Massively Multiplayer (12 page)

“But that’s just it. It’s going the same place the game does. The anomaly appears to be distributed with the same frequency, and to the same ports and addresses, as the game data.”

“Huh?”

“As far as I can tell, it’s in the game itself. And it’s being picked up by everyone.”

Janet Chen was not the only one who was concerned today with the transfer of a little extra data over the ports of the Crucible game servers. Underneath the Archimago headquarters building, the second and third sub-basements were devoted to data storage, rank upon rank of hulking gray cubes, each surrounded by a coolant coil and fronted with a small access and indicator panel.

In the third bank of storage units, in the second basement, a tiny red light suddenly blinked on.

That might not, in itself, have indicated much – the light, a red two-volt LED, was supposed to turn on whenever the data in these enormous cubes was accessed. But this particular cube, the fifteenth in its row, was supposed to be devoted to the storage of archival data. Theoretically, there was no reason for anyone to turn it on.

As additional evidence of odd behavior, the red indexing laser which should have lit up the cube as its data was accessed remained unlit. Instead, the invisible x-ray laser which actually did the work of data retrieval shot through the cube, sweeping up, down, and sideways, gleaning information from the super-compressed quartz crystals at speeds high enough to transfer the Ancient Library of Alexandria, architecture and all, to Chicago and back in about ten nanoseconds.

Had anyone sufficiently versed in the architecture of industrial high-compression data-storage units been handy, they might have noticed another irregularity. The quadrant of the storage cube which was being accessed was properly referenced in the unit’s index by a long series of hexadecimal memory addresses, a perfectly sequenced and orderly directory of all the information which was to be stored on that particular device. According to this index, however, the area currently being scanned had absolutely nothing in it. Anyone bringing up a catalog of Archimago’s archives would have quite reasonably assumed that this section of the unit was blank. Nevertheless, the invisible x-ray laser swept through the quartz with manic intensity, and according to the rapidly pulsing LED, there was an awful lot of information being retrieved.

This continued for approximately three minutes.

The little red light blinked off.

So much for the second sub-basement.

The data which had been extracted from the storage cube was transferred by wireless beams to a central hub receiver in sub-basement one, piped over the building’s fiber optic network, and rocketed at the speed of light to a little used mail sorting computer on the third floor. From there it was distributed to a number of places, including the Archimago primary financial database, the network administrative consoles, the personnel files of Evelyn Hernandez, Wallace Wolfgang, and several dozen other long-time Archimago employees, the central monitor which controlled building security, and to a single private net-address in China. From China, a large chunk of the data was automatically forwarded over heavily encrypted lines to a bankruptcy clearinghouse in the Congolese Republic, then to an anonymous remailer in Brazil, where it was bounced off two satellites and finally came to rest on a personal desktop unit in a darkened room.

There, it was subjected to the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for intensive medical procedures and space launches. Lit only by the radiation of an old-fashioned two-dimensional display, long-fingered hands bounced with professional rapidity across a keyboard stained with coffee, sweat, and less-identifiable accretions of long use. After a long period of scanning, cross-checking, and comparison, the hands rested.

“There,” said a voice in the darkness. “That oughta’ do it.”

With a final tap, the data which had been stored in the unlisted memory of the third storage bank of the second sub-basement was sent back through Brazil, bypassing Archimago system security by posing as a harmless advertisement, then routed through Archimago’s intranet to the Crucible update hub, where it was integrated seamlessly into the game’s maintenance routines, which began shifting it, in millisecond-long bursts, into every single game server, and from there, into the home computers of millions and millions of game players, all over the world.

Chapter Seven - Go

“You’re sure you haven’t heard anything?” Andrew asked again.

