An anemic sun hung low on the horizon, casting baleful shadows across a glittering field of bloodstained ice. The plain was littered with the honored dead, their sprawled corpses mangled into arcane siguls, redolent of valor, and skill, and death. Thousands lay split-skulled, their brains cooling and drying beneath a pale, cool sun. A few dozen of their stronger, more fortunate companions battled on, armor bent and bloodied, swords notched and gore-crusted.
From time to time the warriors paused, wiping sweaty arms against their helms, leaning on their swords like exhausted amputees on bloody crutches, gasping and glowering at their opponents before they hoisted swords and began the slaughter anew. Action swirled around an oversized human shape: Loki, writhing in the grip of a snake thrice his size.
The tableau shifted: The darkening sky bled red, then split. Clouds parted as a flock of winged wolves appeared. At first they appeared as faint specks against the pitiless clouds. Now they resolved into sharper focus.
A brassy wail drowned out the ring of metal on metal, and the moans of the wounded and dying. Combatants raised their weary eyes to the heavens, and laid down their swords, stretching their arms up as if calling to the beautiful Valkyries whose crimson or golden hair flagged out in the wind, placid faces surveying the carnage with infinite compassion and calm.
The wind seemed to shape itself into a controlled whistle. A cynical ear might have suggested that it sounded much like Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Played through a kazoo.
Now even the dead rose from their places, and held their arms up to the sky. The Norse angels plucked up first one, and then another… and carried them off to the skies. A parade of Valkyries carried off more and more of the dead and dying. Each survivor was spirited away, along with about half of the dead. In less than two minutes, it was over.
The winged wolves wheeled and returned to the heavens. Clouds roiled as the sky closed. The remaining corpses moaned and cursed in a manner unbefitting the dead.
“Shit! I never get chosen-”
Lights snapped on and the frozen plain, the cold mountains and the bleak sky all disappeared, leaving behind eight frustrated people in a domed room fifty meters in diameter, just large enough for three times that number to swing padded swords without thumping one another.
Amid a chorus of disappointed curses, they unbuckled their light armor. The losers trudged off the combat stage toward the dressing rooms and showers, and, thought a thoroughly bored Wayne Gibson, probably the slot machines and gambling pits, to drown their disappointment in more disappointment.
“That’s a wrap,” he said to his one-woman crew. Buffy Childress applauded ritually, as if it had truly been a job well done.
Eighteen months past he would have agreed with Buffy. Two years ago he had landed this job at the Fantasy Park Escalade, a tenth-rate Dream Park rip-off a half mile off the Vegas strip. Three times daily he coordinated the Escalade’s big games, the motifs generally rotated on a monthly basis. This month was The Ragnarok Experience ™. Fifty minutes ago, twenty bright-eyed players had entered the arena. Judging by the body language, adrenaline and exertion had toasted them all.
The side door opened and the winners, who had been quietly asked to leave the stage-only a fool argues with a Valkyrie-emerged. One of the survivors was a woman most would have thought too skinny these days, but Wayne liked just fine. He had recognized her superior coordination and conditioning the instant she had stepped onto the platform. There was something familiar about her, but she was using an assumed gaming name, wearing a mask, and had declined to use a gaming profile. So… whatever happened here wouldn’t affect her IFGS points (not that she could pick up many from a place like the Escalade). She was just enjoying a little anonymous slaughtering of her inferiors. Not especially admirable, but he’d done as much himself, in bad moods on bad days.
“What now?” Childress said. She had the body of a showgirl and the bored manner of a blackjack dealer on a midnight shift. Just Wayne and Buffy were needed to run the game. The Escalade’s management weren’t the kind to spend pinchable pennies.
“Now, we take a break, and do it all over again in two hours.”
She nodded and began her standard checklist of the computer systems while Wayne stripped himself out of the control suit and his shell-shaped chair.
“Time to make an appearance,” he muttered. He walked the narrow corridor to the door of the combat stage. He fixed a smile to his face and opened the door, holding his hands high.
