The Jennifer Morgue - Charles Stross [166]
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