by Jack Dann
“I suppose you’ve heard of Stroboscopic?” he asked, sidling up to me after Valdez ’s ashes had been scattered on Europa’s ice.
“Of course.”
“I presume you won’t be playing, in that case.” Zubek smiled. “I gather the game’s going to be more than slightly challenging.”
“You think I’m not up to it?”
“Oh, you were good once, Nozomi-nobody’d dispute that.” He nodded to the smear of ash on the frost. “But so was Angela. She was good enough to beat the hardest of games-until the day when she wasn’t.”
I wanted to punch him. What stopped me was the thought that maybe he was right.
I WAS on my way back from the funeral when White called, using the secure channel to the yacht.
“What have you learnt about the package, Nozomi? I’m curious.”
“Not much,” I said, nibbling a fingernail. With my other hand I was toying with Risa’s dreadlocks, her head resting on my chest. “Other than the fact that the animal responds to light. The mottled patches on its carapace are a matrix of light-sensitive organs; silicon and quartz deposits. Silicon and silicon oxides, doped with a few other metals. I think they work as organic semiconductors, converting light into electrical nerve impulses.”
I couldn’t see White’s face-it was obscured by a golden blur that more or less approximated the visor of his suit-but he tapped a finger against the blur, knowingly. “That’s all? A response to light? That’s hardly going to give you a winning edge.”
“There’s nothing simple about it. The light has to reach a certain threshold intensity before there’s any activity at all.”
“And then it wakes up?”
“No. It moves for a few seconds, like a clockwork toy given a few turns of the key. Then it freezes up again, even if the light level remains constant. It needs a period of darkness before it shows another response to light.”
“How long?”
“Seventy seconds, more or less. I think it gets all the energy it needs during that one burst of light, then goes into hibernation until the next burst. Its chemistry must be optimized so highly that it simply can’t process more rapid bursts.”
The gold ovoid of his face nodded. “Maybe that ties in with the title of the game,” he said. “Stroboscopic.”
“You wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to what kind of evolutionary adaptation this might be?”
“I wish there was time for it, Nozomi. But I’m afraid that isn’t why I called. There’s trouble.”
“What sort?” Though I didn’t really need to ask.
He paused, looking to one side, as if nervous of being interrupted. “Black’s vanished. My guess is the goons got to him. They’ll have unpicked his memory by now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It may be hazardous for you to risk competition now that you’re implicated.”
I let the words sink in, then shook my head. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already given them my word that I’ll be there.”
Risa stirred. “Too pigheaded to back down?”
“No,” I said. “But on the other hand, I do have a reputation to uphold.”
AS the premiere approached we learned what we could of the creature. It was happier in vacuum than air, although the latter did not seem to harm it provided it was kept cold. Maybe that had something to do with its silicon biochemistry. Silicon had never seemed like a likely rival to carbon as a basis for life, largely because silicon’s higher valency denied its compounds the same long-term stability. But under extreme cold, silicon biochemistry might have the edge, or at least be an equally probable pathway for evolution. And with silicon came the possibility of exploiting light itself as an energy source, with no clumsy intermediate molecular machinery like the rhodopsin molecule in the human retina.
But the creature lived in darkness.
I couldn’t resolve this paradox. It needed light to energize itself-a flash of intense blue light, shading into the UV-and yet it hadn’t evolved an organ as simple as the eye. The eye, I knew, had been invented at least 40 times during the evolution of life on Earth. Nature came up with the eye whenever there was the slightest use for it.
It got stranger.
There was something I called the secondary response-also triggered by exposure to light. Normally, shown a flash every 70-odd seconds, the animal would execute a few seemingly purposeful movements, each burst of locomotion coordinated with the previous one, implying that the creature kept some record of what it had been doing previously. But if we allowed it to settle into a stable pattern of movement bursts, the creature began to show richer behavior. The probability of eliciting the secondary response rose to a maximum midway through the gap between normal bursts, roughly half a minute after the last, before smoothly diminishing. But at its peak, the creature was hypersensitized to any kind of ambient light at all, even if it was well below the threshold energy of the normal flash. If no light appeared during the time of hypersensitivity, nothing happened; the creature simply waited out the remaining half a minute until the next scheduled flash. But if even a few hundred photons fell on its carapace, it would always do the same thing; thrashing its limbs violently for a few seconds, evidently drawing on some final reserve of energy that it saved for just this response.
I didn’t have a clue why.
And I wasn’t going to get one, either-at least not by studying the creature. One day we’d set it up in the autodoc analysis chamber as usual, and we’d locked it into the burst cycle, working in complete darkness apart from the regular pulses of light every minute and ten seconds. But we forgot to lash the animal down properly. A status light flashed on the autodoc console, signifying some routine health-monitoring function. It wasn’t bright at all, but it happened just when the creature was hypersensitized. It thrashed its limbs wildly, making a noise like a box of chopsticks.
And hurled itself from the chamber, falling to the floor.
Even though it was dark, I saw something of its shattering, as it cleaved into a million pieces. It sparkled as it died.
