Fantasy in Death (4 page)

“We’re good, thanks,” Eve told her.

“You sit down, Benny.” Cill swiped her pass then selected a bottle of water. She pushed it on Benny. “Drink a little.”

She tended him, Eve thought. Not like a lover but a doting sister.

Cill went back to Vending, ordered up a coffee. “For Var,” she said. “He’ll want coffee.”

He came in fast, a stocky man of about thirty wearing the maxi-cargos McNab favored in an eye-friendly khaki, but his well-worn skids were the same stoplight red as his shirt. His brown hair capped short around a face hovering between pleasant and homely.

“Jeez, Cill, I told you I’m buried today. No time for breaks. And with Bart still off-line I’ve got five shitloads to shovel before I—”

“Var.” Cill passed him the coffee. “You need to sit down.”

“I need to move. Seriously. So make it quick and...” He noticed Eve and Peabody for the first time. “Sorry.” His face edged slightly closer to pleasant with his smile. “Didn’t know we had company. Are you the reps from Gameland? I wasn’t expecting you until this afternoon. I’d have been a little more organized by then. Probably.”

“This is Lieutenant Dallas and...”

“Detective Peabody.”

“Yeah.” Cill took a deep breath, then closed the glass door. “They’re here about Bart.”

“Bart?” A quick laugh exploded. “What’d he do? Get drunk and jaywalk? Do we need to post bail?”

“Sit down, Var,” Cill murmured.

“Why? What?” Amusement faded. “Oh hell, oh shit, did he get mugged or something? Is he hurt? Is he okay?”

“We’re Homicide,” Eve said. “Bart Minnock’s been murdered.”

The coffee slipped out of Var’s hand and splashed over his bright red shoes. “What do you mean? What does that mean?”

“Sit down, Var.” Cill pulled him to a chair. “Just sit down. We’ll clean that up later.”

“But this is crazy. Bart can’t be... When? How?”

“Sometime between four-thirty and five yesterday afternoon, in his apartment a few blocks from here. He was found by CeeCee Rove earlier this morning, in his holo-room. He’d been decapitated.”

After Benny’s strangled gasp, there was utter silence. Beside him, Cill went deathly white. Her hand flayed out, and Var gripped it.

“Someone cut his head off?” As Cill began to shake, Benny put an arm around her so the three of them sat on the sofa as one unit. “Someone cut Bart’s
head
off?”

“That’s correct. It appears he was in the holo-room at the time of the attack, and had programmed a game by disc. EDD is working on removing the disc from the holo-unit. I’m going to need to verify the whereabouts of all of you from three to six yesterday.”

“We were here,” Cill said quietly. “We were all here. Well, I left just before six. I had a yoga class, and it starts at six. It’s just down the street at Blossom. Benny and Var were still here when I left.”

“I think I was here until about six-thirty.” Var cleared his throat. “I-I went home. My group’s got a game—a virtual game—of Warlord going, and we played from about seven to ten. Benny was still here when I left, and he was already in when I got here at eight-thirty this morning.”

“I worked late and bunked here. Some of us were around until seven or eight—I don’t remember, but we can check the logs. I shut the place up, and worked until about one, then I crashed. None of us would hurt Bart. We’re family. We’re family.”

“They have to know.” Cill leaned her head on his shoulder a moment. “It’s one of the steps. You have to take the steps to get to the next level. If Bart let somebody into his holo, he trusted them, or...”

“Or,” Eve prompted.

“He was showing off.” Var’s voice broke, and once again he cleared his throat.

“What might he want to show off? What was he working on he’d want to take home, play with, show off?”

“We’ve got a lot of things in development,” Var told her. “A lot ready to roll out, others we’re fine-tuning. Bart took hard copies home a lot, to play them out, look for kinks and glitches and ways to pump it up. We all did.”

“Then he’d have logged it out?”

“He should have, yeah.” Var stared blankly. “Oh, I could check. I can go check.”

“I’ll go with you. Peabody,” Eve said with a nod, then followed Var out while her partner continued to interview.

They took one of the elevators down, with Var waving people off. His pockets sent out chirps and beeps and buzzes. She saw him start to reach in—an instinctive move—then let his hand drop away. “They’ll know something’s up, something’s wrong,” he said to Eve.

“What do we tell them? I don’t know what to tell them.”

