 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 Project 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."

Smith's avatar has taken on a jittery quality, almost like he's lagging. But it's not a latency issue. He's trembling with rage. "This," he sputters, "this is... this is..."

"Immoral? Psychologically unhealthy? An example of the toxic masculinity endemic to rape culture?"

"Decadent!" Smith roars. The cone of silence keeps his voice from carrying, but She-Hulk finally notices the way he's looking at her. She gives us both the finger, mouths "Dead to me," and vanishes. Superman goes with her. Smith, still trembling, logs out.

I am left with the dregs of my nostalgia. And a question.

Lots of people think bullets are gross. But it's rare to encounter someone online who has no idea what they are. And Smith is an IT guy—or an IT girl. But Smith being female would make this sort of ignorance even more remarkable. Raise your hand if you're a woman in tech who's never had some creep ask you to email him a hummer.

Where did you get your computer training, Smith? I wonder. On the moon?

I summon Googlebot. "Hello, John Chu," she greets me. "How can I help you?"

"I'm an American tourist interested in experiencing severe culture shock. Can you give me a list of travel destinations that might satisfy me? I'm looking for places that are commonly described as 'like going to the moon' or 'like being on a different planet.'"

"There are a number of countries that remain culturally isolated from the West, such that an American with your travel history would probably find them very strange," Googlebot says.

"Is there one country that stands out as being more culturally isolated from the West than any other?"

"Yes," says Googlebot, and names it. But I've already guessed.


 grinding — Engaging in a repetitive and often mindless task. In a video-game context, grinding may refer either to (a) actions performed to reach the parts of the game that are fun, or (b) the same actions performed out of habit after the game ceases to be fun.

 See also: behaviorism, Skinner box

—The New Devil's Dictionary

I look for Jolene at her favorite fishing spot.

Mom has given me permission to take Jolene into our confidence, but I need to be careful how I do it. As I log into Call to Wizardry, a telltale icon of an eye at the top of my visual field warns me that Smith is monitoring my POV. The telltale should be invisible to him, but he can see and hear everything else that I do.

I play it cool. I teleport to the Hinterlands of Goth and head for the coast, carrying my Krakenmaster 3000 and a Bottomless Creel of Holding.

Among all the secondary professions that a Call to Wizardry character can learn, fishing is the most tedious. The mechanics of it are simple enough: Equip a fishing pole. Find a body of water. Cast your line and wait three to fifteen seconds, as determined by the server's random number generator, for your fishing bobber to signal that you've hooked something. Reel it in and see what you've got. Repeat ad nauseam.

As with other crafting and gathering skills, your proficiency is measured in levels, but fishing is unique in having no maximum proficiency. Instead, leveling up just gets progressively more difficult. To go from level 1 to level 2 requires a single successful cast, but at level 100, you might fish for half an hour before advancing. By level 500, the estimated mean fishing time between level increases is eight hours.

If it's so boring and such a time sink, why do it? A comprehensive answer would require an explanation of dopamine's role in the brain's reward system, as well as a sidebar about the unusually high incidence of obsessive-compulsive disorder among MMORPG players. But the short version is, you do it for the same reason you do everything in Call to Wizardry: to get imaginary stuff. Newbie fishermen catch fish and the occasional tin can; at higher levels, the loot tables get more interesting, and there are rumors of truly exotic, even game-breaking treasures just waiting for someone skillful enough to draw them up.

The current record holder is Ahmet Mirza, a French Call to Wizardry player who briefly achieved fishing level 999. Just as Ahmet was about to crack the four-digit barrier, EULA took a look at his game logs and discovered a series of marathon sessions during which he had fished literally nonstop for days—strong circumstantial evidence of bot use. On the gaming forums, Ahmet swore up and down that he hadn't cheated—he was just an insomniac with epic bladder control—but Tempest banned him anyway. When customer service denied his final appeal, he weighted his backpack with the pieces of his smashed computer and jumped into the Seine. As you would.

People who fish in the Hinterlands usually go to Martin's Beach, but the site's popularity attracts griefers as well, so I know Jolene won't be there. Instead I climb Dead Man's Bluff and enter the Emerald Sea Caves. The caves are infested with bloodthirsty nagas; I know a way to sneak past them, but if Smith has an in-game spy following me, there's a good chance they'll blunder into a fight and reveal themselves.

I emerge onto a narrow cobblestone beach at the base of the bluff. I listen for sounds of melee behind me, but there's only the faint hiss and slither of the nagas. I walk south over the cobblestones, my footsteps echoing beneath the overhanging cliff.

A few hundred yards on, the beach bends sharply to the right, out of sight. I pause and look up, focusing on a distinctive knob of stone projecting from the cliff face. Off in the real world, I flip a control toggle. The telltale eye closes and blinks out; it is replaced by an icon of a spinning tape reel. Playback mode: Smith, or whoever he's got minding my POV, is now viewing a recording of a previous visit I made to this spot.

I continue around the bend. Jolene is standing on a spit of sand. She's just reeled in a barnacle-encrusted crate. I watch her pry it open, revealing a dozen bolts of enchanted silk. These vanish into her inventory and she quickly casts her hook into the water again. I step up beside her and deploy my Krakenmaster 3000.

"So," Jolene says, "you going to tell me about that weird guy from the other day?"

"Even better," I reply. "I'm going to tell you twice."

I've only got twenty minutes before the playback loops, so I lay out the situation as quickly as I can: Smith. Mr. Jones. The job offer. The Chinese woman at the bar. And last but not least, Mom, who I describe as a generic "federal agent," because this already sounds way too much like a spy movie plot and I don't want Jolene to think I'm bullshitting. But it turns out skepticism isn't a problem.

"Which agency?" Jolene asks. "FBI? Homeland Security?"

"It's a part of Cyber Command. A special task force called—"

"Zero Day? For real?" Sounding seriously impressed, like I've just told her Mom's a rock star.

"You know about Zero Day?"

"Hell yeah. I'd have tried to join, if they'd had it back when I was in the service."

"You were Navy?"

"Marines. Six years. Where I got my IT training." Jolene's fishing bobber twitches, and she reels in another crate. Gold doubloons. "So who is this Mr. Jones, that Zero Day would care about him?"

"We don't know yet," I say. "But I have this crazy theory that he might be North Korean."

Now Jolene looks skeptical. "Do North Koreans even have internet access?"

"I need to do some research about that. But I assume the guys running the country have whatever they want."

"Why would a North Korean bigwig want to study MMORPGs?"

"No idea. But game theory has plenty of applications outside entertainment." I reel in a magic halibut and toss it into my creel. Make another cast. "Psy ops. Economics. Military strategy."

"And what makes you think he's North Korean in the first place? The bank in Burma?"

"Partly that. But also..." I tell her about my last meeting with Smith.

