The man in black lifted the knife slowly. Nio zoomed the monochrome security feed until a hazy image of his face filled the screen. Whatever else was about to happen, she wanted to make sure she could identify him, but at that resolution, he was little more than a pair of hollow eyes.
Jane wasn’t doing well. She had lost a lot of blood. She would’ve died right then if not for her husband, who rose suddenly and hit the man in black with a dinette chair, screaming for the children to get out of the house.
“RUN! KIDS! RUN!”
He scurried to his wife.
“G-get them o-o—” His wife tried to finish her sentence, but she was fading.
“I got you,” he said, hands and voice shaking beyond reason. “I got you.”
Aaron pressed a hand to his wife’s abdomen, which was dark with blood. Her face was pale and her lips were twisting. She tried to speak and implored her husband with her eyes.
“No. I’m not leaving you,” he said, crying. “I’m not.”
Neither looked at the killer approaching. They looked at each other instead, and Nio realized they were making easy targets of themselves in the hopes it gave the children time to escape. They dared say nothing else. If the man in black transferred his attentions from the adults, there would be nothing they could do.
Nio wiped the tears from her eyes and saw the flash of the knife.
But then it stopped. Something caught the killer’s attention. Something caught everyone’s attention. A sound. Nio heard it as well.
Sirens.
The teenage daughter, never without her phone, had called the police from her brother’s room, where the pair were holding onto each other inside the closet.
The man in black looked at the couple. Everyone knew he was debating a quick kill. But Aaron simply stood, fallen kitchen knives in both hands, and dared the man to try. He knew he couldn’t win. But he might be able to delay the intruder just long enough to be caught and so to never hurt anyone again.
But the man in black didn’t try. His night was ruined, and he bolted for the back door. Nio thought briefly about locking it in an effort to hold him for the police, but there was no telling what he might do to the couple if desperate and cornered, so she let him go, and as the first yellow-jacketed officer broke through the front, Nio collapsed on the VR pad. She put her head in her gloved hands and started to sob, half in fear, half in relief.
She heard the sound of points being tallied and looked up to see the deductions she incurred for the injuries to the parents. But she got a special bonus for leaving three of four people alive. Jane, it seemed, was deemed “critical” and her final tally was delayed pending the final outcome of a woman’s life. The leader board returned. Nio was dead last, which wasn’t surprising considering she hadn’t played levels two or three. More interesting than her rank, however, was the others’. The leaders had changed, suggesting other games were in progress. AnodyneTomato343 had slipped to second place after five rounds. Someone named LamentablePersimmon994 was in the lead after only three. Before the column of points was another set of small numbers listed in pairs before and after a forward slash. Nio hadn’t really gotten a good look at them before and assumed they were a tally of achievements or something similar, but now it seemed they were odds.
People were betting.
Nio sighed.
Of course they were.
She got up and walked outside, where the earlier clouds had parted like curtains to reveal the greatest show on earth: the night sky free of all light pollution. She sighed, deeply, and stood in the dark and let the glory of the cosmos, all but invisible anywhere else on the planet, wash the grime of humanity off her.
“Hurry . . .” she told the stars.
She couldn’t wait any longer for rescue. At that moment, her only certainty was that she was not going to play another round of the game. The fact that a woman was in the hospital and two children were nearly killed was too much to bear. Progressing to level five meant five lives would be on the line. Given the result of level four, Nio felt certain that one of those five, at least, would be killed, and she chose instead to live with the belief, true or false, that as long as she made it clear she wouldn’t play, the organizers of the game wouldn’t let five people die needlessly—not out of altruism, of course, but self-interest. They would get no benefit, no money, from a playerless game, so there would be no reason to assume the cost, and the risk, of murder. Without a moment’s hesitation, she smashed the satellite receiver with a wood log, picked up all the pieces, and threw them in the river. The VR pedestal was a different story. She would leave it as evidence, assuming any police department believed her—or bothered to make the costly journey to the remote cabin.
With only basics necessary for survival stuffed into her backpack, Nio hiked into the forest in the dark of night. It was dangerous to travel at night. One branch to the eye, one twist of the foot in the dark might leave her lost or stranded, but she couldn’t bear to stay in the cabin. She needed to get away. Far away.
