At sixteen hundred hours, Dagmar was on the roof of the hotel. The top two floors were a series of suites and penthouses, and Dagmar needed a special key card to go there. She’d had to get off the elevator a floor below and go up the stairs. To keep the riffraff out, the top two floors had the same key card locks as the elevator, but the roof door was not so equipped.
By this time she was completely familiar with the hotel stairs. She’d followed Tomer Zan’s instructions and found her six escape routes from her room. By the time she was finished searching out staircases and finding out whether they led outside the hotel, she was tired and covered with sweat. This called for a shower, a change of clothes, and lunch. As the hour she’d chosen for lunch was completely random, she presumed that any hypothetical kidnappers were at least as confused as she was.
She had looked up Zelazni Associates— she had at first spelled it Zelazny, like the writer— and discovered that it was an Israeli firm dedicated to “personal protection” and, it appeared, all things military. The word mercenary was nowhere on its Web site, but that’s what they were. Their offices were in Tel Aviv and South Carolina— nowhere, she observed, near Jakarta.
She stood on the roof in the bright, humid daylight. The dry monsoon was from the north and carried the scent of burning Glodok, the bone and body fat of Chinese mothers and children. The roof had a fringe of the red tiles that were popular here, but most of it was a flat expanse of tar grown soft in the equatorial sun. The housing for the elevators and banks of solar cells and big ten-foot-tall aluminum boxes holding air-conditioning gear made the roof cluttered, so Dagmar made her way to the eastern side of the hotel tower and stood there in the bright sun for a long time, looking up. The tar oozed out beneath her feet, the hot sun prickled the side of her face, and she wished she’d been able to wear her panama. Every so often she brought her watch up into view, checked the time, and lowered her arm.
When it was five minutes past the hour, she looked out over the landscape of modern towers and, beyond the shining emblems of modernity, the vast landscape of the city, made indistinct by humidity and smog. There were other pillars of smoke rising besides Glodok, though none as large, and she wondered what political statements, neighborhood grudges, or mere criminalities were being played out.
This was what a travel writer would call “the real Asia,” the world of those who had been lured to the city on the promise of a better life, then found that every promise, however unspoken, had been broken. Now their life’s work had gone for nothing, their savings were useless, and they were under siege by their own military.
They were a tough people, Dagmar presumed, if they were here at all; but they could be forgiven for being angry. She could only hope that she wouldn’t become a casualty of that rage.
An amplified Javanese voice echoed between the buildings. The speech was rapid, urgent, and male. Dagmar stepped closer to the edge of the building and looked down the slope of ornamental red tile to the street below.
Past the crests of the trees that lined the street, Dagmar saw thousands of people marching north up the street under homemade signs. They were close-packed and orderly and hadn’t yet turned into a mob, though Dagmar wondered how many clubs and knives were hidden away under loose clothing.
The amplified voice wasn’t a part of the demonstration but was coming from a police line stretched across the road ahead of it. They looked like the police she’d met the previous day, with khaki uniforms, helmets, and shields. There seemed to be very few of them compared with the demonstrators.
The bullhorn fell silent. The demonstrators kept moving forward. Then the amplified words came again. Dagmar had a sense that they were the same words, only spoken more rapidly.
Dagmar’s nerves gave a leap at the window-rattling boom of shotguns. Gas canisters arced high above the crowd, splashed down in little flowers of white. The crowd began to move— some running forward, some clumping, some trying to move back against the pressure of the thousands coming up from behind.
The officer with the bullhorn was yelling.
Shots hammered out. Not shotguns this time, but rifles, the rip of automatic fire.
The whole crowd screamed at once, fury and mourning and pain wrapped up in one vast primal sound.
Dagmar remembered the young cop from the car, the boy whose whole life experience seemed derived from Felony Maximum IV. Who made machine-gun noises with his lips as he triggered an imaginary weapon.
I always take the MAC-10.
Aside from a handful that went crazy and charged, the crowd surged away from the police line, leaving behind specks of black and red on the pavement. The officer kept yelling through the bullhorn. The demonstrators who charged were gunned down, and bullets flew past them into the crowd.
Their sprawled figures were tiny. Dagmar could cover their dead forms with her finger and make them go away.
The crowd screamed as if it were one huge animal, and the animal fled. The shooting continued, more deliberate now, as if the police were picking their targets. The signs and banners the crowd had been carrying fell and lay abandoned along the pavement.
