Dangerous Games

by Jack Dann

  Here’s a look at a computer-dominated, high-tech, high-bitrate future that may be coming along a lot sooner than you think that it could, making members of older generations obsolete and unable to compete in society with the tech-savvy Whiz Kids surrounding them. Even in this wired-up future, though, there’ll still be dangerous games to play and boys will still be boys-unfortunately.

  ***

  YEARS ago, games and movies were for indoors, for couch potatoes and kids with overtrained trigger fingers. Now they were on the outside. They were the world. That was the main reason Miguel Villas liked to walk to school with the Radner twins. Fred and Jerry were a Bad Influence, but they were the best gamers Mike knew in person.

  “We got a new scam, Mike,” said Fred.

  “Yeah,” said Jerry, smiling the way he did when something extreme was in the works.

  The three followed the usual path along the flood control channel. The trough was dry and gray, winding its way through the canyon behind Las Mesitas subdivision. The hills above them were covered with iceplant and manzanita; ahead, there was a patch of scrub oaks. What do you expect of San Diego north county in early May?

  At least in the real world.

  The canyon was not a deadzone. Not at all. County Flood Control kept the whole area improved, and the public layer was just as fine as on city streets. As they walked along, Mike gave a shrug and a twitch just so. That was enough cue for his Epiphany wearable. Its overlay imaging shifted into classic manga/animé: The manzanita branches morphed into scaly tentacles. Now the houses that edged the canyon were heavily-timbered, with pennants flying. High ahead was a castle, the home of Grand Duke Hwa Feen-in fact, the local kid who did the most to maintain this belief circle. Mike tricked out the twins in Manga costume, and spikey hair, and classic big-eyed, small-mouthed features.

  “Hey, Jerry, look.” Mike radiated, and waited for the twins to slide into consensus with his view. He’d been practicing all week to get these visuals.

  Fred looked up, accepting the imagery that Mike had conjured.

  “That’s old stuff, Miguel, my man.” He glanced at the castle on the hill. “Besides, Howie Fein is a nitwit.”

  “Oh.” Mike released the vision in an untidy cascade. The real world took back its own, first the sky, then the landscape, then the creatures and costumes. “But you liked it last week.” Back when, Mike now remembered, Fred and Jerry had been maneuvering to oust the Grand Duke.

  The twins looked at each other. Mike could tell they were silent messaging. “We told you today would be different. We’re onto something special.” They were partway through the scrub oaks now. From here you could see ocean haze; on a clear day-or if you bought into clear vision-you could see all the way to the ocean. On the south were more subdivisions, and a patch of green that was Fairmont High School. On the north was the most interesting place in Mike Villas’ neighborhood:

  Pyramid Hill Park dominated the little valley that surrounded it. Once upon a time the hill had been an avocado orchard. You could still see it that way if you used the park’s logo view. To the naked eye, there were other kinds of trees. There were also lawns, and real mansions, and a looping structure that flew a parabolic arc hundreds of feet above the top of the hill. That was the longest freefall ride in California.

  The twins were grinning at him. Jerry waved at the hill. “How would you like to play Cretaceous Returns, but with real feeling?”

  Pyramid Hill had free entrances, but they were just for visuals.

  “That’s too expensive.”

  “Sure it is. If you pay.”

  “And, um, don’t you have a project to set up before class?” The twins had shop class first thing in the morning.

  “That’s still in Vancouver,” said Jerry.

  “But don’t worry about us.” Fred looked upward, somehow prayerful and smug at the same time. “ ‘FedEx will provide, and just in time.’ ”

  “Well, okay. Just so we don’t get into trouble.” Getting into trouble was the major downside of hanging with the Radners.

