He knew why they had come to Shenzhen—to send hard money back to their families in rural China. So much rested on the shoulders of these young women. They might be the only hope of a family that had borrowed heavily to send them here. Failure might mean the loss of the family home. That burden gave a sense of deadly seriousness to their labor—particularly since the global economy had recently started to fray at the edges, and layoffs were a daily occurrence throughout the city.
Ross knew that the same migration was occurring all around the world. In a land of borderless markets, individual farmers could no longer compete with industrial farms on price. The land was being depopulated, landholdings aggregated for efficient management by farm machinery, leaving the surplus labor little choice but to depart to the cities and seek work in industry. The same was true in India, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Even America. It was the largest migration in human history. All in the pursuit of high-efficiency, low-cost production.
And it was that very efficiency that made the system vulnerable to the Daemon. The same uniform networks that moved money and information between markets in fractions of a second also allowed the simple bots of the Daemon to masquerade as high-level management strategy, ordering the manufacture and delivery of goods—and deleting the evidence. State-of-the-art, just-in-time management systems had enabled a silent revolution in more ways than one.
Such was the post-Sobol world.
Ross’s car cleared the crowded main road and turned down an empty lane between factory buildings with tall banks of windows. The workers seemed to be walking a beeline between points, and not one of them detoured down this lane. Ross’s car approached an unmarked steel door where a glowing, catlike eye hovered in D-Space to mark his destination. It would be invisible to nondarknet members.
He tapped his driver on the shoulder and pointed. The moment the car stopped, Ross exited.
He stood in the fire lane before the featureless door. There was no handle and no hinges on this side. The metal looked capable of stopping rifle rounds. Ross adjusted his second-generation HUD glasses—smaller and more businesslike than earlier models—and looked up at the glowing, three-dimensional eye, floating in D-Space above the doorway. A spectral object that only existed in virtual space. He glanced back at the black Buick, still parked nearby. He motioned for the driver to depart and nodded in response to the driver’s quizzical expression. The driver shrugged, wrote down an entry in his logbook, and drove off.
Ross watched the car go, then reached into his suit jacket pocket and removed a small silver amulet set with a single green cat’s-eye stone. It matched the symbol hovering above the door. He positioned the amulet in his line of sight in the HUD glasses so that it matched the glowing symbol in both size and orientation, and carefully held it there. He then spoke slowly in a language that only existed in the online game world created by Matthew Sobol—the language of the creators. “De abolonos—fi theseo va—temposum—gara semulo—va cavrotos.”
At the intonation of the last syllable, a bright light began to glow from his amulet. He was certain it was only a D-Space light, one that did not exist in the real world. Nonetheless, it was real to him, and so he squinted his eyes against the glow of pico projectors in his glasses as a bright tracery appeared in D-Space around the doorway. The white lines curled and expanded, forming the outline of an ornate gate that blazed with white light, emanating from the seams of the real-world door. In a moment he heard a click, and the real-world door opened slowly, spilling forth D-Space light.
Ross lowered the amulet, and shielded his eyes as he walked through the gate. His hand blocked nothing, because the light came from within his glasses. Realizing his mistake, he flipped up his HUD lenses and soon found himself standing in a small factory room lined with shelves piled high with electrical components. Ross could hear the roar of powerful electric motors, as well as the crack and pop of automated welding machinery in the factory beyond. But here in this small room, two armed and uniformed Chinese factory guards stood before him, staring hard with arms folded. The steel door behind him slammed shut.
Ross flipped his HUD lenses back down and saw darknet call-outs hovering above both men. They weren’t only security guards—they were ninth-level Fighters with four-star reputation scores, from the Dark Rose faction. Hard-core operatives who could summon a flash mob at a moment’s notice. D-Space call-outs identified the one on the right as Sentinel949. The one on the left was Warder_13. Ross knew his own call-out showed him to be a sixth-level Rogue with a four-and-half-star reputation, but he noticed Warder_13 clicking through Ross’s achievement log, and examining his current quest, while Sentinel949 just looked him up and down.
That’s when Ross noticed that the Dark Rose faction was an Order of Merritt signatory—as denoted by the flame on its logo. He smiled to himself, marveling at how far Roy Merritt’s fame had spread. The Order of Merritt was a spontaneously evolved standard of conduct with a rigorous ethical requirement. Ross knew he’d be treated fairly here.
Warder_13 spoke to Ross in what sounded like Mandarin. A moment later Ross heard a woman’s voice in his ear translating the warrior’s words: “Rakh, they say you were friends with the Burning Man. That you were there the day he died.”
Ross nodded. “Roy was as decent and courageous as anyone can be. I was fortunate to have known him.”
Warder_13 and Sentinel949 nodded appreciatively.
Sentinel949 asked, “Why have you come through the Maker’s Gate?”
“I’ve come to forge a masterwork.” The Mandarin translation of Ross’s words followed moments later.
Sentinel949 raised an eyebrow. “A masterwork? Which one?”
“The Rings of Aggys.”
The guards exchanged looks. Warder_13 clicked through objects in midair that only he could see. “This is a serious item. You have the prerequisites?”
Ross nodded. “I do.”
“Not just the network credits, but the elements as well.”
“I took the nine quests and have all the pieces. PlineyElder should be expecting me.” Ross put a leather dispatch case on a nearby desk and opened it. He withdrew an ornate wooden box above which nine small D-Space call-outs crowded one another. He handed the box to Sentinel949.
The guard opened it and could see nine pieces of jewelry, eight half-rings of titanium—four of them smaller than the others—and a single crystal. They were all stored in foam receptacles. Each had a separate D-Space call-out. He examined them and nodded to his colleague. “The elements are genuine.”
“The aspirant clears the reputation limit and has the necessary credits.”
“He has passed the necessary class specialties.”
Warder_13 spoke clearly and with official ceremony when he declared, “The aspirant has all the elements of the Rings of Aggys. The masterwork can be attempted.” Ross knew that voice recognition bots were listening to the announcement, and that keywords in this statement would activate the next stage in the process.
The guards motioned for Ross to follow as they headed across the storeroom and unlocked a large interior door. Ross grabbed his dispatch case and followed. One of them handed Ross a red hard hat with built-in hearing protectors from a rack on the wall. Ross donned it as the guards put on white hard hats of their own.
Warder_13 pointed to the headphones and spoke again. Moments later the translation came through Ross’s bone-conduction mic, despite the loud noise. “Don’t take your earphones off. It gets loud in there.”
Ross nodded, and they opened the steel door onto a vast manufacturing floor filled with zapping and popping industrial welding robots. Two engineers wearing bright green coveralls and white hard hats were waiting for them at the first row of machines. Call-outs above the men’s heads identified them as a tenth-level Sorcerer named PlineyElder and a ninth-level Fabricator named WuzzGart.