The valley pixelated around him. The world vanished, then reformed a moment later. He was in a rectangular room, the ceiling thirty or forty feet above him. The room was maybe fifty feet on a side, with walls of dark stone.
Sam turned in a slow circle, taking it in. There were no doors or windows that he could see. Light glowed from half a dozen lanterns hanging from metal brackets along the walls. They illuminated a bare stone floor, a desk and chair in one corner, and a long table with a few random objects scattered on it.
As big surprises went, it didn't amount to much.
“Hello, Roger.”
Sam jumped and spun around, looking in every direction. Unless someone was crouching behind the desk, he was alone. “Who said that?”
“It's me, Roger.”
“Right.” Sam shook his head. “I need you to be a little more specific.”
“I am ABX Five, the AI you created to manage your Fortress of Solitude. You generally address me as Abby.”
“Abby, huh? You sound like a dude.”
Abby didn't reply.
“Fortress of Solitude, like Superman has?” Sam looked around the little room. “I think Superman's is better.” He walked over to the table. “What's this stuff?”
“Those are your possessions.”
“Great.” Sam grinned. “Who am I, by the way?”
“You are Roger Chan, my creator and the creator of the fortress.”
“Really?” Sam chuckled. “How do you know?”
“You are here,” Abby replied. “No one else comes here.”
A worrisome thought popped into Sam's head. Roger Chan might not be too impressed to find a stranger in his hideout. “How often do I come here?”
If Abby thought the question was odd he didn't let on. “There is no easily summarized pattern to your visits.”
“Well, then, when was I last here?”
“Your last visit was ninety-six days ago.”
More than three months. Chan was hardly likely to show up in the next few minutes, then. “Why did he …. Why did I create this place? Why did I create you?”
“I do not know.”
“You know, for an NPC you don't have much character.”
Abby didn't respond. That's probably for the best, Roger thought. He examined the items on the table. There was a bright red baseball cap, a long wooden stick, a cup, and a silver ball no more than an inch and a half across. A dark rectangle turned out to be a leather jacket, neatly folded. A pair of sunglasses sat beside the jacket.
He picked up the hat and squinted at it, checking for item information. Hat of Obscuring appeared in white text above the cap.
“Hey, Abby? What does this hat do?”
“Mostly it sits there.”
“Thanks, Abby. That was real helpful.” Maybe it was a hat of invisibility, like that cloak in Harry Potter. In fact, it might save his neck if Roger Chan showed up.
He put it on.
He could still see his own hands, but maybe he was invisible to everyone else? “Abby? Can you see me?”
“No, Roger.”
Yes! Wait. “Could you see me before?”
“No, Roger. I get a system message when you arrive and when you depart. I can hear you when you speak, and of course I know when you type directly into my interface. But I cannot see you.”
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Sam squinted at the table. The long stick was apparently a Staff of Promotion, whatever that meant. Sam picked it up and waved it around, pointing at things and saying, “Promote!”
Nothing happened that he could see.
The leather jacket was a Coat X59, which was complete gibberish as far as Sam was concerned. The silver ball didn't even have a name, just a string of digits for a label. The cup just said Cup. The sunglasses claimed to be Shades of Perception, but nothing changed when he put them on.
He walked over to the desk and sat down. It was an ordinary featureless piece of furniture. The drawers refused to open when he tugged on them, and the top of the desk was bare. He tapped drawers with the staff, to no effect. Finally he just leaned back in the chair, propped his feet on the desk, and said, “What the hell is this place?”
“This is your Fortress of Solitude.”
“Thank you, Abby.”
“You're welcome, Roger.”
For a time he had wondered if this was someone's personal storage. Personal storage wasn't supposed to have an actual physical location in the game, but perhaps some glitch in the programming had given him access to one. But why would a locker have its own AI? And the sunglasses and cap were modern. The jacket had a zipper. None of it belonged in the medieval fantasy realm of the Crystal Worlds.
“Mysterious,” he said aloud. “Abby, where is this place? Where in the Crystal Worlds? What continent are we on?”
