Plush dolls of Pinky and the Brain overhung Charlie’s monitor, their bottoms fixed in place with Velcro tabs, toes dangling over the video screen. Pinky’s face was set in an expression of befuddled surprise, and the Brain looked out at the world with red-rimmed, calculating eyes.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?” Charlie asked.
Pickups caught his words; software analyzed and recognized his speech; and the big plasma screen winked on. The Brain’s jutting, intent face took on a sinister, underlit cast.
“What we do every night, Pinky,” said the computer in the Brain’s voice.
Welcome, Charlie, to your lair.
Hydraulics hissed as Charlie dropped into his chair. Ice rang as he dropped his glass of Mexican Coke into the cup holder. He touched the screen with his finger, paged through menus, and checked his email.
Dagmar hadn’t sent him her resignation, or a message that gibbered with insanity, so that was good. The previous day she had hosted a game in Bangalore, the game that had been broadcast on live feed to ten or twelve million people, a wild success.
The Bangalore thing had turned out wicked cool.
Wicked cool was what Charlie lived for.
He sipped his Coke as he looked at more email, dictated brief replies, and confirmed a meeting for the next day. Then he minimized his email program.
“Turtle Farm,” he said. The reference was to a facility on Grand Cayman Island, where he kept one of his bank accounts. The two words were unlikely to be uttered accidentally in combination, and therefore served not only as a cue to the software but as a kind of password.
A secure screen popped up. Charlie leaned forward and typed in his password by hand-for the crucial stuff, he preferred as little software interface as possible-and then reached for his Coke as his account balance came up on the screen.
Four point three billion dollars.
Charlie’s heart gave a sideways lurch in his chest. He was suddenly aware of the whisper of the ventilation duct, the sound of a semitruck on the highway outside the office building, the texture of the fine leather upholstery against his bare forearm.
He looked at the number again, counting the zeros.
Four point three billion.
He stared at the screen and spoke aloud into the silence.
“This,” he said, “must stop.”
Dagmar lay on her bed in the dark hotel room in Jakarta and listened to the sound of gunfire. She hoped the guns were firing tear gas and not something more deadly.
She wondered if she should take shelter, lie between the wall and the bed so that the mattress would suck up any bullets coming through the big glass window. She thought about this but did not move.
It didn’t seem worthwhile, somehow.
She was no longer interested in hiding from just any damn bullet.
The air-conditioning was off and the tropical Indonesian heat had infiltrated the room. Dagmar lay naked on sheets that were soaked with her sweat. She thought about cool drinks, but the gunfire was a distraction.
Her nerves gave a leap as the telephone on the nightstand rang. She reached for it, picked up the handset, and said, “This is Dagmar.”
“Are you afraid?” said the woman on the telephone.
“What?” Dagmar said. Dread clutched at her heart. She sat up suddenly.
“Are you afraid?” the woman said. “It’s all right to be afraid.”
In the past few days, Dagmar had seen death and riots and a pillar of fire that marked what had been a neighborhood. She was trapped in her hotel in a city that was under siege, and she had no friends here and no resources that mattered.
Are you afraid?
A ridiculous question.
She had come to Jakarta from Bengaluru, the city known formerly as Bangalore, and had been cared for on her Garuda Indonesia flight by beautiful, willowy attendants who looked as if they’d just stepped off the ramp from the Miss Indonesia contest. The flight had circled Jakarta for three hours before receiving permission to land, long enough for Dagmar to miss her connecting flight to Bali. The lovely attendants, by way of compensation, kept the Bombay and tonics coming.
The plane landed and Dagmar stood in line with the others, waiting to pass customs. The customs agents seemed morose and distracted. Dagmar waited several minutes in line while her particular agent engaged in a vigorous, angry conversation on his cell phone. When Dagmar approached his booth, he stamped her passport without looking at it or her and waved her on.
She found that there were two kinds of people in Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, the frantic and the sullen. The first talked to one another, or into their cell phones, in loud, indignant-sounding Javanese or Sundanese. The second type sat in dejected silence, sometimes in plastic airport seats, sometimes squatting on their carry-on baggage. The television monitors told her that her connection to Bali had departed more than an hour before she’d arrived.
Tugging her carry-on behind her on its strap, Dagmar threaded her way between irate businessmen and dour families with peevish children. A lot of the women wore headscarves or the white Islamic headdress. She went to the currency exchange to get some local currency, and found it closed. The exchange rates posted listed something like 110,000 rupiah to the dollar. Most of the shops and restaurants were also closed, even the duty-free and the chain stores in the large attached mall, where she wandered looking for a place to change her rupees for rupiah. The bank she found was closed. The ATM was out of order. The papers at the newsagent’s had screaming banner headlines and pictures of politicians looking bewildered.
She passed through a transparent plastic security wall and into the main concourse to change her ticket for Bali. The Garuda Indonesia ticket seller didn’t look like Miss Jakarta. She was a small, squat woman with long, flawless crimson nails on her nicotine-stained fingers, and she told Dagmar there were no more flights to Bali that night.
“Flight cancel,” the woman said.
“How about another airline?” Dagmar asked.
“All flight cancel.”
Dagmar stared at her. “All the airlines?”
The woman looked at her from eyes of obsidian.
“All cancel.”
“How about tomorrow?”
“I check.”
The squat woman turned to her keyboard, her fingers held straight and flat in the way used by women with long nails. Dagmar was booked on a flight leaving the next day at 1:23 P.M. The squat woman handed her a new set of tickets.
“You come two hour early. Other terminal, not here.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
There was a tourist information booth, but people were packed around it ten deep.
All cancel. She wondered how many had gotten stranded.
Dagmar took out her handheld. It was a marvelous piece of technology, custom-built by a firm in Burbank to her needs and specifications. It embraced most technological standards used in North America, Asia, and Europe and had a satellite uplink for sites with no coverage or freaky mobile standards. It had SMS for text messaging and email, packet switching for access to the Internet, and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video. It had a built-in camera and camcorder, acted as a personal organizer and PDA, supported instant messaging, played and downloaded music, and supported Bluetooth. It could be used as a wireless modem for her PC, had a GPS feature, and would scan both text and Semacodes.
Dagmar loved it so much she was tempted to give it a name but never had.
She stepped out of the terminal, and tropical heat slapped her in the face. Mist rose in little wisps from the wet pavement, and the air smelled of diesel exhaust and clove cigarettes. Dagmar saw the Sheraton and the Aspac glowing on the horizon, found their numbers online, and called. They were full. She googled a list of Jakarta hotels, found a five-star place called the Royal Jakarta, and booked a room at a not-quite-extortionate rate.
Dagmar found a row of blue taxis and approached the first. The driver had a lined face, a bristly little mustache, and a black pitji cap on his head. He turned down his radio and gave her a skeptical look.
“I have no rupiah,” she said. “Can you take dollars?”
A smile flashed, revealing brown, irregular teeth.
“I take dollar!” he said brightly.
“Twenty dollars,” she said, “to take me to the Royal Jakarta.”
“Twenty dollar, okay!” His level of cheerfulness increased by an order of magnitude. He jumped out of the cab, loaded her luggage into the trunk, and opened the door for her.
Above the windshield were pictures of movie stars and pop singers. The driver hopped back in the car, lit a cigarette, and pulled into traffic. He didn’t turn on the meter, but he turned up the radio, and the cab boomed with the sound of Javanese rap music. He looked at Dagmar in the rearview mirror and gave a craggy-toothed smile.
Then the terror began.
None of the drivers paid any attention to lanes. Sometimes the taxi was one of five cars charging in line abreast down a two-lane road. Or it would weave out into oncoming traffic, accelerating toward a wall of oncoming metal until it darted into relative safety at the last possible instant.
Automobiles shared the roadway with trucks, with buses, with vans and minibuses, with bicycles, with motorbikes, and with other motorbikes converted to cabs, with little metal shelters built on the back. All moved at the same time or were piled up in vast traffic jams where nothing moved except for the little motorbikes weaving between the stalled vehicles. Occasional fierce rain squalls hammered the window glass. The driver rarely bothered to turn on the wipers.
What Dagmar could see of the driver’s face was expressionless, even as he punched the accelerator to race toward the steel wall of a huge diesel-spewing Volvo semitruck speeding toward them. Occasionally, whatever seeds or spices were in the driver’s cigarette would pop or crackle or explode, sending out little puffs of ash. When this happened, the driver brushed the ashes off his chest before they set his shirt on fire.
Dagmar was speechless with fear. Her fingers clutched the door’s armrest. Her legs ached with the tension of stomping an imaginary brake pedal. When the traffic all stopped dead, which it did frequently, she could hear her heart hammering louder than the Javanese rap.
Then the cab darted out of traffic and beneath a hotel portico, and a huge, gray-bearded Sikh doorman in a turban and an elaborate brocade-spangled coat stepped forward to open her door.
“Welcome, miss,” he said.
She paid the driver and tipped him a couple of bucks from her stash of dollars, then stepped into the air-conditioned lobby. Her sweat-soaked shirt clung to her back. She checked into the hotel and was pleased to discover that her room had Western plumbing, a bidet, and a minibar. She showered, changed into clothes that didn’t smell of terror, and then went to the hotel restaurant and had bami goreng along with a Biltong beer.
There was a string quartet playing Haydn in a lounge area off the hotel lobby, and she settled into a seat to listen and drink a cup of coffee. American hotels, she thought, could do with more string quartets.
A plasma screen was perched high in the corner, its sound off, and she glanced up at CNN and read the English headlines scrolling across the bottom of the screen.
Indonesian crisis, she read. Government blamed for currency collapse.
She could taste a metallic warning on her tongue.
All cancel, she thought.
Dagmar had been in Bengaluru for a wedding, but not a real wedding, because the bride and groom and the other principals were actors. The wedding was the climax of a worldwide interactive media event that had occupied Dagmar for six months, and tens of thousands of participants for the past eight weeks.
Unlike the wedding, Bengaluru was real. The white-painted elephant on which the groom had arrived was real. The Sikh guards looking after the bride’s borrowed jewelry were real.
And so were the eighteen-hundred-odd gamers who had shown up for the event.
Dagmar’s job was to create online games for a worldwide audience. Not games for the PC or the Xbox that gamers played at home, and not the kind of games where online players entered a fantasy world in order to have adventures, then left that world and went about their lives.
Dagmar’s games weren’t entertainments from which the players could so easily walk away. The games pursued you. If you joined one of Dagmar’s games, you’d start getting urgent phone calls from fictional characters. Coded messages would appear in your in-box. Criminals or aliens or members of the Resistance might ask you to conceal a package. Sometimes you’d be sent away from your computer to carry out a mission in the world of reality, to meet with other gamers and solve puzzles that would alter the fate of the world.
The type of games that Dagmar produced were called alternate reality games, or ARGs. They showed the players a shadow world lurking somehow behind the real one, a world where the engines of existence were powered by plots and conspiracies, codes and passwords and secret errands.
Dagmar’s job description reflected the byzantine nature of the games. Her business card said “Executive Producer,” but what the players called her was puppetmaster.
The game that climaxed in Bengaluru was called Curse of the Golden Nagi and was created for the sole purpose of publicizing the Chandra Mobile Communications Platform, a fancy cell phone of Indian manufacture that was just breaking into the world market. Live events, where gamers met to solve puzzles and perform tasks, had taken place in North America, in Europe, and in Asia, and all had climaxed with the fictional bride and the fictional groom, having survived conspiracy and assassination attempts, being married beneath a canopy stretched out in the green, flower-strewn courtyard of one of Bengaluru’s five-star hotels and being sent to their happily-ever-after.
Dagmar’s own happily-ever-after, though, had developed a hitch.
The hotel room was good. Dagmar spent a lot of time in hotel rooms and this was at the top of its class. Air-conditioning, exemplary plumbing, a comfortable mattress, a complimentary bath-robe, Internet access, and a minibar.
The rupiah had collapsed, but Dagmar had $180 in cash, credit cards, a bank card, and a ticket out of town. Indonesia was probably going to go through a terrible time, but Dagmar seemed insulated from all that.
She’d passed through too many time zones in the past four days, and her body clock was hopelessly out of sync. She was either asleep or very awake, and right now she was very awake, so she propped herself with pillows atop her bed, made herself a gin and tonic with supplies from the minibar, and called Charlie, her boss. It was Monday morning in the U.S.-in fact it was yesterday, on the other side of the date line, and Charlie was going through a day that, to Dagmar, had already passed its sell-by date.
“How is Bangalore?” he asked.
“I’m not in Bangalore,” she told him. “I’m in Jakarta. I’m on my way to Bali.”
It took a couple of seconds for Charlie’s surprise to bounce up to a satellite and then down to Southeast Asia.
“I thought you were going to spend two weeks in India,” he said.
“Turns out,” Dagmar said, “that Siyed is married.”
Again Charlie’s reaction bounced to the Clarke Orbit and back.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
“His wife flew from London to be with him. I don’t think that was his original plan, but I have to say he handled the surprise with aplomb.”
Her name was Manjari. She had a polished Home Counties accent, a degree from the London School of Economics, beautiful eyes, and a lithe, graceful, compact body in a maroon silk sari that exposed her cheerleader abdomen.
She was perfect. Dagmar felt like a shaggy-haired Neanderthal by comparison. She couldn’t imagine why Siyed was cheating on his wife.
Except for the obvious reason, of course, which was that he was a lying bastard.
“Serves me right,” Dagmar said, “for getting involved with an actor.”
The actor who had played the male ingenue in Curse of the Golden Nagi, in fact. Who was charming and good-looking and spoke with a cheeky East London accent, and who wore lifts in his shoes because he was, in fact, quite tiny.
Leaving for another country had seemed the obvious solution.
“Anyway,” she said, “maybe I’ll find some cute Aussie guy in Bali.”
“Good luck with that.”
“You sound skeptical.”
An indistinct anxiety entered Charlie’s tone. “I don’t know how much luck anybody can have in Indonesia. You know the currency collapsed today, right?”
“Yeah. But I’ve got credit cards, some dollars, and a ticket out of town.”
Charlie gave it a moment’s thought.
“You’ll probably be all right,” he said. “But if there’s any trouble, I want you to contact me.”
“I will,” Dagmar said.
Dagmar had the feeling that most employees of multimillionaire bosses-even youthful ones-did not quite have the easy relationship that she shared with Charlie. But she’d known him since before he was a multimillionaire, since he was a sophomore in college. She’d seen him hunched over a console in computer lab, squinting into Advanced D &D manuals, and loping around the Caltech campus in a faded Hawaiian shirt, stained Dockers, and flip-flops.
It was difficult to conjure, in retrospect, the deference that Charlie’s millions demanded. Nor, to his credit, did Charlie demand it.
“If it’s any consolation,” Charlie said, “I’ve been looking online, and Golden Nagi looks like a huge hit.”
Dagmar relaxed against her pillows and sipped her drink.
“It was The Maltese Falcon,” she said, “with a bit of The Sign of Four thrown in.”
“The players didn’t know that, though.”
“No. They didn’t.”
Being able to take credit for the recycled plots of great writers was one of her job’s benefits. Over the past few years she’d adapted Romeo and Juliet, The Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors (with clones), The Libation Bearers, The Master and Margarita (with aliens), King Solomon’s Mines, and It’s a Wonderful Life (with zombies).
She proudly considered that having the zombies called into being by the Lionel Barrymore character was a perfect example of a metaphor being literalized.
“When you revealed that the Rani was in fact the Nagi,” Charlie said, “the players collectively pissed their pants.”
“I’d rather they creamed their jeans.”
“That, too. Anyway,” Charlie said, “I’ve got your next job set up for when you get back.”
“I don’t want to think about it.”
