“Of course I am,” I replied indignantly.
I was, in fact, only somewhat familiar with it. Try to look at this from my perspective. I remember getting drunk several of years ago with a guy named Bob who declared that “everything” in the world of computers changes completely “every eighteen months.” He went on with “honestly, you blink and you’re hopelessly behind.” That describes just about my whole existence. Nod off during the Restoration, next thing you know you’re right in the middle of the French Revolution, and you’re wondering what the hell just happened.
“Good,” Tchekhy said. “What you are looking at here is a MUD.”
“Okay.”
“Multi-User Dimension.”
“Okay.”
“It is fantasy. Role-playing. You understand?”
“Not even a little bit.”
He sighed heavily. “Many different people join a group, all right? It is a group where everyone pretends to be someone else in someplace else at some other time or some other world.”
“Why?”
“Why not? It is fun, these games of fantasy. I belong to two myself. I am a merchant in one and a warrior in another.”
“And this is fun? Because I’ve been both and they weren’t all that thrilling.”
“Very much. You trade, you fight monsters, solve puzzles… a welcome distraction.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Why are you showing me one?”
“Because this MUD is not like any I have seen before. It is playing out in the modern world.”
“Sounds healthy,” I noted, a tad sarcastically.
“Yes, but still with fantasy elements. There are vampires and demons and other magical creatures. And one immortal.”
“Pardon?”
“It would appear that one of the central goals of this MUD is to track an immortal man. Just reading along, it seems most of the participants treat this as a work of interactive fiction, but a few are taking it very seriously.”
He clicked an entry titled “Recent Pic.” It came with an attachment and in that attachment was a poorly reproduced image—of me.
“Oh shit,” I said.
“Oh shit, indeed,” agreed Tchekhy. “There is some out-of-character speculation that you are merely the person who is running the MUD, encouraging people to seek you out for some egotistic goal. But the ones who take it seriously accept you as an immortal, and seem to believe in the vampires and fairies as well.”
“They’re called pixies,” I said.
He looked at me carefully. “They are real?”
“Sure.”
“And demons?”
I held up the photo of Gary’s face. He grimaced. I returned to my computerized picture. “Does that photo include when and where it was taken?”
“It was captured seven months ago in Cleveland.”
That explained where the photograph in Stan’s kit had come from, as well as the “last known location” identifier.
“So, these… MUD people are tracking me?”
“That is the idea. Much honor is accorded anybody who captures your image and reports your current location. The rumor that you were in Boston had the Boston members wandering the streets with their digital cameras for several days. Shall I write that you have since left for New York?”
“I wish you wouldn’t.” I was feeling sick. Might have been the vodka, but I didn’t think so. “How long has this been going on?”
“For over a year.”
“These people have been following me for a year? Whose idea was this?”
“That, I cannot know for certain. I have identified the screen name of the person running the MUD, but his email is fairly generic.” He referred to a second monitor. “Over here I am attempting to track the origin of the email. I sent a request to join this MUD and obtained an automated response. From that, I analyzed the source, a software company in South Dakota called InfoGen.”
“And this company is running the MUD.”
“No. A person with an email address within this company is running the MUD. And that might not be the case either.”
“You lost me again,” I admitted.
“Say you know a computer technician within a certain company, and say that person is in charge of assigning email accounts for that company. Your technician friend could hypothetically establish a perfectly valid email address for you with no one else in the company being the wiser. And you in turn could have your email from that account forwarded to another address. It would effectively be a blind mail drop. Nearly untraceable.”
“Only nearly?”
“I am breaking into their system to ascertain the owner of the account. If that leads to another account, I shall be forced to do the same. With some luck, I will eventually get a location and possibly a name.”
“And how long will that take?”
“Minutes. Hours. Days. There is no
Tchekhy woke me from a sound, alcohol-induced sleep sometime later. I had no clear idea exactly how much later, not with the air conditioner blocking the window.
“Did you find anything?” I muttered, not particularly willing to move.
“A new message on the MUD,” he said. “You were spotted at the train station.”
“Glorious. What about the email thing?”
“I am still tracing that.”
There was clearly something more. He couldn’t have woken me up just for that. “And?”
“And there is someone here to see you.”
I tried to sit up, but my head wouldn’t let me. “She wouldn’t be blonde and built like a supermodel, by chance, would she? Because otherwise I’m not moving.”
“After a fashion, yes, she is,” he said.
I realized how freaked my old friend looked. Then something buzzed past his ear and I understood.
“Hello, Iza,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“H’lo,” she chimed.
“Remember what I said about pixies, Tchekhy?” I asked. “Meet Iza.”
“We have met,” he stammered, clutching a gold cross around his neck. You’d think a guy who knew an immortal personally would be more difficult to shake up. He was lucky Brenda didn’t come.
Iza was darting madly about the room, which I recognized as the pixie version of a nervous twitch indicative of impending bad news like “you’re living at the base of an active volcano.”
“What’s wrong, Iza?” I asked. “And how did you find me?”
“I follow. Early, when you leave girl. Girl asks Iza to follow. Iza follow to train. Iza read and tell girl.”
I actually understood that. Possibly because I was drunk. I would have to remember that trick.
Brenda—who I hadn’t told where I was going—had asked Iza to find out what train I took. Stupid of me not to consider the possibility I would be tailed by a pixie. Except Iza was sort of coerced into helping me in the first place. I wondered what Brenda did to gain her confidence. Perhaps showing her the mushroom trick was a bad idea.
