Gameprey

17

Gaspar froze, staring back at Madeline Green, not knowing how he’d lost control of the situation so quickly. “What?”

“All my friends call me Maj,” she said. “Ergo, you’re not one of them. No matter how much you look like Matt Hunter.”

Glancing at the crowd around them, wondering if anyone was paying too much attention, Gaspar pleaded, “Wait! I can explain!”

“Ten seconds,” Maj said, “and I’m starting counting now.”

Looking at her, Gaspar thought back to what he knew of her. “Peter Griffen’s in real trouble. I don’t think he knows how deep he’s into it.”

“Has he been kidnapped?”

“Yes.”

“Please lower your voice,” Gaspar said. “This room is being monitored by the people I work for.”

“Who are they?”

“I can’t tell you. Not now.”

“I can scream,” Maj pointed out. “When security shuts the area down, you might escape, but there’s a good chance you’d get tagged with a trace virus.”

Gaspar shook his head. “No. They’ve invaded the system. I can get out as easily as I got in.”

“So you say.”

“It’s true.” Angry and frustrated, Gaspar hardened his voice. “Do you want to help Peter Griffen or not? Because if you don’t, they’re going to kill him.”

“How am I supposed to help him?”

“I don’t know that yet,” Gaspar answered. “I haven’t gotten that worked out.”

“Do you know where he is?”

Gaspar considered lying for only a moment, thinking he could improve his own worth, then didn’t because he was sure she would know that he was lying. “No. I’ll try to find out.”

“Who are you?”

“Someone who needs your help,” Gaspar replied. “I met your friend Mark earlier. I arranged for you to get the invitations tonight so I could meet you.”

“You’re in charge of surveillance over the banquet?”

“Yes.”

“Then shut it down and let’s talk.”

Gaspar glanced across the room, picking out the two men he knew Heavener had assigned to cover the banquet inside the room. Neither of them paid any attention to him. “I can’t. There’s someone in charge of me.”

“It’s going to be hard to help you if I don’t know who you are or what’s going on.”

“I can only hope that it’s enough that you know I exist, and that you’re right in thinking that Peter Griffen didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping. They set him up, used him, and it’s only going to get worse.”

Anxious frustration showed on Maj’s face. “Where do I start looking?”

Gaspar shook his head. “I don’t know. This whole thing is so tangled and I’m so close to the middle of it that anything I say could get Peter and me both killed. We are acceptable losses. There’s too much at risk.”

“What?”

“I don’t know for sure. But I do know these people don’t do anything without millions or billions of dollars on the line.”

“So it is about money,” Maj said.

Gaspar shrugged and felt bad because she sounded so disappointed, which was strange because he was the one who was risking his neck. “Most things are. But this is about a lot of money. I just don’t know how. Yet.” He wanted to say more, but he was afraid to. Anything he said that could lead them back to him was the wrong thing. They need to be led through their own resources to Peter Griffen.

Maj looked at him, studying him. “Where do we—”

Before she could finish her question, Gaspar spotted Heavener approaching the banquet room. The woman wore a deep jade cocktail dress but walked purposefully. Even though the dress clung to the curves, Gaspar knew she could have a dozen deadly weapons concealed on her body.

“What’s wrong?” Maj asked.

Heavener checked in through the banquet security easily, using the ID that Gaspar had generated for her. She paused in the doorway and glanced over the crowd. Her lips barely moved as she spoke. Only someone watching her closely would have noticed.

“Latke.” Her voice came through the aud-connect Gaspar had set up in his veeyar.

“Yes,” he answered, turning to Maj and closing down the aud-send loop so Heavener wouldn’t hear him. “I’ve got to go.”

“Is it because of that woman?” Maj clutched at the sleeve of the tuxedo jacket he wore.

Gaspar hesitated, not wanting to leave the safety Maj Green represented but knowing he should log off now.

“Close your net over this room,” Heavener ordered. “Execute now. I’ve got someone in here with a mask program passing himself off as Matt Hunter.”

Cold hard fear filled Gaspar, and he couldn’t help looking at Heavener across the room. How did she know?

“Latke, close the net.”

Automatically Gaspar closed the net, securing holo traces in a minefield over the immediate area. That had been only one of the safeguards Heavener had insisted on. Now if he tried to leave the room along the Net, he’d be tagged with a trace virus, and Heavener would know he’d made contact with Maj Green.

And he didn’t even know where to tell Maj to find his own body.

