the Deadliest Game (1998)

by Tom - Net Force Explorers 02 Clancy

  Naturally Shel got right on the phone and called the insurance company. Naturally, eventually, they'd pay for a new system. But the one thing they could do nothing about was his hard drive. Shel would find, later, when he got the hard disk to the shop on Monday, that it had been formatted. And then his last hopes died.

  He had not backed up his files to his "emergency" storage before he left. Most particularly, he had not backed up his satchel codes, the complex and completely unrememberable codes that, combined with the codes saved in the master Sarxos games server, gave him access to his character and his character's history.

  It took days for him to stop wanting to bang his head against the wall at his own stupidity. It was going to take weeks to get this mess ironed out--for the Sarxos people were obsessively careful about their security. Oh, eventually he would be able to get back into the game. He would submit the results of his last save from his remote backups (like many computer users these days, he subscribed to a "lifesaver" service, a company that kept copies of his backup files at another site), and copies of the satchel codes that had been used in that save. The company would compare his last-archived files against theirs, and check his other real-world and virtual IDs for validity--and eventually they would assign him a new password so that he could get back in the game.

  But until then, there would be no more roving the green fields of Talairn for Shel. He could get back into Sarxos on one of the cheapo "introductory accounts" they sold people who weren't sure they wanted to get that seriously into gameplay. But he wouldn't be able to get back in as Shel until his new password came through--and by then, this year's campaigning season would be over. Two years' careful preparation of the ground for this year's campaigning, two years' amiable scheming with other players--all shot to hell. Some of the people Shel had been conspiring with would be furious; they might want nothing to do with him in the future, regardless of the fact that what had happened to him was in no way his fault. Others, missing him, might simply move on to other alliances.

  And what about Alla? If she was real, she might very well drift away for lack of the player she had been working with, maybe even drift out of the game altogether. If she wasn't real--well, characters who were generated by the game, and weren't interacted with on a regular basis, tended to be "recalled"--a nice word for "erased." Sarxos, after all, was an economy, and didn't waste resources that weren't being used. The possibility that Alla might just go away, cease to exist, because of his absence, bothered him even more than his lost campaign.

  The whole situation was utterly infuriating. But these were just some of the dangers of the game...and there was absolutely nothing Shel could do about them.

  He started again, of course. It was not in Shel's nature to just give up on anything. That was one of the things that had made him stand out as a Sarxos player to start with. But as he began the slow business of getting his virtual life back, and (after they finally reissued his password) started trying to rebuild his character's credibility, a very important question still remained unanswered:

  Why me? Why?

  Some days later, it was seven-thirty in the morning, and Megan O'Malley was in the kitchen, rummaging in the cupboards and muttering to herself. "I can't believe we're out of it again...."

  Having four older brothers had posed many problems over the course of the years, but the worst was that none of them ever stopped eating, or at least that was the way it looked. You would come in for your breakfast, ready to stuff something hurriedly into your face before heading out to school, and find that the kitchen had been stripped bare like some third-world cropland after the locusts had passed through. When the brothers got old enough to go away to college, those of them that did, Megan had hoped the situation might improve, but instead, it only got worse--Mike and Sean had seemed to start eating more to compensate for Paul's and Rory's absence. Hiding food from the two who were studying close to home at GWU and Georgetown worked only occasionally--usually, if the food was something they didn't want--and there were unfortunately too few kinds of food that fell into that category. Muesli had been one, for a while...until late one night Sean, while rifling the cupboards, had stumbled across Megan's supply. She had had to start moving the stuff around after that. Sometimes this tactic worked.

  Not always. "Locusts," Megan muttered in disgust as she picked up the box she had thought safely hidden down under the sink, behind the bleach and the rubber gloves. It was a box of the genuine Swiss muesli, Familia, not one of the sawdust-tasting local brands. It was an empty box.

  She stood up in the big, sunny, golden-tiled kitchen, and sighed, then chucked the Familia box in the trash can and headed for the counter where the breadbox lived, and opened it.

