This Is Not a Game (22 page)

One of Austin’s associates stood and introduced himself as Stephen. He introduced Austin’s parents to the group and then suggested that if people would like to talk about Austin, they should feel free to do so.

Then he sat down, an expression of satisfaction on his face.

Oh great,
Dagmar thought.
It’s like a Quaker Meeting. No one is in charge.

She would have preferred a little more direction in this enterprise. Or at least some warning, so that she could have had something prepared.

Or, failing any of that, she could have used the Spirit of God descending on her, as it was alleged to for the Quakers.

A silence followed. Dagmar feigned sipping at her coffee while she ransacked her brain for anecdotes of Austin that would make sense to everyone here, including the parents.

BJ bounced up from his chair. Dagmar looked at him in surprise.

“Hi,” BJ said. He spoke directly to Austin’s parents. “My name is Boris Bustretski, and I’ve known Austin since freshman year at college. We were in the same gaming group—and since he mentioned that you were gamers, you know what that’s like.”

The Katanyans listened with interest. The mention of gaming had touched something that the impersonal world of business and crime and investigation had not.

“Austin was a detail-oriented gamer,” BJ said, “like he was in his other life, I guess—you don’t do as well as Austin did without paying attention to the fine print.”

Dagmar saw Austin’s father nod—he understood business as well as gaming.

“Austin’s games,” BJ went on, “were full of interesting technicalities that told you a lot about his game worlds and that told you a lot about Austin. He always did his research. I remember there was one game where the plot point hinged on metallurgy—it depended on the details of how people with a low tech level counterfeit gold and silver coins, which were used by an enemy to destabilize a kingdom. That’s just an example of Austin’s interest in detail, and how markets work, and how you tell good money from bad.”

BJ offered the Katanyans a wistful smile. “When he came west, he brought your old games with him—that original
D&D
rule set, and
Empire of the Petal Throne,
and those others. He ran those games for us, and I think sharing his parents’ games with us was maybe his way of honoring
you.
” For the first time he looked over the room, and then he looked back at the Katanyans. “Thank you,” he said, and sat.

Mrs. Katanyan was weeping silently. The anger that had simmered in Mr. Katanyan had gone, and he was looking at BJ with gratitude.

Somehow BJ had hit exactly the right note.

Others spoke—for the most part they were Austin’s partners or employees, and their focus was toward the business: Austin’s traits as a boss, Austin’s uncanny knack for finding successful start-ups.

Charlie spoke, mentioning that he, too, had met Austin as a result of gaming in college, and that he’d subsequently had the opportunity to help Austin set up his company.

“I knew he would be a success,” Charlie said. “With that mind of his, there was no way he wouldn’t be.”

As he spoke, he very carefully did not look in BJ’s direction.

When Dagmar spoke, she mentioned that she, too, was an old friend from the college gaming group, and that as a result of that group, she now wrote games for a living.

She knew she couldn’t top BJ’s anecdote about gaming, and everyone else had covered Austin’s professional life, so she told the story of how she’d gotten herself and Austin thrown out of the restaurant. She changed the story a bit, to make it better—she made the restaurant Austin’s favorite, and she avoided mentioning that this had happened on the day when Austin had been murdered.

Her anecdote faded out rather than came to an end, and she sat down in silence. Her stories were really much better when she wrote them down than when she had to tell them aloud.

Afterward there was a buffet in the company dining room. Dagmar noticed that the Katanyans sought out BJ and spent an hour talking to him.

For someone whom Austin had barely seen in the past six or seven years, he had certainly made an impression.

 

 

 

 

Is Great Big Idea seriously expecting us to spend US dollars for this cryptography program?

 

Apparently, yes.

 

Have we found a hidden sponsor?

 

A remarkably unsubtle one, if so.

 

I’m not spending any money on this!

 

That’s your privilege. But I ask myself if my entertainment is worth a special introductory price of $31.99 for some software that may have applications outside the game, and I have to conclude the answer is yes.

 

So says the spook!

 

It’s not whether the game is worth the money, but whether they
should be making us spend it at all.

 

Yeah! This is really pissing me off.

 

With the euro under attack, I very soon may not HAVE $31.99.

 

I think I’m going to drop this game. There are plenty of cheaper
entertainments out in the datasphere.

 

I’m not dropping out. But I’m not doing anything that requires me
to spend $$$.

 

Dagmar looked at the bulletin board and felt another surge of bitter anger, one in a long series. Her prediction about the players’ reaction to Portcullis was absolutely on the money.

It wasn’t so much the players who
were
posting on Our Reality Network. It was the players who
weren’t
posting, who were simply absent.

She couldn’t prove it, but she suspected that players were deserting her game in droves. Millions of them, possibly. And the damage extended beyond a single game: she was losing credibility with her audience. They were going to be much less likely to trust her when it came to the
next
Big Idea game.

The game had entered its third week. Neither the players nor the police nor Interpol had been able to find Litvinov. Murdoch had given up trying to find him in the States and was hoping the Germans would pick him up when he returned to his old Hamburg haunts. Austin had been in a grave in Connecticut for six days. Dagmar’s apartment’s owners had not yet sacked their underwear-sniffing manager. And Charlie had gone crazy—he hardly ever appeared in the office, and instead migrated from one hotel to another. Currently he was renting a cabana at the Roosevelt in Hollywood. He called Dagmar at strange hours and demanded constant updates on the progress of the game.

