The Deadliest Game

some yogurt. If Dad was thinking about making dinner tonight, it would be good for putting out the fire when the chilies got too incendiary.

Megan swiveled the computer chair around into the right position. It took a moment to “remember” her favorite settings, raising her feet up a little, tilting back at the right angle. Megan lined up her implant with the computer’s master interface box, and felt the familiar tiny shock of interconnection, like someone throwing a light switch down in your bones: switching the normal universe off, and another one on.

Megan knew that some people organized their personal virtual “workspaces” as just one more office full of file cabinets. She scorned such smallness of mind. When anything was possible in virtual reality, why didn’t people do, well, anything? For the way they behaved, she had no answers. For herself, she now walked out into the middle of a gigantic stone amphitheater, the tiers and tiers of worn white limestone seating reaching up a couple of stories above her. Above the top tier of seats, black sky with fierce white stars burning in it reached up to the zenith. She looked over her shoulder, out past the “front” of the amphitheater, to see a long “downward” slope of dimly lit pink-stained ice and grit, dusted with bluish methane snow; and low above the horizon, fat and oblate and orange as an overripe peach, Saturn hung, his rings rakishly tilted to one side, the long shadow from the sunward side striping the planet’s surface at a slewed and stylish diagonal. Light reflecting from the planet’s surface dusted the surface of the moon Rhea with a pale golden bloom. Like Earth’s moon, Rhea never turned this face away from her primary, but Megan knew that if she stood there long enough watching, Saturn would slowly start to wane, the rings would shift, and soon the sun would come up over Rhea’s too-close little horizon and change the predominant color of the moon from soft gold to blazing ice-white, with a great shadow thrown over the amphitheater from the high edge of the nearby impact basin Tirawa.

Unfortunately, Megan had a lot of other things to do this morning besides planet-watch. “Chair,” she said, and one provided itself behind her, a close duplicate of the one at home. She sat back and put her feet up, and said to the computer, “Mail, please?”

“Running mail,” said the computer in a pleasant female voice, and started displaying a set of frozen, caption- tagged video-audio “thumbnails” of her waiting messages, without any fuss. Other people might want to personify their computer as a “secretary” that would talk to them in the shape of a person, offer to show them their correspondence, and so on, but Megan preferred to have a machine that simply did the work she told it to, when she told it. She didn’t care for chatty interfaces with overbearing personalities.

“That’s because you’ve already got one of your own,” Mike had said to her when she had mentioned this to him, some months back. Mike had complained about the ensuing bruises for some days thereafter. Served him right, Megan thought, smiling slightly at the memory. If he can’t take the trouble to learn enough martial arts to keep his little sister from laying him out flat occasionally, well, it’s hardly my problem.

The mail was mostly nothing important. “First one,” Megan said, and that small “thumbnail” picture suddenly swelled to full size and three dimensions and began speaking to her. The label underneath it identified it as having come from her high school guidance counselor. Mr. MacIlwain was sitting behind his desk, which rather resembled her parents’—covered with papers and disks and books and heaven knew what else. “This is a reminder that your run-through for the SAT III and SAT IV/NMSQT tests has been rescheduled for March 12th. If you’ve requested Advanced Placement Examinations as well, this run-through has been rescheduled for March 15th. The English Composition with Essay examination will be given nationally only in April, so make sure that you—”

“Yeah, yeah, stop, erase,” Megan said. She had taken care of everything mentioned in the message, and was as ready for her SATs as she was ever going to be — though every time she looked at the Advanced Placements date she thought, The Ides of March, oh, great…As if Shakespeare and Julius Caesar hadn’t done enough to curse that date. Still, the real exam itself was a month and more away from that. Another month to spend twitching…. “Next,” she said.

The next “thumbnail” blew itself up into the shape of Carrie Henderson, another junior at her high school. “Megan, hi! Look, I know you said you weren’t really interested in the dance committee, but we could really really really use a—”

“Stop,” Megan said, “save.” I really really really don’t want to be involved in this, let someone else do it. If I just ignore this for a while, she’ll probably find someone else to do it anyway. “Next.”

The third thumbnail blew itself up into a man in a suit and tie holding up a sample of carpet, and standing on a seemingly unending acreage of the stuff, in a horrendous paisley pattern that ran up against the edge of Megan’s amphitheater and mercifully vanished there. “Dear systems user,” the man said excitedly, “your address has been especially chosen as that of one of an elite group of users who will be able to appreciate the value of—”

“Stop, erase!” Megan moaned. Cyberspam…there must be some way to stop it. She found herself wondering whether any of the anti-cyberspam initiatives that Net Force was presently backing were ever going to make it successfully through Congress. The problem was that the “spam” lobbies were so powerful…and as soon as the government found a way to stop one kind, another sprang up. It meant that her mailbox, as well as that of nearly everybody else she knew, kept getting cluttered with ads she didn’t want. At least the carpet ad had been fairly innocuous. Some of the ads that wound up in her mailbox were so annoying or insistent that she wanted to start practicing thrust-kicks on the computer, or better still, the people who sent the ads….

The water must almost be boiling, she thought, glancing at the remaining few thumbnails’ captions. There’s nothing really important here, these can wait—

An abrupt soft chime sounded in the air all around her, and Megan looked around her in surprise. Someone was trying to reach her for live chat. At this hour? “Who is it?” she said to the computer.

“Message ID shows James Winters,” the computer said.

“Really? Wow,” Megan said. “Accept.”

Off to one side of the amphitheater there suddenly appeared an office somewhat tidier than her father’s and mother’s. Early morning sun was streaming through the venetian blinds in its windows, and lay in broad stripes on the big desk in the foreground of the office. Behind the desk, which was empty at the moment except for a few printouts and letters and a few stacked disks, sat the big broad-shouldered form of James Winters, an active-duty officer in the Net Force, and the senior contact for the Net Force Explorers. He pushed aside the piece of paper he had been glancing at, and gazed “out” at Megan, looking for the moment, in his suit, very much like some harried businessman, except for the Marine haircut and the lazy eyes. Those eyes might be all netted with smile lines, but there was a toughness in them that most businessmen could only wish to achieve.

“Megan? I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”

“No, I was getting ready to go to class, but that’s not for a few minutes yet.” But you would have known that, she thought, getting interested. Winters was intimately knowledgeable about all the Net Force Explorers’ schedules. Something’s up!

He nodded, looking past her briefly. “Hey, nice view.”

Megan smiled slightly. “Yeah, it’s summer ‘here.’ For about the next six hours anyway, if you can really call it a summer when the axis tilts by only a third of a degree. How can I help you?”

He looked at her thoughtfully. “Megan, just check me on something. Your profile shows you as being a Sarxos player.”

Her eyebrows went up. “I drop in there every now and then.”

“More than every couple of weeks, say?”

She thought. “Yeah, I’d say so. Maybe once a week on the average, though sometimes more often if something exciting starts happening. But it’s a good place to just wander around in, even when there’s not a war or a feud between wizards going on. Interesting people there…and Rodrigues did a good job on the game. It ‘feels’ realer than a lot of virtual games do.”

He nodded. “What have you heard about players being ‘bounced’?”

Megan blinked at that. “You mean, people’s satchel codes being wiped out? Viruses, and characters being sabotaged, that kind of thing? I’ve heard that it does happen, sometimes. Revenge, supposedly. Someone taking things too seriously….”

“Someone, if it’s just someone, is taking things a lot too seriously lately. There have been something like twelve people ‘bounced’ in the last year.”