dotmeme

by Mike A. Lancaster

  “Or more and more elaborate wastes of time,” Abernathy said. “I guess I like to deny to myself that people actually make money out of these electronic gewgaws.”

  The Shuttleworths both rolled their eyes.

  “Modern games can cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make,” Greg told him.

  “And can still turn huge profits,” Geoff added. “I think it’s time they were acknowledged as something more than mere gewgaws.”

  “Come back for that acknowledgment when they stop fetishizing violence and demeaning women,” Abernathy said.

  Geoff Shuttleworth looked on the verge of explosive anger, or as close to it as he could get, but his brother patted him on the shoulder, gave him a glance and an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and Geoff calmed down immediately.

  Abernathy carried on, oblivious. “So, the long, tall, and short of it is that Dorian made lots of money by making and selling video games to people old enough to know better.”

  “Yes,” Geoff said, through slightly gritted teeth. Joe didn’t think he’d ever seen one of the Shuttleworths angry with Abernathy, or with anyone for that matter. It was kind of interesting to see how one of them remained calm enough to stop the other from saying something he might end up regretting. Once more, it seemed almost like they were two halves of the same individual, yin and yang.

  Joe, however, had no qualms about calling Abernathy out on some of his pompous B.S. “While I’m certain that times were a lot more intellectually rewarding in the rosy-tinted past you seem to compare the modern age to,” he said, “when kids ran down the bridleways with a hoop and a stick, or entertained themselves trying to get balls into cups or hitting balls with bats that were attached by rubber bands, I don’t think you can seriously dispute that computer games are just another example of humanity’s ingenuity and are a legitimate art form all of their own.”

  “I certainly can,” Abernathy said, but Joe was relieved to see he was smiling. “If Pac-Man is art, then the term has become next to meaningless.”

  “But you’re judging an entire genre of entertainment on its earliest examples,” Joe said. “You would never have gotten the Mona Lisa if it weren’t for the cave paintings at Lascaux, but you wouldn’t judge the entire history of painted art on the strength of the horses daubed on the walls there. And if you look at the difference between those cave paintings and the Mona Lisa you’ll see it took seventeen thousand years to refine the artistic techniques that led from one to the other. In the case of Pac-Man to, say, Grand Theft Auto V, I think you’ll find it happened in less than forty.”

  “So stealing digital cars is the computer game’s version of the Mona Lisa?” Abernathy said. “Although, I have to admit I was impressed when I found the hatch from Lost in the ocean near the San Chianski Mountains.”

  Joe did a double take. “Wait a minute, you can do that in GTA V?” He asked.

  “If you use the submersible,” Abernathy said, grinning. Then he rolled his eyes. “Newbs.” He turned to the Shuttleworths. “So, enough of that. The important question is, I think, what is Dorian doing now?”

  There were a few moments of bemused silence as the brothers digested the revelation that Abernathy had not only heard of GTA V, he’d also played it to such an extent that he’d found something that only die-hard gamer nerds would, and then Greg pulled himself together.

  “Dorian made a lot of money from his games, poured it into a massive expansion program swallowing up a lot of smaller software and hardware manufacturers in the process, and ended up doing what a lot of high-tech companies end up doing: he took his business overseas. Dorian has two offices in California—one in Palo Alto, the other in LA which is hardly surprising …”

  “Why is that ‘hardly surprising’?” Abernathy asked.

  “Dorian games are the kind of cutting-edge tech that means they belong in Silicon Valley, but their games are becoming more and more like interactive movies,” Geoff replied. “They’re huge productions now, with movie-sized budgets and A-list celebrities providing voices, and use motion-capture acting. It stands to reason that the company needs to be where all that talent—and money—lives. Having a foot in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood just seems appropriate.”

  “Dorian is reinventing what it means to be a global entertainment brand,” Greg said. “He has the best of the high-tech and entertainment industries at his command. He’s been talking about a merging of games and film for a long time since his games have always been story-based. If you look at the video game landscape today, you can see that convergence is already happening.”

  “With games like Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls, the French video game developers, Quantic Dream, have already blurred the distinction between ‘game’ and ‘interactive movie,’ and with Until Dawn, Supermassive Games raised the bar even farther with a ‘butterfly effect’ system for branching the narrative based on the decisions of the player.” Geoff was flapping his arms around, which suggested to Joe that he was very excited about this direction for video games.

  “Dorian is set to blow them all out of the water with the release of NeWToPia, a game that promises to blur that line even further. A-list voice actors, multiple storylines that can completely alter the overall plot based on decisions the player makes. In Until Dawn, the story, itself, was set in stone. Your decisions only affected small parts of the story—mainly how many characters would survive to the end of the game—but the early buzz with NeWToPia is that the stakes are different. By following a set of decisions, the player can discover one facet of a larger plot, and by following another set, he or she can discover other completely different content. The plot, or rather the game engine, adapts to your choices. Passing up one set of choices closes off a branch of the story, but opens up another.”

