This Is Not a Game (30 page)

Dagmar smiled thinly. “Can we get back to our love lives? Sad to admit, that’s the less depressing subject.”

“It’s like moving from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the Slough of Despond, but—whatever.” BJ gave a self-conscious smile. “I’m celibate on account of poverty,” he said. “The only women who want me are crazy, or single parents who need a father and a second income for their kids.”

“You don’t want to be a father?”

“What I don’t want,” he said, “is to be a stepfather in a trailer court with a swarm of underdisciplined children and no money.”

She nodded. “Yeah. That’s understandable.”

He looked at her, then shrugged and smiled.

“We’re pathetic,” he said, “but at least we’re not in Chile.”

A cold finger brushed her spine. She looked up at him in shock.

“What happened in Chile?” she asked.

“Didn’t you hear? Their currency collapsed today—the Chinese traders again, supposedly. All of South America is on the edge of a depression worse than anything since the nineteen thirties.”

Dagmar sucked in breath. Her mind spun. BJ talked on.

“They say the Chinese are taking out their competition, one currency at a time. It makes sense—Indonesia’s got a huge population, and so does Latin America. These are all people who work for coolie wages, just like the Chinese. From the Chinese point of view, it’s best to keep their economies from ever developing.”

Dagmar thought about that, spoke slowly. “So you think it’s Chinese government policy?”

BJ shrugged. “Their government can be ruthless, and they’re smart and calculating. We know that.”

Images of Jakarta flashed in Dagmar’s mind—the mobs, the police shooting, the tiny bodies strewn on the pavement. The pillar of smoke over Glodok.

“But,” she said, “if Latin Americans are really desperate, they’ll work for less money than the Chinese.”

“Not if the employers don’t have the resources to pay wages in real money.” BJ narrowed his eyes in thought. “Investment will eventually come in, though, right? From other countries. But the country might be China—using the Latin Americans’ own wealth to buy their own factories. It’s a win-win for the Chinese.”

Dagmar decided to change the subject before she lost herself entirely in the nightmare. She gave BJ a wan smile.

“You crashed an economy once, right?” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry?”

“Austin told me that you and Charlie crashed
Lost Empire.
”

“Oh.” He gave a grin. “Yeah, we did that.”

“On purpose?” BJ and Charlie had never been destructive hackers.

“No, it was an accident.” He sipped his iced tea. “When we were shopping AvN Soft around, we both got involved with the game. We spent fourteen hours a day bashing wizards and fighting monsters and stealing treasure. But when the first of the venture capital came in, we had to drop the game and build a real business.”

“So you crashed
Lost Empire
because you couldn’t play anymore?”

“No.” He gave a little laugh. “It’s kind of embarrassing, what we did, actually. We were so freaking young.”

“Go ahead.”

BJ ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair.

“Okay,” he said. “We cashed in all our armor and weapons and magic stuff for the virtual gold pieces they used in the game, and then we put a couple of our software agents to work. We programmed them to make money, so that when we had time to get back to
Lost Empire,
we’d still be in the game, and with luck in a better position than when we left.”

“You had the software agents play
you?
”

“Play our characters, yeah. They had our passwords and just stayed logged on twenty-four/seven, buying and selling. It wasn’t hard, if our characters weren’t moving around, just buying stuff in the market in the Old Imperial City, which was basically the market for the whole world. We were, like, testing our work. Doing a proof-of-concept. And the thing worked out—in four weeks Rialto had
Lost Empire
on its knees. Between the two of us, we had monopolies in lumber mills, flour mills, the woods and fields the lumber and the flour came from, all the mines that produced iron, gems, gold, silver, and copper. We owned all the warehouses. If anyone else competed with us, we’d undersell them and drive them out of business, then buy whatever was left and jack the price up. That way we ended up with all the cash, too. The only thing we couldn’t control was the magic items, because the game produced those on a schedule, or randomly.”

“By ‘we,’ you mean the agents.”

