Dangerous Games

by Jack Dann

  In the free-wheeling, pyrotechnic story that follows, he shows us that there are as many ways to be Saved as there are people to be Saved, even from a peculiar addiction such as computer gaming-and that often the most unexpected way is the way that works the best…

  ***

  KEEL wore a ragged shirt with the holo veed there, simmed that shimmering on it. She wore it in and out of the virtual. If she was in an interactive virtual, the other players sometimes complained. Amid the dragons and elves and swords of fire, a bramble-haired girl, obviously spiking her virtual with drugs and refusing to tune her shirt to something suitably medieval, could be distracting.

  “Fizz off,” Keel would say, in response to all complaints.

  Keel was difficult. Rich, self-destructive, beautiful, she was twenty years old and already a case study in virtual psychosis.

  She had been rehabbed six times. She could have died that time on Makor when she went blank in the desert. She still bore the teeth marks of the land eels that were gnawing on her shoulder when they found her.

  A close one. You can’t revive the digested.

  NO one had to tell Keel that she was in rehab again. She was staring at a green ocean, huge white clouds overhead, white gulls filling the heated air with their cries.

  They gave you these serenity mock-ups when they were bringing you around. They were fairly insipid and several shouts behind the technology. This particular v-run was embarrassing. The ocean wasn’t continuous, probably a seven-minute repeat, and the sun’s heat was patchy on her face.

  The beach was empty. She was propped up in a lounge chair-no doubt her position back in the ward. With concentration, focusing on her spine, she could sense the actual contours of the bed, the satiny feel of the sensor pad.

  It was work, this focusing, and she let it go. Always better to flow.

  Far to her right, she spied a solitary figure. The figure was moving toward her.

  It was, she knew, a wilson. She was familiar with the drill. Don’t spook the patient. Approach her slowly after she is sedated and in a quiet setting.

  The wilson was a fat man in a white suit (neo-Victorian, dead silly, Keel thought). He kept his panama hat from taking flight in the wind by clamping it onto his head with his right hand and leaning forward.

  Keel recognized him. She even remembered his name, but then it was the kind of name you’d remember: Dr. Max Marx.

  He had been her counselor, her wilson, the last time she’d crashed. Which meant she was in Addition Resources Limited, which was located just outside of New Vegas.

  Dr. Marx looked up, waved, and came on again with new purpose.

  A pool of sadness welled in her throat. There was nothing like help, and its pale sister hope, to fill Keel’s soul with black water.

  FORTUNATELY, Dr. Max Marx wasn’t one of the hearty ones. The hearty ones were the worst. Marx was, in fact, refreshingly gloomy, his thick black beard and eyebrows creating a doomed stoic’s countenance.

  “Yes,” he said, in response to her criticism of the virtual, “this is a very miserable effect. You should see the sand crabs. They are laughable, like toys.” He eased himself down on the sand next to her and took his hat off and fanned it in front of his face. “I apologize. It must be very painful, a connoisseur of the vee like you, to endure this.”

  Keel remembered that Dr. Marx spoke in a manner subject to interpretation. His words always held a potential for sarcasm.

  “We are portable,” Dr. Marx said. “We are in a mobile unit, and so, alas, we don’t have the powerful stationary AdRes equipment at our command. Even so, we could do better. There are better mockups to be had, but we are not prospering these days. Financially, it has been a year of setbacks, and we have had to settle for some second-rate stuff.”

  “I’m not in a hospital?” Keel asked.

  Marx shook his head. “No. No hospital.”

  Keel frowned. Marx, sensing her confusion, put his hat back on his head and studied her through narrowed eyes. “We are on the run, Keel Benning. You have not been following the news, being otherwise occupied, but companies like your beloved Virtvana have won a major legislative battle. They are now empowered to maintain their customer base aggressively. I believe the wording is ‘protecting customer assets against invasive alienation by third-party services.’ Virtvana can come and get you.”

