She couldn’t alter the dream’s subject, that last explosion in LA. The green Ford parked with its view of the city, beyond it the webs of lights strung across the night, Century City a brilliant outpost in the darkness. Then the bubble of fire that exploded from the car, the light magnified a hundred times by gridded reflections on the glass-walled office building that stood over the parking lot. The clang as the car roof landed on the asphalt, followed shortly by the hood, and then the little sparkles as the incendiaries rained down like the remains of an Independence Day firework…
The explosion repeated itself over and over-not with startling rapidity, as it had in real life, but in ultraslow motion, like in an action film. It was the fact of its being so much like a movie that helped convince Dagmar that this was a dream.
Over and over again, the life in the car ended.
She couldn’t manage to alter the event itself-she couldn’t make the pieces of the car fly back together, couldn’t restore her lover’s life-but she could act in other ways to make the dream harmless.
Dagmar gave the image a sound track-Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie. The music was filled with drama so overblown as to become comic, the tension undermined by the oboe and flutes chortling away in the background, parodied by a platoon of rapping snares… the humorous sounds helped to neutralize the horror of the image, introduce a farcical element.
She distanced the image still further. She built a proscenium stage around the explosion, in hopes of reinforcing the idea that this wasn’t really happening, that it was just opera or melodrama or some kind of boring art film hoping to make its point by showing the same dumb thing happening over and over.
She thought about pulling back the camera a little farther, showing the heads of the audience as they stared at the explosion, and at that point she woke up.
She was in a hotel, and for a moment panic flooded her, and she thought she might be having a flashback for real.
It wasn’t the hotel in Jakarta, she told herself. She wasn’t lying naked in the tropical heat, helpless amid a civilization that was coming apart, that was dying in riot and arson and looting.
Dagmar was in the hotel room in Selcuk, and she had taken steps to make certain it was not and could never be the room in Jakarta. She’d turned the bed at a diagonal, instead of square to the wall as it had been in Jakarta, and she’d made sure the windows were to her right and not to the left, and therefore there was no reason, none whatsoever, to have a flashback at this time…
She turned on the light. The room was not at all like the one in Jakarta, with its television and its minibar and its tropical heat. Instead she was in a boutique hotel with a view of the mosque and a tile mosaic of an old man gazing down at a group of turtles, some Turkish folk motif that she didn’t understand.
This was not Jakarta. But the terror that was Jakarta was still somewhere in the back of her mind, threatening to break out, and that terror kept her awake, kept her sitting in bed with the light on until long after the muezzin called out the early morning prayer and light began to glint on the mosque dome and she heard the first sounds of traffic filling the streets.
Saint Paul Railed Against Breastwork Here
Dagmar watched as the gamers poured into the great stone theater. It was just after eight in the morning and the theater was still in the deep, long shadow of Mount Panayir; the air was cool and scented by the pines that lined the long walk from the entrance. Mourning doves called nearby; a stork clacked from the untidy nest it had built atop one of the stone arches.
The usual crowds of visitors, reinforced by tourists bused in from cruise ships docking in Izmir, had not yet arrived-aside from the doves and the storks, the gamers had the place nearly to themselves.
Cameras were held high overhead as they panned across the stone seats. Cameras in the hands of Dagmer’s employees gazed back-the whole event was being streamed live to players who couldn’t attend in person.
The flood of gamers slowed to a trickle, and then Mehmet entered. Mehmet scanned the crowd till he saw Dagmar and then gave her a nod from under the brim of his ball cap.
Dagmar gave him a half salute, raising two fingers to the brim of her panama hat. Then she stood and joined him in front of the worn pillars of the proscenium.
The gamers occupied a small fraction of the twenty-five thousand stone seats that the Greeks and Romans had dug into the flank of the mountain. In this theater the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Plautus had been performed. Gladiators had fought and died here. The stage had been flooded for aquatic spectacles, perhaps miniature naval battles. Saint Paul had preached in this place, and been driven out by rioters calling on the name of holy Artemis.
Even Elton John had performed in this place, Captain Fantastic himself, a concert broadcast to the whole world.
The Theater of Ephesus had seen all this in the two thousand years of its history, and now it was going to see something new.
“Gunaydin!” she called, Turkish for “good morning.” “Can you hear me?”
The theater’s superb acoustics echoed her own words back to her. She had more or less worked out she wouldn’t be needing the lapel mic she had pinned to her T-shirt, and she didn’t turn on the battery pack clipped to her waist.
“On behalf of Universal Exports, Limited,” she said, “I would like to thank you for your help in assisting our salesman, Mr. Bond, escape from his troubles in Antalya. And I know you will join with me in sending condolences to the family of Semiramis Orga.”
She signaled to Mehmet, and he translated the words into Turkish. Of the six or seven hundred gamers present, most were Turks, and most of these were new to alternate reality games.
They were picking up the basics pretty quickly, though.
“Unfortunately,” Dagmar continued, “we are still unable to locate Mr. Bond. We believe that he may be in this area, and one among you discovered what seems to be a crossword puzzle partly filled out in his hand. I have provided copies for each of you, and you’re each welcome to take one. The puzzle is called ‘Ephesus,’ and the answers seem to mostly involve this area. Perhaps the answers may help you determine Mr. Bond’s location.”
While Mehmet translated this, Dagmar returned to her seat and a large wheeled cooler, which she pulled out along the front of the proscenium. She opened the cooler to reveal stacks of printed crossword puzzles. The clues were written in both Turkish and English, and the answers, most of which had to do with Ephesian history and with inscriptions on the monuments, would be the same in any language.
She broke the stacks of puzzles into smaller stacks and distributed them between the many pillars of the proscenium. Then she invited the gamers to come down and each take one.
Which they did. At great speed. And then, organizing into groups, they dispersed all over the ancient city with their cameras, their phones, their maps, their Baedekers, and their Lonely Planet guides. Dagmar’s camera crews followed them, eavesdropping on their conversations.
The puzzle and the clues would be scanned and uploaded to networking sites so that people off-site could work on them. People would be calling up the Internet on their handhelds so that they could google answers to the clues. Turkish clues would be translated into English, and vice versa, in hopes of gaining additional insight. Pictures would be taken of inscriptions, and of maps, and of monuments, and then the players would share the pictures with one another, or upload them so that others might have a crack at deciphering any mysteries they might contain.
And somehow, when all those pictures and clues and answers were jigsawed together, they would provide a form of aid to the world’s most famous fictional spy, who lurked somewhere in the landscape near Ephesus, just beyond your eyeblink, or humming somewhere in the electronic landscape, or in the stream of celluloid running before the great blazing unwinking eye, images focused on the blank white screen that might just exist solely in your mind…