Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

“I’m outta here,” Clayton said in a clipped voice. He got up and left.

  Nolan leaned back in his chair and pressed his fingers against his temples. This headache seemed to come and go in waves, waxing and waning but becoming progressively stronger as the case went sourer.

  “Your new partner.” That was a cheap shot. Gonna kill each other before this thing is through.

  He picked up his phone and dialed the Pacific Surf Hotel.

  *

  Marianne returned to her hotel room after visiting Tony and Roland. She was fully exhausted now—a simple exhaustion heavy with the promise of sleep, not a complicated exhaustion imploding in on itself, making sleep impossible. She was grateful to feel it.

  Now she could make plans. Now she could take charge of her life again. Most crucially, she could do what she had tried to do earlier—lie down and catch some sleep. Then she would shower. After that, she would shop around for some clothes to wear during her stay in Los Angeles, however long that might turn out to be.

  But first, she had to call in to her office. Nobody there expected her to come in today, but they did expect her to e-mail the just-completed rendering for the Abernathy project. She called the secretary and told her to pass the word to Dwayne not to expect any work from her for today—or maybe for the next several days. She explained that a friend in L.A. had died. Marianne really didn’t hear the secretary’s ensuing barrage of condolences. She simply emitted mechanical replies.

  “… yes, thank you … it was a terrible shock, thank you … thank you, I will …”

  She hung up the phone and lay down on the bed.

  No hum, she realized with satisfaction.

  But no sooner had she started to doze off than her phone rang. She picked it up and heard a man’s voice.

  “Ms. Hedison?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is Lieutenant Grobowski. Did I catch you asleep?”

  “No,” she said.

  No such chance.

  “Well, listen,” Grobowski said. “I hate to impose, but maybe you could help me with something. I’ve got to drop in on these Insomnimania guys you’ve been talking about, and I, uh, wondered if you might come with me.”

  Marianne almost laughed aloud. The lieutenant clearly wanted to keep watch over his femme fatale.

  “Why, Lieutenant, what a lovely offer,” she said sweetly. “I’ve always wanted to visit a computer network office. Thank you so much.”

  “What I mean is, you know about computers and I don’t,” Grobowski said a little defensively. “I thought you might help me talk to these guys. You know, interpret for me.”

  “Of course. When do you want to pick me up?”

  “Right now, if that’s possible.”

  Marianne stifled a groan. She wanted to watch Grobowski’s progress on the case as much as he wanted to see her betray her guilt—so she couldn’t blow this opportunity.

  So much for sleep.

  “Yes, that will be fine,” she said.

  “Great. I’ll be right over.”

  She hung up the phone and laughed. For the first time since this whole wretched thing had happened, she laughed. Grobowski had sounded for all the world like a high school kid asking the most popular girl in school for a date.

  At least his agenda isn’t to get me in the sack. It’s to get me a lethal injection.

  *

  Judson gets murdered, and some Auggie guy acts out his killing on a computer network. A woman gets murdered in an apparently unconnected case, and Auggie acts out her killing on the network, too. And there’s this other woman who has seen both computer shows and who turns up at both crime scenes. And she says she can tie it all together for us …

  “Watch the road!” cried a voice beside Nolan.

  “What?” Nolan exclaimed. He was so tired and lost in thought that he almost forgot he was driving into the depths of downtown L.A. on the way to the Insomnimania office.

  “You almost hit that lady,” scolded Marianne Hedison, who was sitting on the passenger side.

  “What lady?”

  “In the crosswalk. You’re not supposed to kill pedestrians if they’re in the crosswalk. That’s the law. How are you supposed to defend the law if you don’t know a thing like that?”

  “I’m not a traffic cop,” Nolan said.

  Nolan wondered if it had been a mistake to bring her along after all. It was bad enough that he couldn’t make her fit into the puzzle this case had become. Now she had to criticize his driving.

  And was he awake enough to deal with both her and these computer people? He couldn’t help thinking the trip would be a waste of time. It went against Nolan’s every instinct to believe the network fit into the crimes at all.

