 apophany — A false epiphany, in which a person perceives a meaningful connection between things which are in fact unrelated. The term, coined by German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad in the 1950s, originally referred to a type of delusion suffered by schizophrenics, but has since come to apply broadly to any misfire of human pattern recognition.

—Lady Ada's Lexicon

The Coast Starlight arrives at Los Angeles Union Station just after eleven p.m. Everyone on board is cranky. At the start of the dinner service, after another shouting match between protesters ended in a food fight, the crew shut the dining car down and sent the passengers back to their seats without supper. Now, as we roll to a stop, I see Amtrak security and LAPD out in force on the platform.

When the train doors open, I'm one of the first to disembark. I keep my head down and walk swiftly past the cops. Inside the terminal, I fake towards the Metro subway escalators but instead go up and out. A black limousine is waiting at the car service pick-up; the driver sees me coming and the back door opens automatically. I duck inside, and before I've even got my backpack on the floor, the door clanks shut and we are moving.

"Hi John," the driver says, turning to flash me a quick smile. "How was your trip?"

"Exciting," I tell her, reluctant to say more until I'm sure we can't be overheard.

"It's OK," she says. "Faraday's on." She points to the bright green shield that has lit up on the dashboard, a telltale signifying that the limo's Virtual Faraday Cage has been activated. All electronic transmissions into and out of the vehicle should be blocked; GPS trackers cannot transmit, cell phones have no bars, and booby-trapped death collars cannot be remotely triggered. So for the moment I am safe, and if we are lucky, Smith will interpret the loss of GPS signal to mean that I've taken the subway.

My chauffeur's name is Bamber Holtz—"Bambi," inevitably, in the trades. Originally from Oklahoma, she did a stint in the Army after high school and then came to Hollywood to do FX work, specializing in pyrotechnics and demolition, skills she'd honed defusing IEDs in Syria. She's won two VES awards and was nominated for a Visual Effects Oscar, but to heterosexual men of a certain age she's most famous for her one on-screen role, body-doubling Sandra Bjorn during the nude motorcycle chase in Death Race 5000. After the original stunt woman suffered a bad case of road rash during a test shoot, the director, desperate to keep the film on schedule, turned to the only other woman on the crew and asked how she'd like to take her clothes off and ride a vintage Harley. Bamber agreed to do the scene in exchange for the bike.

We met on one of my previous trips to L.A. Dad had told me he had a new girlfriend, but hadn't said who she was. The first night of my visit, I got up at two a.m. to get a snack from the kitchen and found Bamber raiding the fridge. We were both in our underwear, and even without a motorcycle helmet, I recognized her instantly. Which was awkward for about five seconds, but then we got dressed and made fajitas, and Bamber told me about the exploding hovercar she was building for Fast & Furious 17. We've been friends ever since. And of all the women I've seen gratuitously naked, she's the one best suited to help me with my current predicament.

"Where's Dad?" I ask her.

"Picking up your friend Jolene." She steers with one hand and keeps an eye on the rearview screen in the dashboard, watching to see if anyone's following us. "Her plane landed at LAX about an hour ago."

"What about Mom? Were you able to get through to her?"

"Your dad talked to her on the phone earlier today. She had him put me on for a few minutes at the end."

"What was that like?"

"Awkward, for him. I don't think they'd spoken since they broke up. With me she was all business." Bamber smiles. "Reminded me of my old squad leader in Damascus."

We're on Sunset Boulevard now, near Dodger Stadium. It doesn't look like anyone's tailing us. Bamber pulls the limo into the parking lot of an Arby's. "OK," she says, "let me see this famous collar of yours." I climb through the partition and sit in the front passenger seat. She checks out the buckle under my chin first, then has me tilt my head forward so she can examine the vial in its metal bracket. "Someone told you this was loaded with VX?"

"Smith didn't tell me what it was, only that I'd be sorry if I tried to take the collar off. If it is VX, though, or something like that, shouldn't you be—"

"Wearing MOPP gear? Yeah, probably. Your mom gave me an address to take you to if I decided to go the full hazmat route, and I've got a couple auto-injectors of atropine in the glove box. But I don't think we'll need those."

"No?"

"No... Keep your head down and hold still a second." She takes a knife from a side pocket in her jeans and flicks it open. I hold very still. I feel the blade slide up against the back of my neck, and there's a tug, and then the collar pops loose and falls away.

I straighten up, rubbing my neck. As Bamber turns the collar over in her hands, I see that the LED light on the buckle is still green, despite the ribbon cable being cut.

She holds up the glass vial so I can take a close look at it. "VX isn't bright orange like this," she says. "It's more of a pale brown, and it's viscous, like motor oil."

"So what do you think this stuff is?"

"Probably ethanol, with some dye mixed in."

"Ethanol?" I say. "Alcohol?"

She nods. "That's why they call it a spirit level." She balances the metal bracket on her palm; with the vial lying on its side, I can see the bubble in the fluid, watch it move as she waggles her hand back and forth. When her palm is perfectly horizontal, the bubble comes to rest between two thin black lines painted on the glass.

"Oh," I say, and as I belatedly recognize the level for what it is, I can feel my cheeks get hot.

Bamber smiles, not unkindly. "I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess you never worked a summer job in construction."

"I was more of a Minecraft guy," I tell her.

THE NEW SONY PICTURES HOTEL IS ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, across the street from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Dad, who is doing some script-doctoring for the studio, has arranged the use of one of the top-floor executive suites. The suite is equipped with a version of the same signal-blocking technology as the limo.

I have the North Koreans to thank for this. Back in 2014, as retaliation for a Seth Rogen comedy that disrespected the Supreme Leader, the DPRK hacked Sony's corporate network and used the stolen information to embarrass the studio. Those studio execs who survived the resulting scandal became obsessed with data security. To say they are paranoid about leaks is like saying Kim Jong-un has a problem with satire.

Bamber and I take a private elevator from the hotel parking garage to the penthouse level. Dad's waiting for us at the door to the suite. "What's the verdict?" he says.

"False alarm on the deadly nerve agent," Bamber tells him.

"Well, that's good!" Dad says. "Are you hungry, John? We ordered Lebanese."

One of the things I like about my father is that it's almost impossible to freak him out. I suspect he was always like this, but life in Hollywood has given him lots of practice taking weird shit in stride. And as a professional artist, he is inherently sympathetic to trains of thought that my mother would deride as "imaginative," so he's not going to try to make me feel dumb for believing a carpenter's level was a weapon of mass destruction. Which is good, because I'm doing a fine job feeling dumb on my own.

Jolene is inside, finishing up a plate of kafta and rice. I approach her almost shyly, and we both do that staring thing you do, the first time you meet an online friend in the flesh. The close-cropped hair is the most obvious difference between Jolene and her avatar, but it's little details that really jump out at me: the corkscrew threads of gray at her temples, and the crow's feet at the corners of her eyes.

That Jolene is old enough to be my mother is not news to me. But at this point in history, video games have conquered every demographic, so when you play online, you routinely interact with people of all generations, and granting a certain base level of maturity, age just doesn't matter that much. I mean, not to exaggerate: The internet, as we know, did not eliminate prejudice. But it did create an environment where shared interests can easily count for more. And what strikes me now is how unlikely it is, in a world without the net, that Jolene and I would ever have spent time hanging out with each other.

Score one point for living in the future.

"Thanks for coming," I say.

She smiles, exposing the gap between her teeth. "Don't mention it."

"No, I mean it. I just hope I didn't get you out here for a prank."

