“The Game Commander must have found that cruelly disappointing,” said Gideon, “and been horribly lonely on Teen Level with all their old teen friends gone. They consoled themselves by unpacking their game master stack, and getting back in communication with all their players who hadn’t gone off to Lottery. Their old Teen Game didn’t just come back to life, but expanded to have tens of thousands of players.”
I became aware that the Tactical team were sneaking furtive glances in Beckett’s direction. I looked across at him myself, and couldn’t see what was so interesting at first, but then I realized the orange and brown fur collar around his neck was moving. Front and back legs appeared, and Cee Cee delicately stepped down onto Beckett’s desk, before yawning, stretching, and fastidiously washing its face.
“The original Game Commander of Blue Upway kept running it until Halloween,” said Lucas. “Beckett, could you emphasize the fracture line in the pattern at that point for us?”
Beckett waited for Cee Cee to move out of the way before adjusting the holo diagram upwards again, and then heightened the colours at one point. I spared a moment to study the diagram, but then was distracted by Cee Cee strolling up to the side of the blue object on Beckett’s desk and giving it a business-like swat with a front paw.
One side of the blue object rotated out of the way, to reveal twin dishes of food and water inside. Cee Cee sniffed them delicately before starting to eat.
“A week after Halloween, the new Game Commander took over Blue Upway,” said Lucas.
“There’s definitely a fracture line in the pattern then,” said Kareem, “but no break of activity like the one at Carnival.”
“So long as the game master stack was still running to handle the game communications, Blue Upway could be handed over to a new Game Commander without any activity break or organizational disruption at all,” said Emili. “All the delegation had been set up to deal with points and promotions.”
“What’s puzzling me is that the original Game Commander of Blue Upway was a highly responsible person,” said Lucas. “Why would they hand control of their game to someone who’d endanger their thirty thousand players?”
“They wouldn’t,” said Gideon. “Something unexpected happened, but what?”
“My theory is that the original Game Commander was given a last-minute medical clearance to enter the Halloween Lottery,” said Lucas. “That took them totally by surprise, so they didn’t have time to shut down their game before leaving Teen Level.”
I’d been watching Cee Cee eat, but Lucas’s comment caught my attention. “I don’t understand what you mean. Lottery testing always happens during the week after Carnival.”
“The main Hive Lottery happens during the week after Carnival,” said Lucas. “There are advantages in having as many teens as possible go through Lottery at the same time. That allows the Lottery systems maximum flexibility in juggling candidates and projected vacancies, which leads to the optimal result for both the candidates and the Hive.”
He paused. “There will always be a small percentage of candidates who can’t enter their scheduled Lottery after Carnival though. A variety of problems like injury, illness, or the death of a close family member can either prevent a candidate doing the tests at all, or affect the validity of their results.”
Lucas shrugged. “It would be extremely wasteful to make these candidates wait an entire year to enter Lottery again, so there are small-scale alternate runs of Lottery after the festivals of Valentine, Halloween, and New Year.”
I’d always believed the day that I’d enter Lottery was a completely inflexible and inescapable fixed point in my life. “I’ve never heard anyone mention this before.”
“Candidates for the alternate runs of Lottery tend to be secretive about it,” said Emili. “Some people consider their results less valid than those from the main Carnival Lottery.”
“There’s an especial prejudice against candidates who go through the Halloween Lottery,” said Gideon. “When I first arrived in Claire’s unit, some people queried whether it was safe to allow a Halloween Lottery candidate to work for a telepath.”
He smiled. “Claire soon put a halt to that though. She called a meeting of the entire unit, told them that anyone who didn’t like being in the same unit as me was welcome to leave, and quoted the words of the Light and Dark pageants. ‘There can be no light without darkness, and no darkness without light.’”
I wondered what problem had stopped Gideon from entering the long-ago Carnival Lottery and sent him into the Halloween Lottery instead, but Lucas was already speaking again, so I needed to concentrate on what he was saying.
“The original Game Commander would need to come back to Teen Level after Lottery to collect their belongings. They would have been planning to shut down their game master stack, take away the dataviews, and dispose of them. Instead, they found the dataviews had all gone. Our dangerous new Game Commander had grabbed the chance to steal the game master stack and take control of Blue Upway.”
“That theft must have happened within two days of the original Game Commander going into Lottery,” said Hallie. “If it had been any later, then the game master stack would have run out of power, and we’d be seeing a break of activity in the pattern. Cheap teen dataviews don’t have remote charge ability, and teen rooms only have one dataview charging point, so there was no way to leave all those dataviews plugged in.”
“I know it’s a very long time since I was a Game Commander,” said Gideon, “but I distinctly remember the boring job of plugging each dataview in turn into the charging point for two minutes, and I’m sure I only needed to do it once a week.”
Hallie sighed. “From what you’ve told us, you were running a very small game, Gideon. Blue Upway has thirty thousand players. Just think how many messages those dataviews are relaying. They might last two days without charging, but no longer.”
