This Is Not a Game

by Walter Jon Williams

  “He was my boyfriend ten years ago, before my marriage. We were good friends with Charlie Ruff and Austin Katanyan. But BJ and Charlie started their business together, and they ended up hating each other. BJ acted crazy, and Charlie fired him. Austin didn’t get along with him, either, after that. BJ is-was-still angry about it, after all these years.

  “I recently gave BJ a job because I felt sorry for him. But”-she hoped she was convincing-“I don’t know why anyone would kill him. That’s just crazy.”

  There was another little pause, another little explosion.

  “Had Boris-BJ-ever made threats against Mr. Ruff?”

  “None that I took seriously,” Dagmar said.

  “What were the nature of the threats?”

  In her mind, Dagmar replayed the Phalanx flying apart in flames, one image following the other like frames on a film reel.

  “He said that if he could figure out a way to kill Charlie, he would,” Dagmar said. “But he wouldn’t do it if it meant being caught.”

  The car burned in Dagmar’s mind, a smear of brilliant orange against the night web of Los Angeles.

  “But BJ wasn’t a violent man,” she said. “He wasn’t serious.”

  “Can you come down to the station and talk to us?”

  “No,” Dagmar said. “Maybe later. Right now I’m in the middle of something at work.”

  Whole networks of bots vanished from the world. The threat to the dollar faded by late afternoon, along with the morning’s rainstorm. The Federal Reserve had an emergency meeting; the IMF stepped in; so did European banks; so did sovereign wealth funds from a number of American allies. The value of the dollar began to rise.

  Billions, Dagmar thought, were pouring into the United Bank of Cayman as the botnets shut down. At some point, Dagmar was going to have to call Charlie’s parents and tell them how rich they were and urge them to continue Charlie’s generous donations to charities worldwide.

  They could keep a billion or two. What the hell.

  By evening the dollar was regaining value on Pacific exchanges, where it was already Thursday morning. Eventually it stabilized at about 85 percent of its former value.

  On Thursday morning, Dagmar went to a meeting with Murdoch and Special Agent Landreth of the FBI, who managed at length to convince her, against her will, that BJ was a killer. That he’d hired Litvinov to kill Austin, that he was responsible for the bomb that killed Charlie, that he’d beaten Siyed to death in a jealous rage, and that finally he’d blown himself up accidentally.

  “It doesn’t make any sense!” Dagmar protested, and she was right; but she knew it made all the sense that it had to.

  Read the Schedule

  Know the Schedule

  Love the Schedule

  Dagmar looked at the words tracking endlessly on the flat-screen wall monitor and permitted herself a small smile. The mass hacking was the last big event of The Long Night of Briana Hall, and after that the game would grow manageable, both for her and her staff.

  On Saturday, the Tapping the Source modules had told the players which water sources would be targeted by the terrorists, and allowed them to foil the terror plot. On Wednesday, they had destroyed the financial networks of the money men who had planned to profit from the disruption.

  With both sets of major villains defeated, the game turned more intimate. It would all be about Briana Hall’s trying to convince the police that she was innocent in the deaths of her two former boyfriends.

  Briana Hall’s life, Dagmar thought, was not unlike her own. Born a refugee in a hotel room, ending as words in a police file.

  The web of Los Angeles spread out below her, lines of yellow and red, incandescents and neon and billboards.

  The crime-scene tape was gone. The rubble had been swept into boxes to be stared at by experts. A few lights were on at Katanyan Associates, and a few cars remained in the parking lot.

  Dagmar stood where the Phalanx had been and looked out at the city. The wind coming up the slope stirred her hair and brought with it the faint scent of eucalyptus.

  Her phone sang. She answered.

  “Miss Shaw?”

  A wry smile touched Dagmar’s lips at the sound of the familiar voice. “You know, Lieutenant Murdoch,” she said, “I believe you know me well enough by now that you might as well call me by my first name.”

  “If you like,” Murdoch said.

  “How can I help you?”

  “I called because I have news,” Murdoch said. “Rather sad news, I’m afraid.”

  Police sirens wailed somewhere down in Los Angeles. Billboards flashed, transmitting the code that was commerce.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Preliminary DNA evidence has confirmed that it was Mr. Ruff that was killed in the hotel explosion,” Murdoch said. “The preliminary evidence will be confirmed later, when a more thorough analysis is performed, but I’ve never known the preliminary to be wrong.”

