It was then that Allison realized she had left her reading glasses on. A quick check to the head confirmed that, as usual, she also had a pen stuck through the messy bun on top of her head. She could only hope the pen was a plain black one, which her nearly black hair would hide much more adequately than something blue, red or—she flinched at the distinct possibility—fluorescent pink with a feathery bobble-headed flamingo on the end.
The girls, or rather young women, were older close up than they had appeared at a distance. They were graduate students, Allison guessed, which made sense as there would probably be more graduate students than undergrads studying economics. And only one of the girls appeared to actually be questioning the handsome professor; the other two were hangers-on, who perhaps recognized him or took a course with him but were primarily waiting for their friend to finish speaking. They didn’t look as though they minded taking in the scenery while they waited, though.
When the two girlfriends caught sight of Allison, waiting a few yards away with her arms folded cautiously across her chest, they nudged their cohort and began clearing their throats rather pointedly. After a few pokes, the girl finally took the hint and turned around to spot Allison, who waved politely and smiled.
“Ladies,” Seth said smoothly, “I was actually heading this way for a consultation with my colleague from the psychology department, so you’ll have to excuse me. Sarah, just email me your draft, and I’ll take a look at it for you and get you some notes next week some time, all right? Professor, sorry to keep you waiting. Shall we?” He nodded cordially and led the way back toward Dillon Hall, where Allison officed, leaving her to follow at his elbow until they were out of earshot of the students.
“Now,” said Seth, stopping near an oak tree and leaning against it nonchalantly, all the while scanning the grounds for encroaching youngsters. “You have me at a disadvantage, Doctor. You know who I am, but all I know from the location of your office is that you’re either Alfreda Morgenstern, Mary Gowan McGillicuddy or Allison Moore. Or possibly Robert Adelston, but I don’t think you look like a Robert.”
“Allison Moore,” she said. “I won’t shake hands, it would shatter the fiction you’ve created to shake off your fangirls.”
“Fair enough.” He was smiling again, that same slightly crooked smile that made Allison’s heart thump in her chest. She noticed he didn’t deny he had fangirls. “First things first, I guess. I was going to ask you about your research and why you get to spend your days playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games, but I really think I have to go with asking you what’s up with the flamingo?”
“It’s a pen!” she retorted a bit defensively. Her hand went up to her bun automatically and she snatched the flamingo pen down. She regretted the move instantly as she had nowhere else to put the pen, and after a second she stuck it back into her hair. “I wasn’t dressing to impress, I just came down here as is, you know? And I might ask you the same question about playing games all day. You’re on every afternoon too.”
“It’s part of my research.”
“Mine too.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes.”
They stared at each other, until the moment grew a little too intense and they both glanced away at the same time. Seth, whose arms had been crossed in a mirror of Allison’s posture, unfolded one wrist enough to look at his watch.
“Okay, it’s pretty obvious the universe wants us to have some Indian food together right about now. It’ll be neutral territory, all right? We can answer each other’s burning questions over some sag paneer.”
“Daal makhni.”
“Have you tried the sag paneer?”
“Well…no, not at this place.”
“There you have it. Shall we?”
Allison hesitated before nodding. She wanted the food, she wanted the conversation, she wanted her curiosity about this sudden change in events satisfied. But she also wanted to be back in her office, following her usual routine and enjoying a little harmless flirting in the environment she viewed as a safe zone, the online forum where only words, never actions, could be considered. Where any unpleasantness could be ended by a simple keystroke and an abrupt exit explained away the next day as a lost network connection.
* * * * *
Seth stuck his hands in his pockets, jingling his keys, as they walked the four blocks to the restaurant. It wasn’t as crowded as it would be an hour or so later, when the four-to-seven-thirty class block ended and students poured off the campus and into the neighborhood looking for food and friends.
At just before six-thirty on a Friday night, however, the drag was still relatively free of frat boys, and Khyber was never a prime hangout for Greeks in any case. The darkened room, the air dry and cool after the unseasonable heat and humidity of the September afternoon, was as welcoming to the pair of academics as the hostess who seated them. They were led to Allison’s favorite table, as it happened, just below a large woodcarving of elephants in a jungle. She thought the piece was actually Thai, not Indian, but she liked it just the same. It occupied a space some four feet by six on the wall over the table, and the dark, warm tones of the wood were somehow varied enough to make the scene feel real. Allison always felt as though she could walk into the carving, and sometimes wished she actually could.
“I’ve seen you here before,” Seth remarked. “I just realized. You sit at this table a lot, don’t you?” At her startled nod, he continued. “I always sit over in that alcove. You wouldn’t be able to see me too well over there because of the plant in the way. But I can see this table from there.”
“I see.” She looked where he was pointing, to a booth in a niche in the corner of the restaurant. Indeed, a large potted palm obscured the view of the already-dark table, but it was easy to see he would have a clear view of the rest of the room, including her table, which was more centrally located and directly under a light. “I feel a little bit spied on. I mean, you recognize me, I don’t recognize you…”
“I really didn’t, until just now.”
