Chapter 12: // Masterwork

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The GamerZ faction has launched the open-source Burning Man Project with the express aim of “resurrecting” Roy Merritt as a system-level D-Space avatar. The planned avatar would obey the eleven principles of the Order of Merritt and be imbued with powers as participants donate levels. The project was made feasible through the recent discovery of comprehensive biometric data for the late Roy Merritt in the Building Twenty-Nine security database. The data includes body and facial geometry, textures, voice, gait, and other info. Contributors need a five-star reputation score and at least fifteen levels of proficiency in their primary class.

XiLAN_oO*****/ 2,930 23rd-level Programmer

Situated just across the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong, Shenzhen was a city of migrants. Declared a Special Economic Zone by the Chinese government in 1980, it was an experiment in limited capitalism—and had grown with astonishing speed. Fueled by cheap labor, Shenzhen’s population exploded from three hundred thousand to over twelve million people in less than three decades. State-of-the-art factory complexes producing goods for Western companies covered mile after mile in the northern reaches of the city, away from the tourism- and trade-centered southern districts.

Jon Ross had been here for only a few weeks, and already he liked it better than Beijing. The air was better, for one thing, and it had milder, subtropical weather. It was a city made for the type of person he was pretending to be—a thirty-year-old, successful entrepreneur looking for manufacturing capacity. To such a person, Shenzhen held many charms, not the least of which was cheap, skilled labor.

China was no longer punching out plastic trinkets. They made iPods, computers, and medical devices here now. High-quality merchandise. If you were making shirts or plastic patio chairs, you brought your business to Vietnam or Pakistan. At least for now.

Ross gazed out the window. Thousands of blue-uniformed, female factory workers with multicolored ID tags clipped to their pockets surged around Ross’s chauffeured Buick Regal. As they pressed past in the narrow lane between production buildings and dormitories, the car’s blacked-out windows hid Ross from their view. His driver honked the horn repeatedly and cursed in Mandarin as they inched along. Ross studied the tableau of humanity as it squeezed by—or he by it. It was hard to tell which. Up close, every worker was distinct in some way. Their eyes. Their expression. But in a few moments each disappeared into the crowd.

He knew why they had come to Shenzhen—to send hard money back to their families in rural China. So much rested on the shoulders of these young women. They might be the only hope of a family that had borrowed heavily to send them here. Failure might mean the loss of the family home. That burden gave a sense of deadly seriousness to their labor—particularly since the global economy had recently started to fray at the edges, and layoffs were a daily occurrence throughout the city.

Ross knew that the same migration was occurring all around the world. In a land of borderless markets, individual farmers could no longer compete with industrial farms on price. The land was being depopulated, landholdings aggregated for efficient management by farm machinery, leaving the surplus labor little choice but to depart to the cities and seek work in industry. The same was true in India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Even America. It was the largest migration in human history. All in the pursuit of high-efficiency, low-cost production.

And it was that very efficiency that made the system vulnerable to the Daemon. The same uniform networks that moved money and information between markets in fractions of a second also allowed the simple bots of the Daemon to masquerade as high-level management strategy, ordering the manufacture and delivery of goods—and deleting the evidence. State-of-the-art, just-in-time management systems had enabled a silent revolution in more ways than one.

Such was the post-Sobol world.

Ross’s car cleared the crowded main road and turned down an empty lane between factory buildings with tall banks of windows. The workers seemed to be walking a beeline between points, and not one of them detoured down this lane. Ross’s car approached an unmarked steel door where a glowing, catlike eye hovered in D-Space to mark his destination. It would be invisible to nondarknet members.

He tapped his driver on the shoulder and pointed. The moment the car stopped, Ross exited.

He stood in the fire lane before the featureless door. There was no handle and no hinges on this side. The metal looked capable of stopping rifle rounds. Ross adjusted his second-generation HUD glasses—smaller and more businesslike than earlier models—and looked up at the glowing, three-dimensional eye, floating in D-Space above the doorway. A spectral object that only existed in virtual space. He glanced back at the black Buick, still parked nearby. He motioned for the driver to depart and nodded in response to the driver’s quizzical expression. The driver shrugged, wrote down an entry in his logbook, and drove off.