  “I understand,” Dagmar said.

  Murdoch was only telling her what she already knew. Charlie, who despite his best efforts was not Victor von Doom, had not substituted another body for his own and had not gone underground in order to mastermind the collapse of world economies. That was the sort of thing that happened only in fiction-including the sort of fiction Dagmar wrote.

  “We’ve also found the place where the bombs were assembled,” Murdoch said. “A hotel room. The tenant had asked not to be disturbed, but after three days the management decided to open the door. When they looked into the tenant’s luggage, they found bomb-making materials and instructions downloaded from the Internet, and called us. Prints taken at the scene match prints taken from Boris Bustretski’s apartment.”

  “If there was a late-model laptop, it belongs to my company,” Dagmar said.

  “You’ll have to contact the FBI about that,” Murdoch said. “Homeland Security has it all now.”

  “Ah,” Dagmar said.

  Great Big Idea would probably get the computer back only after time had made it thoroughly obsolete.

  “Thank you for calling,” she said.

  She holstered her phone and looked out over Los Angeles, feeling the wind lift her hair.

  This was what BJ had played for, the view from the corner office, the tycoon car, the tycoon clothes, the tycoon bank account, and all Los Angeles at his feet.

  Played and lost. All the brilliant game mastering, the devious plots, the ninja tactics played in World of Cinnabar, hadn’t helped BJ in the end.

  The world was just too big. BJ hadn’t been defeated by Dagmar so much as by the Group Mind, lots of little autonomous agents out in the world, each with a skill set and a knowledge set, each with her own motivations, her own joys, her own alternate reality, all networked together in the great gestalt, the great becoming, that was the world.

  Dagmar turned, Los Angeles at her back, and walked to her car.

  FROM: LadyDayFan

  Motel Room Blues, or The Long Night of Briana Hall, will end on Saturday with a live event in Griffith Park. Presumably we’ll meet Briana, and maybe some of her friends, and help them tidy up the last few bits of plot before the happy ending that we see on the near horizon.

  What are we to make of this game?

  We’re used to ARGs wandering in and out of the real world, but this one took more twists and sharp turns than any I can remember. We’ve had real-life death wound into the narrative, and we’ve done some real-life detection. We’ve also skied down glaciers on Titan, got drunk in the bars of Mars Port, and engaged in the most outrageous public hacking event in world history.

  Is this a model for ARGs of the future? Will we be asked to aid real-world problem solvers with their agendas? And if so, can such a thing possibly be classified as entertainment?

  We’re used to following the whims of puppetmasters, but puppetmasters with real-world policies are another matter. Is this a good idea? Should we follow anyone who provides what they say is entertainment, even if it comes with
an ideology?

  Does it become dangerous when This Is Really Not A Game?

  The chatter of players filled the rooms of the Fajita Hut with a constant roar. Dagmar recognized LadyDayFan, Hippolyte, GIAWOL-and of course Joe Clever, who sat alone at his table. No one, in this highly networked group, wanted to be seen talking to him. Even helping to catch Litvinov had not persuaded the others not to shun him, at least in public.

  The Griffith Park event had gone well. Despite a day of drizzle, five or six hundred players had turned out to publicly solve a few last-minute puzzles. Briana, played by the actress Terri Griff, had appeared to thank the players for their efforts and then rumbled away in a vintage red Mustang convertible, the personal wheels of Richard the Assassin, who had lent the car for the occasion.

  Dagmar watched the event on the live feed. To attend in person would have broken the fourth wall.

  The players, buoyed and sad, their collective dream fading, reassembled in the nearby Fajita Hut, a large fast-food place with obsessively clean counters and containers of freshly made tortillas on the buffet. Dagmar, Jack Stone, the puzzle designer, and a few of the minor actors joined them. The fourth wall had, by this time, crumbled to dust.

  “What’s coming up next?” asked a young man with bright red hair.

  Dagmar finished chewing her pollo asado, swallowed, and spoke.

  “Wait and see,” she said. A puppetmaster never revealed anything, not in public.

  “I’ve never done one of these before,” he said. “I’m totally stoked.”

  Dagmar dabbed a bit of sour cream from her upper lip.

