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That afternoon, Lucas called a meeting of the entire unit in the park to discuss Blue Upway. We were walking down the corridor that led to the park doors, when Gideon came out of his apartment, incongruously dressed in a flowing blue robe and wearing a jewelled headband on his white hair.
He gave me an ornate bow. “If music be the food of love, play on.”
“What?” I stared at him in bewilderment.
“I was playing Duke Orsino in a bookette of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night,” he explained. “I’d lost track of the time when my dataview reminded me of the meeting.”
Lucas raised his eyebrows. “People don’t often go to the lengths of dressing up in a genuine costume to play a part in a bookette. The holos fake your appearance quite well.”
“This wasn’t a standard bookette,” said Gideon. “You’ve got some of Claire’s old unit members coming in for an assessment tomorrow, so I’ve been feeling nostalgic. When I worked for Claire, a group of us had costumes and put on performances of her favourite plays, and the bookette is of our last performance of Twelfth Night.”
“Oh, I see,” I said. “I’d love to play the bookette one day.”
Gideon laughed. “You can play it if you like, but I warn you that we were appallingly bad actors. We had a lot of fun though. There was one performance of Romeo and Juliet where Romeo got his lines muddled up with his lines from Henry V. We just kept going, Romeo ended up winning the battle of Agincourt, and Juliet became Queen of Hive England.”
I wasn’t sure if I’d really understood the joke, but I smiled anyway.
We headed on to the park, and found the rest of the unit members had already gathered in the picnic area. Whenever we had a meeting of the whole unit, there was a tendency for people to cluster together in their teams. I noticed that Zak was standing with the Alpha Strike team, and pulling comic faces at where Rafael was with the Beta team. Rafael was desperately trying not to look at him.
Lucas climbed on top of a picnic table, and started speaking. “By now, everyone should be well aware that the Teen Game Blue Upway is causing increasing problems across the Hive. While most Teen Games never spread outside their home zone, and reach a maximum size of about fifteen hundred players, Blue Upway has gone Hivewide and grown to a terrifying thirty thousand players.”
He waved his hands. “The size of Blue Upway wasn’t a problem when the Game Commander was setting reasonable challenges. Now those challenges have moved from being reasonable to reckless, and game group leaders are being offered bonuses to take novice players into maintenance areas. Teen Game players are natural risk-takers, so warning them Blue Upway is dangerous would just add to the attraction. Gold Commander Melisande has given us the job of shutting down the game, and we need to do it as fast as possible.”
Lucas paused to look around at his audience. “Fortunately, we should be exceptionally well qualified to shut down Blue Upway. It’s confession time, everyone. Can all those who were Teen Game players please raise their hands?”
I wasn’t surprised when a forest of hands went up in both the Alpha and Beta Strike team groups. Adika had raised his hand too and was frowning at Rothan.
“You’ve never played a Teen Game at all?” Adika sounded quite shocked.
“I was invited to join several Teen Games,” said Rothan, in a virtuous voice, “but I refused to get involved in anything so rebellious as trespassing in forbidden areas of the Hive.”
Lucas laughed. “Of course you wouldn’t be interested in playing Teen Games, Rothan. Your family belonged to the Ramblers Association. There wouldn’t be much of a thrill going trespassing inside the Hive, when you’d been doing something far more rebellious by going on camping trips Outside.”
I finally noticed there were a few hands raised among other groups than the Alpha and Beta Strike teams. One in particular caught my attention. Someone standing with a motley assortment of the Admin team, hand half-raised, and with an embarrassed expression on her face.
I gasped in disbelief. “You were a Teen Game player, Megan?”
“Only intermittently,” she said defensively. “My boyfriend on Teen Level was a dedicated player but didn’t like leading groups. When he occasionally needed help with his plans, he took me along with him.”
Adika looked even more stunned than me. “You’ve never mentioned being a Teen Game player.”
Megan blushed. “Why would I mention it? I forgot all about Teen Games when I went through Lottery over thirteen years ago.”
Lucas was obviously struggling not to laugh. I linked to his mind to find out exactly why he was so amused and found a thought train about Megan.
