Big If Read online

  Money made in different ways—stripping corpses, robbery—was spent on weapons. Under Naubek’s weapon-market algorithms, pistols were cheap, shotguns more expensive, while a laser-sighted assault rifle with spare banana clip cost about as much as ten years’ worth of food. Players engaged in rampant brigandage to get money to buy weapons to become more fearsome brigands to get money to buy better weapons, and hire a mercenary or two, or three, or ten, or better yet a small army of mercenaries, similarly outfitted and invincible. The strongest players dreamed of becoming a warlord with a retinue. The warlords could do anything, anywhere, anywhen, subject only to the toxic storms, the hunger-thirst-exposure alg, or the danger of betrayal by your bodyguards. This danger could be cut to zero by hiring gamebot bodyguards, but the bots were considered inferior henchmen because they were, under the Asplund-Naubek template, incapable of thrill killing and did not, therefore, inspire true visceral terror in the squatter camps. Warlords plundered squatter camps, slaying hundreds of subscribers, until there were very few unplundered places left. After that, warlords plundered warlords. It was stated as fact in the BigIf chat rooms that sixteen known human players had achieved superwarlord status, traveling the space, pillaging enough gamedollars to pay off their followers. Soon, normal human players, sick of dying or living in fear, desubscribed and monthly revenues downspiked.

  The VCs panicked and the IPO was canceled. The bosses ordered patches in the shell to stop the war. Many patches were discussed. One would have stopped any player from hiring more than ten mercs at a time. There were numerous conceptual problems with this. Because humans were the preferred brigands, the superwarlords who hired them were interacting with other players, not with any part of the software. They could install a twenty slays-a-day cap, but this would permit a midsized army to kill several thousand humans a day. A super could run a decent-sized genocide that way. They met and talked, managers and engineers, sipping seltzer water in conference rooms, charting counter-warlord strategies on smeary whiteboards. Why not declare a safe haven around the squatter camps? Or send the holybots through the desert spreading some kind of peace message? Or eliminate automatic weapons? Or cut the slay-per-day cap to nine or six or four? Or write a filter to deduct frequent-flier miles for each massacre? Jens was frightened at these meetings. He had come to see his great creation as he imagined Walter saw it—malignant, runaway—as a compromise one makes for money, and now they were saying that the game might die of desubscription, leaving Jens with nothing for his compromise.

  The crisis peaked and passed. Superwarlords got bigger on more killing. A few became megasuperwarlords, but one after another, each of them was swallowed up by his or her own retinue, which had grown too big to pay, feed, or lead. The mercenaries, going unpaid, mutinied, killed the megas, and fought over spoils. The mutineers split into factions, slaughtering each other. Survivors were absorbed into a rival army, swelling it beyond the point of supportability and carrying the idea of mutiny like a germ, and the armies started to dry up, like a flood receding. Slowly normal players returned to the shops and roads and everything was back to where it started.

  Jens looked at his watch. It was nine-fifteen, time to go upstairs. Jens heard chewing and quiet, polite spitting in the balcony. He saw Prem Srinivassan, the dapper Indian who wrote helper bots. Prem sat a few rows back, eating little purple seeds from a sandwich bag.

  “See the cars?” he asked.

  “What cars?”

  “Out front,” said Prem. “Five Lincolns at the curb, the drivers in dark suits gabbing in a circle, reading Boston tabloids to each other.”

  “Bankers?”

  Prem ate a seed. “First three cars look bankerly to me. They usually have black cars with plain hubcaps, very understated, and at least one cellular antenna. Next one, the gray one? I’ll bet that’s underwriter’s counsel. Lawyers do the gray or blue radio cars with wire rims. The last one, the true limo, is Howard Powers.”

  Howard ran the modem farm. He answered to Digby and had about twenty underlings.

  Jens said, “Why did Howard rent a limo?”

  “Last night was his high school’s winter dance,” Prem said. “His date is crashed out in the backseat. You can see right up her gown, at least you could when I came in. She may have changed position since then.”

