Halting State

JACK: Designs on Your Dungeon

You don’t want to stay in the pub after the poison voice mail and the bitter memories it dredged up, but it’s too early to go home, and you don’t much want to be on your own with nothing else to think about. Besides which, while you’ve had a bellyful of hanging out with folks from work recently, Elaine is different. She’s pretty intimidating in a work context, but right now she seems to want company. She’s an odd mixture of spiky stand-offishness and—Well, maybe she just wants company because she’s suffering from new-city syndrome, right? But you’re inclined to go along with it anyway, for your own reasons.

Before you leave the pub you nervously call the Polis—but they’re deeply uninterested in a terribly bureaucratic kind of way. They take a detailed statement, asking you to spell your name, the name of the pub you were in, the people you were with, your cat’s name, and your mother’s blood group, then they promise to email the phone company a request for their call logs: but due to some quirk of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, as Amended, even though you routinely record all your calls, they can’t actually use it as evidence of anything. “I’ve got your complaint on the system, Mr. Reed, and if it happens again, you just text us on this number, citing this case reference…”

Bastards! Squeaks the mummy lobe, outraged at their unwillingness to enforce the full majesty of the law on your behalf. (After all, every time you’ve had a run-in with them before, they’ve had no trouble enforcing it against you, have they?)

After that, you move on by mutual consent to a less-foreboding venue, a city centre pub with HAPPY HOUR signs and a jukebox and loud after-office revellers getting it on. It’s not fun, exactly, but it beats the alternative. One pint is enough to calm you down again, but it also seems to be enough for Elaine, who is beginning to look twitchy. “Look, I need to be up tomorrow without a hang-over if I’m going to do the face thing with Hayek’s people. How about we call it an evening and you meet me at their offices at nine thirty sharp?” She beams you the address and you stick a push-pin in your phone’s map display.

“Okay, I’ll do that,” you say, stifling a groan at the idea of the up-with-the-larks timing. (It wasn’t like this at LupuSoft: breakfast at noon, so to speak.) “I’ll walk you back to the hotel.” You stand up and hold the door for her, and at the hotel she makes her awkward good-byes and strides through the door. Then the whole thing comes crashing down on your shoulders like a suit woven from slabs of slate. Jesus fuck. The panicky urge to phone Sophie is sudden and nearly irresistible—but then, what if you’re wrong? You don’t want to tear holes in the Potemkin village of her reality. So you decide to play games instead.

It’s zero dark o’clock and you’re coiled up on the futon in your living room like a basket case, goggles glued to your face by a mixture of sweat and determination. Your hands are twitching and spazzing from side to side, and you’re muttering under your breath like an old alkie communing with his invisible pink proboscidean. At least, that’s how it would look to a time-travelling intruder in your wee house who didn’t know what was actually going on—the body adrift in the grip of a weird compulsion while the mind decays inside it. A time-traveller from the 1980s or later might notice the winking LED status lights on the boxes under the flat-screen telly and guess at the significance of the glasses, and from the early nineties onwards they’d stand a good chance of understanding the muse whose arms you dance in: But to a visitor of Wellsian or earlier vintage, it would be wholly incomprehensible other than as some weird display of vile degeneracy.

(You vile degenerate, you and your hundred million cyberspatial compatriots!)

Not that you’re much given to probing the time-travelling condition when you can go rushing around bashing goblin brains with your clan buddies, which is what you’re doing right now—a bit of mindless recreational hack’n’slash to distract yourself until you’re tired enough for bed.

You’re running around as Oberon, a high-level warlock of more or less human origins who you’ve been developing for a while, out of idle curiosity—he’s well optimized for playing in a variety of fantasy zones, mostly ones that branch off the old dungeon paradigm—and you’ve hooked up with a trio of adventurers you just met in the guild-house to go and kick short green butt in a cave complex somewhere north of Castle Greyhawk and east of the rising sun. Alice (on morningstar and clerical anti-undead duty), Helmut (on war-axe and attitude) and Fantomas (lock-picking and garottes) are reasonably experienced players, for which you are grateful: So far the goblins have just been a minor nuisance, but you’ve got a feeling there’s more to this cave complex than meets the ultravision-augmented eye up to now. Which is why you’ve got half a dozen defensive spells locked and loaded, a neon-red knife missile floating above your left shoulder, and a serious case of paranoia as you tiptoe after Fantomas towards the running water you can hear ahead.