... irresistibly attracted to dominant, risk-taking men. She had a game-playing boyfriend on Teen Level. Then she came out of Lottery with Keith, and was married to one of his Strike team within two months. When her husband was killed, she moved to our unit and promptly got entangled with Adika.
Megan’s husband had a strong resemblance to Adika, so I expect the boyfriend was the same physical type as well, and ...
Adika was scowling. “You’ve never mentioned this boyfriend before either. Where is he now?”
“Lottery assigned him to Hive Defence,” said Megan.
Oh no. Our Strike team leader has no problem with a dead husband who gave his life in the service of the Hive, but a living boyfriend is triggering his jealous streak. I’d better move the conversation on rapidly before ...
“I’m curious how many of our game players reached the rank of Colonel,” said Lucas aloud.
All but eight hands went down. Adika still had his hand raised. So did Kaden, Matias, Eli, and Zak from the Alpha team, and Amir and Yosh from the Beta team. They were all staring incredulously at Megan.
Lucas was fighting off laughter again.
... never have guessed our sedate Megan was once a Colonel in a Teen Game. She couldn’t get that rank by occasionally helping her boyfriend. She must have been so besotted with him that she was crawling around air vents every day. Sadly, that’s going to make Adika even more ...
“You were a Colonel?” demanded Adika.
“Only in the last two Teen Games we played,” said Megan guiltily.
“A twice-ranked Colonel!” gasped Eli. “High up, Megan!”
... and it just keeps getting worse. Adika looks as if he’s about to explode.
“Thank you, Teen Game players,” said Lucas hastily, and faced his Tactical team. “Now, can everyone who was a Game Commander please raise their hands?”
Lucas’s words shocked me. I pulled out of his head to concentrate my attention on the Tactical team members, and saw Gideon, Hallie, and Kareem raise their hands.
“You were Game Commanders!” I gave them a reproachful look.
Gideon smiled. “Don’t look so horrified, Amber. Just as Strike team members often have a history of playing Teen Games, Tactical team members often have a history of running them.”
I waved my hands in despair. “Why would you want to run a Teen Game?”
“It’s fun testing your mental limits by playing what’s effectively a giant chess game with unpredictable human pieces,” said Kareem. “Don’t worry though. Tactical team members have a history of running well-behaved games that keep the danger within reasonable limits. They’d never have caused problems for the Hive.”
“I expect Kareem was a wildly successful Game Commander,” said Gideon gloomily. “I was a disaster. I tried running two different games. Both times, all my players left in the first six weeks.”
“They were bound to leave,” said Kareem, in a sympathetic voice. “You’re a defence specialist. You’d have been so careful to avoid your game breaching the boundaries and attracting official attention that the players found the challenges boring.”
He grimaced. “I had the opposite problem. My game attracted too many players, so it was hard keeping up with the routine work of awarding points. Hallie is our mathematical specialist, so would have been able to set up automation to help her.”
“I didn’t have any problems running my game,” said Hallie, “but I made some colossal mistakes choosing group leaders. Lucas must have been a brilliant Game Commander though.”
I looked at Lucas and saw he had his hand raised too. He gave me a nervous smile before replying to Hallie.
“I was brilliant at what I was trying to achieve. In fact, I think being a Game Commander was the defining experience in my life.”
I’d thought that I’d broken my link to Lucas’s mind, but I must have been wrong. A sudden surge of powerful emotion caught me, and I was engulfed in an old memory. Lucas was standing in his teen room, tensely facing a man who weirdly felt like both someone deeply familiar and a stranger.
“You’ve no need to worry, Lucas,” said the man. “The Hive has faith in you. If you have faith in the Hive in return, then you’ll find that Lottery gives you answers that you didn’t know existed.”
I was still trying to make sense of what I’d seen when Lucas spoke again. “I didn’t start my own Teen Game back then. I invaded someone else’s game, and fought to take control of it.”
“What?” I gave Lucas an incredulous look. “Why?”
“Because I knew the Game Commander was putting lives at risk with dangerous challenges. I’d no knowledge at all of telepaths and Telepath Units back then, so had no idea that Keith’s unit was trying to shut down the game as well.”
He grinned. “The method I used back then was to join the game myself, get a few group leaders to contact me with offers of places in their group, and then respond with suggestions for far more interesting challenges than the Game Commander was offering. Once I’d tempted those players into trying my challenges, they gradually drew their friends into obeying me rather than the Game Commander.”
