He had been clicking around on the computer he’d rented and found that it was so riddled with spyware, trojans, and viruses as to be nearly unusable. And so he had begun a project of rebuilding the machine from scratch. He divided its drive into two partitions, a big one and a small one, and reinstated its existing bootleg copy of Windows, and all of its other bootleg software, viruses, and so on onto the big partition. Then he set about downloading Linux onto the small partition. This entailed a seemingly endless number of reboots, during which he had plenty of time to explain matters to Yuxia. “We’ll get Tor running on this thing,” he said. “It will anonymize all of our IP traffic, provided we use the right browser … as long as you don’t come out and tell your family where we are, no one will be able to trace us using IP addresses.”
The news that she’d soon be able to check in with her family had powerfully affected Yuxia. Csongor was preoccupied for a time with explaining to her why the procedure was taking so long, why he had to keep rebooting the machine, why he insisted on opening up many small files filled with cryptic Unix jargon and making small edits to them, what it meant to get Tor configured and installed. When he finally got the machine up and running a fully secure, firewalled, anonymized installation of Linux—a feat for which he might have charged a commercial client lots of euros—he handed the machine over to her and then got up and strolled five paces over to where Marlon was just in the final phases of getting T’Rain online.
“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.