Geek Mafia: Mile Zero (18 page)

"You got everything covered here?" Paul asked Bee as he stifled a yawn.

"Yep," she said, eyes on the screens in front of her.

"Okay...I'm going downstairs then," said Paul. "Check my mail and stuff."

"You mean check your auction," teased Bee.

"Yeah, yeah, that too. Do you need anything? Coffee?"

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Bee was clicking through the network of cameras, looking for something. Or maybe just looking. Bee did a lot of just looking through her cameras. "I'm fine," she said, pointing over her shoulder to a small refrigerator that Paul knew was full of Red Bull and string cheese.

"Ok..." Paul started to say something - what would have been the latest in a series of admonitions to Bee that she should eat and, well, live more healthily. But he knew it would only piss her off. It would certainly piss him off if someone kept hectoring him like that.

He went downstairs, past the second floor bedrooms and down into the main living space. The old Key West house had a complicated layout, having been divided, subdivided and then remodeled again and again in the hundred or so years since it had been built. He made his way through the kitchen to the back of the house to a room that had once been a porch before being turned into a separate apartment and then reintegrated into the main living space as a sun room. It was Paul's favorite room in the house, filled with light during the day and cool breezes at night (except in summer of course, when there was no such thing as a cool breeze in Key West unless it came with a hurricane).

One table was given over entirely to Paul's art supplies - a pile of sketchbooks, Bristol boards, pencils, charcoal and inks. He gave the pile a guilty glance and then moved over to his laptop. He'd started a new comic book project when he'd moved here and had been going strong on it for a while, but he'd scarcely touched it in months. Too much shit happening in his life. Especially right now, when he needed to concentrate on the crisis at hand. With the whole Raquel-Isaiah-Winston-Eddie-Murder-Conspiracy-Revolution thingy, he didn't have any bandwidth left for anything else.

Well, almost anything else. He fired up his public laptop (as opposed to the secure laptop he had for Crew related activities) and logged into the neighbor's wireless network (for which they'd cracked the wimpy WEP

security months ago.) He did check e-mail, although he seldom got much besides spam these days - he'd cut himself off from anyone in his old life who might e-mail him. He thought briefly about trying to do a search for info about Isaiah, but he couldn't imagine that a man like him had left many traces of himself in the Web for someone like Paul to find. Inevitably he pointed his browser to his bookmarks and then, inevitably, to the forums. And then, because he couldn't help himself, he started playing the damn game.

Forty, maybe fifty minutes later he jumped in his seat at the sound of Chloe's voice. "Don't tell me you're playing that fucking game again," she teased. He looked up to see her coming up the back steps into the sun room. She must have snuck in through the neighbor's back yard, thought Paul. She really is being security conscious. He toyed briefly with the idea of shutting the laptop down before she could see the game up on the screen, but decided not to bother. He'd been caught red-handed.

"If I'd known you liked beating yourself up so much, I'd have brought my chains with me from Cali," Chloe said.

"Are they better than the chains on our bed now?" he asked.

"Not really," she admitted. "But those haven't seen near as much use as that thing." She pointed to the laptop.

"That's only because we never seem to wait until we get to the bedroom."

"Maybe we should bring them with us to the party next time," Chloe suggested as she sat down next to Paul and looked at the screen. She pointed to the display, "Are you winning?"

"We'll see in a few minutes," he replied.

"Seriously, Paul, why are you playing that fucking game?"

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"Because it's fun."

"It can't be fun."

"It is fun."

"It might be fun for other people. But it's not fun for you. I can tell."

"You can tell?" he asked, growing angry that they were having this conversation again. "What clued you in?

That I play it so often? I must hate it if I keep playing it all the time."

"I can tell because every time you play it you're in a shitty mood for the next hour or three until some other bullshit comes along to distract you."

"That's not..."

"Honey, it is. I know you try to hide it. Maybe you even try and hide it from yourself or some psychological shit like that. I don't know. But I do know it makes you pissed off."

