PIMPF
I HATE DAYS LIKE THIS.
It’s a rainy Monday morning and I’m late in to work
at the Laundry because of a technical fault on the Tube. When I get
to my desk, the first thing I find is a note from Human Resources
that says one of their management team wants to talk to me,
soonest, about playing computer games at work. And to put the
cherry on top of the shit-pie, the office’s coffee percolator is
empty because none of the other inmates in this goddamn loony bin
can be arsed refilling it. It’s enough to make me long for a high
place and a rifle . . . but in the end I head for Human Resources
to take the bull by the horns, decaffeinated and mean as only a
decaffeinated Bob can be.
Over in the dizzying heights of HR, the furniture
is fresh and the windows recently cleaned. It’s a far cry from the
dingy rats’ nest of Ops Division, where I normally spend my working
time. But ours is not to wonder why (at least in public).
“Ms. MacDougal will see you now,” says the
receptionist on the front desk, looking down her nose at me
pityingly. “Do try not to shed on the carpet, we had it steam
cleaned this morning.” Bastards.
I slouch across the thick, cream wool towards the
inner sanctum of Emma MacDougal, senior vice-superintendent,
Personnel Management (Operations), trying not to gawk like a
resentful yokel at the luxuries on parade. It’s not the first time
I’ve been here, but I can never shake the sense that I’m entering
another world, graced by visitors of ministerial import and
elevated budget. The dizzy heights of the real civil
service, as opposed to us poor Morlocks in Ops Division who keep
everything running.
“Mr. Howard, do come in.” I straighten
instinctively when Emma addresses me. She has that effect on most
people—she was born to be a headmistress or a tax inspector, but
unfortunately she ended up in Human Resources by mistake and she’s
been letting us know about it ever since. “Have a seat.” The room
reeks of quiet luxury by Laundry standards: my chair is big,
comfortable, and hasn’t been bumped, scraped, and abraded into a
pile of kindling by generations of visitors. The office is bright
and airy, and the window is clean and has a row of attractively
un-browned potted plants sitting before it. (The computer squatting
on her desk is at least twice as expensive as anything I’ve been
able to get my hands on via official channels, and it’s not even
switched on.) “How good of you to make time to see me.” She
smiles like a razor. I stifle a sigh; it’s going to be one of
those sessions.
“I’m a busy man.” Let’s see if deadpan will
work, hmm?
“I’m sure you are. Nevertheless.” She taps a piece
of paper sitting on her blotter and I tense. “I’ve been hearing
disturbing reports about you, Bob.”
Oh, bollocks. “What kind of reports?” I ask
warily.
Her smile’s cold enough to frost glass. “Let me be
blunt. I’ve had a report—I hesitate to say who from—about you
playing computer games in the office.”
Oh. That. “I see.”
“According to this report you’ve been playing
rather a lot of Neverwinter Nights recently.” She runs her finger
down the printout with relish. “You’ve even sequestrated an old
departmental server to run a persistent realm—a multiuser online
dungeon.” She looks up, staring at me intently. “What have you got
to say for yourself?”
I shrug. What’s to say? She’s got me bang to
rights. “Um.”
“Um indeed.” She taps a finger on the page. “Last
Tuesday you played Neverwinter Nights for four hours. This Monday
you played it for two hours in the morning and three hours in the
afternoon, staying on for an hour after your official flexitime
shift ended. That’s six straight hours. What have you got to say
for yourself?”
“Only six?” I lean forwards.
“Yes. Six hours.” She taps the memo again. “Bob.
What are we paying you for?”
I shrug. “To put the hack into
hack-and-slay.”
“Yes, Bob, we’re paying you to search online
role-playing games for threats to national security. But you only
averaged four hours a day last week . . . isn’t this rather a poor
use of your time?”
SAVE ME FROM AMBITIOUS BUREAUCRATS. THIS IS the
Laundry, the last overmanned organization of the civil service in
London, and they’re everywhere—trying to climb the greasy
pole, playing snakes and ladders with the org chart, running
esoteric counterespionage operations in the staff toilets, and
rationing the civil service tea bags. I guess it serves Mahogany
Row’s purposes to keep them running in circles and distracting one
another, but sometimes it gets in the way. Emma MacDougal is by no
means the worst of the lot: she’s just a starchy Human Resources
manager on her way up, stymied by the full promotion ladder above
her. But she’s trying to butt in and micromanage inside my
department (that is, inside Angleton’s department), and just
to show how efficient she is, she’s actually been reading my time
sheets and trying to stick her oar in on what I should be
doing.
To get out of MacDougal’s office I had to explain
three times that my antiquated workstation kept crashing and needed
a system rebuild before she’d finally take the hint. Then she said
something about sending me some sort of administrative assistant—an
offer that I tried to decline without causing mortal offense.
Sensing an opening, I asked if she could provide a budget line item
for a new computer—but she spotted where I was coming from and cut
me dead, saying that wasn’t in HR’s remit, and that was the end of
it.
ANYWAY, I’M NOW LOOKING AT MY WATCH AND IT turns
out that it’s getting on for lunch. I’ve lost another
morning’s prime gaming time. So I head back to my office, and just
as I’m about to open the door I hear a rustling, crunching sound
coming from behind it, like a giant hamster snacking down on trail
mix. I can’t express how disturbing this is. Rodent menaces from
beyond space-time aren’t supposed to show up during my meetings
with HR, much less hole up in my office making disturbing noises.
What’s going on?
I rapidly consider my options, discarding the most
extreme ones (Facilities takes a dim view of improvised ordnance
discharges on Government premises), and finally do the obvious. I
push the door open, lean against the battered beige filing cabinet
with the jammed drawer, and ask, “Who are you and what are you
doing to my computer?”
I intend the last phrase to come out as an ominous
growl, but it turns into a strangled squeak of rage. My visitor
looks up at me from behind my monitor, eyes black and beady, and
cheek-pouches stuffed with—ah, there’s an open can of Pringles
sitting on my in-tray. “Yuh?”
