Pluto seemed to be in an extrapissy mood, so Richard asked the flight attendant for another tray of sushi and turned to gaze out the window. It was a clear day. They were well into square-road-grid territory now. From here—he guessed Nebraska—the grid would continue eastward until it lapped up against, and discharged into, the finer scratchings of the Great Lakes’ industrial conurbations: places that Richard’s people never went to, save as beggars or conquerors. But before getting there the jet would plunge down into thicker air and home in on the K’Shetriae Kingdom.
SOMETIMES HE USED the FBO, the private jet terminal, at Omaha, and drove from there to the Possum Walk Trailer Park, a trip of about two hours. Today, however, they were pressed for time, and so they landed at a small regional airport only about half an hour from their destination.
Richard was oppressed by a desire to get clear of the airport and out into open country. In a big place like Omaha they could slip out of the FBO and quickly blend in with the mundanes, but here the arrival of a private jet was a big deal, and everyone in the place knew about it. Just inside the little pilots’ waiting room in the terminal, a plate of Rice Krispie Treats had been set out for them. Richard absentmindedly stuffed one into his mouth as they waited for their ride. Presently they were collected by a very polite young man named Dale, who drove them on a hilariously tortuous route around the airport to the car rental lot. Dale guessed out loud that they had come to pay a call on “Mr. Skraelin,” and Richard agreed that it was so. Dale paid Richard an elaborate compliment on the success and the sheer entertainment value of his game and, warming to the task, told Richard a few things about his band of raiders, a group of local kids who had gone to high school together and now spent every Friday evening sitting around in someone’s basement conducting bloodthirsty incursions against the Earthtone Coalition, whom Dale hated so much that he seemed almost offended that he had to go to the trouble of killing them. Almost all Dale’s friends’ characters belonged to the Var’ species.
Richard knew better than to draw actionable conclusions from this one chance encounter. Corporation 9592 had an entire department full of people with advanced degrees in statistics, managing a code base that monitored a million Dales per second, analyzing them six ways from Sunday. Any wisdom that proceeded from this sketchy conversation with Dale would be listened to, politely but incredulously, and then classified as “anecdotal” and forgotten. But Richard couldn’t help himself. Unlike the K’Shetriae, which were basically elves, and the Dwinn, which were basically dwarves, the Var’ had no discernible antecedents in folklore, unless you counted focus groups of nerds as folk. They were technologically primitive but capable of channeling the forces of weather, for example, shooting lightning bolts at their enemies but only during thunderstorms, freezing them to death but only during blizzards, and so on. A perfect match, in other words, for midwesterners. Just like Republicans or Democrats who spent so much time socializing with others of their kind that they could not believe any normal-seeming, mentally sound person could possibly belong to the opposite faction, Dale was a rock-ribbed Forces of Brightness man. As such, he exemplified a trend that had already been analyzed to exhaustion by the demographers. The Earthtone Coalition was 99 percent Anthrons, K’Shetriae, and Dwinn: the old-school races found in the works of Tolkien and his legion of imitators. Players who opted to belong to the newfangled races such as the Var’, on the other hand, tended to join up with the Forces of Brightness.
He was working on a theory that it was all related to the Rice Krispie Treats.
Bear with me, he said (not out loud, of course), showing his palms to the Furious Muses. Just hear me out.
Having now lived for a few decades in parts of the United States and Canada where cooking was treated quite seriously, and having actually employed professional chefs, he was fascinated by the midwestern/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient. Was it too much of a stretch to think that the rejection, by the Dales of the world, of traditional fantasy-world races such as elves and dwarves was motivated by the same deep, mysterious cultural mojo as their spurning of onions and salt in favor of onion salt?
The recombinant food thing was a declaration of mental bankruptcy in the complexity of modern material culture. Likewise, Dale and his friends, living in a world where libraries were already stuffed with hundreds of thousands of decaying novels that would never again be read, where any television program or movie ever filmed could be downloaded and viewed, simply did not have the bandwidth to absorb a vast amount of detailed background material about fictitious races on a made-up planet. They just wanted to kick ass.
Anyway, Dale got them to their rental car, not before pumping Richard for a few tips about the latest from the Torgai Foothills. Weather in that region could be violent, which was a good thing for Var’ raiders, and so Dale’s group had been hanging out on some windy crag and staging raids on the freebooters who had been raiding the ransom bearers. Richard allowed as how “nothing lasts forever” and “the situation is fluid” before shaking Dale’s hand and thanking him and closing the rental car’s door.
The largest and newest billboard on the airport access road sported a huge picture of a blue-haired elf and said KSHETRIAE KINGDOM in ten-foot-high block letters. Beyond that, the roadsides were mercifully free of T’Rain-related clutter until they hove in view of the theme park itself. Taking advantage of the digital map on the car’s GPS device, Richard diverted onto a gravel road about half a mile short of the main entrance and gave the whole complex a wide berth; he had remembered that the park included some fiberglass terrain features—mountains with painted-on snow, dotted with fanciful K’Shetriae temple architecture—that most certainly would not pass muster with Pluto, and he didn’t want the rest of the day to be about that. The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.
