This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  If he had been foolish enough to use his own phone when contacting the players he’d used to deliver the bomb to the Fig, he’d have hanged himself-but Dagmar knew that BJ was smarter than that. Dagmar knew he would have used what on TV crime shows was called a burner-a cell phone with prepaid hours, purchased anonymously and after the crime destroyed.

  There was nothing in any of this that would indict BJ, let alone convict him.

  A bigger demonstration would be required.

  In the morning she took Hollywood Boulevard west, toward the ocean, and found a place to park near where it became Sunset Boulevard. Between two shabby old office buildings, and beneath a billboard for Ray Corrigan’s new blockbuster, she found an old, steep stairway that connected Sunset and Santa Monica boulevards, and from this vantage viewed the building that contained Katanyan Associates.

  She had been there many times, but she thought it might be useful to refresh her memory. The building was a four-story structure of dark glass. Austin’s company occupied the second floor. Cars were parked on a kind of concrete shelf cantilevered out over the slope, with a view of Century City beyond. There was a booth for a gate guard, but it was manned only during working hours.

  The building across the street had CCTV cameras on its roof, but these were drooping downward-broken or unused.

  It’s going to happen Tuesday night, she thought. When you’ve got Aram for your alibi.

  It was lucky that Katanyan Associates was only a short distance from the New Hollywood Inn.

  That would make things easier.

  This Is Not an Assassin

  Richard the Assassin sat behind his long, curving row of consoles, screen images winking in his eyes. Ninjas glared down from the upper shelves, fierce eyes gazing from masked faces.

  “CRAPJOB’s starting to scare me,” he said. “He’s using your account to build a program that’s going to cause major damage. When he gives the word, it’s going to trash every record on our servers, starting with all Great Big Idea’s games, then going on to email and accounting files, then demolishing everything in AvN Soft that it can reach. We’ve got backups off-site, of course, but we can’t swear that every single thing is backed up.”

  “He won’t move till after the Wednesday update,” Dagmar said. “He can’t afford to destroy anything until the players send his patch out.”

  “I’m still worried,” said Richard.

  She looked at him. “All right,” she said. “If we don’t track this guy down by Tuesday six P.M., lock him out. Eliminate his account, wipe out his little data bomb, and make sure-” She leaned forward, intent. “Make sure it’s Charlie’s patch that goes out to the players, not anything else.”

  Richard shrugged. “Of course.”

  Dagmar began to speak, then hesitated, then spoke anyway. Any residual loyalty to BJ had vanished at the point at which she’d seen him stalking up and down outside her conjectural motel room.

  “While you’re doing that,” she said, “eliminate Boris Bustretski’s account.”

  Richard raised his eyebrows. “You think he’s CRAPJOB? ”

  “CRAPJOB appeared after BJ came on as a freelancer.”

  The eyebrows lifted another millimeter.

  “BJ? ”

  “He’s an old friend,” Dagmar said, “but I don’t trust him.”

  Richard made a sweeping motion with his hand, clean as the slice of a ninja sword.

  “It’s done,” he said.

  FROM: Consuelo

  SUBJECT: Porn Invasion

  Hey, Dagmar-

  Why has my hard drive filled up with this awful Asian porn?

  Is this any way for a detective to treat his partner?

  Joe

  FROM: Dagmar Shaw

  SUBJECT: Re: Porn Invasion

  Andy,

  Your hard drive should keep its fly zipped.

  Good detectives don’t go anywhere without a warrant.

  Dagmar

  FROM: Consuelo

  SUBJECT: Re: re: Porn Invasion

  Darn it, Dagmar, I thought we were friends!

  FROM: Hippolyte

  SUBJECT: Re: L.A. Games

  Hi, Dagmar,

  I’ve got the phone call from David! I’m supposed to help deliver data

  to Maria so that she can get it to Briana.

  I told David yes. He said it’s going down Tuesday night.

  My phone is (714) 756-0578.

  H.

