Type of Whiskey Minus Two
Dagmar walked with Mehmet down the pine-shaded road that led to the entrance to the site. Behind her, gamers and cameramen were flooding over the ancient city like an invasion of driver ants.
She had gotten her ass saved by James Bond four months earlier. She supposed that might make her a Bond girl-possibly, at thirty-three, the oldest ever.
Six or seven years earlier, when her creative skills had been paired with her friend Charlie’s money, she had built her company, Great Big Idea, into a powerhouse in the world of alternate reality games, or ARGs. But then Charlie had died-been murdered, actually-and his various business interests had been “rationalized,” as the jargon had it, by his corporate heirs. Great Big Idea had been cut loose, left to fend for itself in a sea now swarming with other companies promising to deliver equally terrific cross-platform viral advertising.
The company in fact did reasonably well most of the time, but there were times when Great Big Idea needed injections of cash to pay rent and make its payroll. In the past she could go to Charlie for a short-term loan from one of his other businesses, but now she had to establish relationships with financial institutions, like banks.
Explaining an alternate reality game to a banker was a daunting experience. It’s an online game? Yes, except when it’s out in the real world. The real world? Yes, we send players all over the world on live events. And the players pay for this entertainment? No, we give it away free and charge sponsors for our services.
Banks seemed unable to entirely reconcile themselves to this business model.
During the dry periods she’d kept the company going with her own money, paying herself back when she found a client. Until, earlier in the year, she had failed to find a client at all.
In March she had fired eight of her friends. She would have fired the rest in April except that James Bond had come to her rescue.
The new Bond movie, Stunrunner, would open in August. It was pretty much a remake of From Russia with Love, itself a film shot largely in Turkey-though instead of the maguffin being a Soviet coding machine that needed to be smuggled across the Balkans, it was Iranian nuclear secrets that needed to be got across Anatolia, with a climax filmed as a boat chase through the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.
James Bond would be played by a new actor-Ian Attila Gordon, a Scots pop star new to the business of acting. He was also the first Bond since Connery to speak with a Scots accent and the first with a visible tattoo, a large, colorful one on his neck that loomed above the wing collar of his tuxedo.
The studio seemed a little nervous about the film, and about the Bond franchise in particular, which was suspected of being on the wane.
At any rate, Dagmar was told that the studio would very much like a state-of-the-art viral-marketing campaign for the film and would like it to take place in Turkey, tracing Bond’s route across the country.
“Turkey?” Dagmar had asked. “Isn’t Turkey like a military dictatorship now?”
“The movie was shot before the coup,” Lincoln had explained. “And sad though the political situation may be, the studio would like its investment back.”
And so would I, Dagmar thought, thinking of her savings that were on the brink of extinction, all eaten by her company.
“I don’t have a good history with military governments,” she said. In a dark corner of her mind she could hear automatic weapons rattling, see bodies sprawled on the street, a great pillar of smoke that marked a massacre, roads lined with broken glass and burning autos.
Lincoln gave her a mild look.
“You handled yourself well,” he said.
“I was scared spitless the whole time.”
“This time,” said Lincoln, “you’ll have a whole posse to keep you out of trouble. I’ll be there myself.”
The game, Dagmar considered, would bring some money to Turkey, of which the generals would no doubt get their share. But Dagmar could make sure the game wouldn’t have to support the generals in any other way.
And she could make payroll. Her friends wouldn’t all be thrown out into the world.
And all that was required was she pretended that a few generals didn’t exist. And, it had to be admitted, she already did that every day.
“There’s never been a full-scale ARG in Turkey,” Lincoln said. “I expect it’ll be huge.”
“Is there enough of an IT backbone in Turkey to run one of these?”
“Turkey is supersaturated with IT,” Lincoln said. “They’re completely wired. A goodly percentage of the world’s hackers come from Turkey.”
Lincoln Jennings worked for Bear Cat, a public relations company that represented the studio. Dagmar had met him before, but not under that name-she’d encountered only his online handle, which was “Chatsworth Osborne Jr.” He was a complete alternate reality geek-a dedicated player of ARGs himself-and now he had the budget to stage one himself.
He was pretty well over the moon about it. This was some kind of long-buried dream for him.
A six-week game in two languages, with live-action meet-ups in a foreign country? Dagmar charged Lincoln a lot. She had to pay herself all the money she’d loaned the company, she had to rehire as much staff as she could, and she had to have enough left over to survive the next dry period. She built escalator clauses into the contract, getting a bonus if more than the usual number of people actually signed up to play. During the course of her job, she’d be getting several checks, each for seven figures.
The game she created took place around the margins of the movie’s action. Stunrunner had a straightforward script: a long series of encounters, some violent, some sexual, separated by chase scenes that took Bond through Turkey’s most iconic scenery, from Mount Ararat to the dome of the Blue Mosque. In Dagmar’s hands the story became much larger, sprawling out from the movie’s spare story line. She made use of the characters from the movie and added a couple dozen of her own, either on Bond’s team, the Iranians’, or members of a freelance group of mercenaries who wanted the Iranian secrets for their own reasons. She was tempted to make them SPECTRE but decided against it. The Bond films seemed to have forgotten about SPECTRE.
The film’s Operation Stunrunner, in which Bond first was inserted into Iran, then made his thrilling escape, in Dagmar’s hands took on a far more Byzantine aspect, now not simply about the mullahs’ nuclear secrets but about security in the Strait of Hormuz, about the mercenary outfit’s attempt to hijack an oil tanker, and about Semiramis Orga’s attempt to establish herself as an opium smuggler.
Semiramis Orga, by the way, was a character from the movie, the bad Bond girl who gets killed about a third of the way in. (The less bad Bond girl, the one converted to virtue by a night with Bond and who flew off with him in the end, was a Brit named Evelyn Modestbride.)
Dagmar’s story was told in many different ways. Radio plays, short films, coded messages, comic strips, pictures with coded messages between the Photoshopped layers, sound files with text hidden in the code.
Then, as if the story wasn’t complex enough, Dagmar broke it up into bits, fragments that would be hidden online on Web pages, buried in source code, sent in email, and even available in plain sight if you just knew where to look.
Many of the game’s puzzles had a crossword theme. That was Dagmar’s idea, inspired by the notion that the answers-if they stuck very carefully to the Turkish setting and to elements of the Stunrunner story-would be the same no matter which language the clues were given in. Turkish, like English, was written in the Latin alphabet. She wouldn’t have to explain to players how the puzzles were supposed to work or cut across too many cross-cultural divides. Dagmar hired a crossword designer and signed her to nondisclosure agreements the length and complexity of which surprised her.