Neal Stephenson - Reamde

“Then it’s like I said. We pay the ransom.”

Quite a long silence.

“I was hoping,” Wallace said, “that there was another copy of the file.”

“I already told you—”

“I know what you fucking told me,” Wallace said. “I was hoping that you were lying.”

“Is this all just another ruse to find out whether or not I am lying?”

“You’re just clever enough to be stupider than if you weren’t clever at all,” Wallace said. “This is quite real. I very badly want you to tell me, right now, Peter, that you lied to me earlier and that you have a backup copy of the file on one of your machines here.”

And then Wallace dropped his voice to a low growl and talked for about two minutes. During this time, Zula could not make out a single word that Wallace was saying.

When he was finished, all Peter could say, for a minute or so, was the f-word. He said it in about a dozen different ways, like an actor searching for just the right reading.

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” he finally said, very close to sobbing, “because I was telling you the truth before. There really is no other copy!”

Now it was Wallace’s turn to say the f-word a lot.

“So we have to pay the ransom,” Peter said. “A thousand gold pieces?”

“That’s what it says,” Wallace answered.

“How much is that in real money?”

“Seventy-three dollars.”

Peter, after a moment, let out a burst of laughter that sounded eerie to Zula. He was close to hysteria. “Seventy-three dollars? This whole problem can be solved for seventy-three bucks !?”

“Raising the funds isn’t the hard part,” Wallace said.

Something about the sound of Peter’s laugh told Zula it was time to call 911. Best to do it from a landline so that the dispatcher would have the building’s address. She got up as quietly as she could and padded around to the corner where Peter had all his kitchen stuff. A cordless phone was bracketed to the wall. She picked up the handset and turned it on, then put it to her ear to check for a dial tone.

Instead of which, she heard a series of touch-tone beeps.

Someone else was on the line, on another extension, dialing a different number.

“Welcome to Qwest directory assistance,” said a recorded voice.

“Good morning, Zula,” said Wallace on the other extension. “I know you’re in the building because your computer suddenly popped up on Peter’s network. I’ve been keeping an eye on the phone down here. It’s got a handy little indicator, tells me when another extension is in use.”

The phone went dead. Down below, Zula could hear ripping and snapping noises as Wallace did something violent to the line. “What are you doing!?” Peter exclaimed, more confused than anything else.

“Getting us all on the same level,” Wallace said. She could hear him bounding up the stairs.

ZULA CARRIED A bike messenger shoulder bag rather than a purse. She’d left it on the floor at the top of the stairs. Wallace stirred a hand through it, plucked out her phone, then her car keys. With his other hand he closed the lid on her laptop and picked it up. “When you’re feeling more sociable, I’d be pleased to see you below,” he announced, then turned and walked back down the stairs.

She heard her Prius beep as he unlocked it with the key fob. For some reason that broke her out of her paralysis. She walked over to her bag. She was starting to wish she’d listened to all her relatives in Iowa who thought of Seattle as being only one step above Mogadishu and who kept importuning her to get a concealed weapons permit and buy a handgun. In an outside pocket of the bag she did have a folding knife, which she now found and slipped into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she came down the stairs to see Wallace slamming the passenger door of the Prius and hitting the lock button. He pocketed the key chain. “Your mobile and Peter’s are safe and sound inside the car,” he announced. Zula didn’t understand this use of “mobile” until she reached the base of the steps and saw two phones resting side by side on the car’s dashboard.

“Fucking rude of me, ain’t it?” Wallace said, looking her hard in the eye. “But for us to solve this problem we need to trust each other and to focus, and you kids nowadays substitute communicating for thinking, don’t you? So let’s think.”

She could feel Peter’s gaze on her, knew that if she turned to face him, a channel would open up between them and he would try to say something, by a gesture or a look on his face, probably by way of apology. She did not do so. Peter needed to issue an apology much more than she needed to receive one, and, in keeping with Wallace’s suggestion, she wanted to focus on solving the problem and getting out of here.

“We need to deliver a thousand GP to a location in the western Torgai Foothills?” she said.

“And then pray that our virus writer is a nice honest criminal who’ll cough up the key promptly,” Wallace said.

“If we’re going to travel with that much gold, we are going to be a target for thieves,” she pointed out.

“It’s only seventy-three dollars,” Peter said.

“To a teenager,” Zula said, “in an Internet café in China, it’s huge. And stealing it from travelers on a road is much faster than mining it.”

“Not to mention more fun,” Wallace added.

“How will their characters even know that you’re carrying that much gold?” Peter asked.

“I have an idea,” Wallace announced brightly. He turned to face Peter and aimed a finger at him. “You: shut the fuck up. If you can make yourself useful in some other way, such as making coffee, please do so. But Zula and I don’t have time to explain every last fucking detail of T’Rain to you.” Wallace turned back to Zula. “Shall we make ourselves comfortable upstairs?”

“WHAT IS YOUR most powerful character?” Zula asked as she was plugging in her power adapter in what passed for Peter’s living room. Peter was in what passed for a kitchen, making coffee.

“I only have one,” Wallace said. “An Evil T’Kesh Metamorph.” He was logging on to T’Rain using Peter’s work-station.

“Let me see him,” Zula said. She launched the T’Rain app on her laptop and logged in. She was sitting in an office chair, which she now rolled over in Wallace’s direction as far as the power cord would let her go. Wallace’s T’Kesh Metamorph was visible on the screen of the workstation.

“What have you got?” Wallace asked, taking a peek at her laptop. “A whole zoo of characters, I’ll bet?”

“Employees don’t get in-game perks. We have to build our characters from scratch just like the customers.”

“Probably a wise corporate policy,” said Wallace, sounding a bit disappointed.

“I have two. Both Good,” Zula said. “But of course it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“The one on the left,” Wallace said, craning his neck sideways to look at her screen, “is a better match in these times, is it not?”

He was talking, of course, about palettes.

Until the week before Christmas, it would have been quite difficult for Zula’s and Wallace’s characters to do anything together in T’Rain, because hers were Good and his was Evil. Hers would not have been able to travel very far into Evil territory, or his into Good. They could have met up in some wilderness area or war zone, but that would not have helped them on this mission, since the western Torgai Foothills were an island of firmly Evil territory most easily approached from Good zones to the west.

But then, as millions of students had gone on Christmas break and found themselves with vast amounts of free time for playing T’Rain, the War of Realignment had been launched. This had been carefully prepared, for months in advance, by parties still unknown. It basically consisted of a hitherto unidentified group, consisting of both Good and Evil characters, launching a well-laid blitzkrieg against a different group, also mixed Good/Evil, that wasn’t even aware it was a group until the hammer fell on them. The aggressors had been dubbed, by Richard Forthrast, the Forces of Brightness. The victims of the attack were the Earthtone Coalition. These terms, initially used only for internal memos in Corporation 9592, had leaked out into the player community and were now being printed on T-shirts.