Reamde

THEY HAD ALL—FOUNDERS, executives, engineers, Creatives, toilers in Weird Stuff—been trying to think about big long-term issues raised by the Wor: the War of Realignment. Without a doubt T’Rain was making money from the Wor in the short term, but the question that was bothering the hell out of all of them was: Will it last? Because they had making money before, when the story of the world had actually made sense. Now it had mutated into something that seemed to lack exactly the kind of coherent overarching narrative that they had hired the likes of Skeletor and D-squared to supply.

All their meetings since the beginning of the Wor had been circular and pointless, even more so than meetings generally. Much of it came down to idle speculation about the internal mental states and processes of Devin Skraelin. Could the Wor really be laid at his feet? Suppose they could prove that he had orchestrated the whole thing, should they charge him with breach of contract? Or should they just lean on him to write his way out of the problem? In which case, Skeletor had only succeeded in drumming up more business for himself. Or was Devin helpless in the toss of cultural-historical forces beyond his ken? In which case, should they fire him and hire one of the thousands of ambitious, eager, and perfectly qualified young writers all hoping for an opportunity to take his place?

These meetings tended to start out with confident PowerPoint presentations and gradually trail off into quasi-philosophical management-speak aphorisms, more and more eyes turning to Richard as if to say, Please O please help us. Because Corporation 9592, at bottom, didn’t make anything in the way that a steel mill did. And it didn’t even really sell anything in the sense that, say, Amazon.com did. It just extracted cash flow from the players’ desire to own virtual goods that would confer status on their fictional characters as they ran around T’Rain acting out greater or lesser parts in a story. And they all suspected, though they couldn’t really prove, that a good story was as foundational to that business as, say, a blast furnace was to a steel mill. But you could slap a white hard hat onto an investor and take him into the plant and let him verify that the blast furnace was still there. Whereas a fantasy world was—well—a fantasy world. This had not prevented a lot of investors from entrusting many steel mills’ worth of capital to the board of directors of Corporation 9592 and the CEO they had hired to look after the business. And in normal times, it made money and everyone was happy, probably because they weren’t thinking about this potentially troublesome fantasy-world-based aspect of the business. But now they were thinking about it quite hard, and the more they thought about it, the more troubled they became. Corporation 9592 seemed to be undergoing an ontogenical retroversion to something like a start-up company. Richard was the only link back to that phase of the company’s development, the only one who could think and function in that environment. The rabid dog they kept locked in the basement. Most of the time.

Anyway, now Richard was on the plane over eastern Montana. Pluto was sitting across the aisle in a backward-facing seat, regarding the eastern foothills of the Rockies like a plumber gazing into a torn-open wall. Not that Pluto could really be of much direct use when it came to story issues. But it comforted Richard to have a God of Olympus on the plane with him. Pluto was a reminder that there were more elemental principles even than whatever it was Devin Skraelin did for a living. Pluto tended to view all Narrative Dynamics as nothing more than benign growths on his work, kind of like those microbes embedded on Martian meteorites. And indeed Richard supposed that, if it came down to that, Pluto could probably summon up a planetary catastrophe that would eradicate all life and history on T’Rain’s surface, and then start over again. But he would have a hard time sliding that one by the board of directors.

Enough of this woolgathering. He forced himself to look back down at the Devin Skraelin novel open on his lap.