It’s a cave complex, of course, because you don’t generally run across anything as small as a mere cavelet in Greyhawk. There will be underground rivers, vast and wide, and huge cavernous killing zones with mist-wreathed stalagmite islands and waterfalls thundering into the subterranean depths—and stepping-stones and brokeback bridges to traverse under fire from the chittering hordes. Plus at least two side-quests to fulfil if you want to acquire the plot coupon to open the door to the money shot on the third sub-basement level guarded by the Klingon security detachment—except you made that last bit up: Whimsical, but that’s how the automatic scenario generators work, they’ve got all the subtlety of a play-by-numbers adventure book or a Hollywood motion picture.

Still, you can enjoy the art-work. Someone put a lot of effort into the music score, which is variations on a vaguely classical theme with a trance background: And the stony footing actually looks as if someone who’d been down a limestone karst or two in their day designed it, bedding planes and all. It doesn’t look like off-the-shelf tiles, and you’re almost beginning to wonder whether someone at Wizards of the Co$t has finally cracked procedural sedimentary rock formation in Zone when you run up against Alice, who has stopped and is crouched behind a boulder.

“What is it?” you ask, using your private chat channel.

“Someone else ahead. Don’t look like NPCs.” That’s Fantomas talking. He’s got a thick Yorkshire accent, which is pretty weird coming from a halfling swathed in black assassin’s silks.

“Eyeballs, oh great mage?” That’s Helmut. There’s a suspicious buzz to his voice that bespeaks either a suspiciously lossy routing or a voice remixer—the latter’s most likely, so you peg him as a transvestite, but that’s his privilege—but the sarcasm comes through undimmed.

“Certainly. Give me one second.” You hit on a spell slot and the knife missile shimmers with a shield of invisibility, then you send it forward into the dark cavern that vaults across the underground lake on whose shore you are playing hide-and-seek.

There’s a beach about fifty yards out across the expanse of black liquid, and a rickety wooden pier running out from it to a gondola-like boat that rocks slightly in an invisible breeze. You look through the missile’s eyes as it closes in on the boat, then, as if by magic (as if! In a place like this!) it pierces a shield of some description, and a small horde of bad guys appear beneath you. There are at least twelve of them, lumpen green-skinned warriors in heavy iron armour, skull-helmets and horsehair fringes nodding above beetle-browed faces: And they all bear a red ideogram on their shields. But they’re sure as hell not NPCs—you can hear a low-key conversation, the strange (to your Western ears) nasal-sounding intonation of mandarin speakers, and they’re equipped like adventurers, and that one in the sorcerer’s robe is an—

“Oh shit,” you manage to say, just as the enemy mage looks up expressionlessly, stabs his staff of power at your knife missile, and you lose contact. “Hostile clan, look like dark-dwellers, at least a dozen”—and then you flip back to your local context and look around and everything’s going to pieces around you. Half a dozen of the skull-helmed intruders march up out of the placid lake waters at the double, shedding their magical gills as they lower their halberds. You begin to trace a rune of protection, but you’re too late: A crossbow bolt, burning with alchemist’s fire, takes you in the back, from the trio of archers who have appeared from cover in the passageway behind you.

That pisses you off, and you’re a sufficiently powerful sorcerer that you don’t have to take that sitting: So you turn and prepare to zap a fireball at them as your magic armour comes online.

But nothing happens. You twitch. “Give me fire support!” yells Alice. “Someone heal Helmut—”

You line up another fireball and let rip. Nada. Huh? Something’s clearly wrong.

Another hostile steps out from behind the archers. This one is wearing a suit of powered battle armour and carrying a small tactical atomic grenade launcher from SPACE MARINE. Which is just not possible in Zone—it’s a tech-level transgression, not to mention a red flag to the moderators—but the last thing you see of your enemies is the red-glowing ideogram floating in the depths of his helmet face-plate as he pulls the trigger.

And brings the curtain down on Oberon the Warlock as neatly as any game you’ve ever lost.