A chime told Dagmar that she had email, and she clicked to her mail program.

 

Dear Dagmar,

 

I’ve arrived in the City of Angels. They’re putting me up at the Chateau
Marmont—very sweet, don’t you think?

 

I’m still hoping to see you while I’m in town. I know you keep saying
that you have no time, but I’m still hoping you will be tempted to
have dinner with me. I have reservations at the Pentagram tonight at
eight o’clock—will you please tell me that you will come?

 

Your adoring fan,

 

Siyed

 

Dagmar sent Siyed a terse reply to the effect that she was working late and wouldn’t be able to join him for dinner. At which point her phone sang, and Dagmar saw that it was Charlie.

“Have you seen Our Reality today? ” she said. “We’re losing lots of players, Charlie.”

“We are also selling a lot of copies of Portcullis,” Charlie said. “Their servers were jammed today. Whenever I tried to load their page, my browser kept timing out.”

“All you’re doing,” Dagmar said, “is giving hope to a bunch of losers with a delusional business plan.”

“Since when has
your
division of my company made a big profit? ” Charlie asked.

Good point, she had to admit. Great Big Idea, though it had always been in the black, had never been much of an earner, at least as compared with the rest of AvN Soft.

Best to change the subject.

“What do you need, Charlie? ” she asked.

“I need a sit-down. Come see me at the Roosevelt.”

“Why don’t you come to your office? Meetings are what your office is
for.
”

“My office,” Charlie said, “is for burying me in piles of trivia. Talking to
you
is what my
cabana
is for.”

Dagmar looked at the time in the corner of her display.

“I’ve got a recording session this afternoon,” she said. “That’s in West Hollywood anyway. So I can come by after that.”

“Perfect,” said Charlie.

It was only after the phone call was over that Dagmar realized she hadn’t asked what Charlie wanted to see her for.

It can’t be good,
she thought.

 

We are happy to play host to the tens of thousands of new players that
have been arriving in the past few days, but we urge them to check the
FAQ List
and
Player Tutorial
before asking questions in this forum.

Thank you.

(Signed) Frazzled

The recording sessions usually left Dagmar in a buoyant mood. Terri Griff, the actress she’d hired to play Briana Hall, was incredibly talented, and very good at improvisation. It was a good reminder that not all actors were vapid, self-involved mirror gazers.

Or lying shit-heel married psychos, like Siyed.

Dagmar took an active role in this session, playing the part of Maria Perry, Briana’s best friend. Dagmar had never possessed any inclination to become an actress, but during the fifth week of the game, the players were scheduled to phone Maria and try to sweet-talk her into giving them information that would move the game forward. These conversations were very intense and tended to jump in unexpected directions as the players disgorged everything they thought might get them the knowledge they were after, and an actress might not be able to improvise. Dagmar knew exactly what the players would have to say in order to get Maria to spill, and therefore it seemed sensible for her to play Maria herself.

Dagmar found the recording sessions chock-full of positive reinforcement. The life of a writer was a solitary one—you worked alone, and the stuff went into a magazine or a book or onto a Web page, and then you either got feedback or you didn’t. And in the case of her ARGs, a lot of the feedback was carping over small details.

But in a recording session the feedback was
immediate.
Her words were spoken aloud, usually by talented professionals, and she knew at once whether they’d work or not. If rewrites were needed, she could do them on the spot.

“How much does Briana trust Cullen at this point? ” Terri asked. She was tall, with long, dark hair and a pale complexion that belonged more in Elsinore than in L.A.

“I don’t think she does,” Dagmar said.

“In that case,” Terri said, “would Briana say, ‘I saw someone in the courtyard,’ or would she identify Cullen right away? ”

Dagmar paused. “Let me think,” she said.

The sound studio was a small one off La Brea, used mainly for recording commercials. The white sound-absorbent panels on the walls and ceiling were turning yellow with age, and the microphones were venerable steel objects dating from the birth of disco. There was a better-equipped studio in the back used for looping, also mostly commercial work.

The owner of the studio, Ray, sat behind the controls. He was an elderly man with a goatee and a white pompadour and fingers stained yellow with nicotine. The odor of his cigarettes leaked into the studio from the hall outside. He sat behind the console with a melancholy, infinite patience that suggested that perhaps he
had
heard everything.

“We don’t want to make it clear that it was Cullen this early in the game,” Dagmar said. “Maybe she’d say it
could
have been Cullen. Because by this point the players are going to suspect Cullen anyway.”

And then Cullen turns up dead the week after,
Dagmar thought,
and the sinister plot just keeps on rolling.

After recording the conversation between Briana and Maria, Dagmar hung around to listen to Terri record Briana’s call to the police on finding the body of her ex, Duncan.

When they joined the game, the players were asked to provide basic data such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. After joining, the players received a series of phone calls, faxes, emails, and sometimes packages, usually purporting to be from the fictional characters in the game.

In this case, the players were all going to get to overhear Briana’s 911 call.

The actor playing the emergency operator had already recorded his lines, so Terri just waited for the cues and spoke Dagmar’s words—or rather, sobbed and shrieked and wailed them.

Terri did take after take, and each time her voice grew more hysterical, more horrified. Terri’s eyes grew wider, her mouth looser somehow, more moist, the tongue more visible as it pulsed behind the teeth. The color drained from Terri’s face, as if she’d actually managed to work herself into a genuine state of terror. Dagmar was fascinated by the process.