“Oops,” Risa said.
THE premiere soon arrived. Games took place all over the system, but the real epicenter was Tycho. The lunar crater had been domed, pressurized, and infused with a luminous mass of habitats and biomes, all dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure through game. I’d visited the place dozens of times, of course-but even then, I’d experienced only a tiny fraction of what it had to offer. Now all I wanted to do was get in and out-and if Stroboscopic was the last game I ever played there, I didn’t mind.
“Something’s bothering you, Noz,” Risa said, as we took a monorail over the Icehammer zone. “Ever since you came back from Valdez ’s funeral.”
“I spoke to Zubek.”
“Him?” She laughed. “You’ve got more talent in your dick.”
“He suggested I should consider giving this one a miss.”
“He’s just trying to rile you. Means you still scare him.” Then she leaned toward the window of our private cabin. “There. The Arena.”
It was a matt-black geodesic ball about half a kilometer wide, carbuncled by ancillary buildings. Searchlights scissored the air above it, neon letters spelling out the name of the game, running around the ball’s circumference.
Stroboscopic.
Thirty years ago the eponymous CEO of Icehammer Games had been a top-class player in his own right-until neutral feedback incinerated most of his higher motor functions. Now Icehammer’s frame was cradled within a powered exoskeleton, stenciled with luminous Chinese dragons. He greeted myself, the players, and assorted hangers-on as we assembled in an atrium adjoining the Arena. After a short preliminary speech a huge screen was unveiled behind him. He stood aside and let the presentation roll.
A drab, wrinkled planet hove into view on the screen, lightly sprinkled with craters; one ice cap poking into view.
“PSR-J2034+454A,” Icehammer said. “The decidedly unpoetic name for a planet nearly 500 light-y
ears from here. Utterly airless and barely larger than our moon, it shouldn’t really be there at all. Less than ten million years ago its sun reached the end of its nuclear-burning life cycle and went supernova.” He clapped his hands together in emphasis; some trick of acoustics magnifying the clap concussively. “Apart from a few comets, nothing else remains. The planet moves in total darkness, even starlight attenuated by the nebula of dust that embeds the system. Even the star it once drew life from has become a corpse.”
The star rose above one limb of the planet: a searing point of light, pulsing on and off like a beacon.
“A pulsar,” Icehammer said. “A 15-kilometer ball of nuclear matter, sending out an intense beam of light as it rotates, four flashes a second; each no more than 13 hundredths of a second long. The pulsar has a wobble in its rotational axis, however, which means that the beam only crosses our line of sight once every 72 seconds, and then only for a few seconds at a time.” Then he showed us how the pulsar beam swept across the surface of the planet, dousing it in intense, flickering light for a few instants, outlining every nuance of the planet’s topography in eye-wrenching violet. Followed by utter darkness on the face of the world, for another 72 seconds.
“Now the really astonishing thing,” Icehammer said, “is that something evolved to live on the planet, although only on the one face, which it always turns to the star. A whole order of creatures, in fact, their biology tuned to exploit that regular flash of light. Now we believe that life on Earth originated in self-replicating structures in pyritic minerals, or certain kinds of clay. Eventually, this mineralogic life formed the scaffolding for the first form of carbon-based life, which-being more efficient and flexible-quickly usurped its predecessor. But perhaps that genetic takeover never happened here, stymied by the cold and the vacuum and the radiative effects of the star.” Now he showed us holoimages of the creatures themselves, rendered in the style of watercolors from a naturalist’s fieldbook, annotated in handwritten Latin. Dozens of forms-including several radically different bodyplans and modes of locomotion-but everything was hardshelled and a clear cousin to the animal we’d examined on the yacht. Some of the more obvious predators looked incredibly fearsome. “They do all their living in bursts lasting a dozen seconds, punctuated by nearly a minute of total inactivity. Evidently some selection mechanism determined that a concentrated burst of activity is more useful than long, drawn-out mobility.”
Jumping, I thought. You couldn’t jump in slow motion. Predators must have been the first creatures to evolve toward the burst strategy-and then grazers had been forced to follow suit.
“We’ve given them the collective term Strobelife-and their planet we’ve called Strobeworld, for obvious reasons.” Icehammer rubbed his palms together with a whine of actuating motors. “Which, ladies and gentlemen, brings us rather neatly to the game itself. Shall we continue?”
“Get on with it, you bastard,” I murmured. Next to me, Risa squeezed my hand and whispered something calming.
WE were escorted up a sapphire staircase into a busy room packed with consoles and viewing stands. There was no direct view of the Arena itself, but screens hanging from the ceiling showed angles in various wavebands.
The Arena was a mockup of part of the surface of Strobeworld, simulated with astonishing precision: the correct rocky terrain alleviated only by tufts of colorless vacuum-tolerant “vegetation,” gravity that was only a few percent from Strobeworld’s own, and a magnetic field that simulated in strength and vector the ambient field at the point on Strobeworld from which the animals had been snatched. The roof of the dome was studded with lamps that would blaze for less than 13 hundredths of a second, once every 72 seconds, precisely mimicking the passage of the star’s mercilessly bright beam.
