Daemon

driveways. Once out of the cone of the streetlight, he slowed to five mph and scanned the darkness for … he didn’t know what. Bare birch trees lined the road on the left, while a ditch and a riot of thornbushes ran along the right. Gragg turned off his headlights and put the car in park. He took his foot off the brake to prevent the brake lights from giving away his location to anyone driving along the main road.
    Gragg fumbled around in the darkness and found his rucksack. He unzipped it and pulled out night vision goggles. Untangling the headband, he then pulled them over his head and powered them up. He scanned the terrain ahead in the green glow of the viewfinder.
    The edge of a single-story cinder-block building was visible a couple of hundred feet down the road. There were no lights there. A single, thick chain spanned the road fifty feet ahead, secured to two steel posts. A metal No TRESPASSING sign hung down at its lowest point.
    Gragg looked at the GPS unit. He was still one decimal off. He put the car in gear and, with some trepidation, let it roll forward without putting his foot on the gas. He scanned from side to side, looking for anything that wasn’t a plant or a rock. He finally reached the chain and put the car in park again. He glanced at the GPS unit.
    He was on station.
    Gragg hesitated for a moment, then turned off the engine. Suddenly he could hear the woods. He heard the clattering of naked tree branches in the wind. Leaves scraped across the gravel road with each gust. The interior of the car cooled rapidly.
    Gragg pulled the Glock 9mm pistol out of his rucksack and then freed the pistol from its holster. He placed it on the bench seat beside him.
    What the fuck am I doing out here?
    It was starting to seem like a really bad idea. He was running blind, and that was definitely something Brian Gragg did not like. It ran against his nature. He scanned the trees and the desolate-looking cinder-block building again.
    How did this place have anything to do with the Monte Cassino map? There wasn’t any light out here. Was there even electricity? Gragg craned his neck to look up through the windshield and accidentally bumped the single night vision lens against the glass. He straightened the goggles and looked again. An electrical feed line ran along the road on the left side. Narrow utility poles of gray, cracked wood supported it every hundred feet or so.
    Following the line with his eyes, Gragg noticed something interesting ahead: a fairly tall antenna was bolted to the side of the cinder-block building. He could see the mast rising above the roof.
    Gragg took a deep breath. He was jittery. Time to concentrate. He pulled his laptop bag from the backseat and cleared space on the seat beside him. He put the pistol on the dashboard, then unzipped the laptop bag. He unpacked his laptop and booted up, flipping up the tiny antenna on the wireless card. He was temporarily blinded as the screen lit up, and he hurriedly stripped off the night vision goggles.
    While the laptop booted up, he kept looking around in the darkness. He could actually see pretty well once his eyes adjusted. There was some moonlight.
    After what seemed an eternity, the logon dialog came up, and a minute later Gragg launched NetStumbler. The program scanned for access points. In a moment, he was surprised to see a familiar SSID appear:
Monte_Cassino
.
    The signal appeared to originate from the cinder-blockbuilding. Gragg’s jitters returned. Had he really done this? He tried to calm his rising fear. What was he doing? He thought about it.
    There was an
OTR
server here.
    He configured his Wi-Fi card to use the SSID, and soon Gragg obtained an IP address on the unsecured network. He didn’t even bother to explore. Instead, he closed NetStumbler and ripped open his CD case. He flipped through the CD-Rs until he found one marked with felt pen ‘OTR.’ He slid the CD into the laptop’s drive and launched
Over the Rhine
. He clicked quickly past the opening screens, then selected multiplayer mode. He let the game scan for available servers. Only one appeared in the server list: the Houston Monte Cassino server. This was the one visible to his wireless card.
    Gragg smiled, then double-clicked on the name. The map started to load. Oddly, the weapon selection dialog box never appeared. Soon, Gragg’s avatar was standing, unarmed, in a trench at the base of the Monte Cassino mountain. Normally he’d work his way around to the