Massively Multiplayer (15 page)

He would not have been good company right now, anyway. Damn Druin anyway. The little worm seemed to make a practice of dragging other people into his weakling schemes, then moping about getting people killed, all the while coming out on top, alive and unscathed. It offended Herrera aesthetically, but more importantly, it offended his sense of justice.

Matteo “MadHarp” Herrera would have been surprised, even offended, to know that Druin thought of him as a sociopath. On the contrary, Herrera thought of his function as both honorable and practical. He was an enforcer of rules, a bringer of consequences, and a trustworthy soldier, both within his favored netvironment and in RL. Assassinating one of Gil’s enemies in-game meant about as much to him as fulfilling any other set of orders he might receive from the Commandante. Knife a rival? Well they shouldn’t have muscled in on Gil’s territory. Burn a village? Well they should have paid their taxes.

He wasn’t even responsible for these acts. He was a soldier. In his heart of hearts he had never wished death on anybody. He wasn’t evil, just implacable. The embodiment of instant karma.

Still, there was something about the Druin situation which burned deep down in his guts, which made him yearn to punish the little llama for all the trouble he had caused. Inefficiency in a soldier was a weakness, and when it was one of your own, it endangered your own people, and it needed to be met with swift retribution. Druin thought too much, he was too susceptible to emotions, and to top it off he was squeamish: traits which had gotten some friends seriously dead in the Chill Swamp, and over the course of half a dozen other quests and sorties in the past. Gil seemed to think that using Druin as his latest stalking horse was punishment enough, but Matteo didn’t think so. The whole point of dropping people into the ocean was that they didn’t get out again. Even in Crucible, there were forms of death which were permanent. But knowing Druin’s weird luck, it seemed entirely too likely that the vermin would live. Someone else would pay the price for the llama’s false nobility again, just like they always did, and Druin would make it back aboard Captain Thunder’s hired ship, to plague him once more.

More and more, he thought it might be in everyone’s best interests if he, or one of his agents, met Druin when he got off that boat. Maybe he could convince the little weakling of the error of his ways.

The third day after the rollout of Crucible 4.0, Bernardo Calloway was sequestered in his offices, having left strict instructions with Mrs. Hernandez that he was going to go over the growth models based on the new user data, and that he was not to be disturbed.

In fact, he was secretly celebrating with a very old bottle of scotch, which had arrived that morning by courier from his father, Vitus Calloway, who was off inspecting some of Vital Enterprise’s industrial holdings in Eastern Europe. The elder Calloway’s devotion to the family fortunes had not excluded attention to his newest acquisition, however, he had assured his son in a lengthy v-mail dictated from the back of his infamous electric-blue limousine. “I am
very
pleased at the reports I’ve received from our digital entertainment division heads, who assure me the reviews have been fabulous. Looks like you’ve outdone yourself, Bernie my boy. I understand our development partners – chosen by you, I know – are doubly pleased at how discreetly their role in the new product has been handled. I’m sending a bottle of the finest from our club on Whitby Island – toast one to me, dear boy. Capitol work! Top drawer! I’m very proud indeed.”

“Very proud indeed.” Bernardo savored the words even more than the liquor as he re-watched the video. That line about the “discreet” handling of the update’s third-party material was excellent proof that the old badger had been paying attention to Bernardo’s ideas after all! His initial enthusiasm for the project had met with skepticism from Vitus Callowy’s established industry advisors, who had assured the elderly executive that there would be too much resistance from the gaming “establishment” to his proposals. But he had won them over. Apparently, he’d won it all.

“Gaming establishment!” Hah! The digital realm was hardly the place to talk of traditionalism and institutions...why, they whole thing was all about new, fresh content, the more unusual the better, wasn’t it? And if they failed, so what? Who would they alienate, a small segment of the market, the ‘geek’ consumer? Who cared?

