Massively Multiplayer (4 page)

Calloway shook his head vigorously. "No, no. I'll deal with all that lot tomorrow, at the release party. Just a tour today, preferably from someone knows their way about, been here for a while. Henny likes a quick peek at new acquisitions, don’t you know. How 'bout you, Wallace?"

Wolfgang directed his charges towards the waiting elevator. Henry, the security guard, was still holding the door open.

“I’m a little confused. I know you’ve been to the offices before, during the purchase negotiations. What, specifically, did you want to see?”

“Everything,” Vitus Calloway enthused. “Give us the grand tour.”

“I can do that,” Wolfgang agreed. “Although I should tell you, I’d take a potential investor to the Catalyst floors, to meet the celebrities, and I’d probably take a new employee to the top floor for coffee and the view.”

Calloway laughed. “Very honest of you, dear chap! Well, we’ll pay our respects to the stars of the show before we leave, but I’d relish a cuppa. Lead on!”

“Can do,” Wolfgang agreed. “Top floor please, Henry.”

The towers of Seattle were just visible through the morning fog across the Puget Sound through the wraparound windows of the thirteenth floor. “Lovely view,” Vitus Calloway said, “ but why so far from the city?” He slurped his tea noisily.

“Land is cheaper,” Wolfgang offered. “And frankly, we like being a little bit remote. The lack of distraction is a plus when you're in a business like ours, which depends as much on artists as it does on algorithms.”

That wasn’t very politic
, he thought belatedly as he saw the gleam in Calloway’s eye. For the third time in half an hour, the affected British stereotype had taken him off guard. He should know better – Vitus Calloway was one of the richest men in the world, and men like that didn’t simply drop by to chat about their latest acquisition. He could have sent a fleet of accountants to take care of the change of management, but he hadn’t – he’d come in person. There was something Calloway was trying to figure out about Archimago, something he thought he could only get in person. All the more reason for Wolfgang to be cautious: this wasn’t just his boss, this was his owner.

“Let's go downstairs and I'll show you the type of work we’re currently up to."

"Very interesting, I'm sure," Calloway responded heartily. "Most keen, yes, all these new projects. But what about the big game, eh? That's the bread and butter, isn't it?"

Wolfgang smiled. "I always like to leave the game for the end of the tour, since that's what everyone knows us for. Kind of a climax. But if that's what you want to see..." He ushered his guests back towards the elevators.

"I like to let everyone know that the game isn't all we do here, but you're quite right in that it is the focus of our work. In fact, it takes up about eight stories of this building, not counting the servers and the hardware in the basement. Let's go straight to the heart of it. Henry, eight please."

The elevator doors snapped closed, and there was a brief surge. When the doors opened again, the elevator was flooded with a rainbow of light, and an explosion of sound. Wolfgang stepped forward and spread his arms impressively. When he spoke, he sounded truly proud.

"Gentlemen, Ms. Forthwhit, this is the game. This is Crucible."

They were standing on a metal dais, part of a platform supported by open-beam scaffolding which ran around the edges of the enormous room which filled the entire eighth floor of the building. Around the walls were a number of gigantic holographic screens, each twenty feet across. In front of these was a long, arched lectern at which were seated some dozen people, dressed in everything from lab coats to cut-offs, some reclining in virtualounges and some manipulating the holographic control-fields which hovered over their desks. Scattered throughout the room were row upon row of additional, smaller workstations and virlos, partially partitioned off from one another by portable room-dividers. Everywhere was activity as people ducked from one workstation to another or discussed the contents of this or that screen.

The screens themselves were what truly drew the eye, and the variety of their contents made the peoples' activity dull by comparison. In the nearest screen, a green-scaled humanoid in a hood swung a scythe at a group of humans, who fled, screaming. To the other side, a line of fur-cloaked shapes trudged up a mountainside in a howling storm. Two adjoining workstations showed another scene from two different points of view, a vast pillared courtroom presided over by a figure mummified in rotting bandages, wearing a tall golden crown. Another presented a scene that was practically bucolic by comparison: a fenced field set among rolling hills, home to a dozen grazing horses. Only closer observation revealed that the horses had wings. All around them, mythological scenes from a hundred cultures swung and skittered and swirled and snarled and screamed.