Trouncing loudly through the brush, hoping to scare whatever animals might be in her path, she never heard the soldiers.
While passing through the sparse branches of two adjacent trees, a hand went over her mouth before she could scream. It held her head down while a second pair grabbed her feet and lifted them out from under her. She struggled, but the men were strong. More than that, they were well-trained. She was swiftly bound—first at the ankles, then at the wrists—and then gagged. A hood was slipped over her head. The world got much quieter then, and she realized it had some kind of noise cancellation. Still, she could catch the faint sound of a single-engine aircraft as if heard from a great distance, and she could feel it rise into the air and bounce with turbulence. After it landed, she was hauled to a room with a tile floor where she was left alone, still bound and gagged. She could see nothing, but she could feel the tiles on her hands. She was stripped and searched and examined forensically. A gloved hand palpated her orifices while others swabbed samples from inside her cheek and under her fingernails. They shaved her head and removed her bandages and put her through some kind of scanner. Then she was doused in chemical-smelling water and dressed in a loose-fitting orange jumpsuit and dropped in a room with the door slammed shut.
She dragged herself to the corner. With the hood back over her head, she could tell almost nothing of her surroundings.
Her first problem, she realized, was that not the threat to her life. It was that she knew almost nothing about her predicament. Based on what little information she had, two scenarios were possible. In the first, Emilio Cortez had been a real person who was actually killed, and the man she had spoken to on the phone was an agent of the game’s organizers who had killed Cortez in order to preserve their identities. The second scenario, which her brain insisted was the more likely, was that Emilio Cortez was a false identity, just like the company he represented, and that after receiving her first email, he had sent her the paperwork not with the intention of ever filing a claim, but to get her to provide information about herself—not just her answers, which could be faked, but all the digital logs of their communications, which might be used to locate her. Clearly, someone had investigated Nio’s own assumed identity, Elise Steele, before they bothered calling the phone number she provided. It was very possible the man she had spoken to was Emilio Cortez, or whoever pretended to be him, and that there had been no car accident and that was just a ploy to scare her into running.
If so, it had worked.
In the latter case, there could be only one reason she was still alive. They needed to discover what she knew and who she had told, if anyone. That was a tricky game. Once they had what they wanted, her life would no longer be valuable. What would keep her alive, then, was uncertainty, which they would try to pry away by any means necessary.
After a long enough time that the silence had become legitimately unnerving, the door was opened and she was dragged to a chair. The hood was lifted, and a bright light was shone in her face.
“So,” a man said from the dark. “How does one get a name like Niobium?”
By the sound, he was a good ten feet away. And there were others in the room.
“It was random,” she said. It was cold in the room, especially on her bare feet, and she started shivering. “They all were.”
A lone drop of sweat ran down her bare scalp and into her eyebrow, and she realized she had a fever. What had they done to her?
“Random? How so?”
“Is this r-really necessary? Can’t we just—”
“Just answer the questions,” he insisted.
She swallowed dry. Was it an interrogation tactic? Make her feel awful so she’d say anything to get out of there, to get back to her room?
“The project scientists picked randomly from all words with the same first two letters as our alters.”
“Ah. So, Manda instead of Marilyn.”
“Her name is Mandala,” Nio shot back defiantly.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“I take it you don’t go by Niobium.”
“Nio,” she answered after a pause.
“Nye-oh,” he repeated, sounding out each syllable separately. “Why not Niobe?”
“I don’t know,” she said tersely. “That’s just how it turned out when we were kids.”
“I see you spent a couple years in an American prison.”
She didn’t answer.
“What was that about?”
She squinted under the light. It was the way he said “about.” There was a distinct Canadian accent.
“What do you want?” she asked. “Do you want to know how I found the lawyer? Because it’s really not that hard. I emailed the shipping company. So, whatever you’re gonna do, just get on with it.”
There was a long pause, and in the ensuing quiet, Nio got the sense that the others in the room were exchanging glances.
“I was asking why you were in prison.”
She made a face. “Does it matter?”
“Just trying to establish the facts. Since you’ve been out, you’ve been a kind of private detective, is that correct?”
“Not really.”
“What would you call it?”
“I help people.”
“Help them with what?”
“Whatever the police can’t.”
“Dangerous things?”
“Sometimes.”
“But not lucrative,” he said.
“What do you think?”
