Chapter 29

Summoned

 

 

After too little sleep, Shea had gone to work still angry with Falin or Bobby or whatever his name was and had been a total jerk to Tony. She’d even fought with him, something she never did.

Now, sitting at her desk, staring at her rig, she felt terrible about mistreating her boss. It wasn’t his fault she’d been duped by a hacker and a wizard. The whole situation was making her crazy. Who or what was the Gray Warrior and why had Falin and Em used a phony quest to mislead her into hunting him? The questions nagged at Shea, making her even more miserable. Maybe her mother was right. It was time to grow up, put the fantasy world behind her, and follow the family dharma.

Trinity raced past, chasing a mouse. Small gaps between the bay door and the floor made it impossible to keep them out. Rodents were just one more reason to move on.

Another unread message from the dwarf appeared in her inbox, begging for attention. The subject line screamed, NO TIME, NEED YOUR HELP. She didn’t know what “NO TIME” meant, and she didn’t want to know. She sent the unopened plea to the delete folder. He could find another sucker to lead him around the Land, maybe Samuel. She was ignoring the Ranger Guild leader’s messages too—six of them since his emergency meeting two nights ago. Same plea: Help hunt down and kill the Gray Warrior. From what she’d seen, that was impossible. She needed to talk to the wizard behind the quest. It was time to use the summon spell.

She crossed the bay to her rig and strapped in. A moment later, she was in the Sun Lobby staring at Darshana’s control panel, trying to decide which of the Land’s gates would put her in the best place for a private conversation. Her careful search was more nervous procrastination than planning. Any place would do; she’d be with a wizard. But where intentionally summoning the most powerful, evil-aligned character in the Land had seemed like a good idea a moment before, it now seemed incredibly foolish and likely an act of character suicide. Most players, including herself, did everything they could to avoid the red wizard, and here she was about to use a magic spell to call her. Táma would likely FOD her on the spot for the temerity, but Shea needed answers.

She selected the gate labeled Land’s End from the list. Few players, other than rangers, ever reached it. Perfect, she thought and punched the button. Her visual field faded to black. When it returned, she was standing under an alabaster gate, perched atop a massive promontory projecting into the azure blue of the great Southron Sea. Sounds of crashing waves and squawking gulls filled her headgear, and she could almost smell the ocean. It was one of her favorite views, and she’d often thought of trying to find out if it had been modeled after a place in the Real-Real that she might someday visit.

North from the gate, the road continued over a flat sand and scrub plain. South was the cliff’s edge and then the sea. Darshana headed south, following a narrow walkway that led to a bench placed a few feet from the precipice. The bench was carved from the same translucent stone as the gate and glowed like white fire in the sun. She withdrew the spell orb from her pouch and sat. She’d never cast a summon spell before, and she wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

She studied the orb, replaying Em’s words in her mind and allowing herself more time to consider what Táma might do to her. When she was sure she remembered the casting instructions, and before she lost her nerve, Darshana crushed the silver ball in her fist and whispered the elvish invocation phrase. Then she blew the glittering silver dust toward the sea and shouted as loudly as she could, “Arcesse, Táma the Terrifying.”

She held her breath and waited. Ten seconds, twenty, forty, a minute, gasp, nothing happened.

She shouted “Arcesse, Táma the Terrifying,” again, and waited; another breathless minute passed and still nothing happened.

“Táma.”

A gull landed beside her, but there was no sign of the wizard.

Frustrated, she shouted “Fuck you, Táma!”

The gull squawked and flew away.

Still no wizard.

Darshana crossed her arms and stared at the waves below. After several minutes, she shouted, “Fuck you, Táma!” one last time before making her way back to the arch.

At the end of the walkway, she opened the gate menu and was about to select EXIT when her view filled with a gold light, so bright she had to close her eyes. When she opened them again, her surroundings had changed. The gleaming alabaster gate and blue sky had been replaced by gray stone walls illuminated by flickering torchlight. She had been teleported to a large round chamber with a high-domed ceiling, pear-shaped windows, and no visible door. Worked into the smooth stone floor tiles at her feet was the image of a red eyed Raven.

Raven’s Perch. Shit.

She turned slowly and saw nothing but a darkening sky in every direction and surmised the room was atop a tall tower.

A hooded figure, draped in a red robe stood gazing out the east window with her back to Darshana. The figure laughed in a woman’s voice and said, “Fuck you, Táma? Really?”

Oh shit.

“Umm. Sorry about that,” Darshana said.

The wizard turned to face her. When she moved, waves of golden light rippled through the folds of her robe. She pulled back her hood, revealing long, silver hair that framed an angelic face with skin the same brilliant white as the gate at Land’s End. Her eyes were closed, and when she opened them, they were not those of an angel. Red as her robe, they shown like two fiery rubies in the torchlight. Terrifying.

