Jumping, I thought. You couldn’t jump in slow motion. Predators must have been the first creatures to evolve toward the burst strategy-and then grazers had been forced to follow suit.
“We’ve given them the collective term Strobelife-and their planet we’ve called Strobeworld, for obvious reasons.” Icehammer rubbed his palms together with a whine of actuating motors. “Which, ladies and gentlemen, brings us rather neatly to the game itself. Shall we continue?”
“Get on with it, you bastard,” I murmured. Next to me, Risa squeezed my hand and whispered something calming.
WE were escorted up a sapphire staircase into a busy room packed with consoles and viewing stands. There was no direct view of the Arena itself, but screens hanging from the ceiling showed angles in various wavebands.
The Arena was a mockup of part of the surface of Strobeworld, simulated with astonishing precision: the correct rocky terrain alleviated only by tufts of colorless vacuum-tolerant “vegetation,” gravity that was only a few percent from Strobeworld’s own, and a magnetic field that simulated in strength and vector the ambient field at the point on Strobeworld from which the animals had been snatched. The roof of the dome was studded with lamps that would blaze for less than 13 hundredths of a second, once every 72 seconds, precisely mimicking the passage of the star’s mercilessly bright beam.
The game itself-Level One, at least-would be played in rounds: single player against single player, or team against team. Each competitor would be allocated a fraction of the thousand-odd individual animals released into the Arena at the start-fifty/fifty in the absence of any handicapping. The sample would include animals from every ecological level, from grazers that fed on the flora, right up to the relatively scarce top predators, of which there were only a dozen basic variants. They had to eat, of course: light could provide their daily energy needs, but they’d still need to consume each other for growth and replication. Each competitor’s animals would be labeled with infrared markers, capable of being picked up by Arena cams. It was the competitor’s goal to ensure that their population of Strobeworld creatures outperformed the rival’s, simply by staying alive longest. Computers would assess the fitness of each population after a round and the winner would be announced.
I watched a few initial heats before my turn.
Most of the animals were sufficiently far from each other-or huddled in herds-that during each movement burst they did little except shuffle around or move slightly more in one direction than another. But the animals that were near each other exhibited more interesting behavior. Prey creatures-small, flat-bodied grazers or midlevel predators-would try and get away from the higher-level predators, which in turn would advance toward the grazers and subordinate predators. But then they’d come to a stop, perfectly motionless, their locations revealed only by the cams, since it was completely dark in the Arena.
Waiting.
It was harder than it looked-the dynamics of the ecosystem far subtler than I’d expected. Interfering at any level could have wildly unexpected consequences.
Risa would have loved it.
Soon it was my turn. I took my console after nodding briefly at my opponent; a rising player of moderate renown, but no real match for myself, even though neither of us had played Stroboscopic before.
We commenced play.
The Arena-initially empty-was populated by Strobelife via robot drones that dashed out from concealed hatches. The Strobelife was in stasis; no light flashes from the dome to trigger the life cycle; as stiff and sculptural as the animal we’d studied in the yacht. My console displayed a schematic overlay of the Arena, with “my” animals designated by marker symbols. The screens showed the same relationships from different angles. Initial placement was pseudo-random; animals placed in lifelike groupings, but with distances between predator and prey, determined by algorithms compiled from real Strobeworld populations.
We were given five minutes to study the grouping and evolve a strategy before the first flash. Thereafter, the flashes would follow at 72-second intervals until the game’s conclusion.
The five minutes slammed past before I’d examined less than a dozen possible opening gambits.
For a few flash cycles nothing much happened; too much distance between potential enemies. But after the fifth cycle some of the animals were within striking range of each other. Little local hot spots of carnage began to ensue; animals being dismembered or eaten in episodic bursts.
We began to influence the game. After each movement burst-during the minute or so of near-immobility-we were able to selectively reposition or withdraw our own or our opponent’s animals from the Arena, according to a complex shifting value scheme. The immobile animals would be spirited away, or relocated, by the same robots that had placed them initially. When the next flash came, play would continue seamlessly.
All sorts of unanticipated things could happen.
Wipe out one predator and you might think that the animals it was preying on would thrive, or at least not be decimated so rapidly. But what often happened was that a second rival predator-until then contained in number-would invade the now unoccupied niche and become more successful than the animal that had been wiped out. If that new predator also pursued the prey animals of the other, then they might actually be worse off.
I began to grasp some of Stroboscopic’s latent complexity. Maybe it was going to be a challenge after all.
I played and won four rounds out of five. No point deluding myself: at least two of my victories had been sheer luck, or had evolved from dynamics of the ecology that were just too labyrinthine to guess at. But I was impressed, and for the first time in years, I didn’t feel as if I’d already exhausted every aspect of a game.
I was enjoying myself.
I waited for the other heats to cycle through, my own name only displaced from the top of the leader board when the last player had completed his series.
Zubek had beaten me.
“Bad luck,” he said, in the immediate aftermath, after we’d delivered our sound bites. He slung an arm around my shoulder, matishly. “I’m sorry what I said about you before, Nozomi.”
“Would you be apologizing now if I’d won?”
“But you didn’t, did you? Put up a good fight, I’ll admit. Were you playing to your limit?” Zubek stopped a passing waiter and snatched two drinks from his tray, something fizzy, passing one to me. “Listen, Nozomi. Either way, we won in style and trashed the rest.”
“Good. Can I go now? I’d like to speak to my wife.” And get the hell away from Tycho, I thought.
“Not so fast. I’ve got a proposition. Will you hear me out?”
I LISTENED to what Zubek had to say. Then caught up with Risa a few minutes later and told her what he had outlined.
“You’re not serious,” she said. “He’s playing a game with you, don’t you realize?”
“Isn’t that the point?”
Risa shook her head exasperatedly. “Angela Valdez is dead. She died a good death, doing what she loved. Nothing the two of you can do now can make the slightest difference.”
“Zubek will make the challenge whether I like it or not.”
“But you don’t have to agree.” Her voice was calm but her eyes promised tears. “You know what the rumors said. That the next level was more dangerous than the first.”
“That’ll make it all the more interesting, then.”
But she wasn’t really listening to me, perhaps knowing that I’d already made my mind up.
Zubek and I arranged a press conference an hour later, sharing the same podium, microphones radiating out from our faces like the rifles of a firing squad; stroboscopic flashes of cameras prefiguring the game ahead. We explained our proposition: how we’d agreed between ourselves to another game; one that would be dedicated to the memory of Angela Valdez.