“How does it work?” Csongor asked. “Your character goes to this place — ”
“He has been there the whole time,” Marlon said, “waiting in his HZ for me to log in again.”
“Okay, but anyway he has vassals?”
“About a thousand of them.”
“Wow.”
“Only twenty, thirty actual players,” Marlon said, “members of the da G shou. But each one has a few toons — ”
“Toons?”
“Characters. And they have vassals — low-level toons who are basically nothing more than robots running around the world. Anyway. I am the LL–Liege Lord — of all of these. Any gold that they have hidden, I can see, I can pick up — it belongs to me.”
“So your toon can go to this place — ”
“Torgai.”
“Yeah. Where you live. Where the Troll lives.”
“He doesn’t have to go there. He’s there already. His HZ is in a cave, in the middle of it.”
“Okay, so he can pop out of his cave and run around and see gold that would be invisible to anyone else. He can pick that gold up and put it in his bag.”
“Maybe. If he can go outside at all.” Marlon had, Csongor noted, opened a browser window instead of logging immediately into T’Rain. He seemed to be scanning Chinese-language chat rooms. Csongor could not read the text, but it was obvious from the artwork surrounding it that this chat room was all about T’Rain; it was some kind of board where players hung out to exchange information and opinion, and the Chinese text was studded here and there with “LOL,” “FFS,” “w00t,” and other staples of text messages.
“Why would you not be able to go outside?”
“Someone might be waiting for me. Or the whole place might be conquered by an army who came to grab all the gold. They would pounce on me as soon as I came out of the cave.”
“Can’t you hide yourself? With invisibility spells or something?”
“It depends on their power. If you let me read for a minute, I can find out what has been happening around this place.”
Having been given the brush-off, Csongor went back over to check in on Yuxia, who was composing a message in a browser window. He was eager for her to finish so that he could do some anonymous browsing of his own, but she was taking her time about it. As well she might. How would she go about explaining herself to her family?
“Remember,” he suggested, “even if the cops in China can’t trace your location, they can read your email. So don’t tell them anything you wouldn’t want the cops to know.”
“I am not stupid,” Yuxia said levelly.
Doubly brushed off, Csongor drifted back to Marlon, who seemed to have made short work of his reconnaissance. “We are lucky,” he said. “It is all total chaos there. No one has hegemony. Perfect for me.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“I can fight off bandits and raiders,” he said coolly, “just not an army.”
With that he launched the T’Rain application proper and typed in a username and a password. A gallery of characters was displayed on the screen, all blinking and breathing and scratching themselves. Beneath each one was a parchment-textured scroll labeled, apparently, with its name. Most of these were written in Chinese. Csongor’s eye was drawn to one of these, which he had seen before, depicted in the original ransom note. It was a troll. Its name, neatly printed in Latin letters, was REAMDE.
Marlon double-clicked on Reamde. The image grew to fill the screen, taking on resolution and three-dimensionality as the others faded and flattened. Reamde spun around, turning his back on them. They were now looking over the troll’s shoulder. He had been sleeping in a cave and had just now stood up to look about his surroundings. In a quick series of preprogrammed movements, Reamde pulled on clothes, armor, weapons, and boots and slung a bag over his shoulder. Then, responding to commands from Marlon’s fingers, he broke into a trot, headed down the cave toward the exit: a starry night sky, showing through a rough aperture. A few moments later Reamde stepped out into the world of T’Rain.
Day 18
“Bingo,” Corvallis said. “He is on the system. He just stepped out of his cave. It looks like he’s going to be active for a while.”
It was 8:23 A.M. Richard was standing next to his Land Cruiser beside the runway at Elphinstone’s tiny airport, watching a Cessna climb into the sky and bank south. He had just stuffed John and Jake into it and handed a couple of ancient C-notes to its pilot.
Just twenty-four hours ago, John and Richard and Jake had landed here. A single day of sitting around had been quite enough, so John had volunteered that he might rent a car and drive Jake back across the border and spend a little time with Jake’s family in Idaho. Richard — hoping it didn’t seem as if he were rushing his brothers out the door — had called a bush pilot of his acquaintance and made it happen on about thirty minutes’ notice. The roar of the Cessna’s takeoff run had drowned out the sound of Richard’s phone ringing, but he’d felt it vibrating against his butt and whipped it out moments before it had gone to voice mail.
“Do we know where he is?” Richard asked.
“Still working on that, but we think the Philippines.”
“That would kind of make sense,” Richard mused. “The shit hits the fan in China, he gets out of the country, lies low for a while, finally pops his head up when he needs cash.” The Cessna was just a faintly droning mote in a cloudy pink sunrise. He let his bottom slam down into the ragged seat of the Land Cruiser.
“Shit,” Richard said, glancing back and forth helplessly between his phone and the gearshift lever. “I can’t drive stick and talk on the phone.”
“Probably just as well,” Corvallis mused, “on those twisty mountain roads.”
“Just keep track of what he’s up to, okay? Don’t do anything that would spook him.”
“I’m not even logged in,” C-plus said. “Just tracking him with database queries.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Mostly looking for his friends. Putting a posse together.”
“So that he can go and gather gold,” Richard said. “I’ll be at the Schloss in half an hour. Call me if that seems warranted.” He hung up, stuck his phone into his jacket pocket, then opened the door and dumped tepid coffee out of his travel mug and got that stowed. There was some crap on the dashboard; he swept it off onto the floor, where it was going to end up anyway. Then he peeled out of the parking lot and began to haul ass in the direction of the Schloss.
CSONGOR, WHO WAS no T’Rain player, was struck by how little screen real estate was actually devoted to viewing the world of the game. From what little he could see, it was quite a beautiful place, with highly detailed, realistically rendered landforms, scattered clouds drifting overhead illuminated by a full moon, and trees whose leaves and branches stirred convincingly in the wind. A bat was orbiting in the clear space before the cave’s entrance, and crickets, or something, were singing in the undergrowth. But he had to perceive all these things through a sort of rectangular porthole, not much larger than his hand, in the middle of a screen that was otherwise claimed by windows: one showing a full-length portrait of Reamde himself, with an array of statistics plotted in diverse colorful, ever-fluctuating widgets. Large-scale and small-scale maps showing where he was in the world. A sort of radar plot with bogeys of different colors moving about on it. Three different chat windows in which conversations, 75 percent in Chinese and 25 percent in English, streamed upward in fits and starts, like steam rising from boiling pots. Gridded displays that apparently depicted the inventory of weapons, potions, and magical knickknacks that Reamde was carrying on his person. A sort of roster, tall and skinny, running the entire height of the monitor on its far left, each entry consisting of a thumbnail portrait of a T’Rain character; the character’s name, sometimes in Chinese and sometimes in European glyphs; and various fields of data that, Csongor guessed, indicated whether that person was logged on, where they were, and what they were up to. Perhaps three dozen entries were packed into the list, and all but three of them were grayed out. Even as Csongor was noticing this, Marlon moved the cursor to the top of the list and clicked a column heading that caused it to be rearranged: the few who were shown in full color were all moved up to the top. He clicked on one of them and began typing in a pop-up window that suddenly appeared next to the character’s icon. The process of typing in Chinese was completely mysterious to Csongor; as Marlon’s fingers hopped all over the keyboard, a little window flashed onto the screen as some piece of software tried to guess what Marlon was trying to say and suggested possible completions. The sheer quantity and variety of data being rammed into Marlon’s face by, Csongor guessed, at least a thousand discrete user-interface widgets on this huge screen, was overwhelming to his tired brain. But Marlon seemed to have been banking his energies during their sea voyage and was at last getting an opportunity to do what he did best.