Heavener circled the room, talking to the two men inside the room over the audlink running through Gaspar’s veeyar system.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Gaspar said to Maj, taking her by the arm and pulling her. He scanned the room. There were three other exits. He glanced over his shoulder. Heavener and the two men had spread out, going slowly and steadily through the crowd, closing in like pincers. They easily covered three of the exits. The exit on the other side of the room was his only hope.

“What’s wrong?” Maj asked, resisting his urge to move.

“They’re on to me.”

“The woman?” Maj still wasn’t moving, and Heavener was getting closer.

“Yes. But she doesn’t know it’s me. She sees your friend Matt, the same as you do.”

Maj got into motion, following at his side. “What happens if she finds out it’s you?”

“Then I’m dead, and your friend Peter is probably dead, too.” Gaspar struggled not to run for the exit. They were ahead, but it was going to be close.

“Latke,” Heavener called over the audlink. “Do you see him? The guy with Madeline Green?”

Gaspar had to restrain himself from correcting Heavener and telling her it was Maj, not Madeline. “I see him. Are you sure that isn’t Matt Hunter?”

“Matt Hunter left the room where he was a few minutes ago,” Heavener responded. “He’s another problem I’m having to take care of at the moment.”

“I missed that,” Gaspar said. Panic flooded his senses, and he knew his heart rate was accelerating beyond control again. He tried to control it, knowing the tranquilizers would definitely affect his ability to do everything he needed to do.

“We’ll talk about it when I see you again,” Heavener said.

Gaspar felt like an animal with a leg in the iron jaws of a bear trap. He hurried toward the glass doors of the exit. “I need you to open the door,” he told Maj. “It’s not programmed for holo interaction. There are holoprojectors out in the hall for the hotel guests, so I won’t be immediately tossed out of the hotel, but if I just walk through the door, Heavener’s going to know I’m a holo instead of a person in a mask program.”

“Heavener’s the woman?”

“Forget you heard that name.” Gaspar couldn’t believe he’d let it slip. “The door. Get the door.” He held her arm, the sensation almost feeling normal thanks to the holoprojector feedbacks.

Maj hit the door release lever, and they walked briskly out into the hallway. Gaspar trotted alongside her, listening to his heart thunder back in his physical body. He expected to feel the hot burn of the tranquilizers rushing through his system at any second.

“Stop!” Heavener’s voice barked behind them.

Maj broke into a run, yanking Gaspar after her. He stumbled and almost fell, prey to the realistic approach of the holoprojectors. The hallways were safe, he knew from his research on the hotel, and so were most of the rooms. He glanced over his shoulder, watched in escalating terror as Heavener started closing the distance. Maybe Maj would have been able to outrun her on her own, but he couldn’t keep the pace.

“She’s catching up,” he gasped.

Abruptly Maj turn and shoved him ahead. “Keep going!”

Gaspar hesitated just a moment, watching as Heavener pounded down the hallway. The two men followed behind her. “Matt’s in danger. That’s how they knew I was here. Don’t forget.” Then he ran, wishing there were someone else in the hallways to help Maj, wishing he didn’t think he was such a coward for running.

But he ran as hard as he could, taking the first corner to the left that he came to. Releasing the holo form, he jumped back to his veeyar.

“Peter’s a brilliant guy,” Oscar Raitt said. “He’s always got a head full of ideas. Twists on programming no one else has ever even thought of. If there was ever anyone born to work in the gaming world, it was Pete.”

Matt sat at the small desk in the hotel room where Oscar was staying. “You don’t think Peter disappeared on his own?”

“No way.” Oscar was adamant. He was at least six feet eight or six feet nine, with the broad shoulders of a woodcutter or a linebacker. He sat on the bed, obviously more at home there than in one of the hotel’s regular-sized chairs. He wore a tank top and shorts, his massive feet clad in Roman sandals. A chocolate mint was stacked on top of the pillow behind him. “That production number Pete had up front? That was his show, man. In his book, this would be an all-time low.”

“Had you been in touch with him much?”

“Sure. We talked a lot.” Oscar grinned. “We saw each other at least once a month. He was the reason I got to know Paris so well.”

“Paris?”

Oscar nodded. “Yeah. You know. Paris, France. Eiffel Tower. Arch of Triumph. Napoleon.”

“Got it. What was Peter doing in France?”

“Developing Realm of the Bright Waters. That’s where Eisenhower put him up to do the design work.”

“I didn’t know Eisenhower Productions had a Paris office.” Leif had mentioned that Eisenhower was based in Seattle.

