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  “What about the gold you spent?”

  “Jesus Christ. Take it out of my share, I don’t care.”

  According to official Call to Wizardry lore, the Barbican was originally an archmage’s castle. Near the end of the Second Multiverse War, it was overrun by orcs. The murder of the archmage set off a magical earthquake that swallowed up most of the structure; all that remained above ground was the castle’s front gate, which now guards the entrance to a crevasse.

  As Darla had noted, this was not a hard dungeon for characters of our level. The most challenging fight is right at the beginning, where you take on a squad of elite orc warriors supported by archers. The archers are on the wall above the Barbican’s front gate, protected by anti-missile and anti-magic wards; you can’t shoot at them, but they can and do shoot at you, pumping out a steady stream of damage until you fight past the ground troops, climb a ramp up the wall, and engage them hand to hand.

  There are a number of effective strategies for tackling this fight. The safest, and the one Ray favored, involves sending the tank in to aggro the warriors and draw them away from the gate, out of arrow range. Without the extra dps the warriors aren’t that dangerous, and once they’re dead it’s a simple matter to rush in and kill the archers.

  Darla had a different plan. “OK,” she said, as we stood on a hill overlooking the gate, “I’m going to pull the ground troops off to the right, away from the ramp. As soon as I’ve got their attention, Argentina, here”—pointing at Anja—“is going to run up the wall and go full mountain lion on those archers.”

  Ray shook his head. “The archers will all aggro on her the second she steps on the ramp. She won’t make it.”

  “Yeah, she will,” Darla said, “because Buffalo Boy”—pointing at me—“is going to be secondary heals on this fight. While Mr. Panties in a Bunch is busy keeping me alive, you’re going to spam Blessings of the Earth Mother on Argentina.”

  “That’s not good enough,” Ray insisted. “If those archers roll critical hits, Blessings of the Earth Mother won’t— What are you doing?”

  Darla had bowed her head to check herself over again, and as she did so, the pieces of her armor began fading away. Soon all that was left was her shield and her sword, and her avatar was naked, or as naked as Call to Wizardry lets you get: A loincloth and bikini top remained, to preserve the game’s Teen ESRB rating.

  “I’ve done this fight in armor a billion times,” Darla explained. “It’s boring.”

  “Doing it without armor is suicidal,” Ray said.

  “Not if you do your job. I’ll pop my Shield of Righteousness cooldown right at the start. If I can kill two of those guys before the shield breaks, that should lower the damage to a point where you can keep up with it.”

  “And what if I decide not to heal you?”

  Darla shrugged. “Then it’s going to be a really long dungeon run. But at least you won’t have to waste any gold fixing my armor when you resurrect me . . . OK, let’s do this. Argentina, follow me!”

  This is not news, but people who fantasize about being knights or ninjas often can’t fight worth a damn in real life. Do a search on YouTube and you’ll find lots of videos of people in VR headsets flailing around hilariously as they pretend to be Brienne of Tarth or Conan the Barbarian. Good game designers understand that even though players may not be cool, they want to feel cool, and so most VR motion-capture systems incorporate a feature called “kinetic photoshopping,” which translates the jerky movements of the gamer into the smooth blows and parries of a trained martial artist.

  Tempest, as usual, takes things a step further. Buried deep in the Call to Wizardry settings menu is an option to turn off kinetic photoshopping. Ordinarily you would only do this if you were planning to get stoned and have a good laugh at yourself. But if you actually are a martial artist, or just someone who knows how to move—someone who doesn’t need help to look cool—you can take off the training wheels and really show your stuff.

  Darla knew how to move. She fought like a dancer, with a kind of brutal grace. She flowed. It was breathtaking to watch. I’d seen it in our duel in the Jurassic Swamp, and it had certainly factored into my decision to offer her a job. But in the swamp she’d been a green-skinned monster with fangs and warts. Here at the Barbican, she was an elf; she looked more like a real person.