She's laughing by the time I finish. "Man," Jolene says. "And you busted my chops for reading too much into Ray's IP address... Have you told your mother about this yet? Because if not, I would like to be a fly on the wall for that conversation."

"Ha ha," I say. "So are you in?"

"On a Zero Day op? Sure. Do I get a new computer, too?"

"That's part of the plan," I tell her. "That way you and I can b-channel right under Smith's nose, without having to do this again."

"And the money? I get a cut, right?"

"Of course." Then, just to get it out of the way: "I'm going to need you to fill out a W-9 form, too."

"Why, so you can claim my share as a business expense?"

I shrug. "It's a lot of money."

"You do know the IRS likes you to declare all your income, right? Not just the individual payments that are big enough to make you nervous."

"Are you saying you report all the money you make as a sherpa?"

"Are you saying you don't?"

A tug on my fishing line saves me from making a potentially incriminating statement. I reel in a vanity license plate: YTWHALE.

"What about the split?" Jolene asks. "Fifty-fifty seems fair, especially if you're claiming me as a deduction."

"The split will be fair," I promise. "But it's four ways, not two, so it can't be fifty-fifty."

"You're bringing Ray and Anja in on this, too?" She sounds like she doesn't approve.

"Sure, why not? We're going to need them."

"I'll bet you Ray's not going to be happy about someone poking around in his system, even if you do give him a clean machine first."

"Ray's not getting a new computer." Mom's orders are explicit, I explain: Ray is not to be told about Zero Day's involvement in this. "As far as he's concerned, Mr. Jones is just another client."

"So your mom doesn't trust Ray either," Jolene says. "That's interesting. She say why?"

"No, and I didn't ask. I don't think you're right about Ray, but if you are, I don't want to know."

"You don't, huh?"

"Why would I want to know a thing like that? I've still got to work with the guy."

"That's right, I forgot you don't have a choice who you work with. What about Anja?"

"What about her? You don't think... Come on, she's nineteen years old. And Ray's never shown any kind of interest in—"

"That's not what I'm asking. Are you allowed to tell Anja what's really going on?"

I shake my head. "She's a foreign national. There are strict recruiting rules that apply to those, and U.S. and Argentine intelligence aren't getting along right now."

"Well, if you don't tell Anja what's up, how are you supposed to satisfy Smith's security requirements?" From the way Jolene says this I can tell she's already worked out the answer, and she really doesn't approve.

"There's a malware package," I say. "Smith sent it to me. Mom's people are decompiling it right now—we're going to need to infect your computer, too, so they want to make sure they know exactly what the malware does and how to control it."

Out on the water, Jolene's fishing bobber is jumping again, but she ignores it and focuses her full attention on me. "How many lines of code are we talking about?"

"I'm not sure. The file was a few hundred megabytes."

"A few hundred... And they're going to work out exactly what it does in a day or two?"

"It's a big team. And they're really good at what they do."

"Uh-huh." Jolene frowns. "Look, John, I don't really give a shit if Ray's computer accidentally gets bricked—or mine either, for that matter. But Anja—"

"I know," I say. "But it's OK. Anja's VR rig and her life support are completely independent systems. Corrupting one won't affect the other. I Googled it to be sure."

"Oh, you Googled it, did you?" Her expression says: There is not enough side-eye in the world for some things. "Before we go any further with this plan, I need to have a serious conversation with your mother."

"Sure, no problem. I'll have her get in touch with you."

We are almost out of time. Jolene makes herself scarce. I stare at my right foot as my computer counts down the last five seconds in playback mode. Then I look up, cast my hook, and fish for another hour.

A couple hours after that, Jolene and I bump into each other in the Game Lobby. The telltale eye observes as I tell her about Mr. Jones again, this time sticking to Smith's preferred script: Jones is a secretive rich guy offering a lot of money, up front, for a sherpa crew willing to work long hours on short notice and not blab about it.

Jolene doesn't have her new computer yet, so we cannot b-channel. But one of the benefits of being as outspoken as Jolene usually is is that even when you're unable to speak freely, people who know you can guess what you're thinking.

I tell Jolene that Mr. Jones is offering us a weekly salary of ten thousand dollars per crew member, and she says, "Ten thousand? Each?" To anyone eavesdropping, it must sound as if she is impressed by—and a little suspicious of—Mr. Jones's generosity. But what I hear, loud and clear, is: "Ten thousand each? That's what you call a fair split?" The ensuing discussion about what Mr. Jones is going to expect for his money is edged with a subtext of what an incredibly greedy bastard I am. And when Jolene asks whether I've talked to Ray and Anja yet, I can tell that she's gone from being concerned for Anja's safety to being actively pissed off at me for endangering it: Not only am I selfish, I am reckless.

I can't see what my own face is doing. But my VR rig needs to be able to read my expression in order to render my avatar, which means Smith can read my expression too, if he wants to. So I do my best to not react to any of this.

It's not as if I could argue with Jolene, anyway. On the charge that I am a selfish and reckless person, I can only plead guilty.


Darla's first outing as a member of sherpa, inc. was a level grind. The client was a junior executive at Amazon who was scheduled to go adventuring with his coworkers as part of a corporate team-building exercise. He had a high-level elf paladin he wanted maxed out in time for the run, and rather than pull an all-nighter he decided to pay us to do it for him. He also gave us a shopping list of magic items and crafting materials he wanted; our deal stipulated that in addition to our fee, we got to keep any treasure that wasn't on the list.

It was Ray who'd found the client, so it was Ray's gig. He'd mapped out a conservative strategy for getting the job done with a minimum of fuss and a maximum return on time invested. I would tank, as the client's paladin; Anja and "the new girl" would dps; Ray, of course, would heal. That left one open dps spot, but the dungeons Ray wanted to run were easy enough that he thought we could manage with a smaller party—and a four-way split on experience points meant the leveling process would go faster.

When I told Darla about the job, she insisted that I should let her tank. "Come on," she said, when I hesitated. "You wanted to know whether I can do it, let me show you." Of course, this meant giving her access to the client's account. But I made a snap decision to trust her, telling myself, on the basis of nothing more than intuition, that if Darla were going to screw me over it wouldn't be anything as pedestrian as stealing a customer's credit card information. Yes, I am aware of how ridiculous that sounds.

I gave Darla the client's password and told her where in the game world to meet up with the rest of us.

She was late. When I showed up at the meeting spot as one of my own characters—a plainswalker shaman named Dances With Hooves—Ray immediately wanted to know what was going on, and he wasn't happy with the answer. He became even less happy once Darla finally arrived. It took me a moment to recognize what the problem was: Darla looked like herself. That is to say, the paladin avatar had her face and skin tone, and a female body. This would have been fine if it was her paladin, but it wasn't, it was the client's, and the client was (a) male, (b) Hispanic, and (c) not into crossgender play.

