by L. E. Price
But he could use what wasn’t there.
“You said the custodian emptied his locker out?” he said, putting a dubious spin in his voice.
Her smile faded a notch. “Just after you called. Why, is something wrong?”
“Well, I was specifically told to look for a spiral notebook, like this one, but it had a deep blue cover. That’s the one with the notes for his computer-science class. Is it possible the custodian missed it?”
“Oh, dear. I don’t see how. Is there any chance he loaned it to a friend?”
Jake pretended to think about it, contemplating his imaginary orders.
“Well, I didn’t talk to him directly, but Senator Kensington was very insistent. I’m sorry, I hate to put you to any trouble—”
Her chair rolled back on rumbling casters. “Don’t you even worry about it. Wait right here, I’ll take a look myself.”
“Means the world to me,” he said.
She gave him a conspiratorial wink. “I know what it’s like to have a demanding boss.”
He felt bad, playing her like this. All the same, he waited patiently until she vanished from sight, one of the two doors in back swinging shut in her wake. Then he vaulted the counter. He swung up and over, landing on the hard tile beside her empty chair, and darted for the other exit.
Two minutes later he was lost in the beehive. Every octagonal corridor looked like the rest, lined with numbered doors where rectangular windows looked in on classes in session. Time wasn’t on his side, here. The second the receptionist came back, finding the office as empty as her hands, she’d know something was up. Meanwhile he still walked under the omnipresent eyes of the security cameras, and had to hope whoever sat behind the console wasn’t paying that much attention.
There were simple rules to moving freely in places where you didn’t belong, and they all boiled down to confidence. Walk briskly, but don’t run. Chin high, eyes hard, an authority figure on the move. Every bit of body language needed to say, “Of course I belong here.” Jake studied the classroom windows like a regional manager carrying out a formal inspection, giving each one a curt nod before moving along.
And there he was. Mr. Rickey stood at the head of his class, writing out a longhand equation on a chalkboard while rows of uniformed students looked on with glazed eyes. Jake checked the time. Fourteen minutes before the hour and the class-change bell, and that was fourteen minutes he didn’t have.
The door swung wide. He stood on the threshold as every face turned his way. Rickey stopped in mid-lecture.
“Mr. Rickey?” Jake said. “Need to speak with you outside.”
It wasn’t a request. The teacher gave an uncertain glance to his students, then back to Jake.
“Is this urgent? Can it wait until—”
“Now,” Jake said.
Rickey’s fingers gave his funeral gray bow-tie a nervous pluck. A murmur rose, and Rickey pushed it back down with the palms of his hands.
“Sharon? Do me a favor, walk the rest of the class through the chapter-eight reading. I’ll be right back.”
He followed Jake into the hallway. Jake was ready for him, reaching into his breast pocket, the fake leather portfolio cool against his fingertips. He flashed his old police credentials in Rickey’s face and snapped the case shut just as fast, not giving him time to register anything but the photograph and the official-looking typeface.
“Agent Johnson, Grid Regulatory Authority,” Jake said.
The color drained from Rickey’s freckled cheeks.
“Do I need a lawyer?” he asked.
“This is just a friendly visit. You aren’t in any trouble.” Jake injected a pointed pause, locking eyes with him. “At the moment. Of course, if you’d like to call a lawyer, you have every right to do so — but that means I have to treat this as a formal interrogation and escalate matters accordingly. So. Would you like a friendly chat, or an interrogation?”
“A, uh…a friendly chat sounds good.”
“Excellent,” Jake said. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
* * * *
Rickey led him through swinging double doors and out into vibrant sunlight.
It was a lie, of course. They were on the eighteenth floor. There wasn’t any sunlight this close to the ground, only choking clouds of smog. All the same, they were outside, gazing up at a big blue sky streaked by puffy white clouds. Jake caught the tiny ripples in the ceiling screen’s projection, the pixel static at the edges of sunlight that gave the illusion away. The air was still, climate-controlled, too perfect to be outdoors.
