This Is Not a Game Page 5

  “You forgot to buy batteries,” Zan said. His voice betrayed absolutely no sense of humor.

  “Buy batteries,” Dagmar said. “Check.”

  “Don’t lose this number. I’ll send you email in a few minutes repeating everything I’ve said.”

  “Okay.”

  Zan said good-bye and hung up. Dagmar located his number in her phone’s memory and shifted it into the directory under the name Charlies Friend.

  Ten minutes later, Zan’s email turned up on her computer.

  Dagmar decided she might as well go find batteries.

  A woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought a few hours later. That would be a good place to start a story.

  You would have plenty of issues to deal with right away. Who was the woman, and why was she in the hotel room? Where was the hotel? What was going on outside? Was she in transit, in hiding, on the phone, in denial?

  Probably all four, Dagmar thought, and felt an uneasy pang of self-knowledge.

  The sad fact was that every sad fact in the world was the raw material for a story. Fiction thrived on desperation, on dejection, on violence. Every time you stepped outside the door, you could find a new subject. Every book and newspaper became research. Every act, no matter how sordid, and every tragedy, no matter how pointless, was matter for fiction-and in fiction, all tragedy has meaning and no action is random.

  So you start with the woman in the hotel room, Dagmar thought. And the reason she is there is that she has no place else to go.

  CHAPTER SIX This Is Not the BatCave

  The screen was full of chaotic movement, explosions, the clash of weapons. BJ’s fingers danced over the controller. The ice-cold Entropy Beast that hovered over the chamber exploded in a blast of flame, scattering chunks of frozen flesh-shrapnel and knocking down half a dozen Goblin Warriors and one Lawful Paladin.

  “No,” BJ said, “you can’t download all of ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ as a ring tone.”

  The Paladin sprang back to his feet and cut a Goblin Warrior in half with his Fire Sword.

  “No,” BJ said, “it doesn’t matter if your friend says he did it. You still can’t. If you have the right software, you can convert a sound file into a ring tone and download it from your own computer, but we don’t provide that service.”

  Explosions rocked the stone castle walls. BJ’s Elven Mage-who had the advantage of being invisible, at least as far as the other players were concerned-scuttled up the staircase and toward the glowing chest on the Altar of the Black Goddess.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said BJ. “Sorry I wasn’t able to help.”

  BJ worked in the darkest, most depressing dungeon of information technology, that of customer service. He spent his hours aiding the inept, the insane, and a very large population of compulsive liars. It was that last category that drove him into a fury-couldn’t any of these people tell the simple truth? They chanted their mantra-“I didn’t do anything”-when it was clear that they had been ravaging their own software with one deranged decision after another.

  Fortunately, Spud LLC-“Your source for user-friendly IT solutions”-didn’t much care that BJ ran his own little gold-farming projects on the side.

  “Let’s try this,” BJ said. “Try restarting your computer. If you still have a problem, call me back.”

  His Elven Mage was the first of the party to the casket on the Black Goddess’s altar. BJ knew that once he magicked open the casket, he had approximately thirty-four seconds before the Goddess Herself materialized in the chamber to lay waste to any intruders, whether they were invisible or not. BJ planned to be out of the room by then.

  “Your email program won’t respond to the password? Indulge me for a moment-have you checked to see if the Caps Lock key is on?”

  The Elven Mage touched the glowing casket. A balloon appeared in a corner of the screen. BJ moused to the balloon and typed in the Pre-Adamite spell that would open the casket. With the sound of flourishing trumpets-a sound that BJ hoped would be obscured from other players by the general sound of combat going on below-the glowing casket opened.

  The countdown had started.

  BJ clicked the Grab button, and the Elven Mage glommed the two items in the casket, a scroll of spells and the Orb of Healing. The spells on the scroll were low-level crap, but BJ could maybe trade the item for something more useful. The Orb of Healing, however, was the big prize on this level, and BJ wasn’t about to give it up.