Every city in Asgarth has a transmogrification parlor where you can map a new face or hairstyle onto your avatar, swap genders, and even change races. But all of this costs gold, and sex changes are expensive, so unless Darla had been thoughtful enough to transfer the funds from one of her own accounts, she'd just spent a bunch of treasure that wasn't hers.

No, Ray was not happy.

I tried to smooth things over by making introductions: "Ray and Anja, this is Darla. Darla, this is Ray Nelson and Anja Kirchner..."

"The girl in the iron lung," Darla said. Anja froze up and her expression turned brittle, but then Darla continued: "I saw the video of your floor routine at the Pan American Championships. You were badass." Which thawed Anja out again, but left her looking more off-balance than flattered.

"So," Darla said. "Where are we going first?"

"Before we go anywhere," Ray said, "I want to know—"

"The Barbican," I said.

"The Barbican?" Darla gave herself a once-over, double-checking the quality of her gear. "We can do a lot better than the fucking Barbican, with this. What about the Temple of the Seven Lanterns? If we four-man that on heroic mode, I'll be maxed out in no time."

"The client wants three hundred ingots of orcish steel. That's a common loot drop in the Barbican."

"Why not just buy steel off the auction house?"

"Because then we have to pay gold for it," Ray said. "If we farm it, it's free." He gave me a look, like: Did you forget to explain who's in charge here?

Darla took the hint. "Fine," she said, rolling her eyes. "We'll run the Barbican... And just so you don't wet your panties: I saved the original avatar configuration when I did the transmog, so I can switch back when we're done. Your client will never know he had tits."

"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."


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."

"Why didn't the government shut the markets down after the famine ended?" I ask.

"Shutting them down completely would be impossible at this point," Mr. Park says. "Most of the true believers in communism starved to death in the famine, while the people who survived became very adept at circumventing the rules. The local authorities and border guards have been corrupted by bribes. As for the central government, they don't really care if people have money to buy refrigerators or nicer clothes. They concentrate their enforcement efforts on select classes of goods. For example, one of the most popular things on the black market is foreign media: books, movies, music, TV series. Like the internet, these are forbidden to ordinary citizens, because they contradict the government's claims about the outside world. But enforcing the ban is extraordinarily difficult, because digital media are so easy to smuggle, and despite severe penalties for trafficking and possession, people are willing to take the risk."

"What about video games? Are there—"

I stop, suddenly aware of another figure in the room. It's the white guy from the plaza. He's materialized off to our left and is staring out the window, pretending to ignore us.

This time I don't bother to hide my lips. "Take me somewhere else."

"Where would you like to go?"

"Surprise me."

Another blur of motion, and I am staring at a rack of metal shelves. The shelves hold rows of large octagonal cases. Each case is labeled in Korean, and most are labeled in a second language as well. DAS BOOT, reads one. Another says: FRIDAY THE 13TH PT. II.

I crane my head around. I am inside what looks like a large, windowless warehouse. There are many rows of shelves, holding what must be tens of thousands of octagonal cases.

"This is the Kim family's private film vault," Mr. Park says. "It—"

"Hold up a second. Do you have any idea who that guy was?"

"What guy?"

"Just now, back in the hotel, there was another guy in the room with us. You didn't see him?"

"I'm a software construct," Mr. Park reminds me. "My awareness, such as it is, is focused on the user or users I'm currently interacting with."

"Is there any way for you to look up information on other users accessing the Factbook right now? Like the IP addresses they're logged in from?"

"I'm afraid not."

"Do you know if the CIA keeps records of visits to this site?"

"I have no direct knowledge of that," Mr. Park says. "But the site's privacy policy, which you declined to read, does contain language suggesting that is the case."

"OK, thanks... So, you were saying? This is the Kims' movie vault?"

Mr. Park nods. "It's believed to be one of the largest film collections in private hands. Much of it was amassed by Kim Jong-il while he was head of the DPRK's Propaganda and Agitation Department."

"And it's actual film? These cases, they're for old-style celluloid reels, right?"

"Yes. What you see here is a reconstruction based on a decades-old eyewitness description. The collection may have been digitized in the interim—but perhaps not. Again, all forms of foreign media are considered classified material, and celluloid, being harder to copy than digital files, is more secure."

"Friday the 13th is classified?"

"I'm unfamiliar with that title," Mr. Park says, "but, for example, if it contained scenes showing ordinary Westerners driving cars, living in beautiful houses, or eating more or better food than DPRK citizens do, then of course it would be seen as problematic by the regime."

"How did they get the films?"

"Most are bootleg copies. Kim Jong-il had professional duplicating equipment installed in all of the DPRK's foreign embassies. The diplomatic staff would bribe local theater owners and borrow their film reels for copying. An elaborate security protocol was devised for dubbing the films into Korean: To minimize the risk of ideological contamination, the films' audio tracks would be recorded separately, without images, and broken up into short segments, each of which was given to a different translation team for processing. Whenever possible, the teams were made up of foreigners who had already been exposed to the outside world—either defectors who had come to the DPRK willingly, or people abducted specifically for that purpose."

"Kim Jong-il kidnapped people to translate movie dialog?"

"Kim Jong-il kidnapped people for all kinds of reasons," Mr. Park says. "So did Kim Il-sung. And Kim Jong-un—"

I put up a hand. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

It sounded like a cough, a couple rows over. "Hello?" I call out. "Is somebody else in here?"

No answer.

"Would you like to hear a story about the time Kim Jong-il kidnapped a film director from the Republic of Korea?" Mr. Park asks me.

"Sure. But not here. Take me somewhere else."

"Where would you like to go?"

"Someplace indoors," I say, "but smaller than this, with a corner where I can sit and watch the whole room while you're talking."


 G.G.R. — "Gonna get raped," a popular video-gamers' utterance meaning either "We are about to inflict a humiliating defeat on those other players" or "Those other players are about to inflict a humiliating defeat on us." The abbreviation, originally coined to bypass speech filters, has since become common even in gaming environments where explicit, humorous references to sexual assault are considered perfectly acceptable. In environments with very strict speech codes, on the other hand, even the abbreviation is bowdlerized, becoming G.G.P., "Gonna get pwned," or G.G.F., "Gonna get fucked" (which, despite containing an obscenity, is viewed by many censors as inoffensive).

—The New Devil's Dictionary

In Alpha Sector near the galactic core, the big boys are getting ready to rumble.

Today's MMORPG is The Fermi Paradox, a game of interstellar conquest. There are no character classes, just money, testosterone, and big things blowing up in space. The game's economy runs on space ducats, which can be acquired through honest trade, piracy, or—the most popular option—via direct purchase from Fermigames LLC. The player base skews libertarian, but the in-game ethos is more corporate than rugged individualist: The ship control AI is notoriously lame, so even if you're rich enough to buy your own battlefleet, you still need friends, or lackeys, to help crew it. Players form guilds with hundreds or even thousands of members, pool their resources, and try to take over the galaxy.

