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  Medicine Girl collects one more scalp, and then—either because she’s reached her quota, or because she’s run out of patience—she turns and starts walking away. BootFuqqer stays right on her heels, no longer screaming, but breathing hard so she’ll know he’s still there.

  It gets to her. She’s only gone about a hundred yards when she stops, squares her shoulders, sighs, and logs out. BootFuqqer spins around and raises his fists in triumph. Choaksondik and CukULongtime exchange high-fives.

  Idiots.

  Mr. Jones has wandered away from me in pursuit of his fourth or fifth gremlin. I move closer to him—a protective gesture that BootFuqqer notices.

  “Hello there!” BootFuqqer calls to me. Pointing at Mr. Jones: “Is that your boyfriend?”

  BootFuqqer’s sidekicks scope me out.

  “A five,” Choaksondik pronounces.

  CukULongtime nods in agreement. “Definitely a five.”

  Mr. Jones looks up from his latest kill. “Who are these people?”

  “Griefers,” I say. “Assholes who try to ruin the game for other players. You see that red halo around their heads? That means they’re flagged for PvP—player-versus-player combat. They want to pick a fight with us. With you, really.”

  “Should I accept?”

  “No. They’re maximum level, you wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “Hey five!” BootFuqqer shouts. He raises his middle fingers to his face and tugs down the corners of his eyes. “Five-four!”

  “Why is he shouting numbers at you?”

  “It’s code,” I explain. “To get around the profanity filter.”

  Call to Wizardry’s user interface offers an optional audio filter that can bleep out specific words and phrases. The basic filter only bleeps curse words, but you can get custom add-ons to suppress racial epithets and other forms of hate speech. Griefers have adapted by making code-slurs out of common words that can’t be censored without rendering ordinary conversation impossible. Numbers are popular: A shout of “six,” for example, would mean “nigger,” “faggot,” “retard,” or all of the above. “Five-four,” I’m guessing, is “slant-eyes.” The fact that I am guessing—that they’ve actually got me wasting precious brain cycles to figure out what they’re calling me—says something about the genius of the method. If only they’d use that ingenuity for good.

  I lock my slant-eyes on BootFuqqer and his friends and say, “Mute. Mute. Mute.” They fall silent. Unfortunately, I can still see them. Despite numerous requests, Tempest refuses to implement a “Dead to me” feature, saying it would cause too much confusion to have characters who couldn’t see one another attacking the same monsters and trying to harvest the same resources. This is actually a fair point, one that underscores the difficulty of policing antisocial behavior in a game whose core elements are murder and pillage.

  When BootFuqqer realizes I’ve muted him, he walks over and gets in my face visually, waving his hands and mouthing obscenities with his troll-sized Al Jolson lips. Choaksondik and CukULongtime focus on Mr. Jones. His gray features have them stymied; they don’t know what numbers to shout at him. Even more vexing from their perspective, Mr. Jones has better ignoring skills than Medicine Girl did. Trolls love it when you only pretend not to care about them, but they find genuine indifference intolerable. Mr. Jones, having decided that the trolls are not worth his attention, puts them out of his mind, and not even rampant kill-stealing can get them back in. He just works around them.

  But these assholes are nothing if not adaptable. Choaksondik waits for Mr. Jones to swing at another gremlin and then steps into the path of the blow. The game engine, which is smart but not infallible, interprets this as a deliberate attack by Mr. Jones and flags him for PvP. His hatchet nicks Choaksondik for one hit point of damage. Choaksondik winds up and hits back for a hundred thousand hit points. Mr. Jones explodes into a cloud of pink vapor.

  BootFuqqer claps his hands to his cheeks and shoots me a look of mock horror. Then he grins and drops a hand to his crotch and mimes jerking off. He pokes the inside of his cheek with his tongue and makes more jerk-off motions near his mouth.

  I open a b-channel. “You there?”

  Jolene’s voice comes back loud and clear: “Yep. Right behind Tweedledum and Tweedledumber.” I look over at Choaksondik and CukULongtime, who are now squatting over Mr. Jones’s remains, pretending to shit on him. The air on the far side of them shimmers, and I glimpse the outline of a third person. Then Jolene drops back into full ninja stealth mode.