A straight shot down a paved state highway took them to the gate of the Possum Walk Trailer Park, which had been beefed up and connected to an electronic security system. Childish as the emotion was, Richard could not help but feel resentful over being interrogated by an electronic box thrust out on a pipe. He had come to this place several years ago when it had still reeked of exploded meth factories and hog confinement facilities. In those days, Devin had been a mere tenant, living alone in a thirty-year-old mobile home that gave and groaned beneath his weight whenever he troubled himself to get up and move around. Of course, he had long since bought the entire property, as well as a couple of adjoining lots, and evicted his erstwhile neighbors and sold their trailers on eBay. His original trailer stood alone, a weird hybrid of Little House on the Prairie and Grapes of Wrath. A prefab steel roof had been erected above it to protect it from vengeful elements. Farther back from the highway, concrete pads had been poured and steel buildings erected to form a U-shaped compound embracing the small, separate building, little different from a mobile home in size and layout, where Devin worked and lived. The purpose of the U was to house his lawyers, accountants, managers, and sous-novelists.
The gate droned aside. As Richard drove through it, the GPS unit announced: “You have arrived!” Idling past the old mobile home, Richard gazed at its front door for a few moments and let himself be that guy from several years ago who had come up those rotten wooden steps to knock on that door and offer Devin a job. Then he sn
apped out of it and turned his attention to a woman just emerging from the closest prong of the U. She was struggling with her weight, and was dressed and coiffed in a way that, seen on the streets of Seattle, would have been incontrovertible proof of Sapphism. But Richard knew he had to be careful about making such assumptions here. As he parked in one of about seven thousand available spaces, she drifted over toward the driver’s side of the car and began simpering at him through the window. Richard prepared himself to receive disagreeable news manfully.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Forthrast, I’m Wendy.”
“Nice to meet you, Wendy.” Until a couple of years ago, he’d have gone through the ritual of insisting that she address him as Richard, but the fact was that he had flown here from Seattle in a private jet and she had driven her Subaru.
“He just went into F. S. about fifteen minutes ago,” she said apologetically. “Would you like to come in and make yourself comfortable?”
The first of these sentences meant that, according to the biometric sensors on Devin’s body, he had just entered into what psychologists referred to as the flow state, and he was not to be disturbed until he emerged from it of his own volition.
The second of these sentences meant sitting around and eating. As Richard knew all too well, there was a waiting room stocked with bowls of Chex Party Mix and recombinant gorp, with fridges along the walls replete with soft drinks, and a coffee urn. Sitting in that room, using the free Wi-Fi, was an inevitable prelude to any meeting with Devin, who had an uncanny knack for ascending into the flow state only minutes before any scheduled visit. As a way to head off tiresome, repetitive objections from visitors who could not be placated with gorp and sugar water, Devin’s staff had printed up copies of a complimentary handout sheet, “Flow State FAQ,” and scattered them around the feeding troughs. Pluto, who had never been here before, picked one of them up and went into the flow state himself as he learned all about this amazingly productive psychological/physiological regimen and how all history’s greatest artists and geniuses had done their best work while immersed in it. Richard, who’d had plenty of opportunities to familiarize himself with the document’s contents, knew that it contained only one operative phrase, which was that interruptions were inimical to the flow state and had to be prevented at all costs. It was the most passive-aggressive way imaginable for Devin Skraelin to tell people that he was in the middle of something and fuck off.
Having already committed an unpardonable sin against his body by eating the Rice Krispie Treat at the airport, Richard forced himself to ignore the proffered food. He opened his laptop and checked his email.
• As far as T’Rain was concerned, he saw nothing that couldn’t wait. Everyone who mattered at Corporation 9592 knew that he was doing this and so they weren’t bothering him.
• There was a little uptick of traffic on his Schloss Hundschüttler email address. The weather had turned warm during the last few days, as they’d expected, and the skiing, which had been marginal during Peter and Zula’s visit, had gone decisively to hell. The long-range forecast looked worse. So Chet had declared that Mud Month would commence in two days. This was a mandatory four-week break in the Schloss’s operations, when all the employees got to go home, and the place sat empty.
• Brother John had posted an update on Dad’s latest round of visits to medical specialists. Nothing huge to report on that front.
Richard closed his laptop. He reached over and took one of the free “Flow State FAQ” handouts and flipped it over so that he was looking at its back side, which was blank. He reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a Sharpie and used it to write
DEVIN
FUCKING KNOCK IT OFF
on the back of the FAQ. Then he got up and walked out of the waiting area and back across the parking area, passing the old trailer again, all the way to the entrance gate. He slapped an override button that caused the gate to pull open, then went outside and positioned himself in front of the video camera that monitored incoming cars. He held up the sheet of paper in view of the video camera and stood there while he counted to twenty. Then he walked back through the gate and returned to his position in the waiting area.
Five minutes later, Wendy came in and announced that Devin had emerged from the flow state earlier than was his wont and that they were welcome to go in and see him.