There is no official code of conduct. Backstabbing and betrayal are common; even certain forms of cheating are allowed. So are profanity and hate speech: If you want to name your guild The Alte Kämpfer, or Bitch, Make Me a Sandwich, customer service won't hassle you about it. Consequently, The Fermi Paradox is also popular with bigots and people who like to kick the shit out of bigots.

In one famous incident, an Israeli guild, Rainbow Pride, got into a spat with a Russian skinhead group, Jews to the Ovens. The Rainbows bought one of their members an Aeroflot ticket and sent him to the St. Petersburg housing projects where J.T.T.O.'s members all lived. Right before Rainbow Pride launched its in-game assault, the projects lost internet access; by the time it was restored, J.T.T.O.'s space fleet had been wiped out and its territory was being divvied up between the Rainbows and the Ukrainian guild Putin Fucked My Cat. Though the victory was sweet, the real winner was Fermigames, which saw a huge uptick in ducat sales as other space Nazis lined up to avenge their fallen comrades.

Today's title fight involves a different sort of rivalry. In one corner is the Los Angeles–based G.R.U. Syndicate, whose leader and chief financial backer is one of Tempest's founders. In the other is a South Korean guild whose members all work for the video-game company GangnamSoft; their guild name is a play on words whose meaning in English would be something like "Penis Swarm." These are the two most powerful guilds in the galaxy right now, which by the logic of The Fermi Paradox means genocidal war is inevitable.

Three hours ago, a friend of mine in G.R.U. emailed to tell me that the Mother of All Battles is about to kick off. I messaged Mr. Jones and asked if he'd like to watch two superpowers duke it out in cyberspace.

We arrive just before the shooting starts. The battleground is Penis Swarm's home system. Their capital planet is protected by a ring of heavily armed space stations and three dozen star cruisers. It's an impressive amount of firepower, but to an experienced eye it's obvious that the cruisers are operating on autopilot, which means that they will suck in combat.

We lurk in a conveniently located asteroid field. Our ship is a Wasp, a small vessel with a powerful cloaking device. Ray, at the helm, keeps one eye on the proximity alarm. In addition to dodging asteroids, we need to watch out for the other ships that are sure to be hiding here; the cloaking device will keep them from shooting at us, but the Wasp's lack of shields means that even a minor collision could be fatal.

Anja is in charge of the Wasp's spy drones. Her avatar occupies a chair next to Ray's, but her POV is outside, zooming untethered through space, peeking around the far sides of the rocks. From the sound of her voice as she describes what she sees, she is loving every second of it.

Jolene is back in the engine compartment. The antimatter drive is running smoothly and nothing else on the ship needs fixing, so she's using the downtime to catch up on some work from her real-life job.

Mr. Jones sits in the captain's chair. I stand beside him, playing Spock to his Kirk, or maybe Vader to his Emperor Palpatine. I explain the fundamentals of the game and lay out what is about to happen. I make a point of referring to the Swarm as Korean, not South Korean, and stress that it is the American G.R.U. who are the aggressors here.

The attack begins on schedule. "Warp signatures," Ray announces. "A lot of warp signatures." He brings up a long-range view on the main screen and we watch the American battle fleet drop out of hyperspace.

Because space ducats can be bought for cash, it's possible to put a real-world value on the game's spaceships. Dreadnought battlecruisers, the largest standard class of attack ship, run about four hundred dollars U.S. apiece; the Americans have brought at least fifty of them. But the serious money is in bespoke ships, custom vessels whose size and firepower is limited only by the purchaser's budget. A pair of enormous warp signatures heralds the arrival of two bronze-tinted Death Stars whose coloring is no doubt intended as a visual pun: Big Brass Balls. You'd need to look at the schematics to calculate an exact price tag, but these are easily worth ten thousand bucks. Each. Add in the star cruisers, destroyers, frigates, carriers, fighter and bomber wings, and support ships, and the Americans are fielding at least eighty grand's worth of virtual hardware—much of which is likely to be destroyed in the next hour.

But first the South Koreans will take a beating. The defense fleet reacts immediately to the incursion, but the response is uncoordinated, with each star cruiser pursuing a different target. The Americans keep their ships in formation and concentrate their fire. One by one, the Korean star cruisers lose their shields and explode.

Mr. Jones is appalled. "Who is in charge of that fleet?" he says. "A blind man?"

"No one." The Americans have timed their attack very deliberately, I explain: It's morning in Los Angeles, which means it is the middle of the night in Korea. For employees of GSoft, it is also crunch time, as the company puts the finishing touches on its own MMORPG, due to roll out next month. The Americans are hoping that the Swarm are all either asleep or too busy to respond.

"A real fight would be more interesting," Mr. Jones suggests. "What can we do to help the Koreans?"

"Nothing. Those star cruisers aren't going to take orders from us."

"What if we fight alongside them? Show them—"

"Wouldn't help. Anyway, we don't have any weapons."

"What?"

"This ship is designed for spec ops. Espionage."

"You should have gotten us one of those!" Mr. Jones says, jabbing a finger at the Big Brass Balls.

"If you want one of those, you're going to need to talk to Smith about sending me more money... But listen, this ship isn't useless. We will get a chance to do something. You just need to be patient."

"I do not enjoy being patient."

More than half the Korean star cruisers have been destroyed. The Americans have lost a frigate and suffered minor damage to one of their carriers. Soon they will begin to attack the space stations. The stations have much tougher shields and will take longer to kill, but without human controllers to issue them orders, their target selection will be as haphazard as the cruisers'.

"We must contact the Korean high command," Mr. Jones says. "Warn them about what is happening here, before it is too late."

"No need. The cavalry is already on its way. Look."

More warp signatures are blooming on the tactical display. In a matter of seconds, the amount of money in play more than doubles: The South Koreans have brought their own fleet of Dreadnoughts and their own custom Death Stars. Bigger ones.

As the reinforcements come out of hyperspace, the surviving star cruisers abruptly smarten up. They fire a combined salvo at the damaged American carrier, turning it to plasma, then fall back towards the space stations, which begin launching waves of long-range nukes from hidden missile batteries.

A caution light flashes on Ray's control panel. "The Koreans just turned on a bunch of warp inhibitors. The whole system is locked down."

"Warp inhibitors prevent ships from using their hyperdrives to escape the battle," I explain to Mr. Jones.

He brightens instantly at the news. "This is a trap?"

"Of course it's a trap. I'm not the only one with a friend in the G.R.U. Syndicate. The Koreans knew this attack was coming."

"But the Americans must have spies as well," says Mr. Jones.

"Oh, sure. And yes, they've probably got a counter trap lined up. That's the game."

The Koreans aren't done springing surprises: As the two fleets begin slugging it out in earnest, one of the American Dreadnoughts turns traitor. It blows up another carrier, then launches a kamikaze attack on one of the Big Brass Balls.

