Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Then he drove back to Corporation 9592. Along the way, it occurred to him that he had just confessed to breaking and entering; but somehow he didn’t think that Peter would press charges. Wedged in traffic because of an unholy conjunction of a Sounders game and a slow-moving freight train, he called C-plus. He had one of those rigs where his phone Bluetoothed the conversation into his car’s stereo system. The volume was turned up too loud; a blast of noise nearly blew the windows out of his vehicle. Some very unusual mixture of bellowing voices, clashing metal, and heavy respiration. He turned it down hastily.

“Richard.”

“C-plus. Busy?”

“Am I ever not?”

In the background, some guy was screaming single-word utterances in Latin. There was rhythmic tromping.

“What the fuck are you doing?”

“Maneuvers.” C-plus said. Then there was some kind of interruption, the sound of a hand shuffling the phone around.

“You’re in the National Guard?” But even as he was saying this, Richard was dismissing the possibility; they didn’t speak Latin in the National Guard.

“Roman Legion reenactment group,” C-plus explained.

“So you’re, like, marching around in sandals and a skirt?”

“The Roman caliga is far, far more than just a sandal, at least as that term is construed by modern-day persons,” C-plus began. “To begin with—”

“Okay, shut up,” Richard said.

C-plus sighed.

“Want to get involved with something way more interesting than what you’re actually being paid for?”

“Richard, if you are trying to trap me into griping about my job—”

“Furthest thing from my mind.”

“Even so, let me say that my normal work is incredibly interesting and uplifting.”

“It is so noted,” Richard said, “but I need your help with a personal project. Kind of a detective thing.”

“That REAMDE project?”

The question struck Richard as a bit odd and stymied him for a few seconds. “No,” he said. “If it were about computer viruses, I wouldn’t have even tried to con you into thinking it would be interesting.”

“What is it about then?”

“Come down to the IT lab and I’ll explain it.”

Corvallis raised his voice. “My legion has been getting ready for these maneuvers for three months!” he said. “I have responsibilities as the pilus posterior of my cohort—”

“It’s about Zula,” Richard said. “It’s important.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Richard got to the office about fifteen minutes later, retrieved the computer from the IT lab, and took it to a small conference room, where he got it booted up and hooked into a monitor. Corvallis showed up wearing a tunic of off-white, natural-looking wool that Richard was afraid he might have woven himself on a Roman-style loom. He had swapped his caligae for cross-trainers. With practically no small talk he made himself at home on this computer and began poking around in the files that Richard had copied over from Peter’s Wi-Fi hub. The files and directories had nonintuitive, computer-generated names, and Richard didn’t recognize any of the file formats being used.

In the meantime, Richard’s curiosity had gotten the better of him. “Hey,” he said, “how come, when I told you I had a detective problem, you guessed it was about REAMDE?”

Corvallis shrugged. “I know Zula has been working on that with you.”

“Really?” Richard was startled by this; but then he remembered something Corvallis had said a few days ago, in the Prius, to the effect that Zula had somehow helped narrow the location of the virus writer down to Xiamen. “How long have you known of this supposed collaboration between me and Zula?”

“Since Tuesday morning.”

“ Tuesday morning!? ”

“Oh my God, Richard, settle down.”

“What time Tuesday morning?”

“Earlyish. I could check my phone.”

Silence.

“What the F is going on, Richard?”

“It’s like I said on the phone: Zula and her boyfriend have vanished. No one has seen or heard from them in almost a week.”

This rocked Corvallis back, and he said “Oh my God” in an altogether different tone. “When did they vanish?”

“Well, as it turns out, C-plus, one of the problems with vanishing is that it is difficult to pin down an exact time when it happened. If you had asked me twenty-four hours ago…” Richard paused, groping through the last day’s memories.

Twenty-four hours ago, he had not even been made aware, yet, that Zula was missing.

“Let’s just say that, as far as I know, you are the last person who talked to her.”

“Oh.”

“So what the fuck did you talk to her about?”

“Let go of my shoulders, please.”

“Hmm?”

“It doesn’t help, and it makes it hard for me to type.”

“Okay.” Richard relaxed his grip on the woolen tunic and backed away from Corvallis, hands in the air.

“She had been up all night—Monday night into Tuesday morning—playing.” Meaning, as Richard understood, playing T’Rain. “She said she was researching some gold movements connected with REAMDE.”

“Seems a little unusual right there,” Richard pointed out. “Tracking down viruses isn’t her department.”

Corvallis heard a rebuke in that and colored slightly. “It’s hard to believe, but at the time, I’d never even heard of REAMDE. Had you?”

“No,” Richard confessed.

“So I took what she said at face value. It was a special project you’d asked her to undertake.”

“Really unlike her to just flat out lie,” Richard remarked.

“Anyway, she needed to identify a player who had cast a healing spell on her at some point during her playing session.” Corvallis had his laptop out now and began typing on it between utterances; and as he did, they degenerated from sentences to fragments. “In the Torgai Foothills.” Type, type, type. “Total mayhem.”

“Was it a member of her party?”

“No. Questing with one other. Getting killed a lot. Didn’t understand why at the time.”

“Because you didn’t know about REAMDE and the bandits and so on.”

“Yeah,” Corvallis said absently. After about fifteen seconds of typing, he said, “Okay.”

Richard bent forward, reached into the gully that ran down the center of the conference table, and extracted a video cable, which he threw across to Corvallis, who plugged it into his laptop. The projection screen at the end of the room lit up with a display consisting mostly of a terminal window: just lines of (to Richard) inscrutable text, the results of various queries that C-plus had been typing into a database. At the moment two character profiles were being displayed. These were just long strings of numbers and words. Corvallis typed a command that caused two windows to appear on the screen, each displaying a character profile in a more user-friendly form: a 3D rendering of a creature in T’Rain, the character’s name in a nice little cartouche, tables and plots of vital statistics. Like a police dossier as art-directed by medieval clerics. One of the windows depicted a female character, whom Richard recognized as belonging to Zula. The other was presented in a window whose palette, typeface, and art all said Evil . The portrait was not fixed, but kept shape-shifting among several different species, one of which was a redheaded T’Kesh.

“Who is the Evil T’Kesh Metamorph?” Richard asked.

“That is the character Zula was hanging out with the whole time she was logged on that night,” C-plus said. Speaking slowly and haltingly as he scanned some user’s customer profile, he continued: “Belongs to a longtime customer and heavy user named Wallace, based in Vancouver. But on the night in question”—(typing)—“he and Zula were logged on from the same place”—(typing)—“in Georgetown.”