“That’s very true,” said Lucas. “We can assume the new Game Commander stole the game master stack on either the first or second day after Halloween. Let’s advance the timeline until today.”
The holo diagram moved on to show a ragged edge where it ended.
“You can see the change in the organization backbone in Blue Upway since Halloween,” said Emili. “The new Game Commander isn’t nearly as intelligent or methodical as the original one. They’ve got all the game structure set up for them, and the delegation in place to handle all the basic things like points and promotions. Blue Upway should be continuing to run smoothly on pure momentum, but they’re still messing things up.”
I noticed Cee Cee moving back into position around Beckett’s neck, and settling down with the weary air of a comfort cat that had been having an unreasonably hard couple of days.
“That’s an interesting point,” said Lucas. “Beckett, can you put a filter on everything that’s been running on momentum since Halloween, and highlight the changes for us?”
“It won’t be totally accurate,” said Beckett. “I’ll have to make some judgement calls.”
“I have absolute faith in your judgement,” said Lucas.
There was a long wait, then most of the pattern abruptly went pale, leaving what looked like bright, garish vertical lines. Lucas leant forward to study it.
“The new Game Commander is barely touching Blue Upway,” he said. “There have only been a dozen changes to the game since Halloween, but every single one of them is causing major safety issues. That isn’t someone messing things up by accident. It’s deliberate.”
“Blue Upway has been taken over by someone deeply malicious,” said Kareem. “They’re enjoying themselves using the power of a Game Commander to endanger players and cause trouble for the Hive.”
“Our next step will be to assign a hazard rating to each change,” said Lucas. “We then start looking for clues to the personality of our target, their goals, and how much they know about Teen Games.”
“How much they know about Teen Games?” repeated Emili. “What
are you thinking, Lucas?”
“I’m thinking that the reason our target is making so few changes could be that they’ve little previous experience of Teen Games. We believe they stole the game master stack for Blue Upway on either the first or second day after Halloween, but they didn’t make any changes to the game at all until five days later. I think it took them that long to go through the information on the dataviews, work out what the game master stack was, and learn how to use it.”
“But if they didn’t know what the game master stack was,” said Emili, “then they couldn’t have been actively trying to steal it. They must have stumbled across it by accident. Does that mean the original Game Commander didn’t keep the game master stack in their room or storage locker, but in a different hiding place?”
“I didn’t keep my game master stack in my room, but inside an air vent at the local community centre,” said Kareem. “Any hiding place has to be somewhere you go regularly and close to a charging point. You can’t be seen carrying a whole stack of dataviews around, so you have to take them to be charged one at a time.”
Lucas stood up. “I’d like my team to carry on working on that approach. Amber and I will go back to our apartment for a while now, because I want to look at some restricted records.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I followed Lucas out of the Tactical office door, and down the corridor. “What restricted records do you want to look at?”
“The candidate test results for the last Halloween Lottery,” said Lucas.
I frowned. “I thought all the Liaison and Tactical team members could access Lottery candidate results when necessary for their work.”
“They can, but a Tactical Commander has higher level access, and I have a theory that I may need it.”
I was still confused. “Why?”
“Our target is the current Game Commander of Blue Upway. We’ve no real clues to that person’s identity, but we have learned some highly distinctive facts about the original Game Commander. Distinctive enough that we should be able to identify them from their test results in the Halloween Lottery. Over a million candidates go into the Carnival Lottery each year, but only about ten thousand go into the Halloween Lottery, and only about a thousand will be from Blue Zone.”
Lucas stopped to open the security doors. “The snag is that I believe Lottery will have imprinted the original Game Commander for a very important position in our Hive. Important enough that I’ll need my higher level Tactical Commander access to see the details of their Lottery test results. Important enough that I’ll need to be very discreet about contacting them.”
That sounded ominous to me. “Do we need to contact this person at all? You just said that they aren’t our target.”
“I consider the original Game Commander to be an innocent bystander in this case,” said Lucas. “I’ve absolutely no wish to cause trouble for them. I’d just like to call them and discuss what happened at Halloween. They may only know that they went into Lottery, and came back to find the game master stack of Blue Upway was missing, but there’s a chance they’ll remember some detail that gives us a clue to our target’s identity.”
We walked on in silence to our apartment, then sat down on a couch in the sprawling living room. Lucas took out his dataview, tapped it to make it unfurl, and then accessed the Lottery systems.
“So, we want the last Halloween Lottery results,” he muttered, working on the dataview. “We’re searching for a candidate from Blue Zone that’s a gifted leader, persuasive, highly intelligent, organized, and responsible.”
He gave a decisive tap at the screen. “I knew it. The only openly available test results that match my selection criteria are for two very moderate candidates, but there’s one hidden result. I’ll request access.”
He did some more tapping at the dataview, and entered authorization codes. “Yes, that hidden result is for our original Game Commander of Blue Upway. Michaela came out of the last Halloween Lottery, and was imprinted for the highest position in Hive Politics, but she’s currently only assigned as a Diplomat while she gains basic experience. I’ll just check …”
He worked on his dataview for another minute before giving a despairing groan. “Do you remember there were a lot of blue decorations in the apartment belonging to the head of Hive Politics, which suggested he’d grown up in Blue Zone?”