"A mutiny?" Mr. Jones says.

"More likely a cyberattack," I say. "They're generally careful to let only the most trusted guild members crew the big ships. Although with a fleet this size, it's possible that a sleeper agent or two got through. Look there." One of the Korean space stations has just dropped its shields; its last missile salvo pulls a one-eighty and slams into the station's command deck, crippling it.

"I wish to participate in this battle," Mr. Jones says. "What can we—"

The proximity alarm sounds. Ray kicks in the subspace thrusters and boosts us hard to starboard. A small ship resembling a silver teardrop flits past with just meters to spare. The alarm keeps wailing and Ray dodges again as two more teardrops race by.

"Gleaners," I explain to Mr. Jones. "When the big ships blow up, they're like piñatas—they spew space ducats equal to a tenth of their construction cost. Any ship with a tractor beam can collect the money. The Gleaners go in while the battle is under way and try to steal as much loose change as they can."

"They are not allied with either side?"

"No, they're opportunists with good spy networks. They go wherever they hear a fight is about to break out."

"I hope this is not what you intend us to do," Mr. Jones says. "I have no interest in scavenging."

"I had something a little more ambitious in mind. Gleaners are optimized for speed, but they're short-range vessels, with no hyperdrive. There's got to be a base ship back in the rocks here somewhere, that they launched from. We can use the Wasp to capture that, then threaten to strand the Gleaners unless they give us their ducats."

Mr. Jones does not seem enthused about this plan, either. "How can we capture a ship if we have no weapons?"

"The Wasp has a device called a cybertronic ovipositor that lets us hack into a larger ship's computer and seize control of it."

"We can perform a cyberattack? Why didn't you say so? We should capture an American ship!"

"We could try that," I say. "But you understand, even if we capture a Dreadnought—which is a very difficult thing to do—we won't last long against the rest of that fleet. If we take the Gleaner base ship, we have a good chance of making it out of here with enough money to—"

"I don't want the stupid base ship!" Mr. Jones says. He points at the Big Brass Balls again. "I want one of those!"

"That would be extremely difficult." An understatement. "To even attempt it, we'd need to land on the hull without being detected, which—"

"Hey guys!" Anja breaks in. "I think I found something! Ray, bring up the POV from drone number four."

The main screen switches from the view of the battle to the feed from the drone's camera.

"Huh," Ray says.

"'Huh,' what?" says Mr. Jones. "There is nothing there."

"Exactly," I say. The drone is hovering in what should be one of the densest parts of the asteroid field. But a void has developed among the asteroids—a long, narrow, open space. And it's moving. Picture an invisible submarine nosing its way through a rock slurry: That's what it looks like.

A gigantic invisible submarine.

"It's got to be five hundred meters long," Ray says. "With a top-end cloaking device, and a shitload of tractor beams to move the asteroids out of the way. I don't even want to know how much that cost."

"It is a ship?" Mr. Jones says. "Whose?"

Ray consults the tactical display. "If it stays on its current heading, it'll exit the asteroid field in perfect position to attack the Koreans."

"American, then," says Mr. Jones. "Good." He looks at me: You know what to do.

"Ray."

"Already on the way," Ray says.

As we maneuver towards the void, I call back to the engine room and tell Jolene we're going to need her to change the laws of physics. The target ship is certain to have a deflector shield, which would ordinarily have to be blasted away before we could get close to it. But the Wasp is equipped with a Planck-Heisenberg oscillator that allows it to pass through intact force fields.

"It's going to be tricky, though," Jolene cautions. "The shield will shimmer when we make contact with it. If they've got guys on lookout—and they should—there's a good chance they'll notice."

"You will ensure that does not happen," Mr. Jones says. "I want this ship."

We round a final asteroid and arrive at the gap in the rocks. Ray reverses thrust to avoid hitting the force field prematurely.

"There's definitely something there," Jolene says. "I'm getting a really strong shield reading... It's going to shimmer, for sure. It might even spark."

"Maybe there's a blind spot," Ray suggests. "If we come in from behind..."

A Gleaner darts out of the rocks on the far side of the void. Oblivious to the danger, the pilot accelerates and slams full speed into an invisible wall. The Gleaner explodes. A pattern of ripples forms in space, flowing outward from the blast, and for a moment we can see the contour of the force field.

It gives me an idea.

"Anja," I say, "can you spot any more Gleaners headed this way?"

"Plenty. They're all coming from the same direction, too. The base ship must be close."

"Never mind the base ship. Here's what we're going to do..."

Fifteen seconds later, a trio of Gleaners enter the void. All three crash into the force field and die. We use this as cover, the shimmer and spark of our passage through the shield obscured by the ripples.

Once past the deflector shield, we are inside the radius of the cloak as well. We can see the ship. It's dark, massive, and sharp-angled, like a big black skyscraper laid on its side. The hull bristles with point-defense lasers; we hover amidships waiting to see if they will vaporize us. But the spotters must have missed our entry, and our own cloak remains intact. They don't know we're here.

Ray swings us around. The big ship's command bridge is located near the stern. We read the name painted above the bridge windows: U.S.S. PAINAL. "'Painful anal,'" I translate, for Mr. Jones's benefit. "It's American, all right."

"Good," says Mr. Jones. "Now what?"

"We look for the external AI nexus port." A white circle flashes on the hull of the big ship, directly beneath the bridge. "There."

"That is where we plug in the... ovipositor?"

"Yes."

"And then we take control?"

"Hopefully," I say. "But first we have to beat a trivia challenge."

"A what?"

The beta version of The Fermi Paradox simulated computer hacking by making players solve a series of timed Sudoku puzzles. According to the handful of people who got to play it, this was a fun mini-game, and one that actually made you feel like you were breaking through walls of encryption. From a development perspective, it had another advantage: Sudoku are language-independent and can be procedurally generated, so they don't require paid translators or puzzle-makers. Unfortunately, this strength was also a weakness. Within days of the beta's debut, someone had created a mod called Spacecracker that could solve the most difficult Sudoku in microseconds, and would even plug in the numbers for you.

Fermigames could have tried to ban the use of Spacecracker, but besides being tough to enforce, such a ban would have gone against the spirit of the game. Hackers should be allowed to use exploits. The trick was figuring out a way to let them cheat while still posing a meaningful challenge.

One of Fermigames' lead programmers suggested switching from Sudoku to Trivial Pursuit. He crafted a backstory about how ship AIs train to pass their Turing tests by studying the lore of Old Earth; this makes them vulnerable to intruders who exhibit mastery of obscure information. To save on implementation costs, the development team came up with a plan to recruit players to write the trivia questions, paying them in space ducats.

