“Have I won the game?” she was crying in childish glee. “Have I won? Have I won?”
Then another kind of blackness flooded in around them both.
[ 26 ]
It had once been a simple country church, but was deconsecrated years ago. In recent times it had been used for dances, community meetings, elections, the occasional political rally. The hall was typical of the sort of places where game companies took their product out for market evaluation: it was in a remote country area with a high percentile of known game-software users, the hall familiar to everyone in the locality and cheap to rent, and in addition it was an unobtrusive place for the top VR people to gather. You couldn’t be too careful these days.
There was a platform, with players sitting on chairs. To one side of them was a blackboard on an easel. Their seats were arranged in a loose semicircle, and some of the principal technology of the game was resting on the floor of the platform in the middle of the players. The rest of the hall was filled with an admiring, eager audience, waiting their own turn to evaluate the brand-new game system being launched that night.
There were two security guards, armed only with electronic wands.
Neither of them was Ted Pikul.
One of the guards had a dog on a lead. It was squatting in a bored fashion beside the man, chewing gutturally on something hard.
Pikul himself was on the platform, hooked into the game. He was a player, who earlier had been selected from the crowd, only too eager to be one of the first to try out the new system.
Allegra Geller sat beside him, one of her hands resting companionably on Pikul’s forearm.
Both of them were sitting with their heads tipped forward peacefully. All the other players had their heads tipped forward peacefully.
The audience waited quietly and politely, sipping the glasses of iced tea and chilled mineral water that had been handed out earlier. They were not willing to make any commotion that might precipitate an early end to the game. They wanted to see how this new system worked out on its own. They were going to be next; they all hoped they would be next. These advanced-system game evaluation seminars were legendary for the way in which everyone present was given a turn. No one was left out who wanted to be in.
Even the two security guards would be allowed to put aside their electronic wands and try the system before the evening was out.
No one liked having to wait, though. The suspense was agonizing.
Overseeing the whole event was a woman named Merle. She was not only in charge of setting up and running the seminar, but responsible for the security of the various participants. She was one of the few people there who would not be hooking in to the system that night.
While the game proceeded she kept an eye on the electronic monitors, making sure nothing went wrong from that point of view, but her overall concern was the well-being of the players and what they made of the new system. So she was at her most tense as the game went on, able to relax a little only when it ended.
This was signaled by a general sense of stirring among the players. One of them, whose head had been lolling forward, straightened slowly. Another moved her hand, flexing the fingers gently. One or two people allowed their legs to stretch, or they muttered a barely audible groan of contentment.
Allegra Geller sighed, and her fingers tightened affectionately on Ted Pikul’s arm. He grunted.
The VR sets the players were using did not in themselves represent a breakthrough in technology. At seminars like these the company always relied on tried and tested hardware, temporarily retroadapting the game software to work in the old boxes. When the product was eventually launched, it would be accompanied by its own sleek, state-of-the-art tech kit—difficult for the clone-makers to reproduce, at least for a few months—but at this stage plans had still not been finalized for the hardware.
Tonight the players were therefore wearing conventional VR equipment: the traditional large VR headsets, which input data through the optic and aural nerves and other sensations through paste-on electronic sensors.
These headsets were linked by ordinary wires to the game modules, which rested in the players’ laps.
Again, the technology was reasonably conventional, the only departure from the norm being a thumb-sensor. This was a recessed input/output aperture in the side of the module, into which the player inserted his or her thumb, where more microsensors translated and evaluated the gigabytes of sensory data the program required or generated.
Seeing that many of the players were stirring, Merle nodded an okay to one of her two assistants. The rather matronly woman stepped into the center of the semicircle and flipped the master switch on the console that stood there.
At once there was a collective sigh from the players. Their eyes fully opened and they looked around at each other, blinking in the lights.
“Are you all back, ladies and gentlemen?” Merle asked, stepping up on the platform. “Is everyone okay?”
There were general sounds of assent, and one by one the players slipped their thumbs out from the sensors and took off their VR headsets.
Some of the women shook out their hair, loosening it after the confines of the helmet, while one or two of the men scratched their sweaty scalps ruefully. No one much liked wearing the VR helmets for long, but at the same time no one much liked breaking out of the game.
One of the first to remove his helmet was the man sitting beside Allegra Geller. It was Yevgeny Nourish.
Nourish put down the VR headset, glanced around at the other players, then leaped to his feet. There was a distinct energy to the man, and he radiated exuberance, artistry, and a dynamic youthfulness. Unlike the game version of himself, Nourish had a shining, almost messianic fervor in his eyes. He wore casually modern clothes, and his dark hair was cut short. He appeared to be in his mid-forties.
“Hi, Merle!” he called, as much for the benefit of the audience and the other players, as for Merle herself. “Yes, we’re all back. And safely too, I think. Although I suspect that some of the present crew might not realize it yet.”
Yevgeny Nourish spoke perfect English, without any trace of a foreign accent.
