This Is Not a Game (6 page)

“Thanks!” But Charlie had hung up.

Dagmar reluctantly closed the phone and returned it to her belt.

“Your boyfriend?” asked Mrs. Tippel.

Dagmar shook her head. “My boss.”

Mrs. Tippel seemed a little surprised.

“He must be a good employer,” she said.

He’s hiring mercenaries to rescue me,
Dagmar almost said. But she reflected that so far as she knew, no mercenaries were coming for the Tippels or for anyone else in the breakfast room, and that to mention her good fortune might seem tactless, as if she were boasting about her return to the life of a privileged Westerner.

“We went to college together,” she said.

Hiring mercenaries, she thought.

It was like something you’d do in a game.

 

After breakfast, Dagmar checked with Mr. Tong to see if anything had changed, and found that nothing had. So she went to her room, booted her ultrathin computer, and checked her email.

Her handheld could do anything her computer could, but she preferred a standard keyboard to having to thumb long messages on the phone’s little keypad. She wiped out spam, answered some routine queries, and sent messages to friends about her situation. She wrote about the riot and about being trapped in the music store, and about the bodies she thought she’d seen on the trip to the hotel.

As she typed on the familiar keyboard, in the hotel room that smelled of clean sheets, with the hushed sound of the air-conditioning in the background and the room’s coffeemaker hissing and snorting as it provided Dagmar’s caffeine fix, the previous day’s hazards began to seem unreal, a brief dip into a nightmare that had been banished by the morning’s strong tropical light.

The plangent sounds of Johnny Otis echoed in the room. Dagmar snatched at her phone. The number flashing in the display had a country code she didn’t recognize.

“Hello?” she said cautiously.

“Is this Dagmar Shaw?”

The male voice had some kind of Eastern European accent.

“Yes,” she said.

“My name is Tomer Zan,” the man said. “I work for Zelazni Associates. Your employer, Mr. Ruff, has retained us to see about your safety.”

Dagmar restrained her impulse to begin a joyful bouncing on the mattress.

“Yes,” she said. “He told me to expect your call.”

“Can you describe your situation, please?”

She did. She mentioned the riot the previous day, and being trapped in the music store, and the fact that she had $180 in cash. She told Tomer Zan that she was on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, with a view to the northwest. She mentioned that meals were no longer being served on the third-floor terrace because the hotel management considered it unsafe.

“I’m looking at a satellite picture of your hotel on Google Earth,” Zan said, “and I can tell you right now that I don’t like it. You’re too close to that traffic circle with the Welcome Statue, you’re too close to the government buildings that are going to be targets for demonstrators. The natural path for marches or riots runs right past your front door.”

“Great,” Dagmar said.

“We’re going to try to move you someplace safer. But we don’t have any assets in Jakarta, so that may not be possible for a few days.”

Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.

“You don’t have anybody in Jakarta?” she asked.

“No, we don’t.”

“So why did Charlie hire you?”

“Because,” Zan explained patiently, “the companies with assets in Jakarta are all overcommitted right now.”

Figures,
Dagmar thought. She wandered to the window, parted the heavy curtains, and looked down at the street below. There was very little traffic, and none on foot. And no police.

“We’ll have someone on the ground there in a few days,” Zan said.

He seemed very confident of this.

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re not with anyone?” Zan asked.

“No. I’m alone.”

“Okay. I want you to change your schedule every day. Eat meals at different times, and in different restaurants in the hotel, if that’s possible.”

“Why?”

“It takes three days to set up a kidnapping. If you keep changing your schedule, that makes an abduction more difficult.”

Dagmar began to say,
But why would they kidnap
me
?
then clacked her teeth shut on the words because they sounded just like the sort of thing a stupid tourist would say.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

“The power supply may be erratic, so keep your cell phone and your computer charged. Buy extra batteries if you can—or make sure your miniturbines have extra fuel.”

“My phone doesn’t have miniturbines.”

“Then charge it every chance you can, and buy extra batteries if you can find them in the hotel. And don’t use the phone for anything except absolutely necessary calls.”

“All right.”

“If there’s a store in the hotel where you can buy food, buy all you can. Even if it’s junk food. The average city has only a three-day supply of food, and calories may get scarce.”

“What do I buy the food
with?
Do I use my dollars?”

There was a long moment’s silence.

“Save the dollars,” Zan said.

He then went on to tell Dagmar that he wanted her to find six different ways to escape the hotel from her room. And another six exits from every other place she regularly visited within the building.

“What do I do if I have to leave the hotel?”

“Find a place of temporary safety, and call me.”

He went on to tell her not to wear any expensive jewelry or be seen carrying her computer, because that might mark her out as someone worth robbing.

“Another thing,” he said. “I need you to be on the roof of the hotel at sixteen hundred hours Jakarta time.”

“This afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“So the satellite can get a look at you. I need you facing east and looking up.”

Dagmar wondered how much it was costing Charlie to retask someone’s satellite, and decided it was better not to know.

“You can use my picture on the Great Big Idea Web page,” she said.

“We’re getting pictures of the roof anyway,” Zan said, “in case we want to extract you from there. So we might as well find out what you look like
now.
”

Extract,
Dagmar thought.

“All right,” she said.

She was placing herself in the hands of experts. Not that it had worked so far.

Tomer Zan advised her to keep her passport and money on her, preferably in a money belt, or in a pocket that could be buttoned or zipped.

“I have a pouch I can wear around my neck,” she said. Which she rarely used, because it wasn’t designed for people with tits.

“That’s good,” Zan said. “Would you like me to repeat any of my instructions?”

“Change my schedule,” Dagmar said. “Six exits, no jewelry or computer in public, on the roof at sixteen hundred.”