So now, to commit grand-theft spaceship, you must demonstrate your nerd cred. As our Wasp docks with the AI port, a five-minute clock appears on the main screen. To determine how many questions we must answer, the game server compares the two ships' cyberwarfare ratings. I am grateful that for once I resisted the urge to be stingy; the Wasp's ovipositor is Neuromancer grade, the best and most expensive option. If we were going after a star cruiser or even a Dreadnought, I'd be feeling pretty good about our chances. But a bespoke ship is another matter; there's no limit to the amount of security they can buy, and I've never heard of one being successfully hijacked.

The target number appears on screen. At first I read it as two hundred and assume we are out of luck, but then I realize there's only one zero after the two.

"Fuck me," Ray says, as surprised as I am.

"What?" says Mr. Jones. "What is wrong?"

"Nothing." Is it sabotage, I wonder, or did someone on the G.R.U.'s shipbuilding committee decide to cut corners on cybersecurity? The latter explanation seems crazy given the amount of money at stake, but on the other hand, if you expect everyone to assume your ship is invulnerable to hacking, why waste ducats actually making it invulnerable? "This is doable."

"I don't know," Ray says. "Twenty questions in five minutes is still a stretch."

"How many wrong answers do we get?" Mr. Jones asks.

"None," I tell him. "The first mistake locks us out of the system and fries our life support. But it's OK," I add, staying positive. "The questions are multiple choice, and we'll have help."

I conjure a control pad beneath my right hand. "I'm going to be quizmaster," I say, addressing the whole crew now. "If I know an answer is right, I'll just go ahead and send it. If I'm not sure, I'll delay as many seconds as I can to give the rest of you a chance to jump in. If I say your name, I want you to screenshot the question and go research it—quickly!—while the rest of us skip ahead. Stay focused and try not to panic. We can do this. Everybody ready?"

Everyone says yes. I signal the game server. The lighting inside the Wasp goes red and a sinister voice issues from the loudspeakers. Male and vaguely British, it is meant to evoke the platonic ideal of an evil computer without violating any Hollywood trademarks. "Foolish users!" it snarls. "You think you can match wits with me? No mortal being—"

I ping the server again to skip the rest of this intro. The game clock starts, and the first of our twenty questions appears on the main screen:

 WHICH EPISODE OF AQUA TEEN HUNGER FORCE INTRODUCED THE CHARACTERS OF IGNIGNOKT AND ERR?

 A. "MOON MASTER"

 B. "REVENGE OF THE MOONINITES"

 C. "MAYHEM OF THE MOONINITES"

 D. "MOONAJUANA"

The correct answer, C, is highlighted. The highlighting is courtesy of the latest version of Spacecracker, which cheats by asking Googlebot. Unlike brute-forcing a Sudoku puzzle, however, this form of cheating can be unreliable. Sometimes Googlebot answers incorrectly; sometimes Spacecracker misunderstands what Googlebot is telling it. The nerds who make up the questions delight in finding ways to confuse the bots' algorithms.

For example, question two:

 WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING MAN-MADE OBJECTS IS VISIBLE FROM EARTH ORBIT?

 A. THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA

 B. GRANT'S TOMB

 C. THE SUEZ CANAL

 D. ALL OF THE ABOVE

The correct answer, as a moment's calm reflection will tell you, is D. But Spacecracker picks A. There is a popular myth that the Great Wall is the only artificial structure large enough to be seen from space; the myth has been debunked many times, and these debunkings have themselves become part of Googlebot's knowledge base. A human questioner is smart enough to grasp the distinction between "A lot of people believe X," and "A lot of people believe X, which is false," but Spacecracker, querying Googlebot in shorthand, misses it. Being able to spot trick questions like this one is key to successful time management. You need to know when you can trust Spacecracker and when to pause and think.

You also need to know when and how to delegate to your teammates. In general you must answer the questions in order, but the rules allow you two set-asides: That is, you can skip up to two questions, but must then go back and answer them before you can skip any more. This allows you to hand off questions that require extra research. Jolene has told me stories of how she used to play vintage Dungeons & Dragons with her grandparents when she was little, so I have her double-check Spacecracker's answer to a question about the first-edition Monster Manual. I give Anja a question about soccer. Ray saves me from a rookie mistake by reminding me that it was Mary, not Jesus, who was immaculately conceived. Even Mr. Jones contributes: When I balk at what feels like another trick question (THE ASIAN GIANT HORNET IS NATIVE TO WHAT CONTINENT?), he assures me that the obvious answer is also the right one.

Another key to success is a favorable metagame. Because the trivia questions are submitted by players, guilds seeking an edge in cyberwarfare can try to flood the question pool. Four years ago, when I first played The Fermi Paradox, the galaxy was dominated by guilds from mainland China; the trivia game in those days referenced an alternate nerd universe, one whose in-jokes and obsessions were, despite my ancestry, foreign to me. Today, with the Americans and South Koreans in ascendancy, it's a much easier challenge—and ironically, it seems like it's the Americans who've been working hardest to stack the deck. We get two questions in a row about Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I don't even need Spacecracker for those.

With a minute remaining on the game clock, we are down to three questions. Not only does it look like we'll be able to pull this off, I may even have time to engage in a bit of subterfuge.

Spacecracker routes the questions through the quizmaster's computer before passing the data on to the other players. This allows for some interesting shenanigans if you know how the program works. By abusing the skip function, I can peek ahead and see what the next question in line is. I do this, and see that the penultimate question is one that Spacecracker can be trusted to answer correctly.

So when we come to it, I set that question aside and go immediately to the final one. This turns out to be another softball: WHAT FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER WAS THE FIRST TO ALLOW TARGETED HEADSHOTS? (The Quake Team Fortress mod, duh.)

Now all that remains is the set-aside question:

 IN KLINGON-LANGUAGE SCRABBLE SETS, THE ץ TILE IS WORTH HOW MANY POINTS?

 A. 7

 B. 8

 C. 9

 D. 10

The correct answer is B. The answer key resides on Fermigames' server, so I cannot change this. But what I can do, by messing with the data that Spacecracker forwards to my teammates, is substitute a different question of my own devising:

 WHICH GROUP OF NUMBERS ALL REFER TO THE SAME YEAR?

 A. 1982, 1402, 101

 B. 1982, 1402, 71

 C. 1982, 1372, 71

 D. 1982, 1372, 101

The correct answer is still B. The year 1982 in the Gregorian calendar overlaps 1402 in the Islamic calendar. It also corresponds to year 71 in the North Korean Juche calendar, which counts from the birth year of Kim Il-sung. And because AD 1982/Juche 71 is the official birth year of Kim Jong-un, it should be especially memorable to anyone raised in the DPRK.

B is the right answer, but I instruct Spacecracker to highlight C instead.

Eighteen seconds remain on the clock as my doctored question appears on the main screen.

"Wait." This from Jolene, who is following a script she and I worked out in advance. "It's not C, it's A or B."

"Which, A or B?"

