Megan was staring at the floor again, her face burning. “All right,” Winters said. “I’m not going to belabor the point. You seem at least vaguely conscious of the implications. But at the same time, the question also applies to you.” He turned to Leif. “You were next on the list. He had the address of your school. He would have found you there. He would either have tried to take you away, and possibly succeeded — in which case we would have found you in a ditch somewhere, or a river — or he would have tried to deal with you on the spot. There are any number of ways he could have done it, and any number of ways he could have killed one of your schoolmates ‘accidentally’ at the same time. Responsibility,” Winters said. “It would have been yours.”
Leif, too, became very interested in the carpet. “Someday it may be you,” Winters said. “All I can offer you, at the moment, is how this feels right now: this shame, this guilt, this fear. All I can do is tell you that this is infinitely better than what you will feel when, because of your disobeying an order, one of your mates goes down in the line of duty. A death with no meaning: or something worse than death.”
The room was very still. “Speaking of which,” Winters said, sitting forward a little again. “Your friend Ellen—”
“Elblai! How is she?” Megan said.
“She woke up this morning,” Winters said. “She’s been told what’s going on — she insisted on being told, apparently. They say she’s going to be all right. But she’s apparently extremely annoyed about some battle that she missed with this…” He leaned toward the desk, looked at another of the papers in the stack. “This ‘Argath’ person. Who, by the way, turns out to be completely uninvolved in all of this.”
“We thought so,” Leif said.
“Yes, you did. Which was interesting, considering how little hard data you had to go on. But hunches come into our line of work, as well as hardware…and riding the hunch on the short rein is definitely a talent we can use.”
“Why did he do it?” Megan said.
“Who? Oh, you mean Simpson of the many aliases?”
Winters sat back in his chair. Quite without warning, a man sitting in a chair appeared in the corner of Winters’s office. The man was wearing prison clothes — plain blue coveralls — and the same unmoved expression that Megan had seen on his face when he was pointing a weapon at her. She resisted the urge to shiver.
“I never win,” the man said, in a flat voice that matched the affectless face — and Megan was suddenly glad that he hadn’t spoken to her during the assault. He sounded like a robot in this holoclip. “I mean, I never used to win. But now, in Sarxos…I win all the time. No one was as clever as I was. No one knows strategy the way I do.”
“Especially when you were playing all those different characters,” said a quiet voice, just out of frame, probably a psychiatrist. Or a psych program, Megan thought.
“How else could I be all the people I am? How else could all of them win? Not just me,” Simpson said. “I may be the main one…but winning, winning matters so much. My dad always used to say, ‘It isn’t how you play the game; it’s whether you win or lose.’ Then he died—” Only now did that face show any emotion at alclass="underline" a flash of pure rage so uncontaminated by maturity or experience that you would have sworn the three-year-old owner was about to throw himself on the ground in a full-scale tantrum, screaming and turning blue. Except that the three-year-old was in his early forties. “I won lots of times,” the voice said, calm again, the face’s expression seamlessly sealed over, “and I was going to keep winning, too. All of me were — all the people who’re inside. And I’ll win again, someday, even though I’m out of the game now. Sooner or later, I’ll win again….”
The figure in the chair winked out, leaving Megan and Leif looking at each other in a combination of pity, fear, and revulsion. “We no longer use the phrase ‘crazy as a jaybird,’” Winters said, “but if we did, I would say that fella’s a good candidate for the description. It’ll take the therapists a long time to work their way down to the bottom of his difficulties…but I would say multiple-personality disorder is part of the clinical picture, complicated by an inability to tell reality from a game…or to understand that a game is for playing.”
Silence fell again in the room. Winters sighed at the depth of it. “All right, you two. I’m not going to throw you out of the Explorers, as much because I hate to waste valuable raw material as anything else. I emphasize the word ‘raw.’”
He looked at them both, and they both looked at the carpet again, faces hot. But Leif looked up. “Thank you.”
“Yes,” Megan said.
“As for the rest of it — if in the near future we find a piece of business which is suited to your unique talents of nosiness, inability to take no for an answer, annoying persistence, and screwy thinking….” He smiled. “You’ll be the first to hear about it from me. Now go away and compose yourselves for the press conference. Both of you better have the grace to conduct yourself like modest little Net Force Explorers or, by God, I’ll….” He sighed. “Never mind. See what you do to me? A whole morning’s worth of composure shot. Go on, get out of here.”
They stood up. “And before you go,” Winters said, “just this. There’s nothing more fatal than believing a lie is the truth. Think of all the fatal lies you just saved the world from. Even with all the other things you got wrong, and did wrong…that’s something you can be proud of.”
They turned and went out, flashing each other just the quickest grin…though being careful not to let Winters see it.
“Oh, and one last thing.”
They paused in the dilating doorway, looked over their shoulders.
Winters was shaking his head. “What the heck is a ‘Balk the Screw’?”
Elsewhere, in a room with no windows, three Suits sat and looked at one another.
“It didn’t work,” said the man who sat at the head of the table.
“It did work,” said another of the men, trying not to sound desperate. “It was only a matter of a few more days. The first announcement impacted the company’s stock more and more severely as the media spread the news of the first attack around. A few more hours, the next couple of attacks, the next announcements, would have affected their stock so drastically that they would have had to stop trading. People would have deserted that environment in droves. But more important: The technology worked.”
“It worked once,” said the man at the head of the table. “They know about it now. It had to work and not be found. It’s a cause celebre now. Everybody who’s heard about this is going to be going through their databases, looking for evidence of non-presence or surrogacy among their users. This was a tremendous window of opportunity…but now it’s shut.”
Silence fell in the room. “Well,” said the man who had tried not to sound desperate, and failed, “the necessary paperwork will be on your desk in the morning.”
“Don’t wait till the morning. Have it there in an hour. Clear your desk, and get out. If you go now, I’ll have an excuse when Tokagawa gets here in the morning.”
The third man in the suit got up and went away in great haste.
“So now what?” said the second man.