Neal Stephenson - Reamde

They had, in other words, been assuming three things of Chinese Internet cafés: (1) that they were all over the place, (2) that they were easy to find, and (3) that they served coffee; that is, that they were literally cafés, as in small cozy places where customers could curl up with a laptop to check their email.

The pathetic naïveté and Seattle-centrism of these assumptions had already begun to infiltrate Zula’s awareness but clobbered her in the teeth as she followed Qian Yuxia to the top of the stairs. The helpful strangers who had been giving them useless directions always seemed to be saying that the Internet café was “upstairs of” or “in the back of” such-and-such a business, and this had given Zula the idea that they were talking about tiny backroom enterprises.

Now she understood that these business had to be upstairs of, or in the back of, other enterprises because they were so enormous . This one occupied an entire floor of the building. Brand-new PCs with flat-panel screens were packed in together as tightly as the laws of thermodynamics would allow, and essentially all of them were in use. There were at least a hundred people in here, all wearing headphones and therefore weirdly silent.

“Holy Jesus,” Csongor said.

“What?” asked Yuxia.

“It is ten times as big as the biggest one we have ever seen,” Zula explained.

“This is only half of it,” said Yuxia, nodding toward another stair that led up to an additional story. “How many you want?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How many of you want to use computer?”

“One,” said Zula, “unless—?” She looked at Sokolov, who had been staring at more decorative swag posted on the wall. It was one of a series of promotional posters that Corporation 9592’s marketing department had produced shortly after the launch of the game, when they were making a ferocious effort to steal customers away from World of Warcraft. They were fake travel posters, rendered in photorealistic detail. This particular one showed a Dwinn perched on a boulder at the edge of a pristine mountain lake, fishing rod in hand, battling it out with a toothy, prehistoric-looking beast that could be seen breaching from the surface in the middle distance with a lure hooked through its lip. The real purpose of the poster had been to show off the incredible realism of Pluto’s landform-generating software, which was on spectacular display in the mountain slopes on the far side of the lake. But the riggers and animators, not to be outdone, had lavished a lot of time and energy on getting the Dwinn’s posture exactly right: leaning back against the tension on the line, one foot planted, the other just coming up off the ground. It was as good, for Zula, as seeing a snapshot of home and hit her hard; she’d not been ready for it here.

Conveniently, Sokolov chose this of all moments to wax talkative. He slowly turned his head to gaze at Zula, then Yuxia. “Maybe I google fishing equipment store.”

Zula was still contending with a sizable knot in her throat, and Yuxia had no idea what to make of Sokolov.

“Fishing,” Sokolov repeated, nodding at the poster and pantomiming a cast and a reel-in. “My boss wants to go fishing. But we did not bring matériel.”

“When?” Yuxia asked.

Sokolov shrugged. “Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next day. Depends. But today I could be getting equipment. Need to google store.”

“That’s not going to work,” Yuxia said, “if you can’t read Chinese.”

“Need help then. Need to buy special hats. Little iceboxes. Case for rod.” He shrugged. “Usual.”

Yuxia turned away and approached the front counter of the wangba, which was a pretty sizable installation in its own right, spanning about twenty feet and sporting two tills. The wall behind it was filled with a couple of glass-fronted refrigerator cases, jammed with beverages, and some shelves stocked with instant dried noodle bowls, sealed with disks of foil and printed all over in eye-grabbing colors. Behind the counter were three people: two employees, both men in their twenties, and one Public Security Bureau officer in his light blue shirt, necktie, and dark slacks. The latter was seated with his back to them and was paying attention to a pair of flat-panel screens subdivided into four panes each. Zula assumed that these were showing security camera footage, but on a second look she saw that each one of them was showing a half-size image of a computer screen. Some of those were displaying windowed user interfaces, such as a person might use to surf the web or check Facebook, but most were running video games. Each pane changed every few seconds.

She looked at Csongor, who had become fixated on the same thing. He turned to look at her. Their eyes met and they both laughed.

“What is funny?” Sokolov asked.

Csongor turned to him. “This guy is looking over everyone’s shoulder,” he said. “Making sure they don’t look at porn, or whatever.”

Sokolov got it but didn’t see the humor.

Qian Yuxia had in the meantime stomped up to the counter and addressed one of the employees in the style of a drill sergeant greeting a trainee who had showed up drunk and disheveled. The employee, for his part, began and ended the conversation by looking her carefully up and down, which confirmed in Zula’s mind that Yuxia was a bit of an unusual customer, and yet not wholly unprecedented. The PSB officer turned away from his screens long enough to examine the three Westerners, then glanced at Yuxia, then turned back to the screens. Apparently being a Westerner wasn’t such a big deal if you had a Chinese minder to lead you around; it was the unaccompanied and clueless Westerners who drew all the attention.

Some kind of transaction took place. Yuxia summoned Sokolov forward with a snap of the fingers and compelled him to produce money, which disappeared into the till. The employee handed over two strips of paper with alphanumeric strings printed on them: user IDs and passwords.

They proceeded into the main floor of the wangba, which reminded Zula of the part of a casino where the slot machines are lined up, except without the noise: densely packed humans in a dark, low-ceilinged room, sitting on identical chairs and focused on machines. And indeed the slot machine comparison was not a bad one in that most of these people were playing video games. A few of them were playing World of Warcraft, Counterstrike, and Aoba Jianghu, which was the all-Chinese game that Nolan Xu had created prior to cofounding Corporation 9592 and that lived on in the wangba world as an oldie but goodie, frequently imitated, always pirated (its copy protection scheme had been annihilated twenty-two hours after its release), never equaled. But the clear majority of them were playing T’Rain, which meant that most of them were here for business and not pleasure. Zula had enough experience with the game by this point that she could identify, at a glance, most of the landscapes and situations that passed beneath her eye as she followed Yuxia down an aisle toward the stairway. Taking in a longer view of the wangba, she saw just a few heads that had popped up, gopher style, above the low half walls that separated one row of workstations from the next. Some of these were young men slurping noodles from bowls and watching their friends play games, but she also saw another PSB officer making his rounds.

The next floor up was a repeat of the first, with more terminals vacant. A third PSB officer was stationed here, sitting on a chair at the top of the stairs, drinking tea from a big glass thermos and bored out of his mind. Csongor sat down at one terminal and Sokolov sat at the next. Csongor pretended to check his email while Yuxia helped Sokolov search for fishing gear providers in downtown Xiamen.