Strange Flesh (17 page)

I try to mollify them, saying, “I didn’t mean to—”

“Christ’s tits, mate, I think my testicles have undescended,” he says.

Xan is cross. “James, what are you doing racing about in the dark?”

I can see hackles rising, so I temporize. “I, ah, was getting a drink, and I heard y’all come in. So I just wanted to catch you before you left again.”

They both squint at me.

“I’m crawling the walls with boredom. Capturing hours of video. I thought maybe I could help y’all if you want.”

Xan starts to say, “Thank you, but no, we’ll—”

Garriott interrupts her. “Xan . . . Let him have at it. You know we don’t have time for arsing around. Give him the simulated stuff and see what’s what. He sorted me the other night.” Garriott suppresses a yawn and consults his watch. With a shriek, he grabs his case and scurries toward his office.

Xan gives me a long appraising look and says, “Really, I can handle it myself. I’ve no need to impose on your rather suspicious generosity.”

“It’s not suspicious at all. Maybe I need a favor from you.”

“All right, what?”

“I’d like to interview you. But we’ll get to that later. For now, show me this dastardly data.”

Nine hours pass. Xan and I are cloistered in her office, sitting close, staring at her monitors. I stretch my wrist and solemnly tap F7 to test the latest version of her program. “This is it. We got it this time.”

Xan drops her head, her fingers digging at pressure points around her face.

The problem we’ve been working on is a thorny one. Xan is trying to use a stream of sensor values to determine the position of a number of points linked together like the joints of a robot arm. That would be straightforward, but the underlying points’ ability to shift of their own accord makes them jump around crazily. We need them to move smoothly, but it’s like we’re trying to deduce the exact postures of two fencers only knowing the forces on their foils.

I run the program. The graphed output of the data looks different than it has all night.

I say cautiously, “I think we may have a win—”

“Wait.”

None of our debug breakpoints trip, and the program runs to completion for the first time. This triggers a burst of graphic fireworks we rigged on the end line.

Xan wraps me in such an exuberant hug that the ball chair I’m sitting on tips over backward, and we thump onto the floor. She screams comically, levers herself off my chest, and then gives me a hand up. She’s concerned that I hit my head and starts inspecting it for a bump. I should say that I’m fine, but the feel of her fingers running through my hair has dissolved my capacity for speech. I want to turn to face her, but my spine has locked itself in place.

Perhaps she picks up on this, because seconds later my head is pronounced “quite sound,” and I’m dismissed with effusive thanks and a sisterly peck on the cheek.

Sisterly, but this is the second time she’s kissed me.

B
illy’s virtual Silling remains the province of a select few until someone posts this thread to the NOD forums on Saturday night:

Thread: New Game Trailhead?

Cal_Iglooa

Joined: 9/17/11

Posts: 357

Location: your business

So here’s something:

Check out this NOD shard we found at:

http://nod.com/ule_find/grid:334.118.797

Screen Grabs: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/Cal_Iglooa/737027084/]

Those among us who actually still read might recognize that castle. We’ve now got a sim based on
120 Days of Sodom.

The stakes? Foul lucre it seems. And any of you who have read
120
will know that I mean *foul*. For those that haven’t,
educate
yourselves:

A summary
The full text

We’ve only explored a little, but here’s how it works:

Every day one of the whores tells a story involving 5 “passions.”

Once she starts telling each, you can go into the dungeon and there are rooms set up corresponding to each situation. You reenact the stories with the provided NoBots, sounds, and cameras. Then post your videos back in the amphitheater.

Good ones play up on the wall above the whore’s head. After a submission, the Duke puts out his hand with a Louis d’Or. When you take this, your NOD account is credited with 7,500 Noodles [about $5 per video].

Not even minimum wage, you complain? Wait, it gets better. After we tipped him off, Hal_LaCoste took his time and made a couple quality nut nuggets, like the ones already playing in the rotation. We rezzed in today, and when we entered the theater, the Duke got up and said to him, “Your work has pleased us. It is now part of the Telling.” He holds out his hand, and in it there’s a purse: 75,000 Noodles! That’s $50 per video. For all 600 tortures, that == serious spaghetti.