“Welcome!” Wayne said, forcing cheer through his waxy smile. “And congratulations to those stalwarts who have survived, and been chosen to receive the Escalade medal of honor!”
The top 50 percent of the players applauded, commending themselves more than him. They were tired and battered to a pleasant soreness and not one iota more. Armor absorbed 90 percent of the impact of the padded swords. Only a hemophiliac with glass bones would sustain any real damage.
The Ragnarok Experience ™ was actually a pretty sweet deal for the guests. Half of them “won” on any given game, thereby accruing points to play more sophisticated contests elsewhere. Some of them even went on to play low-level IFGS games, but he imagined most were satisfied with the illusion that they were real rootin’ tootin’ gamers. They would return to their mundane lives, and remember the time they strapped on armor and wailed the crap out of a Tuskegee stockbroker for fifty minutes without garnering either a coronary or a criminal record.
But he kept those thoughts to himself, smiling and nodding and bowing…
And noticing that one woman in the back, the one with the killer body, was clapping without letting her palms touch. Pure symbol. Her half-face mask shadowed a sardonic smile.
He completed the rest of his pitch encouraging them to come back any time, and every time, and compete for more points and prizes, and to go out and spend the rest of their vacation money at the gaming tables.
After a few weary claps, they trudged back to their changing cubicles.
But the mystery woman walked up to him and said with perfect diction, “Good to see you haven’t altogether abandoned bullshit.”
If she had hit him in the chest with a Mitsubishi shocksword, it couldn’t have been a bigger jolt.
“Angelique,” he said, struggling to find something clever to say. “Angelique Chan. As always, your consonants are remarkable. Since when do you play with the kindergarten?”
“I wanted to find out how much of your talent remains unsquandered,” she said bluntly. “It’s been a long time.”
Was that a reference to their prior relationship, or his current level of skill? There was something lurking behind her words, and he just couldn’t imagine what it was. One dark, hot spark of hope flared for a moment, and Wayne tamped it down. Hope killed.
Angelique was five foot ten, just one inch shorter than Wayne, and taller in her heels. She was dressed as Hela, the death goddess from Marvel Comics: black shadings and a spiky headdress. She was leaner than a Valkyrie, a meld of Chinese and Filipina blood that promised both sensuality and fierce intelligence, and delivered on the promise.
No good could come of those memories, and he shut them down. He said, “So… you’ve seen.”
“Your subroutines?”
“Yeah. The hotel bought some standard games, but I get to tweak and then I get to operate.”
“Not bad, really. You need to tighten up the automated response loops, but really I have no major complaints.” She cut her eyes sideways at him. She was playing a game. Angelique was always playing a game. “Time for a bite?”
He managed a grin. “Schmoozing the customers is part of the job. The Escalade has a great buffet.”
“We can do better than that,” she said, twinkling at him. “Give me ten to get showered, and meet me at the eastern slots.”
“There is nothing like a dame, nothing in the world…”
The naval-white clad waiters and menus sang in unison. The walls exploded in a riot of tropical color, the ceilings opened up into a Busby Berkeley fantasy of clockwork dancers… the White Way restaurant had everything, Wayne figured, with the possible exception of memorable cuisine.
But at the moment, even the finest food would have done little for his numbed tongue. Wayne sat on his side of the table, nibbling at a five-bean salad, watching Angelique wolf down a massive chef salad, wondering where she tucked it all. Her body should have filled out until she resembled one of the Fit/Fat models parading their chubby perfection in every vidzine and holo ad. He wondered faintly if his rather retro taste in slender females was just a rebellious nature prolonged beyond adolescence.
“So,” she said between bites. “What do you know about me?”
“You mean since you dumped me?”
“Yes,” she nodded. “Since then.”
“I’ve followed your career,” he admitted. “Hard not to. You’re probably the most successful female gamer in the world. I saw that ceremony where Acacia Garcia passed the baton. She still looks pretty good, actually.”
“Better in person,” she said. “I’m guessing pineal transplant, but who knows?”
“Anyway, you play at the highest levels, and win more than you lose. The others are chasing you, but can’t catch up. I think you’re about eight thousand points above your closest competitor.”