Fucking cheats!

The next morning you awaken in a breathless near panic, one of those I’m-late-I’m-late-I’m-late tension dreams you get just before the alarm tweedles. You bounce out of bed too fast, get dizzy, stagger to the shower, begin getting dressed, and realize you only bought the one dress shirt to go with the suit. So you end up being ten minutes late out the door, unshaven and wearing a grand’s worth of pinstripes over a STEAMING tee-shirt that promises to bam yer pot, Jimmy.

You hop the bus from the high street out to Drum Brae, shifting the time with a wee dip into Ankh-Morpork. The bus trundles past ominously looming hunchbacked houses, cars replaced by noisome horse-drawn wagons, pedestrian commuters by a mixture of dwarfs, golems, werewolves, and humans from various periods of History-Land™. There are only a couple of icons spinning over players’ heads, though—Discworld™ isn’t too popular among the nine-till-five set. It’s all a bit drearily boring, so you drop out of the overlay and into your newsfeed for the rest of the trip.

The Hayek Associates’ offices—well, you’d heard about the old government nuclear command/control bunker out near Corstorphine hill, but you weren’t sure you believed in it until now. The car-park is full of Porsches and Bentleys, plus a Police van: All it needs is a bathroom with a Jacuzzi full of brightly coloured machine parts to make your day. You head for the entrance, where a big guy with a badly trimmed moustache and a suit that screams “cop” in sixteen different languages steps into your path.

“Hold on, son. What are you here for?”

You swallow. “I’m a contractor, working for Dietrich-Brunner Associates, who I’m supposed to be meeting here”—you check your glasses—“ten minutes ago.” Damn.

Mr. Moustache pulls out an ancient smartphone that bristles with keyboardy goodness. “Just a mo. Can I see your ID card?”

You resist the urge to get shirty and open your wallet. “Yup.”

“Okay.” He checks his phone. “In you go, Mr. Reed.”

“Thanks—” You pause, suddenly realizing something. “Who are you?”

“The tooth fairy, son.” His cheek twitches, then he reaches into his suit pocket and produces a warrant card. “In you go.”

“You can never be too sure,” you say, risking it, and scurry inside before the mummy lobe can scream and faint at your scandalous temerity in questioning his authority.

The bored temp on the reception desk stares at you like you’re something she trod in by accident: “You’re late,” she says. “Second level, room 110.” She points at the lift opposite, then hands you a badge. You get the message, and head straight for room six (having figured out—unlike the temp—that of course the lunatics at Hayek Associates number everything in binary).

Room six turns out to be a boardroom. The door’s open, and as you slide through it crabwise in an unconscious attempt to render yourself invisible you find Elaine, half the gang from last night, and a bunch of strangers, some of whom have that geek vibe to them. Chris, Elaine’s boss, is speaking. You sneak in and stand at the back like a naughty schoolboy while Chris rolls on in an imperious tone of voice, telling the bunch of strangers that he’s got the legal equivalent of a carrier strike group zeroed in on them, and they’d better give him access all areas, or else. Which goes down about as well as you’d expect.

“What you’re asking for is impossible,” snaps the leader of the enemy faction, a big silverback marketroid with all the charm of a Gitmo interrogator. “The audit can be arranged, if you’re willing to pay for it and contract with a mutually acceptable third party who will be bound by our standard NDAs, but the rest is right out. You’re asking for a complete copy of our database and transaction log, plus core mission-critical systems so you can perform a hostile audit while we’re trying to keep our business running in the face of an external hack attack: That’s just not practical, unless you’ve got a few hundred petabytes of storage kicking around and a data centre to run the sandbox in.”

The vaguely rat-faced guy from last night—Brendan—raises a document wallet. “This says you’re going to give us access. Why not just get it over with?”

“Give me that,” the silverback says contemptuously. He sniffs a couple of times as he reads it. Meanwhile, you fidget with your specs. There’s a new layer on the room, and a whole bunch of documents. It’s lawsuit-space: Cool! You glance at the auths and see that you’re on the Dietrich-Brunner case folder—they’ve listed you as staff, so you can edit their files. “Chris, I’d appreciate a word with you and your counsel in private with me and Phil.” He glances at a cynical thirty-something who is doodling notes with a pen on a yellow legal pad. “Just to clear the air.”