  No bread. So much for toast, Megan thought, letting the breadbox lid fall. It's a pity I don't need to lose any weight, because I'd be starting. Oh, well. Tea...

  That, at least, she found. Her brothers, mercifully, had all become coffee drinkers as soon as it became plain to her parents that it would not stunt their growth (and that, in cold fact, probably nothing could). Megan put water in the kettle, put it on the stove, turned the "hot" burner up to full, and went off to find a mug, glancing at the clock. Seven-forty-five. Half an hour before my ride shows up...might as well check the mail.

  She headed into the downstairs den, a big room that housed one of the family's three networked computers, and that was otherwise stuffed full, from floor to ceiling and around all four walls, with her father's and mother's research books. When your mom was a reporter for the Washington Post, and your dad was a mystery writer, this made for a fairly eclectic and occasionally haphazard-seeming collection; and everything inevitably got mixed together, so that books on international politics and economics and the environment and world history, and slightly weird volumes like Nameless Horrors and What To Do About Them and Luftwaffe Secret Projects 1946, wound up shelved with or piled on top of a truly terrifying collection of books on forensics and weapons and poisons, books with titles like Snobbery with Violence and The Do's and Don'ts of Committing the Perfect Crime and The A-Z of Venomous Animals and Glaister's Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology. Megan knew her father was perfectly law-abiding and utterly gentle. She had once seen him weep when he'd accidentally killed a mouse he was trying to catch and release outside, after one of the cats had turned it loose in the house. But all the same, she hoped fervently that no one would ever suspect him of a murder. Once they got a look at the downstairs den, no human being could possibly believe that he wouldn't have known exactly how to do it.

  She sat down in the computer chair and sighed at the sight of the inevitable pile of books on the table in front of the main interface box. No matter how many times she reminded them, her father or mother kept leaving their current research material obstructing the working pathway between the machine and the implant chair. But then they used retinal/optical implants, which lined up with the machine well above the level of the table, and Megan's was one of the newer type of implant, a side-looking neckneural or "droud," which lined up from a lower angle. As Megan pushed this morning's heap of books aside--her dad's, mostly; he typically stayed up writing until three or four in the morning--she looked them over with mild interest. The pile included, at its top, copies of the Thomas Cook European Railway Timetable, Jane's Guns Recognition Guide, and The Curry Club Book of 250 Hot and Spicy Dishes. She blinked at that one. The potential "plot" for the book he was working on had been shaping itself up perfectly until then. Lure someone onto an obscure Eastern European train, shoot them--and then put them in a curry?

  Naah. All the same, she resolved to stop at the store on the way home and pick up some yogurt. If Dad was thinking about making dinner tonight, it would be good for putting out the fire when the chilies got too incendiary.

  Megan swiveled the computer chair around into the right position. It took a moment to "remember" her favorite settings, raising her feet up a little, tilting back at the right angle. Megan lined up her implant
with the computer's master interface box, and felt the familiar tiny shock of interconnection, like someone throwing a light switch down in your bones: switching the normal universe off, and another one on.

  Megan knew that some people organized their personal virtual "workspaces" as just one more office full of file cabinets. She scorned such smallness of mind. When anything was possible in virtual reality, why didn't people do, well, anything? For the way they behaved, she had no answers. For herself, she now walked out into the middle of a gigantic stone amphitheater, the tiers and tiers of worn white limestone seating reaching up a couple of stories above her. Above the top tier of seats, black sky with fierce white stars burning in it reached up to the zenith. She looked over her shoulder, out past the "front" of the amphitheater, to see a long "downward" slope of dimly lit pink-stained ice and grit, dusted with bluish methane snow; and low above the horizon, fat and oblate and orange as an overripe peach, Saturn hung, his rings rakishly tilted to one side, the long shadow from the sunward side striping the planet's surface at a slewed and stylish diagonal. Light reflecting from the planet's surface dusted the surface of the moon Rhea with a pale golden bloom. Like Earth's moon, Rhea never turned this face away from her primary, but Megan knew that if she stood there long enough watching, Saturn would slowly start to wane, the rings would shift, and soon the sun would come up over Rhea's too-close little horizon and change the predominant color of the moon from soft gold to blazing ice-white, with a great shadow thrown over the amphitheater from the high edge of the nearby impact basin Tirawa.