“I’m impressed,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d keep such close tabs.”
“You’re hard to forget.” He’d actually researched that last bit while she was showering, but why tell her? He rolled the next question around in his head, wondering if he’d really ask it. “All right, we’ve established that I know what you’ve been up to. So what do you know about me?”
“I know you LARP around town,” she said. Live-Action Role-Playing. “You run some games-I really wouldn’t call it a Game Master role, would you?”
Those slanted green eyes dared him to contradict her. He couldn’t find the moxie to do it, and finally had to grin. “It’s a living.”
“Not a really good one,” she said. “I did a credit check. You’ve got markers all over town, Wayne, and some of them are in unfriendly hands. A little gambling problem?”
He winced. Anyone working for the casinos or hotels was vulnerable to credit checking, exposing patterns of… er… entertainment investment? Spontaneous analysis of cumulative distribution functions? Oh, what the hell: call it gambling. He wanted to curse at her for invading his privacy.
But reconsidered. Why would she look into his financial affairs? This was sounding less and less like idle curiosity, more and more like a serious inquiry of some kind. Angelique Chan was dangling bait there, but where was the hook? Was she testing his temper? Why did she want to know how he behaved under pressure?
You know why.
“So you’ve been helping bookies adjust odds on LARP action. And some of that gambling paid off. I know that two years ago you won a weeklong orbital vacation. How was that?”
As she nursed a forkful of ham and greens, there seemed something studiedly neutral, calm, about the way she asked that question. Calm enough to set off alarm bells.
“It was fun,” he said, more mystified than ever. “I took Buffy Childress, one of my coworkers. We had the honeymoon suite. You should try it.” There-another little dig. Was this a come-on? And if she was interested, would the Buffy story get under her skin a bit?
Rather than becoming upset, her lips curled in a smile. “I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “My friend didn’t have such a great time. Developed inner-ear problems. If he hadn’t come back down he would have upchucked his belly button.”
“There are drugs for that.”
“Everyone has a special talent. Eddie’s seems to be resisting massive doses of antiemetics. I got a little tired of breathing barf.”
Two waiters warbled arias from some musical play that Wayne couldn’t name.
“-land of the Free and the Brave
We caught the Second Wave
After two hundred years of sweat and toil
We told the Arabs to drink their oil-”
Hmm. Probably something about the Second Canadian War. Their voices were actually quite good. Talent isn’t enough, he reminded himself. You need luck, too.
For a moment, he forgot himself, and his problems, and concentrated on the lovely, slender black-haired woman before him. He even began to wonder if she simply needed a friend to talk to, perhaps a broad perspective from someone who wasn’t in the game anymore. Could he handle that? Could he remember that sometimes, you just gave because it was needed, not because of what you might or might not get in return?
He sighed. All right. Let’s just do this right. If this is the last time you ever see her, how do you want her to remember this conversation? That you were a good guy, in her moment of need, and agile of mind. Try that one.
“You seem stressed,” he said.
Her smile was wan. “And you’re probably wondering why, and what this is all about.”
“Well, you’ve gone to some trouble.”
She put another forkful in her mouth, chewed thoughtfully, and then spoke. “Why am I stressed? I’ve won my way into the greatest game of my life, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t want it.”
“That does not sound like the girl I knew,” Wayne said.
“I think that people are kind of like trees,” she said. “Cut down a tree, and you see all these rings, like the younger tree is still in there, just covered up with new bark. We’re like that, Wayne. That girl is still there, but there’s been a lot of mileage along the way. It’s hard to reach her sometime.”
“I tell you what. Just tell me what’s going on. Maybe I can help. And if I can, I will.” Even though she was the one who had come to him, he could see that she had a hard time trusting or believing. “You’re not sure that you want the gig you’ve nailed. Why? Isn’t it everything you’ve been working for?”
Her smile was a bit haggard. “Oh, yeah. And one thing I hadn’t counted on. The Game Master.”
Her voice clearly implied the capital letters, and in his experience, that could only mean one thing. “Xavier?”
She nodded. “He’ll grind my bones to make his bread.”
