A Dwarf Stood At The Door

infinitely tangled, and in the last twenty years Dogor has spread Xynk like a virus."

  "Immortality..."

  "Exactly."

  "So even if I take the Thinkpad and drop it on the Santa Monica freeway—"

  "There are other copies."

  A light bulb went off in my head. "But how does Dogor connect to the internet? I've never been online using the Thinkpad. I mean, I freed him from his box on my version of the game. In all other versions, he's still trapped."

  "It's a decent theory, but your facts refute it."

  "They do?"

  "You said Dogor knew your friend's name, age and address. Correct?"

  "Yes."

  "Did you give him this information?"

  "No."

  "Then he must have gotten it elsewhere, most likely online. Look around at the world we live in. You don't have to connect to anything to be connected. All it takes is a wireless card that connects automatically and one unprotected WiFi network. At a coffee place, a library. An airport. And it wouldn't take much time. The size of the data is small. What is Xynk but a collection of text?"

  That meant I'd freed Dogor in every version of Xynk that existed. I felt sick to my stomach. I motioned for that glass of water that I'd earlier declined. "If it helps," Olaf Brandywine said, "conceptualize Xynk as existing only in one version, always the latest version—everywhere."

  "A version that's been evolving since the 1970s."

  "Do you see the difficulty?"

  "How did Dogor develop the ability to materialize into our world? How does he even understand what our world is?"

  "I assume he treats our world as a kind of parallel, equal, existence with his. Of course I don't know. I've never asked him. I also don't know exactly how he travels from one world to another, but my experience has taught me that nature enjoys symmetry, so if we enter Xynk via a command prompt on a computer, I like to think that Dogor does something similar."

  "But we don't really exist in Xynk," I said.

  "Don't you?"

  "I exist in our world."

  Olaf Brandywine raised both his bushy eyebrows. "Existence is a little like national sovereignty, I'm afraid. It all depends on how your national state—or lack of one—is treated by others. When you type commands into Xynk, asking the Innkeeper of The Yawning Mask where to go to buy the sharpest sword or the most delicious pastries in Xynk, his answer makes you real. And to answer your third question, I assume that Dogor developed the ability to materialize in our world at some point in 1983."

  "You said it was through a floppy drive?"

  "It was. I don't know if it still is."

  "Didn't you ever try to defeat Dogor after he murdered Tim Birch?" I asked.

  His hand started to shake so furiously he had to push it against the armrest of his wheelchair, but his voice remained calm. "Do not take me for a coward. I tried many times, in many ways. I set all sorts of traps for Dogor in Xynk, first using what source code I still had access to and, once I'd lost access to all of it, in-game, the way you have experienced Xynk, as a player. Sometimes I was successful—for a week, a month, once for a several years Dogor remained imprisoned—but never permanently. He always returned. Wherever I managed to trap him or have him trapped by other characters, he escaped from. Someone would always help because Dogor would always be in a known place in Xynk from where he could promise treasure from Verbamor's own vaults. He corrupted honest men, and he did so believing he was carrying out his duty as protector of Xynk. That's when I devised the idea of creating a new space in the city from within the city, a place that only I would know about. If I could build it and lure Dogor into it, he might remain sealed off forever."

  "The #FF0000RUM was that place."

  "Yes."

  "So who was Jacob?"

  "One limitation that we'd written into our game engine—a rational one in most circumstances—was that no place, or room, in Xynk could be an orphan, that is unlinked to any other room. As Tim said, 'A room without doors is no room at all.' It disappears. Hence, Jacob's throat was the requisite door to #FF0000RUM. The physical key that I hid in the east store room of Castle Mothmouth combined with the use of the phrase #FF0000RUM in a command to Jacob unlocked that door. No one knew about any of this except for me. When, after many attempts to trap Dogor inside, I finally succeeded, I connected to the internet to update all other versions of Xynk, then hacked my way into the Pentagon's computer servers and announced myself so that I would be cut off from the world of computing forever. I never wanted to be tempted to check on Dogor or revisit Xynk."

  "You let yourself be caught." I knew I was saying the obvious, but saying it aloud made it real somehow. "Although I still don't understand how Dogor could find out about the keys you created."