“We are in Galway.”
The same continent Sam spawned in by default, in other words. The continent where he mined teleportation stones. Looks like my mystery stone didn't take me very far. “Can you be more specific?”
A map appeared, projected in the air above him. He saw the continent of Galway in incredible detail, stretching from wall to wall. The map expanded, zooming in and in until he saw a flashing green circle marking his current location. By the look of it, the Fortress of Solitude was maybe a hundred and fifty miles from his valley. It was in wilderness, a good ten or fifteen miles from the nearest settlement.
“Abby, can you zoom in further?”
The AI complied, increasing the scale until Sam could see individual trees on the sides of rolling green hills. He stood and walked around the desk, moving closer to the red circle. He stood directly beneath the place that marked his current location.
According to the map, there was nothing there. In fact, it was on the side of a fairly steep hill. Even if the map was simply out of date, there was simply no place to build a room like this.
“This place must have a secret door or something. Can you tell me where it is?”
“Can you rephrase the query?”
Sam made a frustrated sound. “Does the Fortress of Solitude have a door?”
“No.”
“Is there any way to get in or out besides teleporting?”
“I do not believe so.”
Sam stopped looking at the map and looked through it instead. The ceiling above him appeared to be made of stone, the same stone as the walls and floor. He knelt, examining the floor more closely. It was not stone tiles, not flagstones, not blocks of stone carefully fitted together. It was one smooth stone surface, as if the floor had been carved into solid rock.
He walked to the nearest wall, squatted, and stared at the point where floor and wall met. The stone had a hint of a pattern, swirls of brown just a shade lighter than the surrounding rock. He traced the outline of one swirl as it moved down the wall and continued across the floor.
He stood. “Abby.”
“Yes, Roger?”
“Are we underground?”
“Yes. This room is approximately six hundred feet below the surface of the ground.”
Roger shook his head. “What in the world?”
“I believe that was a rhetorical question.”
“Yes, Abby, thank you.” Roger rubbed his chin, baffled. There was no way to access this place. No way except teleportation, and no way to choose it as a destination. The name was a string of digits, the meaningless jumble of characters on the mystery stone he'd found. It wouldn't appear on any menu of locations. But the game computer knew it existed. As people dug in the gravel, the computer generated an endless stream of stones, each with a random destination. The Fortress of Solitude existed. Therefore its number eventually came up.
“This room.” Sam could hear the awe in his voice. “It's not for players. Some programmer made this for his own purposes.” Not some programmer. Roger Chan. “Hey, Abby? What can you tell me about Roger Chan?”
A player stat sheet appeared in the air in front of him. It showed Chan's avatar, a burly Asian man with permanently scowling eyebrows. He was Level 80, with almost a hundred Health Points, a hundred and five Strength, ninety Endurance, and ninety-nine Intelligence. Sam whistled. Chan was a formidable character.
Which made sense, he supposed. The man was clearly a programmer, and he was screwing around inside the game. “How much do you want to bet he didn't get those levels by grinding?”
“Can you rephrase the question?” Abby asked.
“Never mind. You know, Abby, I think Roger has been cheating.” Except, none of his numbers were maxed out. If he was going to cheat, why stop at Level 80? Why not go for 99, the upper limit built into the game?
Because the game's top players would attract attention, he realized. Joining the very elite, a group that contained well under one percent of all players, would probably trigger all kinds of scrutiny. Chan had made himself badass without pointing a giant flashing arrow at himself.
“This is pretty cool,” he told Abby. “I've found a cheater's hideout. So why isn’t there an Epic-class sword, or a suit of armor that's impervious to everything?” He looked down at himself. “Instead I get the Fonz's jacket and a pair of sunglasses.”
And a hat, he reminded himself. A hat that might just make him invisible. He opened his inventory and took out the yellow teleportation stone. “I'm off to test the hat,” he said to Abby. “Don’t wait up.” He activated the stone's menu, scrolled through the destinations, chose Castlegar, and watched the Fortress of Solitude disappear.