“Yes,” I said uneasily.
“Well, Senior Ambassador Elliott came out of Lottery eleven years ago. He’s the eldest of a family of two boys and four girls. Michaela is his youngest sister.”
“Six children!” I gasped. “Does that mean the parents had six duty children?”
“The children were probably all born through the duty child programme, but raised by their parents rather than being adopted. It’s obviously one of those cases where siblings share similar abilities, because all six of them are imprinted for the highest positions in Hive Politics. Elliott and Michaela as Senior Ambassadors, and the other four as Ambassadors.”
Lucas took out his dataview and pulled an apprehensive face. “I’ll try calling Diplomat Michaela now. I just hope she decides to co-operate instead of calling for help from her big brother. Do you want to be included in the call?”
I shook my head. “I’d be terrified of saying the wrong thing.”
Lucas stood up and moved to a point in the room where I’d be out of view, then made the call. After about five seconds, the holo head of a stunningly lovely woman in her late twenties appeared in front of him, her dark hair so long that it trailed well past her shoulders.
“Hive Politics,” she said briskly. “Ambassador Paula speaking.”
“I was hoping to talk to Diplomat Michaela,” said Lucas.
“I regret that Diplomat Michaela is unavailable,” said Ambassador Paula. “Can I be of assistance?”
“Do you mean that Diplomat Michaela is in a meeting?” asked Lucas.
“May I ask who’s inquiring?”
“I’m Tactical Commander Lucas 2511-3022-498.”
Ambassador Paula glanced down, clearly checking Lucas’s identity on a desktop display. “Tactical Commander Lucas, I regret that Diplomat Michaela isn’t in a meeting. She is at Hive Genex.”
I blinked.
“I assume her presence there is connected to the Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement investigation of Hive Genex,” said Lucas.
Ambassador Paula nodded. “When Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement’s investigation team arrived at Hive Genex, they invited our Hive to send a delegation to join them. We naturally can’t take part in the investigation itself, but it’s centred on Hive Genex’s attempt to kidnap one of our telepaths, so we’ve a right to join all the negotiations about penalties and compensation arrangements.”
“It was my telepath and partner that Hive Genex attempted to kidnap,” said Lucas pointedly, “so I’ve a strong personal interest in those negotiations. Have we made any progress?”
“We have made significant progress,” said Ambassador Paula. “Unfortunately, I can’t disclose any details of ongoing negotiations.”
“Is it possible for me to speak to Diplomat Michaela at Hive Genex?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Ambassador Paula. “We suspect that Hive Genex is spying on our delegates’ communication channel, so we’re flooding it with fake messages infected with a self-modifying cyber virus.”
Lucas rubbed his forehead. “I see. At least, I think I see.”
“I’m supervising the situation at Hive Genex, and would be delighted to assist you myself,” said Ambassador Paula.
“You won’t be able to help with this because it’s a personal matter,” said Lucas.
“I may still be able to assist you,” said Ambassador Paula encouragingly. “Diplomat Michaela is my youngest sister.”
“I can only discuss this subject with Diplomat Michaela herself,” said Lucas firmly. “Please ask her to contact me as soon as she returns to our Hive.”
Lucas ended the call and came back to
sit on the couch next to me. “I’m not sure if Ambassador Paula is protective of her youngest sister, or just nosy about her personal affairs. I suppose that in a family of six duty children, the eldest girl may take on some of the maternal role.”
I waved my hands to show my ignorance of how things worked in such a large family.
“Well, we’ll have to wait to talk to Michaela,” continued Lucas, “but it’s virtually certain that she doesn’t know anything helpful.”
I raised my eyebrows. “A few minutes ago, you said the original Game Commander of Blue Upway might remember some detail that gives us a clue to our target’s identity. Now you’re saying it’s virtually certain that Michaela doesn’t know anything helpful. What’s changed?”
“What’s changed is that we know Michaela was imprinted for Senior Ambassador and is part of a delegation at Hive Genex,” said Lucas. “The minute she found out the game master stack for Blue Upway had been stolen, she’d have realized the potential for danger in an unknown person having control of a Teen Game with thirty thousand players. She’d have reported the change in control of Blue Upway and any clues to the thief’s identity before leaving our Hive.”
I shook my head. “Michaela wouldn’t want to tell Law Enforcement something that could mess up her brilliant new career.”
“Michaela might be a bit embarrassed to admit she’d started a technically illegal Teen Game, but I can’t believe it would seriously damage her career. Anyway, no one would be imprinted for the role of Senior Ambassador unless they were unflinchingly loyal to our Hive.”
Lucas paused. “If necessary, Michaela wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice her career or her life in the interests of our Hive. In this case, she didn’t even need to worry about the minor embarrassment though, because she could just make her report anonymously. If she’d done that, then Game Control would have given us that information along with everything else they knew about Blue Upway. They didn’t.”
Borderline (Hive Mind Book 4) Page 31