The Deadliest Game

used to win. But now, in Sarxos…I win all the time. No one was as clever as I was. No one knows strategy the way I do.”

“Especially when you were playing all those different characters,” said a quiet voice, just out of frame, probably a psychiatrist. Or a psych program, Megan thought.

“How else could I be all the people I am? How else could all of them win? Not just me,” Simpson said. “I may be the main one…but winning, winning matters so much. My dad always used to say, ‘It isn’t how you play the game; it’s whether you win or lose.’ Then he died—” Only now did that face show any emotion at all: a flash of pure rage so uncontaminated by maturity or experience that you would have sworn the three-year-old owner was about to throw himself on the ground in a full-scale tantrum, screaming and turning blue. Except that the three-year-old was in his early forties. “I won lots of times,” the voice said, calm again, the face’s expression seamlessly sealed over, “and I was going to keep winning, too. All of me were — all the people who’re inside. And I’ll win again, someday, even though I’m out of the game now. Sooner or later, I’ll win again….”

The figure in the chair winked out, leaving Megan and Leif looking at each other in a combination of pity, fear, and revulsion. “We no longer use the phrase ‘crazy as a jaybird,’” Winters said, “but if we did, I would say that fella’s a good candidate for the description. It’ll take the therapists a long time to work their way down to the bottom of his difficulties…but I would say multiple-personality disorder is part of the clinical picture, complicated by an inability to tell reality from a game…or to understand that a game is for playing.”

Silence fell again in the room. Winters sighed at the depth of it. “All right, you two. I’m not going to throw you out of the Explorers, as much because I hate to waste valuable raw material as anything else. I emphasize the word ‘raw.’”

He looked at them both, and they both looked at the carpet again, faces hot. But Leif looked up. “Thank you.”

“Yes,” Megan said.

“As for the rest of it — if in the near future we find a piece of business which is suited to your unique talents of nosiness, inability to take no for an answer, annoying persistence, and screwy thinking….” He smiled. “You’ll be the first to hear about it from me. Now go away and compose yourselves for the press conference. Both of you better have the grace to conduct yourself like modest little Net Force Explorers or, by God, I’ll….” He sighed. “Never mind. See what you do to me? A whole morning’s worth of composure shot. Go on, get out of here.”

They stood up. “And before you go,” Winters said, “just this. There’s nothing more fatal than believing a lie is the truth. Think of all the fatal lies you just saved the world from. Even with all the other things you got wrong, and did wrong…that’s something you can be proud of.”

They turned and went out, flashing each other just the quickest grin…though being careful not to let Winters see it.

“Oh, and one last thing.”

They paused in the dilating doorway, looked over their shoulders.

Winters was shaking his head. “What the heck is a ‘Balk the Screw’?”

Elsewhere, in a room with no windows, three Suits sat and looked at one another.

“It didn’t work,” said the man who sat at the head of the table.

“It did work,” said another of the men, trying not to sound desperate. “It was only a matter of a few more days. The first announcement impacted the company’s stock more and more severely as the media spread the news of the first attack around. A few more hours, the next couple of attacks, the next announcements, would have affected their stock so drastically that they would have had to stop trading. People would have deserted that environment in droves. But more important: The technology worked.”

“It worked once,” said the man at the head of the table. “They know about it now. It had to work and not be found. It’s a cause celebre now. Everybody who’s heard about this is going to be going through their databases, looking for evidence of non- presence or surrogacy among their users. This was a tremendous window of opportunity…but now it’s shut.”

Silence fell in the room. “Well,” said the man who had tried not to sound desperate, and failed, “the necessary paperwork will be on your desk in the morning.”

“Don’t wait till the morning. Have it there in an hour. Clear your desk, and get out. If you go now, I’ll have an excuse when Tokagawa gets here in the morning.”

The third man in the suit got up and went away in great haste.

“So now what?” said the second man.

The first one shrugged. “We try another way,” he said. “It’s a shame. This one had possibilities. But it’s made some suggestions for other possible routes of attack.”

“Still…it’s a shame we lost this one. Wars could have been fought inside a paradigm like this. Real wars…”

“But only as real as the controlling software makes them,” said the first man with the slightest, chilliest smile. “What we’ve proven is that the present technology is insufficient to what we have in mind…not secure enough to convince our customers to use them instead of more conventional battlefields. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though, because the assumption would be that when the next wave of technology comes along, it’ll be watertight. And of course it won’t be. We’ll be there again, building in the ‘back doors.’ And from the beginning of the process, this time, rather than starting in the middle. Because of this failure, we’ll be smarter. And those of us who aren’t smarter, will be cleaning out their desks.” He looked at the second man. “And where will you be?”

“If you’ll excuse me,” the second man said, rising to leave, “I have a phone call to make.”

When he was gone, the first man sat and thought. Oh, well. Next time…for what man has devised, man can unravel and debase, and in any game, there’s always a way to cheat, if you look hard enough.

Next time for sure….

At the very edge of Sarxos, the legends said, was a secret place. It had many names, but the one which was most frequently used was the shortest. It was the House of Rod.

Some Sarxonians, standing on the uttermost heights of the northeastern mountains of the North Continent, and looking westward in the clearest weather, claimed to have seen it there: a single island, a mighty mountain peak standing lone in the wild waters, far out in the Sunset Sea. Tales of the place abounded, though you were unlikely ever to meet anyone who had ever been there. The souls of the good departed went there, some of the stories said, and dwelt in bliss with Rod forever; other stories said that Rod Himself went there, on weekends, and looked out on the world that he had made, and found it good.

Few knew the truth of any of these stories. But Megan and Leif knew now.

It was a castle. That was more or less unavoidable. But there the resemblance stopped, for the place looked like it had been designed by an Angeleno architect who had had a bad dream about Schloss Neuschwanstein, and tried to execute a copy of it in a cross between Early Assyrian and Late Rococo. Green lawns were laid out around it, with tasteful flowerbeds full of asphodel. There was a small white beach where you could land a boat. It was said that the Elves liked to stop there, on their way into the West. “The True West, though,” Rod said, amused. “This is the Fake West. You want the true one, you keep going the way you’re going, straight off the planet, hang a right at the second moon, and straight after that, you can’t miss it.”

From the main body of the castle, one tall tower speared upward, with a balcony looking east. All the castle’s windows looked east. All of Sarxos lay there, the cloud-capped mountains and the seas, the lakes, the distant glint of clouds reflecting back the sunset….

“Nice view, isn’t it?” asked a voice behind Megan.

She turned around and nodded at Rod, who was holding a can of cola and looking out the window past her. “We get great sunsets here,” he said, “but you can only see them from the tower.”

“Personal reasons?” Megan said.

Rod looked resigned. “To the architect, maybe. My ex designed this place. She called it a ‘feature.’ I call it a nuisance. I think she just wanted to make sure I got plenty of exercise.”

“Is it a long way up?”

“The traditional number of steps,” Rod said, “three hundred and thirty-three. That’s why I put in the elevator.” He grinned.

Megan laughed, turning to look at all the people gathered in the big first-floor room. Nobody refused an