The Deadliest Game nfe-2 Read online

  “It doesn’t bear thinking about, the amount of redesign that’s going to have to be done. Except that we have to think about it now, thanks to you.” The narrow smile went crooked. “There are probably more managers and systems analysts and hardware and software jockeys cursing your names at the moment than you’ll ever have again, if you’re lucky. And the same people are blessing you. If you were to die right now, no telling which direction you’d go.”

  He sat back. “Meanwhile…Sarxos itself…” He picked up one of the pieces of paper from the top of the stack, looked at it, and put it aside. “Sarxos has possibly just survived as a company because of what you’ve done. It’s been a major profit-maker for its parent firm, and the attack on that player, along with the inability to catch the person who did it, was beginning to affect the company’s performance in the market. The Law of the Market is, ‘Know when they’re greedy, know when they’re scared.’ Sarxos’s stockholders got scared, and the market started losing confidence in the company. Their stock’s value plummeted all over the world, everywhere it traded.

  “Now, the game’s designer, who is a man not exactly without some political pull due to being at least half a Croesus’s worth of rich, has asked us to give you every possible consideration in what we do. The parent company’s CEO has weighed in on your side, an astonishing event for a man who was widely thought not to care if the Big Bad Wolf was about to eat his grandmother unless at the time she happened to be carrying a bag full of his stock options.

  “The police in Bloomington are very happy with you, because your suspect’s testimony has led them straight to the rented vehicle used in that lady’s hit-and-run. The FBI is happy, because the same suspect has now confessed to offenses in several states — he’s attempting to cut some sort of plea-bargain deal, but I don’t know how much good this is going to do him. There are several organizations that neither you nor I should know about who are also happy, for reasons which they either won’t tell me, or I’m not at liberty to discuss. And a general wave of unbridled goodwill seems to be sweeping the planet at the moment on your behalf.”

  His voice was very dry. “It’s slightly bizarre. People who normally couldn’t be bothered to give other people the time of day are asking us to be lenient with you.” Winters sat back and looked at them. “Frankly, I think they’re misunderstanding exactly what you did, in some cases, or why you did it, in other cases…but still, some of them have a point.”

  Leif stole a glance at Megan. She was holding very still. “All of this being the case,” Winters said, “I really doubt if sacrificing you on the altar of blind obedience is going to do anyone any good. I would just as soon leave the option open that, someday, you might possibly serve with the — what’s the phrase I heard used? ‘Grownups’?”

  Megan squirmed. So did Leif. “Do you read minds?” Megan said abruptly.

  Winters looked at her and raised an eyebrow, then said, “Not usually. It makes my head hurt. Faces are more than sufficient. As for the rest of it…”

  Winters raised his eyebrows, pushed back in his chair, pushed the report away from him a little bit. “Something you are going to have to understand, should you come to work with the ‘grownups,’ should you eventually reach that beatific state yourself, is that your work as part of a team is not necessarily about being ‘right,’ and there is a very, very small gap between being ‘right’ and being ‘righteous.’ The latter state can be fatal. The distance between the two is enough to get you killed, or your partner killed, or some innocent person around you killed.” He looked over at Megan. “What if your father had come down in the middle of that attack a few days ago? What if one of your brothers had stumbled into it?”

  Megan was staring at the floor again, her face burning. “All right,” Winters said. “I’m not going to belabor the point. You seem at least vaguely conscious of the implications. But at the same time, the question also applies to you.” He turned to Leif. “You were next on the list. He had the address of your school. He would have found you there. He would either have tried to take you away, and possibly succeeded — in which case we would have found you in a ditch somewhere, or a river — or he would have tried to deal with you on the spot. There are any number of ways he could have done it, and any number of ways he could have killed one of your schoolmates ‘accidentally’ at the same time. Responsibility,” Winters said. “It would have been yours.”

  Leif, too, became very interested in the carpet. “Someday it may be you,” Winters said. “All I can offer you, at the moment, is how this feels right now: this shame, this guilt, this fear. All I can do is tell you that this is infinitely better than what you will feel when, because of your disobeying an order, one of your mates goes down in the line of duty. A death with no meaning: or something worse than death.”

  The room was very still. “Speaking of which,” Winters said, sitting forward a little again. “Your friend Ellen—”

  “Elblai! How is she?” Megan said.

  “She woke up this morning,” Winters said. “She’s been told what’s going on — she insisted on being told, apparently. They say she’s going to be all right. But she’s apparently extremely annoyed about some battle that she missed with this…” He leaned toward the desk, looked at another of the papers in the stack. “This ‘Argath’ person. Who, by the way, turns out to be completely uninvolved in all of this.”

  “We thought so,” Leif said.

  “Yes, you did. Which was interesting, considering how little hard data you had to go on. But hunches come into our line of work, as well as hardware…and riding the hunch on the short rein is definitely a talent we can use.”

  “Why did he do it?” Megan said.

  “Who? Oh, you mean Simpson of the many aliases?”

  Winters sat back in his chair. Quite without warning, a man sitting in a chair appeared in the corner of Winters’s office. The man was wearing prison clothes — plain blue coveralls — and the same unmoved expression that Megan had seen on his face when he was pointing a weapon at her. She resisted the urge to shiver.