  "When you asked how Dogor travels from his world to ours, I answered that he uses a computer. That's my theory. However, there's more to it than that. I don't just believe that Dogor has a computer. I believe that he is a computer. I believe we're all computers, hardware programmed to do one thing but that can be reprogrammed to do another. It's not bizarre to suggest that DNA is a language. Isn't it natural for the next stage of human consciousness to be the use of this language to code new software?"

  I assumed the question was rhetorical. Also, my hour was running out. "I came here because I thought you could help me," I said.

  "You're an unusual person, you know that? Most people would never have started playing Xynk. They would have treated the laptop as defective. Most of those who did play wouldn't have started following mysterious directions delivered to their door as notes. And those who did follow the directions would never have walked into a man's throat or opened up the pounding box in the room inside."

  "I'm weird. I get it."

  "You're curious."

  "My curiosity's put me and who knows how many other people in danger of getting killed by a dwarf."

  "I know. That list of people includes me."

  "You?"

  "I was safe here until you came."

  I thought about standing up to give my words more authority. "I requested to see you and you agreed."

  "Don't get hissy. I didn't say I don't accept being in danger. After all, Dogor's my problem."

  "Which you solved."

  "And you unsolved, which makes it our problem, but that's beside the point. I was saying that you're unusual, curious and conscientious, open minded. Not one to smash laptops on sidewalks. One to ask for help when you he finds himself in a spot."

  "And?"

  "And that makes you the perfect foil to Dogor."

  "If I knew how to foil him."

  Olaf Brandywine rolled his wheelchair so close to me that our legs were nearly touching. "But don't you see the fatal flaw in Dogor's existence?"

  "His absolute belief in the rightness of his goal of saving Xynk."

  "Yes."

  By God, I'd gotten it. "I know what to do," I cried out. "To defeat Dogor I need to solve the quest given to me by Verbamor, by which I mean that I have to find the Amulet of Vermillion, defeat the Hooded Rat Brotherhoo—"

  "You're running out of time, so I'd going to cut you off. My apologies. But you won't defeat Dogor by solving a quest. It's impossible. Xynk, the game, was never finished, and Xynk, the city, has evolved beyond the simplistic situation we first put it in. Thirty years ago, maybe you could have beaten the game and been a hero. Today, there is no Hooded Rat Brotherhood. It disbanded. There is no more threat to Xynk of any kind. The former members of the Hooded Rat Brotherhood now own taverns, inns, are members of government, are beggars, bankers. They've assimilated. The artificial intelligence with which we imbued them quickly helped them figure out that destroying a city is pointless if you can exploit it instead. They still exist as a conspiracy only in Dogor's head and Verbamor's rhetoric. It's easier to rule by fear than admiration."

  So Dogor was right about that. "I am running out of time," I said.

  "Think."

  I tried that. What I
knew was that Dogor was convinced he was fighting a group that apparently no longer existed, that he exhibited symptoms of what we might call paranoia, and that as a key character in "Xynk: An Interactive Quest" he couldn't die. Bingo! "Dogor can't die when he's in Xynk," I said feverishly. "That's his flaw. When he's outside of Xynk, when he materializes in our world, that's when he's vulnerable."

  Olaf Brandywine clapped.

  I kept talking, "So what I need to do is lure him to me and kill him according to the rules of our existence."

  "Almost."

  "What do you mean 'almost'?"

  "I mean that video games sometimes exhibit bizarre behaviours when characters vanish. They may respawn. In Dogor's case, that would recreate the problem. That said, your line of thinking is astute as long as you remember to transfer Dogor's remains back to Xynk, because while a key character cannot be killed in the game world, he can surely be dead in it. The game understands life and death. It's the action that transforms one into the other that it sometimes forbids."

  On some level that made perfect sense. On another, it was absolutely insane. On a third, it scared the shit out of me to even imagine facing a fantatical dwarf in open, hand-to-hand combat. "In case you're wondering," Olaf Brandywine said, "I do not see a reason why you can't shoot Dogor with a gun or run him over with a truck. You don't need to kill him with a magical sword."

  "And how on earth do I get his corpse back to Xynk?"

  "The same way he leaves it."

  I remained silent. "By that I mean you're going to have to find out," he said.

  "Time's up," the guard said. I'd heard him come