  And yes, she was naked. I don’t want to downplay that, but I don’t want to oversell it, either. I mean, I like nudity. Nudity is definitely a thing for me. But my real turn-on, my big fetish, is competence. Competence gets to me in a way that nudity alone never could.

  Darla knew what she was doing. She tore into those orcs like nobody’s business, and managed to kill half of them before her magic Shield of Righteousness collapsed. Then Ray, deciding he had no choice but to play along, stepped in with his own brand of competence, healing Darla’s wounds as the orcs’ scimitars finally started to bite.

  I was the one who nearly screwed up. Focused on the Spectacle that was Darla, I forgot about Anja. She started up the ramp and was immediately hit with a volley of arrows. A second volley dropped her to a quarter of her hit point total. Then Darla, who’d managed to maintain situational awareness despite being mobbed by orcs, called out, “Hey, Buffalo Boy, WAKE THE FUCK UP!”

  I started firing off blessings. It was a close call, but the random number generator was kind to me and I kept Anja from bleeding out. Once she got into melee range, she made short work of the archers. Darla finished off the ground troops, lopping the head off the last one with a flourish, then spread her arms and took a deep bow.

  I shuffled my feet and tried to look nonchalant. Beside me, Ray cracked open a potion and guzzled it; keeping Darla alive had used up most of his mana.

  “So,” I said, “she’s a little high maintenance, but I think you can see—”

  Ray tossed the empty potion flask aside. “How long?” he said.

  “How long what?”

  “How long are you planning to be stuck on this girl?”

  Lying about your true feelings doesn’t make you stop feeling them. Another Mom saying. But Mom’s point is that you should be honest with yourself about your motivations; confessing them to other people is optional.

  “It’s not like that. Darla is—”

  “Trouble,” Ray said. “And since you don’t normally have your head up your ass, I can only think of one reason why you’d want her on the crew.” He raised a hand to stop me interrupting. “I’m not judging. I’ve got my own history of stupid, so I get it. I just want some idea of how long I’m going to have to put up with her.”

  “Ray—”

  “Hey ladies!” Darla called. “Are we here to do genocide, or what?”

  “Try to make it quick,” Ray said to me. “Figure out what you want from this girl, get it, and get out. And when she makes you pay for it—and she will—remember that I told you so.”

  Chapter 8

  * * *

  Korea, North — An independent kingdom for much of its long history, Korea was annexed by Imperial Japan in 1910. Following WWII, Korea was split, with the northern half coming under Soviet-sponsored communist control. After failing in the Korean War (1950–53) to conquer the US-backed Republic of Korea (ROK) in the southern portion by force, North Korea (DPRK), under its founder President KIM Il Sung, adopted a policy of ostensible diplomatic and economic “self-reliance” as a check against outside influence. The DPRK demonized the US as the ultimate threat to its social system through state-funded propaganda, and molded political, economic, and military policies around the core ideological objective of eventual unification of Korea under Pyongyang’s control. KIM Il Sung’s son, KIM Jong Il, was officially designated as his father’s successor in 1980, assuming a growing political and managerial role until the elder KIM’s death in 1994. KIM Jong Un was publicly unveiled as his father’s successor in 2010.

  —The CIA World Factbook (text edition)

  * * *

  I’m sorry,” the
guide tells me. “The unicorn cave is a myth.”

  “Really? I found a million references to it on Google.”

  “Yes, it is a popular legend in Western media. The story stems from a mistranslated press release that went viral. The name of the site, Kiringul, is more properly rendered in English as Kirin’s Grotto. A kirin is—”

  “A royal chimera.” I’ve killed slews of them in Call to Wizardry: Dragon-headed, ox-footed beasts who guard the tombs of the xiongmao emperors.

  “Yes. What the DPRK archaeologists actually claimed to have found was an inscription in the rock identifying the cave as the home of a kirin ridden by King Dongmyeong, founder of the ancient Korean state of Goguryeo. The discovery is part of a broader propaganda effort to foster a sense of continuity between Korea’s first rulers and the modern Kim family dynasty.”

