Reamde

The most notable feature of the landscape was that it was littered—no, paved—with corpses in varying stages of decomposition.

A boulder, about the size of an exercise ball, plunged out of the sky and struck the ground nearby. Since meteorites were no more common in T’Rain than they were on Earth, Zula suspected some artificial cause. Turning toward the nearest of the Torgai Foothills, a small peak a couple of hundred meters distant, she saw a battery of three trebuchets, one of which was being reloaded. The other two were just in the act of firing. Their dangling weights and hurling slings seemed ungainly, chaotic, and unlikely to work. But they did a fine job of hurling two additional boulders in her direction. Zula had to dodge one. Not far away was an outcropping of stone that looked like it might provide shelter. She ran to it and immediately came under fire from a squadron of horse archers hidden in tall grass nearby. She invoked some spells that should have protected her from the barrage of arrows, but one of them scored a lucky hit and killed her. Her character disappeared from the screen and went to Limbo.

Zula turned her head to see how Wallace was faring. Not much better. He was pinned under a boulder and had been surrounded by another squadron of horse archers, riding around him in a ring, firing inward. His health was low and dropping fast. “Don’t let yourself get captured,” she warned him. “I know,” he said, and clicked an icon on his screen, helpfully labeled FALL ON YOUR SWORD.

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO FALL ON YOUR SWORD? asked a dialog box.

YES, clicked Wallace.

A few seconds later his character was in Limbo too.

“It’s so obvious,” Wallace said, after devoting a few moments to regaining his composure. “This REAMDE thing has infected—how many computers?”

“Estimated at a couple of hundred thousand,” said Peter, who’d been sitting in the corner with his laptop, doing research on it. But he could only see Internet rumors in the public domain. Zula, thanks to her access to the VPN, knew that the real figure was closer to a million.

“All the victims have to go to the same fucking place with a thousand gold pieces. So naturally, thieves are going to set up an ambush at the closest ley line intersection.”

“It would pay for itself pretty quickly,” Zula allowed.

“So those guys stole your money?” asked Peter, violating the rule, earlier laid down by Wallace, that he couldn’t ask stupid questions about how T’Rain worked.

“No, because I fell on my sword, and died, and went to Limbo with all my kit,” Wallace said. “If I’d gotten weak enough for them to capture me, then they could’ve made away with the gold and everything else. But I was lucky. What they’re doing is probably quite profitable.”

“So what do we do?” Zula asked.

“Get out of Limbo,” Wallace said. This was easy enough; there were half a dozen ways to bring a character back to life, each with its own pros and cons. “Find a less obvious ley line intersection. Go there and be ready to fight our way through.”

“We could recruit a larger party—”

“At three in the morning? Not enough time,” Wallace said. “You’re sure you can’t recruit a more … omniscient character?”

“You mean, wake up my uncle?” Zula responded. “Are you sure you want him involved?”

SO THEY GOT out of Limbo and tried again, teleporting to another, much less convenient ley line intersection an hour’s ride from the place they were trying to reach. Here they were immediately ambushed, and nearly overcame the thieves, but because of some unluckiness they ended up in Limbo again and had to try it a third time. First, though, Wallace got more gold pieces and used them to buy, at extortionate rates, some spells and potions that would keep them alive a bit longer. They teleported back in again and fought their way through the ambush and withdrew to higher ground a couple of thousand yards away—where they were set upon by another party of thieves before they could recover from wounds suffered in the first ambush. They fought back as hard as they could but ended up in Limbo once more.

Just before Zula’s character perished, though, she saw something a bit odd: some of their ambushers were going down with spears and arrows lodged in their backs. The ambushers had been counterambushed by some hostile group that had rushed to the scene of the fight but arrived too late.

“Let’s go back there,” she suggested. “I think we have help.”

“Saw them. It’s just another group of thieves,” Wallace said.

“So what? Let them kill each other.”

So they attempted to do the same thing, except this time they didn’t even make it past the first group of thieves. Again, though, their ambushers got ambushed.