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

—Call to Wizardry loading screen tip

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

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

—Lady Ada's Lexicon


The client is an idiot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," Brad says.

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

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

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

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

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

"All right," I say, "let's do this."

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

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

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

"Battle rez me!" Brad's disembodied voice cries. "Battle rez me!"

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

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

"Rez me, you fucks!" Brad shouts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*CHUNK!*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then it's happening to me, too. Everything goes black. Words appear, floating in the void:

> ACCOUNT TERMINATED.

RIP, Blockhead of Moria.

RIP, Sir Valence.

I'm down to eighty-eight names.


 avatar — The audiovisual manifestation of a person or software agent in a virtual environment. Avatars can resemble any animate or inanimate object that their host computer is capable of rendering. They can also manifest differently to different observers simultaneously: In a three-way virtual conference, Alice might appear to Bob as a photorealistic rendering of herself, while Charlie sees and hears her as a cartoon character, a talking horse, or the ghost of Neville Chamberlain. This ability to project multiple aspects, known as faceting, allows for all manner of interesting exploits and shenanigans.

—Lady Ada's Lexicon


"I'm not fucking paying you."

Jolene and I have reconvened with Brad at the Game Lobby, a virtual lounge that is popular as a pre- and post-run hangout spot. The Lobby has a cyberpunk chrome-and-neon aesthetic; there's a bar with a Jumbotron TV that's always tuned to your favorite channel, a laser-lit dance floor that switches over to karaoke three times a week, an arcade where you can play emulations of old coin-op video games, and everywhere, interactive screens you can use to find teammates for Call to Wizardry and a dozen other popular MMORPGs. Because of its sponsorship agreement with Tempest, the Lobby doesn't allow advertising for sherpa services, but there's nothing to stop you opening your own pop-up screen and surfing over to the sherpa forum on GigSearch.

The three of us stand around a table near the edge of the dance floor. I've invoked a cone of silence so we don't have to shout over the music. We've all switched to our default avatars. Brad no longer resembles a racist Gilbert and Sullivan character, but he still doesn't strike me as someone I'd want to know in real life. I didn't attend a normal high school, so I was spared the ritual humiliation that a lot of nerdy kids go through, but I've seen enough Glee reruns to peg Brad as the kind of guy who spent his formative years stuffing nerds into lockers.

Jolene is a tall, fit black woman in her early fifties. Her avatar resembles her Facebook photos, though like most people she's made a few edits, smoothing away some blemishes on her skin and erasing the gap between her front teeth. And of course there's her hair, which on Facebook is natural but short, a conservative 'do that comports with her day job as an IT specialist for a Colorado Springs law firm. Her avatar sports a complex weave whose interlocking braids hang down to the small of her back. It's a style that in real life would cost hundreds of dollars in hair extensions alone and require God knows how many hours of upkeep. But here in fantasyland, it's free, and you don't have to worry about strangers touching it.

If you subscribe to People magazine, you might recognize my avatar from the spread in the March 8 issue: "John Chu, Sherpa to the Stars." My legal surname is Conaway, but I go by Chu out of respect for my mother, who raised me, and also to cut down on awkward questions like, "How come you have an Irish name when you're Asian?"

My avatar has fewer acne scars than I do, but the main difference between us is what I call the Mom-and-Pop switch. It's a piece of code created by a friend of mine, Djimon Campbell, who's also biracial: Scots-English on his father's side and Yoruba on his mother's. Djimon's folks were divorced but shared custody, and growing up he noticed he got treated differently depending on which parent he was with. One day as an experiment he took some public-domain morphing software and created an avatar extension that allowed him to emphasize one side or the other of his ethnic heritage, in effect presenting as a blacker or whiter version of himself. The results surprised him: He expected it to affect people's behavior, he said, but wasn't prepared for how strong the effect was.

I paid Djimon a hundred bucks to write a version of the code for my avatar. I use it as a business tool. The historical connection between Chinese hackers and gold farming has given rise to a stereotype that ethnic Chinese are natural-born sherpas, just as we are all biologically predisposed to score high on the SATs, so for initial meetings with clients I like to put on my Mom genes. When dealing with customer complaints, on the other hand, I find that you can never be too Caucasian.

At the moment I have the Dad setting cranked up to eleven. Even at that extreme, Brad may not consciously notice. But Jolene does.

She b-channels me: From Brad's point of view she's standing motionless with her hands folded on the table in front of her, but I see her lean in close, eyes going wide in astonishment. "Oh my God!" she says. "White... whiter... whitest!"

I ignore her. Outwardly I'm aping my father, but inside my head I'm in one-hundred-percent Mom mode, running a psych profile on Brad and trying to work out a strategy that will get him to cough up the rest of our fee. I could threaten to blackball him on the sherpa forum, but that would probably only make him laugh, while appealing to his sense of fairness might provoke the part of him that likes stuffing nerds into lockers. Really, anything that can be interpreted as weakness is best avoided. I decide my only hope is to throw him off balance and try to redirect his anger.

"Did you hear me? I said I'm not fucking paying y—"

"You bought gold," I say.

The words bring him up short. "What?"

"Ivar's Hammer would have run you at least twenty-five thousand gold pieces on the auction house. Your samurai was broke when I gave him to you, and you couldn't have gotten more than a few hundred for your katana, so you must have bought gold."

"So?"

"So I'm guessing you didn't buy it from the in-game currency shop." After years of trying unsuccessfully to bar gold farmers from Call to Wizardry, Tempest decided to undercut their business by allowing players to buy gold legally from the company store. The price fluctuates, just as it would on a real gold exchange, but is kept low enough that black market gold-selling is no longer profitable. With one exception.

"I bought the gold from a guy advertising on the same forum where I found you," Brad says.

I nod knowingly. "Here's the thing. The only way to make decent money selling gold in Call to Wizardry anymore is by stealing it. These guys crack players' accounts, liquidate their characters' possessions, and then sell the gold to"—idiots like you—"people looking for bargains."

Brad shrugs. Players careless enough to let their accounts get hacked, the shrug says, are not his problem.

Except they are. "Everything that happens in the game world is recorded," I say. "As soon as those hacked accounts get reported, Tempest can track exactly where the gold went. They can't punish the thieves, because the money you paid them is outside the system, but they can punish you."

Brad shrugs again, but with less conviction. "You don't know it was because of me," he says. "They busted you too."

"Because we were with you. When Tempest traced the gold and saw you were in a party, they must have decided to hang back and eavesdrop a while. That's how they knew we were sherpas." I go on, improvising: "And then, to really teach us a lesson, they must have waited for the perfect moment to pull the plug. I bet they even rigged the loot table in Anastasia's cavern to make sure we'd get a legendary drop."

"You mean that sword you wanted? They gave that to us on purpose?"

"And then snatched it right back," I say. I am talking out of my ass now, but Brad doesn't know that. "Look, I understand you're upset, but we're not the ones who fucked you over. You want to be mad, be mad at Tempest. Be mad at the rip-off artist who sold you that gold."

Brad looks away and appears to think it over. When he turns back to me he is nodding, and his carefully composed expression suggests he's decided to be reasonable. It's then I know for certain that we're screwed.

"You're right, it's not your fault," Brad says. "But I'm still not fucking paying you." Another shrug. "It's like what you were saying about the company: I can't punish the guys who really deserve it. So I guess I'll have to settle for taking it out on you."

Jolene breaks her silence. "What is wrong with you? Why would you want to be like—"

Brad cuts her off: "Who asked you to butt in, Beyoncé? You think I give two shits what you—"

"Dead to me," I say. Brad disappears. His avatar still occupies the same coordinates in cyberspace, but I can no longer see it or hear it, and he can no longer see or hear me.

