Massively Multiplayer (36 page)

Mystified, Andrew brought up the telecom software and typed in the unfamiliar number he’d been given. After a moment, the display faded out to frame his fathers’ anxious face.

“Son,” his father started in seriously, “before you answer, I want you to know I’m trying very hard not to jump to conclusions about anything. But the suspense is killing me, and your mom’s so wired she doesn’t trust herself to speak clearly.” This earned him a quick elbow in the ribs from somewhere off camera. “I want you to know we love and support you, no matter—“

“All right, I get the idea,” Andrew broke in, “but now you’re freaking me out. Can you tell me what’s up?”

“Son, is there any reason you might be wanted by the FBI?”

Wolfgang was going home.

There is a degree of exhaustion which is so complete that it bypasses the physical, and even the mental, and becomes a kind of spiritual fatigue. Simple labor is a matter of muscular exertion, but even when the muscles reach their breaking point, we can sometimes conjure up hidden reserves with a little mental trickery. We play games with ourselves. “Go ahead, one more, and then you can rest.” Sometimes we argue with our bodies, imagining all sorts of spurs and consequences in order to eke the most out of the traitorous animal frame of musculature. When this too fails, we sometimes turn to anger, to pride, to the raw emotion of the moment. Driven by need and past the ability to rationalize, we toil onwards out of sheer spite. Humans can be such contrary things.

But there is an exhaustion which kicks even this last bulwark from under our feet, when we can no longer work, not even for the bloody-minded joy of beating ourselves against an impenetrable wall.

You have been there. We all have, at one time or another. Wolfgang was there now. He had been working solidly for almost thirty-six hours, with only brief catnaps and coffee to sustain him. First there had been the mad hunt for the hacker, then the revelations of the previous night, followed by a frenzied review of internal firewalls, communications, database architecture and any other system which Marcus Tenser might have had a hand in authoring (answer: almost all of them). Then, this morning, the arrival of the government agents, the bizarre scene in the conference room, and all the subsequent fallout...

It was too much. Wolfgang could no longer convince himself to work on, not for the good of the company, not for the good of the consumers, not for any patriotic appeal Blanks and the FBI might have made, and definitely not to appease the uncertain aims of Marcus Tenser. Duster, Rod Ruin, Macro...the names of Raphael Gellar’s students, Tenser’s old co-workers who had helped write the original game code. And that snide little speech about grave-robbers and hidden intentions...clearly there was a layered meaning there, a dig at the Calloway’s of some sort. A hidden message. It was infuriating, like trying to play Bridge with a partner who purposefully mixed up the standard bidding signals, and Wolfgang was, for once in his life, very tired of games.

Marching – well, stumbling – through the squat parking structure appended to the Archimago building, he figured he had just about enough energy left to program his car to take him home, and, if he was lucky, enough to get up the stairs and into bed. Disrobing would have to be optional. He didn’t even have enough energy to whistle.

“Wolfgang?”

Then again...

“Wolfgang? Hi.” Marybeth Langridge materialized out of the shadows, looking distinctly nervous.

“Marybeth?”

“Hi. Umm. Are you, uh, heading home?”

“That was the idea.” Wolfgang said slowly.

“Could you give me a ride? Umm, we could get something to eat.”

And Wolfgang Wallace made an interesting discovery. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. For every poison, there is an antivenom. And for even the most miserable exhaustion, there is a balm so potent that it electrifies. He found himself suddenly wide awake.

“Oh. I mean, unless you have plans. Do, uh, you and Janice…”

“Janice? Janice Chen? Janice works in my division. That’s…um…all.”

“Oh. I see. So. Food?”

“I...sure, yes! That would be good. Great! I mean great. Uh, hop in.”

He thumbed the passenger door, grateful that he’d cleaned the car just last week and wouldn’t have to clear the seat of coffee cups or donut wrappers. Marybeth slid in, heaving a sigh of what sounded suspiciously like relief. He, on the other hand, found himself suddenly nervous. He’d spent an awful lot of time with Marybeth over the past week, but was suddenly aware he didn’t know much about her personally.

