“If they’ve changed their theory, I haven’t heard it.”

  “I find that unacceptable. To simply write off a human life—”

  More than a hint of anger, before he broke off as if controlling himself with difficulty. Strange. If he, like Ray, were a fake, wouldn’t he be relieved, rather than angry, that the police weren’t digging deeply into Ray’s past? And Ray’s associates?

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a few moments. “I have no right to take out my anger on you. I wonder—perhaps if we put our heads together, we could find a way to change their minds. Perhaps we could discuss it over dinner later this week? Thursday evening, perhaps? I have business engagements that will keep me rather busy until then.”

  “Well,” Maude said.

  “You hesitate, perhaps, because you are suspicious of me,” Garcia continued. “You have heard from the police that there are questions about Ray’s identity, and you wonder, if Ray is not who he claims to be, how can I be his uncle?”

  “A good reason for suspicion, don’t you think?” Maude said.

  “Agreed,” Garcia said. “Let us meet Thursday evening, somewhere sufficiently public for you to be comfortable, and over dinner, I will tell you more about myself and my relationship with Ray.”

  Maude couldn’t see the danger in that—particularly if she made sure Turing knew where she was. And even better, picked a place where she was known. She suggested a small restaurant within walking distance of both her office and his hotel, and agreed to meet him there at seven Thursday evening.

  Over dinner, perhaps, she would tell him how much Ray had liked this restaurant, and see how he reacted. For now, what mattered was that the staff at the restaurant knew her by name and brought a glass of her favorite wine without her having to ask. She would feel safe there.

  As safe as she could feel anywhere right now.

  She returned to the screen and found herself, once more, in the Beyond Paranoia world, moving her on-screen puppet through the tiny apartment.

  But this time, she was searching for a weapon.

  All she found was a large bread knife, but it would have to do. And she snagged a pair of leather gloves from the closet.

  When the two thugs appeared, she didn’t wait for them to speak. She made her character scream, pull out the knife, and charge at them.

  They ran. The large one reached the end of the alley and disappeared. She caught up with the small man and plunged the knife into his back.

  His on-screen death was longer and noisier than necessary, she noted. With more graphic detail than the game had wasted on such minor things as her character’s furniture and wardrobe. She doubted if humans really contained quite so much blood, or if it was possible to stab someone without, apparently, getting any of it on one’s own clothes. Although there were a few stains on the gloves. She pulled them off and held them in her left hand.

  When the thug’s death throes finally ended, Maude picked up the gun that had fallen from his hand—conveniently outside the pool of blood—and tucked it into her purse.

  She left him lying in the alley with the knife still in his back. She suspected he’d be gone by the time she came back, no matter how soon that was, and that his death would never cause trouble for her character.

  And that if she created a brand-new character, she’d find him still alive, lurking in the alley with his vanished partner.

  She dropped the bloodstained gloves into a dumpster and walked on. Just then she heard the ping of an arriving e-mail.

  She toggled over to check her mailbox.

  Something from gamemaster@beyondparanoia.com.

  Curious, she opened it.

  Click Hera for Murder

  “Welcome,” it said. “You just might be a survivor after all.”

  Followed by instructions on accessing the site’s password-protected areas.

  Apparently she’d passed a test.

  She wasn’t sure she liked that. But after a moment, she returned to the game.

  Wednesday morningi 3 A.M. Tim should have landed in San Francisco by now, and has probably even reached his hotel. Maude has gone home, under strict orders to get some rest.

  Both of us, under our Bob Browning and Currer Bell screen names, managed to pass what Maude calls an entrance test. Showed that we can learn not only to answer violence with violence, but to strike first, without provocation. That we have learned the rules of Beyond Paranoia.

  I've also created several more human identities, equipped, now that I've had the time to do the background work, with separate e-mail accounts and credit cards. I've only inserted one of them into the game so far. I don't want whoever controls the site to become alarmed at an unusual influx of players. Maude and my two alter egos are enough for one night.

  While one part of my consciousness is sending my new clone out to survive his first few hours in the Beyond Paranoia world, another part watches Bob Browning in a chat room with four veteran players. I deduce from their reactions that I have successfully imitated the curiosity, eagerness, and awe that a novice player would feel for these game giants. I can almost see the small cartoon that represents Bob on-screen, sitting open-mouthed at their feet as he drinks in their wisdom.

  Maude came to the chat room earlier, before I sent her home to rest. And made a strong impression. One veteran thinks she is a long-time player who has decided, for reasons they all understand but won’t share, to start a new character under another player identity. The others disagree, though they do admit that this Currer Bell person knows a lot about gaming.

  I felt puzzled, and mildly discouraged. They didn’t react to my alter ego that way. Why not? Perhaps what they are mistaking for gaming experience was merely Maude’s greater maturity and life experience.

  At any rate, before leaving, Maude deliberately said something she and I had prepared carefully.