The other players, emerging back into reality somewhat more slowly than Nourish, laughed a little shakily and glanced around nervously at each other.
One of them, a Chinese man with a cheerful face and an athletic body, stretched his arms and back, then grinned around at the others.
“Wow!” he said. “What an experience! Anyone here want a bowl of hot and sour soup?”
The other players laughed, although still nervously.
“Is it on you?” one of them said, a young man in grease-stained overalls.
“Sure thing,” said the Chinese man. “Tonight it’s all on me!”
That made them laugh louder, and it broke the ice.
“I’ll have some soup,” somebody else said. They turned to look at him. It was Kiri Vinokur. Again, all trace of accent was gone from his voice. He looked younger, healthier than the Vinokur who had appeared inside the game. “I’ll have some,” he said, “but only if you can guarantee there will be lots of amphibian mutations in the rice.”
“Frogs’ legs a speciality,” said the former Chinese waiter. “No one from France here, is there?”
They all shook their heads.
One of Merle’s assistants took a reading from the central console.
“That was a total of twenty-two minutes and thirty-five seconds,” she called across to Merle.
“Right. Thank you.”
“Twenty-two minutes?” Another player spoke up. He was a young man wearing blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and a shiny leather jacket. It was Noel Dichter. “It seemed like days when we were in there,” he said. “That’s fantastic time-dilation. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”
D’Arcy Nader put down his headset and mopped the top and sides of his head with a huge spotted kerchief.
“If that was only twenty minutes,” he sa
id, “think what it could mean if we stayed in longer. If you spent the rest of your life in the game you could live to be five hundred. Not a bad deal!”
Hugo Carlaw was on the platform too.
He said, “Those twists and turns at the end made my head spin. Maybe there were too many plot changes, coming too fast for ordinary players to take in.” He looked across at Ted Pikul and Allegra Geller, now both fully awake. “But, hey, you two were fantastic. You guys are game divas! I think you both deserved to win.”
There was a burst of spontaneous applause at this, coming mainly from the other players. The larger audience, of course, lacked the experience of the game and could only guess at what the players meant. But the others on the platform clearly all agreed with Carlaw’s verdict.
Pikul and Geller smiled sweetly back, and graciously acknowledged Carlaw’s compliments with modest nodding of their heads.
“Well, it’s all right for some of you.” It was Gas, the young man in the greasy overalls. “Let me be honest with you. I felt really bummed out at first. I was knocked out of the game so soon.”
Nourish said, “Yes, I know—”
“But it was only at first I felt like that,” Gas went on quickly, wanting to get his say in. “I didn’t realize that if you’re knocked out suddenly you get to play smaller roles in the later stages. That was a lot of fun for much of the time. I was one of the fire fighters at the ski club, and I’d never been involved in a big fire before. And earlier I liked being one of the spooky customers in the game store.”
“I was there too, but I didn’t see you.” It was Wittold Levi. “But, you know, during that interlude in the filling station, you were wonderfully wicked. The devil gets all the best tunes, right? I had a big part in the first scene at the church hall, but I thought my character was, well, kind of boring, and after that I wasn’t given a whole lot to do by the game.”
“Yeah, but think what happened to me. I played a gas jockey, and in real life I’m a gas jockey! I was frankly disappointed to be the same thing in a game. I play games to escape from reality . . . so let’s have a little more fantasy there, fellers.”
Merle had been listening closely to all of this, and she nodded sympathetically at Gas’s words.
“You’re making an interesting point,” she said. “But why not hold it right now, and we can look at it again when we get to the focus group?”
Gas raised his hand from his lap in brief acknowledgment of that.
Frances, a lady with a comfortable manner and graying hair, held up her game module.
“Does anyone mind if I keep the kit?” she said, smiling to show she wasn’t entirely serious. “The sensation this little gizmo can give you! I’ve never felt anything like it! And I love the thumb hole. What a thrill!”
“Nice try,” Yevgeny Nourish said, to more general laughter. “But as you know, you’re all going to have to turn them in because a lot more people are going to want to try them. Anyway, these modules are just beta-test versions, preproduction handmade specials. We have to take them to pieces after this evening’s tests and examine them for whatever wear and tear they’ve suffered. But everyone here will get a certificate for helping out. That’s right, isn’t it, Merle?”
“Right!” Merle said. “And anyone who receives a certificate this evening will be granted a privileged order status. That means if you turn in the certificate at your local game store, or at any one of the nationwide mail-order outlets, you can reserve one of the first batch of the production modules to hit the market. The game, of course, is TranscendenZ by PilgrImage. You’ll be given a discounted price, and I really mean seriously discounted. You’re going to love it.”
She stepped to the side of the platform, where the chalkboard was standing. She picked up a piece of chalk and with a practiced hand wrote the two words.
“Remember,” she said. “It’s always written like this. TranscendenZ with a capital T, capital Z. It’s new, it’s only from PilgrImage—capital P, capital I—and it’s coming soon.”
