This Is Not a Game Page 6

  Dagmar was a woman on a campus populated largely by males. The gaming group had an even larger percentage of men than the campus as a whole. For the first time in her life, she found herself a social success.

  The attention was pleasing, but she viewed the possibilities with a cautious eye. She was perfectly aware that the only experience she had had in relationships was watching her mother remain in a hopeless marriage to an alcoholic.

  Austin and Charlie had expressed polite interest in her. BJ hadn’t-he was much more interested in working out the details of his future life as a billionaire. So of course-after a couple of years exploring other possibilities-BJ was the one that she fell for. They had a glorious nine months together before BJ’s change in attitude grew too great for Dagmar to ignore.

  The relationship had simply ceased to interest him. He’d gotten as bored with Dagmar as he had with Vásquez de Coronado’s march along the Arkansas.

  Dagmar managed to survive the blow to her self-esteem. Her principal regret, over the long term, was not so much having left BJ as having broken up the gaming group. Austin and Charlie had to decide which of the two to invite to their games, and without the chemistry of the four core members, the games became less interesting.

  But Dagmar wasn’t a part of that scene much longer. On the rebound from BJ, she fell for her English professor. Not that he taught English: he was a chemistry professor on sabbatical from Churchill College, Cambridge. When Aubrey’s sabbatical at Cal Tech expired, Dagmar dropped out of school to marry him.

  Now it was Dagmar’s turn to be bored. Not with Aubrey, not at first, but with her situation. Her visa didn’t allow her to work, though she did manage to wangle some under-the-table consulting jobs in computer departments in and out of Cambridge. When her resident immigrant status finally allowed her to look for jobs, her lack of a degree precluded meaningful employment.

  Out of sheer boredom she created an online role-playing game called Earth/Tea/Paper. It consumed her completely for nine months and was a modest success. She decided that the Chinese backstory she’d written for the game was more interesting than the game itself and thought she might give writing fiction a try.

  The first short story, “Stone/Paper/Tea,” took her six months: one month to write the story, and five to work up the nerve to send it to an editor.

  The story was accepted by Orion Arm, a British science fiction magazine. The magazine folded before they could publish, but during that time Dagmar had written four more stories, all of which eventually sold to better-paying markets than Orion Arm.

  More stories followed, all science fiction. Her life orbited a college that specialized in science and engineering, and her own literary tastes had always tended toward the fantastic. Aubrey, she was pleased to discover, was proud of her achievements.

  The stories were followed by a novel and two sequels, all sold both in the U.S. and the UK. In New York, Dagmar’s acquiring editor left shortly after buying the series. Her replacement was promoted elsewhere in the company, and the next, fired. By the time the fourth editor wrote an email assuring Dagmar of his admiration for her work and his hope for a successful collaborative relationship, the series’ doom was sealed.

  In the UK, the books died because of a lifestyle change on the part of their editor. She had risen to a position of power within the company, fueled by potent cocktails of alcohol and cocaine; but when she went on the wagon, her personality changed. From amiable and energetic, she became critical, angry, and vocal. She found fault with her superiors at meetings; she fired or drove away her assistants; she insisted that Christmas and birthday parties be alcohol-free.

  The higher-ups at the company desperately wanted to get rid of her, but they couldn’t find an excuse-she was, in fact, making them millions of pounds. So the company decided they really didn’t need those millions of pounds after all and dropped their science fiction and fantasy imprint. To Dagmar it seemed an extreme reaction to a personnel problem, for all that it was a typically English one. Dagmar’s books were reassigned to a new editor, an amiable man who had never read a science fiction novel in his life. The books were published, but as literary fiction, a change that only served to confuse everyone.

  Dagmar’s commercial destruction was thus assured on two continents. The books were never actually reviewed on paper, so far as she knew. The few online reviews were respectful, even enthusiastic, but the sales figures were catastrophic.

  That was the end of her writing career, at least under her own name. She had become a literary unperson. Her sales figures were recorded in electromagnetic form in computers in the offices of the major distributors. The figures proved that her books didn’t sell-no publisher in his right mind would take a chance on her.

  That none of this was her fault was not on record anywhere.

  That her career track was not at all untypical-that the career of practically every other SF or fantasy writer at her two publishing houses also cratered-did not make the situation any easier to bear, but only filled her with a rage that had no point and no direction.

  The career collapse occurred simultaneously with a crisis in her marriage. Aubrey had always wanted children, and thus far she had managed to delay the final decision. But he was fourteen years older than she and wanted the children grown and out of the house “before I get too far into my declining years.” He felt he’d indulged her long enough. Considering the death of her career, it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.

  Dagmar thought he might have a point and stopped taking her pill. And then she reflected that she’d had three affaires during her marriage-each during a trip out of town, each short but extremely satisfying-and that rather than have a baby with Aubrey, she’d much rather march over to the Hepworth statue in Churchill College and rip the clothes off the first halfway attractive undergraduate she met.

  It wasn’t very nice, she reckoned, but it was true. And things that were true had their own weight, independent of whether they were decorous or not.

