The Deadliest Game

some clandestine arrangement of Delmond’s mother’s with the Dark One. I wouldn’t put it past her, Shel thought as he went up the stairs at a run. She’s a snake, that one. In fact, wasn’t she a snake originally? Some kind of—

He stopped at his apartment’s landing, with his keys in his hand, and stared at the door. It was ajar.

Don’t tell me I left this open.

He pushed the door open, cautiously, and peered in.

His heart seized. Someone had been in here. Someone had been in…

…and had trashed the place.

He walked softly through, half wondering whether the intruder might still be there — and half not caring: because at the far side of the living room, where his desk was, and his chair with his interface…was a disaster area. The desk was overturned. The computer lay on its side, its main system box pulled open, the boards everywhere. His monitor was smashed. His system was destroyed.

Naturally Shel got right on the phone and called the insurance company. Naturally, eventually, they’d pay for a new system. But the one thing they could do nothing about was his hard drive. Shel would find, later, when he got the hard disk to the shop on Monday, that it had been formatted. And then his last hopes died.

He had not backed up his files to his “emergency” storage before he left. Most particularly, he had not backed up his satchel codes, the complex and completely unrememberable codes that, combined with the codes saved in the master Sarxos games server, gave him access to his character and his character’s history.

It took days for him to stop wanting to bang his head against the wall at his own stupidity. It was going to take weeks to get this mess ironed out — for the Sarxos people were obsessively careful about their security. Oh, eventually he would be able to get back into the game. He would submit the results of his last save from his remote backups (like many computer users these days, he subscribed to a “lifesaver” service, a company that kept copies of his backup files at another site), and copies of the satchel codes that had been used in that save. The company would compare his last-archived files against theirs, and check his other real-world and virtual IDs for validity — and eventually they would assign him a new password so that he could get back in the game.

But until then, there would be no more roving the green fields of Talairn for Shel. He could get back into Sarxos on one of the cheapo “introductory accounts” they sold people who weren’t sure they wanted to get that seriously into gameplay. But he wouldn’t be able to get back in as Shel until his new password came through — and by then, this year’s campaigning season would be over. Two years’ careful preparation of the ground for this year’s campaigning, two years’ amiable scheming with other players — all shot to hell. Some of the people Shel had been conspiring with would be furious; they might want nothing to do with him in the future, regardless of the fact that what had happened to him was in no way his fault. Others, missing him, might simply move on to other alliances.

And what about Alla? If she was real, she might very well drift away for lack of the player she had been working with, maybe even drift out of the game altogether. If she wasn’t real — well, characters who were generated by the game, and weren’t interacted with on a regular basis, tended to be “recalled”—a nice word for “erased.” Sarxos, after all, was an economy, and didn’t waste resources that weren’t being used. The possibility that Alla might just go away, cease to exist, because of his absence, bothered him even more than his lost campaign.

The whole situation was utterly infuriating. But these were just some of the dangers of the game…and there was absolutely nothing Shel could do about them.

He started again, of course. It was not in Shel’s nature to just give up on anything. That was one of the things that had made him stand out as a Sarxos player to start with. But as he began the slow business of getting his virtual life back, and (after they finally reissued his password) started trying to rebuild his character’s credibility, a very important question still remained unanswered:

Why me? Why?

Some days later, it was seven-thirty in the morning, and Megan O’Malley was in the kitchen, rummaging in the cupboards and muttering to herself. “I can’t believe we’re out of it again….”

Having four older brothers had posed many problems over the course of the years, but the worst was that none of them ever stopped eating, or at least that was the way it looked. You would come in for your breakfast, ready to stuff something hurriedly into your face before heading out to school, and find that the kitchen had been stripped bare like some third-world cropland after the locusts had passed through. When the brothers got old enough to go away to college, those of them that did, Megan had hoped the situation might improve, but instead, it only got worse — Mike and Sean had seemed to start eating more to compensate for Paul’s and Rory’s absence. Hiding food from the two who were studying close to home at GWU and Georgetown worked only occasionally — usually, if the food was something they didn’t want — and there were unfortunately too few kinds of food that fell into that category. Muesli had been one, for a while…until late one night Sean, while rifling the cupboards, had stumbled across Megan’s supply. She had had to start moving the stuff around after that. Sometimes this tactic worked.

Not always. “Locusts,” Megan muttered in disgust as she picked up the box she had thought safely hidden down under the sink, behind the bleach and the rubber gloves. It was a box of the genuine Swiss muesli, Familia, not one of the sawdust-tasting local brands. It was an empty box.

She stood up in the big, sunny, golden-tiled kitchen, and sighed, then chucked the Familia box in the trash can and headed for the counter where the breadbox lived, and opened it.

No bread. So much for toast, Megan thought, letting the breadbox lid fall. It’s a pity I don’t need to lose any weight, because I’d be starting. Oh, well. Tea…

That, at least, she found. Her brothers, mercifully, had all become coffee drinkers as soon as it became plain to her parents that it would not stunt their growth (and that, in cold fact, probably nothing could). Megan put water in the kettle, put it on the stove, turned the “hot” burner up to full, and went off to find a mug, glancing at the clock. Seven-forty-five. Half an hour before my ride shows up…might as well check the mail.

She headed into the downstairs den, a big room that housed one of the family’s three networked computers, and that was otherwise stuffed full, from floor to ceiling and around all four walls, with her father’s and mother’s research books. When your mom was a reporter for the Washington Post, and your dad was a mystery writer, this made for a fairly eclectic and occasionally haphazard-seeming collection; and everything inevitably got mixed together, so that books on international politics and economics and the environment and world history, and slightly weird volumes like Nameless Horrors and What To Do About Them and Luftwaffe Secret Projects 1946, wound up shelved with or piled on top of a truly terrifying collection of books on forensics and weapons and poisons, books with titles like Snobbery with Violence and The Do’s and Don’ts of Committing the Perfect Crime and The A — Z of Venomous Animals and Glaister’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology. Megan knew her father was perfectly law-abiding and utterly gentle. She had once seen him weep when he’d accidentally killed a mouse he was trying to catch and release outside, after one of the cats had turned it loose in the house. But all the same, she hoped fervently that no one would ever suspect him of a murder. Once they got a look at the downstairs den, no human being could possibly believe that he wouldn’t have known exactly how to do it.

She sat down in the computer chair and sighed at the sight of the inevitable pile of books on the table in front of the main interface box. No matter how many times she reminded them, her father or mother kept leaving their current research material obstructing the working pathway between the machine and the implant chair. But then they used retinal/optical implants, which lined up with the machine well above the level of the table, and Megan’s was one of the newer type of implant, a side-looking neckneural or “droud,” which lined up from a lower angle. As Megan pushed this morning’s heap of books aside — her dad’s, mostly; he typically stayed up writing until three or four in the morning — she looked them over with mild interest. The pile included, at its top, copies of the Thomas Cook European Railway Timetable, Jane’s Guns Recognition Guide, and The Curry Club Book of 250 Hot and Spicy Dishes. She blinked at that one. The potential “plot” for the book he was working on had been shaping itself up perfectly until then. Lure someone onto an obscure Eastern European train, shoot them — and then put them in a curry?

Naah. All the same, she resolved to stop at the store on the way home and pick up