Massively Multiplayer (35 page)

The skeletal figures incised around the archway writhed, their claw-like hands seeming to dig into the network of cracks which made up the stone facade. Then they yanked, bony limbs stretching back, and with a terrible crackling noise, the stone face split up the middle, revealing a narrow opening which led downwards into darkness.

The words hovered in mid-air, superimposed over a final vision of tons of solid rock:

Kineticus the Thief. Circle: 11. Wealth: 13,021. You have been logged in for 72 minutes. Your character has died. Thank you for playing Crucible v4.0.

Carlo Torrelli whipped off his goggles and gasped. The claustrophobia engendered by his character’s violent death under a ton of rubble was made worse by the stifling heat of his tiny apartment. Normally he gamed in his underwear, but the old lady downstairs had demanded that he pay up with the rent today, and heaven knew she might simply waltz into his rooms uninvited.

What in the name of the saints had that witch hit him with? The brief glimpse he’d gotten of the mountainside peeling away, before his vision was blotted out entirely, had been impressive, but he’d have preferred to see it from a distance. At least this had been active opposition, not the random happenstance which had interfered with his first shot. He’d had the target lined up cleanly, the magically enhanced sights on his crossbow perfectly aligned with the little weasel’s eyes, a specially prepared bolt ready to fly...then the tall fool with the curved sword had swept out his arm and...thwock! Wrong victim. How embarrassing.

And then the piercing searchlight, followed by who knew what kind of terrible magic. He’d known the target was accompanied, but clearly Matteo had no idea how powerful those companions must be. To think, he’d accepted the commission on spec, paid only a nominal fee as a professional courtesy to another assassin...it would take a week for the game’s automatic body-finders to dig his corpse out from beneath the rubble and return it to the Inn down at the Pass. A week in which he wouldn’t be able to play! A week confined to the sweltering heat of his apartment, with no distractions from the Italian summer.

Maybe he should lounge about in his underwear after all. Perhaps he could parlay his landlady’s shock into an extension on the rent. Or air conditioning.

But first, a quick v-mail to Matteo. MadHarp should know that this “Druin Reaver” was proving a harder kill than anyone had thought.

Chapter Sixteen - MasterMind

A brick.

It isn’t much to look at, to the naked eye. This one is hexagonal, formed of reddish clay, compacted with some sort of broad, flat tool, then fired in an oven.

An expert mason, a connoisseur of bricks perhaps, might remark that this one is particularly even, almost inhumanly so, with perfectly smoothed edges only marred slightly where some philistine, unappreciative of the brickmaker’s art, had gouged this particular sample from whatever wall it had once called home.

But there is another view of this brick. It is the view which can see the component elements which define the brick’s structure. It is a sight which sees the brick not as a single unit, but as a collection of definitions. It is vision beyond the visible, down past the microscopic, beyond even the subatomic, to a place where a simple brick is no longer a physical object, to where it is apprehended not as substance but as mathematical abstraction, a unit of compressed time. Even the tiny chips on the brick’s edge are encoded here, available as tiny physical descriptions appended to the original record, testament to the manner in which history inscribes itself on even the humblest creations. This is a vision which peels the brick, layer from layer, searching for hidden truths. It is the eye of God.

Marybeth Langridge worked alone on the most secure terminal she could find – her own private laptop unit, recovered from her car’s trunk and loaded with all the avatar software she could cram into its limited memory. Her work was hidden from prying eyes in two ways, one minor and one major. The minor advantage was that this laptop was not connected to the house intranet in any way, not even through the ubiquitous anonymous guest login which was generated by most wireless-capable devices at all times. Her major security, however, was superior even to the technique described in Poe’s purloined letter: as far as she knew, no-one even knew the computer , or the data on it, existed, nor what she was up to. As long as no-one came looking for her, no-one was likely to find her.

So she hid in plain sight, visible to God and masons and everybody, but totally ignored, perched on the end of a couch in the employee lounge on the thirteenth floor. Every so often she would turn from the display and rest her eyes on the view from the windows, boats plying back and forth over the gray waters of the Puget Sound, and wonder what in the hell she was supposed to figure out from a single brick.

