This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  Which rang, right on cue. It was a dedicated line, so she knew no one but a player was on the other end.

  She pressed the answer button.

  “Hello? ” she said.

  “Is this Maria Perry? ”

  The male voice had a strong accent, Dagmar guessed Korean or Japanese. She wondered if the caller was phoning from Asia.

  “This is Maria,” Dagmar said. “Who is this?”

  “This is…” There was a hesitation. Dagmar was familiar with the phenomenon: the player wasn’t sure whether to use his own name or his online handle.

  “This is Roh,” he said finally.

  “I don’t believe I know you, Roh.” Dagmar tried to sound as harassed and paranoid as Maria was by now, the fourth week in which she was serving as the chief line of defense between her friend Briana and the people who wanted to kill or arrest her.

  “I want to help Briana,” Roh said.

  “Briana who? ”

  “Briana Hall. She is on your Facebook page as your friend.”

  “Okay,” Dagmar said. “So I know Briana. But I still don’t know you.”

  “You must give Briana a message.”

  “What makes you think I know how to reach Briana? ”

  “She-she says that you are helping her.”

  “Well,” Dagmar said, “if you know her that well, you can give her the message yourself.”

  There was a moment of panicked silence.

  “You sound like a cop,” Dagmar said. “You sound like you’re trying to trap me.”

  “I am not a police,” said Roh.

  “Prove it,” said Dagmar.

  Again there was silence.

  “I’m busy,” Dagmar said. “Talk fast.”

  Silence.

  “Nice try, Detective,” Dagmar said, and hung up.

  BJ looked at her.

  “Damn,” he said. “You’re brutal.”

  The phone rang an instant later.

  “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Maria, please?”

  Dagmar thought she recognized the voice as an L.A.-based gamer who went by the handle of Hippolyte. And Hippolyte probably recognized Dagmar as well.

  TINAG, Dagmar thought. This conversation would only work if both of them stayed in character and ignored the fact that this was a game.

  “This is Maria,” she said.

  “I know you’ve been a friend of Briana Hall’s since you were at Central High,” Hippolyte said. “I’d like you to send her a message.”

  “How do I know,” Dagmar said, “that you’re not the police trying to trap me?”

  “The police don’t know about George Weston and his Firebird at the junior prom,” Hippolyte said. “Only someone who knew Briana would know something like that.”

  “Okayyy.” Dagmar tried to sound as if she were reluctant to be convinced.

  “And then there’s your friend David. He’s gay, but he hasn’t come out to his family or to his boss.”

  Dagmar tried to sound as if this last data point had made up her mind.

  “What message do you need to send? ”

  “I need Briana to know that Rita is working with the police. Briana can’t trust her.”

  “Rita? Are you sure?”

  “She’s got her phone bugged by the NYPD. They’re just waiting for Briana to call.”

  “If that’s the case,” Dagmar said, “then somebody else is going to have to move the package.”

  “The package with the evidence from Cullen’s firm?”

  Dagmar grinned at Helmuth and gave him a thumbs-up. Hippolyte was right on top of the story.

  Hippolyte had given Maria the three pieces of information necessary for the game to proceed. She had to come up with some persuasive background to convince Maria that she was Briana’s friend-the junior prom story was one of several, as were the facts about Maria’s friend David-and then the information about Rita and the knowledge of what was in the package.

  “That’s right,” Dagmar said. “The package has been hidden, and there’s a letter in the mail telling Rita where to find it. Somebody’s got to move it before Rita tells the police.”

  “Where is it?”

  “It’s in Grand Army Plaza, on top of the plinth of Gouverneur Warren’s statue.”

  There was a moment of surprise.

  “Where’s Grand Army Plaza?” Hippolyte asked.

  “ Brooklyn. Are you anywhere near Brooklyn? ”

  “Don’t worry about that,” said Hippolyte. Hippolyte was in Southern California, but there were plenty of other players in the New York area who could be counted on to fetch the package.

