Tracy Canfield: Heist

In an argot obsolete long before their time, NESSET would have been the owner, who designed the con. Opel was the roper, who brought the mark in. (“Outside man” was more common in the days of the Pigeon Drop and the Greek Return, but Opel wasn’t a man.) Threely was the cooler, who stuck around after the blow-off to keep the mark from tipping off the authorities.

Bill Martin was the mark.

Guillaume d’Artiman flew past the turquoise Realms of Daelemil hills and out toward the Aloquen Sea. A leviathan’s waterspout crested in the river delta below, and simulated sunlight flashed on its iridescent lavender scales. More proof of how badly the Daelemil economy had crashed. At the peak of the game’s popularity a leviathan lasted an average of one minute forty-one seconds from spawning until being killed for the scales and venom it dropped, but now the gold farmers had moved on to Bushido Online and Pulsar.

Guillaume tapped “]”—strictly speaking, Bill Martin tapped “]”; Guillaume turned his head—to glance at Opel flying beside him on his right, her fingertips nearly touching his. Her gauzy gold dress was a recolor of one of her favorite meshes. She must have traded for it; Opel was the biggest Daelemil addict Bill had ever known, but she never crafted objects.

“Where should we make our final stand?” she asked. Her voice was girlish and conspiratorial. The Daelemil engine did a passable job of matching her lips to her words.

“I suppose it will be our final one, even if we survive it,” said Bill.

He had uploaded his new favorite dance mix, and Blissbeat’s “Self-Defense” thrummed through the speakers. Opel would be listening to it too, synching her recording of the flyover to the music, automatically linking zooms to crescendos, cuts to beats. She’d showed him her scripts, full of (x, y, z) = self.getpos() and general command-console hackery that made his eyes cross.

Bill had never met a gamer like Opel. He played as many hours a week as he worked at his desk job, but that was still less than the true addicts like her. She’d shown him the secret door on the volcano that was only visible with the right spells at the right phase of the moon, the spoken passphrases that opened a path through the Mists of Boggling, the Harpizai/Talon/Upslash combo. He’d never been able to ask a question about the Daelemil world that she couldn’t answer.

A virtual updraft caught Opel and tossed her up fifty feet. Guillaume hit it a second later and spun uncontrollably after her. With mouse and keyboard he realigned himself with her, as unconscious of the commands he used to fly as he would be of the muscle contractions he used to walk in the real world.

“If you had a Turtl you’d feel the turbulence when it hit you,” said Opel.

The two-hundred-fifty-dollar, fist-sized Turtl was the fashionable game controller at the moment, with programmable gestures for the most frequently used keyboard commands and (in games that supported it) tactile feedback: recoil from a virtual gun, a buzz from a magic fountain’s aura.

“Maybe the leviathan will drop one for me,” said Bill. Opel laughed and barrel-rolled into the sea. Guillaume glanced at his virtual finger, made sure the aquamarine ring of water breathing was in place instead of his preferred dragon-strength, and plunged after her.

Bubbles in exactly sixteen shapes streamed past as they made for the ocean floor. Bill reached under his voice-chat headset and scratched his jaw. “So have you made up your mind about what you’re going to do once Daelemil’s gone?” he said.

“Depends.”

Opel’s underwater stronghold, 4x4 squares on the Big Grid and screened with thala spells, nestled deep in the trench that divided Daelemil’s largest sea. The sea-rose vines on the stony floor bore luminescent green blooms that waved in the current. Even the seaweed changed with Daelemil’s programmed seasons. The five-day spring was at its midpoint. Daelemil would never see another summer; the server would be shut down by then.

Huge swaths of the sea-roses had been ripped away. It must have happened in the last ten minutes—the uprooted plants hadn’t yet expired and vanished.

“Kraken spoor,” said Bill. Another side effect of the Daelemil exodus. Normally the trench was kraken-free, since players reported kraken sightings on BlixMe and pirate and privateer guilds teamed up to hunt them down.

“There it is, just northeast,” said Opel. The kraken’s blotchy purple hide blended into the trench shadows, but a neon-red eyeball as tall as Guillaume flicked open, then settled back into its doze.

“It’s blocking the door,” said Bill.

“With its head. The tentacles are facing the other way.”

“If it starts thrashing it’ll take down the protections faster than Jim can put them back up.” Jim St. Jim was a tame NPC djinn that they’d charmed when the southern continent expansion came out, who stayed in the base and kept the thala screens at full strength. Bill could never have kept a djinn tame on his own—you had to refresh the charm several times a day, and his real-life job made that impossible. It was good to have powerful friends.

Opel switched her avatar’s face to the concerned expression. “If we don’t do something, Jim’s charm spell will wear off.”

“We’ll just have to wait for the kraken to move on. It’s not like we can kill it.”

“Jim can. He can t-port it up to the cloud level over his home city. It’ll fall to earth, take damage, then suffocate because it can’t breathe air.”

“If some other party doesn’t get there first and steal the kill.”

Opel shook her head. “I don’t think that’ll happen with so few players online. We may not reach the corpse in time to get the drops, but we’ll get credit for the kill.” A kraken was also worth a lot of experience points, but Guillaume and Opel had both maxed out long ago.

Bill wasn’t sure. He’d never heard of anyone using a djinn’s powers that way. On the one hand, djinni were so hard to tame that only a handful of players had ever had one to play with; on the other, the dev team constantly patched the game to remove cheap kills. “The city will take a lot of damage.”

“No one lives in Al-Afarit but NPCs. We’ll suffer a huge reputation hit, but there’s a delay before they start sending out bounty hunters, and Daelemil will be long gone by then.” She was undoubtedly right, as always. “One of us needs to lead the kraken away while the other sneaks in and gets Jim.”

“Jim’s charm may have worn off already.”

“Then we’ll just have to redo it. Max speed boosts for whoever’s bait, invisibility for whoever gets Jim—and an Amulet of Charming just in case.”

Bill chuckled. “The djinn-wrangler.”

“Djinn-wrangler?” Opel switched concerned to puzzled .

“Yeah. Can’t kraken see the invisible?”

“Yes, but with stealth and cover… and maybe we can time a simultaneous large distraction. Sinita’s Spectral Artifice works underwater.” Bill started to counter with Kéathia’s Bolts, but Opel was still talking. “Before I forget, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I want to give you a present.”

“Go ahead.”

“I mean in real life.”

“I dunno.” Bill had gotten overentangled with online friends before.

“You don’t have to give me your real-world information. That’s okay.” A brief pause. “I’ve sent you an encrypted e-mail with my S-Bank account number and password. Buy yourself a Turtl.”

Bill tapped “)” and Guillaume smiled, without Bill’s real-world blush.