This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  Probably the meetings took place in his secret base in a dormant volcano.

  Was even the Russian Maffya worth twelve billion? In cash? Dagmar doubted it.

  Unless, of course, Charlie owned the Russian Maffya. Given what she’d just discovered, she wouldn’t put it past him.

  FROM: Dagmar Shaw

  SUBJECT: Meeting

  Charlie, I’ve got to see you. Are you still at the Roosevelt?

  There was no answer to the email. Repeated phone calls were answered only by voice mail. Dagmar left a series of messages and then in her frustration drove down the 101 to Hollywood. She banged on the cabana door, which was opened by a fat, middle-aged man wearing nothing but a towel. He smelled strongly of cigars, and behind him were a pair of Hollywood rent-boys who gazed at Dagmar from over his hairy shoulders. Dagmar apologized and shuffled away.

  Fucking Charlie, she thought.

  She had to talk to somebody or she would explode. She called BJ and suggested they meet for dinner.

  “Are you in the valley? ” he asked.

  “I’m in Hollywood.”

  “I know a little place on Olympic near Koreatown. Want to check it out? ”

  When she got in her car, she unholstered her phone and prodded the icon for email. Charlie’s name leaped off the list. She retrieved the email and narrowed her eyes as she peered at the small screen.

  FROM: Charlie Ruff

  SUBJECT: Re: Meeting

  Damn right we’ve got to meet. But I’m in Chicago right now and

  won’t be back for a couple days.

  I’ve got some ideas for the game. Don’t worry, nobody buys anything

  this time.

  “Damn you, Charlie!” Dagmar shouted.

  A pair of tourists walking past gave her a quick glance, then just as quickly turned away.

  Dagmar decided she didn’t care if they thought she was crazy, and pounded the steering wheel with her fists until her phalanges felt they’d been slammed by a crowbar. She slumped in her seat, breathless.

  Suddenly she missed Austin very much.

  There was a burning in the back of her sinus. She dabbed tears away with the back of her wrist.

  She hadn’t had time to mourn him. Everything since Austin ’s death had been constant movement, dreadful pressure, frantic improvisation. All tangled up, one way or another, with The Long Night of Briana Hall and the decision to use the game to solve real-world problems.

  That had been her decision, she realized. She’d pressed Charlie to permit it.

  She realized, as she searched for a tissue to wipe away the tears, that she was as crazy as he was.

  B J’s restaurant turned out to specialize in egg dishes. It was the kind of place that would serve you breakfast eighteen hours out of twenty-four.

  “Be sure to order the candied pepper bacon,” BJ advised.

  “Candied pepper bacon,” Dagmar repeated.

  “Sounds weird, but it’s good. Try it.”

  She ordered an omelette with an English muffin and the candied pepper bacon. BJ ordered corned beef hash with poached eggs on top.

  The restaurant had about twelve different kinds of iced tea, and Dagmar asked which one of them had caffeine. The waiter just stared at her, as if no one had ever asked about caffeine before.

  No caffeine, she thought. Check.

  “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll have the French press.”

  The waiter had barely gone to place their order when Dagmar exploded.

  “Fucking Charlie,” she said, “has sent me an email telling me he’s going to screw with the game again. But he hasn’t told me how or why or when, and now I’m going crazy.”

  BJ looked at her intently through his spectacles. He had arrived in worn blue jeans and a T-shirt so old that its original blue had turned to purple. He hadn’t shaved in several days.

  He smelled of lavender soap. That was nice.

  “What did Charlie say, exactly?” BJ said.

  “Hardly anything, just that he had another idea. That’s what’s making me nuts.” She waved her hands. “We may as well stop working. We’re going to have to change it all anyway.”

  BJ gave a shrug. “All I can say is that he’s behaving true to form.”

  “I went to his cabana at the Roosevelt and found he’d left. He’s gone to Chicago!”

  Surprise passed across BJ’s features. “Chicago? Did he say why?” “No.”

