Neal Stephenson - Reamde

This arrow, however, was even fatter and stupider-looking than the norm, and when Richard zoomed in on it, he saw why: it had a scroll of yellow paper rolled around its shaft and tied with a red ribbon. The interface identified it as a TATAN MESSAGE ARROW.

He gained altitude and looked out to the north to discover a formation of Tatan horse archers cavorting, daring the fort’s garrison to make a sally, firing message arrows in high parabolic arcs. Probably Chinese teenagers, each running a dozen characters at a time; horse archers had bothaviors that made it easy to maneuver them in squadrons. Richard’s eye was offended by their color scheme. He did not have to consult Diane—Corporation 9592’s color tsarina, and the last of the Furious Muses—to know that he was looking at a case study in palette drift.

The horse archers loosed a final volley of arrows, then turned away; crossbow fire from the parapet of the fortress had already felled several of them. Richard turned his attention back to the courtyard, just to see if any of the characters down there had been struck by a message arrow. None had; but one of them had walked over to investigate an arrow that was lying on the ground. As Richard watched, he picked it up. Richard moused over him. The character’s name was Barfuin and he was a K’Shetriae warrior of modest accomplishments. Double-clicking to obtain a more detailed summary of Barfuin, Richard was rewarded with a grid of statistics and a head-and-shoulders portrait. He could not help but be struck by the similarity between Barfuin and the dreadfully low-resolution K’Shetriae icon that had come up on his GPS screen this morning, when he had been attempting to browse the points of interest of greater Nodaway. The most obvious fact was that they both had blue hair. Which was palette drift again. He slammed his laptop shut and pushed it out of the way, because a waitress was approaching with his eggs and bacon.

IF THERE WERE going to be K’Shetriae and Dwinn, and if Skeletor and Don Donald and their acolytes were going to clog the publishing industry’s distribution channels with works of fiction detailing their historical exploits going back thousands of years, then it was necessary for those two races to be distinct in what archaeologists would call their material cultures: their clothing, architecture, decorative arts, and so on. Accordingly, Corporation 9592 had hired artists and architects and musicians and costume designers to create those material cultures consistent with the “bible” of T’Rain as laid down by Skeletor and Don Donald. And this had worked fine in the sense that every new character came with that material culture built in—its clothing, its weapons, its HZs were all drawn from those stylebooks. But it was necessary to give players some freedom in styling their characters, because they liked to express themselves and to show some individuality. So there was an interface for that. Your K’Shetriae cloak could be made of fabric in one color, fringed with a second color, and lined with a third. But all three of those colors had to be selected from a palette, and Diane had chosen the palettes. So in the game’s early years, it had been easy to distinguish races and character types from a distance just by the colors that they wore.

Then someone had figured out that the palette system was hackable and had posted some third-party software giving players the ability to swap out Diane’s official palettes for ones that they made up to suit their own tastes. Corporation 9592 had been slow to react, and so this had become quite popular and widely used before they’d gotten around to having a meeting about it. By that time, something like a quarter of a million characters had been customized using unofficial palettes, and there was no way to repalettize them without deeply pissing off the owners. So Richard had decided that the company would just look the other way.

Which you almost had to, so ugly were many of the palettes that people ended up using. It had gotten so bad that it had actually led to a backlash. The trend in the last year or so had been back toward Diane’s palettes. But out of this, it seemed that an even more strange and subtle phenomenon was going on, which was that people were using Diane’s palettes with only small modifications. These almost-but-not-quite Dianan palettes were being posted and swapped on fan sites. Players would download them and then make their own small modifications and then post them somewhere else. Since a color, to a computer, was just a string of three numbers—a 3D point, if you wanted to look at it that way—you could actually draw diagrams showing the migration of palettes through color space. Over the summer, Diane had hired an intern to develop some visualization tools for understanding this phenomenon of palette drift, and then for the last two months Diane had been putting in way too many hours messing around with those tools and sending Richard “most urgent” emails about the trends she’d been observing. Another executive would have reprogrammed his spam filter to direct these messages into interstellar space, but Richard actually didn’t mind, since this was a perfect example of the hyperarcane shit that he would use to justify his continued involvement in the company to shareholders, if any of them ever bothered to ask. Yet he was having a hard time putting his finger on why it was important. Diane was convinced that the palettes were not just zinging around chaotically but slowly converging on one another in color space, grouping together in regions that she designated “attractors” (borrowing the term from chaos theory).

Cutting into his egg and watching the neon-yellow yolk spread across his plate, Richard considered it. He looked up and gazed around the Hy-Vee. It was a good place to be reminded of the fact that palettes were everywhere, that people like Diane were gainfully employed in many industries, picking out the color schemes that would best catch the eye of target markets. Panning from the cereal aisle (wholesome warm colors for colon-blow-seeking senior citizens) to the checkout lanes (bright sugar bombs in grabbing range of cart-bound toddlers), he saw a kind of palette drift in action right there. He was too far away to read the labels on the boxes, but he could still draw certain inferences as to which customers were being targeted where.

There was a brief interruption as the gastrocolic reflex had its way with him. As he was coming back from the men’s room, Richard glanced over the shoulder of a (judging from attire) farmer in his middle fifties who was sitting alone at a table, ignoring a cold mug of coffee and playing T’Rain. Richard slowed down and rubbernecked long enough to establish that the farmer’s character was a Dwinn warrior engaged in some high-altitude combat with Yeti-like creatures known as the T’Kesh. And palette-wise, this customer was playing it pretty straight; some of his accessories were a bit garish, but for the most part all the hues in his ensemble had been picked out by Diane.

He went back to his table and called Corvallis Kawasaki, one of the Seattle-based hackers. Reflecting the natural breakdown of skills between Nolan and Richard, most of Corporation 9592’s programming work was done in China, but the Seattle office had departments that ran the business, made life good for Creatives, and took care of what was officially denominated Weird Stuff and the weird people who did it. Pluto was Exhibit A, but there were many other arcane R&D-ish projects being run out of Seattle, and Corvallis had his fingers in several of them.

While dialing Corvallis’s number, Richard had been checking the IP address of the Hy-Vee’s Wi-Fi router.

“Richard” was how Corvallis answered the phone.

“C-plus. How many players you have coming in from 50.17.186.234?”