“Will do,” she said. “Whose name is the account under? ”
“Atreides LLC,” Charlie said. “It’s a corporation I created years ago but never got around to using.”
“You named the company after the family in Aeschylus? ” Dagmar asked.
“No.” Blankly. “I named it after the family in Dune.”
“Right,” Dagmar said. “Of course.”
Sometimes she forgot what subculture she was living in.
“I’ll need a good accounting at the end of this,” Charlie said.
“You’ll get one,” Dagmar said. With BJ’s payment listed as “Consultant fee,” and no names mentioned.
“How’s the game moving? ” he asked.
“I believe I gave you my views yesterday,” said Dagmar.
“Just do it,” Charlie said, and hung up.
BJ was watching her. Amusement glittered behind his spectacles.
“You have a very complex life,” he said.
“No kidding. Excuse me for a moment.”
She used her trackball to take her to the Wells Fargo page and then typed in the account number and password.
Charlie had given her an account with twenty-five million dollars.
She stared for a long moment.
Curse of the Golden Nagi had been budgeted at four million, with live events on three continents. The Long Night of Briana Hall had a budget double that of Golden Nagi, much of which had already been spent on professionally produced, professionally acted video, by far the most expensive item in the budget. Now Charlie had given her more than triple that sum, in addition to the eight million already in the budget.
The keys to the kingdom indeed.
If Dagmar couldn’t do what Charlie wanted on this game, she thought, it was because it simply couldn’t be done.
At one o’clock, Dagmar had an emergency meeting with the Great Big Idea creative team, fourteen people altogether, with the exception of one woman who was in Amsterdam setting up the weekend’s live event.
She couldn’t stop herself from peering out the window blinds of the conference room, to make sure that Joe Clever wasn’t lurking somewhere with his Big Ears. No eavesdroppers were visible. She turned on the white-noise generators anyway, and the meeting proceeded with a kind of distant waterfall hiss in the background.
When Helmuth entered, Dagmar introduced BJ.
“Helmuth von Moltke,” Helmuth said, offering his hand.
BJ raised his eyebrows. “Von Moltke? ” he asked.
“Programmer by day,” said Helmuth. “Eurotrash by night.”
Helmuth, descended from a German general, was a sleek, handsome young man, still under thirty. He wore cashmere slacks, a T-shirt with the Ferrari stallion, and a jacket of paper-thin, featherlight leather made in Buenos Aires. He was known to spend most of his nights partying on the Sunset Strip. When or if he slept was unknown.
Jack Stone ambled in next. He was the puzzle designer and a Type Two Geek, which was basically a Type One plus about eighty pounds. He lived, ate, and breathed puzzles, at least when he wasn’t living, eating, and breathing Frito pies, which he made himself by lining a bowl with Fritos, pouring Wolf brand chili on top, and putting the result in the microwave. When it was hot, he’d throw grated jack cheese on top. Even other Type Twos couldn’t abide the result.
Fortunately he hadn’t brought a Frito pie with him this time. Instead he had a plastic sack filled with miniature candy bars, which he would eat like popcorn.
Dagmar introduced BJ as “Boris, who’s going to help with the writing.” The others paid no attention to BJ after that. Writing wasn’t interesting to them.
When everyone arrived, Dagmar demonstrated one of the Tapping the Source units and explained Charlie’s latest nonnegotiable demands.
“You’re changing the story after the launch? ” demanded Helmuth.
“No point in whining,” Dagmar said. “I’ve already whined to Charlie, and Charlie isn’t listening.”
So of course they whined some more. Dagmar let them.
“We have the budget on this one,” Dagmar said. “If you need help, we’ll hire anyone who can provide it. Freelance programmers, design studios, you name it. Start calling them now, if you think you’ll need them down the line.”
“The players are going to hate this!” Jack protested. “They went nuts when they had to buy that ninjaware. They’re going to be even more crazed when they have to buy these damn water-quality units.”
