Massively Multiplayer (21 page)

“But you didn’t notice that the opening riddle offered
four
challenges, not
three
. ‘Nerve, wit, stealth or
eyes
,’ The first three of those matched up with the three obvious exit tunnels. But I had a nagging feeling about that last term, because you said they never make these things randomly. There’s always a purpose to them.”

Druin nodded carefully.

“So I tried to think like you said, like there was an intention behind everything, and if so, then that extra term had to indicate a fifth exit from the room. So I used my eyes, like the riddle suggested, and there it was: another way out, because the water had to be finding a way
in
.”

“Huh. Just like that?”

“Well the way that beam of sunlight landed right on the water looked like a darned arrow, once I started thinking of it as something designed instead of something natural.”

Druin shook his head in disbelief. “Jenna, you are amazing. I’ve never met anybody who was such a natural at something they hated so much.”

Jenna looked embarrassed. “I never exactly said I hated it,” she mumbled. “Besides, we were going to get killed.”

“Uh huh. Of course, why would you care if this game is such a punishment anyway? No, no,” he raised a hand to forestall her protest, “let’s just say I’m glad you’re on our team.” He grinned. “You too, Malcolm. That was nice work up there.”

Malcolm brandished his sword. “I live to serve, sire. But mayhap we ought consider whether yon passage is likewise fraught with peril?”

“Oh, it’s fraught, alright. Places like this are always fraught. Let’s get that lantern out again.”

Once the lantern was lit, they cautiously advanced down the corridor. Spiderwebs and dust clung to vaulted arches holding up the ceiling at regular intervals. Just past the third of these, another rough stone passage intersected their corridor, curving away into shadow. Druin investigated it briefly, reporting back that the tunnel was blocked a short distance away by another of the iron gates. “Given the direction, it might be the passage from the cave mouth,” he hazarded, “which means our corridor here is a central passage. Keep your eyes open.”

They pressed on anxiously, but encountered nothing more menacing than the small spiders which spun in the corners, and once a flight of bats which fled, squeaking, at their approach.

At last, their corridor emptied them into another natural cavern, far vaster than any they had come across. They were standing on a ledge which stretched a few feet to either side before the edges fell away into impenetrable gloom. Before them, a chunk of stone bridge extended out over the gulf, ending sharply after about ten feet. The bottom of the crevasse was too far down to see by the dim lantern light.

Most arresting, however, was the sight of a matching ledge across the forty-foot gap. There, on a short stone pedestal, lay a large gray-metal chest. Beaten copper accents and filigrees gleamed in a shaft of dust-filtered sunlight which beamed from...

“An exit!” Jenna exclaimed. “Hey, it’s the way out. Does that mean that box over there is the grand prize?”

“Most likely,” Druin nodded. “The trouble is going to be getting to it.”

Chapter Ten – Ghost

Wolfgang Wallace stared blankly at a display of colored cubes, a block tower put together by an autistic child. “Someone want to tell me what I’m looking at?”

“Oh, sorry. It’s in diagnostic. One second...there.”

The display abruptly shifted, the blocks separating into stacks by color, each one festooned with numbers and text which were so small as to be illegible, but which he knew would expand if he gestured towards them. “Still no good,” Wallace grumbled. “It just looks like modern art.”

Marybeth Langridge indicated the stacks. “These are visual representations of the new detail zones which appeared on the rollout. We originally sized them according to how much actual memory we estimate is being used by each one, based on its virtual size, detail level, features, AI, and so on. Some of these things are remarkably complex. Others look like they’re simply placeholders for something to come later.”

“Give me some examples.”

“Well, take this one for instance.” She reached forward and extracted a tiny sliver of pink from one stack. The glowing wafer followed her fingers, and its accompanying text enlarged obligingly. “This one is that grove of trees you saw earlier. It’s nicely rendered, very professional, seems to use the same soundscaping and texture-mapping that we use, including references to some of the new features. Whoever did this has a very good idea of our architecture, which is why that group,” she indicated one knot of programmers from the security division, “is pursuing the theory that we’re dealing with a disgruntled employee. Anyway, it’s a nice little grove, and I took out my old character and walked around for a while.”