“I know the way,” Richard said.
THE SPACE WAS windowless. Or, if you were willing to consider giant flat-panel screens as being windows into other worlds, it was a greenhouse. In the middle was Devin’s elliptical trainer, or rather one of a pool of treadmills, elliptical trainers, and other such gadgets that were swapped in and out as he ruined or got sick of them. Depending from the ceiling was a massive articulated structure: an industrial robot arm, capable of being programmed to move along and rotate around a myriad of axes with the silence of a panther and the precision of a knife fighter. It supported an additional large flat-panel screen and a framework that held up an array of input devices: an ergonomic keyboard, trackballs, and other devices of which Richard knew not the names. Devin, naked except for a pair of gym shorts emblazoned with the logo of one of his favorite charities, was stirring the air with his legs, working the reciprocating paddles of the trainer. Invisible streams of cool wind impinged on his body from perfectly silent high-tech fans, not quite evaporating a sheen of perspiration that caused all his veins and tendons, and his twelve-pack abs, to pop out through his skin, as though the epidermis were shrink wrap laid directly over nerve and bone. According to this morning’s stats, Devin’s body fat percentage was an astonishing 4.5, which placed him into a serious calorie debt situation that in theory should extend his life span beyond 110 years. The slight up-and-down bobbing of his head and upper body was compensated for by equal movements of the robot arm, which used a machine vision control loop to track his attitude through a camera and to calculate the vector of translations and rotations needed to keep the huge screen exactly 22.5 inches away from his laser-sculpted corneas and the keyboard and other input devices within easy and comfortable reach of his fingers. A custom-made headset, with flip-down 3D lenses (currently flipped up and out of the way) and a microphone enabled him to dictate ideas or take phone calls as necessary. A chest harness tracked his pulse and sent immediate notification of any flipped T-waves to an on-call cardiologist sitting in an office suite two miles down the road. A defibrillator hung on the wall, blinking green.
You laugh, Richard had once said to a colleague, after they’d visited the place, but all he’s doing is applying scientific management principles to a hundred-million-dollar production facility (i.e., Devin) with an astronomical profit margin.
“Hello, Dodge!” he called out, only a little short of breath. The system was programmed to keep his pulse between 75 percent and 80 percent of its recommended maximum, so he was working hard but not gasping for air.
“Good afternoon, Devin,” said Richard, suddenly wishing he’d remembered to bring a hat, since it was chilly in here. “I apologize if our arrival came as a surprise.”
“Not a problem!”
“I had been assuming that with all your support staff and whatnot, someone here might have made you aware of the schedule.” This for the benefit of the half-dozen members of said staff who, unaccountably, had crowded into the room.
“No worries!” And he sounded like he meant it. If it was true that exercise jacked up one’s endorphin levels, Devin must live his whole life on something like an intravenous fentanyl drip.
“You remember Pluto.”
“Of course! Hello, Pluto.”
“Hello,” said Pluto, looking put out that he was actually being chivvied through this meaningless program of social pleasantries.
“Can we talk about something?” Richard said.
“Sure! What’s on your mind?”
“We,” Richard stressed, “as in, you and me.”
“You and I are both here, Richard,” said Devin.
R
ichard held eye contact for a few moments, then broke it and scanned the faces of everyone else in the room. “This is not material,” he said. “Devin and I are not going to be generating intellectual property. And neither is it some kind of a brainstorming or strategizing effort in which we will be wanting ideas and input from amazingly bright and helpful people whose job it is to supply that. No record of the conversation needs to be made.” Richard could see people’s faces falling as he ticked his way down the list. Finally he looked back at Devin. “I’ll see you in the trailer,” he said, “just for old time’s sake.”
THE TRAILER WAS cleaner and, at the same time, even more of a dump than he remembered. Someone had definitely hit all its surfaces with a diluted bleach solution. The place probably did not contain a single intact strand of DNA. As always, the information technology had aged badly: the plastic shell of Devin’s elephantine cathode-ray-tube monitor had turned the color of dead algae. To his credit, he had a cheerful red diner table in the kitchen, and three chairs to go with it. Richard sat down in one of these and looked out the window as Devin, now in a tracksuit, strode across the lot followed by a train of rattled and nettled assistants. The caboose of that train was Pluto, forgotten and bemused.
Devin’s sleek elven frame made scarcely an impression on the structurally compromised stairs. He banged the door shut and came in looking pissed.
“I’m sorry,” Richard said, “but there is some stuff that we have to sort out.”
Skeletor had not been expecting Richard to lead off with an apology and so this shortened his stride. “The wo-er,” he said.
“Yeah. You know, the last time I came here, the day after Thanksgiving, I was playing the game at a Hy-Vee on my way down and I saw some stuff going on that looked funny to me at the time. But a month later, when the Wor started, it was obvious in retrospect that I had been seeing certain preparations. The creation of a fifth column. Probing been preparing for the Wor one month in advance, who’s to say they weren’t preparing for it six months or even twelve in advance?”