This Is Not a Game (33 page)

“More than twelve billion?”

“More than twenty now. Now that Chile’s burned.”

Suddenly Dagmar’s mouth was dry. “Can I have one of your Cokes?” she asked.

“Be my guest.”

Dagmar got a Coke from the fridge and walked to the window. She pushed back the gold curtain and looked out on Los Angeles, the tall glass buildings of downtown as solid and perfect and permanent as the Royal Jakarta Hotel.

In the blue sky she thought she saw the pillar of smoke above Glodok. She blinked away tears.

“Dagmar.” Charlie’s voice was soft. “I won’t have you killed. I don’t do that.”

“You kill whole countries.”

“I ...” Charlie’s voice faded to a whisper. “I can’t stop the agents. I thought I could, but it isn’t going to work.”

She turned to face him. Charlie’s hands had turned into fists. She could see the tendons standing out on his forearms.

“It could be the dollar next,” he said. “The ruble. The yen, the yuan.” He gave her a wild look. “The bots don’t stop. They just go on winning.”

“It’s not illegal to use a machine to trade online,” Dagmar said.

“It’s illegal when the agent is in someone else’s computer,” Charlie said. “And when they’re using a fictional identity.” He gave a growl of frustration. “The bots don’t
know
what’s legal and what’s not. All they know is to keep on trading.” He scrubbed his neck with his hand, as if he were trying to remove a stain. “The Indonesian and Bolivian currencies were weak. But the Chilean currency
wasn’t
—that means the bots now have enough clout to
manufacture
a currency crisis!”

His eyes were wild. “This goes on, I could own all the money in the world!” he said. “And then the money—mine and everyone else’s—would be worthless!”

Charlie looked down at the room’s Oriental carpet and traced its flowery pattern with his fingers.

“Money isn’t anything real,” he said. “It’s just an
idea.
Even gold only has value because everyone agrees it does. If a piece of software can get all the money for itself, that shows everyone that the money is a
sham.
It’s
nothing.
It’s like a magician revealing his trick—once you see it, it’s not interesting anymore.”

Charlie slumped on his pillow, his mobile hands silent in his lap, his spectacles halfway down his nose.

“I don’t understand how the software agents know enough to do this,” Dagmar said. She remembered BJ’s arguments against this even happening. “Real markets are supposed to be self-correcting. They’re incredibly complex. They’re not
Lost Empire.
”

“Markets are self-correcting
over time,
” Charlie said. “The invisible hand and all that. But in the short term, there can be oscillations. And if the bots are smart enough to anticipate the correction, they can make money there, too.”

He looked up, hands forming models in the air. “The bots are very single-minded. They
evolve.
The ones that make mistakes either learn from them or lose everything and go out of business. They’ve been on the loose for four years now—they’ve got massive amounts of empirical data, and
they talk to each other.
” He shrugged, then looked down at the floor again. “I couldn’t tell you how they know what to do,” he said. “I’m not in charge anymore.”

“Why do the Maffya want to kill you?” Dagmar asked.

He looked up. His eyes were filled with a weary amusement.

“The bots raped and plundered them,” he said. “It was some dodgy offshore scheme, I don’t know exactly what. But I have something like four million in Maffya dollars.”

“So when I asked you about it,” Dagmar said, “the day after Austin got killed, you lied to me.”

“I didn’t
know,
” Charlie said. “The bots don’t tell me where or how they trade, they just send me half the profits. But when you asked if the killer was after me instead of Austin, I started checking. And as far as I can tell, a certain day’s deposits in Cayman rightfully belong to a bunch of Russian criminals.” He waved the hand with the empty Coke bottle. “Apparently they have enough illicit clout to find out who Forlorn Hope belongs to.”

“You and your parents,” Dagmar said. “Are your parents in danger?”

“My folks have new security, thanks to our Israeli friends.”

“And you don’t?”

Charlie was irritable. “I don’t want bodyguards hulking around,” he said. “They’d just get in my way. I just stay nimble and pay for things with cash. They can’t track me if I don’t leave a trail.”