  “How do you spell Gouverneur? ” Hippolyte asked.

  Dagmar spelled it for her.

  “What should be done with the package? ” Hippolyte asked.

  “Send it to Iris Fitzgerald, General Delivery, West Hollywood, nine zero zero four six.”

  Which, since Iris Fitzgerald had been established as an alias used by Briana Hall, would serve as a clue to Briana’s location.

  The incriminating document, stolen by Cullen before his murder, was a list of fifty cities beneath the words “Water Sources,” which set up the Charlie-mandated subplot involving the contamination of water sources and the boxes from Tapping the Source. And the page also contained a watermark that hid a clue to something else.

  Elsewhere among the uploads was a page that would allow players to order Tapping the Source boxes for free. Great Big Idea, with its twenty-five-million-dollar slush fund, was going to buy the players their toys.

  “Have you got that?” Dagmar asked.

  “Nine zero zero four six,” Hippolyte repeated.

  “Thanks,” Dagmar said. “You’ve been a great help.”

  And then Dagmar stabbed the button to hang up, slid off her desk, and punched the air.

  BJ, still leaning on the window, looked up at her. “Do they really do what you tell them to? ”

  “Yes,” Dagmar said. “They do.”

  The phone rang again, then went to voice mail, a brief message telling any caller that Maria Perry was no longer at this number. Dagmar picked up the phone and turned off its ringer.

  Players might be calling this number all day, hundreds or thousands of them, but to no purpose: Hippolyte had scooped them all.

  Helmuth, in the meantime, was tapping his keyboard. He was a precise two-finger typist, and the taps and clicks rattled out in a steady rhythm.

  He stopped his typing, then leaned away from the screen.

  “Okay,” he said, “now there’s a sound file of your conversation on the archive page. If the player forgets how to spell Gouverneur, the recording will remind her.”

  “That was Hippolyte, I think,” Dagmar said.

  Helmuth lifted an eyebrow. “Smart girl,” he said. He rose, took his leather jacket from the back of Dagmar’s chair, and shrugged into it.

  “I’ve got a meeting,” he said, “with one of our freelance programmers who has been fucking up in a truly hideous and original way. Wish us both luck.”

  “Luck,” Dagmar said. Helmuth left.

  BJ was looking at the wall screen.

  “Is there some way of following the players in real time?” he asked.

  “You could count the number of hits. Or you could go on Our Reality Network and watch them work out the puzzles.”

  He took a step toward Dagmar’s computer, then hesitated.

  “Can I do that here? ” he asked.

  “Sure. Be my guest.”

  BJ sat at Dagmar’s computer and reached for the keyboard. Dagmar laid a warning hand over his, then used her other hand to reach for the Shift key and hold it down.

  “Go to Our Reality Network,” she said.

  The browser immediately loaded the ORN’s home page.

  “There you go,” Dagmar said.

  He looked up at her. “Thanks,” he said.

  She stood back, her palm warm from the touch of BJ’s hand.

  H
e watched with undivided attention as the players unraveled the latest mysteries. Dagmar sat in the other chair and watched on the wall screen as the players located the hidden files and encrypted messages. It took them about three hours before they’d found all the hidden Web pages, revealed the video and audio files, and arranged for someone in Brooklyn to pick up Cullen’s hidden document from Grand Army Plaza.

  The only puzzle they hadn’t solved was the key to Charlieland. The routing number told them that the twenty-five mil had gone into a Wells Fargo account, but they’d been given that.

  There was nothing yet about where the money had come from.

  Frustration beat a tattoo on the inside of Dagmar’s skull. She’d risked her job for this, and it wasn’t working. She rubbed her eyes.

  BJ leaned back in his chair, his eyes still fixed on the screen.

  “You know,” he said, “I could really enjoy becoming a puppetmaster.”

  “You already are one,” Dagmar said. She rose from her chair, stood on her tiptoes, stretched.

