Trio of Sorcery (27 page)

Every game had a little economy of its own, since there were always rewards to be gained and people who were willing to pay real-world money to get those rewards
without having to work for them. So a lucrative business had sprung up in the Far East, comprised of barrackslike buildings full of (mostly) young men who did nothing but play the games all day, eating and sleeping in dormitories owned by the company. In the real world, these players earned a pittance of a wage that was, nevertheless, much more than they could earn at most other jobs. These were the Chinese gold farmers and gaming clans, and they could be absolutely single-and bloody-minded about what they did to get the best loot. Hence, most game companies did what they could to shut the farmers down.

He did a double take. “Ah—wha—?”

“Think micro. The tables you guys use are a lot like the ones that slot machines use to decide the percentage of loot dropped over time. How and when it drops is random. The gold farmers used magic on those tables and skewed when the drops happened—when they were in zone—and the level of the mobs—barely high enough to drop loot. They'd exhaust the zone and move on, and no one would get anything until the time period rotated through…and then the Chinese would move in again like a swarm of locusts. In real-world equivalent, they made themselves insanely lucky.”

He felt his jaw dropping. “And how did you—”

Ellen's smile turned cruel. “This sheriff doesn't like having the candy taken away from the kids and then sold back to them at inflated prices. And unlike my stocktrader,
these guys left a bread-crumb trail I could follow. I put a curse on anyone from a Chinese ISP trying the same trick.”

He blinked. “A curse?” How could you—

“In real-world terms, I left a ghost of my own in the machine, a magical watchdog, a permanent thing that waits for their ‘scent.' It reverses their parameters, ‘poisons' their magic, and makes them insanely
unlucky
. No matter what they try, they get the opposite result from what they want. Instead of getting a ton of loot, they end up on the other end of the bell curve and get nothing, and the mobs spawn as high as possible for the zone, so they're doing twice the work for no reward.” She chuckled.

“They weren't very good at sussing out what I did; if they had been, they'd have tried to make themselves unlucky to beat the logic loop. Oh, they tried fifty ways to break the curse without knowing what the curse was or how it worked, then gave up and went back to gold farming the old-fashioned way. Now Worlds of Wonder can deal with them the way it always has.” Her smile turned satisfied and lazy—a little like the smile on the face of a sated lioness sitting on what was left of her prey.

“Well, Tom, without actually looking into your setup, that is all I can give you for now. In my professional opinion, you have a problem. I don't know what specifically caused it—yet—so I can't tell you how to fix it. A single player or a group of players might be trying to sabotage you or it might be something entirely different. Taking
the servers down for a reboot won't clear it. For free, I'll tell you that you might try to change the Wendigo code. I think all your problems center on it. Also for free, I'll tell you that I don't think it will let you, because to me all of this points to something that isn't player interference.”

“And if I can't change the code?” Despite all the weird shit she had thrown at him, Ellen seemed to know her stuff, and…if you suspended disbelief and added “magic” to all the quantum forces there were out there, well…it would make sense that something could be mucking around with Dark Valley by skewing tables in a way Tom couldn't see because he wasn't looking at them at the time they were being skewed, in real time, he was looking at them the way they had been programmed….

And how reverse Schrödinger's Cat was that? The act of looking at the tables in real time meant that they would not be changed….

“If you are still in trouble, then find a way to bring me in as a consultant.” Again, her eyes twinkled. “If you need to, get Milton to round up his buddies to avalanche bug reports. Nothing the management likes less than more justifiable complaints than they can clear.” She got up then, and in response, Tom pushed himself up out of his chair, which reacted with a sigh of its pneumatic shocks. It wasn't just an ordinary office chair, it was a top-of-the-line office chair, and that was just for the visitors. He considered the cost of everything in this one room alone, not just the computer hardware, and sucked on his lower lip.
Either she was a world-class fraud who had pulled the wool over the eyes of some pretty smart people or—

Or she could do what she said she could do.

No way to tell for sure. People paid good money to be defrauded all the time. Computer and business professionals were not immune to being hoodwinked.

He trudged back down the stairs. By the time he reached the bottom, he had decided that he was going to try her suggestion first. Change the code on the Wendigo. He could justify that easily enough, given that it was spawning in safe zones. Maybe the Wendigo code, with its new powers, was interacting with the AI in an unpredictable way.

And if it wasn't?

Right now, that wasn't something he wanted to think about.

“Well, mistress, do you think he will be back?”

Ell quirked an eyebrow at her AIBO, that charming and quirky little robot dog that was the hot adult toy so many years back. This one was the honey-colored version, which she had hacked extensively and given a voder that she'd programmed to sound like the robot dog in the Doctor Who series. All this so that her familiar could move into it. What, after all, was a witch without a familiar?

Familiars were a power source for really expert magicians, since they could tap into arcane energies that were
to ordinary magic power what a power station was to a triple A battery. Traditionally, a familiar inhabited the body of a live animal—anything from a toad to a lion, though usually a cat. But Ell was allergic to fur, and besides, she was a techno-shaman, so she had set Tobermarle (Toby for short) up in the AIBO.

