Massively Multiplayer (25 page)

“Good man,” Bernardo enthused, nodding. “That’s the spirit. Let’s keep this as quiet as possible, and I’ve no doubt your team will get this all squared away in no time.” He stood. “Well, this has been enlightening Walton—“

“Wallace.”

“—Wallace,” Bernardo continued smoothly, “now if you don’t mind, I’ve got a virtual meeting with the parent corporation – my parent, anyway, hah hah! – in just about ten minutes. Must spruce up, get some charts ready, you know the type of thing.” He waved towards the door in an unmistakable gesture of dismissal.

That was entirely too easy, Wolfgang thought to himself. He had come into Bernardo’s office dreading his superior’s incomprehension of the problem, lengthy explanations, volleys of accusation, and threats of termination left and right consistent with the dramatics displayed by the elder Calloway at the rollout party.

Instead, Bernardo had an apparently excellent grasp of Crucible’s system architecture, which certainly refreshing in the wake of the incompetent disregard of Kipling and his associates. He’d apparently understood the problem, and his response betrayed an overarching concern with the players’ experience, which was Wolfgang’s own highest concern. Then Bernardo had effectively clapped him on the back and told him to continue with his independent investigation, which was precisely what he’d been hoping to accomplish.

So why did Wolfgang feel dissatisfied, as though there were an entire level to this conversation which he had not understood?

“Will you be informing Vital Enterprises – and your father – of the problem we’re having?” he asked in his most casual voice.

For a moment, Bernardo’s glib mask broke, revealing a look of alarm which vanished almost before Wolfgang could register it. “No!” Bernardo squeaked, then continued in a milder voice, “I mean, what is there to say at this point, really? Seems to me to be an internal problem, strictly localized, and I have full confidence in your crew. Now if you don’t mind...”

Wolfgang let himself be ushered out, wondering all the while whether that flash of panic had simply revealed the understandable anxiety of an executive wary of bringing bad news to his supervisors, or the eagerness of a son trying hard to impress his father...or something else entirely.

The ergonomic school of design has insisted for years that empathy is the soul of good technology. It is also, as any good detective can tell you, the soul of good investigation. The gathering and categorization of clues is necessary for the successful prosecution of a crime, but it is the intuitive leap which, as often as not, allows the detective to enter into the mind of the criminal, to imagine his or her motives and methods, and break a case wide open.

Of course, as any good detective will also tell you, it helps a lot if the criminal makes a foolish mistake. Dumb luck helps too.

It was dumb luck that Marybeth was working late on the problem of the mysterious hacker at just the same time that Jeffrey the Hut came in to begin his shift as night manager for the Central Western Crucible server.

Jeffrey the Hut had earned his nickname the old-fashioned way: one snack-cake at a time.

It wasn’t so much that he was large – in the usually sedentary programming industry, there were more than the average number of robust specimens – as that he carried his bulk so poorly. He moved ponderously, if at all, and with an air of petulant sluggishness which implied that gravity was exceptionally cruel to him. He seemed allergic to physical motion of any kind, including the finger tapping and wrist twitching which made up the majority of all programming tasks.

Naturally, this near legendary laziness had gotten him promoted to lower-level management, a field in which he could do little damage.

“Evening, Jeff,” Marybeth waved as that unfortunate soul was forced to navigate his weary bulk lethargically up to the slightly raised workstation on the front desk, nearest the big-screen monitors. He grunted an incoherent reply.

As Jeffrey the Hut settled down to sleep away the majority of his shift, Marybeth recalled a story she’d heard once from a colleague. It seemed Jeff had gotten so weary of performing the typical job functions of a line programmer that he had written custom macros for his avatar.

At the stroke of a single key, Jeffrey the Hut’s angel would manifest, perform a dazzlingly complex search pattern which would locate the nearest player character trapped in a rock, a wall, or other architectural defect, teleport that character to the nearest uninhibited space, deliver a stern lecture on the responsibility implicit in the game’s end-user license-agreement, and flag the offending chunk of geography for repair at the next update.

