to that location in the Torgai Foothills. And in order to turn those gold pieces into real-world money, you have to then physically get them out to a town with an M.C.”
“Not ‘physically,’” Richard corrected him. “You guys always make that mistake. It’s a game, remember?”
“Okay, physically in the game world,” Corvallis said, his tone of voice suggesting that Richard was being just a little pedantic. “You know what I mean. Your character has to be capable of surviving the journey from the drop point, through the foothills, to the nearest town or ley line intersection, and to an M.C.”
For, as C-plus didn’t need to explain to Richard, virtual gold pieces in the game could not be converted into real-world cash without the services of a moneychanger—an M.C.—and you couldn’t find those guys just anywhere. For techno-legal reasons Richard had forgotten, they had limited the number of moneychangers, inserted some friction and delay into the system.
Richard said, “So the creators of the virus were leveraging their physical control of the—goddamn it!” For Corvallis had gotten a mischievous look on his face and raised an index finger from his steering wheel. Richard corrected himself, “They were leveraging their
“As far as we can tell, they are using as many as a thousand different characters to go into that region and pick up the gold and act as mules.”
“All self-sus, no doubt.”
“You got it.”
“But how are they extracting real money from self-sus accounts?” Because the usual way of turning your pretend gold pieces into real money was to have it show up as a payment to a credit card account.
“Western Union money transfers, through a bank in Taiwan.”
Richard got a blank look.
“It’s an option we added,” Corvallis explained. “Nolan’s always looking for ways to make the system more transparent to Chinese kids who don’t have credit cards.”
“Fine. Where is the drop point?”
“Drop point?”
“Where are the victims depositing the ransom money?”
“Interesting question. Turns out that there’s not just one place for that. The REAMDE files are all a little bit different—apparently they were generated by a script that inserts a different set of coordinates each time. So far we have identified more than three hundred different drop locations that are specified in different versions of the file.”
“You’re telling me the gold is scattered all over the place.”
“Yeah.”
“They anticipated we might make moves to shut them down,” Richard said, “so they spread things out.”
“Apparently. So it’s analogous to a situation in the real world where caches of gold have been scattered all over a rugged wilderness area, hundreds of square kilometers.”
“If that happened in the real world,” Richard said, “the cops would just cordon off the area.”
“And that is exactly what cops of various nationalities are asking us to do in this case,” C-plus said. “Just write a script that will eject or log out every character in the Torgai Foothills and prevent them from logging back in. Then go in there and collect evidence.”
“By ‘go in there’ you just mean run a program that will identify all gold pieces, or piles or containers thereof, in that region.”
“Yes.”
“And are we telling them to fuck themselves?” This seemed the obvious thing to do, but Richard wouldn’t put anything past Corporation 9592’s current CEO.
“We don’t have any choice!” C-plus said.
Richard was struck mute with admiration at the way C-plus had answered the question while imputing nothing except helplessness to the CEO.
Corvallis went on, “REAMDE has affected users from at least forty-three different countries that we know about. If we say yes to one, we have to say yes to all of them.”
“And then our company is being micromanaged by the United Nations,” Richard said. “Awesome.” He was way too old to use this all-purpose adjective sincerely but was not above throwing it into a sentence for ironic effect.
“The legal issues are just fantastically complex,” C-plus said, “given all the different nationalities. So I’m not here to tell you that we’ve got an answer. But it helps that each individual event is a very small crime. Seventy- three dollars at current exchange rates. Under the radar as far as serious criminal prosecution is concerned.”
“I have a headache already,” Richard said. “Is there anything you actually need me to do? Or are you just…”
“Just cluing you in,” C-plus said. “I’m sure that the PR staff will want some quality time with you before you go on the road.”
“They just want to tell me to shut up,” Richard said. “I already know that.”
“That is not the actual point. They just want to be seen as having done their jobs.”
Richard fell silent for a while, wondering whether there was any way that he could delegate to an underling all meetings whose sole purpose was for the people he was meeting with to demonstrate that they were doing their jobs. Then he realized he should have just stayed in the Schloss if that was what he really wanted.
Half an hour later they were at Corporation 9592’s headquarters, chilling out in a small conference room with an over-sized LCD video screen. Corvallis offered to “drive,” meaning that he would operate the mouse and keyboard, but Richard asserted his prerogative, dragging the controls over to his side of the table and then logging in using his personal account. All his characters were listed on the splash screen. Compared to some players, he didn’t have that many: only eight. Even though he understood, intellectually, that they were just software bots, it made him feel somehow guilty to know that they were all sitting in their home zones twenty-four hours a day, executing their bothaviors, and waiting for the master to log in and exercise them.
He scanned the list of names and decided, what the hell, he would just unlimber Egdod.
Egdod was the first player-character that had ever been created in T’Rain, not counting a number of titans, gods, demigods, and so on that had been set up in order to build the world and that were not owned by any one player. He had his own personal home zone, a towering fortress of solitude constructed on the top of one of T’Rain’s highest mountains and decorated with artifacts that Egdod had looted from various palaces and ruins that he’d had a hand in conquering. Egdod was so famous that Richard could not even take him out of doors without first concealing his identity behind a many-layered screen of spells, wards, disguises, and enchantments whose purpose was to make him look like a much less powerful, but still way-too-puissant-to-fuck-with character. Even the simplest of these spells was far beyond the powers of all but a few hundred of T’Rain’s most powerful denizens. Richard had written a script that invoked them all automatically, with a single keystroke; otherwise it would have taken him half an hour. Each spell triggered its own custom-designed light show and sound effects extravaganza, the latter propagating through the building thanks to the oversized subwoofers with which this conference room had been supplied, and so awareness that Egdod was being aired out spread through neighboring offices by subsonic vibration and then throughout the rest of the building by text message, and curious employees began to congregate in the doorway of the conference room, not daring to cross its threshold, just wanting to catch a glimpse of the event, in somewhat the same spirit that navy veterans would gather on the shore to watch the battle-ship