"No matter if you did. Your mom's got me on loan from my regular job, so my travel and expenses are covered. And besides, I'm as curious as you to find out who Mr. Jones really is."

"I'm curious who you really are," I say. "Is Jolene even your real name?"

"My middle name. My first name's Karen, but only my parents ever call me that."

"And you're some kind of federal agent, right? The Colorado law firm is just a cover. What are you, FBI?"

"Treasury," she says.

"Treasury?"

"It's a fascinating story," says Dad, returning from the kitchen. He hands me a plate. "Jolene has been working undercover, investigating the black market economies in online role-playing games. Looking for ties to organized crime." From his tone, I can tell he is already cooking up a screenplay pitch on this subject.

"It's not an official investigation," Jolene clarifies. "Just one of my boss's crazy pet projects. She saw this 60 Minutes piece about gold farming, and some other report—or maybe it was a Tom Clancy movie—about narcoterrorists using game chat to send secret messages to each other. And by adding two and two to make five, she concluded that the drug cartels might be laundering money through Call to Wizardry."

Unlike my father, I am quite capable of astonishment. "That's..."

"Batshit, I know. Welcome to my reality... Anyway, she'd caught me messing around in VR on my lunch break often enough to know I'm a gamer, so she called me into her office, and long story short, I got drafted into this off-the-books undercover op. It's not a bad gig, really: She covers my monthly subscriptions and lets me play on the clock when I'm not busy with other things. In exchange, I file reports about any 'suspicious activity' I come across."

"And have you found much?" I ask. Thinking not of money laundering, but tax evasion.

Jolene grins knowingly. "Nothing too suspicious, until recently. My investigation had about run its course when the Mr. Jones thing popped up. My boss was thrilled about that—and she was over the moon when your mom reached out to her. I'm like her star agent, now. So like I say, don't apologize about getting me out here. I may get a promotion out of all this yet."

The suite's doorbell rings. "That'll be Ray," Jolene says, as my dad goes to answer it.

"You invited Ray?"

"I didn't." This one's on you, her expression says. Which it is, in a roundabout way: Because I forgot mom's phone number, Dad, who was still ghosted, had no way to contact her directly. But he'd met Jolene on one of our monthly game nights, so in my texts from the train, I told him to go the Game Lobby and look for her. "Ray was there when your dad found me," Jolene explains. "We'd both been looking for you and Anja, to find out what the hell happened in D.M. Zed. When your dad showed, I tried to tell Ray to get lost—among other things, his computer's compromised—but, you know, good luck with that."

"Dad told Ray everything?"

"He told him enough. Ray got really pissed when he heard about the threat against Anja." She says this somewhat grudgingly, as if Ray getting angry on Anja's behalf contradicts her own poor opinion of him. "He wanted to help, and I guess he doesn't live that far from L.A., so..." She trails off, her eyes widening as she looks past me.

I don't know if this is racist, but I'm much less surprised to learn Ray is a woman than to discover she's Hispanic. Brown skin notwithstanding, I immediately see the resemblance to her avatar. She's got the same build, the same eyes. The same hair, too, only longer and with bangs. "Renata," Ray says, in answer to my opening question. "Renata Calveros."

"You're undocumented." This from Jolene, who's spent the last thirty seconds trying to work out why her law woman's intuition pegged Ray as a malefactor. And she's using the polite term, rather than "illegal," because she's worried she'll be wrong twice.

If Ray appreciates the courtesy, she doesn't show it. "I don't have a birth certificate, if that's what you're asking."

"Are you a desposeída, Renata?" my dad asks. I'm not familiar with the term, but later when I Google it I'll learn that it refers to someone who is legally an American citizen but who, for reasons beyond their control, can never prove it.

Ray answers with a shrug. "My mother says I was born here, and the midwife just forgot to register me. I don't really know. But I grew up in San Bernardino. It wasn't until I started applying to colleges that I found out I had a problem, and by then, it was a little late to do anything about it." She looks at Jolene. "Why do you care? You have a day job with ICE you haven't mentioned?"

"I'm a Treasury agent," Jolene says.

Ray laughs. "Well then, you've got no beef with me. I pay my taxes."

"And I'm going to pay mine," I put in. Just to get it out of the way.

THE SUITE HAS A SECURE LANDLINE THAT ALLOWS YOU to make calls even when the signal blocker is active. The five of us gather around a conference table and get Mom on speaker. Jolene recaps what's happened since my arrival. Then Bamber, who has completed an autopsy on the collar, takes a turn.

"John was right about the microphone and the GPS tracker," she says. The good news, she adds, is that the microphone is only equipped to transmit, not record—which means that what we say now will remain private.

"Tell me about the manufacture," Mom says.

"The electronics are all off-the-shelf components. Made in China, but nothing you couldn't get here—it's what I'd use, if I were building something like this."

"What about the spirit level?" I feel a twinge of embarrassment as she asks this.

"The logo was sanded off, but I recognize the brand," Bamber says. "American."

"So it would be reasonable to conclude the collar was constructed locally," Mom says. "Does it seem like something an amateur could build?"

"They'd need some technical know-how, to set up the GPS and mike transmitter, but a skilled amateur could do it, sure."

"OK," I speak up, feeling more than a twinge of embarrassment now, "the collar seems like a prank, but what about the money? And what about—"

"What about Anja?" Ray interjects. "Do we know if she's OK? Have you tried to warn her?"

"Something's blocking internet access to her house," Mom says. "My people are working on it."

"Her parents' cell phones are down too," Jolene adds. "Their numbers are both listed, but if you call you get a message saying they're not in service."

"What about the local police?" Ray says. "Their phones have got to be working, right?"

"Smith told me he'd have someone monitoring the emergency channels in Paraná," I say. "If we send the cops or the fire department to Anja's house, he'll shut down her life support."

"That could be a bluff," Mom says, "but I'd rather not take the risk if we can avoid it."

"Well, is there someone else you can call?" Ray says. "What about the CIA? They've got people all over South America, don't they?"

"There's a CIA station in Buenos Aires," Mom replies. "But I've dealt with them before, and they're not going to want to help with this."

"I bet I know someone in Buenos Aires who'll help," I say. "Anja's new boyfriend, Javier Messner."

"Is he a tech guy?" Jolene asks.

"No, he's a barista. But he's not stupid. If we send him to Anja's house, you can talk him through whatever he needs to do to deal with the malware."

Jolene nods, in tentative approval. "He still needs to get to Paraná from Buenos Aires. How far is that?"

"About three hundred miles, in the real world," I tell her. "I assume Javier's got a car..."

Dad speaks up. "I might be able to get him a helicopter. HBO's got a film crew in B.A. right now, shooting exteriors for their Highlander reboot," he explains. "I know the DP, and I think I can talk him into loaning us a chopper along with one of his tech guys. Then all Javier has to do is convince Anja's parents to let us in."

"Sounds like a plan," Jolene says.

On the phone, I can hear Mom sigh. "Not the way I'd normally do it," she says. "But."

"We should think about shutting down the Faraday soon," Bamber puts in. "Smith is going to be wondering where John's GPS signal went."

"In a minute," I say. "First, there's one more thing I need to mention..." I tell them about the nannycam I left set up in my apartment, and about the mystery trio of gun-toting Asians.

"Well," my mother says when I've finished. "That's interesting."


Smith's Xiaomi phone rings a few seconds after Dad turns off the signal blocker. Bamber has handed me back the collar, and I hold the microphone up to my throat as I answer the phone. "Hello?"

"Where are you?" Smith says.

"I think you already know that," I say.