  She’d lived in two places in the U.S.: Cleveland and Greater Los Angeles. Going west was what Americans did to start over. And so she went back on the pill, packed a pair of suitcases, shipped a copy of the Complete Works of Dagmar Shaw to Charlie by surface mail, and flew to Orange County. When the divorce decree arrived some months later, she signed it.

  The only regret she had was that she’d left Aubrey with so many regrets. It hadn’t been his fault.

  Over the eight years she’d been away, Dagmar had kept in touch with Austin, Charlie, and BJ. Austin had become a successful venture capitalist and started his own company. Charlie and BJ had gone into business together: Charlie had done extremely well, but BJ was still, as the saying went, working on his first million.

  The versions of how that had come about were so wildly different that Dagmar found them impossible to reconcile at a distance. The stories weren’t any more compatible close up, but the anger was a good deal more visible. All Dagmar could do was make sure that Charlie and BJ never met.

  She was looking around for jobs in IT when Charlie asked her to lunch.

  “I think it would be wicked cool to own a game company,” he said. “Would you like to run it for me?”

  The next morning, at an hour chosen randomly in order to foil kidnappers, Dagmar went for the daily hopeless visit to see if Mr. Tong was able to help with any airline reservations. Instead of Tong, the office of the concierge was occupied by a small Javanese woman in a white Muslim headdress.

  “Mr. Tong no here,” she said. She didn’t add anything more, even after Dagmar started asking questions.

  Tong had gone up in flames with Glodok. Or so Dagmar could only suppose.

  A few hours later the protesters came again, and there were no police to stop them. Most of the demonstrators marched past the Royal Jakarta north to the presidential palace, but a group at the tail of the column began throwing rocks at the hotel and smashing those windows that had survived the riot on Tuesday. When thi
s produced no response, they stormed the hotel and looted all the shops on the first floor.

  The Sikh doorman in his imposing uniform decided not to die for his masters and instead ran for the manager’s office and locked himself inside.

  Dagmar didn’t know that any of this had happened until hours later, when she went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. The sight of the lobby, with smashed glass and furniture and glossy tourist brochures scattered like bright flower petals over the fine marble, sent Dagmar straight back to her room in terror. She emailed Charlie and called Tomer Zan.

  “We’re still working on moving you to a safer place,” Zan said.

  “The hotel got looted.”

  “We’re working on it. We’ve got an advanced team in Singapore setting up logistics.”

  How many logistics does it take to move a single person? Dagmar almost screamed.

  A lot, apparently.

  An alternate reality game was made simpler if the players were helping a sympathetic character. The woman lost in her own hotel room was just such a person.

  But how did she get in the hotel room, and what did that have to do with Planet Nine?

  If Planet Nine was like other MMORPGs, there would be places in the game world where people could meet. In fantasy games, this was usually a tavern, where the player-characters could swill ale, eat hearty stew, and find like-minded individuals with whom to embark on quests.

  Presumably there was a similar place in the Planet Nine setup.

  If there was a room somewhere in the Planet Nine world where only the players of Dagmar’s ARG could meet to exchange information, that would be useful to the game.

  But what, she thought, if bad guys had a place to meet, too?

  People who played in MMORPGs lived all over the world. They adopted online identities and knew one another only by those identities.

  They could be anybody. Students, lawyers, teachers, truck drivers, or-as in the old New Yorker cartoon-dogs.

  They could be criminals. Killers. Terrorists.

  Suppose, Dagmar thought, some bad people were meeting in the Planet Nine world to anonymously plan their activities? Suppose they were overheard, by another player or a systems administrator?

  Suppose that person then ended up dead, not in the game but in the real world?

  That, she thought, was your rabbit hole.

  And if the rabbit hole led to the woman in the hotel room-if the woman was the lover or daughter or sister of the man who died-then what Dagmar had was the shape of her story.

  CHAPTER EIGHT This Is Not a Flashback

  “Are you afraid?”

  Dagmar sat up in the bed, stared wildly into the darkened hotel room with the telephone handset pressed to her ear. Shots crackled in the distance. Sweat dripped from her chin onto her chest.

  “Are you afraid?” the woman said. “It’s all right to be afraid.”

  Through a film of sleep and fear, Dagmar thought she recognized the voice. “Mrs. Tippel?”

  “You can call me Anna, dear.”

  Dagmar put her head between her knees and sucked in air.

  “I’m not sure I understand what this call is about,” she said.

  “We hadn’t seen you since yesterday. We thought you might be lonely and afraid, especially after what’s happened to that building.”

  Another dose of fear, this one slow and terrible, crept up Dagmar’s spine.

  “Building?” she said.

  There was a moment of silence before Anna Tippel responded. “Oh my God, you didn’t know. I’m so very sorry.”

  “What building?” Dagmar demanded.

  “There’s another hotel. The Palms. It’s on fire. I’m sorry you didn’t know.”

  Dagmar bounded out of bed and slapped aside the curtains. The burning building was in plain sight, one of the many great towers just to the north of the Royal Jakarta. Black, dense smoke poured from broken windows at the level of the eighth or ninth floor. The fire had burned upward from lower stories: the windows on the lower levels were all shattered, the walls all black.

