Massively Multiplayer (27 page)

“You could always try knifing me,” the giant suggested gently, but the assassin silently shook his head, clearly out of his league.

“Oh well,” the bearded man said, not unkindly. “Sucks to be you.” He laid a finger beside his chin, as if in thought. “You know, you
could
always try running away.”

This clearly hadn’t occurred to the assassin, who visibly perked up. With one more troubled glance at Druin, he scampered for the mouth of the alleyway, but was brought up short by a call from the newcomer.

“One more lesson,” the larger man rumbled. He raised the black staff, which was now humming malevolently, over his head. “Never take your opponents’ advice. It’s usually a trap.”

He brought the staff down sharply. Where it struck the earth, a line of black fire sprang up, racing in a zig-zagging path for the hooded assassin. The little man bleated in fear and turned to run, but made no more than two steps before the ebony radiance caught up with him, enveloping his form.

He vanished with a sharp snap, like a walnut being cracked open, and the black fire faded away.

“Oh, and when you’re fleeing for your life, don’t stop and turn around just because someone says something enigmatic.” The bearded man shook his head. “Sometimes you teach them and teach them, and they just don’t learn.”

Druin, a slightly quicker study, whirled around to plunge deeper into the alleyway. Maybe there was an exit at the other end. However, before he could even get his legs under him, he was arrested by an enormous hand clamping down on his shoulder.

“Hold it, hold it! I didn’t mean you. Relax. Besides, if you were going to run, the time to do it was while I was schooling your playmate back there. Weren’t you listening?”

“I heard you,” Druin acknowledged. “How dead is he?”

“Not a bit,” said the bearded man, shaking his head. “He’s just thinking about life from a new perspective. Without any weapons. Or clothes. On an island, about thirty miles out to sea from here.” He grinned, suddenly, hugely. “As a newt.”

Druin couldn’t help returning the smile. “Thanks, then. You saved my life, but I guess you already knew that. Thank you very much.”

“Don’t mention it,” the bearded man said seriously. “But you ought to keep out of dark alleyways.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Druin agreed. “Druin Reaver.” He stuck out a hand.

“Packer Divide,” the other replied, shaking it. “Let’s head back to the tavern.”

They turned towards the welcoming light of the main street. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s a fellow American doing over here?”

“How could you tell I’m American?”

“Accent,” said Packer. Druin was a little surprised the large man could hear anything under that enormous hat.

“I’m kind of on a job. I got ordered here. Well not here. Whetstone Pass, about a day away.”

“Quest?” Packer asked, holding the tavern door open.

“Sort of. I don’t really know.”

They found an empty table in one of the Fouled Anchor’s quieter back rooms, and Druin briefly summarized the strange encounter with the Catalyst. The declaration that he must travel to Whetstone Pass in order to oppose an indeterminate threat sounded even more nebulous in the telling than it had when he’d heard it himself.

Packer rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “Sounds pretty fishy,” he said quietly. “I mean, Catalysts don’t usually involve themselves with people in the lower circles, right? No offense.”

“None taken.”

“That’s supposed to be one of the whole draws of getting into the upper circles,” Packer continued thoughtfully. “It’s part of the game’s design, the chance to shape the major plotlines, the ways the countries interact, all that stuff. This sounds like you’d be going up against something powerful, right? And it keeps you from what you were doing, your regular game. Why would you go along with that?”

“I don’t really know,” Druin confessed. “It said ‘evil,’ so I guess I thought it was the right thing to do. I didn’t think about it much. Can Catalysts lie about things like that?”

“Not generally, no,” Packer admitted. “Catalysts can tell half-truths, and of course some lie as a matter of course because it’s icy, but that’s not the case this time.”

“How do you know for sure?”

“Forget about it,” Packer advised. “You were mentioning evil. I take it you consider yourself one of the good guys, then?”

“Sure,” said Druin. “Yes. Maybe. I’m not so sure any more.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. This game used to be the simple part of my life – you make some friends, you beat up some monsters, you get some treasure. Man, compared to getting along with my family, or even college, that was practically effortless.”