  “No.”

  He rubbed his chin. “Do you think he’s still hiding from the Maffya? ”

  “I don’t know what to think!”

  Dagmar wished she still had the steering wheel in front of her so that she could punch it again.

  BJ pursed his lips, looked thoughtful. “Do you think he’s testing you? ”

  Dagmar blinked at him. “Why would he do that? ”

  “To find out if you’re-I don’t know-really loyal? ”

  Dagmar considered this.

  “That doesn’t make much sense,” she said. “I’ve never had any tension with him till now. He has no reason to think me anything other than a loyal employee.” Frustration bubbled in her veins. “He picked me, for God’s sake!”

  “He’s under pressure now. His backers, or the Russian Maffya, or whoever it is that’s giving him trouble-he can’t lash out at them. It’s got to be the people around him.”

  She looked at him curiously. “Did he do that to you? ” she asked.

  BJ shrugged his big shoulders. “Now and then,” he said. “Little ways, mostly. He’d demand that I abandon my own ideas and adopt his, that sort of thing. It made no sense, but it was his way of controlling things, and early on I agreed with him against my better judgment. It was when I began to stand up to him that he decided I was disloyal, and then he barely spoke to me.”

  “It’s got me so crazy.” She made claws of her hands and rent the air with her nails.

  “Well,” BJ said, “I wish I could help.”

  “You are helping,” she said. She put her hand over his. “You’re the only person I can talk to.”

  His blue eyes looked into hers. “It’s the same with me,” he said.

  The waiter arrived with their drinks, iced tea for BJ and the French press for Dagmar. She reached for the pot and pushed the plunger down, then poured.

  “Not bad,” she judged.

  This much coffee this late, she knew, she’d be up to 3 A.M.

  Not that she didn’t have plenty of work to do.

  She looked at BJ. “Something I’ve always wondered,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “About Charlie?”

  “About you.”

  A dubious look crossed his face.

  “If you don’t mind,” Dagmar said.

  He spread his big hands. “Ask, if you want.”

  “You went down with AvN Soft, okay,” Dagmar said. “But you were still smart. You still had talent. You had experience.”

  He nodded.

  “What you want to know,” he said, “is how I ended up at a place like Spud LLC?”

  “At the very least,” she said, “you could be working as a programmer, earning a lot more money than doing customer service.”

  “I hate to say this,” BJ said, “because it sounds paranoid. But I got blackballed.”

  Dagmar was surprised. “By whom?”

  “Charlie and his friends. Austin in particular.” Before Dagmar could protest, BJ held up a hand.

  “When Austin moved back to California,” BJ said, “I went to him to start a new company. My idea involved creating a peer-to-peer network for cell phones, so they wouldn’t depend so completely on cell phone towers.” He leaned toward her across the table. “When Hurricane Katrina hit,” he said, “the cell phone towers in New Orleans went down. People couldn’t call out. Maybe thousands died because they couldn’t tell emergency services where they were. If the phones had been connected with a peer-to-peer network, so that they could talk directly to each other instead of to a tower, t
he messages could have chained together until they reached an intact tower.”

  Dagmar was impressed. “That’s a great idea.”

  “It would be ideal in any emergency situation-California’s natural for it, because of the earthquakes. So I went to Austin with the idea of developing it.”

  “He turned you down?”

  “No. What Austin did was try to saddle me with a partner to handle the business end. He insisted I had to follow the guy’s orders whenever it came to a business decision.”

  Dagmar remembered Austin on the phone to his client, insisting that the business plan be followed. Dude, we’ve had this conversation.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  Anger burned in BJ’s eyes. “I turned Austin down. I wasn’t going to have some stranger telling me what to do.” He spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “But then whenever I went to some other venture capitalist, it turned out he had the same stipulation. Turns out that Charlie or Austin had been there ahead of me, telling everyone the official version of how AvN Soft went down, and everyone believed them instead of me.”

