He nodded, looking past her briefly. “Hey, nice view.”
Megan smiled slightly. “Yeah, it’s summer ‘here.’ For about the next six hours anyway, if you can really call it a summer when the axis tilts by only a third of a degree. How can I help you?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “Megan, just check me on something. Your profile shows you as being a Sarxos player.”
Her eyebrows went up. “I drop in there every now and then.”
“More than every couple of weeks, say?”
She thought. “Yeah, I’d say so. Maybe once a week on the average, though sometimes more often if something exciting starts happening. But it’s a good place to just wander around in, even when there’s not a war or a feud between wizards going on. Interesting people there…and Rodrigues did a good job on the game. It ‘feels’ realer than a lot of virtual games do.”
He nodded. “What have you heard about players being ‘bounced’?”
Megan blinked at that. “You mean, people’s satchel codes being wiped out? Viruses, and characters being sabotaged, that kind of thing? I’ve heard that it does happen, sometimes. Revenge, supposedly. Someone taking things too seriously….”
“Someone, if it’s just someone, is taking things a lot too seriously lately. There have been something like twelve people ‘bounced’ in the last year.”
That came as news to Megan. “One a month…but there are hundreds of thousands of players in Sarxos. It doesn’t seem like much.”
“It wouldn’t to me either, unless I knew there hadn’t been any ‘bounces’ for the eight years ending a year and a half ago. Something’s going on, and the companies which sponsor Sarxos are getting twitchy. They would hate to have to shut the server down.”
“I just bet,” Megan said, somewhat dryly. Sarxos players paid by the session or in a yearly “subscription” flat fee. Either way, there would be a lot of money involved, probably, potentially, millions and millions of dollars over any given year.
“Well, we just had a particularly emphatic ‘bounce,’” Winters said. “I’m not going to identify the player by real name, obviously, but a fellow who went by the character-name ‘Shel Lookbehind.’”
“Jeez, Shel?” Megan said, astonished.
“Did you know him?”
“A little, yeah,” Megan said. “I ran across him while he was campaigning about a year ago. A lot of people got interested in those skirmishes he was having with the Queens of the Mordiri. There weren’t any protocols for one person taking over another’s territory before it had officially been declared abandoned, and everyone else wanted to see if any precedents were going to be set. I went down to Talairn to see what was going on there. Shel seemed like a good player, like a really nice guy. At least, his character did.”
“Well, the character is in limbo now, as you might expect,” said Winters, “until the guy running him manages to get his password reissued. And this has been the most physically violent of the ‘bounces’ so far, which is why it came to our attention. Most of them, as you said, have been caused by ‘a person or persons unknown’ infecting the victim’s system with a Trojan or virus of one kind or another. Additionally, there was at least one theft of a home system which may or may not have been a bounce. The evidence isn’t conclusive. But in Shel’s case, somebody broke into his apartment, wrecked the place, wiped his primary storage, and pretty much destroyed his system.”
Megan shook her head. “And nobody has any idea of who it was?”
“Nothing that the local police department’s forensics have been able to turn up, anyway. But I was hoping that you might be able to help out a little.”
“You want me to go into Sarxos and ‘ask a few questions,’” Megan said.
“You’d be good for the job. You have a pre-established identity — which is handy. Any new character who came in and suddenly started asking about the bounces would attract attention and suspicion immediately. But not just you. I think it would be smart, under the circumstances, to have someone working with you. Another viewpoint could be helpful…and Sarxos is, after all, a very big place. There’s a lot of ground to cover.”
Megan chewed her lip thoughtfully. “Someone else in the Net Force Explorers?”
“Preferably.”
She thought about that for a few moments. “I have to confess I’m not sure which of the Net Force Explorers I know might be ‘players.’ You don’t usually ask.”
“Well,” Winters said, “I know of at least one other Explorer with an established identity who’s expressed an interest, and doesn’t mind if other Explorers know he’s playing. Do you know Leif Anderson?”
Megan was caught by surprise one more time. “You mean the Leif Anderson who lives in New York? The redheaded guy with all the languages? He’s in Sarxos?”
“Yes. He plays a…” Winters stopped and looked down at the paper he was holding, and chuckled. “A ‘hedge-wizard,’ it says here. I’m assuming that isn’t someone who works on your garden using magic.”
Megan snickered. “No. It’s a classification that means you’re concentrating on doing small wizardries instead of the big dangerous ones. It can either mean that you prefer to work close to the land and the ‘common people,’ or that you’re not very good at what you do and you’re trying to cover yourself. Hedge-wizards are supposed to be a little on the incompetent side.”
Winters looked bemused. “Right. Well, will it be a good cover, do you think?”
“It should be,” Megan said, considering it. “Hedge-wizards are always traveling around looking for rare herbs and weird spells and deeds to do. They usually get to know a lot of people. My character does the same kind of thing, but for different reasons…so it should work.”
“Should I have him get in touch with you, then?”
“Sure,” Megan said. “Can it wait until tonight? Life around here is a little busy today.”
“No problem. Take this at your own pace. I would much rather you two take your time; rushing in and digging around too earnestly is likely to make the ‘person or persons’ responsible go quiet…and you don’t want that.”
“Nope. I’ll need a list of the other characters who’ve been bounced,” Megan said.
“Right here,” said Winters. With another soft chime, a small slowly rotating pyramid, the symbol for a file waiting to be opened, appeared in Megan’s workspace, hovering in the air near her. “If you have any other questions, if there’s anything else you need, get in touch.”
“Right, Mr. Winters. Thanks!”
He and his office vanished. Megan sat there, beginning to feel much more excited than was good for her with what now looked like an interminably long school day still to come. It was one thing to know you were a Net Force Explorer, affiliated (however loosely) with people doing work that could be about the most exciting there was. It was something else entirely to actually be on an assignment, with the people that you hoped you might someday work with watching you…interested and confident enough in your performance to give you a job and see what you did with it.
This, Megan thought, is gonna be a blast!
She got up out of the chair and told the computer, “Break interface—”
— and found herself sitting in the chair in the den, with an unearthly shriek echoing around her. It came from the kitchen. Her mother’s favorite kettle, the one with the train whistle in its spout, was now banging and clattering and whistling as if it was about to explode; and Megan’s ride was outside, honking her horn.
Megan tore out into the kitchen to get the kettle off the stove before it burned its bottom out. No tea, she thought, but as she turned the stove off, and grabbed her computer pad and books and disks and house keycards off the kitchen table and dashed for the door, she was grinning with sheer exaltation.