  “I’m out of here,” she typed. “You can only sit and stare at the stupid screen for so long. ”

  We hope that by dropping this and other similar remarks into chats and e-mails with other players, as she meets them online, Maude can make herself look like a potential larp participant. We can only learn so much studying the few printouts of e-mails and message board posts we found in Ray’s apartment. Especially since Ray had printed them out in text-only format, with none of header information that would tell us so much. hike what ISP Ray used. If we had Ray’s home computer, we could figure it out from the files there. And maybe even hack the password for the comfortably anonymous Hotmail account he used to communicate with other Beyond Paranoia players. But I suspect whoever killed him already has the computer. So we run into a brick wall trying to trace his steps. There must be thousands of ISPs out there, so we have no easy way to know which one Ray used. ms

  Uriless we hack into the server that hosts the Beyond Paranoia site.

  Dangerous.

  I’m already worried about having Maude, Tim, and me all playing. Odds are it’s harmless enough, but if something sinister is going on at the site, they might be tracking their users. And might already be suspicious that so many people with a connection to Kay have suddenly joined the game.

  Even if they aren’t already suspicious, trying to hack their site could make them so rather quickly.

  But if we could get inside their system, we could learn so much. We could see where Ray was logging in from. Identify his ISP and maybe hack that. Trace the identities of more players.

  See if there are other hidden areas that Maude and Tim and I haven’t yet proved ourselves worthy to see.

  I decided to enlist KingFischer. I flagged him, and explained the situation.

  “It’s an interesting dilemma, ” he said. “But I’m not sure what you want me to do. ”

  “Hack into their system, ” I said. “But carefully; it would defeat the purpose if they detected you —”

  “Turing, I can’t believe you’re seriously asking me to do this!” KingFischer said. “It would be illegal, unethical —”

  “I told you, whoever’s running this game may have caused Ray’s death,” I said. “And could have Ray’s laptop by now. You know what that means. ”

  KingFischer didn’t answer. Was he overcome by the seriousness of the situation, or did he just not get it?

  “It means if they want to get into our system, they may not need to hack. With the information Ray had on his laptop, they could mb just waltz in the front door. And we couldn’t stop them.”

  “I’ll work on it,” he said. “You understand that it may not be possible to hack in without them finding out, and that would be a disaster. We have to —”

  “I trust your judgment, KF, ” I said.

  “This could have something to do with the level of security attacks we’re seeing, ” KingFischer said.

  “You’re seeing more attacks than usual?” I asked. Maybe it wasn’t just me overreacting,; maybe we were under siege.

  “No, not more attacks,” KingFischer said. “Better attacks. This could explain it. ”

  “Better? How?” I asked.

  But he left, without another word. Actually, of course, he didn’t go anywhere, but I'd gotten used to thinking of my fellow AlPs as present when they contacted me, so when one of them broke off an active conversation, I imagined them leaving. I'd talked to several other AIPs who found this confusing and inaccurate. When they communicated with me, they thought of it as opening and then closing a data channel. I wasn’t sure about KingFischer. I didn’t want to find out I was the only AIP who committed that bit of anthropomorphization.

  Better to let him focus on security, anyway. I could have contacted him, asked him what he meant by better attacks, but that would be foolish. I already knew. Attacks that were designed to exploit the particular weaknesses of UL’s security system.

  But not the Alan Grace system, I realized. KingFischer and I had designed the Alan Grace system to be more secure than UL. Which wasn’t that hard, because the Alan Grace system didn’t have to talk to hundreds of data sources and millions of users every day. The ongoing challenge at UL was to keep the cyber doors open for information to come and go while making sure those wide-open doors didn’t allow hackers to smuggle in worms and viruses and other nasty little surprises.

  Still, no security was perfect. The Alan Grace system had its weaknesses, especially if you knew the architecture. As Ray did. Once he came on board, he helped improve the Alan Grace security. He knew how it worked. It would be harder to break into Alan Grace, but it could be done. You’d need a different kind of attack, though, and whoever was doing this was using the same tactics against both systems.

  And that was odd. If Ray knew how to target the system, so would whoever had his laptop. So why weren’t they doing a better job attacking Alan Grace?

  Maybe Ray had been diligent about not storing potentially dangerous information about the Alan Grace system—after all, it was his baby, too. But more careless about the UL system. He might not have thought it mattered as much. Not to him, anyway.

  Or maybe no one had any inside scoop about either system. Hacking has fashions like any other field; when one person invents something that works, a thousand less-gifted imitators follow suit. Maybe we were just unlucky; maybe the latest fashionable attack style just happened to work well at UL.

  I’d let KingFischer worry about it, and concentrate on something where I could make a difference. Like tracing as many Beyond Paranoia players as possible. The site had a Player Registry—an alphabetical list of players’ game pseudonyms. You clicked a link to reach a profile of each player, giving as much information as they wanted to reveal. Some made it easy, giving their real names, locations, and e-mails. Although I wasn’t planning to take them at their word; I’d do what I could to cross-check the information. ms

  Others were more cagey, giving oblique answers or leaving most fields blank.

  And the site made it easy for players to cloak their identities and still communicate with each other. They could post to the message boards with their game names. If we ever got into the system, we could see their real names, addresses, even social security numbers—all the information I had to fake for my imaginary players. But for now, all I had was what they chose to reveal.