A slightly dreamy look had come into her eyes, one which Wolfgang was surprised to find familiar. Gamer, he thought. It never quite washes out of anybody, does it? “Tell me about it,” he said mildly.

“Amitra? She’s a mage, I got her up to seventh circle before I got my degree and had to quit gaming so much. I got the offer from Archimago halfway through my master’s program at Cal Tech, and you know how Kipling discouraged gaming, particularly on in-house projects. Company time, and all that. I guess I thought it would be kind of cheating too. I guess I’d almost forgotten that...” abruptly, Marybeth blushed. “Sorry. You meant the detail zone. Sorry.”

“No, the context you’re bringing to the data tells me a lot about how it’s rhetorically structured, and maybe how it’s meant to be received,” Wolfgang offered. “Take your time.”

“Uh, yes. Anyway. This grove is about fifteen meters on a side. A ring of trees, a small hillock, and that’s it. All the other details, local fauna, butterflies and stuff, localized sound, are all driven by the master template for the area as a whole. It’s like the plan for a detail zone, but there’s no quest element in it: no treasure, no monster, no particular challenge, no information, no NPC, no catalyst routine, no event triggers, nothing.”

“Like a sketch,” Wolfgang mused, “for work that was going to be done but never got finished.”

“Exactly. Now over here,” she fished a large blue block out of the display, twenty times the size of the pink wafer representing the grove, “we have something else. Here’s a fully loaded monastery, a retreat for retired mages. It’s got at least thirty rooms, four-dozen NPCs with full conversation trees, five fully functioning sub-quests plus an over-arching primary quest, custom soundscaping, custom textures, and some boss treasures. We’ve had a team of four programmers running their old characters through there for the past eight hours, and we’re not quite done yet.”

“How do you account for the discrepancy?”

“Time,” Marybeth shrugged. “There was supposed to be a lot more to these detail zones, but whoever put them together had their hand forced. And age...some of these zones reflect programming and story structures that were current years ago. This material was developed over a long period, and some of it has been dormant, without being updated, for years.”

“And what does that tell you?”

“That we’re looking at a lone individual, not a group. We suspected as much once we started seeing similarities between all these new zones. This confirmed it. So he or she released all of these at once, and a lot of them,” she indicated the pink wafer, “are just flack. Decoys, drones. So we’ve been concentrating our attention on the developed scenarios.” She poked the large blue block into its place in the stacked display. “And that led us to another discovery. Desktop, run filter twelve, shadow zone sub-set.”

All the smaller blocks disappeared, leaving a small clutch of the larger blocks. Wolfgang silently counted twenty-four of them.

“These are our targets right now, and we can record access times that players walked through each. When we do that, we get that bandwidth spiking Ms. Chen noticed.” Marybeth gestured at a column of numbers, which flared briefly. “But we’ve also noticed rare super-spikes...times when player access of these shadow zones results in a sudden spike an order of magnitude or larger than the norm. See here, and here, and another one here...we don’t know what those are.”

Wolfgang peered closely at the numbers. “I do,” he said with sick certainty.

Marybeth brightened, oblivious to his tone. “Really? What are—“ but she was cut short by a cry of alarm from a nearby desktop, where a young man in a faded sweatshirt was gesturing frantically.

“Here! It’s another one! The bandwidth is spiking like crazy! Right now!”

Druin was more perplexed than ever. Attempts to reach the far side of the cavern using his grapnel had failed. Jenna had assayed a shot across the gulf with her crossbow, only to hear a sharp crack as the bolt snapped in half, mid-flight. Malcolm had bravely (or foolishly, depending on who you asked) offered to try jumping across the gap, but Druin had vetoed that suggestion.

Clearly, they were not going to gain access to the tempting looking box, and the exit, without solving the mystery of the missing bridge.

A thorough examination of their ledge revealed a series of short pedestals, visually identical to the one supporting the chest on the far ledge, scattered about near the foot of the incomplete bridge. It was Jenna, predictably, who noted the words engraved on each one:

“To reach the prize, all for one. To claim the prize, one for all,” she read aloud sulkily. “Jesus. Don’t you people ever get tired of riddles?”

