Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

entertainments out in the datasphere.

FROM: Hanseatic

I’m not dropping out. But I’m not doing anything that requires me

to spend $$$.

Dagmar looked at the bulletin board and felt another surge of bitter anger, one in a long series. Her prediction about the players’ reaction to Portcullis was absolutely on the money.

It wasn’t so much the players who were posting on Our Reality Network. It was the players who weren’t posting, who were simply absent.

She couldn’t prove it, but she suspected that players were deserting her game in droves. Millions of them, possibly. And the damage extended beyond a single game: she was losing credibility with her audience. They were going to be much less likely to trust her when it came to the next Big Idea game.

The game had entered its third week. Neither the players nor the police nor Interpol had been able to find Litvinov. Murdoch had given up trying to find him in the States and was hoping the Germans would pick him up when he returned to his old Hamburg haunts. Austin had been in a grave in Connecticut for six days. Dagmar’s apartment’s owners had not yet sacked their underwear-sniffing manager. And Charlie had gone crazy-he hardly ever appeared in the office, and instead migrated from one hotel to another. Currently he was renting a cabana at the Roosevelt in Hollywood. He called Dagmar at strange hours and demanded constant updates on the progress of the game.

A chime told Dagmar that she had email, and she clicked to her mail program.

FROM: Siyed Prasad

SUBJECT: Holiday in L.A.

Dear Dagmar,

I’ve arrived in the City of Angels. They’re putting me up at the Chateau

Marmont-very sweet, don’t you think?

I’m still hoping to see you while I’m in town. I know you keep saying

that you have no time, but I’m still hoping you will be tempted to

have dinner with me. I have reservations at the Pentagram tonight at

eight o’clock-will you please tell me that you will come?

Your adoring fan,

Siyed

Dagmar sent Siyed a terse reply to the effect that she was working late and wouldn’t be able to join him for dinner. At which point her phone sang, and Dagmar saw that it was Charlie.

“Have you seen Our Reality today? ” she said. “We’re losing lots of players, Charlie.”

“We are also selling a lot of copies of Portcullis,” Charlie said. “Their servers were jammed today. Whenever I tried to load their page, my browser kept timing out.”

“All you’re doing,” Dagmar said, “is giving hope to a bunch of losers with a delusional business plan.”

“Since when has your division of my company made a big profit? ” Charlie asked.

Good point, she had to admit. Great Big Idea, though it had always been in the black, had never been much of an earner, at least as compared with the rest of AvN Soft.

Best to change the subject.

“What do you need, Charlie? ” she asked.

“I need a sit-down. Come see me at the Roosevelt.”

“Why don’t you come to your office? Meetings are what your office is for.”

“My office,” Charlie said, “is for burying me in piles of trivia. Talking to you is what my cabana is for.”

Dagmar looked at the time in the corner of her display.

“I’ve got a recording session this afternoon,” she said. “That’s in West Hollywood anyway. So I can come by after that.”

“Perfect,” said Charlie.

It was only after the phone call was over that Dagmar realized she hadn’t asked what Charlie wanted to see her for.

It can’t be good, she thought.

FROM: LadyDayFan

We are happy to play host to the tens of thousands of new players that

have been arriving in the past few days, but we urge them to check the

FAQ List and Player Tutorial before asking questions in this forum.

Thank you.

(Signed) Frazzled

The recording sessions usually left Dagmar in a buoyant mood. Terri Griff, the actress she’d hired to play Briana Hall, was incredibly talented, and very good at improvisation. It was a good reminder that not all actors were vapid, self-involved mirror gazers.

Or lying shit-heel married psychos, like Siyed.

Dagmar took an active role in this session, playing the part of Maria Perry, Briana’s best friend. Dagmar had never possessed any inclination to become an actress, but during the fifth week of the game, the players were scheduled to phone Maria and try to sweet-talk her into giving them information that would move the game forward. These conversations were very intense and tended to jump in unexpected directions as the players disgorged everything they thought might get them the knowledge they were after, and an actress might not be able to improvise. Dagmar knew exactly what the players would have to say in order to get Maria to spill, and therefore it seemed sensible for her to play Maria herself.

Dagmar found the recording sessions chock-full of positive reinforcement. The life of a writer was a solitary one-you worked alone, and the stuff went into a magazine or a book or onto a Web page, and then you either got feedback or you didn’t. And in the case of her ARGs, a lot of the feedback was carping over small details.

But in a recording session the feedback was immediate. Her words were spoken aloud, usually by talented professionals, and she knew at once whether they’d work or not. If rewrites were needed, she could do them on the spot.

“How much does Briana trust Cullen at this point? ” Terri asked. She was tall, with long, dark hair and a pale complexion that belonged more in Elsinore than in L.A.

“I don’t think she does,” Dagmar said.

“In that case,” Terri said, “would Briana say, ‘I saw someone in the courtyard,’ or would she identify Cullen right away? ”

Dagmar paused. “Let me think,” she said.

The sound studio was a small one off La Brea, used mainly for recording commercials. The white sound-absorbent panels on the walls and ceiling were turning yellow with age, and the microphones were venerable steel objects dating from the birth of disco. There was a better-equipped studio in the back used for looping, also mostly commercial work.

The owner of the studio, Ray, sat behind the controls. He was an elderly man with a goatee and a white pompadour and fingers stained yellow with nicotine. The odor of his cigarettes leaked into the studio from the hall outside. He sat behind the console with a melancholy, infinite patience that suggested that perhaps he had heard everything.

“We don’t want to make it clear that it was Cullen this early in the game,” Dagmar said. “Maybe she’d say it could have been Cullen. Because by this point the players are going to suspect Cullen anyway.”

And then Cullen turns up dead the week after, Dagmar thought, and the sinister plot just keeps on rolling.

After recording the conversation between Briana and Maria, Dagmar hung around to listen to Terri record Briana’s call to the police on finding the body of her ex, Duncan.

When they joined the game, the players were asked to provide basic data such as addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. After joining, the players received a series of phone calls, faxes, emails, and sometimes packages, usually purporting to be from the fictional characters in the game.

In this case, the players were all going to get to overhear Briana’s 911 call.

The actor playing the emergency operator had already recorded his lines, so Terri just waited for the cues and spoke Dagmar’s words-or rather, sobbed and shrieked and wailed them.

Terri did take after take, and each time her voice grew more hysterical, more horrified. Terri’s eyes grew wider, her mouth looser somehow, more moist, the tongue more visible as it pulsed behind the teeth. The color drained from Terri’s face, as if she’d actually managed to work herself into a genuine state of terror. Dagmar was fascinated by the process.