“I thought it was only giants that did that.”
“Close enough.”
And dammit, she was right. So… the rest of the situation was starting to drop into place. It was the Moon game, the game people had been dreaming of since the first lunar tourist touched down in ’37.
That, and Xavier. Brilliant, reclusive. Sometimes wealthy, sometimes dead broke. A gambler, the kind of high roller the casino sent drop-jets to fetch. He’d pretty much created modern LARP gaming theory, the entire mathematical basis for the interactions of Lore Masters and Game Masters, formalizing the entire culture.
Live-Action Role-Playing took root in the 1970s, when a subculture of mad folk created an organization called the International Fantasy Gaming Society, based on a series of popular novels. The IFGS governed the interactions of “gamers” and “Lore Masters” as they posed each other intellectual puzzles and physical challenges in the midst of one fantasy game or other.
But in 2060 or so, Xavier, then a brilliant teenager who had been gaming since the age of eight, published the first formal gaming theory papers (“LARP Simulation and the Syntax of Combative Improvisation”), and modern gaming was born.
LARPing, which first leapt to world prominence when industrialist Arthur Cowles opened his Dream Park in 2020, was no longer exclusively a Dream Park experience. Still, the parks were considered the supreme expressions of the art, providing mental and physical challenges of the highest order.
Games were still competitions between Lore Masters who were players within the games, and Game Masters who designed and controlled the events from afar, deciding life and death with godlike power. In addition to these competitions, there were also power struggles between different teams within the games themselves.
Xavier, Angelique and Wayne had met at UCLA, and bonded over their love of gaming. Xavier had been six years their senior, a graduate student when Angelique and Wayne were mere freshmen. He was already an expert mime with ten years of ballet on his resume. But the campus IFGS club was a great leveler. Game points were redeemable in real-world status.
And the three of them, separately or together, were brilliant.
Wayne and Xavier had competed for Angelique. She’d been a tall, raven-haired tomboy in jeans and T-shirts, her huge dark eyes perpetually cast downward as if no one had ever told her she was beautiful. Wayne and Xavier had zoned in on her instantly, competing as they had at everything else. They’d suspected that nestled beneath her ice slept blazing coals. Wayne had been first to fan them into flame.
That was damned near the only contest with Xavier Wayne had ever won, and Xavier had never forgiven either of them. While still perfectly friendly on the surface, beneath that exterior the genius seethed with resentment. And as time went on, more and more often it seemed Xavier found reasons to play against, rather than with them.
And while it wasn’t easy for a Game Master to single out specific players for ire, Xavier knew their psychology, game play and character preferences. At times it seemed the games had become more complex and lethal for them, but not for others. Some of the fun had gone out of the play, and if it hadn’t been for their competitive natures, Wayne and Angelique might have dropped out altogether.
And then… scandal. Xavier left UCLA under a cloud of suspicion, accused of plagiarizing part of his doctoral dissertation from an obscure twentieth-century Bulgarian mathematician. Following this event, he voluntarily submitted himself to an institution for “rest” several times. His relationship with his Nobel Laureate father became painfully strained.
And that was the story as he knew it to this point. Because Xavier had been a graduate student, actually teaching some of Angelique’s and Wayne’s classes, there had always been a bit of the student-teacher dynamic about them. At this point, Xavier was… what… forty? While Wayne was thirty-five, and Angelique thirty-four. And that gave Xavier a psychological edge that might prove damned hard to beat.
In the backs of their minds, they might always see him as the teacher.
Wayne understood the problem now. Moon Maze was the game of a lifetime. Xavier was the Game Master. Xavier frightened Angelique.
The public disgrace of losing the Tsatsouline Math Fellowship, the accusations of intellectual theft, had nearly broken the man. But… Wayne remembered the last time he had seen Xavier. His old frenemy had radiated pure hate. You did this, damn you. I don’t know how… I swear to God, I’ll get you…
Wayne still felt chills when he thought about that last meeting. He wasn’t certain he’d ever seen hatred twist a man’s face like that. Deep inside, he’d suspected that Xavier was just posturing for Angelique. That under pressure, Xavier had actually plagarized data, and was blaming anyone, everyone for his problem except himself.