There's a pause, just long enough to glance at a pop-up screen. "Sony Pictures Hotel. Expensive."

"I can afford it."

"Enjoy your money tonight," Smith says. "Tomorrow, you go to work."

"Are you ready to tell me what I'm doing here?"

"I think you already know that."

It's true, I have a theory. I had plenty of time on the train to think about what a ruthless dictator and kidnapper interested in MMORPGs might want from Los Angeles. But if there's one thing this evening has taught me, it's that I shouldn't be so quick to trust my own conclusions.

"I'm too tired for games tonight," I say. "Just tell me." And he does.


 dude — A passive-aggressive euphemism for "motherfucker."

—The New Devil's Dictionary

So who do you think these guys really are?" Jolene asks.

It's quarter of ten the next morning, and we are sitting in the limo on the second floor of a parking garage. Our parking spot has a clear view across the street to the world headquarters of Tempest, LLC.

Tempest HQ is a fourteen-story blue glass tower. Extending west from the tower's base, and occupying nearly twice as much ground space, is a two-story public amusement center and playtest space known as the Arcade. The Arcade opens at ten, and there is already a long queue of people on the sidewalk waiting to get in. Ray and Bamber are both in line. Jolene uses binoculars to scan the rest of the crowd.

Last night while I slept, Bamber performed a second autopsy, this one on my fried gaming rig. Though the motherboard and video cards were slagged, the military-grade hard drive was undamaged. By mounting the drive on another computer, Bamber was able to salvage the footage from my apartment nannycam. Mom's people are now running a facial-recognition search on the mystery trio, and in the meantime, Bamber printed out some nice mug shots for us.

But "I have no idea," is all I can think to say in answer to Jolene's question. I'm feeling much more clear-headed than I was last night, but that clarity just makes it easier to appreciate how little I understand what's going on.

At breakfast this morning, Bamber asked me whether the backpack I'd been using was the only backpack I owned. I told her no—like most nerds, I have a pile of old backpacks gathering dust in the bottom of my closet—but it's my newest backpack, and the one you'd expect me to use if I were taking my rig somewhere. "I thought so," Bamber said, and then she showed me the GPS tracker she'd found hidden in one of the pack's side pockets. It was the same make as the tracker in the collar.

So now we know how Smith found me at the motel. That business where he asked about my IP address must have been a head fake, or a test to see if I'd lie. But if he knew where I was all along, it does raise the question of why he'd send armed goons to break into my apartment. And if the mystery trio aren't his people, and they aren't Ms. Pang's—then yeah, who the hell are they?

Don't ask me, I just work here.

It's five minutes to ten, time for me to get ready. I open the glove compartment and take out the collar, which Bamber has patched back together. On Mom's instructions, she's also disabled the microphone in the buckle. This will likely make Smith suspicious, but it's a risk we need to take, as we are planning to pull a real-life version of a b-channel.

I snap the collar in place around my neck. Then I take Smith's Xiaomi phone, turn it on, and put it in my pocket. Next are a mismatched pair of earbud phones. The one that goes in my left ear has Zero Day-approved encryption and will allow me to communicate securely with Jolene and the others. The one for my right ear is a civilian model that connects wirelessly with the Xiaomi and will let me talk hands-free with Smith while I am doing his bidding.

This second earbud was part of a package that a courier delivered to the hotel early this morning. The package also contained a stolen ID badge and a prosthetic thumb. The badge belongs to Jim Boden, a senior computer programmer for Tempest who has worked on Call to Wizardry since its inception. I don't look anything like him, so if I tried to walk into Tempest HQ through the front door I'd never get past security. But according to Smith, there is a less well-guarded side door that connects to the tower from the Arcade. By swiping the badge, and using the fake thumb to spoof a biometric sensor, I should be able to enter through there. I am then supposed to take an elevator to the floor where the real Jim Boden works, and convince him to walk out of the building with me. Smith's people will be waiting to grab him at street level.

To help with this last part, the courier's package also contained a handgun—a .50 Desert Eagle semiautomatic. This is another popular video-game gun, a fetish weapon that shoots bullets that are half an inch in diameter. The Desert Eagle that the courier delivered is unloaded, but the thing is so scary looking that just pointing it in Boden's direction should be enough to ensure his cooperation. If not, Smith told me, I will need to think and talk fast. "If you fail your mission, I will trigger the collar, and I will terminate your friend Anja's life support."

Thanks to Bamber, I know the first half of this threat is bullshit. We're still waiting to find out about the second half. The helicopter with Javier and the tech guy touched down in Paraná twenty minutes ago, so they should be at Anja's house any moment now, and once they talk their way inside, the tech guy's first priority will be to make sure the medical pod is completely disconnected from the internet.

Until we get the all clear on that, we are going to pretend to play along with Smith's plan—up to a point. I am not actually going to kidnap Jim Boden, and if Mom has her way, I won't even go so far as to breach Tempest's security. For a variety of bureaucratic and legal reasons, Mom's goal, as she puts it, is to maintain "the lightest possible footprint"—ideally, neither Tempest nor the local police will ever know we were here.

Partly for this reason, I will not be bringing the Desert Eagle into the Arcade with me. The only member of our group who will be armed is Jolene. If something happens that Jolene can't handle, Mom has "other assets" that she can bring into play, but, as she stressed in our pre-op conversation, she'd really, really prefer not to use those.

That's what she wants. We'll find out soon enough what she can have.

At ten o'clock sharp, the Arcade doors open and the line starts moving. Beside me, Jolene makes her own final preparations. Smith knows what she looks like, so to disguise herself, and to conceal her Kevlar vest and gun, she is wearing a gray USMC hoodie. She slides a big pair of tinted glasses onto her face and milks the drawstrings of the hood until her chin and forehead disappear. "How do I look?" she asks, flashing me a gap-toothed grin.

"Like the assassin who loses the knife fight to Quvenzhané Wallis in The Bourne Resurrection," I say. I reach for the button on the dash that turns off the Faraday Cage. "See you inside."

Thirty seconds later I am walking out of the parking garage. There's a subway exit just to my right.

As I wait to cross the street, the Xiaomi phone rings.


A twelve-foot-tall troll statue stands just inside the Arcade entrance. It doesn't move or speak, but you can sit in the cauldron at its feet and have your picture taken pretending to be boiled into gumbo. I pass.

Beyond the troll, spread out across the Arcade floor, are long rows of stylish gaming booths chased with blue and purple neon, each one containing a state-of-the-art VR rig. For twenty-five bucks an hour you can play all your favorite Tempest games, and take an advance look at upcoming titles and expansions. Forty bucks an hour gets you a legendary booth—these are larger, and decorated with orange neon—that will project your gameplay onto an overhead holographic display, letting passersby admire your elite skills.

Off to the right, past a long counter selling time cards and merchandise, a sweeping crystal staircase leads up to a second-floor gallery. I spot Bamber at the top of the stairs. She takes a moment to admire a crossed pair of orcish scimitars that are mounted on the wall, then leans on the gallery railing and looks out over the floor.

"Heads up," Ray says, her voice in my left ear. "There's a cop in the building."

I raise a finger to my right earbud and make sure that the microphone is switched off before asking, "Where?"

"Cheapside." This is a region of the Arcade that, like the virtual arcade in the Game Lobby, is devoted to vintage coin-op games and pinball machines. The budget entertainment option, Cheapside is a big draw in its own right, but like the dairy case in a supermarket it is located a long way from the entrance—to get to it, you must walk past the more expensive VR game booths, and a concentration of legendary booths along Cheapside's fringe serves as a constant reminder of what you are missing.