“Tell me about that,” Packer suggested softly.

“It’s just like....nothing’s
clear
any more. I get this sense from my parents sometimes that when they got out of high school everything was straightforward. You went to school, you met the right kind of people, got married, got jobs, had children. The jobs were socially responsible and the children were raised according to the latest child psychology studies, but other than that, I got the impression things hadn’t really essentially changed from the times their parents, and their grandparents grew up. Different flavor, same ice cream shop.”

“And now,” Packer prompted.

“It’s all...chaotic,” Druin sighed. “My parents send me to school, but they’re not really sending me to school because I still live at home with them because housing costs have risen so much no-one my age can afford housing without a job, and you can’t get a job without a degree from a good school. So I live with my parents, except I never see my parents because they spend five out of seven days hooked into their jobs from the VR office suite adjoining their bedroom, so I might as well move out and live with friends, except I can’t ever really move out because even if I did, e-mail and v-mail and texting and chip-implants mean my parents can contact me at any time and check up on what I’m doing and offer ‘helpful’ suggestions about who to date and what to major in even if I’m out doing my laundry because even my laundromat has twenty-four-hour-a-day net service at every single drying station!”

Packer nodded for him to continue, but Andrew couldn’t have stopped at this point if he’d tried.

“And so I go through the motions of becoming an adult while my parents actually look over my shoulder, and I get good grades except I couldn’t do anything but get good grades because my classes are pre-selected according to aptitude tests I took when I was fifteen which declared just how good I’d ever become at anything I ever tried, so it’s less like I’m studying what to do with my life and more I’m like some machine that’s performing tolerably within specs, all while trying to ignore the fact that my sister is maintaining a daily blog on her netsite which catalogs how dysfunctional my family really is.
And
even if I enjoyed the classes, which I sometimes do, it’s not like I have the slightest idea what to do with my life! I’ve got the same social conscience of all my properly-raised friends, except they all disagree about what to do with their lives too.”

“You’d fight evil, if you could find it,” Packer offered quietly.

“Exactly! Fight poverty, except I don’t know if you do that by becoming a farmer or an economist or a sociologist or a politician. Fight ignorance, except I don’t know if you do that by becoming a school teacher or revamping the educational system to get rid of school teachers. Fight injustice, but I don’t know if you do that by becoming a lawyer or fighting off the modern dependence on lawsuits. And every time I take another class, or cruise another netsite, or talk to another friend, I get another opinion which doesn’t agree with all the other ones!”

“Maybe you have to make your own opinions.”

“Out of what?! Where do we get those if it’s not from understanding the information that’s already there? Why can’t my parents understand how hard that is when there’s just too much information to absorb?”

Packer frowned. “You think yours is the first generation to be confused by the complexity of the world it grows up in? Or overwhelmed by new technology? Hell, people have been facing that since Gutenberg, if not before.”

“No! I’m not that arrogant. But I think we might be the first generation which has embraced that complexity and that technology so completely. In the past, wasn’t it always the wealthy and the established – the parents – who got control of all the new toys? Who controlled the television remote in the 1950’s household? Dad did. Who could afford to buy books when Gutenberg invented the printing press? Adults who already had jobs and education. Now there’s all this noise being generated...it’s like everybody’s shouting, all the time, and my generation are shouting louder than anybody.”

“It sounds like you’ve had this conversation before.”

“What else do you do in college but debate these things? Except there’s never any answers.”

“So you don’t like technology?” Packer gestured with the hand that held the staff, taking in the electronically generated environment around them. “Funny place to be doing that.”

“Not really,” said Druin, visibly calming himself. “Think of what most games are about: escapism, to a fantasy past, or a fantasy future, to a time or place where the lines between good and evil are clear. I was having this discussion with a friend, an actor...he said that the reason lowbrow theater usually outsells Shakespeare is because Shakespeare does too good a job of presenting complex issues and situations, that people want the escape of a simple world, with two-dimensional characters. Heroes. Villains. Victims.”

“Shakespeare sells too,” Packer pointed out.