“I want you thinking about it,” said Charlie. “When you’re on the beach in Bali looking some Aussie guy in the glutes, I want you distracted by exciting new plots buzzing through your brain.”
“Oh yeah, Charlie,” sipping, “I’m going to have all sorts of plots going through my mind, you bet.”
“Have you ever heard of Planet Nine?”
“Nope.”
“A massively multiplayer online role-playing game that burned through their funding in the development stage. They were just about to do the beta release when their bank foreclosed on them and found that all they’d repossessed was a lease on an office and a bunch of software they didn’t have a clue about.”
Dagmar was surprised. “They were getting their start-up funding from a bank? Not a venture capital outfit?”
“A bank very interested in exploiting the new rules allowing them to invest in such things.”
“Serves them right,” Dagmar judged.
“Them and the bank.” Cheerfully. “So I heard from Austin they were looking for a sugar daddy, and I bought the company from the bank for eleven point three cents on the dollar. I’ve rehired the original team minus the fuckups who caused all the problems, and beta testing’s going to begin in the next few days.”
Alarms clattered in Dagmar’s head. “You’re not going to want me to write for them, are you?”
“God, no,” Charlie said. “They’ve got a head writer who’s good-Tom Suzuki, if you know him-and he’s putting his own team in place.”
Dagmar relaxed. She already had the perfect game-writing job; she didn’t want something less exciting.
She sipped her drink. “So what’s the plan?”
“Planet Nine is going to launch in October. I want an ARG to generate publicity.”
“Ah.” Dagmar gazed with satisfaction into her future. “So you’re going to be your own client.”
“That’s right.”
Charlie had done this once before, when work for Great Big Idea had been scarce. He’d paid his game company to create some buzz for his software company-buzz that hadn’t precisely been necessary, since the software end of Charlie’s business was doing very well on its own. But Dagmar had been able to build a plot around Charlie’s latest generation of autonomous software agents, and she’d been able to keep her team employed, so the entire adventure had been satisfactory.
This time, however, there were plenty of paying customers sniffing around, so Charlie must really want Planet Nine to fly.
“So what’s this Planet Nine again?” she asked.
“It’s an alternate history RPG,” Charlie said. “It’s sort of a Flash Gordon slash Skylark of Space 1930s, where Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto on schedule, only it turned out to be an Earthlike planet full of humanoids.”
“Out beyond Neptune? The humanoids would be under tons of methane ice.”
“Volcanoes and smog and radium projectors are keeping the place warm, apparently.”
Dagmar grinned. “Uh-huh.”
“So along with the folks on Planet Nine, there are dinosaurs and Neolithic people on Venus, and a decadent civilization sitting around the canals on Mars, and on Earth you’ve got both biplanes and streamlined Frank R. Paul spaceships with lots of portholes. So Hitler is going into space in what look like big zeppelins with swastikas on the fins, and he’s in a race with the British and French and the Japanese and the New Deal, and there’s plenty of adventure for everybody.”
“Sounds like a pretty crowded solar system.”
“There’s a reason these people went broke creating it.”
Dagmar took a lingering sip of her drink. She’d always had an idea that writing space opera would be fun, but had never steered her talent in that particular direction.
The writers of ARGs were almost always drawn from the ranks of disappointed science fiction writers. It was odd that there hadn’t been more space opera from the beginning.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But not while I’m nursing an umbrella drink and watching the Aussie guys at the beach.”
Charlie sighed audibly. “All right, you’re allowed to have some good dirty fun on your vacation. But not too much, mind you.”
“Right.”
“And here’s something else to think about. I’m giving you twice the budget you had for Golden Nagi.”
Dagmar felt her own jaw drop. She looked at the carbonation rising in her glass and put the glass down on the plastic table.
“What are you telling me?” she said.
“I’m telling you,” said Charlie, “that the sky’s the limit on this one. If you tell me you need to send a camera crew off to Planet Nine to take pictures, then I’ll seriously consider it.”
“I-” Dagmar began.
“Consider it a present for doing such a good job these past few years,” Charlie said. She could sense Charlie’s smile on the other end of the phone.
“Think of it,” he said, “as a vacation that never ends.”
Hanseatic says: I was so totally floored when it was revealed that the Rani had really been the Nagi all along.
Hippolyte says: Ye flippin gods! SHE was an IT!
Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says: I was expecting this. The players’ guide turning out to be the villain has been a trope ever since Bard’s Tale II.
Hippolyte says: The Rani isn’t the villain!
Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says: Of course she is. Who put the curse on all those people, I ask you?
“We heard a rumor that the airlines can’t afford to buy jet fuel any longer,” the Dutch woman said the next morning. “Not if they’re paying in rupiah.”
Dagmar considered this. “The foreign airlines should be all right,” she said. “They can pay in hard currency.”
The Dutch woman seemed dubious. “We’ll see,” she said.
The Dutch woman-horse-faced and blue-eyed, like a twenty-first-century Eleanor Roosevelt-was half of an elderly couple from Nijmegen who came to Indonesia every year on vacation and had been due to leave the previous evening on a flight that had been canceled. They and Dagmar were waiting for the office of the hotel concierge to open, the Dutch couple to rebook, and Dagmar to confirm her own tickets. A line of the lost and stranded formed behind them: Japanese, Javanese, Europeans, Americans, Chinese, all hoping to do nothing more than get out of town.
Dagmar had checked news reports that morning and found that the government had frozen all bank accounts to prevent capital flight and had limited the amount of money anyone could withdraw over the course of a single day to something like fifty dollars in American money.
A government spokesman suggested the crash was the fault of Chinese speculators. The governments in other Asian countries were nervous and were bolstering their own currencies.
The concierge arrived twenty minutes late. The shiny brass name tag on his neat blue suit gave his name as Mr. Tong. He looked a youthful forty, and Dagmar could see that the cast of his features was somehow different from that of the majority of people Dagmar had met in Indonesia. She realized he was Chinese.
“I’m very sorry,” Tong said as he keyed open his office. “The manager called a special meeting.”
It took Mr. Tong half an hour to fail to solve the problems of the Dutch couple. Dagmar stepped into the glass-walled office and took a seat. She gave Mr. Tong her tickets and asked if he could confirm her reservations with the airline.
“I’m afraid not.” His English featured broad Australian vowels. “The last word was that the military has seized both airports.”
She hesitated for a moment.
“How can people leave?” she asked.
“I’m afraid they can’t.” He took on a confidential look. “I hear that the generals are trying to prevent the government from fleeing the country. There’s a rumor that the head of the Bank of Indonesia was arrested at the airport with a suitcase full of gold bars.”
“Ferries? Trains?”
“I’ve been through all that with the couple who were here ahead of you. Everything’s closed down.”
And where would I take a train anyway? Dagmar wondered.
Mr. Tong took her name and room number and promised to let her know if anything changed. Dagmar walked to the front desk and told them she’d be staying another night, then tried to work out what to do next.
Have breakfast, she thought.
The dry monsoon had driven out the rain clouds of the previous day, and the sky was a deep, cloudless tropical blue. Dagmar had breakfast on the third-floor terrace and sat beneath a broad umbrella to gaze out at the surrounding office towers and tall hotels, all glowing in the brilliant tropical sun. Other towers were under construction, each silhouette topped by a crane. A swimming pool sat in blue splendor just beyond the terrace. It was about as perfect as a day in the tropics could be.
Her fruit platter arrived, brought by a very starched and correct waiter, and Dagmar immersed herself in the wonder of it. She recognized lychee and jackfruit, but everything else was new. The thing that looked like an orange tasted unlike any orange she’d ever had. Everything else was wonderful and fresh and splendid. The croissant that accompanied the platter-a perfectly acceptable croissant in any other circumstances-was bland and stale by comparison. The meal was almost enough to make Dagmar forget she was stuck in a foreign city that she’d never intended to visit and that had just fallen into economic ruin as surely as if all the great, glittering buildings around her had crumbled into dust.
What happened to you, she wondered as she looked up at the steel-and-glass buildings around her, when your money was suddenly worthless? How could you buy food, or fuel for your car? How could anyone pay you for your labor?
No wonder her taxi driver had been so happy to get American money. With dollars he could feed his family.
On her journey she had taken two hundred dollars with her in cash, for use in emergencies. With that money, she realized, she was better off than all but a handful of the twenty-five million people living in Jakarta.
After finishing her coffee, she decided that since she was stuck in Jakarta, she might as well enjoy the place as much as she could. She returned to her room to change clothes. She put on a cotton skirt and a long-sleeved silk shirt she’d brought with her from the States, an outfit she hoped would be suitable for a Muslim country.
She considered buying clothes here, but all she had was the $180. The dollars, she thought, she should definitely save for emergencies.
She left a hundred of the dollars tucked into her luggage and put the rest, along with her remaining Indian rupees, in a fanny pack. Then she put a hat on her head-a panama, with a black ribbon, that had been woven by machine of some new plastic version of straw. She could roll it up into a tube and stuff it in her luggage-which you could do with a genuine straw panama as well, but this at one-tenth the price.
It set off her gray hair very nicely. Her hair had started going gray when she was seventeen, and by the time she entered college the last of her dark brown hair had turned. She hadn’t minded much at the time-the look had been eye-catching, especially since her eyebrows had remained dark for an interesting contrast, and when she got tired of it, the gray hair was easy to dye a whole rainbow of colors. Eventually she’d grown fond of the gray and decided not to color it any longer. It was a decision that, now that she’d just passed thirty, she was comfortable with, though she reserved the right to change her mind as her biological age caught up with the age of her hair.
It amused her that some people, in an effort to be kind, called her an ash blond.
A younger version of the previous night’s Sikh doorman let her out of the hotel and offered to summon a cab. She said that she’d walk, and he wished her a good morning.
As she set off down the street, she wondered if there was some kind of Brotherhood of Sikh Doormen that had somehow monopolized jobs in many of the big Asian hotels. Perhaps, she thought, that could be an element in some future game-Sikh doormen in various Asian cities would all be part of some conspiracy, and players would have to try to cadge information from them.
No, she thought. Too elaborate. And auditioning Sikh doormen to find out which of them could act would be a time-consuming process.
The dry monsoon had failed to blow away the equatorial heat, and the sun was fierce, but tall trees had been planted on either side of the road to provide shade. She used a flyover to cross four lanes of Jakarta’s insane traffic. The air had the fried-fritter smell of biodiesel mixed with the scent of hot asphalt.
The area was dominated by office towers and hotels, but there were smaller buildings in between with shops and eateries. Billboards and neon signs advertised Yamaha bikes, Anker Bir, and Chandra handsets, the appearance of which made Dagmar smile. Celebrities endorsed beauty products and whiskeys. Street food was available-Dagmar imagined the vendors had to sell their seafood and meats before they spoiled. The smaller shops were open-the single owner, or members of his family, looked out at the street, face impassive-but the medium-size stores, the ones that couldn’t make their payroll in the current situation, were closed. Even in the shade the heat was appalling, so Dagmar stepped into a building that had been converted into a kind of vertical shopping mall, and wandered around in cool air for a while. The international chains, Bok-Bok Toys and Van Cleef and Arpels, were open; the smaller, locally owned businesses, the camera and clothing stores, were closed. There seemed to be few customers in any case, and the goods available for purchase weren’t anything Dagmar couldn’t get at home.
She paused for a moment at an indoor skating rink, a few young people in tropical clothing making lazy circles to the sounds of 1970s American pop.
Back to the heat and the traffic. She made a random turn onto a boulevard shaded by rows of cone-shaped trees, where a series of blocky old office buildings stood with their window air conditioners humming. There was a lot of green in Jakarta-trees, bushes, tropical ferns, and more palms than in L.A. She made another turn and found herself heading toward some kind of square or park-or maybe just a big, empty parking lot. Dagmar saw the open area was filled with people, and that many of them were carrying angry-looking signs and banners; she made a U-turn just as a pair of police vans turned down the street, each filled with men in blue uniforms and white helmets and crossbelts.
Dagmar increased her pace, not about to get between the police and a bunch of pissed-off citizens.
A few blocks away, music boomed out over the street, louder than the traffic. The sound came from a music and video store. The music thundering from its speakers was propulsive: layers of Indian tabla; a harmony line drawn by a chiming synthesizer, a metallic sound influenced by the gamelan; and on top of it all a bubbly 1950s-style pop vocal. Dagmar was completely charmed.
She stepped into the narrow store. Local films glowed from plasma screens, all heroic action, men with bare, blood-spattered torsos, headbands, and krises. The walls were covered with movie posters and pictures of pop stars. There was a row of terminals where customers could download music into portable storage, for transfer into whatever media later suited them.
The fact that this store existed at all told her that most Indonesians still made do with dial-up, assuming that they had Internet at all.
A young man with a Frankie Avalon haircut sat behind a counter up front. Dagmar gave him a nod, and he nodded back, an expression of surprise on his face. Clearly he didn’t see a lot of tourists in here.
Beneath the glass counter were interchangeable plastic cartridges of fuel for miniturbines and a lot of cheap memory storage, sticks and slabs and buttons with pop culture symbols: peace signs, the faces of pop stars and anime characters, popular heroes like Bruce Lee, Che Guevara, and Osama bin Laden, and of course the ubiquitous Playboy rabbit.
It’s a sad world, Dagmar thought, when you have to choose between Osama and Hugh Hefner.
Dagmar was the only customer. She went to one of the terminals where a pair of headphones waited. She took off her faux panama, stashed it atop the monitor, and put on headphones that smelled faintly of someone else’s sweat. The instructions were in Javanese, but she managed to call up a directory and began to sample what was on offer.
There was rap. There was reggae. There was heavy metal and bubblegum pop and classic rock and sappy love songs with far too much reverb. World culture was available to anyone with a T1 connection, and the local people downloaded it, wrung it for meaning, remixed it, rebranded it, uploaded it, and broadcast it onto the street from speakers mounted on the facades of music stores, from off-brand MP3 players, from speakers in taxi cabs, from podcasts and webcasts and radio and audio streamed from thousands of sources, from unlicensed radio stations run by enthusiastic amateurs in Brazilian favelas, by religious fanatics in Sumatran kampungs, by fierce college girls in Kansas with piercings in their navels and anarchy in their hearts…
And by Dagmar, standing atop the massive bandwidth of Great Big Idea Productions in Los Angeles, the media capital of the world. Dagmar, whose job was to take all that culture and history and find, or invent, the collusions and cabals that kept the world dancing… all the content zooming out into the world, where it would join with all the rest and be downloaded and adored and hated and absorbed and remixed again, only now with Dagmar’s fingerprints on it…
Now Dagmar, listening, was worried about how she was going to pay for any content that she downloaded. She figured that the kid behind the counter had no way of breaking one of her twenty-dollar bills, and she still had no local money, not that it would buy much. There was no sign saying the place took credit cards.
She went to the counter and tried talking to the kid, but despite all the rap and classic rock his store had on offer, he had no English at all. She offered credit cards, but he shook his head. She took out Indian rupees and waved them. He looked at them in a businesslike way and took a thousand-rupee note, about twenty dollars U.S., then waved her back to her station.
Dagmar was happy with the exchange, and she congratulated herself that the kid’s family would eat for the next couple of weeks. She took out her cell phone, thumbed the catch that revealed the USB connector, and plugged the phone into her terminal. She began her first download.
There was a few seconds’ pause, and then the phone screen began blinking red warnings at her, and an urgent pip-pip-pip began to sound. She looked at the screen for a startled instant, then yanked the phone from the connector. She reversed the screen to read it and discovered that the download store had just tried to load a virus into her handset.
She looked up at the kid with the Frankie Avalon haircut.
“You little bastard!” she said.
The kid affected nonchalance. What’s your problem, Kafir?
