This Is Not a Game (5 page)

“Royal Jakarta Hotel?” she said hopefully.

The cop looked at her for a long, searching moment, then motioned her to stay where she was. He thumbed on his radio mic, spoke briefly with someone Dagmar assumed was a superior, and then turned back to Dagmar and spoke to her while gesturing at the rear door.

It seemed he wanted her to get in his car.

“There’s a man back there,” she said, pointing, “who’s hurt.”

He squinted at her and pointed at the rear door again.

She pointed at the download store. “Ambulance?” she said.

“No ambulance.” The cop was losing patience.

Dagmar thought she should insist on an ambulance. Instead she got in the backseat and hoped this wasn’t her last moment of freedom.

The car smelled strongly of the driver’s harsh tobacco. The driver put the car in gear and it sprang away, turning onto a side street. They were still heading in the general direction of the Royal Jakarta, which was encouraging.

A second cop riding shotgun turned around and grinned at her. He seemed very young.

“How are you?” he asked.

Dagmar looked at him in surprise.

“I’m all right,” she said. And then, because he seemed to expect a response, she asked, “How are
you?
”

“I’m good.” He made a fist and pumped it in the air. “I’m very good.”

The car swayed as it swerved around a truck that had been driven onto the curb and then looted. The young policeman nodded, then said, “Where are you going?”

“I’m going to Bali,” she said.

He pumped his fist again. “Bali’s very good.” He opened the fist and patted himself on the chest.

“I’m from Seringapatam.”

Dagmar thought about all the places she was from, and decided to mention the most recent.

“I’m from Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles is very good! Very famous!” The cop was enthusiastic.

She glanced down a side street as they sped along, and gasped. A large building was on fire—she thought it might have been the shopping center she’d visited. Tongues of flame extruded from smashed windows to lick at the sides of the building. Fire trucks and police were parked outside, and she saw pieces of furniture in the streets where they’d been dropped—looted, apparently.

She thought she glimpsed bodies lying among the abandoned furniture, and then the car sped on.

“Are you in the movies?” asked the young cop.

Dagmar tried to get her mind back on the track of the conversation. Was she in the movies? she wondered.

The right answer was
sort of
, but that led to too much exposition. And she had a feeling that reality had taken enough turns today without her having to explain about alternate reality gaming.

“I write computer games,” she said.

“Computer games! Excellent!” The cop made a gun with his two hands and made machine-gun sounds. “
Felony Maximum IV!
” he said. “I always take the MAC-10.”

Dagmar had never played
Felony Maximum,
but it seemed wise to agree.

“The MAC-10 is good,” she said.

The car took another turn, and there, visible through the windshield, was the shining monolith of the Royal Jakarta Hotel. The car rocketed under the portico, and the driver stomped on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a juddering halt.

“Thank you!” Dagmar said. “Thank you very much!”

She tried to open the door and found it wouldn’t open from the inside. The driver barked some impatient commands at the Sikh doorman—the same one who had been on duty in the morning—and then the doorman opened the car door and she stepped out.

“Thank you!” she said to the driver, who ignored her and sped away.

The Sikh was holding the hotel door for her. She looked up and down the facade of the hotel and saw broken windows. Hotel workers had already cleaned up the glass. A hundred yards farther down the street was an overturned minibus that had been set on fire. Greasy smoke hung in the brilliant tropical air.

No bodies, at least. A small favor, this.

Dagmar walked into the hotel, nodded to the doorman’s “Good afternoon, miss,” and went to Mr. Tong’s office. Mr. Tong was alone—apparently he’d already discouraged everyone who needed discouraging—and he looked up as she knocked on the doorframe.

“Miss Shaw?” he said. “Nothing’s changed, I’m afraid.”

“There’s a man,” Dagmar said, “who needs an ambulance.”

Together they got a map of the area, and Dagmar reconstructed her morning walk and the location of the music store. Mr. Tong made the call, then looked up at Dagmar.

