Massively Multiplayer (32 page)

Bernardo blanched interestingly, Marybeth thought.

“That’s not—that is, we’d be more than happy, naturally, to hear the proposals of a programmer with your, uh, reputation and experience.”

“Very politic, Bernardo. We’ll talk again later. But all of this is beside the point, Wolf. What’s the lesson I kept drumming into your head? What have I always told you about games?”

“That they create reality as well as simulate it?”

“Bravo! I knew you were paying attention. Look at them.” Marcus’ phantom hand gestured at the central display over the desk, where the collected adventurers were milling about in front of Bartlett Vermillion’s iron-barred store-front, picking out equipment and seriously discussing that which they might face in their journey through the vaults of The Mender. “Conversation. Action. Interaction. They’re making choices...it’s a perfect little microcosm. It’s where these people practice their humanity, without, they think, the consequences of the real world. They’re wrong of course. The consequences and situations they face in the game are more real than RL, not less, because they reflect the way that people act when they don’t think anyone’s seriously looking. With the masks off. Watch them for a while.”

They did. Ghostmaker bustled about, making suggestions, offering blustery advice. The Princess Shining Curious Butterfly ostentatiously called for the best equipment Vermillion had to offer, declaring that money was no object – though she neglected to offer any financial assistance to the other party members. Druin wandered outside the knot of wealthy, confident senior adventurers, answering in monosyllables when spoken to, clearly uncomfortable and uncertain.

“Those aren’t characters. They’re people, making decisions that reflect their personalities, creating personalities with the decisions they make. Now,” Marcus returned his attention to the conference room, “what would happen if someone decided to manipulate those decisions? Figured out how closely rooted people’s game personas are to their innermost thoughts, and worked out a way to make use of that knowledge?”

“What are you talking about, Marcus?”

But Marcus was glancing off-screen again. “That will have to wait, Wolf. Consider this an object lesson, for the moment, in personality manipulation. We’ll continue our conversation at a later time. I have some last minute preparations of my own.”

There was a flash of brilliant blue night, and he disappeared.

“Damn!’ one of the military men swore. “I almost had him!” He held up the small computer he had snatched up when Marcus appeared. “The trace was scrambled, but if I could have had just thirty more seconds...”

“Forget it,” Blanks advised him. “Clearly Mr. Tenser knows very well how close you were to tracing his broadcast. I wouldn’t count on catching him out with any technology which was available in any database he could access when he was employed by your department. Can you at least make this room secure?”

“Yes, the encryption is randomly keyed. It doesn’t matter if he has access to a descrambler or not.” The military man fiddled with his computer for a few seconds, then snapped it into the conference table’s nearest universal port. “Okay, we can talk now.”

“Good.” Blanks took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. “Any suggestions?”

“The agency will want me to set up a monitoring station here, since it represents Tenser’s point of interest, as well as the fewest hops to his initiating signal.”

“Of course. Mr. Calloway, will there be a problem with that?”

“What?” Bernardo had been staring, fascinated, at the party of adventurers still shopping, silently, in the tabletop’s holographic display. “Oh, yes, yes, of course, we will cooperate fully with the authorities. This...madman...needs to be stopped!”

Blanks raised an eyebrow, but nodded. “Thank you for your cooperation. Mr. Wallace, can you set us up with a connected room?”

“Of course.”

“We’ll also need any data, any recordings you might have made of previous activity by Mr. Tenser. Did you say you’d worked with him when he was at this company?”

“I didn’t say, but yes.”

“Okay, we’d like to use you as a liaison, then. Can you tell us anything more about Mr. Tenser’s intentions? Even guesswork would be useful.”

“You heard him as well as I did,” Wolfgang sighed, “and I understood him about as well as you did. I don’t like to think Marcus has gone off the deep end – he’s always been a visionary type, and that allows for a lot of eccentricity. But he seems to be taking the game a little bit too seriously if you ask me. I mean, all that talk about manipulating people in RL through their game interactions? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Marybeth noticed how pale Mr. Bernardo Calloway had suddenly become.

“Okay,” Blanks acknowledged,” what about more straightforward criminal intentions? Could all of this be a distraction from his actual goals? Data smuggling, industrial espionage...”