“You tried to steal my shit!” She turned off the phone, with any luck killing the virus, and marched to the counter. She banged the counter with the metal USB connector.
“Give me my rupees back!”
The kid shrugged. The rupees were nowhere in sight.
Dagmar had just about had enough of Jakarta.
“You want me to call the cops?” She looked out the door and to her immense surprise saw three policemen, right on the spot and right on time.
Two policemen, blue shirts and white helmets, rode a motorcycle. The driver kept the bike weaving between the cars stalled in traffic, and his cohort rode pillion, turning to look rearward as he talked into a portable radio.
The third policeman was on foot. He’d lost his white helmet, and blood ran freely from a cut on his forehead.
He was running like hell.
Dagmar became aware of a strange sound echoing up the street: bonk-whonk-thump-bonk! Like people kicking a whole series of metal garbage cans down the street, or the world’s biggest gamelan orchestra on the march. Behind the metal crashings there was a background noise, a roaring like the crowd in a stadium.
The kid was startled. He ran to the door and took a peek outside, and then suddenly there was a wide-eyed look of fear on his face and he was out on the stoop, reaching over his head to yank at the rolling mesh screen that covered the front of his shop when he wasn’t in it. He had forgotten Dagmar’s existence.
Bang-thump-whonk-thud! The metallic crashings were coming close.
The kid got the screen only about a third of the way down before a silver saucer sailed through the air, hit him squarely in the back of the head, and felled him like a tree. He dropped at Dagmar’s feet, unconscious. Dagmar looked in complete surprise at the VW hub-cap spinning in triumph on the pavement outside the store.
“Hey!” she said, to no one in particular.
And then the streets were full of running figures, scores and then hundreds of Indonesian men. Some carried sticks, some carried signs, and a few carried what looked like machetes.
The demonstration that she had seen in the public square a short while ago had become a riot.
The source of the metallic clanging sounds became apparent. The runners were banging on the hoods, roofs, and sides of the cars as they ran past them. Banging with their sticks or their fists. The trapped drivers stared at them in horror as they streamed past.
There were shrieks as a windshield caved in.
At the sound of the breaking glass, a wave of adrenaline seemed to pick Dagmar right up off the floor. The unconscious boy’s legs stretched out into the street, and she couldn’t lower the screen with him in the way. She knelt by him, hooked both hands in his arm-pits, and dragged him clear.
Then she looked up to see one of the rioters bent to enter the store. He was a small man with a goatee, a bare chest, and a cloth headdress. He carried a knife as long as his forearm.
He looked just like one of the men in the store’s heroic action vids.
Dagmar gave a yell, which startled the rioter. He drew back, then got a better look at Dagmar and took another step toward her.
Dagmar yelled again, jumped to her feet, and ran for the back of the store. She found a toilet cabinet and slammed the door shut and shot the little bolt. The cabinet was a little over three feet deep, with a discolored, streaked hole in the ground, a tank of water, and a battered green plastic scoop. Dagmar looked for an exit and saw a screened window too high to reach. She then looked for a weapon and saw a mop and bucket. The mop was too long to use in the confined space, so Dagmar snatched up the plastic scoop and held it like an ice pick as she faced the flimsy door and its flimsy lock.
In the store were a series of crashes and thuds. The music out front stopped playing. More crashes. Footsteps. Then silence.
Dagmar stayed braced behind the toilet door, scoop raised, ready to gouge whatever flesh she could out of an attacker. The air in the tiny room was hot and rank, and sweat dripped from Dagmar’s chin, patting down onto her silk shirt. Through the open window overhead she could hear, faintly, the poink-whong-bang of the rioters hitting the cars on the street.
But no sounds any closer than that.
She thought about calling for help on her cell but had no idea what number to call, and rather doubted she’d ever reach anyone who could help her. Even if she reached someone, she had no idea where in the city she was or what the street address of the store was.
Dagmar stayed in the toilet for another fifteen minutes, until the sounds of the riot had faded completely. Then-scoop poised to stab any intruder-she flicked the little bolt open and slowly pushed open the door.
Nothing happened.
Carefully she leaned out of the cabinet to scan the store. She could see almost the entire room. The kid still lay on his face near the front door. Several of the plasma screens had been smashed, and others carried away. Brilliant sunlight shone through the narrow windows and the open door.
Dagmar crept out of the cabinet and approached the front. What she could see of the street was empty: the cars and trucks had dispersed. No human beings were visible. The kid on the floor was still breathing and had bled freely from a cut on his scalp, though it looked as if the bleeding had stopped. The mesh screen was still partly deployed.
She stepped over the boy, looked left and right-smashed windows, broken bicycles, a Honda burning, sending up greasy black smoke-and then grabbed the screen and hung her weight on it. The screen rattled down, making a shocking amount of noise, and then hit bottom with a bang.
The bang echoed up and down the empty street.
Dagmar had no way of locking the screen, but hoped any rioters wouldn’t look too closely.
She retreated from the door, bent over the Indonesian kid, and tried to find a pulse in his neck. The heartbeat was strong: it looked as if the boy weren’t about to die anytime soon.
She saw a corner of her thousand-rupee note peeking out of the kid’s back pocket. She reached for it, then hesitated. Then withdrew her hand.
The boy had just had his store wrecked. A thousand rupees might keep him alive for the next few weeks.
She noticed her faux panama on the floor. Someone had stepped on it. She picked up the hat, brushed away the bits of broken glass that clung to it, and put it on her head.
She moved back into the store and waited for whatever was going to happen next.
“Don,” said Austin to his speakerphone, “I think what we should do is follow the strategic plan.”
Austin listened with half his attention as Don protested this idea. He and his partners were spending a fortune to retrofit an old office building, and they didn’t even own it.
“What we need,” said Don, “is a building of our own.”
Pneumatics gave a gentle sigh as Austin leaned back in his office chair and put his feet up on his desk. He had been through this so many times before.
“Don,” he said, “we have a big performance benchmark coming up. We don’t have time to build you a new headquarters.”
“About that benchmark. I’ve got some ideas for new implementations -”
“No, Don,” said Austin. “Follow the business plan.”
“Just listen,” urged Don. “This is great.”
He explained his new ideas at length. Austin let his gaze drift to the window. Century City sat in the middle distance below, white modernist perfection above L.A.’s cap of smog. He thought about Jackson Hole and the sight of snowcapped mountains and the smell of pine, and for a moment he wished he were anywhere but here, going through this scenario yet one more time.
“That’s all good,” Austin said when Don paused for breath, “but we can save all that for Release 2.0. Right now we need to follow the strategic plan.”
“But wait!” Don said. “This will make it so much better. It’ll be really cool.”
And on and on, for another five minutes or so.
Austin listened vaguely to the speakerphone and thought about trout fishing. He thought about high mountain streams and wild-flowers and cowgirls in faded Levi’s and flannel shirts and straw cowboy hats.
On reflection, he changed the fantasy to girls in chaps and fringed vests and hats and nothing else.
Don went on and on.
This, Austin thought, was the problem with geniuses. They got bored too easily.
And most business was boring. You set goals and you worked hard to meet those goals and then you started working on the next set of goals. It was all too plodding for creative types, who came up with half a dozen new ideas every single day and wanted to bring them all into being instantly.
Don paused to take another breath.
“Listen,” Austin said. “What’s your job title again?”
Don paused as his mind shifted tracks.
“I’m chief technology officer,” he said.
“Right,” said Austin. “And what’s my job?”
“I don’t know what your title is.” Don’s voice was suspicious.
“Never mind my title,” said Austin. “What’s my job?”
“You’re VC,” said Don.
“Right,” said Austin. “I’m venture capital. Which means that I and my associates have invested in dozens of start-ups. Hundreds by now. And that means that we’ve seen a lot of strategic plans, successful and unsuccessful. And so what I am telling you now is that you need to follow the plan to which we all agreed.”
He congratulated himself on his sweet reasonableness, that and the excellence of his grammar, avoiding the dangling preposition even in speech.
“I can talk to my partners about the changes,” Don said. “And they’ll be okay with it.”
“Ask yourself,” Austin said, “if they’ll be okay with finding another source of start-up money after I refuse to give you any further capital.”
“But we agreed…”
Austin’s reply was lazy, airy, while he thought of cowgirls.
“Why do I have to follow the agreement, Don, when you don’t? ”
While Don, with greater intensity, explained his ideas all over again, Austin thought of cowgirls riding in slow motion through fields of daisies.
“Don,” Austin finally interrupted, “if you follow the business plan and achieve every benchmark and every deadline, and the firm establishes itself in its market niche, and the IPO happens and everyone leaves rich, you can buy all the buildings you want. And hang around and make all the new implementations that strike your fancy. No one will argue with you-you’ll be rich.”
“But-”
“So for now you need to follow the strategic plan. And if you don’t”-Austin smiled at the thought-“I will join your partners in voting you off the board, and you’ll get nothing. And please don’t think I can’t do it, because I can. Ask Gene Kring.”
There was a moment of puzzlement.
“Who’s Gene Kring?” Don asked.
“Exactly my point,” Austin said.
Honest to Christ, he thought, this guy was almost as bad as BJ.
In midafternoon Dagmar heard tramping outside and peered out to see a double line of police marching down the street in line abreast, followed by police cars and vans. The police were dressed more seriously this time, in khaki, with long batons, shotguns configured to fire tear gas grenades, transparent shields marked POLISI, and round helmets that looked as if they were designed by samurai, with plates hanging down to cover the ears and back of the neck.
The kid with the Frankie Avalon hair was awake by then, if still unwell. He slouched against the wall beneath one of the shelves. His eyes weren’t very focused yet, but he didn’t seem about to drop dead.
Dagmar saw as the police passed that they were heading in the general direction of her hotel. She figured this was about as safe as her day was going to get.
She went to the door and rolled the screen up to waist height, then ducked down beneath the screen and out into the street. The rotating lights on the vehicles flashed on broken windows. Dagmar followed the police line down the street.
At the next intersection the police paused for directions, and that’s when someone noticed her. One of the cops in a car saw her, blipped the horn, and gestured her over. She bent toward him, and-talking around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth-he asked her a question in Javanese.
“Royal Jakarta Hotel?” she said hopefully.
The cop looked at her for a long, searching moment, then motioned her to stay where she was. He thumbed on his radio mic, spoke briefly with someone Dagmar assumed was a superior, and then turned back to Dagmar and spoke to her while gesturing at the rear door.
It seemed he wanted her to get in his car.
“There’s a man back there,” she said, pointing, “who’s hurt.”
He squinted at her and pointed at the rear door again.
She pointed at the download store. “Ambulance?” she said.
“No ambulance.” The cop was losing patience.
Dagmar thought she should insist on an ambulance. Instead she got in the backseat and hoped this wasn’t her last moment of freedom.
The car smelled strongly of the driver’s harsh tobacco. The driver put the car in gear and it sprang away, turning onto a side street. They were still heading in the general direction of the Royal Jakarta, which was encouraging.
A second cop riding shotgun turned around and grinned at her. He seemed very young.
“How are you?” he asked.
Dagmar looked at him in surprise.
“I’m all right,” she said. And then, because he seemed to expect a response, she asked, “How are you?”
“I’m good.” He made a fist and pumped it in the air. “I’m very good.”
The car swayed as it swerved around a truck that had been driven onto the curb and then looted. The young policeman nodded, then said, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going to Bali,” she said.
He pumped his fist again. “Bali’s very good.” He opened the fist and patted himself on the chest.
“I’m from Seringapatam.”
Dagmar thought about all the places she was from, and decided to mention the most recent.
“I’m from Los Angeles.”
“Los Angeles is very good! Very famous!” The cop was enthusiastic.
She glanced down a side street as they sped along, and gasped. A large building was on fire-she thought it might have been the shopping center she’d visited. Tongues of flame extruded from smashed windows to lick at the sides of the building. Fire trucks and police were parked outside, and she saw pieces of furniture in the streets where they’d been dropped-looted, apparently.
She thought she glimpsed bodies lying among the abandoned furniture, and then the car sped on.
“Are you in the movies?” asked the young cop.
Dagmar tried to get her mind back on the track of the conversation. Was she in the movies? she wondered.
The right answer was sort of, but that led to too much exposition. And she had a feeling that reality had taken enough turns today without her having to explain about alternate reality gaming.
“I write computer games,” she said.
“Computer games! Excellent!” The cop made a gun with his two hands and made machine-gun sounds. “Felony Maximum IV!” he said. “I always take the MAC-10.”
Dagmar had never played Felony Maximum, but it seemed wise to agree.
“The MAC-10 is good,” she said.
The car took another turn, and there, visible through the windshield, was the shining monolith of the Royal Jakarta Hotel. The car rocketed under the portico, and the driver stomped on the brakes, bringing the vehicle to a juddering halt.
“Thank you!” Dagmar said. “Thank you very much!”
She tried to open the door and found it wouldn’t open from the inside. The driver barked some impatient commands at the Sikh doorman-the same one who had been on duty in the morning-and then the doorman opened the car door and she stepped out.
“Thank you!” she said to the driver, who ignored her and sped away.
The Sikh was holding the hotel door for her. She looked up and down the facade of the hotel and saw broken windows. Hotel workers had already cleaned up the glass. A hundred yards farther down the street was an overturned minibus that had been set on fire. Greasy smoke hung in the brilliant tropical air.
No bodies, at least. A small favor, this.
Dagmar walked into the hotel, nodded to the doorman’s “Good afternoon, miss,” and went to Mr. Tong’s office. Mr. Tong was alone-apparently he’d already discouraged everyone who needed discouraging-and he looked up as she knocked on the doorframe.
“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.”
That sounded like Uncle Sam all right, Dagmar thought.
“So,” she said, “what next?”
“Lucky for you I’m a multimillionaire,” Charlie said. “I’m going to get in touch with some security firms, and we’re going to stage our own private evacuation. If necessary, we’ll fly you off the hotel roof in a helicopter.”
Dagmar paused a moment to picture this.
“Big box office,” she said.
“Does your handheld have a GPS feature?”
“Yes.”
“Give me your coordinates, then.”
As the Tippels watched with interest, Dagmar thumbed a button, and her coordinates flashed onto the phone’s screen.
“Six degrees eleven minutes thirty-one point eight seconds south, a hundred six degrees forty-nine minutes nineteen point four eight seconds east.”
“Got it,” he said. “I’ll give them your coordinates and phone number and email, and we’ll see what they can arrange.”
“Good,” Dagmar said, and then she added, “Thanks, Charlie.”
“No problem.”
“You keep saving me,” she said.
“I haven’t saved you yet,” he said. “And if I’m going to, I’d better hang up and contact the troops.”
“I love you, Charlie,” Dagmar said with sudden urgency.
There was a moment of silence as Charlie dealt with his surprise.
“I’m fond of you, too,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t leave the hotel.”
“No problem there.”
“Take care. Someone will call soon.”
“Thanks!” But Charlie had hung up.
Dagmar reluctantly closed the phone and returned it to her belt.
“Your boyfriend?” asked Mrs. Tippel.
Dagmar shook her head. “My boss.”
Mrs. Tippel seemed a little surprised.
“He must be a good employer,” she said.
He’s hiring mercenaries to rescue me, Dagmar almost said. But she reflected that so far as she knew, no mercenaries were coming for the Tippels or for anyone else in the breakfast room, and that to mention her good fortune might seem tactless, as if she were boasting about her return to the life of a privileged Westerner.
“We went to college together,” she said.
Hiring mercenaries, she thought.
It was like something you’d do in a game.
After breakfast, Dagmar checked with Mr. Tong to see if anything had changed, and found that nothing had. So she went to her room, booted her ultrathin computer, and checked her email.