“That’s my computer.” I’m breathing rapidly all of
a sudden, and I carefully set my coffee mug down next to the
light-sick petunia so that I don’t drop it by accident. “Back away
from the keyboard, put down the mouse, and nobody needs to get
hurt.” And most especially, my sixth-level cleric-sorcerer gets to
keep all his experience points and gold pieces without some
munchkin intruder selling them all on a dodgy auction site and
re-skilling me as an exotic dancer with chloracne.
It must be my face; he lifts up his hands and
stares at me nervously, then swallows his cud of potato crisps.
“You must be Mr. Howard?”
I begin to get an inkling. “No, I’m the grim
fucking reaper.” My eyes take in more telling details: his sallow
skin, the acne and straggly goatee beard. Ye gods and little
demons, it’s like looking in a time-traveling mirror. I grin
nastily. “I asked you once and I won’t ask you again: Who are
you?”
He gulps. “I’m Pete. Uh, Pete Young. I was told to
come here by Andy, uh, Mr. Newstrom. He says I’m your new
intern.”
“My new what . . . ?” I trail off. Andy,
you’re a bastard! But I repeat myself. “Intern. Yeah, right.
How long have you been here? In the Laundry, I mean.”
He looks nervous. “Since last Monday
morning.”
“Well, this is the first anyone’s told me about an
intern,” I explain carefully, trying to keep my voice level because
blaming the messenger won’t help; anyway, if Pete’s telling the
truth he’s so wet behind the ears I could use him to water the
plants. “So now I’m going to have to go and confirm that. You just
wait here.” I glance at my desktop. Hang on, what would I
have done five or so years ago . . . ? “No, on second
thoughts, come with me.”
THE OPS WING IS A MAZE OF TWISTY LITTLE
PASSAGEWAYS, all alike. Cramped offices open off them, painted
institutional green and illuminated by underpowered bulbs lightly
dusted with cobwebs. It isn’t like this on Mahogany Row or over the
road in Administration, but those of us who actually contribute to
the bottom line get to mend and make do. (There’s a malicious,
persistent rumor that this is because the Board wants to encourage
a spirit of plucky us-against-the-world self-reliance in Ops, and
the easiest way to do that is to make every requisition for a box
of paper clips into a Herculean struggle. I subscribe to the other,
less popular theory: they just don’t care.)
I know my way through these dingy tunnels; I’ve
worked here for years. Andy has been a couple of rungs above me in
the org chart for all that time. These days he’s got a corner
office with a blond Scandinavian pine desk. (It’s a corner office
on the second floor with a view over the alley where the local
Chinese take-away keeps their dumpsters, and the desk came from
IKEA, but his office still represents the cargo-cult trappings of
upward mobility; we beggars in Ops can’t be choosy.) I see the red
light’s out, so I bang on his door.
“Come in.” He sounds even more world-weary than
usual, and so he should be, judging from the pile of spreadsheet
printouts scattered across the desk in front of him. “Bob?” He
glances up and sees the intern. “Oh, I see you’ve met Pete.”
“Pete tells me he’s my intern,” I say, as
pleasantly as I can manage under the circumstances. I pull out the
ratty visitor’s chair with the hole in the seat stuffing and slump
into it. “And he’s been in the Laundry since the beginning of this
week.” I glance over my shoulder; Pete is standing in the doorway
looking uncomfortable, so I decide to move White Pawn to Black
Castle Four or whatever it’s called: “Come on in, Pete; grab a
chair.” (The other chair is a crawling horror covered in
mouse-bitten lever arch files labeled STRICTLY SECRET.) It’s
important to get the message across that I’m not leaving without an
answer, and camping my henchsquirt on Andy’s virtual in-tray is a
good way to do that. (Now if only I can figure out what I’m
supposed to be asking . . . ) “What’s going on?”
“Nobody told you?” Andy looks puzzled.
“Okay, let me rephrase. Whose idea was it, and what
am I meant to do with him?”
“I think it was Emma MacDougal’s. In Human
Resources.” Oops, he said Human Resources. I can feel my
stomach sinking already. “We picked him up in a routine sweep
through Erewhon space last month.” (Erewhon is a new Massively
Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game that started up, oh, about two
months ago, with only a few thousand players so far. Written by a
bunch of spaced-out games programmers from Gothenburg.) “Boris iced
him and explained the situation, then put him through induction.
Emma feels that it’d be better if we trialed the mentoring program
currently on roll-out throughout Admin to see if it’s an
improvement over our traditional way of inducting new staff into
Ops, and his number came up.” Andy raises a fist and coughs into
it, then waggles his eyebrows at me significantly.
“As opposed to hiding out behind the wet shrubbery
for a few months before graduating to polishing Angleton’s
gear-wheels?” I shrug. “Well, I can’t say it’s a bad idea—”
Nobody ever accuses HR of having a bad idea; they’re subtle
and quick to anger, and their revenge is terrible to behold. “—but
a little bit of warning would have been nice. Some mentoring for
the mentor, eh?”
The feeble quip is only a trial balloon, but Andy
latches onto it immediately and with evident gratitude. “Yes, I
completely agree! I’ll get onto it at once.”
I cross my arms and grin at him lopsidedly. “I’m
waiting.”
“You’re—” His gaze slides sideways, coming to rest
on Pete. “Hmm.” I can almost see the wheels turning. Andy isn’t
aggressive, but he’s a sharp operator. “Okay, let’s start from the
beginning. Bob, this fellow is Peter-Fred Young. Peter-Fred, meet
Mr. Howard, better known as Bob. I’m—”
“—Andy Newstrom, senior operational support
manager, Department G,” I butt in smoothly. “Due to the modern
miracle of matrix management, Andy is my line manager but I work
for someone else, Mr. Angleton, who is also Andy’s boss. You
probably won’t meet him; if you do, it probably means you’re in big
trouble. That right, Andy?”
“Yes, Bob,” he says indulgently, picking right up
from my cue. “And this is Ops Division.” He looks at Peter-Fred
Young. “Your job, for the next three months, is to shadow Bob. Bob,
you’re between field assignments anyway, and Project Aurora looks
likely to keep you occupied for the whole time—Peter-Fred should be
quite useful to you, given his background.”