"What's he doing?" This from Mom.

"Fucking off on duty, looks like," Ray says. "Playing Lethal Enforcers."

"Keep tabs on him," Mom says. "But try not to let him notice you."

"No fear."

I reactivate the mike on my right earbud. Smith hasn't said a word since he first checked in with me on the street. He told me there would be a delay while he confirmed Jim Boden's exact whereabouts. I don't mind being patient; the longer this takes, the better it is for Anja. I go over to a nearby legendary booth, where a kid in a Repeal the 2nd T-shirt is tanking a run through the Temple of the Seven Lanterns. A group of older gamers go by, and I scan their faces, instinctively looking for Smith. But this is pointless: They're a diverse bunch, but none of them are Gray People.

Static crackles in my right ear. "It is time," Smith says. "Where are you?"

"Inside the building," I tell him. "Near the troll by the front door."

"Directly behind the troll as you come in, there is an aisle leading towards the far side of the building. Do you see it?"

"Yes." The aisle, a sort of Broadway spanning the width of the Arcade's first floor, is roughly divided into two lanes by a series of padded benches, snack and drink machines, and display cases filled with game world artifacts.

"Follow it to its end, to the back corridor where the restrooms are."

"OK, Smith," I say, for the benefit of my other listeners, "I'm headed towards the restrooms at the end of the big aisle."

But I've barely started walking when Bamber announces: "John's mystery Asians are here."

"Where?" I say, Jolene echoing the question in my left ear.

"Where what?" says Smith. I forgot to shut off his mike.

"Coming my way, up the stairs," Bamber says. "I think they want a bird's-eye view."

"Where do I go once I get to the restrooms?" I say, to Smith. I turn and look up at the gallery. I see the trio pass behind Bamber and move to the railing a few yards beyond her.

"Just keep walking," Smith says. "And keep your eyes in front of you."

I turn back to the aisle, take a few more steps. Even as I ask myself how he could know which way my eyes are pointed, I see, coming towards me down the aisle's other lane, a figure in a hoodie. It's not Jolene. This hoodie is black and bears the Resident Evil game logo, and though the hood is pulled forward over the wearer's head, the drawstrings are loose, so I can see the jaw and the lower part of the face.

His face: It's a white guy, and even this partial glimpse is enough to tell me that I know him. Then I see his lips move, forming words, and the gray monotone voice of Smith speaks in my ear: "That's right, John. Keep going. You're almost there."

I stop dead in my tracks, my head swiveling as he continues to walk forward. I feel like I've taken a hit of something, but it's what happens next that really floors me: A kid comes darting up the aisle, closely pursued by a couple of friends. They're on a collision course with the guy in the hoodie, but just as the lead kid is about to plow into him, the hoodie guy does this sideways pivot, dodging around the kid without even breaking stride. Then he does it again, and again, the kids zipping by heedlessly like paintballs flying across an open field.

Only when he's cleared the last of them does he come to a stop. He's directly across the aisle from me now; we are separated by about ten feet of space and a waist-high display case. I see his lips curve in a smile. He reaches up and slips off his hood and turns to face me. I know him, all right: The white guy from the CIA Factbook. The white guy who broke into my apartment. Ms. Pang's white guy. But he's someone else, too, and though he is flesh and blood, in a moment of total context fail I see him as an avatar, controlled by another person altogether.

"Darla?" I say, the word falling into a moment of perfect stillness that probably exists only in my imagination.

His smile broadens. He winks at me. "Perv," he says, and Smith, in my ear, says it too.

Then his right hand slips inside the front of his hoodie and comes out holding a Desert Eagle handgun. It's the same model as the one the courier delivered to me this morning, but where that one was finished in silver, this one is plated in gold. It is also, I feel quite certain, loaded.

I've been in more VR gunfights than I can count, so I know what I'm supposed to do here: Move. Even at point-blank range, it is amazingly difficult to hit a target that is ducking and weaving and jumping around. I know this, but like a newbie I just stand there with my mouth open.

He doesn't shoot me. He doesn't even point the gun at me, in fact, just says, "Cover your ears." Then he sidesteps, extending his arm and aiming up, towards the gallery.

I clap my hands over my ears. This probably protects me from at least some permanent hearing damage. Not that I really appreciate it in the moment. This is one thing video games, by necessity, get totally wrong: how painfully loud guns are. Even a small-caliber handgun can produce more decibels than a jet engine. When the Desert Eagle fires, I feel the shockwave in the bones of my face, and the muzzle flash—a three-foot-long column of hot gas and propellant—is blinding.

I am literally staggered. The second shot knocks me completely off balance; I am already falling when Jolene comes in from the side and tackles me.

As we hit the floor, the glass in the display case shatters, struck by return fire from the gallery. I shut my eyes and scream into the side of Jolene's neck. The Desert Eagle booms twice more. The last shot is from a different location, and I dimly surmise that he is on the move.

Seconds pass with no more shots fired. I open my eyes carefully. Someone goes running by, and I hear, through the ringing in my ears, the panicked commotion of scores of gamers fleeing towards the exits.

Jolene pushes herself up on one arm and sweeps her hood back. She draws her own gun and swivels her head around. She looks down at me and says, "Get your ass out of here," mouthing the words broadly so I'll be sure to understand. Then she gets up and sprints down the aisle in a crouch. Going after the guy in the hoodie.

I stand up carefully, brushing bits of glass from my shoulders. A logjam has developed by the base of the troll statue, people fighting one another to get out of the building. I look up at the gallery. Bamber and the trio have vanished. I can see where a fist-sized chunk was blasted out of the gallery railing, and three larger and more jagged holes are punched through the glass panels of the balustrade, but there are no bodies, and no blood.

At the Arcade entrance, the logjam breaks. The crowd surges out onto the sidewalk. I go the other way.

A grinning statue of Proctor the Salesgoblin stands guard outside the restroom corridor. From inside, just out of view, I hear two people shouting—it sounds like Jolene is one of them. Then I hear three gunshots in quick succession. Then nothing.

When I poke my head into the corridor, Jolene is on the floor in front of the women's room, clutching her right side. Slumped against a trash bin outside the men's is the person who just shot her—an LAPD officer, probably the same one Ray spotted earlier. The cop has been hit in the shoulder. In most video games this would barely count as a flesh wound, but the guy looks pretty bad—pale, sweating, in shock. He's got his other hand pressed to the wound, but there's a lot of blood seeping through his fingers.

Keeping a wary eye on the cop, I crouch beside Jolene. "Are you all right?"

She glares at me, infuriated by the question or by the fact that I'm still in the building. I take her anger as a good sign. "Ribs," she wheezes, wincing. "Busted."

"Jesus Christ," Ray says, appearing behind me.

"Hey," I say to her. "Jolene's going to be OK, I think, but that guy"—nodding at the cop—"could probably use some help."

Ray gives me a look. "You know I'm not a real cleric, right?"

"Yeah, of course, but..." I guess I assumed, given her affinity for playing healers, that she'd at least know first aid in real life.

Jolene takes a deep breath. "Pressure," she says, wincing again. "Put pressure."

I nod, and look up at Ray again. Ray looks back, like: Are you serious? But then she sighs and goes to put pressure on the cop's wound, so he won't bleed out before help gets here.

Past the men's room, the corridor we are in ends in a set of stairs, headed up.

"The guy in the hoodie," I say. "Did he go that way?"

Jolene shakes her head. Not saying no. Telling me not to do it. Which of course I'm going to. I glance at her gun, which is lying on the floor beside her, and she hisses through gritted teeth: "Touch it and I'll break your damn arm."