Wolfgang snuck a glance at his audience. Vitus Calloway wore a grin of amazed delight which took twenty years from his face, while even Bernardo's bleak expression had been wiped away by the sight before them. His eyes were round, as was his open mouth, giving him a slightly panicky look. Henrietta Forthwhit had clutched her wrist computer to her heart like a protective talisman and was leaning back towards the elevator doors.

"It is a bit much to take in all at once, isn't it?" Wolfgang almost had to shout over the din from the floor.

Vitus Calloway was staring eagerly. "Quite takes one's breath away, eh what? Charming! Completely charming! What's that bit over there?"

Wolfgang glanced. "That's the Chill Swamp. Brokenheart territory. That's a Western server, one of ours down in the basement as a matter of fact. But those Adventurers don't look nearly flash enough. I'd say they're probably doomed." Even as he said it, the lizard-man in the screen swung again, neatly decapitating one of his human opponents.

"And over there?"

"That's the Serpent Court. It looks like Ahken-Set is issuing judgments today. That's one of our Eastern servers, located in Athens. We must be monitoring it for redundancy."

The younger Calloway wore an expression of interested avarice. The Calloways’ accountant seemed still stunned by the noise and images swirling around them. "How many of these rooms are there?"

"There is only the one in this building, Ms. Forthwhit. But there are others at each of our global server centers. Seven in all. The game, as a whole, is very, very large, and very complicated. That's why you pay me so well."

The elevator spat them out into a hallway on the sixth floor that was mercifully silent after the control center’s Niagara of noise. Rooms branched off in every direction, some empty of everything but humming equipment, others like miniature versions of the chaos on the eighth floor: a few virlos with technicians reclining in them, or a handful of people gesticulating and arguing around a single holographic display. Wolfgang directed them into an unused conference room with a single vast window overlooking the water.

"This is my conference room. That's my office just through there, but it's a mess right now. Last minute reviews for the software release tomorrow." Wolfgang sat down in a comfortable leather chair and his guests did likewise.

Henrietta Forthwhit turned immediately to the elder Calloway. "Are you quite sure that–"

Vitus raised an imperious hand. "Now, now, my dear, I know it's a bit much all at once like that, but I think I know best. I've seen it before, don't you know, and if I didn't think that the project needed a firm hand...well." He trailed off mysteriously, giving Wolfgang a sphinx-like smile. "Wouldn't want to be spoiling the surprise. Wallace, the lad's been involved with the update project, from our New York offices, but why don't you bring us all up to speed, eh? Tell us how things look from your end."

Wolfgang nodded, comfortable once more in his role as tour guide.

"O.K. Regular updates are critical in entertainment-oriented netvironments. Without them, the average user cycle is between six and eighteen months. You get your long-timers, but by and large, people want new content, delivered regularly. We’re in luck with Crucible, since a good deal of the content is user-created.”

“How do you mean,” interrupted Forthwhit. “Are they paid for content creation? Is it part of your regular accounting?”

“Er, no,” Wolfgang admitted. “They do it on their own. For fun.” The accountant raised a skeptical eyebrow. Wolfgang sighed

“And how does that work out?”

“Well...it greatly increases the sense of variety in the game environment. It also lends a natural competitiveness to the system -- each country wants to out-do its neighbors, both on the corporate level and within the netvironment itself. We’re a distributed netvironment, seven control centers spread around the world to serve our clients the localized mythology for their region, and there’s a good deal of playful one-upsmanship in content design, storyline advancement, that sort of thing. Our Japanese server team gets a kick out of egging the Japanese players on against the South Americans. That sort of thing.”

“Games within games, eh Wallace,” smiled Vitus Calloway.

“We like to think it’s done with, uh...good will.” Wolfgang was aware that he must sound lamely fainthearted to the notoriously ruthless Calloway. “It was initially a political simulator, designed by a professor” he emphasized. “The goal of the game, the acquisition and balance of influence, forces the players to interact and adapt to one another’s bids for power.”

