That first battle now seemed a long time ago…that, and the problems that followed “saving his country” for the first time. Armies, no matter how small — and his was — have a distressing tendency to want to be paid. If their pay is late, they tend to go elsewhere, or turn on you. Shel had found ways to pay them, out of his own pocket sometimes, thereby acquiring a reputation among other generals and rulers in Sarxos as an eccentric.
Then, along had come the original rulers of “his country,” roused from long neglect of it by the action: rulers who felt (with some cause) that Talairn was their property, and who disliked someone raising an army to defend it without their permission. That particular disagreement had gone on for nearly a year, until the rulers realized that fighting with Shel was getting them nowhere, and that the price he was offering them, to buy them off, was actually pretty good. After that, by and large, he had been left alone…except by the likes of Delmond. When people like him turned up in Talairn, Shel stomped them as best he could…because he had fallen in love with the place. He knew that was always dangerous. Love, and you were likely to be wounded.
But some wounds were worth it.
Shel stood there for a few breaths more, looking out at the moonlight, and then said: “Gameplay ends here.”
Everything around him suddenly acquired the perfectly frozen look of a still photograph or holo. “Options,” said the voice of the server that controlled the “frame” for the virtual experience. “Continue: save: save and continue.”
“Save,” Shel said. “Accounting, please.”
“Saved. Accounting for Shel Lookbehind,” said the master games computer, as the frozen backdrop began, slowly, to dissolve into process-blue. “Balance carried forward from previous gameplay: four thousand eight hundred sixteen points. Score accrued in this session: five hundred sixty points. Total balance: five thousand three hundred seventy-six points. Query?”
“No query,” Shel said.
“Confirming accounting accepted, no query. Read waiting messages now?”
“Save for later,” said Shel.
“Acknowledged,” said the master games computer. “Please enter your personal satchel codes for an archival save of this result.”
Shel blinked twice, summoning up his computer’s copy of the satchel code “signature” that infallibly verified the game’s results as his own to the master games computer. The signature was complex, too much so for an opponent to fake. One part of the code changed with each session, and was combined with a second part, which resided permanently in his machine, and a third, which the “master” Sarxos machine maintained. Shel nodded to the computer, locking in his “save.”
“Save confirmed,” said the computer. He blinked a little, realizing for the first time that its voice was really a lot like Alla’s. “This session of SarxosSM is completed. Sarxos is copyrighted by Christopher Rodrigues, 1999, 2000, 2003–2010, and subsequent years. All rights reserved universe-wide and in all other universes that may be discovered.”
And everything vanished. Once more Shel was sitting in a room crammed with books and tapes and all the other impedimenta of his life, including (taking up most of the room) the big easy chair that let him line up his implant with the link in his home computer. There Shel sat, yawning, in the flesh rather than “in the flash,” at six in the morning in his apartment in Cincinnati, with the dawn beginning to lever its way in through the blinds, and his flesh began to complain to him that after a long night of campaigning, it was stiff and sore. The machinery was supposed to speak to your muscles a few times an hour, to keep them contracting, but sometimes these routine movements just weren’t enough to get rid of the excess lactic acid that built up in the big muscles when you were under stress. Because of this, steady long-term players were likely to do weights and get a lot of exercise on a regular basis. There might be a stereotype that suggested people who VR’d too much were thin and flabby, but Sarxos players tended toward a surprisingly high level of fitness. You could hardly campaign effectively enough to win a kingdom if your body wouldn’t support your gameplay.
Meanwhile, his body was saying something very specific to him. CORNFLAKES! it shouted. CORNFLAKES AND MILK!
Shel got up and stretched, grinning at the thought of something to eat, and at the look on Delmond’s face when he had realized he wasn’t going to be cut loose with his assets intact for the sake of pleasing his mother. Tarasp of the Hills, Shel thought, looking for his housekeys. What are we going to do about you, lady? You’re a menace, even to your own flesh and blood. I’ve got to talk to the wizards about this….
He changed into a less-rumpled T-shirt, locked his apartment, and went down the stairs to the street two at a time in an extremely cheerful mood. Despite it being a Saturday, he wouldn’t be free today. Evening shift at the hospital started at three-thirty. It would be yet another exciting evening of drawing blood and collecting labwork samples on about a hundred patients, every one of whom loathed the sight of him. Yet despite all this, as he swung into the convenience store and got his cornflakes and his milk, and then spent ten minutes or so shooting the breeze with Ya Chen, the night lady, before she went off shift, Shel’s heart sang. What a terrific campaign. What a terrific battle. I can’t wait to start dealing with the can of worms that this will have cracked open….
All the way back from the 7–11 he was laying plans…thinking about which players he needed to consult. The continuing threat from the Dark Lord was on his mind. Exactly what had he meant by that offer to “buy” Delmond? The amount offered had been three times Delmond’s potential ransom value. Unless it was some clandestine arrangement of Delmond’s mother’s with the Dark One. I wouldn’t put it past her, Shel thought as he went up the stairs at a run. She’s a snake, that one. In fact, wasn’t she a snake originally? Some kind of—
He stopped at his apartment’s landing, with his keys in his hand, and stared at the door. It was ajar.
Don’t tell me I left this open.
He pushed the door open, cautiously, and peered in.
His heart seized. Someone had been in here. Someone had been in…
…and had trashed the place.
He walked softly through, half wondering whether the intruder might still be there — and half not caring: because at the far side of the living room, where his desk was, and his chair with his interface…was a disaster area. The desk was overturned. The computer lay on its side, its main system box pulled open, the boards everywhere. His monitor was smashed. His system was destroyed.
Naturally Shel got right on the phone and called the insurance company. Naturally, eventually, they’d pay for a new system. But the one thing they could do nothing about was his hard drive. Shel would find, later, when he got the hard disk to the shop on Monday, that it had been formatted. And then his last hopes died.
He had not backed up his files to his “emergency” storage before he left. Most particularly, he had not backed up his satchel codes, the complex and completely unrememberable codes that, combined with the codes saved in the master Sarxos games server, gave him access to his character and his character’s history.