“Yes, but in smaller doses. Too real.” Druin smirked. “So that’s why I gamed. But it looks like the complexity followed me.”

Packer was silent for a long moment, his chin in his hand. Finally he asked, “have you ever thought of reversing the process?”

“What do you mean?”

“Taking the moral clarity you find in gaming, and applying it to your everyday life? An aptitude test isn’t a Troll, but both are challenges to be overcome. The determination you need to face them is the same.”

Druin looked skeptical. “I don’t follow.”

“Think about the recognizable evils you mentioned. Poverty isn’t a dragon, there’s no head to cut off...but sometimes villages are threatened by plagues, instead of dragons, and what you need then isn’t a sharper sword, but better disease control. In both cases, you decided that hard work, and careful planning, is necessary and worthwhile because you want to save the village. Seems to me that if you know what’s really important to you when you’re gaming, you just need to recognize the same principle in RL.”

It was Druin’s turn for thoughtful pause. “You make it sound so straightforward.”

“I don’t mean to. I think it would be hard. But worthwhile.”

“Sounds like you’ve had this conversation before too,” Druin pointed out.

“I’m thinking of a mentor I had once. Game designer, sharp guy, very idealistic. He thought games should always have something you could take with you, after you logged out...”

Packer trailed off, and his eyes opened wide. “I think I just figured something out, Druin. You’ve unintentionally helped me solve a very important puzzle. Thank you.”

“Uh...you’re welcome?”

There was a faint pinging sound, and Packer became very still, his gaze locked on an empty spot in the air over Druin’s head. After a moment, he unfroze and stood up rapidly.

“I have an urgent call. It’s been a pleasure, Druin Reaver, but I have to go. May I offer you something?”

“You already saved my life,” Druin pointed out.

“Oh, that one was for free. It’s been a long time since I got a chance to teach a turkey like that a lesson. No, this is just something to carry with you.”

Packer reached up to his hatband and plucked out one of the small gray stones. He offered it to Druin, who took it with a bemused expression.

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Just drop it in your bag,” Packer told him. “Think of it as a reminder.”

“Of what?”

“That someone else is certain that you’re one of the good guys, even if you’re not so sure. Farewell.” He touched the black staff to the brim of his hat and walked out the door, whistling a tune under his breath.

If Druin had possessed a bit more background in classical music, he might have recognized it as a leitmotif from Wagner’s Siegfried.

Packer the Divider. Circle: 20. Wealth: 1,896,490. You have been logged in for 45 minutes. Thank you for playing Crucible v4.0.

Wolfgang Wallace leaned forward, letting his weight pull his virlo into the upright position before its servo motors could catch up. He pushed the thin ceramic lenses up onto his forehead, too impatient to bother removing the wireless wrist and ankle cuffs. Technically, he should have been able to access his communications software from within the immersive harness setup, but hadn’t transferred the necessary files over when he had last reloaded the gaming software. Cursing, he slapped the flashing red disk above his desktop which represented an incoming call. A red-bordered window opened in its place.

“Marybeth. I am really hoping you have good news for me.”

Marybeth Langridge looked as tired as he felt. “Yes, Mr. Wall—Wolf. I think so. I think I know who our hacker is.”

Wolfgang nodded. “Marcus Tenser.”

Marybeth’s mouth fell open, combining with her tousled hair and bleary eyes to truly comic effect. Wolfgang savored her awed expression.

“Y-yes! That is, I
just
figured that out myself but how did
you
know that? How long have you known?”

He couldn’t resist laughing. “I just figured it out myself. I wasn’t even really sure until I saw the look on your face.”

“But how did you figure it out?”

“Druin – Andrew Hunter – told me.”

“Huh?”

“He reminded me that in most situations there’s a good reason to look for the simplest answer. It’s usually true. We’ve been tearing our hair out wondering why the designs of these shadow zones resembled the central game architecture so precisely, and how that must mean the hacker had carefully studied the work of the original designers. We neglected the obvious answer: the hacker
is
one of the original designers. I just had to guess which one.”