This Is Not a Game (34 page)

She wondered what he had said to Austin’s father to give himself this chance. She wondered what Austin’s partners would say when a complete novice was promoted over their heads. She wondered if he had any idea how pissed Charlie was going to be when he heard.

She wondered what BJ would say at the first staff meeting. He’d better not walk into it with that grin on his face—that she knew for certain.

“Well,” she said. “Good luck.”

The elevator doors slid open. Neither of them moved.

“I told Aram I had to finish the game writing first,” BJ said. “He was cool with that.”

“Did you know that Charlie owns a piece of the company?” Dagmar asked.

“Yeah. Aram will buy him out.”

BJ spoke with perfect confidence. Dagmar was not certain that Charlie would sell once he discovered the current arrangements. He might hold on to his shares just to fuck with BJ.

The elevator door tried to slide shut. BJ blocked it with a hand.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t tell Charlie right away, okay? He doesn’t own enough of the company to stop Aram from doing whatever he wants to do, but he could cause problems with the partners.”

No shit,
Dagmar thought.

“No problem,” she said.

Charlie had enough on his plate without this news.

And besides, she thought, BJ deserved his chance. If he could pull this off, it would mean happy endings for everybody.

Unless, of course, Charlie’s bots wiped out the financial system, in which case the fate of Katanyan Associates would be a minor tragedy in a world full of sudden, bright, brilliant, and unending pain.

She went to her office to claim her coffee cup, filled it at the snack station, and then dragged herself to the conference room. As she entered, her stomach turned over at the scent of one of Jack Stone’s Frito pies.

Most of her creative team looked at her. Some didn’t: a few hadn’t arrived, and Jack was devoting himself to eating his breakfast with a plastic spoon. Dagmar took a place at the head of the table, put her handheld down, and opened her notes on the display.

She was too nervous to sit still. While she waited for the late arrivals, she got up and looked out the window to make certain that Joe Clever wasn’t across the highway with his laser eavesdropper.

No James Bond vans lurked.

She turned on the white-noise generator to baffle any eavesdroppers she hadn’t spotted. As she returned to her seat, she passed behind Jack and wondered if the sound of Fritos being masticated, echoing over the Big Ears, was enough to make Joe Clever crazy.

It wasn’t doing much for Dagmar’s nerves, that was for certain sure. Said the big wall monitor,

The last few members of the team wandered in with apologies. Dagmar looked down at her notes again, then looked up.

“Charlie’s decided to move the game in an interesting direction,” she said.

There were no actual groans. She supposed that was the best she could hope for.

“What he’s found,” she said, “is that there are unauthorized copies of AvN Soft agents floating around. Specifically Rialto. He wants us to get the players to take them out.”

Suddenly they were all interested.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw BJ listening intently, his eyes staring sightlessly into the shiny finish of the table, one big hand fiddling with the pearl buttons of his new shirt.

Dagmar explained the plan she had worked out over the weekend. When IP addresses came in, the players would have to perform certain acts, and in a certain order.

First, they’d try sending Charlie’s patch to the gold-farming bots at each IP address. If the computer was inadequately firewalled, the bots would rewrite themselves, reboot, send a message to the player indicating that the patch had been installed, and then erase themselves.

Before wiping themselves out, the bots would liquidate their accounts and send the results to the Forlorn Hope account, though the players wouldn’t know that.

If the patch bounced off a firewall, then the player would have to try to find out who the IP address belonged to, contact that person, and tell him that there might be unauthorized software on his machine and how to get rid of it, referencing the AvN Soft patch, which would be found on that person’s Web page.

“Do we have solutions for any of those problems?” Helmuth asked.

“No. The players will have to dig around in reality.”

“You mean,” said Jack, “that we’re going to send millions of people Dumpster-diving in every major brokerage in the world? And following that, we’re going to organize the largest coordinated hacking attempt in the history of the Internet?”

