along the way. Their metal skeletons still hung with quiet grace. The station smelled like piss and stale popcorn, and a steady drizzle of rain left streaks of grime down the tall, rectangular windows that lined the great hall.
Woody had called while Jake was in the shower. Jake’s implant trilled in his inner ear, whining over the rattle of the pipes. Woody had gotten hold of Jeff Dutton and told him only what he needed to: that something was rotten in Paradise Clash, and people inside his old company were involved. That was all Dutton needed to hear.
“To be honest,” Woody said, “he didn’t sound all that surprised.”
Dutton lived across the West Virginia border, not far from Buckhannon. Old country, coal mining country back when there was coal left to mine. It was a four-hundred-mile trip; the 17 Silver Shadow could make it in two hours and change, the bullet train hurtling along custom-built track with electric precision. When the highways started to buckle and bridges gave way, worn down by the weight of years and neglect, the people who still had to commute mostly took to the rails. Jake wasn’t sure why the rail network hadn’t surrendered to the same entropy that seemed to swallow everything else outside the arcology walls, but he figured it was the same old song: the people at the top still needed the people at the bottom. Someone had to do the grunt work, lay the power lines, mend and patch the engines of industry, and those people needed trains.
Jake sat on a hard bench seat and watched the world roll by.
The train wound into the mountains, where remnants of old tech — vast boring-tubes, rusted and corroded boxes the size of trucks — clung to the wet stone faces like metal boils and snaked in and out of the gray rock. Some last gasp of industry, meant to squeeze a little more out of the land when the coal mines failed. Some of the installations were still fitted with banks of solar panels, pointed up at the roiling smog, abandoned by their bankrupt creators decades ago.