Cole Perriman's Terminal Games

by Wim Coleman

  “Your friend had a carousel horse,” Nolan said, as though he had read her thoughts. “Not as pretty as these, though.”

  “No. He was a traveling horse. A real explorer, from the look of him.”

  “It did look like it had seen better days.”

  “When she got her horse, I did some research on how it might have originally looked. I thought I’d help her restore it. The horses we’re looking at were carved for a carousel that would stay in one location. See how delicate some of the ears and manes and tails are? Renee’s horse was probably from a county fair carousel. He was made with small ears laid back tight against his head so they wouldn’t break off when he was taken down and moved around. He’s not as nice an example as these, but he’s probably just as old.”

  “But she never got around to restoring it?”

  “She refused to,” Marianne said, with a catch in her voice. “She said, ‘He’s no beauty, but oh, what a life he’s lived!’ She said she didn’t want to paint over a single one of the stories he could tell.”

  Marianne felt tears spring into her eyes. She wrapped her arms around Nolan and leaned her head on his shoulder. They had spent a wonderful night together and a deliciously sensuous morning. After Nolan went in to the division, Marianne hooked up her computer to the rented monitor and went to work on her project. A few hours later, Nolan called and said he was going to take a long lunch—did she want to go out somewhere? Since he had worked all weekend and nothing new was breaking this morning, he wouldn’t have to rush back. When he picked her up, they decided on the pier. Snuggling close to him like this, she felt they could just as easily have gone back to bed.

  *

  After a few moments, Nolan said, “Let’s walk out on the pier.” He guided her gently away from the carousel. He felt disturbed and broody, and he wanted to talk to Marianne about some things. He decided to walk a little bit first.

  The old pier was pleasant and not particularly crowded at this time of year. There were a only a few people fishing, armed with their rods and bait and buckets. Nolan watched Marianne as she stared out over the ocean. He wished she would release her hair and let it blow in the slight breeze.

  She is beautiful. He realized that he meant it in a very ordinary way—that she could easily grace the cover of a magazine. Her appearance had daunted him at first. He was not usually drawn to coolly beautiful women, not beyond the casual physical responses such looks aroused. Nolan had long since outgrown the notion that he should try to bed every woman who stirred his hormones. And, in his recent lonely years, he had rediscovered how easily his libido could lead him into disastrous entanglements or empty one-night stands with boring, tragic, or troublesome women.

  But Marianne had also stirred him with her quick wit, her intelligence, her intensity, even her grief. With the bright sunlight falling on her face, he could see that she looked less like a porcelain doll than she sometimes did in muted indoor light. At the sight of those fine lines, those circles under the eyes, those signs of vulnerability, confidence stirred within Nolan again. Maybe they would find some basis for a life together.

  He gazed out over the water. The ocean and the sky were both gray, turning silver wherever the sun broke through the cloud cover overhead and where the shafts of light touched the waves. It was as though some magician pointed a wand randomly here and there, lighting the surface of the water, but revealing nothing of what was below. The shafts of light on the water made Nolan think of the electronic magicians, Pritchard and Ramos, those intense young men who wielded such incomprehensible power in a world of their own making.

  “I knew I was going to hate the computer age way back when I was still walking the beat,” he said.

  Marianne laughed. “What could possibly have turned you off computers back then?”

  “The video games,” Nolan replied with a tone of disgust. When Marianne just looked at him inquisitively, he continued. “I patrolled one of those video arcade places every night, and I got to watching kids play those games. My own kids loved them, too. I saw how good they all were at it, how fast and smart they were, how they could do just about anything with those damned machines. And I thought, ‘Jesus, these have got to be the smartest and fastest kids who ever lived.’ But then I realized something. They were in that place learning to be losers.”

  “What do you mean?” Marianne asked.

  “Don’t you get it? That’s what those games are all about. You get as many points as you can, and you get as many free games as you can, but eventually the machine always beats you. Those kids play till they lose. They play till they run out of quarters. That’s the object of the game. Losing and running out of quarters. They were the most terrific kids of all time, and they were already being trained to lose.”

  “I never thought about it that way,” Marianne said. Then she added, grinning. “You were pretty engrossed in that casino card game.”

  “You’re right, it was fun. But it’s a lot more fun to try and figure out whether real people are bluffing or not.” Nolan stared straight ahead for a moment, no longer seeing the water. Finally he said gruffly, “I guess my real gripe about this investigation is that I have to rely on people whose methods I don’t understand very well. And even they’re not coming up with anything useful.”

  “You mean Maisie and Pritchard?” she asked.

  “Yes. And now there’s Ramos. I don’t know if he’s guilty of anything or not, but I don’t get the feeling he’s on our side. I don’t even get the feeling he’s in our world. They’d all rather talk by computer. And on Insomnimania, you don’t even know who you’re talking to. That’s what I really hate about all this information age stuff. It pulls people farther and farther apart. It gives them more and more excuses not to look each other in the eye, not to make commitments. Because when you’re carrying on a relationship by computer, you’re not dealing with an actual person.”