"Not sure," Jolene says, speaking very quickly. "But my cousin's Muslim, and the 1980s are the 1400s in their calendar."

Ten seconds.

"What about the last number?" I say. "Anyone?"

I can hear both Ray and Anja whispering urgently to their own infobots. Mr. Jones is stone silent. I don't look at him.

Five seconds. "I'm going to guess A," I say.

Mr. Jones comes alive: "No. Pick B."

Three seconds. "Are you sure?"

"B! Pick B!"

With one second left—and just as Ray looks up shouting, "B! B!"—I hit send.

The clock stops. The screen goes blank.

"Well done, human," the voice of the big ship's AI says. "I submit to your superior knowledge."

The interior lighting returns to normal. Now the Wasp's computer speaks to us; it is female, a cross between GLaDOS and Mother from the Alien franchise: "Control acquired. Purging target ship atmosphere."

The main screen switches to a forward view of the Painal's hull. All along the ship's length, hatches fly open, venting tall columns of white vapor speckled with the flailing bodies of crew members. As we watch them die, the Wasp's helm expands to make room for a new suite of fire controls. Ray goggles at the assortment of weapons now under his command: "Antimatter cannon. Chained plasma disruptors. Graviton vortex bombs. Nukes, nukes, and more nukes... Jesus Christ, we're a superpower."

The big ship is still moving forward. Its tractor beams, operating automatically, sweep aside the last few asteroids at the edge of the field. Beyond is open space, and the exposed flank of the Korean fleet.

Anja, promoted automatically from dronemaster to communications officer, raises a hand to her ear. "I'm getting an encrypted message from the commander of the American fleet," she says. "He's asking where we are. He wants us to start our attack as soon as possible."

"Tell the American commander not to worry," Mr. Jones replies. The corners of his mouth twitch up into a smile. "Tell him the Painal will begin momentarily."


 opiate of the masses — That which acts to preserve the status quo by short-circuiting demand for political or social change. In Marx's original formulation, the opiate of the masses was religion. Aldous Huxley, in his dystopian novel Brave New World, imagined it as a literal drug, soma. More recent candidates include Twitter, Monday Night Football, legalized marijuana, and virtual reality.

—The New Devil's Dictionary

It's an imaginative theory," my mother says. Today the view out her office window is of a sandy atoll surrounding a crystal blue lagoon. But Mom sounds tired, and CNN is reporting that yesterday's plane crash at Indira Gandhi Airport was the work of cyberterrorists, so I'm guessing she's in Delhi.

"Imaginative," I say. "That bad?"

"Sorry. I meant 'creative.'"

When I was little I used to play at being one of my mother's intelligence assets. I'd collect portentous bits of info off the internet and have her debrief me over dinner. We developed our own private intel rating system. Those rare items my mother deemed "interesting" were genuinely useful to her. At the other end of the scale, "imaginative" referred to tinfoil-hat notions that only a child or a very naive adult would buy into, like the time I became convinced, based on a bad Google translation, that China had staged a secret Mars landing. "Creative" was the middle ground, home of wild theories that might be true, but which Mom needed more evidence or a much better argument to take seriously.

"Tell me what you don't like about the idea," I say.

"Well, to begin with, there's the question Jolene asked you: Why would a powerful North Korean want to study online role-playing games? 'Game theory' isn't a real answer. More like a placeholder for one."

"I've been thinking more about that," I tell her. "Do you know the story of the Shin Sang-ok kidnapping?"

"I pulled up the CIA's file on it after I heard about your conversation with Mr. Park," she says. "But why don't you go ahead and give me your version."

"OK." I know she's humoring me, but it makes me happy when she does that, just like it did when I was a kid. "So this was back in 1978, when Kim Il-sung, the original Great Leader, was still running the country, and his son, Kim Jong-il, was head of the state film industry. Film was an important propaganda tool for the regime, and it was also a way for Jong-il to suck up to his dad and ensure his place as successor; but beyond that, he just really loved movies. He spent millions assembling a bootleg collection from all over the world.

"One of his other hobbies was kidnapping. It's like he was role-playing the villain from a James Bond film: He abducted foreigners to serve as teachers for his spies, to train them how to blend in to other cultures. His commandos would grab random people off beaches, drug them and put them on a boat. Or if he wanted someone specific, he might trick them with a job offer, get them on a plane to Pyongyang and take their passport away, tell the world they'd defected.

"So one day Kim Jong-il decided to import some filmmaking talent. North Korean movies weren't very good, and while the home crowd was a captive audience, Kim wanted to compete internationally. He told his people to find him a good director, and the name they came up with was Shin Sang-ok.

"He was famous. In the fifties and sixties, Shin and his wife, Choi Eun-hee, had been like the first couple of South Korean cinema. But by the seventies, Shin's star was falling. The business was in trouble, and the marriage broke up—"

"Choi left him," Mom interjects, "after she found out he'd fathered a son with a starlet half her age."

I pause. Mr. Park's recitation didn't include that detail.

"Sorry," Mom says. "Continue."

"Yeah, OK... So Shin's career was on the rocks, and then he got in trouble with the government. South Korea in those days was better than the North, but it was still basically a military dictatorship, and Shin pissed off the state censors. They took away his filmmaking license. By the time the North Koreans came after him, he was close to bankruptcy.

"They decided to use his ex-wife as a lure. They got Choi Eun-hee to Hong Kong with a phony job offer and kidnapped her, and when Shin came looking for her, they grabbed him too. Once they got him back to Pyongyang, they tried treating him nicely at first. But Shin wouldn't play ball—he kept trying to escape—so Kim Jong-il had him thrown into prison. They put him in a special kind of solitary where you spend sixteen hours a day sitting cross-legged on the floor, and anytime you move or make a sound, the guards beat you. Three and a half years of that, and then Kim Jong-il gave Shin a choice: Live in a nice house with Choi Eun-hee and make movies on an unlimited budget, or go back to solitary for good.

"Shin took the film job. For the next three years he was Kim Jong-il's pet director, and Choi was his leading lady. The movies they made were better than anything North Korea had ever done before. Some of them won prizes. That's how Shin and Choi finally got away: Kim was so happy that he let them travel abroad to attend film festivals. They slipped their guards in Vienna and escaped."

"Did you watch any of the films?" Mom asks. "You know they're all on YouTube now."

I nod. "I checked out one of them."

"Let me guess. Pulgasari?"

"Of course Pulgasari." The last film Shin directed before escaping Kim's clutches, Pulgasari is the DPRK's answer to the Godzilla franchise: A giant monster movie steeped in the ideology of North Korean socialism. Not one of the award winners. "Did you see it?"

"I fell asleep before the end," Mom confesses. "So, getting back to Mr. Jones: Your theory is that he's a Kim Jong-il figure who's looking to make a mark in video games rather than film?"