Chris turns round. “You heard him, everybody take ten.” He smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. Thinking you might as well beat the rush, you slide out the door about five seconds ahead of Elaine.

“What’s going on?” you ask.

“Chris and Hackman are trying to outasshole each other.” Her lips underscore the dry disapproval of her tone. “When they finish posturing, the lawyers will broker a deal, and the winner gets to dry-hump the loser’s leg.”

You roll your eyes. It’s not exactly a novelty, but…“Why is it that the further up the greasy pole you look, the more childish the games get?”

She examines you with clinical interest, as if looking for signs of life on Mars. “Let’s go find the coffee station. I think they’ll be at it for at least half an hour. Got to make it look hard-fought.”

As it happens, Elaine is out by less than four minutes. You’re just finishing a polystyrene cup of mechaccino from the robot caffeine dispenser in the Mess Hall (that’s what it still says on the door) and you’ve just about gotten round to thinking why me? for the third time this morning when Cynical Phil sticks his head round the door. “It’s safe to come back, the shooting’s over,” he mutters, then withdraws in a hurry. Everyone puts their coffee down and troops obediently back to the boardroom, where the Chris-and-Hackman show has dropped the final curtain.

“You’ve got a week,” says Hackman. He looks like he wants to bite someone’s throat out: No wonder his lawyer didn’t want to hang around. “Your tech heads can poke around as much as they need to, and Rebecca and Mike will give them what they need.” A subtle emphasis on the last word there. “Wayne will act as gatekeeper. You want something, you ask Wayne, he’s got the authority to say yes or no. Your accounts team can dupe our personnel files and accounts and look at them off-line, subject to nondisclosure arrangements. But I don’t want you underfoot. Two bodies, one week, that’s all you get to plant down here.”

One week? Chris smiles lopsidedly and nods at Elaine. “That should be sufficient,” he says confidently. “I’ve got every faith in you, Elaine.” And that’s you, and your eight grand a day, right there.

Midafternoon finds you attending a business meeting in a dungeon under Vhrana, with a gorgon called Stheno and a dark elf archer called Venkmann. Venkmann is one of the house avatars, currently being driven by Mike Russell. He has black-enamelled armour, an elaborately engraved skull-faced helmet, a twenty-centimetre-long Fu Manchu moustache, and an evil laugh—and that’s just the visible assets. “Where do you want to start?” he asks.

“The Orcs.” You ground your blunderbuss on the uneven, rubble-strewn floor of the cave and lean on it. “They were bearers, right?”

“Pretty much.” Venkmann raises one bony finger. Its tip glows green as he commences writing notes that hover in the air behind him. “Encumbrance, one hundred and ten pounds each before they hit a movement penalty.”

“Did you go hunting their registered owners?”

“Yup.” Venkmann scrawls another check mark in mid-air. “All forty were signed up via a botnet in Malaysia, using stolen credit cards. The cost of a tag in Avalon Four is low enough that their banks just authorized the transactions without doing a fraud check.”

The gorgon is looking a little bit lost. Periodically, she shrugs or twitches, stereotyped body language untouched by mortal puppeteer. “Where did the card numbers come from?” she finally asks.

“Who knows?” Venkmann shrugs. “It’s petty crime at this level—fifteen euros here and there. We told the cops, who made a note of it, but—”

“No, I mean, did all the numbers come from the same source?” she asks. “If some web storefront got themselves hacked, that might tell us something. Work it from the other end, find the hacker, find who they sold the numbers to.”

Venkmann looks perplexed. “Is that possible?” he asks.

You shift your weight between feet and rumble bearishly. “Of course it’s possible,” you point out. “There’s a real world out there, Mike. Maybe we ought to ask the cops if they’ve covered that angle yet.”

“The cops will take the details and give you a pat on the head, then they’ll ignore you,” predicts Stheno. “It’s a volume crime, they don’t investigate small frauds individually, it’s not cost-effective.” A small buzzing insect, no doubt attracted by the smell of blood, flies too close to her, and one of her asps snaps at it. The snake-lock misses, but the fly drops to the floor and shatters like glass. “If you expect them to share intelligence, you’re mistaken. The rule is, information flows into an investigation, never out of it. Break the rule, and you risk tipping off the target.”