  “Sure you are,” Marianne replied. “What about the real person typing the words? Or manipulating the graphics?”

  “Yes, but you don’t get the whole person. I mean, if you live with someone, or even next door to someone, sooner or later you have to deal with all their aspects—the bad temper, the prejudices, sometimes even hidden good qualities. A person doesn’t just consist of what they choose to show you. And why do normal people need to hide behind cartoons and fictitious names, anyhow? Judson was an international businessman. Your friend apparently was a real extrovert. Why did they get so interested in online games?”

  “I think Renee liked Insomnimania because it gave her a place to play with no repercussions,” Marianne said. “She could make herself into whatever she wanted to be. She could be ordinary—even unattractive. One of the interesting things about the cartoon alters is that a lot of them are not good-looking. When people can be whatever they want, some of them prefer ugly—at least when the look is temporary.”

  “So you think it gave her a chance to express herself?”

  She nodded. “Parts of herself that even Renee wouldn’t express in real life. Her alter could say whatever she wanted to, do whatever she wanted to. It’s a world with no AIDS, no pregnancies, no spouses or bosses to keep happy.”

  “Do any of them seem to form lasting relationships of any kind?”

  “On sure. Of every kind. They display affection, friendship, jealousy—the whole range of things. They welcome old friends loudly, with hugs. Some alters become inseparable, just like real people. Some of them have major fights.” She hesitated, remembering. “In fact, Sapphire and Auggie used to argue all the time in Ernie’s Bar.”

  “What did they argue about?”

  “Oh, what she was wearing. What kind of drink she should have. Silly things. But Renee said that they were buddies.”

  Nolan drew a deep sigh. Standing here, overlooking the ocean, smelling the salt air, it was hard to believe th
at something so removed as a little electronic box could affect people’s lives so deeply. “Sex that isn’t real,” he said. “Typed-out conversations between made-up characters. I still can’t see why it’s so engrossing.” He hesitated, then asked the question that was really on his mind. “Why does it appeal to you?”

  Marianne seemed to hesitate before answering. “For me, it’s that Insomnimania is there every night, anytime I want to log into it,” she said. “There’s always something going on. Sometimes it’s very entertaining.” She paused for several long moments, then said, “There are times when, just briefly, it begins to seem real. A couple of nights since I’ve had Elfie on as a participant, I’ve almost felt that I was hearing the other side of the conversation, instead of just seeing it on the screen. I’ve almost believed that I was sitting in that bar talking. Just for a few moments. That must happen to some of the others. And sometimes I—well, I seem to lose myself in those moments.”

  Noland felt himself scowl at the idea of Marianne losing herself in that world. But he, too, remembered that moment in the casino when the voices had sounded real, when the typed lines had almost become aural, when he had almost felt like he was in a real space. At the time it had seemed like fun, but now the memory disturbed him deeply. And both Kim and Maisie had mentioned something else about Insomnimania that disturbed him, too.

  “You’ve been using Elfie to talk to Auggie, haven’t you?” he asked Marianne.

  “Yes. A couple of times.”

  “Have you found out anything we didn’t know?”

  “No. But he promises from time to time to let me—or rather Elfie—in on secrets. He refers to hidden places, to power.”

  “I doubt that he’s going to give anything away.”

  “Maybe not. But he and Elfie are developing kind of a relationship. He does talk to her a lot. She laughed and said teasingly, “They even went to the Pleasure Dome last time.”

  “Elfie and Auggie had sex?”

  “Yes. If you can call it that.”

  Nolan was surprised at his sudden surge of annoyance. When he said nothing, Marianne asked, “Does it bother you? It’s only a cartoon. Nothing is really happening.”

  He thought about it for a moment, trying to make sense of his feelings. “Yeah,” he admitted. “It bothers me a little. I mean, Elfie’s too good for him. I helped build that body, remember.”

  “Actually, to have sex even the alters have to use alters—cartoons that have the appropriate equipment, you know. I had to make another alter for Elfie.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “You wouldn’t want to know,” Marianne said with a laugh. “You should see the one Auggie uses—almost featureless, no personality at all.”

  “Well, there’s something that bothers me a lot more than cartoon sex. Something I wanted to talk to you about.” Marianne looked at him without comment and he continued, “This just came up this morning at work. Kim explained to me how a hacker could steal passwords on Insomnimania.”

  “Do you mean that the Insomnimania files aren’t secure? I thought the passwords were encrypted.”

  “They are. Do you understand exactly what that means?”

  “I’ve read something about it. The computer scrambles the password according to some kind of formula. It only stores the scrambled version.”

  “That’s pretty much what Kim said. But I don’t see why everybody assumes that’s safe, in the first place.”

  “It uses a mathematical algorithm to change the word to the encrypted form. Supposedly, it can’t be reversed unless you have something like a Cray supercomputer. I remember seeing an example. A six-letter word was encrypted as a long string of letters and numbers mixed together, something like p-y-y-6-s-y-q-w-3-r. It’s not like a code that can be matched letter for letter.”