Lucas pulled a face. “That approach was painfully slow, and would never work at all in a game like Blue Upway that has thirty thousand players spread across the Hive. I was dealing with a game of fewer than four hundred players though, so I had full control in less than two months. By the time Keith’s undercover players attracted the attention of the Game Commander, that Game Commander was me!”
Kareem laughed. “What happened, Lucas? Did Keith’s Tactical Commander have you arrested?”
“No. Gaius had done a timeline pattern analysis of the game, and worked out what I’d done. He didn’t want me arrested at that point, just identified. It ended with Gaius arriving at my teen room and having an unforgettable conversation with me.”
I blinked. Lucas had first met Gaius on Teen Level. Now I understood why the man in the memory sequence had seemed both familiar and a stranger.
“Gaius had spotted me as a potential Tactical Commander,” added Lucas. “He dropped some heavy hints about how Lottery could give me answers I didn’t know existed.”
Lucas shrugged. “Let’s move on to the key point of this meeting. Most of our Teen Game players came out of the last Lottery with Amber. Blue Upway had already been running for a year by then, so we should have some of its game players among us. Did anyone here grow up in Blue Zone and get involved in Blue Upway?”
Three hands went up. Jalen from the Alpha team, and Forge and Penn from the Beta team.
“Excellent,” said Lucas. “Jalen, how long were you playing Blue Upway?”
“I was involved with a different Blue Zone Game for most of my final year on Teen Level, so I only played Blue Upway for about three months before going into Lottery.”
Lucas nodded. “Penn?”
“I split up with my girlfriend at the start of my last year on Teen Level. By then, everyone was getting wary of beginning new relationships that were doomed to end when we went into Lottery. I lived and breathed Blue Upway for my remaining ten months on Teen Level.”
“What about you, Forge?” asked Lucas.
“A card of instructions was pushed under my door, and I ended up playing Blue Upway for just over a year before I went into Lottery. I must have been one of the very first players to join, because I was offered the chance to prove myself to the Game Commander by some daring exploits and skip straight to a high rank.”
Forge waved both hands. “I had an exacting girlfriend, was a member of a couple of Blue Zone sports teams, and was organizing social events for the other teens on my corridor as well. I’d never had time to do more than a dozen challenges in a Teen Game, and wanted to have a serious try at playing one before I left Teen Level. I decided to take advantage of the Game Commander’s offer, and hoped that doing some exploring in the air vents would be enough to get me promoted straight to Lieutenant or even Captain.”
He grinned. “As it turned out, I got stuck in the air vents, and was still crawling around them during the massive power cut in Blue Zone twenty-one months ago. Amber will probably remember what happened back then.”
I glowered at Forge and folded my arms. I had extremely vivid memories of what happened back then, and how much trouble Forge had caused Atticus and me when he got stuck in the air vents.
“You mean you caused all those problems during the power cut because you were playing some silly game? You never said a word to me about Blue Upway. Did you tell Atticus you were playing a Teen Game?”
“Of course not,” said Forge. “Atticus would have lectured me for weeks.”
“And I’m going to lecture you for months,” I said fiercely.
Forge smiled unrepentantly at me. “It was worth it though, Amber.”
“Was it?” Adika looked disappointed in Forge. “Despite your efforts to grab an advantage at the start of Blue Upway, you never made it to the rank of Colonel.”
“The rank of Colonel was completely irrelevant,” said Forge smugly. “Given all the hazards and the darkness during the power cut, the Game Commander awarded me the title of Blue Upway Champion.”
There was an awed gasp from the other Strike team members, and even Adika looked impressed.
“Someone will have to explain that to me,” said Rothan.
“The Game Commander awards the title of Champion to the most courageous player,” said Eli eagerly. “It’s the highest honour in a Teen Game.”
Rothan saluted Forge. “Hail, Champion!”
Lucas laughed. “Did the Blue Upway Champion ever meet his Game Commander, or learn any personal information about them?”
“I met the Game Commander once to be awarded my Champion badge,” said Forge. “It was the standard arrangement though, with us both hiding our identity by wearing Halloween costumes, and standing at a distance from each other in a night-time park. I couldn’t tell you anything about the Game Commander at all.”