  Keel blinked at Dr. Marx’s dark countenance. “You can’t seriously think someone would… what?… kidnap me?”

  Dr. Marx shrugged. “Virtvana might. For the precedent. You’re a good customer.”

  “Vee moguls are going to sweat the loss of one spike? That’s crazy.”

  Dr. Marx sighed, stood up, whacked sand from his trousers with his hands. “You noticed then? That’s good. Being able to recognize crazy, that is a good sign. It means there is hope for your own sanity.”

  HER days were spent at the edge of the second-rate ocean. She longed for something that would silence the Need. She would have settled for a primitive bird-in-flight simulation. Anything. Some corny sex-with-dolphins loop-or something abstract, the color red leaking into blue, enhanced with aural-D.

  She would have given ten years of her life for a game of Apes and Angels, Virtvana’s most popular package. Apes and Angels wasn’t just another smooth metaphysical mix-it was the true religion to its fans. A gamer started out down in the muck on Libido Island, where the senses were indulged with perfect, shimmerless sims. Not bad, Libido Island, and some gamers stayed there a long, long time. But what put Apes and Angels above the best pleasure pops was this: A player could evolve spiritually. If you followed the Path, if you were steadfast, you became more compassionate, more aware, at one with the universe… all of which was accompanied by feelings of euphoria.

  Keel would have settled for a legal rig. Apes and Angels was a chemically enhanced virtual, and the gear that true believers wore was stripped of most safeguards, tuned to a higher reality.

  It was one of these hot pads that had landed Keel in Addiction Resources again.

  “It’s the street stuff that gets you in trouble,” Keel said. “I’ve just got to stay clear of that.”

  “You said that last time,” the wilson said. “You almost died, you know.”

  Keel felt suddenly hollowed, beaten. “Maybe I want to die,” she said.

  Dr. Marx shrugged. Several translucent seagulls appeared, hovered over him, and then winked out. “Bah,” he muttered. “Bad therapy-v, bad death-wishing clients, bad career choice. Who doesn’t want to die? And who doesn’t get that wish, sooner or later?”

  ONE day, Dr. Marx said, “You are ready for swimming.”

  It was morning, full of a phony, golden light. The nights were black and dreamless, nothing, and the days that grew out of them were pale and untaxing. It was an intentionally bland virtual, its sameness designed for healing.

  Keel was wearing a one-piece, white bathing suit. Her counselor wore bathing trunks, baggy with thick black vertical stripes; he looked particularly solemn, in an effort, no doubt, to counteract the farcical elements of rotund belly and sticklike legs.

  Keel sighed. She knew better than to protest. This was necessary. She took her wilson ’s proffered hand, and they walked down to the water’s edge. The sand changed from white to gray where the water rolled over it, and they stepped forward into the salt-smelling foam.

  Her legs felt cold when the water enclosed them. The wetness was now more than virtual. As she leaned forward and kicked, her muscles, taut and frayed, howled.

  She knew the machines were exercising her now. Somewhere her real body, emaciated from long neglect, was swimming in a six-foot aquarium whose heavy seas circulated to create a kind of liquid treadmill. Her lungs ached; her shoulders twisted into monstrous knots of pain.

  IN the evening, they would talk, sitting in their chairs and watching the ocean swallow the sun, the clouds turning orange, the sky occasionally spotting badly, some sort of pixel fatigue.

  “If human beings are
the universe’s way of looking at itself,” Dr. Marx said, “then virtual reality is the universe’s way of pretending to look at itself.”

  “You wilsons are all so down on virtual reality,” Keel said. “But maybe it is the natural evolution of perception. I mean, everything we see is a product of the equipment we see it with. Biological, mechanical, whatever.”

  Dr. Marx snorted. “Bah. The old ‘everything-is-virtual’ argument. I am ashamed of you, Keel Benning. Something more original, please. We wilsons are down on virtual addiction because everywhere we look we see dead philosophers. We see them and they don’t look so good. We smell them, and they stink. That is our perception, our primitive reality.”

