Chapter 27 The Informant Turns
Padrin moved fast for someone who looked like he was built to stand still.
He took them left at the passage end, then immediately right, then through a gap between two buildings that didn't look like a gap until you were standing in front of it and even then it barely looked like one. Caius felt the terrain data shift as they entered it, the zone's architecture registering the space as non-navigable, a classification that meant nothing to him but would have stopped any normal player cold. Padrin didn't slow down.
"Maintenance infrastructure," he said without turning around. "The world's terrain has service layers built into it. Access points for System processes. No EXP. No loot, no reason for any player to know they exist." He ducked under a geometry edge that existed in the architecture but not in the visual render. "I spent two years mapping them."
"For the network?" Caius asked.
"For myself first. Then the network found out I had the maps and made me an offer." He kept moving. "I was nineteen when I arrived here. I needed resources, they had them."
Behind Caius, Renne said nothing. He could hear what her silence meant.
The tunnel, if it could be called that, was narrow and low-ceilinged with the rough unfinished quality of a space that existed for function and nothing else. The lighting was wrong, too flat, the engine not bothering to calculate shadows in non-navigable zones. Their footsteps sounded different in here, the audio system unsure what surface to render.
"You said you flagged Renne," Caius said.
"Yes." Padrin took a turn without hesitating. "Three days ago. Someone in the player quarter reported an anomaly near the eastern corrupted zones. I ran the observation myself." He paused. "Saw her entering the zone with something I couldn't fully see. Something that moved wrong for the environment." He paused again. "I reported it. I was told to place the bounty on her to isolate the anomaly from player support networks."
"Isolate," Renne said from behind. The word came out flat.
"That's the language they use," Padrin said. "I used it too for four years without thinking about what it meant." He ducked through another geometry gap. "I started thinking about it after I placed your bounty."
"What made you think about it?" Imra asked. She was keeping pace without difficulty, her eyes moving the same way they always moved, reading the environment.
"I went back through my records," Padrin said. "Four years of reports. Every anomaly I filed, every unusual System behavior, every corrupted zone sighting, every player who was asking the wrong kinds of questions." He kept moving but something in his shoulders changed, a tension that hadn't been there when they started. "I cross-referenced the reports against the permanent erasure logs that the player community maintains. The informal ones."
"And?" Caius said.
"One hundred percent correlation." He said it without drama. Just the number, placed in the space between them like something he had been carrying since he found it and needed to put down. "Every player I reported an anomaly on was permanently erased within four weeks." He paused. "Every single one. Over four years." He turned another corner. "I filed the report. They identified the player and the player died." He stopped walking.
They had reached a wider space in the maintenance layer, a junction where several non-navigable passages met. Low ceiling, flat light. Enough room for all five of them to stand without pressing against each other.
Padrin turned around. His face was the same bland unremarkable face it had been in the passage, but something underneath it had changed. The practiced anonymity was still there but it was sitting on top of something rawer now that he had stopped moving and stopped having to concentrate on navigation.
"I have been helping kill people for four years," he said. "Without knowing that was what I was doing." He looked at Renne specifically. "I placed a bounty on you three days ago that was designed to get you erased. Because you were seen near an anomaly." He held her gaze. "I'm not asking for anything. I'm telling you what I did so you understand why I'm here."
Renne looked at him for a long moment. The expression on her face was not warm or forgiving and was also not closed. It was the expression of someone taking in information and deciding what weight to give it.
"The fourteen people," she said quietly.
Padrin didn't know what that meant. Caius did.
"We keep moving later," Orven said from the junction's edge. He had positioned himself near the passage they'd come through, watching the direction they'd come from. "Right now I want to hear about the network node."
Padrin looked at him, then at Caius. "The network has a physical anchor in the Surface Tier. I've known about it for two years. I was never given the location directly but I built it from context, from the routing patterns in the communications, from the response time data when I filed reports." He reached into his pack and produced a folded piece of paper. Not System-generated, handwritten. He held it out to Caius. "I wrote down what I worked out six months ago. When I first started suspecting something was wrong." He paused. "I kept it because I thought I might need it someday."
Caius took the paper. He unfolded it and ead the location written in Padrin's careful hand.
He pushed the Seam Read toward that location from inside the maintenance tunnel, using the junction's relatively clear architecture as a reading point. The Seam Read found the location immediately.
He went cold, not the manageable cold of encountering something dangerous. The specific cold of a fact arriving that recontextualizes everything that came before it, all at once, too fast to process properly.
"What?" Renne said. She was watching his face.
He looked at the paper, at the address, at the Seam Read showing him what was there, the architecture of the network node sitting in the world's structure directly below a building he knew, below a room he had sat in, below a terminal that had been running for three hundred years trying to fix a problem too large for it.
"The node," he said. His voice came out even, which was an effort. "The Architect's network anchor."
"Where is it?" Renne said.
He looked at her.
"It's beneath Duveth's shop," he said. "Directly beneath the error handler."
The junction was very quiet. Imra looked at the floor beneath their feet, the instinctive response to information about what was below something. Orven turned from his watch position and looked at Caius with an expression that was rearranging itself around the new information.
Renne looked at Caius and he looked at her, they both understood at the same moment what it meant.
The error handler had been running for three hundred years, quietly trying to fix the System's failures, generating the corrupted zones, preserving the deleted content. Duveth had been maintaining it alone for two centuries and forty years, sitting above it, keeping it alive.
And directly below it, this whole time, something else had been running too, using the handler's process noise as cover. Listening to everything that happened in that room.
"Duveth," Renne said quietly.
"Yes," Caius said.
"Everything we said in that room."
"Yes."
She closed her eyes for exactly one second and opened them. "We need to get back there."
"Yes," he said. "Now.”