This Is Not a Game Read online

“Good luck with that.”

  “You sound skeptical.”

  An indistinct anxiety entered Charlie’s tone. “I don’t know how much luck anybody can have in Indonesia. You know the currency collapsed today, right?”

  “Yeah. But I’ve got credit cards, some dollars, and a ticket out of town.”

  Charlie gave it a moment’s thought.

  “You’ll probably be all right,” he said. “But if there’s any trouble, I want you to contact me.”

  “I will,” Dagmar said.

  Dagmar had the feeling that most employees of multimillionaire bosses-even youthful ones-did not quite have the easy relationship that she shared with Charlie. But she’d known him since before he was a multimillionaire, since he was a sophomore in college. She’d seen him hunched over a console in computer lab, squinting into Advanced D &D manuals, and loping around the Caltech campus in a faded Hawaiian shirt, stained Dockers, and flip-flops.

  It was difficult to conjure, in retrospect, the deference that Charlie’s millions demanded. Nor, to his credit, did Charlie demand it.

  “If it’s any consolation,” Charlie said, “I’ve been looking online, and Golden Nagi looks like a huge hit.”

  Dagmar relaxed against her pillows and sipped her drink.

  “It was The Maltese Falcon,” she said, “with a bit of The Sign of Four thrown in.”

  “The players didn’t know that, though.”

  “No. They didn’t.”

  Being able to take credit for the recycled plots of great writers was one of her job’s benefits. Over the past few years she’d adapted Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors (with clones), The Libation Bearers, The Master and Margarita (with aliens), King Solomon’s Mines, and It’s a Wonderful Life (with zombies).

  She proudly considered that having the zombies called into being by the Lionel Barrymore character was a perfect example of a metaphor being literalized.

  “When you revealed that the Rani was in fact the Nagi,” Charlie said, “the players collectively pissed their pants.”

  “I’d rather they creamed their jeans.”

  “That, too. Anyway,” Charlie said, “I’ve got your next job set up for when you get back.”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “I want you thinking about it,” said Charlie. “When you’re on the beach in Bali looking some Aussie guy in the glutes, I want you distracted by exciting new plots buzzing through your brain.”

  “Oh yeah, Charlie,” sipping, “I’m going to have all sorts of plots going through my mind, you bet.”

  “Have you ever heard of Planet Nine?”

  “Nope.”

  “A massively multiplayer online role-playing game that burned through their funding in the development stage. They were just about to do the beta release when their bank foreclosed on them and found that all they’d repossessed was a lease on an office and a bunch of software they didn’t have a clue about.”

  Dagmar was surprised. “They were getting their start-up funding from a bank? Not a venture capital outfit?”

  “A bank very interested in exploiting the new rules allowing them to invest in such things.”

  “Serves them right,” Dagmar judged.

  “Them and the bank.” Cheerfully. “So I heard from Austin they were looking for a sugar daddy, and I bought the company from the bank for eleven point three cents on the dollar. I’ve rehired the original team minus the fuckups who caused all the problems, and beta testing’s going to begin in the next few days.”

  Alarms clattered in Dagmar’s head. “You’re not going to want me to write for them, are you?”

  “God, no,” Charlie said. “They’ve got a head writer who’s good-Tom Suzuki, if you know him-and he’s putting his own team in place.”

  Dagmar relaxed. She already had the perfect game-writing job; she didn’t want something less exciting.

  She sipped her drink. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Planet Nine is going to launch in October. I want an ARG to generate publicity.”

  “Ah.” Dagmar gazed with satisfaction into her future. “So you’re going to be your own client.”

  “That’s right.”

  Charlie had done this once before, when work for Great Big Idea had been scarce. He’d paid his game company to create some buzz for his software company-buzz that hadn’t precisely been necessary, since the software end of Charlie’s business was doing very well on its own. But Dagmar had been able to build a plot around Charlie’s latest generation of autonomous software agents, and she’d been able to keep her team employed, so the entire adventure had been satisfactory.

