Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“And in England?” BJ asked. “You worked there?”

“Under the table,” she said, “because of immigration. But then I started selling stories, and that was very nice. The best job I’ve ever had.”

“I imagine it would be.” He tilted his head. “And-Aubrey, was that his name? How did he feel about the writing?”

“He was proud of me.”

BJ nodded. “But the marriage still didn’t work.”

She looked at him. “I married him on the rebound. Never a good idea.”

BJ held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. “Seeing anyone now?”

Dagmar tried to work out a way of explaining how she had been Promiscuous Girl back in England, and that while her morals hadn’t improved since, her work hours had increased and so her flings were few and far between. She gave up.

“I’m celibate on account of a seventy-hour workweek,” she said.

“Typical geek,” he said. “A geek with a crap job and a crap boss.”

“I’m being paid very well for all those hours,” Dagmar pointed out.

“You’re being paid well to burn yourself out, after which the money and the job will disappear and you’ll be in your late thirties with no current job skills. That’s the very definition of a crap job.”

Dagmar smiled thinly. “Can we get back to our love lives? Sad to admit, that’s the less depressing subject.”

“It’s like moving from the Valley of the Shadow of Death to the Slough of Despond, but-whatever.” BJ gave a self-conscious smile. “I’m celibate on account of poverty,” he said. “The only women who want me are crazy, or single parents who need a father and a second income for their kids.”

“You don’t want to be a father?”

“What I don’t want,” he said, “is to be a stepfather in a trailer court with a swarm of underdisciplined children and no money.”

She nodded. “Yeah. That’s understandable.”

He looked at her, then shrugged and smiled.

“We’re pathetic,” he said, “but at least we’re not in Chile.”

A cold finger brushed her spine. She looked up at him in shock.

“What happened in Chile?” she asked.

“Didn’t you hear? Their currency collapsed today-the Chinese traders again, supposedly. All of South America is on the edge of a depression worse than anything since the nineteen thirties.”

Dagmar sucked in breath. Her mind spun. BJ talked on.

“They say the Chinese are taking out their competition, one currency at a time. It makes sense-Indonesia’s got a huge population, and so does Latin America. These are all people who work for coolie wages, just like the Chinese. From the Chinese point of view, it’s best to keep their economies from ever developing.”

Dagmar thought about that, spoke slowly. “So you think it’s Chinese government policy?”

BJ shrugged. “Their government can be ruthless, and they’re smart and calculating. We know that.”

Images of Jakarta flashed in Dagmar’s mind-the mobs, the police shooting, the tiny bodies strewn on the pavement. The pillar of smoke over Glodok.

“But,” she said, “if Latin Americans are really desperate, they’ll work for less money than the Chinese.”

“Not if the employers don’t have the resources to pay wages in real money.” BJ narrowed his eyes in thought. “Investment will eventually come in, though, right? From other countries. But the country might be China-using the Latin Americans’ own wealth to buy their own factories. It’s a win-win for the Chinese.”

Dagmar decided to change the subject before she lost herself entirely in the nightmare. She gave BJ a wan smile.

“You crashed an economy once, right?” she said.

He looked at her in surprise. “Sorry?”

“Austin told me that you and Charlie crashed Lost Empire.”

“Oh.” He gave a grin. “Yeah, we did that.”

“On purpose?” BJ and Charlie had never been destructive hackers.

“No, it was an accident.” He sipped his iced tea. “When we were shopping AvN Soft around, we both got involved with the game. We spent fourteen hours a day bashing wizards and fighting monsters and stealing treasure. But when the first of the venture capital came in, we had to drop the game and build a real business.”

“So you crashed Lost Empire because you couldn’t play anymore?”

“No.” He gave a little laugh. “It’s kind of embarrassing, what we did, actually. We were so freaking young.”

“Go ahead.”

BJ ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair.

“Okay,” he said. “We cashed in all our armor and weapons and magic stuff for the virtual gold pieces they used in the game, and then we put a couple of our software agents to work. We programmed them to make money, so that when we had time to get back to Lost Empire, we’d still be in the game, and with luck in a better position than when we left.”

“You had the software agents play you?”

“Play our characters, yeah. They had our passwords and just stayed logged on twenty-four/seven, buying and selling. It wasn’t hard, if our characters weren’t moving around, just buying stuff in the market in the Old Imperial City, which was basically the market for the whole world. We were, like, testing our work. Doing a proof-of-concept. And the thing worked out-in four weeks Rialto had Lost Empire on its knees. Between the two of us, we had monopolies in lumber mills, flour mills, the woods and fields the lumber and the flour came from, all the mines that produced iron, gems, gold, silver, and copper. We owned all the warehouses. If anyone else competed with us, we’d undersell them and drive them out of business, then buy whatever was left and jack the price up. That way we ended up with all the cash, too. The only thing we couldn’t control was the magic items, because the game produced those on a schedule, or randomly.”

“By ‘we,’ you mean the agents.”

“The software, yeah. And Lost Empire came to a screeching halt. The game masters had to shut everything down, and they confiscated all our property and gave the players a bunch of free game gold to make up for being ripped off.” He laughed. “God, we were infamous. But they didn’t know our real names, just our online identities. Otherwise we might have gotten our asses sued off.”

A cold ice-water thought drenched Dagmar’s brain.

“Is that what the Chinese are doing?” she asked. “In the real world?”

“Using software agents?”

“Yeah.”

BJshook his head. “Lost Empire basically had only a couple of dozen tradeable commodities, that and armor and weapons and magic stuff. The real world has fifty million times as much complexity, and real-world economies have more mechanisms for correcting themselves.” He grinned. “Believe me, Charlie and I discussed this. We had all sorts of fantasies about conquering the real world the same way we conquered Lost Empire.” He shrugged. “But you know how the agents we unleashed on the real-world markets turned out. They’re good, they’re making money for Charlie and everyone who rents one…” He laughed. “Nobody owns the planet yet.”

“Guess not.”

Twelve point three billion, she thought. But even that wasn’t enough to bring down a large, diverse, robust economy like that of Chile.

Chad, maybe.

Something else was going on.

She thanked BJ for listening, paid for both meals, and took the 101 back to the valley. She worked past ten o’clock, at which point the thought of a swim in her apartment’s pool began to creep softly into her mind. Doing laps in the pool alone in the night, as she’d done in Indonesia. She began to think of the weightlessness, the water caressing her skin, the silence. The eerie glow of the underwater floodlight.

Eventually she couldn’t concentrate on work any longer and drove home.