  The Elven Mage scurried down the stairs and snaked through the battling warriors. The Paladin was still cleaving Goblins in twain. The Dwarf Twins were fighting to protect the Enchanter, who in turn was casting spells, fireballs exploding with little mushroom clouds like atomic bombs, and the Halfling was hanging around in the background and throwing flaming bottles of oil at the Goblins.

  If they were still in the room when the Dark Goddess showed up, they were all going to become extinct.

  BJ didn’t much care-he’d gotten what he came for, and if none of his party survived, there wouldn’t be any argument over how to split the loot.

  Besides, the Orb of Healing was unsplittable.

  “Let’s try restarting your computer,” BJ said. “If you still have a problem, call me back.”

  The Elven Mage ducked through the Gothic arch at the far end of the room and ran past the splintered bodies of two Guardian Gargoyles. Behind him, he heard the chiming chords that accompanied the appearance of the Dark Goddess, followed by the sounds of a lot of dying.

  Stupid noobs, BJ thought. And when the Dark Goddess disapparated, he could reenter the room and pick up the gold and possessions of his deceased companions.

  That Fire Sword would come in handy… for somebody.

  BJ had just made anywhere between six hundred and a thousand dollars-real dollars, not the virtual gold pieces used in the game. More if he could pick up the Fire Sword.

  BJ had played the Adventure of the Orb so many times that he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He could do it with perfect competence even when performing his customer service job. But though the adventure was by now tedious in the extreme, the tedium was worth it in terms of income.

  The fact was that there were a lot of players who didn’t want to play the lower levels of online games like World of Cinnabar. They wanted to start powerful characters right away and were willing to pay-pay real money-for those characters and for powerful magic items like the Orb of Healing. It was against the rules of the World of Cinnabar for money to be exchanged for these virtual items, but there was no practical way for game administrators-or those of any other MMORPG-to police eBay or the many other auction sites.

  The Orb alone, when auctioned online, would net BJ at least three hundred dollars. His Level Twelve Elven Mage, with all its loot and gear, would net him another three hundred. If he was lucky, the auction could go higher.

  Not bad for the thirty online hours it had taken to raise the Mage to his present level-even if competition from a thousand Chinese boiler-room gold farms had depressed prices.

  And besides, BJ’s old Chevy needed a new set of tires. And a paint job, but the tires came first.

  BJ’s job with Spud paid him enough to cover his nine-year-old car and an apartment that smelled both of mildew and of his ursoid roommate, a UCLA dropout and fellow Spud employee named Jacen-whose parents had named him, incidentally, after a character in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

  When he reflected on his apartment and his car and his job with Spud and compared it with what Charlie had, it made him want to sneak over to Santa Monica and slash Charlie’s tires.

  If he could actually come up with a Spell of Invisibility, he would do exactly that.

  But until then, it looked as if he was stuck with having to toil at the gold farm in order to make ends meet.

  CHAPTER SEVEN This Is Not the Whole Story

  At sixteen hundred hours, Dagmar was on the roof of the hotel. The top two floors were a series of suites and penthouses, and Dagmar needed a sp
ecial key card to go there. She’d had to get off the elevator a floor below and go up the stairs. To keep the riffraff out, the top two floors had the same key card locks as the elevator, but the roof door was not so equipped.

  By this time she was completely familiar with the hotel stairs. She’d followed Tomer Zan’s instructions and found her six escape routes from her room. By the time she was finished searching out staircases and finding out whether they led outside the hotel, she was tired and covered with sweat. This called for a shower, a change of clothes, and lunch. As the hour she’d chosen for lunch was completely random, she presumed that any hypothetical kidnappers were at least as confused as she was.

  She had looked up Zelazni Associates-she had at first spelled it Zelazny, like the writer-and discovered that it was an Israeli firm dedicated to “personal protection” and, it appeared, all things military. The word mercenary was nowhere on its Web site, but that’s what they were. Their offices were in Tel Aviv and South Carolina-nowhere, she observed, near Jakarta.