Oscar lifted his broad shoulders and dropped them. “Beats me. But that’s where Pete worked on the game. He didn’t take much time off, but when he did, he usually called me, and we spent some time prowling the city. Art museums because any video graphics designer is going to tell you that you just can’t see enough stuff. And we spent some downtime at the cyber cafés. A true game junky just can’t get away from it.”

“What did you talk about?” Matt asked.

“The usual. What he was working on, what I was working on. What we thought of some of the games that were out there.”

“Peter didn’t mention any problems with Eisenhower Productions? How they wanted to market the game?”

“No. Peter didn’t concern himself with that. Realm of the Bright Waters was strictly his baby. They couldn’t make move one without his okay.”

“Isn’t that unusual in the gaming industry?”

“Like finding a frog with wings. In the real world.”

“Don’t the publishers underwrite a lot of a developer’s expenses?”

“Most deals,” Oscar said, “they underwrite entirely. Financial freedom doesn’t come without a price, though. They usually control the milestones and deadlines more than you do, and they can make you release a game that you know isn’t right. It’s hard to blame them, though. They’ve got investors and accountants crawling over them with microscopes.”

“You two worked together on some games in the past, didn’t you?”

Oscar nodded. “Peter said he thought he might need me on this game at the end. He had some problems with the game engine. He built it from scratch, you know, to maximize play possibilities.”

“I don’t understand,” Matt admitted.

“One of the chief gripes of the CRPG players,” Oscar said, “is the whole campaign structure. Take a game like Sarxos. It’s interactive, with a constantly varying number of players online, all with their own agendas. They raise armies, battle each other for regions, cities, rights to water, whatever. But you can’t introduce new elements into the game without playing havoc with a lot of ongoing campaigns.”

“Give me an example.”

“Okay, say you and your group have been in Sarxos. Maybe building up a carnival complete with goods and jousting tournaments. Something to draw the populace and line your own pockets with gold. Another bunch of players decides the game has gotten too dull in that area, and they go attack goblin or bandit camps. They get all the goblins or bandits stirred up. Next thing you know, the goblins or bandits come tearing out of the hills and totally raze the carnival. The second group got the excitement they wanted, but the first group loses all their investment time. On one hand you got guys saying you’ve got a great game. But on the other, you’ve got a lot of unhappy campers.”

Matt nodded. He’d seen it happen more than once.

“Different people like to play the game at different speeds,” Oscar said. “The hack and slashers want action and a Monte Hall dungeon. But the builders want a game they can basically build another existence in; a place where they can chill out from a stressful world. That was one of the major draws Pete had with the new game engine. It was designed to offer the option to integrate with any ongoing campaign.”

“So each adventure could be individual and at a pace the particular gamer wanted.”

“Yes.”

Matt thought about the concept. “That’s almost like building a million different games at one time.”

Oscar grinned. “You’re getting it now. Individually tailored for the individual player.”

“The programming must have been intense.”

“I saw some of the coding Pete wrote for it. Groundbreaking stuff. And that game, when it hits the market, is going to go huge. Pete’s already got story arcs mapped out for the game.”

“What kind of story arcs?”

“Plagues. Invasions. In one of them a magic spell tilts the whole planet on its axis, causes a year-long winter to fall over the world. Can you imagine that?”

Matt shook his head. He couldn’t, but the whole idea sounded fascinating.

“This world is going to be more interactive than Sarxos for the gamer,” Oscar said. “The people who put Sarxos online have kind of had to maintain the status quo. No coloring outside the lines. No huge story or environment changes. With Pete’s world he could introduce anything he wanted to. The players could play it then, later, or not at all.”

The idea was staggering. Matt wasn’t as informed and as excited about Net games as Mark and Andy were, but he liked them on occasion. Realm of the Bright Waters sounded nothing short of awesome. “You said Peter thought he might need your help.”

“Yes. He had some game engine problems. See, I taught Pete everything he ever learned about game engines. We started tinkering with them at the orphanage. Pete and I were both state raised.”

Matt nodded.

“I think that’s why he’s so good at building worlds,” Oscar said. “He was always a quiet kid. Polite. Didn’t ever raise a big stink about things. He stayed to himself a lot. I didn’t know what to think of him. But when the home got online and brought in implant chairs, that’s when I saw Pete really come alive. It turned out that I had some skill at programming. Pete wanted to learn. That’s how we met. I could write programming and teach it to Pete, but he’s the one with the ideas. I can do a little world-building, setting up environments, and pulling a cohesive storyline together, but I can’t keep up with him. Nobody could.”

“Why did he go off on his own instead of signing a deal with a major publisher?”

