 theory of mind — A controversial hypothesis that other human beings are sentient and possess thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and goals that are different from our own. In its most radical form, the theory posits that while these differences may make other people's behavior hard to understand, the question "What the fuck are you thinking?" has a real answer which reason and empathy can discover.

—The New Devil's Dictionary

My father didn't believe that infidelity was wrong.

This doesn't excuse his betrayal of my mother, but it does help to explain it. It's not an easy thing to wrap my brain around: Though I have my share of kinks, they all involve one partner at a time, so to really get a sense of where Dad's head was at, I need to resort to analogy. Rachel Nakamura is my go-to for that.

She was the first girl I ever had a crush on. Rachel and her mother worked in the PX at Fort Meade, where Zero Day's stateside HQ was located. Jimmy del Toro's older sister, Sarah, had a part-time job in the PX too, and Sarah was friends with Rachel, which is how I came to know her.

The Nakamuras were devout Christians. The conservative sect they belonged to had some peculiar taboos—or rather, taboos that seemed peculiar if you hadn't been indoctrinated with them. The weirdest one, from a Zero Day perspective, was that they didn't use virtual reality, which they apparently regarded as a high-tech species of graven-image worship. They weren't Luddites: Rachel was rarely without her iPad. But she used it mostly for reading, limiting her web surfing to what was required for schoolwork. She didn't play video games, not even Bejeweled.

And she didn't date. This didn't stop a long string of boys and girls from asking her out anyway: Rachel was beautiful, and there was the added psychological lure of That Which You Know You Cannot Have. But she always said no.

I was determined to take my shot like everybody else. The fact that I was nine years old, while Rachel was seventeen, meant my odds were longer than most, but I was hoping the half-Asian thing might give me a leg up.

That was the same month that Paramount Studios released Amok Time—the first, and still only, R-rated Star Trek picture. It was a trending topic in nerdland; my underage friends and I had all watched the pirated 2D version online, and were now scheming ways to go see it in 3D IMAX. When I heard Rachel Nakamura was a science-fiction fan (according to Sarah del Toro, she'd been reading C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy), I decided to kill two obsessions with one stone.

I went to the PX on a day when Rachel was working checkout, grabbed a copy of the latest eSports Illustrated, and got in her line. While she rang up the magazine I mentioned—trying to be smooth and casual about it—that I was planning to go see Amok Time. I said I'd heard that she might be a Star Trek fan too, and asked if she'd maybe like to see the movie with me. I added that I would be happy to pay her way, if—very smooth, here—she wouldn't mind handling the actual purchase of the tickets.

I was hopeful but not delusional; I knew that Rachel would probably say no and wouldn't have been surprised if she'd humiliated me in the bargain. But her reply still stunned me.

"Thank you for asking, John," she said. "But I don't go to R-rated movies."

On its face, this was less weird than the no-VR thing, but it shocked me more, I guess because it ran so contrary to my own impulses. To be free to see any movie you liked without adult supervision or the hassle of illegal downloading, and yet to choose not to: What kind of crazy theology was that?

I stood there with my mouth open, trying desperately to think of another movie, something PG- or even G-rated, to ask her to instead. But my mind drew a blank, and then the staff sergeant waiting behind me in line put her hand on my shoulder and said, "You've been shot down, son. Accept it and move on."

A few weeks later, Mom and I deployed overseas. I never saw Rachel Nakamura again. But I still thought of her from time to time, and later, when I was trying to understand my father, I immortalized her in a thought experiment.

The experiment goes like this: Imagine you're in love with a smart and beautiful girl. She loves you too, and she's willing to spend her life with you, but only if you agree to convert and follow the dictates of her religion, the first of which is, Thou Shalt Not Watch R-Rated Movies. So, no more Matrix trilogy for you; no more The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; no more Shakespeare in Love (yes, it's an R). No more Amok Time.

Oh, and no more hamburgers, either. She's a vegetarian.

That's the deal, take it or leave it.

Imagine that you take it.

Now imagine you're traveling, alone, on business. You stop for the night at a hotel a thousand miles from home. Though you didn't ask for it, your room comes with a premium cable TV package. In the elevator you overhear another guest mentioning that Strange Days—one of your favorite films—is playing on HBO tonight. Further investigation reveals that Near Dark and The Hurt Locker are also on offer. And the room service menu? They don't just serve burgers here. They serve gourmet burgers, made from grass-fed, antibiotic-free Wagyu beef, ground in-house. The kind you can eat blood-rare without worrying about E. coli.

What do you do? True, you've made a vow, and a promise is a promise. On the other hand, these aren't your taboos, they're hers. To you, they're just arbitrary rules, victimless sins; the only person who will be hurt if you transgress is her, and only if she finds out.

This is how my father thought about fucking other women. If you're inclined to argue that the analogy is flawed—because women aren't room service items; because you can't catch an STD from a Kathryn Bigelow film—you are missing the point, which, again, is not to excuse Dad's behavior but to make sense of it.

And not just his behavior, but his timing. That used to bug me even more than the fact of the betrayal itself. Bad enough to cheat on your pregnant girlfriend, I thought, but to cheat on her while you're waiting to find out if she'll marry you? Who does that?

Someone who believes his moral obligation is to not get caught, that's who. If my mother had accepted my father's proposal, as he fully expected her to, they would have moved in together, and not long afterwards, they'd have had a baby to take care of. Which would have made it hard for him to discreetly step out on her. But he had a brief window of opportunity before that happened, and he decided to make good use of it. And as awful as it might seem to me, I can see how, from his perspective, it was not just a reasonable choice, but a responsible one: By having one last fling, getting it out of his system, he'd make it easier to resist temptation later.

Of course, this dubious moral logic is premised on the notion that it is possible to keep secrets from my mother. Not a safe assumption, as it turns out. My father still has no idea how my mother found out he'd been unfaithful. "It's like she just knew," he said, the one time we talked about it. "She looked at me, and she knew."

Which sounds like Mom, all right. And Dad's response sounds like me, before I learned better: He denied the accusation. At first he tried to laugh it off. When that didn't work, he tried to gaslight her, acting hurt that she'd be so paranoid and untrusting of him. Mom hates that tactic, and she's not shy about expressing her displeasure physically. Their confrontation took place outside the motel where Dad was staying; the motel had a pool, and my father ended up swimming, fully clothed. By the time he dragged himself out of the water, Mom had gotten in her car and driven away. Dad waited twenty-four hours for her to come back, realized she wasn't going to, got scared, and spent another two days tracking her down.

By then, he was properly contrite. He confessed. He said that he was sorry and begged for another chance. He swore he would never do it again. He sounded sincere, and, in that moment, he probably thought that he was sincere.

Mom thought differently. She didn't believe that Dad was sorry; just unhappy with the consequences of his actions. Given a second chance, she believed he would act the same way, but try to make it come out differently somehow. Which it wouldn't.

You could make a case for giving him a second chance anyway. My mother would say that was wishful thinking. People do change, but they change in their own time, for reasons that make sense to them. They don't change just because we want them to, or because it would be convenient to our own desires if they did.

As my mother saw it, she had three choices:

One, she could reconcile herself to marrying a serial adulterer, in the hope that he'd one day grow out of it, or that she'd someday stop caring. Like volunteering to be punched in the gut at random intervals, this was not an attractive option to her.

Two, she could declare war: Find some threat or emotional cudgel to force my father to be faithful. As I've already made clear, Mom has a talent for behavior modification, so I don't doubt she could have succeeded at this, but the resulting marriage would have been miserable, hardly worth fighting for. She'd have done it if she'd had to, for my sake. Thank God, it wasn't necessary. She had her family's support, and then she had Zero Day; she didn't need to marry my father.

Which left option three: Say no. Let him go. Simple.

The decision to cut my father out of her life completely—and, by extension, out of my life—was the only part she ever agonized about. It's also the part that took me the longest to understand.

I used to think she'd done it for me. To protect me from him. But the truth is, my mother didn't think of my father as a bad guy. A jerk, yes, and painful for her to be around, but not wicked. When I asked about him, she was honest about his shortcomings, but she never trash-talked him in front of me (it was some of my other relatives who did that). And when I decided I wanted to meet him, she told me where to look.

It wasn't me Mom was protecting. And it wasn't just my father who she didn't trust. He was the wrong guy for her. She knew that. But she'd always known it—from the start, before they ever got together. It didn't matter. She got together with him anyway. Fell for him, hard.

And even after he broke her heart, she wasn't sorry.


"You can snoop, but don't be weird about it," Darla said when she gave me the link to her Facebook page.

She'd been on the crew for several weeks by that point, and we'd just finished one of the best gigs we would ever work together, a fifty-person raid on the troll city of Zuul'titlan. Currently the hardest dungeon in Asgarth, Zuul'titlan takes a minimum of eight hours to complete, and even experienced raiding guilds often require multiple attempts to get through it. It's not a place you want to bring clients to, even if they're willing to pay overtime rates. Too frustrating.

But there's an exception to every rule, and in this case it came in the form of the Kwan brothers, Wing and Arthur. They were engineers from Shenzhen who'd made a fortune building solar power plants in Africa, and they had a lot of eclectic hobbies, including Call to Wizardry. They didn't play often, and when they did, they were only interested in the toughest end-level content. Every few months they'd pop up on the sherpa forum, looking to recruit an army. They paid extremely well, but they expected perfection in return. They'd been known to boot whole sherpa crews mid-raid for the mistakes of a single member, and once they'd dinged you, they'd never hire your team again.

Darla had already alienated one of our other long-term customers. To protect our relationship with the Kwans, Ray wanted to exclude her from the run. I overruled him. Darla could be trouble, but she was predictable: She only really acted out when she was bored or when the clients couldn't keep up with her. I thought she'd be an asset on the Kwan brothers gig, and I was right. She did wisecrack a little going into it—enough to make Ray nervous—but once we got started and she saw that she was the one who was going to have to keep up, she did great.

I didn't have a lot of chance to admire Darla's form that day. The Kwans had picked me to be one of the raid tanks, so I was in front and very busy. Beating Zuul'titlan is like running a marathon. The most physically taxing part of the raid happens right in the middle, when, after fighting your way across a long series of heavily defended causeways, you enter the Plaza of Dancing Snakes, where a group of troll high priests are about to perform a human sacrifice. Killing the priests is harder than the final boss fight would be in a normal dungeon, but in Zuul'titlan, it's just a prelude. Once the priests are dead, waves of angry troll peasants start streaming into the plaza. To advance, you must kill ten thousand of them, and if you screw up and let your raid group get wiped, the body count resets to zero.