  Employees checked the curbs every morning, posting sightings and interpretations to the office intranet. No cars meant that the IPO had been put off yet again. Two cars meant exploratory talks, banker-to-banker, and a sign of life. Three cars was ambiguous, but more than three cars, not counting the prom limo, meant that the bankers had brought lawyers, which even Howard’s little sister Pru knew meant that they were getting close to going public.

  Vaughn Naubek, Jens’ fellow founding coder, passed through the balcony on his way to the employee locker room.

  Prem said, “Naubek, sunny greetings. Want a seed?”

  Naubek said, “No thanks, I don’t like Indian food.” He continued to the lockers.

  Jens and Prem watched a few players die, then took the stairwell to the ground floor.

  Jens ducked into the break room by the Bot Pod. Howard and Pru Powers were sitting at a formica table trying to piece together ribbons of shredded paper. Howard wore a rust tux and a ruffled shirt. Pru was breathless, sifting through the bag, describing some lawyer-looking men she had seen outside Jerzy’s private conference room. Jens took a mug from the mug hooks on the wall, found a liter bottle of Glucola in the cabinet, and filled the mug with ice.

  Howard said, “How many, Pru?”

  “Three, maybe four,” she said. “I forgot to count.”

  “But you’re sure they’re lawyers? It’s important, Pru.”

  “They looked like lawyers.”

  “What kind?”

  “Thick-lipped, corpulent, pugnacious—I didn’t get a good look. Prem and Digby were blocking my view.”

  “What specialty, I mean. Did they look like underwriter’s counsel or a bankruptcy insertion team? Shoes are a dead giveaway. Laces mean we’re going public. Loafers mean finito. Come on, Pru, think.”

  “One was in-house counsel, that midget Jaffe. The others were definitely out-house.”

  “What about the shoes, you freaking retard?”

  “Don’t call me a retard.”

  “Don’t act like a retard.”

  “Mom said no calling me a retard.”

  “Zitface!”

  “Loser!”

  “Scumhead!”

  “Non-market-savvy zitface!”

  “Oh shut up!” said Howard.

  Jens said, “Hey hey hey you guys. Howard, go to your suite. You too, Pru—those MIPs won’t map themselves.”

  Pru said, “A MIP is a type of map, not a thing to be mapped.”

  “Oh shut up,” said Jens.

  The Bot Pod was a wide and pillared space with three sealed windows at the far end. In the center of the room was a bank of low, orange, armless, foamy-looking chairs, actually a Danish Modern couch in sections, several couches probably. The sections could be reconfigured as a circle for Pod-wide thinkathons, or in twos and threes for smaller project groups, or pushed together into beds when the coders pulled all-nighters. There were enough sections to make two decent beds, or one double bed, or three short ones, or a short one and a small working circle, more like a working square. Lu Ping, the engineer, and Phoebe Rosenthal, the artist, were sleeping on the couches. Jens did not disturb them. This was their honeymoon.

  The walls were lined with cluttered tables and workstations. Charlie Mayer, who telecommuted from Honolulu, had by far the neatest workspace. Lu Ping, next to Mayer, was compiling a subroutine as he slept entwined around his bride. Error flags slowly filled his screen, Path/File access error, Bad file name, Bad file name, Bad record length, Bad file name, Input past end of life, Path not found.

  Davey Tabor, next to Lu Ping, was on vacation, supposedly trekking Nepal. Davey called in every few days from what he said was a satellite
phone, telling glowing anecdotes about monks and Sherpas and the thousand-year enlightenment, but he seemed vague on the specifics, which led some Podders to suspect that the trek was a cover story and that Davey was actually doing a round of job interviews in California.

  Beltran, next to Davey, was signed out to a mental health day—the company allowed them five per annum. Bjorn Bjornsson, next to Beltran, was busy grooming his screen pets, a litter of furry whatzits, and Vaughn Naubek at the next desk was making fun of him.

  Bjorn said, “At least I don’t carry pictures of Phoebe in my wallet.”

  Naubek had changed out of street clothes into his working costume, a letter carrier’s summer knits, white knee socks, gray-blue shorts, a sky-blue shirt, and a U.S. Postal Service pith helmet. Naubek had taken to dressing “in character” to get himself psyched up for working on a new-series monster known as the Postal Worker. He winced at Bjorn’s comment, glanced at the couch where Phoebe slept, uttered something vile in UNIX, and went back to work.