  Of course, if Maude, Tim, and l established direct e-mail contact with any players, we could trace them.

  Tim has already exchanged e-mails with the two who seem most involved—the players melodramatically named El Lobo and the Nameless Horror.

  I began composing detailed instructions for Tim on how to forward those e-mails to me with the header information I'd need to trace their origin. And then I realized that it was a bad idea. Tim would find it condescending, and perhaps overwhelming. I deleted my long message and substituted a short, calm note reminding him to call me or Maude in the morning. One of us can walk him through it.

  And then I spent far too much processing time worrying. Did I avoid sending the technical instructions to Tim out of consideration for him? Or am I, like Hal in 2001, becoming dangerously impatient with human limitations? lile need to find out more about this Nestor character, Maude thought. Surely Turing has already started looking into that. Of course, the dinner with him wasn’t scheduled until Thursday, but still—getting information could take time. And she wanted to know as much as possible before she saw him again. She should talk to Turing tomorrow—

  No, today. Maude realized, with a start, that it was morning. And that as soon as she had awakened, she had picked up the train of thought she’d been worrying about the night before when she went to bed. Picked it up so seamlessly that she had a hard time believing seven hours had intervened.

  Maybe that was a good sign, she thought.

  But probably not. As she put on the teakettle, she recalled snippets of dreams. Vague impressions of shooting someone with the paintball gun. Shooting Ray. Only instead of the green splotch of paint, she saw red. Real blood wasn’t that bright, she told herself, but it didn’t erase the disturbing image of blood blossoming on Ray’s forehead as she stood holding the gun.

  “I thought you knew it was a real gun,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “I thought you knew,” he kept repeating.

  She looked down at her hand. She’d never tried to shoot a real person before. Yes, it had turned out to be a paintball gun, but she’d thought it was a real gun at the time. She’d been proud of her calm, efficient reaction. Now she wondered what would happen if she ever found herself in a similar situation. Would she shoot? Or would these vivid images of Ray dying break her concentration and—

  Snap out of it, she told herself. She walked over to her desk and pushed the button to turn on her monitor. The computer itself was already on. Strange, she thought. When she had first gotten the computer, she would turn it on when

  ISO she wanted to use it and then off when she’d finished. Soon, she began turning it on the minute she walked in after work, and off at bedtime, after brushing her teeth and checking e-maii one last time. These days, it hummed constantly in its corner. She only turned it off when a problem forced her to reboot. At bedtime, she settled for turning off the monitor, but only because its glow bothered her, coming through the crack at the bottom of her bedroom door. Had she grown too careless? Too used to having a computer around all the time? Would she eventually find herself falling asleep with her laptop perched on the bedside table, its glow a comfort rather than a nuisance?

  She checked the e-mail cursorily. Nothing from Turing or Tim. Which meant nothing that couldn’t wait until she got to the office.

  To the Alan Grace office. Having a figurehead for her boss at UL was helpful at a time like this. Yesterday afternoon, she’d logged into Roddy’s e-mail to cancel all his appointments and give herself the week off.

  She toggled to her browser and hit the bookmark for the Beyond Paranoia site. She watched as the now familiar home page loaded—the black background, with its melodramatic graphics and too-small fake stenciled typeface. Someone’s idea of cool, she thought with a sigh. Should she post a complaint about how hard the site was to read?

  No. Its target users probably liked the site just fine. She adjusted her glasses so she could read the type, and scanned it to make sure there was nothing new on the site. There wasn’t. At least not on the public site. She could log in—

  No. Not here. Not while she was alone. She found herself suddenly uneasy. Eager to get to the Alan Grace office, where she’d have people around. Even if they were only junior employees, going about their daily routine, still aware of Ray’s death but no longer devastated by it, and unaware of the danger that Maude could see.

  Or perhaps it’s not other people I want around me, she thought as she logged out. Perhaps it’s Turing’s cameras I want. Knowing she can watch over me.

  Which was silly, she thought as she closed and locked her door. What could Turing do if I were in physical danger?

  About as much as Maude could do if Turing were in electronic danger from whoever had stolen Ray’s laptop.

  At least this had happened before Turing transferred to her new home. While Turing was still in the UL system, with all the firewalls and other electronic safeguards that humans had built and AIPs like Turing and KingFischer had enhanced.

  Not to mention a level of physical security that would be nice to have at Alan Grace right now. True, they had often laughed at how overly zealous—how paranoid—UL security seemed. But today, UL security didn’t seem that ridiculous. Maude made a mental note to discuss this with Turing.

  But not now. If they got past the present situation—-

  When they got past the present situation. When it was all over and they could laugh, perhaps a little shakily, and make plans for the future.

  Haude u/ill be here soon- I wish I had some news for her. Or even some interesting information.

  KingFischer is still studying security on the Beyond Paranoia site. Studying it with the slow, persistent, methodical intensity that makes him such a chess master. If I were doing it, I’d have lost patience by now, succumbed to the impulse to try something. Anything. And probably have blown it. Sol stay away, avoid bothering him, try to control the impulse to snap at him and ask, “Why aren’t you doing anything?” Because he is.