It took three and a half hours, but we cleared the plaza on the first try. The brothers announced a fifteen-minute bio break. When I got back from the bathroom I looked around for Darla and spotted her unattended avatar standing beside a mountain of corpses, covered in gore and still panting with exertion from the fight. Then Darla resumed control and caught me looking. "Perv," she said, and grinned.

And then it was on to the raid's final act: a running battle up a nine-step pyramid and a showdown with the troll demigod Machu Picchu Mon. Long story short, we aced it.

Afterwards, we and the other sherpa crews went to the Game Lobby, where the Kwan brothers handed out performance bonuses. While Darla and I waited our turn, she told me she wouldn't be around for the next few days—she was going to visit her dad, who lived in a part of Arizona where bandwidth was sketchy. "But if another job like this comes up, let me know," she added. "I can drive into Flagstaff and find a game café if I need to."

"OK," I said. "I'll hit you up on Ghost." Meaning Ghost-it Note, an anonymous contact app popular with gamer gurls who don't want their online acquaintances following them home. It was how Darla and I had been communicating since we'd met.

"No, wait," she said. "Here." She handed me a virtual calling card with her phone number, instant message code, and a link to her Facebook page.

It's always flattering when a woman lets you know that she's decided you're not an ax murderer, but I've learned from experience not to make a big deal of it. I just nodded and saved the contact info to my system. "You can snoop," Darla told me, "but don't be weird about it."

Just then I was too tired to do anything but crash, so as soon as the Kwan brothers' money was in my PayPal account, I logged out and slept for ten hours. But the next day, after a shower and some food, I went on Facebook and finally learned Darla's full name.

Darla Jean Covington's Facebook page was only four years old, which meant it probably wasn't her first. That's not unusual. I'm hardly ever on Facebook, and I've still managed to accumulate half a dozen separate accounts, for business, family, and different groups of friends.

Darla's timeline consisted largely of reposts of not-safe-for-work memes, and videos in which people did stupid, dangerous, illegal, and/or offensive things. There were also videos of Darla herself at various ages, tagged "personal." The most recent of these, which had been posted less than an hour after she gave me her contact info, was titled "OMG — DARLA NIP SLIP & TWAT SHOT, SO EMBARRASSING!!!" I figured that was a test and didn't click on it. Instead I scrolled down to one marked "CLASSIC: DEENIE LOSES HER SHIT AT 2,000 FEET."

The video showed two little blond girls, one in a dress and the other in ripped jeans and a Resident Evil T-shirt, riding in a hot air balloon over a landscape of wooded hills. Deenie, the girl in the dress, was terrified of heights and kept her face buried in her hands. Darla, bored with the view, leaned against the side of the gondola and tilted her head back. "Oh my God, Deenie!" she exclaimed. "The balloon has a hole in it! And look, the cables are coming loose!" Deenie began shrieking, and an unseen older woman, probably the one holding the camera, said, "Darla! Darla, you stop that!" (Spoiler alert: She did not stop that.)

I scrolled down further, checking out "SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL" (teenage Darla starts a fistfight during a roller derby game), "DARLA BREAKS HER ASS, CHAPTER 99" (a demonstration of why unicycles are rarely used for stunt jumping), and "HISTORY'S SHORTEST LIGHTSABER DUEL" (Darla and one of the girls from the roller derby video try fencing with fluorescent light tubes).

My favorite was "EARL IS A GINORMOUS PUSSY," in which Darla and three boys—Jeff, Mason, and Earl—played paintball out in the woods, capturing the action with helmet and body cams. They only had three paintball guns, all of which the boys had claimed, so Darla used a BB gun instead. I know that sounds idiotic, but their helmets had solid face shields and they were wearing heavy clothes, so the chance of maiming was minimal. Darla's real problem was getting the boys to admit they'd been hit at all. After giving them a chance to play fair, she adapted, double-pumping the action on the BB gun to increase the velocity of the pellets and aiming for weak spots in their armor. Much of the footage was devoted to ambushes: Darla buries herself in a pile of leaves and shoots Mason in an exposed band of belly fat as he goes by; Darla waits in a tree, whistles as Jeff passes beneath her, and plinks a BB off his face shield when he looks up.

In the video's final scene, Earl crouched behind a stone wall while Darla hectored him from the far side of a clearing, daring him to stop hiding and face her in the open. When Earl declined, Darla charged. With the video slowed to half speed, you could see the paintballs leave Earl's gun, and see Darla do this amazing series of sideways pivots, dodging every shot while somehow keeping her balance and her forward momentum. Then the paintball gun jammed, or maybe Earl just panicked. The POV switched from his helmet cam to Darla's as she vaulted the wall, knocked Earl to the ground, pulled down his pants, and shot him in the ass.

I rewatched that part of the video several times, then scrolled back up to the top of Darla's Facebook page, zeroing in on a line from her bio: "Virginian by blood, Arizonan by birth, Oregonian by choice."

Oregonian, I thought. Interesting.

Right after I first came to Berkeley, I hooked up with another online acquaintance, Suzie O'Dell, who also lived in Oregon. We'd been flirting for a while, and when Suzie found out I was moving to the Bay Area, she invited herself down to meet me face to face. The off-campus apartment I'd rented was unfurnished, and I didn't have a bed yet, but that was OK, Suzie came prepared, driving down from Eugene with a futon mattress strapped to the roof of her car. The hookup didn't go so well: As sometimes happens, the electricity we'd felt in cyberspace didn't translate into real-world chemistry. We gave it our best try, but by the second day it was clear this would be a one-time visit. Suzie did let me keep the futon, though—so if the moral of the story was "sometimes wanting is better than having," the other moral of the story was, "even when having disappoints, you can still get something useful out of it." But in my current frame of mind, the real takeaway was simply this: Oregon is close to California. Practically next door.

Darla had said she'd be at her dad's place for a few days, but two weeks passed with no word from her. I thought about calling to see if she wanted to work, but the gigs we were getting—level grinds, easy dungeon runs—were the sort that brought out Darla's bad side, and meanwhile, Ray had been much happier in her absence; so I decided it would be better all around if I were patient.

Then the Kwan brothers popped up on the forum again. They wanted to take another run at Zuul'titlan, this time going for the Knights and Priests achievement, which requires you to complete the raid using only tanks and healers, no dps characters. The reduced damage output turns the marathon into something more akin to a death march: We were looking at twenty hours, start to finish. And the Kwans wanted to do it all in one day.

I rang Darla's number and left her a message on voice mail, asking if she was up for an insane tanking job.

She called back two minutes later.

"Jesus Christ," Darla said, "why did I agree to this?"

"Because you were bored, and wanted to do something fun and exciting?"

"Ha ha, fuck you."

It was the day before the raid, and we were out on the Mirage Salt Flats, busting rocks—grueling but necessary prep work. Armor degrades in combat—faster if you die, slower if you don't—and in an hours-long battle like the Plaza of the Dancing Snakes, even plate mail will wear away to nothing, leaving you naked before you've murdered your last peasant. The solution is Arneson's Clearcoat, a magical preparation that prevents armor degradation for up to twenty-four hours. Clearcoat's main ingredient is Essence of Gygax, which can only be obtained by mining adamantium nodes. The nodes are shiny rock clusters that spawn in the Flats; each one contains several chunks of adamantium ore and has a two-and-a-half-percent chance of yielding an Essence. You need ten Essences to make one dose of Clearcoat, so we had a long slog ahead of us. But I was OK with that.

"How was it really, with your dad?" I asked. "You must have been having a pretty good time, since you stayed so long."

"The first week was great," Darla said. "Dad's got this little wind racer he built himself—you know, like a sailboat on wheels? Near where he lives there's a dry lake bed, kind of like this but without the giant scorpions, and if the wind's right, you can get the racer up to seventy, eighty miles an hour, easy."

"That does sound like fun."

"It was, until I tipped it making a turn and broke the mast."

"You OK?"

"Scrapes and bruises." Darla shrugged. "But that put an end to the races."

"You stayed to help fix it?"

"I helped Dad put a new mast on, but me staying, that was more about pissing off my mom." She paused, sizing up a node on the ground in front of her. To mine it you hit it with a pickax; the UI judges your form, and if your aim is off, it can take half a dozen swings. Darla never needed more than three.

"Your mom's in Arizona, too?"

"No, she moved back to Lynchburg after the divorce." Darla swung her pickax—WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!—and frowned as the node fractured into three chunks of ore, but no Essence. "My parents have one of those 'mature' divorces where they pretend to still be friends, even though they can't stand to be in the same part of the country. The day after I was supposed to go home, she called him, and when she found out I was still there, she got jealous. She tried to play it like she was upset about the racer crash, but really it was just, 'How come Darla never overstays her visits with me?' She started calling every day to see whether I'd left yet, and so of course then I had to stay. It's like this game we play, Who's the Bigger Bitch? I always win. So what about your parents? They divorced?"

"Never married. Separated, though, since before I was born."

"Whose fault was it?"

"His fault," I said. "But her call."

"Interesting. So your mom's a bitch too, then."

"I wouldn't call her that. Mom's a badass, yeah, but—"

"A badass is just a bitch you happen to like." Darla grinned. "I guess that explains why you have the hots for me, huh? Don't deny it, I know it's true."

This was my cue to say something like, "I wasn't going to deny it," and then swing the conversation around to how San Francisco is a convenient stopover if you're driving between Oregon and Arizona. But instead I said, "You think you remind me of my mother?"

"Don't I?"

"The two of you are nothing alike."

"Really? I'm not a badass?"

"You are, and I like that you are, but you're..." I fumbled for a way to frame the distinction that wouldn't come off as an insult. ".... a different flavor of badass."

"Ooh, a different flavor!" Darla laughed. "And what about my cousin? You like his flavor, too?"

"Your cousin?"

"Earl. The ginormous pussy."

"I liked the video."

"Yeah, I know you did. Fun fact about YouTube: Not only can you see how many times a video gets watched, you can also track what part people are looking at. Somebody was really interested in the last thirty seconds of that paintball game... So what was it that turned you on? Earl's bare ass, or me pumping a BB into it?"

When someone's trying to embarrass the shit out of you, sometimes the best strategy is just to embrace it. "Does it have to be either/or?" I said.

