The VCs panicked and the IPO was canceled. The bosses ordered patches in the shell to stop the war. Many patches were discussed. One would have stopped any player from hiring more than ten mercs at a time. There were numerous conceptual problems with this. Because humans were the preferred brigands, the superwarlords who hired them were interacting with other players, not with any part of the software. They could install a twenty slays-a-day cap, but this would permit a midsized army to kill several thousand humans a day. A super could run a decent-sized genocide that way. They met and talked, managers and engineers, sipping seltzer water in conference rooms, charting counter-warlord strategies on smeary whiteboards. Why not declare a safe haven around the squatter camps? Or send the holybots through the desert spreading some kind of peace message? Or eliminate automatic weapons? Or cut the slay-per-day cap to nine or six or four? Or write a filter to deduct frequent-flier miles for each massacre? Jens was frightened at these meetings. He had come to see his great creation as he imagined Walter saw it — malignant, runaway — as a compromise one makes for money, and now they were saying that the game might die of desubscription, leaving Jens with nothing for his compromise.
The crisis peaked and passed. Superwarlords got bigger on more killing. A few became megasuperwarlords, but one after another, each of them was swallowed up by his or her own retinue, which had grown too big to pay, feed, or lead. The mercenaries, going unpaid, mutinied, killed the megas, and fought over spoils. The mutineers split into factions, slaughtering each other. Survivors were absorbed into a rival army, swelling it beyond the point of supportability and carrying the idea of mutiny like a germ, and the armies started to dry up, like a flood receding. Slowly normal players returned to the shops and roads and everything was back to where it started.
Jens looked at his watch. It was nine-fifteen, time to go upstairs. Jens heard chewing and quiet, polite spitting in the balcony. He saw Prem Srinivassan, the dapper Indian who wrote helper bots. Prem sat a few rows back, eating little purple seeds from a sandwich bag.
“See the cars?” he asked.
“What cars?”
“Out front,” said Prem. “Five Lincolns at the curb, the drivers in dark suits gabbing in a circle, reading Boston tabloids to each other.”
“Bankers?”
Prem ate a seed. “First three cars look bankerly to me. They usually have black cars with plain hubcaps, very understated, and at least one cellular antenna. Next one, the gray one? I’ll bet that’s underwriter’s counsel. Lawyers do the gray or blue radio cars with wire rims. The last one, the true limo, is Howard Powers.”
Howard ran the modem farm. He answered to Digby and had about twenty underlings.
Jens said, “Why did Howard rent a limo?”
“Last night was his high school’s winter dance,” Prem said. “His date is crashed out in the backseat. You can see right up her gown, at least you could when I came in. She may have changed position since then.”
Employees checked the curbs every morning, posting sightings and interpretations to the office intranet. No cars meant that the IPO had been put off yet again. Two cars meant exploratory talks, banker-to-banker, and a sign of life. Three cars was ambiguous, but more than three cars, not counting the prom limo, meant that the bankers had brought lawyers, which even Howard’s little sister Pru knew meant that they were getting close to going public.
Vaughn Naubek, Jens’ fellow founding coder, passed through the balcony on his way to the employee locker room.
Prem said, “Naubek, sunny greetings. Want a seed?”
Naubek said, “No thanks, I don’t like Indian food.” He continued to the lockers.
Jens and Prem watched a few players die, then took the stairwell to the ground floor.
Jens ducked into the break room by the Bot Pod. Howard and Pru Powers were sitting at a formica table trying to piece together ribbons of shredded paper. Howard wore a rust tux and a ruffled shirt. Pru was breathless, sifting through the bag, describing some lawyer-looking men she had seen outside Jerzy’s private conference room. Jens took a mug from the mug hooks on the wall, found a liter bottle of Glucola in the cabinet, and filled the mug with ice.
Howard said, “How many, Pru?”
“Three, maybe four,” she said. “I forgot to count.”
“But you’re sure they’re lawyers? It’s important, Pru.”
“They looked like lawyers.”
“What kind?”
“Thick-lipped, corpulent, pugnacious — I didn’t get a good look. Prem and Digby were blocking my view.”
“What specialty, I mean. Did they look like underwriter’s counsel or a bankruptcy insertion team? Shoes are a dead giveaway. Laces mean we’re going public. Loafers mean finito. Come on, Pru, think.”
“One was in-house counsel, that midget Jaffe. The others were definitely out-house.”
“What about the shoes, you freaking retard?”
“Don’t call me a retard.”
“Don’t act like a retard.”
“Mom said no calling me a retard.”
“Zitface!”
“Loser!”
“Scumhead!”
“Non-market-savvy zitface!”
“Oh shut up!” said Howard.
Jens said, “Hey hey hey you guys. Howard, go to your suite. You too, Pru — those MIPs won’t map themselves.”
Pru said, “A MIP is a type of map, not a thing to be mapped.”
“Oh shut up,” said Jens.
The Bot Pod was a wide and pillared space with three sealed windows at the far end. In the center of the room was a bank of low, orange, armless, foamy-looking chairs, actually a Danish Modern couch in sections, several couches probably. The sections could be reconfigured as a circle for Pod-wide thinkathons, or in twos and threes for smaller project groups, or pushed together into beds when the coders pulled all-nighters. There were enough sections to make two decent beds, or one double bed, or three short ones, or a short one and a small working circle, more like a working square. Lu Ping, the engineer, and Phoebe Rosenthal, the artist, were sleeping on the couches. Jens did not disturb them. This was their honeymoon.
The walls were lined with cluttered tables and workstations. Charlie Mayer, who telecommuted from Honolulu, had by far the neatest workspace. Lu Ping, next to Mayer, was compiling a subroutine as he slept entwined around his bride. Error flags slowly filled his screen, Path/File access error, Bad file name, Bad file name, Bad record length, Bad file name, Input past end of life, Path not found.