The game itself-Level One, at least-would be played in rounds: single player against single player, or team against team. Each competitor would be allocated a fraction of the thousand-odd individual animals released into the Arena at the start-fifty/fifty in the absence of any handicapping. The sample would include animals from every ecological level, from grazers that fed on the flora, right up to the relatively scarce top predators, of which there were only a dozen basic variants. They had to eat, of course: light could provide their daily energy needs, but they’d still need to consume each other for growth and replication. Each competitor’s animals would be labeled with infrared markers, capable of being picked up by Arena cams. It was the competitor’s goal to ensure that their population of Strobeworld creatures outperformed the rival’s, simply by staying alive longest. Computers would assess the fitness of each population after a round and the winner would be announced.
I watched a few initial heats before my turn.
Most of the animals were sufficiently far from each other-or huddled in herds-that during each movement burst they did little except shuffle around or move slightly more in one direction than another. But the animals that were near each other exhibited more interesting behavior. Prey creatures-small, flat-bodied grazers or midlevel predators-would try and get away from the higher-level predators, which in turn would advance toward the grazers and subordinate predators. But then they’d come to a stop, perfectly motionless, their locations revealed only by the cams, since it was completely dark in the Arena.
Waiting.
It was harder than it looked-the dynamics of the ecosystem far subtler than I’d expected. Interfering at any level could have wildly unexpected consequences.
Risa would have loved it.
Soon it was my turn. I took my console after nodding briefly at my opponent; a rising player of moderate renown, but no real match for myself, even though neither of us had played Stroboscopic before.
We commenced play.
The Arena-initially empty-was populated by Strobelife via robot drones that dashed out from concealed hatches. The Strobelife was in stasis; no light flashes from the dome to trigger the life cycle; as stiff and sculptural as the animal we’d studied in the yacht. My console displayed a schematic overlay of the Arena, with “my” animals designated by marker symbols. The screens showed the same relationships from different angles. Initial placement was pseudo-random; animals placed in lifelike groupings, but with distances between predator and prey, determined by algorithms compiled from real Strobeworld populations.
We were given five minutes to study the grouping and evolve a strategy before the first flash. Thereafter, the flashes would follow at 72-second intervals until the game’s conclusion.
The five minutes slammed past before I’d examined less than a dozen possible opening gambits.
For a few flash cycles nothing much happened; too much distance between potential enemies. But after the fifth cycle some of the animals were within striking range of each other. Little local hot spots of carnage began to ensue; animals being dismembered or eaten in episodic bursts.
We began to influence the game. After each movement burst-during the minute or so of near-immobility-we were able to selectively reposition or withdraw our own or our opponent’s animals from the Arena, according to a complex shifting value scheme. The immobile animals would be spirited away, or relocated, by the same robots that had placed them initially. When the next flash came, play would continue seamlessly.
All sorts of unanticipated things could happen.
Wipe out one predator and you might think that the animals it was preying on would thrive, or at least not be decimated so rapidly. But what often happened was that a second rival predator-until then contained in number-would invade the now unoccupied niche and become more successful than the animal that had been wiped out. If that new predator also pursued the prey animals of the other, then they might actually be worse off.
I began to grasp some of Stroboscopic’s latent complexity. Maybe it was going to be a challenge after all.
I played and won four rounds out of five. No point deluding myself: at least two of my victories had been sheer luck, or had evolved from dynamics of the ecology that were jus
t too labyrinthine to guess at. But I was impressed, and for the first time in years, I didn’t feel as if I’d already exhausted every aspect of a game.
I was enjoying myself.
I waited for the other heats to cycle through, my own name only displaced from the top of the leader board when the last player had completed his series.
Zubek had beaten me.
“Bad luck,” he said, in the immediate aftermath, after we’d delivered our sound bites. He slung an arm around my shoulder, matishly. “I’m sorry what I said about you before, Nozomi.”
“Would you be apologizing now if I’d won?”
“But you didn’t, did you? Put up a good fight, I’ll admit. Were you playing to your limit?” Zubek stopped a passing waiter and snatched two drinks from his tray, something fizzy, passing one to me. “Listen, Nozomi. Either way, we won in style and trashed the rest.”
“Good. Can I go now? I’d like to speak to my wife.” And get the hell away from Tycho, I thought.
“Not so fast. I’ve got a proposition. Will you hear me out?”
I LISTENED to what Zubek had to say. Then caught up with Risa a few minutes later and told her what he had outlined.
“You’re not serious,” she said. “He’s playing a game with you, don’t you realize?”
“Isn’t that the point?”
Risa shook her head exasperatedly. “Angela Valdez is dead. She died a good death, doing what she loved. Nothing the two of you can do now can make the slightest difference.”
“Zubek will make the challenge whether I like it or not.”
“But you don’t have to agree.” Her voice was calm but her eyes promised tears. “You know what the rumors said. That the next level was more dangerous than the first.”