Her handheld could do anything her computer could, but she preferred a standard keyboard to having to thumb long messages on the phone’s little keypad. She wiped out spam, answered some routine queries, and sent messages to friends about her situation. She wrote about the riot and about being trapped in the music store, and about the bodies she thought she’d seen on the trip to the hotel.
As she typed on the familiar keyboard, in the hotel room that smelled of clean sheets, with the hushed sound of the air-conditioning in the background and the room’s coffeemaker hissing and snorting as it provided Dagmar’s caffeine fix, the previous day’s hazards began to seem unreal, a brief dip into a nightmare that had been banished by the morning’s strong tropical light.
The plangent sounds of Johnny Otis echoed in the room. Dagmar snatched at her phone. The number flashing in the display had a country code she didn’t recognize.
“Hello?” she said cautiously.
“Is this Dagmar Shaw?”
The male voice had some kind of Eastern European accent.
“Yes,” she said.
“My name is Tomer Zan,” the man said. “I work for Zelazni Associates. Your employer, Mr. Ruff, has retained us to see about your safety.”
Dagmar restrained her impulse to begin a joyful bouncing on the mattress.
“Yes,” she said. “He told me to expect your call.”
“Can you describe your situation, please?”
She did. She mentioned the riot the previous day, and being trapped in the music store, and the fact that she had $180 in cash. She told Tomer Zan that she was on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, with a view to the northwest. She mentioned that meals were no longer being served on the third-floor terrace because the hotel management considered it unsafe.
“I’m looking at a satellite picture of your hotel on Google Earth,” Zan said, “and I can tell you right now that I don’t like it. You’re too close to that traffic circle with the Welcome Statue, you’re too close to the government buildings that are going to be targets for demonstrators. The natural path for marches or riots runs right past your front door.”
“Great,” Dagmar said.
“We’re going to try to move you someplace safer. But we don’t have any assets in Jakarta, so that may not be possible for a few days.”
Dagmar felt her mouth go dry.
“You don’t have anybody in Jakarta?” she asked.
“No, we don’t.”
“So why did Charlie hire you?”
“Because,” Zan explained patiently, “the companies with assets in Jakarta are all overcommitted right now.”
Figures, Dagmar thought. She wandered to the window, parted the heavy curtains, and looked down at the street below. There was very little traffic, and none on foot. And no police.
“We’ll have someone on the ground there in a few days,” Zan said.
He seemed very confident of this.
“Okay,” she said.
“You’re not with anyone?” Zan asked.
“No. I’m alone.”
“Okay. I want you to change your schedule every day. Eat meals at different times, and in different restaurants in the hotel, if that’s possible.”
“Why?”
“It takes three days to set up a kidnapping. If you keep changing your schedule, that makes an abduction more difficult.”
Dagmar began to say, But why would they kidnap me? then clacked her teeth shut on the words because they sounded just like the sort of thing a stupid tourist would say.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll do that.”
“The power supply may be erratic, so keep your cell phone and your computer charged. Buy extra batteries if you can-or make sure your miniturbines have extra fuel.”
“My phone doesn’t have miniturbines.”
“Then charge it every chance you can, and buy extra batteries if you can find them in the hotel. And don’t use the phone for anything except absolutely necessary calls.”
“All right.”
“If there’s a store in the hotel where you can buy food, buy all you can. Even if it’s junk food. The average city has only a three-day supply of food, and calories may get scarce.”
“What do I buy the food with? Do I use my dollars?”
There was a long moment’s silence.
“Save the dollars,” Zan said.
He then went on to tell Dagmar that he wanted her to find six different ways to escape the hotel from her room. And another six exits from every other place she regularly visited within the building.
“What do I do if I have to leave the hotel?”
“Find a place of temporary safety, and call me.”
He went on to tell her not to wear any expensive jewelry or be seen carrying her computer, because that might mark her out as someone worth robbing.
“Another thing,” he said. “I need you to be on the roof of the hotel at sixteen hundred hours Jakarta time.”
“This afternoon?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“So the satellite can get a look at you. I need you facing east and looking up.”
Dagmar wondered how much it was costing Charlie to retask someone’s satellite, and decided it was better not to know.
“You can use my picture on the Great Big Idea Web page,” she said.
“We’re getting pictures of the roof anyway,” Zan said, “in case we want to extract you from there. So we might as well find out what you look like now.”
Extract, Dagmar thought.
“All right,” she said.
She was placing herself in the hands of experts. Not that it had worked so far.
Tomer Zan advised her to keep her passport and money on her, preferably in a money belt, or in a pocket that could be buttoned or zipped.
“I have a pouch I can wear around my neck,” she said. Which she rarely used, because it wasn’t designed for people with tits.
“That’s good,” Zan said. “Would you like me to repeat any of my instructions?”
“Change my schedule,” Dagmar said. “Six exits, no jewelry or computer in public, on the roof at sixteen hundred.”
“You forgot to buy batteries,” Zan said. His voice betrayed absolutely no sense of humor.
“Buy batteries,” Dagmar said. “Check.”
“Don’t lose this number. I’ll send you email in a few minutes repeating everything I’ve said.”
“Okay.”
Zan said good-bye and hung up. Dagmar located his number in her phone’s memory and shifted it into the directory under the name Charlies Friend.
Ten minutes later, Zan’s email turned up on her computer.
Dagmar decided she might as well go find batteries.
A woman in a hotel room, Dagmar thought a few hours later. That would be a good place to start a story.
You would have plenty of issues to deal with right away. Who was the woman, and why was she in the hotel room? Where was the hotel? What was going on outside? Was she in transit, in hiding, on the phone, in denial?
Probably all four, Dagmar thought, and felt an uneasy pang of self-knowledge.
The sad fact was that every sad fact in the world was the raw material for a story. Fiction thrived on desperation, on dejection, on violence. Every time you stepped outside the door, you could find a new subject. Every book and newspaper became research. Every act, no matter how sordid, and every tragedy, no matter how pointless, was matter for fiction-and in fiction, all tragedy has meaning and no action is random.
So you start with the woman in the hotel room, Dagmar thought. And the reason she is there is that she has no place else to go.
The screen was full of chaotic movement, explosions, the clash of weapons. BJ’s fingers danced over the controller. The ice-cold Entropy Beast that hovered over the chamber exploded in a blast of flame, scattering chunks of frozen flesh-shrapnel and knocking down half a dozen Goblin Warriors and one Lawful Paladin.
“No,” BJ said, “you can’t download all of ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ as a ring tone.”
The Paladin sprang back to his feet and cut a Goblin Warrior in half with his Fire Sword.
“No,” BJ said, “it doesn’t matter if your friend says he did it. You still can’t. If you have the right software, you can convert a sound file into a ring tone and download it from your own computer, but we don’t provide that service.”
Explosions rocked the stone castle walls. BJ’s Elven Mage-who had the advantage of being invisible, at least as far as the other players were concerned-scuttled up the staircase and toward the glowing chest on the Altar of the Black Goddess.
“Thank you, ma’am,” said BJ. “Sorry I wasn’t able to help.”
BJ worked in the darkest, most depressing dungeon of information technology, that of customer service. He spent his hours aiding the inept, the insane, and a very large population of compulsive liars. It was that last category that drove him into a fury-couldn’t any of these people tell the simple truth? They chanted their mantra-“I didn’t do anything”-when it was clear that they had been ravaging their own software with one deranged decision after another.
Fortunately, Spud LLC-“Your source for user-friendly IT solutions”-didn’t much care that BJ ran his own little gold-farming projects on the side.
“Let’s try this,” BJ said. “Try restarting your computer. If you still have a problem, call me back.”
His Elven Mage was the first of the party to the casket on the Black Goddess’s altar. BJ knew that once he magicked open the casket, he had approximately thirty-four seconds before the Goddess Herself materialized in the chamber to lay waste to any intruders, whether they were invisible or not. BJ planned to be out of the room by then.
“Your email program won’t respond to the password? Indulge me for a moment-have you checked to see if the Caps Lock key is on?”
The Elven Mage touched the glowing casket. A balloon appeared in a corner of the screen. BJ moused to the balloon and typed in the Pre-Adamite spell that would open the casket. With the sound of flourishing trumpets-a sound that BJ hoped would be obscured from other players by the general sound of combat going on below-the glowing casket opened.
The countdown had started.
BJ clicked the Grab button, and the Elven Mage glommed the two items in the casket, a scroll of spells and the Orb of Healing. The spells on the scroll were low-level crap, but BJ could maybe trade the item for something more useful. The Orb of Healing, however, was the big prize on this level, and BJ wasn’t about to give it up.
The Elven Mage scurried down the stairs and snaked through the battling warriors. The Paladin was still cleaving Goblins in twain. The Dwarf Twins were fighting to protect the Enchanter, who in turn was casting spells, fireballs exploding with little mushroom clouds like atomic bombs, and the Halfling was hanging around in the background and throwing flaming bottles of oil at the Goblins.
If they were still in the room when the Dark Goddess showed up, they were all going to become extinct.
BJ didn’t much care-he’d gotten what he came for, and if none of his party survived, there wouldn’t be any argument over how to split the loot.
Besides, the Orb of Healing was unsplittable.
“Let’s try restarting your computer,” BJ said. “If you still have a problem, call me back.”
The Elven Mage ducked through the Gothic arch at the far end of the room and ran past the splintered bodies of two Guardian Gargoyles. Behind him, he heard the chiming chords that accompanied the appearance of the Dark Goddess, followed by the sounds of a lot of dying.
Stupid noobs, BJ thought. And when the Dark Goddess disapparated, he could reenter the room and pick up the gold and possessions of his deceased companions.
That Fire Sword would come in handy… for somebody.
BJ had just made anywhere between six hundred and a thousand dollars-real dollars, not the virtual gold pieces used in the game. More if he could pick up the Fire Sword.
BJ had played the Adventure of the Orb so many times that he could practically do it with his eyes closed. He could do it with perfect competence even when performing his customer service job. But though the adventure was by now tedious in the extreme, the tedium was worth it in terms of income.
The fact was that there were a lot of players who didn’t want to play the lower levels of online games like World of Cinnabar. They wanted to start powerful characters right away and were willing to pay-pay real money-for those characters and for powerful magic items like the Orb of Healing. It was against the rules of the World of Cinnabar for money to be exchanged for these virtual items, but there was no practical way for game administrators-or those of any other MMORPG-to police eBay or the many other auction sites.
The Orb alone, when auctioned online, would net BJ at least three hundred dollars. His Level Twelve Elven Mage, with all its loot and gear, would net him another three hundred. If he was lucky, the auction could go higher.
Not bad for the thirty online hours it had taken to raise the Mage to his present level-even if competition from a thousand Chinese boiler-room gold farms had depressed prices.
And besides, BJ’s old Chevy needed a new set of tires. And a paint job, but the tires came first.
BJ’s job with Spud paid him enough to cover his nine-year-old car and an apartment that smelled both of mildew and of his ursoid roommate, a UCLA dropout and fellow Spud employee named Jacen-whose parents had named him, incidentally, after a character in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
When he reflected on his apartment and his car and his job with Spud and compared it with what Charlie had, it made him want to sneak over to Santa Monica and slash Charlie’s tires.
If he could actually come up with a Spell of Invisibility, he would do exactly that.
But until then, it looked as if he was stuck with having to toil at the gold farm in order to make ends meet.
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 BJ. 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 BJ 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 BJ 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.
BJ’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.
BJ 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.
BJ’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. BJ 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; BJ 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. BJ 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-BJ was the one that she fell for. They had a glorious nine months together before BJ’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 BJ 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 BJ, 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 BJ. Austin had become a successful venture capitalist and started his own company. Charlie and BJ had gone into business together: Charlie had done extremely well, but BJ 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 BJ 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.
“Are you afraid?”
Dagmar sat up in the bed, stared wildly into the darkened hotel room with the telephone handset pressed to her ear. Shots crackled in the distance. Sweat dripped from her chin onto her chest.
“Are you afraid?” the woman said. “It’s all right to be afraid.”
Through a film of sleep and fear, Dagmar thought she recognized the voice. “Mrs. Tippel?”
“You can call me Anna, dear.”
Dagmar put her head between her knees and sucked in air.
“I’m not sure I understand what this call is about,” she said.
“We hadn’t seen you since yesterday. We thought you might be lonely and afraid, especially after what’s happened to that building.”
Another dose of fear, this one slow and terrible, crept up Dagmar’s spine.
“Building?” she said.
There was a moment of silence before Anna Tippel responded. “Oh my God, you didn’t know. I’m so very sorry.”
“What building?” Dagmar demanded.
“There’s another hotel. The Palms. It’s on fire. I’m sorry you didn’t know.”
Dagmar bounded out of bed and slapped aside the curtains. The burning building was in plain sight, one of the many great towers just to the north of the Royal Jakarta. Black, dense smoke poured from broken windows at the level of the eighth or ninth floor. The fire had burned upward from lower stories: the windows on the lower levels were all shattered, the walls all black.
She imagined the fire rising, driving the people upward floor by floor until there was nowhere else to go, nowhere but into space, spilling by twos and threes from the blackened roof.
Dagmar licked her lips.
“I’m looking,” she said, and her voice dried up. She coughed to clear her throat, and said, “I’m looking at it now.”
“I thought we might have breakfast together,” said Anna Tippel. “If you were feeling lonely.”
“It’s safe to have breakfast?” Dagmar said. Her words seemed spoken out of some great void: her mind was entirely taken up with the sight before her, the fire eating its way upward floor by floor.
“Breakfast is as safe as anything,” Anna Tippel said. “And we must eat.”
Through the horror, Dagmar recalled that she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous noon, not having dared the lower levels of the hotel in case looters were still present.
“All right,” she said. Tears welled into her eyes, and she could barely speak the words. “I’ll meet you.”
Yes, she thought, answering Anna Tippel’s first question. Yes, I am afraid.
The breakfast room was crowded, and Dagmar and the Tippels shared their table with a businessman from Sumatra, a man named Dingwangkara. The menu was limited: there were no Western egg dishes and no fresh fruit save for various kinds of bananas, but there were still a range of breads, steamed rice and fried rice, vegetables, and a wide variety of sauces.
The meal was starch-heavy, but Dagmar ate a lot of it.
The Sumatran businessman was talkative and asked a great many questions: Where are you from? Where are you going? How many brothers and sisters do you have? What do you do for a living?
Dagmar was suspicious at first, Zan’s warnings about kidnapping fresh in her mind. But the Tippels answered freely, and Dingwangkara was so cheerful, and so clearly what he claimed to be, that Dagmar found herself answering.
“My father died a few years ago,” she said.
He had finally succeeded in his life’s ambition of drinking himself to death.
To her surprise she found tears stinging her eyes. She hadn’t wept for her father during his cirrhosis or anytime thereafter.
She supposed she wasn’t crying for him now, not really, but for the victims, those who had lost their life savings, who were killed in the riots and the demonstrations, those who had their homes burned out from under them or who were trapped in the burning hotel.
Dingwangkara looked at her with a gentle expression.
“My parents are both alive,” he said, and then he added, “Inshallah.”
“Inshallah,” Dagmar repeated, and she blinked away her tears.
“They always want to know about your family,” said Cornelis Tippel after Dingwangkara departed. “They’ll ask any damn question they please.”
“Their culture came from the kampungs,” said Anna, “the long houses where they all lived together. They believe it’s normal for everyone to know about everyone else.”
Dagmar remembered the young policeman turning to her and asking her about her work. I always take the MAC-10.
She wondered how you were supposed to know when they were just asking questions, and when they were kidnappers trying to decide if you were worth a ransom.
FROM: BJSKI
SUBJECT: Re: Jakarta
Holy cripes! I had no idea you were even out of the country!
What can I do? Can I send you a care package? A gun? A helicopter?