“Okay, in that case, good to know I’m so noticeable,” she said wryly, picking up her menu and examining it as though it was the Rosetta stone and she was an archeologist on a mission.
“I noticed. I just assumed you were a student.” Seth was engaged in his own fervent pursuit of knowledge from the menu. The light shone off his glasses, partially obscuring his eyes. Allison found herself wondering what color they were.
“And now that you know I’m not?”
“And that you play computer games? And can write a coherent sentence? And get my jokes? And are not afraid to walk around in public with a flamingo in your hair?”
“Yes, well. All that too, I guess.”
He smiled broadly. “You’re looking better all the time.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“But the downside is I suspect I’ve just screwed up some of your research, haven’t I?”
She contemplated him suspiciously. “How could you know that?”
“I know how much time you’ve spent talking to me in chat. You’re gaming during school hours. And if you’re Allison Moore, then your research involves text cues to veracity in casual written interaction on the internet, specifically in real-time discussions. I’m guessing your next paper is going to focus on in-game chat.”
“You’ve read my work?” She was stunned. It always stunned her to find out anybody read her work, even though she knew some people must.
“It involves the internet and relates to organizational psychology, which is an area that comes into play in my work, so yes. Well…specifically, you’ve written a few things that speculated about levels of language formality as a cue to lying in chat rooms, and the difficulty in finding a way to control for education and age in an anonymous, non-random sampling. I was really looking for something else, but I came across that and read those two papers. Never know when the information might come in handy.”
“Let me guess. You’re doing so
mething with online economies, or maybe guild organizational dynamics, and you’re using that game as a test case?” Allison asked.
“Very good. Actually it started as org dynamics, but now it’s the pure economics part. I was a consultant on the game when they were developing it. Developing the online version, at least. Not the original role-playing game from the eighties. Now I have some running experiments, and two of those younger guild members we were talking about are research assistants of mine.”
“Are they playing to earn gold for you?”
“You’d better believe it. For the guild, anyway. But they do all right for themselves too. One of them is actually from the IT department. I needed someone to help me control for issues in the research that arose from the way the game itself is coded, so we could gather information in a standardized way from more than just this one game. He’s also done some security testing for the company on the side. He’s working for them now on a hack that could potentially circumvent some of the account safeguards. Probing for back doors that need closing, essentially. And the other kid… I’m sorry, this is probably insanely boring.”
“No, no,” Allison protested. “I’m right there with you. I’m assuming his goal is to improve security to prevent people from hacking into accounts?”
Seth chuckled. “Well, that’s what he claims, anyway. The other kid is just working on gold farming practically nonstop with a few different characters, seeing what the limits of the economy are in practice. I have to make him stop to sleep and eat, otherwise he’d play all the time. Ironically he wasn’t ever a gamer before graduate school. He was a frat boy, just wanted an MBA like his buddies, but then got into economics and decided to switch to that. When he decided to work on this project, he used to tease the nerds. He thought he’d be immune to the lure of the game. But of course it’s addictive, which I’m sure you’ve had a chance to observe.”
“The usual, please.” Allison handed her menu to the waitress, who nodded and looked expectantly at Seth.
“The usual,” he echoed.
In the lull that followed, the gentle sitar music and accompanying clinks of cutlery filled the space between them with comforting familiarity. Seth took his glasses off and rubbed at the bridge of his nose with his fingers. Allison toyed with her napkin, attempting to fold it into an origami crane but failing due to the floppiness of the fabric.
“So yes,” she finally ventured, “this is going to affect my research a bit. Assuming you were telling the truth as much as I now suspect you were. Even if it were just knowing who you were, without meeting you. You’re now officially an outlier, statistically. And by the way, based on the indicators I’m developing, you tell the truth online much more than the average user in the game.”
“I always tell the truth,” Seth asserted, but immediately qualified his statement. “Well, I mean, I tell white lies of omission about things like whether I think my mother’s new haircut looks nice, or whether I like the casserole at a friend’s house, stuff like that. But I don’t actively lie, or at least I make a conscious effort to tell the truth. It’s kind of an ongoing sociological experiment. Well, and also I have a philosophical and economic objection to lying. It’s rarely efficient in the long term.”
She stared at him, blinking a few times in disbelief. “Are you for real?”
“As far as I know,” he quipped. “Why? Is that not the norm?”
Allison realized, as she continued to look at him, that his eyes were quite a remarkable shade of green. The color of jade, she thought, that same pale, cool green.
“Y-you know it isn’t the norm,” she finally stammered out. The whole evening was really too surreal; it was starting to affect her reasoning.
“Your flamingo is trembling.” The look he was giving her now was acute, penetrating…sexy. Allison cleared her throat and hoped the light in the restaurant was dim enough to hide the blush she felt rising from her neck to her forehead.
