This Is Not a Game (9 page)

 

BJ

 

After breakfast, Dagmar found it too depressing to wander around the lower hotel, with its looted shops, boarded windows, and frightened employees, so she returned to her room. She didn’t dare open the curtains to watch the burning Palms, so she kept the drapes drawn and watched the catastrophe on television. The talking heads on CNN discussed 9/11 and speculated about the ideological or religious motivations of whoever had set the fire, chatted about how whoever had constructed the hotel had obviously ignored a lot of building codes, and spoke of a well-known American lawyer who was jetting with his team to Singapore in hopes of signing up as many survivors as possible in order to file a class-action suit for damages.

Dagmar hoped her own hotel was up to spec.

When desperate people started throwing themselves off the burning building, Dagmar turned off the television and opened her laptop. She found she had dozens of emails from practically everyone who knew she was in Jakarta, some of them writing more than once, to all of the three email addresses she currently maintained. They’d seen the burning hotel on television, and they were desperate to know whether she was all right.

She answered one email and CC’d anyone else who had queried, so that everyone would have an answer in as short a space of time as possible.

When she was finished, she sat back in her chair while a slow sense of wonder rose in her, wonder at the sheer number of people who cared for her. Some of those who had sent email were people whom she hadn’t seen in person for years and with whom she maintained only a tenuous form of contact.

Dagmar hadn’t realized so many people cared.

She was used to the way interest groups spontaneously formed on the Internet, but there had never been one centered on
her
before. These people—friends from Caltech, from Britain, friends of her family in Cleveland, people in the gaming industry, players she knew only as Hippolyte or Chatsworth Osborne, individuals who came from different walks of life and whose only point in common was a personal knowledge of Dagmar—had seen news of the burning hotel and responded within
hours.
Many of them had clearly been in touch with one another, spreading the word that she might be in danger, and the outpouring of concern was touching.

It was then, as Dagmar decided to give everyone who had queried a personal answer, that the power died.

The lights flickered and went off, and the whisper of the air-conditioning faded away. An array of tiny plastic turbines, each the diameter of a pencil, switched on to provide her laptop with power. A breathy sound accompanied the ignition, and paper on her desk rustled to the warm exhaust.

A notice flashed on her display: the hotel’s wireless connection had gone down along with the power. Dagmar checked the room’s phone and found it worked. The phone had an Ethernet jack, and she considered connecting the laptop to it but then decided against using fuel and turned the computer off.

The screen had just gone blank when the lights wavered on again. They didn’t seem as bright as before, so Dagmar figured either that it was a brownout or that a hotel backup generator had gone on but didn’t have quite the power required.

She lay across her bed and thought about
Planet Nine,
and the fictional woman in the hotel room, and what uncanny series of accidents had brought her down the rabbit hole.

 

Tomer Zan called in midafternoon. Dagmar had just finished doing her laundry in the bidet—she’d run out of clean clothes and was dubious about giving any of her belongings to hotel staff.

“How are you feeling, darling?” Zan asked. The “darling” sounded perfectly professional, as if it were a substitute for “Miss Shaw.”

“I’ve been better,” Dagmar said.

“We’ve decided to pull you off the roof with a helicopter.”

Dagmar paused to think about this.

“You’re not moving me to a safer place first?”

“Putting you on the streets right now would be exposing you to too much risk. The situation is deteriorating fast—most of the police have walked off the job, since no one’s paying them real money.”

“So the streets are in the hands of the rioters.”

“That’s about it.” Dryly. “We’ll have a helicopter in Singapore by tomorrow.”

“So you can pick me up the next day?”

“Well,” Zan admitted, “no. Singapore’s the nearest place we can stage from—except maybe Sarawak—but Singapore’s nearly a thousand kilometers away, and the copter’s an old Huey from Thailand, equipped for rescue work in the jungle. It doesn’t have the range to reach you. So we’re going to charter a ship in Singapore, put a lot of fuel aboard, and then steam toward Jakarta while the crew builds a helicopter landing platform from scratch. The chopper will land on the ship once the platform is built, refuel, and then fly to you once it’s in range.”