“We own complete title to the entire system, though, right?” the accountant persisted.

"Yes. Always have. Rafe Gellar had an absolutely amazing programming team for initial design. All students of his. Legendary guys: Rudi Singh did the original AI, Marcus Tenser coded the interface, Brian Stahlgren did the physics engine. But Gellar knew that new content was always going to be necessary. It was part of his design philosophy: persistent effort.”

Bernardo Calloway leveled a chubby finger at a sign over Wolfgang’s desk. “Is that the source of the slogan?”

Wolfgang glanced at it. “Yes. ‘Observe, Persist, Challenge.’ That was what Gellar used to tell his students was the soul of political movement and organization -- observation of how a system operates, persistent efforts in pursuit of a goal, and knowing when to take risks.”

“Game theory,” said Vitus Calloway, in a voice that was anything but playful. “I had to read Gellar’s work at University. Macroeconomics. And you sound like a student of his.”

“I was a student of his student, Marc Tenser. But a lot of the locals who now work here were Gellar’s. He was a very popular professor. Anyway, we’ve adopted it as a kind of design mantra around here. Not that we programmers have much to do with content design. That’s mostly up to the catalysts, the writers and actors we hire. They’re good at it. Seven Emmy awards, three Tonys, half a dozen Hugos, some Nebulas, the World Fantasy trophy, and a National Book Award work here. Moira Roth, the actress who plays the part of the Vampire Queen of Westerly, has been a pinup on more gaming sites than anyone, real or virtual, since Lara Croft. We have more E3 awards than I can count. The difficulty hasn’t been generating publicity, it’s been keeping the whole thing under wraps. Your security must be phenomenal.”

Again the Calloways shared an enigmatic glance. “It’s interesting that this product has done so well over time,” Calloway mentioned with deliberate idleness. “Particularly given its departure from so many standards of the genre. But then, I like original thinking. But we’re not the biggest game in town, are we Wolfgang?"

Wolfgang nodded easily. "True, we're actually about the third largest game-space, depending on what standard you use. Asylum, by IchiiSoft, is probably the largest. They’re a pure combat simulation with hundreds of international servers, and their tournament system has over twenty-million subscribers. And InterTain has a mixed environment. They do simulations, free-style arcade games, educational software, passive-form movies. They make a lot more money than we do. I'm not sure how much."

"Approximately seventy-two times Archimago's annual returns," Vitus supplied with a grin that now seemed just the slightest bit nasty.

But Wolfgang merely nodded again. "That sounds right. But our focus hasn't been on being the biggest. Just the best."

Vitus Calloway's grin widened. "Tomorrow, that will change."

Chapter Three - Tag

For Andrew, Friday began at eleven o'clock. The lateness of the hour was partially a result of the late gaming session the previous night and partially of intent. Rising so late guaranteed that his parents would already be working. The last thing he needed was another lecture on the subject of finding a summer job. No matter how well-intentioned Sara thought they were. Let Sara listen to them if she was so convinced.

Not that his parents could be avoided entirely. His breakfast of leftover pizza was devoured while reading the notes they’d left on the house network, words scrolling up from the kitchen table projector like steam, vanishing into the air as fast as he read them. There were a few vague statements about how late their work might go tonight, and, predictably, a coaxing mention of his joblessness, hot-linked to the employment advertisements section of the morning newscast.

There was also a reminder that today was one of Sara’s livedays, meaning that she would actually be attending the neighborhood school in the flesh instead of merely logging in to her classes from home. He was to assist Sara with schoolwork if she needed it: further evidence, if any were needed, of his parents’ general cluelessness. She was much more likely to assist him than the other way around.

Another note reminded him of his promise to do the yard work. He shook his head wearily. If he were the type of person who regularly forgot his promises or who skipped out on his commitments, that would be one thing. But he wasn't.

The nagging just came with being parents, he supposed. Returning to his room, he threw on his oldest pair of sweats and tossed the rest of his laundry into the wall hamper, where it was whisked away into the laundry system. Let them see his room, clean as he usually kept it, and draw their own conclusions regarding his sense of responsibility.