“I’ve told them,” he said. “But I don’t know if they’ll come.”

Dagmar thanked Mr. Tong and left, trying to think if there was anything else she could do. Short of going back out onto the streets, there was nothing.

She went to her room and took off her sweat-stained clothing and stood in the shower for a long while. Then she lay naked on her sweet-smelling sheets and turned on a news program and heard the reporter from Star TV talk about “anti-Chinese rioting.”

Anti-Chinese?
she wondered. From what she could see, the rioters hadn’t much seemed to care whose stuff they were looting.

The reporter went on to talk about an “unconfirmed number of deaths,” and the report was accompanied by video, mostly from cell phones, that had captured bits of the action.

CNN showed no video of the riot but broadcast a lengthy discussion of the causes of the currency collapse.

“The government went on a spending spree before the last election,” said the Confident Analyst. “It won them reelection, but they ran through almost all their foreign currency reserves just at the moment when the price of oil went soft. Then they made matters worse by keeping their current account deficit a state secret—and when that secret leaked, it was all over.”

All cancel,
Dagmar thought.

 

 

 

 

Start with a woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought. Because there’s nowhere else to go, because all her options are gone. Because a stranger’s voice on the phone has told her to stay in this place until she’s told to go somewhere else.

From there, reaching back in time, her story unfolds. Perhaps in reverse order. That would be a nifty trick.

Except that you have to
find
the story. It’s not all in one place, as it would be in a novel or a movie. It’s scattered out all through the world, and most of it’s in electronic form.

That’s the sort of story Dagmar writes.

At the beginning of the sort of game that Dagmar designs for a living, you go down the rabbit hole. That’s what it’s actually called, “rabbit hole.” The rabbit hole draws you into a Looking-Glass Land—okay, Dagmar knows, she’s mixing the two Alice stories—a Looking-Glass Land where the truth lies, and where, unlike in real life, you can look behind the mirrors to find out what it is.

A rabbit hole could be anything. A jar of honey that appeared in the mail, a data stick found in a washroom, an online poker site. A wedding in Bengaluru, a ticket to Jakarta. A virus loaded onto your phone.

And where the rabbit hole took you was a place that was just like your own place, except there was another reality hidden there.

In Looking-Glass Land the truth was hidden in source code, layered into Photoshop, transmitted in Morse, hidden in music files, whispered in Swedish or Shanghainese or Yiddish. Secrets were revealed in table talk on poker sites, found in genealogical charts, written with spray enamel on the sides of buildings.

Dagmar figures that some of the woman’s backstory has to be found in
Planet Nine.
Or on Planet Nine. Because that’s where this thing has to start.

 

Charlie, I never made it to Bali. I’m stuck in the Royal Jakarta Hotel. There’s rioting all around and people are getting killed. The airports are closed and I can’t get out. I’ve got $180 in hard currency and some credit cards that I can’t use because the banks are all shut down.

 

I’ve called the embassy and they put my name on a list. They say that if the situation warrants, they will stage an evacuation. They also say in the meantime I might as well stay here, because it’s as safe as anyplace.

 

Any suggestions? You or Austin wouldn’t happen to know anyone out here with a helicopter, would you?

 

Elevator music—saccharine Indonesian pop—tinkled from speakers in the breakfast room. A lavish buffet had been set up for hotel guests: coffee, tea, fruit juices, and a bewildering amount of food, both Indonesian and Western.

Meals were no longer served on the third-floor terrace. Hotel management had apparently decided it was safer to keep their guests under cover.

“Did you see the pillar of smoke?” asked Mrs. Tippel.

“Yes.”

Dagmar hadn’t been able to miss it: her windows faced northwest, and from the fourteenth floor she had an excellent view of the part of the city that was on fire.

“That’s Glodok,” the Dutch woman said. “It’s where the Chinese people live.”

The elevator music tinkled on.

