Massively Multiplayer (10 page)

Too rich. Speaking of which, his total was up almost five thousand again today, nearer the two-hundred-thousand mark. He’d heard rumors, from Mim and some others on the Up-Hill net, that two-hundred was a target, and that if you broke it you got contacted by Archimago. It was much too early to talk about a real deal, as a Heptarch or a Catalyst, of course, but it was an important step, if it was true. God, he hoped it was.

It was what Gilbert Morton lived for.

Furtively, he bundled up the headset and the elastic wrist and ankle bands, and shoved them unceremoniously behind the computer’s desktop case. Let them think one of the nurses or doctors left it there. Let them clean it up for a change.

Carefully, he snuck back out into the hall, eyes blinking rapidly at the change from the unlit computer room to the fluorescent white of the hallway. In the distance, the howls of the patients in the west-wing let him know that the nurses were still occupied. Like all hospitals, it smelled of bandages and cleaning fluid. The bandages were not his concern. But the cleaning fluids were.

He locked the door carefully. One of the few advantages he had was the fact that, as a janitor, his cardkey could anonymously access almost any room in the hospital. And there, in the alcove across the hall, were his mop, and bucket. Right where he’d left them, along with the rest of his life. Gilbert Morton closed his eyes, savoring, for just a moment more, the feeling of control he’d experienced ordering Druin around, there in the seat of his power, his fortress on the hill, surrounded by the minions who did his bidding. With his sword hand, he reached for the mop, and with his shield hand, the handle of the bucket. Scooping them up, Gil de Wraithmorte, Warrior of the fourteenth circle, made his way back to his assigned duties, dreaming of power.

After only fifteen minutes of road time, Druin was almost ready to cast himself from the cliff-top and into the sea below. The fall would certainly kill him, and his body would be transported back to his room at the Pumpkin, minus only his possessions and a small step in rank. Maybe he could tell Gil that he had slipped.

No, that was ridiculous. It was impossible to slip in Crucible. Unless, perhaps, they’d upgraded the physics engine in version four. As it was, only the improved visuals kept him from desperate actions. At least the view could distract him from thoughts of suicide. Or murder.

Rud the Almost Magnificent had asked a few sensible questions about changes to the system since his last login. Killian had revealed that he was a long-time player of combat simulators – no surprises there - but that he’d considered branching out into fantasy netvironments on the advice of a friend. Since those introductory revelations, Killian had limited his conversation to a single question: “when will I be able to afford a gun?” Druin’s assurance that the primitive firearms available within the Crucible universe were more expensive and less trustworthy than the crossbow had been met with skeptical silence.

As it was, Killian cradled his crossbow in his arms like a rifle, swinging it constantly to cover their flanks. Druin had considered telling him that, since they were on the main coast road, a safe zone between Quest areas, there was absolutely no possibility of ambush, but Killian seemed to already be chafing at the lack of combat action, and so Druin remained silent.

If only Jenna and Malcolm could be persuaded to follow his example.

“So if the monsters and whatever hole up in these quest thingies, why the hell don’t you just stay away?” Jenna was asking now. “Wall them off and just ignore them.”

“Because,” he explained impatiently, “that’s not the point. In the first place, the monsters multiply, like bugs, so they’d eventually break out of whatever container you put up. In the second place it’s just…it’s just what you do. Kill the monster, get the treasure. Maybe get enough experience to go up to a higher circle of rank. It’s kind of the whole point of the game. Why are you here again?”

“My boss thinks I’m overworking.”

“I can’t imagine why. Where do you work, anyway?” This, at least, might distract her from the murky topic of the rewards of fantasy adventure.

“I’m a journalist for MetGlobeNet. I write copy for the ‘casts. Economics.”

“Yeah, okay. Economics. Hey, here.” He produced a thick golden coin from his pouch and handed it over. One side displayed a stylized castle, and the other a crossed sword and shield. “That’s worth ten of the little coins you got when you first logged in to the game and created your character. That’s another reason to go Questing. With more gold, you can buy better equipment.”

“To go on more Quests, right?”

“Yes.”

