Zula turned her head to see how Wallace was faring. Not much better. He was pinned under a boulder and had been surrounded by another squadron of horse archers, riding around him in a ring, firing inward. His health was low and dropping fast. “Don’t let yourself get captured,” she warned him. “I know,” he said, and clicked an icon on his screen, helpfully labeled FALL ON YOUR SWORD.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO FALL ON YOUR SWORD? asked a dialog box.
YES, clicked Wallace.
A few seconds later his character was in Limbo too.
“It’s so obvious,” Wallace said, after devoting a few moments to regaining his composure. “This REAMDE thing has infected — how many computers?”
“Estimated at a couple of hundred thousand,” said Peter, who’d been sitting in the corner with his laptop, doing research on it. But he could only see Internet rumors in the public domain. Zula, thanks to her access to the VPN, knew that the real figure was closer to a million.
“All the victims have to go to the same fucking place with a thousand gold pieces. So naturally, thieves are going to set up an ambush at the closest ley line intersection.”
“It would pay for itself pretty quickly,” Zula allowed.
“So those guys stole your money?” asked Peter, violating the rule, earlier laid down by Wallace, that he couldn’t ask stupid questions about how T’Rain worked.
“No, because I fell on my sword, and died, and went to Limbo with all my kit,” Wallace said. “If I’d gotten weak enough for them to capture me, then they could’ve made away with the gold and everything else. But I was lucky. What they’re doing is probably quite profitable.”
“So what do we do?” Zula asked.
“Get out of Limbo,” Wallace said. This was easy enough; there were half a dozen ways to bring a character back to life, each with its own pros and cons. “Find a less obvious ley line intersection. Go there and be ready to fight our way through.”
“We could recruit a larger party — ”
“At three in the morning? Not enough time,” Wallace said. “You’re sure you can’t recruit a more … omniscient character?”
“You mean, wake up my uncle?” Zula responded. “Are you sure you want him involved?”
SO THEY GOT out of Limbo and tried again, teleporting to another, much less convenient ley line intersection an hour’s ride from the place they were trying to reach. Here they were immediately ambushed, and nearly overcame the thieves, but because of some unluckiness they ended up in Limbo again and had to try it a third time. First, though, Wallace got more gold pieces and used them to buy, at extortionate rates, some spells and potions that would keep them alive a bit longer. They teleported back in again and fought their way through the ambush and withdrew to higher ground a couple of thousand yards away — where they were set upon by another party of thieves before they could recover from wounds suffered in the first ambush. They fought back as hard as they could but ended up in Limbo once more.
Just before Zula’s character perished, though, she saw something a bit odd: some of their ambushers were going down with spears and arrows lodged in their backs. The ambushers had been counterambushed by some hostile group that had rushed to the scene of the fight but arrived too late.
“Let’s go back there,” she suggested. “I think we have help.”
“Saw them. It’s just another group of thieves,” Wallace said.
“So what? Let them kill each other.”
So they attempted to do the same thing, except this time they didn’t even make it past the first group of thieves. Again, though, their ambushers got ambushed.
Another potion-buying spree led to another attempt at the same location. This time — now that they knew something of the ambushers’ numbers and tactics — they dispatched the first group handily, and then retreated to a place where they would have a few minutes’ respite before the second group attacked them. And this time — because she knew what to watch for — Zula was distinctly able to see two separate groups converging on them: the bandits, and the bandit fighters. And her theory about the latter group was borne out when they focused all their fire on the bandits but left Zula’s and Wallace’s characters alone. One of them even cast a healing spell on Zula’s character when her health was beginning to run low.
But then they retreated into the woods with no explanation, no attempts to communicate.
“I get it,” Wallace finally said. “They work for the Troll.”
“Interesting,” Zula said.
“Their job is to help ransom carriers make it through.”
“Well,” said Zula, causing her character to mount up, “let’s make the most of it.”
And so began what they had expected to be an hour-long ride.
In practice, five hours of intense and difficult play got them most of the way there. The Torgai Foothills — which, only two weeks ago, had been some of the most desolate territory in all T’Rain — were tonight overrun by roving bands of characters Good and Evil, Bright and Earthtone. Every bit of open land was littered with skeletons of departed characters and infested by ransom thieves fighting pitched battles against hastily formed coalitions of ransom carriers. Zula and Wallace joined up with one such group that was carrying a total of eight thousand gold pieces. It was reduced to a quarter of that size by successive ambushes and then joined another coalition with ten members, which later split up because, as they belatedly found out, they were going to different places: apparently, different REAMDE files specified different coordinates. Everything was hard fought and required multiple scouting missions, feints, and probing attacks.
Zula was not a gamer. She avoided people who were (another reason she’d liked Peter). She’d fallen into the job at Corporation 9592 not out of any desire to work in that industry but because of the family connection and the accident of knowing how to do what Pluto wanted. The character she’d created in the world of T’Rain was her first personal exposure to this world, and it had taken some getting used to. She had learned to understand and appreciate the game’s addictive qualities without really being addicted herself. Devoting this much time — six hours and counting — to a game session was a new behavior for her. She was only doing it to extricate herself and Peter from this freak situation they had gotten into. She had assumed that it would take about fifteen minutes and that then she would go home and never see Peter again, never see Wallace again.
Now it was light outside. She’d been awake for twenty-four hours. There was something deeply wrong about the situation, and the only thing that had kept her from simply running out the door of the building and flagging down the first car she saw and asking them to call 911 was the addictive quality of the game itself, her own inability to pull herself out of the make-believe narrative that she and Wallace had found themselves in. She’d always scorned people who compulsively played these games when they should have been studying or exercising. Now she was playing the game when she should have been calling the cops. And yet none of this crossed her mind until Wallace’s phone began to emit a Klaxon alarm sound, and she looked up and noticed that it was daytime, that her bladder was about to explode, and that Peter was asleep on the couch.
It wasn’t the first time that Wallace’s phone had rung. He had it programmed to make different ring sounds for different people. Until now his calls had all been generic electronic chirps, which he had silenced and ignored. But this was the sound of battle stations on an aircraft carrier. He snatched it up immediately and answered “Hello.” Not “Hello?” with the rising inflection that meant To whom am I speaking? but “Hello” with the full stop that meant I was wondering when you’d call.