Trio of sorcery, p.23
Trio of Sorcery, page 23
He realized he was glad, damned glad, they hadn’t built that animatronic Wendigo for the trade shows. Somewhere in the dim, dark recesses of his memory stirred vague images of a sci-fi thing, maybe a made-for-TV movie, about an evil sentient AI that jumped into someone’s animatronic monster, and he shuddered.
Okay, it would have been tethered by an umbilical of cables five inches around, but still…
It’s not an AI, it’s not an AI, he kept reminding himself. It’s not self-aware. No code is self-aware. No, it was something else, some malevolent haunt that was using their code to write itself a new life. Something that had invaded their servers from outside. They just had to find a way to exorcise it.
He wondered, was it a bunch of mini-Wendigos, separate mythagos, or was it a single entity spread out across all the servers? If it was the former, they could take it out server by server, but if it was the latter, they’d have to eradicate it across all of them at the same time. There wasn’t supposed to be a connection across all the servers, but technically there was. The global chat system let players talk across servers to their friends and the bug reporting system also linked all the servers. If the Wendigo was a kind of ghost spread out in pieces across the servers, it could communicate through either of those systems without a lot of trouble. And that meant it could probably find a way to hide itself somewhere they wouldn’t think to look for it when they started taking it out. He worried at the problem all the way back to his apartment, where he logged onto chat just long enough to catch Bev and let her know the vague outline of Major Problem at Work.
Heard the new zone was giving you fits, came the reply. Bless Bev, bless her for typing articulate sentences. Having to deal with l33tkidz who texted everything, leaving him to try to decipher what the hell the trouble log was about, made him deeply appreciate anyone who knew how to string nouns and verbs together properly. No worries. When you put the baby to bed, I’ll claim a steak dinner off you.
He grinned, despite the current worries. With all the trimmings, he replied. Night, babe.
Her icon went inactive and he was about to log off when jquest77 pinged him. Thought you might want to know, there’s a couple of Chinese gaming clans getting waxed by the Wendigo over on Topaz server. Did you hire Ellen?
He blinked. Yeah, why?
Good. We’re not just gaming buddies, Ell and me.
No duh. There was no chance jquest77 (and I know your real name, Milton!) could have known just what Ellen did for a living if they were “just” gaming buddies. But now he was curious, so he asked the leading question. Really? How so?
I work for the DoD.
For a moment, he thought jquest77 had typed D and D, for the game…but no. Jquest77 was a precise guy and rarely mistyped. DoD. Department of Defense? Tom blinked again. What—
We go back a long ways, college, in fact, and I was just as skeptical as you when she first told me what she does. Then—well, let’s just say that it’s a good thing there’s a black budget for things like this, or Congress would be having litters of kittens right now. When this is over, I’ll tell you the story of how she exorcized a stealth fighter. Right now, get some sleep. You’re gonna need it.
Jquest77’s icon went inactive.
Tom stared at the screen for a long time before finally flagging himself as inactive. It was not going to be an easy night.
“Mistress, this could be very dangerous.” Toby’s prim little voice did not properly reflect the amount of anxiety the familiar was feeling right now. Ell didn’t blame him. She was feeling a fair amount of stress herself.
“I know it is, but this is the only way to get the information firsthand,” she replied. “Magic traces are not going to show up in the machine the way they will truly be acting in the game world. And our ugly friend is investing himself in the game world right now. I need a first person viewpoint.”
The AIBO pawed at its ear. “I do not like it, I do not like it at all. But I concur, mistress. Please be careful.”
Careful; oh yes, she was going to be careful. She’d done this with animals before but never with something that only lived inside a computer. And she was going to be helpless here, Toby was going to be the puppet master. For this run, anyway. If she needed to do this again, she’d find a way to be more than just a passenger.
Tom had set her up with an endgame character, as high as you could go, with all of the bells and whistles, just short of actually having god-mode. She’d had him leave it outside the portal into Dark Valley. Best to get used to this in a safe zone first.
Here goes nothing.
She logged in her avatar; an elfy-looking chick armed with sword and dagger, chest as flat as you could get it in the character generator and still be female, and costumed to have the least amount of skin showing. The last thing she needed right now was hormonal teenyboppers hitting on her avatar. Tom had also set her up with some temporary weapons, the sort of loot that would only last a few days or a bunch of uses. Hers were all distance weapons; properly run, this little flower was lethality on two legs.
She’d asked Tom to program the avatar so that its combat moves autofired if anything unfriendly got within range. If anything got close, barring the Wendigo, of course, it would be coleslaw. You weren’t supposed to automate more than one move, but that’s what devs are for, right?
She’d told him it was because she wasn’t used to hack and slash, but she’d lied—in the real world she’d been doing reenactment and stage fighting since she was in her teens. It was so that all Toby had to do was steer; AIBO paws were not good for mashing buttons.
Note to self; hack the little shite some hands.
All right, there was Stevie the Elf and here she was, and it was showtime.
