Walter Williams - This Is Not a Game

“Miss Shaw?” he said. “Nothing’s changed, I’m afraid.”

“There’s a man,” Dagmar said, “who needs an ambulance.”

Together they got a map of the area, and Dagmar reconstructed her morning walk and the location of the music store. Mr. Tong made the call, then looked up at Dagmar.

“I’ve told them,” he said. “But I don’t know if they’ll come.”

Dagmar thanked Mr. Tong and left, trying to think if there was anything else she could do. Short of going back out onto the streets, there was nothing.

She went to her room and took off her sweat-stained clothing and stood in the shower for a long while. Then she lay naked on her sweet-smelling sheets and turned on a news program and heard the reporter from Star TV talk about “anti-Chinese rioting.”

Anti-Chinese? she wondered. From what she could see, the rioters hadn’t much seemed to care whose stuff they were looting.

The reporter went on to talk about an “unconfirmed number of deaths,” and the report was accompanied by video, mostly from cell phones, that had captured bits of the action.

CNN showed no video of the riot but broadcast a lengthy discussion of the causes of the currency collapse.

“The government went on a spending spree before the last election,” said the Confident Analyst. “It won them reelection, but they ran through almost all their foreign currency reserves just at the moment when the price of oil went soft. Then they made matters worse by keeping their current account deficit a state secret-and when that secret leaked, it was all over.”

All cancel, Dagmar thought.

Start with a woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought. Because there’s nowhere else to go, because all her options are gone. Because a stranger’s voice on the phone has told her to stay in this place until she’s told to go somewhere else.

From there, reaching back in time, her story unfolds. Perhaps in reverse order. That would be a nifty trick.

Except that you have to find the story. It’s not all in one place, as it would be in a novel or a movie. It’s scattered out all through the world, and most of it’s in electronic form.

That’s the sort of story Dagmar writes.

At the beginning of the sort of game that Dagmar designs for a living, you go down the rabbit hole. That’s what it’s actually called, “rabbit hole.” The rabbit hole draws you into a Looking-Glass Land-okay, Dagmar knows, she’s mixing the two Alice stories-a Looking-Glass Land where the truth lies, and where, unlike in real life, you can look behind the mirrors to find out what it is.

A rabbit hole could be anything. A jar of honey that appeared in the mail, a data stick found in a washroom, an online poker site. A wedding in Bengaluru, a ticket to Jakarta. A virus loaded onto your phone.

And where the rabbit hole took you was a place that was just like your own place, except there was another reality hidden there.

In Looking-Glass Land the truth was hidden in source code, layered into Photoshop, transmitted in Morse, hidden in music files, whispered in Swedish or Shanghainese or Yiddish. Secrets were revealed in table talk on poker sites, found in genealogical charts, written with spray enamel on the sides of buildings.

Dagmar figures that some of the woman’s backstory has to be found in Planet Nine. Or on Planet Nine. Because that’s where this thing has to start.

From: Dagmar

Subject: Indonesia Fubar

Charlie, I never made it to Bali. I’m stuck in the Royal Jakarta Hotel. There’s rioting all around and people are getting killed. The airports are closed and I can’t get out. I’ve got $180 in hard currency and some credit cards that I can’t use because the banks are all shut down.

I’ve called the embassy and they put my name on a list. They say that if the situation warrants, they will stage an evacuation. They also say in the meantime I might as well stay here, because it’s as safe as anyplace.

Any suggestions? You or Austin wouldn’t happen to know anyone out here with a helicopter, would you?

Elevator music-saccharine Indonesian pop-tinkled from speakers in the breakfast room. A lavish buffet had been set up for hotel guests: coffee, tea, fruit juices, and a bewildering amount of food, both Indonesian and Western.

Meals were no longer served on the third-floor terrace. Hotel management had apparently decided it was safer to keep their guests under cover.

“Did you see the pillar of smoke?” asked Mrs. Tippel.

“Yes.”

Dagmar hadn’t been able to miss it: her windows faced northwest, and from the fourteenth floor she had an excellent view of the part of the city that was on fire.

“That’s Glodok,” the Dutch woman said. “It’s where the Chinese people live.”

The elevator music tinkled on.

“In the sixties,” said her husband, “the Chinese were killed because they were Communists. In ’ninety-eight they were killed because they were capitalists. Now they’re being killed for capitalism again.”

“Scapegoats,” said Mrs. Tippel.

“Yes, yes.” Mr. Tippel’s blue eyes were sad. “The government or the military always need to blame others for their mistakes. And now the Chinese will pay for all the mistakes that the government made before the election.”

“And even if there were Chinese traders who attacked the rupiah,” said Mrs. Tippel, “they weren’t here in Indonesia. They were in Hong Kong or Shanghai or somewhere.”

The elderly Dutch couple had seen Dagmar wandering through the breakfast room with her fruit plate and invited her to join them.

Dagmar tasted a piece of fruit from her plate and paused for a moment to savor the astonishing bright taste. Then Mr. Tippel began to talk, and Dagmar lost interest in breakfast.

“In ’ninety-eight it was terrible,” said Mr. Tippel. “The military had just lost power, and they thought that if there was enough chaos, they would be called back. So the riots were actually led by the military.”

“There were rape squads,” said Mrs. Tippel.

Dagmar opened her mouth, closed it, strove for a response.

“Is that what’s happening now?” she asked.

The Tippels looked at each other.

“Who knows?” said Mr. Tippel. “The army’s up to something, though. They have the city under siege.”

All those games she’d played, Dagmar thought as the elevator music tinkled in the background. All those dungeon crawls and conflicts and mysteries, all those battles, skirmishes, raids, and sieges. All those rolls of a twenty-sided die, all those experience points.

And none of them worth a damn. She had no idea how to behave in a city being blockaded by its own military. She hadn’t known what to do in the face of a mob other than to lock herself in a toilet.

As far as action in the real world was concerned, all those games had been a complete waste of time.

When her ring tone went off-the first few bars of “Harlem Nocturne,” the Johnny Otis version-Dagmar didn’t notice right away. The sounds blended too well with Indonesian elevator music. And then she realized someone was calling her, and she snatched at the phone.

“Dagmar?” said Charlie. “Are you still in Jakarta?”

Dagmar’s heart gave a foolish leap at the sound of his voice. “Yes!” she said. “Yes, I’m still here.”

“Okay. I’ll arrange to get you out, then.”

“Good! Good!” Dagmar realized she was babbling and made an effort to achieve rational communication.

“How are you going to manage it?” she asked. “Because the embassy-”

“I’ve been with the Planet Nine people all day and only just got your email,” Charlie said. “But I already know enough to realize that the embassy’s fucked. They can’t evacuate you because all our military assets are tied up in the current Persian Gulf crisis, and my guess is that our government is too proud to ask anyone else to do it.”