This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

“We’re in the middle of it.” You bastard. “No problems so far.” You selfish, treacherous bastard.

  “I’m back in L.A. We need to meet.”

  “Damn right we need to meet,” Dagmar said. She was aware of BJ’s mild gaze, ten feet away.

  BJ raised his coffee cup, sipped.

  “I’m at the Figueroa Hotel,” Charlie said. “ Medina Suite.”

  “Hotel Figueroa? That’s on Figueroa, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Downtown’s a freakin’ desert. Why are you there?”

  “It’s next to the Staples Center. Maybe I want to catch a game.”

  “Heh. Yeah. Right.”

  “Can you make it down as soon as the update’s finished?”

  “Yeah. I was going to do a laundry, but I guess I can go on wearing stinky clothes for another day.”

  “See you.”

  She reholstered her phone and looked at BJ’s expectant face.

  “The master calls?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He nodded. “Good luck.”

  A few minutes later, Helmuth hit Enter one last time, peered at the screen, then pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Update’s finished,” he said. “All the pages are up, and all the video files from London are archived for anyone who wants to watch them.”

  “Go home, then,” Dagmar told him.

  Helmuth yanked the cord from his laptop and closed the computer’s display, then stood. He looked at the wall clock.

  “I’ve got time for a nap before my haircut,” he said.

  “You sleep?”

  Helmuth smiled. “Only on weekend afternoons,” he said.

  As Helmuth made his way out, BJ stood, crumpled his empty coffee cup, and tossed it in the recycling.

  “I’m ready for a nap myself.”

  “If you’re not going to the country club with the other tycoons.”

  He grinned and waved on his way out.

  Dagmar looked at the time display on her phone. Medina Suite, she thought. On my way.

  It was easy to find Figueroa, which was a major street downtown, but the road was one-way going in the wrong direction, and she got lost at least three times trying to find her way around the problem. Once, Dagmar discovered herself on the 110 headed for Long Beach with no clear idea how she got on the freeway. By the time she finished blundering around the basketball arena and the convention center, found the hotel, and gave her car keys to the Figueroa’s valet, her nerves were crackling with fury.

  The Figueroa Hotel was in a building that dated back to the 1920s and had been decorated in some kind of Moroccan Iberian frenzy, with a lobby full of wrought-iron lamps, geometric tiles, palms, bougainvillea, and throne-shaped chairs slung with bull hide. As Dagmar passed by the front desk, she heard an unfamiliar clattering and turned to discover the clerk working on an actual typewriter, an IBM Selectric probably manufactured before she was born.

  She appreciated the classical touch.

  Dagmar found the Medina Suite easily enough, by the flat of Mexican Coke empties sitting outside the massive doors with their iron hinges. Dagmar knocked, and Charlie let her in. Her anger was forgotten in the first glimpse of the room-painted an unlikely Mediterranean blue, with gold curtains, a russet spread on the enormous bed, ballooning striped tent fabric that concealed the ceiling, and a low couch with dangling tassels.

  The plush Pinky doll sat in the strange wood-mounted metal bowl that served as a coffee table. The Brain glowered with red eyes from a Moorish cupboard. Charlie’s laptop sat on a desk by the window.

  Dagmar looked at Charlie. “Where’s Kimba Leigh when you need her?” she asked.

  “Providing room service elsewhere, I guess,” Charlie said. “Sit down.”

  The low couch swallowed her. Charlie sat cross-legged on a vast cushion. He hadn’t shaved today. He seemed tired, and discouraged, and more than a little irritated.

  In which case, she thought, they were a matched pair.

  “So how are things?” she said.

  “They suck.” He looked up at her. “I was looking for someone to take Austin ’s place, but that was an impossibility. All the really talented venture capital guys already have terrific jobs that pay them ridiculous profits. So then I thought I’d try to find another firm that would buy Austin’s shares and fold his business into theirs. Which I did-I had a nice deal lined up with a Chicago firm that wanted a presence on the West Coast. But then Austin’s father scotched it.”

  “Mr. Katanyan?” Dagmar asked. “Why?”

  Charlie’s mouth tightened into a line. “He’s decided to run the business himself. I tried to tell him that VC was a little different from the rug business, but I think that just made him mad.”

  He flapped his hands.

  “Oh well,” he said. “It’s not my damn business anyway. I was just trying to do Austin’s dad a favor.” He grimaced. “I hope I can sell him my shares, though.”

  “You can sell them to someone, I suppose.”

  He glared. “Not once someone discovers that the firm’s in the hands of an Armenian American rug seller, no.”

  Dagmar almost told him that his billions would be a comfort in this matter, but decided not to.

  “You wanted to talk to me about the game,” she said.

  He seemed embarrassed. He took off his glasses, looked at them in his hand for a moment, then replaced them.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I thought I had a good idea, but I realized it wouldn’t work.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it involves the cooperation of too many people who aren’t connected to the game.”

  She looked at Pinky, waving from the table with one three-fingered hand.

  “Cooperation from whom?”

  There was a strange little twitch behind his eyes, as if he first had to decide what piece of the story Dagmar was entitled to know before he could tell her anything.

