Trio of Sorcery (31 page)

OW!

The ninja's attack “got through”—that is, the computer had added up his ability to hit with her ability to defend, with a skew on the ninja's side to allow for chance, and she had been found wanting. And it
hurt!
This might be a Rated-T-For-Teen game, with no gore allowed, but the character reacted with animation indicating pain, and she by deity
felt
it.

Crap crap crap crap…that's not supposed to happen!

It hurt
badly,
the way an inch-deep katana swipe would hurt in the real world. Instead of blood, she was bleeding health, more bits being flipped in the code, but if she could have screamed, she would have, and for a mo
ment the pain blinded her. She hadn't signed on for this…

Too late. She was signed on, and anyway, this wasn't one she could just walk away from. Not if things got out of hand here. She didn't dare walk out and take the chance that they wouldn't.

Fortunately two things happened. One, Toby managed to figure out how to access her self-healing spell, so the invisible (No gore! This game is rated T for Teen!) gash across her arm stopped hurting and she stopped leaking health. Two, the macros finally beat the ninja; he collapsed like a rag doll at her feet and a moment later faded away into that never-never land where all defeated things went.

It was a heckuva way to be introduced to life-in-the-game-world.

“All right, Toby, let's zone into Dark Valley. And remember to toggle invisibility cloak when we get there.” She spoke out loud, but of course she heard nothing but the sound effects from this zone. What she said would appear in the onscreen chat box. What other people said would appear over their heads in cartoon balloons, as well as in the chat box. Unfortunately this meant that Toby couldn't actually talk back to her.

But her body moved to the portal and she had a disorienting and frighteningly long moment of blankness as the tangle of code that was her avatar got passed from one part of the virtual world to another. It went on just long
enough for her to start to worry, and not long enough for her to panic.

When she could see again, she was in Dark Valley, and immediately she felt a peculiar sensation, as if something had brushed every nerve ending in her body at once. When she looked down, she could only see the faintest shadow of herself. The invisibility cloak was in place. The Ojibwa Medicine Man had autodispensed her a cowrie shell that appeared as an active icon in her powers inventory.

It was showtime. But she was at a distinct disadvantage—unless she was standing right next to someone who was saying something on the general broadcast channel, she would not know what was being “shouted” across the whole zone. And there were shouts she needed to hear—like where the Wendigo had spawned. Toby knew this, though, and presumably he got some directions, because suddenly her body lifted into the air (she had chosen “flying” as her means of transportation) and headed off game-east. She knew it was game-east because the sun was heading toward setting behind her.

The melee was easy to spot from up here. The Wendigo towered head and shoulders above the trees, and those trees were not small. It looked as if he was playing host to a small army of Far Eastern martial artists, while less uniformly clad people stood around and watched. She winced and looked away from one fellow who looked like he was wearing a cow that had died in a collision with a paint truck.

She recognized the Wendigo's attackers from numberless articles in online gaming forums.
Chinese gaming clans. Literally cutthroat. If they think they can get away with it, they'll kill your avatar, steal your stuff before you come back from revival, and bugger off with it to sell on eBay.
It was virtual loot of course, it didn't exist in any form except here, but there were a lot of people who would pay real-world money for some presumed advantage in the game. It made no sense to her, except in the abstract: work equals money, and if someone has worked to get something, it should be worth money.

Still, she could admire their finesse and their sheer dogged tenacity. Blades flashed, feet and fists thudded, the Wendigo bawled its outrage. It surprised her at first that so many people were simply standing around watching, until she caught a speech balloon over the head of one of the attackers in the gray-on-white of broadcast speech, warning everyone in the zone that this Wendigo had been claimed by the Red Lotus Clan and interlopers were not welcome.

Despite being the biggest, baddest thing around, the Wendigo was having a hard time against this bunch. It couldn't grab god-mode to turn the tables on them, because no one around here was in god-mode. It could heal itself, but not as fast as it was used to doing, because the entire Red Lotus clan was wearing their talismanic cowrie shells, preventing it from using their health to heal. They were whittling it down, bit by bit, and it did not like that at all.

There was grumbling in local speech about the selfishness of the Red Lotus Clan—after all, this was a rare case where everyone who laid any damage on the thing was going to get juicy loot! But no one moved in on the Wendigo. Finally, a brass-bikini-clad wench with breasts so enormous that in the real world she'd be falling over from the sheer weight of them pushed her way through the onlookers. What she said was pretty much indecipherable texting-based leet-speak, but the gist of it was that she was going to go beat on the Wendigo too, this wasn't a Player versus Player zone, so what could the clan do to her?

“Dude, chill,” came the reply from a seven-foot-tall, blue-skinned trollish-looking thing. “They can herd a hundred zombies on ya and loot the corpse.”

The wench typed an explicative-laden reply, most of which was bleeped out by the profanity filter, but no longer made any moves toward joining the melee.

Through this all, the faint ghosting of the code was over everything, like an arcane sort of filter. Not like that famous business in
The Matrix
with the streaming numbers. No, the numbers didn't move—but they did change. There was her real-time trace, if only she knew machine code well enough to read it.

But she was here for another purpose, and while the Wendigo was busy with what looked like the casts of twelve kung fu movies, it was time for Ellen to do her thing.

“Now, Toby,” she said, and felt a tingle as somewhere out there in the real world, Toby hot-keyed her spells.

