Cutting into his egg and watching the neon-yellow yolk spread across his plate, Richard considered it. He looked up and gazed around the Hy-Vee. It was a good place to be reminded of the fact that palettes were everywhere, that people like Diane were gainfully employed in many industries, picking out the color schemes that would best catch the eye of target markets. Panning from the cereal aisle (wholesome warm colors for colon-blow-seeking senior citizens) to the checkout lanes (bright sugar bombs in grabbing range of cart-bound toddlers), he saw a kind of palette drift in action right there. He was too far away to read the labels on the boxes, but he could still draw certain inferences as to which customers were being targeted where.
There was a brief interruption as the gastrocolic reflex had its way with him. As he was coming back from the men’s room, Richard glanced over the shoulder of a (judging from attire) farmer in his middle fifties who was sitting alone at a table, ignoring a cold mug of coffee and playing T’Rain. Richard slowed down and rubbernecked long enough to establish that the farmer’s character was a Dwinn warrior engaged in some high-altitude combat with Yeti-like creatures known as the T’Kesh. And palette-wise, this customer was playing it pretty straight; some of his accessories were a bit garish, but for the most part all the hues in his ensemble had been picked out by Diane.
He went back to his table and called Corvallis Kawasaki, one of the Seattle-based hackers. Reflecting the natural breakdown of skills between Nolan and Richard, most of Corporation 9592’s programming work was done in China, but the Seattle office had departments that ran the business, made life good for Creatives, and took care of what was officially denominated Weird Stuff and the weird people who did it. Pluto was Exhibit A, but there were many other arcane R&D-ish projects being run out of Seattle, and Corvallis had his fingers in several of them.
While dialing Corvallis’s number, Richard had been checking the IP address of the Hy-Vee’s Wi-Fi router.
“Richard” was how Corvallis answered the phone.
“C-plus. How many players you have coming in from 50.17.186.234?”
Typing. “Four, one of whom appears to be you.”
“Hmm, that’s more than I thought.” Richard looked around the diner and found one of the others: a kid in his early twenties. The fourth was harder to pick out.
“One of them’s dropping a lot of packets. Look outside,” Corvallis suggested.
Richard looked out the window and saw an SUV parked in the handicapped space, a man sitting in the driver’s seat, face lit up by a grotesquely palette-drifted scenario on the screen of his laptop.
“One of them’s a Dwinn fighting some T’Kesh.”
“Actually, he just got killed.”
Richard looked up and verified that the farmer had disgustedly averted his gaze from his screen. The farmer reached for his coffee cup and realized how cold it was. Then he looked up at the clock.
“This guy is a study!” Richard said.
“What do you want to know?”
“General demographics.”
“His net worth and income are strangely high, considering that you are in something called a Hy-Vee in Red Oak, Iowa.”
“He’s a farmer. Owns land and equipment that are worth a lot of money. Takes in huge federal subsidy checks. That’s why.”
“He has a bachelor’s degree.”
“Ag engineering, I’ll bet.”
“He has bought seventeen books in this calendar year.” Meaning, as Richard understood, T’Rain-themed books from the online store.
“All by D-squared?”
“You called it. How’d you know?”
“Call up his character.”
Typing. “Okay,” Corvallis said, “looks like a pretty standard-issue Dwinn to me.”
“Exactly my point.”
“How so?”
Richard pulled the paper placemat out from under his platter and flipped it over. Pulling a mechanical pencil from his shirt pocket, he drew a vertical line down the middle and then poised the tip of the implement at the head of one of the columns.
“Richard? You still there?”
“I’m thinking.”
In truth, he wasn’t certain that “thinking” was the right word for what was going on in his head, since that word implied some kind of orderly procedure.
There were certain perceptions that pierced through the fug of day-to-day concerns and the confusions of time like message arrows through the dark, and one of those had just hit him in the forehead: a memory of a scene from a generic fantasy world, not Tolkien but something derivative of Tolkien, the kind of thing that a Devin Skraelin would have created. It had been painted on the side of a van that had picked him up in 1972 when he had been hitchhiking to Canada so that he wouldn’t have to get his legs blown off like John. In those days—strange to relate—there’d been a connection between stoners and Tolkien buffs. For the last thirty years it simply hadn’t obtained; the ardent Tolkien fans were a disjoint set from the stoners and potheads of the world. But he remembered now that they were once connected to each other and that the van-painting types used the same album-cover palette as these people—some Good, some Evil—groping out to find one another with their cobalt blue message arrows and their acid yellow scrolls.
“New research project,” Richard heard himself saying.
“Uh-oh.”
“You seen all Diane’s shit about attractors in palette space?”
“I’m aware of it,” Corvallis said, pivoting into a defensive crouch, “but—”
“That’s all that matters,” Richard grunted. His hand had begun moving, drawing letters at the top of the left-hand column. He watched in dull fascination as they spelled out: FORCES OF BRIGHTNESS. Then his hand skated over to the right column. That one only took a few moments: EARTHTONE COALITION.
“Forget everything you’re supposed to know about T’Rain. The races, the character classes, the history. Especially forget about the whole Good/Evil thing. Instead just look at what is in the way of behavior and affiliation. Use attractors in color space as the thin end of your wedge. Hammer on it until something splits open.” Richard thought about supplying Corvallis with these two labels but thought that if he wasn’t completely full of shit, C-plus would discover the same thing on his own.
“What prompts this?”
“At Bastion Gratlog this morning, horse archers were shooting messages over the walls to people inside.”
“Why don’t they just use email like everyone else?”
“Exactly. The answer is: they don’t actually know each other. They are reaching out. Reaching out to strangers.”