Venkmann walks over to the Iron Maiden that leans up against the far wall of the dungeon. He idly spins the hand-crank that winches the lid up. “Whatever. We got forty Orcs. They didn’t act like a bunch of macro zombies. When I reran the footage, they were acting too random, too human—making mistakes and cancelling out of them, that kind of thing. They were following their leader, and when they ran, they ran back here.”

“Orcs. Treasure. How did they get into the bank?” you ask.

“Someone gave them ownership privs on the loot.” Venkmann sounds annoyed. “The same someone who nerfed the gods, presumably.”

“Could someone have cracked Hayek Associates’ root certificate from outside?” you ask. “Or do you think it was an inside job?”

Venkmann winches the Iron Maiden’s lid all the way open. What’s inside lies in darkness. “What I think is, there’s a bug in Kensu’s shitty Chinese code. It might be a memory leak—someone left a fence-post error in a copy-on-write primitive or something—or maybe something more exotic, but someone figured out a privilege-escalation attack that works. If you can get deity level rights, you can probably de-escalate other folks, too. The question is, who got root? And what did they do with the loot, anyway?”

You snort. “Treasure is treasure. That’s what eBay is for.” It’s worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it—like bank-notes, which used to carry the words, I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds.

“Yes, but they haven’t shown up there yet. This is stolen goods, I think we might get a stop put on the auction a bit faster than usual.” He clears his throat. “Anyway. After they got here, they, well, they made an unorthodox exit.”

He gestures at the Iron Maiden.

“You have got to be kidding,” you say. If you die in-game, your body—and what it’s wearing—stays where you fell. You reincarnate in your bare scuddies and you’ve got to run if you want to re-equip before some scavenging farmer grabs your kit. But the Iron Maiden is tagged as a shredder—it’s got the permanent death attribute, a creepy purple glow surrounding it in your admin-enhanced vision. That’s pretty damned unusual in this kind of game space; it doesn’t just kill you, it shreds you beyond resurrection. “What would be the point of that?”

“Well, obviously it killed them fatally. More importantly, it surrendered ownership of their in-game assets to, to whoever was waiting here. The Fence.”

“Ah,” says Stheno, sounding as if she’s just achieved enlightenment.

“So let’s replay the entry log for this shard and see who came here,” you suggest, “before the Orcs showed up with the loot.”

“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” says Stheno.

“Huh?”

“Open Sesame!” she cries. And the Iron Maiden starts flashing.

“What the fuck?” says Venkmann.

“Go on, open it up,” Stheno urges.

“Not likely, it might be a trap.”

Venkmann’s risk-averse attitude bugs you, so you put your mad skillz to work. Bringing up the in-game debugger in your field of view shows a whole bunch of scripting cruft attached to the torture implement. “Hey, this thing is really over-engineered for a simple killing machine, huh?”

“What? What’s—” Venkmann can see what you’re seeing, and you get the feeling that back in his office Mike is twitching with something other than a caffeine jag. “Hey, that’s not right. It says it’s signed by…” He trails off, muttering to himself, and the Venkmann avatar lolls on its feet like a hanged puppet, only its jittery fingertips showing that it’s not dead.

WHAT’S HE DOING? Stheno IMs you.

“There’s about”—you run a quick compile/syntax check on the tree—“about fifteen thousand lines of code attached to that thing, where there should only be a couple of hundred. They’re digitally signed using the Hayek corporate certificate, too, which means that someone at HA put them there. Numpties.”

“You’re telling me they didn’t even check? Before now?” the snake-woman hisses at you.

“Yeah, looks like.”

“Jesus.” She glances at you. “How do you know this?”