The brick was, make no mistake, a marvel of twenty-first century computing prowess. Like every object in the world of Crucible, and in most netvironments for that matter, the brick was defined as a series of numbers, each assigned to a particular characteristic. Its physical dimensions were listed as such a width by such a height by such a depth, its color represented in angstroms, its hardness defined as so, its other material properties, flammability, flexibility, reflectivity, index of refraction, electrical resistance...every function or characteristic which the game’s physics engine could assign to the object “brick” was available in its record. In addition, there were a number of game-specific variables in the brick’s file: magical resistance, elemental associations, original programmer, revision dates, a unique identifier, and so on. Effectively the “brick” wasn’t really an object so much as a collection of definitions – of data – and it was this collection which she had copied to her laptop.

She’d been going over the file for hours. The problem was that as far as Marybeth could see, the resultant file had already yielded its most precious secret. This brick hadn’t even existed until she – or, rather, Amitra – had chipped it out of the hive wall in her daring raid the night before. Until that point, the wall had been defined, coded with all the characteristics of brick walls of its kind. There, for all the world to see, was the name of Rudi Singh, the physics instructor turned programming guru who had first designed the Crucible world and its rules, listed as the primary source for most of the material data in the brick’s record. A few other names had been appended when new game functions had necessitated new data for all brick walls. Then, when she’d levered out a single stone, the game program had generated this particular object, scratches and all, and at the same time appended the record of the hive-wall to note the small hole she had created.

Here was the record which had sent her to Wolfgang last night: the moment of the brick’s creation, the program had appended tracking data to its record, in case anyone, or any part of the program, needed that information later on. The originator of the wall was listed as Marcus Tenser. There was a date. There was a note that player #04121692 – that was Amitra – had been responsible for separating this particular brick from its original resting place. Another date.

She looked at the dates.

She looked at the calendar on her computer display.

She looked at the dates again.

She paged back up through the file to read an earlier line.

Very carefully, as though afraid she might disturb the balance of a delicate mechanism, she brought up her research notes from the night before, the one’s she’d cribbed off the company intranet before calling Wolfgang.

“Holy crap,” she said. “Owned.”

Duster’s Tomb was a wreck.

The slab walls, clearly sturdy once, and richly carved, were crumbled and pitted, and in some spots fallen away entirely, revealing the rough mountain stone behind through occasional, ominous gaps. Ghostmaker kept glancing nervously at these, certain that nasty things might come oozing out of them at any moment. Bits of wood and strands of material, furry with dust, cobwebs, and time, lay strewn about the floor. Just about the only thing which wasn’t broken was a metal plaque set into one wall, inscribed with three enigmatic words: “Observe. Persist. Challenge.”

After one glance around the filthy rubble, Druin was glad that he was here only virtually. His allergies would be killing him in a place like this.

“What a dump,” he said.

The others concurred with his assessment, Dinah grunting agreement as she poked at some shards of wood. “These are remnants of a coffin,” she said quietly. “Bones too. I think we are not the first to enter this tomb.”

“Indeed not, lady,” came an unhappy voice from a dark corner. Ghostmaker, already skittish, nearly nailed his own foot to the floor with his dartgun.

Blue light flickered to fitful life as their spectral guide drifted from the ruin.

“Adventurers?” guessed Butterfly.

“Grave robbers,” the ghost spat back with obvious bitterness. “When the Mender prepared his vault, he charged his assistants to guard it from harm. He was aware of what the wicked might do if his inventions fell into their hands.”

“You mean his weapons,” Ghostmaker asked, too eagerly for Druin’s tastes.

“Yes. And when the assistants themselves fell, to age, to...other things...it was arranged that their own tombs might be made the key to unlock his vault, that they might continue to stand guard over his secrets, in death and beyond.”

“But?” Druin prompted.