“What am I going to have to do when it gets here?”

“Practically nothing. We’ll have rescue specialists onboard. The chopper will hover over the hotel roof and drop one of our people down to you. Then we’ll lower a stretcher, and our guy will strap you into it. We’ll winch you aboard, and then our guy will go up next.”

“So all I have to do is lie down?”

“That’s it.”

Dagmar felt relief mixed with a degree of disappointment. She had hoped for a more swashbuckling exit than being strapped to a basket and winched to safety.

“Can I bring anything with me?” she asked.

“A small bag maybe. Emphasis
small.
” There was a brief pause. “It’s a pity we can’t go in tomorrow. That’s when the Japanese are evacuating, so our chopper could slip in without being noticed.”

“How come they can evacuate and—”

“Because,” Zan said, “they don’t have all their goddam naval assets in the Persian Gulf, that’s why.”

“I haven’t heard a single thing from the embassy.”

“Schmucks.” All the disgust in the universe filled the word. “One word from the embassy and this thing might be over. Instead they’re going to let the military loot Jakarta.”

Dagmar felt a hesitation. In a sense she didn’t want to know anything more, know how much more desperate her situation had become. It was bad enough that she was in a tall building in a city where tall buildings were being burned.

“Loot Jakarta?” she said.

“Anything that goes into Jakarta goes with the permission of the generals,” Zan said. “Food, fuel—everything the people need to live. And that means the generals get a cut of the action. They’re going to gut the city, but they’ll make their fortunes—or make their fortunes
back,
since they probably lost their money in the crash along with everyone else.”

“Christ,” said Dagmar.

“What’s a banana cost there?” Zan asked. “Ten cents maybe? In another few weeks that banana’s going to cost five, six dollars. And the difference will all go to the military.”

“And if you can’t afford the bananas,” Dagmar said, “you starve.”

“The government’ll probably tell the starving people to kill the Chinese and steal
their
food,” Zan said. “But lucky for you, in a few days, it won’t be your problem.”

 

The water caressed Dagmar like warm little strokes of a fine brush. The water tinkled against the pool’s tiled edge as she paddled her way gently into the deep section, then arrowed her body, closed her eyes against the sting of chlorine, and sank feet-first into the blood-warm water.

The darkness and silence were perfect. Her body was weightless. The boundaries between her self and the waters faded. Her pulse made a hushed, regular noise in her ears.

Then she began, slowly, to rise in the dark water. Her head broke the surface, and she swiped away the strands of hair that crossed her face, and took a breath. Chlorine burned in her sinus.

She opened her eyes. The blacked-out city rose around her, silent. There was no traffic noise, no noise at all, nothing but the flapping of canvas umbrellas set around the pool.

Dagmar was engaged in an act of rebellion. After dinner—where Dagmar had gotten skewered chicken with peanut sauce, a double dose of protein in a situation where she feared proteins might become scarce—and after the announcement that the hotel’s generators would be shut down at nine o’clock in order to save fuel, Dagmar had found herself with nothing to do except consume the drinks in her room’s minibar. After a couple of whiskeys, she realized that she simply couldn’t stay in her room any longer.

Yet there was no place to go. The hotel was blacked out except for emergency lighting in corners and stairwells, and the elevators were shut down. The streets were beyond dangerous.

Then she had thought of the third-floor terrace, with its pool. The management had closed it because it was too exposed to theoretical attack from the tall buildings around, but now the pool was just one darkness among others.

Dagmar refused to believe in the existence of armed strangers sighting on the pool with night-vision scopes. Surely armed strangers had better things to do.

What had Anna said?
Breakfast is as safe as anything.

And better, the pool was on the opposite side of the Royal Jakarta from the burning hotel. Out of sight, out of mind.

