A chime told Dagmar that she had email, and she clicked to her mail program.
FROM: Siyed Prasad
SUBJECT: Holiday in L.A.
Dear Dagmar,
I’ve arrived in the City of Angels. They’re putting me up at the Chateau
Marmont-very sweet, don’t you think?
I’m still hoping to see you while I’m in town. I know you keep saying
that you have no time, but I’m still hoping you will be tempted to
have dinner with me. I have reservations at the Pentagram tonight at
eight o’clock-will you please tell me that you will come?
Your adoring fan,
Siyed
Dagmar sent Siyed a terse reply to the effect that she was working late and wouldn’t be able to join him for dinner. At which point her phone sang, and Dagmar saw that it was Charlie.
“Have you seen Our Reality today? ” she said. “We’re losing lots of players, Charlie.”
“We are also selling a lot of copies of Portcullis,” Charlie said. “Their servers were jammed today. Whenever I tried to load their page, my browser kept timing out.”
“All you’re doing,” Dagmar said, “is giving hope to a bunch of losers with a delusional business plan.”
“Since when has your division of my company made a big profit? ” Charlie asked.
Good point, she had to admit. Great Big Idea, though it had always been in the black, had never been much of an earner, at least as compared with the rest of AvN Soft.
Best to change the subject.
“What do you need, Charlie? ” she asked.
“I need a sit-down. Come see me at the Roosevelt.”
“Why don’t you come to your office? Meetings are what your office is for.”
“My office,” Charlie said, “is for burying me in piles of trivia. Talking to you is what my cabana is for.”
Dagmar looked at the time in the corner of her display.
“I’ve got a recording session this afternoon,” she said. “That’s in West Hollywood anyway. So I can come by after that.”
“Perfect,” said Charlie.
It was only after the phone call was over that Dagmar realized she hadn’t asked what Charlie wanted to see her for.
It can’t be good, she thought.
FROM: LadyDayFan
We are happy to play host to the tens of thousands of new players that
have been arriving in the past few days, but we urge them to check the
FAQ List and Player Tutorial before asking questions in this forum.
Thank you.
(Signed) Frazzled
The recording sessions usually left Dagmar in a buoyant mood. Terri Griff, the actress she’d hired to play Briana Hall, was incredibly talented, and very good at improvisation. It was a good reminder that not all actors were vapid, self-involved mirror gazers.
Or lying shit-heel married psychos, like Siyed.
Dagmar took an active role in this session, playing the part of Maria Perry, Briana’s best friend. Dagmar had never possessed any inclination to become an actress, but during the fifth week of the game, the players were scheduled to phone Maria and try to sweet-talk her into giving them information that would move the game forward. These conversations were very intense and tended to jump in unexpected directions as the players disgorged everything they thought might get them the knowledge they were after, and an actress might not be able to improvise. Dagmar knew exactly what the players would have to say in order to get Maria to spill, and therefore it seemed sensible for her to play Maria herself.
Dagmar found the recording sessions chock-full of positive reinforcement. The life of a writer was a solitary one-you worked alone, and the stuff went into a magazine or a book or onto a Web page, and then you either got feedback or you didn’t. And in the case of her ARGs, a lot of the feedback was carping over small details.
But in a recording session the feedback was immediate. Her words were spoken aloud, usually by talented professionals, and she knew at once whether they’d work or not. If rewrites were needed, she could do them on the spot.
“How much does Briana trust Cullen at this point? ” Terri asked. She was tall, with long, dark hair and a pale complexion that belonged more in Elsinore than in L.A.
“I don’t think she does,” Dagmar said.
“In that case,” Terri said, “would Briana say, ‘I saw someone in the courtyard,’ or would she identify Cullen right away? ”
Dagmar paused. “Let me think,” she said.
The sound studio was a small one off La Brea, used mainly for recording commercials. The white sound-absorbent panels on the walls and ceiling were turning yellow with age, and the microphones were venerable steel objects dating from the birth of disco. There was a better-equipped studio in the back used for looping, also mostly commercial work.
The owner of the studio, Ray, sat behind the controls. He was an elderly man with a goatee and a white pompadour and fingers stained yellow with nicotine. The odor of his cigarettes leaked into the studio from the hall outside. He sat behind the console with a melancholy, infinite patience that suggested that perhaps he had heard everything.
“We don’t want to make it clear that it was Cullen this early in the game,” Dagmar said. “Maybe she’d say it could have been Cullen. Because by this point the players are going to suspect Cullen anyway.”
And then Cullen turns up dead the week after, Dagmar thought, and the sinister plot just keeps on rolling.
After recording the conversation between Briana and Maria, Dagmar hung around to listen to Terri record Briana’s call to the police on finding the body of her ex, Duncan.
When they joined the game, the players were asked to provide basic data such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. After joining, the players received a series of phone calls, faxes, emails, and sometimes packages, usually purporting to be from the fictional characters in the game.
In this case, the players were all going to get to overhear Briana’s 911 call.
The actor playing the emergency operator had already recorded his lines, so Terri just waited for the cues and spoke Dagmar’s words-or rather, sobbed and shrieked and wailed them.