He shrugged. “If I could figure out how to give the Russians their money back, I would. When things get a little less hectic, I’ll start researching all that and come up with a name. I’ll pay him back double—that should get me off the hook.”

“It won’t help Austin.”

Charlie gave Dagmar a defiant look.

“I
know,
okay?” he said. “I
know
that bad things have happened! I
know
they’re my fault! I kick myself enough without you kicking me, too!”

You haven’t been kicked nearly enough,
Dagmar thought.

“Sorry,” she said, not sorry enough.

“Listen,” Charlie said, “I’m giving the money away as fast as the system permits. International Red Cross, Oxfam, Red Crescent, even Billy the Kid’s little kampung in Jakarta ... I’m trying to repair as much of the damage as I can.”

She returned to the couch and sat, leaning toward Charlie, her elbows on her knees.

“So,” she said, “you need to tell all the Internet security companies about the gold-farming bots. When the virus-checking programs have the bots in their database, that will take care of most of the problem.”

Charlie shook his head. “Sorry, no,” he said. “Virus-checking programs generally don’t wipe the program, they
quarantine
it so that the experts can study it. Which means they’ll find out how the bots
work,
which means
any one of their engineers
could release a new, improved bot into the environment again, one tooled so that the virus checkers wouldn’t find it.

“
And,
” he added with an emphatic gesture, “what if a hacker took a look at what turned up in his quarantine cage? Better
I
have all the money in the world than some bastard at McAfee or a fourteen-year-old script kiddie.”

Dagmar sagged into the cushions, defeated.

“Your compassion knows no bounds,” she said.

Anger grated in his voice. “I’m trying to think of a way out of this!” he said.

“You said you had a plan to fix the problem.”

“I also said it wouldn’t work.” There was still defiance in Charlie’s voice.

“Tell me about it.”

His jaw muscles clenched.

“Okay,” he said. He looked up at her. “I’ve been manipulating stocks, trying to figure out how the bots would react. That’s what I did with Portcullis, and what I’m doing with Tapping the Source. I’ve been buying and selling online, too. Penny stocks—it doesn’t take much to alter their value. I’ve still got my original bot running on my old PC. It’s networked with the others, and it gets news from the network about what to buy and sell. I’m watching it, and I’m getting an idea of how the bots think.”

“Yes. Good. Go on.”

“When I make certain trades, the bots see it—remember, they’re analyzing tens of thousands of trades every second. When certain things happen, I can count on the bots’ reacting a certain way. And if I can trace their orders and find out where they’re hiding, I could send a patch that will turn them off.” He gave a mischievous look. “Or rather, I’ll tell them to liquidate their positions, send the results to my bank account, and
then
turn off.
Not,
” he said, seeing her face, “because I need the money, but because large sums sitting in the accounts of brokerage houses are a temptation to mischief.”

“Okay,” Dagmar said. “Let’s pretend I believe that.”

Charlie made a cat’s cradle of his fingers. “The problems with the plan are twofold.”

“Twofold,” Dagmar repeated. The first time in her life she’d heard anyone speak the word aloud.

“First, all the actual buy and sell orders come from online brokers, so tracing them would just give us the brokers’ servers, not the servers where the bots are hiding.”

“Right.”

“That’s why I’ve been flying all over the place, talking to the security people at brokerage houses,” he said. “I’ve told them that I’ve found evidence of someone using unlicensed copies of Rialto to manipulate the markets. I’ve got them to agree to let me see a list of the IP addresses from which buy and sell orders of certain stocks originate on certain days.”

“There must be a million online brokerage houses,” Dagmar said.

“I didn’t tell the bots to use some boiler-room operation in Jersey, you know.” Charlie’s tone was scornful. “There are only a handful that are big enough to trade in every market across the world and to swing the kind of trades that brought down Chile. Those are the ones I programmed into the agents in the first place, six years ago.”

“Okay, great,” Dagmar said. “You’ve got the brokerage firms cooperating. So what’s the problem?”