“Because he wanted the control. Publishers have their own ideas about things. Too many hands in the pot. And, basically, I think Pete was building his own world that he could share with others. It’s supposed to be a place where he can stay and control things. No car wrecks. No losing his parents. Total control.”

“And he wouldn’t want to give that up.”

“No. No way.”

“How did he get along with Eisenhower Productions?”

“Everything with them was hurry. They’d have had the game out six months ago if they could have.”

“Peter held them up?”

“Yeah. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t have a choice. Part of it was their fault. When he asked me to help with the game engine, they told me I couldn’t. They maintained that much control.”

“Did they say why?”

Oscar shrugged. “They didn’t want anything about the game getting out was what they told him. I think it was a petty vengeance thing. He told them wait on the game; they told him he couldn’t use me.”

“Did he ask anyone else?”

“No. Pete wouldn’t have.”

“So he worked through the game engine problems himself?” Matt asked.

“Yes.”

“Did he say what they were?”

“We talked about it a little. What he was having was a bleed-over problem.”

“Bleed-over?”

“Sure. You have more than one player in a multi-user game, you have to build in boundaries so one player doesn’t affect the other player’s gameplay. What Pete was trying to do was isolate whole worlds, yet at the same time have them all remain accessible. So the concrete facts remain concrete. If he wanted to introduce a new creature or a new spell, he needed to be able to integrate as a sys/ops change, not have to write new programming for each offshoot a player had made. Understand?”

“Separate but equal,” Matt said.

“Kind of lame,” Oscar said, “but that’s the general idea.”

Matt remembered last night, when Peter Griffen and the dragon had invaded Maj’s veeyar. “Is it possible that the bleed-over you’re talking about could affect other games?”

“You mean the way they did at the convention today?” Oscar asked.

“Yes. I was in one of those games. I saw that dragon.”

Oscar grinned. “Yeah. A lot of people did. I’ll bet they never forget it, either. I never saw the bleed-over that Pete was talking about, but from his description that was exactly how it was. I was going to go over to him and talk to him about it. You could see the surprise on his face. He had no clue.”

“He thought he had the bleed-over fixed?”

“Pete had to have thought he had it fixed,” Oscar said. “Otherwise that game would never have seen the light of day.”

“He’d stop the release on Saturday?”

“In a heartbeat.”

That, Matt figured, might be a good reason for Eisenhower to get Peter out of the way. Maybe Peter figured the overlap into Maj’s veeyar was just a fluke, a small hiccup in the programming the night before. But there was no way to mistake what had happened at the convention.

“Pete didn’t know the bleed-over bug was still there,” Oscar said. “I’d bet my life on it.”

“Do you have any notes Peter sent you regarding the game engine bleed-over?”

“He called me last night,” Oscar said. “I wasn’t here because I was out wining and dining some game developers who are interested in some ideas I have. I think the message is still on my veeyar at home. Maybe I’ve got a few other e-mails still lingering around. A lot of Pete’s e-mail had jokes and stories in them that I like to read over occasionally.”

“Can you get whatever you have?”

“Sure. I talked to Pete last night after I got in. He thought he had it under control again then. We were going to get together after his presentation today. But that didn’t happen.” Oscar paused. “Do you think Pete’s okay?”

“So far,” Matt said, “there’s not any reason to think otherwise.”

Oscar nodded, but he didn’t look convinced.

Matt’s foilpack rang unexpectedly. He excused himself and opened it.

Megan’s face filled the vidscreen. “Trouble,” she said breathlessly. “Maj just ran out of the banquet room with a couple guys that looked as if they match the descriptions of the men who invaded her room last night. Leif went after them, too.”

“I’m on my way.” Matt stood up and headed for the door at a trot.

“Something wrong?” Oscar asked.

“A friend needs me.” Matt opened the door. “Download a copy of Peter’s e-mails and get it to me over at the Bessel Midtown front counter. I’ll meet you there.”

“If it will help find Pete, I’ll be there with bells on.”

“I think it will.” Then Matt was through the door, running for the stairwell that would take him down to the third floor where the above-street enclosed walkway was. He ran to the other hotel, not really noticing the shadows at the other end till one of them stepped out at him. Instinctively he tried to turn to defend himself.

Something crashed into the side of his face, detonating what felt like a small nuclear device on his right temple. His legs turned to jelly, and he went down. Falling over onto his back, he glanced up with double vision and saw the hard-lined shadow lean down over him.

“Stay out of this, kid,” a raspy voice advised. “You’re in way over your head.” The shadow raised its arm again, the blackjack showing this time.

When it landed, Matt lost consciousness, and he knew he wasn’t going to be able to help Maj.