  “Are you Corporal Carrot, by any chance?” she asked.

  He grinned. “That’s me!”

  “I thought I recognized your voice. Big Terry Pratchett fan?”

  “Oh! He’s huge!”

  In truth, Dagmar had no idea what game project was coming next. There seemed to be a lull in demand for Great Big Idea’s product. She’d have to get out and start stirring the pot.

  And furthermore, she had no idea what might become of her job. She didn’t expect that Mr. and Mrs. Ruff would want to run Charlie’s business. They’d sell their interest to someone else, and that someone would send some stern vice president or other with instructions to “rationalize” the business, which was usually done by firing as many people as possible.

  Charlie’s main business was his software, of course. The game business would stick out by contrast-the two game businesses, actually, since Great Big Idea and Planet Nine were effectively separate companies.

  Of the two, Planet Nine had already generated eight or nine million players. Most of those had joined for free under the eight-week special offer, courtesy of Briana Hall, but a lot of them had sampled Planet Nine’s pleasures while waiting for updates from Dagmar and would probably stay. Planet Nine would most likely have at least a million revenue-generating subscribers.

  By contrast, Great Big Idea had just lost a huge amount of money. Millions. Dagmar could always explain that those millions were lost on Charlie Ruff’s direct orders, and that he had provided the millions in question out of his own funds, but this distinction might well be lost on any Harvard MBA intent on proving his worth by slashing costs and jobs.

  She supposed that Great Big Idea might be sold to some other, larger game company, where it would remain a square peg in a round hole or be spun off into a company of its own.

  In any case, Dagmar had reason to be worried about her professional future.

  She could survive, of course, by theft. Nobody knew about Atreides LLC but her, and there were nearly fourteen million dollars left in that account, even after all her lavish spending. But she had every intention of returning the money to AvN Soft.

  When all was said and done, she wasn’t a thief. She was a puppetmaster, and she had blown up a former boyfriend, but it had to be said in her favor that stealing was quite beneath her.

  Besides, a forensic accountant could turn up that money without a lot of trouble, and Dagmar had no intention of going to jail, not after all this.

  “May I join you?”

  She recognized the gamer she knew as Hippolyte-a scrawny young woman with straw blond hair. “Of course.”

  Hippolyte arranged her thin body on a chair. Her hair was frizzed by the day’s humidity, and she had a smudge of pale green eye shadow between her eyes, which suggested that she’d put on her makeup in great haste that morning, before she’d quite come awake.

  “That was a phenomenal game!” Hippolyte said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Everyone’s talking about how it staked out new ground, solving a crime in the real world and running down an actual criminal.” Hippolyte smiled. “But then you know that, since you read all the posts on Our Reality Network.”

  Dagmar, Woman of Mystery, gave an ambiguous shrug.

  “But it didn’t solve all the mysteries, did it?” Hippolyte said. “Those other deaths.”

  “You couldn’t help,” Dagmar said. “We didn’t have the clues to give you. Nobody had a picture of the perpetrator.”

  “They were all your friends, right?” Hippolyte asked. “Even the bomber.”

  Dagmar allowed herself a moment of sadness.

  “Even the bomber,” she said. “We all knew each other.”

  Hippolyte shook her head. “That’s kind of amazing.”

  “We all met in college,” Dagmar said. “We were in the same gaming group.”

  And then, in front of that audience, she found herself telling that story, about BJ and Austin and Charlie, and the treacherous, devious worlds they had created, when they were all young and games were all they knew of life.

  Acknowledgments

  With thanks to Daniel Abraham, Sage Walker, Melinda Snodgrass, Emily Mah, Ty Franck, Ian Tregillis, Terry England, Victor Milán, Corie Conwell, David Levine, Allen Moore, Deborah Roggie, Ben Francisco, Brian Lowe, and Steve Stirling, who read drafts of this work with their usual active intelligence.

  Special thanks to poker buddies Sean Stewart, Maureen McHugh, Elan Lee, and Jordan Weisman, for introducing me to the subject matter of this book.

  About the Author

  Walter Jon Williams has been nominated repeatedly for every major SF award, including Hugo and Nebula Award nominations for this novel City on Fire. His most recent books are The Sundering, The Praxis, Destiny’s Way and The Rift. He lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico, with his wife.

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