The Deadliest Game

Not Lateran. She still couldn’t get over that. It just seemed wrong. But Sherlock Holmes was whispering in her ear: Eliminate the impossible, and what you have left is the truth. Or at least possible.

Five-thirty. I can’t believe I was in there all night. But…She raised her eyebrows, sighed at herself, poured boiling water into her teacup, then went into the small bathroom off the kitchen, wetted a washcloth with cold water, and just plastered it over her eyes for a moment. The chill of it on her face was something of a shock, a welcome one.

Megan let it rest there for a moment, and looked at the faint lights moving inside her eyelids, phosphene byproducts of how tired her eyes were. Then she peeled the washcloth off, left it by the sink, and went in to get her tea.

Megan sat down, sipped at it gingerly, and started to go over things one more time. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that she’d missed something about the server logs. But then Leif seemed to think they’d exploited everything they could from examining that set of information, and she was willing enough to bow to his expertise in this area. There must be something else, she thought. Something we’ve missed…

But the back of her mind kept going back to the server logs, and wouldn’t be appeased. It’s just brain fugue, Megan thought to herself after a while, sipping at the tea again, and burning herself again. I’m like a rat going down a tunnel with no cheese in it, again and again. It was the same kind of behavior she made fun of in her mother when her mother put the car keys down and later couldn’t find them, and kept checking the same spot over and over and over, even though she knew perfectly well by now that they weren’t there. I’m no better than she is.

The tea was beginning to cool enough to drink. Megan sipped at it one more time. I feel so grungy. What’m I going to wear to school today? I haven’t checked the laundry situation in days.

Then she swore softly, got up again, and headed straight back into the office.

She went over to the desk and pushed yet another pile of books off to one side. Baedeker’s Handbook for London, 1875? Fungi of the World? Taste of the East? What, he wants to go back in time for a curry now? With mushrooms in it, I guess. She sat down in the implant chair again and lined the implant up.

There was Rhea’s ochre surface spread out before her, all powdered blue with new-blown snow from one of the nearby methane vents, and there was Saturn hanging golden and uncommunicative in the long cold darkness, like a message delivered and unread. All that e-mail…. Megan thought. “Computer? Chair, please.” The chair appeared. “Show me what’s come in.”

The icons of about fifteen messages appeared in the air before her, some holding still, some rotating gently, some vibrating up and down as an indication of their urgency. The urgent ones were in the majority — though as Megan read through the mail, she found once again that other people’s definitions of urgency didn’t usually match hers. Two more mails from Carrie Henderson, who really really wanted her to do something that Megan didn’t bother finish listening to. Yet another unnecessary notice about the SATs. Someone selling subscriptions to a new virtual news service, a demo account of which began playing itself noisily in one corner of her space, showing her a smoke-filled expanse stitched with the burning lines of battlefield lasers, a firefight going on in some dark place in Africa. She wished she had a hammer to hit the sender with. Instead, Megan just told the machine to turn the demo off, and went back to reducing the clutter, icon by icon.

Several failed connects of attempted live chat…Well, she routinely refused chat while she was in Sarxos. J. Simpson? Who’s that? She shook her head. You did sometimes get requests to chat from people you’d never seen or heard of before. Probably it was someone she’d run into in the game who wanted to follow up on something.

She opened the messages, but they had nothing but the characteristic “failed message, chat refused” tag inside them. Oh, well, Megan thought. As her mother usually said, if it was important, they’d call back. If it wasn’t important, they’d call back.

Maybe whoever this is left some mail inside Sarxos, Megan thought. “Computer? Sarxos log-in.”

“Working.”

Her own area didn’t go away, but went shadowy while the Sarxos logo and copyright notices displayed themselves burning in the air before her as usual, and her scores and last-play times came up. “Resume from previous extraction point?” said the computer. “Or start new area play?”

“Another alternative.”

“State it, please.”

“Do you recognize this token?” She picked up Rodrigues’s golden sigil, tossing it in her hand.

“Concessionary token recognized. How can I help you?”

Down the same old tunnel, Megan thought, resigned. “Identify attempted chat connections to my account from 1830 local last night to 0515 today.”

A moment’s silence. “No connections from within Sarxos.”

“Okay.” J. Simpson. She shook her head. “Any e-mail waiting?”

“No e-mail.”

So Wayland had come up with nothing new. “I want access to server logs,” Megan said.

“That access is allowed with your token. Which logs would you like to see?”

“Logs for players Rutin, Walse, Hunsal, Orieta, Balk the Screw, and Lateran.”

“Specify mode. Audio? Text? Graphical?”

“Graphics, please,” Megan said. Her eyes weren’t up to reading much text at the moment.

“What span of time?”

“The last—” Megan waved her hand, not really caring. “Four months.”

“Working.”

Six separate bar graphs stacked themselves up in the air in front of Megan, looking something like a long detailing of what the Dow Jones index might have been doing for the last quarter. Each upright bar was a twenty- four-hour period; in it, as a series of bright vertical dashes stitched down the darker “bar,” was a representation of the number of hours that the person in question had been in Sarxos playing.

The six players were serious ones. Not one of them seemed to have played less than four hours a day, for all four months. Some of them had played six, or eight, routinely. Some of them had repeated stretches, especially at weekends or around holidays, when they were in the game for fourteen hours a day, or more. I wonder where they’ve been getting their massage programs from, Megan thought, stretching her aching body. Jeez, I thought I was fairly serious about the game. But these people are obsessed.

For amusement, she said to the computer, “Put up the matching server log for Brown Meg.”

It came up. She breathed out a rueful laugh. Over the last few days, her usage, staggered as it was, had become almost as obsessive as theirs. Dad’s gonna have words with me, she thought. And as for Mom…no, let’s not even think about it right now.

“Display matching server usage for Leif Hedge-wizard,” Megan said. Another bar graph appeared below hers. His usage looked a lot like hers, for the past few days. He’s no better.

And there was the tunnel, still with no cheese in it. She made a face at herself, and said, “Oh, go on, display server usage for Lateran.”

It came up. Lateran was as bad as any of them. Worse. Another mad one, in and out constantly. “Display usage for Argath.”

Argath, strangely, wasn’t in as much as Megan would have thought. His usage over the past several months actually looked more like her usual pattern, though it had been busier than usual the past few days. It didn’t seem normal, somehow…but then, what was normal usage for a Sarxos player? Was there any such thing? Probably not.

Megan raised her eyebrows at the thought, and said to the computer, “Display usage pattern for — oh, Wayland—”

His pattern came up under Argath’s. Megan sipped at her tea again, which she had “brought” into the virtual space with her, and sat gazing a little blearily at all the bar graphs hanging there glowing in the air in front of her.