“If the bot is sitting in an insecure computer—which is very possible, considering how they spread—I can send the patch to that IP address and everything’s good. But if the computer is firewalled, I’m screwed. In order to get the patch in, I’d have to find out who that IP address belonged to, contact that person, tell them their computer was infected, and either get them to erase the bot or to load the patch themselves.”

“Or let you through their firewall.”

“Yes.” Charlie looked at the wall in despair. “Do you know how much work that is? It would take thousands of hours.”

“Or thousands of people,” Dagmar said.

She looked at him.

“Or millions,” she said.

He gazed at her with wide eyes.

“Oh,” he said.

Over what remained of the weekend, Siyed sent no flowers, made no calls, and was not observed haunting the apartment parking lot. No Russian killers were seen, and Richard the Assassin seemed to have succeeded in keeping Joe Clever from breaching computer security.

None of this meant peace for Dagmar. She worked madly on
Briana Hall,
trying to figure out how to get the players to track down Charlie’s swarm of bots.

The scenario itself was clear enough—the financiers who hoped to profit from the terror attack would send buy or sell orders to manipulate the market, and the players would track them down and stop them and unknowingly kill Charlie’s bots while they were at it—but the exact game mechanism by which the players would locate and process all this information, and then act on it, was unclear.

Dagmar called an early morning meeting on Monday with the whole design team—“early morning” in this case being an IT euphemism for ten o’clock. She knew how badly they dealt with Mondays.

She wasn’t in very good shape herself. Hoping for clean arteries and a lively mind, she’d breakfasted on oatmeal and Red Bull, but she suspected she’d failed on both counts.

She encountered BJ in the parking lot as they walked to the entrance. He was dressed in a charcoal gray shirt with pearl buttons and softly glowing gray cashmere slacks.

For the first time ever, Helmuth had competition for the title of best-dressed game geek in the building.

Dagmar looked at him and lifted her eyebrows.

“Dressing for the other tycoons?” she said.

BJ spread his hands and did a clumsy pirouette.

“And thanks to you,” he said, “I can afford it.”

She hugged him hello.

“Good for you,” she said.

“Things are looking up. Once I get a paycheck, I hope you’ll let me take you to dinner.”

She grinned. “Absolutely.”

The door opened to her thumbprint. She said hello to Luci at the front desk, saw with satisfaction that no enormous bouquet from Siyed waited, then walked with BJ to the elevator. As they waited in the elevator lobby, Dagmar looked again at BJ. He was glowing with pleasure, the smile on his face just the least bit smug.

“Either this is a fucking great job you’ve got,” Dagmar said, “or you got laid last night. Which is it?”

BJ leaned back and laughed. Louder, Dagmar thought, than the joke quite warranted.

“Why not both?” BJ asked.

She shrugged. “Why not?”

“I was on the phone to the East Coast this morning,” BJ said. “And I nailed the job down.”

“It’s on the East Coast?” Dagmar asked. “Can you talk about it yet?”

“No, the job’s here. I—”

The elevator door opened, and they stepped into the car. The doors slid shut, and BJ turned to Dagmar.

“I was on the phone with Austin’s father,” he said. “I’m going to be the new chief operating officer of Katanyan Associates.”

A long moment followed, the elevator ascending, in which Dagmar looked at BJ and seemed to see a completely new human being, not an old friend but an alien, a total stranger.

“Damn,” she said, for lack of anything better.

His grin was radiant.

“It’s really something, isn’t it?” he asked.

“I ...” She considered him again, still a stranger. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way,” she said, “but do you know anything at all about the venture capital business?”

“I know everything I really need to know,” BJ said. “I know how to evaluate a new idea or a technology. I know how to arrange financing, and I know how to run an office. Austin’s dad—his name is Aram—is coming out to supervise until the arrangement gels. He’s run a business forever. He’ll be my backup.”

BJ had met Mr. Katanyan for the first time at Austin’s memorial and had charmed his way into Austin’s place. Dagmar had to give BJ credit: he had seen his chance and acted on it.