  “Come on,” Dagmar said. “I can’t see them calling everyone in the industry just to get back at you.”

  “Believe it how you want,” BJ said. There was belligerence in his tone. “I’m just telling you what happened.”

  Dagmar decided to skate away to another subject.

  “But why Spud, then?” she asked. “There must be a thousand better jobs.”

  BJ gave a bitter little laugh and took a sip of his iced tea.

  “I decided that rather than take a crap job, I’d take a shit job.”

  Dagmar found herself laughing.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “you’d better make that distinction clearer.”

  He scratched his chin. “Okay,” he said. “When you know a job is shit going in, then it’s a shit job. It’s honest about being a shit job. That was my job at Spud.”

  “Okay,” Dagmar said.

  “But a crap job is a shit job with pretensions. You get paid more, maybe, but it’s only because you have to work twelve-hour days in a cubicle doing work that’s beyond tedious, all with fuck-wit managers on your case every minute of the day. Crap jobs aren’t for bright people, they’re for Dilberts. And I’m not a Dilbert.”

  Dagmar looked at him and shook her head.

  “No,” she said, “you’re not.”

  Their dinner arrived. Dagmar’s omelette was fluffy and moist, and her home fries had a surprising, delightful herbal taste.

  “These are the best home fries I’ve ever had,” she said.

  BJ grinned. “There was a reason I recommended this place.”

  She tried the candied pepper bacon. It was very good.

  “I didn’t think you could improve bacon,” she said.

  “Told you it was good.”

  They talked about jobs through their meal, trying to distinguish shit jobs from crap jobs. BJ had endured many worse jobs than the one at Spud. Dagmar had experienced plenty of both, working as a teenager in Cleveland, where she had dealt in addition with the hazard of a father who would steal her money and valuables.

  “And in England?” BJ asked. “You worked there?”

  “Under the table,” she said, “because of immigration. But then I started selling stories, and that was very nice. The best job I’ve ever had.”

  “I imagine it would be.” He tilted his head. “And-Aubrey, was that his name? How did he feel about the writing?”

  “He was proud of me.”

  BJ nodded. “But the marriage still didn’t work.”

  She looked at him. “I married him on the rebound. Never a good idea.”

  BJ held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Seeing anyone now?”

  Dagmar tried to work out a way of explaining how she had been Promiscuous Girl back in England, and that while her morals hadn’t improved since, her work hours had increased and so her flings were few and far between. She gave up.

  “I’m celibate on account of a seventy-hour workweek,” she said.

  “Typical geek,” he said. “A geek with a crap job and a crap boss.”

  “I’m being paid very well for all those hours,” Dagmar pointed out.

  “You’re being paid well to burn yourself out, after which the money and the job will disappear and you’ll be in your late thirties with no current job skills. That’s the very definition of a crap job.”

  Dagmar smiled thinly. “Can we get back to our love lives? Sad to admit, that’s the less depressing subject.”

  “It’s like moving from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the Slough of Despond, but-whatever.” BJ gave a self-conscious smile. “I’m celibate on account of poverty,” he said. “The only women who want me are crazy, or single parents who need a father and a second income for their kids.”

  “You don’t want to be a father?”

  “What I don’t want,” he said, “is to be a stepfather in a trailer court with a swarm of underdisciplined children and no money.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. That’s understandable.”

  He looked at her, then shrugged and smiled.

  “We’re pathetic,” he said, “but at least we’re not in Chile.”

  A cold finger brushed her spine. She looked up at him in shock.

  “What happened in Chile?” she asked.

  “Didn’t you hear? Their currency collapsed today-the Chinese traders again, supposedly. All of South America is on the edge of a depression worse than anything since the nineteen thirties.”

  Dagmar sucked in breath. Her mind spun. BJ talked on.

