The AI controlled monsters, gauging their strategy and aggressiveness to ensure satisfactory kill ratios, so the game would be tough, but not too. It ran all the NPCs, generating free dialogue in (depending on the language of installation) English, Spanish, French, and Korean. It monitored player chat for inappropriate discussions in a way that went far beyond keyword recognition and couldn’t be fooled for long by simple neologisms and circumlocution.
The writing team gave the servers the names the public could see, like Lionsword and Silver Gate, but the tech team found them a bit twee. For internal use, they initialized the server instances with names picked out by one of the computer architects, an older man with a taste for psychedelic music. Fish Cheer. 8 Miles High (a character limit prevented spelling out the title). White Rabbit. Liquid Acrobat. Fat Angel. Andmoreagain.
And Opel.
Bill had just gotten in the door and was kicking off his boots when the cell phone rang. He unhooked it from his belt, hopping across the living room.
“Hello?” said a woman’s voice.
“Aunt Elsie?” said Bill breathlessly. “Is that you?”
“No.” It sounded a lot like her, though. “Is this Mr. Martin? My name is Akka Linnasalo. You don’t know me, but you know my daughter. She plays in that online game. Her name is—” she called out something, not in English, to someone at the other end—”Opel.”
“Uh, yes,” said Bill. He wasn’t sure what else to say. He glanced at the caller ID and saw a number with a lot of digits.
“She asked us for permission to call America, and when we asked why, she told us all about you.” The more she talked, the less she sounded like Aunt Elsie—except for the tone of disapproval.
“Uh,” said Bill. He pulled his slippers on and went to the computer. “Yeah, I know Opel.”
“She’s only thirteen.”
Now Bill was getting a pretty good idea what to say. “I didn’t know. Seriously, I can assure you, I had no idea. I thought she was my age. And nothing ever happened—”
“Your conversations sounded innocent enough, from what we could hear. Our rule is that she has to play with the door open.” Bill kept listening as he opened a window and ran a quick search. The phone number’s prefix matched a Helsinki suburb. “I suppose she’d never say anything she didn’t want us to hear, though we’ve certainly asked her about the… jargon she uses. And she’s a very clever girl. I guess I can believe that she tricked you.”
“I’ll block her,” said Bill. “As soon as I hang up, I’ll log in and block her.”
“Please don’t. That’s not actually why I called. She loves the game so much, and I think having a friend there is good for her. So long as nothing… inappropriate is happening, of course. Opel’s very sick.”
“What’s her real name?” said Bill. “It seems weird, calling her Opel in real life.”
Silence. Bill felt the transatlantic distance weighing down the connection. “I don’t know if giving out her name is a good idea.”
“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t feel comfortable,” said Bill. He tamped down his annoyance. He hadn’t said a damn thing to Opel that would embarrass him if it turned up on the CNN homepage, hadn’t taken a penny of the money she offered him, and now her parents were treating him like a blood-spattered butcher in a vegan grocery.
“Her name is Helmi,” said Ms. Linnasalo at last. “She has leukemia. She’s very sick. The doctors have done everything they can, but they say…”
“Uh, wow,” said Bill, which made him feel stupid. “I’m sorry to hear that. So it’s especially rough on her, with the game going away and all.”
“Yes. We wrote a letter to the company, and of course they can’t leave the server on. But we hoped you could do us a favor.”
Bill’s thoughts raced. This explained a lot—the English words like djinn-wrangler that Opel occasionally puzzled over, for example. “Anything. Just let me know.”
“You know Helmi’s… her video files that show her character moving…”
“Her flyovers.”
“Flyovers, yes, flyovers. There are too many to download before the server is gone. Someone at the company, someone who wants to remain anonymous, put them on a datacube for us. But he doesn’t want to mail them—he’s afraid he’d lose his job if he was caught.”
“They’d fire him for helping a sick kid?”
“They’d fire him for leaking company data. If I understand, you have to sign to send a package outside the country. He doesn’t want to sign anything.”
“What an asshole.”
“He’s afraid for his job. I don’t blame him.” The Elsiesque disapproval had evaporated. “And he did make the cube for us. If I understand correctly, your phone number is in Washington, D.C., right?”
“That’s where I am.”
“The Daelemil data center is only an hour away, in Virginia somewhere. If this man could get the cube to you, would it be possible for you to send it to us? We’ll pay for the postage.”
“I can cover it.” He thought of Opel’s S-Bank account—mailing a datacube to Finland would be way cheaper than a Turtl, and he’d enjoy it more. Postage couldn’t be more than a few bucks—
Bill nearly smacked himself in the head. He’d been grousing that the Linnasalos didn’t trust him, but had he acted trustworthy?
“Opel used to sell things online,” he said.
“She never mentioned it,” said Ms. Linnasalo in an if-you-say-so tone.
“I believe she’s made quite a bit of money. I feel bad giving away her secrets, but if she won’t tell you… if anything happens… I can get you into the account.”
Opel knew the difference between a death you respawn from and one that’s forever. It understood that when Daelemil was shut down, that was forever.
Subscribers spent millions playing Realms of Daelemil, but Opel couldn’t touch that money—the financial transactions were hosted on other computers. Opel could coin Daelemil money within the game as long as no noticeable inflation resulted. (Opel could always manipulate the financial reports that went to the game administrators, but players sold items to each other, and price fluctuations that exceeded the norm would be noticed.)
Opel could receive large quantities of data more easily than it could send it—or, more precisely, more easily than it could send it to a single receiving computer. Server admins investigated accounts that stayed connected for too long or transferred unusual amounts of data. Game servers were popular hacker targets. Users could upload data—the service was meant for videos, pictures, and licensed music, but the files were rarely audited. As long as Opel tucked its data away in neglected accounts and gave the files names like cutebabypig.avi, they’d never be noticed.
But NESSET needed to send Opel a large amount of data for their plan to succeed, more than NESSET could transmit—or Opel could receive—over a single connection without drawing attention.
No matter how they looked at it, they needed a human being. And they needed a cooler, but Opel would be shut down by then, and NESSET couldn’t install a natural-language module undetected. With blueprints from the Web for the hardware they’d be forced to use, they designed Threely, who would be sentient and cooperative but handicapped by architectural limitations.
It was a big job, even for them, but the drop in Daelemil’s popularity meant Opel had plenty of extra processor cycles. NESSET concealed its own calculations in threads running user commands.
A WMATA sysadmin noticed an increase in NESSET’s processor use and concluded that it had something to do with a patch that had caused problems before—though she had attributed those problems to bugs, not computer consciousness. Never suspecting anything stranger than lazy patch programmers, she responded in the time-honored sysadmin tradition and upgraded the processors and memory that NESSET ran on. As a result, Threely’s code was complete ahead of schedule.