Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

“Yeah, but how do you think such a game would work?” Risa said. “An ecology’s much too chaotic to build into a game.” Before she married me she’d been a prominent games designer for one of the other houses, so she knew what she was talking about. “Do you know how disequilibrate your average ecology is?”

“Not even sure I can pronounce it.”

“Ecologies aren’t kids’s stuff. They’re immensely complex-food webs, spectra of hierarchical connected-ness… Screw up any one level, and the whole thing can collapse-unless you’ve evolved the system into some kind of Gaian self-stabilizing regime, which is hard enough when you’re not trying to re-create an alien ecology, where there might be all sorts of unexpected emergent phenomena.”

“Maybe that’s the point, though? A game of dexterity, like balancing spinning plates?”

Risa made the noise that told she was half acknowledging the probable truthfulness of my statement. “They must constrain it in some way. Strip it down to the essentials, and then build in some mechanism whereby players can influence things.”

I nodded. I’d been unwilling to probe the creature too deeply until now, perhaps still suspicious of a trap-but I knew that if I didn’t, the little arthropod would drive me quietly insane. At the very least, I had to know whether it had anything resembling a brain-and if I got that far, I could begin to guess at the kinds of behavioral routines scripted into its synapses, especially if I could trace pathways to sensory organs. Maybe I was being optimistic, though. The thing didn’t even have recognizable eyes, so it was anyone’s guess as to how it assembled a mental model of its surroundings. And of course that told me something, though it wasn’t particularly useful.

The creature had evolved somewhere dark.

A MONTH later, Icehammer began a teaser campaign for Stroboscopic . The premiere was to take place two months later in Tycho, but a handful of selected players would be invited to an exclusive preview a few weeks earlier, me among them.

I began to warm up to competition fitness.

Even with insider knowledge, no game was ever a walkover, and my contacts in the resistance movement would be disappointed if I didn’t turn in a tidy profit. The trouble was I didn’t know enough about the game to finesse the required skills; whether they were mental or physical or some combination of the two. Hedging my bets, I played as many different types of games as possible in the time frame, culminating in a race through the atmosphere of Jupiter piloting frail cloudjammers. The game was one that demanded an acute grasp of aerodynamic physics, coupled with sharp reflexes and a willingness to indulge in extreme personal risk.

It was during the last of the races that Angela Valdez misjudged a thermal and collapsed her foil. Valdez had been a friend of mine years ago, and though we’d since fallen into rivalry, we’d never lost our mutual respect. I attended her funeral on Europa with an acute sense of my own mortality. There, I met most of the other gamers in the system, including a youngish man called Zubek whose star was in the ascendant. He and Valdez had been lovers, I knew-just as I’d loved her years before I met Risa.

“I suppose you’ve heard of Stroboscopic? ” he asked, sidling up to me after Valdez ’s ashes had been scattered on Europa’s ice.

“Of course.”

“I presume you won’t be playing, in that case.” Zubek smiled. “I gather the game’s going to be more than slightly challenging.”

“You think I’m not up to it?”

“Oh, you were good once, Nozomi-nobody’d dispute that.” He nodded to the smear of ash on the frost. “But so was Angela. She was good enough to beat the hardest of games-until the day when she wasn’t.”

I wanted to punch him. What stopped me was the thought that maybe he was right.

I WAS on my way back from the funeral when White called, using the secure channel to the yacht.

“What have you learnt about the package, Nozomi? I’m curious.”

“Not much,” I said, nibbling a fingernail. With my other hand I was toying with Risa’s dreadlocks, her head resting on my chest. “Other than the fact that the animal responds to light. The mottled patches on its carapace are a matrix of light-sensitive organs; silicon and quartz deposits. Silicon and silicon oxides, doped with a few other metals. I think they work as organic semiconductors, converting light into electrical nerve impulses.”

I couldn’t see White’s face-it was obscured by a golden blur that more or less approximated the visor of his suit-but he tapped a finger against the blur, knowingly. “That’s all? A response to light? That’s hardly going to give you a winning edge.”

“There’s nothing simple about it. The light has to reach a certain threshold intensity before there’s any activity at all.”

“And then it wakes up?”

“No. It moves for a few seconds, like a clockwork toy given a few turns of the key. Then it freezes up again, even if the light level remains constant. It needs a period of darkness before it shows another response to light.”

“How long?”

“Seventy seconds, more or less. I think it gets all the energy it needs during that one burst of light, then goes into hibernation until the next burst. Its chemistry must be optimized so highly that it simply can’t process more rapid bursts.”

The gold ovoid of his face nodded. “Maybe that ties in with the title of the game,” he said. “ Stroboscopic. ”

“You wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to what kind of evolutionary adaptation this might be?”

“I wish there was time for it, Nozomi. But I’m afraid that isn’t why I called. There’s trouble.”

“What sort?” Though I didn’t really need to ask.

He paused, looking to one side, as if nervous of being interrupted. “Black’s vanished. My guess is the goons got to him. They’ll have unpicked his memory by now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It may be hazardous for you to risk competition now that you’re implicated.”

I let the words sink in, then shook my head. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ve already given them my word that I’ll be there.”

Risa stirred. “Too pigheaded to back down?”

“No,” I said. “But on the other hand, I do have a reputation to uphold.”

AS the premiere approached we learned what we could of the creature. It was happier in vacuum than air, although the latter did not seem to harm it provided it was kept cold. Maybe that had something to do with its silicon biochemistry. Silicon had never seemed like a likely rival to carbon as a basis for life, largely because silicon’s higher valency denied its compounds the same long-term stability. But under extreme cold, silicon biochemistry might have the edge, or at least be an equally probable pathway for evolution. And with silicon came the possibility of exploiting light itself as an energy source, with no clumsy intermediate molecular machinery like the rhodopsin molecule in the human retina.

But the creature lived in darkness.

I couldn’t resolve this paradox. It needed light to energize itself-a flash of intense blue light, shading into the UV-and yet it hadn’t evolved an organ as simple as the eye. The eye, I knew, had been invented at least 40 times during the evolution of life on Earth. Nature came up with the eye whenever there was the slightest use for it.

It got stranger.

There was something I called the secondary response-also triggered by exposure to light. Normally, shown a flash every 70-odd seconds, the animal would execute a few seemingly purposeful movements, each burst of locomotion coordinated with the previous one, implying that the creature kept some record of what it had been doing previously. But if we allowed it to settle into a stable pattern of movement bursts, the creature began to show richer behavior. The probability of eliciting the secondary response rose to a maximum midway through the gap between normal bursts, roughly half a minute after the last, before smoothly diminishing. But at its peak, the creature was hypersensitized to any kind of ambient light at all, even if it was well below the threshold energy of the normal flash. If no light appeared during the time of hypersensitivity, nothing happened; the creature simply waited out the remaining half a minute until the next scheduled flash. But if even a few hundred photons fell on its carapace, it would always do the same thing; thrashing its limbs violently for a few seconds, evidently drawing on some final reserve of energy that it saved for just this response.