  This time, however, there were plenty of paying customers sniffing around, so Charlie must really want Planet Nine to fly.

  “So what’s this Planet Nine again?” she asked.

  “It’s an alternate history RPG,” Charlie said. “It’s sort of a Flash Gordon slash Skylark of Space 1930s, where Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto on schedule, only it turned out to be an Earthlike planet full of humanoids.”

  “Out beyond Neptune? The humanoids would be under tons of methane ice.”

  “Volcanoes and smog and radium projectors are keeping the place warm, apparently.”

  Dagmar grinned. “Uh-huh.”

  “So along with the folks on Planet Nine, there are dinosaurs and Neolithic people on Venus, and a decadent civilization sitting around the canals on Mars, and on Earth you’ve got both biplanes and streamlined Frank R. Paul spaceships with lots of portholes. So Hitler is going into space in what look like big zeppelins with swastikas on the fins, and he’s in a race with the British and French and the Japanese and the New Deal, and there’s plenty of adventure for everybody.”

  “Sounds like a pretty crowded solar system.”

  “There’s a reason these people went broke creating it.”

  Dagmar took a lingering sip of her drink. She’d always had an idea that writing space opera would be fun, but had never steered her talent in that particular direction.

  The writers of ARGs were almost always drawn from the ranks of disappointed science fiction writers. It was odd that there hadn’t been more space opera from the beginning.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But not while I’m nursing an umbrella drink and watching the Aussie guys at the beach.”

  Charlie sighed audibly. “All right, you’re allowed to have some good dirty fun on your vacation. But not too much, mind you.”

  “Right.”

  “And here’s something else to think about. I’m giving you twice the budget you had for Golden Nagi.”

  Dagmar felt her own jaw drop. She looked at the carbonation rising in her glass and put the glass down on the plastic table.

  “What are you telling me?” she said.

  “I’m telling you,” said Charlie, “that the sky’s the limit on this one. If you tell me you need to send a camera crew off to Planet Nine to take pictures, then I’ll seriously consider it.”

  “I-” Dagmar began.

  “Consider it a present for doing such a good job these past few years,” Charlie said. She could sense Charlie’s smile on the other end of the phone.

  “Think of it,” he said, “as a vacation that never ends.”

  Hanseatic says: I was so totally floored when it was revealed that the Rani had really been the Nagi all along.

  Hippolyte says: Ye flippin gods! SHE was an IT!

  Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says: I was expecting this. The players’ guide turning out to be the villain has been a trope ever since Bard’s Tale II.

  Hippolyte says: The Rani isn’t the villain!

  Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says: Of course she is. Who put the curse on all those people, I ask you?

  “We heard a rumor that the airlines can’t afford to buy jet fuel any longer,” the Dutch woman said the next morning. “Not if they’re paying in rupiah.”

  Dagmar considered this. “The foreign airlines should be all r
ight,” she said. “They can pay in hard currency.”

  The Dutch woman seemed dubious. “We’ll see,” she said.

  The Dutch woman-horse-faced and blue-eyed, like a twenty-first-century Eleanor Roosevelt-was half of an elderly couple from Nijmegen who came to Indonesia every year on vacation and had been due to leave the previous evening on a flight that had been canceled. They and Dagmar were waiting for the office of the hotel concierge to open, the Dutch couple to rebook, and Dagmar to confirm her own tickets. A line of the lost and stranded formed behind them: Japanese, Javanese, Europeans, Americans, Chinese, all hoping to do nothing more than get out of town.

  Dagmar had checked news reports that morning and found that the government had frozen all bank accounts to prevent capital flight and had limited the amount of money anyone could withdraw over the course of a single day to something like fifty dollars in American money.

  A government spokesman suggested the crash was the fault of Chinese speculators. The governments in other Asian countries were nervous and were bolstering their own currencies.

