The Deadliest Game

PROLOGUE

It was the kind of windowless room found in any one of a thousand office buildings nowadays, since the world had become truly virtual and any wall could become a window at the will of the inhabitants. However, the inhabitants of this particular room seemed unwilling to indulge in even the illusion of windowing; or perhaps what they disliked was the basic implication of a window, that someone might be able to see in as well as out. The walls were blind and bare, though they glowed softly white, shedding a cool, even light over the large, shiny black table in the middle of the room, and over the five men sitting at one end of it.

They were Suits. Some of their lapels or ties were marginally more slender than others, or wider, but only those slight clues to their ages or preferences in fashion made them look at all different from one another. Otherwise, their ties were all subdued, and their shirts were plain white or pale colors, no prints. In nearly all ways they were unremarkable-looking men, and wore that unremarkableness like a disguise.

It was one.

“So when will it be ready?” said the one who sat at the center of the group.

“It’s ready now,” said the man sitting furthest from him on his left, a youngish-looking man with iron-colored hair and iron-gray eyes. “The controls have been in place for eighteen months now, consolidating their positions and getting ready to go into maximal intervention mode.”

“And no one suspects?”

“No one. We’ve had zero tolerance for leaks…not that it would have been that much of a problem had there been one. The environment is so intrinsically chaotic that you could drop a tactical nuke in it and get a lot of hair-tearing and recriminations, but absolutely no profitable analysis.” The youngish man laughed a scornful one-breath laugh. “No one there is interested in analysis anyway. The context is completely devoted to raw sensation and ‘experience.’ Even when the program starts running, no one will have the slightest idea what’s going on until everything’s over and it’s much too late.”

The man in the center turned to one of the two on his right, an older man with a deeply lined face and shaggy blond hair going silver. “What about the people at Ecs? Are they set?”

The man with the silver-gilt hair nodded. “They had the point of maximum economic result picked several months ago. All the projections have matched real-world outcomes…if ‘real’ is the word we’re looking for. We can move the world, all right. The lever’s ready. All we need to do now is pick the place to stand.”

The man in the center nodded. “All right. Your two sections will need to work very closely together on this, but you have been anyway. Make sure you pick the right ‘spot’…and when you start to push, don’t spare the effort. I want the whole thing overturned. A lot of people are watching this demonstration, and they’ll expect to see something spectacular for all the funds they’ve diverted. Excuse me. I mean ‘laterally invested’”—the others smiled—“toward setting up the best possible result. Make absolutely certain the endgame position matches the modeling. I don’t want any bull afterwards about ‘equivocal results.’”

The two men to whom he had spoken nodded.

“All right,” said the man in the center. “Lunch with the people from Tokagawa is at one-thirty. Don’t be late. We want to make a unified presentation, and you know what a stickler that miserable little old man is for manners.”

“If this works out,” said one of the men to whom he had not spoken, “we won’t need to mind our manners much longer. He’ll be the one who’ll have to be looking over his shoulder.”

The man in the center looked at him: a slow, deliberate turn of the head, like a targeting mechanism turning on gimbals and locking on.

“If?” he said.

The other man went slightly pale, and glanced down at the table.

The man in the center held the look for a few seconds more, then stood. The others stood with him. “The car will be here at five after one,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”

The man who had gone pale was first out of the room, closely followed by the only one who had not spoken. The young iron-haired man glanced at the man in the center, then followed the others out. The door shut.

Then the man in the middle chuckled softly. “A nuke, huh?” he said. “It might be funny.”

The man with the silver-gilt hair produced a slightly sardonic expression, and turned to follow in the wake of the others. “Well,” he said, “frankly, I don’t know if I’d bother. They’d probably just think it was magic….”