Jolene goes on staring across the table, listening to—and, I assume, recording—whatever Brad is saying to her. Another half minute elapses before she says, "Dead to me," and sighs.

"Griefnet?" I ask her.

"Nah," she says. "If he'd dropped the n-word I'd post it to Griefnet. But I can't be too mad about 'Beyoncé,' even if he meant it as a slur... So, I guess we'd better break the bad news, huh?"

Anja and Ray are waiting for us in the Lobby arcade. Anja's avatar looks like Anja herself did before her accident: a pretty, petite teenager with a gymnast's physique. Anja's family, the Kirchners, are a clan of German Argentines who live in Paraná. Anja was on her way to the summer Olympic trials in Buenos Aires when the van taking her to the airport got sideswiped by a bus. She was left partially paralyzed, and an experimental stem-cell treatment meant to repair the damage instead made things worse, rendering her unable to breathe on her own. The machine that keeps her alive has a thought-controlled VR rig that reads and interprets the electrical impulses in her cerebrum. Anja's online 24/7, which combined with her eagerness to please and her relative indifference to money makes her the perfect employee, a fact I try not to take too much advantage of. Jolene tells me I need to try harder.

Ray Nelson presents as a thirtysomething white guy with a medium build, brown eyes, and short black hair. He has no social media presence—not under that name, at least—so I don't know if he's really a white guy, but if forced to guess I'd say he probably is. People masquerading as another race or gender tend to gravitate towards stereotypes. Ray's avatar isn't celebrity beautiful or Aryan chic, nor does it suggest an inbred hillbilly. He looks, by white guy standards, unremarkably ordinary, and who would want to pretend to be that?

Jolene has some interesting thoughts on the matter. Not long after she became a Sherpa, Inc. regular, she asked me what I knew about Ray. I told her he was the best healer I'd ever worked with. What about offline? she said. What's he do when he's not playing? I don't know, I replied. He doesn't really talk about himself. Jolene, not satisfied with that, used her IT skills to sniff out Ray's IP address. She looked it up and found it was one of a block of IP addresses assigned to an internet provider in southeast California. The provider's coverage area included a region of the Mojave Desert that is said to be popular with people who are legally forbidden to live near children.

You think Ray's a pedophile because of his IP address? I said when Jolene told me about this. I don't know what he is, she said, but my gut tells me he's hiding something. You don't get that vibe? Not from him, I said. But I'm starting to wonder what you haven't told me.

One thing I do know about Ray is that the sherpa gig isn't a part-time job for him, it's his main source of income. Which is a concern, because good healers are hard to come by, and if he can't make rent working for Sherpa, Inc., he won't hesitate to join another crew. I already came close to losing him once before.

"He stiffed us?" Ray says, not even waiting for me to deliver the news. "We got stiffed, right?"

"The guy's an asshole," I say. "Look, it happens. Just bad luck, that's—"

"Bad luck?" Ray's avatar's cheeks stay pale but I can tell that he's red-faced with anger. "And what about that thing last week? Or the two the week before that?"

We have been going through a rough patch lately. Tonight is the third time in a month the EULA cops have busted us during a run. On the previous two occasions, our customers did pay us, but they were unhappy and left us one- and two-star ratings on the sherpa forum.

Last week's incident was different. The run itself went off without a hitch, with the client, who went by the screen name Ollie Oxenfree, opting to add a third dungeon at overtime rates. The trouble started afterwards, when Ollie failed to meet us at the Game Lobby. My instant messages and emails inquiring about payment all bounced, and when I tried to log back into Call to Wizardry, the account I'd used for the run had been suspended: Besides stiffing us, "Ollie" had ratted us out to Tempest.

Pranked. It happens. Concern that it might happen again was the reason I'd spent so much time vetting Brad Strong on social media, making sure he was real.

"It's not bad luck," Ray says. "It's Darla."

"You don't know that." Sounding uncomfortably like Brad as I say this.

"She's getting even with you, like she promised she would. And she's making the rest of us pay, too."

"Come on, Ray. Don't be—"

"I'm sorry, John. I can't afford to keep doing this."

"What if I give you my share of tonight's upfront money?"

Ray makes a face. "The guy only paid a quarter in advance, right? So even with your share, that's only half of what I'm owed. And—"

"You can have my share, too," Anja pipes up.

Jolene interjects: "Oh no you can't. You keep your money, honey."

"It's not just the money," Ray says, staying focused on me. "I don't have a million spare accounts like you do. You know how long it takes to level up a new cleric?"

"You want a replacement for the one you lost tonight?" I say. "I'll give you one of mine. Two—I'll give you two."

"Two clerics," Ray says. This is insanely generous and he knows it. "Max level?"

"One of them is. The other's in the high hundreds, like one-seventy or one-seventy-five."

"I could finish leveling that one up for you," Anja offers. "It won't take long."

Jolene opens her mouth to say something, then thinks better of it. But I know I'll be hearing from her about this later.

"Two clerics," says Ray, still mulling it over. "And your share of tonight's upfront money?" I nod, trying not to think about my own unpaid bills. "All right," Ray says. "I'll stick around a while longer. But you need to go deal with Darla. Find her and kiss her ass, or whatever it's going to take to get her to lay off."

"I will," I promise. "Don't worry about it."

Ray and Jolene log off. I give Anja the account ID and password for that second cleric I promised Ray. "Only if you really want to," I say, picturing Jolene's parting glance to me.

"I wouldn't offer if I didn't want to," Anja says. And whether that's true or not, I know she'll have the cleric maxed out by the next time I see her.

"Are you feeling OK?" I ask. "About tonight, I mean." I know that EULA busts, like anything involving loss of avatar control, are potentially traumatic for her.

She shrugs. "It happens. Do you really think Darla was responsible?"

"I think tonight was on Brad. Last week, though, yeah, could be. But don't worry, I'll figure something out."

We say goodnight. Anja goes back into Call to Wizardry. I stay in the Lobby arcade, playing Gauntlet. I think about Darla.


Darla has me blocked on social media, but if you go on her Facebook page you'll find a profile pic of what looks like a young Chloë Grace Moretz in combat boots and paint-spattered camo, sitting cross-legged in the grass with a paintball rifle balanced across her knees. Her green eyes look out from under sweat-matted bangs, and she's got this wicked grin on her face like she knows something you don't and is wondering just how long it's going to take you to get a clue. According to her bio, she's Darla Jean Covington, "Virginian by blood, Arizonan by birth, Oregonian by choice." A twenty-two-year-old white, bi-curious, cisgender, middle-class, apolitical atheist omnivore who doesn't like being put into boxes. "Ha ha, see what I did there?" Occupation: Shit-stirrer and gamer gurl. Relationship status: Single.

We met in Call to Wizardry, in the Jurassic Swamp, where we'd gone to farm dinosaur hides and archaeopteryx feathers. The game server we were on is used primarily by South Koreans, and it was three a.m. in Seoul, so we'd both been hoping to have the swamp to ourselves. After a cursory attempt at sharing, we started stealing each other's kills. When I bagged a rare T. rex that Darla had her eye on, she challenged me to a duel, and despite her character being four levels below mine, she kicked my ass. Twice. I offered her a job with Sherpa, Inc. on the spot.

Considered purely as a player, she was a great hire. Her dps skills were phenomenal, but she could also tank, and while she didn't really have the temperament for healing, in a pinch she could do that, too.