  THE healing was slow, and the sameness, the boredom, was a hole to be filled with words. Keel talked, again, about the death of her parents and her brother. They had been over this ground the last time she’d been in treatment, but she was here again, and so it was said again.

  “I’m rich because they are dead,” she said.

  It was true, of course, and Dr. Marx merely nodded, staring in front of him. Her father had been a wealthy man, and he and his young wife and Keel’s brother, Calder, had died in a freak air-docking accident while vacationing at Keypond Terraforms. A “sole survivor” clause in her father’s life insurance policy had left Keel a vast sum.

  She had been eleven at the time-and would have died with her family had she not been sulking that day, refusing to leave the hotel suite.

  She knew she was not responsible, of course. But it was not an event you wished to dwell on. You looked, naturally, for powerful distractions.

  “It is a good excuse for your addiction,” Dr. Marx said. “If you die, maybe God will say, ‘I don’t blame you.’ Or maybe God will say, ‘Get real. Life’s hard.’ I don’t know. Addiction is in the present, not the past. It’s the addiction itself that leads to more addictive behavior.”

  Keel had heard all this before. She barely heard it this time. The weariness of the evening was real, brought on by the day’s physical exertions. She spoke in a kind of woozy, presleep fog, finding no power in her words, no emotional release.

  Of more interest were her counselor’s words. He spoke with rare candor, the result, perhaps, of their fugitive status, their isolation.

  It was after a long silence that he said, “To tell you the truth, I’m thinking of getting out of the addiction treatment business. I’m sick of being on the losing side.”

  Keel felt a coldness in her then, which, later, she identified as fear.

  He continued: “They are winning. Virtvana, MindSlide, Right to Flight. They’ve got the sex, the style, the flash. All we wilsons have is a sense of mission, this knowledge that people are dying, and the ones that don’t die are being lost to lives of purpose.

  “Maybe we’re right-sure, we’re right-but we can’t sell it. In two, three days we’ll come to our destination and you’ll have to come into Big R and meet your fellow addicts. You won’t be impressed. It’s a henry-hovel in the Slash. It’s not a terrific advertisement for Big R.”

  Keel felt strange, comforting her wilson. Nonetheless, she reached forward and touched his bare shoulder. “You want to help people. That is a good and noble impulse.”

  He looked up at her, a curious nakedness in his eyes. “Maybe that is hubris.”

  “Hubris?”

  “Are you not familiar with the word? It means to try to steal the work of the gods.”

  Keel thought about that in the brief moment between the dimming of the seascape and the nothingness of night. She thought it would be a fine thing to do, to steal the work of the gods.

  DR. MARX checked the perimeter, the security net. All seemed to be in order. The air was heavy with moisture and the cloying odor of mint. This mint scent was the olfactory love song of an insectlike creature that flourished in the tropical belt. The creature looked like an unpleasant mix of spider and wasp. Knowing that the sweet scent came from it, Dr. Marx breathed shallowly and had to fight against an inclination to gag. Interesting, the way knowledge affected one. An odor, pleasant in itself, could induce nausea when its source was identified.

  He was too weary to pursue the thought. He returned to the mobile unit, climbed in and locked the door behind him. He walked down the corridor, paused to peer into the room where Keel rested, sedated electrically.

  He should not have spoken his doubts. He was weary, depressed, and it was true that he might very well abandon this crumbling profession. But he had no right to be so self-revealing to a client. As long as he was employed, it behooved him to conduct himself in a professional manner.

  Keel’s head rested quietly on the pillow. Behind her, on the green panels, her heart and lungs created cool, luminous graphics. Physically, she was restored. Emotionally, mentally, spiritually, she might be damaged beyond repair.

  He turned away from the window and walked on down the corridor. He walked past his sleeping quarters to the control room. He undressed and lay down on the utilitarian flat and let the neuronet embrace him. He was aware, as always, of guilt and a hangdog sense of betrayal.