Wisefellow shook his head. They stood in the public atrium of Wisefellow’s netsite, a cartoonishly inaccurate model of the Acropolis, painted bright pink and adorned with travel posters from the Greek ministry of tourism. “My friend, I promise you, if I had I would tell you, but I am barely keeping up with the updates myself. My friends in the ‘cast industry are busy writing reviews, and cannot be spared to answer my questions. I am relying on hearsay from other players – Archimago has been very secretive about this update, and my industry contacts have been kept as in the dark. There are new areas being explored throughout all seven countries, of Crucible, and several new islands as well. But as far as I know, all the new territories have been added to the outermost frontiers of the game area. However, I have heard no reports of new areas opening up within existing domains.”

“Well. That’s that.” Andrew nodded his thanks. “Later, Wise. I have to get back to babysitting.” He waved at Wisefellow and flicked his fingers, propelling his virtual perspective backwards, away from the pink acropolis, over the silver foam of the international connection he had established, and back into the glistening soap bubble of his operating system’s standby interface. A glance at a floating readout warned him that almost twenty-five minutes had passed – time to get back indeed. He caught sight of the bright green bubble representing the Crucible system, reached out one hand, felt the universe inverting...

...and was standing, once more, on the coastal road between Bitter Edge and Coppertown.

Alone.

The others were gone.

At first, Jenna, Killian, Rud and Malcolm had been curious about Druin’s sudden apprehension, and they spent about five minutes debating what resources he must be consulting regarding the apparently unfamiliar road which beckoned them into the cool depths of the forest. In only ten minutes, curiosity had given way to anxiety, anxiety to tension, tension to weariness, and weariness, by the inevitable mathematics of toil, to boredom. “Drear Wood,” the signpost read, which was an ominous enough sounding name, but even the ominous seemed inviting compared to monotony.

There was no note, since no-one had brought any paper, but Druin had no difficulty interpreting a small pile of rocks, arranged into an arrow pointing due East, into the depths of the forest. Visions of Mad-Harp, and what Gil would have the assassin do to him if he lost his commission, pursued him as he sprinted in pursuit.

Although they were only a few minutes ahead of Druin, his four charges might as well have been on a different planet. The path twisted narrowly between the gnarled trunks of graying trees. Overhead, branches thicker than telephone poles tangled up the light, letting through only occasional shafts of the brilliant sunlight they knew must still shine somewhere outside the forest. Dense underbrush muffled almost all sounds, save for the occasional distant shrieks of carrion birds, which did no-one’s nerves any good.

“Are you sure this is supposed to be the shortcut?” Jenna complained for the third time, as she threw an apple over her shoulder.

“Of course I’m not sure,” Rud snapped. “I only traveled through here once before, and it was years ago, before this version of the game. Who knows what the hell they’ve got going in here.”

“All I know is this is boring,” Jenna retorted. “For an epic adventure game, this thing’s pretty monotonous.” She reached into her pack again and brought out a small loaf of bread. “What the heck is this food for, anyway? It’s not like it would make you full.” She threw it back down the path they had come.

“This is a world-simulator, not an exercise machine,” Rud shot back. “There are plenty of game which are nothing but kill, kill, kill, all day long. Old West, castle sieges, spaceships, whatever. I’m sure Killian can tell you all about them. The whole point of Crucible is that it’s an immersive environment – you’re supposed to be getting into the mood of the thing. The food is probably for player interactions. Stop throwing it.”

“I’m leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for that Druin guy,” Jenna quipped. “I’m trying to find out what’s useless, other than this whole gaming thing.”

“Fear not, fair lady,” Malcolm interjected, “forsooth, when evil strikes, we shall prevail!”

“Of course, immersion can be taken too far,” Rud said quickly. “Just...what are you looking at?”

“Spider on your shoulder.”

“What? Cripes, get it off me!” They paused momentarily so that Rud the Almost Magnificent could perform a spasmodic dance punctuated by violent swipes with his hand-axe. The spider, a tiny maroon specimen, took the opportunity to scuttle off. Assorted smirks and snorts were quickly silenced by a glare from under Rud’s hood which could have boiled metal. “Hmmph! Well. Looks like they found the time to stick in a bunch of environmental details, anyway.”

“Let’s keep moving,” Killian contributed mildly.

