Reamde

Half an hour later they were at Corporation 9592’s headquarters, chilling out in a small conference room with an over-sized LCD video screen. Corvallis offered to “drive,” meaning that he would operate the mouse and keyboard, but Richard asserted his prerogative, dragging the controls over to his side of the table and then logging in using his personal account. All his characters were listed on the splash screen. Compared to some players, he didn’t have that many: only eight. Even though he understood, intellectually, that they were just software bots, it made him feel somehow guilty to know that they were all sitting in their home zones twenty-four hours a day, executing their bothaviors, and waiting for the master to log in and exercise them.

He scanned the list of names and decided, what the hell, he would just unlimber Egdod.

Egdod was the first player-character that had ever been created in T’Rain, not counting a number of titans, gods, demigods, and so on that had been set up in order to build the world and that were not owned by any one player. He had his own personal home zone, a towering fortress of solitude constructed on the top of one of T’Rain’s highest mountains and decorated with artifacts that Egdod had looted from various palaces and ruins that he’d had a hand in conquering. Egdod was so famous that Richard could not even take him out of doors without first concealing his identity behind a many-layered screen of spells, wards, disguises, and enchantments whose purpose was to make him look like a much less powerful, but still way-too-puissant-to-fuck-with character. Even the simplest of these spells was far beyond the powers of all but a few hundred of T’Rain’s most powerful denizens. Richard had written a script that invoked them all automatically, with a single keystroke; otherwise it would have taken him half an hour. Each spell triggered its own custom-designed light show and sound effects extravaganza, the latter propagating through the building thanks to the oversized subwoofers with which this conference room had been supplied, and so awareness that Egdod was being aired out spread through neighboring offices by subsonic vibration and then throughout the rest of the building by text message, and curious employees began to congregate in the doorway of the conference room, not daring to cross its threshold, just wanting to catch a glimpse of the event, in somewhat the same spirit that navy veterans would gather on the shore to watch the battle-ship Missouri being towed to a new berth. Which was not to imply that a warship of that class would have stood much of a chance against the firepower of an Egdod. A direct hit from an ICBM might have mussed Egdod’s hair—which, predictably, was white, in a God of the Old Testament do. Richard longed to swap it for something a little more against-the-grain, and when Egdod was in disguise, he always did. But once in a blue moon, Egdod had to appear in his true avatar to kill a god, divert a comet, or carry out some ceremonial function, and at those times it was necessary that he look the part. As the successive magic wrappers were laid down, however, this awe-inspiring figure and his harbingers and vanguards, his encloaking energy-nimbi and meteorological accoutrements, got stripped away and snuffed out, and finally Egdod himself altered his appearance to that of a somewhat pixieish, vaguely elven-looking young female with spiky dark hair. At this point the crowd in the doorway dispersed, except for a few who wanted to linger and get a view of Egdod’s fortress from inside.