He watched the players moving west across the screen. It was rumored in the thousand or so BigIf-themed chat rooms that if you made it through the game, from the crater to Redondo Beach, with sufficient wisdom points and solved a final riddle there, you would be admitted to a new environment, which was said to be like Paradise, prepared and waiting in the database. This was rumor, not fact. No one knew for certain what lay at the end-of-play. The only way to know was to arrive. The parent corporation, BigIf Systems, owned by Jerzy Czoll and a claque of venture caps, refused to issue the customary game guides, forcing a hundred thousand players to wander the desert, killing monsters and each other, paying steady monthly fees, accumulating points, and gossiping. It was generally thought that no player had made it all the way through. A few claimed they had, by hacks and cheats, crossed into the next world, but they were exposed as frauds and mercilessly flamed. Seven humans — this, again, was rumor — had made it to the beach with insufficient wisdom points to solve the final riddle and pass through the water-door. The seven who made it were forced back into the desert to solve more riddles and kill bigger monsters, and generally pad their wisdom tallies, but all seven died when they turned back.
If the object of the game was to get to Los Angeles with wisdom, the key to playing was surviving and the key to this was money. When you entered BigIf for the first time, the shell assigned you a few days’ worth of food and water and a hundred game dollars, which would buy another few days’ worth from a merchant bot, but after that it was slow death from thirst and hunger unless you were robbed or scammed or ran into a pack of killer cats or got caught in a toxic downpour, in which case death wasn’t slow. To stay alive and keep trekking west, you had to earn money to buy provisions. There were several software-sanctioned ways to do this. Wise players hired out as guides. Strong players worked as bodyguards. Even a new player could find a spring and sell the water, or gather firewood in the overlush forests, or make and sell bread and boots and tunics, and survive that way. One side effect of giving the game a shadow economy was that most players forgot about the wisdom pilgrimage and settled into one of the squatter camps along the way, selling simple, useful items to the new players streaming from the crater every day. You could buy and sell weapons — anything from cudgels and daggers to crossbows to fully modeled firearms. On most afternoons, when America was playing, the plains were dotted with fresh dead and the stooped figures of itinerant scavengers who moved among the bodies collecting food and water icons, stripping the dead of boots and any relatively undamaged armor. Some pickers, as these scavengers were called, waited at the crater for new players to emerge. Players who moved jerkily were new to their PCs, or breaking in a mouse or joystick or power glove or data helmet, and it was almost sad to watch them bumble as the robbers circled. Players with geek names (K00L RULZ) were generally geeks — a fair assumption, since they had named themselves — and geeks played awkwardly, often over their parents’ pokey at-home modems. They stood like hapless water bags before the robbers porting over high-speed DSL or corporate T-3s. The pickers waited by the crater, following the newbies, who sometimes asked the poignant question Why R U following me? — the text floating in a box above their heads as the robbers struck or Hamsterman popped up and sank his fangs. Robbers sometimes killed each other over these choice victims. Pickers fought pickers for the spoils and other robbers waited, killing pickers as other pickers waited for the spoils of the spoils, and some of these were robbed. Others got away and sold the scavenged goods at stalls along the road, making money to buy weapons to stave off the robbers. Some players became prostitutes, taking players to a quiet spot for a bit of mouse-clicking and hot typing back and forth. The hookers also had off-duty chat rooms, buddy lists, and home pages, known only to them, where they ridiculed the johns, swapped investment tips, and inveighed against the robbers who posed as prostitutes, leading players to the canyons and clubbing them. Bad for business, said the whores. Some whores plotted in their chats to lure sporting robbers into the canyons for revenge, others e-mailed pseudo-postcoital thank-you notes to the robber-johns. The notes contained one of several nasty software viruses as an.exe attachment.
Some robbers worked in gangs and started moving west en masse, down the road and closer to the climax on the sea where the players were better, stronger, more experienced, but also richer, having been in the game long enough to get that far. Hunting Arizona into California took real skill, and many brigands died, straying too far west. The monsters got stronger too, and faster and hungrier, and the roads and stalls and squatters’ camps, so thick around Albuquerque, disappeared coming into awesome ruined silent Phoenix, and after Phoenix there were no more helper bots. Out there, it was pretty empty. Few saw those western screens. You could travel for a day and not meet another soul. You could spend a month in real time, six hours every day, amassing strength, killing monsters, killing robbers, clicking west one footstep at a time, and, braving many dangers, earn — really earn—those pixel-vistas, and know, as you stared down from Mount Wilson into the basin of old L.A., that you had come farther than almost any player ever. You could do all of this, and know that you were perhaps another day’s hard clicking from the gigabyte Pacific, which maybe seven pairs of eyes had ever seen, and, as you stood there and you gazed, you could be jumped by Farty Pup and lose it all.
Jens had written death. Death was zero-out, loss of name and scores and property and back to Albuquerque. To novice players — sixty seconds from the crater and you’re dead — death was like losing any other game, but seasoned players had been known to grieve their own deaths, all that effort flushed, and grieve the loss of trusted friends along the way. Friends made pacts with each other: if you die, I’ll kill myself; we’ll meet in Albuquerque and start west again together. Jens remembered a strong player, one of the strongest humans in the game, standing alone in the cracked hardpan outside of Barstow, California, the avatar at rest. Jens went upstairs to write some code, came back at lunch, and saw the player in the desert still, logged on, but doing nothing. It took three days for the avatar to starve itself to death, so that the human could rejoin some beloved friend at the smoking crater; there was no other algorithmic way to kill yourself. The avatar collapsed, the sacrifice complete. Watching these stark moments in the server ring, Jens realized that the game, the mass of logic he had written, was growing beyond logic, beyond sense, and he began to wonder if maybe Walter had been right after all.
Money made in different ways — stripping corpses, robbery — was spent on weapons. Under Naubek’s weapon-market algorithms, pistols were cheap, shotguns more expensive, while a laser-sighted assault rifle with spare banana clip cost about as much as ten years’ worth of food. Players engaged in rampant brigandage to get money to buy weapons to become more fearsome brigands to get money to buy better weapons, and hire a mercenary or two, or three, or ten, or better yet a small army of mercenaries, similarly outfitted and invincible. The strongest players dreamed of becoming a warlord with a retinue. The warlords could do anything, anywhere, anywhen, subject only to the toxic storms, the hunger-thirst-exposure alg, or the danger of betrayal by your bodyguards. This danger could be cut to zero by hiring gamebot bodyguards, but the bots were considered inferior henchmen because they were, under the Asplund-Naubek template, incapable of thrill killing and did not, therefore, inspire true visceral terror in the squatter camps. Warlords plundered squatter camps, slaying hundreds of subscribers, until there were very few unplundered places left. After that, warlords plundered warlords. It was stated as fact in the BigIf chat rooms that sixteen known human players had achieved superwarlord status, traveling the space, pillaging enough gamedollars to pay off their followers. Soon, normal human players, sick of dying or living in fear, desubscribed and monthly revenues downspiked.