  Jens hung his coat on the rack, signed himself in on the in/out whiteboard, and sat at his terminal between Prem and Naubek. He debugged SmoShadow for the next few minutes, clearing error flags, until he got it to compile. He grabbed his mug and went up to the second floor for the weekly meeting of the Spec Committee.

  Meredith Shattuck, sexless, cool, and twenty-two, was boss of everybody in the conference room, Digby from the server ring, the twins from marketing, Jaffe the attorney, the head creative, and Jens, who came in late. This was the Spec Committee, BigIf’s politburo of design, where system problems were hashed out, new product lines discussed, asses kissed and paddled, egos fluffed and crushed. Meredith presided in her heavy horn-rims and her pearl-gray Nehru suit, buttoned to her tiny, pointed chin. The suit made her look less Indian than Maoist, a Maoist from Connecticut, Miss Porter’s School, and Harvard, where she had spent, she always said, the best semester of her life, leaving at eighteen to join and finally run the largest war game on the Web. Her hair was short and glossy brown, barbered carefully, hair by hair it seemed, and she listened to everything—the head creative ranting, mad schemes from the twins, Jaffe’s dense and verbless legalese—with the same expression of polite engagement, one hand on the blondwood conference table, one hand in her tailored lap, a Connecticut Confucian, a Communist entrepreneur, a woman trapped inside the body of a woman.

  “Smoke?” she said to Jens. “Are we actually talking about smoke?”

  “No,” said Jens, “smoke shadows.”

  The topic wasn’t actually smoke or shadows, but rather Jens’ modest (so he thought) proposal to upgrade the blackened crater, the game’s Cartesian 0, 0, 0 and universal starting point. Jens, knowing that he would be on the crush-and-paddle list for not completing Monster Todd, had planned to unveil SmoShadow as cover and excuse for his delays on the new monster bot. Jens made his pitch. The smoke pouring from the crater, as presently configured, didn’t cast a shadow—a nit, perhaps, Jens said, but why not do it right?

  Digby leapt in before Jens could finish. Digby pointed out that they already had shadows in the crater, moving with the sun, a phasing crater lip of gloom, adjusted for the weather, the goddamn fucking weather, Digby said, clouds and partial clouds and toxic clouds, plus other local-object shadows, helper bots and human, holybots and monsters, and all of these had to be splined and tessellated by the angle engines, giant loads of memory and throughput, batching plots to render engines, which colored plots and shaded them, laying texture maps (sand, shale, stucco wall), and turned the colors down to create a hazy fading in the distance, rounding objects in the foreground by wrapping darkness around “curves,” eight or nine subrenderings, Digby pointed out, Z-sorting and MIP mapping, alpha-blending, P-correction—all of this to produce a weak 3-D illusion, forget about the loads of movement, aping movement, saving movement, everybody’s moving and the game is about movement, we’re heading west to destiny, and then you’ve got preloaded sprite routines, the mo-capture files, and the new full-polygon monsters, and all of this remembering and math-on-the-fly was carefully divided between the servers and the user’s at-home RAM and vid cards, dual-ported, double-buffered, co-co-co-co-processed, and even so, Digby said, they were barely hitting three frames a second in the lulls, and now you want to enhance the smoke?

  “No,” Jens said, “the shadows. The smoke is fine, it’s wonderful. I’m talking about shadows.”

  The crater was every player’s first impression of the game and, if studies were correct, the place they saw on average 6.2 times a month (the average player died that often and was reborn from the hole—this was a post–Plague War number and a happy one; in the worst weeks of the war, players died a dozen times a day and desubscribed at the rate of ten a minute). The crater was important, Jens contended, a signature tableau, the realistic scree, the ocher tones and dusty wash, a symbol of a land returned to Bible times by Revelation 21. The crater code was very nearly perfect, Jens believed, except for this: the smoky pillar, paletted in gorgeous twenty-four-bit gray, should cast a shadow in its thickest part, and yet it didn’t. Jens had written SmoShadow to track the billow’s dancing shape and local densities, a function of prevailing winds. SmoShadow would upload the sun’s position and throw a moving shadow on the crater wall, making allowances for rocks and rough terrain and the lip-horizon (because smoke in shadow, out of sun, would not cast a shadow of its own)—a complicated hack, and yet Jens had made it happen in a kilobyte, compiled.