  “So it’s the Korean equivalent of a ‘George Washington slept here’ plaque. But they didn’t actually dig up a kirin.”

  “No.”

  “That’s disappointing. I was picturing a sort of P. T. Barnum exhibit with fake fossils. You know, like a horse skeleton with a horn glued to its forehead?”

  “Kiringul has nothing like that. But if your interest is absurdities connected to the Kim regime’s cult of personality, there are numerous other examples I could show you.”

  “That’s OK. I’m actually here to learn about infrastructure.”

  I am in the DPRK section of the CIA’s Virtual World Factbook. An important tool in the CIA’s own propaganda arsenal, the Factbook is open to anyone with internet access. You can walk the streets of the world’s capitals and visit thousands of other “sites of interest,” asking questions about history and current events. Of course, everything you see and hear is the American government’s preferred version of reality. But that’s good enough for my purposes today; if I have any doubts, I can always ask Mom for the straight facts later.

  My guide to virtual Pyongyang is a software agent who goes by Mr. Park. Modeled on a North Korean intelligence officer who defected in the 2020s, he reminds me of some older Germans I knew when I lived in Berlin—people who’d grown up in the East before the Wall came down and were only too happy to share stories of how awful life had been under communism.

  Mr. Park and I are in a plaza atop Mansu Hill in central Pyongyang. The space is dominated by a trio of seventy-foot-tall statues depicting three generations of the Kim dynasty: the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung; the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il; and the currently presiding Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un. A group of Japanese school kids led by another copy of Mr. Park is gathered at the base of the Kim Jong-un statue. There’s also an unchaperoned white guy who looks to be in his early twenties; he stares up at the faces of the statues, panning his head slowly in the way people do when they are recording. He’s probably a reporter, a “foreign correspondent” for a news outlet that cannot afford a real travel budget.

  Looking down the hillside I can see a curving road that an overlay identifies as Sungri Street. Like every other Pyongyang street I have seen so far, it is eerily empty. “This simulation doesn’t attempt to model traffic,” Mr. Park tells me when I ask about this, “but the absence of vehicles is realistic. Despite recent improvements in the economy, car ownership remains rare in the DPRK, even among members of the Core Class.”

  “Core Class?”

  “All citizens of the DPRK are assigned a ranking, based on their perceived political reliability. The top ranks form the Core Class, who are accorded special privileges, such as the right to live and work in Pyongyang, priority in receipt of medical care and other services, and relative freedom of movement within the country. Below the Core Class is the so-called Wavering Class, and at the bottom of the scale are the members of the Hostile Class.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Descendants of people who collaborated with the Japanese during the occupation, or who supported the Americans during the Korean War. Families of defectors, including POWs who chose not to return to the DPRK after the war ended. People whose ancestors were religious, or who owned too much land, or ran successful businesses. Anyone else whose background or associations puts them at high risk of counter-revolutionary activity.”

  “Is there any way to improve your ranking?”

  “Extraordinary service to the state is occasionally rewarded with an increase in status. But social mobility more often goes the other way. From time to time, the government revises the ranking system as new categories of counter-revolutionary are identified. Anyone who offends the regime is subject to demotion, along with their children and their children’s children.”

  “That’s harsh.”

  “The Kims are ruthless,” Mr. Park says matter-of-factly. “It’s how they’ve stayed in power so long.”

  I turn back towards the statues and catch the white guy looking at us. I double-check the telltale at the top of my visual field; the icon is a closed eye. This is sleep mode, a variant of playback mode that is supposed to make it appear to anyone monitoring my computer that I am offline right now. But because this website is public, I can still, theoretically, be spied on from within the simulation. It occurs to me that I probably shouldn’t be using my default avatar.