  “The word is,” Greg continued, “that there is no right or wrong way to play it—no single set of decisions that will lead to an ending—because the game has so many paths and so many endings, that even a set of wrong choices will still lead to a pretty satisfying, if sometimes bleak or disturbing, conclusion.”

  “It sounds like an overpriced version of one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books,” Abernathy said. “If you want to hit the dragon with your sword, turn to page 189. If you want to run away from the dragon, turn to page 96. Hardly the dawning of a new multimedia age now, is it?”

  Geoff shook his head. Vigorously.

  “That’s like saying an iPhone is like an old brick Nokia because it can make telephone calls. The difference is the tech. The story in NeWToPia is adaptive. You can make so many choices, that it’s like the game is able to adapt to those choices and spin off in new and interesting ways.”

  “Clever software,” Joe said. “I’ve read a lot about the game, but I hear that it’s going to be very expensive.”

  “That’s because it’s not just software,” Greg said. “At the heart of the NeWToPia experience is a new piece of tech—a peripheral that hooks up to your PC or console. Something that Dorian has been working on for years.”

  “And what is it?” Joe asked. “This new tech that’s going to have me forking out all this extra money?”

  Geoff and Greg shrugged in unison.

  “You won’t believe the secrecy surrounding the specs,” Greg said. “I mean the next iPhone is practically open source compared to this bad boy.”

  “And the secrecy means that, instead of actual information, the Internet is rife with rumor and speculation,” Geoff said. “The web is saying that it could be anything from a little add-on memory to a neural net via total immersion virtual reality and quantum computing.”

  “What now?” Abernathy said.

  “A bunch of science fiction ideas that certainly won’t be in the add-on,” Greg said. “The point is, no one knows.”

  “But it could have … I don’t know … a new kind of Dorian chip in it.” Abernathy said, cutting through all the clutter and homing straight in on the heart of the matter.

  Joe
saw where he was leading and whistled. “You think that maybe there’s a connection between the computers we seized and the new Dorian game? But how would a bunch of lowlifes get a hold of something that no one else on the planet can?” Joe asked.

  “And why would they?” Geoff asked.

  “I guess we need to know whether the chip that didn’t completely self-destruct is indeed Dorian’s latest tech, and if it is, we need to know exactly what it does.” Abernathy said.

  “And how are we going to do that?” Joe wanted to know.

  “Field trip,” Abernathy said. “You, me, and the Brothers Shuttleworth are going to America to ask.”

  “But Dorian is notoriously reclusive,” Greg said.

  “He’s never seen in public,” Geoff continued. “He prefers to let his games do the talking for him.”

  “He had some kind of health scare in the ’90s that led to him slipping out of the public eye, and he liked it so much …”

  “… he’s kept it up ever since. He doesn’t do interviews, so he’s not going to … Wait, what did you say? You want us to … ?”

  Greg Shuttleworth looked like his legs were going to collapse out from under him.

  “That’s right.” Abernathy said. “You’re coming, too.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “ARE YOU SERIOUS?” FACE

  Ani realized that she watched too much TV.

  The source of this revelation was the disappointment she felt when the physical address given to her by the victorious website turned out to be in central London. She’d been hoping for something cool, like an abandoned arcade in a dilapidated fairground, but knew that was only because it was the location of the headquarters of fsociety in Mr. Robot.

  But where she found herself now couldn’t be farther away from that lovely fiction. She was standing in front of an anonymous pile of glass blocks that an architect had probably convinced his client looked visionary, but turned out to be so bland, that it managed to recede back into an already quite dull section of Tottenham Court Road.

  It was the type of managed office suite that one rented on a month-by-month basis to give your business more prestige than a unit on an industrial park or a home office ever could. Your monthly payment bought you as much square footage as your budget would stretch to, a broadband and phone package, and a part-share in a receptionist who would answer the phone with your company name, but certainly wouldn’t make you tea or coffee or run errands for you.

  VTR Industries was a vague enough name for a high-tech company that no one would give it a second look, but it had enough of the letters of victorious in it to make her sure she was in the right place.

  The digital interview had led to the website, and that had led her here. The only other information had been a time and date (now) and the instruction:

  come alone. dress nice.

  If the message had been meant for her, alone, based on her recruiter’s recommendation, then it seemed like a pretty damned sexist instruction, so Ani clad herself in black—smart, expensive clothes (a YETI salary was a pretty amazing thing) that managed to cover over every curve and most of her flesh, but still managed to look “nice” in a hacker-chic kind of way. She’d even finished the outfit off with some black, knee-high, lace-up boots that were very much in the Raven Adler vein. She’d broken the fem-hacker stereotype of “little-to-no make-up” by going for full-on war paint.

  Reflected in the mirrored glass of the offices, she thought she looked pretty good.

  Way better than just “nice.”

  She took a deep breath and entered the building.

  The reception area was spacious, modern, and functional. It was hard to say anything else about it, really. Sure, there were a sprinkling of chairs, sofas, and low tables to give the illusion of the space being designed for humans to inhabit, but in truth, it was all too corporate and staged to feel comfortable.