"OK," I say, putting my hands up. "OK."

Then I stand, and turn, and head for the stairs.


As I'm climbing the stairs I try to tell mom what's going on, which is when I realize I've lost my left earbud. I've still got the right one, though, and the microphone is still on.

"Sorry, perv," he says, "I'm not your mom." He's turned off the Smith voice filter, so he sounds like a real person now. Though still not the person I think of him as.

"Who the hell are you?" I say.

The question makes him laugh. "A badass," he says. "A different flavor of badass."

The Arcade's upper level is a huge food court. At the top of the stairs I pause and look around carefully. I don't see anybody, but that doesn't mean much—the sightlines are terrible, the floor space broken up by fast food kiosks and whimsical statues of NPCs eating and drinking.

"What about those guys you were shooting at?" I ask, keeping my voice low. "Who are they?"

"The kind of people who keep their money in Burmese savings accounts. They're pissed because I ripped them off."

"Gangsters? You stole the money from gangsters?"

"I told you I was going to have a big surprise for you when I got back from my trip."

Oh my God. "You ripped off a bunch of gangsters... to finance our MMORPG?"

"I was going to steal the money for that," he says. "Technically, the surprise was that I got my hacker friend Orville to show me how to steal it. I was going to talk it over with you before I did it, give you a chance to wet your pants and get used to the idea, then discuss how much we'd actually need. But before any of that could happen, you fucked me over. So I decided to steal the money to fuck you back, instead."

"Jesus Christ," I say. "I know you're mad I cut you out of the Janet Margeaux gig, but this... You think this is proportional?"

"Of course it's not proportional." He laughs. "But it is awesome."

"You're an asshole."

"Look, if you're worried about Anja, don't be. You know I'd never really hurt her. All I did was fiddle the alarm system on her medical pod. I had to, to get you to put on that collar... Which I can't believe you fell for, by the way."

As we've been talking, I've been making my way through the food court, staying low, moving from cover to cover. Listening. At the moment I'm hunkered down beside a Panda Express kiosk. Straight ahead is a dwarven longboat with some kid's tables inside it. When he laughs again, I don't just hear it in my right ear, I hear it in my left as well.

"You do have to admit it was an epic troll," he says. "One for the ages."

"Yeah, really epic," I say. "Do you know Jolene just got shot downstairs?"

Long pause. "Well, I didn't shoot her," he says, sounding offended by the implication.

"And if you're such a fucking genius," I continue, "how come the gangsters got onto you?"

"That was your fucking fault. The first withdrawal went smooth as silk. But you made me go back for more, and I guess that time they noticed. They've been on my ass ever since I picked up the cash at the bank."

I'm crouched beside the longboat now. Gripping the gunwale with both hands, I stand up, stick my head over the top. He's sitting on the floor inside, looking up expectantly.

"Boo," he says.

Ordinarily it would be unhealthy to think about punching a guy who has a gun, but having finally grasped the rules of the game he and I have been playing, I know that even if I broke his nose, he would probably just laugh. But before I can put this theory to the test, I glimpse movement out of the corner of my eye, and some late-arriving reflex of self-preservation makes me hop over the gunwale and squat down beside him.

Posed on the prow of the longboat is a figure of a drunken dwarf, dancing a highland jig. Peering out through the gap beneath his kilt, I see the male contingent of the trio headed our way with their guns out. The younger guy looks nervous—no doubt this has to do with the sound of approaching sirens outside the building—but the tough older guy just looks focused, like he's cool with being arrested as long as he gets to kill someone first.

My boat mate elbows me in the side. I turn to him, and he offers me the Desert Eagle, holding the gun in his left hand while showing me his right wrist, which is swollen and badly bruised. "Recoil," he mouths, by way of explanation.

"Idiot," I mouth back. I don't take the gun. I shift back in the boat and look over the gunwales, trying to decide if there's any way to run that won't get us instantly shot.

That's when I see Bamber. She's crouched by the corner of the Panda Express kiosk where I was a few moments ago, and she is holding an elvish longbow. The bow is a replica of Helios, a legendary loot drop from the Fields of the Sun. Bamber briefly makes eye contact with me. Then she nocks an arrow in the bow and fires it in a high arc over the heads of the approaching gunmen. The arrow lands with a clatter in the distance and the gunmen spin around at the sound.

Bamber nocks another arrow. Then she freezes, and I see a look of frustration come over her face. She tosses the bow and arrow to the floor and raises her arms. The female member of the trio, her pistol pointed at the back of Bamber's head, marches Bamber into the open.

"Everybody come out," the gunwoman says, "or I shoot her now."

I stand up and put my hands in the air. The boy in the hoodie stays crouched below the gunwale.

"Everybody," the gunwoman says. I look down, scowling, and my boat mate rolls his eyes and says, "Fine." He gets up, leaving his own gun on the floor.

We exit the longboat and stand next to Bamber. By this point the gunwoman's confederates have joined us. The young guy keeps his Beretta out, but the tough guy holsters his pistol, and then, to my consternation, reaches into the other side of his jacket and pulls out a cleaver.

"Where is the money?" the gunwoman says.

Bamber answers: "In a safe in our hotel room."

"What hotel?"

"The Sony, on Hollywood."

"What room?"

"Suite 10A." Glancing down: "The key card is in my pocket."

The gunwoman makes no move to take it. "Tell me about the safe. Is it a number combination, or"—nodding in the direction of the guy with the cleaver—"a biometric lock?"

"It's a voiceprint lock," the boy in the hoodie says. The gunwoman points her pistol at him, but he looks back unblinking with a screw-you expression on his face that makes me wish I'd punched him when I had the chance. "Go ahead, shoot me," he says. "Shoot all of us. You won't get the cash back."

"Motherfucker." The young guy, really on edge from the sirens now, raises his own Beretta.

"Wait!" the gunwoman says. She turns back to Bamber, and then, reconsidering, zeroes in on me. "You," she says. "Is your friend here telling the truth?"

And I just gape at her, trying to think how to sell the lie, which of course means I've already blown it. In a moment of rising panic I see something flitting through the air behind her. I glance at it, look away, then look back again, even as my brain warns me not to.

The gunwoman sees it all in my face. Eyes narrowing in suspicion, she turns, pistol at the ready, but the drone is small, no larger than a pack of cards, and it's much faster than she is. The instant her gun is pointed away from us the drone fires, hitting her in the neck, dumping more voltage into her body than any civilian Taser would be allowed to. She does a jittering dance, and the men, each tasked with their own drone, dance too. All three of them go down.

The Taser drones settle into a protective hover, and a larger drone glides into view from behind the Panda Express kiosk. The big drone has a camera mounted inside a dome on its underside. It pauses to scan the trio, confirming that the Real Threats have been neutralized, then glides forward until it's right in front of me. As it comes to a stop, it does this little side tilt, the way a person might cock their head, and through this gesture I intuit who the driver is.

"Hi Mom," I say, and I tilt my own head towards the dude in the hoodie at my side. "I'd like you to meet my girlfriend, Darla."

Epilogue

88 Names

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.

—Mark Twain


"The Great Impostor" — Sobriquet of Ferdinand Waldo Demara Jr. (1921–1982), an American folk legend who used stolen identities and forged credentials to obtain work as a prison warden, college dean, sheriff's deputy, civil engineer, and numerous other jobs for which he was technically not qualified. In what became his most famous exploit, he assumed the identity of a Canadian doctor, Joseph C. Cyr, and served as a trauma surgeon aboard the destroyer HMCS Cayuga during the Korean War. Despite his lack of medical training, he performed several successful operations, speed-reading medical reference books to learn the necessary procedures. Demara's stated motivation for his many impostures was "Rascality. Pure rascality."