“I’ve got a work-around,” Dagmar said, and smiled. “We buy the units for them.”
They looked at her. She shrugged.
“Maybe not for all of them,” she conceded, “but the budget will buy a lot of forty-dollar boxes.”
After that, it went a little easier.
After the meeting, Dagmar and BJ went to her office to replot Briana Hall. The scent of Siyed’s roses saturated the air. Drinking coffee and eating Pop-Tarts from the snack station, they worked over Dagmar’s interactive monitors and saw their changes appear instantly on the big wall plasma screen, complete with colored arrows that showed how the complex plot elements were connected.
BJ was as devious a story craftsman as Dagmar remembered from their college days. He had an instinctive gift for the twist, the reveal, the snapper that would whip the story in an unanticipated direction, like a rocket slinging around the moon en route to some distant world.
“Right,” Dagmar said finally. “Let me put you to work writing the various documents relating to the backstory. I’ll do the audio, video, and comic scripts, because I’m familiar with the format.”
BJ shrugged. “That should work.”
This meant that BJ would be spending his days creating the text for phony documents, everything from school reports to classified government intelligence assessments, newspaper articles to blog entries, birth certificates to death certificates. The Graphics Department would then turn the text into facsimiles of the actual documents. An ARG thrived on its virtual paper trail-puzzles led to documents, documents contained more puzzles, the puzzles led to more documents, the documents led to revelations.
“You might as well work from home,” Dagmar told him. “We don’t have an office for you here.”
“And besides,” BJ said, “I might run into Charlie in the elevator.”
“Like I care? ” Dagmar snarled. And then wondered if she actually meant what she’d just said.
Dagmar looked out her office window and was surprised to discover it was night. She looked at the time on her monitor screen and saw it was after nine o’clock.
She realized she was very hungry. The coffee shop in the atrium closed at nine, so there was no food in the building unless she wanted something from a vending machine, or more Pop-Tarts. At this hour, neither option seemed attractive.
“Want to get dinner? ” she asked. “Charlie’s paying.”
BJ grinned. “That’s an offer I can’t refuse.”
They found a steak house open on Ventura, one with dim lighting in 1950s colored-glass sconces, battered dark wood tables, and red-and-white-checked tablecloths. Dagmar ordered a margarita and a medium-rare rib eye. She didn’t eat much red meat, but on this evening she planned on making a sizzling, juicy exception.
“Well,” BJ said, “as long as Charlie’s paying.” He ordered the same thing, only with a shrimp cocktail for an appetizer and king crab legs draped over his steak.
“At this rate,” Dagmar said, “it won’t be long before you bring Charlie to his knees.”
“I wish,” BJ muttered.
Dagmar looked at him. “What would it take,” she said, “for you and Charlie to be friends again? ”
“Well,” said BJ, “he could give my half of the company back.”
“He doesn’t actually own the company,” Dagmar said. “It’s his investors.”
BJ raised an eyebrow. “You ever met one of these investors? Seen one? Heard their names? ”
“No,” Dagmar said. “Bu
t then I’m not involved with Charlie on that level.”
“I don’t think anyone is,” BJ said. “I think there’s a reason no one’s ever seen the people who rescued the company.”
Dagmar felt suspicion sing in her bones, a deep, subdural hum of mistrust. The day’s anger and the complex logistics and plotting session had kept a lid on her speculations, but now her doubts flooded her.
“Any idea,” she asked, “why Charlie’s angels are so mysterious?”
“Nope.” He scratched one of his muttonchops. “My best guess is that they’re involved in some kind of tax-fraud scheme. Or maybe the investors are laundering money through AvN Soft.”
Dagmar leaned toward BJ over the table.
“How would that work, exactly? ” she said.
“If they’re laundering money, they’d just overpay for AvN’s services. How are the IRS auditors going to know how much our autonomous agents are worth? As long as Charlie pays taxes on the money that’s rolling in, the IRS and everyone else are happy.”
