Reamde

But his mind kept drifting into the Blue. It was like a puzzle in a video game: he had to figure out what was really bothering him. It wasn’t the Furious Muses; after a brief howl of outrage when he’d almost rear-ended the pickup truck, they had been silent for hours.

Somewhere around Red Oak, he finally put it together: it was yesterday’s short but uneasy exchange with the Wikipedia-reading in-law.

The actual content of the Wikipedia entry was not at issue. What bothered Richard was the mere fact that such a thing existed and that he had been abruptly reminded of it at a moment when he just wanted to be Dodge, hanging around the old place, doing normal Iowa stuff.

The entry in question started with a summary of what Richard was now, and it filled in biographical details only when they seemed relevant to whatever mysterious stalker/scholars compiled such documents. He was not important enough, and the entry was insufficiently long, to include a biographical section laying out the whole story in narrative form. Which seemed all wrong to him, since the only way to make sense of what he was now was to tell the story of how he’d gotten that way.

WHEN HE HAD lugged that bearskin down the Selkirk Crest, he had done so without a plan—without even a motive—and certainly without a map. The ridges were steep and rocky. The sun shone on them like a torch. No water sprang from them. Attempts to descend into the cool-looking valleys were baffled by the density of the vegetation, called “dog fur” by the few people who actually lived in those parts, apparently because it made the hiker know what it must be like to be a flea navigating a dog’s hindquarters. Half out of his mind with hunger and exhaustion, he traversed a long talus slope that ramped down into the remnants of a dead silver mine, then descended through a belt of dog fur and, surprisingly, into a grove of ancient cedar trees. Decades later he would learn the term “microclimate.” At the time, he just felt that he had stepped through a wormhole to a damp and chilly rain forest perched above the Pacific. The canopy was so dense as to choke off the energy supply to everything beneath it, so the place was mercifully free of undergrowth, and a brook ran through the middle of it from a spring farther up the slope. Maybe it was just heatstroke and low blood sugar, but he felt something holy. He flung off his pack and sat down in the creek and let its cold water explore his clothes, lay down on his back, gasped at the cold, rolled over on his stomach, drank.

His fantasy that he was the first human ever to set foot in the place was shattered moments later when he noticed, just a few yards from the stream, the foundations of an old one-room cabin. It was currently occupied by the wreckage of its own roof. Rot and carpenter ants had reduced it to a splintery mulch that he raked out with his bare hands, until a cold slicing sensation told him he had just cut his finger on something unnaturally sharp. Investigating more carefully after he’d bandaged the cut, he found a crate of whiskey that had been crushed into shards by the collapse of the roof. He had inadvertently followed an old whiskey-smuggling trail from Prohibition days. This cabin had been used as a cache by bootleggers.

What worked for whiskey ought to work as well for marijuana, and he made a business out of that for a few years, sometimes traveling solo, other times as part of a pedestrian caravan. He showed them the bootleggers’ shack, and they used it as their base camp in the United States. Half a mile down the slope was a logging road where they would rendezvous with their U.S. distributors, a sodality of motorcycling enthusiasts.

In 1977, President Carter granted amnesty to draft dodgers, so Richard, finally free to do business in his own country under his own name, crossed the border in an actual vehicle for a change and drove down the valley to Bourne’s Ford, the county seat, where the records were kept. He found the owner of the property where the cabin stood, and he bought it for cash.

Though this was exactly the kind of subtlety that the Wikipedian herd mind could be relied on to trample, there was much about his later life that could be traced back to the obsession with land that had come over him when he first walked into that cool grove. In the fullness of time, he came to understand that it probably had something to do with the farm in Iowa and his knowing, even at that age, that whatever Dad’s last will and testament said—however things were handled after his father’s eventual demise—he wasn’t going to be part of it. If he wanted to own land, he’d have to go out and find some. And it might be better and more beautiful land than the farm in Iowa could ever be, but it would never be the same; it would always be a place of exile.