In the area of customer relations, however, she left a lot to be desired. When clients were rude, Darla took it personally; when they made mistakes, or were slow to understand the rules of a boss fight, she made fun of them. This latter tendency in particular bugged the shit out of me. As I kept pointing out to her, our business model was dependent on our clients being amateurs; if they could put in the time required to become great players, they wouldn't need to hire sherpas. I know that, Darla said, but they're just so lame sometimes, it makes me want to scream.

When she wasn't alienating customers, Darla poked fun at her coworkers. Anja, the German South American, got a steady stream of fugitive Nazi jokes. I got cracks about lactose intolerance and requests to share my thoughts on Mickey Rooney's performance in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Getting under Ray's skin was harder, since he revealed so little about himself, but Darla somehow deduced that he was Catholic, or at least sensitive to remarks about Catholics; she was still teasing out which heresies most offended him when he threatened to quit.

I should have fired Darla then. But our relationship had gotten complicated, so instead I just read her the riot act. She laughed and told me I was cute when I was angry. I told her I wasn't kidding; she could knock it off or she could look for another sherpa crew. Fine, she said, if Ray's going to be such a huge pussy about it I'll leave him alone. Anja too, I said. And the customers. All right, all right, she said.

And she did knock it off. Mostly. I was relieved, though I also assumed that this was temporary, and that in a week or a month she'd start in again, and there would be another crisis where I'd have to choose between her or the business. I still believe that; it was doomed to end badly, one way or another.

But the way it did end was this: I got a call from the CAA agent who represents Janet Margeaux. She was set to costar with Jaden Smith in a film about a sherpa crew who stage a bank heist in cyberspace—"a sort of Snow Crash meets The Thomas Crown Affair." To research the role, Ms. Margeaux wanted to spend a couple days hanging out with some real sherpas. People magazine was also interested: If I agreed, they'd embed a reporter on one of the dungeon runs, get some video and some screenshots, and interview me about the business.

I hadn't even said yes yet when I started worrying about Darla. What if she decided to razz Janet Margeaux about the lousy box-office on that Citizen Kane remake she did last year? Or what if she decided to get "edgy" and say something racist to the People reporter?

I could have tried talking to Darla, to impress on her how potentially important this gig was for the future of the business. I could have admitted that I didn't trust her, her recent good behavior notwithstanding. But I was afraid of how she might react, so I took a more cautious, which is to say cowardly, approach: I scheduled Janet Margeaux for a weekend when I knew Darla would be offline, facetiming with her family at a reunion in Virginia. I brought in Jolene, who'd subbed for Darla a couple times before, and only told Ray and Anja what was up at the last minute—and even then, I was cagey about it. I think Ray understood that I'd cut Darla out deliberately, but Anja didn't get it; she thought it was just bad luck that Darla couldn't be with us.

The gig went extremely well—Janet Margeaux was thrilled, and the reporter said she'd be devoting a full page to our interview. I told myself that I'd made the right call and that even Darla would come to agree with that, after she'd had some time to cool off.

But I wasn't in a hurry to test that theory. The day Darla was due back from the reunion, I went to the Jurassic Swamp again. Call to Wizardry's most recent software patch had introduced a new subspecies of velociraptor whose claws could be used to make magic necklaces. I switched off my instant messages and settled in to farm a few hundred of them.

Darla came online and went to the Game Lobby to look for me. She ran into Anja, who, not knowing any better, spilled the beans about what we'd been up to in Darla's absence.

Back in the swamp, I got into another territorial pissing match, this time with a couple of low-level griefers. I picked a fight and killed them until they got bored and went away. I was still flagged for PvP when Darla found me. She'd logged in as a 200th-level deathlord, so the first sign that she was coming was when the ferns at the edge of the clearing I was in shriveled up and turned black. She burst through the dead foliage wielding a flaming two-handed sword the size of a telephone pole.

"Hey Darla, let's talk," I said. She decapitated me. I came back from the graveyard and she was desecrating my corpse; I imagine she had her gib setting turned up full. I knew if I resurrected she'd just kill me again, so instead I hovered there, disembodied, saying, "Come on Darla, let's talk."

She logged out. I did too. I went to the Game Lobby and waited. It was karaoke night, and a group of senior citizens were competing to see who could do the most grating rendition of Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On." As penance, I decided not to invoke a cone of silence.

But that was self-indulgent bullshit. One of my mother's most often repeated pieces of wisdom is that there's a difference between being unhappy with the consequences of your actions and being sorry. I was unhappy that Darla was pissed off, but I didn't regret what I'd done—if anything, her reaction confirmed for me that I'd made the right decision.

Not being sorry, I knew it would be wrong to apologize. I could explain why I'd done what I'd done, I could try to make it up to her, but to say sorry when I wasn't would only add insult to injury. Do not apologize, I counseled myself as I waited. Do. Not. Apologize.

Then I saw her, standing over by the bar. She saw me too—had seen me first, no doubt—but pretended to ignore me.

I walked up to her. "Darla," I said.

She turned and threw a virtual martini in my face. This is less effective than throwing a real drink—like a chest-bump aimed at an avatar teammate, it passed right through me.

Darla's words had more of an impact. "You lying, backstabbing piece of shit!" she shouted. Onstage, the latest bout of Titanic theme music had just ended, and the scattered applause hadn't yet begun; Darla's exclamation landed at full volume in the space between. Suddenly it felt like everyone in the Game Lobby was staring at us.

I spoke without thinking: "Darla, I'm sorry. I—"

"Sorry?" Darla said. "You're not sorry... But you will be." Then: "Dead to me."

That was two and a half months ago. I spent the first week awaiting Darla's revenge, which I assumed would take the form of a post on the sherpa forum. There were things she could have revealed about the nature of our relationship that would have been embarrassing, and maybe bad for business. But time went by and no post appeared. Darla blocked me on social media, as I've said, but she didn't take her accounts private, so by logging in under a different name I could look and see that she hadn't posted on Facebook or anywhere else, either. It was as if she'd left the internet entirely—though of course, she was free to log in under a different name, too.

The People magazine article came out. The publicity had the effect that I'd hoped for, and more—Sherpa, Inc. was suddenly very busy. I raised our standard fee and hired Jolene as a full-time replacement for Darla. We made good money, at first.

There were a few negative repercussions. Some of the other sherpa outfits, jealous that Janet Margeaux hadn't picked them, started badmouthing us. Others complained that by inspiring "John Chu wannabes" the article was creating too much competition, driving overall profits down. Gold-selling scams increased, and Tempest, unhappy with the expansion of the black market, began cracking down harder on EULA violations. All of the accounts we'd used for the Janet Margeaux job got banned.

The price of fame, I figured. I had other accounts, and could afford to get more. I settled in to what I thought was the new normal, and talked about expanding.

But now our luck has changed again, and instead of building a larger crew I'm struggling to hold the core group together. Karma, or Darla? The main argument against the latter is that I just don't see Darla having the patience for an extended revenge scheme. Her idea of a long game is making sure you're listening with both ears before she unloads on you.

But strong emotions can cause people to act very differently than they normally would. That's another of my mother's axioms. I keep thinking about the expression on Darla's face when she pronounced "Dead to me" in the bar that night, which was the same expression she wore when she cut my head off in the swamp. As if she were wishing the invocation of death were more than just a metaphor.

Speaking of death: In Gauntlet, my elf, who needs food badly, falls to an onslaught of grunts. Rather than plug in another virtual quarter, I open a pop-up screen and surf over to Darla's Facebook page. There are no new posts. While I debate whether to leave a message tagged with my real name, Darla's profile pic stares at me, grinning.


I'm about to log out when I get an instant message, the words appearing in a pop-up box at the bottom of my visual field:

> ARE YOU AVAILABLE TO MEET NOW? — SMITH

Smith—no first name, no "Mr." or "Ms.," just Smith—emailed me a week ago, claiming to be the personal assistant of a "wealthy, famous person" who wanted to hire a sherpa for a special project. The job paid "quite generously," Smith promised, but added that the client wished to remain anonymous. Would that be acceptable?

