This Is Not a Game (21 page)

“Sure.”

“This way.”

Dagmar followed Charlie down the corridor to another hotel room, where his thumbprint opened the lock. She followed him into the room, which turned out to be a corner suite decorated in a Hollywood version of Louis Quinze and scented with sachets of potpourri. A notebook computer sat on a white marble-topped table in the corner, its display showing a Pinky and the Brain screensaver.

“You’re staying in the same hotel? ” Dagmar asked.

“It makes things more convenient.” He went to the minibar and pulled out a half-liter bottle of Coca-Cola—imported from Mexico, where Coke was made with white sugar instead of corn syrup and therefore tasted far better. Charlie had cases of the stuff at his house, and more in a cooler near his office.

“Want something to drink? ” he asked.

She took another Coke. Charlie sat on a patterned armchair and began to unlace his shoes.

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m going to try to explain to the Katanyans just how wealthy their son was. Mr. Katanyan’s well off, I think, but as Austin’s heir he’s rich twenty times over.” He ran a hand over his balding head. “My nightmare is that Mr. Katanyan will think he can run his son’s company.”

“He wouldn’t. Would he? ”

“He runs his own import company, why not? But there are some crucial differences between seed-stage venture capital and a family-run Oriental carpet business.”

Dagmar didn’t answer, but instead looked at the minibar.

“Are there peanuts or something in there? ”

“Help yourself.”

She found a packet of peanuts and seated herself on a sofa. Charlie looked at her.

“Now,” he said, “I don’t want you to scream.”

She gave him a narrow look.

“I want you to change the game,” he said, and then cut her off as she was about to protest.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “This will add to the coolness factor.”

“I’m listening,” she said, and put down the packet of peanuts.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ve got more than a million players, right?”

“More than
three
million, as of this morning.”

“So what if they each received a text message that consisted of
one
packet of data. Encrypted. And when they decrypted it, they discovered that they
still
had only one packet of data and that they all had to be combined in the right order for the message to make sense.”

Dagmar looked at him.

“How big is a packet? ” she asked.

“No smaller than twenty bytes, no bigger than sixty.”

“The routing information might be larger than the message.”

“Yes.” Charlie nodded. “It would. But the routing information could be a part of the puzzle. If you include the IP layer, it would include the originating IP address, which could be crucial to finding out who sent the messages.”

Slowly, Dagmar lifted her drink and took a contemplative sip.

“One big problem,” she said, “is that a lot of our players don’t actually play, they just lurk.”

“So make the number of messages smaller and build in a lot of redundancy.”

“Okay. So we break the message into, say, three thousand packets, and we send out multiple copies of each packet until everybody gets one. Then they have to decode the thing, right? ”

“Yeah.”

“And reassemble it.”

“Which won’t be hard, because each message will contain a sequence number as part of the routing information.”

“We’ll have to create some kind of engine that reassembles it. We can’t expect them to do it by hand.”

Charlie shrugged. “Whatever.”

“And the result could be a graphic or a photo, which would be more cool than a text message. And more unanticipated.”

Nodding. “That’s good.”

“Okay.” Dagmar lifted her Coke bottle and offered Charlie an ironic toast. “I don’t actually hate this idea. Especially since it won’t require a lot of rewriting, and I can shift most of the work onto Helmuth and his staff.”

Charlie smiled.

“Excellent,” he said. “Now, the cipher I want you to use is called Portcullis.”

She looked at him. “Why Portcullis? I never heard of it.”

He shrugged. “Portcullis is a start-up out of Dallas. They have a good product, and they also offer support in case the players run into trouble.”

A feeling of unease seeped like a cool mist into Dagmar’s brain.

“This is a private company?” she asked. “They sell their product?”

“Yeah. They sell the cipher fairly cheaply and plan to make most of their money selling support.”

Mentally, Dagmar probed this idea and realized she didn’t like it.

“Why not use freeware?” she asked. “You can find military-grade encryption on the Web and use it for free.”

Charlie straightened in his chair and looked down at her. “Firstly,” he said, “because Portcullis offers support, and a lot of the players haven’t necessarily used decryption programs before.”

Dagmar did not find this argument convincing.

“And secondly . . . ? ” she said.

He gazed down at her expressionlessly.

“Secondly,” he said, “because Portcullis is the program I want you to use.”

Anger flashed through Dagmar, but it faded quickly, to be replaced by an anticipation of oncoming wretchedness—that there was some horrible truth about to emerge, something that would send her spiraling into misery. A sense that she was on a ship running before the storm, only vaguely aware of the reefs looming ahead.

“How much,” she asked, “will Portcullis cost the players? ”

“Basic service is something like thirty bucks and comes with half a year’s free support.”

She looked at him and folded her arms across her chest.

“Charlie,” she said, “that’s going to make the players berserk. Traditionally, ARGs are
free Internet entertainment.
Players aren’t used to paying for them, and they
won’t.
ARGs that expected their players to pay for something have all . . .
struggled,
to put it as kindly as I can.”

Charlie nodded at her words, but only to dismiss them.

“Enough of them will buy Portcullis to make this work,” he said.

A sudden urgency possessed her. She had to make herself understood.

“Charlie,” she said, “we’re on our way to more than three million players. This game is
already
an enormous success. Why are we risking that success? ”

He looked down at her. “I do not have to explain my decision.”

She spread her hands helplessly.

“Give me something to work with, okay?” she asked. “Make believe this is a rational act.”

Charlie said nothing.

“Are you
invested
in Portcullis in some way? ”

Charlie shook his head slightly, a few millimeters left and right. “No. Absolutely not. This decision does not benefit me in any way.”

“Is Austin’s company involved? ”

“No,” Charlie said. “Portcullis came to him for funding originally, but Austin turned them down.”