I was curious enough to check Forge’s thoughts and saw the memory in his head. He’d been standing at the appointed spot in a dimly lit park for about five minutes, when the shadowy figure of the Game Commander appeared at the far end of the path. The two of them had silently bowed to each other, before the Game Commander put the badge on a nearby bench, turned, and walked away.
Sharing that memory with Forge, I could feel his proud delight that the Blue Upway Game Commander had come to honour their chosen Champion. The moment I retreated into my own head though, it seemed ridiculous. Why bother arranging a meeting where neither of them would say a word to the other?
“Later, we exchanged some messages about game challenges,” added Forge. “I didn’t learn any personal information about the Game Commander from those messages, but they were very likeable, responsible, and had a great sense of humour. I can’t believe that person would ever send novice players into danger.”
“My theory is that the original Game Commander of Blue Upway went into Lottery last Carnival,” said Lucas, “and someone totally different is now running the game. My team members will need to investigate that possibility by having a discreet conversation with everyone from Blue Zone who was imprinted for Telepath Unit Tactical team in the last Lottery.”
His voice took on a meaningful note. “If someone is hiding the fact that they started Blue Upway because they think it will get them into trouble, then they’re entirely wrong. I’d be so pleased to have the original Game Commander of Blue Upway helping us that I’d personally buy them a year’s supply of their favourite raspberry dreamcakes.”
“It’s no good trying to bribe me with dreamcakes, Lucas,” said the newest member of the Tactical team, Telyn. “I never had any involvement with Teen Games at all. I wasn’t even living on Teen Level for most of my final year before entering Lottery.”
She sighed. “I had an accident during the huge Blue Zone power cut, and injured my leg so badly that I needed a series of reconstructive operations. I was given a special dispensation to let me spend the next eight months living with my parents so they could support me through the surgery.”
I winced in sympathy. There’d been a lot of accidents in the darkness during the Blue Zone power cut, and a friend of mine had been badly injured like Telyn.
“Statistically we were virtually certain to have some Blue Upway game players in our Strike team,” said Lucas. “We’re exceptionally lucky to have the Blue Upway Champion with us, and we couldn’t expect to have its original Game Commander in our Tactical team as well.”
He frowned. “There’s something puzzling me, Forge. Established Teen Games have selected players acting as recruiters, looking out for promising teens to invite to join the game. With a new Teen Game though, the Game Commander has to recruit the first players personally, and normally protects their own identity by inviting teens from distant areas of their home zone.”
Lucas paused. “The Game Commander won’t know anything about the teens in those areas, so they just issue blanket invitations to random corridors of older teens. If you got a card of instructions pushed under your door, Forge, then Amber should have got one too, but she’d never heard of Teen Games before the last emergency run.”
“Amber might have got a card and not realized what it was about,” said Forge.
Lucas turned to me. “Do you remember getting any strange cards pushed under your door back then, Amber?”
“No, and I’m sure I’d have remembered something that unusual,” I said.
“Now I stop and think about it,” said Forge, “I doubt my friend Atticus got a card either. He was like Amber, much too law-abiding to be a game player, but I’m sure he’d have mentioned anything odd like that to me.”
“So these cards weren’t being pushed under every door in a random corridor,” said Lucas. “You were chosen to get an invitation, Forge. What were the instructions?”
“If I wanted to join Blue Upway, I had to write my game name and the identification number of an anonymous dataview on the card, and leave it at a drop point. If I wanted the chance to impress the Game Commander and skip to a high rank, then I had to donate a second anonymous dataview to Blue Upway as well.”
“What’s an anonymous dataview?” I asked.
“When you buy a new dataview, it’s on factory settings, so there’s no personalization at all until you enter your identity code,” said Lucas. “That’s an anonymous dataview. Everyone involved in Teen Games uses them, because you can send and receive messages using just the dataview identification number. That means the other players, and even the Game Commander, only know your game name rather than your real identity.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Teen Game players seem totally obsessed with secrecy. Don’t they trust each other at all?”
“It’s not that they don’t trust other players,” said Forge. “It’s that they’re worried about nosies reading their minds. Hiding true identities from each other is an act of mutual protection.”
