Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

Maybe it wasn’t a command-detonated bomb at all, she thought. Maybe it was a time bomb, scheduled to go off at 2 A.M. or something.

But in that case, why the text message? That was a breach in security, though a small one. There was no reason for it unless it was timed somehow to the bomb’s detonation.

A figure appeared in the parking lot below, and she recognized BJ at once. His big body moved with a jaunty stride, as if he were on top of the world. He was wearing tycoon clothes, a dark suit. A bright tie glowed at his throat in the light of the streetlamps.

BJ stepped toward the Phalanx and reached into a pocket for a remote. He opened the car door, put the remote away, reached into a pocket for something else. Something small.

Dagmar felt her insides twist. She stopped herself from calling out.

BJ dropped into the car. It lurched under his considerable weight. Seconds ticked by. Perhaps he was gazing through the windshield at his new domain, at the Los Angeles that lay before him, spread out like a harlot on a mattress.

In the merest fragment of a second, the explosion happened. The explosion was faster than in movies. In films, Dagmar realized, explosions are slowed down so you can see them. In reality, they’re too fast for the eye to catch.

Clangs echoed up the stair as pieces of the Phalanx began raining down. The part of the car that remained on the ground caught fire instantly and burned with a brilliant flame. Little fiery pellets fell over the parking lot, burning with bright chemical fire, and Dagmar realized they were incendiaries.

If the bomb hadn’t killed her directly, she realized, she was meant to burn to death in her motel room or choke to death on smoke.

She couldn’t see BJ amid the flames. She knew only that he hadn’t gotten out of the car.

She wondered if he had died happy. Knowing that he was a fraction of a second from erasing the last obstacle between him and his prospects. Pleased with his new job, with the billions that the software agents would soon be dropping into his account, with his future as a tycoon.

Or in that last fragment of a second, had he heard the cell phone detonator chirp from behind his driver’s seat and realized that it had all gone horribly wrong?

Dagmar returned to her own car, which was filled by now with a horrid rose scent. She stopped at a filling station and hurled all the flowers into a rubbish can, along with the cloned remote and the cell phone burner, both rubbed clean of fingerprints.

When she got to her motel room, she began taking apart all her surveillance gear. She thought that maybe she should erase all the evidence she’d gathered, in case it ended up pointing toward her.

Then she thought she might want to keep it, to prove that BJ was whatever it was that BJ was.

“This is not a game,” she reminded herself.

So, she thought. What else could she have done?

There wasn’t, and would probably never be, enough evidence to convict BJ of anything. At least not until the bomb went off in his car, which would precipitate a very thorough investigation by some rather thorough government agencies. And by then, BJ being in the car, it was too late.

If she had saved him, then what? He would have beaten her to death and thrown her off the parking jetty into the darkness below.

She could have been smarter or less distracted by events. But she hadn’t been, and instead she had been who she was, so caught up in events that she had never caught up to the truth.

And the truth was four dead by violence, here in L.A. And countless others, in Bolivian mining towns, Indonesian kampungs, burning Cantonese passenger trains…

Her own well-meaning fictions, layered page by page on the so-called World Wide Web, differed from the web of the real world in that they lacked genuine malice. No matter how depraved her imagination when it came to Briana Hall or blood-crazed revenge-maddened nagis, her own work was practically wholesome compared with anything served up by Southeast Asian generals, Chinese mobs, or Arkady Petrovich Litvinov, the scope of whose iniquity had been reduced to the county jail.

These thoughts drifted through Dagmar’s mind as she drowsed amid the disassembled spyware in her Lysol-scented motel room. Throughout her reflections drifted slumber itself, half-submerged on a slow-moving tide of perception.

She woke craving waffles and hearing the sound of rain on the walk outside.

Dagmar ate waffles in a coffee shop on Ventura while the rain turned the street outside into a canal. On the way to the Great Big Idea office, the radio informed her that the assault on the dollar had begun. As soon as the tech team had assembled, she told them to begin the update to The Long Night of Briana Hall. Normally they waited until noon, but the gold-farming bots had not delayed, and neither would she.

“If I were you,” Helmuth said, “I’d slip out and buy as many euros as I could.” He gave her a significant look. “I already did that on Monday.”

“I don’t have that much in cash,” Dagmar said.

“Still.” Still.

Sipping from an insulated mug of Darjeeling tea, Dagmar watched the update from over Helmuth’s shoulder. The well-practiced tech team loaded the day’s series of puzzles. Because the real job came after the puzzles were solved, the puzzles themselves weren’t all that difficult, and the players devoured them with the Internet equivalent of roars of gusto.

Then they encountered the long lists of IP addresses and paused.

LadyDayFan says:

What the hell???

Vikram says:

We’re supposed to cope with all these addresses? Seriously?

Corporal Carrot says:

I’m game! Let’s divide up the numbers!

LadyDayFan says:

Ohmygoddess! This is madness!

Vikram says:

All right, let’s have a show of hands! Who wants a job?

Dagmar watched as the players divided the thousands of numbers among themselves and began posting their successes and failures. They argued about which successes belonged to whom and offered methods of locating the owners of firewalled computers.

The dollar was down 35 percent since the start of the day.

Dagmar bought a sesame chicken salad in the coffee shop downstairs, and the largest, most elaborate latte for dessert afterward. She thought she might as well spend her money now, before it was no longer worth the paper it was printed on.

Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says:

This has to be the biggest feat of social engineering in the history

of the Internet! Or possibly anywhere!

Corporal Carrot says:

It’s pure hackage, man! This is soooooo freaking cool!

No doubt, Dagmar thought, some of the players were decompiling and reverse-engineering Charlie’s patch to figure out what it did and how it worked. But they wouldn’t discover much: it was a patch, not a whole program. It altered some modest bits of code to other bits of code. It gave the address of the Cayman account, but the players already had that address. It didn’t offer any insights into what the original gold-farming bot was for.

Reverse engineering would show that it was a patch designed to tell one piece of a network to shut the entire network down. That was all. And that information happened to fit right in with the premise of Briana Hall, in which the players were called upon to shut down networks of villains.

It was all, amazingly, fitting together.

“Miss Shaw? ”

“Yes?”

Dagmar recognized the voice of Detective Murdoch. She left the conference room and returned to her office.

“Do you know a Boris Bustretski?” he asked.

“Yes.”

There was a little pause-the length, perhaps, of an explosion.