by Jack Dann
It came to the same thing, really.
He entered the ravine, burrowed into the thick underbrush and lay still. The Thompsons appeared on both ridges, moving slowly, watching for any movement. Raeder held his breath as they came parallel to him.
He heard the quick explosion of a revolver. But the killer had only shot a squirrel. It squirmed for a moment, then lay still.
Lying in the underbrush, Raeder heard the studio helicopter overhead. He wondered if any cameras were focused on him. It was possible. And if someone were watching, perhaps some Good Samaritan would help.
So looking upward, toward the helicopter, Raeder arranged his face in a reverent expression, clasped his hands and prayed. He prayed silently, for the audience didn’t like religious ostentation. But his lips moved. That was every man’s privilege.
And a real prayer was on his lips. Once, a lipreader in the audience had detected a fugitive pretending to pray, but actually just reciting multiplication tables. No help for that man!
Raeder finished his prayer. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he had nearly two hours to go.
And he didn’t want to die. It wasn’t worth it, no matter how much they paid! He must have been crazy, absolutely insane to agree to such a thing…
But he knew that wasn’t true. And he remembered just how sane he had been.
ONE week ago, he had been on The Prize of Peril stage, blinking in the spotlight, and Mike Terry had shaken his hand.
“Now, Mr. Raeder,” Terry had said solemnly, “do you understand the rules of the game you are about to play?”
Raeder nodded.
“If you accept, Jim Raeder, you will be a hunted man for a week. Killers will follow you, Jim. Trained killers, men wanted by the law for other crimes, granted immunity for this single killing under the Voluntary Suicide Act. They will be trying to kill you, Jim. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Raeder said. He also understood the two hundred thousand dollars he would receive if he could live out the week.
“I ask you again, Jim Raeder. We force no man to play for stakes of death.”
“I want to play,” Raeder said.
Mike Terry turned to the audience. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have here a copy of an exhaustive psychological test which an impartial psychological testing firm made on Jim Raeder at our request. Copies will be sent to anyone who desires them for twenty-five cents to cover the cost of mailing. The test shows that Jim Raeder is sane, well-balanced and fully responsible in every way.” He turned to Raeder.
“Do you still want to enter the contest, Jim?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Very well!” cried Mike Terry. “Jim Raeder, meet your would-be killers!”
The Thompson gang moved onstage, booed by the audience.
“Look at them, folks,” said Mike Terry, with undisguised contempt. “Just look at them! Antisocial, thoroughly vicious, completely amoral. These men have no code but the criminal’s warped code, no honor but the honor of the cowardly hired killer. They are doomed men, doomed by our society, which will not sanction their activities for long, fated to an early and unglamorous death.”
The audience shouted enthusiastically.
“What have you to say, Claude Thompson?” Terry asked.
Claude, the spokesman of the Thompsons, stepped up to the microphone. He was a thin, clean-shaved man, conservatively dressed.
“I figure,” Claude Thompson said hoarsely, “I figure we’re no worse than anybody. I mean, like soldiers in a war: They kill. And look at the graft in government, and the unions. Everybody’s got their graft.”
That was Thompson’s tenuous code. But how quickly, with what precision, Mike Terry destroyed the killer’s rationalizations! Terry’s questions pierced straight to the filthy soul of the man.
At the end of the interview, Claude Thompson was perspiring, mopping his face with a silk handkerchief and casting quick glances at his men.
Mike Terry put a hand on Raeder’s shoulder. “Here is the man who has agreed to become your victim-if you can catch him.”
“We’ll catch him,” Thompson said, his confidence returning.
“Don’t be too sure,” said Terry. “Jim Raeder has fought wild bulls-now he battles jackals. He’s an average man. He’s the people-who mean ultimate doom to you and your kind.”
“We’ll get him,” Thompson said.
“And one thing more,” Terry said, very softly. “Jim Raeder does not stand alone. The folks of America are for him. Good Samaritans from all corners of our great nation stand ready to assist him. Unarmed, defenseless, Jim Raeder can count on the aid and goodheartedness of the people, whose representative he is. So don’t be too sure, Claude Thompson! The average men are for Jim Raeder-and there are a lot of average men!”
RAEDER thought about it, lying motionless in the underbrush. Yes, the people had helped him. But they had helped the killers, too.
A tremor ran through him. He had chosen, he reminded himself. He alone was responsible. The psychological test had proved that.
And yet, how responsible were the psychologists who had given him the test? How responsible was Mike Terry for offering a poor man so much money? Society had woven the noose and put it around his neck, and he was hanging himself with it and calling it free will.
Whose fault?
“Aha!” someone cried.
Raeder looked up and saw a portly man standing near him.
The man wore a loud tweed jacket. He had binoculars around his neck and a cane in his hand.
“Mister,” Raeder whispered, “please don’t tell!”
“Hi!” shouted the portly man, pointing at Raeder with his cane. “Here he is!”
A madman, thought Raeder. The damned fool must think he’s playing Hare and Hounds.
“Right over here!” the man screamed.