  “Get ready,” I say.

  “Remember I’m not the only one who can be invisible,” she replies. It’s a good bet that the griefers have brought their own ninja—or two of them. If it’s a pair, they can take turns stunning me with paralytic strikes while the other trolls tear me to pieces.

  I grip my wizard’s staff with both hands. The homunculus in the crystal snaps to attention, pulling out a lighter and an aerosol can. BootFuqqer smiles and makes a “come at me” gesture.

  I take three quick steps to my right and set off a freezing sphere. A wave of subzero cold expands ten yards in all directions around me. BootFuqqer is caught in the blast and encased in a solid block of ice. Another ice block forms around the invisible ninja who was lurking beside me.

  A second ninja breaks stealth to my left. He’s not frozen, but my sidestep has put me out of melee range, so his opening strike hits empty air. Before he can close the gap, I teleport backwards thirty yards. Then I light him up with fireballs and magic missiles.

  BootFuqqer breaks free of the ice block. I pause in my immolation of Ninja #2 and hit BootFuqqer with a polymorph spell, turning him into a pig. I turn Ninja #1 into a pig, too. Ninja #2 is almost in melee range, so I frostbolt him in the face to slow him down and teleport away again. In the background, I see Choaksondik stumbling around blindly, trying to rub ninja pepper spray out of his eyes, while CukULongtime staggers beneath a flurry of blows from Jolene’s Nunchucks of Severe Head Trauma.

  I finish off Ninja #2 and turn my attention to BootFuqqer. I use my Arcane Trinity cooldown: My avatar splits into three identical copies, hurling fire, ice, and lightning respectively. As BootFuqqer’s hit point total plummets, Ninja #1 squeals impotently and lowers his snout to root in the dirt.

  CukULongtime is down. I kill BootFuqqer, and Jolene kills Choaksondik. Ninja #1 de-swines and tries to make a run for it. I hit him in the back with an ice lance, and Jolene, going for style points, whips out a Flying Guillotine and takes his head off from twenty yards away. Game over.

  We hear the sound of disembodied applause. Mr. Jones’s spirit reunites with his corpse. He gets up slowly, his deerskin armor and headband looking somewhat the worse for wear.

  “That was excellent,” Mr. Jones says. He surveys the bodies. “Will they come back?”

  “They can,” I say. “Without a healer to resurrect them, they’ll have to walk their souls back from a graveyard, the same way you just did. And because this is supposed to be a beginners-only zone, they’ll be sent to a graveyard that’s farther away. It may take them several minutes to return.”

  “But they will be back.”

  “Probably.”

  “And then you can kill them again.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many times?”

  “As many times as we feel like. Until we get tired, or they get tired.”

  Mr. Jones nods. “Until they get tired,” he says.

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  culture shock — A feeling of profound disorientation caused by exposure to an alien worldview or way of life. Once primarily an affliction of immigrants, soldiers, and wealthy tourists, it was democratized by the internet, which put culture shock on tap 24/7. Whether civilization can survive the resulting stress remains an open question.

  —The New Devil’s Dictionary

  * * *

  Smith is mad at me.

  After eight hours in Call to Wizardry with Mr. Jones, I go to the Game Lobby
and leave my avatar standing at a table by the bar while I take a much-needed bio break. When I come back, my instant message queue is overflowing and Smith’s avatar is snapping its gray fingers in my face.

  “What’s wrong?” I say. Smith answers with a grunt and jerks his head in the direction of the chat rooms.

  I don’t go. Mom has suggested that I try pushing back against Smith’s authority to see how he’ll react, and this seems as good a time as any.

  “We can talk here,” I say, invoking a cone of silence. “It’s OK, no one can overhear us. Just don’t move your lips.”

  Smith scowls and his hand twitches like he’d like to grab my wrist and start dragging me. If he could.

  “Is this about Jolene?” I ask.

