88 Names Read online

  Dedication

  for Neal

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Mr. Jones

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Part Two: Online Games

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Part Three: RL

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Epilogue: 88 Names

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix

  John Chu’s Call to Wizardry Quick-Start Guide

  About the Author

  Also by Matt Ruff

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  NEW TO ONLINE ROLE-PLAYING GAMES? Don’t worry! At Sherpa, Inc., we are dedicated to providing a fun, quality gaming experience to clients of all skill levels. Feel free to dive right in—we’ll explain everything you need to know, when you need to know it. Or if you’d prefer to do some reading in advance, check out our handy quick-start guide (located in the appendix of this document), which covers all of the important game concepts and terminology. We look forward to serving you!

  Part One

  Mr. Jones

  An exclamation point above a character’s head indicates that they have a quest for you.

  —Call to Wizardry loading screen tip

  Chapter 1

  * * *

  sherpa — A person who acts as a paid guide in a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Sherpas provide their clients with playable characters, equipment, and skilled teammates, allowing them to experience high-level game content that would otherwise require hundreds of hours to reach. Sherpas typically act as freelancers, unaffiliated with the companies whose game worlds they operate in.

  Like gold-buying and other “pay to win” strategies, the use of sherpas is regarded by many players as a form of cheating. Game companies vary in their attitude towards the practice, with some tolerating sherpas’ existence while others—notably Tempest, makers of the popular Call to Wizardry—classify sherpa activity as a violation of the End-User License Agreement (EULA) and a bannable offense.

  —Lady Ada’s Lexicon

  * * *

  The client is an idiot.

  His name is Brad Strong, and in real life he works as a commodities trader at one of those big Wall Street banks that’s always implicated, but never held accountable, whenever the economy crashes. According to his social media accounts, Brad is a graduate of the Wharton School of Finance. He owns a nineteen-hundred-square-foot duplex in Soho and drives a Jaguar XP. He rock-climbs and SCUBA dives and is a student of Krav Maga, the martial art practiced by Israeli commandos. Philosophically he considers himself a libertarian, but he votes Republican because let’s be serious. He’s a fan of the Three Stooges and early Chuck Palahniuk. He hates fat chicks, libtards, and people who won’t shut up about their kids.

  Tonight, Brad is paying me and my associates at Sherpa, Inc. a substantial fee—substantial to us, trivial to him—to take him adventuring in the Realms of Asgarth in Tempest’s Call to Wizardry. Like the majority of clients, he has opted for a dps character: a 200th-level elf samurai. Brad thought about going with an orc ninja instead, but decided he’d rather not lurk in the shadows like a pussy. He wants to charge the monsters head-on and “crack some skulls.”

  I’m tanking, as a warrior troll named Blockhead of Moria. My job is to hold aggro, get the monsters to concentrate their attacks on me and my Plate Mail of Invulnerability, while the dps characters—Brad and my colleagues Jolene and Anja—do their damage-per-second thing, and Ray, running heals as a gnome cleric, staunches any bleeding that my armor can’t prevent. It’s a balancing act. The dps need to finish off the monsters before the healer runs out of mana and everybody dies. But if they do too much damage too quickly, they’ll steal aggro off the tank, and what should be an orderly killing spree will become a chaotic melee.

  This shouldn’t be an issue. Jolene and Anja both know what they’re doing, and Brad bought his character from us. His samurai has been carefully specced out to hit the sweet spot between too much damage and too little.

  The problem is the hammer. When Brad hired us two days ago, he asked if he could have access to his samurai in advance, to get in some practice before the run. Since he was paying a quarter of our fee up front, I said yes. I guess I should have paid more attention to his comment about wanting to crack skulls. During practice, he decided he didn’t like the katana his samurai was packing, so he went to the in-game auction house and bought himself a new weapon: Ivar’s Hammer.

  Ivar’s Hammer is basically Thor’s Hammer, without the Marvel trademark issues. Even by the high production standards of Call to Wizardry, it is a gorgeously rendered virtual object, a brutal, sexy work of art with black basilisk-leather handle wraps, a dragontooth butt spike, and mithril filigree thunderbolts on the mallet head. You can see why an alpha-male skull-cracker would be drawn to it.