“We’ll need to interview all the employees. How many are there?”

“On-site? Seventy or so. We have a couple dozen nationally who work virtually—in sales, in testing, that kind of thing.” He gestured her into an office that looked like the bridge of a starship.

“This is Bart’s space. It’s, ah, a replica of Galactica’s CIC. Bart works—worked—best when he had fun with it.”

“Okay. We’ll need to go through his things here, and take his comps and com units in.”

“Don’t you need a warrant or something?”

She aimed a cool look. “Do you want me to get one?”

“No. Sorry.” He raked a hand through his hair and sent the short ends into tiny tufts. “No. I just... His stuff. It’s all his stuff. He’d have logged anything he took with him on this unit. It’s inventory. The four of us have the same password here, so we can check what’s in and out. There’s a secondary, different for each of us, that’s required on our own units to edit. So we can’t mess around, you know?”

“All right.”

He entered the password manually, his back to Eve. “Var,” he said and held his pass up for verification.

Var is cleared,
the computer announced.

“Show any log-outs for off-site use by Bart for June twenty-third.”

“Make it a week,” Eve told him.

“Oh. Amend to June seventeenth to June twenty-third.”

One moment, please. How are you, Var?

“I’ve been better.”

I’m sorry to hear that. Here’s your list. Can I help?

“Not right now, thanks. There’s nothing for yesterday.” He gestured at the screen. “He’s got a couple of in-developments off-site through the week, but he logged them back in. He didn’t have anything out yesterday.”

“I’ll take a copy of that list, and a copy of any of the programs he took out this week.”

“Oh wow, Jeez. I can’t. I mean, I really can’t just give you copies of stuff we’ve got in development.” His face went from shocked, to pained, to worried. “It’s, like, secret. Nobody but the four of us is cleared to take anything off-site. Benny won’t even do that until we’re about ready to rock it. It’s why he ends up working all-nighters here. He’s nervous about taking something that’s not in the jump out of the building.”

“I’ll just get a warrant.”

“Oh, man. I don’t know what to do. I can’t think straight.” Tears swirled into his eyes before he turned away. “I have to protect the company, but I don’t want to do anything that messes things up. I don’t even know if I can say yes or no. We have to vote on it. The three of us. We’d need to figure it out. Can you let us try to figure it out first?”

“I’ll give you some time. How long did you know Bart?”

“Since college. He was already hooked with Cill and Benny. They hit in, like, elementary, and then we all just... See the logo.” He pointed to the logo of U-Play on the screen. “He’d come up with a lot of fancier ones, really rocking ones, but he wanted this. The words in a square. He said that was us, the square, because it took four of us to make it happen. Can I be excused for a minute? Please. I just want to, um, take a minute.”

“Go ahead.”

As he fled, Eve’s ’link signaled. “Dallas.”

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Feeney told her.

“Good first, it’s been a crap morning.”

“We were able to dig some of the program details out of the unit. The name’s Fantastical, and it’s coded SID.12—still in development, I’d say twelfth version. It’s got the U-Play copyright, and the date of last edit as of two days ago.”

“Was he playing solo, or was somebody in it with him?”

“The unit’s set for solo, but that’s part of the bad. No way to tell from the disc. No way to tell what the hell Fantastical is as the disc self-destructed when we bypassed the last fail-safe.”

“Shit.”

“It’s pretty toasted. We might be able to get something off it, given a miracle or two. They have to have a copy. No way this is the only one.”

“I’ll get on that from here. I’m going to need a team to pick up the vic’s work equipment. Try not to blow it up.”

“That hurts, kid.”

“Well, it might as well be a crap day for you, too,” Eve said and signed off before signaling Peabody. “I need you to come to the vic’s office, start a prelim search, and keep everybody else out. I’m on my way there.”

“Copy that. I’ve got the salients on these two, and I’ll do runs on the three of them. Are we going to interview the rest of the place today?”

“Better now than later. We’ll keep it to whereabouts at the time of until we do more runs.”

“There’s over seventy of them, Dallas.”

She sighed. “I know. Contact Feeney again. He and McNab and Callendar can come down. They speak geek anyway.”

“Copy that, too. McNab’s going to wet his pants when he sees this place.”

“And won’t that be fun? You here, me there. Now.” Eve clicked off again.