  “Don’t worry about it.” The three left the edge of the flood channel and climbed a narrow trail along the east edge of Pyramid Hill. This was far from any entrance, but the twins’ uncle worked for County Flood Control and they had access to CFC utilities-which just now they shared with Mike. The dirt beneath their feet became faintly translucent. Fifteen feet down, Mike could see graphics representing a ten-inch runoff tunnel. Here and there were pointers to local maintenance records. Jerry and Fred had used the CFC view before and not been caught. Today they blended it with a map of the local nodes. The overlay was faintly violet against the sunlit day, showing comm shadows and active highrate links.

  The two stopped at the edge of a clearing. Fred looked at Jerry. “Tsk. Flood Control should be ashamed. There’s not a localizer node within thirty feet.”

  “Yeah, Jer. Almost anything could happen here.” Without a complete localizer mesh, nodes could not know precisely where they were. High-rate laser comm could not be established, and low-rate sensor output was smeared across the landscape. The outside world knew only mushy vagueness about this area.

  They walked into the clearing. They were deep in comm shade, but from here they had a naked-eye view up the hillside. If they continued that way, Pyramid Hill would start charging them.

  The twins were not looking at the Hill. Jerry walked to a small tree and squinted up. “See? They tried to patch the coverage with an airball.” He pointed into the branches and pinged. The utility view showed only a faint return, an error message. “It’s almost purely net guano at this point.”

  Mike shrugged. “The gap will be fixed by tonight.” Around twilight, when maintenance UAVs flitted like bats around the canyons, popping out nodes here and there.

  “Heh. Well, why don’t we help the County by patching things right now?” Jerry held up a thumb-sized greenish object. He handed it to Mike.

  Three antenna fins sprouted from the top, a typical ad hoc node.

  The dead ones were more trouble than bird poop. “You’ve perv’d this thing?” The node had Breaklns-R-Us written all over it, but perverting networks was harder in real life than in games. “Where did you get the access codes?”

  “Uncle Don gets careless.” Jerry pointed at the device. “All the permissions are loaded. Unfortunately, the bottleneck node is still alive.” He pointed upwards, into the sapling’s branches. “You’re small enough to climb this, Mike. Just go up and knock down the node.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Hey, don’t worry. Homeland Security won’t notice.”

  In fact, the Department of Homeland Security would almost certainly notice, at least after the localizer mesh was patched. But just as certainly they wouldn’t care. DHS logic was deeply embedded in all hardware. “See All, Know All,” was their motto, but what they knew and saw was for their own mission. They were notorious for not sharing with law enforcement. Mike stepped out of the comm shade and took a look at the crime trackers view. The area around Pyramid Hill had its share of arrests, mostly for enhancement drugs… but there had been nothing here-abouts for months.

  “Okay.” Mike came back to the tree and shinnied up to where the branches spread out. The old node was hanging from rotted velcro. He knocked it loose and the twins caused it to have an accident with a rock. Mike scrambled down and hey watched the diagnostics for a moment. Violet mists sharpened into bright spots as the nodes figured out where they and their perv’d sibling were, and coordinated up toward full function. Now point-to-point, laser routing was available; they could see the property labels all along the boundary of Pyramid Hill.

  “Ha,” said Fred. The twins started uphill, past the property line. “C’mon, Mike. We’re marked as county employees. We’ll be fine if we don’t stay too long.”

  PYRAMID Hill had all the latest touchie-feelie effects. These were not just phantoms painted by your contact lenses on the back of your eyeballs. On Pyramid Hill, there were games where
you could kick lizard butt and steal raptor eggs-or games with warm furry creatures that danced playfully around, begging to be picked up and cuddled. If you turned off all the game views, you could see other players wandering through the woods in their own worlds. Somehow the Hill kept them from crashing into each other.

  In Cretaceous Returns the plants were towering gingko trees, with lots of barriers and hidey holes. Mike played the purely visual Cret Ret a lot these days, in person with the twins and all over the world with others. It had not been an uplifting experience. He had been “killed and eaten” three times so far this week. It was a tough game, one where you had to contribute or maybe you got eaten. Mike was trying. He had designed a species-quick, small things that didn’t attract the fiercest of the critics. The twins had not been impressed, though they had no alternatives of their own.

