This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  It was then, as Dagmar decided to give everyone who had queried a personal answer, that the power died.

  The lights flickered and went off, and the whisper of the air-conditioning faded away. An array of tiny plastic turbines, each the diameter of a pencil, switched on to provide her laptop with power. A breathy sound accompanied the ignition, and paper on her desk rustled to the warm exhaust.

  A notice flashed on her display: the hotel’s wireless connection had gone down along with the power. Dagmar checked the room’s phone and found it worked. The phone had an Ethernet jack, and she considered connecting the laptop to it but then decided against using fuel and turned the computer off.

  The screen had just gone blank when the lights wavered on again. They didn’t seem as bright as before, so Dagmar figured either that it was a brownout or that a hotel backup generator had gone on but didn’t have quite the power required.

  She lay across her bed and thought about Planet Nine, and the fictional woman in the hotel room, and what uncanny series of accidents had brought her down the rabbit hole.

  Tomer Zan called in midafternoon. Dagmar had just finished doing her laundry in the bidet-she’d run out of clean clothes and was dubious about giving any of her belongings to hotel staff.

  “How are you feeling, darling?” Zan asked. The “darling” sounded perfectly professional, as if it were a substitute for “Miss Shaw.”

  “I’ve been better,” Dagmar said.

  “We’ve decided to pull you off the roof with a helicopter.”

  Dagmar paused to think about this.

  “You’re not moving me to a safer place first?”

  “Putting you on the streets right now would be exposing you to too much risk. The situation is deteriorating fast-most of the police have walked off the job, since no one’s paying them real money.”

  “So the streets are in the hands of the rioters.”

  “That’s about it.” Dryly. “We’ll have a helicopter in Singapore by tomorrow.”

  “So you can pick me up the next day?”

  “Well,” Zan admitted, “no. Singapore’s the nearest place we can stage from-except maybe Sarawak-but Singapore’s nearly a thousand kilometers away, and the copter’s an old Huey from Thailand, equipped for rescue work in the jungle. It doesn’t have the range to reach you. So we’re going to charter a ship in Singapore, put a lot of fuel aboard, and then steam toward Jakarta while the crew builds a helicopter landing platform from scratch. The chopper will land on the ship once the platform is built, refuel, and then fly to you once it’s in range.”

  “What am I going to have to do when it gets here?”

  “Practically nothing. We’ll have rescue specialists onboard. The chopper will hover over the hotel roof and drop one of our people down to you. Then we’ll lower a stretcher, and our guy will strap you into it. We’ll winch you aboard, and then our guy will go up next.”

  “So all I have to do is lie down?”

  “That’s it.”

  Dagmar felt relief mixed with a degree of disappointment. She had hoped for a more swashbuckling exit than being strapped to a basket and winched to safety.

  “Can I bring anything with me?” she asked.

  “A small bag maybe. Emphasis small.” There was a brief pause. “It’s a pity we can’t go in tomorrow. That’s when the Japanese are evacuating, so our chopper could slip in without being noticed.”

  “How come they can evacuate and-”

  “Because,” Zan said, “they don’t have all their goddam naval assets in the Persian Gulf, that’s why.”

  “I haven’t heard a single thing from the embassy.”

  “Schmucks.” All the disgust in the universe filled the word. “One word from the embassy and this thing might be over. Instead they’re going to let the military loot Jakarta.”

  Dagmar felt a hesitation. In a sense she didn’t want to know anything more, know how much more desperate her situation had become. It was bad enough that she was in a tall building in a city where tall buildings were being burned.

  “Loot Jakarta?” she said.

  “Anything that goes into Jakarta goes with the permission of the generals,” Zan said. “Food, fuel-everything the people need to live. And that means the generals get a cut of the action. They’re going to gut the city, but they’ll make their fortunes-or make their fortunes back, since they probably lost their money in the crash along with everyone else.”

  “Christ,” said Dagmar.

  “What’s a banana cost there?” Zan asked. “Ten cents maybe? In another few weeks that banana’s going to cost five, six dollars. And the difference will all go to the military.”

  “And if you can’t afford the bananas,” Dagmar said, “you starve.”

  “The government’ll probably tell the starving people to kill the Chinese and steal their food,” Zan said. “But lucky for you, in a few days, it won’t be your problem.”

  The water caressed Dagmar like warm little strokes of a fine brush. The water tinkled against the pool’s tiled edge as she paddled her way gently into the deep section, then arrowed her body, closed her eyes against the sting of chlorine, and sank feet-first into the blood-warm water.

  The darkness and silence were perfect. Her body was weightless. The boundaries between her self and the waters faded. Her pulse made a hushed, regular noise in her ears.

  Then she began, slowly, to rise in the dark water. Her head broke the surface, and she swiped away the strands of hair that crossed her face, and took a breath. Chlorine burned in her sinus.

  She opened her eyes. The blacked-out city rose around her, silent. There was no traffic noise, no noise at all, nothing but the flapping of canvas umbrellas set around the pool.