“Localize that!” Wolfgang ordered to the nearest technician. “Strip out all the normal bandwidth usage, so we can get a profile of the excess! Marybeth, get me a list of all of those fully developed detail zones, the big blocks you were showing me, and port them to this desk. Access the current port-by-port statistics and see which ones are experiencing excess bandwidth on that scale. I want to know which shadow areas have players in them right now, and who those players are! You,” he gestured at a third programmer, “open a window in observation mode, but do
not
sign in as a super-user or admin. And move your chair, please. I need room.”

Solving the riddle of the pedestals didn’t take nearly the same degree of concentration as that in the earlier chamber. Of course, it helped that they weren’t being systematically poisoned and threatened with skeletal death while they solved it.

“These things are about big enough for a person to stand on,” Jenna noted.

Without waiting for further hints, Malcolm clambered up onto one of the rough stone platforms. At once, a musical humming pervaded the chamber, and Druin could see that, where once their bridge had jutted out jaggedly over the gulf, there was now a dim blue shadow, like the outline of a complete bridge spanning the gap.

“Jenna?” he invited.

Obediently, Jenna stepped up onto another of the short pedestals. The humming sound increased, and there was now a distinct blue glow, a few feet wide, stretching between their ledge and the gleaming chest.

Druin extended a tentative foot, confirming that the magical bridge would bear his weight. “All for one...it takes all but one of us to generate the bridge, and one to go across and retrieve the chest. This should take a second. Malcolm, do not step off the pedestal, no matter what, okay?”

He took a few steps, disoriented by the sight of the rocky chasm visible through the translucent indigo surface. A few more brought him confidence, and he walked swiftly to the opposite side and contemplated the ornate box, shining in the light from the cavern exit. His thief’s vision revealed no obvious traps, but that didn’t preclude magical ones, and he was wary about the second half of the clue, given Jenna’s earlier experience. “To claim the prize, one for all...,” he murmured. He reached out a hand and touched the iron surface. He hesitated. “Wait a second, guys. If I claim this, the riddle’s over, right? But how will you get across the bridge? Jenna, try stepping down.”

Mutely, she did so. The glowing bridge remained.

“Malcolm?”

Malcolm stepped down, and the bridge snapped out of existence. Malcolm stepped back up onto the platform, and the glowing span rematerialized.

“Well, that answers that question. As long as all the members of the group who are on the far ledge
except one
stand on the pedestal, the bridge appears. So you can always get all but one member of the group over the gap, because you need that last person to hold the bridge.”

“What about running a rope across,” Jenna suggested.

“I have a strong suspicion that if the last person stepped off their pedestal to use it, any rope would be cut by the same force which snapped your crossbow bolt.

“Then it is a sacrifice,” Malcolm intoned solemnly. ‘To claim the prize, one for all.’ One must remain here in order that the group, as a whole, can reach the treasure and the exit. My liege, good mistress, I am honored to remain here. Mayhap I shall find another way from these caverns.”

“Stinks to be you,” Jenna shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like a very nice trick, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given the generally homicidal nature of this place.”

“Hold on,” Druin shouted. “We can’t just leave him.”

“Druin, he’s volunteering.”

“Indeed, sire, it is a far, far nobler thing that I do, a far, far...”

“Can it, Malcolm.” Visions of his failure in the Chill Swamp swam behind Druin’s eyes, of Mim and Gil and MadHarp cursing as they fled from the wrath of the Vampire Queen and her consort. Of Uriah, desperately decoying the enraged Sea Troll slavers. Of Killian’s body, long legs sticking out of the shrubbery. He couldn’t be responsible for that sort of fiasco again.

“Druin,” Jenna said, “we solved the riddle. It’s not like we have a choice.”

“No,” he said, more firmly now. “There’s always a choice. We’ll go back through the skeletons if we have too. Or we can try to make it through that other passageway, from the cave mouth. Jenna, get back onto your pedestal. We’ll find another way.”

“Suit yourself,” Jenna snorted, retaking her position.