  Losing patience, Smith speaks: “You were given strict instructions not to tell anyone what you were doing!”

  “I didn’t tell Jolene anything. I mean, she knows he’s a client, obviously, but I didn’t share any details about our arrangement.”

  “You are not to involve other people in this.”

  “It’s a massive multiplayer game,” I say. “I have to involve other people, to do what your boss wants me to do. They can either be people I know and trust, who are competent players, or random strangers who may not know what they’re doing. Which do you think Mr. Jones would prefer?”

  Smith shakes his head, furious at the dilemma this puts him in. “Your people will have to be cleared,” he says after a moment. “Their systems will have to be secured, as yours was.”

  “If you want my crew to give you root access on their computers, you’re going to have to let me tell them what’s going on. And they’ll expect to be well-paid.”

  “Then you will have to pay them,” Smith says pointedly. “Out of the already generous fee you are receiving.”

  “Mr. Jones said that money is no concern.”

  “And I am saying that you will do the job for the amount you agreed to.”

  This is not what I want to hear, but I decide to table the issue for now; later I can always lobby Mr. Jones directly for more money. “Do I have your permission to tell Jolene and the others what’s up?”

  Smith considers. “Yes, but say as little as possible. Tell them only that you have a new client who wishes to remain anonymous.”

  “What about your security concerns?”

  “Perhaps there is another way to handle that.” He gives me a knowing look. “One that will not require you to pay them so well.”

  “If you think I’m going to help you hack my friends’ computers—”

  “I think you will do whatever is in your own best interest.”

  Ouch. He’s not entirely wrong, of course: If my mother weren’t watching, I’d at least be tempted to do what he’s suggesting. In this case I’m pretty sure I’d resist temptation, but I’m just as happy not to put that to the test. I suspect, going forward, I’ll have plenty of other chances to demonstrate my virtue.

  Now that he’s put me in my place, Smith relaxes a little. He looks over at the bar, where She-Hulk—or a reasonable facsimile—is hitting on Superman. “What is that?”

  “Superhero cosplay,” I say. “They’re probably coming off a run in League of Avengers.” The DC/Marvel co-branded MMORPG.

  “Not the costumes,” Smith says. “I am talking about the necklace she is wearing. I have seen other women with this, and some men as well. What is the significance?”

  I take a closer look. She-Hulk has a thin chain around her neck; dangling from it is a shiny silver talisman the rough size and shape of a rifle cartridge. “It’s a bullet.”

  “For another game? A shooting game?”

  “No, not a bullet,” I say. “A bullet. You know, a virtual blow job?”

  Smith tilts his head and raises a finger to his ear—as if, off in reality, he were tapping his headset, checking for a malfunction. “A virtual—”

  “Blow job. As in oral sex? Seriously, you don’t know what bullets are?”

  Clearly he doesn’t. Which is interesting. “This is . . . a fad of some kind?”

  “A fad?” I say. “Not really. It’s just something people do. I suppose it was a fad, back when it first got started. And of course originally, it was an art project . . . You really don’t know the story?”

  Smith just stares at me, conflicted. A part of him wants to know, but another part really, really doesn’t.

  So I tell him.

  “This would have been about seven, eight years ago,” I say, doing the math in my head. “The artist was a German woman, Leni Ortmann, and the project was called Datenfetisch. Data fetish. What it was, she wired up a dildo with all kinds of sensors, and then convinced a hundred women to, you know, be recorded going down on it . . .”

  “Women,” Smith says darkly. “You mean prostitutes.”

  “One of them was a sex worker,” I say. “Number sixty-two, I think. But they were from all walks of life. A few of them were already famous—there were a couple of actresses, a pop singer, a professional wrestler—but most were just ordinary women who accepted Ortmann’s invitation.” I pause, recalling number eighty-seven, Raquel Sandoval, a welder from Barcelona, who thirteen-year-old me had had a huge crush on.

  “But how is this art?” Smith wants to know.

  “It was transgressive art,” I explain. “The point is to provoke people. The art isn’t so much the project itself, it’s the reaction to the project—what Ortmann called the Spectacle.”