Darshana lowered to one knee and bowed her head. She’d come for answers, not to be FODed.

“No need for that,” the red wizard said and motioned for her to stand.

Darshana stood. “I did not expect the spell to work this way.”

“When you summon a wizard, you take a chance. A wizard gets to decide whether to accept the summons or not. I was indisposed when you called.” Her red eyes flashed. “I hope this time works for you.”

“Fine. I mean, it’s good,” Darshana stammered. Then she added, “Thank you,” and readied herself for the Finger of Death.

The wizard studied her. “Where did you get the spell?”

“Em.”

“Ah. I should’ve known. Something tells me he did not expect you to summon me with it.”

“No, probably not.”

“What does the legendary Darshana want from Táma the Terrifying?”

Darshana spread her arms. “I have questions.”

Táma chuckled. “I bet you do.” The wizard glared at her, and Shea trembled. She actually trembled. “Well, ask them.”

Shea’s nervous words tumbled out of Darshana’s mouth. “I want to know about a quest notice I saw issued from you calling for the head of a character called the Gray Warrior.”

The wizard glided toward her, and Shea glanced around again for an exit. “Is that what you call him? The Gray Warrior?”

Darshana nodded. “Yes. What do you call him?”

“The Anomaly.”

“That’s an unusual name.”

“He’s an unusual character. Don’t you think?”

Just a little.

“Did you post the quest for his head? Is it real?”

Táma motioned with her hands and two heavy, wooden chairs inlaid with, gasp, elaborate carvings depicting scenes of torture and death slid noisily across the tiles and came to rest next to each of them. “Let’s sit,” she said and lowered herself into one.

Darshana sat.

“No. I did not post the quest.”

“I fucking knew it,” Shea blurted before she could check herself. “If the quest isn’t real, what are Em and this dwarf up to, and what is this Anomaly?”

Táma folded her glowing hands in her lap. Her long, red fingernails resembled bloodied talons. “The quest is real.”

“I don’t understand. You just said it wasn’t.”

“I said I didn’t post it. No need. It was created for a specific player and delivered directly to them.”

She had to be joking. “For the dwarf? Seems like a lot to expect from a càiniǎo half-in who can’t fight and knows nothing about the Land.”

Táma’s red lips turned up in a slight grin. “The quest wasn’t created for Falin.” She touched Darshana’s arm. “It was created for you.”

“Me? I’m supposed to kill this gray monster? With the dwarf?” Shea laughed. “You need a fucking army. You should have every ranger and warrior in the Land hunting for him.”

Táma’s spooky eyes met hers. “You’re assuming he can be killed.”

“He can’t?”

Táma shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”

“You don’t know? What’s the point of the quest then? And if it was meant for me, why give it to this noob Falin?”

Táma’s evil grin grew. “I think we both know Falin is more than a noob, Shea. May I call you Shea?”

The sound of her real name coming from the wizard’s mouth startled and annoyed Shea. “How does everyone in here seem to know my name? Is it posted somewhere?”

Táma shook her head. “Not that I know of. If it makes you feel better, my real name is Angela Harding. I work for Xperion.”

Shea’s annoyance had exceeded her fear of being FOD’d. “No. It doesn’t make me feel better. Can just anyone who works at Xperion access my personal information?”

Táma shook her head. “Not just anyone. And those of us who can, sign stacks of legal documents that prevent us from disclosing it.”

Shea thought about Tony’s friend who had looked up Falin’s user profile. Those stacks of documents hadn’t stopped him. “Well, someone’s disclosing it. Was it you who gave Falin my name?”

Angela laughed. “No. Falin wouldn’t need to ask me for that. Nothing stored online is really safe from him.”

“He’s just a kid,” Shea said, but as she said it, she was even less sure about the dwarf’s identity. “Isn’t he?”

“Hardly.”

Shea thought of what the dwarf had said at White Hall Gate, Nothing is what it seems. “I take it his name isn’t Bobby Penn?”

The wizard’s grin broadened even more, like Shea had said something funny. Maybe she had.

“He told you his name is Bobby Penn?”

“Yes. Is it?”

“I doubt it. I don’t know his real name.” The wizard’s red eyes bored through Darshana’s into Shea’s. “What else did he tell you about himself?”

The question made Shea suspicious. The wizard worked for Xperion. Was she trying to learn about Falin’s hacking? “Not much,” she said. “He’s a half-in from Boston who almost got my character killed.”

Angela laughed again. “No point in pretending, Shea. I know what he’s doing. I know all about the thing he created to track the Gray Warrior.”

Shea swallowed, worried now she’d be banned from the game. “You know about the mirror?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know he’s hacking your systems.”

“Of course. That’s what I hired him to do.”

“You hired him? For what? And how could you not know his real name then?”