—The Book of Lulz


He wants to see me.

Darryl Joseph Carter (aka Darla Jean Covington, aka Smith, aka Mr. Jones, aka Ms. Pang, aka Nameless White Guy, aka Mr. Bungle) is being held in the John McCain Special Housing Unit at the Federal Correctional Complex in Victorville. The McCain SHU is an ultramax-security facility designed for the sort of prisoners who used to be held at Guantanamo Bay. Darryl's incarceration there has less to do with his alleged crimes than with the circumstances of his capture. The government's logic goes like this: Darryl was the target of a Zero Day operation; Zero Day exists to hunt down super-dangerous terrorists; QED, Darryl deserves the Al Qaeda treatment. Don't get on my mom's bad side, is the moral of the story.

The SHU does not have regular visiting hours. Even the prisoners' lawyers must apply in advance to meet with their clients. As a civilian with no security clearance, I require an escort to get inside the facility. For a while Mom talks about doing this herself—she'd love an excuse to fly in and spend some time with me and the other West Coast relatives—but other work duties keep intervening, so eventually she sends her latest Zero Day recruit in her stead.

Jolene picks me up at LAX. This is the first time I've seen her in person since the day she got shot. She's looking much better; her broken ribs have healed, and she's thrilled about the new job. "Almost worth taking a bullet for," she jokes.

Our appointment at the prison isn't until two, so we stop for lunch at a diner in the San Gabriel Mountains. Over burgers, Jolene asks me how the sherpa business is doing. Not well, I tell her. I'm working without a crew these days. "Anja left right after you did."

"You told her the truth about the malware?"

I nod. "I thought about pretending that Darryl hacked her medical pod without my help, but that just didn't feel right. So I came clean."

"Good," Jolene says. "How pissed off was she?"

"More sad than mad, I think. She didn't actually say she was quitting, just told me she was going to take a break and spend some time with Javier. Did you hear about Ray?"

"Oh yeah, I heard."

In the movie version of this story, Ray's reward for saving the life of the cop Jolene shot will be full recognition of her American citizenship. In the real world, Ray knew better than to count on that ending—after the SWAT team escorted her and the cop and Jolene out of the Arcade to where paramedics were waiting, she managed to slip away. But her face had been captured by Tempest's security cameras, and the LAPD IDed her as a fugitive with an outstanding ICE warrant. Mom tried to run interference by claiming that Ray was a Zero Day asset, but the local cops were upset that she hadn't told them about the op in advance, and ICE just didn't give a shit. Rather than back off, ICE demanded, and eventually got, Ray's home address, which Mom knew from having traced her internet connection.

Ray was living in a rented trailer outside of Barstow. ICE raided the place two weeks ago. The agents shot a stray dog on the property, but Ray herself was nowhere to be found. From the look of things, she'd cleared out just hours earlier, taking her computer and VR rig with her.

ICE is mad. They think Mom warned Ray that they were coming. I thought so too at first, but now, listening to Jolene say, "Oh yeah, I heard," it occurs to me that someone else might have given Ray the heads-up.

"So anyway," I say, "I'm working solo now, when I'm working at all. It looks like my fifteen minutes' of fame from that People article are over."

"That's a shame," Jolene says, not sounding too broken up about it. "Especially since you lost all that money."

Just as Mom predicted, the government confiscated the half million dollars Darryl had given me. Or as much of it as they could get their hands on: The ten thousand I paid Anja for her first week's cut is safe in her bank in Argentina, and Ray cleared out her PayPal account before ICE could freeze it. I assume Jolene had to give up her share, but since she was working undercover all along, she never expected to keep it. "Yeah, I'm back in the poorhouse where I started." I shrug. "It happens."

"Don't worry, I'll pay for lunch," Jolene tells me, and she does. While we're waiting for the waitress to bring her change, she says: "So listen, it's none of my business but I've got to ask. You and Darla. When the two of you were having your thing together, whatever that was, did you ever..."

"Have cybersex? Yeah. A few times."

"Yeah, OK. So is it weird for you, to find out that she's... well, I want to say 'a guy,' but maybe that's making assumptions."

"I don't think Darryl's trans, in the traditional sense," I say. "And even if he was, I think he'd think it was funny that you were worried about the etiquette. You didn't watch the recording of his FBI interview?"

She shakes her head. "I was going to check it out, for today, but I didn't get around to it."

"His gender identity came up. One of the agents asked him if he felt 'like a woman trapped in a man's body,' quote-unquote."

"How'd he answer?"

"He laughed his ass off. Then he told them no, it wasn't like that, he just wasn't hung up on the whole male-female thing."

"Hmm. And you?"

"I'm a little hung up on it. I'm not going to pretend that Darla being a girl was irrelevant, because I liked the way her avatar looked—the way I thought she looked. But that was never the main attraction. The thing that got to me about her was her talent, and that was real."

"I don't know. I think I'd still be pretty upset, if it was me."

"It's the internet," I say. "Nobody's ever exactly what they seem like. You know what does freak me out, though? Unless Darryl erased it, the feds have the bullet I made for Darla."

"You worried they're going to send a copy to your mom?"

"Don't even joke about that."

We're at the prison at two o'clock, but it's closer to three by the time we make it past the gates, doors, ID checks, pat-downs, and scans. Near the end of the gauntlet, Jolene and I part company. She heads for a security office to watch on closed-circuit television while I go up to the interview room alone.

The room is like something out of the Combine interrogation center in Half-Life 3: an octagon assembled from poured concrete slabs, divided down the middle by a curtain of armored Plexiglas. Small circular grilles of titanium mesh are set into the Plexi to allow sound to pass through. On either side of the barrier, a broad strip of floor has been painted red, with signs warning of dire consequences if this no-go zone is violated; God help you if you actually tried to pry one of the grilles out, or messed with the cameras mounted on the ceiling.

The chair on my side of the Plexi is an expensively padded and ergonomic office number, the kind of thing you'd want under your butt if you were settling in for a marathon session of online poker. The prisoner chair is a hardback plastic seat that you might buy in bulk if you were shopping for an underfunded school district. This might seem like needless cruelty, and it is, but it's also logical from a business perspective: As much as any private corporation, the Department of Corrections knows the difference between its clients and its products.

I take a seat in the comfy chair. I've still got a few minutes to wait, so I have another look at the crib sheet on Darryl that Mom had prepared for me.

He is twenty-four years old, and he does not live in Oregon. It's true that his parents are divorced, but the whole family still resides, as they always have, in Palo Alto. Darryl's dad works for Apple. His mom is a deputy in the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office.

Darryl's own occupation, which he seems to have pursued full-time for at least the past several years, is pretending to be other people on the internet. Principally Darla, whose stories about visiting Dad in Arizona or attending family reunions with her mother were a scheduling strategy to block out time for her different online relationships. The FBI and Mom's people are still working to compile a full list of contacts, but so far they've identified four individuals who Darla spent significant time with.

The first is Darla's hacker friend, Orville. A positive ID is still pending, but they believe he is Orville Slusarski, a forty-nine-year-old former NSA employee who quit the agency under a cloud of suspicion and took some stuff he shouldn't have when he left. Orville, an avid League of Avengers player whose favorite alter ego is Lex Luthor, was apparently tutoring Darla in the dark arts of cyberwarfare. The crib sheet doesn't say what Orville got out of the deal, but I think it's a safe bet that Darla lied when she told me she and Orville weren't fucking. Not that I care.

