“What is it?
“An element of a new game,” said the other man, Black. “Something called Stroboscopic.”
I carried the package to a workbench. “Never heard of it.”
“It’s hush-hush,” Black said. “Company hopes to have it up and running in a few months. Rumor is it’s unlike anything else in Tycho.”
I pulled back the last layer of wadding.
It was an animal packed in ice; some kind of hard-shelled arthropod like a cross between a scorpion and a crab—all segmented exoskeletal plates and multi-jointed limbs terminating in various specialized and nasty-looking appendages. The dark carapace was mottled with patches of dirty white, sparkling with tiny reflections. Elsewhere it shone like polished turtleshell. There were ferocious mouth parts but nothing I recognized as an eye, or any kind of sensory organ at all.
“Looks delicious,” I said. “What do I cook it with?”
“You don’t eat it, Nozomi. You play it.” Black shifted nervously as if wary of how much he could safely disclose. “The game will feature a whole ecology of these things—dozens of other species; all kinds of predator-prey relationships.”
“Someone manufactures them?”
“Nah.” It was White speaking now. “Icehammer found ’em somewhere outside the system, using the snatcher.”
“Might help if I knew where.”
“Tough titty. They never told us; we’re just one of dozens of teams working on the game.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “So you’re saying, all I have to go on is one dead animal, which might have come from anywhere in the galaxy?”
“Yeah,” White said, his helmet nodding. “Except it isn’t dead.”
* * *
The mere fact that I’d seen the creature, of course, meant that I’d have an unfair advantage when it came to playing the game. It meant that I, Nozomi, one of the dozen or so best-known gamers in the system, would be cheating. But I could live with that. Though my initial rise to fame had been driven mainly by skill, it was years since I’d played a game without having already gained an unfair edge over the other competitors.
There were reasons.
I could remember a time in my childhood when the playing of games was not the highest pinnacle of our culture; simply one means by which rich immortals fought boredom. But that was before the IWP commenced the first in a long series of wars against the Halo Ideologues, those scattered communities waging dissent from the system’s edge. The Inner Worlds Prefecture had turned steadily more totalitarian, as governments generally do in times of crisis. Stealthily, the games had been pushed toward greater prominence, and shady alliances had been forged between the IWP and the principal gaming houses. The games enthralled the public and diverted their attentions from the Halo wars. And—unlike the arts—they could not be used as vehicles for subversion. For gamers like myself it was a near-utopian state of affairs. We were pampered and courted by the houses and made immensely rich.
But—maybe because we’d been elevated to such loftiness—we also saw what was going on. And turning a blind eye was one of the few things I’d never been good at.
One day, five years ago, I was approached by the same individuals who’d brought the box to my yacht. Although they were officially working for Icehammer, they were also members of an underground movement with cells in all the gaming houses. Its lines of communication stretched out to the Ideologues themselves.
The movement was using the games against the IWP. They’d approach players like myself and offer to disclose material relating to games under development by Icehammer or other houses; material that would give the player an edge over their rivals. The player in turn would siphon a percentage of their profit into the movement.
The creature in the box was merely the latest tip-off.
But I didn’t know what to make of it, except that it had been snatched from somewhere in the galaxy. Wormhole manipulation offered instantaneous travel to the stars, but nothing larger than a beach ball could make the trip. The snatcher was an automated probe that had retrieved biological specimens from thousands of planets. Icehammer operated its own snatcher, for obtaining material that could be incorporated into products.
This time, it seemed to have brought back a dud.
* * *
“It just sits there and does nothing,” Risa said when the Icehammer employees had left, the thing resting on a chilled pallet in the sick bay.
“What kind of game can they possibly build around it?”
“Last player to die of boredom wins?”
“Possible. Or maybe you throw it? It’s heavy enough, as though the damn thing is half-fossilized. Those white patches look like quartz, don’t they?”
Maybe the beast wouldn’t do anything until it was placed into the proper environment—perhaps because it needed olfactory or tactile cues to switch from dormancy.
“Black said the game was based on an ecology?” I said.
“Yeah, but how do you think such a game would work?” Risa said. “An ecology’s much too chaotic to build into a game.” Before she married me she’d been a prominent games designer for one of the other houses, so she knew what she was talking about. “Do you know how dis-equilibriate your average ecology is?”
“Not even sure I can pronounce it.”
“Ecologies aren’t kids’ stuff. They’re immensely complex—food webs, spectra of hierarchical connectedness . . . Screw up any one level, and the whole thing can collapse—unless you’ve evolved the system into some kind of Gaian self-stabilizing regime, which is hard enough when you’re not trying to recreate an alien ecology, where there might be all sorts of unexpected emergent phenomena.”
“Maybe that’s the point, though? A game of dexterity, like balancing spinning plates?”
Risa made the noise that told she was half-acknowledging the probable truthfulness of my statement. “They must constrain it in some way. Strip it down to the essentials, and then build in some mechanism whereby players can influence things.”
I nodded. I’d been unwilling to probe the creature too deeply until now, perhaps still suspicious of a trap—but I knew that if I didn’t, the little arthropod would drive me quietly insane. At the very least, I had to know whether it had anything resembling a brain—and if I got that far, I could begin to guess at the kinds of behavioral routines scripted into its synapses, especially if I could trace pathways to sensory organs. Maybe I was being optimistic, though. The thing didn’t even have recognizable eyes, so it was anyone’s guess as to how it assembled a mental model of its surroundings. And of course that told me something, though it wasn’t particularly useful.
The creature had evolved somewhere dark.
* * *
A month later, Icehammer began a teaser campaign for Stroboscopic. The premiere was to take place two months later in Tycho, but a handful of selected players would be invited to an exclusive preview a few weeks earlier, me among them.
I began to warm up to competition fitness.
Even with insider knowledge, no game was ever a walkover, and my contacts in the resistance movement would be disappointed if I didn’t turn in a tidy profit. The trouble was I didn’t know enough about the game to finesse the required skills; whether they were mental or physical or some combination of the two. Hedging my bets, I played as many different types of game as possible in the time frame, culminating in a race through the atmosphere of Jupiter piloting frail cloud jammers. The game was one that demanded an acute grasp of aerodynamic physics, coupled with sharp reflexes and a willingness to indulge in extreme personal risk.
It was during the last of the races that Angela Valdez misjudged a thermal and collapsed her foil. Valdez had been a friend of mine years ago, and though we’d since fallen into rivalry, we’d never lost our mutual respect. I attended her funeral on Europa with an acute sense of my own mortality. There, I met most of the other gamers in the system, including a youngish man called Zubek whose star was in the ascendant. He and
Valdez had been lovers, I knew—just as I’d loved her years before I met Risa.
“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 pig-headed 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 exploit 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, lightl
y sprinkled with craters; one ice cap poking into view.
“PSR-J2034-+454A,” Icehammer said. “The decidedly unpoetic name for a planet nearly 500 light-years 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 holo-images 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 hard-shelled and a clear cousin to the animal we’d examined on the yacht. Some of the more obvious predators looked incredibly fearsome.
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