This Is Not a Game (26 page)

Dagmar took a contemplative sip of her drink.
You’re going to do this, Dagmar,
Charlie had said.
Because you owe me, and you know it.

“I can see that, I suppose,” she said. “But why now? If Charlie is really involved with the Maffya, and there is an assassin running around looking for him, you’d think he’d have other things to do besides prove to himself that he can boss me around.”

BJ lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “He can be erratic if he’s under pressure. Trust me, I know. He can be
crazy.
”

Dagmar thought about this while BJ ate a prawn.

“So,” she said, “tell me what happened with you and Charlie and AvN Soft.”

BJ made a face. “This isn’t my favorite topic.”

“I’ve had Charlie’s story,” Dagmar said. “I’ve had enough from you to know how you
feel
about it, but not what actually happened.”

BJ said nothing for a while, just ate the last prawn. Then he touched his lips with his napkin and pushed the cocktail glass away.

“Okay,” he said. “We both came up with the ideas that made the autonomous software agents work. That was in one of those late-night bull sessions where we were both flinging theory around, and by five in the morning we’d nailed down our particular approach to intelligent, distributed, self-replicating, self-evolving agents. We knew that was what we wanted to spend the next ten years working on.

“And
then
we had to divide up the work, and that was pure chance. I’d been a project manager for Crassus Software, and I knew how to run an office, so I ran the business side. And by default that put Charlie in charge of creating the software—though in the early days we
both
worked on that. He was better at line-by-line coding, anyway.”

He sipped his drink, then put the heavy glass down on the checked tablecloth.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “It wasn’t Charlie who cold-called venture capital firms and who convinced them to take a chance on a couple of twenty-five-year-old software engineers and their wonky ideas about self-evolving software. It wasn’t Charlie who raised the millions to start the company and fill that office tower with software engineers. It wasn’t Charlie who did any of that.”

She looked at his stubborn, defiant face, and she nodded. “Did Austin help? ”

“Right then, Austin was in New York working for Morgan Stanley. But he put us in touch with some people.”

“Go on,” she said, but at that point the steaks arrived, sizzling on hot metal plates set into wooden platters, and they paused for appreciation.

“Eat while it’s hot,” BJ said, and picked up his steak knife.

“So,” Dagmar said, “did you get the big office building right away, or—”

He gave her an amused look from over the rims of his spectacles.

“I’m not talking about this,” he said, “till my surf and turf is
history.
”

Dagmar sighed and picked up her knife. She carved a piece of her rib eye, inhaled its savor, then placed it on her tongue. Juices awakened tired taste buds.

Oh my. Where had this steak
been
all her life?

BJ was using some highly specialized tools to crack open a king crab leg. The carapace snapped; a tiny piece of shrapnel hit Dagmar on the cheek. She flicked it away and reached for her drink.

When the waitress came back with a plate for empty crab shells, Dagmar called for another round of margaritas. She ate her meal with languid pleasure and watched BJ wrestle with his crab legs. By the time the last chunk of crabmeat had been dipped in lemon butter and consumed, Dagmar was well into her second margarita and was willing to view the world from on high, enthroned, like a pagan god, amid a benign radiance.

BJ pushed away his plate.

“That was the best meal I’ve had in a long time,” he said.

Dagmar lifted her arms and stretched.

“Ready for dessert? ” she asked.

BJ laughed. “Maybe I’d better digest a bit first.”

She looked at her watch and saw that it was a quarter after eleven. The dining room was nearly empty, and the noise from the bar had faded.

The waitress cleared their plates and asked if they wanted dessert. Dagmar allowed as how they’d look at menus. The waitress moved away, balancing plates on her arms. Dagmar watched her.

“I’m always glad when I find a waitress who’s just a waitress,” Dagmar said.

“What do you mean? ”

“One who’s not”—Dagmar tilted her head and assumed a perky voice—“ ‘Hello, my name is Marcie and I’ll be your waitress tonight. I’d like to recommend the swordfish, and just in case you’re someone important I’d really really
really
like to be in your next motion picture.’ ”

BJ grinned. “You don’t get that in the Valley so much, I bet.”