  Murder’s a flesh and blood kind of deal. Electronics has nothing to do with it. People kill people face to face. They don’t do it over the phone. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but that part of the human condition is never going to change.

  *

  Marianne followed Lieutenant Grobowski toward the front entrance of a nondescript, unmarked downtown building. The neighborhood didn’t look very promising. Most of the buildings in the area were either boarded up or turned into warehouses, and the sidewalks were lined with vagrants.

  She was so tired now that she didn’t even notice it anymore. In fact, she felt almost refreshed, as if she’d gotten some sort of second wind.

  They stopped in front of a large, blank, metal door. Did he get the wrong address? To her surprise, the forbidding door wasn’t locked. The detective simply opened it, and they stepped inside the building.

  Marianne had to blink a few times to adjust to the sudden darkness. It took her a moment to realize that the primary illumination in the room came from a black light. Old sixties decor, ranging from a phosphorescent Buddha to numerous Grateful Dead posters, coated the walls. Little psychedelic lapel pins were attached to all the posters, making archaic pronouncements like “Make Love Not War,” “The Witch Is Dead,” “Mary Poppins is a Junkie,” and “Up Against the Wall.” The music of Santana undulated through the thick smell of incense and presumably less legal fragrances.

  Seated in a battered leather swivel chair with his feet propped up on the desktop and his nose buried in a copy of Naked Lunch was an emaciated, bearded man with his graying hair in pigtails. How he could read in this light was impossible for Marianne to imagine. She could see that his face was deeply lined. She suspected that he wasn’t nearly as old as he looked—that drugs of one kind or another had taken their toll. And indeed, a water pipe containing a remnant of marijuana sat openly in front of him.

  Hope this arrest-happy cop doesn’t bust this guy for dope before we can ask him any questions.

  “I’m here to talk to either Ned Pritchard or Baldwin Maisie,” Lieutenant Grobowski said. “Are you one of them?”

  “Yes,” the man said simply.

  “Care to tell me which?” Lieutenant Grobowski asked.

  The man’s brow furrowed deeply as he pondered the request.

  “No,” he said finally, without a trace of belligerence.

  Marianne was tickled by the lieutenant’s slow burn. Grobowski produced a badge and identified himself.

  “I’d like to ask some questions,” Lieutenant Grobowski said.

  The man looked intently at the badge, as if noting how it failed to show up very well in the black light. Then he looked up.

  “Who’s the lady?” he asked.

  “Someone with a special interest in this case,” Lieutenant Grobowski said.

  The man looked Marianne over approvingly.

  “Swank,” he said, with seemingly sincere admiration.

  Now it was Marianne’s turn to be taken aback.

  Swank?

  She didn’t feel s
wank. She glanced down to remind herself what she was wearing. In the dim light, she could barely make out the rumpled slacks and jacket that she had hastily put on—when had it been? Only last night?

  “What’s the case?” the man muttered, leaning forward on the desk.

  “Have you got a member who goes by the name of Auggie?” Lieutenant Grobowski asked.

  “I don’t pay much attention to who’s logged on,” the man said with a shrug.

  “Auggie’s kind of a celebrity in your Snuff Room.”

  “Oh, that Auggie.”

  “Yeah, that Auggie.”

  Then Marianne chimed in. “Did you know that Auggie’s snuffs are reenactments of real-life murders?” Grobowski shot her a disapproving look. But Marianne had to ask. Since Grobowski barely believed in either Auggie or the Snuff Room, she couldn’t exactly count on him to ask the right questions.

  “You don’t say,” the man said, with apparently honest incredulity.

  “You’ve got to help us,” Marianne said. “We think Auggie’s operator might be a murderer.”

  She could see that Lieutenant Grobowski was seething now.

  Well, what does he expect from me? Surely he didn’t expect me to just hang around and keep my mouth shut.

