Reamde

“What we had before wasn’t really Good vs. Evil. Those were just names pasted on two different factions.”

“Okay,” Richard said, “I’ll admit I’ve often had similar thoughts myself.”

“The people who called themselves Evil weren’t really doing evil stuff, and the people who called themselves Good were no better. It’s not like the Good people were, for example, sacrificing points in the game world so that they could take the time to help little old ladies across the street.”

“We didn’t give them the opportunity to help little old ladies across the street,” Richard said.

“Exactly, we set them certain tasks or quests that had the ‘Good’ label slapped on them; but, art direction aside, they were indiscernible from ‘Evil’ tasks.”

“So the Wor is our customers calling bullshit on our ‘Good/Evil’ branding strategy, you’re saying,” Richard said.

“Not so much that as finding something that feels more real to them, more visceral.”

“Which is what exactly?”

“The Other,” said Skeletor.

“Say what!?”

“Oh come on, you did it yourself when you saw the billboard at the airport. ‘Ugh! Blue hair! How tasteless!’ When you did that, you identified, you categorized that character as belonging to the Other. And once you have done that, attacking it, murdering it, becomes easier. Perhaps even an urgent need.”

“Wow.” Richard was seriously taken aback because Furious Muse number 5, a comparative literature graduate student at the University of Washington who had toiled in Corporation 9592’s creative salt mines for a summer, had barely been able to make it through a paragraph without invoking the O-word. Hearing it from the mouth of Skeletor had taken Richard right out of the here-and-nowness of the conversation and left him wondering if he had fallen asleep on the business jet and was only dreaming this. He made a mental note to google F.M. number 5 at the next opportunity and find out if she had moved to Nodaway.

Richard had always writhed uncomfortably during O-word conversations, since he had the general feeling, which he could not quite prove, that certain people used it as a kind of intellectual duct tape. And yet any resistance to it on Richard’s part led to the accusation that he was classifying people who liked to talk about the Other as themselves belonging to the Other.

And so the general result of Skeletor’s invocation of the O-word at this point was to make Richard want to pull the rip cord on this whole conversation.

But no. There were shareholders to think of. At some level he had to justify spending a bazillion dollars on jet fuel just to translocate his ass to this diner chair.

On one level this was stressful and pressure-laden, but on another he could not have been more comfortable. Richard knew a few people who, like himself, basically could not stop making money no matter what they did; they could be kicked out the door of a moving taxi anywhere in the world and be operating a successful business within weeks or months. It usually took a few tries to get the hang of it. Beyond that, it was possible to succeed beyond all reasonable bounds if one kept at it. Some found an adequately successful business early enough in life that they were golden-handcuffed; others only figured out how to make money as they were approaching the age of retirement. After the smuggling and the Schloss, Richard had gotten to the place where he just knew how to do it, in the sense that every teenaged tinkerer who played with electricity knew that in order to make anything happen you had to connect a wire to each terminal of the battery. At some level, making any business run was that simple. Everything else was fussing with the knobs.

“Say more about the Crips and the Bloods,” Richard said, stalling for time while he tried to get his mental house in order.

“To us they look the same. Urban black kids with similar demographics and tastes. Seems like they all ought to pull together. But that’s not where they’re at. They are shooting each other to death because they see the Other as less than human. And I’m saying it has been the case for a long time in T’Rain that those people we have lately started calling the Earthtone Coalition have always looked at the ones we now call the Forces of Brightness and seen them as tacky, uncultured, not really playing the game in character. And what happened in the last few months was that the F.O.B. types just got tired of it and rose up and, you know, asserted their pride in their identity, kind of like the gay rights movement with those goddamned rainbow flags. And as long as it’s possible for those two groups to identify each other on sight, each one of them is going to see the other as, well, the Other, and killing people based on that is way more ingrained than killing them on this completely bogus and flimsy fake-Good and fake-Evil dichotomy that we were working with before.”

“I get it,” Richard said. “But is that all we are? Just digital Crips and Bloods?”

“What if it’s true?” Devin shrugged.

“Then you’re not doing your fucking job,” Richard said. “Because the world is supposed to have a real story to it. Not just people killing each other over color schemes.”

“Maybe you’re not doing yours,” Devin said. “How can I write a story about Good and Evil in a world where those concepts have no real meaning—no consequences?”

“What sort of consequences do you have in mind? We can’t send people’s characters to virtual Hell.”

“I know. Only Limbo.”

They both laughed.

Devin thought about it a little more. “I don’t know. I think you have to create an existential threat to the world.”

“Such as?”

“Comparable to a nuclear holocaust or what would have happened if Sauron had gotten his hands on the One Ring.”

“I’m going to have all kinds of fun getting that idea past the shareholders.”

“Well, maybe the shareholders have a point. The company is making money, right?”

“Yeah, but the reason I’m here is that there is some concern that this may not continue to be the case. If the F.O.B. kill all the Earthtone Coalition, which they are likely to do, then what is there left to do in that world?”

Devin shrugged. “Kill each other?”

“There’s always that.”

Day 3

“Homegirl, this is the third time you come by here, let me put you out of your misery!”

The voice was a confident alto: someone with an excellent ear for pronunciation, even if her command of certain idioms was a little shaky. Zula spun around on her heel, then dropped her gaze twenty degrees to discover a face—somewhat familiar—smiling back at her from five feet and two inches above street level.

This was the woman—no, girl—no, woman—who had sold her a kilogram of green tea on the street yesterday afternoon. A kilogram being a rather huge amount. But she had made it seem like such a reasonable idea at the time.

The girl/woman confusion was irresolvable. She was petite and trim, traits hardly unusual among Chinese females. She had a pixie haircut, which was unusual. But this did not seem to be a fashion statement, given that she was wearing blue jeans and a pair of knee-high, bright blue pull-on boots—the kind of boots that working people used when scrubbing a boat deck or sloshing around in a rice paddy. A black T- shirt and a black vest completed the ensemble. No makeup. No jewelry except for a man’s watch, clunky on her wrist. She was rooted to the ground in a way that kept catching Zula’s eye: she planted those boots shoulder width apart on the pavement and stood square to whomever she was talking to, occasionally bounced a little on the balls of her feet when she was amused or excited by something. Her confidence made her seem forty but her skin was that of a twenty-year-old, so Zula concluded that she was young but odd in some way that would take Zula a little while to sort out.

Not all young women around here wore high heels and dresses, but it was certainly common enough that this tea-selling woman was placing herself miles outside of the mainstream by