“Then why do it?”
But Nio didn’t have an answer—not at first. She recalled Semmi’s description. He had called it her “alternate function,” by which he meant the purpose she made for herself in lieu of any that had been made for her. He was still struggling to find his own, and Nio got the sense he was a bit jealous—and that he was starting to get frustrated at his own lack of progress. What does one do when one doesn’t seem to have anything to do?
But that wasn’t what the man was asking. He was asking why it was her “alternate function.” Why that and not something else? She felt no obligation to answer, but the mere fact of his asking made her realize she hadn’t really known, not in a way that spoke from her bones, not until her time at the cabin, when the noise of life had faded and the soft, distant droning of her own mortality rung clear.
“Is that what took you to the cabin?” the man asked. “A client?”
“No.”
“Then why were you there?”
“I had surgery. I was recovering.”
“You were recovering from surgery in the wilderness hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital?”
“Not physically. Spiritually. Haven’t you ever needed some time away?”
“And what were you planning on doing there?”
It became easier to keep her eyes closed than keep squinting at the light, so she did.
“What does one usually do at a cabin?” she asked sarcastically.
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Nio leaned forward. “You have a Canadian accent. We traveled by air for less than two hours. I counted. Which means we’re still up north somewhere. But I’m supposed to believe you’ve never spent time in a cabin?”
She sat back.
“So, you went there to do a little fishing?” he asked. “Is that it?”
“I don’t fish. I just wanted to relax.”
“Then why bring a VR machine?”
“Ha.” She snorted. “Is that supposed to be a joke?”
“You say you just wanted to relax, to get away from it all, but you brought a state-of-the-art personal VR machine, a high-speed satellite router, an e-reader.”
“You know I only brought the e-reader.”
“The others just showed up out of nowhere?”
Something odd occurred to her then and Nio sat up straight. They were interrogating her. But they weren’t torturing her. They weren’t even threatening it. She leaned forward and squinted again at the light.
“Who are you?”
“Why did you throw the satellite receiver in the river? Trying to cover your tracks?”
“What tracks? Who are you?”
“We’re asking the questions.”
“Yeah, yeah, fine. But who’s we?”
“What was the VR machine for?”
“It was sent to me,” she said. “Check the box.”
“What for?”
“To play a game.”
“Someone sent a fifteen-thousand-dollar VR machine hundreds of miles into the wilderness so you could play video games?”
Nio thought for a long, cool minute.
“You’re not them,” she said.
“Not who?”
“The people who sent the cube.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because you kidnapped me in the middle of the night! So, who the fuck are you?” She stood. “Where the hell am I?”
A man came and forced her back into the seat. She saw a camo uniform.
“Are you military?”
“I don’t think you realize just how serious this is, Ms. Tesla. Right now, best case, you’re looking at life in prison.”
“For what?”
The man didn’t answer, but the fact that the military had taken her and not the police suggested an answer. She scoffed. Then, slowly, derision turned to recognition, and from recognition to fear.
“This is it . . .” she whispered.
“This is what?”
This was how they planned to eliminate her: implicate her in a crime, something very serious, something against the state, and she would be instantly discredited. No one would believe her story about the rest of it. Not without evidence. And what was there? The existence of the VR pedestal corroborated her story, but it didn’t really prove anything, not when all it contained were some meaningless connection logs.
“Check the cube,” she blurted. “There’s a shipping code. It was sent to me by drone from a company called Estivus Global, a shell corp registered in Panama. The director is a man named Emilio Cortez. He died yesterday. Or a couple days ago. I don’t even know what day it is. Just check. You’re being played. I haven’t done whatever it is you think I’ve done.”
“Rest assured, we will verify everything you say. But since you brought him up, what’s your relationship to this Mr. Cortez?”
“I never met him before. We exchanged emails.” She leaned forward. “Check the e-reader. In my pack. You’ll see email exchanges with the shipping company. And with a bunch of tax guys.”
“Tax guys?”
“That’s how I found Cortez. There’s always a paper trail. I didn’t know where to look, but they do.”
“That’s very clever.”
She laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“That’s not clever. This is.”
“What?”
“This. Getting you to do their dirty work, 100% legally. It’s effing brilliant.”