“Seems pretty circular, doesn’t it? Repetitive.” She handed the coin back to him. “Probably self-destructive too. Why not just get the programmers to stop making more monsters? Turn them all off?”

“But…” he was stumped. He had no idea how to explain to her why it was important. In real terms, it wasn’t, of course, any more than it was important that a football move from one end of a field to another, or the number of strokes it took to put a small white ball in a hole in the ground. And yet it drove him, drove millions of people, to shell out money, time, and effort, in order to shift pixels around in front of their eyes, rescuing fictional victims who’d never really been in any peril from the fictional monsters. Why
did
he care?

Perhaps luckily, “Sir” Malcolm decided to answer for him. “To the true knight, the quest is its own excuse,” he declared roundly, brandishing his sword. “To right wrongs, to vanquish evil—“

“Stop waving that thing before you cut my ear off,” Druin scowled. He called the group to a halt and reached into his pouch once more for Gil’s map. “I think we’re about halfway to the crossroads, but I want to check—“

“We’re there, aren’t we?” Killian spoke up.

“What? No, It’s about thirty minutes to Heron Rock crossing.”

“What’s that then?”

Druin looked up in annoyance, then surprise. Sure enough, Killian was pointing to a weathered-looking post, to which planks had been nailed a right angles. The sign pointing south, the way they had come, read “Bitter Edge,” while that pointing north indicated the road to “Coppertown and Northern Mountains.” To the east, a dirt trail led inland, into the woods. The sign pointing that way read “Drear Wood and Heron Rock.”

“What the…” Druin finished unrolling his map and consulted it quickly. Sure enough, a small glowing dot indicating their current location put them at the intersection of two lines, the broad stroke of a main road running north and south between Copper and Bitter Edge, and the faint scrawl of a forest track bisecting the northern peninsula, right through the heart of the Dread Wood before it popped out on the other side at Heron Rock. “I don’t get it,” he muttered. “I’ve made this trip dozens of times, and normally we go almost to Coppertown, then take a right and just skirt the edge of the Wood. This takes us right through it. I’ve never seen this route before.”

“Maybe it’s the update,” Rud volunteered. “They could have added a new area or something.”

“No,” Druin maintained, “they always tack new areas to the outer edges of the map. They never mess with the existing geography, because it would confuse people.”

“You mean like now?” Jenna smirked. “Looks like the rules to your little game changed. Too bad.”

Druin was too surprised to be annoyed at her tone. “Yeah. I guess so. Huh. Really, though, I should take you the old way, over the northern edge of the Wood. You guys are first circle adventurers. You could get into real trouble…”

“No way,” Jenna shook her head. “If I’m going to do this at all, let’s get it over with. Maybe we’ll see some of these famous monsters. This walking is getting boring.”

“Agreed,” Killian chimed in, and in a moment, all four of them were pressing Druin to take the new, unexpected route through the forest. Sir Malcolm was particularly insistent, eager to test his virtuous steel, he claimed, against the unhallowed hordes. In the end, Druin had little choice but to agree.

“One thing first, though,” he admonished. “I need to log out for a second and go see if anyone else has any intel on new areas being added to the game. Just wait right here until I get back. Do
not
leave the road until I get back. I’m going to look a little stupid for a moment, but just hold on.”

Eager to take this apparent shortcut, Druin’s four charges solemnly nodded their agreement. Druin rolled his eyes back in his head, and quietly ordered his computer to open a new session. A small window opened in the air before him, invisible to the others, but which presented Druin a view back to the library representing his operating system. He reached out and touched the window with his left hand, temporarily shifting his point of view back into that program, while maintaining contact with the Crucible system.

To the others it appeared as though he had simply reached out with one hand, then frozen in place, a blank expression on his face. Tentatively, Killian poked at him, and got no response.

“Multitasking,” Killian reported.

“We could check his pack for goodies,” Rud suggested practically. Malcolm’s disapproving frown sent his hands up in a defensive gesture. “Just kidding.”

Jenna contemplated the statue-like form of Druin the Reaver. “And here I thought this epic fantasy stuff couldn’t get any more dull. Guess I was wrong after all.”

