Neal Stephenson - Reamde

Wallace’s character was identifiable from a thousand yards away as belonging to the Earthtone Coalition. Zula’s first character—the one on the left—was also Earthtone. Her other character was markedly Brighter. She had created it on Christmas Eve when it had become obvious that large parts of the world of T’Rain were being rendered inaccessible to her Earthtone character because of the huge advances being made on all fronts by the numerically superior legions of the Forces of Brightness. In consequence, her Bright character—being newer—was much weaker. How much weaker was a matter of interpretation. In a radical break with role-playing game tradition, T’Rain did not use numerical levels to indicate the power of its characters; rather, it used Aura, which was a three-part score calculated from a number of statistics including the character’s rank in its vassal network, the size and overall power of that network, the amount of experience it had racked up, the number of things it knew how to do, and the quality of its equipment. As a character’s Aura expanded it acquired certain perks, but never in a wholly predictable way.

The world that Pluto’s software had created was almost exactly the same size as Earth, which meant that traveling around it using thematically appropriate (i.e., medieval) forms of transportation required a lot of time. In theory that might have been fixable by messing around with the very definition of time itself; one could imagine, for example, jump-cutting from the beginning of a three-month sea voyage to its end. This was fine in single-player games but totally unworkable in a multiplayer setting. The progress of time in T’Rain had been locked down to that of the real world.

Pluto’s solution had been to computer-generate a system of ley lines that crisscrossed the world with density comparable to that of the New York City subway system. This had been used as the basis of a teleportation system that worked by routing characters to intersections of ley lines. The number of lines and intersections was incredibly colossal and made far more complex by the fact that certain lines could only be accessed by certain types of characters. No one could really use the system without the aid of software that kept track of everything and provided suggestions on how to get from point A to point B.

And so with a few moments’ work, Zula and Wallace were able to teleport their characters to a city in the flatlands below the Torgai Foothills. Wallace’s character went to a moneychanger and acquired a thousand gold pieces, which would show up as a $73 charge on Wallace’s credit card. From there they teleported to the closest ley line intersection that they could find to the coordinates specified in the REAMDE ransom note, which, from there, would be a fifteen-minute ride on the swift mounts that both of them owned.

The ley line intersection point was marked by a simple cairn. This shimmered into view on both of their screens. Zula turned her character (a K’Shetriae mage) until she saw Wallace’s T’Kesh standing about a hundred feet away (the teleportation process involved some positional error).

The most notable feature of the landscape was that it was littered—no, paved—with corpses in varying stages of decomposition.

A boulder, about the size of an exercise ball, plunged out of the sky and struck the ground nearby. Since meteorites were no more common in T’Rain than they were on Earth, Zula suspected some artificial cause. Turning toward the nearest of the Torgai Foothills, a small peak a couple of hundred meters distant, she saw a battery of three trebuchets, one of which was being reloaded. The other two were just in the act of firing. Their dangling weights and hurling slings seemed ungainly, chaotic, and unlikely to work. But they did a fine job of hurling two additional boulders in her direction. Zula had to dodge one. Not far away was an outcropping of stone that looked like it might provide shelter. She ran to it and immediately came under fire from a squadron of horse archers hidden in tall grass nearby. She invoked some spells that should have protected her from the barrage of arrows, but one of them scored a lucky hit and killed her. Her character disappeared from the screen and went to Limbo.

Zula turned her head to see how Wallace was faring. Not much better. He was pinned under a boulder and had been surrounded by another squadron of horse archers, riding around him in a ring, firing inward. His health was low and dropping fast. “Don’t let yourself get captured,” she warned him. “I know,” he said, and clicked an icon on his screen, helpfully labeled FALL ON YOUR SWORD.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO FALL ON YOUR SWORD? asked a dialog box.

YES, clicked Wallace.

A few seconds later his character was in Limbo too.

“It’s so obvious,” Wallace said, after devoting a few moments to regaining his composure. “This REAMDE thing has infected—how many computers?”

“Estimated at a couple of hundred thousand,” said Peter, who’d been sitting in the corner with his laptop, doing research on it. But he could only see Internet rumors in the public domain. Zula, thanks to her access to the VPN, knew that the real figure was closer to a million.

“All the victims have to go to the same fucking place with a thousand gold pieces. So naturally, thieves are going to set up an ambush at the closest ley line intersection.”

“It would pay for itself pretty quickly,” Zula allowed.

“So those guys stole your money?” asked Peter, violating the rule, earlier laid down by Wallace, that he couldn’t ask stupid questions about how T’Rain worked.

“No, because I fell on my sword, and died, and went to Limbo with all my kit,” Wallace said. “If I’d gotten weak enough for them to capture me, then they could’ve made away with the gold and everything else. But I was lucky. What they’re doing is probably quite profitable.”

“So what do we do?” Zula asked.

“Get out of Limbo,” Wallace said. This was easy enough; there were half a dozen ways to bring a character back to life, each with its own pros and cons. “Find a less obvious ley line intersection. Go there and be ready to fight our way through.”

“We could recruit a larger party—”

“At three in the morning? Not enough time,” Wallace said. “You’re sure you can’t recruit a more… omniscient character?”

“You mean, wake up my uncle?” Zula responded. “Are you sure you want him involved?”

SO THEY GOT out of Limbo and tried again, teleporting to another, much less convenient ley line intersection an hour’s ride from the place they were trying to reach. Here they were immediately ambushed, and nearly overcame the thieves, but because of some unluckiness they ended up in Limbo again and had to try it a third time. First, though, Wallace got more gold pieces and used them to buy, at extortionate rates, some spells and potions that would keep them alive a bit longer. They teleported back in again and fought their way through the ambush and withdrew to higher ground a couple of thousand yards away—where they were set upon by another party of thieves before they could recover from wounds suffered in the first ambush. They fought back as hard as they could but ended up in Limbo once more.

Just before Zula’s character perished, though, she saw something a bit odd: some of their ambushers were going down with spears and arrows lodged in their backs. The ambushers had been counterambushed by some hostile group that had rushed to the scene of the fight but arrived too late.

“Let’s go back there,” she suggested. “I think we have help.”

“Saw them. It’s just another group of thieves,” Wallace said.

“So what? Let them kill each other.”