Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

Dagmar my Dear,

I’m going to be in Los Angeles next week to shoot a commercial. My

agent tells me that the Golden Nagi credit has been a big plus! Lots

of people in the business saw it, apparently.

I would like to thank you for the opportunity to work with you, and

all the doors that you have helped to open for me.

Can I take you to dinner?

Your appreciative Siyed

“Oh for God’s sake,” Dagmar said aloud. And then, to the computer, “Return mail.”

FROM: Dagmar Shaw

SUBJECT: re: Holiday in L.A.

Siyed,

I’m working hard on a new project, and I doubt I’ll be able to see

you.

Good luck with the commercial.

Dagmar

Was that curt enough? she wondered.

Get lost, married man.

She began dealing with the problems involved in reworking the game to suggest that Austin’s death was somehow a part of it. She didn’t feel she could say it outright, but she could offer hints that the players were certain to notice.

Dagmar thought that maybe Joe Clever wasn’t clever enough to find Litvinov, but she had more confidence in the entire Group Mind.

Three million people: they had to know something.

Briana Hall, the woman in the hotel room, was hiding from the police, who were under the impression that she had killed two of her former lovers. The game was designed to move both backward and forward in time, following Briana as she fled from the police and attempted to prove herself innocent, and simultaneously going back into the history of the characters to discover their past actions and the reasons for them. The help of the players would be needed in order to accomplish both of these objectives.

One of Briana’s exes had been killed by a sleeper cell of saboteurs who were using a location in the Planet Nine game as a rendezvous-the sometime boyfriend had been a sysop and during the course of his work had overheard some of their conversation.

The other had been killed because he was a minor player in a securities fraud and his cronies erroneously assumed he was under investigation-in fact he had had contact with SEC investigators for an entirely different reason.

Dagmar wondered if that victim could be renamed Austin. But if so, she’d have to change the plot: she didn’t want to make one of her oldest friends guilty of securities fraud, not even in the context of fiction. So she’d have to reengineer the plot in order to provide a reason why he was killed-accidentally-by a hired assassin.

She calculated how to make the plot changes, which she figured would involve a couple of days of rewriting. But there would be more than rewriting, because she’d have to add a whole Maffya subplot, and that would take up a lot of resources.

While thinking this over, she found the card that Lieutenant Murdoch had given her and called him. He was out, but she left a message asking him to return her call.

She was deep into rewriting when “Harlem Nocturne” announced Murdoch’s call. She looked at the time in the corner of her monitor and saw that it was after six o’clock-Murdoch was probably returning all his phone calls before leaving the office.

“This is Dagmar,” she said.

She had met Murdoch the previous day. He was a small, systematic man with a lined face and graying hair. His mouth had the kind of pinched look that suggested false teeth. His questions the other day had been competent and professional, and he’d asked them all without giving the slightest clue what was happening behind his pale blue eyes. He was almost like a character on the old Dragnet program, deadpan and businesslike, but more human, without the TV characters’ utter humorlessness.

“You called? ” he said.

“Yes. I realized that if you give me the name that Litvinov used to enter the country, I could probably find him for you.”

“How could you do that? ” he said after a pause.

Dagmar explained about the game and the fact that she had thousands of detectives eager to set their intelligence on the problem.

“While we appreciate citizen help,” Murdoch began, “I’m not sure that this would be appropriate.”

“Lieutenant Murdoch,” Dagmar said, “can you call every hotel and motel in Greater Los Angeles to find out if Litvinov, or his alias, is staying there? ”

“No. There are thousands of hotels altogether. We don’t have that kind of manpower.”

“I do,” Dagmar said.

There was another pause.

“Here’s what I figured out,” Dagmar said. “Either Litvinov has left town, in which case you’ll have to hope you can get him arrested back home in Saint Petersburg or whatever-”

“He’s based in Hamburg,” Murdoch said.

“Okay,” Dagmar said, “Hamburg. But my point is, either he’s gone, or he’s still in town. And if he’s still in town, it’s because he’s realized he shot the wrong man and is still planning on going after his real target. So if he isn’t found, someone else could die.”

After a moment of thoughtful silence, Murdoch spoke.

“Let me sleep on it,” he said. “I’ll get back to you tomorrow morning.”

“Thank you,” said Dagmar.

And got busy with her rewrite.

FROM: Consuelo

I’m going to steal a page from Chatsworth’s book and decline to reveal how I came by this information.

But.

Litvinov, the assassin, entered the country with a Latvian passport under the name Ainars Vilumanis. Latvia is a NATO country and he probably had less difficulty entering than with a Russian passport. Since Litvinov was born in Latvia he probably speaks acceptable Latvian.

As of 9:00PDT this morning he hadn’t used that passport to leave the country. He may still be in the Los Angeles area, and it’s possible we could locate him.

Anyone want to help me try?

FROM: Corporal Carrot

I thought Litvinov had nothing to do with the game.

FROM: Hanseatic

That’s what I thought, too, and then I saw this on Briana’s MySpace page this morning:

Thanks, Consuelo. You’re on the right track.

FROM: LadyDayFan

I am finding this really intriguing. Can anyone think of another example of a character in a game addressing a player directly?

FROM: Hanseatic

Only when we’ve screwed up badly and need a nudge to get us back on the right track.

FROM: LadyDayFan

We should consider ourselves nudged. We should assume that the death of Austin Katanyan is a part of the game until proven otherwise.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

But it was in the papers! The real papers! Great Big Idea can’t plant phony stories in the L.A. Times! Not stories that big, anyway.

FROM: Hanseatic

If we solve all the puzzles like good little players, everything will be revealed.

FROM: LadyDayFan

So how are we going to find Litvinov? His rap sheet doesn’t list any known associates in Los Angeles.

FROM: Hanseatic

Let’s not forget that the rap sheet lists a number of aliases. We should search for those as well.

Dagmar watched as the messages appeared on Our Reality Network, followed by concerted action as the available players located an online Los Angeles telephone directory, divided up the alphabet between themselves, and began to call motels.

Dagmar could only hope that Litvinov hadn’t googled his name and found this bulletin board, and wasn’t aware that his cover identity had been penetrated.

People in places like Dubai, the Low Countries, and Ceylon began calling motels in places like Culver City, San Gabriel, and Costa Mesa. Observing the process was fascinating, and Dagmar watched the messages pile up for the next forty-five minutes as more and more people got involved.

If Litvinov was staying at a hotel under any of his known aliases, he was dead meat.