“He keeps his identity secret, and I don’t care to know it, probably better I don’t. He’s a special kind of consultant. We use him for secret projects, mostly cyber security.”

“But he’s a hacker,” Shea said.

The wizard gave her an amused look. “Sometimes you need a hacker to catch a hacker.”

“Is that what the Gray Warrior is? A hacker?”

“Yes, a good one.”

Shea remembered what Falin had told her about what it took to build simulation games like LMM. “If Xperion built all this,” Shea spread Darshana’s arms, “why do you need a special consultant? The company must have plenty of expert programmers.”

“We do, and they’ll find and stop the hacker, eventually.” The wizard’s eyes stared out one of the pear-shaped windows as if she’d seen something in the dark clouds. They lingered there for a moment then their laser-like gaze refocused on Darshana. “But Falin specializes in breaking into systems. He knows the techniques that hackers use. I hired him to speed things up.”

“That’s what this is all about? Finding and stopping a hacker?”

“Yes.”

“But why the phony quest?”

Angela sighed. “We needed a way to trick the hacker into revealing himself. He’s very good at evading our monitoring systems.”

“Em told me. He said you couldn’t see the Gray Warrior—the Anomaly.”

The wizard’s eyes flashed. “Em talks too much, but it’s true what he told you. Falin can see him, though. He created special programs to track him.”

“The mirror,” Shea said.

“The mirror is only the part you see here in the Land. Think of it as the user interface. It’s really a system of sophisticated data collection and analysis programs.”

Táma took Darshana’s hand in hers. “The virtual reality we are in is created by thousands of programs working together. The programs communicate with each other using special messages. Players like you and I generate thousands of these messages with our movements. Me taking your hand just now created hundreds of them.”

Shea nodded. “Falin calls that the event stream.”

“That’s right. When I took your hand, our characters interacted. The programs that told our headgear what to show and our gloves what to feel had to know about both of us. Your events have data identifying me, and my events have data identifying you. The hacker’s character’s events are somehow being erased, and he leaves no identifying data in the events belonging to the players he interacts with. Falin’s programs look for the data gaps and uses them to recreate the Gray Warrior’s event stream.

Shea remembered Falin explaining the gaps. “He calls them the Gray Warrior’s shadow.”

The wizard smiled. “Shadow. I like that.”

“Do the shadows only occur when the Gray Warrior interacts with other players?”

“Mostly, but there are certain simulation functions where he leaves a shadow as well, like when he teleports from place to place.”

“The gates,” Shea said. “That’s how Falin’s mirror knows when the Warrior enters and leaves the Land.”

“Yes.”

“So if you know all this, why haven’t you caught him?”

Angela laughed. “You sound like someone I know. The problem is the amount of data. The simulation generates millions of events every second. Storing them all for Falin’s programs to analyze would slow everything down.”

“Not sure I understand.”

“The game would come to a crawl, Shea. Players like you would stop playing. Falin’s programs must analyze interactions between the Gray Warrior and other players as they occur, in real-time.”

“That’s why Falin wouldn’t let me summon Em when we were attacked by The Gray Warrior in the Wolfwood. He was gathering data for analysis.”

The wizard nodded. “Yes. His programs look for patterns in the data. We call them signatures. We can use the signatures to determine what security holes the hacker is exploiting to do what he is doing, and if we’re lucky, the right signatures will lead us to information about the hacker himself.”

Shea thought for a moment, remembering Falin’s words. “He calls that his trap.”

The wizard squeezed her hand again. “Yes. That’s sounds right. Falin’s trap will spring when the analytic functions find the right data signatures.”

“What will the right signatures tell you?”

“We hope enough to put an end to this nightmare. We’re analyzing what was captured during your fight in the Wolfwood now, and we believe it will tell us how to close the security holes. But what we really want is to catch the hacker.”

“Falin’s trap.”

“Correct. The signatures we get from the trap will lead us to the hacker’s account and the network addresses of the places where he enters the Land. Maybe even the unique addresses of his devices.”

“His rig and headset’s device addresses, their MACs,” Shea said. “With that you can find out where he is in the real world.”

Táma showed her pointed teeth when she smiled. Creepy as fuck. “If we’re lucky. Then the police can arrest him, and we can all go back to normal. You can resume your guide business, and I may even get some sleep.”

Shea had been angry, but now she found herself intrigued by the details of the behind-the-scenes hunt. “Did the Wolfwood battle provide enough data to find him? Did it spring the trap?”

The wizard’s creepy smile disappeared. “Falin says no. His analytic programs need more events of the kind generated by intimate player-to-player physical interactions.”

“Fuck that. There’s no way I’m getting intimate with that thing.”

