Steadying himself on an eight-foot wizard’s staff as he waded through a knee-high river of blood washing down the market street of Bagpipe Gulch—a community that once prized its status as the “Gateway to Torgai”—Shekondar the Fearsome, a local alchemist, denied that the trend was a negative influence on the town’s image, insisting that the influx of “Meat,” and the bandits, land pirates, and cutthroats who had come to prey on them, had been a boon to the region’s economic development and a bonanza for local merchants, especially those who, like Shekondar, dealt in goods, such as healing potions and magically enhanced whetstones, that were in demand among the newcomers.
In the Wayfarer Inn, a popular local watering hole situated on the precipitous road leading up out of Bagpipe Gulch into the foothills, a more nuanced view of the situation could be heard in the remarks of a muffled voice barely audible through a wall of corpses stacked all the way to the taproom’s ceiling, and identifying itself as Goodman Bustle, the barkeep. Suggesting that all the visitors and attention might be “too much of a good thing,” the voice identifying itself as Bustle complained that many customers, citing as an excuse the towering rampart of decaying flesh that had completely blocked access to the bar, had departed the premises without paying their tabs.
The compilers of this document all sported advanced liberal arts degrees from very expensive institutions of higher learning and wrote in this style, as Richard had belatedly realized, as a form of job security. Upper management had grown accustomed to reading the Gazette every morning over their lattes and would probably have paid these people to write it even if it hadn’t been an official part of Corporation 9592’s budget.
The phrase “as yet unexplained astral phenomena” was a hyperlink leading to a separate article on the internal wiki. For it was an iron law of Gazette editorial policy that the world of T’Rain as seen through the screens of players must be treated as the ground truth, the only reality observable or reportable by its correspondents. Oddities due to the choices made by players were attributed to “strange lights in the sky,” “eldritch influences beyond the ken of even the most erudite local observers,” “unlooked-for syzygy,” “what was most likely the intervention of a capricious local demigod,” “bolt from the blue,” or, in one case, “an unexpected reversal of fortune that even the most wizened local gaffers agreed was without precedent and that, indeed, if seen in a work of literature, would have been derided as a heavy-handed example of deus ex machina.” But of course it was one of the Gazette staff’s most important tasks to report on player behavior, that is, on things that happened in the real world, and so such phrases were always linked to non-Gazette articles written in a sort of corporate memo-speak that always disheartened Richard when he clicked through to it.
In this case, the explanatory memo supplied the information that the Torgai Foothills were the turf of a band calling themselves the da G shou, probably an abbreviation of da G[old] shou, “makers of gold,” where the truncation of “Gold” to “G” was either due to the influence of gangsta rap, or because it was easier to type. They had been running the place for years. All pretty normal. There were many little enclaves like this. Nothing in the rules prevented a sufficiently dedicated and well-organized band of players from conquering and holding a particular stretch of ground. The “Meat” were there because of REAMDE, which had been present at background levels for several weeks now but that recently had pinballed through the elbow in its exponential growth curve and for about twelve hours had looked as though it might completely take over all computing power in the Universe, until its own size and rapid growth had caused it to run afoul of the sorts of real-world friction that always befell seemingly exponential phenomena and bent those hockey-stick graphs over into lazy S plots. Which was not to say that it wasn’t still a very serious problem and that scores of programmers and sysadmins were not working eighteen-hour shifts crawling all over the thing. But it wasn’t going to take over the world and it wasn’t going to bring the whole company to a stop, and in the meantime, thousands of characters were racking up experience points slaying each other in Goodman Bustle’s pub.
CORVALLIS KAWASAKI PICKED him up on the tarmac of the Renton airport. He was driving the inevitable Prius. “I could have had a friggin’ Lincoln town car,” Richard complained, as he stuffed himself into its front seat.
“Just wanted to bend your ear a little,” C-plus explained, fussing with the intermittent wiper knob, trying to dial in that elusive setting, always so difficult to find in Seattle, that would keep the windshield visually transparent but not drag shuddering blades across dry glass. They were staring straight down the runway at the southern bight of Lake Washington, which was flecked with whitecaps. It had been a choppy landing, and Richard felt a bit clammy.
Corvallis had grown up in the town after which he was named, the son of a Japanese-American cog sci professor and an Indian biotech researcher, but culturally he was pure Oregonian. No one at the company knew exactly what he did for a living. But it was hard to imagine the place without him. He shifted the Prius into gear, or whatever it was called when you pulled the lever that made it go forward, and proceeded at a safe and sane speed among the parked airplanes, dripping and rocking against their tie-downs, and out through a gate and onto something that looked like an actual street. “I know you’re going to see Devin tomorrow and mostly what’s on your mind is the war.”
He paused slightly before saying “war,” and he said it funny, with a long O and heavy emphasis.
“Woe-er?” Richard repeated.
“W-O-R,” C-plus explained, “the War of Realignment.”
“Is that what the cool kids are calling it now?”
“Yeah. I guess it works better in email than in conversation. Anyway, I know you’re going to be prepping for that, but also you need to know that there are some interesting technolegal issues coming up around REAMDE.”
“God, that sounds like just the sort of can of worms that I retired to get away from.”
“I don’t think you are actually retired,” Corvallis pointed out mildly. “I mean, you just flew in from Elphinstone and tomorrow you’re taking a jet to Missouri and from there—”