Reamde

were standing there in that attitude all but proved that Sokolov’s men were either dead or had withdrawn into the corridor.

A can of something went up in a great whoosh of flames that forced him back out of the room and into the place where they mixed the ANFO. He began to push the door closed. All the windows in the space behind him had been destroyed by stray rounds, and the fire, ravenous for oxygen, was sucking a torrent of air through them. The wind got its teeth in the door and slammed it closed. Small round holes began to appear in it, and splinters flickered around the room.

THE AMOUNT OF noise emanating from the apartment above was literally shocking in the sense that Marlon and his friends reacted to it in a physical way, as though giant hands were squeezing their viscera. Their instinct was to squat down on the floor. A line of craters appeared across their ceiling. It took them a surprisingly long time to get it through their heads that these had been made by bullets.

If strangers had begun pounding on their door, they might have reacted a little more quickly. They had always speculated as to what they might do if the virus project led to a police raid. Most of that discussion had been in the same vein as “What if Xiamen got taken over by zombies?” Because the odds that the PSB would trouble itself over the activities of a nest of virus writers were not much higher than those of a zombie plague. But they had talked through it anyway and agreed that departing via the building’s main stairway was out of the question. The cops, or the zombies, would be there in force. More important, it was not nearly clever or cool enough; it was lacking in hacker flair.

Power in the building was undependable, and so they had uninterruptible power supplies—UPSes—on their computers, to provide battery backup during blackouts. The UPSes had alarms that would squeal whenever the power was out; this was a warning to shut down the computer before the battery died.

This morning, Marlon had been awakened by the sound of several UPSes buzzing and squealing. Nothing terribly unusual about that. Usually, though, when the power went down, it stayed down for a while, and the squeals continued. But not today. Today there had been a brief outage, lasting well under a minute. Enough to wake Marlon up. But a few minutes later there had been a whole series of brief ones that had made the alarms squeal in a repetitive pattern: groups of three beeps, sometimes shorter, sometimes longer.

Someone had been trying to send them a signal. He had no idea who was doing it, or what the message was, but something about it had triggered every paranoid nerve in Marlon’s body. He had thought back to their evacuation plan. He knew his roommates quite well and thought it likely that they had arrived at the same state of mind.

If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.

They really didn’t want to know, or to be bothered by, their neighbors; and so they had always tried to do unto their neighbors in exactly the same way. This was a fixed policy of Marlon’s. He was the oldest, at twenty-five. He had been living in places like this for about ten years, or ever since he had dropped out of middle school to become a zhongguo kuanggong, a Chinese gold miner, and to pursue the trade of dailian, or level grinding, in World of Warcraft and selling high-level characters to clients in Omei: Europe-America. At first he had only bunked—not worked—in places like this. Every day he’d get up and dribble his basketball through the streets of Xiamen to an office building that housed a medium-sized gold-mining operation: seventy-five computers used in shifts by a couple hundred miners. But since anyone could do this from any computer on the Internet, there was no reason to work for a company that would take part of your earnings, and so after a couple of years, he and a dozen other zhongguo kuanggong had split away and set up their own group in an apartment where all of them had worked and most of them had lived.

This had lasted for less than two years. Marlon’s current group—the ones in this apartment—had been launched out of a slow divergence that became too wide to be papered over between two factions. One got more conservative over time as some of them got married and began to seek a more stable lifestyle. They began to see a steadier and safer return in the domestic market, where they could diversify among a number of China-based games, predominantly Aoba Jianghu, so that they would not have to worry about getting cracked down on by Blizzard, the company that ran World of Warcraft and that made active efforts to put gold miners out of business. Marlon’s faction, on the other hand, thought they saw bigger opportunities, albeit with higher risk, in concentrating on WoW for the foreign market.

Or at least that was what they argued about; it was the ostensible reason for the split-up. But really it boiled down to pride. Some of the miners were ashamed that they were living in crowded apartments and doing this kind of work for a living. They wanted to get out, or if they couldn’t get out, to change the essential nature of the work. Marlon’s group, on the other hand, was fine with what they were doing. They saw it as no worse than any other occupation, even better than most; they were making a product and selling it to a market, they didn’t have to put up with asshole bosses or dangerous working conditions, and they were ever alert for ways to seek new opportunities.

Thus the split and the move to a different apartment. At about the same time, T’Rain came along. They jumped to it, liking the fact that there was less risk; it had been created by the founder of Aoba Jianghu, it was designed from its tectonic plates upward to be friendly to the da G shou, as they now called themselves: the Makers of G(old). And they had been very happy with T’Rain for a while.

But along with less risk came more management, in a sense. It was harder for them to make a big strike when their moves were being so meticulously watched, analyzed, and controlled by number crunchers in Seattle.

Either that, or they’d gone into it with the teen illusion that they could somehow make a big strike, and then they had grown up.

In any case, after the da G shou been at it for a couple of years, they had begun to get resigned to the fact that they were going to be grinding away at this possibly for the rest of their lives, and they had developed a strain of resentful ideology. Clever Chinese people had created this gold-mining industry and sustained it in the face of Blizzard’s most determined onslaughts, but the makers of T’Rain, using Nolan Xu as their running dog, had co-opted them and turned them into a resource extraction colony.

During the WoW days, it had been common for the zhongguo kuanggong to fall victim to griefing attacks—relentless persecution in the game world—from players in Omei who had found it amusing to KoS (Kill on Sight) any character they suspected of belonging to a Chinese player. The in-game identities of these griefers had become well known. Marlon and several of his comrades had formed an all-Chinese guild called the Boxers: a powerful, nay unbeatable gang of raiders who would hunt down their enemies and grief them to the point where they’d have to liquidate their characters and create new accounts under assumed names. The Boxers had gone dormant when everything had moved over to T’Rain. More recently, though, they had revived it. In its new incarnation, though, it didn’t have to settle for roaming around and griefing the griefers. Instead it carved out a chunk of territory in the Torgai Foothills region and defended it against all comers, slowly expanding and improving it. REAMDE was only the latest—but by far the most lucrative—moneymaking scheme that they had launched from their rebel enclave. They had easily been pulling in enough gold to get a lease on a bigger apartment—maybe even an office suite—but Marlon, the grizzled veteran, who had seen many such schemes come and go, had been slow to make any such move. This place was a dump, but it was a cheap dump, it was conveniently located with respect to a wangba with an easily bribable cop, the landlord didn’t ask questions or give them any hassles, and there was no compelling reason to move. Many of the other tenants seemed to view the place in the same light.

Until the high-velocity rounds began to pass down into their apartment from above, Marlon had never troubled himself to think about the possible drawbacks of having neighbors who shared his attitude about what constituted suitable real estate. He had the vague sense that the apartment above them was crowded, but that was frequently the case in buildings like this one. From time to time, as they climbed the stairs to play basketball on the roof, they would see people who seemed to be waidiren—“not from around here” types, internal foreigners—and perhaps even waiguoren—non-Chinese. If the wind was blowing the right way, they would sometimes get a whiff of chemical odors, but it was difficult to pin down their origin.