The winding, rocky path under their feet was real, as real as the grass that lined the vast lawn at the heart of the campus. Trees and shrubs grew along the rim of the cultivated park, nestled in planters and watered by a slender string of pipes and automated valves.
“The recreation quad,” Rickey explained. “It’s beneficial — psychologically — to give the students a sense of being outdoors.”
“Even if that outdoors doesn’t really exist?”
“The human brain is a curious and marvelous organ, Agent Johnson. Anyway, we have the place to ourselves until the next bell rings.”
Almost to themselves. Gardening robots, four feet tall and shaped like white plastic salt-shakers, were tending the manicured paths here and there. Their articulated arms snipped away with shears and whirring trimmers, while boxy little lawn-mowing bots carved a hungry path along the grass.
“There are other ways to experience that illusion,” Jake said. “I understand you’re the sponsor of the school’s immersive simulation club.”
That nervous tug at his tie, again. “Yeah, the kids are crazy about those things. You should hear them at lunch, they’re always talking about the latest and greatest—”
“Like Paradise Clash,” Jake said.
“I…believe that’s a popular one, yes. Agent, what exactly is this about?”
“I’ll be blunt. The GRA has been tracking the activity of a nest of Russian Coalition hackers, operating out of Novgorod. A recent batch of their illicit software pinged our watch-list; specifically, from Academy Three’s internal servers.”
They walked in silence for a moment. Rickey composed his words like they might be his last. Jake gave him time.
“It was me,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“It was me.” Rickey swallowed hard, throat bulging against the knot of his tie. “My students have nothing to do with it. I…I know I breached the game’s terms of service, using unauthorized apps, but I swear, it was just…academic curiosity.”
Jake was impressed. Another man might pick a patsy to toss under the bus; after all, Rickey could have played dumb and pretended he didn’t know anything about the dragon-hunter clubhouse hidden inside his club’s project. Instead, he was bound and determined to take the rap for his students.
“Academic curiosity,” Jake said. “About the sea dragon.”
Rickey stopped dead in his tracks.
“Why,” the teacher asked, “is a federal agent asking me about the sea dragon?”
“You’re apparently the man to ask. Magnolto.”
Something shifted behind Rickey’s eyes. Invoking his character’s name was the final confirmation: there were no lies he could hide behind, no excuses he could make. His only defense now was the truth.
“So you know—”
“Everything,” Jake said. “Assume I know everything, and don’t hold any answers back. That’s your best bet, if you want to keep this interview friendly. And you do.”
Rickey took that in.
“Okay,” he said. “You know about my…hobby. But why does the GRA care about an urban legend?”
“Paradise Clash is SDS’s flagship game, and Strategic Design Simulations is responsible for a sizable chunk of the national economy. We care about anything that could affect the integrity of said economy.”
Something new dawned in Rickey’s eyes. He looked like a kid on Christmas morning, and his voice
dropped to an awed whisper.
“My god. It’s real, isn’t it? That’s why you’re looking into it. You’ve confirmed it. The sea dragon is real.”
“I didn’t say that,” Jake told him. “Only that we consider it a subject worthy of our attention. We’ve already spoken to representatives from SDS and heard their side of the story—”
Rickey snorted. “Let me guess. They blamed everything on Dimitry Machacek.”
“They said it was handled internally, quietly. How do you know about Machacek?”
The teacher started walking again, too excited to stand still. Jake scurried to keep up with him.
“You don’t get it, I mean — listen, dragon hunting isn’t just a weekend thing for me, this is my life. I have interviews, transcripts, stuff SDS thought they flushed down the memory hole ages ago. Machacek is innocent, and I can prove it.”
“How so?” Jake asked.
Rickey was bouncing on the soles of his feet. Full-on manic now, indulging his obsession.