Coming as it did on the heels of the Ollie Oxenfree incident, this offer struck me as highly suspicious, but on the off chance it was for real I wrote back. I said that I was fine with not knowing the identity of my employer, so long as they were willing to pay my full fee in advance—and by the way, what did "quite generous" mean in actual dollars? When I got no response, I assumed that whoever it was had given up the gag after having their bluff called.

> I'M AVAILABLE, I message back. WHERE?

> GAME LOBBY PRIVATE CHAT ROOM #24, Smith replies. ENTRY CODE 77G4M9.

The door to the chat rooms is right outside the arcade. I knock and a peephole slides open; a robot bouncer jabbers at me in faux Star Wars droid language. "Room twenty-four," I tell it, and recite the code. The door opens and I step directly into a conference room where Smith and the client are waiting.

They are Gray People. This is a special type of anonymizing avatar, inspired by a bit of business from an old Ursula K. Le Guin novel. Users manifest as androgynous, racially nondescript humanoids with light gray skin; the avatar suite includes an audio filter that replaces your real voice with an accentless monotone, though unless you're also speaking through a translator, your word choice can still give information away.

I see they have opted not to use the avatar's lack-of-affect toggle. The Gray Person on the right is smiling as I enter, and he or she regards me with an open and intense curiosity. The Gray Person on the left is more reserved, but in a way that suggests seriousness rather than an absence of emotion.

"Smith?" I say.

"I am Smith," the serious one replies. He—I decide to think of him as "he," because otherwise I'll think of him as Darla—indicates his companion. "This is my boss, Mr. Jones."

"Hello. I'm John Chu." I nod. Jones doesn't nod back, just goes on staring at me, his smile starting to seem a little creepy now. "I understand you're interested in hiring a sherpa for some sort of project."

"Yes," Mr. Jones says. "I wish to undertake a comprehensive survey of the world of more pigs."

More pigs: MMORPGs. "What kind of survey?"

Smith answers: "Mr. Jones believes that the design philosophy of massive multiplayer online role-playing games may have applications beyond the realm of mere entertainment. Applications that are relevant to his own profession."

"Which is?"

"Not your concern."

"I have researched the subject of more pigs," Mr. Jones says. "Read articles, watched videos. But I lack firsthand experience. I want you to help me rectify this."

"OK," I say. "Do you know which games you'd like to play?"

"All of them."

"All? You know there are dozens of them, right? Hundreds, if you count legacy games."

"All of them," Mr. Jones says. "I wish to experience the full potential of the medium. You can arrange this for me?"

"I can," I say. "I've got accounts on all the most popular MMORPGs, and I can get others. But it'll cost you."

"Money is no concern."

It is to me, I think. "When do you want to start?"

"As soon as Smith is satisfied with the security arrangements. You understand, I must maintain strict anonymity."

"Yeah, I got that."

"The logistics of that I leave to Smith. But I do have a question before we begin."

"Go ahead."

"It is about identity." He lowers his gaze and studies the backs of his avatar's hands. "I can resemble anything I wish to, in here." Looking up again: "And so can you."

"And so can anyone else." I nod, guessing where he's going with this.

"Yes," Mr. Jones says. "So when you are guiding me through the world of more pigs, how do I know that you are you, and not one of my enemies? How do you know that I am me?"

I can't tell whether he's asking because he really wants to know, or just wants to see if I do. But I've got this covered. "It's a standard cryptographic protocol," I say. Jones arches an eyebrow: crypto-whaticol? "Here, let me show you..."

I pass my hand over the conference table between us, causing three objects to materialize there: a small blue box, a blue key, and a red key.

I pick up the red key. "This is my public encryption key," I say, offering it to Mr. Jones, who accepts it after exchanging a quick glance with Smith. "Because it's public, I can give away a copy to anybody who wants one.

"The blue key is my private key," I continue, "and I'm very careful not to let anyone else have that. Now if I want to send you a message, I can put it in here..." I lift the lid of the blue box. Inside is a business card, which I hold up so Mr. Jones can read the words preprinted on it: IT'S ME, JOHN CHU. I put the card back in the box and close the lid. "Now I lock it with my private key." I turn the key and the box turns red. "And I send it to you." I slide the box across the table. "If you've got my public key, you can open it."

"But so can anyone else," Mr. Jones says. "Anyone with your public key can read the message."

"Unless the message is also encrypted, with a code that only you have the key to. But that's not necessary in this case. In this case, the real message is the box itself. My public key will only open boxes that were locked with my private key. So if you get a box that you can open, you know it came from me."

"I see," Mr. Jones says. "Clever, but also cumbersome. Anytime I wish to verify your identity, I ask for a box?"

"It's just a metaphor." I nod at the table; the box disappears, and the key in Mr. Jones's hand transforms into a key fob, the kind you use to find your car in a crowded garage. "Go ahead," I say, pointing to the little blue speaker pin that has appeared on my avatar's lapel. "Try it."

Mr. Jones stares at the key fob like he's never seen one before. Then he says, "Ah," in a way that makes me think Smith just b-channeled him. He aims the fob at me and pushes the button.

"It's me," the lapel pin says in my voice. "John Chu."

A new smile appears on Mr. Jones's face. He laughs like a little kid and presses the button again. And again.

"It's me, John Chu... It's me, John Chu... It's me, John Chu..."

A dozen times. Finally satisfied, he lowers the key fob and turns to Smith. "This is the one I want," he says.

And then he's gone, without so much as a goodbye glance.

"Thank you for explaining public-key cryptography to my boss," Smith says. "You did a much better job than I would have."

"It's no problem." I consider telling him that I created this demonstration for Janet Margeaux, but divulging even that small a detail about a former client relationship might come across as indiscreet. Instead I say, "I want you and your boss to feel totally comfortable."

"It is good that this is your attitude," Smith says. "Because your encryption protocol is inadequate to our security needs."

"Inadequate how? Are you worried about the integrity of my computer?"

"I am worried about that, also. But I was referring to the encryption itself."

"I generate the keys with a Really Good Privacy app. It's solid. No known vulnerabilities."

"No publicized vulnerabilities," Smith replies.

"You're saying someone's found a hole in RGP?"

"I am saying my boss has powerful enemies with extraordinary capabilities."

"Enemies like who, the NSA?"

"Their identity is not your concern. But I am going to require root privileges on your computer; I will be modifying the operating system and installing additional software that you are not to remove or tamper with."

"You understand why that's impossible, right?" I try to say this lightly, but it's hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice. For all of its weirdness, I'd been starting to hope this job offer might be genuine.

"I understand why you would be reluctant to grant root access to a stranger. But you will do it."

"No I won't, Darla."

"I am not your darling," Smith says. "Now listen carefully, John Chu: In addition to granting me the access I require, you will clear your schedule of all other personal and business commitments. You will make yourself available on fifteen minutes' notice, any time of the day or night. You will show my boss the world of MMORPGs and answer his questions. You will explain things in a way that he can understand. You will do all of this tirelessly and without complaint, and you will tell no one else what you are up to. In exchange, you will receive a weekly salary of one hundred thousand dollars, for as long as Mr. Jones chooses to employ you."

"A hundred thousand a week," I say. "And is that U.S. dollars, or Monopoly money?"

"You can have it in whatever currency you like," Smith says. "As per your email, I am prepared to wire the first week's payment right now, to the bank account of your choice. The money will be available for immediate withdrawal. You can spend it, transfer it to another account, or do whatever else you require, to convince yourself it is real. In seventy-two hours, I will contact you again, and you will either agree to my terms or refund the money in full. Will that be satisfactory?"