Another keystroke would send the avatar hurtling over an area in search of large concentrations of NPCs, who tended, despite all AI programming, to cluster in dead-ends, in alleyways, and on the edges of cliffs. When located, the huddled NPCs would be randomly distributed throughout a virtual five-mile radius. True, that often left them incongruously halfway up trees, hanging in space, or at the bottom of the ocean, but Jeffrey the Hut wasn’t interested in beauty; he was interested in efficiency.

And, truth to tell, his shortcuts were no more offensive than those followed by many programmers. The great virtue of the digital medium is the ability to store and to duplicate, endlessly, any pattern, whether an accounting record or a line of code. Most programmers were notorious plagiarists and pack-rats, because you never knew when a chunk of well-written code might come in handy on a later project.

Thinking about shortcuts led Marybeth back to her current problem, accurately cataloguing the fragmentary bits of geography which had been illicitly parked on the Crucible game platform. Her present target, for instance, was located down a short-cut of sorts, a secret passage hidden behind the throne in a ruined castle located in the Heart Kingdom. If players simply marched down the tunnel, they would eventually come to a hive of giant wasp-people, the cause of the castle’s fall.

It was slickly done work, Marybeth admitted. Glyphs carved into the tunnel walls provided a translation key to the tablets found in the lower temple, but only if characters went slowly enough to notice them. It was excellent design, pacing the quest without artificially slowing it, a maneuver which also allowed the tension to build before the final revelation of the cavern’s insectile inhabitants. It was artistic, with great attention to internal consistency, down to the steady progress from the rough-hewn human stonework of the upper tunnel to the geometrically perfect bricks which made up the insects’ inner hive, repeating row upon row in inhuman precision.

Precision of design. Repetition. The efficiency (or laziness) of computer programmers. Modular code design. Thoughts suddenly swirled in Marybeth’s head, fighting for dominance. She regarded the massive silhouette of Jeffrey the Hut. She looked back at her desk.

“Holy crow,” she said. “It can’t be that simple.”

Ignoring the sleepily curious gazes of her remaining program team, she dove from her chair to the nearest virtualounge, trembling with anticipation so badly that she had trouble snapping the harness leads around her ankles and wrists. Leaning back, she whispered the codes which would launch her personal interface, and transport her into the game.

Amitra opened her eyes to the dull red glow of the sun setting behind the ruins of the House of the Bitter Lotus. The gold braid hem of her white blouse fluttered in the twilight breeze, constrained by an ornately knotted sash which held her bow, her pouches of herbs, and flasks of various crushed crystals.

Jogging ahead, she soon reached the ruin itself, the crumbling remains of a one-time pleasure palace. Weed-choked cisterns and fragments of mosaic told of the ornate baths which had filled much of this wing of the building. Even as she rushed purposefully forward, she couldn’t help admiring the attention to detail evident in each chip of gleaming marble peeking through the whispering grass.

After a brief pause to orient herself, she made her way along the remains of a wide corridor indicated by the low ranks of remaining stones. At the end, what appeared to be a large clearing in the weeds indicated the former audience chamber of the palace. A squat dais denoted where the throne itself had stood.

Amitra knelt in the weeds. She knew what she was looking for, but was disoriented by her new perspective. Annoyed, she brushed her hair out of her eyes and cursed herself for not bringing along a companion. Oh well, she had been in a hurry, and this minor irritation was the price she paid for it. Still, someone with scouting skills would have already spotted...there!

On hands and knees she scuttled to the spot where the floor tiles lifted, betraying hidden pressure plates. Pressing them simultaneously, she was rewarded with a sharp crack as the ancient mechanism activated, then a sullen grinding as the dais slid backwards, revealing a wide opening descending into the earth.

Once more she hesitated, wishing she had brought a thief along. But if this didn’t pan out, she wouldn’t want anyone else to see her embarrassment. And, of course, if it worked she wanted to make sure she got credit for it.

Amitra stood, and rummaged for a moment in the pouch at her side, finally withdrawing a handful of small stone chips of such flawless clarity that they seemed to catch the little remaining light from the sun and magnify it, shining with their own intense light. Silently she counted: nine. It would be tight, but she thought that might be enough. She whispered a word to the stones, which flared momentarily in response, then tossed them straight up into the air. The pebbles arced overhead, then halted, flared once more, and exploded silently into shimmering sparks, which fell onto Amitra. Everywhere the sparkling motes passed, they left a transparent smear, carving away bits of her until nothing remained.