“I met him at a convention in Barcelona last year. I saw the transcripts, the termination letter, his pay stubs — I have copies. I can show you the copies. Anyway. There was no plagiarism. Machacek was moonlighting, doing contract work for SDS and for Evolution Games at the same time. Big no-no. SDS gave him the boot on April the eighth.”
Rickey turned to Jake, eyes feverish.
“The first sea-dragon sighting was April the eleventh. Three days later. The entire story about the art plagiarism, about Machacek being in charge of the project, about stripping all the dragon assets out of the game? It’s all a cover story they made up after the fact.”
“Okay,” Jake said, following along. “If Machacek wasn’t in charge of designing the sea dragon, who was?”
Rickey barked out a laugh. “You don’t get it. So close, but you don’t get it.”
“Then clue me in.”
“The internal story is the lie, to throw off anyone who digs too deep. The public statement, at least the part where they claim there wasn’t any plan for an underwater expansion — that’s the truth.”
The teacher gave him a feral grin.
“Nobody was working on it. Nobody at SDS created the sea dragon. It created itself.”
22.
The teacher was unhinged. Paranoid. But that didn’t mean he was wrong. Jake walked at his side as they circled the manicured lawns. Hedge-trimmers buzzed and gardening-bots pruned back the bushes, keeping the outbreak of nature under strict control.
“What do you mean, it created itself?” Jake asked.
“It just was. SDS’s confusion, the way they scrambled for a denial and held their ground ever since — it’s because they were blindsided. They have no idea where the sea dragon came from or who put it in the game. Or who removed it, or how it’s been showing up here and there, ever since. It’s rogue code.”
And rogue code was a nightmare waiting to happen. Everyone from professional e-sports teams to bookmakers in Vegas relied on the integrity of SDS’s games. That was why employees were banned from playing, why gamemasters were branded with a golden halo and leashed to tracking apps that followed and logged their every move.
It didn’t matter if the sea dragon was the product of a rebellious employee or some outside hacker. If someone could prove that it existed, and that SDS couldn’t account for how or why, it would be the ultimate vote of no-confidence. After all, if someone could slip an unexplainable monster into Paradise Clash without getting caught, what else could they do? They might tweak numbers, fudge statistics, put a finger on the economy’s scale. Entire secondary markets and billions of real-world dollars depended on SDS’s integrity. Take that away, and the game — along with SDS — could crash overnight.
What would the company do to protect that secret? Would they kill for it? Would they drive a curious teenage boy into a digital coma? Jake had already leaned toward Trevor’s mind-napping being an inside job; now he was even more convinced. You found something, didn’t you, Trevor? You learned something you shouldn’t have. A senator’s kid, from a AAA-credit family — you’d be hard to get at in the real world, hard to kill. But they knew exactly where your mind would be, every single night.
The priestess Cybele’s warning, from his first steps into Paradise Clash, nagged at him. He looked to Rickey as they walked along the stony path.
“Have you ever heard of a ‘drumming man,’ possibly connected to the sea dragon?”
The teacher’s brow furrowed. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“How about ‘deep magic’?”
“I’ve studied every scrap of material about Paradise Clash’s development, believe me. Every interview, every bio of every member of the dev team. Yeah, deep magic I know about, but it’s nothing to do with the dragon: it was just part of the design for the original magic system. Never made it into the game.”
That backed up his own research. Another dead end. Jake shifted gears.
“What about realm keys?”
“What about them?” Rickey said, suddenly shifty.
“Now’s not the time to start playing dumb.”
“I mean what I said. Everything, the unauthorized software, that’s all on me.”
Now Jake understood his sudden reluctance. He was protecting Trevor.
“I already know you drafted at least two students, Trevor Kensington and Timothy Miller, to help you out.”
“I didn’t draft them,” Rickey said. “They’re smart kids. Curious. They were already interested in the legend. I just…organized them.”
“They aren’t in any trouble, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Jake said. That was a lie, Trevor was in a world of it, but Rickey didn’t need to know.