“They’re everywhere.”

The waitress—whose name was
not
Marcie—returned with the dessert menu on laminated cards. Dagmar was too full to eat anything more, but she looked at the list for form’s sake. Her glance lifted from the list of desserts to look at BJ.

It struck her that, despite the way he’d been neglecting himself, he was still a very attractive man. BJ gazed down at the menu with a relaxed expression, his blue eyes half-lidded behind their spectacles, and Dagmar considered how few of her memories involved his being relaxed. In school he had always been on the hustle: planning his future, sucking up information, writing vast amounts of sloppy code because he was in too much of a hurry to make it clean. Eventually the hustle had grown so all-encompassing that it had squeezed Dagmar out of his life without anyone quite noticing.

BJ had never allowed himself to be bored. Dagmar wondered if he was bored now.

He looked up at her, saw her looking at him, and his lips firmed in a frown.

“I can see that it’s time to pay for this meal,” he said.

Dagmar hadn’t been thinking of their earlier conversation, but she was willing to take advantage of BJ when the opportunity arose.

“You can order dessert first,” she said.

When the waitress came back, he ordered coffee and strawberry shortcake. Then he turned to Dagmar.

“Actually,” she said, “I was wondering if you find your life boring.”

“I just left a stupid, dead-end job in customer service,” he said. “I supplement my income with the two most despised activities in online RPGs: I’m a ninja and a gold farmer. All of the above is as repetitive as hell.” He thumped his fingers on the table. “So yes,” he said, “I’m bored.”

“Well,” Dagmar said, “I’ll try to keep things from turning too dull for the next few weeks.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“But in the meantime I need to find out as much as I can about Charlie. So I need to find out what happened to AvN Soft.”

He glanced away, a rueful smile on his lips, then turned back to her and visibly steeled himself, squaring his shoulders, sitting more rigidly in his seat.

“Right,” he said. “We started by calling ourselves Advanced von Neumann Software, because our agents were meant to reproduce themselves. But that ended up being misleading, because von Neumann machines are self-replicating
machines,
not software, so we settled for AvN Soft. We started in this old building down in Culver City—it had been an old movie-production facility, and by that I mean
old.
There was junk in there dating from the forties. I wanted to put it on eBay and sell it to collectors, but Charlie insisted we didn’t have time, so we just paid the trash men to haul it away. And then we had to retrofit the whole building to modern standards—my God, there was no high-speed Internet anywhere in the building, let alone a T3 connection. And while that was going on, we found the asbestos in the ceiling
.
So that meant more delays and more money down the drain and guys in moon suits covering half the building in plastic sheeting.

“So then that’s the situation we were in when Soong Scientific went bankrupt. You remember them? ”

“No,” Dagmar said.

“They were bleeding-edge for, like, three years—but it turned out the bleeding edge was nothing but vapor, and when their CEO was arrested by the Chinese government for fraud and bribery and shot in the back of the head, his office tower in the valley became available. I talked Charlie into moving because we could buy the building cheap and it would save money in the long run. But that meant more discussion with the VC people, and more delay and more money . . .” He waved a hand. “Well. You can imagine.”

“I’ve heard Austin describe start-ups. This sounds sort of typical.”

“It felt like we were going off into the wilderness,” BJ said, “felling trees with hand tools, and putting up cabins. It felt like we were fighting bears with stone axes and eating them raw. It felt as if
nobody
had ever done
any
of this before. It felt like we had to invent everything from scratch.”

“Didn’t you have a business plan? ”

“Sure we did. But what did the business plan say about asbestos? What did it say about contractors that never showed up to do their work, about a project manager who found Jesus and ran away to a fundamentalist Bible camp in Arkansas, about old Soong servers that were riddled with Chinese trapdoors and had to be replaced—
Christ,
those Soong people were devious! The business plan didn’t last ten seconds. We were up the creek without a map.”