  The virtual had come on the Highway two weeks ago. He’d already left Addiction Resources with Keel, traveling west into the wilderness of Pit Finitum, away from the treatment center and New Vegas.

  Know the enemy. He’d sampled all the vees, played at lowest res with all the safeguards maxed, so that he could talk knowledgeably with his clients. But he’d never heard of this virtual-and it had a special fascination for him. It was called Halfway House.

  A training vee, not a recreational one, it consisted of a series of step-motivated, instructional virtuals designed to teach the apprentice addictions counselor his trade.

  So why this guilt attached to methodically running the course?

  What guilt?

  That guilt.

  Okay. Well…

  THE answer was simple enough: Here all interventions came to a good end, all problems were resolved, all clients were healed.

  So far he had intervened on a fourteen-year-old boy addicted to Clawhammer Comix, masterfully diagnosed a woman suffering from Leary’s syndrome, and led an entire Group of mix-feeders through a nasty withdrawal episode.

  He could tell himself he was learning valuable healing techniques.

  Or he could tell himself that he was succumbing to the world that killed his clients, the hurt-free world where everything worked out for the best, good triumphed, bad withered and died, rewards came effortlessly-and if that was not enough, the volume could always be turned up.

  He had reservations. Adjusting the neuronet, he thought, “I will be careful.” It was what his clients always said.

  KEEL watched the insipid ocean, waited. Generally, Dr. Marx arrived soon after the darkness of sleep had fled.

  He did not come at all. When the sun was high in the sky, she began to shout for him. That was useless, of course.

  She ran into the ocean, but it was a low res ghost and only filled her with vee-panic. She stumbled back to the beach chair, tried to calm herself with a rational voice: Someone will come.

  But would they? She was, according to her wilson, in the wilds of Pit Finitum, hundreds of miles to the west of New Vegas, traveling toward a halfway house hidden in some dirty corner of the mining warren known as the Slash.

  Darkness came, and the programmed current took her into unconsciousness.

  The second day was the same, although she sensed a physical weakness that emanated from Big R. Probably nutrients in one of the IV pockets had been depleted. I’ll die, she thought. Night snuffed the thought.

  A new dawn arrived without Dr. Marx. Was he dead? And if so, was he dead by accident or design? And if by design, whose? Perhaps he had killed himself; perhaps this whole business of Virtvana’s persecution was a delusion.

  Keel remembered the wilson ’s despair, felt a sudden conviction that Dr. Marx had fled Addiction Resources without that center’s knowledge, a victim of the evangelism/paranoia psy
chosis that sometimes accompanied counselor burnout.

  Keel had survived much in her twenty years. She had donned some deadly v-gear and made it back to Big R intact. True, she had been saved a couple of times, and she probably wasn’t what anyone would call psychologically sound, but… it would be an ugly irony if it was an addictions rehab, an unhinged wilson, that finally killed her.

  Keel hated irony, and it was this disgust that pressed her into action.

  She went looking for the plug. She began by focusing on her spine, the patches, the slightly off-body temp of the sensor pad. Had her v-universe been more engrossing, this would have been harder to do, but the ocean was deteriorating daily, the seagulls now no more than scissoring disruptions in the mottled sky.

  On the third afternoon of her imposed solitude, she was able to sit upright in Big R. It required all her strength, the double-think of real Big-R motion while in the virtual. The effect in vee was to momentarily tilt the ocean and cause the sky to leak blue pixels into the sand.

  Had her arms been locked, had her body been glove-secured, it would have been wasted effort, of course, but Keel’s willing participation in her treatment, her daily exercise regimen, had allowed relaxed physical inhibitors. There had been no reason for Dr. Marx to anticipate Keel’s attempting a Big-R disruption.

  She certainly didn’t want to.

  The nausea and terror induced by contrary motion in Big R while simulating a virtual was considerable.

  Keel relied on gravity, shifting, leaning to the right. The bed shifted to regain balance.