  “I do not understand this at all.”

  “Think of it as the fine art version of clickbait: The more attention you get, the better. Now, anything involving famous women and sex is guaranteed a certain amount of attention, but Ortmann was savvier than that. She’d studied marketing at university, and she knew how to manipulate public interest. And the thing that really made Datenfetisch take off, that sent it into the stratosphere as far as Spectacle was concerned, is that she didn’t build a playback device. She made these recordings, and she put each one on its own custom flash drive—the drives were supposed to look like lipstick cases, but what they also looked like, especially when they were racked together, was bullets, which is where the name comes from—and then, when she had all hundred of them, she destroyed her recording equipment, and all the technical notes that went with it. All that was left was the data.”

  “Which would be useless without the technical documentation,” Smith says.

  “That depends on your assumptions. Ortmann put up a Datenfetisch website, with pages for each of the women in the project. There were photographs, capsule biographies, video interviews, and of course, the data. Which, yeah, without the technical specs, were just long strings of ones and zeroes. But that was Ortmann’s marketing savvy at work. It’s a classic strategy for building demand: Show customers something they think they want, then tell them they can’t have it.”

  “But they couldn’t have it,” Smith insists. “On their own, such data strings would be meaningless.”

  “On the contrary, they were full of meaning—the trick was getting access to the information. Ortmann herself had provided at least one clue: On the website, each data string was tagged with a time code showing how long that particular recording was supposed to run. With that, and an educated guess about the sampling rate, you could divide up the string into discrete data packets, and start hypothesizing about the number of different variables you were dealing with. And if you were obsessed enough to go that far, the next step, obviously, was to ask yourself whether there might not be other, subtler clues hidden in the Datenfetisch website. To wonder whether Datenfetisch was actually a puzzle that was meant to be solved.”

  “That is repulsive and insane.”

  “It’s the power of targeted marketing,” I say. “Ortmann’s data strings were like the Voynich Manuscript for chronic masturbators. All over the web, people—guys—started setting up forums devoted to cracking Ortmann’s code. And there was a corresponding hardware effort, an amateur Manhattan Projec
t to build the playback device. That was what set off the Spectacle: Wired magazine ran a squib about all these Kickstarters and Patreons people had created to fund the hardware research. Then Slate did a post about how problematic it was that Men on the Internet were trying to build a magic decoder ring for fellatio, and it went viral. The whole internet started weighing in.”

  Talking about this is making me nostalgic. The Datenfetisch affair certainly wasn’t the first online controversy I’d witnessed, but thanks to the raging hormones of puberty, it was the first one I felt personally invested in. I even wrote a few impassioned Reddit posts on the subject—all of them, thankfully, lost in the noise. “It struck a lot of nerves, especially in America. This was right after a bunch of Hollywood celebrities got their nude selfies hacked, and there were people arguing that the Datenfetisch decryption effort was the same sort of violation—and that was just one subgenre of hot take. Another sore spot was that four of Ortmann’s subjects were transwomen—you can imagine the reactions that provoked, right? The back and forth on that, people lecturing each other about how they were supposed to feel, went on for weeks . . .”

  Peak Spectacle was achieved when the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives held joint hearings to determine whether digital blow-job technology represented a threat to children. My own youthful eye-rolling aside, this was a reasonable thing to have a conversation about, but only if you assumed that grown-ups would be doing the talking. In Zero Day, I was used to dealing with adults who wielded power with restraint and tried to educate themselves before forming opinions; it was a jolt to log into C-SPAN and see members of Congress acting more like the dickheads I encountered in game chat.

  “The Spectacle did eventually die down,” I tell Smith. “Ortmann sold her original set of bullets to a private collector for some crazy amount of Euros, and the outrage machine moved on to other things. As for the Men on the Internet, they never did crack Ortmann’s code. But the hardware effort was more successful: They say Datenfetisch jumped cybersex technology ahead half a decade overnight.” I look over at the bar, where She-Hulk is dangling her bullet above Superman’s open palm, teasing him with it. “So now, yeah, it’s just a thing people do.”