Tension stiffened Dagmar’s spine.

“Yes,” she said.

Helmuth absorbed this, looked at Jack, and nodded.

“Cool,” he said.

Jack nodded back.

“Wicked cool,” he confirmed, and took a spoonful of Frito pie.

Dagmar felt her tension ebb.

“It
is
pretty cool,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

 

“I have another whole idea, a better one,” Charlie said. “I’m working on Patch 2.0.”

It was Tuesday morning, and Dagmar was talking to Charlie on the phone. He was in his Moorish extravaganza of a hotel room, and she was in the break room at Great Big Idea, watching her plastic cup of beef barley soup rotating in the microwave.

“Tell me,” Dagmar said.

The cup of soup rotated. The microwave hummed. The odor of beef stock crept into the room.

“The agents are linked in a peer-to-peer network, right?” Charlie said. “So Patch 2.0 rewrites the program to spread
the patch itself
along the network. It’ll be like a killer virus aimed right at the whole population of agents.”

Dagmar considered this.

“You mean,” she said, “we only have to succeed once? And then the whole network gets infected and goes down?”

“No,” Charlie said. “The peer-to-peer network is organized into smaller groups, and there are bound to be gaps even in those. Gaps where the program’s been wiped by an alert systems administrator, or where a disk drive blew up, or where the computer was shut down and stuck in a closet somewhere, or where the machine was just tossed away.

“Redundancy,” he said, “is still our friend.”

“But it’ll make the job easier.”

“A
lot
easier.”

World saved,
Dagmar thought.
Charlie still rich, game still cool.

What could possibly go wrong?

The microwave gave a chime. Dagmar opened the door, gingerly took out her cup of soup by the handle, and put it on the counter.

“Okay,” she said. “When can you have the new patch ready?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I hope.”

After the call ended, Dagmar stirred her soup with the plastic spoon, then returned to her office. She found BJ there, peering at her computer screen, his fingers poised over her keyboard.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“I’m looking for the script for Week Six, Part One,” BJ said. “I wanted to make sure I included the bit about Carlo leaving the matchbook behind in the Russian restaurant for David to find.”

“I
think
you did,” she said, stirring.

BJ was still staring at the screen, his hand busy on her trackball.

“Can we make sure? Because I don’t want to leave that detail out.”

“Let me,” said Dagmar. She put down her lunch, and BJ rolled her office chair out of the way. Dagmar bent over the computer and said, “Open file
Briana Assets 6.1.
” When the file popped open, she instituted a search for
matchbook.

“Yeah,” she said. “There it is.”

She pointed. BJ followed her finger, then nodded.

“Okay. Good.”

She picked up her soup and tasted it.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked.

“I just got back from a lunch with Helmuth,” BJ said. His blue eyes glittered mischievously from behind his spectacles. “I’m thinking of stealing him to work for me at Katanyan Associates.”

She looked at him.

“Not funny, Boris,” she said.

“I was kidding,” he said.

“Uh-huh.”

He smiled up at her. “I just got interested in how he does what he does. Making Web sites disappear, hiding stuff in the code.”

“Be careful around Helmuth,” Dagmar said. “Especially if you’re planning on collecting a big salary from this new job of yours. Helmuth will corrupt you faster than hanging with any twenty rock stars.”

BJ was impressed.

“I had no idea,” he said.

“He’ll tell you so himself,” Dagmar said.

There was another update later in the afternoon. It was intended that after the last puzzle was solved, there was going to be a clue hunt in
Planet Nine,
with the players’ avatars zooming around the rust-colored surface of Titan on flying scooters.

Except that the clue hunt didn’t happen. The players got hung up on one of the online puzzles and never progressed to Titan.

At the end of the day, there was a meeting concerning how to nudge the players loose.

