But-maybe because we’d been elevated to such loftiness-we also saw what was going on. And turning a blind eye was one of the few things I’d never been good at.
One day, five years ago, I was approached by the same individuals who’d brought the box to my yacht. Although they were officially working for Icehammer, they were also members of an underground movement with cells in all the gaming houses. Its lines of communication stretched out to the Ideologues themselves.
The movement was using the games against the IWP. They’d approach players like myself and offer to disclose material relating to games under development by Icehammer or other houses; material that would give the player an edge over their rivals. The player in turn would siphon a percentage of their profit into the movement.
The creature in the box was merely the latest tip-off.
But I didn’t know what to make of it, except that it had been snatched from somewhere in the galaxy. Wormhole manipulation offered instantaneous travel to the stars, but nothing larger than a beachball could make the trip. The snatcher was an automated probe that had retrieved biological specimens from thousands of planets. Icehammer operated its own snatcher, for obtaining material that could be incorporated into products.
This time, it seemed to have brought back a dud.
“IT just sits there and does nothing,” Risa said when the Icehammer employees had left, the thing resting on a chilled pallet in the sick bay.
“What kind of game can they possibly build around it?”
“Last player to die of boredom wins?”
“Possible. Or maybe you throw it? It’s heavy enough, as though the damn thing is half-fossilized. Those white patches look like quartz, don’t they?”
Maybe the beast wouldn’t do anything until it was placed into the proper environment-perhaps because it needed olfactory or tactile cues to switch from dormancy.
“Black said the game was based on an ecology?” I said.
“Yeah, but how do you think such a game would work?” Risa said. “An ecology’s much too chaotic to build into a game.” Before she married me she’d been a prominent games designer for one of the other houses, so she knew what she was talking about. “Do you know how disequilibrate your average ecology is?”
“Not even sure I can pronounce it.”
“Ecologies aren’t kids’s stuff. They’re immensely complex-food webs, spectra of hierarchical connected-ness… Screw up any one level, and the whole thing can collapse-unless you’ve evolved the system into some kind of Gaian self-stabilizing regime, which is hard enough when you’re not trying to re-create an alien ecology, where there might be all sorts of unexpected emergent phenomena.”
“Maybe that’s the point, though? A game of dexterity, like balancing spinning plates?”
Risa made the noise that told she was half acknowledging the probable truthfulness of my statement. “They must constrain it in some way. Strip it down to the essentials, and then build in some mechanism whereby players can influence things.”
I nodded. I’d been unwilling to probe the creature too deeply until now, perhaps still suspicious of a trap-but I knew that if I didn’t, the little arthropod would drive me quietly insane. At the very least, I had to know whether it had anything resembling a brain-and if I got that far, I could begin to guess at the kinds of behavioral routines scripted into its synapses, especially if I could trace pathways to sensory organs. Maybe I was being optimistic, though. The thing didn’t even have recognizable eyes, so it was anyone’s guess as to how it assembled a mental model of its surroundings. And of course that told me something, though it wasn’t particularly useful.
The creature had evolved somewhere dark.
A MONTH later, Icehammer began a teaser campaign for Stroboscopic. The premiere was to take place two months later in Tycho, but a handful of selected players would be invited to an exclusive preview a few weeks earlier, me among them.
I began to warm up to competition fitness.
Even with insider knowledge, no game was ever a walkover, and my contacts in the resistance movement would be disappointed if I didn’t turn in a tidy profit. The trouble was I didn’t know enough about the game to finesse the required skills; whether they were mental or physical or some combination of the two. Hedging my bets, I played as many different types of games as possible in the time frame, culminating in a race through the atmosphere of Jupiter piloting frail cloudjammers. The game was one that demanded an acute grasp of aerodynamic physics, coupled with sharp reflexes and a willingness to indulge in extreme personal risk.
It was during the last of the races that Angela Valdez misjudged a thermal and collapsed her foil. Valdez had been a friend of mine years ago, and though we’d since fallen into rivalry, we’d never lost our mutual respect. I attended her funeral on Europa with an acute sense of my own mortality. There, I met most of the other gamers in the system, including a youngish man called Zubek whose star was in the ascendant. He and Valdez had been lovers, I knew-just as I’d loved her years before I met Risa.
“I suppose you’ve heard of Stroboscopic?” he asked, sidling up to me after Valdez ’s ashes had been scattered on Europa’s ice.
“Of course.”
“I presume you won’t be playing, in that case.” Zubek smiled. “I gather the game’s going to be more than slightly challenging.”
“You think I’m not up to it?”
“Oh, you were good once, Nozomi-nobody’d dispute that.” He nodded to the smear of ash on the frost. “But so was Angela. She was good enough to beat the hardest of games-until the day when she wasn’t.”
I wanted to punch him. What stopped me was the thought that maybe he was right.
I WAS on my way back from the funeral when White called, using the secure channel to the yacht.
“What have you learnt about the package, Nozomi? I’m curious.”
“Not much,” I said, nibbling a fingernail. With my other hand I was toying with Risa’s dreadlocks, her head resting on my chest. “Other than the fact that the animal responds to light. The mottled patches on its carapace are a matrix of light-sensitive organs; silicon and quartz deposits. Silicon and silicon oxides, doped with a few other metals. I think they work as organic semiconductors, converting light into electrical nerve impulses.”
I couldn’t see White’s face-it was obscured by a golden blur that more or less approximated the visor of his suit-but he tapped a finger against the blur, knowingly. “That’s all? A response to light? That’s hardly going to give you a winning edge.”
“There’s nothing simple about it. The light has to reach a certain threshold intensity before there’s any activity at all.”
“And then it wakes up?”
“No. It moves for a few seconds, like a clockwork toy given a few turns of the key. Then it freezes up again, even if the light level remains constant. It needs a period of darkness before it shows another response to light.”
“How long?”
“Seventy seconds, more or less. I think it gets all the energy it needs during that one burst of light, then goes into hibernation until the next burst. Its chemistry must be optimized so highly that it simply can’t process more rapid bursts.”
The gold ovoid of his face nodded. “Maybe that ties in with the title of the game,” he said. “Stroboscopic.”
“You wouldn’t care to hazard a guess as to what kind of evolutionary adaptation this might be?”
“I wish there was time for it, Nozomi. But I’m afraid that isn’t why I called. There’s trouble.”
“What sort?” Though I didn’t really need to ask.
He paused, looking to one side, as if nervous of being interrupted. “Black’s vanished. My guess is the goons got to him. They’ll have unpicked his memory by now.”