"I knew it," Darla said. "Total perv." She turned away, shaking her head, and swung her pickax again. WHAM! WHAM! "Fuck." One chunk of ore. No Essence.

I had better luck with my next node, though it took me five swings to crack it. When the rock finally fell apart, nestled among the ore was a glowing pile of silver dust. Already bound to me, the Essence of Gygax shimmered and vanished into my inventory. "Sorry," I said, to Darla's sullen stare. "I'd share if I could."

"Yeah, whatever." She scanned the horizon.

"Want to go find some griefers to kill?" I asked, guessing that was what she was looking for. "Or some innocent players to grief on?"

"I'd love to, but that would only drag this misery out longer... How many of these rocks do we have to smash?"

"With a two-point-five percent drop rate, you should expect to farm around four hundred nodes to get all ten Essences. Of course that's the straight average. Depending on the RNG, it could be—"

"Yeah, thanks, I get it. Do me a favor?"

"What?"

"If you ever do get around to making your own MMORPG, leave out this grindy crap. I know the Asperger's crowd eat it up, but it makes me want to throw myself out a window."

"How about I put in a special toggle for you?" I said. "Let you skip the grind, while the players who enjoy it can still do it. Everyone's happy."

"Swell." WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! "Shit."

"What else would you want in a game?" I asked. "If you could have anything."

Darla sighed. "Is this your idea of sexy banter?"

"Call it market research. I'm honestly interested."

"OK... Permadeath."

"Permadeath? Really?"

"Do I sound uncertain?"

"How would you make that work, though?"

"How do you think? No resurrection: If your character dies, you've got to start over with a new one."

"I know what permadeath is," I said. "But how do you get people to sign up for it? Would you really want to play a game where one mistake could cost you a character you'd invested hundreds of hours in?"

"Aren't we doing that already? Think how many thousands of hours' worth of characters are going to be on that raid tomorrow. And EULA will ban every one of them if they get wind we're doing it for pay."

"Eula bans are different, though. They're a cost of doing business. They're not fun."

"Doesn't mean they couldn't be," Darla said. "What if you could fight the EULA cops? Trial by combat, I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat."

"They'd never let you win."

"They'd stack the deck, sure. But what if you had a chance, even five percent? You saying you wouldn't go for that?"

My immediate thought was that I'd rather not have to deal with EULA at all. But I could see how, to a certain mind-set, being able to fight the law and win was an even more attractive option. "What about technical issues? If you lose a fair fight—or even an unfair one—that's one thing. But what if your internet goes out? What if you're lagging so bad you've got no chance at all?"

She shrugged. "Make it so that can't happen."

"But you can't do that."

"I know you can't." Another shrug. "But we're talking about what I want, right? What you want, and what you can have, those are two different things." Eyeing me significantly: "You should know that."

After that we pounded rocks for a while without talking. But then Darla's luck changed—she found two Essences in a row—and with it, her mood. "Hot streak, hot streak!" She collected her bounty and eyed me again, smiling. "So what about you? You know what you'd want in a game?"

"Oh sure. I've got a whole list of things."

"So tell me one," Darla said. "Come on, I showed you mine."

"All right. I—"

"And never mind the practical shit," she added. "Tell me an idea you think would be really cool, even if you don't think it could work. Those are the ones worth doing."

"OK," I said. "Have you heard of a game called Footsteps After Midnight?"

She shook her head. "What is it, some new horror movie tie-in?"

"Original IP. And old. Dial-up era."

"Dial-up? You talking about a MUD?"

"Parts of it were MUDlike. You played a hacker-slash-private investigator caught up in a hunt for a serial killer. You had a sidekick who did fieldwork for you, and the parts where you sent him out to different locations and told him what to do, that played a lot like a traditional text adventure. But to figure out where he would go next, you'd also do things like hack into databases and email accounts.

"But that was just the online part of the game," I continued. "The cool thing was, there was also an offline component. When you first started playing, you'd give the game all this personal information: your name, your mailing address, your email address if you had one, your home phone number, and so on. And then, as you made progress through the case—"

"The killer would call you," Darla guessed.

"Yeah," I said nodding. "And other characters, too. Like, the day after you broke into the central police database, you'd get a threatening call from the chief of detectives: 'Hey, we can't prove it, but we know it was you, knock it off...' And there were packages. The way the game company got around bandwidth limitations was by mailing you stuff. You'd hack the coroner's email and forge an evidence request, and a few days later you'd get a set of crime scene photos."

"And the killer?" Darla asked. "What would he send you, body parts?"

"A severed finger, at one point," I said. "Other trophies from his victims. And creepy letters and postcards, personalized to make it seem like he was watching you."

"OK, I'm sold," Darla said. "This sounds awesome. How come I never heard of this game?"

"The company went bankrupt a few months after the game debuted. It was expensive to play, and they couldn't get enough subscribers to cover their overhead. And the few players who did sign up had these, unique customer service issues... Like, one of the questions you'd get asked when you first started playing was what time of day it was OK to call you. But the company forgot about time zones somehow, and also, this was back when most people still had shared landlines. So these phone calls would be coming in at odd hours, and sometimes the person who picked up would be a roommate who didn't know about the game... And it was the same with the packages. Someone's mom would come home early from work and get curious about this envelope from the coroner's office addressed to her kid, and when she opened it, there'd be these photos of a hacked-up body in a bathtub."

Darla was hugging herself laughing now. "Oh my God!" she said. "I would pay anything to do that to my mom!"

"Well, you're special," I told her. "Most of the players weren't happy about it—or their parents weren't. The game company had the real cops called on them more than once. So they had to shut down."

"Is there any way I can still play this game?" Darla asked. "Like a legacy version of the online part of it?"

"No, I looked. There's a stub article on Wikipedia about it, but the links are all dead. Nothing else. The only reason I know as much as I do is that my dad has this collection of really old computer game magazines. I was looking through it the last time I visited and came across an article, 'Missteps After Midnight,' about the company going out of business."

"So you want to do your own version of this? New and improved?"

"Maybe," I said. "The idea's not as original anymore—there are alternate-reality games that have covered a lot of the same ground—but I still think you could do something interesting with it. With advances in technology, especially social media, you could do a much better job of personalizing the experience. And at the same time, it'd be easier to keep control of it, make sure only people who signed up to play got involved in the game."

"Fuck that," Darla said. "I want the version that scares the shit out of my friends and family."

"We can do another special toggle. A 'give my mom a heart attack' option."

"No, fuck that, I'm serious. This is what I mean about practical shit—you barely come up with the idea, and you're already looking for ways to water it down."

"Not wanting to send corpse photos to the wrong people is 'watering it down'?"

"If the point of the game is to make people feel like they're involved in something real, that's what you should be focused on—how to make them feel that. Instead, you're thinking about how to put limits on it."

"Because I don't want to get arrested. Or sued."

"So do a EULA: 'This is an intense game, not intended for lightweights, click here if you've got the balls to indemnify us.'"

I laughed. "And assuming for the sake of argument that that would hold up legally, how many people would click, do you think?"

"I would."

"OK, that's one subscriber."

"There'd be others. If the game is really cool, cool players will find it."

"But I don't just want cool players. Uncool players have money to spend, too. And there are more of them."

Darla frowned impatiently. "Is the money even that important, though?"

"To a profit-making business? Yeah, it's pretty important."

"No, seriously, think about it: Footsteps After Midnight came out, what, thirty years ago? Forty years ago?"

"Forty-five."

"Which means the guys who made the game are probably dead now, or drooling in an old folks' home somewhere."

"Drooling and bankrupt," I said.

"Yeah, but so what? Their business tanked, but a half century later you read about what they did and you're like, 'Whoa, that sounds cool! I'd like to try that.'"

"OK, but Darla—"

"And isn't that better? Wouldn't you rather go broke doing something cool than get rich doing something lame?"

I'd never seen Darla get this passionate before. I'd seen her excited, but there was always an element of flippancy to her enthusiasm, a sense that she was herself too cool to take anything that seriously. That flippancy was gone now. She sounded earnest.

This was another cue, a signal for me to put my own opinions on hold and really hear her out. I didn't need to agree with her, but I did need to let her know that I was paying attention—that I took her seriously. But we were deep in what I considered my turf now—business—and I'd already decided that Darla, whatever her other skills, had no head for that. So I plowed ahead with my own way of looking at things. Which was, after all, the right way.

"The thing is," I told her, using that know-it-all voice that women find endlessly endearing, "the thing is, Darla, you don't need to choose. You can do something really cool and turn a profit at it..."

"Not if wanting to turn a profit makes you a pussy about taking risks." Her voice grew mocking. "'We'll put in a special toggle, Darla.' 'We'll make everybody happy, Darla.' Except you won't. You'll just ruin what's good about the idea."

"Darla—" I broke off, laughing at her sudden fury. Probably the worst thing I could have done.

"Fine, don't listen to me." Stone-faced and indignant now. "Make a lame-ass game, I don't care. I hope you make a billion dollars."

"Darla, wait," I said, too late. "I'm sorry, OK? I do want to hear your thoughts about this, I just—"

"Fuck you and your sorry. I know what you want." Hefting her pickax: "But I've got a ton of rocks to break, so you're out of luck. I'm going this way. You can fuck off that way."

"Darla, come on... Darla..." But she was already walking away.

Well played, genius, I thought. Yet at the same time I couldn't really bring myself to feel bad. Obviously you couldn't make a game that might panic innocent bystanders. How was it unreasonable to say that?

Assuming that Darla's anger would be fleeting, I gave it half an hour, in the meanwhile collecting another two Essences. Then I started edging back towards her, watching out of the corner of my eye for the telltale silver sparkle that would signal she too had found another Essence. Once I saw that, I moved closer, my plan being to act as if her blowup had never happened. But I was barely within earshot when she said, "I told you to fuck off," without even looking at me.

So on that day, at least, California and Oregon weren't so close together after all.


 MUD — Multi-User Dungeon. One of the earliest forms of virtual world, MUDs originated as multiplayer versions of classic interactive fiction games like Colossal Cave and Zork. Most MUDs are entirely text-based. Players enter commands using simple sentences (e.g., WALK NORTH, or PUT OIL IN LANTERN) and the results of their actions are described in prose... MUDs remain popular even today. Their lack of graphics means that they can run on almost any computer system. Where a cutting-edge video game might require as big a production staff as a major motion picture, a MUD can be scripted by a single author. And while fantasy and science-fiction themes are the most common, the lack of commercial pressure means that MUDs can and do exist in every conceivable genre: There are spy MUDs, horror MUDs, Western MUDs, educational MUDs, religious MUDs, and, of course, pornographic MUDs.