“We considered all that when we first found the hacking,” said Wolfgang. “Data didn’t fit the patterns. And he’d need a confederate on the outside of the system, and that doesn’t tie in either.”

“What about one of these game players?”

“We already have a trace on four of them. And I’ve personally researched the two who are local to the Seattle server. Both Americans, relatively young, one in college, one recent MBA graduate. They don’t seem the type. I had some acquaintances interviewed, and even spoke directly with one of them and they seem to be just what they say they are. A newbie with a Galahad complex and a member of Wraithmorte’s Company. Regular gamers.”

“Wraithmorte’s
Company
?” Bernardo put in, looking suddenly urgent. “A rival company to Archimago? Could this be corporate espionage?”

“Er, no.” Wolfgang said, a bit disparagingly. “Wraithmorte’s Company is an adventuring band, one of the larger questing groups operating out of our North American server.” He couldn’t resist lecturing. “It’s from the original meaning of the term. ‘Company’ meant a group of ‘companions.’” He smiled thinly at Calloway’s discomfiture. “It used to be a friendly word.”

“You’ve spoken with one?” Ms. Sumter asked insistently. “Did you mention the hacking, or your suspicions at all?”

“No, this was in the context of the game. I don’t think he’s suspicious.”

“Maybe he should be,” Blanks said, fingers steepled in front of his chin. “Maybe we could use someone suspicious in a situation like this.”

Wolfgang Wallace carefully closed the door to his office. Marybeth was showing the various agents to a soundproofed room off the main observation floor, where they could set up their equipment. Janet Chen had been volunteered to provide them any hardware they might need, but Wallace assumed that they would want to use their own equipment. They had rejected the programming floors out of hand, saying that there was too much “operational noise” created by the many types of projects various programmers were working on there. How this differed from the actual noise of the main server floor, he didn’t know and frankly didn’t care to find out. Despite Sumter’s clearly intense desire to find Marcus Tenser, and Agent Blanks’ obvious competence as an investigator, Wolfgang suspected that they weren’t going to solve this mystery any sooner than Tenser wanted it solved. Not that Tenser had been entirely stingy with his clues.

“Alright, Marcus, I’m alone. Do you want to tell me what that was all about?”

The glimmering specter materialized over his desktop.

“Now Wolfgang, that would be telling. What kind of challenge would that be?”

“Stuff it. If you’d wanted me completely baffled, you wouldn’t have been dropping hints like candy back there.”

“Why Wolfgang, whatever are you talking about?”

“’Mender.’ I paid attention to the company history when I signed on, Marcus. ‘Mender’ was the personal avatar – the character – of Raphael Gellar, Crucible’s designer and the founder of Archimago Technologies. Why are you setting up a quest to have players excavate the corpse of a dead programmer?”

“Bravo!” The apparition grinned broadly and clapped its translucent hands. “I knew I was leaving the system in good hands when I left it with you, Wolf. You listen. You remember.”

“I get pretty ticked off when someone hacks my system is what I do, Marcus. What is this really all about?”

“Magical artifacts. I wasn’t making that part up. When we were designing Crucible, we made up all kinds of absolutely boss weapons, which turned out to be way too powerful. Soul-eating swords, a spear that created earthquakes, that sort of thing. They seriously upset game balance. So we shelved them, but we kept all the prototypes in a sub-zone, inaccessible to the players. I just unlocked the directory and wrote the entrance area – kind of a tribute to the original design team, Raphe and Rudi and all us great guys.” The playful grin vanished. “What’s the first rule of game design, Wolf? You have to pace every test so that it’s able to be solved, but challenging enough to give the players a sense of accomplishment. That way they keep coming back for more.”

“Stop it!” Wolfgang yelled, releasing for the first time the pent-up frustration he’d felt since the hacking first surfaced. “This isn’t a game, Marcus! This is a real company, and there are real people who could seriously lose their jobs here! Are you
trying
to kill the company?”