  Unfortunately, Megan had a lot of other things to do this morning besides planet-watch. "Chair," she said, and one provided itself behind her, a close duplicate of the one at home. She sat back and put her feet up, and said to the computer, "Mail, please?"

  "Running mail," said the computer in a pleasant female voice, and started displaying a set of frozen, caption-tagged video-audio "thumbnails" of her waiting messages, without any fuss. Other people might want to personify their computer as a "secretary" that would talk to them in the shape of a person, offer to show them their correspondence, and so on, but Megan preferred to have a machine that simply did the work she told it to, when she told it. She didn't care for chatty interfaces with overbearing personalities.

  "That's because you've already got one of your own," Mike had said to her when she had mentioned this to him, some months back. Mike had complained about the ensuing bruises for some days thereafter. Served him right, Megan thought, smiling slightly at the memory. If he can't take the trouble to learn enough martial arts to keep his little sister from laying him out flat occasionally, well, it's hardly my problem.

  The mail was mostly nothing important. "First one," Megan said, and that small "thumbnail" picture suddenly swelled to full size and three dimensions and began speaking to her. The label underneath it identified it as having come from her high school guidance counselor. Mr. MacIlwain was sitting behind his desk, which rather resembled her parents'--covered with papers and disks and books and heaven knew what else. "This is a reminder that your run-through for the SAT III and SAT IV/NMSQT tests has been rescheduled for March 12th. If you've requested Advanced Placement Examinations as well, this run-through has been rescheduled for March 15th. The English Composition with Essay examination will be given nationally only in April, so make sure that you--"

  "Yeah, yeah, stop, erase," Megan said. She had taken care of everything mentioned in the message, and was as ready for her SATs as she was ever going to be--though every time she looked at the Advanced Placements date she thought, The Ides of March, oh, great...As if Shakespeare and Julius Caesar hadn't done enough to curse that date. Still, the real exam itself was a month and more away from that. Another month to spend twitching.... "Next," she said.

  The next "thumbnail" blew itself up into the shape of Carrie Henderson, another junior at her high school. "Megan, hi! Look, I know you said you weren't really interested in the dance committee, but we could really really really use a--"

  "Stop," Megan said, "save." I really really really don't want to be involved in this, let someone else do it. If I just ignore this for a while, she'll probably find someone else to do it anyway. "Next."

  The third thumbnail blew itself up into a man in a suit and tie holding up a sample of carpet, and standing on a seemingly unending acreage of the stuff, in a horrendous paisley pattern that ran up against the edge of Megan's amphitheater and mercifully vanished there. "Dear systems user," the man said excitedly, "your address has been especially chosen as that of one of an elite group of users who will be able to appreciate the value of--"

  "Stop, erase!" Megan moaned. Cyberspam...there must be some way to stop it. She found herself wondering whether any of the anti-cyberspam initiatives that Net Force was presently backing were ever going to make it successfully through Congress. The problem was that the "spam" lobbies were so powerful...and as soon as the government found a way to stop one kind, another sprang up. It meant that her mailbox, as well as that of nearly everybody else she knew, kept getting cluttered with ads she didn't want. At least the carpet ad had been fairly innocuous. Some of the ads that wound up in her mailbox were so annoying or insistent that she wanted to start practicing thrust-kicks on the computer, or better still, the people who sent the ads....

  The water must almost be boiling, she thought, glancing at the remaining few thumbnails' captions. There's nothing really important here, these can wait--

  An abrupt soft chime sounded in the air all around her, and Megan looked around her in surprise. Someone was trying to reach her for live chat. At this hour? "Who is it?" she said to the computer.