Dagmar nodded. That seemed plausible enough. And she hadn’t failed to notice that “our.”
The margaritas and the shrimp cocktail arrived. The prawns were vast and pink, like tongues lolling from the rim of a cocktail glass. BJ offered Dagmar one, and she took it. It had that bland, farmed taste that suggested it had never been anywhere near an ocean, but even so, it whetted Dagmar’s appetite.
BJ gave her a calculating look.
“You’re thinking about that Russian assassin, aren’t you?” he said. “You think Charlie’s involved with the Maffya.”
“The assassin,” said Dagmar, “is a problem to which I have no ready answer.”
“So you’re trying to track the killer through the game.” Thoughtfully, BJ picked up a shrimp, then replaced it on the rim of the cocktail glass. “And you have to hope that he’ll have some answers once he’s picked up. I have to give you credit for optimism.”
“Foolhardy though it may be.”
Feeling foolhardy and hopeful, she licked the rim of her glass and took a swallow of her drink. Tongues of tequila fire sped along her veins.
“There’s more than one Charlie Ruff,” BJ said. “There’s the one you’ve known all these years, and then there’s the other one.” His gaze darkened. “You’re starting to meet that other one now. I met him six years ago.”
“And what’s he like, this other Charlie? ”
BJ took a thoughtful drink of his margarita.
“At some point,” he said, “Charlie has to be the winner. And with him it’s a zero-sum game-if he’s the winner, that means everyone else has to lose.”
Dagmar considered this. “What kind of game is he playing with me, then? ” she asked.
“He hired you to run his game company because he thought the games would be cool,” BJ said. “You succeeded. You made the games cool. But now Charlie figures your cool quotient is bigger than his, so he’s got to take you down a peg.”
“So he’s doing this just to humiliate me?” Dagmar didn’t find the theory entirely convincing.
“That, and the fact that he’s learned enough about ARGs to think he can run one,” BJ said. “That’s what happened at AvN Soft. He thought he’d learned enough about my end of the business to tell me what to do, and he started trying to do my job as well as his.” He flapped his big hands. “We both went down in flames. But he found those mysterious backers, and I didn’t. So I got thrown out of the building, and Charlie sat up on the balcony and watched and never said a word.”
Dagmar took a contemplative sip of her drink. You’re going to do this, Dagmar, Charlie had said. Because you owe me, and you know it.
“I can see that, I suppose,” she said. “But why now? If Charlie is really involved with the Maffya, and there is an assassin running around looking for him, you’d think he’d have other things to do besides prove to himself that he can boss me around.”
BJ lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “He can be erratic if he’s under pressure. Trust me, I know. He can be crazy.”
Dagmar thought about this while BJ ate a prawn.
“So,” she said, “tell me what happened with you and Charlie and AvN Soft.”
BJ made a face. “This isn’t my favorite topic.”
“I’ve had Charlie’s story,” Dagmar said. “I’ve had enough from you to know how you feel about it, but not what actually happened.”
BJ said nothing for a while, just ate the last prawn. Then he touched his lips with his napkin and pushed the cocktail glass away.
“Okay,” he said. “We both came up with the ideas that made the autonomous software agents work. That was in one of those late-night bull sessions where we were both flinging theory around, and by five in the morning we’d nailed down our particular approach to intelligent, distributed, self-replicating, self-evolving agents. We knew that was what we wanted to spend the next ten years working on.
“And then we had to divide up the work, and that was pure chance. I’d been a project manager for Crassus Software, and I knew how to run an office, so I ran the business side. And by default that put Charlie in charge of creating the software-though in the early days we both worked on that. He was better at line-by-line coding, anyway.”
He sipped his drink, then put the heavy glass down on the checked tablecloth.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “It wasn’t Charlie who cold-called venture capital firms and who convinced them to take a chance on a couple of twenty-five-year-old software engineers and their wonky ideas about self-evolving software. It wasn’t Charlie who raised the millions to start the company and fill that office tower with software engineers. It wasn’t Charlie who did any of that.”