"Maybe," Paul admitted. In fact, he knew she was right. Playing the game did piss him off. Even when he was enjoying it at the time, afterward he felt worse. Like scratching a bug bite or picking at a scab.

"Definitely," Chloe said. "So why do it? Why drudge that bullshit up? You left that all behind in San Jose, didn't you? Isn't that why we're here on this insane little island, so we can forget about all this and start over."

"But it's not that easy. I can't just forget."

"Not if you keep playing that fucking thing, you can't."

"But it's mine. My game. My fucking creation..." his voice rose as he spoke, almost to a shout.

"Not anymore," said Chloe, her voice soft. She put a hand on his and lifted his fingers from the keyboard.

"They stole it from you, remember. They stole it from you and we took revenge."

"It's not that simple."

"It's never that simple. But you're making it extra complicated by playing the damn thing. You're like the jealous ex-boyfriend who stands out on the lawn and watches the girl you lost fuck the new guy. That's not the way to get over it."

"I know," said Paul. And he did. He knew that she was absolutely right. The game, Metropolis 2.0 was based on a comic book he'd created and written. He'd gone on to be the lead designer on the game until he'd been unceremoniously fired. And while that nasty turn of events had ultimately led to the much more rewarding relationship with the woman he loved, it had still been a traumatic time. He retained nothing but anger and resentment for his former partners and the game.

Paul had been front page news when he and Chloe and Bee fled California. And if CNN had lost interest in his scams and crimes relatively quickly, the computer gaming press had latched onto his story for months.

Despite the fact that Paul had tried his crooked best to screw with his former partners, the unwanted publicity of his blown con game had given Metropolis 2.0 more free press than anything the company's marketing department could ever have dreamed of. Every article and Web post about the game included some mention of

"wanted criminal and con artist Paul Reynolds" and his role in creating the game.

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His old company, Fear and Loading Games, never mentioned his name in their own press materials and did everything they could to distance themselves from their fugitive former designer. When the game came out six months later, his name was nowhere to be found in the credits or the press releases. Nevertheless, a whole new round of news stories retold his sordid tale, providing even more exposure for the game. It was an immediate best seller (helped a great deal by the fact that it turned out to be a pretty damn good game), topping the PC game sales charts for three months and was, by any measure, a hit. Industry observers all noted that the air of infamy associated with Metropolis 2.0's creator gave the game a mystique and "Net cred" that couldn't help but boost sales.

All through the process, Paul followed the game's progress with a feverish intensity. He'd lurked on the game's message boards and read every post about him. At first he'd been heartened to see that he had plenty of fans who lamented his loss and were dead certain that the game would be a miserable failure, doomed to obscurity. But he quickly learned that this support was just typical Internet hyperbole. The Fear and Loading team steadily and relentlessly ignored Paul - simply not commenting on either his contributions to the game or his crimes. Instead they released a flood of new screen shots, designer diaries and interviews. Within a month, his one-time champions online had all but forgotten about him.

Paul found that not being the center of attention hurt him more deeply than he would have imagined. And when the game came out without his name on it, it felt like a body blow. It really was like seeing the girl you love marry someone else. He'd created the comic, the world the game was based on, and now he didn't have any connection to it at all. As part of his contribution to founding the company, he'd turned over all rights to his original, self-published comic book. The game company included a compilation of his comics in the box with every game, and even there you had to search the very fine print to find his name. They'd literally taken his world from him.

But when the game came out, Paul couldn't help but try it out. He'd loaded it onto his laptop, signing on with a stolen credit card and fake identity, intending to just take a quick look and see what those bastards had done to his creation without him. As it turned out, they'd done an annoyingly good job. The vast, futuristic dystopia he'd drawn in the comics was alive in digital 3D on his screen. He created his cybernetically enhanced freedom fighter and started playing, just to poke around and test the game play. The game play was great - and very different from what he'd originally designed. He kept playing, wanting to unlock more content and see more of the game.