  He smiled, watching her. “I’m a last-second, highly spur-of-the-moment PM at best.”

  “You’ve been doing very well.”

  “I just hit a snag, though.”

  She looked down at him. “Yes? ”

  “My laptop’s down.”

  “What’s wrong with it? ”

  “I think the fan failed, and then everything cooked.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing but a doorstop now. But then it was an antiquated piece of junk anyway.”

  “You have another computer, right?”

  “No. My high-powered computer was the one at work, but I quit that job to take this one.” He shrugged. “Well, I can afford a hot computer now, thanks to you.”

  Dagmar thought for a moment. “You don’t have to buy one right away,” she said. “I’ll give you one.”

  He was startled. “You have a spare? ”

  “I don’t, but the company does.” She walked toward the door and gestured for him to follow.

  “It’s time,” she said, “to visit the assassin.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Not the Russian one?”

  Suddenly the situation wasn’t amusing.

  “No,” she said curtly. “We have an assassin of our own.”

  He then rose heavily from his chair.

  “Sure,” he said. “Sounds like…” He hesitated. “Fun,” he said.

  AvN Soft’s network security guy worked out of the fifth floor and basked in his nickname of Richard the Assassin. The name was actually on his desk nameplate. He was a young olive-skinned man in his early twenties who favored black jeans and T-shirts, which he wore with white Converse sneakers. Action figures of ninjas lined his top rank of shelves. He was relentless in guarding the security of AvN Soft from spam, malware, intruders, and people like Joe Clever.

  Richard had a personal grudge against Joe Clever, who had actually breached his security on two occasions, and he swore that the next time Clever came calling, he’d flood Clever’s machine with a program that would do nothing but load thousands of pop-ups from fifth-rate Singapore porn sites, the kind with businesslike, thick-bodied hookers performing listless acts in badly lit rooms.

  Richard checked out a laptop to BJ, gave him a temporary password, made certain he could access the office net, and packed the computer in a green cardboard box with a plastic carrying handle. He told BJ never to use the password on a Wi-Fi connection, even on a private network, and handed BJ an Ethernet connector.

  “This is your best friend,” he said.

  BJ looked at the cable with a bemused expression.

  “Hello, best friend,” he said.

  “You’re friend’s paranoia is really impressive,” BJ told Dagmar as they left.

  “Remind me to tell you about Joe Clever,” Dagmar said.

  BJ headed for the elevators, but Dagmar checked him.

  “This way,” she said.

  “Where are we going? ”

  “Accounting.”

  At Accounting, Dagmar arranged for BJ to be air-expressed the latest office suite compatible with everything used at AvN Soft. Word processor, spreadsheet, browser, presentation software, video and audio editors, Web page builder, SFTP ware, templates for standardized business forms, a miniaturized research library on disk, a word processor that offered film and TV script format-even interest-rate calculators and software used for making investments and planning retirement. Thousands of dollars’ worth of software altogether, all to be delivered to BJ’s apartment the next day courtesy of Federal Express.

  “Uhh, thanks,” said BJ, a little stunned.

  “Might as well get the total upgrade. We’re spending Charlie’s money like water, anyway.”

  BJ tweaked a little smile. “I’m all for doing that.”

  They went to the elevators, and Dagmar pushed the down button.

  BJ turned to her. “So tell me about Joe Clever.”

  A brief outline of Joe Clever’s infamous career lasted them the length of the elevator journey and the return to Dagmar’s office.

  “You see anyone following you home,” Dagmar said, “it’s probably Joe Clever, or one of the other stalkers.” She looked at him. “In fact, you’re a prime target. You’re new to the game, and he might think you’d be careless with a computer or with documents.”

  BJ looked at his computer in its cardboard box. “I’ll be prudent, then.”

  “That would be good.”

  He looked at her. “Doing anything for dinner tonight? ”

  “I’ll be working late and grabbing a salad in the coffee shop.”