  “They say the Chinese are taking out their competition, one currency at a time. It makes sense-Indonesia’s got a huge population, and so does Latin America. These are all people who work for coolie wages, just like the Chinese. From the Chinese point of view, it’s best to keep their economies from ever developing.”

  Dagmar thought about that, spoke slowly. “So you think it’s Chinese government policy?”

  BJ shrugged. “Their government can be ruthless, and they’re smart and calculating. We know that.”

  Images of Jakarta flashed in Dagmar’s mind-the mobs, the police shooting, the tiny bodies strewn on the pavement. The pillar of smoke over Glodok.

  “But,” she said, “if Latin Americans are really desperate, they’ll work for less money than the Chinese.”

  “Not if the employers don’t have the resources to pay wages in real money.” BJ narrowed his eyes in thought. “Investment will eventually come in, though, right? From other countries. But the country might be China-using the Latin Americans’ own wealth to buy their own factories. It’s a win-win for the Chinese.”

  Dagmar decided to change the subject before she lost herself entirely in the nightmare. She gave BJ a wan smile.

  “You crashed an economy once, right?” she said.

  He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry?”

  “Austin told me that you and Charlie crashed Lost Empire.”

  “Oh.” He gave a grin. “Yeah, we did that.”

  “On purpose?” BJ and Charlie had never been destructive hackers.

  “No, it was an accident.” He sipped his iced tea. “When we were shopping AvN Soft around, we both got involved with the game. We spent fourteen hours a day bashing wizards and fighting monsters and stealing treasure. But when the first of the venture capital came in, we had to drop the game and build a real business.”

  “So you crashed Lost Empire because you couldn’t play anymore?”

  “No.” He gave a little laugh. “It’s kind of embarrassing, what we did, actually. We were so freaking young.”

  “Go ahead.”

  BJ ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair.

  “Okay,” he said. “We cashed in all our armor and weapons and magic stuff for the virtual gold pieces they used in the game, and then we put a couple of our software agents to work. We programmed them to make money, so that when w
e had time to get back to Lost Empire, we’d still be in the game, and with luck in a better position than when we left.”

  “You had the software agents play you?”

  “Play our characters, yeah. They had our passwords and just stayed logged on twenty-four/seven, buying and selling. It wasn’t hard, if our characters weren’t moving around, just buying stuff in the market in the Old Imperial City, which was basically the market for the whole world. We were, like, testing our work. Doing a proof-of-concept. And the thing worked out-in four weeks Rialto had Lost Empire on its knees. Between the two of us, we had monopolies in lumber mills, flour mills, the woods and fields the lumber and the flour came from, all the mines that produced iron, gems, gold, silver, and copper. We owned all the warehouses. If anyone else competed with us, we’d undersell them and drive them out of business, then buy whatever was left and jack the price up. That way we ended up with all the cash, too. The only thing we couldn’t control was the magic items, because the game produced those on a schedule, or randomly.”

  “By ‘we,’ you mean the agents.”

  “The software, yeah. And Lost Empire came to a screeching halt. The game masters had to shut everything down, and they confiscated all our property and gave the players a bunch of free game gold to make up for being ripped off.” He laughed. “God, we were infamous. But they didn’t know our real names, just our online identities. Otherwise we might have gotten our asses sued off.”

  A cold ice-water thought drenched Dagmar’s brain.

  “Is that what the Chinese are doing?” she asked. “In the real world?”

  “Using software agents?”

  “Yeah.”

  BJshook his head. “Lost Empire basically had only a couple of dozen tradeable commodities, that and armor and weapons and magic stuff. The real world has fifty million times as much complexity, and real-world economies have more mechanisms for correcting themselves.” He grinned. “Believe me, Charlie and I discussed this. We had all sorts of fantasies about conquering the real world the same way we conquered Lost Empire.” He shrugged. “But you know how the agents we unleashed on the real-world markets turned out. They’re good, they’re making money for Charlie and everyone who rents one…” He laughed. “Nobody owns the planet yet.”