This Is Not a Game (39 page)

“What’s the matter?”

“When you’re played,” Dagmar said, “you play back.”

Richard’s eyes narrowed in thought.

“We tell him what he wants to know,” Dagmar said. “And then we pull the rug out from under him.”

Richard the Assassin looked at her with a growing admiration.

“Excellent,” he said.

 

 

 

 

Dagmar cleaned her office. Dropping Siyed’s faded flowers, one pot after another, into the trash can, the series of clangs ringing off the walls, echoing down the hall.

A warning Klaxon.

She picked up the trash can with its ceramic, earth, and plant matter and carried it away in a swirl of dry petals. She didn’t have a place to put it, really, so she took it to the break room and swapped it for the trash can there. It held only used tea bags, foil packets that had once contained instant hot chocolate, and an empty donut box.

It was a lot lighter.

He had trapdoors
everywhere, Charlie had said.
He’d been thinking about doing a scorched-earth on the company long before I took control... Wiping out everything before the creditors could have it, or lurking in the computers in order to sabotage our successors or to steal things. Bad as the damn Soong. He could have ended up in jail!

Except that Charlie had locked him out before he could do any damage. It had been Dagmar herself who gave him a computer, an account, and a paycheck. Once he had access, he used one of his trapdoors to create CRAPJOB and alter Dagmar’s own account so that he could use it to go anywhere in AvN Soft’s system.

That had been posted on Our Reality Network, where anyone could read it. The players assumed the numbers had been made up, but Dagmar had known they were real.

And one other person had seen that number and realized right away what Charlie had done, and had known how to turn the whole thing to his own advantage.

Figueroa? That’s
on
Figueroa, right?

My God, she’d spoken Charlie’s location aloud right in front of him.

She remembered him standing ten feet away, sipping his coffee, pretending he wasn’t listening.

She remembered him in the steak house, the dull fury in his eyes as he talked about Charlie stealing his company.

Dagmar went into her office and dropped the trash can next to her desk. Another clang.

She grabbed a dusty stack of papers from her shelf and, without looking at them, dumped them in the trash. They’d been there for months: if they were important, she’d have needed them by now.

You
are
helping,
she’d said.
You’re the only person I can talk to.

And then she’d handed him all he needed in order to kill Charlie and collect millions. Billions.

He had played her. He had played her totally.

His games back at Caltech had always been about deviousness and betrayal. All the nonplayer characters in the games had their own agenda. They all functioned within ruthless, logical parameters. They were all treacherous, all faithless, all false. Charlie, Dagmar, and Austin had grown to trust the fact that they would be stabbed in the back sooner or later.

Dagmar hadn’t realized that the games were
autobiography
. All those false-hearted mercenaries, recreant knights, and traitorous grandmothers were the same person.

They were all BJ.

All along he had been telling the world how his mind worked, and everyone had thought it was fiction.

She could reconstruct his chain of logic.

Charlie and BJ had worked on Rialto
together.
They
both
created the algorithm that the agents used to acquire knowledge and evolve new strategies.

Why, he must have wondered, should Charlie be the only one to profit?

Charlie had
cheated
him. Let the company go into bankruptcy just so that he could buy it with money he’d earned on the sly.

Charlie
owed
him. Owed him on the business, the money, the clothes, the cars, the homes. Owed him half of everything.

Charlie wasn’t paying that debt—and the debt was greater than BJ had ever imagined, half of twelve
billion,
as he had just discovered. So when chance made the opportunity not only desirable but profitable, Charlie was punished by having his face shredded from his skull with sixpenny nails.

Which didn’t quite solve the problem, because it only reduced the number of people who knew about the gold-farming bots from three to two.

Dagmar had to be dealt with, too.

Because, in this line of utilitarian reasoning, Dagmar was just another obstacle.

 

Dagmar found another pile of old papers and heaved them into the trash. The can rocked; a small cloud of dust rose.

She looked at the rocking trash can and dared it to tip over.

It chose obedience and returned to an upright setting.

Richard entered the room on his silent white Converse sneaks, a laptop in his hands. His nose wrinkled at the scent of dust.

“I’ve got your new machine. And your new account.”

“Very good.”

She dumped another stack of papers to clear a space on the desk, and Richard put the machine down.

By then, Richard had found out how Dagmar’s account had been compromised. A keystroke monitor had been installed on her office computer, one that recorded every single letter or numeral that she typed and made it available for download by someone else. It had given away her passwords, which were the keys to everything else. BJ had found Patch 2.0 on the IMAP server and acted to replace it with his own, searching through the entire system for the patch and its copies, then overwriting them with the patch that had the number of his own offshore account.

I’m looking for the script for Week Six, Part One,
BJ had said. She’d found him using her computer. He had just installed the keystroke monitor.