  She stood on the roof in the bright, humid daylight. The dry monsoon was from the north and carried the scent of burning Glodok, the bone and body fat of Chinese mothers and children. The roof had a fringe of the red tiles that were popular here, but most of it was a flat expanse of tar grown soft in the equatorial sun. The housing for the elevators and banks of solar cells and big ten-foot-tall aluminum boxes holding air-conditioning gear made the roof cluttered, so Dagmar made her way to the eastern side of the hotel tower and stood there in the bright sun for a long time, looking up. The tar oozed out beneath her feet, the hot sun prickled the side of her face, and she wished she’d been able to wear her panama. Every so often she brought her watch up into view, checked the time, and lowered her arm.

  When it was five minutes past the hour, she looked out over the landscape of modern towers and, beyond the shining emblems of modernity, the vast landscape of the city, made indistinct by humidity and smog. There were other pillars of smoke rising besides Glodok, though none as large, and she wondered what political statements, neighborhood grudges, or mere criminalities were being played out.

  This was what a travel writer would call “the real Asia,” the world of those who had been lured to the city on the promise of a better life, then found that every promise, however unspoken, had been broken. Now their life’s work had gone for nothing, their savings were useless, and they were under siege by their own military.

  They were a tough people, Dagmar presumed, if they were here at all; but they could be forgiven for being angry. She could only hope that she wouldn’t become a casualty of that rage.

  An amplified Javanese voice echoed between the buildings. The speech was rapid, urgent, and male. Dagmar stepped closer to the edge of the building and looked down the slope of ornamental red tile to the street below.

  Past the crests of the trees that lined the street, Dagmar saw thousands of people marching north up the street under homemade signs. They were close-packed and orderly and hadn’t yet turned into a mob, though Dagmar wondered how many clubs and knives were hidden away under loose clothing.

  The amplified voice wasn’t a part of the demonstration but was coming from a police line stretched across the road ahead of it. They looked like the police she’d met the previous day, with khaki uniforms, helmets, and shields. There seemed to be very few of them compared with the demonstrators.

  The bullhorn fell silent. The demonstrators kept moving forward. Then the amplified words came again. Dagmar had a sense that they were the same words, only spoken more rapidly.

  Dagmar’s nerves gave a leap at the window-rattling boom of shotguns. Gas canisters arced high above the crowd, splashed down in little flowers of white. The crowd began to move-some running forward, some clumping, some trying to move back against the pressure of the thousands coming up from behind.

  The officer with the bullhorn was yelling.

  Shots hammered out. Not shotguns this time, but rifles, the rip of automatic fire.

  The whole crowd screamed at once, fury and mourning and pain wrapped up in one vast primal sound.

  Dagmar remembered the young cop from the car, the boy whose whole life experience seemed derived from Felony Maximum IV. Who made machine-gun noises with his lips as he triggered an imaginary weapon.

  I always take the MAC-10.

  Aside from a handful that went crazy and charged, the crowd surged away from the police line, leaving behind specks of black and red on the pavement. The officer kept yelling through the bullhorn. The demonstrators who charged were gunned down, and bullets flew past them into the crowd.

  Their sprawled figures were tiny. Dagmar could cover their dead forms with her finger and make them go away.

  The crowd screamed as if it were one huge animal, and the animal fled. The shooting continued, more deliberate now, as if the police were picking their targets. The signs and banners the crowd had been carrying fell and lay abandoned along the pavement.

  Dagmar stepped back from the edge, tar pulling at her shoes.

  The scent of burning Chinese was strong in the air.

  Once upon a time there had been four of them, Dagmar and Charlie and Austin and BJ. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games.

  They met at Caltech, where they majored in computer science. They spent a lot of their time staring into screens, and computer games had a limited appeal for eyes that were already weary of looking at 525-line images. They preferred games played with paper and pencil-RPGs, where each could pretend to be someone different from themselves, yet someone they had created.