  “Okay,” said Dagmar. “So the data stick is going to be hidden in a vase of flowers? ”

  She was speaking not to Hippolyte, to whom she had talked earlier in the day, but to a player named GIAWOL, whom she did not know. GIAWOL had a clenched-sounding voice, as if he were afraid to let his lower teeth get too far from his upper. Possibly, Dagmar thought, he had a pipe in his mouth.

  “Yes,” GIAWOL said. Dagmar knew that his name was an acronym for Gaming is a way of life.

  “I don’t know that it’s a data stick, exactly,” he said, “only that I’m supposed to put it in the vase. And that once I deliver it to Maria, I’m supposed to text-message David at a certain number.”

  “Can you give me the number?”

  GIAWOL did. Dagmar wrote it down. It was a number she didn’t recognize.

  BJ’s latest cell phone burner.

  “Where are you supposed to deliver the flowers?” Dagmar asked.

  “Someplace called the New Hollywood Inn,” GIAWOL said. “Room one one eight.”

  Dagmar felt the flush of anger on her skin.

  “Anything else?” she asked.

  “Just that I’m to say it’s from the management.”

  “Of the motel?”

  “Yes. It’s supposed to be thanks for staying there for so long.” There was a hesitation. “Can I make a request?”

  “Of course.”

  “More mathematical puzzles,” GIAWOL said. “I love those.”

  She smiled. “I’ll make a note of it.”

  “Also, the destegging program you people use only works with a PC. I’m a Mac user.”

  “I’ll pass that on to them.”

  Over Monday afternoon she had tracked the evolution of BJ’s plot. It featured sending players along the same wandering courses that he’d used in his last scheme, followed by a player’s uniting the data with the “package”-in this case a vase of flowers-and delivering them to a motel room door.

  His bomb-making skills had evolved, clearly. The last bomb had been triggered when Charlie turned on the computer or opened the door to the CD player. This one would be command-detonated, presumably by cell phone. It would have to be assumed that Dagmar would be averse to plugging in any strange computers delivered to her door, so when GIAWOL sent the text message that the flowers had been delivered, BJ in turn would call the cell phone hidden in the flower vase. Which would trigger the bomb, thus ending BJ’s problems. And Dagmar’s, of course.

  An abstract kind of pity, devoid of genuine sadness or compassion, floated through Dagmar’s mind.

  Poor BJ, she thought. He’s only got the one trick.

  He’s not puppetmaster enough to save himself.

  FROM: Maria Perry

  SUBJECT: Ford Phalanx

  I’ve located Cullen’s briefcase. It’s in a late-model Ford Phalanx

  parked in the Coolomb Corporation garage!

  Is there any way I can break into the car without setting off the

  alarm? I don’t need to steal the car, I just need to get into it!

  Maria

  FROM: Desi

  SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

  Maria,

  This company sells custom lockpick sets for specific models of cars.

  If the Phalanx has keyless entry, then of course this won’t work.

  FROM: ReVerb

  SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

  Pity it’s not the late nineties, when GM cars had keys so

  interchangeable that you could randomly insert your key into a strange
<
br />   lock with a 50% chance it would open. Of course the Phalanx isn’t

  GM, but I can’t resist an interesting bit of trivia!

  You might try ordering some of these tools from this online catalog.

  These are the tools used by professionals, legit and otherwise,

  to break into cars.

  The tools don’t seem to have names, just catalog numbers.

  FROM: Atenveldt

  SUBJECT: Re: Ford Phalanx

  Maria, the Phalanx has keyless entry. There isn’t a conventional

  lock anywhere on the vehicle. The driver carries a sort of seedpod-

  shaped cartridge with an active (battery-operated) RFID tag that

  scanners in the car will recognize. The car won’t start without the

  RFID tag inside.

  RFIDs, of course, have a well-known problem, which is that they

  broadcast to all the wrong scanners as well as the right ones.