“Project Aurora?” Pete looks puzzled. Yeah, and me,
too.
“What is his background, exactly?” I ask.
Here it comes . . .
“Peter-Fred used to design dungeon modules for a
living.” Andy’s cheek twitches. “The earlier games weren’t a big
problem, but I think you can guess where this one’s going.”
“Hey, it’s not my fault!” Pete hunches defensively.
“I just thought it was a really neat scenario!”
I have a horrible feeling I know what Andy’s going
to say next. “The third-party content tools for some of the leading
MMORPGs are getting pretty hairy these days. They’re supposed to
have some recognizers built in to stop the most dangerous design
patterns getting out, but nobody was expecting Peter-Fred to try to
implement a Delta Green scenario as a Neverwinter Nights persistent
realm. If it had gone online on a public game server—assuming it
didn’t eat him during beta testing—we could have been facing a mass
outbreak.”
I turn and stare at Pete in disbelief. “That was
him?” Jesus, I could have been killed!
He stares back truculently. “Yeah. Your wizard eats
rice cakes!”
And an attitude to boot. “Andy, he’s going
to need a desk.”
“I’m working on getting you a bigger office.” He
grins. “This was Emma’s idea, she can foot the bill.”
Somehow I knew she had to be tied in with
this, but maybe I can turn it to my advantage. “If Human Resources
is involved, surely they’re paying?” Which means, deep pockets to
pick. “We’re going to need two Herman Miller Aeron chairs, an Eames
bookcase and occasional table, a desk from some eye-wateringly
expensive Italian design studio, a genuine eighty-year-old Bonsai
Californian redwood, an OC3 cable into Telehouse, and gaming
laptops. Alienware: we need lots and lots of Alienware . . .”
Andy gives me five seconds to slaver over the
fantasy before he pricks my balloon. “You’ll take Dell and like
it.”
“Even if the bad guys frag us?” I try.
“They won’t.” He looks smug. “Because you’re the
best.”
ONE OF THE ADVANTAGES OF BEING A CASH-STARVED
department is that nobody ever dares to throw anything away in case
it turns out to be useful later. Another advantage is that there’s
never any money to get things done, like (for example) refit old
offices to comply with current health and safety regulations. It’s
cheaper just to move everybody out into a Portakabin in the car
park and leave the office refurb for another financial year. At
least, that’s what they do in this day and age; thirty, forty years
ago I don’t know where they put the surplus bodies. Anyway, while
Andy gets on the phone to Emma to plead for a budget, I lead Pete
on a fishing expedition.
“This is the old segregation block,” I explain,
flicking on a light switch. “Don’t come in here without a light or
the grue will get you.”
“You’ve got grues? Here?” He looks so excited at
the prospect that I almost hesitate to tell him the truth.
“No, I just meant you’d just step in something
nasty. This isn’t an adventure game.” The dust lies in gentle
snowdrifts everywhere, undisturbed by outsourced cleaning
services—contractors generally take one look at the seg block and
double their quote, going over the ministerially imposed cap (which
gets imposed rigorously on Ops, freeing up funds so Human Resources
can employ plant beauticians to lovingly wax the leaves on their
office rubber plants).
“You called it a segregation block. What, uh, who
was segregated?”
I briefly toy with the idea of winding him up, then
reject it. Once you’re inside the Laundry you’re in it for life,
and I don’t really want to leave a trail of grudge-bearing juniors
sharpening their knives behind me. “People we didn’t want exposed
to the outside world, even by accident,” I say finally. “If you
work here long enough it does strange things to your head. Work
here too long, and other people can see the effects, too. You’ll
notice the windows are all frosted or else they open onto air
shafts, where there aren’t any windows in the first place,” I add,
shoving open the door onto a large, executive office marred only by
the bricked-up window frame in the wall behind the desk, and a
disturbingly wide trail of something shiny—I tell myself it’s
probably just dry wallpaper paste—leading to the swivel chair.
“Great, this is just what I’ve been looking for.”
“It is?”
“Yep, a big, empty, executive office where the
lights and power still work.”
“Whose was it?” Pete looks around curiously. “There
aren’t many sockets . . .”
“Before my time.” I pull the chair out and look at
the seat doubtfully. It was good leather once, but the seat is
hideously stained and cracked. The penny drops. “I’ve heard of this
guy. ‘Slug’ Johnson. He used to be high up in Accounts, but he made
lots of enemies. In the end someone put salt on his back.”
“You want us to work in here?” Pete asks, in a
blinding moment of clarity.
“For now,” I reassure him. “Until we can screw a
budget for a real office out of Emma from HR.”
“We’ll need more power sockets.” Pete’s eyes are
taking on a distant, glazed look and his fingers twitch mousily:
“We’ll need casemods, need overclocked CPUs, need fuck-off huge
screens, double-headed Radeon X1600 video cards.” He begins to
shake. “Nerf guns, Twinkies, LAN party—”
“Pete! Snap out of it!” I grab his shoulders and
shake him.
He blinks and looks at me blearily. “Whuh?”
I physically drag him out of the room. “First,
before we do anything else, I’m getting the cleaners in to
give it a class four exorcism and to steam clean the carpets. You
could catch something nasty in there.” You nearly did, I add
silently. “Lots of bad psychic backwash.”
“I thought he was an accountant?” says Pete,
shaking his head.
“No, he was in Accounts. Not the same thing
at all. You’re confusing them with Financial Control.”
“Huh? What do Accounts do, then?”
“They settle accounts—usually fatally. At least,
that’s what they used to do back in the ’60s; the department was
terminated some time ago.”
“Um.” Pete swallows. “I thought that was all a
joke? This is, like, the BBFC? You know?”
I blink. The British Board of Film Classification,
the people who certify video games and cut the cocks out of movies?
“Did anyone tell you what the Laundry actually does?”
“Plays lots of deathmatches?” he asks
hopefully.
“That’s one way of putting it,” I begin, then
pause. How to continue? “Magic is applied mathematics. The
many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set.