Terri did take after take, and each time her voice grew more hysterical, more horrified. Terri’s eyes grew wider, her mouth looser somehow, more moist, the tongue more visible as it pulsed behind the teeth. The color drained from Terri’s face, as if she’d actually managed to work herself into a genuine state of terror. Dagmar was fascinated by the process.
And then she wondered what she’d sounded like on her own 911 call when Austin was shot, and suddenly she couldn’t watch or listen anymore. She barged out of the studio into the hall with its flickering fluorescent lighting. On the walls were old LP jackets and photographs of celebrities that may or may not have ever recorded there.
Dagmar’s head swam. Her pulse raced. Her flesh prickled with waves of heat. She looked at her hands and saw fluorescents strobing on her, crawling over her skin like ants.
The hall reeked of cigarette ash. Muffled by the studio door, Terri’s screams raked Dagmar’s nerves like rusty nails. Dagmar walked down the hall, through the reception area, and out into the parking lot. She leaned against her car and took deep breaths of the asphalt-scented air. A police siren dopplered up and down on La Brea.
A horrific sense of dread possessed her. She remembered the Palms burning in Jakarta, the pillar of smoke over Glodok, protesters falling under police fire. Sparks flying in the darkness as bullets caromed off the metal bodies of cars.
She imagined bodies lying on La Brea, Century City afire, automatic weapons crackling down in Japantown.
It was all so fragile, she thought. That was really the lesson of Jakarta, how the world could change in an instant. How a nation could fall, a neighborhood burn, a friend lie murdered.
How a general or a politician or a mobster could watch it all and smile.
What am
I playing with? she wondered. She created entertainments based on all this, on violence and mysteries and movements behind the scenes, all the things that might be fun so long as they weren’t actually happening to you. And now she had sent people from her strange, insular world of online entertainment to track a genuine killer.
She was, it occurred to her, completely crazy. And Charlie was even crazier.
It was all going to end, she thought, in a rising cloud of ash.
A little farther down La Brea, Dagmar found a convenience store with flyspecked windows and a cashier who carried a pistol on his hip for use in the event of a robbery. She bought two miniature bottles of Cuervo, which she took to the car and drank very fast, one after the other.
She sat in the car and listened to the radio for a while, until the burning in her gut turned to a relaxation that slowly spread to her barbed-wire nerves, and then the radio began to irritate her. They were playing some kind of extended-play nineties music that she didn’t remember from the actual nineties, so she got out of the car to toss the miniatures in the trash, got back in the car, and headed north to Hollywood.
Driving drunk to see your boss, she thought. How fucked is that?
She drove past Scientology’s Norman castle and the sad, tacky souvenir shops. Hollywood was seedier and more depressing every time Dagmar saw it. She saw clouds of tourists wandering the Walk of Fame, lining up to take one another’s pictures. All probably wondering how to get their vacation back.
She gave the car to the valet at the Roosevelt and walked to the pool. The poolside areas were full of people talking on cell phones, doing business. Dagmar walked to Charlie’s cabana and was about to knock when the door opened from the inside. A young woman smiled at her, all bouncing strawberry curls and gleaming teeth.
“Excuse me,” the woman said, and slipped out of the cabana to walk back toward the main hotel. Dagmar watched her walking away.
Damn, she thought. That girl could wear anything and her ass would forgive her.
She entered the cabana. Charlie sat on a striped couch, gazing at the notebook computer that was propped up in front of him on a hassock. Charlie wore one of the complimentary Roosevelt bath-robes and looked down at the display with a frown. Behind him, a portable massage table had been set up and draped with white towels.
“Hello, Mr. Hefner,” Dagmar said.
Charlie glanced toward her, looking at her from over the rims of his spectacles.
“Ah,” he said. “Did you meet Kimba Leigh? That’s not Kimberly, it’s k-i-m-b-a l-e-i-g-h. Two words.”
“Your model/actress/masseuse?” Dagmar asked as she closed the door behind her.
“Not mine,” Charlie said mildly. “She belongs to the hotel. And the person who gives massages is, unfortunately, a fireplug-shaped Arab named Mahmoun.” He turned toward the tray sitting next to him on the couch and removed the shiny metal dome to reveal the plate and sandwich beneath.
“Kimba Leigh brought my French dip,” he said.
Dagmar smiled. “I’ll just bet she did.”
He gave her a tolerant look. “She’s the food and beverage manager. She thinks I’m in the business, so she offers me her special VIP personal service.”
“I bet she does.”
“Would you mind getting me a Coke from the fridge? And help yourself, if you like.”
The air bore a faint undertone of paint in the room, a hint that the place had recently been redecorated. The cabana had a full kitchen and a wet bar prestocked with expensive liquor. The walls were plastered white with ocean turquoise trim. Slate blue drapes had been drawn over the glass wall that looked out onto the pool area. The furniture was the sturdy sort you might find in a Mexican beach resort, wood-framed, with colorful fabrics. The chairs and couch were covered with books and papers, and there was a cluster of featureless white cardboard boxes, each slightly larger than a paperback book, around Charlie’s feet.
