Walter Williams: This Is Not a Game

“I thought you were going to spend two weeks in India,” he said.

“Turns out,” Dagmar said, “that Siyed is married.”

Again Charlie’s reaction bounced to the Clarke Orbit and back.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

“His wife flew from London to be with him. I don’t think that was his original plan, but I have to say he handled the surprise with aplomb.”

Her name was Manjari. She had a polished Home Counties accent, a degree from the London School of Economics, beautiful eyes, and a lithe, graceful, compact body in a maroon silk sari that exposed her cheerleader abdomen.

She was perfect. Dagmar felt like a shaggy-haired Neanderthal by comparison. She couldn’t imagine why Siyed was cheating on his wife.

Except for the obvious reason, of course, which was that he was a lying bastard.

“Serves me right,” Dagmar said, “for getting involved with an actor.”

The actor who had played the male ingenue in Curse of the Golden Nagi, in fact. Who was charming and good-looking and spoke with a cheeky East London accent, and who wore lifts in his shoes because he was, in fact, quite tiny.

Leaving for another country had seemed the obvious solution.

“Anyway,” she said, “maybe I’ll find some cute Aussie guy in Bali.”

“Good luck with that.”

“You sound skeptical.”

An indistinct anxiety entered Charlie’s tone. “I don’t know how much luck anybody can have in Indonesia. You know the currency collapsed today, right?”

“Yeah. But I’ve got credit cards, some dollars, and a ticket out of town.”

Charlie gave it a moment’s thought.

“You’ll probably be all right,” he said. “But if there’s any trouble, I want you to contact me.”

“I will,” Dagmar said.

Dagmar had the feeling that most employees of multimillionaire bosses-even youthful ones-did not quite have the easy relationship that she shared with Charlie. But she’d known him since before he was a multimillionaire, since he was a sophomore in college. She’d seen him hunched over a console in computer lab, squinting into Advanced D &D manuals, and loping around the Caltech campus in a faded Hawaiian shirt, stained Dockers, and flip-flops.

It was difficult to conjure, in retrospect, the deference that Charlie’s millions demanded. Nor, to his credit, did Charlie demand it.

“If it’s any consolation,” Charlie said, “I’ve been looking online, and Golden Nagi looks like a huge hit.”

Dagmar relaxed against her pillows and sipped her drink.

“It was The Maltese Falcon,” she said, “with a bit of The Sign of Four thrown in.”

“The players didn’t know that, though.”

“No. They didn’t.”

Being able to take credit for the recycled plots of great writers was one of her job’s benefits. Over the past few years she’d adapted Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors (with clones), The Libation Bearers, The Master and Margarita (with aliens), King Solomon’s Mines, and It’s a Wonderful Life (with zombies).

She proudly considered that having the zombies called into being by the Lionel Barrymore character was a perfect example of a metaphor being literalized.

“When you revealed that the Rani was in fact the Nagi,” Charlie said, “the players collectively pissed their pants.”

“I’d rather they creamed their jeans.”

“That, too. Anyway,” Charlie said, “I’ve got your next job set up for when you get back.”

“I don’t want to think about it.”

“I want you thinking about it,” said Charlie. “When you’re on the beach in Bali looking some Aussie guy in the glutes, I want you distracted by exciting new plots buzzing through your brain.”

“Oh yeah, Charlie,” sipping, “I’m going to have all sorts of plots going through my mind, you bet.”

“Have you ever heard of Planet Nine?”

“Nope.”

“A massively multiplayer online role-playing game that burned through their funding in the development stage. They were just about to do the beta release when their bank foreclosed on them and found that all they’d repossessed was a lease on an office and a bunch of software they didn’t have a clue about.”

Dagmar was surprised. “They were getting their start-up funding from a bank? Not a venture capital outfit?”

“A bank very interested in exploiting the new rules allowing them to invest in such things.”

“Serves them right,” Dagmar judged.

“Them and the bank.” Cheerfully. “So I heard from Austin they were looking for a sugar daddy, and I bought the company from the bank for eleven point three cents on the dollar. I’ve rehired the original team minus the fuckups who caused all the problems, and beta testing’s going to begin in the next few days.”

Alarms clattered in Dagmar’s head. “You’re not going to want me to write for them, are you?”

“God, no,” Charlie said. “They’ve got a head writer who’s good-Tom Suzuki, if you know him-and he’s putting his own team in place.”

Dagmar relaxed. She already had the perfect game-writing job; she didn’t want something less exciting.

She sipped her drink. “So what’s the plan?”

“Planet Nine is going to launch in October. I want an ARG to generate publicity.”

“Ah.” Dagmar gazed with satisfaction into her future. “So you’re going to be your own client.”

“That’s right.”

Charlie had done this once before, when work for Great Big Idea had been scarce. He’d paid his game company to create some buzz for his software company-buzz that hadn’t precisely been necessary, since the software end of Charlie’s business was doing very well on its own. But Dagmar had been able to build a plot around Charlie’s latest generation of autonomous software agents, and she’d been able to keep her team employed, so the entire adventure had been satisfactory.

This time, however, there were plenty of paying customers sniffing around, so Charlie must really want Planet Nine to fly.

“So what’s this Planet Nine again?” she asked.

“It’s an alternate history RPG,” Charlie said. “It’s sort of a Flash Gordon slash Skylark of Space 1930s, where Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto on schedule, only it turned out to be an Earthlike planet full of humanoids.”

“Out beyond Neptune? The humanoids would be under tons of methane ice.”

“Volcanoes and smog and radium projectors are keeping the place warm, apparently.”

Dagmar grinned. “Uh-huh.”

“So along with the folks on Planet Nine, there are dinosaurs and Neolithic people on Venus, and a decadent civilization sitting around the canals on Mars, and on Earth you’ve got both biplanes and streamlined Frank R. Paul spaceships with lots of portholes. So Hitler is going into space in what look like big zeppelins with swastikas on the fins, and he’s in a race with the British and French and the Japanese and the New Deal, and there’s plenty of adventure for everybody.”

“Sounds like a pretty crowded solar system.”

“There’s a reason these people went broke creating it.”

Dagmar took a lingering sip of her drink. She’d always had an idea that writing space opera would be fun, but had never steered her talent in that particular direction.

The writers of ARGs were almost always drawn from the ranks of disappointed science fiction writers. It was odd that there hadn’t been more space opera from the beginning.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But not while I’m nursing an umbrella drink and watching the Aussie guys at the beach.”

Charlie sighed audibly. “All right, you’re allowed to have some good dirty fun on your vacation. But not too much, mind you.”

“Right.”