Demonology is right after debugging in the dictionary. You heard of
Alan Turing? The father of programming?”
“Didn’t he work for John Carmack?”
Oh, it’s another world out there. “Not
exactly, he built the first computers for the government, back in
the Second World War. Not just codebreaking computers; he designed
containment processors for Q Division, the Counter-Possession Unit
of SOE that dealt with demon-ridden Abwehr agents. Anyway, after
the war, they disbanded SOE—broke up all the government computers,
the Colossus machines—except for the CPU, which became the Laundry.
The Laundry kept going, defending the realm from the scum of the
multiverse. There are mathematical transforms that can link
entities in different universes—try to solve the wrong theorem and
they’ll eat your brain, or worse. Anyhow, these days more people do
more things with computers than anyone ever dreamed of. Computer
games are networked and scriptable, they’ve got compilers and
debuggers built in, you can build cities and film goddamn movies
inside them. And every so often someone stumbles across something
they’re not meant to be playing with and, well, you know the
rest.”
His eyes are wide in the shadows. “You mean, this
is government work? Like in Deus Ex?”
I nod. “That’s it exactly, kid.” Actually it’s more
like Doom 3 but I’m not ready to tell him that; he might start
pestering me for a grenade launcher.
“So we’re going to, like, set up a LAN party and
log onto lots of persistent realms and search ’n’ sweep them for
demons and blow the demons away?” He’s almost panting with
eagerness. “Wait’ll I tell my homies!”
“Pete, you can’t do that.”
“What, isn’t it allowed?”
“No, I didn’t say that.” I lead him back towards
the well-lit corridors of the Ops wing and the coffee break room
beyond. “I said you can’t do that. You’re under a geas.
Section III of the Official Secrets Act says you can’t tell anyone
who hasn’t signed the said act that Section III even exists, much
less tell them anything about what it covers. The Laundry is one
hundred percent under cover, Pete. You can’t talk about it to
outsiders, you’d choke on your own purple tongue.”
“Eew.” He looks disappointed. “You mean, like, this
is real secret stuff. Like Mum’s work.”
“Yes, Pete. It’s all really secret. Now let’s go
get a coffee and pester somebody in Facilities for a mains
extension bar and a computer.”
I SPEND THE REST OF THE DAY WANDERING FROM desk to
desk, filing requisitions and ordering up supplies, with Pete
snuffling and shambling after me like a supersized spaniel. The
cleaners won’t be able to work over Johnson’s office until next
Tuesday due to an unfortunate planetary conjunction, but I know a
temporary fix I can sketch on the floor and plug into a repurposed
pocket calculator that should hold “Slug” Johnson at bay until we
can get him exorcised. Meanwhile, thanks to a piece of freakish
luck, I discover a stash of elderly laptops nobody is using;
someone in Catering mistyped their code in their Assets database
last year, and thanks to the wonders of our ongoing ISO 9000
certification process, there is no legal procedure for
reclassifying them as capital assets without triggering a visit by
the Auditors. So I duly issue Pete with a 1.4 gigahertz Toshiba
Sandwich Toaster, enlist his help in moving my stuff into the new
office, nail a WiFi access point to the door like a tribal fetish
or mezuzah (“this office now occupied by geeks who worship the
great god GHz”), and park him on the other side of the spacious
desk so I can keep an eye on him.
The next day I’ve got a staff meeting at 10:00 a.m.
I spend the first half hour of my morning drinking coffee, making
snide remarks in e-mail, reading Slashdot, and waiting for Pete to
show up. He arrives at 9:35. “Here.” I chuck a fat wallet full of
CD-Rs at him. “Install these on your laptop, get on the intranet,
and download all the patches you need. Don’t, whatever you do,
touch my computer or try to log onto my NWN server—it’s called
Bosch, by the way. I’ll catch up with you after the meeting.”
“Why is it called Bosch?” he whines as I stand up
and grab my security badge off the filing cabinet.
“Washing machines or Hieronymus machines, take your
pick.” I head off to the conference room for the Ways and Means
Committee meeting—to investigate new ways of being mean, as Bridget
(may Nyarlathotep rest her soul) once explained it to me.
At first I’m moderately hopeful I’ll be able to
stay awake through the meeting. But then Lucy, a bucktoothed goth
from Facilities, gets the bit between her incisors. She’s going on
in a giggly way about the need to outsource our administration of
office sundries in order to focus on our core competencies, and I’m
trying desperately hard not to fall asleep, when there’s an odd
thudding sound that echoes through the fabric of the building. Then
a pager goes off.
Andy’s at the other end of the table. He looks at
me: “Bob, your call, I think.”
I sigh. “You think?” I glance at the pager display.
Oops, so it is. “’Scuse me folks, something’s come
up.”
“Go on.” Lucy glares at me halfheartedly
from behind her lucky charms. “I’ll minute you.”
“Sure.” And I’m out, almost an hour before lunch.
Wow, so interns are useful for something. Just as long as he
hasn’t gotten himself killed.
I trot back to Slug’s office. Peter-Fred is sitting
in his chair, with his back to the door.
“Pete?” I ask.
No reply. But his laptop’s open and running, and I
can hear its fan chugging away. “Uh-huh.” And the disc wallet is
lying open on my side of the desk.
I edge towards the computer carefully, taking pains
to stay out of eyeshot of the screen. When I get a good look at
Peter-Fred I see that his mouth’s ajar and his eyes are closed;
he’s drooling slightly. “Pete?” I say, and poke his shoulder. He
doesn’t move. Probably a good thing, I tell myself. Okay,
so he isn’t conventionally possessed . . .
When I’m close enough, I filch a sheet of paper
from the ink-jet printer, turn the lights out, and angle the paper
in front of the laptop. Very faintly I can see reflected colors,
but nothing particularly scary. “Right,” I mutter. I slide my hands
in front of the keyboard—still careful not to look directly at the
screen—and hit the key combination to bring up the interactive
debugger in the game I’m afraid he’s running. Trip an object dump,
hit the keystrokes for quick save, and quit, and I can breathe a
sigh of relief and look at the screen shot.