Ellen drew on Toby’s energy and murmured the mnemonic for spirit transfer at the same time that she sketched the pattern in the air with the special new twist that should send her—
She found herself sitting on her very shapely ass, looking up at a flat blue sky with painterly clouds scudding across it. It looked less real than a ceiling painting, especially because she was seeing it in a kind of double vision. Ghosted under the sky was…code. Machine language, which meant it would take her a while to decipher, but she had a good idea what it was she was looking at—the code that specified what the sky was, what the ceiling was (so a flying character didn’t find himself outside the zone), how the clouds moved and in what directions, what color everything was…
In short…the sky.
She was fairly relieved that she didn’t actually feel anything other than enough to give her a kinesthetic sense of where her limbs were. That was good. If something started shooting at her, she really did not want to be feeling pain….
In fact, she felt a curious disconnect. She felt no weight, felt no pressure of any sort on her skin. Every moment of every day, a human being was aware, if not consciously, of all the little adjustments that had to be made, the feedback from skin and gut and muscle and nerve, things that registered wellness or illness, the downward pressure of gravity. Everything had a scent, and though your conscious might not register it, your subconscious did.
But not now. Ell felt nothing. Nothing had an odor. There was no taste of anything in her mouth. There was none of that. She had done sensory deprivation once, and even that was not like this. She had sight and hearing and body sense.
Hmm.
Suddenly, without warning, her body leapt to its feet and spun around in a deadly circle of steel. She didn’t register that something was attacking her until her two blades had already marked the attacker and deflected a knife. Black clothing, head wrap, Oriental eyes, and katana. Great. Why are the game ninjas after me?
Even while she was thinking this, her body was moving in on the NPC, a ninja that was probably something generated by the computer to make her life exciting.
All right, there’s no two ways about this, she thought, as her body executed the patterns in the macros as mechanically as the ninja was executing its own macros. Which was fine going against something the AI was running, but the Wendigo was not in the AI. I am going to have to have full in-game control next time I do this. If I go up against a living Wendigo, or the blasted Wendigo figures out how to flip the Player versus Player switches to let the hypercaffeinated crowd into Dark Valley, I would be in deep kim—
OW!
The ninja’s attack “got through”—that is, the computer had added up his ability to hit with her ability to defend, with a skew on the ninja’s side to allow for chance, and she had been found wanting. And it hurt! This might be a Rated-T-For-Teen game, with no gore allowed, but the character reacted with animation indicating pain, and she by deity felt it.
Crap crap crap crap…that’s not supposed to happen!
It hurt badly, the way an inch-deep katana swipe would hurt in the real world. Instead of blood, she was bleeding health, more bits being flipped in the code, but if she could have screamed, she would have, and for a moment the pain blinded her. She hadn’t signed on for this…
Too late. She was signed on, and anyway, this wasn’t one she could just walk away from. Not if things got out of hand here. She didn’t dare walk out and take the chance that they wouldn’t.
Fortunately two things happened. One, Toby managed to figure out how to access her self-healing spell, so the invisible (No gore! This game is rated T for Teen!) gash across her arm stopped hurting and she stopped leaking health. Two, the macros finally beat the ninja; he collapsed like a rag doll at her feet and a moment later faded away into that never-never land where all defeated things went.
It was a heckuva way to be introduced to life-in-the-game-world.
“All right, Toby, let’s zone into Dark Valley. And remember to toggle invisibility cloak when we get there.” She spoke out loud, but of course she heard nothing but the sound effects from this zone. What she said would appear in the onscreen chat box. What other people said would appear over their heads in cartoon balloons, as well as in the chat box. Unfortunately this meant that Toby couldn’t actually talk back to her.
But her body moved to the portal and she had a disorienting and frighteningly long moment of blankness as the tangle of code that was her avatar got passed from one part of the virtual world to another. It went on just long enough for her to start to worry, and not long enough for her to panic.
When she could see again, she was in Dark Valley, and immediately she felt a peculiar sensation, as if something had brushed every nerve ending in her body at once. When she looked down, she could only see the faintest shadow of herself. The invisibility cloak was in place. The Ojibwa Medicine Man had autodispensed her a cowrie shell that appeared as an active icon in her powers inventory.
It was showtime. But she was at a distinct disadvantage—unless she was standing right next to someone who was saying something on the general broadcast channel, she would not know what was being “shouted” across the whole zone. And there were shouts she needed to hear—like where the Wendigo had spawned. Toby knew this, though, and presumably he got some directions, because suddenly her body lifted into the air (she had chosen “flying” as her means of transportation) and headed off game-east. She knew it was game-east because the sun was heading toward setting behind her.
The melee was easy to spot from up here. The Wendigo towered head and shoulders above the trees, and those trees were not small. It looked as if he was playing host to a small army of Far Eastern martial artists, while less uniformly clad people stood around and watched. She winced and looked away from one fellow who looked like he was wearing a cow that had died in a collision with a paint truck.
She recognized the Wendigo’s attackers from numberless articles in online gaming forums. Chinese gaming clans. Literally cutthroat. If they think they can get away with it, they’ll kill your avatar, steal your stuff before you come back from revival, and bugger off with it to sell on eBay. It was virtual loot of course, it didn’t exist in any form except here, but there were a lot of people who would pay real-world money for some presumed advantage in the game. It made no sense to her, except in the abstract: work equals money, and if someone has worked to get something, it should be worth money.