  What I would do is this: I’d get an RFID scanner somewhere near

  that car to record the signal the pod emits when it tells the Phalanx

  to open its doors. Then you create an electronic duplicate of the

  signal, and the car is yours!

  And the car is mine, Dagmar thought.

  Two players she’d never heard from had jumped out of the electronic world to answer Maria’s question. She could always count on the Group Mind.

  It was time for another visit to the electronics store.

  This Is Not Breakfast

  It was typical of L.A. that the surveillance store was open till midnight-after all, one never knew at what hour one’s husband, or one’s banker, would choose to cheat. The clerk sold her a battery-powered RFID scanner and a device for cloning the captured signals. Both boxes were compact and idiotproof-stupid criminals, after all, used them every day, usually to steal someone’s identity when the victim swiped a credit card while making a purchase, or when they were carrying one of the new American passports, which the government had insisted could only be detected at a range of four inches, even in the face of objective tests that demonstrated their vulnerability at a range of ten meters or more.

  The clerk gazed at her from sad, idiotproof eyes. “You must promise to use this only for good,” he told her.

  She looked at him.

  “I’m innocent as chocolate syrup,” she told him.

  She drove to BJ’s apartment. She’d never been there before, but the address was available in the contract he’d signed with Great Big Idea.

  It wasn’t in a good part of L.A. The small building, with clap-board walls and a shake roof, was ramshackle and contained no more than four apartments. Two vehicles sat in the parking lot on concrete blocks. In this district her Mercedes coupe glowed like a beacon.

  Dagmar circled the apartment and saw neither the Phalanx nor BJ’s old Chevy. She parked half a block away, in a place where her car was shaded from the streetlight by an overgrown willow, and shifted to the passenger seat. She remembered reading somewhere that a person sitting in the passenger seat was less conspicuous than someone behind the wheel.

  She reclined the seat as far as possible, pulled her panama hat partly down her face, and waited for the rumble of the Ford’s V-8. When BJ arrived and went to bed, she intended to slip out and put the RFID scanner beneath his car to catch the signals from his remote, then retrieve the scanner after he left.

  The Phalanx didn’t come. She waited for hours, enduring the occasional scrutiny of young men walking past along the broken sidewalk. When they began to crowd the Mercedes, either to admire the car or to steal it, she raised her seat to make herself more visible and pretended to be talking on the phone. The young men, surprised and suddenly self-conscious, retreated. No one really bothered her.

  Eventually even the drifting knots of young men went to bed. Dagmar drowsed and periodically scanned the apartment building with night binoculars. BJ hadn’t come home.

  He was wherever he was building the bomb, she thought. Where he was carefully crafting the instrument that would kill her.

  When dawn began to feather the leaves of the willow tree overhead, Dagmar got out of the car and stretched aching limbs. She retreated to her motel room for a shower and an hour’s jangled sleep, and the alarm function in her phone woke her promptly at seven.

  Dagmar looked at the phone and dreaded what was going to happen next. She tasted stomach acid in the back of her throat.

  She took a deep breath and pressed buttons for the speed dial.

  When BJ answered, she said, “Let’s have breakfast. I need to talk to someone.”

  He cleared his throat, and when his voice emerged it was thick with sleep.

  “Dagmar? Are you all right?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m not.”

  The morning news was about the continued attack on the yuan. The Chinese currency had lost at least half its value, neatly canceling half the value of the obsessive savings of hundreds of millions of people, most of them poor. Rioters had trashed a train station in Guangzhou and broken bank windows on the Shanghai Bund. The dollar was losing value as well, and the Chinese government was still uttering threats.

  She wondered if anyone other than she and BJ had yet realized that the attacks were coming from a botnet.

  Dagmar and BJ met near Koreatown, in the egg-themed restaurant where they’d dined before Charlie had been killed. BJ had been planning to kill Charlie then, Dagmar thought, because the twelve-billion-dollar figure had shown up on Our Reality Network earlier in the day, and BJ would have known at once what it meant.