Dagmar stepped back from the edge, tar pulling at her shoes.
The scent of burning Chinese was strong in the air.
Once upon a time there had been four of them, Dagmar and Charlie and Austin and B J. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games.
They met at Caltech, where they majored in computer science. They spent a lot of their time staring into screens, and computer games had a limited appeal for eyes that were already weary of looking at 525-line images. They preferred games played with paper and pencil— RPGs, where each could pretend to be someone different from themselves, yet someone they had created.
Unlike their peers who preferred computers to human company, each was comfortable around other people. Austin and Charlie even knew how to talk to girls— and B J was a fast learner.
Other people wandered in and out of the games, but these four were constants. They were all role players— they could stay in character for hours and shared a dislike of players whose chief motivation was to manipulate the rules in order to gain rewards or treasure.
Dagmar was a scholarship student. Her mother worked in a dry-cleaning establishment; her father was a bartender who had descended over time to a barfly. Dagmar had grown up preferring game worlds to her own life, though sometimes the latter intruded, as when she’d discovered that her father had pawned her computer in order to buy vodka. Caltech, in Pasadena, with its smog and perfect weather, was the best life she’d ever known.
When she ran her own games, she used GURPS as a rule set and created her own worlds of adventure, all crafted in meticulous detail. She specialized in elaborate plots with enormous sets of characters, sometimes so complex that after the game had run on for weeks or months, she herself forgot who had stolen the jewels, or murdered the Antarean ambassador, or double-crossed the Allies on the eve of World War II. Her games required hours of research to put together, but on the other hand, she enjoyed research.
Charlie’s games were agreeably eccentric. In one game the players were ravens in a quest for the magic that had given them human intelligence; in another, they were zombies in search of human brains to eat. In a third, they were ordinary people who had somehow been shrunk to the size of hamsters. Other sorts of players— those who wanted to kill monsters, plunder treasure, and rack up experience points— recoiled from Charlie’s campaigns as if they transmitted plague. Dagmar, Austin, and B J loved them.
Austin Katanyan was a second-generation gamer. His parents had met playing Dungeons and Dragons in college. He had brought their first-edition D&D rules with him in the original brown cardboard box, actually used them to run a game, and had a worn copy of Chainmail that he used to resolve the large-scale conflicts. He liked to run old game systems: RuneQuest, Witch Hunt, Empire of the Petal Throne. Like Dagmar, he liked to explore the elaborate backgrounds of fantasy worlds. Unlike Dagmar, he didn’t invent his own.
B J’s games were, in a word, diabolical.
His given name was Boris Jan Bustretski, and he came from the same eastern working-class background that had produced Dagmar. He was tall and stocky and blond and had inherited steelworker’s arms and shoulders from his father, who had worked for Bethlehem until the bankruptcy, and for a trucking firm thereafter.
B J thought very well of his own intelligence. He was happy to tell people how smart he was and boasted of his plans for a successful career as a master of Internet 2.0. Despite that, he didn’t seem to know how physically attractive he was, a trait Dagmar found endearing.
His games were full of twists and cunning. Traps lurked around every corner. His nonplayer characters all had agendas, and all were faithless. The character who hired mercenary characters for a mission had no intention of paying them at the end of it; the venerable old lady who provided information to the players was an agent of the opposition; the weapons with which the adventurers were provided were faulty, or were cursed, or would give their position away to anyone with the right tracking devices. Characters would appear who would offer the players their heart’s desire in order to betray their fellows.
B J’s campaigns kept his players sharp. Austin, Charlie, and Dagmar became experts at anticipating the treacheries and multiple loyalties of others. It was a paranoid worldview that was, in its way, comforting. You knew everyone would betray you; the question was when.
Sometimes the campaigns would simply change. Players who had been adventuring in twenty-first-century North America suddenly found themselves translated to alien worlds. A perfectly realistic historical campaign involving Vásquez de Coronado’s march into the Midwest, a campaign that had gone on for weeks, would suddenly encounter Indian tribes worshipping world-threatening Lovecraftian monsters. B J was a good enough craftsman that all these switches eventually made sense, if tenuously, but he admitted that he got bored with his creations and that the sudden switches from one genre to another were intended to keep him interested in his own games. Sometimes these attempts failed; B J abandoned more campaigns than he finished.