So much pasta raises questions:

1) I can haz?

2) If not, why would someone want to spend so much to crowdsource a machinima version of
120 Days?

3) Is this new game related to the recent bubble in NOD cybering tools like our much-loved LibIA?

Those of you up for finding out the answers, hit us up at our new forum:

Savant

I gather from browsing around in the forum that “Savant” is the nickname for this new place that emerged during chats between early explorers. It’s a corruption of “
cent vingt,
” the French word for 120. There are already a number of replies to the post, most expressing “OMF-GROFJUADBBQ” enthusiasm.

But there are also some comments like this one from Anne_Sasha_Ball:

Is it just me, or does ANYONE maybe have a problem with this? I cyber every day, but I have to draw the line at making virtual kiddie porn. I mean is this even legal?

Her question ignites a firestorm of responses, and the discussion degenerates into First Amendment bickering that then wades off into tendrils about whether George W. Bush was a “genocibal rapist” and the extent to which communist Jews control the media.

I check Cal_Iglooa’s initial
Savant
forum posts in which he outlines essentially the same path I took to find Château de Silling. I’ll bet the guy is one of the original GAMErs who received a pendant. What bothers me is that the number of active participants has reached three hundred in the few hours since he posted to the NOD forums. So Billy’s game has now infected a broad population of bored net people looking for something to do.

Savant
is spreading.

T
he New York Harvard Club’s two buildings neatly embody the dual nature of the university itself. The original neo-Georgian edifice features an old-boy décor of polished wood and animal heads, reputed to be the spoils of Teddy Roosevelt’s shooting expeditions. The resolutely modern addition next door resembles the headquarters of an EU agency, more in the spirit of the school’s current inclination toward international technocracy.

Blythe had texted me asking if I’d meet her for a drink after she finished with a speaking engagement here.

I can’t think why she would have agreed to debate Mark Cooper ’96, a communications professor at Hunter College, on the subject of media consolidation. Perhaps she considered it a practice bout to hone her message in advance of her imminent congressional hearings.

The big news at IMP is that they’ve agreed to buy TelAmerica, one of their East Coast rivals, in a twenty-six-billion-dollar combination that will make them the largest cable provider in the country. As VP for cable operations, the deal is very much Blythe’s baby. Congress loves to make a circus out of major media mergers, so she’s been called to Washington early this spring.

The press quickly jumped on the atavistic nature of the deal. Blythe’s father first put himself on the map with a daring bid for CalCast, a much larger rival, in 1974, well before the leveraged buyout boom really caught fire. While analysts complained that Randall’s balance sheet couldn’t
justify the debt required, interest soon shifted to larger deals elsewhere. Randall digested his prey and proceeded to ever-greater conquests. In taking a swing at TelAmerica, Blythe is paying tribute to her father’s legacy.

I step in just as Blythe is winding up her closing argument. Judging by the way the crowd is nodding at her every sally, poor Dr. Cooper was badly overmatched.

She spends a long time chatting with the attendees afterward. Her performance has compelled even some of the audience’s avowed socialists to try slipping her their résumés. Eventually she catches my eye and, covertly rattling a notional lowball, sends me to the bar to secure refreshment.

The words “double Laphroaig neat” come out a little husky and get me a double take from the bartender. I’m repulsed by my sentimentality, but the drink is ingrained in my mind as the enchanted love potion in my secret history with Blythe.

After the night she kissed me by the snowdrifts of Mt. Auburn Street, I took on the lone goal of wooing her. The project seemed futile to the heartsick adolescent in me, which left my autistic engineer side to take control by asking, “Isn’t courting someone really just the oldest and most fundamental form of social engineering? Well, isn’t it?”

A woman like Blythe, with legions of men falling all over her, looked like an exceedingly hard target. But I had a few advantages. I was already a more-or-less trusted party, I had ample resources harvested from her twin brother, and I had the determination fostered by my sincere belief in the hacker’s creed:

There’s always a way in.

One begins such an operation with detailed reconnaissance. I admit some pretty stalkerish gambits leapt to mind, but I decided that reading her email would be dishonorable. However, I did hack the registrar’s systems to get her class schedule.