“In the sixties,” said her husband, “the Chinese were killed because they were Communists. In ’ninety-eight they were killed because they were capitalists. Now they’re being killed for capitalism again.”

“Scapegoats,” said Mrs. Tippel.

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Tippel’s blue eyes were sad. “The government or the military always need to blame others for their mistakes. And now the Chinese will pay for all the mistakes that the government made before the election.”

“And even if there
were
Chinese traders who attacked the rupiah,” said Mrs. Tippel, “they weren’t here in Indonesia. They were in Hong Kong or Shanghai or somewhere.”

The elderly Dutch couple had seen Dagmar wandering through the breakfast room with her fruit plate and invited her to join them.

Dagmar tasted a piece of fruit from her plate and paused for a moment to savor the astonishing bright taste. Then Mr. Tippel began to talk, and Dagmar lost interest in breakfast.

“In ’ninety-eight it was terrible,” said Mr. Tippel. “The military had just lost power, and they thought that if there was enough chaos, they would be called back. So the riots were actually led by the military.”

“There were rape squads,” said Mrs. Tippel.

Dagmar opened her mouth, closed it, strove for a response.

“Is that what’s happening now?” she asked.

The Tippels looked at each other.

“Who knows?” said Mr. Tippel. “The army’s up to something, though. They have the city under siege.”

All those games she’d played, Dagmar thought as the elevator music tinkled in the background. All those dungeon crawls and conflicts and mysteries, all those battles, skirmishes, raids, and sieges. All those rolls of a twenty-sided die, all those experience points.

And none of them worth a damn. She had no idea how to behave in a city being blockaded by its own military. She hadn’t known what to do in the face of a mob other than to lock herself in a toilet.

As far as action in the real world was concerned, all those games had been a complete waste of time.

When her ring tone went off—the first few bars of “Harlem Nocturne,” the Johnny Otis version—Dagmar didn’t notice right away. The sounds blended too well with Indonesian elevator music. And then she realized someone was calling her, and she snatched at the phone.

“Dagmar?” said Charlie. “Are you still in Jakarta?”

Dagmar’s heart gave a foolish leap at the sound of his voice. “Yes!” she said. “Yes, I’m still here.”

“Okay. I’ll arrange to get you out, then.”

“Good! Good!” Dagmar realized she was babbling and made an effort to achieve rational communication.

“How are you going to manage it?” she asked. “Because the embassy—”

“I’ve been with the
Planet Nine
people all day and only just got your email,” Charlie said. “But I already know enough to realize that the embassy’s fucked. They can’t evacuate you because all our military assets are tied up in the current Persian Gulf crisis, and my guess is that our government is too proud to ask anyone else to do it.”

That sounded like Uncle Sam all right, Dagmar thought.

“So,” she said, “what next?”

“Lucky for you I’m a multimillionaire,” Charlie said. “I’m going to get in touch with some security firms, and we’re going to stage our own private evacuation. If necessary, we’ll fly you off the hotel roof in a helicopter.”

Dagmar paused a moment to picture this.

“Big box office,” she said.

“Does your handheld have a GPS feature?”

“Yes.”

“Give me your coordinates, then.”

As the Tippels watched with interest, Dagmar thumbed a button, and her coordinates flashed onto the phone’s screen.

“Six degrees eleven minutes thirty-one point eight seconds south, a hundred six degrees forty-nine minutes nineteen point four eight seconds east.”

“Got it,” he said. “I’ll give them your coordinates and phone number and email, and we’ll see what they can arrange.”

“Good,” Dagmar said, and then she added, “Thanks, Charlie.”

“No problem.”

“You keep saving me,” she said.

“I haven’t saved you
yet,
” he said. “And if I’m going to, I’d better hang up and contact the troops.”

“I love you, Charlie,” Dagmar said with sudden urgency.

There was a moment of silence as Charlie dealt with his surprise.

“I’m fond of you, too,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the hotel.”

“No problem there.”

“Take care. Someone will call soon.”