The second name on the list is Martin Duncan, a New Mexico schoolteacher and Star Trek Online devotee who'd been sending Darla gifts of cash—paying Darryl's rent—in hopes that she would one day agree to meet with him in person. Then there is Jason Hoyt, a physical therapist and Call of Duty leaderboard champ from Boston who used to send Darla gifts of cash, until he lost patience and decided to stalk Darla instead. Hoyt is undergoing some serious physical therapy of his own now, after tracking Darla to a house in New Haven that actually belonged to a Navy SEAL.

Individual number four is yours truly. Zero Day's psych profilers are divided on what my relationship with Darla meant to Darryl. One theory is that he was grooming me to be a replacement for Martin Duncan, which if true would be pretty funny, given the difficulty I often had paying my own rent. My preferred hypothesis is that Darryl saw me as a more age-appropriate version of Orville. I believe Darla's passion for game design was real, and that Darryl was sincere about wanting to go into business with me—however dim the long-term prospects for that might have been. Why else would his revenge have taken the form that it did?

Mom, after hearing me out at length on the subject, agrees with me. She thinks Darryl did regard me as a kind of peer, a friend even. But she also pointed out that being befriended by a sociopath, like being hired to work for a dictator, is not really something I should be proud of, or flattered by. And I know that she's right, but it feels a lot better than being taken for a sucker.

The door opens on the other side of the room and Darryl comes in. He is dressed in orange prison scrubs, and his arms and legs are shackled. His hair has gotten longer, and he is sporting a thick growth of beard whose unkempt nature gives him the appearance of a hermit. He stops just inside the threshold and looks around, taking in the dimensions of the room, which is significantly larger than the cell they've been keeping him in. Before sitting down, he does a brisk circuit of his side of the octagon. Despite the chain between his ankles, he doesn't shuffle, he walks, maintaining a short graceful stride, and in this, and in the way he comes right up to the edge of the red zone without going over, I see Darla's talent, that thing I found so compelling in her.

But I see him, too. At the Arcade that day, there was too much going on for me to ever really take a good look at Darryl, but now, as he takes his turn around the room, I have a chance to check him out. I think about that question Jolene asked me at the diner, and find myself wondering how things might have played out if Darla ever had given me her home address.

I identify as straight, and have never been with a guy in real life, but I like to believe I'm cool enough to be open to the possibility. The masculine physique isn't a problem for me. I'm attracted to athletic women, a polite way of saying I'm not a huge boob guy, and Darryl, from the neck down, could pass for a flat-chested Valkyrie. Kind of. The beard, though, really doesn't work for me.

And yes, I am aware of the absurdity of this train of thought. We're talking about someone who tried to blow up my life and my business. Who tricked me, tased me, and threatened to kill me. Who threatened Anja's life too, and nearly got Jolene killed, and started a panic in a crowded building that could easily have killed or injured many more people. Ostensibly he did all this to get even with me for lying to him, but really he did it to entertain himself. For the lulz. Mom's right, Darryl is a sociopath—and as sexual turn-offs go, what's a little facial hair, compared to that?

I don't know. Maybe I'm just shallow.

Done with his stroll, Darryl sits in the public-school chair and looks directly at me for the first time since he entered.

"Darla," I say, to break the ice.

"Perv." He smiles, but it feels perfunctory. Then he says: "I'm bored shitless."

As he would be. There are no video games in prison, of course, but inmates in the SHU don't get television, either. They are allowed reading material, but in a jailhouse version of the old desert island meme, they are limited to a maximum of five books at any given time. And if they tire of their current selection and want to swap out titles, they can't just run down to the prison library; they have to make a written request to the warden's office. The response time is measured in months.

"My mother can get you out of here," I tell him. "Agree to cooperate, and you'll be moved to a medium-security facility, with extra privileges. If the information you provide is valuable enough, you'll eventually be released to home detention, though you'll still owe restitution for the medical bills of that cop who got shot."

"What are they going to want for that?" he asks. "The bank in Burma?"

"To start with. They want to know how you hacked in, and everything you learned when you did."

"I can give you that. No problem."

"Also, your hacker friend Orville. Is his last name Slusarski?"

"He never told me his last name. But there can't be too many Orvilles who know how to tunnel past a Burmese firewall."

"The NSA wants to talk to him," I say. "They want to know where he is."

He shakes his head. "I can't tell you that."

"Because you don't know, or—"

"I'm not going to rat out Orville. He always played fair with me, and I'm no backstabber."

"Darryl, come on. You really want to stay in here?"

"Ask me something else."

There is nothing else. Finding Orville Slusarski is a top government priority, and Mom has made it clear that this point is non-negotiable—that it is, in fact, the only thing of real value that Darryl has to offer. But I do have some questions of my own that I'd like answered.

"The girl in the videos," I say. "The one you modeled your avatar on. Who is she?"

He grins like he was expecting this question. "You know those videos are fakes, right?"

I nod. Mom's tech people figured it out: The girl's image was added into pre-existing footage. The technique is basically the same one used to skin and reskin avatars; the editing software is widely available, and popular for making internet memes. Doctoring video crudely is easy, but to match the image to the background so that the fakery is hidden takes significant skill, along with lots of time and processing power—way too much effort for a typical prankster. But Darryl's not typical. "That was originally me, in the paintball video," he says. "And in the balloon. Most of the other clips were found footage, cool stuff I saw on the net that I thought Darla would be into."

"But the girl," I say. "Who is she?"

"Why do you want to know? So you can stalk her on Facebook? It's me you had the hots for," he says, and in his smirk, in the set of his shoulders as he leans forward, I see Darla again. I feel her. But the beard still doesn't do it for me. He picks up on this, and I can tell he's disappointed. "She's nobody," he says, sitting back in the chair. "I mean, literally nobody. I made her up, used morphing software to create a composite from a bunch of different images. Tweaked it for days, until I had it just the way I wanted. Then I put together a backstory for her, started building her Facebook page. I'd done that sort of thing before, made puppets, dozens of them, but Darla, she's my masterpiece."

"Why? What for?"

"You know why," he says. "Don't tell me you never pretended to be someone else online. It's fun, playing Darla. Getting people to believe in her and watching how they react. There are the ones like you, who fall head over heels for her, and that's fun in one way"—he winks—"and then there are the others, the assholes who try to grief on her, and that's really fun. That never gets old, taking someone who thinks they're a badass and teaching them who the real badass is. Darla, she's perfect for that."

"The bigger bitch," I say.

"Always." He smiles for real this time, enjoying himself.

"What about that day we met in the Jurassic Swamp?" I ask next. "Was that just a coincidence, or did you—"

"Come looking for you on purpose?" He laughs. "What are you thinking, that I saw one of your ads and said to myself, 'Gee, this one sherpa guy who sounds exactly like all the other sherpa guys must be super interesting, I guess I'll go pretend to bump into him by accident'?"

"OK, never mind."

"Aw, don't be hurt." He laughs again. "Who knows, maybe it was fate. I went to the swamp that day because I was bored and wanted to blow off steam, so I was definitely looking for someone to mess with, and there you were... I could tell how much you loved it when Darla kicked your ass, and when you offered me that job, I was like, OK, sure, let's see what kind of fun I can have with this. But then," and he hesitates, before continuing in a more serious tone, "then you showed me that eye thing, that mod you use, and your Mom-and-Pop switch, and there was just something about that, that made me think, I don't know, that maybe we were..."