  Unfortunately, Ivar’s Hammer is a tanking weapon. Anything you hit with it gets really pissed off, and on critical hits it shoots out fingers of lightning that aggro every other monster within thirty yards. Brad’s samurai keeps getting mobbed, and unlike my plate armor, his scale mail can’t handle that much punishment.

  Brad dies and Ray resurrects him. I warn Brad that this is going to keep happening if he insists on using the hammer. Brad doesn’t want to hear it. As a paying customer, he feels he should be entitled to use any weapon he likes. I remind him that I’m only a guide to the game world; I don’t make the rules. “Figure something out,” Brad says.

  We do what we can. I switch from Blockhead the warrior to Sir Valence, a paladin who can call down holy fire and throw his shield like Captain America, and who is generally better at emergency crowd control. Jolene’s ranger summons a special companion animal, a fire-breathing tortoise that can serve as a secondary tank. When, despite my and Jolene’s best efforts, Brad dies again (and again), Ray revives him, and Anja, whose druid moonlights as an armorsmith, patches the holes in his scale mail so we don’t have to go back to town for repairs.

  Our contract with Brad guarantees him two full dungeon runs. Even the most difficult dungeons rarely take more than three or four hours to complete, and the Caverns of Malice, where we are now, ought to be a cakewalk. But the constant cycle of death and resurrection slows our progress to a crawl; an hour in, we’ve barely cleared the first boss.

  Brad is as frustrated as we are and not professionally constrained from showing it. As he gets more impatient, he starts charging into battle before the rest of us are ready, with predictable results. Jolene tries to calm Brad down, at which point we discover he doesn’t particularly like black chicks, either. Jolene shuts up and Anja takes over; her attempt to soothe Brad is more successful, but the dying continues. I crank up the gib setting on my user interface, causing Brad’s demises to be rendered in as gory a fashion as possible, blood and viscera exploding from his wounds. This has no practical effect on game play, but it makes me feel better.

  After another forty minutes, we reach the second boss, the green dragon Anastasia. We stop outside her lair so I can explain the fight to Brad. There are three phases, I tell him. In phase one, Anastasia will bite and claw. In phase two, she’ll vomit a river of acid. In phase three, she’ll beat her wings and conjure a storm of tornadoes. Then back to phase one and repeat, until either she or all of us are d
ead. The rules of survival are straightforward: Don’t steal aggro off the tank. Don’t stand in the acid. Avoid the tornadoes. We also need to be mindful of Anastasia’s eggs, which are stacked along the walls of her cavern. The eggs are sensitive to jostling and if bumped—or struck by lightning—they’ll hatch. Anastasia’s brood spit acid like their mom; they also poop little patches of Krazy Glue that make it much harder to dodge tornadoes. Hatch more than a handful of eggs, and the fight quickly becomes unwinnable.

  Having laid all this out, I ask Brad if he would please, just for this one battle, switch back to his katana.

  “No,” Brad says.

  It’s getting harder not to lose my temper with this guy, and not just because of the way he’s behaving. Call to Wizardry’s avatar-creation system maps your real face onto the skull of whatever mythical creature you’re playing. Brad’s spray-tanned mug, stretched over the angular physiognomy of an elf, produces an unfortunate suggestion of yellowface that is amplified by the samurai costume. I feel like I’m talking to the lead from an old-fashioned production of The Mikado. Who is an idiot.

  I’m a professional with bills to pay, so I keep my cool. But I also keep pressing: The hammer just isn’t going to work in here, I say. It’ll break too many eggs and we’ll be stuck on this boss all night.

  Brad tells me that he can’t switch back to the katana, OK? He doesn’t have it anymore; he sold it to a vendor right before he bought Ivar’s Hammer. If I want to teleport back to town and buy him a new sword, fine, he’ll use it for this one fight. Otherwise, I need to suck it up and deal.

