“Yes.”
“And are we telling them to fuck themselves?” This seemed the obvious thing to do, but Richard wouldn’t put anything past Corporation 9592’s current CEO.
“We don’t have any choice!” C-plus said.
Richard was struck mute with admiration at the way C-plus had answered the question while imputing nothing except helplessness to the CEO.
Corvallis went on, “REAMDE has affected users from at least forty-three different countries that we know about. If we say yes to one, we have to say yes to all of them.”
“And then our company is being micromanaged by the United Nations,” Richard said. “Awesome.” He was way too old to use this all-purpose adjective sincerely but was not above throwing it into a sentence for ironic effect.
“The legal issues are just fantastically complex,” C-plus said, “given all the different nationalities. So I’m not here to tell you that we’ve got an answer. But it helps that each individual event is a very small crime. Seventy-three dollars at current exchange rates. Under the radar as far as serious criminal prosecution is concerned.”
“I have a headache already,” Richard said. “Is there anything you actually need me to do? Or are you just…”
“Just cluing you in,” C-plus said. “I’m sure that the PR staff will want some quality time with you before you go on the road.”
“They just want to tell me to shut up,” Richard said. “I already know that.”
“That is not the actual point. They just want to be seen as having done their jobs.”
Richard fell silent for a while, wondering whether there was any way that he could delegate to an underling all meetings whose sole purpose was for the people he was meeting with to demonstrate that they were doing their jobs. Then he realized he should have just stayed in the Schloss if that was what he really wanted.
Half an hour later they were at Corporation 9592’s headquarters, chilling out in a small conference room with an oversized LCD video screen. Corvallis offered to “drive,” meaning that he would operate the mouse and keyboard, but Richard asserted his prerogative, dragging the controls over to his side of the table and then logging in using his personal account. All his characters were listed on the splash screen. Compared to some players, he didn’t have that many: only eight. Even though he understood, intellectually, that they were just software bots, it made him feel somehow guilty to know that they were all sitting in their home zones twenty-four hours a day, executing their bothaviors, and waiting for the master to log in and exercise them.
He scanned the list of names and decided, what the hell, he would just unlimber Egdod.