"What? Kindred spirits?" I'm not buying it.

"I know you think I'm bullshitting," he says. "But it's true. I felt a connection, and I know you did, too." Scowling: "Of course if I'd known I could never trust you, I'd have cut your ass dead right there."

"That probably would have been the smart move," I say. "But if you had done that, you'd never have gotten the chance to play Mr. Jones."

"True." He brightens.

"What was the plan, with Jones?" I ask. "Did you always intend me to think he was Kim Jong-un?"

"It was never that specific. I assumed you'd figure out where the money came from—I was going to have Ms. Pang drop a clue-anvil on your head, if you didn't—so it made sense that Jones was some kind of powerful Asian dude, someone the PRC security ministry would be interested in. A dictator with a creative itch was an obvious choice, but I was open to other possibilities. A Chinese government official or spymaster gone rogue, or a drug kingpin, or even a pirate."

"Why would a pirate want to study MMORPGs?"

"I don't know. But that was the genius part of the plan—I didn't need to know, any more than I needed to know exactly who Mr. Jones was. I had you to figure it out for me. I knew you would, once the money got your imagination rolling. All I had to do was plant the seed, and let Mr. Profiler do the work." He grins. "It was amazing, watching you connect dots that weren't even there."

"Yeah, you really had me going. Well played, I guess."

"Oh, come on, don't be like that. I was pranking you, sure—I was mad—but don't pretend it wasn't fun for you too."

"Fun?" I say.

"OK, maybe not all of it... But solving the mystery? Thinking the Supreme Leader of North Korea had picked you to be his personal sherpa? Come on, that was fun."

I want to tell him he's wrong, but I remember how it felt, catching Mr. Jones out on the Juche calendar, and laying out my theories for Mom. "I suppose it had its moments."

"Moments!" He snorts. "It was the best fucking game you ever played. The best game I ever played, too."

"Well, I'm glad we both had fun, Darryl." Thinking as I say this that it is likely to be the last game he will play, for a long while.

He reads the thought in my expression. I watch him mull it over in silence.

"So," he says. "About Orville..."

"Yes?"

"What if I don't tell you exactly where he is, but I give you a really good hint? Enough for the NSA to figure it out on their own."

"Why not just give up the location?"

"I told you, I'm not a backstabber. But Orville likes to brag about how much smarter he is than the people he used to work for, always one step ahead, so as long as I leave him a chance to see it coming, it's not like I'm actually betraying him."

"Darryl."

"The odds will be stacked in your favor, don't worry. But I've got to leave him an out. A small one."

"Five percent?"

"Hey, that's all I'd need... So what do you say?"

"It's not my call," I tell him. "But I can talk to Mom about it, I guess."

"One other thing," he says. "Even if I do get home detention, there's going to be some pretty big restrictions on what I can do, right? Like, no computers?"

"I don't know. But I suppose so, yeah."

He nods. "Yeah, that doesn't work for me. Not being able to go online, that's worse than being locked up. I wouldn't mind staying in here if I had my rig."

"I understand," I say. "But you know they've got you flagged as a cyberterrorist."

"And that's totally cool!" he says. Like it's a badge of honor. "I get that they're not going to want to just turn me loose. But maybe there's another way to handle it, so everybody benefits."

He pauses, waiting to see if I'll figure it out on my own, which of course I do. We've seen a lot of the same movies.

"You want a job?" I say. "With Zero Day?"

"I know it sounds like a bullshit Hollywood plot twist," he tells me. "Black hat hacker gets caught and joins the good guys. But before you get all practical on me and say it's never going to happen, really think about it. That game I ran on you, I did that all by myself—well, except for the bank hack, but even that, I convinced Orville to tell me how to do it. And the rest of it, with you, I was playing all those different characters, sometimes two or three at the same time... Like, when you had your first meeting with Smith and Mr. Jones, I know you were suspicious, but did it even occur to you that the same person might be controlling both avatars?"

"I don't know. I don't think I thought that hard about the actual mechanics of it. And I mean, yes, OK, you did fool me. But—"

"And you're not stupid," Darryl says. "Gullible as fuck, sure, but even with the money, I had to work my ass off to make sure you bought it. And if I could do that with you, on my own, imagine what I could do with some support. You want to run a game on the real Kim Jong-un? Have your mom give me some resources, and I'll show her what I can really do."

He is delusional, I realize. The prospect of being stuck in prison has made him crazy. Or maybe he was nuts all along. I think this, but I try very hard not to let it show, because I know it will piss him off and make him uncooperative. But even as I struggle to control my expression, another thought comes to me, out of left field, and before I can stop myself, I laugh.

He thinks I'm laughing at him. He doesn't like it. All at once I see Darla again, at her most furious. "What?" he demands. "What's funny?"

"It's not you," I say. "I just..."

"What? What?"

"It just occurred to me... You're never going to apologize, are you? For any of it. You're never going to say you're sorry."

"I'm not sorry," he replies, indignant. "So why the fuck would I say I am?"

"No reason at all," I say. And as insane as it may sound, what I feel, in that moment, is a warm and genuine affection towards him.

Oh Darla, I think.

"OK," I tell him. "I'll talk to Mom about the job. I can't make any promises, but I'll talk to her."

"The baby dragons poop krazy glue?" Mom says. "Did i hear that right?"

"The magical equivalent of Krazy Glue," I clarify. "The point is, if we break too many eggs, we can't maneuver, and then the mother dragon just kills us."

"Why doesn't she break the eggs herself, then?"

"Because she's a mindless drone, not a three-dimensional chess–playing badass like you, Mom."

"Ooh, flattery!" Mom laughs and looks over her shoulder at Jolene. "Are you hearing this?"

Tonight was supposed to be my monthly game night with Dad, but Sony moved up the deadline on his latest rewrite, so he's got to work. On a whim I messaged Mom and asked if she'd like to give Call to Wizardry a try, and to my surprise she said sure. After hearing a basic rundown of the different character roles, she decided she wanted to try tanking, so I gave her my best paladin and took her to the transmog parlor. There's something about the way Mom's head looks on top of a giant suit of plate mail that makes it seem like she's wearing power armor, so if she starts flying around like Iron Man, I won't be surprised.

I thought about inviting Anja along tonight as well, but it's still a bit too soon. So we're running the Caverns of Malice as a four-person team, which is easy enough if you've got a good healer. And we do: His name is Roy Wilson, and he presents as a thirtysomething white guy with a medium build, brown eyes, and short black hair. I haven't checked Roy out on social media, so I couldn't swear under oath that he is actually a white guy, nor could I hazard a guess as to his real-world location—but I think I might hire him.

"So don't break the eggs," Mom says. "Don't stand in the acid, and steer clear of the tornadoes. Anything else?"

"Nope. Just keep holding aggro, like you've been doing. We'll ace this."

"Cool," she says. Then, grinning mischievously, she tosses her shield into the air and catches it, spinning, on one finger. It's an impressive move—one that is not included in the paladin avatar's default repertoire. The only way Mom could do this is by turning off kinetic photoshopping. Which means that she knows what kinetic photoshopping is, and that it can be turned off, without me telling her about it. And if she's done that much advance research on her own, you can bet she's read up on the boss fights for this dungeon, too.

She's been humoring me again. But what can I say—it makes me happy when she does that. And in turn, I'll do what I can to make her happy too, to keep things in balance between us. Which, in a nutshell, is what I know about love.

Mom tosses her shield up one more time, catches it and grips it firmly. Twirls her sword for good measure.

"All right," she says. "Let's do this."