  As he walked through the gingko forest, he kept his eye out for critters with jaws lurking in the lower branches. That’s what had gotten him on Monday. On Tuesday it had been some kind of paleo disease.

  So far things seemed safe enough, but there was no sign of his own contribution. They had been fast breeding and scalable, so where were the little monsters? Maybe someone had exported them. They might be big in Kazakhstan. He had had success there before. Here today-nada.

  Mike stumped across the Hill, a little discouraged, but still uneaten. The twins had taken the form of game-standard velociraptors.

  They were having a grand time. Their chicken-sized prey were Pyramid Hill haptics.

  The Jerry-raptor looked over its shoulder at Mike. “Where’s your critter?”

  Mike had not assumed any animal form. “I’m a time traveler,” he said. That was a valid type, introduced with the initial game release.

  Fred flashed a face full of teeth. “I mean where are the critters you invented last week?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Most likely they got eaten by the critics,” said Jerry. The brothers did a joint reptilian chortle. “Give up on making creator points, Miguel. Kick back and use the good stuff.” He illustrated with a soccer kick that connected with something running fast across their path. That got some classic points and a few thrilling moments of haptic carnage. Fred joined in and red splattered everywhere.

  There was something familiar about this prey. It was young and clever looking… a newborn from Mike’s own design! And that meant its Mommy would be nearby. Mike said, “You know, I don’t think-”

  “The Problem Is, None Of You Think Nearly Enough.” The sound was like sticking your head inside an old-time boom box. Too late, they saw that the tree trunks behind them grew from yard-long claws.

  Mommy. Drool fell in ten-inch blobs from high above.

  This was Mike’s design scaled to the max.

  “Sh-” said Fred. It was his last hiss as a velociraptor. The head and teeth behind the slobber descended from the gingko canopy and swallowed Fred down to the tips of his hind talons. The monster crunched and munched for a moment. The clearing was filled with the sound of splintering bones.

  “Ahh!” The monster opened its mouth and vomited horror. It was scarey good. Mike flicker-viewed on reality: Fred was standing in the steaming remains of his raptor. His shirt was pulled out of his pants, and he was drenched in slime-real, smelly slime. The kind you paid money for.

  The monster itself was one of Hill’s largest robots, tricked out as a member of Mike’s new species.

  The three of them looked up into its jaws.

  “Was that touchie-feelie enough for you?” the creature said, its breath a hot breeze of rotting meat. Fred stepped backwards and almost slipped on the goo.

  “The late Fred Radner just lost a cartload of points,”-the monster waved its truck-sized snout at them-“and I’m still hungry. I suggest you move off the Hill with all dispatch.”

  They backed away, their gaze still caught on all those teeth.

  The twins turned and ran. As usual, Mike was an instant behind them.

  Something like a big hand grabbed him. “You, I have further business with.” The words were a burred roar through clenched fangs. “Sit down.”

  Jeez. I have the worst luck. Then he remembered that it was Mike Villas who had climbed a tree to perv the Hill entrance logic.

  Stupid Mike Villas didn’t need bad luck; he was already the perfect chump. And now the twins were out of sight.

  But when the “jaws” set him down and he turned around, the monster was still there-not some Pyramid Hill rentacop. Maybe this really was a Cret Ret player! He edged sideways, trying to get out from under the pendulous gaze. This was just a game. He could walk away from this four-storey saurian. Of course, that would trash his credit with Cretaceous Returns, maybe drench him in smelly goo. And if Big Lizard took things seriously, it might cause him trouble in other games. Okay… He sat down with his back against the nearest gingko. So he would be late another day; that couldn’t make his school situation any worse.

  The saurian settled back, pushing the steaming corpse of Fred Radner’s raptor to one side. It brought its head close to the ground, to look at Mike straight on. The eyes and head and color were exactly Mike’s design, and this player had the moves to make it truly impressive. He could see from its scars that it had fought in several Cretaceous hotspots.

