This Is Not a Game (15 page)

 

 

File along with the fact that 216 plus 6518124 is 6518340, which could be a whole = other = phone number. I = never = think numbers are coincidence.

 

I’ve just converted that binary string into ASCII, and it says “cullen’s dead.” Which is probably the clue that you’re really after.

 

 

 

 

Hey, guys! Among the contents of Briana’s bag is an invitation to
Planet Nine,
which is an online RPG. They’re offering free membership for the next eight weeks, which suggests the length of the ARG.

 

 

Hi, Consuelo! Have we met?

 

 

I’ve just subscribed to this forum, though I’ve been lurking for a while. I was waiting for an ARG to start at a convenient time for me, and this is it.

 

 

You’re not a puppetmaster, are you?

A lady never tells. But notice that the
Planet Nine
invitation has a
serial number on it.

 

 

Has anyone noticed that there’s a DVD sitting atop the TV set? I bet
we can get a video if we solve the right puzzle.

 

Of course we have to
find
the puzzle first.

 

 

6518124 doesn’t get much when typed into the YouTube search
engine.

 

 

But the binary string works when you look on Video Us!

 

 

Binary after all! PSYCH!

 

 

Nice work, Desi.

 

BTW, I observe a high gloss to this production that suggests the
house style of Great Big Idea. Not to mention the woman-in-the
hotel motif that might be viewed as autobiographical in view of the
recent history of a certain friend of this bulletin board.

So hi there, Dagmar, if it’s you! We’re on Briana’s trail!

 

Dagmar stood in the lobby of Burger Angeleno and watched the hostess chat on the phone. The hostess was very young, maybe just out of high school, and was talking about somebody named Vincent, who was involved in some soap opera issues with another person named Janis. As she talked, the hostess stood behind the cash register and watched Dagmar with an indifference that was perfectly without affect. It was as if Dagmar wasn’t there at all.

Dagmar wondered if she should just grab a menu and seat herself. She peered around the divider between the dining room and the lobby to see if Austin was waiting for her, but she didn’t see him.

She decided she could wait.

After several minutes the hostess wound up her phone call. She hung up the phone and looked at Dagmar for a long moment, again with that affectless expression, as if she saw nothing worthy of interest.

Dagmar looked back at her. Two could play at this game.

Eventually the hostess was stirred to action. She looked up and to the left, as if she were trying to remember something.

“Can I like help you or anything?” she asked, having at last recalled an approximation of the correct line.

“Table for two,” said Dagmar.

The hostess took two menus out of the rack and led Dagmar to a booth.

“I didn’t know if you wanted anything or not,” she said.

“I wanted to sit down,” said Dagmar.

“You might have wanted to pay,” said the hostess.

“I didn’t have a check,” Dagmar pointed out.

“You don’t have to be so rude about it,” the hostess muttered as she returned to her station.

Dagmar stared after her for a long moment, then reached into her pocketbook for a pen.

A few minutes later, Austin arrived and found her writing on the back of her paper place mat.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A flow chart,” Dagmar said.

Austin dropped his canvas shoulder bag onto the table and sat. “For the game?” he asked.

“No. For our hostess.”

She finished the chart and took it with her to the lobby. The hostess was back on the phone, talking about someone named Tashi. Dagmar walked up to the hostess and held out the flow chart and tapped it with her pen. The hostess looked annoyed.

“I’m talking,” she said.

Dagmar reached out and pressed down the telephone toggle, disconnecting it.

“Tashi can wait,” Dagmar said. “I want to show you something that can help you keep your job. This is a flow chart.”

“A what?”

Dagmar ignored the question. “There’s a box at the top, see. You’ll notice it says
Customer stands in lobby.
And then there’s an arrow from this to the
next
box, which says
Does the customer have a check?
”

The hostess stared at her.

“You’ll see,” Dagmar continued, “that the second box has two arrows, marked
Yes
and
No.
If the answer is
Yes,
you follow another arrow to the box marked
Take his money.
And if the answer is
No,
you follow that arrow to the box that says
Ask the customer if you can help him.
And there’s an arrow leading from that box to the next, which says
Does the customer want to be seated?

“If the answer is
Yes,
the arrow goes to the box that says
Seat him.
And if the answer is
Customer is looking for someone,
the arrow takes you to
Help customer find his friend,
and then to
Seat him.
”

Dagmar put the flow chart down in front of the hostess.

“I left off a few unlikely situations,” she said, “like
Does customer have a gun?
which would lead to a box that says
Give him money,
but I figure in that situation the customer will tell you what to do. But in the meantime, all you have to do is follow these simple instructions, and you’ll do fine.”

The hostess didn’t say thank you, but then Dagmar hadn’t thought she would.

Dagmar returned to her seat and opened the menu. Burger Angeleno was an upscale diner, the kind of place that served you grass-fed bison patties on your burger, offered the option of soy milk in your shakes, and assured you that the chicken nuggets were free-range and had never been within pecking distance of an antibiotic.