Eventually, his arguments had persuaded his father to put him in charge of this project, a gamble that showed some confidence but which also entailed a good deal of risk if the experiment failed. But it hadn’t failed, had it. The “experts” on the gaming industry had been wrong, and he had been right. He had been right all along. The gamers were so busy oohing and aahing over the smells and sounds they were downloading that they didn’t really notice what it was they were looking at.

Nobody suspected a thing.

The scotch really was very good.

Evelyn Hernandez had devoted almost two percent of her attention to Bernardo’s imperious order that visitors be dissuaded from disturbing him. It seemed unlikely any would try. In the days since taking over the company, the younger Calloway had managed to alienate every division of the company other than the Acting and Content departments, which he apparently found beneath his notice entirely. He scorned the administrative pool with his imperious tone, distanced himself from the programming department, annoyed maintenance with endless requests, and confounded the financial division with demands for dozens of new reports, often bafflingly cross-indexed with the performance of dozens of other companies, most of them not even in the software industry.

It was this last which troubled Ms. Hernandez, and which occupied the remaining ninety-eight percent of her attention.

The immediate object of her scrutiny was a message which had appeared on her desktop this morning. The communiqué, a plain two-dimensional text message, had contained an embedded executable which delivered itself to her printer, generated a hardcopy, and immediately erased itself, eliminating not only the message and any hint of its sender, but wiping from the desk’s memory any indication that it had ever existed. It was a capital violation of her privacy and her professional sphere, and would normally have drawn down all sorts of dire consequences save for two factors:

In the first place, in the absence of any header information, Ms. Hernandez had no idea where to direct her wrath.

In the second place, the information contained in the printout was actually very fascinating. It listed some sixty or seventy companies, ranging from well known restaurant chains, to manufacturers of shoes and soap, to financial concerns she had never even heard of but which, upon brief research, she recognized as holding companies for popular brand names. Next to each company name was a series of figures and dates and what appeared to be a jumble of random letters. The world’s largest shoe manufacturer, for instance, was next to a date last March, a notation of some millions of dollars, and the word “gh_1257_lf.” Further down was a popular brand of makeup – Ms. Hernandez bought their products all the time – four dates, more dollar amounts, and words like “umFctCa12_r7” and “umFctAs33_r3.”

The second most interesting thing about the list was that several of the companies on it had shown up in the strange requests Bernardo Calloway had been making of the Financial Department over the past three days.

The
most
interesting thing about it, however, was that several more had shown up in Bernardo’s newest requests, issued today, well
after
the printout had launched itself from her desktop to her printer and then erased the evidence of its existence.

Which meant either that someone had suddenly developed the ability to predict the future, or they had somehow known of the tie between these companies and Bernardo Calloway’s odd requests. That implied that there were records somewhere which would explain the mystery currently effecting Archimago, the company Evelyn Hernandez had loved like a child. Why else would they have sent it to her?

She had little idea of who her unknown benefactor might be, or how they had stumbled upon this information. Nor did she care very much. What she cared about was figuring out just what was going on at
her
company. The key, she was certain, lay in the confused strings of apparent gibberish appended to each item in the list. She had no idea what those meant, for now, but she was going to find out.

Deep in the shadows of the great trees of the Snarle Wood, a young scout of the Southron army paused in his journey to admire his shoes. He was oblivious to office politics and corporate takeovers and shadowy communications. He was thinking, instead, about how nicely trimmed his new scouting boots were. Probably nobody else in the guild had boots this nice, and the new environmental effects meant they even
felt
nicer than the regulation boots he’d been issued when he volunteered for this foray to map out enemy defenses. It made him a little self conscious about the fact that back in RL, he was wearing tattered sneakers which he’d received as hand-me-downs from his older brother. Maybe he’d bug his parents into a trip to the mall to buy a new pair.