  Dagmar was engaged in an act of rebellion. After dinner-where Dagmar had gotten skewered chicken with peanut sauce, a double dose of protein in a situation where she feared proteins might become scarce-and after the announcement that the hotel’s generators would be shut down at nine o’clock in order to save fuel, Dagmar had found herself with nothing to do except consume the drinks in her room’s minibar. After a couple of whiskeys, she realized that she simply couldn’t stay in her room any longer.

  Yet there was no place to go. The hotel was blacked out except for emergency lighting in corners and stairwells, and the elevators were shut down. The streets were beyond dangerous.

  Then she had thought of the third-floor terrace, with its pool. The management had closed it because it was too exposed to theoretical attack from the tall buildings around, but now the pool was just one darkness among others.

  Dagmar refused to believe in the existence of armed strangers sighting on the pool with night-vision scopes. Surely armed strangers had better things to do.

  What had Anna said? Breakfast is as safe as anything.

  And better, the pool was on the opposite side of the Royal Jakarta from the burning hotel. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Dagmar had decided on this quiet night swim, alone in the dark water.

  Of course this meant going down eleven floors in a non-air-conditioned stairwell to reach the pool, and then climbing back up at the end. She’d be a ragged, hot, miserable mess at the end of her climb, but then she could take a cool shower, and in the meantime the pool was perfection itself.

  Dagmar dove to the bottom of the deep end several times, just to feel the joy of weightlessness, and then she began to swim laps. Her job kept her in hotels a lot, and swimming was her usual exercise. She started with a pair of laps as fast as she could go, just to get the heart pounding, and then settled into a slower, steadier pace. She did a few laps in a crawl, then switched to a backstroke, to exercise opposing sets of muscles. Alone in the darkness, she cruised through the water as purposefully as a shark.

  The rhythm and warmth relaxed her. The physical demands drove the tension from her body, the unease from her mind. In her solitary exercise in the darkness, surrounded by the empty lawn furniture and the umbrellas, the dark tow
ers of the city and the stars, she became only the swimmer. She was relieved of the burden of being Dagmar, of being caught in some strange, overlapping quantum state in which she was both tourist and refugee. A lonely geek in a hotel, waiting for the rescuers who seemed to have mistaken her for a princess in a tower…

  Dagmar swam steadily for half an hour, alternating crawl and backstroke, and then went into a cooldown, lying on her back and paddling along with slight movements of her arms and legs. It was difficult, she thought, to cool down when you were floating in water warmer than body temperature.

  She stared at the stars overhead and tried to think of nothing at all, just gradually let her breathing and the cotton-wool thudding of her pulse return to something like normal. Then she climbed out of the pool on legs that had turned a little wobbly, adjusted the crotch elastic of her swimsuit, and reached for her towel.

  The empty terrace stretched out before her, all shadows and reflected starlight. It was eerie, and Dagmar felt as if she were in one of those postholocaust films, where everyone but she had died of radiation sickness or the plague. From all she could tell, she was alone in this empty night-world.

  Then, clearly through the night air, she heard three gunshots echo up between the tall buildings.

  No, she thought, there were humans here after all.

  It was a long, hot climb back to her room.

  Breakfast was a little more barren than that of the previous day-no proteins at all except for peanuts-and so Dagmar packed down the rice while she could and sprinkled it with crushed peanuts, fried shredded coconut, and a pungent chile sauce. Then she took some of the rolls in a paper napkin, went to her room, and put them in the fridge of the minibar.

  They could keep her from starvation, maybe.

  Damn, she thought as she closed the fridge, I’m starting to think like Tomer Zan.

  City power was back on-it had come on abruptly at six in the morning, blasting Dagmar out of a peaceful sleep as all the lights and the TV snapped on-so Dagmar sat before her computer and vowed once again to answer all the email she’d received on the previous day.

  She was halfway through the list when her phone rang. She reached for where it sat on the charging cradle, saw “Charlies Friend” on the display, and pressed Send.

  “Hello, Mr. Zan,” she said.

  “Hello, darling,” Zan said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got bad news.”

  Mentally she screwed together an assembly of struts, just below her heart, to prevent it from sinking.

  “What sort of news?” she asked.

  “We’ve lost touch with the helicopter,” he said. “And the ship as well. We don’t know why.”

  “Do, uh,” she began, “do radios break nowadays?”

  “No,” Zan said, “not really. Both the ship and the Huey had state-of-the-art satellite communications equipment. So it’s unlikely that there’s any kind of malfunction. We suspect an accident.”

  Dagmar tried to imagine an accident that could take out a ship and a helicopter at the same time. Then she thought she would rather not imagine it-the crew of each craft were on a mission that involved her, after all, and if an accident had claimed them, it was all on her account…

  “So,” Dagmar began, “do you send out a search party, or-”

  “We’ll wait a few more hours in case there was a communications problem, and then contact the authorities in Singapore. But for you, darling, we’re going to get a new helicopter, and if necessary a new ship, so don’t worry.”

  Dagmar closed her eyes. She could kill two whole new crews.

  “Not to worry,” she said. “Right.”

  “Things have calmed down a little in Jakarta. When the Palms burned, it scared everybody. So a lot of the local Islamic associations have mobilized to guard their own neighborhoods.”