Can I fly out there and help you somehow? Only problem is, I’m so broke you’d have to buy the ticket. But I’ll come!
Let me know!
Hearts,
BJ
After breakfast, Dagmar found it too depressing to wander around the lower hotel, with its looted shops, boarded windows, and frightened employees, so she returned to her room. She didn’t dare open the curtains to watch the burning Palms, so she kept the drapes drawn and watched the catastrophe on television. The talking heads on CNN discussed 9/11 and speculated about the ideological or religious motivations of whoever had set the fire, chatted about how whoever had constructed the hotel had obviously ignored a lot of building codes, and spoke of a well-known American lawyer who was jetting with his team to Singapore in hopes of signing up as many survivors as possible in order to file a class-action suit for damages.
Dagmar hoped her own hotel was up to spec.
When desperate people started throwing themselves off the burning building, Dagmar turned off the television and opened her laptop. She found she had dozens of emails from practically everyone who knew she was in Jakarta, some of them writing more than once, to all of the three email addresses she currently maintained. They’d seen the burning hotel on television, and they were desperate to know whether she was all right.
She answered one email and CC’d anyone else who had queried, so that everyone would have an answer in as short a space of time as possible.
When she was finished, she sat back in her chair while a slow sense of wonder rose in her, wonder at the sheer number of people who cared for her. Some of those who had sent email were people whom she hadn’t seen in person for years and with whom she maintained only a tenuous form of contact.
Dagmar hadn’t realized so many people cared.
She was used to the way interest groups spontaneously formed on the Internet, but there had never been one centered on her before. These people-friends from Caltech, from Britain, friends of her family in Cleveland, people in the gaming industry, players she knew only as Hippolyte or Chatsworth Osborne, individuals who came from different walks of life and whose only point in common was a personal knowledge of Dagmar-had seen news of the burning hotel and responded within hours. Many of them had clearly been in touch with one another, spreading the word that she might be in danger, and the outpouring of concern was touching.
It was then, as Dagmar decided to give everyone who had queried a personal answer, that the power died.
The lights flickered and went off, and the whisper of the air-conditioning faded away. An array of tiny plastic turbines, each the diameter of a pencil, switched on to provide her laptop with power. A breathy sound accompanied the ignition, and paper on her desk rustled to the warm exhaust.
A notice flashed on her display: the hotel’s wireless connection had gone down along with the power. Dagmar checked the room’s phone and found it worked. The phone had an Ethernet jack, and she considered connecting the laptop to it but then decided against using fuel and turned the computer off.
The screen had just gone blank when the lights wavered on again. They didn’t seem as bright as before, so Dagmar figured either that it was a brownout or that a hotel backup generator had gone on but didn’t have quite the power required.
She lay across her bed and thought about Planet Nine, and the fictional woman in the hotel room, and what uncanny series of accidents had brought her down the rabbit hole.
Tomer Zan called in midafternoon. Dagmar had just finished doing her laundry in the bidet-she’d run out of clean clothes and was dubious about giving any of her belongings to hotel staff.
“How are you feeling, darling?” Zan asked. The “darling” sounded perfectly professional, as if it were a substitute for “Miss Shaw.”
“I’ve been better,” Dagmar said.
“We’ve decided to pull you off the roof with a helicopter.”
Dagmar paused to think about this.
“You’re not moving me to a safer place first?”
“Putting you on the streets right now would be exposing you to too much risk. The situation is deteriorating fast-most of the police have walked off the job, since no one’s paying them real money.”
“So the streets are in the hands of the rioters.”
“That’s about it.” Dryly. “We’ll have a helicopter in Singapore by tomorrow.”
“So you can pick me up the next day?”
“Well,” Zan admitted, “no. Singapore’s the nearest place we can stage from-except maybe Sarawak-but Singapore’s nearly a thousand kilometers away, and the copter’s an old Huey from Thailand, equipped for rescue work in the jungle. It doesn’t have the range to reach you. So we’re going to charter a ship in Singapore, put a lot of fuel aboard, and then steam toward Jakarta while the crew builds a helicopter landing platform from scratch. The chopper will land on the ship once the platform is built, refuel, and then fly to you once it’s in range.”
“What am I going to have to do when it gets here?”
“Practically nothing. We’ll have rescue specialists onboard. The chopper will hover over the hotel roof and drop one of our people down to you. Then we’ll lower a stretcher, and our guy will strap you into it. We’ll winch you aboard, and then our guy will go up next.”
“So all I have to do is lie down?”
“That’s it.”
Dagmar felt relief mixed with a degree of disappointment. She had hoped for a more swashbuckling exit than being strapped to a basket and winched to safety.
“Can I bring anything with me?” she asked.
“A small bag maybe. Emphasis small.” There was a brief pause. “It’s a pity we can’t go in tomorrow. That’s when the Japanese are evacuating, so our chopper could slip in without being noticed.”
“How come they can evacuate and-”
“Because,” Zan said, “they don’t have all their goddam naval assets in the Persian Gulf, that’s why.”
“I haven’t heard a single thing from the embassy.”
“Schmucks.” All the disgust in the universe filled the word. “One word from the embassy and this thing might be over. Instead they’re going to let the military loot Jakarta.”
Dagmar felt a hesitation. In a sense she didn’t want to know anything more, know how much more desperate her situation had become. It was bad enough that she was in a tall building in a city where tall buildings were being burned.
“Loot Jakarta?” she said.
“Anything that goes into Jakarta goes with the permission of the generals,” Zan said. “Food, fuel-everything the people need to live. And that means the generals get a cut of the action. They’re going to gut the city, but they’ll make their fortunes-or make their fortunes back, since they probably lost their money in the crash along with everyone else.”
“Christ,” said Dagmar.
“What’s a banana cost there?” Zan asked. “Ten cents maybe? In another few weeks that banana’s going to cost five, six dollars. And the difference will all go to the military.”
“And if you can’t afford the bananas,” Dagmar said, “you starve.”
“The government’ll probably tell the starving people to kill the Chinese and steal their food,” Zan said. “But lucky for you, in a few days, it won’t be your problem.”
The water caressed Dagmar like warm little strokes of a fine brush. The water tinkled against the pool’s tiled edge as she paddled her way gently into the deep section, then arrowed her body, closed her eyes against the sting of chlorine, and sank feet-first into the blood-warm water.
The darkness and silence were perfect. Her body was weightless. The boundaries between her self and the waters faded. Her pulse made a hushed, regular noise in her ears.
Then she began, slowly, to rise in the dark water. Her head broke the surface, and she swiped away the strands of hair that crossed her face, and took a breath. Chlorine burned in her sinus.
She opened her eyes. The blacked-out city rose around her, silent. There was no traffic noise, no noise at all, nothing but the flapping of canvas umbrellas set around the pool.
Dagmar was engaged in an act of rebellion. After dinner-where Dagmar had gotten skewered chicken with peanut sauce, a double dose of protein in a situation where she feared proteins might become scarce-and after the announcement that the hotel’s generators would be shut down at nine o’clock in order to save fuel, Dagmar had found herself with nothing to do except consume the drinks in her room’s minibar. After a couple of whiskeys, she realized that she simply couldn’t stay in her room any longer.
Yet there was no place to go. The hotel was blacked out except for emergency lighting in corners and stairwells, and the elevators were shut down. The streets were beyond dangerous.
Then she had thought of the third-floor terrace, with its pool. The management had closed it because it was too exposed to theoretical attack from the tall buildings around, but now the pool was just one darkness among others.
Dagmar refused to believe in the existence of armed strangers sighting on the pool with night-vision scopes. Surely armed strangers had better things to do.
What had Anna said? Breakfast is as safe as anything.
And better, the pool was on the opposite side of the Royal Jakarta from the burning hotel. Out of sight, out of mind.
Dagmar had decided on this quiet night swim, alone in the dark water.
Of course this meant going down eleven floors in a non-air-conditioned stairwell to reach the pool, and then climbing back up at the end. She’d be a ragged, hot, miserable mess at the end of her climb, but then she could take a cool shower, and in the meantime the pool was perfection itself.
Dagmar dove to the bottom of the deep end several times, just to feel the joy of weightlessness, and then she began to swim laps. Her job kept her in hotels a lot, and swimming was her usual exercise. She started with a pair of laps as fast as she could go, just to get the heart pounding, and then settled into a slower, steadier pace. She did a few laps in a crawl, then switched to a backstroke, to exercise opposing sets of muscles. Alone in the darkness, she cruised through the water as purposefully as a shark.
The rhythm and warmth relaxed her. The physical demands drove the tension from her body, the unease from her mind. In her solitary exercise in the darkness, surrounded by the empty lawn furniture and the umbrellas, the dark towers of the city and the stars, she became only the swimmer. She was relieved of the burden of being Dagmar, of being caught in some strange, overlapping quantum state in which she was both tourist and refugee. A lonely geek in a hotel, waiting for the rescuers who seemed to have mistaken her for a princess in a tower…
Dagmar swam steadily for half an hour, alternating crawl and backstroke, and then went into a cooldown, lying on her back and paddling along with slight movements of her arms and legs. It was difficult, she thought, to cool down when you were floating in water warmer than body temperature.
She stared at the stars overhead and tried to think of nothing at all, just gradually let her breathing and the cotton-wool thudding of her pulse return to something like normal. Then she climbed out of the pool on legs that had turned a little wobbly, adjusted the crotch elastic of her swimsuit, and reached for her towel.
The empty terrace stretched out before her, all shadows and reflected starlight. It was eerie, and Dagmar felt as if she were in one of those postholocaust films, where everyone but she had died of radiation sickness or the plague. From all she could tell, she was alone in this empty night-world.
Then, clearly through the night air, she heard three gunshots echo up between the tall buildings.
No, she thought, there were humans here after all.
It was a long, hot climb back to her room.
Breakfast was a little more barren than that of the previous day-no proteins at all except for peanuts-and so Dagmar packed down the rice while she could and sprinkled it with crushed peanuts, fried shredded coconut, and a pungent chile sauce. Then she took some of the rolls in a paper napkin, went to her room, and put them in the fridge of the minibar.
They could keep her from starvation, maybe.
Damn, she thought as she closed the fridge, I’m starting to think like Tomer Zan.
City power was back on-it had come on abruptly at six in the morning, blasting Dagmar out of a peaceful sleep as all the lights and the TV snapped on-so Dagmar sat before her computer and vowed once again to answer all the email she’d received on the previous day.
She was halfway through the list when her phone rang. She reached for where it sat on the charging cradle, saw “Charlies Friend” on the display, and pressed Send.
“Hello, Mr. Zan,” she said.
“Hello, darling,” Zan said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got bad news.”
Mentally she screwed together an assembly of struts, just below her heart, to prevent it from sinking.
“What sort of news?” she asked.
“We’ve lost touch with the helicopter,” he said. “And the ship as well. We don’t know why.”
“Do, uh,” she began, “do radios break nowadays?”
“No,” Zan said, “not really. Both the ship and the Huey had state-of-the-art satellite communications equipment. So it’s unlikely that there’s any kind of malfunction. We suspect an accident.”
Dagmar tried to imagine an accident that could take out a ship and a helicopter at the same time. Then she thought she would rather not imagine it-the crew of each craft were on a mission that involved her, after all, and if an accident had claimed them, it was all on her account…
“So,” Dagmar began, “do you send out a search party, or-”
“We’ll wait a few more hours in case there was a communications problem, and then contact the authorities in Singapore. But for you, darling, we’re going to get a new helicopter, and if necessary a new ship, so don’t worry.”
Dagmar closed her eyes. She could kill two whole new crews.
“Not to worry,” she said. “Right.”
“Things have calmed down a little in Jakarta. When the Palms burned, it scared everybody. So a lot of the local Islamic associations have mobilized to guard their own neighborhoods.”
“Islamic associations? They’re like-what, militias?”
All Dagmar could think about was Sunni and Shiite terrorists in Iraq, and that didn’t sound encouraging.
“Some of them are self-help groups,” Zan said, “but most of them are martial arts clubs.”
Bitter laughter exploded in Dagmar’s head. She thought of the film posters in the music store, with their bare-chested heroes. These were the same people that had looted the store and the hotel.
“They’re going to protect the neighborhoods with kung fu?” she asked.
“With silat,” Zan said seriously. “That’s the indigenous style. Indonesian martial arts always had a close relationship with religion.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Of course,” Zan said, “some of these groups are political. Some are pro-military, some are against. I’m sure none of them are for the government anymore, but they have different ideas about what kind of government to have next. So if they start fighting each other, there could be more problems.”
More problems, Dagmar thought.
As if murder and riots and starvation weren’t enough.
It was her hour of answering the phone. After Zan hung up, she heard from Austin. The squishy, warm feeling that came from talking to one of her oldest friends multiplied when Charlie called only a short while later.
He said he was trying to find a tanker aircraft to fly north of Sumatra in order to provide in-flight refueling for the new helicopter.
“How much is this costing you?” Dagmar asked.
“Your next Christmas bonus,” Charlie said. “Maybe.”
Tears stung her eyes. “Thank you,” she said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Charlie said, “you’re not going to tell me that you love me again, are you?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“Whatever I’m spending,” Charlie said, “I can afford. No one else, including me, is going without a Christmas bonus, okay?”
“Right,” said Dagmar.
“My Christmas bonus,” Charlie added, “is going to include a Maserati.” There was a pause.
“Have you been thinking about Planet Nine?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Dagmar. “Yes, I have.”
He liked what she told him.
Late that morning, Dagmar heard the throbbing of helicopters outside, and she dared to draw back the curtains and look out. The Palms stood like the one rotten black tooth in the city’s gleaming modernist smile. The fire had gone all the way to the roof. A few threads of smoke still rose from a window here and there.
The copters were orbiting behind the destroyed hotel, black, businesslike silhouettes spiraling to a landing somewhere to the northwest.
Evacuating the Japanese.
Dagmar couldn’t stand the sight of the Palms and let the curtains fall back into place.
She paced the room for a while, restless, and then went to the laptop she had been typing on when Tomer Zan had called. She was in the middle of a letter to the gamer she knew as LadyDayFan, thanking her for an email of concern.
Unfortunately I don’t know anybody in Jakarta, LadyDayFan had written, but let me know if there’s any way I can help.
Dagmar scrolled along her list of emails, answered and unanswered. There were even more than there had been the previous day, an impressive number. Many were from people that Dagmar knew only as online presences floating around the online game blogs.
She considered again this circle of which she was the temporary center, and the further circles that emanated from each of the members. There was a latent power in this group, a wide variety of skills and acquaintance. This group, she thought, could get things done.
Everyone, supposedly, was within six degrees of separation from everyone else.
Dagmar reflected that LadyDayFan maintained her own ARGRELATED online bulletin board, called Our Reality Network, where industry gossip was retailed and games were discussed, analyzed, and eventually solved.
The games that Dagmar created were designed to be solved. She created the puzzles, or suggested them to the team’s professional puzzle designers, and the solutions were buried somewhere for the players to find. The games were finite: they led to a particular place, like the wedding in Bengaluru, and then they were over.
Her current situation, which had her placed at a hotel in a state of Schrödingerlike uncertainty, was a puzzle that perhaps had no solution. Certainly she was incapable of solving it.
Perhaps, she thought, her dilemma could be solved not by any individual but by a Group Mind.
She sat down and began to type.
From: Dagmar
Subject: Indonesia
Perhaps you can help me after all. I seem to be at the center of a puzzle that is in need of a solution.
I’m at the Royal Jakarta Hotel, on the fourteenth floor. This is at 6°11’31.8”S, 106°49’19.48”E. The situation is deteriorating and I’m worried for my personal safety.
The embassy has been of no use at all.