It takes me several seconds to figure out what I’m
looking at. “Oh you stupid, stupid arse!” It’s Peter-Fred,
of course. He installed NWN and the other stuff I threw at him: the
Laundry-issue hack pack and DM tools, and the creation toolkit.
Then he went and did exactly what I told him not to do: he
connected to Bosch. That’s him in the screenshot between the two
half-orc mercenaries in the tavern, looking very afraid.
TWO HOURS LATER BRAINS AND PINKY ARE BABY-SITTING
Pete’s supine body (we don’t dare move it yet), Bosch is locked
down and frozen, and I’m sitting on the wrong side of Angleton’s
desk, sweating bullets. “Summarize, boy,” he rumbles, fixing me
with one yellowing, rheumy eye. “Keep it simple. None of your
jargon, life’s too short.”
“He’s fallen into a game and he can’t get out.” I
cross my arms. “I told him precisely what not to do, and he went
ahead and did it. Not my fault.”
Angleton makes a wheezing noise, like a boiler
threatening to explode. After a moment I recognize it as
two-thousand-year-old laughter, mummified and out for revenge. Then
he stops wheezing. Oops, I think. “I believe you, boy.
Thousands wouldn’t. But you’re going to have to get him out. You’re
responsible.”
I’m responsible? I’m about to tell the old
man what I think when a second thought screeches into the pileup at
the back of my tongue and I bite my lip. I suppose I am
responsible, technically. I mean, Pete’s my intern, isn’t he? I’m a
management grade, after all, and if he’s been assigned to me, that
makes me his manager, even if it’s a post that comes with loads of
responsibility and no actual power to, like, stop him doing
something really foolish. I’m in loco parentis, or maybe
just plain loco. I whistle quietly. “What would you
suggest?”
Angleton wheezes again. “Not my field, boy, I
wouldn’t know one end of one of those newfangled Babbage machine
contraptions from the other.” He fixes me with a gimlet stare. “But
feel free to draw on HR’s budget line. I will make enquiries on the
other side to see what’s going on. But if you don’t bring him back,
I’ll make you explain what happened to him to his mother.”
“His mother?” I’m puzzled. “You mean she’s one of
us?”
“Yes. Didn’t Andrew tell you? Mrs. Young is the
deputy director in charge of Human Resources. So you’d better get
him back before she notices her son is missing.”
JAMES BOND HAS Q DIVISION; I’VE GOT PINKY and
Brains from Tech Support. Bond gets jet packs, I get whoopee
cushions, but I repeat myself. Still, at least P and B know about
first-person shooters.
“Okay, let’s go over this again,” says Brains. He
sounds unusually chipper for this early in the morning. “You set up
Bosch as a server for a persistent Neverwinter Nights world,
running the full Project Aurora hack pack. That gives you, oh, lots
of extensions for trapping demons that wander into your realm while
you trace their owner’s PCs and inject a bunch of spyware, then
call out to Accounts to send a black-bag team round in the real
world. Right?”
“Yes.” I nod. “An internet honeypot for
supernatural intruders.”
“Wibble!” That’s Pinky. “Hey, neat! So what
happened to your PFY?”
“Well . . .” I take a deep breath. “There’s a big
castle overlooking the town, with a twentieth-level sorceress
running it. Lots of glyphs of summoning in the basement dungeons,
some of which actually bind at run-time to a class library that
implements the core transformational grammar of the Language of
Leng.” I hunch over slightly. “It’s really neat to be able to do
that kind of experiment in a virtual realm—if you accidentally
summon something nasty it’s trapped inside the server or maybe your
local area network, rather than being out in the real world where
it can eat your brains.”
Brains stares at me. “You expect me to believe this
kid took out a twentieth-level sorceress? Just so he could
dick around in your dungeon lab?”
“Uh, no.” I pick up a blue-tinted CD-R. Someone—not
me—has scribbled a cartoon skull-and-crossbones on it and added a
caption: DO’NT R3AD M3. “I’ve been looking at this—carefully. It’s
not one of the discs I gave Pete; it’s one of his own. He’s not
totally clueless, for a crack-smoking script kiddie. In
fact, it’s got a bunch of interesting class libraries on it. He
went in with a knapsack full of special toys and just happened to
fuck up by trying to rob the wrong tavern. This realm, being hosted
on Bosch, is scattered with traps that are superclassed into a
bunch of scanner routines from Project Aurora and sniff for any
taint of the real supernatural. Probably he whiffed of
Laundry business—and that set off one of the traps, which yanked
him in.”
“How do you get inside a game?” asks Pinky,
looking hopeful. “Could you get me into Grand Theft Auto: Castro
Club Extreme?”
Brains glances at him in evident disgust. “You can
virtualize any universal Turing machine,” he sniffs. “Okay, Bob.
What precisely do you need from us in order to get the kid out of
there?”
I point to the laptop: “I need that, running
the Dungeon Master client inside the game. Plus a class four
summoning grid, and a lot of luck.” My guts clench. “Make that a
lot more luck than usual.”
“Running the DM client—” Brains goes cross-eyed for
a moment “—is it reentrant?”
“It will be.” I grin mirthlessly. “And I’ll need
you on the outside, running the ordinary network client, with a
couple of characters I’ll preload for you. The sorceress is holding
Pete in the third-level dungeon basement of Castle Storm. The way
the narrative’s set up she’s probably not going to do anything to
him until she’s also acquired a whole bunch of plot coupons, like a
cockatrice and a mind flayer’s gallbladder—then she can sacrifice
him and trade up to a fourth-level demon or a new castle or
something. Anyway, I’ve got a plan. Ready to kick ass?”
I HATE WORKING IN DUNGEONS. THEY’RE DANK, smelly,
dark, and things keep jumping out and trying to kill you.
That seems to be the defining characteristic of the genre, really.
Dead boring hack-and-slash—but the kiddies love ’em. I know I did,
back when I was a wee spoddy twelve-year-old. Fine, says I, we’re
not trying to snare kiddies, we’re looking to attract the more
cerebral kind of MMORPG player—the sort who’re too clever by half.