“But the greedy, the arrogant, they who lust for power even more than they lust for wealth, laid siege to the tombs, and eventually broke in. This, the tomb of Duster, who raised the storms and was master of all the elements of the world, was ransacked entirely. There are no treasures remaining here but one.”

“And what is that,” asked Ghostmaker impatiently.

The specter turned the empty space where its head would be on the fighter. “It is the gift of knowledge, weapon master, the understanding of intentions. There is no treasure more valuable, and none so likely to be overlooked by thieves. Sorting true gold from false is not in their nature.” He swept his gaze over the group. “Prove you are no mere grave robbers. Understand how Duster was ordered, and progress onward.”

The light flickered out. The ghost-thing was gone.

“Don’t have to get all snarky about it,” Ghostmaker muttered sullenly.

After a brief consultation, they agreed that the hour had grown too late to continue further into the tomb at this time. Aside from the difficulties posed by each of them living in a different time zone, Ghostmaker and Dinah pled obligation to their jobs which would keep them offline for most of the next day.

Malcolm drifted away during this part of the conversation, Druin noted, to return only as Ghostmaker announced a suitable time at which they might reconvene. Dinah and Butterfly agreed and began setting out ward-stones.

“Watch this part, Malcolm,” said Druin. “If you’re ever on an extended trip away from a regularly designated resting spot – no, don’t look away this is important – you’ll need to do this.”

Dinah and Butterfly set out enough of the small, glowing ward-stones to describe a circle twelve feet in diameter. Then they instructed everyone to stand inside it. They chanted briefly and a line of blue light spread from stone to stone, eventually forming a thin shield around the assembled party.

“That’s it,” Druin observed quietly. “We’ve just defined this area as a resting spot, for the next thirty six hours. That means nothing can eat us while we’re away from our characters. If you just logout anywhere, and you don’t have a ward-circle, you’re likely to get eaten in your sleep. If that ever happens to you, try to find a hidden spot, or you’ll wake up in a nearby town with a slit throat and empty pockets.”

He lay down on the dusty ground, near where Ghostmaker and Dinah had already spread themselves out. “It’s not technically necessary to lie down, but if you don’t, you might fall outside the circle when you cut your connection.”

Malcolm obligingly lay down next to him. He watched, for a moment, as Princess Butterfly settled in her many-layered robes, carefully making certain she was entirely within the protective circle.

“Druin?”

“Yes Malcolm?”

“Nothing outside the circle can harm you until you...wake up, right?”

“That’s right. Or until the wards give out. Why?”

“What about things – or people –
inside
the circle? Could they hurt you?”

“Er...” Druin hadn’t really thought about that before. It was far outside his nature to contemplate such treachery. He hadn’t even considered the idea. The questing party was the standard unit of the game, the way in which anything greater than a single player action got done. Not even MadHarp would violate a party like that.

Would he?

“Yes,” he answered slowly. “Technically. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it happening to any party established enough to be setting ward-circles in the first place. Anyone who does stuff like that doesn’t get asked to go questing very much, and pretty soon they’re left in the dust. And lonely.”

Malcolm was silent for a while. “It’s a risk though,” he said finally. “Letting someone into the circle is a risk. You could get hurt. Or die. Or they could.”

Druin propped himself up on an arm and looked at Malcolm, who was apparently no longer just thinking about the game. “Yes.” he said finally. “That’s the trouble with trust. You can get hurt, when you let people into your circle.” He shrugged. “But consider the alternative.”

Malcolm didn’t answer, other than to whisper “logout,” so quietly Druin almost didn’t hear him.

“Logout,” he said, his head flopping backward as the screen went dark.

Druin the Thief. Circle: 6. Wealth: 3,805. You have been logged in for 178 minutes. Thank you for playing Crucible v4.0.

“Dude, your parents called.”

“Why didn’t they just v-mail me?”

“Dunno.” Trick’s shrug was eloquent in its ignorance. “But they left a number to call. Said to use my computer too.” He gestured at his own unit, a deskbound two-dimensional display hooked to a landline plugged low into the wall.