Codex (31 page)

“At—” He must have heard wrong. “You mean at Esslin & Hart.”

“That's right,” said Nick, his accent sounding just like a foreign correspondent for the BBC, reporting live from Ouagadougou. “What, didn't they tell you?” He grinned. “I used to be in the London office. I'm the fellow they sent here to take your place.”

 

THAT EVENING,
back in his apartment, Edward was staring at his computer screen as usual. But this time Zeph stared at it with him. Zeph sat in Edward's office chair, and Edward watched over his shoulder.

“Dude,” Zeph said. “This is unbelievable.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean it's really fucking incredible.” His face was a mask of shock and outrage. “Really! I mean I literally cannot believe it!”

“I don't know how to explain it.”

“Neither do I!”

Zeph prodded halfheartedly at the controls, rotating the point of view back and forth. Even Edward, who was looking for something to distract him from the storm of complications that had descended on him that afternoon, was sick of looking at it. He had decisions to make, hard ones, and soon, but instead he stared at the monitor. What he saw, when he could bring himself to look, was the same thing he'd been staring at futilely for the past week: the broken-down encampment of the tribe he was supposed to be leading. Snow filtered down from street level through sidewalk grates and melted on the cement platform where his fellow humans sat disconsolately awaiting his orders. A smoky fire built with wooden subway ties burned sullenly down on the tracks. It was a flat little world in a box, a pitiful, pixilated simulacrum of three dimensions.

“How could you have let this happen?” Zeph said reproachfully. He was growing a beard, sparse and curly, which made him look even more ogreish than usual. “This is the most pathetic spectacle of incompetence I have ever witnessed in the context of a computer game. And believe me I've seen a few. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

“I am ashamed of myself.”

“You shouldn't even be here!” Zeph went on. He smacked his enormous thighs with both hands. “Since I gave you this copy I've won MOMUS three times—once on each difficulty level! Let me explain something to you: You should have bases on the moon by now. You should be mining the comets and having sex with alien babes.” He was so upset he was spluttering. “You should have a satellite-based planetary defense system! You should be on the offensive! Instead it's like
Clan of the Cave Bear
in here.” He shook his head sadly. “This is over. It's just fucking over.”

“Good. I want it to be over.”

Zeph was right. He hadn't been paying attention. He'd made mistakes, he'd missed his cues, and now it was too late to fix them. He never paid close enough attention when it mattered. What clues was he missing right now?

“It's been like this from the beginning,” Edward knew he sounded petulant, but he didn't care anymore. “I didn't have any weapons, or I didn't have the right ones, or I didn't know where they were, or who to use them on, and when I finally got there it was too late, everybody was gone, and the aliens were off blowing up something else, or messing up time, or God knows what! Now even the other humans are beating on me.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Plus there's this whole thing with the sun.”

Zeph's eyes went wide with horror.

“You let them fuck with the
sun?
”

“Look for yourself.”

Edward reached past him to the keyboard and guided his character up the stairs and outside. He pointed his gaze upward: The weakened sun, behind the alien lens, was streaming down its empty, heatless rays. While they watched it a band of feral humans from another tribe came by and killed him. He fell down backward onto the snow, bleeding but still looking up at the sky.

“For fuck's sake,” said Zeph. “I've never seen that before.”

“Why else do you think it's so cold?”

Zeph pushed himself back, stood up, and strolled over to the windows with an expression of enormous gravity on his face, his hands clasped behind his back like an emergency room doctor facing the greatest diagnostic challenge of his career. It was late in the evening, and the apartment was dark.

“How did you get here?” he said after a while. “Tell me from the beginning.”

Edward described the opening scenes of the game. Zeph listened carefully, then held up a hand to stop him.

“So you didn't get the letter that was in the mailbox? You didn't save the bridge?”

“No, I didn't save the goddamned bridge. How could I have saved the bridge?”

“You were supposed to be under the bridge. Killing the goddamned munitions expert.”

“What munitions expert? What are you talking about? How could I have killed a munitions expert?”

“With the pistol,” said Zeph. He shook his head. “It was all supposed to fit together, like clockwork. But forget it. Forget it, I can't even explain it. You fucked it up from the beginning. You never had a chance.”

They were both silent for a while. Edward had a couple of strategically placed fans going, but even at night it was still oppressively hot. The summer air smelled damp and heavy, as if it had already been breathed by eight million other Manhattanites in turn. He went to the kitchen and came back with a bottle of scotch and two tumblers with ice in them.

Zeph accepted a glass.

“Don't feel too bad,” he said, jingling his ice philosophically. He sank into an armchair. “It's like this one time, when I was right on the verge of conquering medieval Japan. But this one
daimyo,
he built a land bridge across—actually, it's easier if I draw it for you—”

“Zeph.” Edward kept his voice steady with an effort. “Try to focus. I don't care about medieval Japan. Just tell me how to win MOMUS.”

“I don't know if you can. In fact, offhand I'd say you were totally and permanently fucked, except for one thing: The game should have ended already. A long time ago. By rights it should have just stopped.”

Zeph rubbed his large, woolly chin thoughtfully.

“Okay,” Edward said sulkily. “So what?”

“Don't you see? Somebody bothered to code this whole elaborate scenario you're playing through. Why? Usually by now, when it's this hopeless, you'd have gotten to the point where your character flops down dead and a voice intones, ‘Mortal, you have failed!' or something to that effect. Instead somebody deliberately created all this stuff you're seeing—all these elaborate maps and textures and backgrounds and sound effects. They scripted it all out in advance. Why, when it's all so useless?”