“Trevor’s the one you should talk to. He noticed…irregularities in the key and key-fragment market. Speculation in odd spikes and waves.”
“What’s the connection to the dragon?”
“There isn’t one,” Rickey said. “He was hunting for dragon clues when he stumbled onto the market fluctuations. Well, he was on that like a bloodhound. I haven’t talked to him in a week; poor kid’s out sick, I think he has tonsillitis or something. All I know is, Trevor believed he was onto something big.”
A bell chimed, soft and strident, ringing out over the lush green lawn. A moment later, double doors swung wide at the far end of the field and the stampede began. Students boiled out, some carrying sack lunches, others toting Frisbees and footballs, emerging to spend a precious hour under the light of a simulated sun.
Jake knew he was almost out of time. If he was very, very lucky, the receptionist simply decided he’d left before she got back from checking Trevor’s locker, and she’d already forgotten about him. If he wasn’t, security was out hunting for a stranger on campus.
He was rarely lucky.
Up ahead, a gardening robot was trundling their way, its tank treads rocking on bumps in the path. They moved to one side and dropped their voices low.
“’Big’ meaning what, exactly?” Jake said.
Rickey shot a nervous glance at the packs of teenagers, some coming closer now. A young girl with a ponytail gave him a wave, steaming their way like she needed to tell him something and it wouldn’t wait for class.
“You know how the realm gates work, right?” Rickey said, talking fast. “Three open on the first of each month. Randomly chosen. No pattern, computer-generated choice.”
“Sure,” Jake said. “Sort of a lottery for speculators. Snatch up keys on the open market and hope you chose the right ones, ones that people are going to want to buy from you.”
“After each spike of interest in a particular key,” Rickey whispered, “within four months, that exact realm opened up and buy orders came flooding in. It’s not a lottery. Not a fair one, because somebody knows the sequence ahead of time. The game is rigged.”
Jake had been watching the approaching students, not the gardening bot. No reason to. It rolled on by, docile and softly beeping, sensors hunting for wo
rk to do.
Then it let out a squelch of hot static, rocking on its treads, and its hedge-clipper arm whirred to life like a chainsaw. Mr. Rickey turned, jolted by the sound.
The clipper arm punched through the teacher’s throat. Then it ripped free, shattering his spine and leaving his head dangling from the stump of a half-severed neck. Hot blood and scraps of torn flesh spattered Jake’s face as the dead man collapsed to the path at his feet. The approaching girl, her uniform caked in a thin scarlet mist, clasped her hands to her mouth and started to scream.
* * * *
Jake sat at a white plastic table in a windowless white plastic cube. The ceiling was a panel of light, glowing down, showering him with raw, relentless heat. Sweat flecked his forehead, matting one damp curl.
His two interrogators had sweaty faces, too. They didn’t like being stuck in the hot-box any more than he did, and they’d been at him for what felt like three hours now. Give or take; it was hard to tell, with no clocks and no line of sight to the outside world. A good police interview room was built like a casino. A place disconnected from reality, inviting guests to make bad decisions about their future.
“I don’t think you realize,” the heavyset cop named Martigan said, “the sheer depth of the shit you have stepped into here.”
His partner was Guinness. Guinness had a discolored front tooth. Just the one, like it had been dipped in coffee and never brushed, and he flashed it every time he snarled.
“Arcologies are sovereign territory,” he said. “And you’re not a citizen. Know what that means? We can do whatever we want to you, and nobody can say a damn thing about it. We can disappear your ass.”
The manacles on Jake’s wrists matched the decor, smooth and ivory as fresh-fallen snow. He contemplated the short chain running between them.
“Sounds like a lot of work,” Jake said.
Martigan stirred his stubby finger in the air. “See, this? This right here? This is us being nice.”
“How much longer we stay that way, that’s up to you,” his partner added.
“Already told you gentlemen. Client confidentiality.”