  “I have the mod right here,” said Jens, brandishing SmoShadow on the disk. “Just give me a second and I’ll get it loaded. You’ll see how beautiful it is.”

  Jens had expected support from the head creative or at least the twins—they were always hot for new immersive graphics—but the twins were silent and the head creative said, “I think we need more dread.”

  Reed and Reese were nodding. They claimed to be nonidentical twins. Jens, who couldn’t see a difference, suspected that the twins’ parents, fearing merged identities and unhealthy personality dependence, had told their sons, falsely, that they weren’t identical and the twins grew up believing in their difference, so they were relaxed and non-hung-up about dressing alike (baggy chinos, polo shirts) and driving the same car—vintage MG Spiders, a color called Champagne—and thinking the same way about how to sell the game and whip the competition, because they weren’t identical, they were just agreeing, like any two smart and market-savvy people.

  “I’m not sure I follow, Head,” said Meredith.

  Head was shaggy, fifty, ponytailed, a lamp-tanned movie refugee who kept himself by force of will on California time. Head said that Hollywood was dead, that the Web was the future of all entertainment narratives. Deep immersive gaming—this was the new movies and they should all be damn glad to be among the founding fathers, the Chaplins and the Griffiths and the Lumières, but everybody knew that Head was still in love with the big screen, still mourning the loss of the Ohm’s Law franchise, a series of high-grossing summer action pictures, Ohm’s Law, Ohm’s Law II, OL III: The Reckoning, up to OL VII due out in July. Head had co-executive-produced the first Ohm’s Law, which told the story of Joey Ohm, a tough but flawed detective, battling an asteroid. Sequels pitted Joey against other planetary threats, global warming, mass extinction, a wandering black hole, but Head was gone by then, disenfranchised of his franchise, squeezed out by his former so-called friends’ attorneys.

  “We need more dread,” he said, coming forward in his chair. “We have these fucking early meetings, fine, I don’t complain, but do I have to sit here listening to dweebs talking about fucking smoke? Smoke is not the issue. What we really need is dread.”

  “I agree,” said Reed or Reese.

  “Absolutely,” said his brother. “We already have the best, most textured smoke in the business, and don’t say Napalm Sunday because their smoke blows.”

  BigIf had two major rivals in the world of Web-based, multiplayer shoot-’emups. One was Napalm Sunday, set in the
distant future. The other was Elfin, set in the magic past, an age of dragons, gorgons, castle keeps, warlocks, and bad spells. BigIf was poised nervously between them, set in the near future, a tricky time to work with—not exactly now, but also not the never-never of Arthurian romance or of interstellar war. The three games had been launched at more or less the same time, during the last game craze when every venture cap worth his or her corporate salt had at least one multiplayer shoot-’em-up.com in the incubator. Many games were started in the fad, all of them pursuing the same vision strategy: take the VC money, build a game, do the marketing, get the player loads up to a stable-profit, self-sustaining waterline, then take the baby public and everyone gets rich, a can’t-miss plan—so can’t-miss, in fact, that many game designers saw it, and thirty games were launched, more than the hard-core gamer base could possibly support, and so the can’t-miss plan was the ruin of many interactivists, and a kick in the wallets of their VC backers. Remember Scoregasm, which let you, the gamer, blast your way out of a terrorist-held junior high school? Or Red Motorcade, which let you relive the murder of John Kennedy in the role of Oswald, the Cubans, the CIA, the Soviets, the Cosa Nostra, or the Secret Servicemen playing in thwart mode? Jens worshiped Red Motorcade as a design. It had one beginning, eight middles, and sixty-four endings, the nice effect of squaring possibilities, but the teens, the target audience, were only dimly aware of the real events in Dallas and the Dealey Plaza graphics were always going down. Of the surviving games, only BigIf, Elfin, and Nap Sunday were thought to have a chance of reaching steady profit, stable loads, and the sunburst of successful IPOage.