The four new-minted Adventurers sat down to wait until Druin returned. From the woods nearby, something watched them

Chapter Six - Careers

Bernardo Calloway arrived for his first day as the President of Archimago Technologies (a Vital Enterprises Corporation) in a manner significantly less ostentatious than that of his prior visit. Instead of his father’s slick electric-blue limousine, Bernardo arrived in a conservative black sedan, which he parked himself in a reserved spot. He brandished no cane, and his suit was as conventional as his car. The bright trappings and outrageous behavior of his father were not to his taste, and he intended that everyone in the company understand so at once.

Wolfgang Wallace met him in the lobby. “Good morning, Mr. Calloway. The department heads took a vote to see who should show you upstairs, and I drew the short straw.”

The familiarity of Wallace’s greeting caught Bernardo slightly off guard and he decided to regain the initiative. “You mean the remaining department heads, don’t you Mr. Wallace?” he asked, favoring the larger man with a meaningful glance over the rims of his glasses.

Wolfgang’s hand dropped awkwardly to his side. Perhaps working under Bernardo Calloway wasn’t going to be as different an experience as he had imagined it might. “Er, yes, that would be the case. Quite a shake-up. Um, in any case, let me show you to your office.” He motioned towards the elevators, whistling the overture to “Tosca” under his breath.

The elevator disgorged them onto the twelfth floor, which unlike the bathhouse quiescence of the actors’ floors, or the controlled chaos of the programmer’s environs, resembled the offices of almost any other large corporation. Administrators and assistants hustled between cubicles and offices, small stacks of note-taking computers and data cubes balanced in their arms. The faint whirring of fans and the lower hum of virlo motors filled the air.

“This is Dr. Morgenstern’s office, department of research. Over there is customer relations. Marketing is – or, was – in these two offices. I understand you have some Calloway transplants who’ll be moving in there. I believe you’ve already met most of the accounting department.” Bernardo nodded, comfortable once more in the familiar surroundings of the business world.

“And this is your office. And this is Mrs. Hernandez.”

Mrs. Evelyn Hernandez was, to the uninformed eye, not a particularly noteworthy person. She was perhaps forty or fifty, somewhat short and slightly plump, possessed of a head of tight mahogany curls which might or might not have been colored. She wore just a bit too much lipstick, in a shade just slightly too bright. Viewing her on the street, the casual observer might have been mistaken for thinking her entirely normal, prosaic even, clearly someone’s mother or perhaps even a youngish grandmother, no doubt a competent worker, devoted wife, and reliable if not inspiring member of the PTA.

Anyone making that judgment would be making a cosmic mistake, and if he happened to work for Archimago Technologies, it would be the mistake of a lifetime.

Mrs. Hernandez had served as the company’s administrative assistant for longer than anyone could remember. She had, to Wolfgang Wallace’s knowledge, outlasted three separate Presidents. She had a knowledge of the company’s financial status, developmental history, and employee morale that was beyond encyclopedic and bordered on the eerie. When almost three months’ worth of sales data was lost in an electrical surge, the accounting department had re-created the information from files provided by Mrs. Hernandez. When an actor’s wife was suddenly diagnosed with cancer, he found that his request for leave had been filled out before he returned to the office.

Programmers working unpaid overtime in order to fulfill company commitments sometimes found mysterious batches of cookies in their offices. A senior designer with a reputation for harassing his interns found that his budget request had been unfortunately misplaced, and would have to be filled out from scratch.

Senior managers, Presidents, and world leaders are always less essential than they think to the operations they supposedly control. The hairdresser who may or may not decide you are worth his best efforts, the taxi driver who may or may not get you to the airport on time, the secretary who may or may not pass on a particular message in a timely fashion…these are the people who, more or less conscious of their power, actually run the universe.

Mrs. Hernandez was one of the conscious ones. Such people maintain a mysterious network by which they communicate with one another who is worthy, and who is not, and act accordingly. They are ignored at grave peril.

Mrs. Hernandez smiled tentatively at Bernardo Calloway. Little did he know it, but it was the most important smile he would ever encounter.