The Deadliest Game

that’s going to make that option fairly difficult. Yet at the same time, there are other people shaking their heads and saying, ‘Throw them the hell out!’ So what do I do? Any suggestions?”

He looked at them. Leif opened his mouth, shut it again. “Go ahead,” said Winters. “I don’t see how you can make it any worse for yourself than it already is.”

“Keep us on,” Leif said, “but on probation.”

“What does probation look like to you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You?” Winters looked at Megan. “Any ideas?”

“Only a question.” She swallowed. “What happens to full Net Force professionals when they do this kind of thing?”

“Mostly they get cashiered,” Winters said grimly. “Only extraordinary extenuating circumstances sometimes manage to save them. Can you suggest any in your case?”

“That we’ve uncovered possibly one of the most dangerous trends in thirty years’ worth of virtual experience?” Leif said, just a touch innocently.

Winters gave him a sidelong look, and allowed out just one thin grudging smile. Leif saw it and knew, instantly, that they had him, that it was going to be all right. Not comfortable…but all right.

“That is, fortunately for you, true,” Winters said. “Up until now, the whole virtuality system has been predicated on the certainty that transactions carried out remotely via implant were genuine. Now, suddenly, all that is thrown into confusion. There’s hardly a part of the Net that this doesn’t touch. All authentication protocols everywhere are going to have to be looked at, made proof against the kind of subversion that your Sarxonian friend managed to devise. With whose help, we’re not sure…but it’s being looked into. Sarxos has been a testing ground for some technologies that various countries are interested in. When someone starts interfering with that particular game…well, alarm bells ring. They’ll ring for a long time.

“But leaving that aside for the moment, this incident has been a wake-up call for a lot of people who felt their systems were secure. Sarxos has a very highly-thought-of proprietary security system. The discovery that it was being subverted in this manner, filled with spurious data, and no one suspected that this had been going on for months, perhaps many months…it came as quite a shock. If Sarxos could be subverted this way, so could many other carefully built proprietary systems. Banking systems. Securities clearing systems. ‘Smart’ systems that handle various aspects of national security for nations around the world. Weapons control systems…” Winters trailed off.

“It doesn’t bear thinking about, the amount of redesign that’s going to have to be done. Except that we have to think about it now, thanks to you.” The narrow smile went crooked. “There are probably more managers and systems analysts and hardware and software jockeys cursing your names at the moment than you’ll ever have again, if you’re lucky. And the same people are blessing you. If you were to die right now, no telling which direction you’d go.”

He sat back. “Meanwhile…Sarxos itself…” He picked up one of the pieces of paper from the top of the stack, looked at it, and put it aside. “Sarxos has possibly just survived as a company because of what you’ve done. It’s been a major profit-maker for its parent firm, and the attack on that player, along with the inability to catch the person who did it, was beginning to affect the company’s performance in the market. The Law of the Market is, ‘Know when they’re greedy, know when they’re scared.’ Sarxos’s stockholders got scared, and the market started losing confidence in the company. Their stock’s value plummeted all over the world, everywhere it traded.

“Now, the game’s designer, who is a man not exactly without some political pull due to being at least half a Croesus’s worth of rich, has asked us to give you every possible consideration in what we do. The parent company’s CEO has weighed in on your side, an astonishing event for a man who was widely thought not to care if the Big Bad Wolf was about to eat his grandmother unless at the time she happened to be carrying a bag full of his stock options.

“The police in Bloomington are very happy with you, because your suspect’s testimony has led them straight to the rented vehicle used in that lady’s hit-and-run. The FBI is happy, because the same suspect has now confessed to offenses in several states — he’s attempting to cut some sort of plea-bargain deal, but I don’t know how much good this is going to do him. There are several organizations that neither you nor I should know about who are also happy, for reasons which they either won’t tell me, or I’m not at liberty to discuss. And a general wave of unbridled goodwill seems to be sweeping the planet at the moment on your behalf.”

His voice was very dry. “It’s slightly bizarre. People who normally couldn’t be bothered to give other people the time of day are asking us to be lenient with you.” Winters sat back and looked at them. “Frankly, I think they’re misunderstanding exactly what you did, in some cases, or why you did it, in other cases…but still, some of them have a point.”

Leif stole a glance at Megan. She was holding very still. “All of this being the case,” Winters said, “I really doubt if sacrificing you on the altar of blind obedience is going to do anyone any good. I would just as soon leave the option open that, someday, you might possibly serve with the — what’s the phrase I heard used? ‘Grownups’?”

Megan squirmed. So did Leif. “Do you read minds?” Megan said abruptly.

Winters looked at her and raised an eyebrow, then said, “Not usually. It makes my head hurt. Faces are more than sufficient. As for the rest of it…”

Winters raised his eyebrows, pushed back in his chair, pushed the report away from him a little bit. “Something you are going to have to understand, should you come to work with the ‘grownups,’ should you eventually reach that beatific state yourself, is that your work as part of a team is not necessarily about being ‘right,’ and there is a very, very small gap between being ‘right’ and being ‘righteous.’ The latter state can be fatal. The distance between the two is enough to get you killed, or your partner killed, or some innocent person around you killed.” He looked over at Megan. “What if your father had come down in the middle of that attack a few days ago? What if one of your brothers had stumbled into it?”

Megan was staring at the floor again, her face burning. “All right,” Winters said. “I’m not going to belabor the point. You seem at least vaguely conscious of the implications. But at the same time, the question also applies to you.” He turned to Leif. “You were next on the list. He had the address of your school. He would have found you there. He would either have tried to take you away, and possibly succeeded — in which case we would have found you in a ditch somewhere, or a river — or he would have tried to deal with you on the spot. There are any number of ways he could have done it, and any number of ways he could have killed one of your schoolmates ‘accidentally’ at the same time. Responsibility,” Winters said. “It would have been yours.”

Leif, too, became very interested in the carpet. “Someday it may be you,” Winters said. “All I can offer you, at the moment, is how this feels right now: this shame, this guilt, this fear. All I can do is tell you that this is infinitely better than what you will feel when, because of your disobeying an order, one of your mates goes down in the line of duty. A death with no meaning: or something worse than death.”

The room was very still. “Speaking of which,” Winters said, sitting forward a little again. “Your friend Ellen —”

“Elblai! How is she?” Megan said.

“She woke up this morning,” Winters said. “She’s been told what’s going on — she insisted on being told, apparently. They say she’s going to be all right. But she’s apparently extremely annoyed about some battle that she missed with this…” He leaned toward the desk, looked at another of the papers in the stack. “This ‘Argath’ person. Who, by the way, turns out to be completely uninvolved in all of this.”

“We thought so,” Leif said.

“Yes, you did. Which was interesting, considering how little hard data you had to go on. But hunches come into our line of work, as well as hardware…and riding the hunch on the short rein is definitely a talent we can use.”

“Why did he do it?” Megan said.

“Who? Oh, you mean Simpson of the many aliases?”

Winters sat back in his chair. Quite without warning, a man sitting in a chair appeared in the corner of Winters’s office. The man was wearing prison clothes — plain blue coveralls — and the same unmoved expression that Megan had seen on his face when he was pointing a weapon at her. She resisted the urge to shiver.

“I never win,” the man said, in a flat voice that matched the affectless face — and Megan was suddenly glad that he hadn’t spoken to her during the assault. He sounded like a robot in this holoclip. “I mean, I never