Dangerous Games

six more, and the paypal she used filled with real, honest-to-goodness cash, Pounds Sterling that she could withdraw from the cashpoint situated exactly 501 metres away from the schoolgate, next to the candy shop that was likewise 501 metres away.

“Anda, I don’t think it’s healthy for you to spend so much time with your game,” her Da said, prodding her bulging podge with a finger. “It’s not healthy.”

“Daaaa!” she said, pushing his finger aside. “I go to PE every stinking day. It’s good enough for the Ministry of Education.”

“I don’t like it,” he said. He was no movie star himself, with a little pot belly that he wore his belted trousers high upon, a wobbly extra chin and two bat wings of flab hanging off his upper arms. She pinched his chin and wiggled it.

“I get loads more exercise than you, Mr Kettle.”

“But I pay the bills around here, little Miss Pot.”

“You’re not seriously complaining about the cost of the game?” she said, infusing her voice with as much incredulity and disgust as she could muster. “Ten quid a week and I get unlimited calls, texts and messages! Plus play of course, and the in-game encyclopedia and spellchecker and translator bots!” (This was all from rote-every member of the Fahrenheits memorised this or something very like it for dealing with recalcitrant, ignorant parental units.) “Fine then. If the game is too dear for you, Da, let’s set it aside and I’ll just start using a normal phone. Is that what you want?”

Her Da held up his hands. “I surrender, Miss Pot. But do try to get a little more exercise, please? Fresh air? Sport? Games?”

“Getting my head trodden on in the hockey pitch, more like,” she said, darkly.

“Zackly!” he said, prodding her podge anew. “That’s the stuff! Getting my head trodden on was what made me the man I are today!”

Her Da could bluster all he liked about paying the bills, but she had pocket-money for the first time in her life: not book-tokens and fruit-tokens and milk-tokens that could be exchanged for “healthy” snacks and literature. She had real money, cash money that she could spend outside of the 500 meter sugar-free zone that surrounded her school.

She wasn’t just kicking arse in the game, now-she was the richest kid she knew, and suddenly she was everybody’s best pal, with handsful of Curlie Wurlies and Dairy Milks and Mars Bars that she could selectively distribute to her schoolmates.

“GO get a BFG,” Lucy said. “We’re going on a mission.”

Lucy’s voice in her ear was a constant companion in her life now. When she wasn’t on Fahrenheit Island, she and Lucy were running missions into the wee hours of the night. The Fahrenheit armourers, non-player-characters, had learned to recognise her and they had the Clan’s BFGs oiled and ready for her when she showed up.

Today’s mission was close to home, which was good: the road-trips were getting tedious. Sometimes, non- player-characters or Game Masters would try to get them involved in an official in-game mission, impressed by their stats and weapons, and it sometimes broke her heart to pass them up, but cash always beat gold and experience beat experience points: Money talks and bullshit walks, as Lucy liked to say.

They caught the first round of sniper/lookouts before they had a chance to attack or send off a message. Anda used the scrying spell to spot them. Lucy had kept both BFGs armed and she loosed rounds at the hilltops flanking the roadway as soon as Anda gave her the signal, long before they got into bowrange.

As they picked their way through the ruined gobbets of the dead player-character snipers, Anda still on the lookout, she broke the silence over their voicelink.

“Hey, Lucy?”

“Anda, if you’re not going to call me Sarge, at least don’t call me ‘Hey, Lucy!’ My dad loved that old TV show and he makes that joke every visitation day.”

“Sorry, Sarge. Sarge?”

“Yes, Anda?”

“I just can’t understand why anyone would pay us cash for these missions.”

“You complaining?”

“No, but-”

“Anyone asking you to cyber some old pervert?”

“No!”

“OK then. I don’t know either. But the money’s good. I don’t care. Hell, probably it’s two rich gamers who pay their butlers to craft for them all day. One’s fucking with the other one and paying us.”

“You really think that?”

Lucy sighed a put-upon, sophisticated, American sigh. “Look at it this way. Most of the world is living on like a dollar a day. I spend five dollars every day on a frappuccino. Some days, I get two! Dad sends Mom three thousand a month in child-support-that’s a hundred bucks a day. So if a day’s money here is a hundred dollars, then to a African or whatever my frappuccino is worth like five hundred dollars. And I buy two or three every day.

“And we’re not rich! There’s craploads of rich people who wouldn’t think twice about spending five hundred bucks on a coffee-how much do you think a hotdog and a Coke go for on the space station? A thousand bucks!

“So that’s what I think is going on. There’s someone out there, some Saudi or Japanese guy or Russian mafia kid who’s so rich that this is just chump change for him, and he’s paying us to mess around with some other rich person. To them, we’re like the Africans making a dollar a day to craft-I mean, sew-T-shirts. What’s a couple hundred bucks to them? A cup of coffee.”

Anda thought about it. It made a kind of sense. She’d been on hols in Bratislava where they got a posh hotel room for ten quid-less than she was spending every day on sweeties and fizzy drinks.

“Three o’clock,” she said, and aimed the BFG again. More snipers pat-patted in bits around the forest floor.

“Nice one, Anda.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

THEY smashed half a dozen more sniper outposts and fought their way through a couple packs of suspiciously bad-ass brigands before coming upon the cottage.

“Bloody hell,” Anda breathed. The cottage was ringed with guards, forty or fifty of them, with bows and spells and spears, in entrenched positions.

“This is nuts,” Lucy agreed. “I’m calling them. This is nuts.”

There was a muting click as Lucy rang off and Anda used up a scrying scroll to examine the inventories of the guards around the corner. The more she looked, the more scared she got. They were loaded down with spells; a couple of them were guarding BFGs and what looked like an even bigger BFG, maybe the fabled BFG10K, something that was removed from the game economy not long after gameday one, as too disruptive to the balance of power. Supposedly, one or two existed, but that was just a rumour. Wasn’t it?

“OK,” Lucy said. “OK, this is how this goes. We’ve got to do this. I just called in three squads of Fahrenheit veterans and their noob prentices for backup.” Anda summed that up in her head to four hundred player characters and maybe three hundred nonplayer characters: familiars, servants, demons…

“That’s a lot of shares to split the pay into,” Anda said.

“Oh ye of little tits,” Lucy said. “I’ve negotiated a bonus for us if we make it-a million gold and three missions’ worth of cash. The Fahrenheits are taking payment in gold-they’ll be here in an hour.”

This wasn’t a mission anymore, Anda realised. It was war. Gamewar. Hundreds of players converging on this shard, squaring off against the ranked mercenaries guarding the huge cottage over the hill.

LUCY wasn’t the ranking Fahrenheit on the scene, but she was the designated general. One of the gamers up from Fahrenheit Island brought a team flag for her to carry, a long spear with the magical standard snapping proudly from it as the troops formed up behind her.

“On my signal,” Lucy said. The voice chat was like a windtunnel from all the unmuted breathing voices, hundreds of girls in hundreds of bedrooms like Anda’s, all over the world, some sitting down before breakfast, some