Richard himself was not a user of the calendar app. He did most of his T’Rain questing solo, or in the company of one or two old friends, and so he didn’t need it; and the mere idea of needing to schedule his time that carefully made him dispirited. He used his phone for stuff like that, and the calendar app’s integration to the phone was clunky and not really worth putting up with. Even if it had worked, it just would have meant more crap showing up on his schedule, and fewer of the perfectly empty days that always gave him such a nice little endorphin rush when they appeared, as if by some act of divine grace, on his screen. Consequently, he was in no danger of being infected by REAMDE. And so, the morning after Peter and Zula had gone back to Seattle, when Richard woke up in his big, round, quasi-medieval bedchamber at the Schloss and checked his corporate email account, he was able to view the weekend’s spate of escalating SECURITY ALERT messages with some kind of detachment. There was a new virus; it was called REAMDE ( sic ), which was an accidental or deliberate/ironical misspelling of README; it had been simmering for a few weeks now, and in the last few days it had gone exponential, as these things commonly did. It was a consequence, really, of APPIS, and of all Richard’s efforts to turn T’Rain into a Profit Center above and beyond the mere world of hard-core gamers. As such, it was perfectly all right from a business and marketing standpoint; it would only generate stories in the tech press about how T’Rain had made the jump from a mere niche product for the prohibitively geeky to a business productivity app that mundanes felt that they had to have, along with their Excel and their PowerPoint, and Richard could already predict that at their next quarterly meeting they would see, in retrospect, a surge in sales precisely tracking the spike in free publicity generated by the advent of this terrible virus.