  “I never win,” the man said, in a flat voice that matched the affectless face — and Megan was suddenly glad that he hadn’t spoken to her during the assault. He sounded like a robot in this holoclip. “I mean, I never used to win. But now, in Sarxos…I win all the time. No one was as clever as I was. No one knows strategy the way I do.”

  “Especially when you were playing all those different characters,” said a quiet voice, just out of frame, probably a psychiatrist. Or a psych program, Megan thought.

  “How else could I be all the people I am? How else could all of them win? Not just me,” Simpson said. “I may be the main one…but winning, winning matters so much. My dad always used to say, ‘It isn’t how you play the game; it’s whether you win or lose.’ Then he died—” Only now did that face show any emotion at all: a flash of pure rage so uncontaminated by maturity or experience that you would have sworn the three-year-old owner was about to throw himself on the ground in a full-scale tantrum, screaming and turning blue. Except that the three-year-old was in his early forties. “I won lots of times,” the voice said, calm again, the face’s expression seamlessly sealed over, “and I was going to keep winning, too. All of me were — all the people who’re inside. And I’ll win again, someday, even though I’m out of the game now. Sooner or later, I’ll win again….”

  The figure in the chair winked out, leaving Megan and Leif looking at each other in a combination of pity, fear, and revulsion. “We no longer use the phrase ‘crazy as a jaybird,’” Winters said, “but if we did, I would say that fella’s a good candidate for the description. It’ll take the therapists a long time to work their way down to the bottom of his difficulties…but I would say multiple-personality disorder is part of the clinical picture, complicated by an inability to tell reality from a game…or to understand that a game is for playing.”

  Silence fell again in the room. Winters sighed at the depth of it. “All
right, you two. I’m not going to throw you out of the Explorers, as much because I hate to waste valuable raw material as anything else. I emphasize the word ‘raw.’”

  He looked at them both, and they both looked at the carpet again, faces hot. But Leif looked up. “Thank you.”

  “Yes,” Megan said.

  “As for the rest of it — if in the near future we find a piece of business which is suited to your unique talents of nosiness, inability to take no for an answer, annoying persistence, and screwy thinking….” He smiled. “You’ll be the first to hear about it from me. Now go away and compose yourselves for the press conference. Both of you better have the grace to conduct yourself like modest little Net Force Explorers or, by God, I’ll….” He sighed. “Never mind. See what you do to me? A whole morning’s worth of composure shot. Go on, get out of here.”

  They stood up. “And before you go,” Winters said, “just this. There’s nothing more fatal than believing a lie is the truth. Think of all the fatal lies you just saved the world from. Even with all the other things you got wrong, and did wrong…that’s something you can be proud of.”

  They turned and went out, flashing each other just the quickest grin…though being careful not to let Winters see it.

  “Oh, and one last thing.”

  They paused in the dilating doorway, looked over their shoulders.

  Winters was shaking his head. “What the heck is a ‘Balk the Screw’?”

  Elsewhere, in a room with no windows, three Suits sat and looked at one another.

  “It didn’t work,” said the man who sat at the head of the table.

  “It did work,” said another of the men, trying not to sound desperate. “It was only a matter of a few more days. The first announcement impacted the company’s stock more and more severely as the media spread the news of the first attack around. A few more hours, the next couple of attacks, the next announcements, would have affected their stock so drastically that they would have had to stop trading. People would have deserted that environment in droves. But more important: The technology worked.”

  “It worked once,” said the man at the head of the table. “They know about it now. It had to work and not be found. It’s a cause celebre now. Everybody who’s heard about this is going to be going through their databases, looking for evidence of non-presence or surrogacy among their users. This was a tremendous window of opportunity…but now it’s shut.”

  Silence fell in the room. “Well,” said the man who had tried not to sound desperate, and failed, “the necessary paperwork will be on your desk in the morning.”

  “Don’t wait till the morning. Have it there in an hour. Clear your desk, and get out. If you go now, I’ll have an excuse when Tokagawa gets here in the morning.”

  The third man in the suit got up and went away in great haste.

  “So now what?” said the second man.

  The first one shrugged. “We try another way,” he said. “It’s a shame. This one had possibilities. But it’s made some suggestions for other possible routes of attack.”

  “Still…it’s a shame we lost this one. Wars could have been fought inside a paradigm like this. Real wars…”

  “But only as real as the controlling software makes them,” said the first man with the slightest, chilliest smile. “What we’ve proven is that the present technology is insufficient to what we have in mind…not secure enough to convince our customers to use them instead of more conventional battlefields. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, because the assumption would be that when the next wave of technology comes along, it’ll be watertight. And of course it won’t be. We’ll be there again, building in the ‘back doors.’ And from the beginning of the process, this time, rather than starting in the middle. Because of this failure, we’ll be smarter. And those of us who aren’t smarter, will be cleaning out their desks.” He looked at the second man. “And where will you be?”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” the second man said, rising to leave, “I have a phone call to make.”