His first impulse had to have been wrong. She was just asking for a ride home, nothing more. Oh, and food.

Was that a date? Or could that still be something professional, like a business lunch? If so, was he courting a sexual harassment lawsuit, even though it was she who was asking him to go out? And what kind of cuisine did you serve with that?

“Chinese?” Wolfgang asked tentatively, holding up his hand to the car’s i.d.-plate.

“I actually had in mind a Greek place on Capitol Hill,” Marybeth countered. “It’s quiet. And we need to talk.”

It had taken Andrew only a moment to convince his parents that he was not running drugs, engaging in espionage, or otherwise doing anything which should attract the notice of the FBI. It was actually a bit of a surprise, given his first reaction.

“What?!? The FBI? As in the Federal Bureau of Investigation? I haven’t done anything!”

“Okay,” his father had instantly agreed. “That’s what we thought, but we needed to ask you first.”

Andrew was surprisingly miffed at how easily he had been discounted as a master criminal. “You know I
could
have done something without knowing it.”

“I don’t think so,” his mother assured him, “Agent Sharps assured us they just want your assistance in an investigation, but you are not being considered as a suspect in anything. We have that on record. We just needed your okay to talk to him. We trust you, dear.”

Andrew scowled even further. What good was that, being trusted by your own parents? Here he was, supposedly reeling from a big conflict, practically run away from home and disowned, and his parents called up to say they trusted him. This had better not get back to his friends.

“Wait a minute, ‘Agent’ Sharps? The FBI sent an actual agent to talk to you?”

“He showed up at the house this morning,” his father nodded. “Dark suit, sunglasses, the whole schtick. He said they’re looking into a case which has to do with unlawful access to corporate accounts, and your name came up as a possible witness.”

“But how? When?” Andrew asked, doubly mystified.

“We think it’s your game,” his mother supplied. “Agent Sharps was being very vague, but your father got him to admit that they were asking for clients of the corporation in question to discuss recent activity, lag, security concerns, that kind of thing. After he left, we, uh, looked up your usage log on the house net and figured that was the only commercial system you’d been spending much time on recently.”

“You...so this guy’s not at the house now?”

“Do you think we’d leave your sister with an FBI agent?” his mother demanded. “Without us there?”

Andrew noticed again the unfamiliar surroundings behind his parents. “Where are you guys anyway?”

“The mall,” said his father. “Public phone. We figured they might be tracing the house lines, and we didn’t know if you wanted to talk to these people.”

Andrew blinked unsteadily. Who were these aliens who had clearly replaced his parents? “What, are you guys secretly spies or something?”

“Nope, I’m just a copy-editor,” his father smiled smugly, “but I read thrillers. Your mom wants to be a secret agent when she grows up though.”

Andrew had to shake his head in disbelief. “So you ducked out – evaded an
FB
for-frig’s-sake
I
agent – ducked out to the mall just to ask if I was secretly a terrorist or something?”

“Oh no,” his mother looked positively wounded. “We never thought that for a moment, honey. We trust you. We love you.” Her voice became grim. “It’s the
government
we don’t trust.”

“Aren’t they supposed to be the good guys?” Andrew asked weakly.

“So they keep telling us,” his father smirked. “That’s why I never trust them.”

The Greek place on Capitol Hill had an unpronounceable name, and smelled strongly of olive oil and garlic, but as promised it also possessed quiet tables lit only by a net of tiny Christmas lights twinkling overhead like stars. It also boasted a seven page menu filled with things wrapped in grape leaves and similar delights which reminded Wolfgang that he hadn’t gotten around to eating anything other than vending-machine food since noon.

Marybeth ordered for both of them, then sat, staring down into her wine glass as though she were about to make a confession.

“You seem nervous,” Wolfgang suggested.

“I am,” she admitted. “I needed to talk to you and I’m still not sure if I should.”

Wolfgang hesitated, his lips on the verge of an encouraging smile, his hand half-poised to reach out. He hadn’t been thinking of it as a romantic gesture. It was a friendly sort of movement. He was an expressive guy, according to all the personality tests, and he wouldn’t have hesitated at a business meeting. He did that sort of thing all the time. But this wasn’t a business meeting. Or, at least, he didn’t think it was. Was it?