“The software, yeah. And
Lost Empire
came to a screeching halt. The game masters had to shut everything down, and they confiscated all our property and gave the players a bunch of free game gold to make up for being ripped off.” He laughed. “God, we were
infamous.
But they didn’t know our real names, just our online identities. Otherwise we might have gotten our asses sued off.”

A cold ice-water thought drenched Dagmar’s brain.

“Is that what the Chinese are doing?” she asked. “In the real world?”

“Using software agents?”

“Yeah.”

BJshook his head. “
Lost Empire
basically had only a couple of dozen tradeable commodities, that and armor and weapons and magic stuff. The real world has fifty million times as much complexity, and real-world economies have more mechanisms for correcting themselves.” He grinned. “Believe me, Charlie and I discussed this. We had all sorts of fantasies about conquering the real world the same way we conquered
Lost Empire.
” He shrugged. “But you know how the agents we unleashed on the real-world markets turned out. They’re good, they’re making money for Charlie and everyone who rents one ...” He laughed. “Nobody owns the planet yet.”

“Guess not.”

Twelve point three billion,
she thought. But even that wasn’t enough to bring down a large, diverse, robust economy like that of Chile.

Chad, maybe.

Something else was going on.

She thanked BJ for listening, paid for both meals, and took the 101 back to the valley. She worked past ten o’clock, at which point the thought of a swim in her apartment’s pool began to creep softly into her mind. Doing laps in the pool alone in the night, as she’d done in Indonesia. She began to think of the weightlessness, the water caressing her skin, the silence. The eerie glow of the underwater floodlight.

Eventually she couldn’t concentrate on work any longer and drove home.

She parked in front of the ginkgo trees in the parking lot. As she got out of the Prius, the scent of the rotting fruit stung her nostrils, a disgusting combination of vomit and semen that was like a fraternity the morning after the homecoming party, and she stepped away from the smell. She walked to the iron apartment gate and prepared to give the lock her thumbprint. A shadow moved quickly toward her from the darkness between a pair of SUVs, and Dagmar’s nerves gave a shriek.

She tried to get her heart under control and briefly considered flight—no, she realized, he’d probably catch her. If she tried to open the gate, he could pin her against the iron bars. And so—adrenaline booming in her ears like kettledrums—she hastily adjusted her car keys in her hand so the keys were protruding from between her fingers, improvised brass knuckles.

Her reactions had improved since Jakarta. If this guy tried to attack her, she was going to do her level best to fuck him up.

Unless, of course, he was a Russian assassin with a gun, in which case she would die.

The man stepped into the light, and Dagmar saw it was Siyed.

“Shit!” she said. “You scared the piss out of me!”

“I had to see you, love,” Siyed said. His pupils had shrunk to pinpricks in the floodlights. “Dagmar,” he said, “you’re all I can think about.”

“Are you
stalking
me now?” she demanded. “Go home!” She pointed at the street and talked to him as if he were an overaffectionate dog. “Go home!”

“I can’t!” Siyed staggered toward her. He was a tiny man, only two or three inches over five feet. Once Dagmar had enjoyed the lightness of his frame, the delicacy of his hands and wrists, but now she just wanted to throw him across the parking lot. He wore chinos and a white cotton shirt, and in the glare of the floodlights his dark eyelashes were black commas drawn above and below his eyes.

Her grip on her keys loosened. She couldn’t be afraid of a man shorter than she, even if he
was
barking mad.

“Dagmar, I love you!” he croaked. “I only want to be with you. You’re like night and day and moon and sun—”

She interrupted before she could become any more cosmic than he had already made her.

“Siyed,” she said, “you’re fucking married! Go back to your wife!”

“I can’t!” he said again. He blinked up at her. “Oh my God,” he said. “You’re so dazzling.”

He fumbled for her hand. She pulled away from him. The stink of the rotting ginkgo fruit lay in the back of her throat like a coating of phlegm that she couldn’t hawk out.