  The concierge arrived twenty minutes late. The shiny brass name tag on his neat blue suit gave his name as Mr. Tong. He looked a youthful forty, and Dagmar could see that the cast of his features was somehow different from that of the majority of people Dagmar had met in Indonesia. She realized he was Chinese.

  “I’m very sorry,” Tong said as he keyed open his office. “The manager called a special meeting.”

  It took Mr. Tong half an hour to fail to solve the problems of the Dutch couple. Dagmar stepped into the glass-walled office and took a seat. She gave Mr. Tong her tickets and asked if he could confirm her reservations with the airline.

  “I’m afraid not.” His English featured broad Australian vowels. “The last word was that the military has seized both airports.”

  She hesitated for a moment.

  “How can people leave?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid they can’t.” He took on a confidential look. “I hear that the generals are trying to prevent the government from fleeing the country. There’s a rumor that the head of the Bank of Indonesia was arrested at the airport with a suitcase full of gold bars.”

  “Ferries? Trains?”

  “I’ve been through all that with the couple who were here ahead of you. Everything’s closed down.”

  And where would I take a train anyway? Dagmar wondered.

  Mr. Tong took her name and room number and promised to let her know if anything changed. Dagmar walked to the front desk and told them she’d be staying another night, then tried to work out what to do next.

  Have breakfast, she thought.

  The dry monsoon had driven out the rain clouds of the previous day, and the sky was a deep, cloudless tropical blue. Dagmar had breakfast on the third-floor terrace and sat beneath a broad umbrella to gaze out at the surrounding office towers and tall hotels, all glowing in the brilliant tropical sun. Other towers were under construction, each silhouette topped by a crane. A swimming pool sat in blue splendor just beyond the terrace. It was about as perfect as a day in the tropics could be.

  Her fruit platter arrived, brought by a very starched and correct waiter, and Dagmar immersed herself in the wonder of it. She recognized lychee and jackfruit, but everything else was new. The thing that looked like an orange tasted unlike any orange she’d ever had. Everything else was wonderful and fresh and splendid. The croissant that accompanied the platter-a perfectly acceptable croissant in any other circumstances-was bland and stale by comparison. The meal was almost enough to make Dagmar forget she was stuck in a foreign city that she’d never intended to visit and that had just fallen into economic ruin as surely as if all the great, glittering buildings around her had crumbled into dust.

  What happened to you, she wondered as she looked up at the steel-and-glass buildings around her, when your money was suddenly worthless? How could you buy food, or fuel for your car? How could anyone pay you for your labor?

  No wonder her taxi driver had been so happy to get American money. With dollars he could feed his family.

  On her journey she had taken two hundred dollars with her in cash, for use in emergencies. With that money, she realized, she was better off than all but a handful of the twenty-five million people living in Jakarta.

  After finishing her coffee, she decided that since she was stuck in Jakarta, she might as well enjoy the place as much as she could. She returned to her room to change clothes. She put on a cotton skirt and a long-sleeved silk shirt she’d brought with her from the States, an outfit she hoped would be suitable for a Muslim country.

  She considered buying clothes here, but all she had was the $180. The dollars, she thought, she should definitely save for emergencies.

  She left a hundred of the dollars tucked into her luggage and put the rest, along with her remaining Indian rupees, in a fanny pack. Then she put a hat on her head-a panama, with a black ribbon, that had been woven by machine of some new plastic version of straw. She could roll it up into a tube and stuff it in her luggage-which you could do with a genuine straw panama as well, but this at one-tenth the price.

  It set off her gray hair very nicely. Her hair had started going gray when she was seventeen, and by the time she entered college the last of her dark brown hair had turned. She hadn’t minded much at the time-the look had been eye-catching, especially since her eyebrows had remained dark for an interesting contrast, and when she got tired of it, the gray hair was easy to dye a whole rainbow of colors. Eventually she’d grown fond of the gray and decided not to color it any longer. It was a decision that, now that she’d just passed thirty, she was comfortable with, though she reserved the right to change her mind as her biological age caught up with the age of her hair.