"Not exactly. My main point with the Shin Sang-ok story is that there's precedent for North Koreans going to extremes to acquire professional expertise. As for Mr. Jones wanting to make a mark, well, who knows? I mean, people are snobby about it, but video games are an art form, and you can get recognition for making good ones. Would a dictator be as excited about winning E3's Game of the Year as he would about the Palme d'Or? Maybe, maybe not."

"Well, I hate to sound snobby, but put me in the 'maybe not' column."

"OK, fine. I think there's another possibility, one that actually makes more sense. Something else that came up in my conversation with Mr. Park is how much the propaganda war has changed in the last few decades. In the 1970s, the only way a typical North Korean could see a foreign film is if someone smuggled in a bunch of heavy film canisters. These days, you can carry an entire film library in your pocket. It's still a quick trip to a labor camp if you get caught, but people are willing to take the risk to get a glimpse of the outside world. They're watching South Korean soap operas, and Hollywood blockbusters, and Bollywood musicals—not the most accurate sources of info, sure, but enough to let them know how much their own government lies to them. North Korea isn't the most prosperous country on earth. South Korea isn't a hellhole. And America—well, they still hate us, which isn't entirely unreasonable given how close we've come to nuking them out of existence, but they know we aren't just bloodthirsty imperialists.

"And so this has created a huge problem for the regime, right? People—especially young people—are getting more and more restless. So now what? The government can try cracking down even harder than it already does, but they can't send everybody to a labor camp... That's why they had to make that deal with China a few years back, where they agreed to limit the size of their nuclear arsenal. They needed more trade dollars, and they needed their foreign aid turned back on, so they could bribe their people with more stuff. Only it's not enough. The younger generation is still pissed off."

"And video games help with this how, exactly?"

"Do you remember Jimmy del Toro?" A friend of mine from Zero Day.

Mom nods. "Lieutenant Commander del Toro's son. The one with diabetes."

"Yeah, and sometimes when Jimmy got caught up in a game, he'd forget to take his insulin. Or he'd remember his insulin but forget to eat. Which was a problem in Jimmy's case, but what if you lived in a country that didn't always have enough food or medicine to go around? What if when you did have enough to eat, that just gave you more energy to think about all the other things you didn't have? In a situation like that, an MMORPG could be a great distraction, not to mention a way of channeling your anger. Instead of rising up and smashing the state, you'd go into the virtual world and kill monsters."

"Pulgasari: The Home Game?"

"Maybe," I say. "Or maybe something less metaphorical. Like, you could do a military-themed game, where the players are North Korean soldiers conquering the South for Kim Jong-un, and the bad guys are American and Japanese troops. Or you could do a covert ops game, where players gain levels for committing sabotage and assassinations in enemy countries. And to sweeten the pot, there could be a leaderboard competition with real-world prizes, like extra rations or points towards improving your citizenship ranking."

"I can see you've been giving this a lot of thought," Mom says. "What about the logistics problem? Where does the regime get the money to supply millions of citizens with computers and VR rigs?"

"They don't need VR rigs. Fully immersive VR is nice, but you can do video games without it. As for the computers, North Koreans have millions of those already. And a network."

"Cell phones?"

"Smartphones. The wifi network's only third-generation, so there will be bandwidth issues, but it's not like they've got to compete with Call to Wizardry. For an audience that's never played an MMORPG before, even a 2D game could be incredibly addictive."

"True." Mom smiles. "I remember."

"So what do you think?"

She shrugs noncommittally. "Like I said, it's creative."

"What would it take to make it interesting?"

"Some actual proof connecting Mr. Jones to North Korea, for a start."

"He knows about the Juche calendar," I say. I tell her about the trivia challenge.

"Clever," Mom says when I've finished. "But are you certain he knew B was the right answer? Or could he have just been playing a hunch?"

"Well... He sounded like he knew. Like he was sure."

"But you didn't ask why. He didn't explain his reasoning."

"There wasn't time. We were down to the last few seconds on the clock. And then once we took the ship, we were busy slaughtering Americans. I suppose I could have brought it up again later, but the whole point was to get him to give himself away without realizing he'd done it..."

"No, I get that. It sounds like you handled it as well as you could," Mom says. Once again, I get the sense that she's humoring me, but this time it doesn't feel so good.

"What about the money?" I ask. "Have you had any luck tracing the owner of the bank account?"

"Not yet. But I've put some new assets in place, so we should have a better picture if and when you get your next payment. That's due in two days?"

"Give or take. I have a feeling Smith may push the deadline, just to yank my chain a little. But I should have it by the end of this week."

"There's also your mysterious Chinese woman, assuming she ever gets back in touch. If she does, you'll want to push her hard about the money she promised you."

"Don't worry about that," I say.

"I'm not worried. But I don't want you to get your hopes up. I think there's a good chance that there won't be any more money coming—and that once that's clear, Smith and Mr. Jones will just disappear."

"You really think this could still turn out to be a prank?"

"I think that's more likely than Mr. Jones turning out to be Kim Jong-un."

"Well, I wasn't thinking it was him, necessarily," I say. "Just someone in his inner circle—a family member, or even just an aide looking to score points with the boss."

"Has it occurred to you that if you are right, that might not be a good thing? Given what the Kims are capable of?"

"Are you asking whether I'm afraid of being kidnapped?" It's my turn to shrug. "I guess I would be, if I were doing this on my own. But I've got you watching my back. I bet if Shin Sang-ok had had a mom like you, they wouldn't have gotten him, either."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence."

"It really would be something, wouldn't it? If Mr. Jones were Kim Jong-un?"

"Yes," my mother says, "that would be something."

"It would be valuable to you, right? Useful?"

"A secret channel to the heart of the North Korean government? Oh yeah, we could find a use for that. Of course," she adds, turning mischievous, "we'd also have to confiscate the money."

"What? Why?"

"China may have signed an accord with the DPRK, but we've still got a trade ban in place. You can't legally profit from business with North Koreans."

"Can't you get me some kind of waiver for that?"

"I suppose I could," Mom says, "but then I worry you'd be wracked with guilt when you remember this is blood money the Kims stole from their own people."

"Uh-huh," I say, unimpressed. "Tell me something, Mom: After you confiscate the money, are you planning to give it back to the people? Because if you are, I guess I can't object. But if you're not, I don't see how having two governments steal it adds up to justice."

"The moral logic is complicated," my mother acknowledges. "Don't worry, we'll find some way to reward you. Maybe you could pitch a declassified version of the story as a screenplay to your dad." She makes a framing gesture with her hands. "'It's like Ready Player One meets The King and I.'"

"Funny, Mom. Hilarious." She certainly seems to think so, though as always when the subject of my father comes up, I can sense other emotions under the surface, masked but there.

And then Mom just looks tired. She glances at the watch on her avatar's wrist.

"Time to get back to work," she says. "Be careful, John."