The specter threw up its hands defensively. “I would never hurt the company! Don’t you know me at all?” It paced back and forth. “ I’ve invested my whole life in understanding games, Wolf. How they work, why people play them, who they make us into...and Raphael and I built the perfect company, and the greatest game that’s ever existed. You think I’d endanger that?

“So what is this, then. Are you just trying to scare off Calloway and Vital Enterprises? Mad that they bought us out? This isn’t a cartoon, Marcus. They’re not going to scream ‘ghosts’ and go running out of the building. They
own
us, Marcus...”

“It’s not about ownership! It’s about games. Have you asked yourself just who is really playing games with this company? Didn’t you start to feel something was off before I even began my overt system intrusion? Don’t tell me you didn’t notice how weird it was that the Calloways took control of the update before they’d even finalized purchase of the company...”

Wolfgang leveled an accusatory finger. “So this
is
about the Calloways.”

“No. Yes. Partially.”

Wolfgang sighed and sat down behind his desk. “Come on, Marcus. You’re asking me to trust you. Well trust me first. If there’s something I should know, about the way the Calloways are running us, or anything, let me know. Maybe I’d even help you. But I’ve got to know first.”

The ghost wavered, clearly in an agony of indecision. Finally it shook its head. “No. I can’t, Wolfgang. You might believe me, you might not, but I can guarantee you, I’m not going to hurt the company. Just the opposite. You’ll just have to trust me. I’m not crazy, and I’m not even really very criminal. Yet. You’re right that there is something serious here, but I can’t tell you what it is.”

Wolfgang pounced on the ghost’s hesitation. “But if this is serious, why all the fireworks? Why all this stuff in the game? Why not just hack out whatever information you’re really searching for, or confront Calloway directly if you’ve got something on him? Why all the distractions?”

“Distractions?” The ghost smiled. “Distractions, diversions...games are those too, Wolf. But have you asked yourself just who I’m really distracting with all this?”

Wolfgang looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean? Me, Calloway, the Feds, half the programming team...”

The ghost shook its head. “You’re missing the obvious. Who gets the most distracted by a game? Figure out the target, then you have half the reasoning.” It glanced off-screen. “And on that note, the curtain’s about to go up. I’ll be seeing you, Wolf.” It vanished.

Wolfgang blew out his cheeks in frustration. “Yeah,” he said miserably, “I’ll just bet you will.”

Jake-In-the-Box propped his standard-issue sword over his right shoulder, wound up like a major league ballplayer, and let fly.

With a less than earth-shattering “squeak,” the last of the bony cave rats flew across the cellar to splat against the wall.

“Right,” Jake said, popping up the visor on his helmet. “Where to next?”

“The map says we take a left, down that hall,” answered his companion, Lynderella.

“You’ve got your skeptical face on.”

“Well...call me suspicious.”

“You’re suspicious. You’re also good looking in that medieval getup.”

“Thank you. It’s called a ‘bodice.’ As in ‘to rip.’”

“And you’re not going to mention how manly I look in a suit of armor?”

“Dashing. Let me know when you can afford more than the helmet.”

“Maybe if you hadn’t insisted on buying the
good
bodice. Now what’s this about suspicious?”

“Oh, that. I think we’re being set up. The map says go left, the ingratiating monks say go left, the big spooky corridor with the dark shadows for things to lurk in is to the left, but all the footprints in the dust lead to the right. Wonder why?”

“You suspect the monks of trying to lure us into something?”

“Let’s say I first became curious when the Abbot offered us a lot of wine
before
wandering down into the supposedly infested vault. Besides, if it was just a plague of rats in their wine cellar, like they said, why couldn’t they take care of it themselves? Some of those monks looked pretty beefy.”

“Holy orders?”

“I don’t think so. Brother Maynard squashed that gobling thingy in the entry chamber without a thought.”

“Which ones were the goblings again?”

“The yellow ones that put a dent in your helmet.”

“Oh yeah.” Jake sighed and sat down heavily on the floor stones. “You know, this game is harder than it looks. I thought you just swung the sword and ran around through the caves. Instead, we show up, get a civics lesson in local government before they’ll even hand over a butter knife, then end up cleaning house for what you now think are a bunch of murderous monks. This place has more twists than office politics.”