Neal Stephenson - Reamde

He stayed there for a night, keeping his eyes on the floor whenever he moved about the house so that they would not accidentally light on a photograph of Zula. John didn’t talk much; he had a database of possible leads on his computer, which he worked at obsessively. But his computer, as Richard could see at a glance, was desperately sick with malware, running at about a hundredth of its normal speed and freezing up a few times an hour. He considered offering to help. But the fact that John was putting up with it was evidence that he knew it was hopeless, was just running in place. Alice was silent, inactive except for occasional bursts of manic energy, in some stage or another of grieving. The only person Richard felt comfortable hanging around with was Dad, so he spent most of the evening sitting next to him in the man cave, listening to the hissing and beeping of his bionic support system, watching whatever TV Dad felt like summoning up with the remote. People kept calling the house, but they didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like an actual death. You couldn’t send flowers. Hallmark didn’t make disappearance cards. It was sort of like the Patricia lightning strike all over again: too bizarre to pass smoothly along the greased channels of grieving and condolence.

Breakfast was better, with the three of them all talking about Zula, telling stories about her fondly, as people did of the dead. Dad listened to the stories and nodded and smiled at the right parts. Richard hugged them, got in the Grand Marquis, drove to the FBO, and was back in Seattle four hours later. That was Friday. During the weekend he stayed home, online most of the time, hovering over the Torgai in one window while, in others, scanning real-time statistics from T’Rain’s databases. He did not care about the details. He doubted that any of this was going to help at all. But he had made a determination, early last week, that it might conceivably help them get more information if the Torgai remained chaotic and did not fall under the control of any one particular Liege Lord. His expedition to Cambridge and to Nodaway had been solely to ensure the requisite level of chaos, and it seemed to have worked. Don Donald, after a slow start, was now five deep, with tens of thousands of tastefully appointed vassals, and he’d apparently had the good sense to delegate military decisions to players who had actually done this before. Skeletor meanwhile had dusted off his most powerful character, which he hadn’t played in several months, and had made a fairly impressive bid to penetrate all the way into the middle of the castle where D-squared’s character was holed up and assassinate him. At the last minute, he had been detected and killed so fast that he hadn’t had time to Sequester all his Virtual Property. So that stuff had fallen into the hands of the Earthtone Coalition (which couldn’t use it because it was so tawdry), and Skeletor’s character had emerged from Limbo naked and impoverished and considerably diminished in power. Which was probably for the better anyway, since Devin had other characters better suited to play the role of warrior king: less powerful but with deeper and more welldeveloped vassal networks.

Such entertainments had prevented Richard from thinking much about Zula all through the weekend and for most of Monday, which had been devoted to long, hairy, poorly run meetings about how the company should deal with this latest turn in the Wor. He had come home late with take-out Thai and slammed into the sofa and tried to watch a movie, but kept drifting from it to the screen of his laptop. This was part of Corporation 9592’s strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies—yes, the entire medium of cinema—to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed entertainment without alarm bells going off in their medullas telling them that they needed to log on to T’Rain and see what they were missing.

It was during one such foray, the movie on pause, some Torgai conflagration burning in a window on the screen, when he noticed he had new email, tentatively flagged as spam. Subject heading: some Chinese characters. He deleted it without looking. But something about it was nagging at him. He didn’t read Chinese. But in the last few days he had been trying to learn some things about this place called Xiamen, hoovering up random stuff on the Internet. Some of the pages he’d found were in English, others in Chinese, many in a patchwork of both languages. But he had grown accustomed to seeing one Chinese character that stood out because of its simplicity: just a square with its bottom side missing, and a little cross-tick in its top side. It was half of the two-character symbol for “Xiamen.” And he might have been imagining things, but he fancied he had seen it in the subject line of that spam email. So he went to his trash folder and retrieved the message and opened it.

It contained no text at all, just three consecutive images, each one a photograph of a brown paper towel with words written on it in black pen.

The first line of the message on the towel was an email address at Corporation 9592 that Richard used only for personal communications. The second line was a date, bracketed in question marks: Friday before last, making it about three days after Zula and Peter had disappeared from the loft in Georgetown. So the note was about ten days old.

Uncle Richard,

Hope you will forward this to John and Alice if it ever gets rescued from the drain trap where I am going to hide it. I thought your email address was more likely to work than theirs. John’s PC has malware.

This is my first damsel in distress letter, so I hope I am striking the right tone. I have a lot of time on my hands and a whole dispenser full of paper towels so I can produce several drafts if need be.

As you probably know if you are reading this, I am on the forty-third floor of an unfinished skyscraper in downtown Xiamen. I am being held captive—hate that word, but it fits—in a ladies’ room next to an office suite that is being used as a safe house by a Russian identifying himself as Ivanov, though this is clearly not his real name. I think that he used to be part of a Russian organized crime group but that he has betrayed them, or at least disappointed them to an extent that he thinks is going to end up being fatal. He was running some sort of financial scam with their pension fund money, working with a Scottish accountant in Vancouver by the name of Wallace, who was a very active T’Rain player. Wallace’s computer got infected with REAMDE…

…and the note went on to tell a story that, while bizarre in a lot of respects, explained much of what had been puzzling Richard for the last week. The narrative portion of the letter ended in what could only be called a cliffhanger: she and Peter and some other guy had seemingly identified the Troll, and she had the impression that the Russians were making preparations to go and snatch him. Assuming that the letter had been written early Friday morning Xiamen time, this fit perfectly with Corvallis’s statistics showing that the Troll and his minions had suddenly logged off and gone dark on Friday morning.

The remainder of the letter consisted of a series of personal notes directed at various family members, clearly based on the assumption that Zula would never see any of them again. Richard had attempted to read it about ten times and been unable to get through it.

He had awakened John and Alice right away, of course, and John had packed his bags and started driving through the night toward the Omaha airport, Alice calling ahead to arrange a morning flight to Seattle. Richard had called his jet leasing company to set up an ASAP flight to Xiamen, and they had warned him that he’d need a visa. He had stayed up into the small hours of the morning researching Chinese visa policies and learned that it all had to be done through a consulate, of which the nearest was in San Francisco, and so at five in the morning he had dropped an assistant off at Sea-Tac, sending her down with his passport and all the documentation needed to get a visa in ultra-super-expedited fashion. Richard had called John during a layover in Denver and revectored him to SFO so that he could hand his passport over to the same assistant. John had then caught the next flight up to Seattle. Recent text messages from the assistant suggested that all was proceeding according to plan and that she would probably be able to catch a six P.M. flight back to Seattle, which would get the visas into their hands at about eight and enable wheels up from Boeing Field as early as nine.