  Mike forced a cheerful smile. “So, you like my design?”

  It picked at its teeth with eight-inch foreclaws. “I’ve been worse.” It shifted game parameters, bringing up critic-layer details.

  This was a heavy player, maybe even a cracker! On the ground between them was a dead and dissected example of Mike’s creation. Big Lizard nudged it with a foreclaw. “The skin texture is pure Goldman. Your color scheme is a trivial emergent thing, a generic cliché.”

  Mike drew his knees in toward his chin. This was the same crap he had to put up with at school. “I borrow from the best.”

  The saurian’s chuckle was a buzzing roar. “That might work with your teachers. They have to eat whatever garbage you feed them-till you graduate and can be dumped on the street. Your design is so-so. There have been some adoptions, mainly because it scales well. But if we’re talking real quality, you just don’t measure up.” The creature flexed its battle scars.

  “I can do other things.”

  “Yes, and if you never deliver, you’ll fail with them, too.”

  That was a point that occupied far too much of Mike Villas’ worry time. He glared back at the slitted yellow eyes, and suddenly it occurred to him that-unlike teachers-this guy was not being paid to be nasty. And it was wasting too much time for this to be some humiliating joke. It actually wants something, from me! Mike sharpened his glare. “And you have some suggestions, Oh Mighty Virtual Lizard?”

  “… Maybe. I have other projects besides Cret Ret. How would you like to take an affiliate status on one of them?”

  Except for local games, no one had ever asked Mike to affiliate on anything. His mouth twisted in bogus contempt. “Affiliate? A percent of a percent of… what? How far down the value chain are you?”

  The saurian shrugged and there was the sound of gingkos swaying to the thump of its shoulders. “My guess is I’m way, way down. On the other hand, this is not a dredge project. I can pay real money for each answer I pipe upwards.” The creature named a number; it was enough to play the Hill once a week for a year. A payoff certificate floated in the air between them.

  “I get twice that or no deal.”

  “Done!” said the creature, and somehow Mike was sure it was grinning.

  “… Okay, so what do you want?”

  “You go to Fairmont High, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a strange place, isn’t it?” When Mike did not reply, the critter said, “Trust me, it is strange. Most schools don’t put Adult Education students in with the children.”

  “Yeah, Senior High. The old farts don’t like it. We don’t like it.”

  “Well, the affiliate task is to snoop around, m
ainly among the old people. Make friends with them.”

  Yecch. But Mike glanced at the payoff certificate again. It tested valid. The payoff adjudication was more complicated than he wanted to read, but it was backed by eBay. “Who in particular?”

  “So far, my upstream affiliate has only told me its broad interests: Basically, some of these senior citizens used to be bigshots.”

  “If they were so big, how come they’re in our classes now?” It was just the question the kids asked at school.

  “Lots of reasons, Miguel. Some of them are just lonely. Some of them are up to their ears in debt, and have to figure out how to make a living in the current economy. And some of them have lost half their marbles and aren’t good for much but a strong body and lots of old memories… Ever hear of Pick’s Syndrome?”

  “Um…” Mike googled up the definition:… serious social dysfunction. “How do I make friends with someone like that?”

  “If you want the money, you figure out a way. Don’t worry. There’s only one on the list, and he’s in remission. Anyway, here are the search criteria.” The Big Lizard shipped him a document. Mike browsed through the top layer.

  “This covers a lot of ground.” Retired politicians, military officers, bioscientists, parents of persons currently in such job categories. “Um, this really could be deep water. We might be setting people up for blackmail.”

  “Heh. I wondered if you’d notice that.”

  “I’m not an idiot.”

  “If it gets too deep, you can always bail.”

  “I’ll take the job. I’ll go affiliate with you.”

  “I wouldn’t want you doing anything you feel un-”

  “I said, I’ll take the job!”

  “Okay! Well then, this should get you started. There’s contact information in the document.” The creature lumbered to its feet, and its voice came from high above. “Just as well we don’t meet on Pyramid Hill again.”