—Lady Ada's Lexicon


Location: A Clearing at the Edge of Town

You stand in a grassy clearing on the outskirts of a small Midwestern town. It is dusk of a summer evening, and the first fireflies have begun to appear. A path leads east through a sparse thicket of woods. You see lights shining beyond the trees and hear the faint sound of calliope music.

The clearing is littered with brightly colored handbills.

> TAKE HANDBILL

You pick up one of the handbills.

> LOOK AT HANDBILL

The handbill is illustrated with a drawing of a carousel. The handbill reads:

 Green Meadow Midsummer Mystery Carnival

 Thrills! Amusements! Contests of Brain and Brawn!

 Prove Your Worth and Win a STUPENDOUS TROPHY!!!

A breeze gusts from the direction of the woods, bringing a smell of hot dogs and cotton candy. The handbills flutter and dance about the clearing, like children excited by the prospect of the carnival.

> TAKE HANDBILL

You reach for another handbill, but realize that it is identical to the one you are already holding and decide not to bother.

...

...

Mr. Jones materializes beside you.

Mr. Jones is here.

> LOOK AT MR. JONES

Mr. Jones has not created a physical description for himself.

> SAY, "HELLO, MR. JONES."

...

...

> SHOW HELP SCREEN TO MR. JONES

You call up a handy tutorial screen and show it to Mr. Jones.

...

...

Mr. Jones says, "This seems quite primitive."

> SAY, "YOU WANTED TO EXPERIENCE THE FULL POTENTIAL OF THE MEDIUM. MODERN MMORPGS EVOLVED FROM TEXT-BASED ADVENTURES LIKE THIS ONE."

Mr. Jones says, "Very well. What do I do?"

> SAY, "FOLLOW ME."

Mr. Jones is now following you.

> WALK EAST

You follow the path through the sparse woods. Mr. Jones follows you.

Location: The Entrance to the Carnival

A wooden archway strung with lights and festooned with banners marks the entrance to the Green Meadow Carnival. Standing in front of the arch is a Tout in a cheap suit. "Ladies! Gentlemen! Children of all ages!" he cries. "Come right in! Fun and games will be had by all! And for the deserving among you... This prize!" The Tout gestures dramatically at a pedestal, spotlit from above, upon which rests a stupendous trophy!

> LOOK AT TROPHY

The stupendous trophy is truly stupendous! It is big, and shiny, and totally awesome! To possess it would make you the envy of everyone in town!

Mr. Jones reaches for the trophy. The Tout smacks his hand away and says, "Careful, pal. That's not yours yet."

Mr. Jones tries to hit the Tout. The Tout dodges the blow and says, "Whoa!"

Mr. Jones tries to punch the Tout. The Tout sidesteps and says, "Hey, knock it off!"

Mr. Jones tries to kick the Tout. The Tout ducks backwards and says, "What is your problem, asshole?"

> SAY, "YOU CAN'T FIGHT HIM. NOT A COMBAT GAME."

Mr. Jones says, "How do I get the trophy, then?"

> SAY, "ASK HIM."

Mr. Jones asks the Tout how to get the trophy.

"An excellent question!" the Tout says. "Throughout the carnival, you will find contests and other challenges that allow you to win *PRIZE TICKETS* like this one." He holds up a gleaming golden ticket. "Collect 25 of these tickets, bring them to me, and the stupendous trophy will be yours!"

"But wait!" the Tout says. "There's more! Bring me an additional 5 tickets -- 30 in all -- and I will throw in an additional prize!" The Tout gestures dramatically at a velvet curtain hanging beside the trophy pedestal. A drumroll sounds, and the curtain is swept aside to reveal... "A year's supply of Turtle Wax!"

...

Mr. Jones says, "Why would I put wax on a tortoise?"

> SAY, "IT'S A JOKE. NOT A VERY FUNNY ONE. GOOGLE IT IF YOU ARE CURIOUS."

Mr. Jones says, "I will take your word for it. What now?"

> ENTER THE CARNIVAL

You step through the arch and enter the carnival. Mr. Jones follows you.

Location: Main Carnival Thoroughfare, West End

You are at the west end of a broad thoroughfare lined with carnival attractions. From the east you hear the sound of the calliope, louder now. To the north you see a kissing booth. To the south is a high striker.

> SAY, "EACH OF THE ATTRACTIONS IS A PUZZLE THAT AWARDS A PRIZE TICKET FOR SOLVING IT."

> SAY, "WHAT WOULD YOU L

Mr. Bungle is here!

Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Bungle runs up to you, dressed in a heavy trenchcoat. "Balloon smugglers!" he cries, ripping open the coat to reveal a perfectly shaped pair of double-D breasts. Before you can duck away he clamps his hands around the back of your head and kisses you full on the mouth, ramming his tongue down your throat. You sputter and choke and beat your hands feebly against him, but you cannot escape Mr. Bungle's steely grip, and as he grinds against you, you feel both horribly violated and undeniably aroused.

Just as you are about to pass out, Mr. Bungle breaks the kiss and steps back. "Gazonga!" he says, eyes going wide. You look down and see that the perfect breasts have somehow been transferred from his chest to yours! "Let's motorboat!" says Mr. Bungle. He buries his face in your ample cleavage and buzzes his lips. Once again, your sense of violation wars with feelings of arousal. Arousal wins; you swoon.

"Dee-licious!" Mr. Bungle says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Double-dee-licious, I should say!" Then he spins around, bends over, farts explosively, and jets out of sight with his coattails flapping.

...

Mr. Jones says, "What."

Mr. Jones says, "What was that?"

> SAY, "GRIEFERS ARE EVERYWHERE. I AM SORRY."

Mr. Jones says, "This is a very stupid game so far."

> SAY, "DON'T GIVE UP YET. TRY ONE OF THE ATTRACTIONS."

Mr. Jones looks around.

Mr. Jones says, "Not the kissing booth."

> WALK SOUTH

You approach the high striker. Mr. Jones follows you.

Location: The High Striker

A classic test of strength, the high striker is a twenty-foot-tall tower with a bell mounted at the top. The goal is to ring the bell by striking a lever at the tower's base and propelling a puck up a metal cable. Vertical gradations painted on the tower indicate ascending levels of strength, from "90-pound weakling" near the bottom to "Man of Steel!" at the height of the bell.

A Tout, who appears to have been cloned from the one at the front gate, is leaning against a guy-wire beside the high striker. "Step right up!" he calls. "Ring the bell and win a *PRIZE TICKET*!!! Cave Boy, show them how it's done!" A young boy in a leopard-skin loincloth steps out of the shadows, holding a big wooden mallet. He strikes a pose, flexing his biceps, then winds up and slams the mallet down onto the lever. The puck goes flying to the top of the tower and rings the bell!

"Well done, Cave Boy, well done!" The Tout steps forward to take the mallet, then shoos the boy back into the shadows. "All right," the Tout says, "who's next?"

> SAY, "GO AHEAD."

Mr. Jones takes the mallet from the Tout.

Mr. Jones swings the mallet at the lever. The blow seems at least as powerful as the cave boy's, but the result is far less impressive: The puck ascends only a third of the way up the tower, to the level marked "Assistant furniture mover."

"It's all in the wrists," says the Tout. "Go on, try again."

Mr. Jones swings the mallet at the lever. The blow lands even harder this time, but the puck only rises to the halfway point, "Popeye's understudy."

"Looks like somebody didn't eat his spinach," the Tout says. "But give it another try."

Mr. Jones swings the mallet at the lever. The thunderous blow sets the cable quivering, but the puck barely makes it past "90-pound weakling."

"Jeez," says the Tout. "Are you low blood sugar or something?"

Mr. Jones starts to swing the mallet at the Tout, but fearing he will only embarrass himself further, he decides not to.

> SAY, "STILL NOT A COMBAT GAME. THINK IT THROUGH. SOMETHING CHANGED BETWEEN THE TIME CAVE BOY TOOK HIS SWING AND THE TIME YOU DID. WHAT WAS IT?"

...

Mr. Jones examines the guy-wire.

> LOOK AT GUY-WIRE

The guy-wire is a length of metal cable that holds the high striker steady and keeps it from falling over... or at least, that's what you'd expect it to do. Upon closer examination, you realize that the wire, which should be under tension, actually has some slack in it. The bottom of the guy-wire is attached to a peg in the ground, but you cannot tell how it is attached up top -- the wire just vanishes into a hole in the back of the tower behind the bell. This leads to a final observation: The cable that the puck rides on is the exact same sort of cable the guy-wire is made of... and it looks like it might be a bit slack, as well. Curious.

...

Mr. Jones says, "I understand."

Mr. Jones orders the Tout to lean against the guy-wire.

"I'm sorry," the Tout says, "carnival gaming regulations require me to stand here and observe while you make your attempt."

Mr. Jones threatens the Tout with the mallet, but the gesture is so ineffectual that, out of kindness, we are going to pretend that he does not do this.

...

Mr. Jones says, "Are you allowed to help?"

> SAY, "YES. YOU'VE GOT IT."

> LEAN ON GUY-WIRE

As you approach the guy-wire, the Tout becomes flustered. "Here now!" he says, "this is highly irregular!" He doesn't stop you, though, so you lean your weight against it. As the wire goes taut, you hear the creak of what sounds like a pulley hidden in the top of the tower, and the cable on the front of the tower goes taut, too. The puck should rise much more smoothly now, with less friction.

> SAY, "GO FOR IT."

Mr. Jones swings the mallet at the lever. A mighty blow! The puck rockets up the cable and rings the bell!

"HIGHLY irregular," the Tout grumbles. But a crowd of onlookers has begun to gather, and fearing that his secret will get out, he quickly hands each of you a golden *PRIZE TICKET*. "Now scram!" he shouts, shooing you back to the thoroughfare.

Location: Main Carnival Thoroughfare, West End

Mr. Jones is here. You now have 1 *PRIZE TICKET*, out of a possible 30.

Mr. Jones says, "Do all of the puzzles require the help of a second player?"