He fancied, for a few years in the late 1970s, that he would one day build a cabin on the bank of Prohibition Crick, as he had dubbed the nameless stream that flowed through his property, and live there. But it was much more comfortable north of the border, lounging on the shores of Kootenay Lake with pockets stuffed with hundred- dollar bills, and he lost his gumption for homesteading in the wilderness.

THE MOUNTAINS IN that corner of B.C. were riddled with abandoned mines. Richard and one of his motorcycle gang buddies, a Canadian named Chet, became fascinated by one such property, where, a hundred years ago, a successful miner from Germany had constructed an Alpine-style Schloss whose foundations and stone walls were still in decent shape. The local economy was in the toilet because of the closure of a big paper mill, and everything was cheap. Chet and Richard bought the Schloss. From the moment that they conceived this idea, Richard came to think of the Idaho property as a mere rough draft, a before-thought.

As the Schloss became a more settled and comfortable place to live, and developed into a legitimate resort run by people who actually knew what they were doing, Richard found himself with a lot of free time, which he filled largely by playing video games. In particular, he became seriously addicted to a game called Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and its various sequels, which eventually culminated in the vastly successful massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft. The years 1996 through 2006 were his Lost Decade, or at least that’s what he’d have considered it if it hadn’t led to T’Rain. His weight crept up to near-fatal levels until he figured out the trick of playing the game while trudging along—very slowly, at first—on a treadmill.

Like many serious players, Richard fell into the habit of purchasing virtual gold pieces and other desirables from Chinese gold farmers: young men who made a living playing the game and accumulating virtual weapons, armor, potions, and whatnot that could be sold to American and European buyers who had more money than time.

He thought it quite strange and improbable that such an industry could exist until he read an article in which it was estimated that the size of the worldwide virtual gold economy was somewhere between $1 and $10 billion per year.

Anyway, having reached a place where he had no more virtual worlds to conquer—his characters had achieved near-godlike status and could do anything they wanted—he began to think about this as a serious business proposition.

Here was where the Wikipedia entry got it all wrong by laying too much emphasis on money laundering. The Schloss was turning a profit and appreciating in value and giving him free lodging and food, so it had been years, by this point, since Richard had given much thought to all his unspent hundred-dollar bills. In his younger days, it was true, he had spent enough time worrying about money laundering that he had developed a nose for subterranean money flows, like one of those dowsers who could supposedly find water by walking around with a forked stick. So, yes, the quasi-underground virtual gold economy was inherently fascinating to him. But T’Rain was certainly not about him laundering a few tubs of C-notes.

Video games were a more addictive drug than any chemical, as he had just proven by spending ten years playing them. Now he had come to discover that they were also a sort of currency exchange scheme. These two things—drugs and money—he knew about. The third leg of the tripod, then, was his exilic passion for real estate. In the real world, this would always be limited by the physical constraints of the planet he was stuck on. But in the virtual world, it need be limited only by Moore’s law, which kept hurtling into the exponential distance.

Once he had put those three elements together, it had happened fast. Canvassing chat rooms to communicate with English-speaking gold farmers, he confirmed his suspicion that many of them were having trouble expanding their businesses because of a chronic inability to transfer funds back to China. He formed a partnership with “Nolan” Xu, the pathologically entrepreneurial chief of a Chinese game company, who was obsessed with finding a way to put Chinese engineering talent to work creating a new massively multiplayer online game. During an epic series of IM exchanges and Skype calls, Richard managed to convince Nolan that you had to build the plumbing first: you had to get the whole money flow system worked out. Once that was done, everything else would follow. And so, just as a way of learning the ropes, they worked out a system whereby Richard acted as the North American end of a money pipeline, accepting PayPal payments from American and Canadian WoW addicts, then FedExing hundred-dollar bills to Taiwan, where the money was laundered through the underground Filipino