Neal Stephenson - Reamde

The spray and the cool sea air were a fine antidote for the killing heat of the traffic jam, and so they arrived at a dock on Sangley Point salty and in need of showers but somewhat refreshed. It was a military installation: an airbase, Seamus had explained, formerly of the United States, now of the Philippine Air Force. A pilot in uniform met them at the dock—Seamus had called or texted ahead, apparently—and walked them to a waiting Humvee that took them directly onto the tarmac of the base’s single, very long runway. They pulled up next to a simple two-engine passenger plane with military markings and were airborne a few minutes later. They took off to the west, headed straight for the narrow exit of the gigantic bay, and soon banked left and began the long flight south to Zamboanga: something like five hundred miles, which they expected to cover in a couple of hours. Seamus spent most of it sleeping. Olivia looked out the windows and tried to see the archipelago’s countless islands, inlets, and channels through the eyes of an Abdallah Jones.

“What do you think?” Seamus asked her, just as she was finally about to nod off. She jolted awake, looked across at him—they were seated on opposite sides of a small table that occupied most of the plane’s cabin—and tried to snap out of the jet-lag torpor that had crept up on her. She wondered how long he’d been watching her. His decision to leap out of the taxi in Manila and set off on foot had been made to look like the spontaneous act of a free spirit, but she had little doubt that it had been calculated as a way of putting her to the test. Not by any stretch of the imagination a difficult or strenuous test, but an unscripted moment in which she might let her guard down and reveal aspects of her personality otherwise difficult to see. By sleeping for most of the flight, Seamus seemed to be telling her that she had passed the test, whatever it was. Now they were starting to get down to work.

“A million places to hide, once you get down on the surface,” Olivia said. “But flying in on a business jet in the middle of the day, you’d be absurdly conspicuous.”

With the tiniest suggestion of a nod, Seamus broke eye contact and looked out the window. “There it is,” he said. “Welcome to the GWOJ.”

“GWOJ?”

“Global War on Jones.”

THE ZAMBOANGA OUTPOST of the GWOJ turned out to be one corner of an air force base that had been constructed on flat coastal land, otherwise occupied by rice paddies, outside of a middling regional city. The base as a whole was moderately well fenced and defended. The corner occupied by Seamus and his team was a fortress unto itself, surrounded by high chain-link and razor wire bolstered by stacked steel shipping containers. Approaching vehicles had to run a slalom course through containers that Seamus assured her had been filled with dirt so that they could not simply be bashed out of the way by an onrushing truck bomb. Once inside that perimeter, though, they found themselves in a tiny simulacrum of America: a compound of modular dwellings surmounted by howling air conditioners fed by cables from a huge diesel generator situated downwind. Several of the modules were barracks for Seamus and members of his crew, one was guest quarters for people like Olivia, and there was a double-wide with kitchen and dining facilities at one end and a conference room at the other.

Here as everywhere else in the world, everyone hung out in the kitchen. So after Olivia had dropped her stuff in the guest quarters and taken a shower, she went into the double-wide to find Seamus and two other members of his crew hanging out there, lounging on sofas or sitting with erect postures at the dining table, focused on their laptops, sipping American soft drinks. The whole scene in fact looked quintessentially American to her, which, as she would’ve been the first person to admit, meant nothing, since she had spent practically no time in the United States. Seamus’s crew was multiracial to a fault and looked somewhat uneasy in their cargo shorts and T-shirts, as though they’d all much rather be in uniform. They all had lots of stuff strapped to them: holsters with semiautomatic pistols, knives, radios. Even their eyeglasses were strapped to their heads. Earlier, they’d all been perfunctorily introduced to Olivia; none of them now gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on what they were doing: some sort of pitched battle.

“Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!”

“I see ’em and am pulling. Need backup though.”

“Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back. Someone finish the bastard off. A few Kingly Strokes would take care of it, Shame.”

Seamus said, “Okay, I’ll need to rearm, cover me for second… got it… Fuck!”

All of the men leaned back from their screens in unison and let out roars of anguished laughter so loud that Olivia’s ears crackled. “Fuck, man!” called a compact African American. “He toasted you.”

“We’re all fucked now,” said a Hispanic guy. “Sequester your shit while you still can.”

Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world.

Planted around the dining area, on windowsills and kitchen counters, were plastic dolls: troll-or elflike fantasy characters decked out in elaborate costumes and armed to the teeth with fanciful, quasi-medieval weapons. Each one stood on a faux-stone pedestal with a name chiseled into it. Olivia picked one of them up—very carefully, since it seemed that they were important—and flipped it over. Marked on the underside of the base was the logo of Corporation 9592.

So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain? Because Olivia was not a gamer and could not tell one such game from another.

“Olivia?”

She looked up and locked eyes with Seamus, who was staring at her over the rim of his laptop screen. Seamus spoke with exaggerated calm: “Put… the troll… down… and slowly back away.”

Okay, he was joking. She carefully put the doll back and then clasped her hands innocently behind her back. The other men let out loud fyoosh! noises as if an IED had just been successfully defused.

“I’m sorry I touched your doll,” she said. “I had no idea how important Thorakks was to you.”

Silence, as none of the men knew how to cope with her tactical use of the word “doll.”

“I’m not a big T’Rain expert,” she continued. “Is Thorakks like a major character in the world?”

“Thorakks is my character,” Seamus said.

“Wow, how do you rate having a doll made of your personal character?”

“It’s called an action figure,” he said, “and it’s nothing special. If you’ve got a character in T’Rain, all you have to do is fill out a web form and send them fifty bucks and they’ll make you one of these on a 3D printer and ship it to you. Discount for active-duty military.”

“Are you active-duty military?”

“No, but we have ways of finagling the discounts.”

“Are these your own personal laptops?” Olivia asked.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Seamus, wary that she was about to accuse him of misusing government property.

“Never mind,” she said. “I was only wondering if there might be a spare computer around here that I might use.”

“For, like, secure email?”

“No. For playing T’Rain.”

“I thought you said you didn’t play.”

“I don’t,” she admitted, “but this needs to change.”

“ Needs!? ”

“Professional reasons,” she said.

For she now knew that the missing person called Zula was connected to Corporation 9592—was, in fact, the cofounder’s niece—and that her abduction from Seattle to Shanghai had been somehow related to the activities of the nest of hackers who had lived in the apartment below Jones’s. While she did not feel the need to spend a huge amount of time on T’Rain, and certainly didn’t want to go to the point of having her own personal doll created on a 3D printer, she needed to know a little more about the game.