Designers, in other words.
How do you snare a dungeon designer who’s
accidentally stumbled on a way to summon up shoggoths? Well, you
need a website. The smart geeks are always magpies for ideas—they
see something new and it’s “Ooh! Shiny!” and before you can snap
your fingers they’ve done something with it you didn’t anticipate.
So you set your site up to suck them in and lock them down. You
seed it with a bunch of downloadable goodies and some interesting
chat boards—not the usual MY MAG1C USR CN TW4T UR CLERIC, D00D, but
actual useful information—useful if you’re programming in NWScript,
that is (the high-level programming language embedded in the game,
which hard-core designers write game extensions in).
But the website isn’t enough. Ideally you want to
run a networked game server—a persistent world that your victims
can connect to using their client software to see how your bunch o’
tricks looks in the virtual flesh. And finally you seed clues in
the server to attract the marks who know too damn much for their
own good, like Peter-Fred.
The problem is, BoschWorld isn’t ready yet. That’s
why I told him to stay out. Worse, there’s no easy way to dig him
out of it yet because I haven’t yet written the object retrieval
code—and worse: to speed up the development process, I grabbed a
whole bunch of published code from one of the bigger online
persistent realms, and I haven’t weeded out all the spurious quests
and curses and shit that make life exciting for adventurers. In
fact, now that I think about it, that was going to be Peter-Fred’s
job for the next month. Oops.
UNLIKE PETE, I DO NOT BLUNDER INTO BOSCH
UNPREPARED; I know exactly what to expect. I’ve got a couple of
cheats up my non-existent monk’s sleeve, including the fact that I
can enter the game with a level eighteen character carrying a
laptop with a source-level debugger—all praise the new
self-deconstructing reality!
The stone floor of the monastery is gritty and cold
under my bare feet, and there’s a chilly morning breeze blowing in
through the huge oak doors at the far end of the compound. I know
it’s all in my head—I’m actually sitting in a cramped office chair
with Pinky and Brains hammering away on keyboards to either
side—but it’s still creepy. I turn round and genuflect once in the
direction of the huge and extremely scary devil carved into the
wall behind me, then head for the exit.
The monastery sits atop some truly bizarre stone
formations in the middle of the Wild Woods. I’m supposed to fight
my way through the woods before I get to the town of, um, whatever
I named it, Stormville?—but sod that. I stick a hand into the
bottomless depths of my very expensive Bag of Holding and pull out
a scroll. “Stormville, North Gate,” I intone (Why do ancient
masters in orders of martial monks always intone, rather
than, like, speak normally?) and the scroll crumbles to dust in my
hands—and I’m looking up at a stone tower with a gate at its base
and some bint sticking a bucket out of a window on the third floor
and yelling, “Gardy loo.” Well, that worked okay.
“I’m there,” I say aloud.
Green serifed letters track across my visual field,
completely spoiling the atmosphere: WAY K00L, B08. That’ll be
Pinky, riding shotgun with his usual delicacy.
There’s a big, blue rectangle in the gateway so I
walk onto it and wait for the universe to download. It’s a long
wait—something’s gumming up Bosch. (Computers aren’t as powerful as
most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern
can really bog down a server.)
Inside the North Gate is the North Market. At
least, it’s what passes for a market in here. There’s a bunch of
zombies dressed as your standard dungeon adventurers, shambling
around with speech bubbles over their heads. Most of them are web
addresses on eBay, locations of auctions for interesting pieces of
game content, but one or two of them look as if they’ve been
crudely tampered with, especially the ass-headed nobleman
repeatedly belting himself on the head with a huge, leather-bound
copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Are you guys sure we
haven’t been hacked?” I ask aloud. “If you could check the tripwire
logs, Brains . . .” It’s a long shot, but it might offer an
alternate explanation for Pete’s predicament.
I slither, sneak, and generally shimmy my monastic
ass around the square, avoiding the quainte olde medieval gallows
and the smoking hole in the ground that used to be the Alchemists’
Guild. On the east side of the square is the Wayfarer’s Tavern, and
some distance to the southwest I can see the battlements and
turrets of Castle Storm looming out of the early morning mists in a
surge of gothic cheesecake. I enter the tavern, stepping on the
blue rectangle and waiting while the world pauses, then head for
the bar.
“Right, I’m in the bar,” I say aloud, pulling my
Project Aurora laptop out of the Bag of Holding. (Is it my
imagination, or does something snap at my fingertips as I pull my
hand out?) “Has the target moved?”
N0 J0Y, B08.
I sigh, unfolding the screen. Laptops aren’t
exactly native to NWN; this one’s made of two slabs of sapphire
held together by scrolled mithril hinges. I stare into the glowing
depths of its screen (tailored from a preexisting crystal ball) and
load a copy of the pub. Looking in the back room I see a bunch of
standard henchmen, -women, and -things waiting to be hired, but
none of them are exactly optimal for taking on the twentieth-level
lawful-evil chatelaine of Castle Storm. Hmm, better bump one of
’em, I decide. Let’s go for munchkin muscle. “Pinky? I’d
like you to drop a quarter of a million experience points on
Grondor the Red, then up-level him. Can you do that?” Grondor is
the biggest bad-ass half-orc fighter-for-hire in Bosch. This ought
to turn him into a one-man killing machine.
0|< D00D.
I can tell he’s really getting into the spirit of
this. The barmaid sashays up to me and winks. “Hiya, cute thing.
(1) Want to buy a drink? (2) Want to ask questions about the town
and its surroundings? (3) Want to talk about anything else?”
I sigh. “Gimme (1).”
“Okay. (1) G’bye, big boy. (2) Anything
else?”
“(1). Get me my beer then piss off.”
One of these days I’ll get around to wiring a real
conversational ’bot into the non-player characters, but right now
they’re still a bit—
There’s a huge sound from the back room, sort of a
creaking graunching noise. I blink and look round, startled. After
a moment I realize it’s the sound of a quarter of a million
experience points landing on a—
“Pinky, what exactly did you up-level Grondor the
Red to?”
