"Yup. Same size circle?"
"Same locus."
"Ready. Cover your ears, we've got an altitude change."
The world went black and white and phosphene-filled, and Megan swallowed to pop her ears, and swallowed again. They finally agreed to pop, and she looked down on a landscape as different from Errint as night from day. Everything in sight was flatland, a low swampy oxbowed river delta in which countless pools and trickles of water glittered and shone in the morning. Reeds stood up everywhere, and red-winged blackbirds and orioles perched on the reeds, swaying and singing in the wind that stroked through the reed-beds. In the center of everything was a great platform built on massive piles sunk into the water, and on the platform was a huge wooden house, turreted and towered like a castle. A wooden road was laid to it across the watery landscape, ending in a drawbridge and a steep switchback causeway that led up to the platform.
The two of them began to walk down the wooden path to the Duchess's castle. As they went, Megan slapped an opportunistic mosquito and said, "Were you noticing Wayland this morning?"
"Huh? Not particularly."
"Maybe it was just me," Megan said, "but there was something, a little, I don't know...a little 'off' about him this morning. He seemed distracted somehow."
"I noticed you distracting him, all right. Where did that come from?"
"It occurred to me that we might not want everybody and his brother to know about the token," Megan said. "For one thing, it's a good way to get it stolen. By the way, let me have it for a while."
"Sure." Leif handed it over.
"For another..." Megan trailed off. "You notice the way he was answering questions?"
"No. Why?"
Megan shrugged. "Just that I kept getting back these answers that were kind of general, or...I don't know...not really germane to what was said...."
"Maybe he has trouble hearing," Leif said.
"Oh, come on."
"No, seriously. If it's nerve damage causing the hearing problem, not even virtuality can do much about it, supposedly. He might not be hearing us right. I've seen that kind of thing happen with hearing aids."
"Huh." Megan thought about that. "And it's not really something you'd ask about, I guess."
"You sure you're not imagining it?"
Megan gave him a look, and then rubbed her eyes. She was feeling a little grainy around the edges, possibly from all the transits. "Oh, I don't know...maybe I am. Or maybe he was just distracted. God knows I am at the moment. Anything's possible." She sighed.
But just a little while later, as they walked, Megan thought about what she had said, and the answers she had gotten back, and finally she thought, No. No, it was real enough. He's just a little off, somehow. Not concentrating...I guess anybody can be distracted, even when they're playing. Though for what people pay to play in here, you'd think they'd go get the distractedness out of their systems before they waste the money.
She thought for a moment more, then said quietly as they walked, "Game intervention."
"Listening."
"Do you detect your boss' token here?"
"Concessionary token is detected. How can I help you?"
"The player called Wayland. Is he real or generated?"
"Do you mean, is the player human?"
"Yes."
"Yes, the player is human."
"Huh. Finished," Megan said, and shoved the token back in her pocket. I hate it when this computer tells me things I don't want to hear.
"I see the guards up on the walls have noticed us," Leif said. "Look at all those crossbows."
"Maybe this is what we really needed that armor for," Megan said as they came to the far end of the drawbridge, under the shadow of its gatehouses.
"Too late to go back now," Leif said, entirely too cheerfully for someone who had so many weapons trained on him.
"I don't know," Megan said softly, as guards began to pour down out of the gatehouses and onto the castle side of the drawbridge. "Late breakfast is beginning to look real good."
Megan stepped out of Sarxos into her personal space to find a pile of e-mail waiting--all kinds of things that needed to be handled, and she just wasn't up to it. Too many disappointments, too much excitement. Too many things hadn't worked.
She blinked herself out of the personal space, feeling intensely weary...and also feeling as if she had been hit all over her body with a baseball bat. Stress... As she stood up from the chair, she glanced at the clock. 0516. Ooooh...it can't be that late...can it?
Yes, it can....
Megan left the office and went off into the kitchen, groaning a little as she moved. Somebody had thoughtfully left her tea-making things out, and a banana on the counter.
Dad, she thought, and smiled slightly. Bananas are good for all-nighters, he always said. The potassium helps keep your brain working. And since he pulled so many all-nighters himself, he would know.
There had been fewer repercussions regarding Megan's skipping "family night" than she had feared. Her dad had clearly understood that something important was going on. He had apparently spoken to her mom about it as well, and hadn't asked Megan any questions about it...which was kind of him, and typical. But there would be questions today, all right. She was going to have to explain what was going on...and she dreaded that. She knew that what she hadn't told Winters, her dad would quickly deduce, and he would tell her to forget about the bouncing problems in Sarxos and let Net Force handle it. If he told her that, she would have to do what he said. Megan respected him that much, at least.
Still....
She put the kettle on the stove and turned the burner on under it, peeled the banana, and sat down at the kitchen table, eating reflectively. For about the tenth time she began going over again, in her head, the lines of investigation she and Leif had been following. It was hard to think, though. She was really tired, and the image of Duchess Morn, laughing at them uproariously, kept intruding.