“Can you tell me why we couldn’t talk about it at work?”

“You were exhausted. You looked terrible.”

That stung, a bit, but Wolfgang nodded. Marybeth seemed to reach a decision, and took a deep breath. “Anyway, I needed time to think about whether I was even going to tell you. And If I did, I needed you to be out of the office anyway.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Marcus Tenser is in the Archimago Building.”

Wolfgang spilled his wine.

Agent Savoy Blanks was working late.

This was by no means an unusual condition. It was, if anything, the norm. Savoy Blanks had had to work hard from birth, driven in school to escape a working-class background, driven to excel at other activities by a surfeit of natural curiosity, and, of course, driven at all other times to do well in sports in order to make up for the numbing humiliation of having been named “Savoy” by doting parents who had thought the title sounded regal, rather than hopelessly wimpy. Constant playground harassment led to martial arts classes, and eventually a Judo scholarship. Blanks probably would have graduated from a fine school as a consequence of his inherent brains and ambition, but the fact that he was immediately picked up by the Agency he attributed to the efforts of all the schoolyard bully’s he’d ever known, a succession of thugs who had learned to their detriment that just because someone has a ludicrously fey first name doesn’t mean they can’t throw a left hook.

Ironically, once he reached the agency, his computer talents made him too valuable to waste in the physical confrontations frequented by other field agents. Instead, he found himself assigned to the Agency’s theft division, investigating the increasingly subtle methods by which computers could be made to give up funds, account numbers, and identities. He proved successful enough that he was eventually elevated to Treasury Department liaison, a position which finally gave him enough authority to access the internal affairs database, and eventually to put his opposite number at the Treasury Department away for twelve years for complex fraud.

They rewarded him with this assignment: hunting down a single errant goofball programmer, a nobody who had the temerity to go AWOL from his DoD assignment.

The lesson was clear. In the Agency, as in the Judo ring, there were very clear rules of engagement. One of those was that while you were expected, even required, to be a straight-arrow hard-ass on the perps, you were not to turn the same piercing eye on your supposed teammates.

Perhaps surprisingly, this had not made Agent Blanks bitter in the least. He was the veteran of too many schoolyard scraps, too many Judo bouts, in which the difference between erstwhile friend and opponent depended on the tensions or needs of the moment. Blanks understood rules. It was one of the reasons that he was so very good with computers. He didn’t understand people, necessarily, but this did not really concern him. They, too, were subject to rules, and he was confident he would understand those in time.

For the moment, that involved juggling the egos of his little team, and getting some kind of inside edge on his quarry, the elusive Marcus Tenser. The two puffed-up file clerks provided by the Department of Defense were no challenge at all. Given access to a room full of computers and plenty of important sounding assignments (all of which boiled down to “wait for a breakthrough,” were they clever enough to decipher them) they would give him no unease.

Ms. Sumter, on the other hand, was becoming a pain. Her devotion to the chase might have been admirable, had this been a chase. But Blanks had spent the day interviewing the few employees who had known Tenser when he worked here at this company. The more Blanks found out about him, the more he became convinced of two things: first, that the man really didn’t have it in him to bring about the downfall of civilization, nor even to sell military secrets to a foreign power, or whatever it was Sumter and the Pentagon boys thought was his aim. At least not for money. No, Tenser had impressed everyone who knew him, and therefore impressed Blanks as well, as an idealist, one who believed deeply in wholesome goals like human progress, even if he was egomaniacal enough to think his little games could do something to bring that about. He might be, as Sumter clearly thought, dangerous, but not by intention.

The other thing Blanks was certain of was that Marcus Tenser was an incredibly deep game player. He didn’t doubt that the entire emphasis on this computer game and its players was a mask for some entirely different aim, but he didn’t yet know what that might be. That was bothersome. Tenser, idealist that he was, might have some grand ideas about opening government files to the masses, or using the Archimago company’s economic clout as some sort of bargaining chip to gain...something else. It would be for the best of all possible reasons, of course. But that didn’t mean it would be a good thing to allow him to play out whatever game he was at.