“Teen Game players are aware that Law Enforcement tolerates a little game playing,” said Lucas. “They believe nosy patrols will challenge anyone they catch thinking about major acts of trespass though. I assume that idea is encouraged by the same sort of staged encounter with a nosy patrol that we saw on our last emergency run.”
“That’s right,” said Buzz. “Law Enforcement gets plenty of reports about game players. Those can come from people working on Teen Level, other teens genuinely worried that their friend could get hurt, or a teen with a grudge against the player. Whatever the reason for the report, nosy patrols publicly challenge some of the worst offenders.”
“I can understand game players thinking the best way to hide identity information from nosies is to make sure they don’t know the information themselves,” I said. “That means anyone wanting to play a Teen Game has to buy a brand new dataview though. In fact, Forge needed two brand new dataviews. One to play Blue Upway, and a second one as a donation. How could you afford to pay for two new dataviews on your Teen Level allowance, Forge?”
Forge made a choking noise. “I couldn’t. Game players don’t buy brand new dataviews. They get a damaged dataview that someone has trodden on or dropped in water, and restore it to factory settings. You don’t need everything on the dataview to be working properly to play a Teen Game. You just have to be able to take some images and send messages.”
Lucas was looking thoughtful. “The fact Forge was asked to donate an anonymous dataview does confirm he was one of the very first players of Blue Upway. Game Commanders are aware of the risks of having hundreds or even thousands of players sending messages to each other about their game group plans. They take extra precautions to protect everyone’s identities by relaying all game communications through a whole series of anonymous dataviews called the game master stack.”
He paused. “That means a Game Commander needs a lot of anonymous dataviews. Ideally, those dataviews need to come from entirely different sources, so they don’t give any clues at all to the Game Commander’s location. The best way to achieve that is to get the first players to donate anonymous dataviews.”
“The other three teens in my game group were all among the first players of Blue Upway too,” added Forge. “During my first few trips with them, I noticed they were all remarkably good at climbing. Eventually, I discovered we’d all done some of the advanced cliff climbs on the Teen Level beach.”
Lucas’s eyes widened. “You couldn’t possibly pick a group of four random teens and end up with them all having a history of cliff climbing. The Game Commander of Blue Upway didn’t recruit the first few players of Blue Upway at random, but gave invitations to Blue Zone teens who’d proved they were risk-takers by doing advanced cliff climbing. Do you know who has access to the lists of cliff climbers?”
“Yes,” said Forge, “but I’m afraid the answer won’t help us. You have to book slots for the advanced cliff climbs in advance, so the instructor can check you’ve got the appropriate prior experience. To avoid any confusion or arguments, the full day’s schedule for each of the advanced climbs is displayed on a noticeboard, and that schedule includes the name and room information of every climber.”
Lucas groaned. “You’re saying that anyone could go to the Teen Level beach, look at that schedule, and make a note of climbers from Blue Zone?”
Forge nodded.
“All right,” said Lucas. “Let’s move on to the issue of who goes undercover into Blue Upway.”
Both groups of Strike team members looked hopefully at him.
“Gold Commander Melisande has told me that our unit’s first priority is closing down Blue Upway,” Lucas continued, “but we all know the reality is that we’ll still need to cover any emergency calls that other units can’t handle. That means we’ll need to keep the full Alpha team available.”
There was a massed sigh from the direction of the Alpha team.
“Four of the Beta team will be going undercover,” said Lucas. “Three of them will be Penn, Amir, and Yosh.”
Penn, Amir, and Yosh yelled in triumph.
Lucas looked at Adika. “Would you be willing to allow Forge to go undercover? I realize there could be an impact on the Beta team’s training.”
Adika was silent for a moment before speaking. “Rafael could take over the training duties for a short period. I’ll allow Forge to go undercover until the New Year festival, but I’ll want him back here after that. We expect our unit to be under increased pressure doing emergency runs then, so I’ll need both my deputies available.”
“Agreed,” said Lucas. “Forge, you’re going undercover for a limited period.”
Forge raised his arms in celebration.
“Using Forge and Penn has the advantage that they’ll be familiar with many of the Blue Upway challenges,” said Lucas. “That should help them attract the Game Commander’s attention, but they’ll be going back to the zone where they lived as teens. We can’t risk them being recognized, so I’ll need their formal consent to immersion disguise measures.”