She and Leif hadn't exactly needed armor to deal with her. Maybe Fettick had been overstating that end of things. But Morn's good-natured scorn at the idea that someone might be about to bounce her was like enough to Fettick's to be its twin. Morn was in her seventies, small and skinny and tough as old boot leather, and intensely funny. Fierce, Megan thought. She found herself wishing that when she hit seventy, she could be something like that.
"Let them try to get me," had been Morn's attitude about the whole thing. She was satisfied that her computer was secure enough, that her life was well enough protected. But even if it hadn't been, Megan thought, Morn had the total fearlessness of someone who reckons that she's lived her life well, for a long time, and is not afraid to "check out" if that is the card that falls in front of her when the next deal comes along. Megan and Leif had gone away from Woodhouse with their ears full of an old lady's amused scolding of those who had the nerve to intrude in her personal business. And then both of them had had to get out of Sarxos, because school was coming up later in the day, and they were both dead tired, though they'd hated to admit it to each other.
"I've had a long day," Megan had said to Leif. "But I may be back in here later. Leave Chris's token with me, okay?"
"No problem," Leif had said. He'd handed it to her and disappeared, looking as tired as Megan felt, and more dejected.
So there the thing sat, on her "desk" in her virtual workspace. Now, as she finished the banana and the kettle started shrieking, Megan got up hurriedly to shut it up, and thought about the token again.
Not Lateran. She still couldn't get over that. It just seemed wrong. But Sherlock Holmes was whispering in her ear: Eliminate the impossible, and what you have left is the truth. Or at least possible.
Five-thirty. I can't believe I was in there all night. But...She raised her eyebrows, sighed at herself, poured boiling water into her teacup, then went into the small bathroom off the kitchen, wetted a washcloth with cold water, and just plastered it over her eyes for a moment. The chill of it on her face was som
ething of a shock, a welcome one.
Megan let it rest there for a moment, and looked at the faint lights moving inside her eyelids, phosphene byproducts of how tired her eyes were. Then she peeled the washcloth off, left it by the sink, and went in to get her tea.
Megan sat down, sipped at it gingerly, and started to go over things one more time. She couldn't get rid of the feeling that she'd missed something about the server logs. But then Leif seemed to think they'd exploited everything they could from examining that set of information, and she was willing enough to bow to his expertise in this area. There must be something else, she thought. Something we've missed...
But the back of her mind kept going back to the server logs, and wouldn't be appeased. It's just brain fugue, Megan thought to herself after a while, sipping at the tea again, and burning herself again. I'm like a rat going down a tunnel with no cheese in it, again and again. It was the same kind of behavior she made fun of in her mother when her mother put the car keys down and later couldn't find them, and kept checking the same spot over and over and over, even though she knew perfectly well by now that they weren't there. I'm no better than she is.
The tea was beginning to cool enough to drink. Megan sipped at it one more time. I feel so grungy. What'm I going to wear to school today? I haven't checked the laundry situation in days.
Then she swore softly, got up again, and headed straight back into the office.
She went over to the desk and pushed yet another pile of books off to one side. Baedeker's Handbook for London, 1875? Fungi of the World? Taste of the East? What, he wants to go back in time for a curry now? With mushrooms in it, I guess. She sat down in the implant chair again and lined the implant up.
There was Rhea's ochre surface spread out before her, all powdered blue with new-blown snow from one of the nearby methane vents, and there was Saturn hanging golden and uncommunicative in the long cold darkness, like a message delivered and unread. All that e-mail.... Megan thought. "Computer? Chair, please." The chair appeared. "Show me what's come in."
The icons of about fifteen messages appeared in the air before her, some holding still, some rotating gently, some vibrating up and down as an indication of their urgency. The urgent ones were in the majority--though as Megan read through the mail, she found once again that other people's definitions of urgency didn't usually match hers. Two more mails from Carrie Henderson, who really really wanted her to do something that Megan didn't bother finish listening to. Yet another unnecessary notice about the SATs. Someone selling subscriptions to a new virtual news service, a demo account of which began playing itself noisily in one corner of her space, showing her a smoke-filled expanse stitched with the burning lines of battlefield lasers, a firefight going on in some dark place in Africa. She wished she had a hammer to hit the sender with. Instead, Megan just told the machine to turn the demo off, and went back to reducing the clutter, icon by icon.
Several failed connects of attempted live chat...Well, she routinely refused chat while she was in Sarxos. J. Simpson? Who's that? She shook her head. You did sometimes get requests to chat from people you'd never seen or heard of before. Probably it was someone she'd run into in the game who wanted to follow up on something.
She opened the messages, but they had nothing but the characteristic "failed message, chat refused" tag inside them. Oh, well, Megan thought. As her mother usually said, if it was important, they'd call back. If it wasn't important, they'd call back.
Maybe whoever this is left some mail inside Sarxos, Megan thought. "Computer? Sarxos log-in."
"Working."
Her own area didn't go away, but went shadowy while the Sarxos logo and copyright notices displayed themselves burning in the air before her as usual, and her scores and last-play times came up. "Resume from previous extraction point?" said the computer. "Or start new area play?"
"Another alternative."
"State it, please."
"Do you recognize this token?" She picked up Rodrigues's golden sigil, tossing it in her hand.
