our administration of office sundries in order to focus on our core competencies, and I'm trying desperately hard not to fall asleep, when there's an odd thudding sound that echoes through the fabric of the building. Then a pager goes off.
Andy's at the other end of the table. He looks at me: 'Bob, your call, I think.'
I sigh. 'You think?' I glance at the pager display. Oops, so it is. ''Scuse me folks, something's come up.'
'Go on.' Lucy glares at me halfheartedly from behind her lucky charms. 'I'll minute you.'
'Sure.' And I'm out, almost an hour before lunch. Wow, so interns are useful for something. Just as long as he hasn't gotten himself killed.
I trot back to Slug's office. Peter-Fred is sitting in his chair, with his back to the door.
'Pete?' I ask.
No reply. But his laptop's open and running, and I can hear its fan chugging away. 'Uh-huh.' And the disc wallet is lying open on my side of the desk. I edge towards the computer carefully, taking pains to stay out of eyeshot of the screen. When I get a good look at Peter-Fred I see that his mouth's ajar and his eyes are closed; he's drooling slightly. 'Pete?' I say, and poke his shoulder. He doesn't move. Probably a good thing, I tell myself. Okay, so he isn't conventionally possessed...
When I'm close enough, I filch a sheet of paper from the ink-jet printer, turn the lights out, and angle the paper in front of the laptop. Very faintly I can see reflected colors, but nothing particularly scary. 'Right,' I mutter. I slide my hands in front of the keyboard — still careful not to look directly at the screen — and hit the key combination to bring — up the interactive debugger in the game I'm afraid he's running.
Trip an object dump, hit the keystrokes for quick save, and quit, and I can breathe a sigh of relief and look at the screen shot. It takes me several seconds to figure out what I'm looking at. 'Oh you stupid, stupid arsel' It's Peter-Fred, of course. He installed NWN and the other stuff I threw at him: the Laundry-issue hack pack and DM tools, and the creation toolkit. Then he went and did exactly what I told him not to do: he connected to Bosch. That's him in the screenshot between the two. half-ore mercenaries in the tavern, looking very afraid.
Two hours later Brains and Pinky are baby-sitting Pete's supine body (we don't dare move it yet), Bosch is locked down and frozen, and I'm sitting on the wrong side of Angleton's desk, sweating bullets. 'Summarize, boy,' he rumbles, fixing me with one yellowing rheumy eye. 'Keep it simple. None of your jargon, life's too short.'
'He's fallen into a game and he can't get out.' I cross my i arms. 'I told him precisely what not to do, and he went ahead and did it. Not my fault.'
Angleton makes a wheezing noise, like a boiler threatening to explode. After a moment I recognize it as two-thousand-year-old laughter, mummified and out for revenge. Then he stops wheezing. Oops, I think. 'I believe you, boy. Thousands wouldn't. But you're going to have to get him out. You're responsible.'
I'm responsible? I'm about to tell the old man what I think when a second thought screeches into the pileup at the back of my tongue and I bite my lip. I suppose I am responsible, technically. I mean, Pete's my intern, isn't he? I'm a management grade, after all, and if he's been assigned to me, that makes me his manager, even if it's a post that comes with loads of responsibility and no actual power to, like, stop him doing something really foolish. I'm in loco parentis, or maybe just plain loco. I whistle quietly. 'What would you suggest'
Angleton wheezes again. 'Not my field, boy, I wouldn't know one end of one of those newfangled Babbage machine contraptions from the other.' He fixes me with a gimlet stare. 'But feel free to draw on HR's budget line. I will make enquiries on the other side to see what's going on. But if you don't bring him back, I'll make you explain what happened to him to his mother.'
'His mother?' I'm puzzled. 'You mean she's one of us'
'Yes. Didn't Andrew tell you? Mrs. Young is the deputy director in charge of Human Resources. So you'd better get him back before she notices her son is missing.'
James Bond has Q Division; I've got Pinky and Brains from Tech Support. Bond gets jet packs, I get whoopee cushions, but I repeat myself. Still, at least P and B know about firstperson shooters.