Angela laughed. “I didn’t mean that kind of intimacy. Though, it would work too. I meant fighting with strike weapons. Things that come into contact with the player and the Gray Warrior at the same time. You know, swords, clubs, axes.”

“Not my crossbow.”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you just ask? Why trick me into doing it?”

The wizard hesitated, like Angela was considering her answer. “The hacker is deep in our systems. We’re trying to keep that secret until we catch him.”

Shea laughed. “Hate to tell you, but the Gray Warrior is no longer a secret. He’s killed way too many characters.” Some of the anger at being deceived returned. “Seems like with all the characters he’s slaughtering you’d have plenty of opportunities to collect data without using me.”

“It’s true,” Angela said. “He’s killed many characters—hundreds—but over fifty million exist in the Land. In order for the trap to work, Falin needs to know in advance what character the Gray Warrior will attack so he can configure his programs to analyze the character’s event stream. We started by monitoring a small group of high-level players and waiting for the Gray Warrior to attack them. That worked to a point, but we were unable to collect the right data to spring the trap. We need to focus on a single player.”

“Me.”

The wizard’s creepy smile returned. “Now you know the reason for the quest. Falin uses his mirror to set the trap when you and the Gray Warrior fight.”

Something about the explanation troubled Shea. “You said you monitored a small group of high-level players before you selected me. How did you know which ones the hacker would go after?”

The wizard released Darshana’s hand, “Most of his victims are just random characters in the wrong place at the wrong time. They’re just the unlucky ones he encounters while going after the ones he really wants.” She paused, again taking time to craft the right answer. “Once we figured out what he was after, we focused our monitoring on the characters he really wanted.”

The characters he really wanted. “He’s hunting elite players, isn’t he?”

“Yes. Probably to show how invincible he is, but also to cause the most pain for our customers and the company. I don’t have to tell you how much players invest in their characters to reach the elite levels.”

Shea nodded. “But you couldn’t monitor all the elite players.”

“Still too many. We had to narrow it down. Get him to focus on just a few.”

Legends. “That’s why you created the new legend level. You used it to lure him. That’s why he killed Danaka and Pharaoh.” She gripped the arms of her chair and leaned toward the wizard. “That’s why he attacked my party on Jade Mountain. He wasn’t going for them; he was going for me.”

The wizard nodded. “Danaka was the number one player in the Land before she was killed. You and Pharaoh were tied for number two. Bashal was number three. All four of your characters were already well known on the social platforms, and they became even more well known when we assigned them legend status. That generated quite a buzz in the messagesphere.”

“Buzz.” Shea snapped, growing angrier. “You and Falin hyped our characters on the social platforms to attract the hacker. You used our characters for bait.”

“Yes, but you can’t blame Falin for that. Using you as bait was my idea.”

Maybe she really was evil.

Shea folded Darshana’s arms. “Danaka and Pharaoh have not come back to the game since you sacrificed them. They probably never will.”

Angela sighed. “It’s hard to lose something you work so hard to build.” Then the wizard’s cold features seemed to soften. “But when they come back, I’m sure they’ll pass through the levels fast and get back to legend status before they know it.” She smiled. “Who knows? They might even have some help.”

That pissed Shea off. “Fuck you.”

Táma looked away. When she looked back, her eyes did not meet Shea’s. They landed on a point on the floor between them and remained there. “I understand you’re angry, but now we should discuss what to do.”

Shea scowled. “What if I don’t want to be the bait anymore?”

“That’s no longer an option, really. Unless you plan to stay out of the simulation altogether.”

She knew Angela was right. The Gray Warrior already had Darshana in his sights, and after the battle in the Wolfwood, he was probably even more eager to red-screen her. Shea sighed. Another wizard had chosen the path for her. “Not much of a choice,” she said. “Give up the game or help you get rid of the fucker.”

Táma’s eyes came up, and she shrugged. “We don’t have the data we need yet.”

“You want me to go back in with the dwarf and get more?”

“I do, but…” the wizard’s expression turned sad, “it may be too late for Falin.”

“What do you mean, too late?”

“The consultant is very sick.” Táma stared out the window again, perhaps trying to decide how much to share. “He’s dying. I’m told he may go any day.”

“Dying?”

“Cancer.”

NO TIME. Shea winced. “I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry for the bad news, and for what it’s worth, I’m sorry for using you and the others.” The wizard rose from the chair and smiled down on Darshana. “I hope I answered all your questions.”

Darshana stood. “I would have helped if you’d asked. It wasn’t necessary to trick me.”

The wizard nodded. “I’m glad we met. After this is all over, perhaps I won’t FOD you when I see you in the Land.” Her evil grin returned. “No promises though.” She raised her arms in a spellcaster pose.

Shea shut her eyes against the bright gold light that filled her view. When she opened them, she was back at the Land’s End Gate, her anger at Falin now replaced with sadness. NO TIME.