“You forgot to buy batteries,” Zan said. His voice betrayed absolutely no sense of humor.

“Buy batteries,” Dagmar said. “Check.”

“Don’t lose this number. I’ll send you email in a few minutes repeating everything I’ve said.”

“Okay.”

Zan said good-bye and hung up. Dagmar located his number in her phone’s memory and shifted it into the directory under the name Charlies Friend.

Ten minutes later, Zan’s email turned up on her computer.

Dagmar decided she might as well go find batteries.

 

A woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought a few hours later. That would be a good place to start a story.

You would have plenty of issues to deal with right away. Who was the woman, and why was she in the hotel room? Where was the hotel? What was going on outside? Was she in transit, in hiding, on the phone, in denial?

Probably all four, Dagmar thought, and felt an uneasy pang of self-knowledge.

The sad fact was that every sad fact in the world was the raw material for a story. Fiction thrived on desperation, on dejection, on violence. Every time you stepped outside the door, you could find a new subject. Every book and newspaper became research. Every act, no matter how sordid, and every tragedy, no matter how pointless, was matter for fiction—and in fiction, all tragedy has meaning and no action is random.

So you start with the woman in the hotel room,
Dagmar thought.
And the reason she is there is that she has no place else to go.

The screen was full of chaotic movement, explosions, the clash of weapons. BJ’s fingers danced over the controller. The ice-cold Entropy Beast that hovered over the chamber exploded in a blast of flame, scattering chunks of frozen flesh-shrapnel and knocking down half a dozen Goblin Warriors and one Lawful Paladin.

“No,” BJ said, “you can’t download all of ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ as a ring tone.”

The Paladin sprang back to his feet and cut a Goblin Warrior in half with his Fire Sword.

“No,” BJ said, “it doesn’t matter if your friend says he did it. You still can’t. If you have the right software, you can convert a sound file into a ring tone and download it from your own computer, but we don’t provide that service.”

Explosions rocked the stone castle walls. BJ’s Elven Mage—who had the advantage of being invisible, at least as far as the other players were concerned—scuttled up the staircase and toward the glowing chest on the Altar of the Black Goddess.

“Thank you, ma’am,” said BJ. “Sorry I wasn’t able to help.”

BJ worked in the darkest, most depressing dungeon of information technology, that of customer service. He spent his hours aiding the inept, the insane, and a very large population of compulsive liars. It was that last category that drove him into a fury—couldn’t
any
of these people tell the simple truth? They chanted their mantra—“I didn’t do
anything
”—when it was clear that they had been ravaging their own software with one deranged decision after another.

Fortunately, Spud LLC—“Your source for user-friendly IT solutions”—didn’t much care that BJ ran his own little gold-farming projects on the side.

“Let’s try this,” BJ said. “Try restarting your computer. If you still have a problem, call me back.”

His Elven Mage was the first of the party to the casket on the Black Goddess’s altar. BJ knew that once he magicked open the casket, he had approximately thirty-four seconds before the Goddess Herself materialized in the chamber to lay waste to any intruders, whether they were invisible or not. BJ planned to be out of the room by then.

“Your email program won’t respond to the password? Indulge me for a moment—have you checked to see if the Caps Lock key is on?”

The Elven Mage touched the glowing casket. A balloon appeared in a corner of the screen. BJ moused to the balloon and typed in the Pre-Adamite spell that would open the casket. With the sound of flourishing trumpets—a sound that BJ hoped would be obscured from other players by the general sound of combat going on below—the glowing casket opened.

The countdown had started.

BJ clicked the Grab button, and the Elven Mage glommed the two items in the casket, a scroll of spells and the Orb of Healing. The spells on the scroll were low-level crap, but BJ could maybe trade the item for something more useful. The Orb of Healing, however, was the big prize on this level, and BJ wasn’t about to give it up.

The Elven Mage scurried down the stairs and snaked through the battling warriors. The Paladin was still cleaving Goblins in twain. The Dwarf Twins were fighting to protect the Enchanter, who in turn was casting spells, fireballs exploding with little mushroom clouds like atomic bombs, and the Halfling was hanging around in the background and throwing flaming bottles of oil at the Goblins.

If they were still in the room when the Dark Goddess showed up, they were all going to become extinct.

BJ didn’t much care—he’d gotten what he came for, and if none of his party survived, there wouldn’t be any argument over how to split the loot.

Besides, the Orb of Healing was unsplittable.

“Let’s try restarting your computer,” BJ said. “If you still have a problem, call me back.”

The Elven Mage ducked through the Gothic arch at the far end of the room and ran past the splintered bodies of two Guardian Gargoyles. Behind him, he heard the chiming chords that accompanied the appearance of the Dark Goddess, followed by the sounds of a
lot
of dying.

Stupid noobs,
BJ thought. And when the Dark Goddess disapparated, he could reenter the room and pick up the gold and possessions of his deceased companions.

That Fire Sword would come in handy . . . for somebody.

BJ had just made anywhere between six hundred and a thousand dollars—
real
dollars, not the virtual gold pieces used in the game. More if he could pick up the Fire Sword.

BJ had played the
Adventure of the Orb
so many times that he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He could do it with perfect competence even when performing his customer service job. But though the adventure was by now tedious in the extreme, the tedium was worth it in terms of income.

The fact was that there were a lot of players who didn’t want to play the lower levels of online games like
World of Cinnabar.
They wanted to start powerful characters right away and were willing to pay—pay
real
money—for those characters and for powerful magic items like the Orb of Healing. It was against the rules of the
World of Cinnabar
for money to be exchanged for these virtual items, but there was no practical way for game administrators—or those of any other MMORPG—to police eBay or the many other auction sites.