“Not that kind. Why, do you think…?”
You glance at the blank white walls of the conference room. Perfect. “Now’s your chance. Do you have a line of expenses?”
“What are you suggesting?”
It’s still only a vague thought, but…“We could go have a sniff round Hayek Associates, but we’ll only get the cold shoulder, and, besides, they’ll be logging everything you do. I think we ought to go have a word with this programmer of theirs—”
“Can’t do that, he’s missing.”
“Missing? When?”
“The police say he disappeared, probably over the weekend.” She makes it sound like he pulled a sickie. You shudder. There’s a lot of money in a hack on Zone’s DigiCash layer, but enough for that? “We can’t get access to HA’s offices until the police finish whatever it is they’re doing, so we’re stuck sitting on our thumbs for today, anyway.”
“Oh. Well then.”
“Well?” She looks at you expectantly, and you realize she can’t be all that much older than you. The librarian act is elaborate camouflage. Behind it, who is she really?
“Well, if that’s the case, can your expense budget run to a taxi out to PC WORLD and a pair of high-end gaming boxes?”
“Yes, I think it would,” she says slowly. “What have you got in mind?”
“A guided tour of Avalon Four, from the inside, so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Are you game for it?”
Limbo. In mythology, it used to be where the dead babies were stacked like cord-wood, awaiting a bureaucratic salvation. Limbo: the dusty front porch of hell. In Zone terminology, Limbo is the hat-check desk.
You’ve configured yourselves for spatial proximity, so you step into reality next to the unformed noob. The noob’s not got as far as adopting any specific species or gender, so they’re present as a humanoid blob of mist floating above the marble floor of the temple. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes. You mean through my headset?”
“That’s right.” You take a look around while she’s fiddling with her senses. The temple is vaguely classical, Doric columns and marble floors around a raised central area with your traditional altar, columns of flickering light rising from it towards the airy dome of the ceiling. There’s a ghostly choir improvising atmospherically in the background. “Found the controller yet?”
“I think so—” The noob jolts violently, then sprints across the floor, slamming face-first into a pillar. “Ouch! What just happened?”
“I think you set your acceleration too high.”
An hour later she’s still fiddling with her hair, and you’re wondering if maybe you would have done better to give her an off-the-shelf identity: Answering occasional questions and helping the noob work out who she wants to be is intermittently amusing, but it’s not exactly getting the job done. On the other hand, you’ve got to admit that those asp-headed dreadlocks are very cool indeed, and more to the point, she’s not going to be able to do her job if she doesn’t at least have some idea of why people invest so much time and effort in their characters. “I think we should get moving,” you suggest.
“You think?” The noob turns to look at you and, to your surprise, raises an eyebrow: Obviously she’s been exploring the somatics while your mind was wandering. “How does this look?”
“It looks fine.” For a first attempt. The tools for creating a character in Zonespace are a lot finer and more subtle than those offered by the older MMOs, but by the same token, they’re harder to use welclass="underline" Some people make a tidy real-world living just by fine-tuning other players’ avatars. What Elaine has come up with is a passable attempt at an anime medusa, with brightly textured skin like vinyl, big brilliant eyes, and colourful clothing. “Okay, to start with, you’ll need this.” You hand her a short-sword that she’s skilled up for. “And this.” A chain-mail vest, slightly rusty. “You wear them like so.” The noob nods. “And now you either need to learn how to navigate—there’s a tutorial garden outside the door over there—or I can teach you.”
“Which do you recommend?”
She’s either being very patient or she’s actually enjoying the novelty of it all. “I’d do both. Stick with me for now, then go online yourself tonight and mess around with the tutorial.”
“Okay.” She sounds sceptical. You glance sidelong out of game space and see her as she is, focussed completely on the game box’s dual screens, her glasses shutting out anything that isn’t part of the reality in front of her. Totally intent, finger-joints twitching oddly as she turns the L-shaped controller around in her hands. “How long does this usually take?”
“What? Oh, the tutorial garden outside that door over there is designed to give you the basics of how to control your body in about half an hour to an hour. Then if you pick one of the shards, there are a bunch of solo quests you can run that will train you up until you can play competitively in about a week, um, twenty to thirty hours of online time. But if all you want to do is tag along with me, then just get through the tutorial in the garden.”
“You’ve got a whole load of kit.”
“Yeah. I’m Theodore G. Bear. The G. stands for Grizzly, and I’m an ursus.” You rear up and look down your nose at her from your full three metres, then pull out the huge, brass-barreled blunderbuss you carry in your pack and sling it around your neck where she can see it: “I believe in the right to keep and arm bears.” It’s about the size of a five-pounder carronade off of one of Captain Kidd’s frigates, and it’s been personally blessed by the Spirit of the Age, which gives it a serious edge against superstitionists and darklings. You wait for the groan, then add, “The best way to do this is if I carry you, so I’m going to sit down now, and then I want you to try the mount command.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Nope.”
She fiddles around for a minute, then suddenly she’s sitting on your pack, which has sprouted stirrups and a natty little leather saddle. “Hey! I can ride?”
“It’s a standard skill for epic characters. Don’t try it on anyone you aren’t campaigning with, they might get pissed off. Okay, time to wander.” You stand up and head for the big double doors at the front of the temple, keeping it slow. “This is the Temple of Newborn Souls on the Island of Is, which sits in the Nether Sea just off the coast of the main continent, which is called…Hell.”
Hell lies outside the universe, and is thus largely exempt from the laws of physics. Its geometry is a Dantesque parody, for while the Nether Sea is flat, the entirety of the continent lies below sea-level, a vast trumpet bell some thousands of leagues wide stretched out across the knife-sharp line where the sea meets the swirling vacuity that forever hides this realm from Heaven.
How do you describe a continent of pain that has been hollowed out into a frozen whirlpool, forever held below the cliffs of roaring, glass-green waves that somehow flail at the abyss, without ever curling over and toppling over to inundate the red-glowing wilderness?
How do you describe the turbulent flocks of the venal, swirling like starlings in the autumn air above the muddy fields of the Somme? How to picture the power-pylon ranks of impaled, damned souls marching in synchrony across the deserts of the fourth circle? The searing black-iron skyscrapers of Dis, windows glowing with diabolical light?
It’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch, of course. Bosch, as pastiched by a million expert systems executing code that procedurally clones and extrapolates a work of art across a cosmic canvas. Procedural Bosch, painting madly and at infinite speed to fill in the gaps in a virtual world, guarded by the titanic archangels of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing, spinning the endless tape…