“So until now, this has been a technical possibility, but few people have used it on a large scale,” Wallace said, working it through. “But these fuckers have figured out a way to use T’Rain as a money-laundering system.”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “And I’m guessing, since you drove all the way down here and left, as I now see, eight voice mails on my phone, that your backup drive in the safe also got infected.”
“Yeah, it fucked everything it could reach,” Wallace said. “It must have passed into my system from that fucking thumb drive you handed me, and then—”
“Don’t try to make this my fault. I use Linux, remember? Different OS, different malware.”
“Then how did this fucking virus get on to my laptop?”
“I don’t know,” Peter said.
Zula did know, because she was skimming pages of technical analyses of the REAMDE virus. One of the ways it propagated was through thumb drives and other removable media. And Peter had borrowed one of Richard’s old thumb drives so that he could transfer something into Wallace’s computer. Richard’s machine must be infected with REAMDE; but he wouldn’t know or care, since he was protected by corporate IT.
“But it doesn’t matter,” Peter continued. “All that matters is—”
“It does matter for establishing culpability,” Wallace said. “Which may be of interest to him.”
“All I’m saying is, we have to address the problem,” Peter said.
“Brilliant analysis there, Petey boy. It’s quarter to three. I’m already forty-five minutes late. I bought myself a bit of time by sending an email with some bullshit to the effect that my car broke down in the Okanagans. But the clock is ticking. We have got to decrypt that file!”
“No,” Peter said, “we have to pay the ransom.”
“Fuck that.”
“It is not possible to decrypt the file,” Peter said. “If we had the NSA working on it, we could probably decrypt it. But as matters stand, you’re screwed unless you pay the ransom.”
“We’re screwed,” Wallace corrected him, “since this is all much too complicated to explain to him. He is not a computer guy. Has never heard of T’Rain, or any other massively multiplayer online game, for that matter. Might just barely understand the concept of a computer virus. All he’ll understand is that he doesn’t have what he paid for.”
“Then it’s like I said. We pay the ransom.”
Quite a long silence.
“I was hoping,” Wallace said, “that there was another copy of the file.”
“I already told you—”
“I know what you fucking told me,” Wallace said. “I was hoping that you were lying.”
“Is this all just another ruse to find out whether or not I am lying?”
“You’re just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren’t clever at all,” Wallace said. “This is quite real. I very badly want you to tell me, right now, Peter, that you lied to me earlier and that you have a backup copy of the file on one of your machines here.”
And then Wallace dropped his voice to a low growl and talked for about two minutes. During this time, Zula could not make out a single word that Wallace was saying.
When he was finished, all Peter could say, for a minute or so, was the f-word. He said it in about a dozen different ways, like an actor searching for just the right reading.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he finally said, very close to sobbing, “because I was telling you the truth before. There really is no other copy!”
Now it was Wallace’s turn to say the f-word a lot.
“So we have to pay the ransom,” Peter said. “A thousand gold pieces?”
“That’s what it says,” Wallace answered.
“How much is that in real money?”
“Seventy-three dollars.”
Peter, after a moment, let out a burst of laughter that sounded eerie to Zula. He was close to hysteria. “Seventy-three dollars? This whole problem can be solved for seventy-three bucks!?”
“Raising the funds isn’t the hard part,” Wallace said.
Something about the sound of Peter’s laugh told Zula it was time to call 911. Best to do it from a landline so that the dispatcher would have the building’s address. She got up as quietly as she could and padded around to the corner where Peter had all his kitchen stuff. A cordless phone was bracketed to the wall. She picked up the handset and turned it on, then put it to her ear to check for a dial tone.
Instead of which, she heard a series of touch-tone beeps.
Someone else was on the line, on another extension, dialing a different number.
“Welcome to Qwest directory assistance,” said a recorded voice.
“Good morning, Zula,” said Wallace on the other extension. “I know you’re in the building because your computer suddenly popped up on Peter’s network. I’ve been keeping an eye on the phone down here. It’s got a handy little indicator, tells me when another extension is in use.”
The phone went dead. Down below, Zula could hear ripping and snapping noises as Wallace did something violent to the line. “What are you doing!?” Peter exclaimed, more confused than anything else.
“Getting us all on the same level,” Wallace said. She could hear him bounding up the stairs.
ZULA CARRIED A bike messenger shoulder bag rather than a purse. She’d left it on the floor at the top of the stairs. Wallace stirred a hand through it, plucked out her phone, then her car keys. With his other hand he closed the lid on her laptop and picked it up. “When you’re feeling more sociable, I’d be pleased to see you below,” he announced, then turned and walked back down the stairs.
She heard her Prius beep as he unlocked it with the key fob. For some reason that broke her out of her paralysis. She walked over to her bag. She was starting to wish she’d listened to all her relatives in Iowa who thought of Seattle as being only one step above Mogadishu and who kept importuning her to get a concealed weapons permit and buy a handgun. In an outside pocket of the bag she did have a folding knife, which she now found and slipped into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she came down the stairs to see Wallace slamming the passenger door of the Prius and hitting the lock button. He pocketed the key chain. “Your mobile and Peter’s are safe and sound inside the car,” he announced. Zula didn’t understand this use of “mobile” until she reached the base of the steps and saw two phones resting side by side on the car’s dashboard.