  Unlike their peers who preferred computers to human company, each was comfortable around other people. Austin and Charlie even knew how to talk to girls-and BJ was a fast learner.

  Other people wandered in and out of the games, but these four were constants. They were all role players-they could stay in character for hours and shared a dislike of players whose chief motivation was to manipulate the rules in order to gain rewards or treasure.

  Dagmar was a scholarship student. Her mother worked in a dry-cleaning establishment; her father was a bartender who had descended over time to a barfly. Dagmar had grown up preferring game worlds to her own life, though sometimes the latter intruded, as when she’d discovered that her father had pawned her computer in order to buy vodka. Caltech, in Pasadena, with its smog and perfect weather, was the best life she’d ever known.

  When she ran her own games, she used GURPS as a rule set and created her own worlds of adventure, all crafted in meticulous detail. She specialized in elaborate plots with enormous sets of characters, sometimes so complex that after the game had run on for weeks or months, she herself forgot who had stolen the jewels, or murdered the Antarean ambassador, or double-crossed the Allies on the eve of World War II. Her games required hours of research to put together, but on the other hand, she enjoyed research.

  Charlie’s games were agreeably eccentric. In one game the players were ravens in a quest for the magic that had given them human intelligence; in another, they were zombies in search of human brains to eat. In a third, they were ordinary people who had somehow been shrunk to the size of hamsters. Other sorts of players-those who wanted to kill monsters, plunder treasure, and rack up experience points-recoiled from Charlie’s campaigns as if they transmitted plague. Dagmar, Austin, and BJ loved them.

  Austin Katanyan was a second-generation gamer. His parents had met playing Dungeons and Dragons in college. He had brought their first-edition D &D rules with him in the original brown cardboard box, actually used them to run a game, and had a worn copy of Chainmail that he used to resolve the large-scale conflicts. He liked to run old game systems: RuneQuest, Witch Hunt, Empire of the Petal Throne. Like Dagmar, he liked to explore the elaborate backgrounds of fantasy worlds. Unlike Dagmar, he didn’t invent his own.

  BJ’s games were, in a word, diabolical.

  His given name was Boris Jan Bustretski, and he came from the
same eastern working-class background that had produced Dagmar. He was tall and stocky and blond and had inherited steelworker’s arms and shoulders from his father, who had worked for Bethlehem until the bankruptcy, and for a trucking firm thereafter.

  BJ thought very well of his own intelligence. He was happy to tell people how smart he was and boasted of his plans for a successful career as a master of Internet 2.0. Despite that, he didn’t seem to know how physically attractive he was, a trait Dagmar found endearing.

  His games were full of twists and cunning. Traps lurked around every corner. His nonplayer characters all had agendas, and all were faithless. The character who hired mercenary characters for a mission had no intention of paying them at the end of it; the venerable old lady who provided information to the players was an agent of the opposition; the weapons with which the adventurers were provided were faulty, or were cursed, or would give their position away to anyone with the right tracking devices. Characters would appear who would offer the players their heart’s desire in order to betray their fellows.

  BJ’s campaigns kept his players sharp. Austin, Charlie, and Dagmar became experts at anticipating the treacheries and multiple loyalties of others. It was a paranoid worldview that was, in its way, comforting. You knew everyone would betray you; the question was when.

  Sometimes the campaigns would simply change. Players who had been adventuring in twenty-first-century North America suddenly found themselves translated to alien worlds. A perfectly realistic historical campaign involving Vásquez de Coronado’s march into the Midwest, a campaign that had gone on for weeks, would suddenly encounter Indian tribes worshipping world-threatening Lovecraftian monsters. BJ was a good enough craftsman that all these switches eventually made sense, if tenuously, but he admitted that he got bored with his creations and that the sudden switches from one genre to another were intended to keep him interested in his own games. Sometimes these attempts failed; BJ abandoned more campaigns than he finished.