Dagmar had decided on this quiet night swim, alone in the dark water.

Of course this meant going down eleven floors in a non-air-conditioned stairwell to reach the pool, and then climbing back up at the end. She’d be a ragged, hot, miserable mess at the end of her climb, but then she could take a cool shower, and in the meantime the pool was perfection itself.

Dagmar dove to the bottom of the deep end several times, just to feel the joy of weightlessness, and then she began to swim laps. Her job kept her in hotels a lot, and swimming was her usual exercise. She started with a pair of laps as fast as she could go, just to get the heart pounding, and then settled into a slower, steadier pace. She did a few laps in a crawl, then switched to a backstroke, to exercise opposing sets of muscles. Alone in the darkness, she cruised through the water as purposefully as a shark.

The rhythm and warmth relaxed her. The physical demands drove the tension from her body, the unease from her mind. In her solitary exercise in the darkness, surrounded by the empty lawn furniture and the umbrellas, the dark towers of the city and the stars, she became only the swimmer. She was relieved of the burden of being Dagmar, of being caught in some strange, overlapping quantum state in which she was both tourist and refugee. A lonely geek in a hotel, waiting for the rescuers who seemed to have mistaken her for a princess in a tower . . .

Dagmar swam steadily for half an hour, alternating crawl and backstroke, and then went into a cooldown, lying on her back and paddling along with slight movements of her arms and legs. It was difficult, she thought, to cool down when you were floating in water warmer than body temperature.

She stared at the stars overhead and tried to think of nothing at all, just gradually let her breathing and the cotton-wool thudding of her pulse return to something like normal. Then she climbed out of the pool on legs that had turned a little wobbly, adjusted the crotch elastic of her swimsuit, and reached for her towel.

The empty terrace stretched out before her, all shadows and reflected starlight. It was eerie, and Dagmar felt as if she were in one of those postholocaust films, where everyone but she had died of radiation sickness or the plague. From all she could tell, she was alone in this empty night-world.

Then, clearly through the night air, she heard three gunshots echo up between the tall buildings.

No, she thought, there were humans here after all.

It was a long, hot climb back to her room.

 

Breakfast was a little more barren than that of the previous day—no proteins at all except for peanuts—and so Dagmar packed down the rice while she could and sprinkled it with crushed peanuts, fried shredded coconut, and a pungent chile sauce. Then she took some of the rolls in a paper napkin, went to her room, and put them in the fridge of the minibar.

They could keep her from starvation, maybe.

Damn,
she thought as she closed the fridge,
I’m starting to think like Tomer Zan.

City power was back on—it had come on abruptly at six in the morning, blasting Dagmar out of a peaceful sleep as all the lights and the TV snapped on—so Dagmar sat before her computer and vowed once again to answer all the email she’d received on the previous day.

She was halfway through the list when her phone rang. She reached for where it sat on the charging cradle, saw “Charlies Friend” on the display, and pressed Send.

“Hello, Mr. Zan,” she said.

“Hello, darling,” Zan said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got bad news.”

Mentally she screwed together an assembly of struts, just below her heart, to prevent it from sinking.

“What sort of news?” she asked.

“We’ve lost touch with the helicopter,” he said. “And the ship as well. We don’t know why.”

“Do, uh,” she began, “do radios break nowadays?”

“No,” Zan said, “not really. Both the ship and the Huey had state-of-the-art satellite communications equipment. So it’s unlikely that there’s any kind of malfunction. We suspect an accident.”

Dagmar tried to imagine an accident that could take out a ship and a helicopter at the same time. Then she thought she would rather not imagine it—the crew of each craft were on a mission that involved
her,
after all, and if an accident had claimed them, it was all on her account . . .

“So,” Dagmar began, “do you send out a search party, or—”

“We’ll wait a few more hours in case there was a communications problem, and then contact the authorities in Singapore. But for
you,
darling, we’re going to get a new helicopter, and if necessary a new ship, so don’t worry.”