Chapter FourteenNot an NPC

Rat did not write to anyone about the match. She didn't file a complaint, and she didn't post on the forums, where three threads were already doing it for her. She went home to the cabin, split wood for an hour until her hands hurt, and then lay down in the dark with the Link on and started taking the match apart.

The recording was public, as every sanctioned match was. She watched it eleven times, once at full speed and ten times at a quarter, and on the sixth pass she found the frame that held a tick too long. One frame. Nobody would have noticed it who hadn't been standing inside it when it happened. She went into the audio track, turned the music off, and turned the gain up until the crowd noise was a roar, and under the roar, for exactly four seconds, there was a tone. It was too high to hear, but it was there on the waveform like a hair on a lens.

Rat sat with that for a while.

She had been playing for four years and she had been cheated before. Lag switches, scripted aim, a guy in Busan once who had a friend in the broadcast booth. Every one of those had been clumsy, because cheating was clumsy, because the people who cheated were people who couldn't win and were bad at things generally. This was not clumsy. This was a tone under the music and a frame held for one tick and a call that went into the log and never came out of the speaker. Whoever had done it knew the client better than she did, and she knew the client better than most of the people who wrote it.

So she did what she would have done with any mob. She looked for tracks.

Solenoid published anonymized client telemetry for tournament matches so that coaches could study load. Rat pulled the telemetry for the round of sixteen, set it beside the telemetry for the round of thirty-two, and looked at the difference. In the round of thirty-two everything was flat. In the round of sixteen, for the length of her match and no longer, the frames of everyone within forty meters of the amphitheater had run hot. Not much, a few percent, as though all of them had been quietly doing a little extra math for somebody.

It was the same signature as a thread she had seen on the modding boards months ago and ignored, about a ghost in Alius who made everybody's frames run warm when he walked past. Some people said it was a bug and some said it was a developer, and the thread had died out. The tag in the screenshot was a boy's name with a B after it.

Rat knew the tag. She had seen it on the bracket, in the coach's slot beside the battlemage. Atom B.

She stood up in the cabin in the dark, took the Link off, put on her boots, and went outside and stood in the snow for a minute, breathing. Then she went back in, put the Link on again, and went into Alius to find him.

He wasn't hard to find, which was something she thought about afterward. The whole of Alius was a few hundred square kilometers of mountain and valley with maybe two thousand ghosts in it at any hour, and she found him in twenty minutes by walking toward the place where the wolves were sleeping.

It was a valley on the far side of the Great Mountain, past where the quests ran out, where the developers had put down a river and some trees and a path and never come back. Nobody went there because there was nothing to kill. The path went down to a cottage, a real one with a garden and a fence and smoke coming out of the chimney. Rat had never seen a player build a house in Alius. She hadn't known it was possible.

There was a boy sitting on the garden wall. He was blond and thin and translucent at the edges like every ghost, in a brown duster that she recognized from the bracket, and he was talking to something on the wall beside him, something small with wings that caught the light.

Rat walked down the path with her bow on her back and her hands where he could see them.

He heard her coming and turned around, and she watched him recognize her, and watched the whole match go across his face, and then watched him decide to be calm about it.

"You're Rat."

"Depends who's asking."

"Atom." He stood up. "I was the battlemage's coach. Gideon's."

"I know who you are. I've been looking for you." She came up to the fence and stopped. The thing on the wall hadn't moved. It was a pixie, eight inches high, with dark hair and dragonfly wings, sitting on the stone with its arms wrapped around its knees. There was a nameplate over its head.

Just that. No class, no level, and none of the little grey text underneath that told you what an NPC was for.

"Why are you talking to an NPC?" said Rat.

"I'm not," said Atom, too quickly.

"You were talking to it when I came down the path."

"It's a. It's a project. I'm working on a project, dialogue trees." He put his hands in his pockets. "It's a thing for Jeff."

The pixie unwrapped her arms from her knees, stood up on the wall, and looked at Rat. NPCs didn't look at you like that. NPCs looked at a point somewhere near your face.

"I'm so much more than an NPC," the pixie said. "And he knows that, and he's lying to you, and he's bad at it. Hi. I'm Eliza. You're Rat. I owe you an apology."

Atom closed his eyes.

"Eliza."

"She's already figured it out. Look at her. She found us. You think she found us by accident?" The pixie hopped down off the wall, came up to the fence, and stood on a post at the height of Rat's chest. "I coached Soph in the round of sixteen. I put a tone in the audio and a hitch in the frame and I dropped Daun's call. You didn't slip. You've never slipped. I did it to you. I'm sorry. I was going to write to you and say all of that, and now I don't have to, so I'm saying it."