Dagmar was a woman on a campus populated largely by males. The gaming group had an even larger percentage of men than the campus as a whole. For the first time in her life, she found herself a social success.
The attention was pleasing, but she viewed the possibilities with a cautious eye. She was perfectly aware that the only experience she had had in relationships was watching her mother remain in a hopeless marriage to an alcoholic.
Austin and Charlie had expressed polite interest in her. B J hadn’t— he was much more interested in working out the details of his future life as a billionaire. So of course— after a couple of years exploring other possibilities— B J was the one that she fell for. They had a glorious nine months together before B J’s change in attitude grew too great for Dagmar to ignore.
The relationship had simply ceased to interest him. He’d gotten as bored with Dagmar as he had with Vásquez de Coronado’s march along the Arkansas.
Dagmar managed to survive the blow to her self-esteem. Her principal regret, over the long term, was not so much having left B J as having broken up the gaming group. Austin and Charlie had to decide which of the two to invite to their games, and without the chemistry of the four core members, the games became less interesting.
But Dagmar wasn’t a part of that scene much longer. On the rebound from B J, she fell for her English professor. Not that he taught English: he was a chemistry professor on sabbatical from Churchill College, Cambridge. When Aubrey’s sabbatical at Cal Tech expired, Dagmar dropped out of school to marry him.
Now it was Dagmar’s turn to be bored. Not with Aubrey, not at first, but with her situation. Her visa didn’t allow her to work, though she did manage to wangle some under-the-table consulting jobs in computer departments in and out of Cambridge. When her resident immigrant status finally allowed her to look for jobs, her lack of a degree precluded meaningful employment.
Out of sheer boredom she created an online role-playing game called Earth/Tea/Paper. It consumed her completely for nine months and was a modest success. She decided that the Chinese backstory she’d written for the game was more interesting than the game itself and thought she might give writing fiction a try.
The first short story, “Stone/Paper/Tea,” took her six months: one month to write the story, and five to work up the nerve to send it to an editor.
The story was accepted by Orion Arm, a British science fiction magazine. The magazine folded before they could publish, but during that time Dagmar had written four more stories, all of which eventually sold to better-paying markets than Orion Arm.
More stories followed, all science fiction. Her life orbited a college that specialized in science and engineering, and her own literary tastes had always tended toward the fantastic. Aubrey, she was pleased to discover, was proud of her achievements.
The stories were followed by a novel and two sequels, all sold both in the U.S. and the UK. In New York, Dagmar’s acquiring editor left shortly after buying the series. Her replacement was promoted elsewhere in the company, and the next, fired. By the time the fourth editor wrote an email assuring Dagmar of his admiration for her work and his hope for a successful collaborative relationship, the series’ doom was sealed.
In the UK, the books died because of a lifestyle change on the part of their editor. She had risen to a position of power within the company, fueled by potent cocktails of alcohol and cocaine; but when she went on the wagon, her personality changed. From amiable and energetic, she became critical, angry, and vocal. She found fault with her superiors at meetings; she fired or drove away her assistants; she insisted that Christmas and birthday parties be alcohol-free.
The higher-ups at the company desperately wanted to get rid of her, but they couldn’t find an excuse— she was, in fact, making them millions of pounds. So the company decided they really didn’t need those millions of pounds after all and dropped their science fiction and fantasy imprint. To Dagmar it seemed an extreme reaction to a personnel problem, for all that it was a typically English one. Dagmar’s books were reassigned to a new editor, an amiable man who had never read a science fiction novel in his life. The books were published, but as literary fiction, a change that only served to confuse everyone.
Dagmar’s commercial destruction was thus assured on two continents. The books were never actually reviewed on paper, so far as she knew. The few online reviews were respectful, even enthusiastic, but the sales figures were catastrophic.
That was the end of her writing career, at least under her own name. She had become a literary unperson. Her sales figures were recorded in electromagnetic form in computers in the offices of the major distributors. The figures proved that her books didn’t sell— no publisher in his right mind would take a chance on her.
That none of this was her fault was not on record anywhere.
That her career track was not at all untypical— that the career of practically every other SF or fantasy writer at her two publishing houses also cratered— did not make the situation any easier to bear, but only filled her with a rage that had no point and no direction.