  He shrugged. “Too bad. With my computer slagged and my software not arriving till tomorrow, I’ve got a free evening.”

  “That means more work for me, unfortunately.”

  “I suppose it does.”

  She hugged him good-bye and suppressed an urge to kiss his cheek.

  It wasn’t as if the last work-related romance had worked out very well.

  And she could hardly consider it a good idea to have a boyfriend who made her boss crazy. Or vice versa.

  She drifted to the window and watched BJ cross the parking lot and put the computer in his old Chevy.

  It probably hadn’t been such a good idea to bring BJ into Charlieland.

  But what choice, she reflected, had Charlie really given her?

  A software suite and the loan of a computer were probably the least she could do in compensation.

  CHAPTER TWENTY This Is Not a Tale

  FROM: Vikram

  It took me a couple days, but I’ve been able to discover that the twenty-five million was transmitted from the United Bank of Cayman, from an account owned by a company called Forlorn Hope Ltd.

  In the incorporation pages, the officers of Forlorn Hope include Charles Ruff of Los Angeles, California, and Anthony and Marcia Ruff of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, all in the USA.

  The balance of the account, as of 1600 hours Cayman time yesterday, was $12, 344,946, 873.23, all in US dollars.

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  How much???

  FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

  May I ask how you acquired this information, Vikram?

  FROM: Vikram

  I don’t want to say much here, for obvious reasons, but I’m from the Indian subcontinent and I come from a family connected with a merchant bank.

  Everyone in the world is six degrees of separation from everyone else, but I only needed to go through two degrees to acquire this information.

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  You’re with a merchant bank? Like the United Bank of Cayman?

  FROM: Vikram

  Well, no. I’m not connected with that institution. And I didn’t say that I was with any bank, just that members of my family are.

  FROM: Corporal Carrot

  You’re just connected, period.

  You know, I figured it would be Chatty who’d bust this one.

  FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr
.

  Corporal Carrot overestimates my powers.

  But still, I find this interesting in terms of the game. Charles Ruff owns Great Big Idea and what his Wikipedia profile states is a profitable software company. I assume the other two corporate officers are his parents or other relations.

  In addition to the late Austin Katanyan, that’s three more real, living people who have appeared in Motel Room Blues. What are we to make of this?

  As I don’t believe that Mr. Ruff, wealthy as he may be, actually has twelve billion dollars lying around in cash, I also wondered how he managed to insert that figure in his bank balance, such that Vikram was able to discover it. How are we to read that?

  Or is it that we really weren’t intended to backtrack the money transfer, just to accept that it was part of whatever scheme Cullen’s traders were up to?

  But in that case, why the deception over the twelve billion?

  It doesn’t entirely add up.

  It doesn’t entirely add up, Dagmar read.

  No, she thought, it didn’t.

  Because she knew, unlike the gamers, that the figure in the Forlorn Hope account was real.

  And she also knew that there was no way that Charlie, successful as he was, could have made that kind of money legally.

  She reached blindly for her cup of tea, drank, replaced the tea on its St. Pauli Girl coaster.

  Across her office, a leaf fell from one of Siyed’s bouquets.

  Her sense of scale was completely wrong where Charlie was concerned. He was huge. He was like the Medellin cartel, like the Burmese junta, like the smiling president of oil-rich Nigeria with his Swiss accounts and white cotton-lined cardboard boxes full of blood diamonds.

  Charlie’s Godzilla-size footprints ought to be all over the world.

  And the fact that they weren’t-the fact that Charlie was masquerading as a modest software entrepreneur in the San Fernando Valley-meant that Charlie had left the real world altogether and now lived somewhere in supervillain territory. He was Magneto. He was Lex Luthor. He was Doctor Doom.

  He was the Napoleon of Crime.

  When the hell had Charlie found time to develop this secret life? Certainly not in the years since Dagmar had begun working for him. She’d seen him nearly every day, and she’d never once seen him meeting with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.