  Behind a desk on the far side of the room, a bored blonde tried to embody a whole bunch of stereotypes by ignoring Ani’s entrance and fussing with her nails with a polka dot emery board. She lost marks off her professional rating when she carried on filing her nails as Ani approached. The only way she could have made a worse impression was if she’d been chewing gum.

  “Hi,” Ani said, and the woman looked up, but continued her manicure. “I have a meeting at VTR.”

  “Name?” the woman said in a voice that proved that “bored” wasn’t just a look this woman cultivated, but a holistic diagnosis of the woman’s entire personality.

  “And a good afternoon to you, too,” Ani said. “No name. Just an invitation code: 57A18.”

  The woman made the simple act of reaching for a phone look like a physical inconvenience.

  “There’s a girl here,” she said, after lifting up the handset and making a pantomime of pressing a button. “That’s right. Yes. Yes, she has a number. A7 …”

  She frowned, then looked at Ani and raised an eyebrow of rude inquiry.

  “57A18,” Ani repeated.

  “578 …” Eyebrow raise.

  “57A,” Ani said slowly.

  “57A …” Eyebrow raise.

  “18,” Ani finished.

  “57A18,” the woman said into the phone, and listened for further instructions. “Sure. I’ll send her up.”

  If the woman was embarrassed by her inability to remember and repeat a five-character sequence, then she didn’t show it. Instead, she pointed to a glass-fronted elevator and said, “Fifth floor. Ask for Mr. Ian Black.”

  The finger she pointed with had a nail that looked like it needed more manicuring.

  As Ani walked to the elevator, she thought about the name she’d just been given. Mr. Ian Black? Seriously? Mystery in black? She wondered if everyone in victorious was handed out cheap puns as Secret Squirrel names.

  Ani turned back to thank the woman, but she was already deeply involved in buffing her nails, so the youngest YETI operative shrugged, entered the elevator when the doors opened, and hit 5.

  Ani knew, deep down, that she was being overly harsh in her judgment of the woman on the desk. She was, after all, probably earning something close to minimum wage and was just trying to get through her days. Ani knew that she was just generally a bit irritated today.

  She knew why, too.

  When she’d dropped by YETI to report her progress, Abernathy had been distracted and, for the for the first time since joining up, she’d felt that her days as the new girl—with all the novelty value that afforded her—were already coming to an end. It had been a whirlwind few months of adjustment and learning, but the thing that had gotten her through was the feeling that her skills made her somewhat indispensable. She’d kind of gotten used to being the golden girl, so Abernathy’s brusque treatment had made her feel more than a little deflated.

  She’d caught up with him in his office, and when she told him about her meeting with members of victorious, she could tell his mind was on other things.

  “That’s great, Ani,” he’d said. “We really need to make some headway on this, and this sounds promising. Really great.”

  From anyone else, that might have sounded like positive encouragement, but Abernathy’s eyes had never left his computer screen and his voice didn’t quite match his words. It had sounded too much like the voice of a parent humoring his kid while trying to watch TV.

  Sure, she understood that Abernathy—and YETI—had a whole bunch of cases going right now, but when she’d returned from the Yeovil operation, she’d felt like hers was, at least, reasonably important, if not critical.

  She’d already reached the door when Abernathy spoke again:

  “If you’ve got a few minutes, I have a couple of urgent tasks requiring your expert skills,” he’d said. “You know Leeza Marsh? Of course you do. She’ll fill you in on the details.”

  More urgent than preparing for a meeting with the inner circle of victorious? Ani had thought bitterly.

  She was ashamed to find that she felt disappointed as she
left Abernathy’s office.

  It probably wasn’t personal. She knew that.

  Still, she’d done the jobs that Abernathy had asked of her—insinuating information onto a couple of networks—but she also punched the crap out of a bag in the gym before leaving.

  She was met at the door of the left on the fifth floor by a reasonably handsome twenty-something who’d decided that slicking back his hair needed to be done with so much gel that it looked like it was sculpted out of a single solid block. He had a warm smile, a firm handshake, and the inability to look Ani in the eye for longer than about a second.

  “So, you’re the newest member of our little cell, huh?” he said warmly. “I’m Ian. Ian Black.”

  “Ani,” she told him. “Er, did you say cell?”

  She was confused by a couple of things. First, could the man’s name actually be Mr. Ian Black? And, second, by his odd use of word cell.

  Ian nodded, met her eye for another brief moment, then turned away and started off down a white corridor.

  “Follow me,” he said. “I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Ani followed him past a couple of closed doors on the right, before he swerved through an open door on the left.

  Ani had read a lot about boiler rooms, those less than respectable call centers where unscrupulous scammers sold dodgy stocks and shares over the phone, often to retirees probably just happy to be talking to anyone. She had always pictured them as crowded, chaotic environments, with rows of workstations piled into small spaces.

  The office she walked into was almost perfectly matched that image, except instead of plying their trade on telephones, the thirty or so people in the room were tapping away at keyboards with only small sheets of plywood between them to give the impression of individual workstations.