  "Message ID shows James Winters," the computer said.

  "Really? Wow," Megan said. "Accept."

  Off to one side of the amphitheater there suddenly appeared an office somewhat tidier than her father's and mother's. Early morning sun was streaming through the venetian blinds in its windows, and lay in broad stripes on the big desk in the foreground of the office. Behind the desk, which was empty at the moment except for a few printouts and letters and a few stacked disks, sat the big broad-shouldered form of James Winters, an active-duty officer in the Net Force, and the senior contact for the Net Force Explorers. He pushed aside the piece of paper he had been glancing at, and gazed "out" at Megan, looking for the moment, in his suit, very much like some harried businessman, except for the Marine haircut and the lazy eyes. Those eyes might be all netted with smile lines, but there was a toughness in them that most businessmen could only wish to achieve.

  "Megan? I hope I haven't caught you at a bad time."

  "No, I was getting ready to go to class, but that's not for a few minutes yet." But you would have known that, she thought, getting interested. Winters was intimately knowledgeable about all the Net Force Explorers' schedules. Something's up!

  He nodded, looking past her briefly. "Hey, nice view."

  Megan smiled slightly. "Yeah, it's summer 'here.' For about the next six hours anyway, if you can really call it a summer when the axis tilts by only a third of a degree. How can I help you?"

  He looked at her thoughtfully. "Megan, just check me on something. Your profile shows you as being a Sarxos player."

  Her eyebrows went up. "I drop in there every now and then."

  "More than every couple of weeks, say?"

  She thought. "Yeah, I'd say so. Maybe once a week on the average, though sometimes more often if something exciting starts happening. But it's a good place to just wander around in, even when there's not a war or a feud between wizards going on. Interesting people there...and Rodrigues did a good job on the game. It 'feels' realer than a lot of virtual games do."

  He nodded. "What have you heard about players being 'bounced'?"

  Megan blinked at that. "You mean, people's satchel codes being wiped out? Viruses, and characters being sabotaged, that kind of thing? I've heard that it does happen, sometimes. Revenge, supposedly. Someone taking things too seriously...." />
  "Someone, if it's just someone, is taking things a lot too seriously lately. There have been something like twelve people 'bounced' in the last year."

  That came as news to Megan. "One a month...but there are hundreds of thousands of players in Sarxos. It doesn't seem like much."

  "It wouldn't to me either, unless I knew there hadn't been any 'bounces' for the eight years ending a year and a half ago. Something's going on, and the companies which sponsor Sarxos are getting twitchy. They would hate to have to shut the server down."

  "I just bet," Megan said, somewhat dryly. Sarxos players paid by the session or in a yearly "subscription" flat fee. Either way, there would be a lot of money involved, probably, potentially, millions and millions of dollars over any given year.

  "Well, we just had a particularly emphatic 'bounce,'" Winters said. "I'm not going to identify the player by real name, obviously, but a fellow who went by the character-name 'Shel Lookbehind.'"

  "Jeez, Shel?" Megan said, astonished.

  "Did you know him?"

  "A little, yeah," Megan said. "I ran across him while he was campaigning about a year ago. A lot of people got interested in those skirmishes he was having with the Queens of the Mordiri. There weren't any protocols for one person taking over another's territory before it had officially been declared abandoned, and everyone else wanted to see if any precedents were going to be set. I went down to Talairn to see what was going on there. Shel seemed like a good player, like a really nice guy. At least, his character did."

  "Well, the character is in limbo now, as you might expect," said Winters, "until the guy running him manages to get his password reissued. And this has been the most physically violent of the 'bounces' so far, which is why it came to our attention. Most of them, as you said, have been caused by 'a person or persons unknown' infecting the victim's system with a Trojan or virus of one kind or another. Additionally, there was at least one theft of a home system which may or may not have been a bounce. The evidence isn't conclusive. But in Shel's case, somebody broke into his apartment, wrecked the place, wiped his primary storage, and pretty much destroyed his system."