Trio of Sorcery (28 page)

And found himself staring up at the Wendigo's ugly face.

Inside the Trading Post safe zone.

It grinned at him, stomped his avatar flat, sucked all the health out of him, and left him planted on the ground, as it lumbered away in search of more victims.

The nerf wasn't in.

Except that it was. According to the code, it was. According to the Wendigo, it wasn't.

By midmorning, everyone knew. There was the kind of silence in the place that you usually only got at funerals—the kind of funeral where at least half of those attending are pretty sure the corpse is going to jump out of the coffin and start eating brains in the next fifteen minutes.

By lunchtime the entire team was sweating, because everyone had tried nerfing the Wendigo. The server went down. The patch went in. The server came up. The patch was gone.

The servers still weren't up. The natives were getting restless, complaints flooding the boards. The forum trolls were, as Sean put it, “going for the gold in whinging.” As the Wendigo once again bypassed every god-mode protection and stomped Tom's avatar into a thin film on its filthy sole for the umpteenth time while the crowd around him watched, things suddenly went
that kind
of quiet.

Slowly, Tom turned around. Mark Taylor was watching, face unreadable, arms crossed over his chest.

“Servers are still down,” he said in a neutral tone.

Tom nodded.

“Players aren't happy.”

Again Tom nodded.

“If we bring them up without the nerf are things going to be any worse than they were yesterday?” he asked, coming straight to the point.

Tom shook his head.

“Fine. Write new stuff for the patch notes and the forums. Tell people that the new zone is unexpectedly dangerous and that until we tweak it, there's going to be a lot of planting. Then let them play.” He looked around at his dev and design team, or those bits of it that weren't off getting whatever version of Christmas spirit floated their boats. “There are thirty-six zones in this game that aren't
acting like this. If people still want to go into the thirty-seventh after being cautioned, that's their privilege.” He rubbed the side of his face wearily, and it occurred to Tom that he must have been aware all along of how bad the problem was. And that he—Mark Taylor, CEO, signature character Johnny Worldwalker—had been burning as much midnight oil as Tom had. “What the hell, it'll give some of those hard-asses who are always complaining that the game's too easy something to smack their heads against. Bring 'em up. Bring 'em all up. You”—he pointed to Sean—“go write the patch notes. You”—this time it was Kathy—“go throw the forum trolls their meat. And you, Tom—”

Tom winced.

“I had a look at the CV for that consultant you were talking to. And I made some calls. Go down to Personnel, pick up the contract for her—it's already signed—and hand deliver it. Then escort her here.”

Tom blinked at him, certain he hadn't heard what he
thought
he had just heard.

“Chop-chop!” Mark Taylor said sharply. Tom jumped to his feet and hit the ground running. He hadn't heard that tone in Mark's voice since the day some idiot with a backhoe on the East Coast cut through one of the major fiber-optic Net trunks and left the East Coast servers virtually unreachable for most of the player base.

Oh, my God,
was all he could think, over and over again.
Oh, my God. Mark hired a loony. Or Mark hired a witch. And I don't know which it is. What's next, a voodoo doctor?

Maybe,
he thought, as he headed for his car in the parking garage, contract and NDA safely in the briefcase that Laura in Personnel had helpfully supplied him with,
I had better lay in a supply of chickens and goats.
…

The loony—or witch—brought an overnight bag with her. Tom was impressed with her dedication. At least she was serious. She was prepared to pull at least one all-nighter.

He mentioned that in the car on the way back. She gave him an opaque look out of those changeable sea-green eyes. “Of course I'm serious. This is your livelihood, the livelihood of—how many people? From the mailroom to server maintenance to Mark Taylor. Best-case scenario, this is something I can track down and nail down fast, so that no one is aware of anything more than a long maintenance outage. Players don't bitch and moan any more than usual, and nothing affects your income.”

“You know what this is?” he asked hopefully.

She shrugged. “I have some theories. I'll brief your team when we get there. We'll be doing a lot of stuff on one or more of the live servers. I promise not to crash it.”

“Worse-case scenario?” He looked at the street straight ahead of him.

“I have some theories. And some plans. And I hope that I don't have to tell you about them. If I do, it means things will have gone astonishingly pear-shaped, and
we'll be worrying about something more than a loss of income stream.”

Uh, that was reassuring.

“Taylor—”

“Already scheduled as soon as I get there. I will spend one hour with Taylor, no more. Then I meet with you devs and designers and him. And you think I'm a loony, don't you?” He didn't take his eyes off the road, but her bluntness startled him, and he caught the edge of her sardonic smile from the corner of his eye. “I had you convinced while you were in my office, and the moment you walked away, that started eroding. Don't worry about it, it's perfectly normal and the usual reaction. You won't believe again until you see what I do in action. And you will see—provided you can give me a real-time trace on your Wendigo.” She paused. “It knows you're aware of it now. I don't think you'll be seeing it despawn on its own anymore.”

Tom bit back his first response, which was that it had to, it was written in the code that it despawn after a certain period of time. But it wasn't behaving the way the code said it would. And—

“It's aware of us? You don't mean it's self-aware?” He shook his head. “Okay, you
are
loony, that's just not possible—”

“It's not possible for mere code,” she corrected patiently. “But what you have is only shaped by the code, it's not confined by the code anymore. It's—but I'm getting
ahead of myself. I want all of you to hear this, so I don't have to repeat myself.” At that moment, he turned into the parking garage and, frustratingly, she clammed up.