  When he was gone, the first man sat and thought. Oh, well. Next time…for what man has devised, man can unravel and debase, and in any game, there’s always a way to cheat, if you look hard enough.

  Next time for sure….

  At the very edge of Sarxos, the legends said, was a secret place. It had many names, but the one which was most frequently used was the shortest. It was the House of Rod.

  Some Sarxonians, standing on the uttermost heights of the northeastern mountains of the North Continent, and looking westward in the clearest weather, claimed to have seen it there: a single island, a mighty mountain peak standing lone in the wild waters, far out in the Sunset Sea. Tales of the place abounded, though you were unlikely ever to meet anyone who had ever been there. The souls of the good departed went there, some of the stories said, and dwelt in bliss with Rod forever; other stories said that Rod Himself went there, on weekends, and looked out on the world that he had made, and found it good.

  Few knew the truth of any of these stories. But Megan and Leif knew now.

  It was a castle. That was more or less unavoidable. But there the resemblance stopped, for the place looked like it had been designed by an Angeleno architect who had had a bad dream about Schloss Neuschwanstein, and tried to execute a copy of it in a cross between Early Assyrian and Late Rococo. Green lawns were laid out around it, with tasteful flowerbeds full of asphodel. There was a small white beach where you could land a boat. It was said that the Elves liked to stop there, on their way into the West. “The True West, though,” Rod said, amused. “This is the Fake West. You want the true one, you keep going the way you’re going, straight off the planet, hang a right at the second moon, and straight after that, you can’t miss it.”

  From the main body of the castle, one tall tower speared upward, with a balcony looking east. All the castle’s windows looked east. All of Sarxos lay there, the cloud-capped mountains and the seas, the lakes, the distant glint of clouds reflecting back the sunset….

  “Nice view, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind Megan.

  She turned around and nodded at Rod, who was holding a can of cola and looking out the window past her. “We get great sunsets here,” he said, “but you can only see them from the tower.”

  “Personal reasons?” Megan said.

  Rod looked resigned. “To the architect, maybe. My ex designed this place. She called it a ‘feature.’ I call it a nuisance. I think she just wanted to make sure I got plenty of exercise.”

  “Is it a long way up?”

  “The traditional number of steps,” Rod said, “three hundred and thirty-three. That’s why I put in the elevator.” He grinned.

  Megan laughed, turning to look at all the people gathered in the big first-floor room. Nobody refused an invitation to a party like this, if they could help it — and who would want to help it? There were a lot of the “departed” around, players who had died in one way or another during gameplay, and every player who had ever been bounced. Shel Lookbehind was standing not far from the buffet table, happily discussing third-world reconstruction with Alla. There was Elblai, chatting amiably with Argath, whom she had never previously met in the flesh. “I’m just the honorary dear departed,” she was saying cheerfully, “and believe me, I don’t mind….” And some of the fortunate living of Sarxos were there, too. Some people weren’t exactly clear why Megan and Leif were there, but weren’t inclined to pry. Some — Sarxos support staff, or friends of Rod’s — knew, or had a clue, and were keeping their mouths shut. “I can’t go too public about it,” Rod had said to Leif and Megan earlier. “You know why. There are people who’ll twitch. But all the same…I wanted to say thanks.”

  Now Megan wandered over to the far side of her room, where her dad and mom were standing with drinks in hand, talking animatedly with Leif’s mom and dad. As she came up, Megan’s mother looked around them with a smile that was not as grim as it might have been, considering the talk that the t
wo of them had had the day before. “So this is what it’s all about, honey.”

  “Maybe not all, Mom. But…these are the people we were helping.”

  “Well….” Megan’s mother rubbed the top of her daughter’s head, an affectionate gesture that immediately caused Megan to try to smooth her hair back down into some semblance of order. “I guess you did good….”

  “More than that,” Elblai said, coming up behind Megan with her niece, both of them smiling at Megan. “I wanted to thank you again for what you did. It’s rare enough that people just reach out to people, to try to help.”

  “I had to,” Megan said. “We both had to.” She looked over at Leif, in a desperate attempt to get some help with this embarrassing situation.

  He just stood there and nodded.

  “You should be very proud of your daughter,” Elblai said, and Ellen’s niece said to Megan, “I’m still feeling so stupid that I didn’t believe you that night. If I had, it could have saved so much trouble.”

  “You were playing by the Rules,” Megan said. “It’s just the way it goes. The Rules take care of themselves.”

  “True enough,” Elblai said. “Have you had some of those little sushi, the omelette things? They’re really good.”

  “Omelette things?” Megan’s father said, gave her an approving look, and headed off for the buffet table.

  Megan went after him. “Daddy—”

  “Hmm?”

  “What are you writing right now??”

  He smiled. “It’s a history of the spice trade. Couldn’t you tell?”

  “You are not! You’re making it up!”

  “Of course I am. I have to get revenge on you somehow.” He grinned. “Listen, Megan. I’m glad that what you were doing Thursday night really was important. Otherwise we would have had words. But after this, anything so important that it’s likely to get you shot at…I claim the responsibility to hear about it first. Okay?” The look he turned on her was both annoyed and profoundly concerned, so that she found it impossible to be annoyed with him.