I want to get out of Jakarta and to a country that isn’t having a revolution. My sole assets consist of US$180 in cash, a high-powered PDA/telephone, a computer, and some credit cards that don’t seem to be worth anything in the current situation.
Most of the police have gone home. The army has besieged the city but has not entered it. The government is holed up somewhere. The streets are in the hands of rioters or Islamic societies, most of which are composed of martial artists.
If you know of anyone who can help me, I’d appreciate hearing from them.
If you don’t, thanks anyway.
Bests,
Dagmar
She clicked the Send button without thinking, then sat back and wondered just what it was she’d set in motion.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Dagmar Shaw, whom most of you know as the executive producer of games like Curse of the Golden Nagi and Shadow Pattern, is stuck in Jakarta, where supplies of food and medicine are running out and people are being killed. We all saw the hotel burn. Dagmar wants to get out and the government ain’t helping.
Her original email is here and describes her situation.
It’s possible that our combined efforts may be of assistance.
I have set up several topics.
News and Rumors has to do with the situation in Jakarta, Indonesia, etc. Please post any information, along with a link to the source. Finance has to do with money issues. As detailed in her email, Dagmar has only a small amount of viable currency. If we can find a channel, possibly we could get money to her or otherwise finance an escape.
I have set up a special PayPal account to which people can contribute. Details are in the Finance topic.
The Escape Topic has to do with actual plans to move Dagmar to someplace safe.
We’ll keep this topic as an arena for general discussion.
TINAG… I think.
FROM: Hanseatic
TINAG, hell! I think it’s a damn game! But I’m willing to play.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
TINAG?
FROM: LadyDayFan
This Is Not A Game.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Thanks.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Corporal Carrot, TINAG is an ARG design aesthetic. The characters are required to believe they live in the real world, the puppetmasters are required to make a world that is internally consistent, and players should be able to function in the world as well as the characters.
FROM: Hippolyte
This really isn’t a game! I got email from Dagmar yesterday. She’s really stranded in Jakarta, where the hotel burned and all those people were killed.
How much should we contribute to PayPal?
FROM: LadyDayFan
Twenty bucks each?
FROM: HexenHase
Chatsworth, I disagree with you about TINAG. The effects you describe are entirely the result of the puppetmasters’ abilities to skillfully craft a game while remaining behind the curtain. The fictional characters are actors scripted by the puppetmasters-if the scripts don’t work, the players will never believe the game world is real, and the illusion fails.
‹posts deleted›
FROM: LadyDayFan
I have removed twelve flamewar posts to the Hell Topic.
Civil discussions of game aesthetics may take place in the Meta Topic.
If this continues, someone is going to lose access privileges.
FROM: HexenHase
Sorry.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Me too. I’ll make nice from now on.
FROM: Joe Clever
I would like to state for the record that I think it’s a game. But I’m always willing to play along, even if it’s going to cost me twenty bucks.
FROM: Hippolyte
It’s not a game, Joe. But feel free to hack the Indonesian military if it makes you happy.
FROM: HexenHase
I can’t believe we’re engaging with Joe Clever on this or any topic! That cheating shit-for-brains!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Careful, Hexen. Don’t start another flamewar.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Don’t worry, Corporal Carrot. Abusing Joe Clever is an Our Reality tradition.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Can I ask why?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Because the crap-head’s style of play totally violates the spirit of TINAG. He cheats.
FROM: Joe Clever
It’s not cheating when there aren’t any rules.
FROM: HexenHase
There are rules to any community, whether they’re written down or not. We agree not to poke behind the scenes because it spoils the fun for all of us.
Corporal Carrot: What Joe Clever does is dumpster-dive Great Big Idea to find clues that might have accidentally been thrown away.
He followed the actors around to see if they might accidentally drop a script. And he twice hacked Great Big Idea to locate pages that hadn’t yet been uploaded to the Web.
FROM: Joe Clever
You say that as if I should be embarrassed. What I do is win games.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Joe Clever is a complete egomaniac. Totally ruthless. Borderline sociopath. Probably crazy.
My guess is that he lives in his mother’s basement and has no friends.
We despise him.
FROM: Joe Clever
What I have done is to recognize that ARGs are in fact games. That’s what the G in ARG stands for!
Games have winners and losers. I am a winner. You people are losers.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Are we not overwhelmed by Mr. Clever’s personal charm?
FROM: HexenHase
And he’s even more charming in person.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Can’t you ban him from the bulletin board?
FROM: LadyDayFan
I could, but he would immediately rejoin with a new handle.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Ahem. Aren’t we supposed to be talking about Dagmar?
FROM: LadyDayFan
Good point. We need to get back to Indonesia.
FROM: Joe Clever
It’s a game.
FROM: LadyDayFan
You go on thinking that, J. C.
FROM: Desi
I’ve just found this topic. My god! I can’t believe we’re actually doing this.
I don’t know if this will be of any use, but one of my cubicle mates ranks high in penchak silat, or however it’s spelled. I’ll see if his school has any connections to martial arts groups in Jakarta.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Desi, that would be great.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
I took a scuba vacation in Bali a few years ago. Maybe I can contact those people and see if they know anyone with a boat in Jakarta.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
You guyz are acting like this is real.
FROM: LadyDayFan
TINAG, my friends. TINAG.
Dagmar plunged into the water, bubbles erupting around her. She arched her back, feeling the bubbles stream along her legs and the sensitive flesh of her neck, and rose through the dark water until her head broke the surface.
The night loomed around her, silent, the stars muted by wisps of cloud.
She began her laps. Arms, legs, lungs in synchrony, the warm water a midnight dream.
Her future, even her continued existence, was a question mark.
Swimming nightly laps was a defiance of that uncertainty, a statement that she was still an actor on her own stage. That there was still something in which her own will could alter events.
Even if it was just swimming, at night, hidden from the world.
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
Sorry, but I’ve worked the Bali dive boat connection, and it didn’t
pan out.
FROM: Joe Clever
We might try sportfishermen. Do you think any of them would have
a Web site?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
I’ll check.
I’ve been doing some thinking. We’ve got three possibilities for getting
Dagmar out of Jakarta. Air, water, land.
If we use an aircraft, the aircraft has to find a place to land, and
then we’ll have to move Dagmar to that place by car or bus or some
other form of ground transport. In addition, the Indonesian military
isn’t allowing anyone into their airspace, so any aircraft runs a risk
of being shot down.
If we use a boat, then we still have to bring Dagmar to the boat by ground transport. It’s not clear whether the Indonesian navy is blockading Jakarta by sea or how effective the blockade is.
If it’s possible to move Dagmar out of Jakarta by ground transport (say, by bribing or otherwise coming to an understanding with the military), then even if she doesn’t leave the country, she would be safer than she is now. Even though she’d still be in Indonesia, she’d be outside the area of complete chaos.
FROM: Hanseatic
Have you considered a seaplane or flying boat?
FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.
No, I hadn’t. Good idea.
FROM: Vikram
I have an uncle who’s being evacuated with the Indian nationals today or tomorrow. Once he’s out of Jakarta, I will try to contact him and find out if there’s anyone we can contact.
FROM: Desi
I got lucky with the silat connection! My friend’s teacher is affiliated with a school in Jakarta. He’s checking with them.
FROM: LadyDayFan
Great news!
FROM: Desi
We might be able to hook Dagmar up with her own bodyguard of martial artists! How cool is that?
“How are you, darling?” asked Tomer Zan.
“I’m trying to keep my chin up,” Dagmar said.
“That’s good. I just wanted you to know that we got another helicopter. It’s a Spirit, it’s got a much longer range than the Huey, so we’ll be able to stage from farther out at sea.”
“Good to know.”
“It’s on its way from the Philippines now. So we should be set in just a few days.”
“What happened,” Dagmar asked, “to the old helicopter?”
“Yes. Well.” Dagmar sensed considerable reluctance. “It was trying to land on our ship, and the winds were gusty, so it crashed into the superstructure. So we need a new ship and a new helicopter.”
“Was anyone hurt?” Dagmar felt the depression that propelled her words.
There was a brief silence, and then, “The crew of the helicopter was killed. There were some injuries on the ship, too, because there was a fire. The radio room got burned-that’s why we didn’t hear from them.”
It seemed to Dagmar as if her heart slowed, extending the long silence between beats. The breath that she drew into her lungs took an eon. Then time seemed to speed up as she hurled the words into the world.
“Oh Christ, I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not your fault, darling,” Zan said.
Dagmar didn’t answer.
“We’re professionals,” Zan said. “All our people have been soldiers. We understand the risks we take.”
“I’m not a soldier,” Dagmar said. “Nothing’s prepared me for this.”
“We’re coming to get you,” said Zan. “That’s what you need to think about.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
“We’re coming soon.”
After the phone call came to an end, Dagmar closed her eyes and fell into a dark, liquid sorrow, a grief the temperature of blood.
FROM: Joe Clever
I’ve found a boat and a captain. He’s a fisherman named Widjihartani, and he operates from a port in West Java called Pelabuhan Ratu. It’s something like five or six hours from Jakarta by sea.
He’s willing to take a passenger anywhere, provided his fuel and time are paid for. All the way to Singapore, if we want.
He says that Jakarta is technically under a blockade by the navy, but they let fishermen through because they are too necessary to the economy to let them go under.
FROM: Corporal Carrot
FROM: LadyDayFan
Is Widjihartani his first name or his last name? Are you sure he’s reliable?
FROM: Corporal Carrot
What do they call him for short?
FROM: Joe Clever
Widjihartani is the only name he’s got. Lots of Indonesians have only one name.
I spoke to him on the phone. His English is pretty good, he takes tourists out for fishing and sightseeing.
He seemed pretty clearheaded, really. But he didn’t know how he could afford the fuel, and with the banks in the state they are, it’s unclear how we can get money to him.
FROM: Hippolyte
I found Pelabuhan Ratu on Google Earth!
FROM: LadyDayFan
Can we set him up with a PayPal account? Then we could put money into it, and he could withdraw it whenever the bank lets him.
FROM: Joe Clever
I’ll check.
From the restaurant, Dagmar could see the Indian nationals evacuating, the line of helicopters parading neatly across the horizon.
The Chinese were going out in the morning, by sea, and the Singaporeans the next day. Even little Singapore could stage a proper evacuation, complete with a landing by their elite Gurkha troops.
The only nationality that wasn’t evacuating, besides the Americans, was the Australians. The Indonesians were still angry at the Australians over Timor and weren’t letting Australian ships into their waters.
For a moment, watching the Indians go, Dagmar felt a spasm of pure hatred for her own nation. Her country had lost the ability to do anything but make fast food and bad Hollywood blockbusters. Every city would have its very own Katrina, and the United States of America in its greatness and piety would do nothing before or after. At the embassy they handed out lies as if they were the White House budget office.
Even the saving of human life had been privatized. If you could afford your own security outfit to rescue you with its helicopters, then you were granted life; if you couldn’t, you were beneath your nation’s notice.
For a brief, fierce instant she wanted to see her own country burn, just as the Palms had burned.
Then the anger faded, and she looked down at the fried rice that was her supper.
Dutifully, she ate it to the last grain.
FROM: Simone
LadyDayFan, can you set up a fanfic topic?
FROM: LadyDayFan
Fanfic? You want to write fan fiction about Dagmar?
FROM: Simone
Yeah. She’s cool.
FROM: Hanseatic
‹glyph of astonishment›
FROM: LadyDayFan
Well. This is against my better judgment, but here you go.
“Where are you from?” asked the young man with the halberd.
“Los Angeles.”
“That is near Hollywood?”
“Yes.”
“That must be very interesting.”
Dagmar understood that in the Q-and-A conversations favored by the Indonesians, both sides were supposed to ask questions.
“Are you from Jakarta?” she asked.
Paying her ritual morning visit to the concierge-which, following Zan’s advice, she did at a different hour each morning-Dagmar had discovered that the hotel was now guarded by men with medieval weapons. They wore kilts over baggy pants, with short jackets, round pitji hats, and sashes in bright primary colors. The outfits of the young men were black, and of the older men, white. They carried long knives, spears, sticks, and blades on the ends of sticks. They clustered by the hotel entrances and smiled and bowed at anyone walking by. They were making a clear effort not to seem threatening.
Mr. Tong had never reappeared, and his place seemed taken permanently by the young woman in the Muslim headdress. She told Dagmar that the hotel had hired a group of martial artists to secure the hotel.
“What is your group called?” Dagmar asked. Maybe Tomer Zan would know something about them.
“We are the Tanah Abang Bersih Jantung Association.” The young man touched his chest. “Bersih Jantung means ‘pure heart.’ ”
“And the other part?”
“Tanah Abang? That is our kampung-our neighborhood, near this hotel.” He looked at her with curiosity. “Do you like Miley Cyrus?” he asked.
“Miley?” Dagmar said. “I think she’s swell.”
“Bersih Jantung?” asked Tomer Zan that evening. “How do you spell it?”
“It means ‘pure heart,’ ” Dagmar said.
“What is the attitude of these people?” Zan asked. “Are they disciplined? Do you feel safe around them?”
“They seem friendly. They like Miley Cyrus, for heaven’s sake! There are some older men in white who give the orders. They’re trying not to be scary.”
“That’s good. Just remember that this can change at any second. You should be alert to any sign that their attitude is changing. Remember, these are the people that invented the word amok. Well, actually they call it mataglap, but amok is what they mean.”
Great, Dagmar thought. Let’s by all means look inside that silver lining to find that all-consuming black hole.
“How’s the helicopter?” she asked.
“It should be in Singapore tomorrow,” said Zan.
Dagmar wondered whether to tell Zan about the amateur efforts to rescue her that were centered on the Our Reality bulletin board, efforts she had been following online with great attention.
She decided against it.
Let them compete, she thought. Let the free market system prevail. Besides, she thought that Zan probably wasn’t into fan fiction.
FROM: Desi
My friend has checked with his school’s silat guru in Jakarta, and
he’s willing to help Dagmar. As an act of charity, they’ll take her in
and share their food with her, and they’ll take her anywhere that
doesn’t involve danger to their own people.
Their style is called Bayangan Prajurit Pentjak Silat. My impression
is that they’ll take money if we give it to them, but their religion
obliges them to do charitable acts, so they don’t insist on being
paid.
Here’s the problem. Dagmar’s hotel is being guarded by a group
that Bayangan Prajurit doesn’t get along with. The hotel guards are
allied with the military, and their organization is headed by a general.
Bayangan Prajurit are pro-democracy and they won’t cooperate
with the hotel guards in any way.
Anybody have any ideas? Do we have to get Dagmar away from her
own guards?
By the next morning a food shipment had arrived, and for breakfast, Dagmar gorged on Southeast Asia’s finest, freshest, most glorious fruit.
The military were providing food to their allies in the city, and the Bersih Jantung were willing to supply the hotel. Dagmar presumed there were vast bribes involved, money shifting around offshore, where the banks still worked.
There was an upside, Dagmar supposed, to dealing with a corrupt military.
“What’s the word?” Dagmar asked.
“Whatever the word is,” said Tomer Zan, “it’s not a good one. Our people have had a chance to look at this helicopter, and it’s a piece of shit. The maintenance logs are incomplete or nonsensical or forged in some obvious way, and it’s clear we’ll have to do a complete overhaul on the machine before we dare fly it out to you.”
The dry monsoon, which had ceased to be dry, spattered rain against her hotel window. Dagmar let the space of three seconds go by in order to demonstrate to Zan her displeasure.
“How long will the overhaul take?” she asked.
“Depends on whether new parts are required. And of course, what parts.”
Dagmar let more time pass.
“Why don’t you hire one of the helicopters that took the Indians or the Japanese out?”
“They were military aircraft, darling. They don’t rent them.”
“Zelazni Associates has an air division,” she said. “I saw it on your Web page. Can’t you fly me out in one of your own aircraft?”
