The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [165]
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