Dagmar should have recognized BJ’s careless, sloppy coding. He was always in too much of a hurry for elegant code.

Richard set up the computer and connected it with a cable to the AvN Soft network.

“You don’t use the wireless network now,” Richard said. “You don’t know who’s going to be listening.”

“Check,” Dagmar said.

Her old computer would be used entirely for routine correspondence, and for anything she wanted BJ to know.

Richard handed her a portable memory card. “Here’s all the details of Charlie’s correspondence with the brokerage firms.”

“Thanks.”

The new computer, with her new online identity, would be used for anything important.

She booted the new computer, paged through Charlie’s email on the memory card, and wrote the first of several emails to the officers of various brokerage firms. She let them know that, after Mr. Ruff’s unfortunate death, she was now handling the matter of the bootleg Rialto programs, and she hoped to continue the same degree of cooperation, particularly in the matter of the trades for Tapping the Source Ltd. on the following Monday.

She sent that letter eighteen times. A brief business letter, eighteen times, to help save the world.

She got out a notepad and wrote a list of things to do.

With someone—with
BJ
, since she had to think of him as the enemy now—with BJ staking out her apartment, there was no way she’d return there. She’d have to find a hotel or something and hope it worked out better for her than for Charlie.

BJ, she thought, could have killed Siyed easily. With his big hands and powerful arms and shoulders, he could have hammered the little man to the ground with only his fists.

Dagmar wondered if he had bruises and cuts. If so, he would be avoiding her until he healed.

She stared out the window into the parking lot. Sudden hot rage flooded her. BJ had reached through
her
to kill Charlie. He had used her—
used her very own tools
—to deceive, to manipulate, and to kill.

She tilted her head back and
screamed,
a hoarse cry of fury and frustration and grief. Her ears rang with the sound.

After her shriek, the silence of the building seemed profound.

In a storm of anger she reached for her pen and added a new item to the list.

•
Fuck up BJ

Her actual job title was executive producer, but the players called her puppetmaster.

She hadn’t lived up to the name. She’d been dancing at the ends of someone else’s strings, a perfect, cooperative pawn in someone else’s fantasy of power and murder.

It was time to show BJ just who the real puppetmaster was.

Then she put the pen down on the desk and thought about nothing else for a long while.

“Are you all right? ”

Dagmar considered her answer while she turned the notebook over so that Helmuth couldn’t read her notes.

It was safe to say, she thought, that she was not all right.

She swung her chair around to face him. He stood in the doorway, a concerned look on his handsome blond head.

“I had to identify Charlie’s body,” she said. Explaining about Siyed, she’d decided, would have taken too much energy.

“I’m sorry,” Helmuth said.

“I couldn’t identify him,” Dagmar said. “He was too torn up.”

Helmuth seemed not to know where to go from there. He took a step into the room and raised his arms. Dagmar rose from her chair and hugged him.

Perhaps she felt a little better.

They surrendered their embrace. “Some of us are going out for pizza,” Helmuth said. “Want to come? ”

She shook her head. “I have too much work.”

“Should we bring some pizza back for you?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

“Your friend Boris did well last night.”

The words sent a shock through her. Her mind whirled. Her shock must have been clear, because Helmuth clarified.

“The mix-up about Banana Split,” he said.

“Oh.” A hollow laugh rose from her chest. “I’d forgotten about all that.”

“Boris went into one of the chat rooms on
Planet Nine
and waited for some of the players to come in—they’ve started hanging around Joe’s Joint and the Galaxy, like they were real clubs. Desi was there, and Corporal Carrot, and some others. And Boris started up a conversation about hauling asteroid ore to the smelters at the New Dome on Mars, and along the way he mentioned he’d like to ski the Banana Split someday.” He laughed. “You should have seen how fast they all left the room! Boris was all alone, talking to himself!”

“He’s slick,” Dagmar said.

Helmuth nodded approvingly.

“He calls you Hellmouth, by the way,” Dagmar said. “After the other night.”

Helmuth smiled. “I bait the hook of temptation,” he said, “but do they bite? ”

“How late were you out? ”

“Three or four, I think.”

“Well,” Dagmar said, “be careful he doesn’t corrupt
you.
”

After Helmuth left, Dagmar sat before her computer again. BJ had been out with Helmuth all of Wednesday night and well into Thursday morning, when Charlie had died.

BJ had gone out with Helmuth to establish his alibi, and then compounded the alibi by sending Dagmar a letter filled with Internet cant, one that arrived in her mailbox at a certain time. Charlie died a short time afterward, which gave BJ a small window to actually plant the bomb himself, but BJ had probably intended the bomb to explode sometime Wednesday night.