Through study, research, and what she suspected was an instinctive grasp of how magic interfaced with technology, Ell could create a process—which was, in essence, what a spell really was. She had the world book for this game; she had access to whatever crafting items existed in this virtual world. She could find the equivalents to real-world items and she could use them to help create a process that would take her energy and send it into the machine to do her bidding.

In other words, in this world of pixels and bits, she could combine virtual eye of newt and imaginary tongue of frog and give herself the power of mage-sight, which would let her see just how magic was flowing. She hadn't done it until now because she wanted to be very certain that the Wendigo was fully concentrating on its attackers. Using real magic here would light her up like a Christmas tree to the eyes of something that could see magic too.

Oh, now this is an interesting side effect.
…She hadn't expected to feel anything, given that the only sensory feedback she was getting was pain. But she felt her whole body start to tingle as a faint and subtle shimmer washed over her. Fortunately, in this crowd full of people with rainbow-effect auras demonstrating their powers and abilities, it passed completely unnoticed.

She closed her eyes and counted to three as the tingle intensified, then looked.

And yes…there was a third layer of reality now. The machine code, the visuals, and…

The power map.

She could see how the energy that was magic was flowing within this place. The Wendigo was lit up with so many kinds and flavors of power that if she had been using her real eyes she would have been blinded. And the second she saw that—her heart plummeted.

Because this could only mean one thing.

This Wendigo was not a mythago.

This Wendigo was the real thing.

Self-aware? Oh my, yes. And if he hadn't had all his attention concentrated on squashing the ninja hordes, if he'd caught sight of
her,
all lit up with similar power, she would have been in very dire straits.

It was very strange, being grabbed by sheer terror while inhabiting Stevie the Elf. There was no corresponding physical reaction, no tightening of the throat, no cold sweats, no shaking. That made it easier to do what she generally did when she was scared shitless. She went entirely cold and analytical, her mind working much faster than normal. She dictated everything she saw to Toby, with one eye on the Wendigo. Because if it noticed her—

She saw power passing along what she knew must represent the communication channel that cut across all the servers, but it was power that was actually part of the Wendigo. That told her that all the Wendigos were actually one Wendigo. Its essence, its soul, was shared out across the entire game system. Which made sense,
since this was the real thing. That would have ramifications, but she would think about it later. Right now, she was eyes and a mouth.

Power was flowing from the avatars around it to the Wendigo as well—not just from the ones it was fighting, but from the onlookers, and even from PCs beyond the onlookers. It wasn't much, the merest thread from each—but a hundred thousand threads can be spun into a very strong rope….

The sight was startling. This wasn't the in-game health that the Wendigo had been mostly blocked from absorbing. This was something else entirely. It was as if every person logged into the game was somehow feeding the Wendigo. No, more than that—it looked as if the Wendigo was feeding
on
them, magically.

And then it dawned on her; that was exactly what was happening.

And she knew why.

It was, in fact, her worst-case scenario.

“Toby, log me out,” she said quickly—because the Wendigo must not be allowed to know that there was a real magician here, someone who could do what the monster
wanted
to do. If it flipped the code switches on
her
…

She felt her “body” freeze and there was a moment of blackness.

Ellen opened her eyes, staring up at the ceiling of her computer room, flat on her back in her zero-g recliner. Her body, her real body this time, broke into a cold sweat.

But now was not the time for paralysis, because time itself was against them.

The Wendigo wanted out of the computers and into the real world.

And it had a plan to get there.

The phone woke Tom before the alarm did. Because of the weird hours he sometimes worked, blackout blinds weren't good enough for his bedroom; he had silvered bubble insulation, the kind they wrapped around hot-water tanks, carefully taped over all the glass in the windows, and heavy curtains over that. So his bedroom was pitch-black and very peaceful, until that peace was shattered by the shrill ring of the phone.

Fortunately the thing lit up when it rang, or he would never have been able to find it in the dark.

“I know I woke you, and I'm sorry.” The voice on the other end of the line was female and unfamiliar. His sleep-fogged brain couldn't even come up with a shadow of an ID before the caller identified herself. “This is Ell. Remember when I told you there could be a worst-case scenario?”

He didn't, but she took his vague mumble as assent.

“It's the worst-case scenario.”

That woke him up like a bucket of cold water in his face. “How worst case is worst case?”

“Imagine the Wendigo in the real world.”

Oh, God. Oh, God.

“Meet me at the offices. I need to pick your brains. We're running out of time.”

He blinked at that. Yesterday she had said that it wouldn't make much difference one way or the other if they sat on this for a few days or weeks.

“What changed?” he demanded harshly, phone clutched in a hand gone suddenly sweaty. “Yesterday you said we had time—”

“Yesterday I didn't know it had another way of feeding.”

“What?”

“It's feeding on belief, Tom. On your players' belief. The more they believe in the world, the more real the game feels to them, the more they feed the Wendigo. It was one thing when that belief was just passively allowing it to be there. Now it's active feeding; the Wendigo is sucking it all in. That is real, in the real-world real, it happens 24/7 and it isn't something we can block with code. Meet me at your offices.”

There was a click, followed by the dial tone. Tom stared at the softly glowing phone for a moment before gently replacing it in the cradle. Then he threw himself out of bed and grabbed clean clothing out of the laundry he'd just done.