> SAY, "NO. MOST HAVE MULTIPLE SOLUTIONS, AND IT IS POSSIBLE TO GET THE TROPHY SOLO. YOU *MIGHT* NEED SOMEONE ELSE'S HELP TO GET THE TURTLE WAX. I CAN'T REMEMBER."

> SAY, "THIS CARNIVAL IS A SUBZONE OF A MUCH LARGER MUD CALLED 'PLANET I.F.' THERE ARE OTHER ZONES THAT REQUIRE A TEAM EFFORT THROUGHOUT."

> SAY, "I KNOW OF AT LEAST ONE PUZZLE WHOSE SOLUTION REQUIRES A HUNDRED PLAYERS TO ACT IN TANDEM, PERFORMING A SPECIFIC SEQUENCE OF ACTIONS WITHIN A SHORT TIME PERIOD. VERY DIFFICULT, ESPECIALLY WITH GRIEFERS AROUND."

Mr. Jones says, "Interesting."

Mr. Jones says, "This type of game must be relatively easy to produce."

> SAY, "VERY EASY. SETTING UP THE SERVER CAN BE TRICKY, BUT THERE ARE DEVELOPMENT KITS THAT DO THE HARD WORK FOR YOU, AND LET ANYONE WITH A STANDARD BROWSER LOG IN AND PLAY."

Mr. Jones says, "Interesting."

Mr. Jones says, "I will look around some more. Follow me."

> FOLLOW MR. JONES

You are now following Mr. Jones.

Mr. Jones walks east. You follow Mr. Jones.

Location: Main Thoroughfare, Carousel Intersection

At this point, the thoroughfare intersects another pathway leading north and south. At the center of the intersection is a carousel, blaring calliope music. Looking around the corners of the intersection clockwise from the northeast, you can also see: a ring toss, a hot dog cart, a water pistol range, and a fortune-teller's tent.

Ms. Pang waves to you from the carousel.

Mr. Jones walks east. You start to follow him, but something in the calliope music makes you turn around and walk back towards the carousel.

Ms. Pang waves to you from the carousel.

> WHO IS MS. PANG?

I don't know who Ms. Pang is.

Ms. Pang waves to you from the carousel.

> FOLLOW MR. JONES

Mr. Jones is not here.

Ms. Pang waves to you from the carousel.

> WALK EAST

No.

Ms. Pang waves to you from the carousel.

> GO CAROUSEL

You climb aboard the carousel.

Location: Aboard the Carousel

You are riding on an old-fashioned merry-go-round. Teams of wooden horses bob up and down in time to the music of a steam-powered calliope. As the ride picks up speed, you notice a metal pole that has been erected beside the carousel. A mechanical arm extends down and inward from the top of the pole, so that its tip is almost within reach of the outermost ring of horses as they move past. Attached to the tip of the arm is a shiny brass ring with a *PRIZE TICKET* stuffed inside it!

Never mind the brass ring. The brass ring is not important. You turn your full attention to Ms. Pang, who sits on a bench between two rows of horses. She is a striking ethnic Chinese woman; though small in stature, something about the way she carries herself suggests it would be a fatal mistake to underestimate her. You should do whatever she asks.

Ms. Pang assumes you have already recognized her, but to avoid wasting time, she points to a small blue pin on her blouse. The pin speaks in your voice: "It's me, John Chu."

> SAY, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?"

Ms. Pang says, "I was going to ask you the same question."

> SAY, "I'M WORKING. I'M BUSY."

Ms. Pang says, "Indeed."

Ms. Pang whips out a computer tablet and shows you the screen. You see yourself -- or, rather, a very convincing copy of yourself -- leading Mr. Jones into the carnival funhouse. The two of you are soon lost in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

Ms. Pang says, "We have a few minutes. Why did you bring Mr. Jones here?"

> SAY, "HE IS STUDYING MMORPGS. MUDS ARE THE FOUNTAINHEAD."

Ms. Pang says, "I know. I have done my homework. But why this MUD? Why not something more iconic?"

> SAY, "I WANTED TO TRY A DIFFERENT THEME, TO SHOW HIM IT'S NOT ALL D&D AND STAR WARS. I USED TO PLAY PUZZLE GAMES LIKE THIS WITH MY MOM WHEN I WAS A KID. OUR VERSION OF BEDTIME STORIES."

Ms. Pang says, "That is touching. But I don't believe you."

> SHRUG

You shrug.

Ms. Pang says, "I think you chose this MUD for the software it uses."

Mr. Bungle is here!

Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Bungle leaps onto the carousel, dressed in a heavy trenchcoat. "Check out MY trophy!" he cries, ripping open the coat to reveal a truly stupendous penis. You gape at it, awestruck, wondering how he manages to keep his balance while sporting such an enormous member. "But wait, there's more!" Mr. Bungle says. Opening up a jar of Turtle Wax, he anoints himself and begins rubbing the creamy wax into his foreskin. The truly stupendous penis becomes even more stupendous!

"We're gonna go a gusher!" Mr. Bungle warns. You scramble for cover but it's too late. He ejaculates, like a proverbial fire hose, spraying semen everywhere: onto the wooden horses, into the calliope, through the brass ring, and of course, all over you. Drenched from head to toe, you feel horribly violated, yet strangely aroused. If not for embarrassment about the inadequate size of your own manhood, you might even unzip your fly and join in.

Mr. Bungle's orgasm goes on and on. He begins to shrink and shrivel up as his entire body mass is converted into hot spunk. "Veni, veni, veni," he croaks, until at last, turning completely inside out, he vanishes into his own urethra, leaving you to enjoy...

Location: Cum-Covered Carousel

...

...

...

Ms. Pang says, "Your little hobby attracts some sick fucking people, you know that?"

> SAY, "YOU DON'T HAVE TROLLS IN THE PRC?"

Ms. Pang smiles at your pathetically transparent attempt to get her to divulge information about herself.

Ms. Pang says, "As I was saying. This MUD uses the MUDMAKER software suite. All versions of MUDMAKER have security flaws in the server, which is why griefers are so rampant here. But this particular build also has a critical client-side flaw that can allow hackers to gain root privileges on certain users' computers."

Ms. Pang says, "I believe you are aware of this. I believe you brought Mr. Jones here so that you, or a confederate, can try to hack Mr. Jones's system. This hacking attempt is futile and reckless. If Smith notices, he will terminate your relationship with Mr. Jones. Do you remember how I told you not to disappoint me?"

> SAY, "I REMEMBER YOU PROMISED TO PAY ME TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS A WEEK. IS THERE A PROBLEM AT YOUR BANK?"

Ms. Pang says, "Your money is coming soon. In the meantime, you need to stop your foolish sleuthing attempts. Smith is not an idiot, and you are not nearly as clever as you think you are. The fact that I am here now should be proof enough of that. If you screw this up, I will make you very, very sorry."

> SAY, "I THINK IT IS WEIRD THAT YOU'RE TRYING TO SCARE ME LIKE THIS. IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU SAY YOU ARE, THE EASIEST WAY TO GET ME TO DO WHAT YOU WANT IS TO PAY ME WHAT YOU PROMISED. IF YOU WANT TO FREAK ME OUT TOO, THEN HAVE SOMEONE KNOCK ON MY DOOR AND HAND ME A SACK OF CASH. THAT WOULD MAKE AN IMPRESSION."

...

Ms. Pang says, "Very well. You will get your money. And regret your words."

Ms. Pang says, "He is leaving the funhouse. He is bored and wants to quit. I am having your double tell him to meet you back at the Game Lobby. Go now."

> SAY, "WAIT. HOW DO I CONTACT YOU IF I NEE

Ms. Pang leaves the carousel.

> FOLLOW MS. PANG

Ms. Pang is not here.

Mr. Bungle is here!

Appearing seemingly out of nowhere, Mr. Bungle bounds up to you, dressed in a heavy trenchcoat. "Who likes DONKEYS!?" he cries...


 context fail — Confusing one social, political, or technological environment for another, with disastrous consequences. A popular, if apocryphal, example is the avid video gamer who gets hurt after forgetting that in real life there is no reset button. Other examples include acting as if you are anonymous when you are not; calling your spouse by your lover's name; telling a racist joke to the wrong group of friends; or expecting a stranger to show the same patience and understanding as someone who knows you well.

 Context lag occurs when switching to a new environment after an extended period in an old one. Rapid switching or overlap between multiple environments can lead to context collapse. The practice of remaining continually aware of one's environment and the rules that apply there is context vigilance.

—Lady Ada's Lexicon

Three days later, I still don't have the money. And it's not just Ms. Pang who's delinquent—I haven't received my second week's payment from Mr. Jones, either, and neither he nor Smith is responding to my messages. I do have a brief conversation with Mom. She's kind enough to not say I told you so, but I can tell she's thinking it.

Mom sounds better rested than the last time we spoke, which makes sense—the culprit in the Delhi plane crash has been apprehended. Instead of a terrorist mastermind, he turns out to be an emotionally disturbed fifteen-year-old boy, Sunil Gupta. Sunil was angry at his parents for making him stay home while they went to Goa on holiday. He decided to get even by hacking into the air traffic control system at Indira Gandhi Airport and messing with their flight. Sunil has told authorities that he didn't mean to murder his parents; he just wanted to scare them, by engineering a near-miss between their small commuter plane and a much larger jet. But the commuter plane went down, killing all eleven people on board, and only quick work by the jet's pilots kept it from suffering a similar fate.

I would love to ask Mom for more details, but she can't even confirm that she was working on the case, so like the rest of the world I am forced to rely on news reports and net gossip. The big question on everyone's mind is, did Sunil Gupta act alone? On CNN, the pundits are reluctant to accept that a teenager could crack the ATC system's sophisticated encryption without help. But after consulting Wikipedia and discovering that India is in Asia, they grudgingly acknowledge that Sunil is probably a whiz at math.

There's a lot of wild speculation about how the hack worked—other than a vague pronouncement that they have "identified and fixed the problem," the authorities have no comment. But an unsourced rumor that goes viral says that the point of entry was a smart coffeemaker in the air traffic control tower. Rather than attack the ATC system directly, the rumor goes, Sunil used the insecure Bluetooth connection in the coffee machine to execute a "cyber bank shot" into the ATC computer. This strikes me as bullshit, but the CNN people love it because it sounds cool and raises a host of other questions that they can fill time blathering about: Should internet-connected appliances be banned from sensitive areas like air traffic control towers? What's a coffee machine doing in Delhi, anyway? Don't Indians drink tea? Does the presence of the coffeemaker suggest that some of the air traffic controllers are foreigners? From a Muslim country, maybe? What do people drink in Pakistan?