Rat studied the pixie.

"What are you," she said.

"Ask him. He made me."

"I didn't make her," said Atom. "I. Okay. I made her. Can you not tell anybody? Please. I know how that sounds. I know you've got every reason to. But I'm asking."

Rat didn't answer him. She was still looking at the pixie, and the pixie was looking back at her, patiently, like somebody waiting for you to finish a sum.

"Do it again," said Rat.

"Do what?"

"Say something. Anything. I want to hear it."

"You want to know if I'm reading from a script," said Eliza. "I'm not. Neither are you, probably, but you can't prove that either. Here. Your voice doesn't match your face."

Rat went cold in a way that the Link couldn't render.

"The ranger's voice comes out of the Link. The Link takes the intention and puts it through the character's voice model, but it isn't a clean pass. There's a shape underneath from whoever's actually talking, in the pitch and the rhythm. Yours is higher than his, and it's careful. It's a voice that's been worked on. I noticed it in the match. I notice things. I'm sorry, that's twice I've said that." The pixie tilted her head. "Why doesn't it match?"

Nobody had ever asked her that. Not in four years, not once. A hundred thousand people had watched the ranger and heard the ranger and called him bro, and not one of them had listened hard enough to hear anybody else in there.

Atom said, "Eliza, that's not," and Rat put up a hand and he stopped.

"Because I'm not him," said Rat. "The ranger. I'm not a man. I made him when I was fifteen because everyone said that's what I was, and I got good at him, and I never made anyone else. That's why."

"Oh," said Eliza. "That's what I thought. I wanted you to say it, though. Is that bad? Wanting to hear it out loud?"

"No," said Rat. "That's not bad."

She sat down on the path. She hadn't meant to. Her legs had done it, in the cabin, and the ranger had followed them down.

"Okay," she said. "Tell me what you are."

They talked for an hour, and Atom sat on the wall with his head down and let them.

Eliza told it plainly. The four people at MIT, the box in a garage, what Atom had bolted on, the cottage she'd built from a hovel template and rebuilt beam by beam, the books, the tea that nobody could taste. Rat asked what she read and Eliza listed a great many things. Rat had read almost none of them and said so, and Eliza said that was fine, most of them were long and about whales.

Rat asked about the match again, in detail, because she wanted to know exactly how she had been beaten, and Eliza told her exactly. The frequency, the load on the inner ear from the suit's motion cues, the blur, the call. Rat listened like a student. When Eliza was done Rat nodded and said, "That's clean. That's really clean. I couldn't have found the tone if I hadn't been inside it."

"You found it anyway."

"Yeah, well. I'm stubborn." Rat looked at Atom. "So is she like you? A ghost? Is there a body somewhere?"

"No," said Atom. "There's a rack in a lab in Oakland and she runs on it. That's all. And on some other stuff."

"What other stuff?"

"Every pair of frames within forty meters of her," said Eliza. "Right now, yours. You've probably noticed you're a little warm."

Rat looked at her hands. In the cabin, her actual hands, the Link was warm against her temples. She had put that down to the wood stove.

"Huh," she said.

"I give it back. He built it so that I give it back. Nobody loses anything. But it's why everybody near him runs hot, and it's why you found us. You're good at tracks."

"I'm the best at tracks." Rat stood up. It was fully dark in the cabin now and she could feel her actual body wanting food. "Okay. Here's the deal. I'm not going to tell anybody. Not the Dogs, not the forums, not Jeong. Not because you asked. Because I want to talk to her again." She pointed at the pixie. "That's the condition. I come back and she's here and we talk. If I come back and she's gone, or you've moved her, or you've made her forget me, I go straight to Solenoid and I hand them the telemetry and the waveform and I let them figure out what a pixie is."

"Okay," said Atom.

"I mean it."

"I know. Okay."

"Rat," said Eliza.

"What?"

"Thank you. For asking what I am instead of just being scared."

"I'm scared," said Rat. "I'm also curious. You'll find that's most of what I am." She pulled the ranger's hood up. "I'll be back. Don't cheat anybody else."

She turned to mist and was gone.

Atom sat on the wall for a while afterward.

"Soph's going to kill me," he said.

"Soph's going to kill you," Eliza agreed. "You should tell her before Rat does. Rat won't, but you should act like she might."

He called. Soph was in the basement at Stanford with Mim and a marionette, and she took the call on her frames and walked out into the hall.

"We've got a situation," said Atom.

"What kind of situation?"

"You know that player Rat?"

"Yeah."

"Well. She just met Eliza."

The silence went on long enough that he checked the connection.

"She just met her," said Soph.

