Trio of Sorcery (29 page)

“I thought it was obvious.” When he shook his head, she shrugged. “Simple. We won't have to wait around for it to spawn; when you log in, it will spawn right then and there. It recognizes you the same way that a cat recognizes the shape of a snake, on an instinctive level. It knows you for an enemy. It's watching for you; it'll spawn on top of you. Because it hates you.”

“Why are we doing this again?” Tom looked unhappy about logging in Quiet Knight, and to be honest, Ell couldn't blame him. There was a reason why the Wendigo responded to him. He didn't know it, but he was magic sensitive. Whether or not he actually could use magic was
another question, but he had pegged the Wendigo from the moment he logged in to look at it as something that was not operating by the rules he expected, and somehow the Wendigo recognized that. Maybe it too was sensitive to magic and magicians.

The real question here was this—was the Wendigo reacting the way a “normal” mythago would, like an invertebrate that has a crude ability to “learn” but has no real brain? Was it
only
that it was sensitive to magic and reacted accordingly? That was what she hoped. Because the alternative could be very nasty indeed. If it actually was able to think…

“We're doing this so I can take snapshots of the Wendigo code and compare it to what it's supposed to be,” she replied patiently. “You haven't done a real-time trace or a live capture yet. You haven't
got
real-time trace on your live servers, so I am going to have to depend on captures. Some of the things the Wendigo is doing are not in the code or the mythos, like critting you in god-mode. I want to see how it's doing that.” She very much wanted to see that, in fact. Nothing in the myths suggested that the Wendigo had that sort of ability to neutralize another's powers. This one had been coded pretty faithfully from the Ojibwa version of the myth, in which all of its abilities were strictly those of any gigantic creature—immense strength, the power of sheer size, and the game equivalent of “devouring” what it “killed.”

Tom nodded, but he was looking a bit green.

“Look, all you need to do is let it plant you, then just log out or rez back in the town and log. The player mobs will pounce it as soon as someone broadcasts that it's spawned.” She patted his shoulder; in his shoes she would be just as reluctant. He was feeling every bit of the thing's malevolence, didn't understand why, and the bottom had fallen out of his universe. Poor fellow. His world had been rational and run by numbers up until this moment. She wished there was time to have him talk to Jin Lee. Jin had been a code monkey first and only came into magic later. Maybe she should do that when this was all over.

Nah. He'll probably want to forget all about it.
On the other hand, if he didn't…yeah. Take him to Lee.

“Okay. Here goes nothing…” He selected his avatar and logged in—she began taking captures as fast as she could mash the macro button that allowed her to take a hundred “snapshots” in the time it would take a human to grab one. You could never do this with most gaming machines, the buffers would fill up before you could store to memory. But this was as good as her machine at home. It was a good thing she was using that level of machine and macro too, because the Wendigo spawned inhumanely fast, and she only had time for one set of captures as it spawned, one set of captures as it planted Quiet Knight, absorbing his hit points and health as it did so, and one set as it shambled off.

“Bastard,” Tom muttered, and looked on grimly as swarms of gold farmers and power gamers descended so
fast you would have thought someone had yelled “free beer” in the parking lot of a football stadium on game day. Then again, in a sense, someone had. Even people who don't normally read patch notes are going to sit up and take notice when you announce you've superbuffed a reward instead of nerfing it.

Ellen claimed her dumps, then remote accessed her own computers and IMed Toby. Fortunately she had cleared this beforehand with Mark Taylor, saying merely that she had a code analyst back in her office. He didn't have to know what Toby was, after all—and she was rather certain that hauling in an AIBO that sounded like K-9 was not going to win her sanity points. There was such a thing as suspension of disbelief—and there was such a thing as hanging it by the neck until it was dead.

Yes, mistress?
came the reply in the chat box. Toby could plug in via a USB port and “talk” directly into chat and documents.

Isolate the Wendigo and Quiet Knight from the dumps, then run comparison in time. Message me if you find anything.

Yes, mistress!
She uploaded the dumps to her server and went back to work, looking at the background of the zone in detail. Because the thing was, if this was something more than a mythago, it was going to be doing more than keeping itself intact and acting out the mythic tales. It was going to have desires and it was going to act on them. And there would be something it might very well want.

Out.

There was a pressure of unbelief in magic as well as a pressure of belief. That was why you didn't see a lot of real magic operating in the modern world, even from people like her, who had familiars and access to a lot more oomph than your average talent. The counterpressure was simple; far more people disbelieved in it than believed, and an equal percentage of talents were disbelievers. That was why the old gods and spirits rarely appeared anymore; how could they, when the greater numbers of the talented disbelieved in them so strongly?

But allowing a mythago to appear in an online game changed all that. Now the Wendigo had a huge audience that were being made to believe in him, an audience that invested all of its time and concentration in living through this game while they were in it. Even the power gamers who were only interested in beating the game as fast as possible and getting the most loot on the way “lived” in it to a certain extent. There was a piece of the subconscious that believed, strongly, in the reality of what was on the monitor. Perhaps for the power gamers that was even more true, because they would spend every free hour in that game. In a month, they might be on to another game, but while they were here, they ate, slept, and breathed MWO. What the Wendigo was doing now was reinforcing this…and if he could find a way, and the energy, to free himself from the computer, he would have that to empower him….