“Fucking rude of me, ain’t it?” Wallace said, looking her hard in the eye. “But for us to solve this problem we need to trust each other and to focus, and you kids nowadays substitute communicating for thinking, don’t you? So let’s think.”
She could feel Peter’s gaze on her, knew that if she turned to face him, a channel would open up between them and he would try to say something, by a gesture or a look on his face, probably by way of apology. She did not do so. Peter needed to issue an apology much more than she needed to receive one, and, in keeping with Wallace’s suggestion, she wanted to focus on solving the problem and getting out of here.
“We need to deliver a thousand GP to a location in the western Torgai Foothills?” she said.
“And then pray that our virus writer is a nice honest criminal who’ll cough up the key promptly,” Wallace said.
“If we’re going to travel with that much gold, we are going to be a target for thieves,” she pointed out.
“It’s only seventy-three dollars,” Peter said.
“To a teenager,” Zula said, “in an Internet café in China, it’s huge. And stealing it from travelers on a road is much faster than mining it.”
“Not to mention more fun,” Wallace added.
“How will their characters even know that you’re carrying that much gold?” Peter asked.
“I have an idea,” Wallace announced brightly. He turned to face Peter and aimed a finger at him. “You: shut the fuck up. If you can make yourself useful in some other way, such as making coffee, please do so. But Zu
la and I don’t have time to explain every last fucking detail of T’Rain to you.” Wallace turned back to Zula. “Shall we make ourselves comfortable upstairs?”
“WHAT IS YOUR most powerful character?” Zula asked as she was plugging in her power adapter in what passed for Peter’s living room. Peter was in what passed for a kitchen, making coffee.
“I only have one,” Wallace said. “An Evil T’Kesh Metamorph.” He was logging on to T’Rain using Peter’s work-station.
“Let me see him,” Zula said. She launched the T’Rain app on her laptop and logged in. She was sitting in an office chair, which she now rolled over in Wallace’s direction as far as the power cord would let her go. Wallace’s T’Kesh Metamorph was visible on the screen of the workstation.
“What have you got?” Wallace asked, taking a peek at her laptop. “A whole zoo of characters, I’ll bet?”
“Employees don’t get in-game perks. We have to build our characters from scratch just like the customers.”
“Probably a wise corporate policy,” said Wallace, sounding a bit disappointed.
“I have two. Both Good,” Zula said. “But of course it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The one on the left,” Wallace said, craning his neck sideways to look at her screen, “is a better match in these times, is it not?”
He was talking, of course, about palettes.
Until the week before Christmas, it would have been quite difficult for Zula’s and Wallace’s characters to do anything together in T’Rain, because hers were Good and his was Evil. Hers would not have been able to travel very far into Evil territory, or his into Good. They could have met up in some wilderness area or war zone, but that would not have helped them on this mission, since the western Torgai Foothills were an island of firmly Evil territory most easily approached from Good zones to the west.
But then, as millions of students had gone on Christmas break and found themselves with vast amounts of free time for playing T’Rain, the War of Realignment had been launched. This had been carefully prepared, for months in advance, by parties still unknown. It basically consisted of a hitherto unidentified group, consisting of both Good and Evil characters, launching a well-laid blitzkrieg against a different group, also mixed Good/Evil, that wasn’t even aware it was a group until the hammer fell on them. The aggressors had been dubbed, by Richard Forthrast, the Forces of Brightness. The victims of the attack were the Earthtone Coalition. These terms, initially used only for internal memos in Corporation 9592, had leaked out into the player community and were now being printed on T-shirts.
Wallace’s character was identifiable from a thousand yards away as belonging to the Earthtone Coalition. Zula’s first character—the one on the left—was also Earthtone. Her other character was markedly Brighter. She had created it on Christmas Eve when it had become obvious that large parts of the world of T’Rain were being rendered inaccessible to her Earthtone character because of the huge advances being made on all fronts by the numerically superior legions of the Forces of Brightness. In consequence, her Bright character—being newer—was much weaker. How much weaker was a matter of interpretation. In a radical break with role-playing game tradition, T’Rain did not use numerical levels to indicate the power of its characters; rather, it used Aura, which was a three-part score calculated from a number of statistics including the character’s rank in its vassal network, the size and overall power of that network, the amount of experience it had racked up, the number of things it knew how to do, and the quality of its equipment. As a character’s Aura expanded it acquired certain perks, but never in a wholly predictable way.
The world that Pluto’s software had created was almost exactly the same size as Earth, which meant that traveling around it using thematically appropriate (i.e., medieval) forms of transportation required a lot of time. In theory that might have been fixable by messing around with the very definition of time itself; one could imagine, for example, jump-cutting from the beginning of a three-month sea voyage to its end. This was fine in single-player games but totally unworkable in a multiplayer setting. The progress of time in T’Rain had been locked down to that of the real world.
