Neal Stephenson - Reamde

His face was illuminated by flickering white light.

“James” was on his feet. He ran around to where he could see the screen. “Holy crap,” he exclaimed. “This could only be one spell. But I don’t think it’s ever been used before.”

“One time,” Marlon said, “it was used to kill a whole dynasty of Titans.”

“Who used it?”

“Egdod.”

“I’m going to Yank you,” said James, running over toward the terminal where his T’Rain session was still open.

“I have wards and spoilers in effect,” Marlon warned him. “You can’t Yank me.”

“Turn them all off and let me do it. My name is Thorakks.”

By now Csongor and Yuxia had edged into the space vacated, moments earlier, by James, and were looking over Marlon’s shoulder. Marlon had pushed all the little chat windows and status displays to the periphery of his screen, so they were seeing the world of T’Rain over the shoulder of Reamde, which was to say that they were now looking over two shoulders, Marlon’s and the Troll’s. The latter was standing on open ground in the floodplain of a river, with the tail end of a mountain range visible on the right, giving way to rolling bottomlands tiled with green fields and speckled with villages. He had, in other words, almost made it out of the Torgai Foothills and seemed to be well on his way to reaching some inhabited place where amenities such as moneychangers and ley line intersections could be found. Csongor, who by now had learned how to make sense of the user interface, observed that Reamde was carrying on his person 9 pieces of Indigold, 767 pieces of Blue Gold, 32,198 pieces of Red Gold, and 198,564 of plain old yellow gold pieces: numbers that boggled the T’Rainian mind, since even a few hundred pieces of yellow gold was rated a considerable fortune and well worth fighting over. This absolutely had to be the largest amount of money ever carried by a single T’Rain character at one time. At a quick calculation it was well over a million dollars in real money, probably closer to two million.

Accordingly, Reamde was surrounded by a phalanx of other characters, too numerous for Csongor to count or even to see. The entire formation was marching across the plain as a bloc, so tightly coordinated in its maneuvers that Csongor reckoned they must all be linked together by some sort of computer algorithm; the other players must have slaved their characters to Reamde’s movements and taken their hands from the controls, allowing Marlon to drive the entire formation.

These things alone—the vast amount of money in play, the colossal size of the formation—would have absorbed the attention of even the most experienced and hard-core T’Rain player. And yet the scene was visually dominated by something even huger and more attention-getting: an incoming comet. At its core it was as bright as the screen of Marlon’s computer was capable of shining, and its brilliance was lighting up all that faced it with ghastly white brilliance while casting everything else into impenetrable shadow. An interesting psychological phenomenon kicked in here, having to do with perception of light and color. They were looking at a monitor screen in a dimly illuminated room. The monitor was a tray of black plastic with some fluorescent tubes in its back and a window covering its front. The window was etched with a few million microscopic light valves, made of liquid crystals, that could be turned on or off, or to various gradations in between. If every single one of those valves was opened up to let 100 percent of the light through, then they would simply be looking at a tray with some fluorescent tubes in the back, and it wouldn’t be all that bright. It would be like staring up at a light fixture in the ceiling of an office: certainly an ample amount of illumination, but nothing compared to the amount of light that the sun shed on the ground, even on the most heavily overcast day. Anyone walking indoors and staring at that tray of light going full blast would not perceive it as bright. They might not even be able to tell whether it was turned on.

And yet Marlon and Csongor and Yuxia were all squinting and averting their gazes and even holding up hands to shield their retinas from the light of the imaginary comet being depicted on the screen of this computer monitor. They perceived it as intolerably bright. Admittedly, this was partly because they were in a dark room and so their pupils were dilated. But beyond that, there was a psychological factor at work. They had been habituated to avert their gaze from extremely bright objects that did what the light in this fictional scene was doing, that is, shining out of the sky and casting deep shadows on the ground, and these instincts were kicking in as the comet drew closer. Moreover, the subwoofer attached to Marlon’s computer had gone into some kind of serious overdrive and was causing visible nervousness among the porn-watching clientele of the café, who had probably been warned that there were lots of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis in the Philippines. One of them even jumped up from his monitor and made a run for the door, fearing he might in the next moment be buried in a lahar. Csongor, snapping out of suspended-disbelief mode, stepped forward and twiddled a knob on the speaker, cutting the bass to a more manageable level.

This made it possible to hear James, who was hollering from across the café: “Dude. It is Comet Rider. And it is targeted on your ass. You are going to die. Let me Yank you.”

Marlon’s hands flickered like firelight over the keyboard, changing some of the interface settings. Csongor was familiar with what he was doing, since he’d been forced to learn similar tricks in order to perceive all the warding spells that were permanently installed around the trading pit at the Carthinias Exchange. These suddenly became visible—though badly washed out by comet-light—around Reamde and his phalanx: at least a dozen concentric layers of colored force fields, some dome shaped, some conical, some open-topped cylinders, all depicted in different hues and shimmering with various textures. Spells for turning aside projectile weapons, for stopping magical fireballs, for making hidden characters visible, and for inflicting damage automatically on any foes who tried to penetrate to the center.

And for preventing the beneficiary from being Yanked. Yanking was a spell, normally used with hostile intent, that abducted the target character and sucked him across space at unthinkable velocity and deposited him at the feet of the spell caster.

Marlon began bringing down the curtains of protective spells. In doing so, he was exposing himself and the members of his army to attack; but his army was dissolving anyway, fleeing on a menagerie of winged, four-footed, and six-footed mounts, magic carpets, numinous motorcycles, and magical currents of air, trying to put as much space as possible between themselves and him upon whom the comet was unmistakably crosshaired.

Just as the screen was going completely white and the subwoofer trying to turn itself inside out, a translucent image of Thorakks appeared square in the middle, reaching toward him with one gloved and mailed fist. The screen became considerably darker, and they were treated to an animation that made it seem as though they were being vomited up an esophagus of eerily colored smoke and twining tendrils.

And then they were on a rocky ledge on the side of a mountain somewhere, looking at Thorakks, who was lit up a blinding white on one side and completely black on the other.

Marlon spun the point of view around so that they were looking in the same direction as Thorakks, that is, into the valley below them. A fireball the size of Staten Island was just that second slamming into the ground. Marlon had to turn the subwoofer totally off.