Reamde

“Just wanted to bend your ear a little,” C-plus explained, fussing with the intermittent wiper knob, trying to dial in that elusive setting, always so difficult to find in Seattle, that would keep the windshield visually transparent but not drag shuddering blades across dry glass. They were staring straight down the runway at the southern bight of Lake Washington, which was flecked with whitecaps. It had been a choppy landing, and Richard felt a bit clammy.

Corvallis had grown up in the town after which he was named, the son of a Japanese-American cog sci professor and an Indian biotech researcher, but culturally he was pure Oregonian. No one at the company knew exactly what he did for a living. But it was hard to imagine the place without him. He shifted the Prius into gear, or whatever it was called when you pulled the lever that made it go forward, and proceeded at a safe and sane speed among the parked airplanes, dripping and rocking against their tie-downs, and out through a gate and onto something that looked like an actual street. “I know you’re going to see Devin tomorrow and mostly what’s on your mind is the war.”

He paused slightly before saying “war,” and he said it funny, with a long O and heavy emphasis.

“Woe-er?” Richard repeated.

“W-O-R,” C-plus explained, “the War of Realignment.”

“Is that what the cool kids are calling it now?”

“Yeah. I guess it works better in email than in conversation. Anyway, I know you’re going to be prepping for that, but also you need to know that there are some interesting technolegal issues coming up around REAMDE.”

“God, that sounds like just the sort of can of worms that I retired to get away from.”

“I don’t think you are actually retired,” Corvallis pointed out mildly. “I mean, you just flew in from Elphinstone and tomorrow you’re taking a jet to Missouri and from there—”

“It’s a selective retirement,” Richard explained, “a retirement from boring shit.”

“I think that’s called a promotion.”

“Well, whatever you call it, I don’t want to ‘drill down’—is that the expression you use?”

“You know perfectly well that it is.”

“Into nasty details of REAMDE’s legal consequences. I mean, we’ve had viruses before, right?”

“We have 281 active viruses as of the last time I checked, which was an hour ago.”

Richard drew breath but C-plus cut him off. “And before you go where you’re going, let me just point out that most of them don’t actually make use of our technology as a payment mechanism. So REAMDE is not just another virus. It presents new issues.”

“Because our servers are actually being used to transfer the booty.”

“Turns out,” Corvallis warned him, “that federal law enforcement types haven’t yet bought into the whole APPIS mind-set, and so they aren’t real big on terms like ‘booty,’ ‘swag,’ ‘hoard,’ ‘treasure,’ or anything that is evocative of a fictitious Medieval Armed Combat scenario. To them, it’s all payments. And since our system uses real money, it’s all—well—real.”

“I always knew that that was going to swing around and bite me in the ass someday,” Richard said. “I just didn’t know how or when.”

“Well, it’s bitten you in the ass lots of times, actually.”

“I know, but each one feels like the first.”

“The creator of the REAMDE virus has made some … interesting choices.”

“Interesting in a way that’s bad for us?” Richard asked. Because this was clearly implied by Corvallis’s tone.

“Well, that depends on whether we want to be the avenging sword of the Justice Department, here, or sort of cop out and say it’s not our problem.”

“Go on.”

“The instructions in the eponymous file just state that the gold pieces are to be left at a particular location in the Torgai Foothills. They do not say that the gold is to be mailed or transferred to any one specific character.”

“Obviously,” Richard said, “because in that case we could just shut down that character’s account.”

“Right. So the way that the virus creator takes possession of the gold is by simply picking it up off the ground where it has been dropped by the victim.”

“Which is something that any character in the game could do.”

“Theoretically,” Corvallis said. “In practice, obviously, you can’t pick the gold up unless you can actually get to that location in the Torgai Foothills. And in order to turn those gold pieces into real-world money, you have to then physically get them out to a town with an M.C.”

“Not ‘physically,’” Richard corrected him. “You guys always make that mistake. It’s a game, remember?”

“Okay, physically in the game world,” Corvallis said, his tone of voice suggesting that Richard was being just a little pedantic. “You know what I mean. Your character has to be capable of surviving the journey from the drop point, through the foothills, to the nearest town or ley line intersection, and to an M.C.”