Ell vanished into Taylor's office for a bit more than the hour she had predicted. Meanwhile, Tom was busy explaining what it was she supposedly did, and laying out what of her theory that he could remember. Which wasn't as much as he thought, and he was making a muddle of it when he and his team were summoned to the big conference room.

He half expected Mark Taylor to be in there alone. And he wasn't sure just what Mark's reaction was going to be to all this
X Files
stuff. But there Ellen was, in the chair at Taylor's right, looking like Wolf the Fixer from
Pulp Fiction,
and with that same air of being able to get the job done. They both waited while the other five filed in, then Ellen got up and shut the door.

She turned to face them with a disarming smile. Today the wild mane of red curls was pulled back into a ponytail, and she wore what looked like a standard business suit—but it was made of denim and there was a tank top underneath the suit jacket.

Taylor folded his hands atop a stack of papers. “I'll warn you all, this is going to sound delusional. But every time you start to think about locking us up, think back to what the Wendigo is doing and ask yourself if there is a so-called sane and rational explanation for
that.
”

He said “us.” So he believes her…holy guacamole.

With that for an introduction, Ellen went into her song and dance routine. But this time either Tom paid more attention, or she added some detail, because it all started to make even more sense than it had the first time.

“I've had a look at your bible for this zone,” she said at last. She looked pained. “On the one hand, I have to say, well done when it comes to doing your research. But on the other…
oy
. I wish you guys had been a little less thorough.”

“What do you mean?” Kathy asked, looking puzzled.

“Because you were thorough and very accurate, you have tapped into some ancient archetypes, which means…which means, in a very Jungian sense, that the whole is far, far more than the sum of its parts. You took the architecture of the zone from extant buildings, with terrain and landscape you re-created from real places. And as for your enemies—” Her brow creased as she thought before she said anything else. “Well…our buddy the Wendigo, for instance. You've basically built a mythago there, because you adhered so faithfully to the Native American descriptions.”

“What's a ‘mythago'?” Tom asked.

“It's a term invented by Robert Holdstock to describe idealized mythic images come to life.” She shook her head. “In retrospect, I should have guessed this day was going to come. The more realistic you make games, the more people believe in them as they play them. If any of your players have untapped magical ability, the more they
believe, the more of that gets invested in the reality of the game. You have a huge game; even a tiny percentage adds up to a lot of actual players that have magical ability. It's a positive feedback thing. You'll see it in people who are insanely lucky in the game; they believe in their character, believe it is unstoppable, and to an extent, especially when there are no other players around with conflicting beliefs, they influence the game in their favor. Remember, it's all bit switches, and those are easy if you have the talent for magic. Even if you don't know that you have it, or that you're doing it.” She started to run her hand through her hair, then stopped. “So when you devs add things into the game that lots of people have believed in, not only in the here and now but in the past, all that magical pressure keeps things tweaked in that direction. And then, when you code in something that people believed in for centuries…you get a mythago.”

“Belief can be very powerful,” Taylor said unexpectedly. “Powerful enough to create things in the real world. I'm not surprised it can create something in cyberspace.”

Ell nodded. “Now I
think
—I hope—that the reason your patches haven't taken and the thing keeps resetting is because it is a mythago and not”—she hesitated, then said—“not something else. It's being reset by the collective belief in it, embedded in the matrix of accurate description. In essence, because of that pressure of belief, you've made self-repairing code. It can't not be cannibalistic, it can't lose that game power, because that's what a Wendigo
is
, and
making it otherwise would be making it into something that was not a Wendigo. Like memory plastic always returns to the shape it was cast in. Does that make sense?”

Erik, the dev who designed the Wendigo, sighed. “As much as anything does about this situation.”

Ellen turned her attention back to Tom. “So, now I have a question. Just how defeatable is the Wendigo, right this minute?”

He shrugged. “It can be done…it just takes a lot of people. I think you'll need five full teams at least, eight for sure, and about half an hour. Most people aren't willing to invest that much time and effort in defeating a Boss. You can do a quest in the same time for a lot more loot.”

“So let's make it worth their time.” She turned her attention back to Mark Taylor. “How terrible would it be to your game economy to make it really worth defeating this thing? Make sure that until we get this solved everyone on every team that takes down one of the manifestations gets a really sweet drop? Much gold, much experience, and everybody gets a goody.”

Taylor made his “thinking” face. “If it's short term…the problem is that the gold farmers and the power gamers will be on it like white on rice…”

“And for once, is this a bad thing?” she retorted. “Let them be useful for a change. While they're swarming it, it won't be bothering your regular players. And we want to make sure that the reward compensates them for the inevitable faceplants.”

“She has a point,” Kathy agreed.

“The loot is not an intrinsic part of the mythago, so I am pretty sure it won't reset every time you try to load it with the enhanced tables.” Ell patted the zone bible. “Meanwhile I can look at what you did in detail, so I can figure out what is going on with the rest of the zone as well as how to un-mythago it.” She paused and looked at Tom. “And I may ask you to log in an avatar in god-mode so I can do a real-time trace or a code capture on it when it squashes you.”

He winced. The way the thing looked past his avatar and straight at the screen still gave him the creeps, and he wasn't too happy about having that experience again. “Why me?”