  Dagmar arrived at the restaurant first and sat with her back to the wall and ordered coffee. BJ arrived fifteen minutes later, heralded by the bass vibrato of the Ford. He was unshaven and dressed in worn jeans and a faded T. Apparently, she thought, tycoon wear and bomb factories did not mix.

  Dagmar managed not to hurl the coffee in his face. Instead she steeled herself and rose to embrace him. She smelled the familiar lavender soap and her stomach turned over.

  “What’s going on? ” he asked. “You look awful.”

  She seated herself. “Three friends dead. Cops on my tail. No sleep. And the game updates tomorrow.”

  This time BJ remembered he wasn’t supposed to know about Siyed.

  “Three friends? ” he asked.

  She told him about Siyed, and while she did, she watched him. The calculation behind his reactions seemed plain, the falsity enormous. There was a little delay behind every response, as he tried to decide how to react. He did everything but wave a placard saying “Murderous Sociopath.”

  How, she wondered, had she not noticed any of this till now?

  They had known each other for thirteen or fourteen years. They had been lovers for nine months of that. She had adored him at the start of the relationship, had been secretly relieved when he broke it off, and had been twisted enough by the rejection to marry a man she didn’t love.

  She and BJ had been working together for weeks, and she’d sat opposite him at desks and tables and heard his stories of the fall of AvN Soft and seen his blue eyes glitter with anger at Charlie, and she hadn’t seen any of the mendacity, any of the self-interest, any of the plotting.

  Charlie had told her over and over about BJ. So had Austin. She hadn’t thought they were lying; she had just thought they were prejudiced.

  She hadn’t seen any of what BJ had created. She, so good at plots, at hiding and detecting, had gone on thinking of BJ as her friend-and not only that, but her friend of last resort.

  Dagmar could only conclude that she was as broken as he was.

  “Staying out of sight is probably a good idea,” BJ said. “It’ll give them time to find out who really did it. And you should get some rest, you look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

  Go stay in your hotel room, Dagmar translated, where I can get to you with my bomb.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But there’s the big update tomorrow.”


  “It’s all set up, right?” he said. “You don’t even need to be there. Any last-minute writing or anything, I’ll handle it.”

  “You’re spending the day with Aram, I thought.”

  He gave one of his big-shouldered shrugs. “I’ll work all night, if I have to.”

  BJ went on to talk about Aram Katanyan, about how he’d made the connection at Austin ’s memorial service, then kept in touch. He’d known that Aram would have a lot to say about what happened to Katanyan Associates, and so BJ had kept stressing his qualifications for the job. He’d talked about how long he’d known Austin, how they’d met over gaming. Eventually it was Aram, not BJ, who had first brought up the matter of his coming in as acting head of the firm.

  BJ was bouncy and confident and pleased with himself. A few weeks ago, she’d seen him baffled and defeated. Now he was much more like the BJ she’d met at Caltech, the one who’d walk up to you and tell you how smart he was and how successful he was going to be.

  All it took to create this change, she thought, was killing a couple of people and getting away with it.

  Suddenly she realized why she’d been so blind. I haven’t been in his way till now. She’d been trying to help BJ, not prevent him from doing anything he’d wanted to do. What little she’d had, she’d offered freely. She’d never thwarted him, and he’d never turned into any of those people in his games, the two-faced gutter crawlers that stood ready to betray everyone in sight.

  She looked down at the table. BJ’s plate was empty. Her own blueberry and pecan pancakes had been more torn to shreds than eaten. The smell of candied pepper bacon hung in the air.

  She’d never be able to eat candied pepper bacon again.

  “Can we go for a ride in your car?” she asked.

  Surprise blinked in his blue eyes.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Can I drive?”

  She left money on the table for breakfast, and they stepped out into yet another brilliant Los Angeles morning. She held out a hand.

  “The key?” she asked.

  BJ fished in his pocket and found the remote.

  “You press the-”

  “I know.”