“You’ve got access to a built-in debugger and development suite whenever you’re running in god mode”—a nasty thought strikes you—“and there was a bunch of core database code in that thing: If someone’s planted a trigger in a public table and a watcher somewhere else in Zonespace—”

There’s a brilliant blue flash of light from the Iron Maiden, prompting you nearly to sprain a thumb bringing up a bunch of defensive spells you keep ready for just such occasions. “Shit!” yells Venkmann. Darkness gathers, fulminating, in the corners of the room, a smoky penumbral effusion spilling from the crack that has opened up in reality. You power up the Shield of Steel Focus and the Dome of Defence in a hurry, watching the world around you blur into watery unfocus as figures with too many limbs step out of the corners, moving in insectile stop-go jerks.

Venkmann is frozen over the gaping maw of the Iron Maiden, held in place by some unseen force. You turn to confront the intruders and realize that Stheno is outside your zone of protection. Shit. This is going to be ugly. There are four of the things, like gigantic anthropomorphic toads with strangely articulated limbs and great horned heads. You crack open a vial of Neverslow and inhale the bitter fumes, then unsling your blunderbuss as the world around you seems to slow, jerking in stop-frame animation. The gun’s already loaded with coarse-ground silver filings and lead shot, and when you pull, it bangs deafeningly in the confined space, blasting a cloud of smoke and sparks at the nearest of the demonic intruders, who yells raucous rage at you but doesn’t even stop coming. You can see the haze of improbability spiralling around its head, the madness in its eyes—it’s a fucking slaad of some kind! What are they doing here?—and then it raises its webbed hands in a spell-caster’s gesture, and a vast bloom of emerald fire envelops you. Which is a huge relief because it tells you you’re up against a bot; no human player—not even a total noob—would do something that stupid.

Two of the slaad’s fellow gate-crashers run into your Dome of Defence from either side, rattling your teeth as you invert the blunderbuss and reload as fast as you can. Reflexes left over from your munchkin days take over, and you blaze away, trying meanwhile to figure out what it all means. (You were looking for a clan of cannon fodder, not a booby-trapped artefact that triggers a teleport routine to drop a gang of pissed-off midlevel demons on you: Who put it here, and why?) “Stheno, you still alive?”

“Yes! What’s going on?”

“They’re trying to kill us, and they’re a whole lot more powerful than Orcs. Get behind me, I’ll handle—”

“No you won’t.” Stheno steps daintily around the Iron Maiden—Venkmann still wired to it with blue sparks flashing off his hair—and draws a long sword she found somewhere. Her status icon shows that she’s trying to go into some weird-ass haptic combat mode, something only idiot LARPers use, and you swear quietly as you dump a handful of Dust of Dispelling down the smoking maw of your gun and raise it again. One of the slaadi is going for her, which means—

A huge fountain of blood squirts across the room in arterial gouts. Shit, exit one auditor, dashed bad game-play, do you want to reincarnate in the middle of a fight? You shrug and drop the hammer on the demon as it scrabbles with ichor-dripping claws at the edge of your dome. Stupid fuckers, they’ve got a magical arsenal all of their own: Played straight, they could take you down in minutes. Magic stick go Bang and you can see daylight—okay, torchlight—through the beastie’s rib-cage as it takes a tumble. Good. You turn to the next one, only to find that Stheno’s still in the game and has got in ahead of you with that sword. She’s holding it at a weird angle and as the slaad screams and launches itself at her, she twists it and hops sideways, as if that’s going to achieve anything. The predictable thing happens—it takes a swipe at her but misses, probably because she’s accidentally triggered her Tumble talent and gone cartwheeling face-first into the wall.

What the hell? You’re supposed to be in quick time thanks to the dust you snorted, forcing the local Zonespace servers to crank down the time base for everyone else within the game’s event horizon (meaning, this room). Maybe Stheno’s LARP-addled mode can only do real-time, and the god mode Venkmann dropped on you both so casually has stopped the game engines from downgrading her movement rate. Or something like that…You’re still turning towards the next pebble-skinned party pooper as Stheno twists sideways and jabs her frog-sticker at him, misses, and does a neat back-flip. The slaad twitches, roars, then takes a swipe at her. “Why can’t I touch the fucking thing?” she yells frustratedly.

“You’re not equipped for it! And he’s got too many hit points!” you yell back at her, reloading in a hurry because bad guy #4 is sneaking up behind her with malice clearly in what passes for its tiny mind. “Clear the area! No, duck!”