Now thoroughly invisible, for a while anyway, Amitra unslung her bow and carefully knocked an arrow. Her invisibility should protect her, but it would be embarrassing to die here before recovering her prize. Of course, using her programming avatar, Marybeth could have easily dropped a horde of healing ointments, impenetrable armor, cosmically powerful weapons and magical wards just outside the shadow zone, but she hadn’t thought about it in her excitement. If this worked, she thought, she would definitely have to get back into the habit of thinking like a gamer.

Hefting her bow, and mindful of the time limit on her invisibility, Amitra crept into the tunnel. Wolfgang was going to be happy with her. Briefly, she wondered why that mattered to her. She shook her head, concentrating on her goal. She only had a few minutes, and she had a mission to do.

As Amitra descended into the earth, Druin Reaver descended the gangplank. Unlike the ramshackle quay at Heron Rock, the docks at Hasport boasted an orderly array of well-maintained docks, lit at this dark hour by regularly spaced lanterns set on tall poles.

There was a thin fog scudding over the water, which had not been enough to obscure them from the watchful eyes of Hasport’s massive guard towers, set high up on the cliffs overlooking the entrance to the harbor. Captain Thunder had been hard pressed by the harbormasters, who wanted to know the reason for their visit and seemed intent on inspecting every crew member and passenger present, and had only been prevented from poking their noses belowdecks when the Captain started hinting at high connections in the Antiquan naval authority. He had produced imposing looking papers, and the harbormasters had suddenly found pressing business across the bay.

“Forged,” he’d confessed to Druin as they waved away the cutters. “Learned the trick back when I was a lawyer.”

From Hasport’s waterfront, the overall impression Druin got was of a well-organized city, older and perhaps wiser than any he’d seen in Westerly, laboring under some vague but constant threat. Where Westerly’s towns were noisy at night, this one was eerily silent. In the distance, he could see the high towers of the curtain wall which bordered the city inland. The sense of menace was borne out by Captain Thunder’s warnings as they had made their way carefully to their assigned berth.

“Antiqua is old country,” the Captain had growled around the stem of a long pipe. “It’s civilization is older, but so is its wilderness. You said you’ve never been outside of Westerly, so you’ll be used to the way things are there. The nasties in Westerly ain’t too bad, once you get to know ‘em. Most of ‘em aren’t too far off of being people anyway – slave outfits, and savages, and dead folk, mostly. What we might call ‘yer small-scale villain. And the cities in Westerly are built accordingly, generally open to the world, few with city walls save those on the frontiers. Hell, some quests you’re hard pressed to tell the difference between the monsters and the city councilors what sent you.

He shifted the pipe to the other side of his mouth. “Antiqua ain’t like that. They’re organized, so their cities get to be huge – most impose mandatory taxes to keep up city defenses. They have a strong sense of duty, once they know you’re one o’ the good guys. But they got them a real firm definition of ‘evil,’ too, and a definite idea that it belongs
outside
the city walls. Very metropolitan, yer’ Antiquan.”

Trudging down the wooden bridge from the mid-deck now, he wondered briefly if the Antiquan metropolitanism was as substantial as the Captain thought. Certainly the dockside looked seedy enough – grimier, if possible, than a typical Westerly portside. “Metropolitanism” seemed to necessitate a lot of taverns, warehouses, and squalid shops sporting incomprehensible wooden signs. Maybe the deep soot stains were a respectable indicator of the buildings’ great age. Of course, that wouldn’t quite explain the tough looking customers who moved through the fog between the various establishments.

“Uh, sure you don’t want to come ashore? Drinks on me.” he hazarded.

“Not I, lad,” the Captain said with a shake of his head. “I’ve lost time this voyage already, and I’ve got to get the
August
back to sea. There’s a consignment I’m due to ship from south of here back to Westerly. And I’d better be off before one o’ the harbormaster’s begins to wonder why our papers were signed by the wrong Heptarch.”