  “It had to do with the game’s… financial dimension,” he said slowly. “You know, the money men who are supposedly going to profit from the terrorist attacks. I thought… I thought the players could track the buy and sell orders coming into the brokerage houses, then-I don’t know-do a little hackage to wreck the bad traders. But so many people trading online are perfectly firewalled-it’s sort of a necessity, come to think of it, if you’re going to start moving money around through the Internet. In the game we might be able to get an IP number, but that won’t necessarily get into the other folks’ computers. It’s just not going to happen.”

  Dagmar wondered if Charlie could see the calculation behind her own eyes, as she herself tried to decide what to reveal and what to hide.

  “We could build a virtual brokerage in the game,” Dagmar said. “We could give the players access to trades, let them track the traders using information we provide.”

  “No,” Charlie said. “That’s too much work for the technical staff on such notice.”

  Pity you didn’t consider the deadlines for the writing staff, Dagmar thought.

  Pity you didn’t consider, she thought, all the people you killed.

  She sighed. Scrubbed at her jeans with her palms. Decided to stop the guessing games.

  “Charlie,” she said. “Can you tell me what the hell this is about?”

  He looked at her in a calculating way, as if he understood perfectly well what she meant but was trying to decide how much she knew.

  “What do you mean?” he said.

  “You’re going to have to find some other mechanism for taming your gold-farming bots,” Dagmar said.

  Charlie’s look turned to horror.

  “You’ve got all the money in the Forlorn Hope account,” she said. “Twelve billion that I know about. That’ll accomplish a lot, I expect. But all that money’s got Austin’s blood on it-and probably the blood of a lot of other people by now-so if you want me to help you, I’ve got to know everything.”

  The color had drained from Charlie’s f
ace. He stared at her wildly, eyes huge behind his spectacles. Dagmar pointed a finger at him.

  “Don’t even think about having me killed,” she said. “The gamers are halfway to the truth already-they just don’t know it. But if we don’t give them satisfactory answers, they’re going to find out everything you want to keep hidden.”

  Protest entered Charlie’s face-he was going to say that he’d never even considered killing Dagmar. But he didn’t say it.

  Maybe he was considering it now.

  “And not only that,” Dagmar said. “My guess is that the world’s security forces are taking a big interest in you right now. You can’t hide what’s happening from them, not once they start probing.” She looked at him. “Deaths just make all that worse,” she said.

  All expression had faded from Charlie’s face. He was staring emptily into a corner of the room.

  Dagmar looked at the plush doll in the Moorish cabinet.

  “What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” she asked, and then she gave a galvanic leap as Charlie’s laptop computer answered for her.

  “What we do every night, Pinky.” The computer spoke in the Brain’s deep Orson Welles voice.

  “Try,” added Charlie, his voice listless, “to take over the world.”

  Dagmar looked at him.

  “How’s that working for you, Charlie?” she asked.

  Charlie stared expressionlessly at a corner of the room.

  “Better than it’s worked for Brain,” he said. He looked at Dagmar. “So what do you want to know?”

  “Start with you and BJ crashing Lost Empire.”

  Charlie sighed. “God. That was so long ago.”

  “But it gave you an idea for saving AvN Soft when you ran into trouble.”

  Charlie looked up, spread his hands helplessly. “The first release of Rialto was a mess. I’d worked for months, and all we’d done was screw it up. And BJ was making us crazy, changing his mind every few hours about the way he wanted the company run, about the features on the software, about how he wanted to advertise the product.”

  He rose from his cushion and began pacing the room. He marched to the gold curtains, turned, marched back.

  “We had created many different versions of the software during the development process, and we were working on upgrades to the existing software when the money ran out. The thing was already configured to make trades on its own, if the buyers wanted that feature.” He stopped, turned, and began speaking rapidly, hands gesturing on the ends of his thin arms.

  “The software was configured to evolve. It would learn from its mistakes, learn from its successes. I didn’t want multiple copies on our company servers, because then BJ and every other damn person in the building would see what was happening. I ran the first copy from my own desktop machine in my own apartment.

  “In order to create more copies, I added peer-to-peer networking, like the old Russian Storm Worm, and I sent it out into the world with the company’s last twenty thousand dollars as a stake.” He laughed. “That money wouldn’t have kept the company going more than a week. It didn’t seem worth hanging on to it.”

  “How do the bots work?”

  He walked to the fridge as he answered, drew out a half-empty half liter of Mexican Coke, and began to drink.

  “They look for other machines where they can reproduce, and if they find a security weakness, they’ll clone themselves. They’re not a threat to their host machines. They do no damage. They just use spare memory and processor capacity to make online trades. If a systems administrator wasn’t looking for them, he wouldn’t find them.”

  The peer-to-peer network, harnessing computers with poor security to do the actual work of computation, wasn’t unique. More than half the spam in the world was generated by computers whose owners had left them open to intrusion. Other infected machines participated in stock fraud, pump-and-dump schemes, trolled for passwords and credit card information, and sent out denial-of-service attacks on targeted companies.