“Go home!” she said again. And then, more gently: “This is
California.
You can get
arrested
for this kind of behavior.”

“I can’t go home.” Siyed’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I told Manjari about us. I told her we were in love!”

“We’re
not!
” Dagmar cried. Out of sheer frustration she waved her fist, and Siyed jumped back at the glint of the keys in her hand.

“There’s no obstacle now, love!” Siyed said quickly. “We can be together. I’ve got it all arranged ...”

“Did you think to
ask
me about these goddam arrangements first, whatever they are?” she demanded. “Did you think to
ask
me whether you should tell your wife anything about me?”

“I did it for you!” Siyed said. Tears spilled down his face. “It’s all for the two of us!”

Dagmar turned from him and jabbed at the gate with her thumb.

“I see you around here again, motherfucker,” she said, “I’m having you arrested!”

“But Dagmar . . . ,” he moaned.

Dagmar swung the creaking iron gate open, then shut. Siyed stepped close to the gate, and the shadow of the bars fell across his face.

“Dagmar!” he cried.

“Go away!”

She stalked toward the stairs, then up and to her apartment, where she had to restrain herself from slamming the door behind her and waking any of the neighbors who hadn’t already been roused by all the shouting.

She didn’t turn on the lights. Instead she went to the window over the sink and looked out to see if Siyed was still in the parking lot.

He was gone, at least from the patch of asphalt she could see through the gate.

He could still be skulking outside her view, though. For a moment she fantasized about calling the cops, and then decided she was too tired to wrangle with Siyed
and
the police.

Dagmar’s gaze shifted to the pool, glowing Cherenkov blue down in the courtyard, and she felt her energy level subside, swirling into emptiness like the pool draining away.

She wanted to use the pool, but she didn’t want to give Siyed the pleasure of watching her swim, assuming that he was still lurking around.

Goddam it.

Instead of swimming, she opened the refrigerator, and in its light she ate half an eggroll that was left over from a take-out Chinese meal two nights before. The cold grease was rancid on her tongue.

Then, still creeping like a bewildered ninja around her own apartment, she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and went to bed.

In the middle of the night she woke up with a sudden understanding of everything that had happened.

BJ was wrong,
she thought.
And Charlie is riding a tiger.

Poor man,
she thought.
He can’t get off.

And then:
None of us can.

 

 

 

 

Dagmar knew what was going on, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Not now, perhaps not ever.

And furthermore, she was trapped in her ordinary life. The next day was Saturday—for Great Big Idea a workday, with
Briana Hall
scheduled for another update, complete with a live event in London that would begin at 8 A.M. California time. Dagmar was in her office by seven, gulping coffee and digging through Siyed’s employment records from
Curse of the Golden Nagi
.

She found that she wanted to clear herself with Manjari. She didn’t want to come clean, exactly—if she could manage this without having to admit that she’d actually been to bed with Siyed, that would be fine with her—but she wanted Manjari to know that, despite what Siyed had told her over the phone, she wanted no part of him now, that whatever romantic fantasies Siyed was spinning were entirely a product of his own unhinged imagination.

It occurred to Dagmar that Manjari might well be skeptical of whatever claims her husband’s lover might make.

I don’t want him
.
Please take him back
.

Was that convincing or not? But why
wouldn’t
it be convincing?

She didn’t
want
Manjari’s husband, right? Why wouldn’t Manjari believe that?

Dagmar decided she was getting paranoid.

None too soon,
whispered an internal voice.

But if she didn’t have some way to get ahold of Manjari, Dagmar wouldn’t have a chance to say anything. And Siyed’s file was not very forthcoming where his London family was concerned.

The file had Siyed’s email address. His cell phone number. The different number that he’d been assigned when he was in the States and given one of Great Big Idea’s cell phones. His street address in London. And the name and phone number of his London agent. But Dagmar didn’t want to talk to Siyed or his agent; she wanted to talk to Manjari, and the file didn’t offer Siyed’s home phone number, where Manjari might reasonably be expected to pick up.