Still, she could admire their finesse and their sheer dogged tenacity. Blades flashed, feet and fists thudded, the Wendigo bawled its outrage. It surprised her at first that so many people were simply standing around watching, until she caught a speech balloon over the head of one of the attackers in the gray-on-white of broadcast speech, warning everyone in the zone that this Wendigo had been claimed by the Red Lotus Clan and interlopers were not welcome.
Despite being the biggest, baddest thing around, the Wendigo was having a hard time against this bunch. It couldn’t grab god-mode to turn the tables on them, because no one around here was in god-mode. It could heal itself, but not as fast as it was used to doing, because the entire Red Lotus clan was wearing their talismanic cowrie shells, preventing it from using their health to heal. They were whittling it down, bit by bit, and it did not like that at all.
There was grumbling in local speech about the selfishness of the Red Lotus Clan—after all, this was a rare case where everyone who laid any damage on the thing was going to get juicy loot! But no one moved in on the Wendigo. Finally, a brass-bikini-clad wench with breasts so enormous that in the real world she’d be falling over from the sheer weight of them pushed her way through the onlookers. What she said was pretty much indecipherable texting-based leet-speak, but the gist of it was that she was going to go beat on the Wendigo too, this wasn’t a Player versus Player zone, so what could the clan do to her?
“Dude, chill,” came the reply from a seven-foot-tall, blue-skinned trollish-looking thing. “They can herd a hundred zombies on ya and loot the corpse.”
The wench typed an explicative-laden reply, most of which was bleeped out by the profanity filter, but no longer made any moves toward joining the melee.
Through this all, the faint ghosting of the code was over everything, like an arcane sort of filter. Not like that famous business in The Matrix with the streaming numbers. No, the numbers didn’t move—but they did change. There was her real-time trace, if only she knew machine code well enough to read it.
But she was here for another purpose, and while the Wendigo was busy with what looked like the casts of twelve kung fu movies, it was time for Ellen to do her thing.
“Now, Toby,” she said, and felt a tingle as somewhere out there in the real world, Toby hot-keyed her spells.
Through study, research, and what she suspected was an instinctive grasp of how magic interfaced with technology, Ell could create a process—which was, in essence, what a spell really was. She had the world book for this game; she had access to whatever crafting items existed in this virtual world. She could find the equivalents to real-world items and she could use them to help create a process that would take her energy and send it into the machine to do her bidding.
In other words, in this world of pixels and bits, she could combine virtual eye of newt and imaginary tongue of frog and give herself the power of mage-sight, which would let her see just how magic was flowing. She hadn’t done it until now because she wanted to be very certain that the Wendigo was fully concentrating on its attackers. Using real magic here would light her up like a Christmas tree to the eyes of something that could see magic too.
Oh, now this is an interesting side effect.…She hadn’t expected to feel anything, given that the only sensory feedback she was getting was pain. But she felt her whole body start to tingle as a faint and subtle shimmer washed over her. Fortunately, in this crowd full of people with rainbow-effect auras demonstrating their powers and abilities, it passed completely unnoticed.
She closed her eyes and counted to three as the tingle intensified, then looked.
And yes…there was a third layer of reality now. The machine code, the visuals, and…
The power map.
She could see how the energy that was magic was flowing within this place. The Wendigo was lit up with so many kinds and flavors of power that if she had been using her real eyes she would have been blinded. And the second she saw that—her heart plummeted.
Because this could only mean one thing.
This Wendigo was not a mythago.
This Wendigo was the real thing.
Self-aware? Oh my, yes. And if he hadn’t had all his attention concentrated on squashing the ninja hordes, if he’d caught sight of her, all lit up with similar power, she would have been in very dire straits.
It was very strange, being grabbed by sheer terror while inhabiting Stevie the Elf. There was no corresponding physical reaction, no tightening of the throat, no cold sweats, no shaking. That made it easier to do what she generally did when she was scared shitless. She went entirely cold and analytical, her mind working much faster than normal. She dictated everything she saw to Toby, with one eye on the Wendigo. Because if it noticed her—
She saw power passing along what she knew must represent the communication channel that cut across all the servers, but it was power that was actually part of the Wendigo. That told her that all the Wendigos were actually one Wendigo. Its essence, its soul, was shared out across the entire game system. Which made sense, since this was the real thing. That would have ramifications, but she would think about it later. Right now, she was eyes and a mouth.
Power was flowing from the avatars around it to the Wendigo as well—not just from the ones it was fighting, but from the onlookers, and even from PCs beyond the onlookers. It wasn’t much, the merest thread from each—but a hundred thousand threads can be spun into a very strong rope….
The sight was startling. This wasn’t the in-game health that the Wendigo had been mostly blocked from absorbing. This was something else entirely. It was as if every person logged into the game was somehow feeding the Wendigo. No, more than that—it looked as if the Wendigo was feeding on them, magically.