'Okay, let's go over this again,' says Brains. He sounds unusually chipper for this early in the morning. 'You set up Bosch as a server for a persistent Neverwinter Nights world, running the full Project Aurora hack pack. That gives you, oh, lots of extensions for trapping demons that wander into your realm while you trace their owner's PCs and inject a bunch of spyware, then call out to Accounts to send a blackbag team round in the real world. Right'
'Yes.' I nod. 'An internet honeypot for supernatural intruders.'
'Wibble!' That's Pinky. 'Hey, neat! So what happened to your PFY'
'Well ... ' I take a deep breath. 'There's a big castle overlooking the town, with a twentieth-level sorceress running it. Lots of glyphs of summoning in the basement dungeons, some of which actually bind at run-time to a class library that implements the core transformational grammar of the Language of Leng.' I hunch over slightly. 'It's really neat to be able to do that kind of experiment in a virtual realm — if you accidentally summon something nasty it's trapped inside the server or maybe your local area network, rather than being out in the real world where it can eat your brains.'
Brains stares at me. 'You expect me to believe this kid took out a twentieth-level sorceress? Just so he could dick around in your dungeon lab'
'Uh, no.' I pick up a blue-tinted CD-R. Someone — not me — has scribbled a cartoon skull-and-crossbones on it and added a caption: DO'NT R3AD M3. 'I've been looking at this — carefully. It's not one of the discs I gave Pete; it's one of his own. He's not totally clueless, for a crack-smoking script kiddie. In fact, it's got a bunch of interesting class libraries on it. He went in with a knapsack full of special toys and just happened to fuck up by trying to rob the wrong tavern. This realm, being hosted on Bosch, is scattered with traps that are superclassed into a bunch of scanner routines from Project Aurora and sniff for any taint of the real supernatural.
Probably he whiffed of Laundry business — and that set off one of the traps, which yanked him in.'
'How do you get inside a game?' asks Pinky, looking hopeful. 'Could you get me into Grand Theft Auto: Castro Club Extreme'
Brains glances at him in evident disgust. 'You can virtualize any universal Turing machine,' he sniffs. 'Okay, Bob.
What precisely do you need from us in order to get the kid out of there'
I point to the laptop: 'I need that, running the Dungeon Master client inside the game. Plus a class four summoning grid, and a lot of luck.' My guts clench. 'Make that a lot more luck than usual.'
'Running the DM client — ' Brains goes cross-eyed for a moment ' — is it reentrant'
'It will be.' I grin mirthlessly. 'And I'll need you on the outside, running the ordinary network client, with a couple of characters I'll preload for you. The sorceress is holding Pete in the third-level dungeon basement of Castle Storm.
The way the narrative's set up she's probably not going to do anything to him until she's also acquired a whole bunch of plot coupons, like a cockatrice and a mind flayer's gallbladder — then she can sacrifice him and trade up to a fourth-level demon or a new castle or something. Anyway, I've got a plan.
Ready to kick ass'
I hate working in dungeons. They're dank, smelly, dark, and things keep jumping out and trying to kill you. That seems to be the defining characteristic of the genre, really. Dead boring hack-and-slash — but the kiddies love 'em. I know I did, back when I was a wee spoddy twelve-year-old. Fine, says I, we're not trying to snare kiddies, we're looking to attract the more cerebral kind of MMORPG player — the sort who're too clever by half. Designers, in other words.
How do you snare a dungeon designer who's accidentally stumbled on a way to summon up shoggoths? Well, you need a website. The smart geeks are always magpies for ideas — they see something new and it's 'Ooh! Shiny!' and before you can snap your fingers they've done something with it you didn't anticipate. So you set your site up to suck them in and lock them down. You seed it with a bunch of downloadable goodies and some interesting chat boards — not the usual MY MAGIC USR CN TW4T UR CLERIC, DOOD, but actual useful information — useful if you're programming in NWScript, that is (the high-level programming language embedded in the game, which hardcore designers write game extensions in). But the website isn't enough. Ideally you want to run a networked game server — a persistent world that your victims can connect to using their client software to see how