She gave the blackboard an extra tap with the chalk to lend emphasis to her words, then walked to the front of the platform again, brushing off the loose chalk dust from her hands.
Allegra Geller stood up, placed her module on her seat, and crossed to Yevgeny Nourish. He had his back to her at that moment, so she gently touched his hand with hers. He turned to see who it was and smiled broadly.
“Ms. Geller!”
“May I say thanks, Mr. Nourish?” Allegra said shyly. “I just want you to know how much I appreciate you giving me the chance to play the star designer. I guess the game picked up on my ambitions to be like you.”
Speaking partly to Allegra Geller, but also for the benefit of the audience, Nourish said, “Let me be the first to say that I’m kinda glad I lost this game. I don’t usually cast myself as such a nasty character.”
There was general amusement at this. Allegra joined in the polite laughter.
Nourish took her hand and held it up.
He said to the audience, “This young lady . . . well, this is Allegra Geller. I want to say, Allegra, that you were so good in your role that I suspect it won’t be long before PilgrImage is after you to sign a designing contract.”
A lot of people clapped at this, and whistled loudly.
“And maybe,” Nourish went on, “maybe you should take your friend Ted, Mr. Pikul here, with you. You make one hell of a team. Ted’s good in a crisis, and when you design games for a living, there are certainly plenty of those.”
Allegra actually blushed, and reached behind her for Pikul’s hand. He came forward quickly and stood beside her.
She said, “I guess it’s no secret that Ted and I had a relationship before we came here tonight. We really do like to play together.”
Pikul took up her theme.
“That’s right,” he said boldly. “But I’d like to assure everybody here that Allegra wouldn’t really jump into bed with a trainee security guard unless he were me. Right, Allegra?”
“Right!”
She clung to his arm, while everyone laughed again. The two security guards particularly enjoyed this banter.
Merle stepped to the center of the platform.
“Well, what do we have to say to our designer? Our brilliant, award-winning designer, as I should properly describe him? Does he have another winner on his hands, or doesn’t he?”
The wild and prolonged applause from all the gamers gave an unequivocal answer to that.
Nourish took the acclaim modestly and happily, smiling and looking around the crowd. Geller and Pikul were particularly demonstrative of their feelings, and Pikul slapped the man heartily on his back.
Merle finally quieted everything down, raising her hands, and with smiling gestures brought the applause to an end.
“Okay, everyone,” she said. “Now we have to get down to business.”
Pikul let out a theatrical groan, which Merle neatly acknowledged with another smile.
“I have to ask everyone who took part a number of questions, before the game half-life wears off. But first, let me thank you, every one of you, for contributing to this test seminar. It’s part of PilgrImage’s ongoing customer satisfaction program to deliver nothing but the finest games to the greatest enthusiasts. Tonight, you have all been a proud part of that process.
“In a moment,” she continued, “we’ll be collecting all the headsets and game modules. After that we’ll be handing out a brief questionnaire to each of you, and we ask you to take a little time to fill it in for us. I want your answers to the questions to be honest, brutally honest if necessary. Don’t hold back on anything. As the leading game corporation, we are seriously committed to evaluation and reevaluation, and if you give us clear responses to the game you have just played, we can build on them for the future.
“After that, we’ll select the next group to play the game, and the first group will go into focus session, where we can interact on a personal level. We need to hear you ta
lk about what happened to you while you were in TranscendenZ. You’ve had separate experiences inside the game, but they all interlock. The focus session will bring out that interaction. I think you’ll find it slightly amazing.” She raised her hand to indicate that her speech was over. “Thank you, everyone.”
After the questionnaires had been handed out and the participants were quietly answering them, Nourish walked over to Merle at the side of the platform. He spoke quietly to her.
“We’ve got to talk, Merle,” he said.
“What is it? Something wrong?”
“I don’t know about wrong, but I was more than somewhat disturbed by the game we just played.”
“It sounded to me like it was a howling success.”
“In some ways. Perhaps not in others.”
“What do you mean?” Merle asked.
“It had . . . undercurrents. Violent undercurrents. No, not as remote as that. Violent main themes, and disruptive themes too. We all know that violence is a part of gaming, but . . .”
“Go on.”
Nourish looked troubled. “It had a strong antigame theme. None of this was in the main coding. It was . . . out of control, if you like. For instance, it started with the attempted assassination of a game designer.”
Merle tried to shrug it off, still not entirely sensing how serious Nourish was.
“Really?” she said. “That’s a creative departure.”
“Yeah . . . we’re programmed for that. The game is designed to allow random events, even unpredictable random events. But randomness in a game is usually positive: a reward, a revelation, a higher level of reality. Starting on a negative like that is not good.” He flicked a quick, warning look at her. “It’s not to be ignored. The source has to be tracked down.”
“When you put it that way, I think I see what you mean.” Merle glanced across at the players, many of whom were now quietly working their way down the second page of the questionnaire forms. “I admit that does make me nervous. If it’s not in the code, then what’s happening? Could it have derived from one of the volunteer players?”