From Wayne’s point of view, Xavier had been gaming when he should have been working on his papers. The man had simply run out of time and tried to cut corners…
He didn’t know for certain, and doubted he ever would. He’d never encountered Xavier again. A year before, Xavier had come to Vegas for a high-stakes poker tournament, and Wayne had watched him walk the red carpet. For a fraction of a second Wayne had considered catching Xavier’s eye. Ultimately, nerve had failed.
A question niggled at the back of his mind, and Wayne sensed that on one level, he already knew the answer. “So… Angelique, you aren’t here to talk about old times. And you don’t need my advice. It’s been a long time since I could tell myself I belonged in your league. You’ve been in the game continuously while I’ve been out making a living. You’re current on things I’d have to research. What do you need?”
Now, for the first time, she seemed unable to meet his eyes. “I want you to be my partner,” she said.
“In… what?” he couldn’t quite believe his ears, even though one part of him had anticipated just such an invitation.
“Eddie can’t do the thing. If he can’t control his nausea, he can’t do the trip. You could. I want you for my partner.”
He pushed back, away from Angelique, squinting, head suddenly pounding with a nascent headache. Gaming again, real gaming, after all these years? And with Angelique Chan?
He had fallen out of formal gaming when his win percentage was circling the drain, and he was offered a job running games for paunchy tourists. Nothing wrong with a little income security, Wayne thought. A health plan. Retirement.
Those voices in his head belonged to his smallest, most fearful aspects. He remembered the way his friends had looked when he’d made the choice. His relationship with Angelique was long over. He’d wondered: If she hadn’t existed, wasn’t still a gaming force to be reckoned with, wouldn’t he have left the field long ago?
And now… the carousel had swung around again. Even worse-or better, depending on how you looked at it-it was the Big Game. The biggest game ever. The first lunar game. No matter what happened, no matter who won, everyone involved was headed for the record books.
But… why him? “Does he still blame me?”
Angelique leaned across the table, her fingers folded. “What do you think? He’s never forgiven you for ratting on him.”
His heartbeat accelerated. “I didn’t!” Even to Wayne, the protestation of innocence felt a bit too automatic.
Angelique smiled. It was a nasty smile.
“Riiight,” she said. “And he never forgave me for sleeping with you. I suppose that never happened, either?”
The discomfort vanished, replaced by another, equally powerful sensation. “Touch makes better memories than sight. How about a little reminder?”
“Hah,” she replied, but her smile was warm. So. She remembered their previous relationship with a certain fondness, just as he had. “Business. Only. ”
“Then I take it my evenings are my own?”
Her lips remained pursed into the same smile, but a tiny furrow had appeared between her eyebrows. Still a bit of possessiveness there? “I need your attention on work.”
This time, he grinned right back to her. “Stress relief is part of the package, dear heart.”
They both knew exactly what he was talking about. Gaming was a highly intense experience… emotionally, intellectually and physically. And the evenings were often filled with intense stress relief. Gaming relationships were as intense as those in Olympic villages. Yum.
“I’ll trust your professionalism,” she said.
“Why me?” he asked. “This isn’t just a game to you, and you’re playing OTG.”
That was another gaming term. “Playing Off the Grid” meant using tactics and strategies designed to upset or unbalance the other players, rather than to concentrate on the game itself.
Just like poker: Play the player, not the cards.
“I need the truth,” he said, “or I can’t even think about this.”
She drummed her fingers against the table. She’d known this moment would come, and probably wondered exactly how he would react when it did.
“Six years ago,” she said. “It was the Tesseract game. Xavier was the Game Master, but I’d thought that enough time had gone by that maybe bygones were bygones.”
“And they weren’t.”
She shook her head. “No. They weren’t. He humiliated me publicly, made me look like an idiot. He’s good enough to do that, to entertain himself privately and still function professionally.”
“What was your estimation of his skill?”
“Aren’t you listening?” Irritation was creeping into her voice. “I was at the top of my game, and he tore me to pieces.”