Cursing, Raeder sprang to his feet and began running. He came out of the ravine and saw a white building in the distance. He turned toward it. Behind him he could still hear the man.
“That way, over there. Look, you fools, can’t you see him yet?”
The killers were shooting again. Raeder ran, stumbling over uneven ground, past three children playing in a tree house.
“Here he is!” the children screamed. “Here he is!”
Raeder groaned and ran on. He reached the steps of the building and saw that it was a church.
As he opened the door, a bullet struck him behind the right kneecap.
He fell, and crawled inside the church.
The television set in his pocket was saying, “What a finish, folks, what a finish! Raeder’s been hit! He’s been hit, folks, he’s crawling now, he’s in pain, but he hasn’t given up! NOT Jim Raeder!”
Raeder lay in the aisle near the altar. He could hear a child’s eager voice saying, “He went in there, Mr. Thompson. Hurry, you can still catch him!”
Wasn’t a church considered a sanctuary? Raeder wondered.
Then the door was flung open, and Raeder realized that the custom was no longer observed. He gathered himself together and crawled past the altar, out of the back door of the church.
He was in an old graveyard. He crawled past crosses and stars, past slabs of marble and granite, past stone tombs and rude wooden markers. A bullet exploded on a tombstone near his head, showering him with fragments. He crawled to the edge of an open grave.
They had deceived him, he thought. All of those nice, average, normal people. Hadn’t they said he was their representative? Hadn’t they sworn to protect their own? But no, they loathed him. Why hadn’t he seen it? Their hero was the cold, blank-eyed gunman: Thompson, Capone, Billy the Kid, Young Lochinvar, El Cid, Cuchulain, the man without human hopes or fears. They worshipped him, that dead, implacable robot gunman, and lusted to feel his foot in their face.
Raeder tried to move, and slid helplessly into the open grave.
He lay on his back, looking at the blue sky. Presently a black silhouette loomed above him, blotting o
ut the sky. Metal twinkled. The silhouette slowly took aim.
And Raeder gave up all hope forever.
“Wait, Thompson!” roared the amplified voice of Mike Terry. The revolver wavered.
“It is one second past five o’clock! The week is up! JIM RAEDER HAS WON!”
There was pandemonium of cheering from the studio audience.
The Thompson gang, gathered around the grave, looked sullen.
“He’s won, friends, he’s won!” Mike Terry cried. “Look, look on your screen! The police have arrived, they’re taking the Thompsons away from their victim-the victim they could not kill. And all this is thanks to you, Good Samaritans of America. Look folks, tender hands are lifting Jim Raeder from the open grave that was his final refuge. Good Samaritan Janice Morrow is there. Could this be the beginning of a romance? Jim seems to have fainted, friends; they’re giving him a stimulant. He’s won two hundred thousand dollars! Now we’ll have a few words from Jim Raeder!”
There was a short silence.
“That’s odd,” said Mike Terry. “Folks, I’m afraid we can’t hear from Jim just now. The doctors are examining him. Just one moment…”
There was a silence. Mike Terry wiped his forehead and smiled.
“It’s the strain, folks, the terrible strain. The doctor tells me… Well, folks, Jim Raeder is temporarily not himself. But it’s only temporary! JBC is hiring the best psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in the country. We’re going to do everything humanly possible for this gallant boy. And entirely at our own expense.”
Mike Terry glanced at the studio clock. “Well, it’s about time to sign off, folks. Watch for the announcement of our next great thrill show. And don’t worry, I’m sure that very soon we’ll have Jim Raeder back with us.”
Mike Terry smiled, and winked at the audience. “He’s bound to get well, friends. After all, we’re all pulling for him!”
ANDA’S GAME by Cory Doctorow
Here’s a fast-paced tale that takes us inside a very dangerous game, one with real-world implications-and demonstrates that even in a game, there are sometimes things more important than hit-points and treasure.
Cory Doctorow is the co-editor of the popular Boing Boing website (boingboing.net), a co-founder of the internet search-engine company OpenCola.com, and until recently was the outreach coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). In 2001, he also won the John W. Campbell Award as the year’s Best New Writer. His stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, The Infinite Matrix, On Spec, Salon, and elsewhere, and were recently collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More. His well-received first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award as Best First Novel, and was followed shortly by a second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. Doctorow’s other books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, written with Karl Schroeder, and a guide to Essential Blogging, written with Shelley Powers. His most recent book is a new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. He has a website at www.craphound.com.
***
ANDA didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was twelve, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf, because if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet, and none of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armour. Bintware, she called it.
But when Anda was twelve, she met Liza the Organiza, whose avatar was female, but had sensible tits and sensible armour and a bloody great sword that she was clearly very good with. Liza came to school after PE, when Anda was sitting and massaging her abused podge and hating her entire life from stupid sunrise to rotten sunset. Her PE kit was at the bottom of her school-bag and her face was that stupid red colour that she hated and now it was stinking maths which were hardly better than PE but at least she didn’t have to sweat.