She put the brakes on her imagination. Best not to hatchet that count before it had chickened. Look through the world book first.

Unfortunately, looking through the world book and comparing it side by side to her own research did not make her any happier.

The design team had chosen the most powerful and dangerous of the Wendigo descriptions and had been absolutely faithful to it. This Wendigo could move faster than any human; it was able to seize its prey before the hapless victim was even aware it was there. That tallied with it being able to spawn in without warning to plant someone. The more it devoured, the more powerful it became; that was certainly happening, although as yet the limitations of the game itself were keeping it from going completely out of control. There was only so much processing power that a Boss could take up, and that was partly what was saving it from growing until it hit the zone “ceiling” and wiping everything in the zone.

Hmm. There was another idea. Could they put a further limiter on it? It would have to be something not in the Wendigo code, but imposed from outside. Limit the processing cycles on all Bosses? No, that didn't seem practical…

All right; according to the world book, it's coded so that it loses what it absorbs over time. The myth kind of implies the same, since the Ojibwa Wendigo never turns into
Attack of the
Fifty Foot Zombie.
So we can limit it by limiting how much it can absorb from the victims. But that will have to be imposed from outside…

Back she went to her own research, this time into Ojibwa magic.
Got it.
This had to be fast and dirty, but it was solid, should be easy to code and fit the myth.

Who handled Temp Powers? She checked the world book again. Kevin. She left the workstation she'd taken over from some lucky, lucky vacationing coder and went in search of Kevin.

She found him studying the world book himself, with a window open on a view of Dark Valley on one of his monitors and a worried look on his face. He looked up when he heard her footstep.

“How long will it take you to design up and load a Temp Power?” she asked. “Autogive it to everyone who zones in, take it away when they zone out. Blocks the Wendigo from absorbing their health and hit points. Make it look like a cowrie shell, and
call
it an Ojibwa cowrie.” She thought a little more. “Think you can give me an NPC that looks like a Native American and call him Ojibwa Medicine Man? Have him ‘give' the cowrie to the players?”

“Uh—” Kevin began, obviously caught flat-footed by her questions.

“As fast as you can,” she said, as her phone chimed with the
Stargate
theme—she was being texted, and that could only be Toby. She checked.

Results, mistress.

She sprinted back to her workstation. Behind her, Kevin reached for his keyboard.

“All right, folks, gather 'round,” Ellen said. It was close to midnight and the pile of empty pizza boxes by the trash can testified that none of them had gone home yet. Even Mark Taylor was there; he was sitting in the back, and staying quiet, but the fact that the boss was still in the trenches was heartening to the whole team. She had a projector in demo-mode hooked to her notebook computer. “Code monkeys to the front, I want you to see this.

Here are my snapshots of the code. Here's Tom”—she pointed to the right-hand section of the side-by-side capture—“and Wendigo on the left. Now, this highlighted section is Tom's god-mode powers. This snapshot is where the Wendigo first spawned. And here it is a moment later. Tom and the Wendigo.”

“Haven't you got that reversed?” asked Kathy, looking at where the highlighted code suddenly appeared on the left-hand stack.

Ellen shook her head, and waited for them to grasp what had just happened.

Tom got it first. “He
stole my code?
” he sputtered in a tone of complete outrage.

Ellen nodded. “He snatched it off you, just like taking
your knife or club away from you. Now here's the next difference. Toby tells me that this”—she indicated a section that had been highlighted in another color—“means your powers were no-oped, nulled out. Which is why Wendigo could crit you. In effect, he stole your club and whacked you unconscious, then kicked the bejeezus out of you. And here is the last snapshot, after you were planted.” The god-mode code was back where it belonged, on Tom's Quiet Knight, and his powers were turned back on again. “And if we hadn't been taking millisecond by millisecond captures of the code, we would never have seen it happen.”

“How can—this thing is—” Kathy's voice faded. Ellen knew what she wanted to say,
How can it do that? It's just a piece of code.
If Mark Taylor was Fox Mulder in this little scenario, Kathy was definitely Dana Scully. But she couldn't argue with her own eyes. The god-mode code had jumped from Quiet Knight to the Wendigo and back again. It was there in black and white.

There was silence. It was one thing for her to talk about magic acting to flip bit switches. It was quite another for them to see the evidence in a form they couldn't argue with. “But why didn't it keep the code?” Kathy said finally.

“Because, thank the god or goddess of your choice, it can't. The mythic Wendigo can't absorb powers, it only gets
strength
and
size
from the people it eats. The mythago is coded essentially the same way. To try and keep a power it steals would be violating its coding
and
its own mythos,
and that could destroy it.” She pulled her hair out of the clip and ran her hands through it. “Makes me very, very grateful for that limiter. Kevin, how's the dingus coming?”