sound.
Dagmar remembered the young cop from the car, the boy whose whole life experience seemed derived from Felony Maximum IV. Who made machine-gun noises with his lips as he triggered an imaginary weapon.
I always take the MAC-10.
Aside from a handful that went crazy and charged, the crowd surged away from the police line, leaving behind specks of black and red on the pavement. The officer kept yelling through the bullhorn. The demonstrators who charged were gunned down, and bullets flew past them into the crowd.
Their sprawled figures were tiny. Dagmar could cover their dead forms with her finger and make them go away.
The crowd screamed as if it were one huge animal, and the animal fled. The shooting continued, more deliberate now, as if the police were picking their targets. The signs and banners the crowd had been carrying fell and lay abandoned along the pavement.
Dagmar stepped back from the edge, tar pulling at her shoes.
The scent of burning Chinese was strong in the air.
Once upon a time there had been four of them, Dagmar and Charlie and Austin and BJ. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games.
They met at Caltech, where they majored in computer science. They spent a lot of their time staring into screens, and computer games had a limited appeal for eyes that were already weary of looking at 525-line images. They preferred games played with paper and pencil—RPGs, where each could pretend to be someone different from themselves, yet someone they had created.
Unlike their peers who preferred computers to human company, each was comfortable around other people. Austin and Charlie even knew how to talk to girls—and BJ was a fast learner.
Other people wandered in and out of the games, but these four were constants. They were all role players—they could stay in character for hours and shared a dislike of players whose chief motivation was to manipulate the rules in order to gain rewards or treasure.
Dagmar was a scholarship student. Her mother worked in a dry-cleaning establishment; her father was a bartender who had descended over time to a barfly. Dagmar had grown up preferring game worlds to her own life, though sometimes the latter intruded, as when she’d discovered that her father had pawned her computer in order to buy vodka. Caltech, in Pasadena, with its smog and perfect weather, was the best life she’d ever known.
When she ran her own games, she used GURPS as a rule set and created her own worlds of adventure, all crafted in meticulous detail. She specialized in elaborate plots with enormous sets of characters, sometimes so complex that after the game had run on for weeks or months, she herself forgot who had stolen the jewels, or murdered the Antarean ambassador, or double-crossed the Allies on the eve of World War II. Her games required hours of research to put together, but on the other hand, she enjoyed research.
Charlie’s games were agreeably eccentric. In one game the players were ravens in a quest for the magic that had given them human intelligence; in another, they were zombies in search of human brains to eat. In a third, they were ordinary people who had somehow been shrunk to the size of hamsters. Other sorts of players—those who wanted to kill monsters, plunder treasure, and rack up experience points—recoiled from Charlie’s campaigns as if they transmitted plague. Dagmar, Austin, and BJ loved them.
Austin Katanyan was a second-generation gamer. His parents had met playing Dungeons and Dragons in college. He had brought their first-edition D&D rules with him in the original brown cardboard box, actually used them to run a game, and had a worn copy of Chainmail that he used to resolve the large-scale conflicts. He liked to run old game systems: RuneQuest, Witch Hunt, Empire of the Petal Throne. Like Dagmar, he liked to explore the elaborate backgrounds of fantasy worlds. Unlike Dagmar, he didn’t invent his own.
BJ’s
Dagmar remembered the young cop from the car, the boy whose whole life experience seemed derived from Felony Maximum IV. Who made machine-gun noises with his lips as he triggered an imaginary weapon.
I always take the MAC-10.
Aside from a handful that went crazy and charged, the crowd surged away from the police line, leaving behind specks of black and red on the pavement. The officer kept yelling through the bullhorn. The demonstrators who charged were gunned down, and bullets flew past them into the crowd.
Their sprawled figures were tiny. Dagmar could cover their dead forms with her finger and make them go away.
The crowd screamed as if it were one huge animal, and the animal fled. The shooting continued, more deliberate now, as if the police were picking their targets. The signs and banners the crowd had been carrying fell and lay abandoned along the pavement.
Dagmar stepped back from the edge, tar pulling at her shoes.
The scent of burning Chinese was strong in the air.
Once upon a time there had been four of them, Dagmar and Charlie and Austin and BJ. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games.
They met at Caltech, where they majored in computer science. They spent a lot of their time staring into screens, and computer games had a limited appeal for eyes that were already weary of looking at 525-line images. They preferred games played with paper and pencil—RPGs, where each could pretend to be someone different from themselves, yet someone they had created.
Unlike their peers who preferred computers to human company, each was comfortable around other people. Austin and Charlie even knew how to talk to girls—and BJ was a fast learner.
Other people wandered in and out of the games, but these four were constants. They were all role players—they could stay in character for hours and shared a dislike of players whose chief motivation was to manipulate the rules in order to gain rewards or treasure.
Dagmar was a scholarship student. Her mother worked in a dry-cleaning establishment; her father was a bartender who had descended over time to a barfly. Dagmar had grown up preferring game worlds to her own life, though sometimes the latter intruded, as when she’d discovered that her father had pawned her computer in order to buy vodka. Caltech, in Pasadena, with its smog and perfect weather, was the best life she’d ever known.
When she ran her own games, she used GURPS as a rule set and created her own worlds of adventure, all crafted in meticulous detail. She specialized in elaborate plots with enormous sets of characters, sometimes so complex that after the game had run on for weeks or months, she herself forgot who had stolen the jewels, or murdered the Antarean ambassador, or double-crossed the Allies on the eve of World War II. Her games required hours of research to put together, but on the other hand, she enjoyed research.
Charlie’s games were agreeably eccentric. In one game the players were ravens in a quest for the magic that had given them human intelligence; in another, they were zombies in search of human brains to eat. In a third, they were ordinary people who had somehow been shrunk to the size of hamsters. Other sorts of players—those who wanted to kill monsters, plunder treasure, and rack up experience points—recoiled from Charlie’s campaigns as if they transmitted plague. Dagmar, Austin, and BJ loved them.
Austin Katanyan was a second-generation gamer. His parents had met playing Dungeons and Dragons in college. He had brought their first-edition D&D rules with him in the original brown cardboard box, actually used them to run a game, and had a worn copy of Chainmail that he used to resolve the large-scale conflicts. He liked to run old game systems: RuneQuest, Witch Hunt, Empire of the Petal Throne. Like Dagmar, he liked to explore the elaborate backgrounds of fantasy worlds. Unlike Dagmar, he didn’t invent his own.
BJ’s
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