  It amused her that some people, in an effort to be kind, called her an ash blond.

  A younger version of the previous night’s Sikh doorman let her out of the hotel and offered to summon a cab. She said that she’d walk, and he wished her a good morning.

  As she set off down the street, she wondered if there was some kind of Brotherhood of Sikh Doormen that had somehow monopolized jobs in many of the big Asian hotels. Perhaps, she thought, that could be an element in some future game-Sikh doormen in various Asian cities would all be part of some conspiracy, and players would have to try to cadge information from them.

  No, she thought. Too elaborate. And auditioning Sikh doormen to find out which of them could act would be a time-consuming process.

  The dry monsoon had failed to blow away the equatorial heat, and the sun was fierce, but tall trees had been planted on either side of the road to provide shade. She used a flyover to cross four lanes of Jakarta’s insane traffic. The air had the fried-fritter smell of biodiesel mixed with the scent of hot asphalt.

  The area was dominated by office towers and hotels, but there were smaller buildings in between with shops and eateries. Billboards and neon signs advertised Yamaha bikes, Anker Bir, and Chandra handsets, the appearance of which made Dagmar smile. Celebrities endorsed beauty products and whiskeys. Street food was available-Dagmar imagined the vendors had to sell their seafood and meats before they spoiled. The smaller shops were open-the single owner, or members of his family, looked out at the street, face impassive-but the medium-size stores, the ones that couldn’t make their payroll in the current situation, were closed. Even in the shade the heat was appalling, so Dagmar stepped into a building that had been converted into a kind of vertical shopping mall, and wandered around in cool air for a while. The international chains, Bok-Bok Toys and Van Cleef and Arpels, were open; the smaller, locally owned businesses, the camera and clothing stores, were closed. There seemed to be few customers in any case, and the goods available for purchase weren’t anything Dagmar couldn’t get at home.

  She paused for a moment at an indoor skating rink, a few young people in tropical clothing making lazy circles to the sounds of 1970s American pop.

  Back to the heat and the traff
ic. She made a random turn onto a boulevard shaded by rows of cone-shaped trees, where a series of blocky old office buildings stood with their window air conditioners humming. There was a lot of green in Jakarta-trees, bushes, tropical ferns, and more palms than in L.A. She made another turn and found herself heading toward some kind of square or park-or maybe just a big, empty parking lot. Dagmar saw the open area was filled with people, and that many of them were carrying angry-looking signs and banners; she made a U-turn just as a pair of police vans turned down the street, each filled with men in blue uniforms and white helmets and crossbelts.

  Dagmar increased her pace, not about to get between the police and a bunch of pissed-off citizens.

  A few blocks away, music boomed out over the street, louder than the traffic. The sound came from a music and video store. The music thundering from its speakers was propulsive: layers of Indian tabla; a harmony line drawn by a chiming synthesizer, a metallic sound influenced by the gamelan; and on top of it all a bubbly 1950s-style pop vocal. Dagmar was completely charmed.

  She stepped into the narrow store. Local films glowed from plasma screens, all heroic action, men with bare, blood-spattered torsos, headbands, and krises. The walls were covered with movie posters and pictures of pop stars. There was a row of terminals where customers could download music into portable storage, for transfer into whatever media later suited them.

  The fact that this store existed at all told her that most Indonesians still made do with dial-up, assuming that they had Internet at all.

  A young man with a Frankie Avalon haircut sat behind a counter up front. Dagmar gave him a nod, and he nodded back, an expression of surprise on his face. Clearly he didn’t see a lot of tourists in here.

  Beneath the glass counter were interchangeable plastic cartridges of fuel for miniturbines and a lot of cheap memory storage, sticks and slabs and buttons with pop culture symbols: peace signs, the faces of pop stars and anime characters, popular heroes like Bruce Lee, Che Guevara, and Osama bin Laden, and of course the ubiquitous Playboy rabbit.

  It’s a sad world, Dagmar thought, when you have to choose between Osama and Hugh Hefner.