  She imagined the fire rising, driving the people upward floor by floor until there was nowhere else to go, nowhere but into space, spilling by twos and threes from the blackened roof.

  Dagmar licked her lips.

  “I’m looking,” she said, and her voice dried up. She coughed to clear her throat, and said, “I’m looking at it now.”

  “I thought we might have breakfast together,” said Anna Tippel. “If you were feeling lonely.”

  “It’s safe to have breakfast?” Dagmar said. Her words seemed spoken out of some great void: her mind was entirely taken up with the sight before her, the fire eating its way upward floor by floor.

  “Breakfast is as safe as anything,” Anna Tippel said. “And we must eat.”

  Through the horror, Dagmar recalled that she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous noon, not having dared the lower levels of the hotel in case looters were still present.

  “All right,” she said. Tears welled into her eyes, and she could barely speak the words. “I’ll meet you.”

  Yes, she thought, answering Anna Tippel’s first question. Yes, I am afraid.

  The breakfast room was crowded, and Dagmar and the Tippels shared their table with a businessman from Sumatra, a man named Dingwangkara. The menu was limited: there were no Western egg dishes and no fresh fruit save for various kinds of bananas, but there were still a range of breads, steamed rice and fried rice, vegetables, and a wide variety of sauces.

  The meal was starch-heavy, but Dagmar ate a lot of it.

  The Sumatran businessman was talkative and asked a great many questions: Where are you from? Where are you going? How many brothers and sisters do you have? What do you do for a living?

  Dagmar was suspicious at first, Zan’s warnings about kidnapping fresh in her mind. But the Tippels answered freely, and Dingwangkara was so cheerful, and so clearly what he claimed to be, that Dagmar found herself answering.

  “My father died a few years ago,” she said.

  He had finally succeeded in his life’s ambition of drinking himself to death.

  To her surprise she found tears stinging her eyes. She hadn’t wept for her father during his cirrhosis or anytime thereafter.

  She supposed she wasn’t crying for him now, not really, but for the victims, those who had lost their life savings, who were killed in the riots and the demonstrations, those who had their homes burned out from under them or who were trapped in the burning hotel.

  Dingwangkara looked at her with a gentle expression.

  “My parents are both alive,” he said, and then he added, “Inshallah.”

  “Inshallah,” Dagmar repeated, and she blinked away her tears.

  “They always want to know about your family,” said Cornelis Tippel after Dingwangkara departed. “They’ll ask any damn question they please.”

  “Their culture came from the kampungs,” said Anna, “the long houses where they all lived together. They believe it’s normal for everyone to know about everyone else.”

  Dagmar remembered the young policeman turning to her and asking her about her work. I always take the MAC-10.

  She wondered how you were supposed to know when they were just asking questions, and when they were kidnappers trying to decide if you were worth a ransom.

  FROM: BJSKI

  SUBJECT: Re: Jakarta

  Holy cripes! I had no idea you were even out of the country!

  What can I do? Can I send you a care package? A gun? A helicopter?

  Can I fly out there and help you somehow? Only problem is, I’m so broke you’d have to buy the ticket. But I’ll come!

  Let me know!

  Hearts,

  BJ

  After breakfast, Dagmar found it too depressing to wander around the lower hotel, with its looted shops, boarded windows, and frightened employees, so she returned to her room. She didn’t dare open the curtains to watch the burning Palms, so she kept th
e drapes drawn and watched the catastrophe on television. The talking heads on CNN discussed 9/11 and speculated about the ideological or religious motivations of whoever had set the fire, chatted about how whoever had constructed the hotel had obviously ignored a lot of building codes, and spoke of a well-known American lawyer who was jetting with his team to Singapore in hopes of signing up as many survivors as possible in order to file a class-action suit for damages.

  Dagmar hoped her own hotel was up to spec.

  When desperate people started throwing themselves off the burning building, Dagmar turned off the television and opened her laptop. She found she had dozens of emails from practically everyone who knew she was in Jakarta, some of them writing more than once, to all of the three email addresses she currently maintained. They’d seen the burning hotel on television, and they were desperate to know whether she was all right.

  She answered one email and CC’d anyone else who had queried, so that everyone would have an answer in as short a space of time as possible.

  When she was finished, she sat back in her chair while a slow sense of wonder rose in her, wonder at the sheer number of people who cared for her. Some of those who had sent email were people whom she hadn’t seen in person for years and with whom she maintained only a tenuous form of contact.

  Dagmar hadn’t realized so many people cared.

  She was used to the way interest groups spontaneously formed on the Internet, but there had never been one centered on her before. These people-friends from Caltech, from Britain, friends of her family in Cleveland, people in the gaming industry, players she knew only as Hippolyte or Chatsworth Osborne, individuals who came from different walks of life and whose only point in common was a personal knowledge of Dagmar-had seen news of the burning hotel and responded within hours. Many of them had clearly been in touch with one another, spreading the word that she might be in danger, and the outpouring of concern was touching.