Pluto’s solution had been to computer-generate a system of ley lines that crisscrossed the world with density comparable to that of the New York City subway system. This had been used as the basis of a teleportation system that worked by routing characters to intersections of ley lines. The number of lines and intersections was incredibly colossal and made far more complex by the fact that certain lines could only be accessed by certain types of characters. No one could really use the system without the aid of software that kept track of everything and provided suggestions on how to get from point A to point B.
And so with a few moments’ work, Zula and Wallace were able to teleport their characters to a city in the flatlands below the Torgai Foothills. Wallace’s character went to a moneychanger and acquired a thousand gold pieces, which would show up as a $73 charge on Wallace’s credit card. From there they teleported to the closest ley line intersection that they could find to the coordinates specified in the REAMDE ransom note, which, from there, would be a fifteen-minute ride on the swift mounts that both of them owned.
The ley line intersection point was marked by a simple cairn. This shimmered into view on both of their screens. Zula turned her character (a K’Shetriae mage) until she saw Wallace’s T’Kesh standing about a hundred feet away (the teleportation process involved some positional error).
The most notable feature of the landscape was that it was littered—no, paved—with corpses in varying stages of decomposition.
A boulder, about the size of an exercise ball, plunged out of the sky and struck the ground nearby. Since meteorites were no more common in T’Rain than they were on Earth, Zula suspected some artificial cause. Turning toward the nearest of the Torgai Foothills, a small peak a couple of hundred meters distant, she saw a battery of three trebuchets, one of which was being reloaded. The other two were just in the act of firing. Their dangling weights and hurling slings seemed ungainly, chaotic, and unlikely to work. But they did a fine job of hurling two additional boulders in her direction. Zula had to dodge one. Not far away was an outcropping of stone that looked like it might provide shelter. She ran to it and immediately came under fire from a squadron of horse archers hidden in tall grass nearby. She invoked some spells that should have protected her from the barrage of arrows, but one of them scored a lucky hit and killed her. Her character disappeared from the screen and went to Limbo.
Zula turned her head to see how Wallace was faring. Not much better. He was pinned under a boulder and had been surrounded by another squadron of horse archers, riding around him in a ring, firing inward. His health was low and dropping fast. “Don’t let yourself get captured,” she warned him. “I know,” he said, and clicked an icon on his screen, helpfully labeled FALL ON YOUR SWORD.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO FALL ON YOUR SWORD? asked a dialog box.
YES, clicked Wallace.
A few seconds later his character was in Limbo too.
“It’s so obvious,” Wallace said, after devoting a few moments to regaining his composure. “This REAMDE thing has infected—how many computers?”
“Estimated at a couple of hundred thousand,” said Peter, who’d been sitting in the corner with his laptop, doing research on it. But he could only see Internet rumors in the public domain. Zula, thanks to her access to the VPN, knew that the real figure was closer to a million.
“All the victims have to go to the same fucking place with a thousand gold pieces. So naturally, thieves are going to set up an ambush at the closest ley line intersection.”
“It would pay for itself pretty quickly,” Zula allowed.
“So those guys stole your money?” asked Peter, violating the rule, earlier laid down by Wallace, that he couldn’t ask stupid questions about how T’Rain worked.
“No, because I fell on my sword, and died, and went to Limbo wi
th all my kit,” Wallace said. “If I’d gotten weak enough for them to capture me, then they could’ve made away with the gold and everything else. But I was lucky. What they’re doing is probably quite profitable.”
“So what do we do?” Zula asked.
“Get out of Limbo,” Wallace said. This was easy enough; there were half a dozen ways to bring a character back to life, each with its own pros and cons. “Find a less obvious ley line intersection. Go there and be ready to fight our way through.”
“We could recruit a larger party—”
“At three in the morning? Not enough time,” Wallace said. “You’re sure you can’t recruit a more … omniscient character?”
“You mean, wake up my uncle?” Zula responded. “Are you sure you want him involved?”
SO THEY GOT out of Limbo and tried again, teleporting to another, much less convenient ley line intersection an hour’s ride from the place they were trying to reach. Here they were immediately ambushed, and nearly overcame the thieves, but because of some unluckiness they ended up in Limbo again and had to try it a third time. First, though, Wallace got more gold pieces and used them to buy, at extortionate rates, some spells and potions that would keep them alive a bit longer. They teleported back in again and fought their way through the ambush and withdrew to higher ground a couple of thousand yards away—where they were set upon by another party of thieves before they could recover from wounds suffered in the first ambush. They fought back as hard as they could but ended up in Limbo once more.
Just before Zula’s character perished, though, she saw something a bit odd: some of their ambushers were going down with spears and arrows lodged in their backs. The ambushers had been counterambushed by some hostile group that had rushed to the scene of the fight but arrived too late.
“Let’s go back there,” she suggested. “I think we have help.”
“Saw them. It’s just another group of thieves,” Wallace said.