Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“Foolhardy though it may be.”

Feeling foolhardy and hopeful, she licked the rim of her glass and took a swallow of her drink. Tongues of tequila fire sped along her veins.

“There’s more than one Charlie Ruff,” BJ said. “There’s the one you’ve known all these years, and then there’s the other one.” His gaze darkened. “You’re starting to meet that other one now. I met him six years ago.”

“And what’s he like, this other Charlie? ”

BJ took a thoughtful drink of his margarita.

“At some point,” he said, “Charlie has to be the winner. And with him it’s a zero-sum game-if he’s the winner, that means everyone else has to lose.”

Dagmar considered this. “What kind of game is he playing with me, then? ” she asked.

“He hired you to run his game company because he thought the games would be cool,” BJ said. “You succeeded. You made the games cool. But now Charlie figures your cool quotient is bigger than his, so he’s got to take you down a peg.”

“So he’s doing this just to humiliate me?” Dagmar didn’t find the theory entirely convincing.

“That, and the fact that he’s learned enough about ARGs to think he can run one,” BJ said. “That’s what happened at AvN Soft. He thought he’d learned enough about my end of the business to tell me what to do, and he started trying to do my job as well as his.” He flapped his big hands. “We both went down in flames. But he found those mysterious backers, and I didn’t. So I got thrown out of the building, and Charlie sat up on the balcony and watched and never said a word.”

Dagmar took a contemplative sip of her drink. You’re going to do this, Dagmar, Charlie had said. Because you owe me, and you know it.

“I can see that, I suppose,” she said. “But why now? If Charlie is really involved with the Maffya, and there is an assassin running around looking for him, you’d think he’d have other things to do besides prove to himself that he can boss me around.”

BJ lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “He can be erratic if he’s under pressure. Trust me, I know. He can be crazy.”

Dagmar thought about this while BJ ate a prawn.

“So,” she said, “tell me what happened with you and Charlie and AvN Soft.”

BJ made a face. “This isn’t my favorite topic.”

“I’ve had Charlie’s story,” Dagmar said. “I’ve had enough from you to know how you feel about it, but not what actually happened.”

BJ said nothing for a while, just ate the last prawn. Then he touched his lips with his napkin and pushed the cocktail glass away.

“Okay,” he said. “We both came up with the ideas that made the autonomous software agents work. That was in one of those late-night bull sessions where we were both flinging theory around, and by five in the morning we’d nailed down our particular approach to intelligent, distributed, self-replicating, self-evolving agents. We knew that was what we wanted to spend the next ten years working on.

“And then we had to divide up the work, and that was pure chance. I’d been a project manager for Crassus Software, and I knew how to run an office, so I ran the business side. And by default that put Charlie in charge of creating the software-though in the early days we both worked on that. He was better at line-by-line coding, anyway.”

He sipped his drink, then put the heavy glass down on the checked tablecloth.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “It wasn’t Charlie who cold-called venture capital firms and who convinced them to take a chance on a couple of twenty-five-year-old software engineers and their wonky ideas about self-evolving software. It wasn’t Charlie who raised the millions to start the company and fill that office tower with software engineers. It wasn’t Charlie who did any of that.”

She looked at his stubborn, defiant face, and she nodded. “Did Austin help? ”

“Right then, Austin was in New York working for Morgan Stanley. But he put us in touch with some people.”

“Go on,” she said, but at that point the steaks arrived, sizzling on hot metal plates set into wooden platters, and they paused for appreciation.

“Eat while it’s hot,” BJ said, and picked up his steak knife.

“So,” Dagmar said, “did you get the big office building right away, or-”

He gave her an amused look from over the rims of his spectacles.

“I’m not talking about this,” he said, “till my surf and turf is history.”

Dagmar sighed and picked up her knife. She carved a piece of her rib eye, inhaled its savor, then placed it on her tongue. Juices awakened tired taste buds.

Oh my. Where had this steak been all her life?

BJ was using some highly specialized tools to crack open a king crab leg. The carapace snapped; a tiny piece of shrapnel hit Dagmar on the cheek. She flicked it away and reached for her drink.

When the waitress came back with a plate for empty crab shells, Dagmar called for another round of margaritas. She ate her meal with languid pleasure and watched BJ wrestle with his crab legs. By the time the last chunk of crabmeat had been dipped in lemon butter and consumed, Dagmar was well into her second margarita and was willing to view the world from on high, enthroned, like a pagan god, amid a benign radiance.

BJ pushed away his plate.

“That was the best meal I’ve had in a long time,” he said.

Dagmar lifted her arms and stretched.

“Ready for dessert? ” she asked.

BJ laughed. “Maybe I’d better digest a bit first.”

She looked at her watch and saw that it was a quarter after eleven. The dining room was nearly empty, and the noise from the bar had faded.

The waitress cleared their plates and asked if they wanted dessert. Dagmar allowed as how they’d look at menus. The waitress moved away, balancing plates on her arms. Dagmar watched her.

“I’m always glad when I find a waitress who’s just a waitress,” Dagmar said.

“What do you mean? ”

“One who’s not”-Dagmar tilted her head and assumed a perky voice-“ ‘Hello, my name is Marcie and I’ll be your waitress tonight. I’d like to recommend the swordfish, and just in case you’re someone important I’d really really really like to be in your next motion picture.’ ”

BJ grinned. “You don’t get that in the Valley so much, I bet.”

“They’re everywhere.”

The waitress-whose name was not Marcie-returned with the dessert menu on laminated cards. Dagmar was too full to eat anything more, but she looked at the list for form’s sake. Her glance lifted from the list of desserts to look at BJ.

It struck her that, despite the way he’d been neglecting himself, he was still a very attractive man. BJ gazed down at the menu with a relaxed expression, his blue eyes half-lidded behind their spectacles, and Dagmar considered how few of her memories involved his being relaxed. In school he had always been on the hustle: planning his future, sucking up information, writing vast amounts of sloppy code because he was in too much of a hurry to make it clean. Eventually the hustle had grown so all-encompassing that it had squeezed Dagmar out of his life without anyone quite noticing.

BJ had never allowed himself to be bored. Dagmar wondered if he was bored now.

He looked up at her, saw her looking at him, and his lips firmed in a frown.

“I can see that it’s time to pay for this meal,” he said.

Dagmar hadn’t been thinking of their earlier conversation, but she was willing to take advantage of BJ when the opportunity arose.

“You can order dessert first,” she said.

When the waitress came back, he ordered coffee and strawberry shortcake. Then he turned to Dagmar.

“Actually,” she said, “I was wondering if you find your life boring.”