He thought about that for a minute. “So you don’t want me for my gaming experience.”
A short shake of the head.
“But for the fact that he hates me.”
A brief nod. She wanted Wayne Gibson because Xavier hated him, not in spite of it. Because he’d taken the woman that both of them loved. Dear God-she wanted to rattle Xavier’s cage. He’d respond by trying to destroy them both. The other gamers would take advantage of his distraction, and leap ahead. His professional pride would force him to spread his attention thin. They could predict some of his responses, and in those predictions might lie a momentary, fractional advantage…
She was playing a desperate, chancy game. But it just might pay off.
“This is either a brilliant move,” she said, reading his thoughts, “or the biggest mistake of my life. If you’re not an asset, you’ll be a lightning rod. So tell me: Want to find out which it is?”
After all these years, a path back into triple-A gaming? A chance to undo some of the mistakes that he had made? And dear God-a chance to go head-to-head with Xavier, with Angelique at his side? In front of the biggest audience in history?
“Asset,” he muttered. “Definitely asset.”
She nodded. They were back on the same page again. “And speaking of asses, mine is off limits. This is strictly business. Can you handle that?”
“I’m tougher than I look,” he said.
“You’d better be. Do we have a deal?”
“I’ll need more information. Wheres and whens. I’ve got a job. Not much in terms of ties, but…” His mind was wheeling. His bosses would bend over backward to give him this opportunity. For their resident Game Master to participate in a major IFGS event would give the Escalade a credibility it sorely needed, and could translate into a major draw. And given that, whether he won or lost, he’d be able to renegotiate his contract.
So he was in and he knew it, and she knew it. Damn her, Angelique had known that even before she’d ever sat down with him.
“How much time do I have to think about it?” he asked.
She seemed a little startled. Surely, she had expected him to jump at the chance and he could understand why.
She gave him until noon the next day to decide.
Midnight was hours gone, but Vegas never sleeps. Walking the streets, you passed from one casino zone into another. Seen from a distance of miles, the desert city was a complex of spires and theme attractions designed to convince Dad to leave his wedding ring on the dresser, and Mama into emptying the college fund. But on street level, only one casino existed at a time. Walk from one zone to another and each business manipulated the visual fields so that their casino, their restaurant, seemed to be the only one. Each establishment was a self-contained world, complete with food, rest, money and sex. Everything that a tourist needed to survive.
One world, multiplying endlessly into many worlds. It was so easy to get lost. Which he had, willingly.
Wayne had come here ten years ago, a minor gaming star, and become fixed in the firmament. He was just another of the has-beens who signed long-term contracts to sing or dance or tell smutty jokes or make tigers disappear on the casino stages.
How had it happened? How had he been caught in a life that brought him so little satisfaction, playing a game that he had once mastered, that had then proceeded to master him?
The truth was simple: He couldn’t do it. He just couldn’t engage with the game deeply enough anymore. It was like a line from one of his favorite old movies.
I’ve been to the puppet show. I’ve seen the strings.
Gamers had to believe. Gamers marched arm-in-arm with the faithful.
Didn’t they?
He had passed from the Azteca casino, with its hourly human sacrifices, to the edge of the Da Vinci, with its ornate bridges and flight stunts. Real people in those winged machines, even if the engine designs would have baffled the legendary inventor. He’d heard some of them had actually trained on Luna. No holograms here, except the visual field that transformed the entire world into fifteenth-century Milan.
“Listen to me carefully, for I tell you this from the bottom of my heart,” he said. “Get a life.” Half a dozen passersby didn’t even glance at the apparent madman. He must be talking on a phone. Wayne stepped onto a bench as an ersatz soapbox and continued William Shatner’s classic “Get a life!” speech for the City of Illusions.
He was going to the Moon. He was going with Angelique. He didn’t even have to win to come out ahead. How could any man resist?
There had to be a way to deal with Xavier.
Did Wayne still have the mental agility to play it by ear? Xavier was a monomaniac. Tunnel vision. There would be something he’d overlooked. Go to the Moon, and see.