LVL 15 C0RTE5AN. LOL!!!
“Oh, great,” I mutter. I’ll swear that’s not a real
character class. A fat, manila envelope appears on the bar in front
of me. It’s Grondor’s contract, and from the small print it looks
like I’ve hired myself a fifteenth-level half-orc rent-boy for
muscle. Which is annoying because I only get one henchthug per
game. “One of these days your sense of humor is going to get me
into really deep trouble, Pinky,” I say as Grondor flounces
across the rough wooden floor towards me, a vision of ruffles,
bows, pink satin, and upcurved tusks. He’s clutching a violet club
in one gnarly, red-nailed hand, and he seems to be annoyed about
something.
After a brief and uncomfortable interlude that
involves running on the walls and ceiling, I manage to calm Grondor
down, but by then half the denizens of the tavern are broken and
bleeding. “Grondor pithed,” he lisps at me. “But Grondor thtill
kickth ath. Whoth ath you wanting kicked?”
“The wicked witch of the west. You up for
it?”
He blows me a kiss.
LOL!!! ROFL!!! whoops the peanut gallery.
“Okay, let’s go.”
NUMEROUS ALARUMS, EXCURSIONS, AND OPEN-PALM
five-punch death attacks later, we arrive at Castle Storm. Sitting
out in front of the cruel-looking portcullis, topped by the
dismembered bodies of the sorceress’s enemies and not a few of her
friends, I open up the laptop. A miniature thundercloud hovers
overhead, raining on the turrets and bouncing lightning bolts off
the (currently inanimate) gargoyles.
“Connect me to Lady Storm’s boudoir mirror.” I say.
(I try to make it come out as an inscrutable monkish mutter rather
than intoning, but it doesn’t work properly.)
“Hello? Who is this?” I see her face peering out of
the depths of my screen, like an unholy cross between Cruella De
Vil and Margaret Thatcher. She’s not wearing make-up and half her
hair’s in curlers—That’s odd, I think.
“This is the management,” I intone. “We have been
notified that contrary to statutory regulations issued by the
Council of Guilds of Stormville you are running an unauthorized
boarding house, to wit, you are providing accommodation for
mendicant journeymen. Normally we’d let you off with a warning and
a fifty-gold-piece fine, but in this particular case—”
I’m readying the amulet of teleportation, but she
seems to be able to anticipate events, which is just plain wrong
for a non-player character following a script. “Accommodate
this!” she hisses, and cuts the connection dead. There’s a
hammering rumbling sound overhead. I glance up, then take to my
heels as I wrap my arms about my head; she’s animated the
gargoyles, and they’re taking wing, but they’re still made of
stone—and stone isn’t known for its lighter-than-air qualities. The
crashing thunder goes on for quite some time, and the dust makes my
eyes sting, but after a while all that remains is the mournful
honking of the one surviving gargoyle, which learned to fly on its
way down, and is now circling the battlements overhead. And now
it’s my turn.
“Right. Grondor? Open that door!”
Grondor snarls, then flounces forwards and whacks
the portcullis with his double-headed war axe. The physics model in
here is distinctly imaginative; you shouldn’t be able to reduce a
cast-iron grating into a pile of wooden kindling, but I’m not
complaining. Through the portcullis we charge, into the bowels of
Castle Storm and, I hope, in time to rescue Pete.
I don’t want to bore you with a blow-by-blow
description of our blow-by-blow progress through Cruella’s minions.
Suffice to say that following Grondor is a lot like trailing behind
a frothy pink main battle tank. Thuggish guards, evil imps, and the
odd adept tend to explode messily very soon after Grondor sees
them. Unfortunately Grondor’s not very discriminating, so I make
sure to go first in order to keep him away from cunningly
engineered deadfalls (and Pete, should we find him). Still, it
doesn’t take us too long to comb the lower levels of the caverns
under Castle Storm (aided by the handy dungeon editor in my laptop,
which allows me to build a bridge over the Chasm of Despair and
tunnel through the rock around the Dragon’s Lair, which isn’t very
sporting but keeps us from being toasted). Which is why, after a
couple of hours, I’m beginning to get a sinking feeling that Pete
isn’t actually here.
“Brains, Pete isn’t down here, is he? Or am I
missing something?”
H3Y d0NT B3 5AD D00D F1N|< 0V V XP!!!
“Fuck off, Pinky, give me some useful input or just
fuck off, okay?” I realize I’m shouting when the rock wall
next to me begins to crack ominously. The hideous possibility that
I’ve lost Pete is sinking its claws into my brain and it’s worse
than any Fear spell.
OK KEEP UR HAIR 0N!! 15 THIS A QU3ST?? D0 U N33D 2
C0NFRONT S0RCR3SS 1ST?
I stop dead. “I bloody hope not. Did you notice how
she was behaving?”
Brains here. I’m grepping the server logfile and
did you know there’s another user connected over the intranet
bridge?
“Whu—” I turn around and accidentally bump into
Grondor.
Grondor says, “(1) Do you wish to modify our
tactics? (2) Do you want Grondor to attack someone? (3) Do you
think Grondor is sexy, big boy? (4) Exit?”
“(4),” I intone—if I leave him in a conversational
state he won’t be going anywhere, dammit. “Okay, Brains. Have you
tracerouted the intrusion? Bosch isn’t supposed to be accessible
from outside the local network. What department are they coming in
from?”
They’re coming in from—a longish
pause—somewhere in HR.
“Okay, the plot just thickened. So someone in HR
has gotten in. Any idea who the player is?” I’ve got a sneaking
suspicion but I want to hear it from Brains—
Not IRL, but didn’t Cruella act way too flexible
to be a ’bot?
Bollocks. That is what I was thinking.
“Okay. Grondor: follow. We’re going upstairs to see the wicked
witch.”