"Concessionary token recognized. How can I help you?"
Down the same old tunnel, Megan thought, resigned. "Identify attempted chat connections to my account from 1830 local last night to 0515 today."
A moment's silence. "No connections from within Sarxos."
"Okay." J. Simpson. She shook her head. "Any e-mail waiting?"
"No e-mail."
So Wayland had come up with nothing new. "I want access to server logs," Megan said.
"That access is allowed with your token. Which logs would you like to see?"
"Logs for players Rutin, Walse, Hunsal, Orieta, Balk the Screw, and Lateran."
"Specify mode. Audio? Text? Graphical?"
"Graphics, please," Megan said. Her eyes weren't up to reading much text at the moment.
"What span of time?"
"The last--" Megan waved her hand, not really caring. "Four months."
"Working."
Six separate bar graphs stacked themselves up in the air in front of Megan, looking something like a long detailing of what the Dow Jones index might have been doing for the last quarter. Each upright bar was a twenty-four-hour period; in it, as a series of bright vertical dashes stitched down the darker "bar," was a representation of the number of hours that the person in question had been in Sarxos playing.
The six players were serious ones. Not one of them seemed to have played less than four hours a day, for all four months. Some of them had played six, or eight, routinely. Some of them had repeated stretches, especially at weekends or around holidays, when they were in the game for fourteen hours a day, or more. I wonder where they've been getting their massage programs from, Megan thought, stretching her aching body. Jeez, I thought I was fairly serious about the game. But these people are obsessed.
For amusement, she said to the computer, "Put up the matching server log for Brown Meg."
It came up. She breathed out a rueful laugh. Over the last few days, her usage, staggered as it was, had become almost as obsessive as theirs. Dad's gonna have words with me, she thought. And as for Mom...no, let's not even think about it right now.
"Display matching server usage for Leif Hedge-wizard," Megan said. Another bar graph appeared below hers. His usage looked a lot like hers, for the past few days. He's no better.
And there was the tunnel, still with no cheese in it. She made a face at herself, and said, "Oh, go on, display server usage for Lateran."
It came up. Lateran was as bad as any of them. Worse. Another mad one, in and out constantly. "Display usage for Argath."
Argath, strangely, wasn't in as much as Megan would have thought. His usage over the past several months actually looked more like her usual pattern, though it had been busier than usual the past few days. It didn't seem normal, somehow...but then, what was normal usage for a Sarxos player? Was there any such thing? Probably not.
Megan raised her eyebrows at the thought, and said to the computer, "Display usage pattern for--oh, Wayland--"
His pattern came up under Argath's. Megan sipped at her tea again, which she had "brought" into the virtual space with her, and sat gazing a little blearily at all the bar graphs hanging there glowing in the air in front of her. I should go out and do the cold-washcloth trick again, she thought, blinking.
And then she stopped, and looked at the graphs again: not the way she normally would have, but with her eyes squinted shut a little bit, as they had been before.
Lateran's graph looked a lot like Wayland's.
In the general patterning, the way the dashes and blank spaces fell...there were a lot more dashes, times "in," than there were empty spaces. Lateran's graph made Megan wonder a little more as she looked at each twenty-four-hour period and realized how much of it was taken up by gameplay. Most of it. A whole lot of it. And if you compared the end of one day with the beginning of the next--as often as not, they ran right into one another. Well, midnight. Peak game time, after all.
But that was
n't it. Twelve-hour stretches. Fourteen, sixteen sometimes. The pattern repeated, cycling backward very slowly through the four-month period. Six hours in, twenty minutes out. Eight hours in, one hour out. Two hours in, an hour out. Five hours in--
The pattern definitely repeated. And Lateran's timings were beyond "obsessed." They were positively pathological. When does he sleep? Megan wondered. More to the point, when does he work? Even if you worked at home, you'd have a hard time keeping up a schedule like this. Without getting fired, anyway...
"Computer."
"Listening."
"User profile on player Lateran."
"Your concessionary token does not allow that access. Please consult with Chris Rodrigues for further information."
"What time is it for Chris Rodrigues?" Megan said.
"0242."
He's on the West Coast somewhere. I'm not going to wake him up at quarter of three in the morning. Unless... "Is Chris in the game at the moment?"
"No."
I'll have to wait. She looked again at Lateran's server log. If this person has a job, it has to be done at home. But even if it is, it can't be more than part-time...not with this kind of usage. And it's not a child. Sarxos's age limit, because of the violence, was sixteen and up. So Lateran has to either be in school or some kind of work.... She shook her head. The usage didn't make sense.
And Megan looked down at Wayland's usage. It really was very much like Lateran's. Six hours on, two hours off...eight hours on, two hours off...seven hours on...And the pattern repeated, and cycled slowly backward through the four-month period. They're a little out of synch. Not exactly alike, but... She shook her head.
But the strange way that Wayland had sounded this morning was still on Megan's mind. A very peculiar suspicion began to grow in her. It was impossible, of course, because Wayland's server log and Lateran's server log showed them as often being on line at the same time...and you couldn't play two characters at once.
Could you?
"Computer," Megan said.
the Deadliest Game (1998) Page 15