“We don’t have helicopters, darling. We fly helicopters, we maintain helicopters, but we don’t own them. What we have are fixed-wing transport aircraft to help move our people and their equipment.”
“Can’t you put a helicopter on one of your transport planes and fly it out here?”
Now it was Zan’s turn to be silent.
“Our planes aren’t big enough,” he said.
“Maybe you could find a bigger one.”
“I’ll look at what’s possible,” Zan said after another pause. Meaning, Dagmar supposed, what Charlie was willing to pay for.
“I should let you know,” she said, “that another group is trying to help me leave Indonesia. They’ve actually made some progress.”
“Another group?” Zan’s query was cautious.
“I’ll email you the Web page.”
Maybe, she thought, he’d enjoy the fanfic after all.
FROM: Hanseatic
This game is amazing. How did Great Big Idea get the Indonesian
government to cooperate with all this?
FROM: LadyDayFan
TINAG.
FROM: Hanseatic
Yah, right. My guess is the setup is something like this: we get 200
points for getting Dagmar out of Jakarta to someplace safer, 500
points if we get her out of Indonesia entirely, and 1,000 points for
Total World Domination.
FROM: LadyDayFan
You’re joking, right?
FROM: Hippolyte
Hanseatic, this really isn’t a game.
FROM: Hanseatic
Maybe yes, maybe no. But what difference does it make?
“Are these people serious?” Tomer Zan asked.
“Some of them.”
“Who are they, exactly?”
“The ones I know, I don’t know well,” Dagmar said. “The rest are just handles they use online.”
“Are they Indonesia specialists?”
“I don’t think so.”
“How well do you trust them?”
More than I trust you, Dagmar thought.
“I don’t think they would deliberately mislead me,” she said.
“I’m going to fly to Singapore myself, to take charge of this,” Zan said. “If you don’t hear from me for the next day or two, that’s why.”
Competition, Dagmar thought, seemed to have heightened Zan’s sense of urgency.
That night, Star TV reported that the American ambassador and his family had been evacuated from Jakarta by some kind of U.S. Special Forces unit. The report made the ambassador seem brilliant and courageous, a combination of Rambo and Jack Kennedy.
In the face of this bold, blazing adventure, the fact that the ambassador had abandoned his post, all his subordinates, and every U.S. citizen in Jakarta seemed hardly worth mentioning.
FROM: Joe Clever
I had to walk him through it, but we’ve succeeded in setting Widjihartani
up with his own PayPal account. He can transfer money
from there into his bank account in unlimited amounts, but the
bottleneck is the bank, which will only allow him to withdraw a certain
mount.
I’m checking into whether the bank will allow him to borrow money
against the money already in his account. That way he can get a lot
of cash at once.
Dagmar had just finished her nightly swim when she heard the roar of vehicles. She threw her towel around her shoulders and walked to the edge of the terrace, then looked down through the screen of trees to the street below.
A convoy of half a dozen cars had just driven up beneath the Royal Jakarta’s portico. The Bersih Jantung guards were running to the cars and leaping inside. Their long, strange weapons thrust awkwardly from the windows as the vehicles sped away.
The last to leave was one of the older men in white. He jumped into a minibus without looking back, and then all Dagmar could see were the red taillights receding along the boulevard.
The hotel’s guards had jumped ship.
FROM: Charlie Ruff
I’m Charlie Ruff. Some of you may know me. I’m Dagmar’s boss, and
Great Big Idea was my great big idea.
Dagmar has alerted me to the existence of this conspiracy, and I’d
like to put your financing on a more professional basis.
Basically, I’ll be paying for anything that leads to Dagmar’s escape
from Indonesia.
Please, let me know what you need.
The looters arrived while Dagmar was paying her morning call on the concierge, a visit that neither enjoyed but that both recognized was inevitable. Dagmar asked whether anything had changed, and the concierge always said that nothing had.
“What happened to Bersih Jantung?” Dagmar asked the concierge.
“Their neighborhood was attacked,” the woman said. “The men left to protect their families.”
It was then that the first vehicles arrived. Dagmar turned at the sound of squealing brakes. Through the glass door of the concierge’s office she saw the small blue bus drawing up under the portico. Men jumped out, some of them armed with the same freakish weapons that the Bersih Jantung had carried.
They didn’t wear uniforms. They wore tropical shirts and T-shirts with the names of bands on them and baseball caps and headscarves and pitji hats. They looked more like the rioters Dagmar had encountered on the first day than anyone’s martial Islamic association.
Her heart gave such a violent lurch that her first grab for the door handle missed. She tried again, moved quickly into the lobby, and faded as fast as she could in the direction of the elevators. She scuttled to the double row of polished metal doors and jabbed at the call button.
Other vehicles had drawn up behind the bus, and more men were piling out. There was no one to stop them-the Sikh doormen hadn’t been seen for days, and Dagmar presumed they had been evacuated along with the other Indian nationals.
The leader entered. He had a Japanese long sword stuck in his belt. One of the managers made a diffident approach, and the leader told him to stand back, which he did. A mob of people followed him into the lobby.
Some of the invaders pushed hand trucks. Several seized the carts the bellmen used to carry luggage. One white-haired man had a list written in an old school notebook.
The leader drew his katana and made a broad gesture in the direction of the lounge. A dozen of his followers charged into the lounge and ran behind the bar. Bottles of liquor were piled on the bar to be swept up later. The bar television was torn from its moorings, and another looter moved a chair so that he could stand on it and disconnect another television that was mounted high in a corner.
Hotel employees clumped in one area of the lobby and did nothing.
The elevator dinged, and Dagmar ran for it. While she counted the seconds until the door closed, she remembered the six exits from the lobby that Tomer Zan had told her to locate, and realized that she should have used one of them.
Instead she’d panicked and run for the elevators.
It occurred to her that she was really unequipped for this kind of life.
The doors closed with an infuriating lack of haste, and Dagmar began her rise to her precarious aerie on the fourteenth floor.
FROM: Dagmar
Okay, this is it. The martial arts association that was guarding the
hotel fled last night, and today the looters moved in. It’s not spontaneous
looting this time; it’s highly organized. I can look out the
window and see trucks moving off with televisions, toilets, sinks,
microwaves, and the gas ranges from the kitchen. I guess I’ve had
my last hot meal. Or maybe my last meal of any sort, since they’ve
probably taken all the food as well.
The looters are armed with swords, knives, and spears. I haven’t
heard of them attacking anyone, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t
happened.
I need out of this hotel, and I need to go now. Any ideas?
“Is this Dagmar?”
A strange male voice, very deep and authoritative, with the same accent as Tomer Zan.
“Yes,” Dagmar said.
“My name is Mordechai Weitzman. I’m calling for Tomer Zan, who is in transit to Singapore and can’t speak right now.”
“Yes!” said Dagmar. “Hello!”
“We got your email. Can you get onto the roof later tonight?”
Dagmar’s heart gave a leap of delight at the prospect of the helicopter finally arriving.
“Yes!” she said. “Yes, of course!”
“The package should arrive about midnight Jakarta time, but it may be delayed. You’ve got to be ready when it comes.”
Her mind seemed to skip several tracks, like a needle hurled across an old LP.
“Package?” she said.
“We’re sending you a package of dollars. They may help you acquire food and other supplies until we can arrive to pick you up.”
Dagmar felt her sudden joy evaporate.
“You’re dropping money, but you’re not picking me up?”
“We’re sending it on a surveillance drone. It’s not big enough to carry you.”
“Shit!” Dagmar kicked the chest of drawers in her room: it banged solidly against the wall. “There are armed men in the hotel! I need to get out of here now!”
“You need to stay in your room.”
“I am in my fucking room!”
At that moment the lights died, and the air-conditioning whimpered to a stop.
“I am in my fucking room,” Dagmar announced, “in the fucking dark.” She was not unaware of a degree of melodrama in her delivery.
“We are coming as soon as we can,” said Weitzman. “But we need a working aircraft.”
“The world is full of aircraft!” Dagmar said. “They’ve been flying in and out of here for days. They could even spare one to fly out the American ambassador!”
“Now that was a profile in courage, wasn’t it?” There was cold humor in Weitzman’s voice.
“I’d say,” Dagmar said, “that the Alamo spirit is definitely dead.”
On the roof at eleven, she thought.
And fuck you, Mordechai, whoever you are.
FROM: Desi
I’ve emailed the Bayangan Prajurit people, but it’s the middle of
the night in Indonesia and it may be a while before we hear from them.
I did hear what happened with Bersih Jantung. They’re pro-military,
remember, and the army was supplying them with food, fuel, and
other black market items. So their neighbors, who all hate the military,
decided to hijack their latest convoy and steal their food and stuff.
Which they did. Successfully.
Bayangan Prajurit claims they weren’t involved, but they’re very
pleased with this development, and they had a hard time keeping
a straight face.
Dagmar stood atop the silent, dark tower as the monsoon spat warm drizzle in her face. She hoped that the reconnaissance craft would be able to find her through the cloud cover.
If it was like everything else Zelazni had tried so far, it would drop into the ocean somewhere west of Krakatoa.
As she looked over the edge, she could see that lack of electricity hadn’t stopped the looters. They were working by flashlight, and now they were loading mattresses and chests of drawers into their trucks.
They’d finished looting the ground floors, she saw, and had started on the guest rooms. The power outage meant they weren’t going to get to the fourteenth floor anytime soon, but Dagmar had considerable respect for their industry and assumed they would reach her eventually.
And besides, sooner or later she was going to have to descend to the ground in search of food and water.
Around her, the city was dark except for a few fires burning here and there. The locals were still exercising blazing benevolence upon their neighbors.
She could see the pool down below, on the third-floor terrace.
She had decided against her nightly swim. Her courage did not extend to defiance of mobs with spears and knives.
Not that her courage had done anything so far but fail her.
She gave a jump as her phone let out a bray. She answered.
“Are you on the roof?” said Mordechai.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
She ransacked a mental map. “Northeast corner,” she said.
“Stay back from the edge. We don’t want the package dropping to the street.”
She stepped back until she came up against one of the roof structures. Water dripped down her neck, a surprising splash of warmth, and she took a step forward.
“Any minute now,” said Mordechai.
Dagmar scanned the sky. A flurry of rain pelted down for a few seconds, then ceased. Then there was a faint whooshing noise, and the wind carried a warm breath of burned hydrocarbon.
Suddenly she saw it, hovering right above her. There were no wings and no tail structure-the thing was just an aerodynamic shape, like an elongated Frisbee, black against the opalescent cloud. It made a sound like a crowd in a distant stadium, a far-off roaring, and Dagmar realized it was propelled by arrays of the same miniturbines that served as backup power for her computer. There had to be some method of directing the thrust so that the machine could hover or fly in any direction. From the smell, Dagmar assumed the machine was loaded with some form of high-powered aviation fuel, as opposed to the stuff in her computer, a substance that, at the insistence of the Department of Homeland Security, couldn’t burn fast enough to be used to blow up an airplane.
“I see it!” she said into her phone. “It’s right over my head!”
“How far above you?”
“Maybe twenty feet. It’s hard to say. I can’t tell how large it is.”
“We’ll take it down three meters.”
The tone of the turbines shifted, and the machine wafted gently toward Dagmar. The hydrocarbon smell grew stronger.
“Right,” Mordechai said. “We’ve got you. It was hard picking you out from the background. Stand by.”
The drone was, Dagmar guessed, about eight feet long. Despite the gusting of the monsoon, the machine hovered with perfect stillness in the air, its fly-by-wire computer adjusting to every shift of the wind.
“Hold out your hand,” Mordechai said. There was amusement in his voice.
Dagmar put out her right hand, her left hand still holding the phone to her ear. The package dropped and bounced off Dagmar’s forearm, then fell to the rooftop with a little slap.
“Have you got it?” Mordechai asked.
Dagmar knelt, swept her hand over the roof, and found the package. Her fingers closed around it.
“I have it,” she said.
She straightened and looked up in time to see the drone take off, its low roar increasing as it turned northeast and flew away with surprising rapidity. She watched it until it disappeared into the night.
“You want to be careful with that money,” Mordechai said. “What you had before was maybe not worth killing over, but what you’ve got now can get you killed very fast.”
Dagmar felt an invisible hand clamp over her throat. She managed to speak in a kind of whisper.
“How much is it?” she said.
“Two thousand dollars. That should pay for a boat to take you away. Now listen.”
He told her that she should split the package up once she got it to her room, carry it in different places so she wouldn’t be peeling bills off a huge roll and offering someone far too much temptation.
“Right,” she said. “No temptation. Got it.”
FROM: Joe Clever
Widjihartani’s got money for fuel. I don’t know how. Apparently
Charlie arranged it.
Widji’s on the way to Jakarta, and he’s got a satellite phone so
that he can be told where he needs to anchor. Or dock, as the case
may be.
Sea rescue is go!
FROM: Desi
Bayangan Prajurit is go!
FROM: LadyDayFan
Evacuation is go!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Thunderbirds are go!
FROM: Corporal Carrot
Sorry about that last, by the way. My enthusiasm got the better
of me.
FROM: Hanseatic
That’s all right. I knew someone was going to say it.
Dagmar helped the Tippels move eight floors up from their looted hotel room. It took the elderly couple a long time to slog their way up the stairs-the elevators, when they were working, were now reserved for looters.
None of them had eaten in more than twenty-four hours, and Dagmar gave her guests the stale rolls she’d smuggled out of the breakfast room five days ago. She couldn’t do anything about the temperature: the power had been out for fifteen or sixteen hours, and the room was at least a hundred degrees-and since it was a modern hotel, all glass and steel, there was no way to open a window.
She had considered offering to take them with her when she made her exit, but the European Union was in the process of arranging an evacuation, and the Tippels had decided to wait. Dagmar asked how they planned to get past the looters.
“The looters have no reason to stop anyone from leaving,” Anna Tippel said.
What, Dagmar wondered, did reason have to do with anything?
Be in the northwest stairwell at 1600 hours. It was the stair farthest from the front doors, and one that the looters weren’t using: the Bayangan Prajurit didn’t want to risk a collision with whatever group was gutting the hotel.
Dagmar was ready a quarter of an hour early, sitting in the hot, stale air of the staircase and waiting for the sound of her rescuers. She had her satellite phone on her belt and her laptop in a rucksack-in view of the amount of cash she had on her person, she was no longer worried about someone killing her just for her computer. Her bag held toiletries and a change of clothing. She wore her panama hat on her gray hair and Reeboks on her feet and couldn’t tell if her current mood of buoyant optimism was a good thing or not.
Perhaps she was light-headed with lack of food.
Minutes crept by. Sweat dripped off Dagmar’s nose and splashed on the concrete stair landing. At 1600 hours she cracked open the steel door to see if the Bayangan Prajurit had used stealthy martial arts skills to creep up without her hearing them, but the street was empty except for a few nervous-looking civilians scuttling in the shadows. Hot air blasted through the open door, and she closed it quickly. Frustration clattered in her nerves.
In another ten minutes she was convinced that the whole rescue had been an absurd fantasy, some kind of wild delusion that had possessed LadyDayFan and all the others. A bunch of game hobbyists, planning a real-life rescue half a world away? Insane.
She paced back and forth along the landing, muscles trembling with anger. She checked her phone repeatedly to make sure no one had left her a message, either voice mail or email.
Through the steel door she heard the sound of a vehicle. Doors slammed. More doors slammed than would have been present on a single vehicle, so there was more than one.
Dagmar’s heart raced. She tipped back her hat and wiped sweat from her forehead with an already-soaked handkerchief.
Through the door, she heard Javanese voices.
They could be Bayangan Prajurit. Or looters. Or killers.