Eight hours later, Chloe had come home, having been out with Sandee scouting a real estate developer as a potential mark. Paul had managed to hide what he'd been doing from them as they came through the door, although Chloe was a little pissed that he'd failed to meet them at the Green Parrot for drinks like he'd promised. But he hadn't been able to hide his new addiction for long. If it weren't for the fact that running and attending the party was insanely fun and enjoyable, he knew he'd have had a much harder time pulling himself away from the game each night. He'd already developed a cabal of online friends who he played with regularly, and he even felt a little guilty when he went too long without logging on and checking in with them.

He stared down at the screen now, as a dead woman lay in their freezer out back and a criminal conspiracy was swirling into existence around them. He watched as the last few seconds ticked away on the display and a message popped up on his screen: "You've won auction for Lvl. 30 Green Crystal Weapon Enhancement.

5,720 credits deducted from your account."

"You won," said Chloe.

"I did," agreed Paul, clicking off the message.

"What's a Green Crystal whachamacallit?"

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"I don't know. One of my guild members wanted it for something."

"Huh."

"Yeah."

They sat in silence for a moment, looking at the screen where absolutely nothing of interest was happening.

"You really should..." Chloe started.

"I know," Paul said.

"It's just that..."

"I know, ok. I know. You're right. I should just cancel the damn game."

"I mean, play a game, sure. Why're we here if we can't play games when we want to? But try something else.

Try World of Warcraft or EVE Online or something else. Anything but that."

"I just keep thinking that somehow this will work out for me," said Paul.

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know what I mean," he said, and he didn't. He just had a sense that somehow if he kept playing that it might lead to him getting even with them for taking his name off it. "It's like, by playing it in secret like this -

it's like I'm stealing back from them. They have no idea that I'm in there. That I'm still playing a role. And if I get powerful enough I might be able to... I don't know. Do something."

"Do something to them?"

"Yeah."

"We kinda already did some fucking things to them. Worse things than you'll ever accomplish by playing their game and paying them money."

"Well, it's not my money."

"They don't care. They're still getting paid."

"I know."

"It's just stupid."

"It's not stupid!" he insisted, even though it obviously was. "Listen, ok. I know it's weird. But there's something I need here, ok? Something important to me."

"No, there's nothing important in there at all, Paul. Nothing. You've got to let that shit go and..."

"I don't have to do anything."

"What you have to do is fucking get your head in the game," said Chloe, her voice turning cold and harsh.

"You may have forgotten about Raquel out there in the freezer, but there's some serious shit..."

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"I haven't forgotten anything!" Paul shouted. "You think I'll forget a dead fucking body? I haven't forgotten that. Just like I haven't forgotten that it was your goddamn friend Winston who dragged us into this bullshit with Eddie and Isaiah and whoever else. We had a good thing going here in Key West until all these freaks and geeks showed up and..."

"Don't you lay this on me!" Chloe shouted back. "Don't you fucking dare lay this on me. This is the life. This is the life you chose. I didn't kill that woman, and I didn't ask these people to come here. I didn't choose this insane little island to live on. And I wasn't the one who got fucking fired from my own company for being a lazy clock watcher. So don't lay your shit on me. You're the one..."

"That you tried to steal from," Paul said, cutting her off. "The one you strung along and cock-teased and tried to take three quarters of a million bucks from. The one who you let get set up by your friend Raff..."

"Oh, this again," she said, standing up from the table.

"What do you mean again?" snapped Paul. "We've never even talked through this shit..."

"But it's always there, isn't it?" asked Chloe. "It's always the fucking elephant in the room. You think I don't get your snide little comments and jokes? You think it doesn't bother me when you say shit about me stealing from you? You know I feel like shit for what I did! You know I do! But you keep digging. You can't help it can you? And when you play that fucking game," she pointed at the screen. "Every time you play that it means you're going to be bitchy to me for the next few hours. Guaranteed."