“What’s new?” Austin said.

“We launched the new game yesterday,” Dagmar said. “The site had nearly a hundred fifty thousand hits as of noon today, so I’d say we’re in business.”

“Someday,” Austin said, “I hope to have enough time to actually play one of these games.”

“So do I,” said Dagmar.

They looked up as a man approached. He was about twenty, with a spotty complexion. His slim body was neatly encased in a dark suit. He wore a single earring.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m the manager. I understand there’s a problem here?”

“I could use a new place mat,” said Dagmar.

“Donna,” said the manager, “said that you have a gun.”

“Donna,” said Dagmar, “is too stupid to know
what
the fuck I said.”

A few minutes later, as they drove away in Austin’s car, Dagmar rolled down the window and threw a finger at the receding restaurant.

“I’ve never been thrown out of a restaurant before,” Austin said. “And I
liked
that place.”

“Plenty of places to get soy milk shakes in L.A.”

He looked at her from beneath the brim of his Yankees cap.

“Sometimes I worry about you,” he said. “Do you think you might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?”

Dagmar thought about it, then shrugged.

“Who isn’t?” she said.

Austin was a Type One Geek, which is to say he was well over six feet tall and very thin. Because he was now rich, he wore Armani sportswear and custom Ray-Bans and drove a 1957 Corvette, but to Dagmar’s mind he still looked like a Type One Geek, only playing dress-up.

Not that she didn’t love him, of course.

And at least he wasn’t shaving his head, even if he was going bald. You could forgive a rich man a lot for not shaving his head.

And clean on the other end of the scale, he didn’t wear a motoring cap. Points for that, too.

Austin had become a legend in the local world of venture capital because he only had a 63 percent failure rate. Normally 80 percent of start-ups failed, but the 20 percent that succeeded made so much money that they paid for the failures and then some. Austin had somehow made a success of another 17 percent, nearly doubling his company’s income.

Dagmar was really very proud of him.

They found a New Mexican place that had walls covered with embroidered sombreros and black velvet paintings of bullfighters, and Dagmar ordered chiles rellenos, with a sauce made from Hatch green chile.

In Los Angeles, she had observed, menus often told you where the food came from.

“Did I ever tell you about the live event we did in Charleston for
Shadow Pattern
?” she said. “I asked the hotel concierge where I could find a restaurant with good southern cooking, and he recommended a place. So I went in, and I looked at the menu and saw, ‘Roast breast of upland Carolina quail on a bed of beef tongue tar-tare, garnished with generous slices of foie gras.’ ”

“Did you order it?”

“How could I not?” She laughed. “So that was my experience of down-home southern cooking.”

“Someday I’ll buy you a pork chop and a box of instant grits.”

Austin reached into his canvas shoulder bag and retrieved a package done up in fancy wrapping paper, with a large golden ribbon.

“I bought you a present,” he said.

Dagmar took it with pleasure. She tore away the wrapping and found a book bound beautifully in rich brown calfskin. The paper was edged in gold, and a pair of red satin ribbons, to mark her place, had been bound into the book. She looked at the spine.

The Unconventional Adventures of Dagmar,
she read.

“It’s the fan fiction they wrote about you on Our Reality Network,” Austin said.

“Oh my God!” said Dagmar.

“Have you read any of it?”

“No!” she said.

He plucked the volume from her fingers and opened to where one of the red ribbons marked a place.

“I’ve marked my favorite passages,” he said. He propped the book up before him and began to read.
“Ahmed ran his fingers through Dagmar’s strangely attractive pale hair.

“ ‘Ahmed,’ she whimpered,
‘
I only feel safe when I’m in your arms.’ ”

“Oh God,” Dagmar moaned.

“Saved!” Dagmar said as their meal arrived.

“The plates are very hot,” the waitress said.

“So’s the prose,” said Austin. “Are there really Indonesians named Ahmed? ”

“Probably. I never met any. Or had anyone named Ahmed palpate my breasts, for that matter.”

She tasted one of her rellenos and smiled. Whatever it was that Hatch did to its chiles, she approved. The taste was a far cry from what Cleveland thought of as southwestern cuisine, chili con carne drenched in cinnamon and served on a plate of spaghetti.

Austin was still looking at the book.

“There’s an explicit sex scene that follows,” he said. “Written, I suspect, by someone who has never actually
had
sex—the anatomy seems wrong here and there—but she’s read about it with great interest.”

Dagmar kept her attention on her plate. “Why do I think,” she said, “that a thousand years from now, the only thing about me that will survive, in some database somewhere, is this fanfic? ”

“Once the other players found out the sort of thing Simone was writing,” Austin continued, “they began to write parodies. They’re pretty merciless, actually.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I noticed Simone stopped posting after a while.” Austin turned to his other bookmark. “My favorite is a lesbian scene. Let me just give you the flavor of it.”

She snatched the book from his hand and put it on the bench seat beside her. He sighed.

“I hope the people in Bayangan Prajurit never see any of this,” Dagmar said.