Ross watched the car go, then reached into his suit jacket pocket and removed a small silver amulet set with a single green cat’s-eye stone. It matched the symbol hovering above the door. He positioned the amulet in his line of sight in the HUD glasses so that it matched the glowing symbol in both size and orientation, and carefully held it there. He then spoke slowly in a language that only existed in the online game world created by Matthew Sobol—the language of the creators. “De abolonos—fi theseo va—temposum—gara semulo—va cavrotos.”

At the intonation of the last syllable, a bright light began to glow from his amulet. He was certain it was only a D-Space light, one that did not exist in the real world. Nonetheless, it was real to him, and so he squinted his eyes against the glow of pico projectors in his glasses as a bright tracery appeared in D-Space around the doorway. The white lines curled and expanded, forming the outline of an ornate gate that blazed with white light, emanating from the seams of the real-world door. In a moment he heard a click, and the real-world door opened slowly, spilling forth D-Space light.

Ross lowered the amulet, and shielded his eyes as he walked through the gate. His hand blocked nothing, because the light came from within his glasses. Realizing his mistake, he flipped up his HUD lenses and soon found himself standing in a small factory room lined with shelves piled high with electrical components. Ross could hear the roar of powerful electric motors, as well as the crack and pop of automated welding machinery in the factory beyond. But here in this small room, two armed and uniformed Chinese factory guards stood before him, staring hard with arms folded. The steel door behind him slammed shut.

Ross flipped his HUD lenses back down and saw darknet call-outs hovering above both men. They weren’t only security guards—they were ninth-level Fighters with four-star reputation scores, from the Dark Rose faction. Hard-core operatives who could summon a flash mob at a moment’s notice. D-Space call-outs identified the one on the right as Sentinel949. The one on the left was Warder_13. Ross knew his own call-out showed him to be a sixth-level Rogue with a four-and-half-star reputation, but he noticed Warder_13 clicking through Ross’s achievement log, and examining his current quest, while Sentinel949 just looked him up and down.

That’s when Ross noticed that the Dark Rose faction was an Order of Merritt signatory—as denoted by the flame on its logo. He smiled to himself, marveling at how far Roy Merritt’s fame had spread. The Order of Merritt was a spontaneously evolved standard of conduct with a rigorous ethical requirement. Ross knew he’d be treated fairly here.

Warder_13 spoke to Ross in what sounded like Mandarin. A moment later Ross heard a woman’s voice in his ear translating the warrior’s words: “Rakh, they say you were friends with the Burning Man. That you were there the day he died.”

Ross nodded. “Roy was as decent and courageous as anyone can be. I was fortunate to have known him.”

Warder_13 and Sentinel949 nodded appreciatively.

Sentinel949 asked, “Why have you come through the Maker’s Gate?”

“I’ve come to forge a masterwork.” The Mandarin translation of Ross’s words followed moments later.

Sentinel949 raised an eyebrow. “A masterwork? Which one?”

“The Rings of Aggys.”

The guards exchanged looks. Warder_13 clicked through objects in midair that only he could see. “This is a serious item. You have the prerequisites?”

Ross nodded. “I do.”

“Not just the network credits, but the elements as well.”

“I took the nine quests and have all the pieces. PlineyElder should be expecting me.” Ross put a leather dispatch case on a nearby desk and opened it. He withdrew an ornate wooden box above which nine small D-Space call-outs crowded one another. He handed the box to Sentinel949.

The guard opened it and could see nine pieces of jewelry, eight half-rings of titanium—four of them smaller than the others—and a single crystal. They were all stored in foam receptacles. Each had a separate D-Space call-out. He examined them and nodded to his colleague. “The elements are genuine.”

“The aspirant clears the reputation limit and has the necessary credits.”

“He has passed the necessary class specialties.”