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “The misunderstanding is all to do with the recording of Omar in the safe house. He’s saying, ‘I need what’s on the banana split.’ And so the players are trying to figure out what’s on a banana split, and how to get it to Omar, instead of noticing that ‘Banana Split’ is a
feature
on
Titan
in
Planet Nine.
”

“They’ve all got the Titan map,” Jack said.

“The problem,” said BJ, “is that they haven’t memorized it.”

“And so they’re trying to get Omar a maraschino cherry,” said Dagmar.

“Or whipped cream,” Jack said.

“Or jimmies,” Helmuth said. “They mentioned jimmies.” He looked at Dagmar. “What
are
jimmies?”

“Little bits of candy,” Dagmar said, “in the shape of mouse turds.”

Lines formed between Helmuth’s brows.

“If I go into an ice cream store and ask for a banana split with jimmies,” he said, “they’ll give to me these candy mouse turds?”

“Yes,” said Dagmar.

Helmuth gave a slow nod. “Interesting,” he said.

He had learned something new about America. Dagmar concealed a smile.

“What about Banana Split in the game?” BJ asked.

Dagmar decided she was too tired to make any major decisions right now.

“Next update’s on Saturday,” she said. “And that’s a big one, because we’ve got players with Tapping the Source machines sampling every water puddle in the world. So we’ve got to get the Titan adventure over before then—let’s say by Thursday night.”

“Okay,” said Jack. “Good.”

“The players could crack the Banana Split thing anytime between now and then. So let’s give them the chance, and if they don’t, we’ll think of a clever way to tell them—or failing that, we’ll just go into one of the forums under a pseudonym and give them the answer.”

The others were happy to put off the decision, and Dagmar called an end to the mission. BJ rose and looked at the others.

“Anyone interested in dinner?” he asked.

Dagmar pushed her chair back from the long table. “Not me,” she said. “I’m for a long night’s sleep.”

She said her good-byes and left as BJ and Helmuth and some others planned a trip to a restaurant.

The reek of the ginkgo trees filled the parking lot. Dagmar looked carefully behind bushes and trees for Siyed or any other lurker, then went through the gate unmolested and went to her apartment. She warmed a frozen meal of chicken and pasta in alfredo sauce—despite the appetizing name, it was alleged to be low in calories—and idly wondered when she had last actually cooked something on the stove.

Weeks ago, at least.

She turned on CNN and ate in front of the television. Charlie’s bots had been busy wrecking South American currencies—Bolivia and Chile had just been a warm-up. Brazil and Argentina were taking a hammering.

The IMF and the World Bank weren’t offering any help. They’d already lost billions trying to prop up other currencies, and now they had removed themselves from the bot wars altogether.

The talking heads speculated that they were keeping what remained of their reserves to prop up the U.S. dollar if it came under attack.

If the dollar fell, it was bad news even for people who weren’t U.S. citizens. The dollar was the world’s reserve currency—it was the currency that foreign governments used when trading with one another, or when buying commodities like gold and oil. Other currencies were coupled to the dollar and would collapse when the dollar fell. And Bolivia and Chile had saved a little of their citizens’ savings by coupling their own money to the dollar. If the dollar fell, they’d be ruined twice over.

It was all too depressing. Dagmar switched the channel and watched a program about a gallant teenager who fought crime with her extrasensory powers. The program’s lack of any connection to reality was a comfort.

She went to bed early and slept late. When she rose, she started the coffee machine and cooked some oatmeal in the microwave, then took a shower. She ate breakfast while CNN reported that South American currencies were still under attack. Dagmar muted the volume on the television while she booted her laptop and checked her email.

Oh hai!

U waz rite about Hellmouth. We haz been out all nite and I iz now
throughly corrupited.

Ai think her nbame was Beverly. She and Hellmouth goze way back.
She drinkz mojitos.

Have you ever haz mojitos? 3 and you can not walk rite. Ai do not
know how Ai gotz home.

Ai just write to let you knowz that I iz going to be lait with the
deliverabblies.