The waitress brought BJ’s coffee and dessert, but BJ’s story had gained momentum, and he ignored the food placed before him. He jabbed the air with a stubby finger.

“The fact was,” he said, “that Charlie and the development team were wandering in circles trying to get the product finished. I kept having to adjust the business strategy because the software kept mutating out from under me. And there were always choices to make—either do something half-assed
now,
or make a commitment to the long haul and do it
right.
I always made the choice that would pay off in the long run. I
began
by assuming the company would be there forever. The only times I compromised were when Charlie talked me into it—he was always looking over my shoulder and arguing with me instead of doing his own work.”

He spread his hands. “And I was right, wasn’t I? Charlie’s reaping the benefits of all my long-range planning. I’m just not there to share it with him.”

Dagmar nodded. “So how did it end? ”

“It was the first release that killed us,” BJ said. “Rialto was eight months late. There were bugs. The user interface sucked. What we had was a data-mining agent that would analyze publically available financial information—everything from stock market quotes to remittances to exchange rates to raw materials prices to employment rates—and it would make predictions. It would make the trades itself, if you wanted it that way.

“The problem was”—fervor shone in BJ’s eyes—“there was already plenty of software on the market that did that. The competition was fierce. Credit Suisse, for example, had an alg program that would analyze eight thousand stocks
per second
and trade based on predictions set three minutes ahead. Each trade took about a millisecond. They’ve probably got a better system now.

“And let’s face it, Release 1.0 just wasn’t all that successful in the beginning—Rialto was designed to
evolve,
not to be brilliant right from the start. It was hard to explain that to the customers. Word of mouth in the marketplace destroyed us.” He shrugged. “It’s very successful now, I understand.”

“That’s what I hear,” said Dagmar.

“After that,” BJ said, “the money ran out. We had five or six other projects in the pipeline, but it was too late. We kept having to lay off staff. I called every venture capitalist in America and every European merchant bank, trying to raise funds to keep us afloat. Eventually it was just Charlie and me and maybe half a dozen other people in this empty building. He was immersed in programming, trying to keep one of the other projects afloat—and whenever he saw me, he’d just start yelling that it was all my fault. He’d gone totally insane.

“Our options ran out. We declared bankruptcy, and all the assets were seized by our creditors. We’d pledged our copyrights and our own shares against our financing, so we were left with nothing. We stayed in our offices, because the building hadn’t been sold yet and our creditors hadn’t gotten around to throwing us out. And then”—he shrugged again—“Charlie’s backers turned up. They bought the company from the VC people for pennies on the dollar. They retained Charlie and threw me out.”

His blue eyes gave Dagmar a defiant look. “Russian Maffya?” he said. “
You
tell
me.
”

Dagmar was silent. BJ took a fork and jabbed it angrily into his shortcake.

“The least I could get out of all that,” he said from around his dessert, “is a damn meal.”

“Be my guest,” Dagmar murmured.

BJ ate his dessert in wrathful silence. Dagmar’s mind spun in circles, trying to reconcile BJ’s story of AvN Soft’s fall with those of Charlie and Austin.

In any case, the story seemed to cast very little light on Charlie’s current behavior.

The waitress arrived to ask if they wanted anything else. Dagmar looked over her shoulder and saw they were alone in the dining room. The loudest sound from the bar was a cable news channel. Dagmar said they’d have the check and then went to the ladies’.

Her route passed through the bar, and something, some dreadful sense of déjà vu, made her look at the news program perched on its plasma screen above the bar.

The crawl at the bottom of the screen read
Bolivian Currency Collapse.

A shiver ran up her spine.

She remembered watching the same network talking heads five months before, from the bar in the Royal Jakarta.

“Apparently the same traders have now switched their focus to Chile,” one said. “Chile’s the IMF’s poster boy in South America, a perfect example of the neoliberal economic model . . .”