“I consent,” chorused Forge and Penn.
“I don’t,” said Buzz. “It could take weeks for Forge to get back to his normal appearance after an immersion disguise. What would you do to him anyway?”
“That’s Liaison’s decision,” said Lucas.
“We’d probably only need to use hair dye, coloured contact lenses, and some long-lasting cosmetics,” said Nicole. “I think we could make Penn a convincing red-head, while Forge could go ash blond.”
“I don’t want a blond Forge,” complained Buzz.
“You can discuss disguise details with Nicole later,” said Lucas, “but Liaison will have to make a decision tonight. Beckett is currently working on the integration of the geographical pattern analysis of Blue Upway, and expects to send the completed version to us early tomorrow morning. I’ll then meet with my Tactical team to study the geographical pattern and choose the four locations that have the highest concentration of Blue Upway game players.”
Lucas paused. “That means Forge, Penn, Amir, and Yosh need to be ready to go undercover tomorrow afternoon. We can’t afford to follow the standard approach of them waiting around on Teen Level for weeks to be noticed and invited to join Blue Upway. We have to get them recruited immediately, so I’m not just planning to send them into areas of Blue Zone that are hot spots of game activity, but to help their chances by staging a dramatic arrival.”
Lucas smiled. “Our undercover men will be escorted to Blue Zone by a large group of hasties, who will take each man to their teen room in turn. At each room, the teens living in that corridor will be called together and lectured about the bad character of the new arrival. They’ll be told about their history of rule-breaking, including excessively reckless behaviour in some game other than Blue Upway, which has led to them being punished by being moved to a different zone. The teens will then be ordered to avoid the new arrival. I expect the news to spread rapidly, so our men are contacted by their nearest Blue Upway recruiter.”
“Can I play the part of the hasty giving the lecture about Forge’s bad character?” asked Buzz.
Forge cringed. “Oh, no. I’m doomed.”
Lucas laughed. “You can give all four of the lectures, Buzz.”
“Then all four of us are doomed,” said Forge, in resigned tones.
“We’re doing everything we can to get our undercover men quickly recruited into Blue Upway,” said Lucas, “but it won’t be easy to find clues to the Game Commander’s identity. We have increasing numbers of players being injured attempting Blue Upway challenges, so my Tactical team will need to find a way to deter teens from playing the game until we’ve caught our target.”
I frowned. “I thought it wasn’t possible to deter them, Lucas. You said that giving warnings about the danger would just make Blue Upway more attractive to risk-taking teens.”
“It would. I wasn’t thinking about giving warnings but distracting them with something like special teen events or ...” Lucas broke off his sentence and shouted. “That’s it!”
“What?” I asked in confusion.
Lucas began gabbling single words. “Brilliant. Answer. Warn. Halloween.”
He’d gone into the minimal speed speech he loved using with me to save time. I automatically linked to the pre-vocalization level of his mind to fill in the gaps between words.
“You’ve never mentioned a Teen Game called Halloween to me before, Lucas,” I said.
There was a chorus of groans from the watching crowd, especially the Tactical team members. “Perhaps Lucas could say his side of this conversation aloud for the benefit of non-telepaths,” said Emili pointedly.
“Apologies,” said Lucas. “I was saying that Amber is brilliant. The answer is that we don’t warn teens not to play Blue Upway. We warn them not to play a Teen Game called Halloween.”
“Just like Amber, I’ve never heard you mention that game before,” said Kareem.
“I’ve never mentioned it before because it doesn’t exist,” said Lucas eagerly. “We issue warnings, or even better actual orders, to teens not to play Halloween. No truly risk-addicted game player will be able to resist an officially forbidden game named after the Hive’s ominous festival of darkness and death.”
I gave him a bewildered look. “But you just said that Halloween doesn’t exist.”
Lucas grinned. “It doesn’t exist now, but it will exist by tonight. My Tactical team will be running it. Blue Upway has about thirty thousand players, but it’s the most reckless teens who are attempting dangerous challenges and getting hurt. If we can lure the most risk-loving five thousand players into moving to Halloween, then the injury rate should drop drastically.”