Idiots, I think, but the fact that I am watching this—and the commercials that come with it—means that it's not just the TV people who are stupid. By the time I log out of CNN, the virus has infected me: I spend another hour wandering the net, looking for evidence that the coffee machine story might actually be true. I don't find any, but my search leads me to Kowloon Bay Daily, a Hong Kong–based news site that specializes in virtual re-creations of crime scenes.

They have a 3D mock-up of the crash. A crude simulacrum of Sunil Gupta hunches over a computer desk, beaming radio waves out of the back of his laptop. The waves strike an air traffic control tower, causing a red coffeepot icon to flash ominously. Overhead, a jumbo jet and a prop plane converge. At the last second the jet increases power and pulls up; the backthrust from its engines forces down the nose of the prop plane and sends it spiraling into the ground. The cartoonish nature of the graphics makes this even more horrific and tasteless than it sounds, but I don't look away. When it's over, I decide to check out the rest of the website.

Which is how I end up in another airport, Suvarnabhumi International in Bangkok, watching a nervous Korean man enter the main terminal. A floating caption identifies him as General Han Yong-chol, "believed until recently to be a trusted member of Kim Jong-un's inner circle." As the general approaches the security line, a woman—"Unknown Female"—steps in his path and spritzes him in the face with the contents of a tiny spray bottle. The general clutches his throat and falls down convulsing. Unknown Female keeps walking, but she doesn't make it far—by the time security guards intercept her, she is limping and gasping, and before they can slap cuffs on her, she collapses. Unknown Female looks surprised by this turn of events, but she shouldn't be: The stuff in her spray bottle is VX nerve agent, one of the deadliest poisons on the planet. Though it was designed as a weapon of mass destruction, VX has been used in at least three political assassinations tied to North Korean intelligence, including the 2017 murder of Kim Jong-un's half brother, Kim Jong-nam.

I ask Googlebot to find me a more sober news report about the murder of General Han. I send Mom the link, along with a note. If we assume Kim Jong-un ordered the hit on the general, I ask her, could that be a sign of bigger problems inside the regime? And if there is some sort of palace intrigue going on in Pyongyang, could that be the reason I haven't heard from Smith or Mr. Jones?

Forty-five minutes pass before Mom sends back a one-word response: "Creative."


It's after midnight. I'm about to log off when i get an instant message from Anja, asking me to meet her in the Game Lobby.

I find her at the bar. "What's up?"

"I have a game in a few minutes," she says, "and I was hoping you could come along."

"Dungeon run?"

She shakes her head. "Habitual Offender."

I smile. "Going to do some crimes?"

"Going to rob some banks. We're trying for the Butch and Sundance achievement on the South American server."

"Is this a paying gig?"

"No, just for fun... But I'd really appreciate it if you'd come."

From the way she says this I know she doesn't want me along for my bank-robbing skills. "Is this about a guy?"

She nods. "Javier," she says. "I met him when I was leveling up that cleric for Ray."

"You want my read on him?"

Another nod. "If you don't mind. He seems really nice, but... you know."

When Anja first joined the crew, she was dating a guy who went by the name of Hans Steuri. They'd met through Reboot, a virtual support group that helps severely disabled people adjust to life online. Hans claimed to be a nineteen-year-old from Switzerland, a one-time Olympic hopeful who, like Anja, had been paralyzed in an accident—in his case, a ski jump gone wrong.

Anja brought Hans along on a level grind one day. I took an instant dislike to him. He was friendly, but aggressively so, like a used-car dealer desperate to make a sale. He also played badly and didn't listen to advice. But Anja seemed smitten with him, so I did my best to make nice.

Then Hans got a phone call. He tried to take it in private but screwed up the b-channel. His voice changed: He suddenly sounded older, and American. The woman he was speaking to, who was obviously his wife, seemed to think he was out showing a house to someone. When Hans realized we could hear him, he hung up on her in mid-sentence. He made a half-hearted attempt at bluffing, but between my Googling and Anja's pointed questions, we soon got the truth out of him.

Hans's real name was Harvey Gladstone; he was a forty-eight-year-old Realtor from Miami. He confessed that he had never been on skis in his life, and aside from "a touch of sciatica," he was completely able-bodied. Listening to him struggle to explain himself, I couldn't quite work out whether meeting girls at Reboot was just a creepy pickup strategy, or if there was some additional kink involved. But that was more information than I needed.

Anja was mortified. She pronounced Harvey dead to her. But the next day she came to me in a panic. Harvey had gotten a new online ID to get around her block, and had approached her in the Game Lobby, wanting to talk things over. She pronounced him dead again. Half an hour later he was back, disguised in a new avatar; she recognized him by his body language.

She didn't know what to do. Harvey knew her routine and her favorite online hangouts; she didn't want to have to change all that, or get a new ID herself. And even more so than for most people, leaving the internet entirely wasn't a reasonable option for her.

I told her I'd take care of it. I reached out to Griefnet, the cybervigilante group, and called in a favor. I don't know what they did, but less than twenty-four hours later, Anja got an email of a recording in which a scared-sounding Harvey swore he would never bother her, or anyone else at Reboot, ever again.

Anja was relieved. She was also grateful. I tried to discourage the latter sentiment, because I guessed where it might lead, and I didn't want the responsibility of vetting all her future boyfriends. But some jobs fall to you whether you want them or not. It has become a thing, when Anja meets a guy she likes, that she asks for my impression. Is he as nice as he seems, or should she be wary? And while we're on the subject: Do I think he likes her, too?

As Jolene is quick to remind me, I take advantage of Anja's good nature and her willingness to work overtime—more than I should. But I try to treat that as a two-way street. If Anja wants something from me, even something I'm not comfortable with, something I wouldn't ordinarily say yes to, I do my best to accommodate her. To maintain the karmic balance between us.

That balance was thrown out of whack when I infected her computer with Smith's malware package. According to Mom's tech people, the malware is primarily spyware. Like all code that operates at a root level, it has the potential to be destructive, but its main function is surveillance: to keep tabs on what Anja sees and says and does, and to open her files to inspection. Even if Smith decided to turn the malware into a weapon, there are limits to what damage it could do. Google was right: Anja's life support is controlled by a separate, independent computer system. The malware can't touch it. Unless, maybe, there's a coffeepot in the room.

So I haven't put Anja's physical safety at risk. But I have sold out her privacy, which is still bad, even with Mom's tacit approval. Focused on the mystery of Mr. Jones—and the money—I managed to avoid acknowledging this until after I got Anja to download the software. Now I'm feeling guilty. Which, like apologizing when you're not sorry, is self-indulgent bullshit.

But I can still try to address the balance. And if Anja wants to know whether some guy she met on the internet is genuinely trustworthy, or only seems to be, I suppose I can provide some insight into that.

"You're sure Javier won't mind you bringing someone else along?" I ask.

"We're going as a group," Anja says. "Javier's bringing his sister and her boyfriend. We've got this cool SUV, too," she adds, "all tricked out for the bank run. You could be the driver, if you'd like."

"No, that's OK," I say. "You really want to know if this Javier is worth your time? Then you need to be the driver. And you need to pretend you're not very good at it."


While I was Anja's go-to for screening potential boyfriends, there were other romance-related topics she couldn't discuss with me—or with Ray. Darla wouldn't have been my choice for sex counseling either, but I can see why Anja picked her.

A few days after the second Zuul'titlan raid, we arranged to meet up for a level grind in the House by the Crossroads. I was late, and when I got to the meeting place I found Ray harvesting magic herbs by the roadside. He was alone, but judging by the irked look on his face, he hadn't been for long.

"Because poop," Ray said, before I could ask.

"What?"

"We were coming down from Lookout Point," he explained, gesturing towards the hill I had just descended, "and we passed the spot with the outhouse quest, you know, the one with the goblin?"

"Proctor." Proctor the Traveling Salesgoblin, who has gotten himself trapped in an outhouse. He wants you to kill owlbears in the surrounding woods and collect the scraps of soft parchment they are carrying. Bring him eight scraps and he will reward you with a handful of warm and smelly diamonds. "Yeah, I remember that quest."

"Everyone remembers it, it's disgusting," Ray said. "Anyway, Darla sees the outhouse, and she starts riffing on all the different quests that involve poop."

"It's true, there are a lot of them." Spend time leveling up characters in Call to Wizardry and you realize that someone on the design team has a thing for scatological humor. There's even a poop-related fishing quest, where you have to use a lump of unicorn dung as a lure to attract a sea monster.

"Yeah, so Darla's going through the whole list. And then she looks over at Anja and she's like, 'Hey Anja, how do you poop?'"

"Oh God," I said. "Was Anja upset?"

"No, actually, she was cool with it," Ray said. "Now that Anja's had time to get used to her, I think she kind of likes the fact that Darla doesn't tiptoe around her condition the way most people do. So that's fine, but the thing is, I don't want to know how Anja poops. I mean, if it's one question, OK, I can close my ears and ignore it. But of course it's not one question, it's a whole goddamn topic of conversation: What sort of container does it go into? Who empties it? How often? Are there hoses? And then, and then, Darla starts talking about this fashion model she heard about who's got Crohn's disease, and her thing, right, her signature, is to be photographed with her colostomy bag showing.

"And hey"—he put up his hands defensively—"I think it's great, you know, that we live in an enlightened time when people with gross medical issues can have fulfilling careers and feel empowered and whatever. OK? But I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to have to dwell on it. Especially since I know the gross-out factor is the only reason Darla's even interested.

"So I don't want to hear about it, but I don't say that, because it'll make things worse, and also, I don't want to hurt Anja's feelings. But that doesn't matter either, of course, because Darla's like a goddamned bloodhound for stuff that bugs people.

"So I've got my head down, I'm minding my business, I'm praying for a change of subject, and suddenly Darla is like, 'Hey, Ray, why so quiet? You don't like to talk about pooping? Pooping's natural, Ray. The Pope poops. Jesus pooped—in fact, I'll bet He shit Himself while He was up on the cross...'"

"Yeah, OK," I said. "I get the picture."

"Do you?" Looking at me pointedly. "I'm so glad... So anyway, I told Darla to fuck off. Which wouldn't have worked either, but Anja took pity on me. She got Darla to go take a walk with her. So that's why I'm here all alone with this pissed-off expression on my face. Because poop."