Now, let me tell you about castles. They don’t have
elevators, or fire escapes, or extinguishers. Real ones don’t have
exploding whoopee cushions under the carpet and electrified
door-handles that blush red when you notice them, either, or an
ogre resting on the second-floor mezzanine, but that’s beside the
point. Let me just observe that by the time I reach the fourth
floor I am beginning to breathe heavily and I am getting distinctly
pissed off with Her Eldritch Fearsomeness.
At the foot of the wide, glittering staircase in
the middle of the fourth floor I temporarily lose Grondor. It might
have something to do with the tenth-level mage lurking behind the
transom with a magic flamethrower, or the simultaneous arrival of
about a ton of steel spikes falling from concealed ceiling panels,
but Grondor is reduced to a greasy pile of goo on the floor. I sigh
and do something to the mage that would be extremely painful if he
were a real person. “Is she upstairs?” I ask the glowing
letters.
SUR3 TH1NG D00D!!!
“Any more traps?”
N0!!??!
“Cool.” I step over the grease spot and pause just
in front of the staircase. It never pays to be rash. I pick up a
stray steel spike and chuck it on the first step and it goes
BANG with extreme prejudice. “Not so cool.” Rinse, cycle,
repeat, and four small explosions later I’m standing in front of
the doorway facing the top step. No more whoopee cushions, just a
twentieth-level sorceress and a minion in chains. Happy joy.
“Pinky. Plan B. Get it ready to run, on my word.”
I break through the door and enter the witch’s
lair.
Once you’ve seen one witch’s den you’ve seen ’em
all. This one is a bit glitzier than usual, and some of the
furniture is nonstandard even taking into account the Laundry hack
packs linked into this realm. Where did she get the mainframe
from? I wonder briefly before considering the extremely ominous
Dho-Na geometry curve in the middle of the floor (complete with a
frantic-looking Pete chained down in the middle of it) and the
extremely irate-looking sorceress beyond.
“Emma MacDougal, I presume?”
She turns my way, spitting blood. “If it wasn’t for
you meddling hackers, I’d have gotten away with it!” Oops, she’s
raising her magic wand.
“Gotten away with what?” I ask politely. “Don’t you
want to explain your fiendish plan, as is customary, before totally
obliterating your victims? I mean, that’s a Dho-Na curve there, so
you’re obviously planning a summoning, and this server is inside
Ops block. Were you planning some sort of low-key
downsizing?”
She snorts. “You stupid Ops heads, why do you
always assume it’s about you?”
“Because—” I shrug. “We’re running on a server in
Ops. What do you think happens if you open a gateway for an ancient
evil to infest our departmental LAN?”
“Don’t be naïve. All that’s going to happen is
Pimple-Features here is going to pick up a good, little, gibbering
infestation then go spread it to Mama. Which will open up the
promotion ladder once again.” She stares at me, then her eyes
narrow thoughtfully. “How did you figure out it was me?”
“You should have used a smaller mainframe emulator,
you know; we’re so starved for resources that Bosch runs on a
three-year-old Dell laptop. If you weren’t slurping up all our CPU
resources, we probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was wrong
until it was too late. It had to be someone in HR, and you’re the
only player on the radar. Mind you, putting poor Peter-Fred in a
position of irresistible temptation was a good move. How did you
open the tunnel into our side of the network?”
“He took his laptop home at night. Have you swept
it for spyware today?” Her grin turns triumphant. “I think it’s
time you joined Pete on the summoning-grid sacrifice node.”
“Plan B!” I announce brightly, then run up the wall
and across the ceiling until I’m above Pete.
P1AN 8 :) :) :)
The room below my head lurches disturbingly as
Pinky rearranges the furniture. It’s just a ninety-degree rotation,
and Pete’s still in the summoning grid, but now he’s in the target
node instead of the sacrifice zone. Emma is incanting; her wand
tracks me, its tip glowing green. “Do it, Pinky!” I shout as I pull
out my dagger and slice my virtual finger. Blood runs down the
blade and drops into the sacrifice node—
And Pete stands up. The chains holding him to the
floor rip like damp cardboard, his eyes glowing even brighter than
Emma’s wand. With no actual summoning vector spliced into the grid
it’s wide open, an antenna seeking the nearest manifestation. With
my blood to power it, it’s active, and the first thing it resonates
with has come through and sideloaded into Pete’s head. His head
swivels. “Get her!” I yell, clenching my fist and trying not to
wince. “She’s from personnel?”
“Personnel?” rumbles a voice from Pete’s
mouth—deeper, more cultured, and infinitely more terrifying.
“Ah, I see. Thank you.” The being wearing Pete’s flesh steps
across the grid—which sparks like a high-tension line and begins to
smolder. Emma’s wand wavers between me and Pete. I thrust my
injured hand into the Bag of Holding and stifle a scream when my
fingers stab into the bag of salt within. “It’s been too
long.” His face begins to lengthen, his jaw widening and
merging at the edges. He sticks his tongue out: it’s grayish-brown
and rasplike teeth are sprouting from it.
Emma screams in rage and discharges her wand at
him. A backwash of negative energy makes my teeth clench and turns
my vision gray, but it’s not enough to stop the second coming of
“Slug” Johnson. He slithers towards her across the floor, and she
gears up another spell, but it’s too late. I close my eyes and
follow the action by the inarticulate shrieks and the wet sucking,
gurgling noises. Finally, they die down.
I take a deep breath and open my eyes. Below me the
room is vacant but for a clean-picked human skeleton and a floor
flecked with brown—I peer closer—slugs. Millions of the
buggers. “You’d better let him go,” I intone.
“Why should I?” asks the assembly of
molluscs.
“Because—” I pause. Why should he? It’s a
surprisingly sensible question. “If you don’t, HR—Personnel—will
just send another. Their minions are infinite. But you can
defeat them by escaping from their grip forever—if you let me lay
you to rest.”
“Send me on, then,” say the slugs.
“Okay.” And I open my salt-filled fist over the
molluscs—which burn and writhe beneath the white powderfall until
nothing is left but Pete, curled fetally in the middle of the
floor. And it’s time to get Pete the hell out of this game and back
into his own head before his mother, or some even worse horror,
comes looking for him.