She looked at his stubborn, defiant face, and she nodded. “Did Austin help? ”
“Right then, Austin was in New York working for Morgan Stanley. But he put us in touch with some people.”
“Go on,” she said, but at that point the steaks arrived, sizzling on hot metal plates set into wooden platters, and they paused for appreciation.
“Eat while it’s hot,” BJ said, and picked up his steak knife.
“So,” Dagmar said, “did you get the big office building right away, or-”
He gave her an amused look from over the rims of his spectacles.
“I’m not talking about this,” he said, “till my surf and turf is history.”
Dagmar sighed and picked up her knife. She carved a piece of her rib eye, inhaled its savor, then placed it on her tongue. Juices awakened tired taste buds.
Oh my. Where had this steak been all her life?
BJ was using some highly specialized tools to crack open a king crab leg. The carapace snapped; a tiny piece of shrapnel hit Dagmar on the cheek. She flicked it away and reached for her drink.
When the waitress came back with a plate for empty crab shells, Dagmar called for another round of margaritas. She ate her meal with languid pleasure and watched BJ wrestle with his crab legs. By the time the last chunk of crabmeat had been dipped in lemon butter and consumed, Dagmar was well into her second margarita and was willing to view the world from on high, enthroned, like a pagan god, amid a benign radiance.
BJ pushed away his plate.
“That was the best meal I’ve had in a long time,” he said.
Dagmar lifted her arms and stretched.
“Ready for dessert? ” she asked.
BJ laughed. “Maybe I’d better digest a bit first.”
She looked at her watch and saw that it was a quarter after eleven. The dining room was nearly empty, and the noise from the bar had faded.
The waitress cleared their plates and asked if they wanted dessert. Dagmar allowed as how they’d look at menus. The waitress moved away, balancing plates on her arms. Dagmar watched her.
“I’m always glad when I find a waitress who’s just a waitress,” Dagmar said.
“What do you mean? ”
“One who’s not”-Dagmar tilted her head and a
ssumed a perky voice-“ ‘Hello, my name is Marcie and I’ll be your waitress tonight. I’d like to recommend the swordfish, and just in case you’re someone important I’d really really really like to be in your next motion picture.’ ”
BJ grinned. “You don’t get that in the Valley so much, I bet.”
“They’re everywhere.”
The waitress-whose name was not Marcie-returned with the dessert menu on laminated cards. Dagmar was too full to eat anything more, but she looked at the list for form’s sake. Her glance lifted from the list of desserts to look at BJ.
It struck her that, despite the way he’d been neglecting himself, he was still a very attractive man. BJ gazed down at the menu with a relaxed expression, his blue eyes half-lidded behind their spectacles, and Dagmar considered how few of her memories involved his being relaxed. In school he had always been on the hustle: planning his future, sucking up information, writing vast amounts of sloppy code because he was in too much of a hurry to make it clean. Eventually the hustle had grown so all-encompassing that it had squeezed Dagmar out of his life without anyone quite noticing.
BJ had never allowed himself to be bored. Dagmar wondered if he was bored now.
He looked up at her, saw her looking at him, and his lips firmed in a frown.
“I can see that it’s time to pay for this meal,” he said.
Dagmar hadn’t been thinking of their earlier conversation, but she was willing to take advantage of BJ when the opportunity arose.
“You can order dessert first,” she said.
When the waitress came back, he ordered coffee and strawberry shortcake. Then he turned to Dagmar.
“Actually,” she said, “I was wondering if you find your life boring.”
“I just left a stupid, dead-end job in customer service,” he said. “I supplement my income with the two most despised activities in online RPGs: I’m a ninja and a gold farmer. All of the above is as repetitive as hell.” He thumped his fingers on the table. “So yes,” he said, “I’m bored.”
“Well,” Dagmar said, “I’ll try to keep things from turning too dull for the next few weeks.”
This Is Not a Game Page 19