She looked at her phone again, saw that no message waited, then returned it to its holster.
The stairwell was more airless than ever. For some reason she thought of the skating rink in the shopping center down the street, trendy young people turning slow circles to pop tunes recorded before Dagmar was born.
Oh hell, she thought. Now or never.
She clutched the door’s locking bar with white-knuckled hands, then pushed the door open a foot or so. The hinges groaned, and Dagmar’s nerves shrieked in response.
As she stared out, she saw a group of Javans looking back at her. There were about ten of them altogether, and three small cars. The men didn’t wear uniforms like the Bersih Jantung Association-they were in ordinary street wear-but the oldest of them, a compact, fit-looking man of fifty or so, wore a loose white top and trousers, with a brilliantly colored wraparound knee-length kilt. All had weapons thrust into their belts or sashes, and each of the men wore a kopiah head wrap, blue with a white pattern, with two subdued little peaks on the top of the head, as if to cover a pair of small horns.
In the States, the kopiah would have made a particularly stylish do-rag.
One young woman was with them. She was still in her teens and was taller than the leader, wearing a wide-sleeved blouse in tropical colors and dark pantaloons. Metal-rimmed glasses were set on her squarish face. Her hair was pulled back in a little bun, and she had a long, sheathed knife thrust through her belt.
When she saw Dagmar, her mouth opened, revealing prominent teeth in a brilliant smile.
The older man looked at Dagmar.
“Dogma?” he said.
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “I’m Dagmar.”
“Please,” said the man, with a stiff little bow. He made a gesture toward a white sedan.
A young man in a wife-beater shirt jumped to open the rear door. Another opened the trunk and walked toward Dagmar with hands outstretched to take her bag.
The young woman approached first, stepping in front of the young man. She was still smiling.
“I’m Putri,” she said. “Please come with us.”
“Yes,” Dagmar said. “Thank you.”
She pushed the door open all the way and stepped onto the sidewalk. Afternoon heat shimmered up around her: the atmosphere seemed scarcely more breathable than the close air in the stairwell. The young man bustled up around Putri and took Dagmar’s bag, then waited expectantly for the knapsack. Dagmar shrugged out of the shoulder straps and handed the computer ruck to him. He put both in the trunk and slammed the lid.
Dagmar stepped into the car. It smelled of tobacco, cloves, and hot plastic. One of the young men, very polite, closed the door for her.
Putri trotted around the car and joined Dagmar in the backseat. The older man gave a quiet command and the others ran into their cars. The three vehicles made U-turns and sped away.
Dagmar looked over her shoulder to see the Royal Jakarta receding.
Putri was still smiling at her.
“Where are you from?” the girl asked.
Dagmar laughed and told her.
FROM: Desi
My friend Eric tells me that Bayangan means “phantom” or
“shadow,” and that Prajurit is “warrior.” So the Bayangan Prajurit
are Phantom Warriors. Pretty cool, huh?
FROM: Hanseatic
Phantom Warriors? Are they like Indonesian ninjas or what?
FROM: Desi
I don’t think so. I think it’s just one of those elaborate names that
martial artists use, like Golden Crane White Tiger Long Fist Kung
Fu. But I could be wrong.
The Bayangan Prajurit convoy avoided the highways and worked their way east and north in short legs, sometimes back-tracking when they didn’t like the look of an area. The older man, whose name, according to Putri, was Mr. Abu Bakar, was on his cell phone continuously-negotiating, Putri said, with groups that controlled the neighborhoods they were passing through.
When they had to take an overpass over a highway, or a bridge across one of the city’s many canals, one car was sent forward to scout, to make certain there was no ambush. Some of the bridges had roadblocks on them, cars drawn across the roadway, and then Abu Bakar came forward to negotiate. Sometimes they were turned away and had to find an alternate route. On other occasions, Abu Bakar paid a toll with sacks of rice that were carried in the lead vehicle.
Jakarta was like Los Angeles in a way, a series of small towns blended together. Some areas featured tall glass office buildings or apartments; some had private homes; some had apartment buildings clustered together. The homes were quiet; businesses were shuttered.
Everywhere there was greenery. The Jakartans liked living among trees.
Or perhaps, in the tropics, you couldn’t keep the green from springing up.
Only in the poor areas, the kampungs, were numbers of people seen-their apartments were too small for anything but sleeping, so life had to be lived in the open whether there was a political and economic crisis or not. The destruction of the currency had hit the rich and the middle classes, but the poor had no savings to lose. What they had lost were jobs: in the streets, Dagmar saw people who would normally have been at work playing football or standing in groups or gambling with whatever passed for currency in an economy where the money had become so much toilet paper.
On one occasion she saw them engaged in a sport that looked like volleyball played with the feet, kicking sometimes from a hand-stand position. The game was fascinating, but the car raced by too quickly for Dagmar to get a good look.
She got on her handheld and sent a message to LadyDayFan, Charlie, and Tomer Zan that she was on her way.
No one tried to stop her from sending the message. If they were kidnappers, she thought hopefully, they would have kept her from communicating.
After two hours of transit, the convoy drew up before a canal, one equipped with a drawbridge of the same type Dagmar had seen in Amsterdam. The drawbridge was up but came down as soon as the cars appeared. Children playing in the canal stared from the water as the cars crossed.
Abu Bakar put down his cell phone for the first time. He turned around in his seat and looked at Dagmar.
“You okay?” he said.
“Okay,” she said.
He gave her an encouraging smile, then faced forward again. Dagmar guessed he had pretty well exhausted his English.
The convoy passed over the bridge, between two shabby canal-side warehouses with red tile roofs, and into a residential area. The principal streets were laid out in a grid, but the smaller streets, very narrow, crept and zigzagged between apartment blocks. There were bright plastic awnings, lines hung with laundry, flags, umbrellas-anything, Dagmar suspected, to provide shade. Broken plaster showed that the buildings were made of red brick, with roofs of metal or worn red tile. The structures were old and sagged a bit, sinking into the soft ground. Zigzag cracks demonstrated that bricks were a very poor construction material in an earthquake zone. The tile roofs often had green plants, and even small bushes, sprouting from the crumbling red clay.
The vehicles passed a small neighborhood mosque and drew up in front of a long building. The brick walls had been plastered and painted white, with neat, bright blue and red lettering. Dagmar recognized “Bayangan Prajurit” amid other words she didn’t know.
Doors opened. Abu Bakar opened Dagmar’s door, and said, “Please.”
The building turned out to be the group’s training hall. The place was scrupulously clean. Racks for weapons stood along the walls, half of them empty. A large photo of a distinguished-looking man, perhaps the style’s founder, stood on one wall between a pair of Indonesian flags.
A group of women sat on a raised platform at one end of the room. Cooking smells brightened the air. Dagmar felt her mouth begin to water.
Dagmar removed her shoes at the entrance along with the others. The boy in the wife-beater shirt brought in her baggage and placed it by the door.
Dagmar looked at the springy split-bamboo floor, ideal for percussive exercise, and reflected that in Los Angeles, fashionable homeowners would have paid a lot of money for a floor just like this one.
She turned to Putri. “How long are we staying here?”
“Till the boat comes. The boat won’t come till night.”
“How will we know when the boat arrives?”
“The captain will call on his phone.”
On his satellite phone. Of course.
“Please,” said Putri, waving a hand in the direction of the circle of women. “We thought you might want to eat.”
“Thank you!”
Dagmar approached the platform eagerly. The women looked up at her-they were young girls in their teens under the direction of an older woman, and they had prepared a large pot of rice and a number of other dishes set in a circle around the rice bowl.
One of the girls gave Dagmar a bowl, and she was prepared to seat herself with the others when a thought struck her. She turned to Putri.
“Food must be scarce here,” she said. “I don’t want to take anyone’s food.”
Putri absorbed this, then nodded.
“That is kind of you,” she said. “But in our kampung we have food. One of those gudangs we passed-storage places?”
“Warehouses?”
“Yes. Warehouses. One of the gudangs was full of rice. So now we have a lot of rice, and the head man of our kampung can trade this rice for other kinds of food.” She smiled. “So we are poor here, but not starving.”
“Is Abu Bakar the head man?”
“No. That is Mr. Billy the Kid. You may meet him later.”
Dagmar was hungry but couldn’t keep the question from her lips.
“Billy the Kid? Is that a name his English teacher gave him?”
“No,” Putri said patiently, “it’s his Indonesian name. American names are very popular here, and Mr. Billy the Kid was named after a character played by Paul Newman in the cinema.”
Dagmar could think of no response but a nod.
Dagmar moved to seat herself with the other women, who gladly made room for her. She noticed that several of the young girls carried knives in their belts, and she was pleased that women were allowed to study martial arts here, in a Muslim country. No one had imposed burkas on these women, not yet.
The food was lovely, and carefully prepared. Dagmar praised it extravagantly. Her stomach had shrunk in the day and a half since her last meal, and that helped her eat slowly. The girls were talkative, and those who had English were eager to practice it. Dagmar answered the usual questions and asked questions of her own.
Time passed. The young men wandered in and out. Abu Bakar talked with the older woman, who Putri said was his wife. Dagmar looked out the rear window and saw an undeveloped area, partly under a shallow lake, that stretched from the rear of the building toward an industrial district in the distance. There was a petrochemical smell-perhaps the lake was used for dumping.
The kampung, backed up against this desolate area, with its canal and drawbridges, was practically an island. That made it very defensible, assuming of course that anyone ever found it worth attacking.
The sun drew close to the horizon. The evening call for prayer went up from the neighboring mosque, but those in the training hall ignored it as if it were nothing more than birdsong.
If you were religious enough to pray, Dagmar supposed, you were probably in the mosque already.
As the muezzin fell silent, Dagmar approached Putri. She reached for one of the pockets where she had stashed some of her money, opened the pocket button, and offered Putri three hundred dollars.
“Could you give this to Abu Bakar for me?” she asked. “For the poor people in the kampung?”
Putri was astonished. For a moment her English deserted her, and she could only nod. She walked to Abu Bakar and gestured for Dagmar to follow. Putri handed Abu Bakar the money, and the two conducted a rapid conversation in Javanese. Then Abu Bakar turned to Dagmar and held out the money.
“He says,” said Putri, “that you don’t have to pay. We are doing this for the sake of our own-” She paused, then made a valiant attempt at the proper English. “For our spirit. For our own development.”
Dagmar’s mind spun. She had wanted this not to be noblesse oblige, a round-eyed female handing out hundred-dollar bills like tips. She genuinely liked these people; she wanted them to be well.
She put out a hand and pressed the bills back toward Abu Bakar.
“For the children,” she said. “For medicine and-whatever.”
Putri translated. Abu Bakar thought for a moment, then gravely put the money into a pocket.
“Thank you, Miss Dogma,” he said.
A cell phone rang. Dagmar recognized a ring tone by Linkin Park. One of the young men answered, then gave the phone to Abu Bakar.
In a few moments everything was motion. Dagmar found herself back in the white sedan with Putri and Abu Bakar, her luggage in the trunk. The convoy moved out, traveling under running lights on the blacked-out streets. They crossed another drawbridge out of the kampung, then turned north. Abu Bakar was back on his cell phone, talking to his friends and allies.
Bags of rice were exchanged, and the group passed through a roadblock into another kampung. The cars passed young men carrying spears and wavy-edged blades. Taillights glowed on the red brick buildings.
The convoy passed through an industrial area, factories looking out with rows of blind glass eyes. Dagmar caught sight of a tank farm off to the left, glowing eerily in the moonlight.
The convoy came to a canal, and a roadblock on a bridge. The cars paused on the deserted road. Dagmar saw a Coca-Cola sign hanging loose on a shuttered fast-food place. The lead car moved up to the roadblock; there was some shouted Javanese, then there were cries and martial yells. Dagmar’s heart lurched as she saw moonlight on sharp blades. There were the bangs of weapons striking the car, and then taillights flashed and the car came roaring back as fast as it could come, a mob in pursuit. Abu Bakar yelled out orders. His young driver faced to the rear and put the car in reverse, his face all staring eyes and moist lips. He couldn’t move until the rearmost car reversed, and the rear car wasn’t moving.
Dagmar was aware only of being trapped, that she could die in this car and not know what to do.
There was a metallic noise as Putri drew her knife. Dagmar stared at it. It was unlike any knife she’d ever seen, a nasty S-shaped thing with a bright little hook at the end, just the size to cut off someone’s finger.
TINAG, she thought. This is not a game.
There was a flash, a bang, and a singing of metal. Someone was shooting.
Abu Bakar leaned out the window and yelled at the driver of the rear car. Then all three cars were scrambling backward as fast as they could go. Crumbling brick walls shot past, and parked vehicles. Whoever had the gun held his fire.
After it put some distance between itself and pursuit, the convoy sorted itself out and began moving westward. Abu Bakar shouted into his cell phone. Dagmar tried to slow her racing heart.
“That kampung,” Putri said, her face white, “was captured by friends of the military.” She sheathed her knife.
“I see,” Dagmar said. She was trying not to gasp for breath.
Abu Bakar managed to reroute his convoy. Now the tank farm was on the right. Then Dagmar scented the iodine smell of the sea, and her nerves gave a little thrill. Despite all obstacles, they had managed to come near the sea. The sea, where rescue floated somewhere in the darkness.
The convoy moved east, and now there was water on the left. Then the convoy turned left and was driving down a long jetty. Wooden schooners floated left and right, all in the local style, with a distinctive raked prow. Some had anchored out in the water, where no one could reach them, but some were drawn right to the pier, their fabulously raked stems and bowsprits hanging over the jetty like openmouthed sharks caught in the act of devouring their prey.
The convoy drove unmolested to the end of the pier. Abu Bakar, very calm now, made a call on the cell phone.
Doors opened. People got out of the cars, stretched, breathed in the sea-drenched scent of the land breeze. Dagmar wandered about in a daze.
A boat engine throbbed somewhere in the darkness. The lead car flashed its headlights. Dagmar stared hopefully out to sea, and then she saw it, a blue and white boat with a tall mast and an extravagantly raked stem in the local fashion. The engine cut out, and the boat made a gentle curve and came up broadside to the jetty. Two crew members threw out rope mats to cushion any impact with the pier, then cast lines to lasso bollards with practiced efficiency. Dagmar saw that jerricans of fuel were lashed to the pilot house. A man in a baseball cap peered out of the pilot house and called over.
“Is Dagmar here?”
She wanted to jump in the air, whoop, wave her arms.
“I’m here,” she said, and then realized her voice was pitched too low. “I’m here!” she repeated, louder this time.
“Good! Come on the boat!”
Dagmar took the time to embrace Putri, the girl who had been willing to draw a knife to protect her. She hugged Abu Bakar as well, much to his surprise. And then she let Widjihartani in his baseball cap help her onto the boat. Lines were cast off, and Dagmar’s last view of Indonesia was of her rescuers lined up on the pier, silhouetted against the car lights, waving as she set off on her return to the Western Paradise.
I never got to meet Billy the Kid, she thought.
Maybe next time.
The dawn rose over the moving ocean, throwing the schooner’s long, dark shadow before it over the sea. Red sun twinkled from the wave caps, long rollers driven by the dry monsoon. Java was well out of sight, but there were islands off the starboard bow. Dagmar stared out over the stern and smelled breakfast cooking.
Suddenly “Harlem Nocturne” rang out over the throb of the engine. Dagmar saw “Charlies Friend” on the display, laughed, and answered.
“Hello, darling,” said Tomer Zan. “How are you?”
“I’m in a boat,” Dagmar said, “heading for Singapore.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Good,” Zan said finally. “The helicopter was crap anyway.”
“Well,” said Dagmar, “I’m sure you tried your best.”
No points to you, she thought.
No world domination, no donut.