Five minutes later I stumble out of the chat room and head for the bar. You can order drinks from the cyborg bartender, but since this is virtual reality, you have to provide your own intoxication.

Tonight that won't be a problem; I'm feeling plenty stupefied. PayPal has just sent me confirmation of a deposit of one hundred thousand dollars. A part of me is wondering how Darla could have faked this, while another part is trying to figure out if it's too late to avoid reporting the income to the IRS. If I'd believed for a moment I might actually get the money, I'd have handled it differently.

I'm almost at the bar when a Chinese woman catches my eye. The avatar looks a lot like my aunt Penny; it's not her, but the woman smiles as if she expects me to recognize her.

"I'm sorry," I say. "Do I know you?"

"That's a good question, John," she says. Her accent is British, with just a hint of Cantonese. "Let's find out. Do you have another of those red key fobs?"

The question takes a moment to process. Then, feeling as though I've downed a bucket of virtual martinis, I hold out my hand and conjure another copy of my public encryption key.

She doesn't take it. "It's not for me," she says, "it's for you." She points at the little blue speaker pin on her blouse. "Try it."

I aim the red key fob. Press the button.

"It's me," the blue pin says, in my voice. "John Chu."

"There you go," says the woman. "I suppose we must be twins."

"Who are you?"

"I'm you, John." She laughs. "Or maybe I'm someone with 'extraordinary capabilities.'"

"What do you want?"

"I want you to take the job. You'll really be working for me, of course; I'll pay you twice what Smith's offering you."

"Two hundred thousand dollars a week? And what else are you going to want, for that?"

"One thing at a time. For now, just tell Smith yes." All the humor goes out of her expression and she gives me a look that is terrifying in its seriousness. "Don't disappoint me, John. You won't like what happens if you do that. At all."

She smiles again. Winks.

Then she's gone.


 memory palace — A virtual architectural space used for storing data. The original memory palaces were purely mental constructs: Ancient Greek and Roman rhetoricians would populate an imaginary structure with mnemonic images and then "walk through" the space in the course of giving a speech. Although this old-school art of memory still has its enthusiasts, modern memory palaces tend to be digital and optimized for VR.

—Lady Ada's Lexicon


The People article described me as a "third-generation gold farmer," which is technically true, but for a lot of readers conjures up a false image of a Chinese immigrant kid whose grandpop played video games in a Beijing internet café. In fact the Chus have been American since long before there was an internet, or video games. Or video.

My great-great-great-grandfather, Chu Yi-wei, emigrated from Guangdong Province in 1871. He helped build the Northern Pacific Railway and started an import/export business in Seattle. In 1886, Seattle's white Knights of Labor rioted and tried to run the entire population of Chinatown out of the city. The local militia intervened at the last minute, but Yi-wei decided to play it safe and left town anyway, taking his family and his business to San Francisco.

It was Chu Yi-wei's great-grandson, Joseph Chu, who first got into gold farming. Grandpa Joe was a graduate student in mathematics at U.C. Berkeley. In his free time, he played a primordial MMORPG called Ultima Online. The game was popular enough to support a side economy in which players exchanged virtual treasure for real-world cash. Grandpa used the money he earned selling gold pieces and magic items to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, Judy Chen.

My mother was born a year after Grandpa and Grandma got married. One night two years after that, they left Mom with a sitter and went to their favorite dim sum house to celebrate their anniversary. During the meal, a neo-Nazi named Charles Clayton came into the restaurant. California law at the time banned semiautomatic "assault weapons" like the AR-15 rifle, so Clayton had armed himself with a pair of pump shotguns, loaded with a type of heavy slug that is normally used to hunt elk. He had fired both guns empty and switched to a backup revolver when he found my grandparents hiding under a table.

My mother was sent to Hawaii to live with the family of my great-aunt Tamara, who was a cryptographer for the Navy. Mom grew up on the base at Pearl Harbor. She learned how to program at an early age and played her fair share of computer games, though her tastes ran more to Sim City and Civilization.

It was my father, David Conaway, who was that generation's gold farmer. Like Grandpa Joe he was a grad student, but in English rather than math; his pursuit of a doctorate was mostly a way of buying time to finish the epic sci-fi/fantasy novel he'd been working on since freshman year. Dad considered his online gaming a form of research for the novel. He did a lot of research, earning a nice chunk of change selling gold in the process—though his profits were dwarfed by the size of his student loans.

The summer before his dissertation was due, Dad flew to Hawaii, ostensibly to unplug and get some writing done, but really to bum around the beach for a couple months. Mom, who'd joined the Navy straight out of high school, had just completed her first term of enlistment and was trying to decide whether to reenlist or go to college. It was the wrong time for her to get involved with anyone and Dad was one of the worst romantic choices imaginable, but as Mom later explained to me, she'd done everything right in her life up to that point and was overdue for a screw-up. Also, contrary to the stereotype about basement-dwelling video gamers, Dad was hot.

They'd been together a little more than a month when Mom found out she was pregnant. Dad, in a grand gesture towards taking responsibility, asked Mom to marry him; Mom said she needed to think about it. She'd been careless but she wasn't stupid, and her instincts were telling her that this wasn't someone she could depend on in the long run. She probably would have turned him down no matter what, but two things happened that made the decision much easier.

The first thing was that Dad cheated on her while he was waiting for her answer. That destroyed any lingering illusions she might have had about his suitability as a husband.

The second thing was that Mom got a visit from a captain with U.S. Cyber Command. The captain was recruiting for a new covert anti-terrorism task force called Zero Day, and Mom's service record showed that she had the aptitude and skill set they were looking for. It was a dream assignment, one that Mom assumed her status as a soon-to-be single parent would disqualify her for. But when she told the captain she was pregnant, he didn't even blink. Zero Day was different, he said, a twenty-first-century organization designed to deal with twenty-first-century realities, more forward-looking even than Cyber Command. Child care issues didn't faze them. Also, Great-aunt Tamara, now a rear admiral with Naval Intelligence, had personally recommended Mom for the job. So it was hers if she wanted it.

Mom said yes to the captain and no to my father. When Dad came back around, begging for another chance, Mom ghosted him, vanishing into thin air as only a member of covert services can. She took me with her.

I spent my childhood shuttling from top-secret command post to top-secret command post. I wasn't always sure what continent I was on, but that didn't matter; like the other kids whose parents worked for Zero Day, my real home was the internet.

It was a good time to be a digital native. After decades of overhyped promises, fully immersive VR was finally becoming a thing, and the tech Zero Day had access to was a generation ahead of what was available on the commercial market. We had great tech support, too, and bandwidth was never a problem.

Of course our every move in cyberspace was monitored, to make sure we didn't blab about what our folks did. We couldn't really talk about ourselves, either, so we made up fake autobiographies to use with online friends and acquaintances. That could get weird sometimes, but trying on different identities is something all children do, and for us it was a form of patriotism.

I suppose it's no surprise that I gravitated towards role-playing games, though for me it's always been as much business as entertainment. Selling gold was my version of having a paper route, and the adventurers' guild I founded with the other Zero Day kids became an early prototype for Sherpa, Inc.

At seventeen I left the Zero Day nest and moved to San Francisco, where I'd gotten early admission to Berkeley. My plan was to go for a double major in computer science and business administration, then found a game company and create my own MMORPG. I did attend a few classes, but much of my freshman year was taken up by the same sort of research that had so obsessed my father.

