Reamde

For there were limits to what Teleological Tectonics could achieve. They had discovered a number of irresolvable conflicts between what the simulations insisted ought to be there, and what was already present in T’Rain. These were simply going to have to be fixed through acts of divine intervention. In and of itself, this wasn’t a problem. There were lots of divinities in T’Rain. But even the craziest divinity didn’t just go around altering landforms at random, and so it had become part of Zula’s job to act as a liaison between the Departments of Teleological Tectonics and of Narrative Dynamics, cajoling the latter into cranking out storylines to explain why this or that god had decided to move a volcano three miles to the south-southeast, or transmute a vein of copper into limestone.

“You know the URL,” Pluto pointed out, meaning the link that Richard only needed to click on if he wanted to inspect the Divine Intervention Queue himself.

Pluto seemed to be in an extrapissy mood, so Richard asked the flight attendant for another tray of sushi and turned to gaze out the window. It was a clear day. They were well into square-road-grid territory now. From here—he guessed Nebraska—the grid would continue eastward until it lapped up against, and discharged into, the finer scratchings of the Great Lakes’ industrial conurbations: places that Richard’s people never went to, save as beggars or conquerors. But before getting there the jet would plunge down into thicker air and home in on the K’Shetriae Kingdom.

SOMETIMES HE USED the FBO, the private jet terminal, at Omaha, and drove from there to the Possum Walk Trailer Park, a trip of about two hours. Today, however, they were pressed for time, and so they landed at a small regional airport only about half an hour from their destination.

Richard was oppressed by a desire to get clear of the airport and out into open country. In a big place like Omaha they could slip out of the FBO and quickly blend in with the mundanes, but here the arrival of a private jet was a big deal, and everyone in the place knew about it. Just inside the little pilots’ waiting room in the terminal, a plate of Rice Krispie Treats had been set out for them. Richard absentmindedly stuffed one into his mouth as they waited for their ride. Presently they were collected by a very polite young man named Dale, who drove them on a hilariously tortuous route around the airport to the car rental lot. Dale guessed out loud that they had come to pay a call on “Mr. Skraelin,” and Richard agreed that it was so. Dale paid Richard an elaborate compliment on the success and the sheer entertainment value of his game and, warming to the task, told Richard a few things about his band of raiders, a group of local kids who had gone to high school together and now spent every Friday evening sitting around in someone’s basement conducting bloodthirsty incursions against the Earthtone Coalition, whom Dale hated so much that he seemed almost offended that he had to go to the trouble of killing them. Almost all Dale’s friends’ characters belonged to the Var’ species.

Richard knew better than to draw actionable conclusions from this one chance encounter. Corporation 9592 had an entire department full of people with advanced degrees in statistics, managing a code base that monitored a million Dales per second, analyzing them six ways from Sunday. Any wisdom that proceeded from this sketchy conversation with Dale would be listened to, politely but incredulously, and then classified as “anecdotal” and forgotten. But Richard couldn’t help himself. Unlike the K’Shetriae, which were basically elves, and the Dwinn, which were basically dwarves, the Var’ had no discernible antecedents in folklore, unless you counted focus groups of nerds as folk. They were technologically primitive but capable of channeling the forces of weather, for example, shooting lightning bolts at their enemies but only during thunderstorms, freezing them to death but only during blizzards, and so on. A perfect match, in other words, for midwesterners. Just like Republicans or Democrats who spent so much time socializing with others of their kind that they could not believe any normal-seeming, mentally sound person could possibly belong to the opposite faction, Dale was a rock-ribbed Forces of Brightness man. As such, he exemplified a trend that had already been analyzed to exhaustion by the demographers. The Earthtone Coalition was 99 percent Anthrons, K’Shetriae, and Dwinn: the old-school races found in the works of Tolkien and his legion of imitators. Players who opted to belong to the newfangled races such as the Var’, on the other hand, tended to join up with the Forces of Brightness.

He was working on a theory that it was all related to the Rice Krispie Treats.

Bear with me, he said (not out loud, of course), showing his palms to the Furious Muses. Just hear me out.