Warder_13 spoke clearly and with official ceremony when he declared, “The aspirant has all the elements of the Rings of Aggys. The masterwork can be attempted.” Ross knew that voice recognition bots were listening to the announcement, and that keywords in this statement would activate the next stage in the process.

The guards motioned for Ross to follow as they headed across the storeroom and unlocked a large interior door. Ross grabbed his dispatch case and followed. One of them handed Ross a red hard hat with built-in hearing protectors from a rack on the wall. Ross donned it as the guards put on white hard hats of their own.

Warder_13 pointed to the headphones and spoke again. Moments later the translation came through Ross’s bone-conduction mic, despite the loud noise. “Don’t take your earphones off. It gets loud in there.”

Ross nodded, and they opened the steel door onto a vast manufacturing floor filled with zapping and popping industrial welding robots. Two engineers wearing bright green coveralls and white hard hats were waiting for them at the first row of machines. Call-outs above the men’s heads identified them as a tenth-level Sorcerer named PlineyElder and a ninth-level Fabricator named WuzzGart.

PlineyElder looked at his watch as they approached. He also spoke in Mandarin. “You’re late.”

Ross shrugged. “There was traffic.”

“There’s always traffic. This is Shenzhen.”

Warder_13 handed the wooden box to the sorcerer, who opened it and inspected the contents closely. He then looked up at Ross. “I hope you have your spells ready. I don’t have all day to deal with this.”

Ross nodded. “You just do your part, and I’ll do mine.”

PlineyElder grunted and motioned for Ross to follow him. WuzzGart was right on their tail. The guards stayed behind. The new trio headed off through aisles of turning, rotating, sparking robot arms. Brilliant flashes of light punctuated Ross’s view. Each line of mechanical arms crowded over an assembly line, moving in a symphony of activity, ducking in and out of metal assemblies about the size of a washing machine. With each motion the welding bots would stop, pop a series of precise welds, and then spin on to the next position. Human workers moved among the rows monitoring the equipment. Some of these workers had darknet call-outs, but most did not.

But all of them ignored the suited Westerner moving through their workspace.

Soon Ross and the engineers came to a corner of the factory where a lone robot welding arm stood next to a project pedestal. There was no assembly-line conveyer belt here, and the numerous half-finished objects on the shelves nearby gave it the feel of a prototyping or test area.

WuzzGart, the fabricator, put on white gloves and removed the titanium half-rings and the single crystal from the wooden box. He cleaned each one carefully with a lint-free cloth and spoke to no one in particular as he placed each into a jig bolted onto the scorched project pedestal. “Why do all the powerful items require titanium?”

PlineyElder looked at his watch. “Come on, I have a meeting in twenty minutes.”

“This must be done carefully. The pieces must be cleaned or the chlorine from human sweat will impact the weld. Titanium is a very reactive metal.”

The sorcerer just tapped at his watch dial impatiently. “Then stop talking, and let’s get on with it.”

Ross leaned over WuzzGart’s shoulder to watch as the man placed the single crystal within the end of one half-ring and encased it by pressing another half-ring into the first. Only one of the rings had this receptacle for a crystal. “Did you ever ponder just how strange the world has gotten since Sobol’s game world leaked into reality? I mean, we’ve gathered here essentially to create a magical item.”

“That’s the plan.” WuzzGart tightened the jig around the pieces and then stepped away. “I’ve already uploaded the welding script. We are ready.”

PlineyElder was manipulating unseen D-Space objects on a private layer of his own, but he took a moment to gesture to Ross, snapping his fingers, and motioning like a wedding photographer. “Rakh! You stand here.”

Ross left his dispatch case on the floor and stood equidistant from the other two men, forming the points of a triangle at a distance of ten feet from the project pedestal.

PlineyElder kept motioning forward, then left, then back—and finally gave a thumbs-up. At which point he raised his hands and began a series of complex somatic gestures, tracked in 3-D space by touch-rings on each hand, as he spoke his unlock code to the Daemon’s manufacturing bots—in this instance it was game world elvish: “Davors bethred, puthos cavol, arbas lokad!”

The welding arm suddenly came to life and moved forward to circle the pedestal at close range.