  The man at the desk began to laugh—softly at first, then more and more loudly. “Oh, my,” he said at last. “My, my, my. This is good. Pritchard’s gotta hear about this. Come on. I’ll introduce you to him.”

  The man they now assumed to be Baldwin Maisie led them through a doorway with hanging plastic beads. A short hallway led the three of them into a large room with off-white cinderblock walls and a black-painted ceiling sprouting pipes and cables. The room was dim and slightly chilly, and its only windows were small, high above the floor, painted over, and barred. It was filled with a noisy electric hum. Marianne didn’t exactly welcome the humming, but she was content to have it outside her body for a change.

  On the tile floor stood a huge beige box at least eight feet high. Fans inside the box hummed noisily. Several expansive folding tables were covered with dozens of other pieces of electronic equipment wired goofily together like some kind of cybernetic Rube Goldberg contraption.

  An overweight man, somewhat younger than Maisie, sat perched uneasily on a tiny stenographer’s chair, looking as though he might melt off the edges at any moment. He wore a green-striped shirt, red-and-blue plaid pants, and rust-colored suspenders. Ketchup was smeared like finger-paint down the left side of his shirt. His hair was greasy and he had a three-day stubble of beard.

  He leaned over one of the tables, intently staring at an antique Commodore monitor. Scattered around him was a week’s worth of fast-food wrappings. He guzzled the remains of a soft drink through a straw with a grotesque, slurping sound.

  Marianne was amazed at the machines on the table—an eclectic collection of top-of-the-line Macintoshes, obsolete Wangs, and what actually appeared to be antique vacuum-tube radio receivers and amplifiers. All the monitors were on, displaying graphics, desktops, or screen-saver patterns. But some of the monitors seemed to be malfunctioning. Their images were eroding or flickering erratically.

  Could this be the control room for Insomnimania? She had imagined rows of people working at individual terminals—not this conglomeration of mismatched parts.

  “Chick, chick, chick,” he said with affectionate baby talk. “Atta gurly-wurly. Chick, chick, chick. Neddy’s little gurly-wurly was hungry, wasn’t she? Chick, chick, chick, chick …”

  The fat man pecked on the monitor screen with his fingernail, behaving like some dotty old lady with a parakeet. Marianne turned toward Maisie, hoping for an explanation.

  “Shhh,” Maisie whispered. “Let ’im finish feeding her.”

  “But what’s he doing?” Marianne whispered back.

  “Viruses,” Maisie explained. “Keeps ’em as pets. Real classics—WDEF, Michelangelo, Friday the Thirteenth, others you never heard of. Why, I’ll bet ol’ Pritch’s got the finest collection in captivity.”

  In captivity?

  Marianne’s eyes scanned the table again. So the terminals were little cages—a petting zoo of computer viruses!

  “But what controls Insomnimania?” Marianne quietly asked Maisie.

  “Over there,” Maisie whispered proudly, leading her to the big beige box. “VAX 8650, running an advanced UNIX system. She’s sweet and she’s independent. Does everything all on her own.”

  Marianne put her hand against the beige monolith. She yanked it away again when she felt that hum begin to reinvade her body. It felt a little awe-inspiring to imagine this thing controlling a sprawling electronic labyrinth like the virtual world of Insomnimania.

  Still, it’s not a lot to look at.

  “Chick, chick, chick,” Pritchard said again. “Oh, my? Isn’t that page-layout program a tasty little sucker! And weren’t we hungry-wungry? Yes, we were!”

  The monitor displayed a page-layout grid. Intermittently and almost subliminally, the monitor flashed screenfuls of obscenities at the viewer. At last, the screen flickered with a barrage of four-letter words and went blank. Pritchard patted the top of the monitor, almost as if he expected the machine to burp.

  “There now,” he said. “Take a nice little nappy-wappy.” He turned toward Maisie. “Hey, Baldy, could you fetch us a nice juicy accounting program? Poor Tourette’s a growing girl, and I just can’t seem to keep her fed.”