  I really should buy him the replacement sword. It’s the smart play. But I’m running out of patience and we’ve still got a long way to go, so I decide to brute-force it instead. I look over at Jolene, who nods. Among the arrows in her quiver is a Shaft of Obliteration, the ranger equivalent of a tac nuke. The resources required to craft it cannot be purchased but must be gathered, tediously, by hand, and generally its use is reserved for the deadliest end-level bosses. For Anastasia, it’s complete overkill, but it should get us through the fight on the first try.

  Next I b-channel Ray and slap a DNR order on Brad; no heals for him on this fight. Ray doesn’t respond, but his expression tells me he’d already decided to cut Brad off.

  “All right,” I say, “let’s do this.”

  Anastasia, curled in slumber at the center of her lair, blinks herself awake as we enter. I draw my sword and charge, but I don’t rush to get to her first; when Brad cuts in front of me yelling “Banzai!” I let him take lead. He runs up and bops Anastasia on the nose. Wide awake now, she rears her head back, roaring. The quality of the animation is incredible; the mix of rage and confusion on the dragon’s face perfectly mimics the expression of someone startled out of sleep by a band of homicidal midgets. Her eyes flit from Brad to me and back again and she cocks her head, suggesting a new level of bafflement: Why is the dps in front? Do these morons not understand how this works?

  Brad raises Ivar’s Hammer for another blow and Anastasia swipes him with a claw, shredding his armor and tearing out his rib cage. As his heart and lungs exit stage right, she bends down and bites his head off. What’s left of Brad’s body collapses into a pile of quivering giblets.

  The cavern flares white as Jolene’s nuclear arrow finds its mark. I move in, hurling my shield and hacking with my sword.

  “Battle rez me!” Brad’s disembodied voice cries. “Battle rez me!”

  We ignore him. While I hold aggro, Anja, her druid now shapeshifted into a mountain lion, comes in from the side and rakes Anastasia with her claws. Jolene’s pet tortoise hits the other flank and Jolene, staying behind me, looses arrow after arrow.

  In no time, Anastasia is caught up in her own bloody death throes; we never even make it to phase three. As the dragon crashes to the ground, the vibrations from her fall cause all of her eggs to swell up and burst, harmlessly. For an instant, all is peaceful in the cavern.

  “Rez me, you fucks!” Brad shouts.

  Ray’s already doing it. I’m sure he’s tempted not to, but like me, he wants to get paid.

  Brad doesn’t appreciate Ray’s professionalism. His body reassembled, he leaps to his feet, shouting, “The fuck!” and darts at Ray with Ivar’s Hammer swinging. But the game won’t let you attack your teammates. Or shove them: When Brad tries to chest-bump Ray, he passes right through him.

  “Brad,” I say. I point to the treasure chest that’s taken the place of Anastasia’s corpse, its purple aura signifying epic loot.

  Still fuming, Brad stomps over to the chest and kicks it, which is allowed. The lid pops open, unleashing rays of gold-orange light; a trumpet flourish sounds. Not just epic loot then—legendary loot. Brad’s won the lottery.

  I step up to get a better look, and my heart sinks as I see the sword hilt rising out of the chest. The Vorpal Blade of Gilliam: another tanking weapon.

  And not just any tanking weapon. For a paladin, the Vorpal Blade of Gilliam is the tanking weapon. It is as rare as it is powerful: You could open a thousand loot chests and not find another. And like all legendary weapons, it’s bind-on-pickup, so you’ll never see one for sale in the auction house.

  Most sherpa contracts specify that clients are only entitled to loot their characters can reasonably use: No tanking weapons for non-tanks, no dps weapons for healers, et cetera. But clients of Sherpa, Inc. are entitled to any and all loot, without restriction. That way they never feel cheated by the rules, and if they choose to pass up loot voluntarily, they get to feel virtuous and altruistic.

  Brad’s no altruist, but he stares for so long at the sword without taking it that I foolishly allow myself to hope he doesn’t want it. Then he glances over at me. I’ve got my best poker face on, but Brad’s Wall Street trader instincts see right through it; he grins and turns back to the chest.