He then began a long chant, moving his hand in a circle, and the robot arm followed suit in a show of slavish mimicry. For more than a minute PlineyElder continued his chant, and then he suddenly stopped and pointed to WuzzGart.

WuzzGart stepped forward and began to cast a spell of his own. Ross knew from the specification for the Rings of Aggys that this was the masterwork spell—creating a D-Space receptacle for the darknet power that the objects would soon receive. PlineyElder’s spell was meant to imbue the D-Space nozzles on the welder with permission to edit virtual space.

WuzzGart’s spell was quite involved, and he failed at his first attempt. Apparently he hadn’t moved his arms in the right combination or perhaps got some of the verbal unlock code wrong. When he finished the last syllable and stood expectantly—nothing happened.

PlineyElder threw up his hands. “Idiot!”

WuzzGart just flipped him off and started again. This time he was successful, and on his last syllable of the enchantment a soft D-Space glow emanated from all four half-rings. “Aha!”

He stepped back smiling. “We’re cooking with gas now!”

As he said this, the welding arm moved in swiftly and zapped each of the four rings once with a blinding flash. Sparks flew from the pedestal and scattered across the floor.

Ross knew this was his cue and ignored PlineyElder, who was waving frantically. He moved toward the rings and held his hands over them, motioning in counter-rotating circles while speaking the darknet incantation that would permanently bind them with the spell. He’d practiced it many times in the shower at the hotel, and he hoped he’d get it right on the first try. “Fasthu, agros visthon, pantoristhas, antoriontus, pashas afthas.”

Happily, as he finished, each ring pulsed with D-Space light.

Ross stepped back, and the welding robot zapped each of them again, this time in a different place. As it withdrew, Ross moved in again and repeated his spell.

The process was performed twice more, and as he spoke the last word, PlineyElder and WuzzGart were already next to him, holding their arms over the pedestal and chanting the words of a fictitious language of a fictitious race of people that had probably been thought up by some writer in a cubicle at Cyberstorm Entertainment in Thousand Oaks, California.

Nonetheless, the Daemon had imbued these words with power.

As the three reached a crescendo and simultaneously completed their chants, a brilliant D-Space light emanated from all the rings and slowly cooled, fading and ultimately disappearing. Now, however, the individual D-Space call-outs above each half-ring had been replaced by a single D-Space call-out, centered above the lone crystal on the parent ring.

PlineyElder grinned. “The masterwork is a success!”

They all shook hands, and Ross stood by eagerly as WuzzGart extracted the finished rings from the jig and dunked them in a bucket of water. He placed all four of them on a ShamWow he found on a nearby workbench and showed them off to Ross and the sorcerer.

“Behold the Rings of Aggys!”

The cloth held two sets of matching rings, one set smaller than the other. All were still steaming. The lone call-out on the ring with a crystal was an inscrutable alphanumeric sequence.

WuzzGart pointed. “Note the quality of the welds. No alpha phase or swirling. You could get those buffed anywhere, and they’ll shine up like white gold.”

PlineyElder nudged Ross and pointed up at his call-out. “Congratulations.”

Ross just then noticed that he’d gone up a level. He was now a seventh-level Rogue. He’d missed the alert in his HUD display amid all the excitement. He nodded to both men. “Thank you, gentlemen. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.”

WuzzGart placed the rings in a small velvet bag and handed them to Ross.

PlineyElder pointed at the bag. “Those are powerful rings, master thief! Do not use them lightly or they will destroy themselves. Or even you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

WuzzGart started cleaning the pedestal with the ShamWow. “You must have a use in mind for these rings to go through so much trouble.”

Ross nodded. “I’ll need them for a journey—through hostile territory.”

“If it’s so hostile, why go there?”

“Because I need to.”

WuzzGart looked into Ross’s eyes, then he looked to PlineyElder. “I’ll bet you a thousand credits it’s a woman.”

Both men laughed.

“You have my thanks, gentlemen.” Ross put the velvet bag in his suit coat pocket, nodded once more, and headed for the exit.