  “In a minute, Pritch. I’ve got a couple of people here—a Lieutenant Somebody-Or-Other and his girlfriend.”

  His girlfriend!

  Marianne shuddered reflexively. Pritchard swiveled around in his chair and faced her and Lieutenant Grobowski.

  “They want to find out about Auggie,” Maisie continued. “You know, the clown character. Says the guy’s some kind of mass murderer.”

  Pritchard smiled and shrugged and said nothing.

  “Well, there’s your answer,” Maisie said amiably. “Client confidentiality, you see? It’s even in our instruction book. I can show it to you. ‘Your actual identity is protected at all times,’ it says—or words to that effect. You wouldn’t want us to turn into high-tech finks, wouldja?”

  “I can get a subpoena,” Nolan said.

  Maisie laughed and shook his head good naturedly. “Lieutenant, we’ve got very good lawyers. We fight cases like this all the time. They tend to drag on for a long while.”

  Suddenly, Pritchard spoke up.

  “Hey, Baldy,” he said warmly. “Show the lady and gentleman a chair. Let me talk to ’em.”

  Nolan and Marianne placed themselves on uncomfortable folding metal chairs, neither of which sat quite squarely on the damp, gray-painted concrete floor. Still perched on his swivel chair, Pritchard rolled toward them, smiling a pudgy but not disagreeable smile.

  “So we’ve got a killer in our midst, eh?” he asked.

  “It looks that way,” said Nolan. “And you guys could find yourselves accessories before the fact.”

  “How do you figure?” Pritchard asked.

  “By inventing a nasty little place called the Snuff Room. By setting the scene, by provoking the situation. By concealing the identity of the perpetrator. It’s called ‘aiding and abetting.’”

  “Now hold it,” interrupted Maisie, his voice quavering a little. “Hold it just a minute. We’re not saying another word without our lawyer present.”

  “It’s okay, Baldy,” said Pritchard benignly. “This isn’t any big deal. I think we can spare some legal fees and set this matter straight.” He began to speak to Nolan with direct simplicity. “We didn’t set a scene, we didn’t provoke a situation, and we aren’t accessories.”

  “No?”

  “Come on, Lieutenant. We’re talking about gaming software! Software doesn’t kill people.”
>
  “People kill people, right?” Nolan answered derisively.

  “The network is virtual reality. Nobody really gets killed in virtual reality.”

  “But some of the cartoons show actual killings,” Marianne interjected.

  “So what? Newspaper reporters depict real events. Have you arrested the guy who wrote up these murders for the Times? Whatever’s going on, Baldy and I aren’t responsible. If there’s a killer in our net, you know perfectly well he’d be killing whether we were here or not.”

  “But you invented the Snuff Room,” Marianne said.

  “Not really. When we first started Insomnimania, we only gave it two rooms: the Factory, where clients could create virtual selves, and the Speakers’ Corner, where those virtual selves could chat with one another. The rest of the thing, the whole labyrinth, was added on piecemeal. New games are requested by our subscribers and we do the programming for them.”

  “How many subscribers have you got?” Nolan asked.

  “Beats me,” Pritchard said. “What do you think, Baldy?”

  “I’d have to look it up. Lots, anyway. The largest number are here in the L.A. area, where we got started. But we’ve got members all over the country, all over the world. Distance has no meaning when you’re online—leastways, not till you get your bill.”

  “So any of these people can request some new sex game or murder game or whatever and you just fill the orders—no matter what?”

  “Only if it’s a cool idea,” said Maisie. “And if it’s workable. We try to run a democratic outfit.”

  “Your prices aren’t exactly democratic,” Marianne remarked.

  “We aren’t as pure as we used to be,” Maisie said. “Who is?”

  “So a subscriber thought up the Snuff Room and you filled their request?” Grobowski asked.

  “That one was a little different, as I recall,” Pritchard said. “A little odd.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Maisie agreed. “That one came to us all ready to run. One of the members sent it in already programmed—software, instructions, everything.”