  I cover my mouth so the white guy can’t read my lips and say to Mr. Park, “Take me somewhere else.”

  “Where would you like to go?”

  “What about that big tower you pointed out before? The one that looks like the Transamerica Pyramid on steroids?”

  There is a blur of motion and then I am high up in the air, gazing out a wall of windows at the city below. Ordinarily this would spell instant vertigo, but the glass in front of me is dirty, thickly streaked with grime and bird shit, so I don’t actually feel in danger of falling.

  “The Ryugyong Hotel,” Mr. Park says. “At its conception in 1987, it was designed to be the tallest hotel building in the world, with one hundred and five floors and a height of three hundred and thirty meters.”

  “Nineteen eighty-seven?” I say. Other than the windows, the floor we are on looks unfinished; I see bare concrete walls, and a wheelbarrow gathering dust beside an exposed steel pillar. “What happened, did they run out of money?”

  “Several times,” Mr. Park says. “The initial round of construction ran three years past deadline and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget; they did manage to top out the superstructure, but for years it was an empty concrete shell. A second round of construction, commencing in 2008, finished the exterior facade before cash flow problems once more caused a halt. Since then, there have been periodic reports of military units being brought in to continue the work, but the hotel has yet to host a single guest.”

  Mr. Park dispels the dirt on the windows with a wave of his hand, then conjures a colored overlay that highlights various buildings in the cityscape. He points out the Pyongyang Art Museum, whose six floors are devoted entirely to portraits of the Kim family, and the Museum of Natural Disasters, which documents the storms, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions that occurred around the world on the day Kim Il-sung died. But this isn’t what I’m here for, so I interrupt him: “Talk to me about internet access.”

  “Access to the global internet is tightly controlled. Only a few thousand citizens, at most, have the necessary security clearance. There is, however, a DPRK intranet—an internal web, with content selected and vetted by the state—that ordinary citizens can use.”

  “How do they access it?”

  “Through public terminals installed in schools, libraries, and businesses. Or through smartphones.”

  “North Koreans are allowed to have smartphones?”

  “Government approved models,” Mr. Park says. “The state maintains a 3G wireless network with about eight million subscribers. It can only be used for domestic calls, and of course all conversations and intranet searches are subject to monitoring.”

  “And you say it’s a 3G network? I think that’s what my grandparents’ cell phones used.”
>
  “The DPRK has been looking to modernize the system,” Mr. Park explains, “but as the foreign contractor who installed the 3G network was never fully paid, they’re having trouble attracting bids.”

  “Tell me more about the cell phone subscribers. Are they mostly members of the Core Class?”

  “Actually, no. Phones must be registered with the police, but they aren’t considered a special privilege. Anyone with money can get one.”

  “But how do members of the other classes afford that? Aren’t they poor?”

  “Almost everyone in the DPRK is poor, by Western standards,” Mr. Park says. “And it’s true, at one time, the members of the Wavering and Hostile Classes were poorer still. But that’s no longer the case. These days, despite their lack of official privileges, many have as much wealth, or even more, as members of the Core Class.”

  “And how did that happen?”

  “It started with the Great Famine in the 1990s. Owing to the Kims’ mismanagement of the economy, the DPRK experienced terrible food shortages, and hundreds of thousands of people starved to death. Even the elite in Pyongyang went hungry, but the situation in the northern provinces, where the members of the Hostile Class are concentrated, was much worse. In desperation, people set up markets and traded whatever they could—including goods smuggled in from China—in order to get money to buy food. This sort of capitalist enterprise was illegal, but authorities turned a blind eye, because the alternative would have been even more widespread starvation.

  “After the famine subsided, the markets remained open and expanded to include a wider range of goods. People were able to accumulate small amounts of wealth—again, not much by Western standards, but enough to afford a few luxuries. Citizens who live close to the border often own two cell phones—a DPRK approved phone for local calls, and a black market phone that can call internationally by connecting to cell towers in China.”