“Could that be,” Dagmar said, her voice rising in heat, “because they’re competing with stuff that cryptoware geeks give away for
free?
Could that be because
their business model totally sucks?
”

Charlie inclined his head, an absolute monarch conceding a minor matter to a loyal councillor.

“Last month they
did
have a disappointing IPO,” he said.

In frustration, Dagmar raised clawed hands and slashed at an invisible barrier. “
So why are we—
”

“Let’s just say,” Charlie said, “that I believe in their product.”

Dagmar gave up. She sagged back on the couch in utter capitulation.

Charlie was screwing again with the shape of Dagmar’s game. The inclusion of Austin’s death and the search for Litvinov had unbalanced the structure, but she had hopes that if she skated fast enough, she could beat it into shape again.

Now they were set to anger millions of players. Millions upon whom Dagmar depended for goodwill. Millions who could have stayed in
Planet Nine
and made Charlie’s new acquisition wildly profitable.

She looked at him, the Type One Geek she’d known all her adult life, and wondered if he knew the havoc he was wreaking upon his own potential bottom line.

“Charlie,” she said, “Litvinov was found in Santa Monica.”

“Yeah.” His face remained expressionless.

“I’ve seen the Seahorse. It’s less than a mile from where you live.”

“Right.”

“Is it more than a coincidence that Litvinov is first seen hanging around your business, and next he turns up
right in your neighborhood?
” What if it really
was
you he’s gunning for? ”

Dagmar saw a twitch in a corner of Charlie’s mouth.

“I don’t know who he was after, Dagmar,” he said.

“And now you’re running your company from a hotel room,” Dagmar said. “It’s like you’re afraid to go home
or
to the office. Plus you’re involved in a scheme that will bring Portcullis a huge wave of unexpected income, which will drive up their stock price. Which”—she leaned toward him—“looks just like a classic pump-and-dump stock fraud, the kind the Russian Maffya does
all the time.
”

Again Charlie gave that brief, taut shake of the head.

“You’re wrong, Dagmar,” he said. “You’re way off base.”

She reached a hand toward him but fell short. She let the hand hang in the air.

“Charlie,” she said, “are you in trouble? ”

“If you want to save me trouble,” he said in a flat, controlled voice, “you will
follow my damn instructions.
”

Dagmar withdrew the hand.

“Right,” she said, and stood.

She carried her drink to the door.

“Don’t forget your peanuts,” said Charlie.

 

 

Can I ask a question? What’s this “destegging” I keep reading about?

 

 

Yeh. That one has me pussled to. And what is teh PM’s besides the
afternoon ha.

 

 

Our bulletin board welcomes all of the thousands of new players
that have been showing up in the past few days, but we urge
them to check the
FAQ List
and
Player Tutorial
before asking
questions.

 

 

Ok thats cool ha. Is there a way to meet briana cuz she is teh hawt.

 

Austin’s memorial service was held at Katanyan Associates in a mahogany-paneled boardroom, the guests seated in padded brown leather chairs with brass accents, the whole a California simulation of a New York bastion of Old Money. The illusion was spoiled by the large LCD screens used for teleconferencing, and by the long smart table with the intelligent, touch-responsive screens, all of which demonstrated that the room belonged not to nineteenth-century robber barons but to those of the twenty-first.

The largest of the LCD screens now showed a large studio portrait of Austin, the one used on his company’s home page, smiling out from between tall, brilliant flower arrangements placed on a table below the screen. Austin’s parents sat in the brown overstuffed chairs, and Dagmar went to say hello and then signed the memorial book.

Dagmar had dressed for the memorial in hose, Blahnik satin shoes, a Marc Jacobs skirt, and a navy Chanel jacket, the last three items of which she’d picked up in a Beverly Hills secondhand store, the sort of place where Orange County trophy wives dumped the previous year’s fashions. Dagmar, whose usual tastes ran to khakis and freebie game-convention T-shirts, didn’t care if her clothes were eighteen months out of date—and the Chanel jacket, in any case, was timeless.

Style sense had always been something she’d planned to acquire, if she ever had the time to think about such things.

Most of the people in the room were Austin’s partners and employees, and though she knew a few faces from Austin’s parties, they were mostly strangers. Charlie either hadn’t arrived or was off organizing something. Dagmar helped herself to some coffee from a brushed-aluminum urn and took a seat.

Half a minute later, BJ dropped into the seat next to her.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi, yourself.” She felt suddenly more cheerful.

He wore gray polyester slacks and a brown twill jacket. Hours spent eating junk food while squinting at low-end monitors had added about thirty pounds to BJ’s stocky frame, but the arms and shoulders were still powerful. His fair hair hung over his ears, and he’d added a set of muttonchop whiskers to his mustache. There were fine lines around his eyes, and he wore a pair of rimless spectacles that made him look like a down-at-the-heels grad student.

She put her coffee on the table, slid her chair closer to his, and reached out to give him a hug. He patted her bemusedly on the back.

“Good to see you,” he said.

He looked around the room. Mischief sparkled in his blue eyes.

“Where’s Charlie? ” he said. “Hiding? ”

The question made Dagmar uneasy. She had not ceased wondering if Charlie was in truth hiding, not from BJ, but from Litvinov or what he represented.

“He’s probably organizing something,” Dagmar said.

“I’ve been looking at your game,” BJ said. “Nice, devious stuff.”

“Thanks.”

Charlie entered at that point, with a man and a woman who were slightly familiar to Dagmar and who she assumed were more of Austin’s business associates. He spared BJ a glance, but nothing more than that. He said hello to Austin’s parents and introduced the two people he was with, then took a seat at the far end of the table.

BJ stared at him throughout, his blue eyes hard. Charlie’s face was mild.