At the easternmost extreme of an unnamed cave entrance in the snowy northern wastes of the Stellar Empire, a troop of hunters rested, their ragged breath fogging before their faces. Several of them knew quite a bit about office politics and corporate takeovers, but such thoughts were far from their minds at the moment. One of their number sprawled at full length on the cave floor while another patched her wounds. The chatted quietly while the healer worked, hands deftly dipping into the pouch of herbs at her waist as she sought the combination which would undue the poisons the giant blind-worm stingers had injected into her fallen comrade’s body. She would live, but the ugly mottling of her skin might be a permanent reminder of their folly in not wearing close-fitting helmets on this expedition. It was a pity, too – her friend’s skin had looked so luminous under the new graphics system. If only cosmetics could achieve such a glow in real life, she might have a steady boyfriend instead of spending all her time patching up the wounded in netvironments like this one. Maybe she’d go shopping for some after she logged out.

In an alleyway near the walls of Al-Sahel, a man lurked. He knew a great deal about office politics, corporate takeovers, and shadowy communications. He was a professional lurker. At the moment, he was lurking while waiting for his contact to arrive, at which time he would hand over a great deal of money and receive in return a certain key to a certain temple which contained a certain holy relic worth a great deal of money to an enterprising lurker with no scruples. He was bored silly with the waiting, so he spent his time admiring the sheen of the moonlight off his knife. It was a nice bit of programming, very subtle and very precise reflections, little bits of light trapped in minute pits on the steel in a way which reminded him of the glint off of a car he’d been coveting for weeks. Maybe tomorrow he’d go down to the bank and talk about making a down payment. He was a successful businessman, after all, as well as a successful gamer. He deserved a little reward.

In his sixth floor office, Wolfgang Wallace was crunching numbers again, but much more interesting ones than the bug reports which had consumed his attention the day before. After several hours of confirming scans, he sent for Janet Chen.

“Janet, come in. And shut the door.” She did so, already guessing from Wolfgang’s tone that this was related to yesterday’s odd discovery.

“First things first: we’re not looking at data smuggling.” This should have been good news, but somehow Wolfgang’s tone wouldn’t let Janet relax.

“You sound pretty certain.”

“I am pretty certain. The unaccounted bandwidth usage you were noting is too diverse for useful smuggling. Data smuggling relies on quick, massive, covert bursts of data, usually hidden in large batch processes, to avoid detection. The distribution pattern we’re seeing here is much more spread out, a continuous trickle of tiny data blocks. It’s the difference between driving a truck through a stone wall versus ten million ants slowly picking apart a tree, a gram at a time. In the second place, the whole point of data smuggling is to transmit data on a hijacked line to a single receiver, or sometimes a small group of receivers. The type of stuff that gets smuggled – industrial secrets, formulas, business plans, media – loses its value if it becomes widely available, or even if it becomes widely known that it has gone missing. This unaccounted data is spread evenly across the whole system, available to every single user.”

“Maybe it’s encrypted,” Janet suggested. “The data is always present, but opaque, invisible to the end users except for a few designated receivers who have a password which allows them to decrypt what to everyone else looks like hash.”

“That was my next thought,” Wolfgang agreed, “so I ran some checks to see whether the leakage was as universal as it looked at first glance. I blew up your graph about ten-thousand-fold, and ran a quick search for anomalies. Here’s what I got.”

He opened a file in the air over his desk. There was the graph which Chen had supplied. Pointing a finger, Wolfgang zoomed the perspective in sharply on a small segment of the display. This close there were clear, though slight, dips and rises in the line which represented the unaccounted data. The view sped to the right until it reached a sudden vertical slash, a peak that extended far above its neighbors.

“What am I looking at, specifically,” Janet asked.

“This is your data from yesterday, distorted to accentuate the extra bandwidth, and then segmented by receiving port.”

“By port. So each one of these lines is a single user.”

“Exactly. And this one,” Wolfgang tapped the sharp vertical line, “is accessing that data at about a thousand times the rate of ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the others.”

“Well, there we go then,” Janet grinned. “That’s your receiver. Call InterPol’s digital crime division and give them his address.”