  “Okay, so maybe it’s true that a hacker is unlikely to break encryption. But this morning Kim Pak said he knows of at least one way a hacker can get around it.”

  “I guess any system can be beaten eventually.”

  “The way I understand it, it’s simpler than that. The hacker just inserts a program of his own that intercepts passwords before they’re encrypted and keeps a list of them. The member gets a message that says, ‘Sorry, invalid password. Please try again’—as though he had typed it incorrectly. On the second try, he logs on as usual.”

  He studied her face. Did she look worried for an instant? Did he imagine it or did she hesitate before she replied?

  “That’s really clever,” she remarked. “Most people occasionally mistype a password, anyhow. I mean, even on bank machines you can get that kind of message and have to do it over. And the word you’re typing doesn’t show up on the screen, so you can’t see whether you made a mistake or not.”

  “Kim finally got Maisie to admit that Auggie could have stolen a lot of passwords long ago—which means he could have some members’ names and addresses. He could still be stealing passwords. All he’d have to do is log on under a name that the Insomnimania detection gear doesn’t recognize. In other words, they can’t guarantee that any membership information hasn’t been read by Auggie.”

  “I thought you were convinced that Renee and Judson both just told Auggie who they were.”

  “I’d still rather think that than consider the implications of Kim’s theory.”

  Marianne just looked at him for a long moment. Finally she said, “So you’re saying that it’s actually dangerous to associate with Auggie on the network?”

  “It might be. I don’t know. I don’t want to take any chances on anything happening to you.”

  Marianne reached out and took his hand, but she said nothing.

  *

  Hand in hand, they strolled back down the pier toward the shore. Marianne caught herself staring at a heavy woman’s back. Someone like that? In her mind she caught a glimpse of the woman in the silver dress turning toward her, of bright red lips opening, as if to tell her something.

  Marianne shook her head. She didn’t want to think about murderers, female or male, and she didn’t want to think about computer hackers. She wanted to concentrate on her own contentment. It feels like we’ve been together for years. It was something she had missed since her divorce.

  When you live with someone for a long time, everything becomes familiar—talents, weaknesses, manias, prejudices, delights, all become familiar—simply contained in that person’s presence. Whether you like what you know or not, you do know them well.

  At one point, the absence of that familiarity had almost driven her back to Evan. Especially when she had moved to Santa Barbara, she had been keenly aware of being in a world full of strangers. Becoming accustomed to the new distance from the people around her had been slow and painful.

  Stephen had never seemed familiar to her. He looked good, behaved well, was reasonably intelligent and entertaining. She wondered whether, if things had kept going without interruption, she would have married Stephen. If I did, I would barely notice the change. Life would continue. She would do her work, he would do his, they would appear together at social occasions. They would politely gloss over the rough edges and weak spots as they appeared.

  In that sense, she thought, Nolan was going to be more like Evan—there was no ignoring his humanity, his maleness, his presence. When she glanced up at him, she saw the slight perspiration on his forehead. A stir deep in her body reminded her how his face had looked after they had made love last night, when he had turned on his back beside her and pulled her to him.

  Halfway back, they stopped at one of the restaurants on the pier and found a table by a large window overlooking the beach and the ocean. They ordered sandwiches and beers.

  *

  “Marianne,” Nolan said, ignoring the shakiness in his own voice, “What are you and I going to do?”

 
“Tonight we’re going back to your house and order a pizza and make mad, passionate love. Tomorrow I’m going to get all businesslike, go back to Santa Barbara, and blow everybody away with my wonderful designs.”

  “You know that’s not what 1 mean.”

  “Doesn’t it seem kind of soon to talk about anything further in the future?”

  “No.”

  “You’re absolutely right. It doesn’t,”

  She studied the bubbles in her beer and pressed her lips together. When she didn’t say anything more, Nolan felt a pang of fear. He had the feeling that this wasn’t going too well—and it had to go well. He wanted it to with all his heart.

  “I want us to move in together as soon as possible,” he said. She looked up. He could see the flush in her face, the emotion in her eyes. But he could also see that she was holding back.

  “You know I want that, too,” she said. “But I do have some reservations … some real problems dealing with …”

  “I have real problems with our not being together.”

  “So do I,” she said. Now he could see that there were tears in her eyes. “What do you want, Nolan? Do you want to be a Los Angeles homicide detective forever? What am I supposed to do—wait at home every night, hoping you’ll make it back alive? I mean, I suppose I could find a job in the city, but I don’t think I could stand the life you lead.” She wiped her eves, then repeated, “What do you want?”

  I want you. But he knew that wasn’t what she meant. He was stunned for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “When was the last time I decided to do something just because I wanted to do it? I can’t remember. For a long time it was like I had become a family, there was no separate me any more. In a way, Louise and I weren’t even a couple. Everything, all the decisions, involved what we all did.”