“It’s hypoglycemic. It needs food.” She was conscious of her own signals, looking downward to avoid eye contact, her eyes flicking to one side as she thought of what to say. Lying. Her body was telegraphing her lie despite her keen self-awareness, and despite her best efforts to stop. But what was she lying about, she wondered? The flamingo was a distraction, a joke, she wasn’t really lying about that. But of course the flamingo wasn’t really the one trembling, and she knew that too. Her attempt to sideline his flirting with a joke, that was the lie. She didn’t really want to divert him. She was interested. Her body was interested even if her mind told her it was a horrible idea to get involved with anyone right now.
“We should definitely feed it then. It’s going to need its strength if it’s going to go raiding later tonight,” he countered blandly, obviously backing off, giving her space. Time. She almost resented it. His perception was attractive in itself, and it only served to coax her closer. He put his glasses back on and rolled his shoulders, settling into his chair.
“I don’t know if that’s wise.”
He looked up, instantly wary. “Why not?”
She felt caught on his gaze, pinned there. He looked at her over his glasses, so she could still see his eyes. They were entrancing. Heat started to pool between her thighs, covered by the napkin she placed in her lap as if she needed to hide her reaction. Horny, she recognized all too well. Horny, because James had done nothing to help ease her longing. He had left her wanting more than she had desired in the first place. Making love—having sex—with James had been like discovering a lie of omission. She had become more aware of things because of their pronounced absence.
A sudden inspiration struck Allison. “I take it back. It’s probably a great idea. I’ll be there. Oh look, the food’s here.”
He looked at her curiously before digging in, the lure of the food winning out over the lure of trying to figure her out. For that moment, at least. Allison was relieved. She thought her plan was foolproof. She had already lost him as a research subject. But perhaps the origins of her newfound knowledge about this all-too-interesting colleague could form the very basis of a distance between them. She would be a game girl, a virtual friend. She could interact with him online, but that didn’t mean they had to be even remotely friendly in person. She could be as intriguing as she wanted to be, as long as she was only intriguing in chat.
In real life she would simply be what she knew herself to be—chilly, bookish, nerdy. Pretty by many people’s standards, or so she had been told since she was a child, but in her own mind ultimately too dull for her looks to ever compensate for her personality. And then she would be safe from any possibility of hurt, because there would never be any connection so strong that breaking it could damage her.
If Seth noticed her withdrawal, he was too polite to comment on it. He walked her back to her office through the sultry evening, making occasional remarks to which she gave fairly short replies, and waited while she gathered her laptop case and some notes. Then he escorted her to her car and reminded her to “meet” him in-game at the capital city, by the auction house, at about nine-fifteen. It would give them time to buy gear before the start of the dungeon raid that was scheduled for ten o’clock.
Allison watched in the rearview mirror, and noted that Seth stood at the curb and waited for her car to start and her lights to come on before he stepped away. He didn’t turn and start walking until she had pulled out from the parking space and started off toward the street. It was chivalrous, she thought. Then she cursed herself for caring that he was chivalrous. Because it didn’t matter. He would be a stranger in every way that mattered.
But online…online, they could play. And online, as Allison’s research showed her more clearly all the time, it was almost impossible to know if a bright, articulate, capable writer was telling the truth or lying. She, more than anyone, knew how to lie in writing and not get caught. And on the computer, her treacherous body and truthful eyes couldn’t give her away. She tried not to answer the question that immediately rose
in her mind.
To whom would she be lying? To Seth…or to herself?
Chapter Two
Allison’s theory, which she had been working on since graduate school, was that just as some people were better at lying and lied more easily in person, another type of person was more likely to get away with lying in online written conversations.
The more control the liar had over conventional standard written English usage, the more he or she was likely to construct a written lie that would be plausible to the reader. Age and education lent themselves to capable lying online, which had certain implications for the success of middle-aged sexual predators, for instance. Isolating the potential markers of written lies during real-time chat discussions, which was also part of her research, grew harder and harder as the sophistication of the liar increased. It was a tricky problem, a field with a lot of gray area, and a fascinating psychological underworld for Allison to roam around in.
She had been at it for three years now. She couldn’t really remember what had started her into the realm of online games, only that the in-game chat turned out to be such a rich source of lies, she really couldn’t resist. Then the game itself had hooked her, and now she found herself with a top-level snow elf healer named after a set of vowels, a guild full of “friends” she played with regularly and an endless stream of case studies.
But she didn’t usually play at night or get involved in the often lengthy and complex high-level dungeon raids. It was for work, and she tried to keep it that way. Now, relaxing in the tub and replaying the dinner conversation in her mind, automatically searching for untruths but finding none on Seth’s part, she debated whether to participate in the raid. It would be fun, of course. But it might also be nerve-racking. And what if Seth didn’t want to leave it at just playing the game?
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