She ducks, still holding on to her hilts like grim death, and you blast a cloud of buckshot across her shoulders and into frogface’s maw. He sneezes, green goop flying, and begins to Incant. That’s a bad sign, those things have big death-magic mojo. So far, the bot’s been playing them clumsily, using a tank to run over individual infantry instead of shelling them from the next county over—but if it gets its shit together, you’re going to be in a world of hurt. As if that’s not enough, you hear a low-pitched warning buzz: Your Shield of Steel Focus is nearing the end of its life, and any moment now you’re going to be unprotected.

You begin to back towards the Iron Maiden, hoping to use it as an obstacle, when Stheno leans over the supine slaad and starts horsewhipping it with her snake-headed dreadlocks. Which, surprisingly, works—the thing must have been pretty near to dead already. There’s a crackling tinkle as the grotesque frog-statue rolls over on its side, and then she vaults over it towards bad guy #4. He’s still busy Incanting—these spells take time—so you follow her, pitching in with all four paws in the faint hope of breaking his concentration roll. Only, no dice. Stheno has another momentary lapse of co-ordination and goes head first into the far wall, limbs spazzing wildly. Slaad #4 emits a strange howl and points, and all hell breaks loose—in the direction of the thoroughly immobilized Venkmann.

You whack the demon alongside his head with an ursine pawful of claws. That gets his attention: He turns and clumsily gouges at you with a scaly hand, gobbling and gurgling incoherently. You whack him again while Stheno leans forward and makes stabby to no particular avail. The gobbling rises towards an angry, incoherent peak, then stops, breaking up like a bandwidth-choked voice call. Another whack, and the slaad subsides in a twitching heap, oozing corrosive juices that eat away at the tiled floor.

“It didn’t work,” she says plaintively. “I kept trying to go into haptic contact-mode, and it wouldn’t work!”

“Whoa,” you wheeze. “You mean, like, full-body input? That doesn’t work in Avalon Four without a hack pack on the side.” Typical noob trick, trying to use an esoteric interface and going arse over tit, instead of simply whaling away with the plus-three Axe of Decerebration. “Let’s check on Venkmann.” You shamble over towards the Iron Maiden, kicking dismembered amphibian parts out of your way. Venkmann’s still wired into the shredder, kicking and twitching, so you call up the debugger console again and drop a break point on the thing. He falls away from it, collapsing on the floor. For a moment you think he’s dead, but he magics up some hit points from somewhere and is back on his feet.

“What the fuck was that all about?” he demands, irritably. “When I catch the mother-fucker who invented those—” He rambles on angrily for some time while you examine the code hooked into the Iron Maiden, which is still sparking and fulminating on an al fresco basis. Interestingly, it seems to have erased itself. If you hadn’t had a devkit buffer open before the extradimensional mugging, you wouldn’t even have noticed the missing twelve thousand lines of code. “What happened?”

“Who’s got write access to your version control system?” you ask Venkmann.

“Huh? What’s that got to do with it?”

“Plenty, I think.” You stare at the Iron Maiden, then tweak a couple of resources. The cascade of sparks and the violet pulsing aura go away. “Should be possible to look inside that without triggering the trap, now.”

Venkmann leans forward. “Either of you got a familiar?”

“Um.” You should have thought of that: Just because you disarmed the trap doesn’t mean that it’s safe to look. “I’m fresh out of ’em. How about you?”

“I’ve got a snake,” Stheno offers uncertainly.

“Badger,” says Venkmann. He turns round and begins to incant. There’s a bang and a cloud of purple smoke as a confused-looking badger appears.

“What…” Stheno begins to ask.

“It’s a familiar. He can see through its eyes, okay?” Venkmann continues to incant. A moment later, the badger shimmers and warps into invisibility. “Now it’s an invisible badger—the best kind of camera.” Venkmann bends down, picks something up, and leans over the Iron Maiden before releasing it.

“Well, there’s a surprise!”

“What’s down there?”

“It’s a rabbit-hole,” he says slowly, looking around as if at a different landscape.

“Where’s it go?”

“Looks like Zhongguo shard, going by the map. Which is part of Hentai Animatics’ zone, and we don’t have an admin contract for that. I think you’ve just uncovered an illegal-immigrant tunnel.”