The career collapse occurred simultaneously with a crisis in her marriage. Aubrey had always wanted children, and thus far she had managed to delay the final decision. But he was fourteen years older than she and wanted the children grown and out of the house “before I get too far into my declining years.” He felt he’d indulged her long enough. Considering the death of her career, it wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.
Dagmar thought he might have a point and stopped taking her pill. And then she reflected that she’d had three affaires during her marriage— each during a trip out of town, each short but extremely satisfying— and that rather than have a baby with Aubrey, she’d much rather march over to the Hepworth statue in Churchill College and rip the clothes off the first halfway attractive undergraduate she met.
It wasn’t very nice, she reckoned, but it was true. And things that were true had their own weight, independent of whether they were decorous or not.
She’d lived in two places in the U.S.: Cleveland and Greater Los Angeles. Going west was what Americans did to start over. And so she went back on the pill, packed a pair of suitcases, shipped a copy of the Complete Works of Dagmar Shaw to Charlie by surface mail, and flew to Orange County. When the divorce decree arrived some months later, she signed it.
The only regret she had was that she’d left Aubrey with so many regrets. It hadn’t been his fault.
Over the eight years she’d been away, Dagmar had kept in touch with Austin, Charlie, and B J. Austin had become a successful venture capitalist and started his own company. Charlie and B J had gone into business together: Charlie had done extremely well, but B J was still, as the saying went, working on his first million.
The versions of how that had come about were so wildly different that Dagmar found them impossible to reconcile at a distance. The stories weren’t any more compatible close up, but the anger was a good deal more visible. All Dagmar could do was make sure that Charlie and B J never met.
She was looking around for jobs in IT when Charlie asked her to lunch.
“I think it would be wicked cool to own a game company,” he said. “Would you like to run it for me?”
The next morning, at an hour chosen randomly in order to foil kidnappers, Dagmar went for the daily hopeless visit to see if Mr. Tong was able to help with any airline reservations. Instead of Tong, the office of the concierge was occupied by a small Javanese woman in a white Muslim headdress.
“Mr. Tong no here,” she said. She didn’t add anything more, even after Dagmar started asking questions.
Tong had gone up in flames with Glodok. Or so Dagmar could only suppose.
A few hours later the protesters came again, and there were no police to stop them. Most of the demonstrators marched past the Royal Jakarta north to the presidential palace, but a group at the tail of the column began throwing rocks at the hotel and smashing those windows that had survived the riot on Tuesday. When this produced no response, they stormed the hotel and looted all the shops on the first floor.
The Sikh doorman in his imposing uniform decided not to die for his masters and instead ran for the manager’s office and locked himself inside.
Dagmar didn’t know that any of this had happened until hours later, when she went to the hotel restaurant for dinner. The sight of the lobby, with smashed glass and furniture and glossy tourist brochures scattered like bright flower petals over the fine marble, sent Dagmar straight back to her room in terror. She emailed Charlie and called Tomer Zan.
“We’re still working on moving you to a safer place,” Zan said.
“The hotel got looted.”
“We’re working on it. We’ve got an advanced team in Singapore setting up logistics.”
How many logistics does it take to move a single person? Dagmar almost screamed.
A lot, apparently.
An alternate reality game was made simpler if the players were helping a sympathetic character. The woman lost in her own hotel room was just such a person.
But how did she get in the hotel room, and what did that have to do with Planet Nine?
If Planet Nine was like other MMORPGs, there would be places in the game world where people could meet. In fantasy games, this was usually a tavern, where the player-characters could swill ale, eat hearty stew, and find like-minded individuals with whom to embark on quests.
Presumably there was a similar place in the Planet Nine setup.
If there was a room somewhere in the Planet Nine world where only the players of Dagmar’s ARG could meet to exchange information, that would be useful to the game.
But what, she thought, if bad guys had a place to meet, too?
People who played in MMORPGs lived all over the world. They adopted online identities and knew one another only by those identities.
They could be anybody. Students, lawyers, teachers, truck drivers, or— as in the old New Yorker cartoon— dogs.
They could be criminals. Killers. Terrorists.
Suppose, Dagmar thought, some bad people were meeting in the Planet Nine world to anonymously plan their activities? Suppose they were overheard, by another player or a systems administrator? Suppose that person then ended up dead, not in the game but in the real world?
That, she thought, was your rabbit hole.
And if the rabbit hole led to the woman in the hotel room— if the woman was the lover or daughter or sister of the man who died— then what Dagmar had was the shape of her story.