"I'll have a talk with Darla."

Ray laughed. "Yeah, like that's going to make a difference... Have you got an answer to my question, yet? The one about how long?"

"I'm working on it, Ray."

"Work faster."


"Atenção, vadia!" The motorcyclist yells as Anja cuts into his lane. Then he swerves onto the sidewalk, hits a woman pushing a stroller, and gets catapulted into the side of the Ministério do Turismo. The federal police in the cruiser behind us look over at the crash but otherwise don't react—Anja didn't actually hit the guy, so the accident does not count as vehicular assault. When she runs a red light, forcing an old man in the crosswalk to drop his cane and leap for the curb, the cops yawn.

We are westbound on the Eixo Monumental, a massive twelve-lane thoroughfare that runs through the heart of Brazil's capital, Brasília. This stretch of the Eixo is lined with government office buildings—ministries of trade, finance, culture, energy, planning, defense. Our first bank is a kilometer away, in the commercial sector on the far side of the Eixo Rodoviário.

Anja's date, Javier Messner, rides shotgun in the front seat of our armor-plated SUV. Javier presents as a slim young white guy with blue eyes, brown hair, and a neatly trimmed beard. Both his appearance and his story—he's a twenty-year-old barista who lives and works in Buenos Aires—check out on social media. A crosscheck on Ancestry.com shows that Javier's family emigrated to Argentina from Bavaria before the Second World War—so no, he is not descended from fugitive Nazis.

Javier and Anja converse in a mix of Spanish and German. Even in the latter tongue, Javier sounds completely laid-back, and he is untroubled by Anja's driving. A few kilometers ago, just after we left the garage where we picked up the SUV, he suggested that Anja make a left turn, and she instead pulled a hard right, directly into the path of an oncoming semi. Javier stayed calm, waited for Anja to finish swerving around the truck, and then said laughing, "Das andere links." The other left.

Javier's sister, seventeen-year-old Blanca, is more intense. She sits behind Javier, fiddling with the submachine gun in her lap in a way that suggests she is eager to get on with tonight's crime spree. But Blanca is also disciplined: Despite her impatience, she does not take potshots at pedestrians the way Darla surely would in the same situation.

Blanca's boyfriend, sixteen-year-old Bruno Ribeiro, is originally from Brasília, though he moved to Argentina with his mother after his parents divorced. Bruno marvels at what a great job the game designers have done of modeling his native city. To Blanca's embarrassment, he keeps pointing out landmarks and commenting on how well-rendered they are. "My God," Blanca says finally. "Why not just tattoo 'I'm a newbie' on your forehead?"

I sit all the way in the back with an assortment of heavy weapons. There's a roof hatch directly above me, so if need be I can stand up and shoot rockets at pursuing vehicles. But for now I just sit quiet and listen to Anja and Javier. I'm using subtitles for translation so I can hear the actual sound of their voices. So far my gut is telling me that Javier is an OK guy. A little too mellow for my taste, maybe, but Anja seems to like that.

After several more traffic violations we reach the street where the bank is located. From a block away we hear gunfire—a robbery is already in progress. Following standard in-game etiquette, Anja pulls over and waits for the other crew to finish. Javier takes advantage of the delay to go over the plan one more time.

The amount of cash in the bank's vault varies depending on how often it's been looted in the past hour, but it will always contain a special money sack made of red cloth. Stealing that starts a clock on the Butch and Sundance achievement. We'll then have ninety minutes to collect four other red sacks from banks in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. Habitual Offender squeezes South America's geography into a few hundred virtual square kilometers, creating a sort of greatest-hits version of the continent, which is what makes this grand tour possible. Brasília to Buenos Aires, for example, a three-thousand-kilometer journey in reality, is just a fifteen-minute commute in the game world—though if you're being shot at by police, it's a long fifteen minutes.

You can hit the banks in any order. We have tentatively decided on a clockwise route of Brasília to Buenos Aires to Santiago to La Paz to Lima. Javier double-checks that everyone is still cool with this. Everyone is. "Let's get on with it," Blanca says.

At the bank, the gunfire has ceased, and ambulance crews are hauling away bodies. They work quickly. "OK," Javier says. "John, do you mind standing guard while the rest of us go inside?"

"No problem." There are griefers here too, of course, and the last thing you want when you're pulling a heist is to have some clown take off with your getaway car.

Anja parks in the bank's front lot, and she and the others get out. Anja and Javier, like Blanca, are armed with submachine guns; Bruno wields a combat shotgun. In the real world this would tend to draw attention, but Habitual Offender is an open-carry universe. So long as you don't aim your gun directly at someone, security guards will ignore it.

While the others proceed inside the bank, I stand up in the roof hatch of the SUV. I am holding a minigun—a heavy, six-barreled rotary machine gun that can fire five thousand rounds a minute. I keep the barrels pointed skyward. A beat cop walking by on the sidewalk smiles and tips his cap to me. "Boa noite," he says. Good evening.

"Foda-se a polícia," I reply. Fuck the police.

"Fuck your mother," Darla said. "It's your life."

I walked through the woods in the direction Ray told me Anja and Darla had gone. I found them on the edge of the zone, on a cliff overlooking the Jurassic Swamp to the south. They were facing away from me as I came out of the trees; I was just about to announce myself when I realized what they were talking about.

"So you don't have any feeling in your clit at all?"

"Nothing below the neck," Anja said. "At least, not when I'm awake. It's like my brain still remembers, so when I dream, sometimes..."

"Remembers," Darla said. "So before the accident, you—"

"Oh yeah, sure. And there was a guy on the men's team, Rolando, we did things. Never all the way, but, you know."

"You and Rolando aren't together anymore? Because of the accident?"

"No, we broke up before then. Rolando got impatient. He kept wanting to do more, but I wasn't ready yet. I'm kind of sorry, now, that I didn't say yes."

"Nah, fuck that," Darla said. "If you weren't ready, you weren't ready."

I'd begun backing up, slowly. Then Darla started to turn around. I was about to dive for cover when I remembered I was playing a ninja and hit the stealth mode toggle.

"Anyway," Darla continued, looking my way now, "the fact that it's all in your head makes it a lot easier. You don't have to mess around with hardware at all, so your mother doesn't need to know what you're up to. She doesn't watch what you're doing online, does she?"

"No, we have a deal about that," Anja said. "But there is this tech guy who comes in once a month, and he can be nosy. If I've downloaded a piece of software he doesn't recognize, he'll ask about it."

"I can show you how to hide the software so your tech guy won't see it. Or if you want to be extra safe, you can just delete it before he comes and reinstall it afterwards."

"And this software, it lets you—"

"Enough to keep a guy interested," Darla said, "and then some."

I faded back into the trees.


"On the right," Javier says calmly, as a black government van with tinted windows appears along a side road. The van tries to T-bone us, but Anja gives the SUV more gas and gets out in front of it, while Blanca fires a full clip from her submachine gun. The driver of the van is hit and loses control; a pair of llamas grazing by the roadside watch as the vehicle goes plunging down the mountainside.

We are crossing the Andes, en route to Santiago. Our notoriety level is currently four out of a possible five, which means it's not just the local and provincial cops who are after us, but the Argentine equivalent of the FBI and the Secret Service. We're OK on time, though, and the SUV is still mostly intact. Anja has dropped the pretense that she can't drive and is doing a good job of swerving around the spike strips that the feds keep throwing on the highway in front of us, while Javier, Blanca, and I deal with the pursuit. Bruno on the other hand is useless at the moment. It turns out he really is a newbie, not just to Habitual Offender but to VR games in general, and he's got a newbie's case of motion sickness: Every time Anja whips the SUV around another switchback, he groans and clutches his stomach.

We crest a high point in the mountains and pass a sign reading BIENVENIDOS A CHILE. Crossing a national border instantly knocks a level off our notoriety. This is good, but not good enough: We want a clean slate before we hit the next bank. If we weren't on a clock, we could detour down to Patagonia and drive around the wilderness until the cops lost interest in us, but our current situation requires a quicker solution. Anja knows this.

The highway turns sharply into a long straightaway. The Chilean-Argentine border is above us now, on a steep slope to our right, running parallel to the road. "Bruno," Anja says, "you probably want to close your eyes." She floors the accelerator and cuts across the soft shoulder. The SUV tilts at a fifty-degree angle as we climb the slope, but the high-traction tires cling like magic and Anja slaloms back and forth across the border—Argentina, Chile, Argentina, Chile—zeroing out our notoriety. As we thunk back down onto the highway, a motorcycle cop who was out for our blood just seconds ago breezes past without even a glance.

We race downhill into the Chilean Central Valley. As we near the outskirts of the capital, we are treated to an amazing sight: A jumbo jet has just taken off from the Santiago Airport, and there are people riding on the outside of the plane. They run around on the roof and the wings, shooting at one another. Competing teams of hijackers, maybe, or perhaps a group of players have made up their own achievement, a guns-and-grenades version of the Mile High Club. Whatever the motivation, the outcome is predictable: A stray round knocks out one of the jet's engines. The plane rolls over and starts to nose-dive.

I am reminded, inevitably, of Sunil Gupta's hack. But I also know the difference between real mass murder and a video game, so what I feel in this case is not horror but annoyance: It looks like the plane is coming down onto the main road into the city. This could delay us.

"Don't worry," Anja says. "I know a good detour." She swerves right again, plowing through a barrier onto an unfinished highway exit that is perfectly angled to serve as a jump ramp. We enter Santiago in midair.

Bruno makes retching noises.

"Did you enjoy the show?" Darla said.

The griefers had caught me on my way back to Ray. I'd uncloaked once I got clear of Darla and Anja, which turned out to be a mistake. As I passed a particularly large tree, a troll warrior jumped out at me, screaming and swinging a battleaxe. I wasn't flagged for PvP, so he couldn't actually hit me, but I reacted by reflexively slashing with my katana—and then I was flagged for PvP. A gnome sorcerer popped out from behind another tree and started hitting me with frostbolts, which slowed me down while the warrior hacked me into slabs.

After I was dead, they camped on my corpse. I came back from the graveyard, resurrected, and tried to use my ninja smoke bomb to make a quick exit, but the sorcerer set off a freezing sphere to stop me turning invisible. They killed me again. And again.