Charlie’s Pinky and the Brain stuffies stared down from atop the television cabinet.
Dagmar went to the refrigerator and got one of Charlie’s imported Mexican half-liter Cokes. She reached for a second bottle and hesitated, then closed the fridge, stepped to the bar, and poured herself three fingers’ worth of Tres Generaciones. She had a feeling she might need it by the time her meeting was over.
She returned to the couch and handed Charlie his Coke.
“Have a seat,” he said.
She balanced her glass on the arm of the couch and took a double handful of papers and books and moved them from the couch to one of the chairs. Double Star, she saw, by Robert Heinlein. Introduction to Macroeconomics. Theories of the Great Economists.
“Why the textbooks? ” she asked.
“They have to do with my new project.”
“I’ve never been terribly impressed by Heinlein’s economic theory.”
Charlie smiled. “That’s leisure reading.”
She sat next to him on the couch. On the hassock she could see the computer’s display, and she saw that Charlie had been writing code.
He saw the direction of her glance, then reached out and closed the display.
“What are you doing? ” she asked.
“It’s a special project.” He looked at her. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve written a piece of code? ”
“Six years?” she said. That being the length of time since AvN Soft had really taken off.
“Exactly.” He shrugged. “I like to code, but because I’m such a big success, I never do it anymore. So I’m working on a little thing of my own.”
He was going to make her ask him, she realized. So she might as well get it over with.
“What’s it about? ” she asked.
His mouth twitched. “I’d rather not say.”
“But it’s about economics.”
He looked away, at Pinky and the Brain atop the cabinet.
“It has an economic dimension,” he said.
“You’re creating a stock-trading program? ”
He gave her an ambiguous look.
“There are a lot of those,” he said. “And AvN Soft already has Rialto.”
“Currency trading? ”
He shrugged.
“The currency traders are really slamming the euro today,” she said.
Charlie shrugged again. “That’s over,” he said. “The central banks intervened, and so did the oil sheiks, to protect all their favorite boutiques.”
“You’d think the sheiks would want their Gucci cheaper.”
“Not if it means the Europeans are so poor they can’t buy petroleum.”
“Ah.” She sipped her tequila. “So who was leading the attack this time? ”
“I believe,” Charlie said carefully, “that the Chinese are getting the blame again.”
“Was it the Chinese? ”
“The Chinese were in the pack,” Charlie said, “but it was all really the fault of the French and the Germans. The euro is supported by this complicated agreement among the member communities that establishes various economic targets, like inflation. But the French and the Germans have been cheating since the beginning-they’re the largest economies over there, and they figured they could get away with it. But they left their currency vulnerable, and now they’ve paid the penalty. The euro’s down about thirty percent, last I checked.”
“How’s the dollar? ” she asked.
He lifted his eyebrows. “Knock wood,” he said.
Dagmar watched him as she sipped again at her drink.
“Was it the Russian Maffya that attacked the euro? ” she asked.
Charlie seemed to consider this.
“I doubt they’ve got enough capital to damage a major currency,” he said seriously. He took a large swallow of his Coke, reached for one of the white cardboard boxes piled at his feet. “I didn’t call you here to talk about this, anyway. I want you to take a look at one of these.”
He tossed her the box. The contents were light. She opened the
box and took out a recharging unit and a device the size of her phone, covered in gray plastic. There was a small display, two buttons with Y and N on them, and a kind of clear plastic reservoir on one end, with a green plastic cap.
“What is it? ” she said. “A really stupid computer? ”
“It’s-well, you’d better use mine, I charged it last night.” He dug beneath the remaining papers on the couch, then produced an identical unit. He held down one of the buttons for a few seconds, and then the display lit.
“Go to the sink,” he said, “and fill the reservoir with tap water.”
She raised her eyebrows, but Charlie just looked at her. She took the unit and walked to the kitchen, then popped the bright green top and very carefully ran a little water into the reservoir.
“The unit is waterproof,” Charlie said. “You can submerge it if you like.”
“Do I put the cap back on? ”
“Yes. Then press the Yes button.”
When Dagmar pressed the button, nothing happened. Nothing visible, anyway. Then letters appeared on the display: DRINKING WATER?
“It’s asking if it’s drinking water.”
“Press the Yes button.”
Dagmar did so.
TRANSMIT? read the display.
“Do I want to transmit? ” Dagmar asked.
“Yes.”
Dagmar pressed the Yes button and waited another few seconds. Then the display read: TRANSMISSION COMPLETE.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s done.”
“Right. Empty out the reservoir, then bring the unit back.”
Dagmar did as she was requested, then sat on the couch and gave the unit back to Charlie.
“What we have here,” he said, tossing the unit lightly in one hand, “is a portable water-analysis device combined with a GPS and a satellite transmitter. It’s a civilian offshoot of technology developed for Homeland Security types to identify biological and chemical threats. Within a few seconds, the scanner can analyze water for any of hundreds of common and uncommon pollutants, including bioforms, then transmit the results to a central database, along with GPS coordinates.”
This Is Not a Game Page 17