Eve took her time going back. She saw that Var was right—people knew something was up, something was off. Heads turned in her direction, whispers followed her. The place reeked of guilt and worry and just a hint of excitement.

What’s going on, what did they do? Are we in trouble?

She spotted Var coming back from the opposite direction, looking wrecked, and the whispers pumped up to murmurs.

She let him go in ahead of her, then closed the door behind her.

“What’s Fantastical?”

The question was answered with shocked silence.

3

“I’ll get a warrant.” Eve tracked her gaze from face to face, looking for the weak spot. “And the department e-team goes through every byte of every file. And I shut you down while they do. It could take weeks.”

“But you can’t, you can’t shut us down,” Benny protested. “We have more than seventy people on-site, and all the others online depending on us. And the distributors, the accounts. Everything that’s in development.”

“Yeah, that’s a shame. Murder trumps all.”

“They have bills, they have families,” Cill began.

“And I’ve got the two parts of Bart.”

“That’s low,” Var mumbled. “That’s low.”

“Murder usually is. Your choice.” She held up her ’link.

“We can get the lawyers on it.” Cill glanced at Benny, then Var. “But—”

“Murder trumps all,” Eve repeated. “I’ll get my warrant, and I’ll get my answers. It’ll just take longer. Meanwhile, your friend’s in the morgue. But maybe a game means more to you than that.”

“It’s not just a game.” Passion rose in Benny’s voice. “It’s the ult for Bart, for us, for the company. The top of top secret—and we swore. We all swore an oath not to talk about it with anyone not directly assigned. And even then, it’s only need-to-know.”

“I need to know. He was playing it when he was killed.”

“But... but that’s not possible,” Cill began. “You said he was killed at home.”

“That’s right. With a disc copy of Fantastical in his holo-unit.”

“That’s wrong, that’s got to be wrong.” Paler now, Var shook his head. “He wouldn’t have taken a development copy off-site without telling us, not without logging it out. It breaks protocol.”

“He had it at home? He took it off-site, without telling any of us?” Benny stared at Eve with eyes that read betrayal as much as shock.

“She’s just trying to get us to tell her—”

“For God’s sake, Var, use your head,” Cill snapped. “She wouldn’t know about it if they hadn’t found it at Bart’s.” As she pressed her fingers to her eyes, a half-dozen rings glittered and gleamed in the light. “He was so juiced up about it, we nearly had it down. Nearly. I don’t understand why he’d have taken it out without letting us know, and why he didn’t log it. He’s pretty fierce on logging, but he was so juiced over it.”

“What is it?”

“An interactive holo fantasy game. Multi-function,” Benny continued. “The player or players choose from a menu of settings, levels, story lines, worlds, eras—or they can create their own through the personalize feature. The game will read the player or players’ choices, actions, reactions, movements, and adjust the scenario accordingly.

It’s nearly impossible to play any scenario through exactly the same way twice. It’s always going to give the player a new challenge, a new direction.”

“Okay, high-end on the fun and price scale, but not staggering new ground.”

“The sensory features are off the scale,” Var told her. “More real than real, and the operator has the option of adding in more features as they go. There’s reward and punishment.”

“Punishment?” Eve repeated.

“Say you’re a treasure hunter,” Cill explained. “You’d maybe collect clues or gems, artifacts, whatever, depending on the level and the scene. But you screw up, you get tossed into another challenge, and lose points. Maybe you’re attacked by rival forces, or you fall and break your ankle, or lose your equipment in a raging river. Screw up enough, game over, and you need to start the level again.”

“The program reads
you
,” Benny went on. “Your pulse rate, your BP, your body temp. Just like a medi-unit. It tailors the challenges to your specific physicality. It combines the sensations of top-flight VR with the reality-based imagery of high-end holo. Fight the dragon to save the princess? You’ll feel the heat, the weight of the sword. Slay the dragon, and the princess is grateful. You’ll, ah, feel that, too. The full experience.”

“If the dragon wins?”

“You get a jolt. Nothing painful, just a buzz, and like Cill said, the game ends at that point. You can start it up again, from that point or back at the beginning, or change any factors. But the program will also change. It morphs and calculates,” he added, obviously warming to the topic. “The characters in each program are enhanced with the same AI technology used in droids. Friend or foe, they’re programmed to want to win as much as the player.”