I was debating whether to call for help or just quit the game and get a job at McDonald's when Darla showed up. She was playing a druid tank—an armored grizzly bear—which made her the opposite of stealthy, but she ran up on the sorcerer and mauled him to death before he knew what was happening. Then she took out the warrior, dancing around him with a nimbleness no real grizzly will ever possess. It was quite the show, all right—but I knew that wasn't what Darla was talking about.

"You saw me."

"Of course I saw you. Pro tip, if you're going to sneak up and eavesdrop on somebody, you want to turn invisible before you step out in the open."

"Where's Anja now?" I asked.

"Back with Ray. Helping him get his ass unchapped."

"Yeah, about that. I really need you to stop poking at him."

"Ray needs to get a thicker skin, is what needs to happen."

"The problem isn't Ray being thin-skinned," I said. "It's you, shit-stirring because you're bored."

Darla shrugged. "That's just how I'm wired. My mom says I get the devil in me whenever I don't have enough to do."

"Is that what's going on with you and Anja?"

"What do you mean?"

"I wasn't eavesdropping, before, but I did hear what you were talking about."

"Yeah? Did it get you hot?"

"It got me wondering. Are you trying to help Anja, or are you pretending to be helpful, so you can stir up some kind of trouble between her and her mom?"

"Wow," Darla said. "First of all, fuck you. And second of all, what the fuck do you think of me, that you'd even ask that?"

"I'm not trying to be an asshole, Darla. But I do pay attention."

"If you really fucking paid attention, you'd know that I like Anja. She's not a pussy, like Ray. Or like you."

"So when you ask her whether her family knows the Mengeles, or if they ever had Adolf Eichmann over for dinner, that's just you being friendly? Or the other day in Zuul'titlan, when you made that crack about how all the corpses must remind her of the old country..."

Darla rolled her eyes, like she couldn't believe I was uncool enough to judge her by her actual behavior. "Fine," she said. "Maybe I do tease her, sometimes. But this is different. She asked for my help, OK? She wants a sex life, the same as any normal girl would. You have a problem with that?"

"No, I don't. But it's not my opinion that matters. Anja's parents are religious—especially her mom. I don't know the whole story, but it's caused problems for her before."

"So what, because her mom has a thing for Jesus, I'm supposed to tell her tough luck?"

"I'm not saying don't help her. I'm saying, don't get bored and forget. If you get into a fight with your mom, you can walk away. Anja can't."

Darla sighed in exasperation. "Fine," she repeated, and looked away frowning. But then the frown became a smirk. "You know she's into you," she said, turning back to me. "Anja. She told me she had a big crush on you when she first joined the crew."

I did know that. It was another reason I'd agreed to vet Anja's dates for her—becoming her confidant was a diplomatic way to take myself out of the running.

"Yeah," Darla continued. "She said you told her you don't date coworkers. So is that, like, a blanket policy, or just something you say to girls you don't have the hots for?"

Now it was my turn to be bored. "Where are you going with this, Darla?"

"Where am I going?"

"It's no secret I'm attracted to you. And I think the feeling's mutual, but what I can't tell is whether you're really interested or just like pretending because it's fun to wind me up."

"Well," Darla said, "if you have to ask..."

"The answer's probably no, I know. But I'm asking."

"Why, so you'll know who to cut from the crew, me or Ray?"

"I just want to know where I stand, OK? Tell me you're not interested, and it'll never come up again."

But of course that would have been way too simple, and no fun at all for her. "Maybe I haven't made up my mind yet," Darla said shrugging.

"Well, is there something I could do to help you decide?"

Enjoying herself now, Darla stroked her chin and made a show of thinking it over. "What about a bullet?" she said finally. "If you're serious."

"You want a bullet? From me?"

"No, from the Duke of Luxembourg... Of course from you. Give me ten minutes, in PPML 4.2 format, with full audio and visuals—good ones."

"Uh-huh," I said. "And what do I get?"

"Well, I'm not making you a bullet," Darla said. "I could offer you a hundred bucks, I guess, but that'd probably be some kind of interstate felony. Just make me the bullet. Make it good. Then we'll see."

"I'll think about it."

She laughed. "Oh yeah—I know you will."

"I need more bullets!" Blanca shouts.

"Forget bullets, get the rocket launcher!" replies Javier, who has finally lost his cool. "A tank is coming!"

Like the original Butch and Sundance, we have come to grief in Bolivia. We'd hit the bank and were about to make our getaway when another group of players decided not to wait their turn and drove up shooting. Bruno was killed by the opening round of gunfire, and a lucky grenade toss blew the back wheels off the SUV. I got busy with the minigun and made short work of the attackers, but in the process I accidentally vaporized a procession of nuns in front of the cathedral across from the bank. This instantly maxed out our notoriety and put the Bolivian Army on crash alert.

Blanca grabs the rocket launcher out of the crippled SUV as the tank rumbles into view at the end of the block. She takes aim and fires before the tank can bring its cannon to bear; the tank explodes and its turret goes flying. Javier and I target the Army snipers who are trying to set up on the surrounding rooftops.

Anja meanwhile searches for a new getaway vehicle. She runs over to an armored car parked in front of the bank, hauls out the driver and executes him, then shouts, "Come on!"

Bad idea. If our notoriety were lower, sure, but that armor won't protect us against military weapons. We need high speed and maneuverability. "Get the Lobini!" I tell her, indicating a yellow sports car farther down the street.

"It's a two-seater!" Anja says.

"I know," I reply. "You and Javier get inside, while Blanca rides on the roof! I'll stay behind and try to keep the soldiers occupied!"

"Fuck that," says Blanca, standing over Bruno's body as she reloads the launcher. "I'll stay too."

"No!" says Javier. "We all go together!" He and Blanca start arguing, faster than the subtitles can keep up, but I get the gist: Javier believes in teamwork and fair play, and doesn't want to win the achievement at someone else's expense. But Blanca doesn't really give a shit about the achievement; she's just as happy to go out in a blaze of glory.

Their debate is interrupted by the arrival of a helicopter gunship. Blanca nails it with a rocket; the chopper spins out of control and crashes into the cathedral's main steeple, killing another sniper. "Take your girlfriend and get out of here while you still can," Blanca says, as fiery debris rains down all around us.

"It's OK, Javier," I add. "I can get the achievement another time." I can tell he's still not happy about it, but the flaming tail rotor that comes whizzing past his head appears to decide him; he gets moving. I glance over at Anja and give her a nod: As best I can tell, Javier is a keeper. Anja nods back, mouthing, "Thank you," and gets in the car. She and Javier speed away.

"Shit!" Blanca exclaims. Two more tanks have appeared at the end of the block. She fires a rocket at the one in front, turning it into a flaming roadblock. "I'm out!" She tosses the empty launcher aside and grabs an M-16 from the SUV. "Now what?"

"Back inside the bank," I suggest. "We can hold them off for a while from in there." Blanca nods and retreats into the building. Burdened by the weight of the minigun, I follow more slowly, continuing to pick off snipers as I go. Another gunship appears above the cathedral and I empty my last few hundred rounds through its windshield.

I drop the minigun and unsling my backup assault rifle. At the end of the block, the second tank pushes past the wreck and fires. The cannon shell zips by a few inches in front of my face and hits the armored bank truck, blasting it into shrapnel. I quickly duck into the bank.

Inside it's much quieter. The only sound is the whimper of terrified customers cowering in the corners. This would be disturbing if they were real people, but they're not, so I ignore them.

"Blanca?" I call. She doesn't answer. I walk slowly forward, scanning for security guards. I don't see any, but I do find Blanca. She is lying on the floor in front of the open bank vault. Her avatar's eyes are glazed and unmoving, and there is a bullet hole perfectly centered in her forehead.

"Don't shoot!" a man's voice calls, in English. I take cover behind a pillar. A figure emerges from the vault with both arms raised. His right hand is empty, while his left clutches a money sack. His only visible weapon is a Taser in a holster on his right hip. "Don't shoot," he repeats. "I just want to talk, John."

I recognize him then. It's the white guy from the CIA Factbook. The one I thought was a reporter, who seemed to be following me and Mr. Park around virtual Pyongyang. His Habitual Offender avatar is dressed in black body armor rather than street clothes, but the face is the same.

I lower my rifle and step out from cover. "Who the hell are you?"

"Ms. Pang sent me," he says. He waggles the money sack. "I have your payment."

I'd laugh if I weren't so confused. "You're going to pay me in play money?"

"No. It's real." The heels of his combat boots click against the marble floor as he walks towards me. But then I hear another sound, an incongruous sound—the creak of a floorboard. A wooden floorboard, like the ones in my apartment.

"Here," he says, and tosses the money sack at me. I make no move to catch it, so in the game world, it passes right through me.

In the real world, a cloth bag filled with soft bricks hits me in the face. I stumble backwards, more startled than hurt. I lift my hands to pull off my goggles and that's when he tases me. The synchronization is off this time: His avatar is still pulling the Taser from its holster when the real-world darts hit me in the chest and pump fifty thousand volts into my nervous system.

The two realities diverge as my avatar topples over backward while I pitch forward. The money sack breaks my fall, but the pain of involuntary muscle contractions keeps me from appreciating it.

When the current shuts off, I am blind. My headset was knocked askew in the fall. Once more I reach to pull it off, but he says sternly, "Don't."

He nudges the money sack. A stack of bills pokes me in the cheek. "Four hundred thousand dollars," he says. "Two weeks' pay. Ms. Pang wants you to know she's good for it. But she also wants you to start taking her seriously. If she tells you to do something, you need to do it. If she tells you to not do something, you need to not do it. Do you understand?"

"Yes." My voice is shaky and I'm short of breath.

"I hope so, John," he says. "You really don't want me coming back here for another visit. Trust me on that." A pause. "This is so we're absolutely clear."

He must have upped the voltage. The second shock is more painful than the first, and it goes on longer. I think I scream, though maybe that's just inside my head. I definitely piss myself. When it's over, I still can't see, but colors are blooming behind my eyes. Through the headphones pressed to the side of my skull, I can feel as well as hear the sound of raised voices in Spanish—Bolivian Special Forces have entered the bank. Their shouted commands mingle with the sound of his footsteps moving away, and a bang that registers dimly as a door slam. Or maybe the bang is a soldier executing my avatar—I can't really tell, and anyway it doesn't matter. The absence of pain, that's the important thing.

I lie on the floor, grateful that the pain has stopped, and while I wait for my nervous system to reboot, I drool on the money.