Since it seemed we were more alike than I'd realized, I decided to track Dad down. I found him in Los Angeles. After Mom left him he gave up on his novel and made his way to Hollywood, where he eventually established himself as a screenwriter.

He was happy to meet me, and after some initial awkwardness the feeling turned out to be mutual. In the three years since, we've gotten to be good friends. Dad doesn't farm gold anymore, but he does play Call to Wizardry, and we've got a standing monthly game night.

My father has told me many times how sorry he is that he wasn't there when I was growing up. He says he wants to make it up to me, and I believe him. Though he hasn't taken credit for it, I'm almost certain it was him who gave Janet Margeaux my contact info: He was a script doctor on her Catwoman reboot. And if I were looking for investors for my game company, or needed an emergency loan to help cover my tuition debt, Dad would be my first call.

But he's the wrong parent for my current situation. I don't need an ex–gold farmer; I need a god gamer, someone with a top-down view who can see the big picture and help me figure out what's going on. Someone with power and access to special codes, who, if things get desperate, really can change the rules.

My mother keeps a memory house on MySpaceII. It's got a number of unpatched security vulnerabilities, so even if you're not on the approved guest list, it's a simple hack to come inside and check out the virtual mementos that collectively tell the story of my mother's life—or rather a story, since a lot of it is fiction. While you're poking around, the house will be getting into your business, too: back-tracing your internet connection, grabbing any unsecured files off your computer, and running a threat assessment. If you're an ordinary identity thief, you'll probably be left alone (although, spoiler alert: the tax returns in the office filing cabinet are fakes, with a randomly generated address and social security number). If the house decides you're a Real Threat, your info will be forwarded to a Zero Day counterintel agent with the power to make you unhappy.

I'm on the guest list, so I don't need to hack in. I come right in the front door, wave to the picture of Grandpa and Grandma on the fireplace mantel, and proceed to the back bedroom that would have been mine if this were a real house I'd grown up in. I open the secret door that only I can access and step into what looks like the reception area of an ultramodern office suite.

A Korean-American woman in a Navy ensign's uniform smiles at me from behind the reception desk. Her name is Maggie Kim, and I'm not sure whether she's human or a software agent. "Hello, John," she says. "Your mother is on a call right now, but she'll be free in a few minutes."

I look around idly while I'm waiting. My picture hangs on the wall beside an American flag and a photo of the president; the Janet Margeaux People issue tops a stack of magazines on a side table. This room is a kind of avatar, capable of manifesting differently to different observers, and I assume these details would not be visible to anyone else. Mom wants me to know that she loves me and is proud of me, but given the nature of her work, she can't risk letting other visitors learn what she cares about.

"John," Ensign Kim says, "she's ready for you now."

I don't have to move. The room morphs around me, becoming Mom's office. "Hey, kiddo," Mom says. "What's up?"

She is standing in front of a window that looks out at a mountain range in twilight. Even before I spot the second moon in the sky, I know the view is fake, selected at random from a library of thousands of imaginary vistas. If you need to know Mom's physical location, she'll tell you; if you don't, she's not giving away free clues.

But there are limits to how much you can conceal from people who are close to you. My mother has always been a morning person, and the chipper tone of her voice tells me she's only been awake for a couple of hours. It's close to midnight here on the West Coast, so assuming Mom got up at the crack of dawn like she always does, that would put her somewhere in Europe or Africa. But the kind of circumstances that would require her physical presence in Africa would also keep her from getting a good night's sleep, and she sounds well-rested. Europe, then: probably the Zero Day base in Berlin.

Her smile tells me something, too. Once when I was a kid I asked my mother whether it bothered her to kill people for a living. She said she didn't have a problem with killing people who deserved it, but added that her job wasn't really like that. Mostly what she did was study people, to learn why they acted the way that they did and figure out how to convince them to act differently. And when she did need to hurt someone, she preferred to get them to do it to themselves, by tricking them into making bad choices. When my mother smiles the way she's smiling now, it means that one of her subterfuges has worked; somewhere in the world, some Real Threats have been coaxed down a wrong path and are now either dead or wishing they were.

It's a good mood to have caught her in, and I try to make the most of it. "I need your help with something," I say. I tell her about my job interview with Smith and Mr. Jones. Her eyebrows go up at the mention of the hundred thousand dollars, but when I get to the Chinese woman in the bar I can see her turn skeptical. "You don't buy it."

"That this woman you bumped into is some sort of government agent? It sure sounds like she wants you to think that. But."

"What about the part where she forged my encryption key?" I say. "Is that— Can you guys actually do that?"

This is one of those questions that my mother will never give a straight answer to. She turns it into a hypothetical: "Suppose someone did figure out a way to subvert public-key cryptography. Do you really think they'd brag about it just to impress you? It's a dramatic gesture, but it doesn't make sense."

"She had my private key, though."

"That doesn't mean she forged it. She could have just hacked you and stolen it."

"I practice safe computing, Mom. I learned it from you."

"I didn't teach you everything," she says. "And there are always exploits. Tell me, do you know anyone who might want to pull a prank on you? Someone you trust, or trusted, enough to run a piece of software they sent you without checking it out first?"

Darla, I think. But. "I don't know anybody with a hundred thousand dollars to blow on a prank."

"The money's interesting," Mom acknowledges. "Have you tried spending it yet?"

"No. I thought I'd better talk to you before I did anything."

"What account is it in?"

I tell her, and she gets this distracted look that means she's either b-channeling someone or checking a pop-up screen. Then her avatar's eyes refocus on me and she says, "Very interesting."

"What?"

"The money is real," Mom says. "And it was transferred from a bank in Burma."

If you pay any attention to the news you know that Burma has become notorious lately as a money-laundering haven for Chinese and Southeast Asian mobsters. "So it's like a numbered account?"

"All bank accounts are numbered. Burmese accounts are designed to keep their holders anonymous, even from people like me." She thinks a moment. "All right. You're going to take the job."

"I am?"

"Yes. But first, you're going to use some of the money to buy yourself a new computer and VR rig. I'll give you the web address of a vendor and a coupon code to use when you order. It'll be an upgraded version of the system you have now, with some special features that won't be in the documentation."

"Special features. So you're going to be watching my back on this?"

Mom smiles that smile. "I can use a new project," she says.


 Online Games

 When interacting with other players, a little kindness goes a long way.

—Call to Wizardry loading screen tip

 meet cute — A scene in a romantic comedy where a couple meet for the first time and realize they are attracted to one another. Such scenes are traditionally meant to be endearing, but modern versions of the meet cute often include behavior that in real life would be grounds for a restraining order.

—The New Devil's Dictionary

Fuck you, perv," is the first thing Darla ever said to me.

It was in the Jurassic Swamp, right after she beat my ass the second time. Newly resurrected, I lay on the ground with my armor in tatters; at higher gib settings, you could see bone fragments and bits of intestine scattered all around me. Darla was an orc that day—a green-eyed orc, with long blond hair—and she loomed above me with her scimitar, ready for round three. When I asked her if she'd like to make some money, I guess it must have sounded like a weird come-on.

"Fuck you, perv."

"Wait!" I said, before she could kill me again. "I didn't mean it like that. My name's John Chu, and I run a sherpa crew, Sherpa, Incorporated? Maybe you've heard of us?"

"A sherpa crew." Darla was incredulous. "People pay you to be a guide? Are these retarded people?" Seeing me frown: "What, you don't like the word 'retarded'?"

"I don't mind it, but some of the clients do. And the ones who do, really don't like it."

Darla smirked in a way I would come to know well. "So this is one of those jobs where you have to watch what you say?" As if the concept of professionalism was the silliest thing she'd ever heard of. "Is there a dress code, too?"