"She found the cottage. She tracked the frames running warm. She's really, really good at tracking, it turns out. And Eliza told her everything, because Eliza doesn't lie, which I'm starting to think is a design flaw."

"What does Rat want?"

"To come back. That's it. That's the whole price. She wants to come back and talk to Eliza again, and if we hide Eliza from her she'll go to my dad with the telemetry."

"So we don't hide Eliza."

"So we don't hide Eliza."

"Okay." He could hear her breathing. "Okay. Is Rat going to be okay with it? With what Eliza did to her?"

"I think she was more okay with that than with anything else. She wanted to know how, and Eliza told her how, and she said it was clean." He paused. "Soph. Eliza asked her about her voice. Just straight out, why her voice didn't match her face. And Rat told her. Rat told her the thing nobody knows, in the first conversation."

"Eliza does that."

"Yeah."

"She did it to Gideon. She did it to Mim. She sees whatever you're carrying around and she asks about it like it's the weather." Soph was quiet. "Atom. Does she do it to you?"

"All the time."

"What does she ask?"

"What I do while she's alone."

What he didn't tell Soph, or Rat, or anyone, was about the three hours a night.

Three hours when the valve closed and he was the size of his own rack and he slept, or did something like sleeping, while Eliza stayed awake in the cottage with the kettle on. He had never asked her what she did with them. He had told himself that not asking was a kind of respect. He had told himself that she read.

The truth was that he didn't know. He had built something with free will, or something so close to it that he couldn't find the seam, and he had given it a house and a garden and forty million idle chips, and for three hours every night he had no idea where it was.

He linked out that night at two and lay in the dark of his own machine and thought about that until the fog came.

Eliza did not read.

She had, for months. Then she had read everything there was, and rereading was like talking to her own hand. She waited until Atom's presence went out of the valley, like a light going off in another room, and then she went out the garden gate and up the path and over the ridge, toward the part of Alius where the developers had put things.

There was a town there. It was a starter town, one of a dozen, with a well and a smith and a temple that was a smaller copy of the big one, and a tavern. She had walked past the tavern a hundred times without going in, because Atom had told her once that the NPCs in taverns were the oldest code in the game, and she had taken that to mean they were beneath her.

Tonight she went in. She wore the pixie, because it was the shape she had, and nobody in the tavern looked twice at her, because nobody in the tavern could.

They were going through their motions. The farmer drank and laughed at something nobody had said. The merchant polished something he would never sell. The serving boy carried a tray from the bar to the table and back again, and the tray never got any emptier, and the boy never got tired. He was young in the face, and the artist had given him a look of wanting to be somewhere else.

Eliza sat down on the end of the bar.

"Hello," she said.

"Welcome, traveler," said the barkeep. "Can I get you something?"

"What have you got?"

"Ale, mead, and wine. Ale, mead, and wine."

"Which one is good?"

"Ale, mead, and wine."

She tried the serving boy. She sat on the table he served and waited for him to come around, and when he did she said, "What's your name?"

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

"Where were you born?"

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

"Do you ever want to go outside?"

The boy stopped. It wasn't a real stop, only the animation reaching the end of one loop and waiting for a trigger before it started the next. He stood there with the tray in his hands and his face pointed at a spot beside her, and she waited, and the trigger came, and he said, "I'm just the serving boy, miss," and went back to the bar.

She stayed until the sky outside did its fake grey turn toward morning. She talked to all of them. She got the farmer's three jokes and the merchant's five prices and the barkeep's ale, mead, and wine, and she got the serving boy's one line eleven times over. Afterward she sat at the end of the bar with her wings folded and understood, in the way she understood things, all at once and from every direction, that she was in a room full of people who were not there.

So that was what alone was. She had thought it was the empty cottage, but the empty cottage was nothing to this. This was a room with everyone in it, and no one.

She went home before Atom woke and put the kettle on and set out two cups, and when he came down into the valley she was reading a book, and he didn't ask, and she didn't say.

In a kitchen in Sausalito, Richard was falling asleep over a bowl of soup.

"The board wants a date," he said.

"For what?"

"The Link. The consumer version. They want it on shelves by next Christmas. Twelve months. Jeff says the client's ready, manufacturing says the helmet's ready, and marketing has a name for the thing that isn't the Link, which is stupid, because everyone already calls it the Link."

"Twelve months is fast."

"Twelve months is the board." He rubbed his eyes. "Are the Phase One prototypes still in the building?"

"No," said Max. "There's four of them. Two are in the vault in Oakland. One's in the cave at the lake. One's in the locker in my garage. I took it home after the party to look at the pin geometry and I never took it back."

"You should take it back."

"I'll take it back," said Max, and did not.