  “Islamic associations? They’re like-what, militias?”

  All Dagmar could think about was Sunni and Shiite terrorists in Iraq, and that didn’t sound encouraging.

  “Some of them are self-help groups,” Zan said, “but most of them are martial arts clubs.”

  Bitter laughter exploded in Dagmar’s head. She thought of the film posters in the music store, with their bare-chested heroes. These were the same people that had looted the store and the hotel.

  “They’re going to protect the neighborhoods with kung fu?” she asked.

  “With silat,” Zan said seriously. “That’s the indigenous style. Indonesian martial arts always had a close relationship with religion.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Of course,” Zan said, “some of these groups are political. Some are pro-military, some are against. I’m sure none of them are for the government anymore, but they have different ideas about what kind of government to have next. So if they start fighting each other, there could be more problems.”

  More problems, Dagmar thought.

  As if murder and riots and starvation weren’t enough.

  It was her hour of answering the phone. After Zan hung up, she heard from Austin. The squishy, warm feeling that came from talking to one of her oldest friends multiplied when Charlie called only a short while later.

  He said he was trying to find a tanker aircraft to fly north of Sumatra in order to provide in-flight refueling for the new helicopter.

  “How much is this costing you?” Dagmar asked.

  “Your next Christmas bonus,” Charlie said. “Maybe.”

  Tears stung her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Charlie said, “you’re not going to tell me that you love me again, are you?”

  “Not if you don’t want me to.”

  “Whatever I’m spending,” Charlie said, “I can afford. No one else, including me, is going without a Christmas bonus, okay?”

  “Right,” said Dagmar.

  “My Christmas bonus,” Charlie added, “is going to include a Maserati.” There was a pause.

  “Have you been thinking about Planet Nine?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Dagmar. “Yes, I have.”

  He liked what she told him.

  Late that morning, Dagmar heard the throbbing of helicopters outside, and she dared to draw back the curtains and look out. The Palms stood like the one rotten black tooth in the city’s gleaming modernist smile. The fire had gone all the way to the roof. A few threads of smoke still rose from a window here and there.

  The copters were orbiting behind the destroyed hotel, black, businesslike silhouettes spiraling to a landing somewhere to the northwest.

  Evacuating the Japanese.

  Dagmar couldn’t stand the sight of the Palms and let the curtains fall back into place.

  She paced the room for a while, restless, and then went to the laptop she had been typing on when Tomer Zan had called. She was in the middle of a letter to the gamer she knew as LadyDayFan, thanking her for an email of concern.

  Unfortunately I don’t know anybody in Jakarta, LadyDayFan had written, but let me know if there’s any way I can help.

  Dagmar scrolled along her list of emails, answered and unanswered. There were even more than there had been the previous day, an impressive number. Many were from people that Dagmar knew only as online presences floating around the online game blogs.

  She considered again this circle of which she was the temporary center, and the further circles that emanated from each of the members. There was a latent power in this group, a wide variety of skills and acquaintance. This group, she thought, could get things done.

  Everyone, supposedly, was within six degrees of separation from everyone else.

  Dagmar reflected that LadyDayFan maintained her own ARGRELATED online bulletin board, called Our Reality Network, where industry gossip was retailed and games were discussed, analyzed, and eventually solved.

  The games that Dagmar created were designed to be solved. She created the puzzles, or suggested them to the team’s professional puzzle designers, and the solutions were buried somewhere for t
he players to find. The games were finite: they led to a particular place, like the wedding in Bengaluru, and then they were over.

  Her current situation, which had her placed at a hotel in a state of Schrödingerlike uncertainty, was a puzzle that perhaps had no solution. Certainly she was incapable of solving it.

  Perhaps, she thought, her dilemma could be solved not by any individual but by a Group Mind.

  She sat down and began to type.

  From: Dagmar

  Subject: Indonesia

  Perhaps you can help me after all. I seem to be at the center of a puzzle that is in need of a solution.

  I’m at the Royal Jakarta Hotel, on the fourteenth floor. This is at 6°11’31.8”S, 106°49’19.48”E. The situation is deteriorating and I’m worried for my personal safety.

  The embassy has been of no use at all.

  I want to get out of Jakarta and to a country that isn’t having a revolution. My sole assets consist of US$180 in cash, a high-powered PDA/telephone, a computer, and some credit cards that don’t seem to be worth anything in the current situation.

  Most of the police have gone home. The army has besieged the city but has not entered it. The government is holed up somewhere. The streets are in the hands of rioters or Islamic societies, most of which are composed of martial artists.

  If you know of anyone who can help me, I’d appreciate hearing from them.

  If you don’t, thanks anyway.

  Bests,

  Dagmar

  She clicked the Send button without thinking, then sat back and wondered just what it was she’d set in motion.

  CHAPTER NINE This Is Not Folly

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Dagmar Shaw, whom most of you know as the executive producer of games like Curse of the Golden Nagi and Shadow Pattern, is stuck in Jakarta, where supplies of food and medicine are running out and people are being killed. We all saw the hotel burn. Dagmar wants to get out and the government ain’t helping.