“Yes, to the fray!” Malcolm shouted, brandishing his broadsword high above his head.

“Keep it down!” Rud hissed back. “We aren’t the only ones out here with ears, you know.”

Which was, of course, quite true. In addition to the birds and the spiders, the Drear Wood was stocked with an adequate supply of garden-variety nasties, most of them carnivorous, and all of them aggressive. Had the four travelers been a bit more experienced, they might well have possessed skills or charms which would have helped them detect immanent danger. At the least, had they been paying more attention to their surroundings than to their complaints, they might have noticed the leafy canopy above them rustling with anticipation. But they weren’t.

Therefore, the first real hint they had of trouble was the sound of snapping twigs as they rounded a bend into a small clearing.

“...the environment is a tool, but it’s the player interactions that really drive the experience,” Rud was saying, when he was suddenly gripped by the ankle and swung upside-down into the low branches of a tree.

“Yaaaaaaahhhhhh!” he shrieked, as something which looked like a clump of moss-covered branches clambered down his body and howled in his face.

“Ambush!” Killian shouted, raising his crossbow as more of the things clattered down the tree trunks and into their midst.

There were at least six of them, though it was hard to count both because of their jerky movements and the way they blended into the grimy forest. It seemed as though they were part of the forest itself, three-foot high mannequins of scrawny wood, bound together by grayish-green moss, with gray treebark faces.

One of the little creatures howled again, a rasping hoot that scraped their eardrums, and the thing charged.

Killian settled his crossbow and fired, the bolt smashing into the leering face of their closest foe and sending it hurtling back into the underbrush. Aware that he would have no time to reload, he threw the heavy weapon at the next rank and reached for the short sword at his waist, painfully aware that his combat skills, honed in military simulators, were not suited to close-range fighting.

Sir Malcolm clearly had no such anxieties, and charged headlong at the stick-figure on the left flank. “Avaunt!” he cried out, followed by a long stream of pseudo-medieval invective which was swallowed in the crunch of steel against tree-branch as his opponent parried his wild swing with a gnarled club.

Jenna shrieked in terror and turned to flee back up the path the way they had come, only to find two more of the horrors clambering out of the underbrush to their rear. Yelping, she fled for the tree from which Rud still dangled, and tried to climb it. “Rud! Help me!”

“You help ME!” he shouted back, desperately grabbing for the axe dangling from his shoulder harness, while simultaneously kicking with his free leg at the clattering twig-thing which swiped at his head.

Below them, Killian had freed his short sword, just in time to desperately block the club of one opponent. This left his midsection wide open, however, and he was heavily beset by two more of the scrambling monsters, who swung simultaneously for his gut.

In a European server node of the Archimago corporation, electrons danced, shuffled up some random numbers, and compared the result to both the monsters’ skills and to Killian’s situation, including their relative positions, environmental factors, and other applicable modifiers. The formula, accreted over eight years of development, modification, and tweaking, would have given a professional mathematician fits. The computer performed all of this in a time measured in picoseconds, and shot the answer back to Killian’s assigned client port. The net result of this background calculation was that both clubs slammed into him at the same time, knocking him backwards and into the underbrush with a resounding “crack!”

He felt no pain, of course, but did experience the visceral shock of the sudden movement, and a speedy view of the tangled forest canopy, before his display went momentarily black. He tried moving his arms and legs, but was unable, in the darkness to tell whether there was any response. He was wondering whether the power had failed in his Berlin apartment, when the golden words floated up at him out of the darkness:

Killian the Warrior. Circle: 1. Wealth: 14. You have been logged in for 65 minutes. Your character has died. Thank you for playing Crucible v4.0.

Rud managed to kick himself free of his antagonist, plummeting to the ground just in time to see Killian go flying. Even from his inverted perspective, he could see that their companion wouldn’t be getting up anytime soon.

Realizing that the odds against the little band had just gotten significantly worse than their already terrible state, he uttered the mantra of beleaguered warriors throughout history. Jenna had her profanity filter on, so she missed most of it.