It’s funny how it takes game space to bring out the poet in you. And it’s even funnier how you’re embarrassed about letting it show.
“That’s Hell. Don’t worry about it, it’s just a little joke that got out of hand.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not at all!” You lumber forward onto the stony path that meanders around the temple, heading downhill towards the beach front. “What happened was, the original set-up is where you go to acquire a body; hence, Limbo. Then a couple of the procedural content guys got bored and decided to have fun with the back-drop. This was all pre-alpha, back in the pioneering days, but they’d seen the movie”—and bloody awful you thought it was, too: an aging Patrick Stewart as Satan, hamming it up for the jeezmoid market—“and somehow managed to grab a chunk of scenery rights by a backdoor licensing deal. So we’re in Limbo, on the hill overlooking a sinkhole estate. And we’re about to teleport ourselves down to Earth, just as soon as I find the, ah—”
You find the right sacred grove, and flop down on the holy mosaic, which lights up in response: Standard Lambent Radiosity Tint #2, if you’re an accurate judge of such things.
“But why is it still here?”
“It’s somewhere we can banish persistent griefers.” The damned souls in this particular hell are there for violations of game law—ranging from beating up noobs and stealing to more recondite offences against virtual reality. All they can do is lie, broken and impaled upon their wheels, screaming abuse at the robot devils until their sentence is done, and they can go back to the game. “Okay, hold on. We’re going down to Vhrana.”
The sky turns deep blue, the world freezes, and a progress bar marches slowly across it from horizon to horizon. Ethereal runes written in aurorae six hundred kilometres high scrawl across the heavens, UPDATING REALITY, and for a moment your skin crawls with superstitious dread. Someday we’re all going to get brain implants and experience this directly. Someday everyone is going to live their lives out in places like this, vacant bodies tended by machines of loving grace while their minds go on before us into strange spaces where the meat cannot follow. You can see it coming, slamming towards you out of the future, like the empty white static that is all anyone has ever heard from beyond the stars: a Final Solution to the human condition, an answer to the Fermi paradox, lights on at home and all the windows tightly shuttered. Because it’s a thing of beauty, the ability to spin the cloth of reality, and you’re a sucker for it: Isn’t story-telling what being human is all about?
And then your claws click down on cobble-stones and the horizon implodes into the uneven Tudor timber-framed frontages of the high street in Vhrana.
Vhrana is the capital city of Cordua, in northern Breasil on the continent of Mu. It’s about two kilometres in diameter, built atop a mushroom-shaped dome of limestone that has come adrift from its foundations and floats about a kilometre up above the rain-forest-covered flanks of Mount Panesh. Enterprising adventurers have quarried out vast cellars beneath their picturesque guild-houses, and for a pittance you can descend through the endless passages until you come to a wicker platform overlooking the jungle. Then you can rent a bamboo-and-silk hang-glider and descend to the surface or, if you are Adept, levitate by the power of will alone.
Vhrana is a mess of clashing architectural styles, but the Duke has imposed a certain uniformity over it all by restricting the supply of certain building materials—not unlike Edinburgh, come to think of it. Thus, the timber-framed Tudor look hunches cheek by jowl with lighter wood-and-wicker buildings, some of them thatched, and the odd eruption of elvish structures—tediously similar to late-mediaeval Japan, in your opinion, but at least it doesn’t clash too violently. There aren’t many people out on the streets yet, for it’s still morning in most of North America, but as you make your way towards the northern market hall, you pass a number of hawkers selling their stuff.
“What are you looking for?”
“Voodoo board. I’m pretty sure it’s near the north end of this market. We’re in a no-PvP zone, by the way, you can hop down and explore if you want: Nobody’s going to jump you.”
“Oh. Okay, then.” She manages to dismount without impaling herself on a street sign while you sniff around among the market stalls—a lot of their keepers are in zombie mode, crying out their sales spiel in a loop—and look for the board. Eventually you find it, tucked away between the Golden Lotus Peace and Justice Co-operative (actually the local chapter of the Assassins Guild) and the Temple of Ru’aark. You scroll through flashing names and blinking icons, looking for—
“The missing guy. What’s his name?”
“Nigel MacDonald, aka Nigel Reliable. Not.”
“I meant, his Zone name. Names. Any inkling?”
“What, you mean what his character was called?”
“No, his true name. The one that’s attached to any character he’s playing, so his friends can find him. Like, I’m currently being Theodore G. Bear, but my Zone handle is JackReed. You’re currently being Anonymous Coward—sorry, that’s a generic, you haven’t named your noob—but when we logged you in we created an account with the Zone handle ElaineBarnaby. Yes?”
“Oh, right. Wouldn’t he just be NigelMacDonald?”
“Nope. For one thing, that’s a common name. I only got JackReed because I’ve been playing since the early days, and I pulled a few strings; name squatting is a national sport hereabouts. And for another, I’m thinking if we want to trace Mr. Reliable, we need to know what his handle was.” You think for a moment. “What his handles were…”
She’s sharp. “Plural?”
“You got it.” You stare at her noob. There’s a faint ding as a name finally appears over her asp-haired head: Stheno. Good, she’s cluing up. “Listen, it’s a quarter to five, and if we don’t get hold of his handle real soon now, we’re not going to be able to get any further today. Assuming he was hiding something, we need to know who we’re looking for. So. Got any bright ideas?”
“Yes. Let’s run through that tutorial you told me about. We’ll worry about finding MacDonald’s name tomorrow; first I figure I need to know what I’m doing. Or did you have other plans for the evening?”
SUE: Victim Liaison
Being first on scene has its little perks, and one of them is that under the Victims of Crime (Restitution) Act (2010)—a hang-over from before the independence vote went through—if an offence has been committed against a designated Victim of Crime with a pecuniary value of blah or a custodial sentence of wibble, the designated VOC must be assigned a Victim Liaison Officer, to do the touchy-feely hand-wringing shit and dial the Samaritans for them. You were the first responder to Hayek Associates, you’re not part of Liz’s trained and certified gang of murder puppies, and the pecuniary value is clearly well outside the two-thousand-euro threshold, so she patted you on the head and told you to run along and be a good little VLO for Hayek Associates.
But how the fuck do you counsel a corporation that’s been mugged?
“Hello, I’m your Victim Liaison Officer. I understand you’re a bit upset about it—share price down in the dumps, third quarter figures looking a bit dodgy, that kind of thing—would you like to talk to someone sympathetic? A cup of tea, perhaps?”
So you go back on site, nip down the fire stairs and through the blast doors round the back, and bang on the Great White Chief’s door.