"No dress code. As long as you're not sending selfies to the clients, you can dress however you like."

"I bet you'd like me to send you a selfie. Perv." Smiling this time, like she enjoyed whatever my face did when she said it.

I decided to try selective deafness as a tactic. "What's your name?"

"Darla."

"Darla what?"

"Why, so you can stalk me on Facebook?"

"Can you tank?"

"Of course I can fucking tank."

"What about healing?"

"If I'm feeling suicidal and want to bore myself to death, sure."

"Do you play any other MMORPGs or first-person shooters?"

"Ooh, you are planning to stalk me! As soon as you log out, you're going to Google 'Darla' and the names of any games I mention, see if you get a hit. Maybe find a nice picture of me to jerk off to, am I right?"

Selective deafness wasn't working. "I want to know what other games you play because we're looking to branch out. Our client base is almost all Call to Wizardry players right now, but—"

"You might be disappointed if you did find out more about me," Darla said. "I mean, I could be a guy for all you know. A fat, disgusting old guy with yellow underwear."

"If you can tank as well as you dps, I don't care how much you weigh. Or what your underwear looks like."

"Or I might be a kid. A twelve-year-old boy. What would that do for your perv fantasies?"

"You're not a twelve-year-old boy."

"How the fuck would you know?"

"Because I used to be one. When a twelve-year-old boy plays a female character, he picks a human or an elf. Not an orc."

Darla glanced down at her avatar's bust. Orc cleavage is not the stuff of typical schoolboy fantasies. "Maybe I'm a perv, too."

"Maybe," I said. "But I think you're a girl. The kind who used to get into a lot of fights in high school."

"Used to?" She raised an eyebrow.

"It's hard to judge with the fangs, but you look more college-age to me."

"You don't even know if this is my real face."

"Also, it's the middle of a school day in America right now."

"Who says I'm in America? Or maybe I'm cutting class."

"If you were, you wouldn't suggest it."

This earned another smirk. "OK, Mr. Profiler," Darla said. "Tell you what: You guess my age, and I'll come work for you."

"How many guesses do I get?"

"One, duh."

"All right," I said, "but I get to ask you three questions, first."

"Yeah? And what do I get?"

"If I guess wrong? A hundred dollars."

"Fuck you, a hundred dollars. How do I know you'll pay?"

I shrugged. "How do I know you won't lie to get the money?"

Darla thought it over. "OK. Three questions."

"On your tenth birthday," I asked, "was the president of the United States a man or a woman?"

"A woman."

"Which makes you at least eighteen. On your eighteenth birthday, what actor was playing Doctor Who?"

"You watch that stupid show?"

"What actor? You can look it up on Wikipedia if you need to."

"I didn't say I didn't know... It was that Pakistani actress, Miriam whatshername."

"Meryem Halil? She's from Wales. And her family's Turkish."

"Whatever. Her."

"OK, so you're either twenty-one or twenty-two. Last question: On your twenty-first birthday, if I showed you a meme of King Charles offering Camilla a hot dog bun, would you know what that was about?"

Darla rolled her eyes. "Fine, I'm twenty-two," she said. "That's a really lame parlor trick."

"It's a simple trick." I nodded at her scimitar. "Like dps is simple, if you're talking about the mechanics. But to do it under pressure, without stopping to think—that takes some skill."

"Plus, the Doctor Who nerdery really wows the ladies, am I right?"

"I do all right with the ladies," I said. "And I'm definitely a nerd. But to be honest, I'm not a Doctor Who fan. I think I've seen like three episodes."

"Well, that's even more pathetic. You don't watch the show, but you memorized the stars' bios in case you need to guess someone's age?"

"I didn't need to memorize anything. I told you, it's on Wikipedia."

"You checked Wikipedia? Just now, while you were talking to me?"

"Yeah."

"No. Bullshit."

"It's a simple b-channel exploit." I held up my hands, made tapping motions with my fingers. "You can't type and talk at the same time?"

"Of course I can—and I can read and talk, too. But I was watching you. You didn't cut your eyes away. You were looking at me the whole time."

"My avatar was looking at you. I have a custom mod, You So Interesting. It keeps my avatar's eyes focused on whoever I'm talking to, even if I'm checking a pop-up screen."

"This mod, it's something you wrote?"

"An old girlfriend."

Darla snorted. "That must have been some relationship."

"We didn't use it on each other."

"You didn't use it on her, maybe... So this is for your clients? You watch porn while you're making your sales pitch?"

"Mostly I use it to look things up on the sly. It helps me keep up my end, making small talk. And I always know the answer to game-related questions, even if I have a brain fart. Clients expect that. It's part of the whole sherpa stereotype." As I said this, I gave the Mom-and-Pop switch a push towards the Mom side. It was just a nudge, but Darla saw it, and she got it. And she laughed.

"All right," she said, "maybe you're not a total loser... But I still think your clients are retarded." She gave it a beat, watching my expression, then burst out laughing again. "Wow, you are going to be so much fun to mess with."

In hindsight, I suppose I should have recognized that as a red flag.

But in the moment I was happy, because it meant she was taking the job.


 problematic — A weasel word. "Problematic" can mean immoral, heretical, politically objectionable, bigoted, rude, harmful to children and small animals, bad for society, personally offensive to the speaker, or some amorphous combination of any of the above. The word's vagueness makes it popular among the intellectually lazy: Whereas calling something "immoral" might require you to articulate—and defend—a theory of right and wrong, "problematic" expresses the same disapproval while offering nothing solid for an interlocutor to push back against. It also accords with the common belief that all right-thinking people share identical worldviews: Either you know intuitively what "problematic" means, or you are too stupid or wicked to deserve an explanation.

 See also: "mistakes were made," shibboleth

—The New Devil's Dictionary

The day after my new computer arrives, I have my first game session with Mr. Jones.

I've decided we may as well start at the top. I sign Mr. Jones up for a Call to Wizardry account and tell him to meet me in the Hall of Generation.

Step one in creating a character is to choose your race and gender. "Race" in this context means species, although, in a tradition that goes back to pen-and-paper RPGs, many of Call to Wizardry's species are thinly veiled ethnic stereotypes. Humans are generic white people who live in medieval European castles and towns. Dwarves are alcoholic highlanders with funny Scottish accents. Goblins are greedy, big-nosed schemers who run all the banks. Orcs are dark-skinned marauders who worship death and love cutting innocent people's heads off with their scimitars. And then there are the trolls: savage jungle creatures who talk like Jamaican ganglords, practice voodoo and cannibalism, and have a shuffling, stoop-shouldered gait that appears to have been motion-captured at a minstrel show.

The popular internet term for this is "problematic," but I don't like to be coy. My specific complaint is not that it's racist (although it is) or that it reinforces negative attitudes about minorities (it might, but let's be serious—if fantasy role-playing games are your main source of information about minorities, the problem is you). No, what bothers me is that it's such bad business practice. Black and brown people's money spends just as good as white people's, so why the hell would you insult them?

Please note that this is not a rhetorical question. It would be one thing if Tempest had made a deliberate decision to alienate minorities in order to cater to people who still think Stepin Fetchit is comedy gold. That would be stupid, but at least there'd be a logic to it. But I doubt the explanation is that cynical. My guess is that the game design team just didn't realize how offensive some of their worldbuilding choices were, and the guys who were supposed to check their work didn't notice either. That may sound incredible, that otherwise intelligent businesspeople could be so clueless, but I see it happen all the time and it galls me.

But that's my ax to grind. I'm curious what Mr. Jones's take will be.