But instead of maths, all the girls were called to assembly, and Liza the Organiza stood on the stage in front of Miss Cruickshanks the principal and Mrs. Danzig, the useless counsellor. “Hullo, chickens,” Liza said. She had an Australian accent. “Well, aren’t you lot just precious and bright and expectant with your pink upturned faces like a load of flowers staring up at the sky?
“Warms me fecking heart it does.”
That made her laugh, and she wasn’t the only one. Miss Cruickshanks and Mrs. Danzig didn’t look amused, but they tried to hide it.
“I am Liza the Organiza, and I kick arse. Seriously.” She tapped a key on her laptop and the screen behind her lit up. It was a game-not the one that Anda played, but something space-themed, a space-station with a rocketship in the background. “This is my avatar.” Sensible boobs, sensible armour, and a sword the size of the world. “In-game, they call me the Lizanator, Queen of the Spacelanes, El Presidente of the Clan Fahrenheit.” The Fahrenheits had chapters in every game. They were amazing and deadly and cool, and to her knowledge, Anda had never met one in the flesh. They had their own island in her game. Crikey.
On screen, The Lizanator was fighting an army of wookiemen, sword in one hand, laser-blaster in the other, rocket-jumping, spinning, strafing, making impossible kills and long shots, diving for power-ups and ruthlessly running her enemies to ground.
“The whole Clan Fahrenheit. I won that title through popular election, but they voted me in cos of my prowess in combat. I’m a world-champion in six different games, from first-person shooters to strategy games. I’ve commanded armies and I’ve sent armies to their respawn gates by the thousands. Thousands, chickens: my battle record is 3,522 kills in a single battle. I have taken home cash prizes from competitions totalling more than 400,000 pounds. I game for four to six hours nearly every day, and the rest of the time, I do what I like.
“One of the things I like to do is come to girls’ schools like yours and let you in on a secret: girls kick arse. We’re faster, smarter and better than boys. We play harder. We spend too much time thinking that we’re freaks for gaming and when we do game, we never play as girls because we catch so much shite for it. Time to turn that around. I am the best gamer in the world and I’m a girl. I started playing at ten, and there were no women in games-you couldn’t even buy a game in any of the shops I went to. It’s different now, but it’s still not perfect. We’re going to change that, chickens, you lot and me.
“How many of you game?”
Anda put her hand up. So did about half the girls in the room.
“And how many of you play girls?”
All the hands went down.
“See, that’s a tragedy. Practically makes me weep. Gamespace is full of cock. It’s time we girled it up a little. So here’s my offer to you: if you will play as a girl, you will be given probationary memberships in the Clan Fahrenheit, and if you measure up, in six months you’ll be full-fledged members.”
In real life, Liza the Organiza was a little podgy, like Anda herself, but she wore it with confidence. She was solid, like a brick wall, her hair bobbed bluntly at her shoulders, dressed in a black jumper over loose dungarees with giant goth boots with steel toes that looked like something you’d see in an in-game shop, though Anda was pretty sure they’d come from a real-world goth shop in Camden Town.
She stomped her boots, one-two, thump-thump, like thunder on the stage. “Who’s in, chickens? Who wants to be a girl out-game and in?”
Anda jumped to her feet. A Fahrenheit, with her own island! Her head was so full of it that she didn’t notice that she was the only one standing. The other girls stared at her, a few giggling and whispering.
“That’s all right, love,” Liza called, “I like enthusiasm. Don’t let those staring faces rattle yer: they’re just flowers turning to look at the sky. Pink-scrubbed, shining, expectan
t faces. They’re looking at you because you had the sense to get to your feet when opportunity came-and that means that someday, girl, you are going to be a leader of women, and men, and you will kick arse. Welcome to the Clan Fahrenheit.”
She began to clap, and the other girls clapped too, and even though Anda’s face was the colour of a lollipop-lady’s sign, she felt like she might burst with pride and good feeling and she smiled until her face hurt.
› Anda,
her sergeant said to her,
› how would you like to make some money?
› Money, Sarge?
Ever since she’d risen to platoon leader, she’d been getting more missions, but they paid gold-money wasn’t really something you talked about in-game.
The Sarge-sensible boobs, gigantic sword, longbow, gloriously orcish ugly phiz-moved her avatar impatiently. “Something wrong with my typing, Anda?”
› No, Sarge
she typed.
› You mean gold?
› If I meant gold, I would have said gold. Can you go voice?
Anda looked around. Her door was shut and she could hear her parents in the sitting-room watching something loud on the telly. She turned up her music just to be safe and then slipped on her headset. They said it could noise-cancel a Blackhawk helicopter-it had better be able to overcome the little inductive speakers suction-cupped to the underside of her desk. She switched to voice.
“Hey, Lucy,” she said.
“Call me Sarge.” Lucy’s accent was American, like an old TV show, and she lived somewhere in the middle of the country where it was all vowels, Iowa or Ohio. She was Anda’s best friend in-game, but she was so hardcore it was boring sometimes.
“Hi, Sarge,” she said, trying to keep the irritation out of her voice. She’d never smart off to a superior in-game, but v2v it was harder to remember to keep to the game norms.