  Brad ditches Ivar’s Hammer, which falls ringing to the floor and vanishes back into his inventory. His hand closes around the Vorpal Blade’s hilt and another trumpet flourish signals that it is now bound to him irrevocably.

  The sword blade is a length of razor-sharp crystal filled with changeable light. When Brad first holds it up, it’s white with holy fire, but as he waves it back and forth, it turns brimstone red, noxious green, icy blue, and finally dark purple shot through with violet sparks. My despair deepens as I realize I’m never going to be able to hold aggro against this thing. And Brad was talking about going to Crimson Castle for his second dungeon run: vampires and succubi, a crowd-control nightmare.

  CHUNK!

  The cavern suddenly brightens, as if Jolene’s set off another nuke. I turn and shield my eyes against the bank of Klieg lights that have appeared up near the ceiling. A second bank comes on beside them, and then a third.

  I’m reminded of my only visit to a real-world amusement park, on a field trip when I was nine. A friend and I snuck away from the group and went on the haunted house ride, which proceeded to break down, stranding us in the middle of a ghoul-infested graveyard. We screamed our heads off until the ride operator came to rescue us, emergency lights exposing the ghouls as nothing more than puppets on a stage.

  These Klieg lights have a similar effect, albeit one that is entirely computer-generated. In the blink of an eye, Anastasia’s lair transforms from a photorealistic cave to a cheap set constructed of wood and papier-mâché. The 3D treasure chest becomes a painted flat propped up with a plank.

  “What the hell is going on?” says Brad, his legendary Vorpal Blade demoted to a Styrofoam toy.

  What’s going on is we’re about to get busted by the EULA police. I should be upset about this, and I am, but I can’t help being impressed as well. Any other game company, having caught us violating their terms of service, would just dump us out of the system. But not Tempest. Even when they ban you, they turn it into a show. And it’s this extraordinary level of polish that has made Call to Wizardry the most successful MMORPG in history.

  A section of the cavern wall sw
ings open, revealing a concrete maintenance tunnel. Two men in suits emerge. At first glance they read as lawyers, but then you notice the gloves they are wearing—blue latex, like the kind police use when handling evidence. The gloves are an inside joke, a reference to a cult science-fiction show that aired before I was born and was canceled after only one season. I’m a big enough nerd that I get it: The EULA cops aren’t here to haul us off to virtual jail. They’re executioners.

  Brad thinks he can fight them with his Nerf sword. He manages a few halting steps before the movement controls on his user interface stop working.

  Two by two, hands of blue, the EULA cops advance to the center of the room. We find ourselves drawn into a semicircle before them. EULA Cop #1 consults a computer tablet and addresses us one at a time, starting with me: “JohnChuAlias8437 at gmail dot com, aka Blockhead of Moria, aka Sir Valence, you are guilty of violating Section 5 of the Call to Wizardry End-User License Agreement . . .”

  Section 5 of the EULA prohibits unsanctioned commercial activities within the game world. I.e., it’s the anti-sherpa clause. Jolene, Anja, and Ray are all guilty of this offense as well, as is Brad, for hiring us. Interestingly, Brad is also guilty of violating Section 2, which prohibits hacking into other players’ accounts or profiting from said hacking.

  “The penalty for these crimes is the immediate and permanent suspension of the offending user accounts,” the EULA cop concludes. “If you believe this judgment has been reached in error, you may appeal to customer service within sixty days.”

  With that, he turns to his counterpart. EULA Cop #2 extends a gloved fist clutching a small cylindrical device; translucent blue antennae sprout from both ends of it. They emit a harsh buzzing noise that jangles the nerves like fingernails scraping on a blackboard.

  I can’t move, but from where I’m standing I can see Brad, at the far end of the semicircle. Blood starts drizzling from his samurai’s nose and ears. The buzzing gets louder and the drizzle becomes a gusher. I experience a brief moment of satisfaction as Brad’s head explodes.