Reamde

THE ZAMBOANGA OUTPOST of the GWOJ turned out to be one corner of an air force base that had been constructed on flat coastal land, otherwise occupied by rice paddies, outside of a middling regional city. The base as a whole was moderately well fenced and defended. The corner occupied by Seamus and his team was a fortress unto itself, surrounded by high chain-link and razor wire bolstered by stacked steel shipping containers. Approaching vehicles had to run a slalom course through containers that Seamus assured her had been filled with dirt so that they could not simply be bashed out of the way by an onrushing truck bomb. Once inside that perimeter, though, they found themselves in a tiny simulacrum of America: a compound of modular dwellings surmounted by howling air conditioners fed by cables from a huge diesel generator situated downwind. Several of the modules were barracks for Seamus and members of his crew, one was guest quarters for people like Olivia, and there was a double-wide with kitchen and dining facilities at one end and a conference room at the other.

Here as everywhere else in the world, everyone hung out in the kitchen. So after Olivia had dropped her stuff in the guest quarters and taken a shower, she went into the double-wide to find Seamus and two other members of his crew hanging out there, lounging on sofas or sitting with erect postures at the dining table, focused on their laptops, sipping American soft drinks. The whole scene in fact looked quintessentially American to her, which, as she would’ve been the first person to admit, meant nothing, since she had spent practically no time in the United States. Seamus’s crew was multiracial to a fault and looked somewhat uneasy in their cargo shorts and T-shirts, as though they’d all much rather be in uniform. They all had lots of stuff strapped to them: holsters with semiautomatic pistols, knives, radios. Even their eyeglasses were strapped to their heads. Earlier, they’d all been perfunctorily introduced to Olivia; none of them now gave her more than a glance and a nod. They were intensely focused on what they were doing: some sort of pitched battle.

“Fuckers are trying to flank us on the left!”

“I see ’em and am pulling. Need backup though.”

“Disengaging from the Witch King and pivoting to get your back. Someone finish the bastard off. A few Kingly Strokes would take care of it, Shame.”

Seamus said, “Okay, I’ll need to rearm, cover me for second … got it … Fuck!”

All of the men leaned back from their screens in unison and let out roars of anguished laughter so loud that Olivia’s ears crackled. “Fuck, man!” called a compact African American. “He toasted you.”

“We’re all fucked now,” said a Hispanic guy. “Sequester your shit while you still can.”

Fierce clicking and typing, punctuated by roaring, anguished laughter, as (Olivia guessed) each man’s character died in the game world.

Planted around the dining area, on windowsills and kitchen counters, were plastic dolls: troll-or elflike fantasy characters decked out in elaborate costumes and armed to the teeth with fanciful, quasi-medieval weapons. Each one stood on a faux-stone pedestal with a name chiseled into it. Olivia picked one of them up—very carefully, since it seemed that they were important—and flipped it over. Marked on the underside of the base was the logo of Corporation 9592.

So that answered the question she’d been afraid to ask, for fear of seeming like the stupidest person in the whole world: Are you playing T’Rain? Because Olivia was not a gamer and could not tell one such game from another.

“Olivia?”

She looked up and locked eyes with Seamus, who was staring at her over the rim of his laptop screen. Seamus spoke with exaggerated calm: “Put … the troll … down … and slowly back away.”

Okay, he was joking. She carefully put the doll back and then clasped her hands innocently behind her back. The other men let out loud fyoosh! noises as if an IED had just been successfully defused.

“I’m sorry I touched your doll,” she said. “I had no idea how important Thorakks was to you.”

Silence, as none of the men knew how to cope with her tactical use of the word “doll.”

“I’m not a big T’Rain expert,” she continued. “Is Thorakks like a major character in the world?”

“Thorakks is my character,” Seamus said.

“Wow, how do you rate having a doll made of your personal character?”

“It’s called an action figure,” he said, “and it’s nothing special. If you’ve got a character in T’Rain, all you have to do is fill out a web form and send them fifty bucks and they’ll make you one of these on a 3D printer and ship it to you. Discount for active-duty military.”

“Are you active-duty military?”

“No, but we have ways of finagling the discounts.”

“Are these your own personal laptops?” Olivia asked.

“Why do you want to know?” asked Seamus, wary that she was about to accuse him of misusing government property.