  “The bots trade twenty-four/seven,” Charlie said. “Every market in the world.” His eyes glowed behind his spectacles as he took a swig of Coke. “Each clone evolves on its own, but they all share information continuously along their peer-to-peer network.”

  “In order to trade online,” Dagmar said, “you need an account.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Accounts with an online brokerage firm aren’t hard to get. You need a name, an address, an email address. And money. Once you wire money to your account, they don’t care so much about the rest.”

  “Social Security number?” Dagmar asked.

  “You don’t need one if you’re operating from a foreign country. All the clones use names and addresses in foreign tax havens-they’ve got access to public databases like online phone lists, and they generate names randomly. All the money is kept in brokerage accounts, except that half of the profits are wired to the Forlorn Hope account on Grand Cayman.”

  “Obviously it succeeded,” Dagmar said.

  “At the last minute.” He took a drink, Adam’s apple bobbing. “I checked the Forlorn Hope account every hour, then every day. Every so often a few dollars would appear, but nothing like the twenty grand I’d invested. I started to get paranoid-I started thinking our creditors would audit the books and prosecute me for that missing money. I decided not to think about any of it. I stopped checking the Cayman account.”

  He looked at the bottle in his hand and frowned.

  “It happened after we’d been formally evicted. We had till the end of the month before the locks would be changed and we’d lose everything. I’d given up-I’d placed ads trying to sell my car, and I was looking for work. Anywhere but L.A.-I was sick of this town. And then I looked at the Forlorn Hope account for the first time in a couple of weeks, and there the money was, just sitting there.”

  He looked at Dagmar. A loose-lipped grin spread across his face.

  “Eleven point two million dollars. All grown from that twenty-thousand-dollar seed.” He laughed and waved his Coke. “L.A. was looking better!” he said.

  He clenched his fists and waved them on either side of his head in a gesture of triumph. “The bots learned. They learned just like they were supposed to. And once they learned, they kicked financial ass!”

  He thrust out a foot to kick someone’s imaginary butt.

  “My babies pwned the markets! Damn, I was proud!”

  “So you bought AvN Soft back,” Dagmar said. “You’re your own mysterious foreign backers.”

  Charlie gave a triumphant little laugh.

  “Damn right. And I kicked BJ the fuck out and changed the locks and got a security specialist to wipe him from the computers before he could do me any damage.” He pointed the bottle at her. “He had trapdoors everywhere, you know that? He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control.” He shook his head. “Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!”

  Dagmar ran fingers through her gray hair and let herself fall into the huge, soft cushions of the couch. She could imagine BJ angry; she could imagine him vindictive.

  But she couldn’t imagine him destructive. That wasn’t his history-his wreckage of Lost Empire had been an accident. If he had trapdoors into AvN Soft, it was to keep track of things.

  It was useless, though, to try to convince Charlie of that.

  “You didn’t put your bots on the market for AvN Soft,” Dagmar said.

  “I couldn’t.” Charlie looked embarrassed. “All I had was the original one on my home computer. And that one wasn’t making that much money-it hadn’t evolved in the right direction. It was the agents I’d released into the wild that were making the money for me, and I didn’t even know where they were. I had no way of keeping track of them.”

  She gazed up at him in awe.

  “You’re out of you
r mind, you know that?” she said.

  “Yeah, probably.” He waved a hand dismissively. “The annoying thing is that I can’t take credit for any of it. It all has to stay secret.”

  Dagmar felt anger enter her voice.

  “You really want to take credit for what happened to Chile?” she asked. “Bolivia? Indonesia?”

  A haunted look crossed Charlie’s face.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  He put the Coke down and flopped cross-legged onto his cushion.

  “The bots were doing well for me,” he said. “Profits were averaging something like twenty million each quarter. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Once I got AvN Soft on its feet, all the excess was just icing on the cake. I invested in Austin’s company and several others. I contributed to a lot of charities and foundations. I tried to be a force for good in the world.

  “And then, back in June”-face turning blank-“the bots leveled.”

  Leveled. A term from gaming, where a character cashed in experience points and gained a host of new magical abilities.

  “The agents started crashing whole countries,” Charlie said. “The day that Indonesia started to go down-it was a Sunday-I saw all this cash sitting in the offshore account, and I knew that something bad had to have happened somewhere, on the other side of the date line, where it was already Monday.” He looked up at Dagmar. “I would have warned you if I’d known you would head for Jakarta that day. It was that afternoon that the real Chinese traders made their move and finished what the bots had started.”

  “There really are Chinese traders?” Dagmar asked.

  Charlie nodded. “Oh yeah. And American traders, European traders… they’ve been following the bots’ action through the currency markets. In the beginning, the bots didn’t have enough muscle to really take down a whole country. But now…” He looked at her. “Back in ’ninety-two, George Soros crashed the English pound with ten billion in positions. The bots now have twice as much money as Soros did.”

  “More than twelve billion?”

  “More than twenty now. Now that Chile’s burned.”

  Suddenly Dagmar’s mouth was dry. “Can I have one of your Cokes?” she asked.

  “Be my guest.”