pressure who has little strokes all the time. I will send her a note saying I’m out of the country on business, but I can’t possibly tell her what has been going on—it would be like throwing her off a bridge. My brother is in Los Angeles working on his dissertation and I talk to him maybe four times a year.”
Yuxia seemed taken aback that any family could be so small and poorly organized.
“What I really want to do is some research,” Csongor said. “I want to see if there is any information about a black, English-speaking Islamic terrorist whose code name or real name might be Jones.”
“For all we know,” Csongor went on, “there are pictures of Mr. Jones up on the Internet, and if I can identify him by name, then I could consider going to the authorities and telling them ‘So-and-so was in Xiamen a couple of weeks ago and he has a hostage.’”
“Which authorities?” Marlon asked.
“I have no idea,” Csongor said.
“Whoever cares,” Marlon suggested.
They dove into the food, almost literally, and did not speak much for a while. It was the finest meal of Csongor’s life, and he cursed himself for not having bought ten times as much of it.
“Do you want to get in touch with your family, Yuxia?” Csongor asked, when he was able to speak again. This created a pang that was obvious on her face and that left both of her companions somewhat aghast. “It is all I think about,” she said eventually, “but I want to wait until we are somewhere that feels safer.”
Csongor went into the bathroom and found Yuxia’s and Marlon’s damp clothes strung up all over the place. All of them had been wearing the same garments for two weeks, rinsing them occasionally in salt water. He turned on the shower and climbed in fully clothed, using bar soap to squeeze lather in and out of the fabric, then stripped down and left it all on the floor of the tub while he washed himself, letting the soapy water run off his body and down into the clothing, treading on it with his feet. Finally he spent a minute squeezing rinse water through them, then turned off the shower and began toweling himself off. He was a hairy man, a living advertisement for the body waxing industry, and it seemed as though his pelt was capable of holding a liter of water. He wrung out his clothing as best he could and hung it up wherever he could find a place, but despaired of its ever getting dry. But under the sink was a hair dryer stashed on a little ledge, which he pulled out and used to dry his underwear, then his trousers—which he had long ago cut off at the knees to make into shorts—and then his shirt.
After he was dressed, Yuxia and then Marlon rotated through the bathroom, drying out their clothes and putting them on, and then they went downstairs and across the street to NetXCitement!, where they devoted a little time to getting themselves situated. The standards and practices here were radically different from what prevailed in a Chinese
Having negotiated these cultural rapids, Marlon claimed the fastest and most expensive computer in the place, on the grounds that running T’Rain consumed a lot of memory and processing power, and Csongor rented a run-of-the-mill one nearby.
There was yet more culture shock as Marlon discovered that T’Rain was not even installed on his computer and that he would have to download it, a procedure that in some precincts would have consumed a great many hours. Here it took twenty minutes. For whatever reason, NetXCitement! had an extremely fast Internet connection.
Meanwhile Csongor had been thinking about Yuxia’s predicament. “I think I know of a way you could send a message to your family without giving away our location,” he said.
He had been clicking around on the computer he’d rented and found that it was so riddled with spyware, trojans, and viruses as to be nearly unusable. And so he had begun a project of rebuilding the machine from scratch. He divided its drive into two partitions, a big one and a small one, and reinstated its existing bootleg copy of Windows, and all of its other bootleg software, viruses, and so on onto the big partition. Then he set about downloading Linux onto the small partition. This entailed a seemingly endless number of reboots, during which he had plenty of time to explain matters to Yuxia. “We’ll get Tor running on this thing,” he said. “It will anonymize all of our IP traffic, provided we use the right browser… as long as you don’t come out and tell your family where we are, no one will be able to trace us using IP addresses.”
The news that she’d soon be able to check in with her family had powerfully affected Yuxia. Csongor was preoccupied for a time with explaining to her why the procedure was taking so long, why he had to keep rebooting the machine, why he insisted on opening up many small files filled with cryptic Unix jargon and making small edits to them, what it meant to get Tor configured and installed. When he finally got the machine up and running a fully secure, firewalled, anonymized installation of Linux—a feat for which he might have charged a commercial client lots of euros—he handed the machine over to her and then got up and strolled five paces over to where Marlon was just in the final phases of getting T’Rain online.
“How does it work?” Csongor asked. “Your character goes to this place—”
“He has been there the whole time,” Marlon said, “waiting in his HZ for me to log in again.”
“Okay, but anyway he has vassals?”
“About a thousand of them.”
“Wow.”
“Only twenty, thirty actual players,” Marlon said, “members of the da G shou. But each one has a few toons—”
“Toons?”
“Characters. And they have vassals—low-level toons who are basically nothing more than robots running around the world. Anyway. I am the LL—Liege Lord—of all of these. Any gold that they have hidden, I can see, I can pick up—it belongs to me.”
“So your toon can go to this place—”
“Torgai.”
“Yeah. Where you live. Where the Troll lives.”
“He doesn’t have to go there. He’s there already. His HZ is in a cave, in the middle of it.”
“Okay, so he can pop out of his cave and run around and see gold that would be invisible to anyone else. He can pick that gold up and put it in his bag.”
“Maybe. If he can go outside at all.” Marlon had, Csongor noted, opened a browser window instead of logging immediately into T’Rain. He seemed to be scanning Chinese-language chat rooms. Csongor could not read the text, but it was obvious from the artwork surrounding it that this chat room was all about T’Rain; it was some kind of board where players hung out to exchange information and opinion, and the Chinese text was studded here and there with “LOL,” “FFS,” “w00t,” and other staples of text messages.
“Why would you not be able to go outside?”
“Someone might be waiting for me. Or the whole place might be conquered by an army who came to grab all the gold. They would pounce on me as soon as I came out of the cave.”
“Can’t you hide yourself? With invisibility spells or something?”
“It depends on their power. If you let me read for a minute, I can find out what has been happening around this place.”
Having been given the brush-off, Csongor went back over to check in on Yuxia, who was composing a message in a browser window. He was eager for her to finish so that he could do some anonymous browsing of his own, but she was taking her time about it. As well she might. How would she go about explaining herself to her family?
“Remember,” he suggested, “even if the cops in China can’t trace your location, they can read your email. So don’t tell them anything you wouldn’t want the cops to know.”
“I am not stupid,” Yuxia said levelly.
Doubly brushed off, Csongor drifted back to Marlon, who seemed to have made short work of his reconnaissance. “We are lucky,” he said. “It is all total chaos there. No one has hegemony. Perfect for me.”