“I don't know. Unless there actually still is a way to win from here.”

“Exactly.” Zeph finished his scotch, stood up, and clapped Edward on the shoulder. “Exactly. It's not over, my friend. Not by a long chalk, as your English associates would say. There's a story here, a plot that's been laid out, which means there must be some way to finish it. But you need help, help that I can't give you. There's somebody you have to go see.”

“Who?”

“You can't call him. He doesn't have a phone. His apartment only has data lines.”

“I'll e-mail him.”

“He won't accept it. Your crypto isn't good enough. You'll have to go see him in person.”

“I don't know, you're not making him sound like that sociable of a guy.”

Zeph shrugged.

“It's your choice. But he's your only chance. He knows as much about MOMUS as anybody I can think of. He's part of the online collective that manages its code base. He moderates the MOMUS newsgroup. As far as I can tell he even wrote most of the graphics engine himself. You have a pen?”

Edward gave him a pen. Zeph looked around for a piece of paper, then took a cheap science fiction paperback out of his back pocket and ripped out one of the endpapers. He wrote out an address on the Lower East Side in block capital letters, along with a name:
ALBERTO HIDALGO.

Then he paused, pen poised fatefully over the page, as if he were contemplating an additional last-minute revision.

“I think you've met him, actually.”

T
HAT NIGHT EDWARD
received a letter from the Duchess.

He found it when he went to walk Zeph to the subway, a cardboard FedEx envelope strapped to his mailbox with thick red rubber bands. Well, she had said she was going to write him, but he hadn't actually been expecting anything. He didn't open it right away, instead he saved it until he was sitting up in bed with the envelope in his lap, balanced on his knees. Inside were several pieces of stiff, expensive white paper, foolscap, covered with writing in dark blue fountain-pen ink. The handwriting was large and feminine, written rapidly, with many extravagant swoops and loops and a few blots, but still quite legible.

The paper was letterhead from Weymarshe. At the top was a shield with a single thick-trunked tree letterpressed on it in black ink, no motto. Their coat of arms? he thought, Or their seal, or whatever it's called? Somehow it looked familiar. He must have seen it before, months ago, when he'd worked on their account for Esslin & Hart. Underneath it were the words
WEYMARSHE CASTLE
in a clean, classic sans serif font. He reflected that as time went by the Duchess seemed to be receding away from him instead of getting closer. First he'd met her in person, then he'd heard her voice on the phone, and now she'd dwindled away into handwritten words on the page.

There was no salutation at the beginning of the letter, or even a date. The writing just started at the top of the page.

 

Edward was coming home from a long day of work.

 

He frowned. That wasn't quite what he'd expected. He bowed open the envelope to see if there was another page in there that he'd missed, but it was empty. He sorted through the pages, to see if he'd somehow gotten them out of order. But no—in fact they were numbered, and this was page one. He read on.

 

Edward worked for a large financial firm in Manhattan, in New York City, in the state of New York, in the United States of America. He was tall and handsome and his hair was dark. It was almost ten o'clock in the evening, and he was very tired. He strolled along the sidewalk by Central Park gazing up at the sky.

He was feeling sorry for himself. He was very successful, and at the early age of twenty-five he was well on his way to acquiring a sizable personal fortune, but he had to work very very hard to do it, and after a long day of listening to difficult clients and studying patterns in the market and that sort of thing he sometimes found himself wondering whether or not it was really all worthwhile.

It was summertime, and moderately warm out, but there was something strange about the weather. A warm wind was blowing, and there was a kind of indescribable sort of electrical feeling in the air. A storm was coming on.

Edward felt something strike him lightly between the
shoulder blades. He turned around to see what it was. It was a sheet of paper blown along by the wind.

A beautiful dark-haired woman was running toward him along the street. She was no longer in her first youth, perhaps older than him by more than a few years, but she was still possessed of a mature and really rather bewitching loveliness. She wasn't really running, more taking little girlish steps as rapidly as she could, which was all she could manage in her long skirt. She carried a leather portfolio, and it had somehow come open, and the wind had taken the papers that were inside and scattered them all up and down the street. Now she was trying to gather them up again, with the assistance of a small man in dark livery who followed along after her.

“Help!” she cried. “Please, my papers!”

Edward joined in the chase, and the three of them dashed about madly after the flying sheets, which filled the warm summer air like autumn leaves. The street was empty, and Edward darted out into the middle of it, nimbly snatching the pages out of the air and tucking them under his arm. His tiredness vanished. The exercise felt good. It was a relief to run around and stretch his long legs after a day spent with them tucked under a cramped little desk.

After a few minutes they had caught all the pages. Panting, Edward brought his bundle back to the beautiful woman like a faithful hound delivering a fallen duck.

“Thanks ever so much!” she said. She was breathing hard too. “I don't know what I would have done without you!”

“It was nothing.”

“Now please,” she said, putting her hand on his arm, “let me ask you one more favor. Take me back to my hotel.”

Edward hesitated.

“All right,” he stammered. “I mean, if—”

“Please!” She gripped his arm with her tiny hand. It was cold, and surprisingly strong. “I am not well! I really am not myself tonight!”

He looked into her eyes. They did seem unusually bright, and her face, though lovely, was worryingly pale against her dark hair.

 

Edward got up and tossed the rest of the pages onto the comforter. What the hell was this? What the hell kind of game was she playing? He went into the kitchen to get himself a glass of water. He'd had another glass of scotch after Zeph left, probably a mistake, and now he could feel a headache coming on. He drank a tumbler of lukewarm tap water, then another. Then back to bed with just one more scotch.