The Hall of Generation contains interactive models of the various races, so you can get a sense of what your character will look like. The sample troll is stirring a big cauldron as we approach. "I and I gon' use your guts for me gumbo, mon!" he greets us—a line that always gets a healthy side-eye from Jolene. Mr. Jones has no visible reaction. This could mean that he's using a translator, which would strip out the Bob Marley accent, or that he's from a part of the world with different racial stereotypes. Or he could be an English-speaking American who just doesn't think the way Jolene and I do.

His only criticism of the troll concerns posture. "Do they all slouch like that?" he asks. I nod. "A pity," Mr. Jones says. "Its size is quite impressive, otherwise."

We move on to the next model. The xiongmao are a race of anthropomorphic panda bears created as fan service for Call to Wizardry's millions of Chinese players. They are another stereotype, but a carefully crafted, positive one. Xiongmao study kung fu and Taoist sorcery, revere their ancestors, and know a thousand and one recipes for stir-fried bamboo, but they do not have buck teeth or exaggerated epicanthic folds, and they can pronounce the "L" sound just fine. Most Americans find them either cute or silly. Mr. Jones, oddly, is contemptuous. When the model xiongmao presses his paws together and says, "It is an honor to meet you, adventurer," Mr. Jones sneers, as if the bear were trying to pass off one of its own turds as dim sum.

"You don't like pandas?" I say.

"They are overrated," Mr. Jones sniffs.

Mr. Jones does like elves, who are as tall as trolls and don't slouch, but he decides they are "too skinny." He passes on dwarves, gnomes, and goblins without comment. He admires orcs' "fierceness," but they, too, have posture problems. Humans earn another sneer, though he won't share what he dislikes about them.

In the end, he decides to become a plainswalker: an intelligent, bipedal buffalo. Culturally, plainswalkers are Native Americans of the Mix-and-Match tribe. They live in both longhouses and teepees, carve totem poles, send smoke signals, worship the Sky Father and the Earth Mother, and shed tears whenever they see humans littering. Physically, they are the largest of the playable races, which is the part that appeals to Mr. Jones. And male plainswalkers are both taller and more broad-shouldered than females, so his choice of gender comes as no surprise.

The next step is to choose a class. In another throwback to pen-and-paper RPGs, your race determines your career options. Plainswalkers, for example, can be warriors and rangers, but not paladins or ninjas—the design team having apparently decided that talking buffalo ninjas are unrealistic.

Mr. Jones wants to know which class has the best leadership skills.

"What kind of leadership? You mean in combat?"

"In general. But in combat, yes, definitely."

"You'll want a tanking class," I say. "For a plainswalker, that means either a warrior or a druid."

"What is a druid?"

"A shapeshifter. For tanking, they can turn into bears with armored skin." Mr. Jones purses his lips, and I clarify: "Grizzly bears, not pandas."

"Show me the warrior," Mr. Jones says. The model plainswalker morphs into a warchief with a painted face and a massive eagle-feather bonnet that adds another foot to its already considerable height. Mr. Jones approves. "This is the one I want."

"All right," I say. "The last step is to pick a name. Other players will be able to see it, if they want to—it'll look like a movie credit that floats over your head—so there's a length limit, but you can use any combination of extended Unicode characters you like. Don't feel like you have to stick to the Roman alphabet."

"I will be Mr. Jones," Mr. Jones says. There is a pause while he types this in. Tempest's host server then checks to see whether the name is already taken, and also verifies that it does not contain any obvious profanities.

The name is available. Mr. Jones locks in his choice. The model plainswalker steps off its pedestal and merges with Mr. Jones's avatar. Mr. Jones becomes a gray-faced bipedal buffalo. A mirror materializes in front of him and he checks himself out. He's pleased with his stature, but less so with his equipment: The big tomahawk the model was carrying has become a teensy stone hatchet, and in place of the war bonnet, he's wearing a headband with a single feather.

"Don't worry," I tell him. "You'll get cooler gear as you level up."

"What about you?" Mr. Jones asks. "Are you going to create a character?"

"I'll be using an existing one. You need to be at least tenth level before you can party up for dungeon runs, so for now I'll just observe and make sure nobody hassles you... Hold on a moment."

I switch to an alternate account and become Keebler, a 200th-level elf sorcerer. Mr. Jones looks me up and down, paying special attention to my wizard's staff, which is capped with a hollow crystal sphere containing a bored-looking homunculus.

"Nice walking stick," Mr. Jones says, sounding jealous. "But you are still too skinny."

A portal at the end of the hall teleports us to Happy Valley, the starting zone for plainswalkers. The valley is lush and green and surrounded by a ring of cliffs that provide an illusion of safety; at its center is a lake, with a large teepee encampment on the eastern shore. We arrive just south of the camp.

A questgiver named Chief Wampum waits to greet newcomers. "How!" he says, focusing on Mr. Jones. "Welcome, young warrior!"

"Hello," Mr. Jones says.

Chief Wampum and I do not acknowledge one another. As a max-level character—and an elf—I do not belong here, and if I insist on talking to him he will just ask me if I'm lost. I keep my mouth shut.

The chief tells Mr. Jones that he could use some help. Recently the tribe received a gift of blankets that turned out to be infested with gremlins. The gremlins escaped and are now breeding and making mischief along the southern lakeshore. If Mr. Jones kills ten of them and brings back their scalps, the chief will reward him with a better hatchet and a new pair of moccasins.

"Very well," Mr. Jones says.

"May the Sky Father light your way," says Chief Wampum.

We walk clockwise around the lake until we see the gremlins. They have invaded a fishing camp, punching holes in the canoes and knocking over the salmon smoker. I count about two dozen of them, but they respawn quickly and continuously, so no matter how many scalps are taken, there will always be more.

Mr. Jones indicates the nearest gremlin. "I just hit it with my hatchet?"

I nod. "Try to take them on one at a time. And when they die, reach down—the scalps peel right off, like decals."

"Very well."

While Mr. Jones works on his quest, I keep my eye on a trio of unpleasant-looking 200th-level characters currently harassing another newbie a short distance away. These guys are, literally and figuratively, trolls. Their screen names are BootFuqqer, Choaksondik, and CukULongtime; in place of their real facial features, their avatars sport skins of Al Jolson in blackface. Collectively they represent half a dozen violations of Section 8 of the EULA, which prohibits both obscene names and "racial insensitivity."

The EULA cops have their hands full running down hackers, bots, and sherpas, so Section 8 violators are a low priority. I could screenshot these guys and report them, but it's unlikely they'd get even a temporary suspension. Instead, as a precaution, I shoot off an instant message to Jolene.

The trolls' current target is a first-level shaman named Medicine Girl. BootFuqqer stands behind her, screaming to break her concentration, while Choaksondik and CukULongtime run around killing all the gremlins in her vicinity. Because of the high respawn rate, they can't actually prevent her from completing the quest, but they can make it a lot harder and significantly less fun.

Though clearly frustrated, Medicine Girl does her best to go on with her business without engaging them. In between screams, BootFuqqer comments on the futility of this strategy: "You think if you pretend to ignore us we're going to give up and go away? Think again!"

"Can't not feed us!" the other trolls chant. "Can't not feed us!"

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

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

Idiots.

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

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

BootFuqqer's sidekicks scope me out.

"A five," Choaksondik pronounces.

CukULongtime nods in agreement. "Definitely a five."

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

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

"Should I accept?"

"No. They're maximum level, you wouldn't stand a chance."

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

"Why is he shouting numbers at you?"

"It's code," I explain. "To get around the profanity filter."

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

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

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

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

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

I open a b-channel. "You there?"

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

"Get ready," I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But they will be back."

"Probably."

"And then you can kill them again."

"Yes."

"How many times?"

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

Mr. Jones nods. "Until they get tired," he says.