But she wasn't going to tell Quiet Knight she had exactly that kind of bang-stick at her disposal. She had no intentions of telling any client any more than she needed to. Because ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when someone was mucking with the bits, you weren't going to be dealing with an adept with a familiar, you were going to be dealing with some slacker who had the talent for magic and enough code savvy to get clever.

“I think that by now, he's decided that his suspension of disbelief has run out, and he's going to try to forget everything I told him. He's going to try to reprogram the Wendigo, and that's either going to work or not. If not, he'll piss it off. And if he pisses it off, it will probably do something so egregious that even the big guns at his firm will notice.” She turned to her keyboard and monitor and did a quick-and-dirty search to find out just who was who at MWO. “The really big gun would be Mark Taylor, the CEO, who pretty much invented this game. Huh, nice to see the initial developer still in the driver's seat. That'll make things easier when they call me in desperation.”

“Shall I run a probability analysis on that, mistress?” Toby's cute little robot head went up and down eagerly.

“Yeah, and factor in any magical traces you can find on the game servers.” She Wi-Fi-beamed him the server addresses and waited while Toby did his thing. He didn't rely on his own processors, of course. He was Wi-Fi-linked to her server, and thus to every Wi-Fi-capable machine in the flat. “I want to know if it's players or something really alive in the code.” She went back to pruning her stock portfolio.

“Oh, dear.”

That got her attention, the way a smoke alarm going off got her attention. “That's a little like hearing a surgeon say ‘oops,' Toby.”

“There is extensive magical activity on the servers, mistress. And…” Toby paused. “And the sort of trace associated with an attempt to manifest. It is not outside interference, mistress. I believe you would be wise to research the mythological attributes of the Wendigo. I calculate the likelihood of you being called back at ninety-eight point nine percent.”

Ellen blinked. “And the probability of manifestation?”

Toby made a distressed noise. “Sixty-seven point two and rising.”

“Rats. I'm on it.” This called for the hard copy library, the things you just did not put on a computer because of the danger of someone somehow accessing what you put there. There really
were
some things man was not meant to know—or at least, things that were best only in the hands and heads of the (relatively) pure of heart and intention. Although she did have every book she owned backed up in image
files on a hard drive and DVDs in three different bank vaults. Just in case. Because in her line of work, there was always the chance you'd be jumping out of your own window with your familiar tucked under your arm one day.

She just hoped that day wasn't looming on the horizon.

Tom faced his fellow devs—the four that hadn't left for the holidays—and prepared to tell them he was going to castrate their baby. “I've got good news and bad news,” he said, the classic opener. “The good news is, I brought donuts. The bad news is I'm gonna have to nerf the Wendigo.”

Tom listened to the groans around the informal conference table with sympathy. His baby in this zone—some of the door quests—were running as expected, given the slight glitches that always showed up with new maps. But these four had all worked on the Wendigo, and now—

“Look, I understand,” he told them. “And I'm not taking it down. I'm just nerfing it. I'm no-oping the hunger code.”

“Ah, bugger that, Tom!” Sean was from the UK, London, a West Ender, and it showed. When there was no one around who mattered he dressed like the punk rocker he'd been before he became a code head. “Come
on,
the hunger code is what makes the Wendigo the Wendigo! Nerf that and it's just another Boss!”

“That's the point, the hunger code is the only thing about it that's new, and it's not acting up on Test.” He ran his hand over the top of his head nervously. “It has to be the hunger code acting unpredictably with the increased load on the game servers. I can no-op the code and have it ready to load with the regular outage tomorrow.” He didn't mention that he already had the go from management, who were not happy with triple the justifiable complaints from the shiny new zone.

Sean groaned. The other three shrugged. “We can put it back in later,” Tom promised.

“Yer makin' it so damn easy to defeat it's gonna be an exploit,” Sean said bitterly. “And what's the bloody point of that?”

“So I take it out of the rare treasure table. At least until I put the hunger code back in.”

“Sounds fair to me,” said Kathy, who was in charge of landscape architecture. The other two nodded. Sean moaned, but did not make any further protests. Tom left them with the box of donuts and hustled off to load the nerf on Test and make sure it didn't break anything else. And to write patch notes for the rare folks that actually
read
the damned things, making it clear that this was a temporary situation and that as soon as possible the Wendigo would be back to its old slaughtering self.

By the time he left for home that night, he was positive that the nerf wasn't going to break anything, and reasonably convinced that this was the solution to the Wendigo's
unreasonable behavior. Maybe even to the problem with the rest of the zone; sometimes code interacted strangely, sometimes there was a runaway process that went trampling all over other code. Usually that just crashed the zone, but—

Well, it still made more sense than some “spook in the server.” When he headed for the office in the morning he was completely convinced that this “techno-shaman” was off her rocker and somehow pulling a scam on everyone gullible enough to believe her. He waited for the end of the normal downtime impatiently, and the moment the first server was up for final checks, he logged in his god-mode avatar at the Trading Post, figuring he would wait for the Wendigo to spawn—