Whoever her interrogators were, Nio expected they knew damned well why she went to prison. Her past only made the charge of espionage seem more likely. Spies were even tried in special secret courts! Her adversaries had found a way to both discredit and eliminate her without anyone in the wider world even being aware. No matter how loudly she protested, her fantastic story would always seem far less probable than whatever circumstantial link identified her as a target. It was simple. Precise.
Like something an AI would come up with.
“Can I at least know what it is I’ve supposedly done? I mean, presumably I’m going to get a lawyer at some point, right, even just for show.”
There was some whispering.
“I think we’re done for today.”
The hood returned and the light went out and she was dragged away.
When Aaron Setera had gone to the basement, Nio had noticed a cylindrical jack connecting the control panel to the wire that erupted from the ground. While it could’ve been part of the original design, there was no reason for such a jack, which could’ve just as easily hidden remote access components. The furnace was new, which meant servicemen had been in the home recently. One of them could’ve inserted the jack fairly easily. Or they could’ve covered the control panel in a thin film that recorded keystrokes. The development of such thin, clear screens led to a whole array of transparent, flexible electronics—electric kites and windows that sensed temperatures and adjusted opacity automatically. And of course a variety of surreptitious uses as well. At some point, someone had created a key logger that was barely the width of food wrap and used it to cover the touchscreen of an ATM on Wall Street, and so to steal both access codes and fingerprints.
But regardless of whether they had used something like that or some other technology entirely, what was certain was that it wouldn’t take a dedicated hacker all that much effort to gain control of any smart home that wasn’t rigorously secure, which is why every security company gave their clients a list of best practices to follow. But in a world where home hacks were rare, the likelihood of being targeted was low, and most families got lazy and settled into a routine of easy checks, which were possible to circumvent with a little time and money. There were no shortage of hackers for hire on the dark web, which meant the person who cracked the house probably had no idea who they were working for or why, and arresting them, even if they could be found, would lead the police no closer to the real culprits.
Then of course there were all the depraved souls who might like to watch. Game viewership was big money. There were professional sports, of course, but video gamers enjoyed watching pros play at tournaments just as much as sports fans did. Broadcasting on the dark web, not to mention bookmaking, would likely offer a revenue stream capable of funding the whole enterprise. Not that whoever was doing this was doing it for money. Nio sincerely doubted that. The money was to pay for it, to pay whoever hacked the Setera house and whoever kidnapped the woman in green. But for the men or women who started it, the game was a labor of love. Making it self-funding simply eliminated unnecessary paper trails created by the transfer of other monies.
The leader board indicated there were other players. Surely one of them had reported it. She couldn’t have been the only one who tried to get free.
Could she?
But then, lying on the floor in a dark room with her hands and legs zip-tied, there was little she could do. The noise-canceling hood ensured she couldn’t easily tell when people were coming or going. Whoever her captors were, they were taking no chances.
After several hours, she was loosed to use the bathroom, although the hood stayed on. She asked for a drink of water but was ignored. She was zip-tied again and left alone, which is when she fell asleep. She was awoken some time later and returned to the interrogation room. The light turned on, the hood came off, and once again she was conversing with darkness.
“So, let me get this straight,” the man said from across the room. “You maintain that you were on some kind of spiritual retreat when, out of the blue, for reasons known only to God, someone you don’t know and can’t name sent you a very expensive VR machine for the sole purpose of recruiting you into a violent video game.”
“It sounds even crazier when you say it.”
He cleared his throat like he was annoyed.
“Yes,” she said. “And you can’t for a second tell me that whatever evidence you found didn’t corroborate that.”
“Some people are coming, Ms. Tesla. They’ll be here any time.”
“People?”
“Americans.”
“Spies?”
“And soldiers. Military intelligence. CIA.”
“Can you at least tell me what it is I’m supposed to have done?” she asked.
“The IP address of your digital satellite receiver was used to hack a server of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. Specifically, one shared by USNORTHCOM and the Joint Task Force North.”
Nio was speechless.
That would do it.
“Given your personal history, your association with known terrorists, multiple felony convictions, and your recent proximity to agents of the Chinese government—”
“Are you kidding?” she interrupted. “That was a year ago. He tried to kill me! I helped catch him!”
“Nevertheless, the Americans are treating the breach very seriously.” He paused. “Very seriously. I’m going to assume, based on your history, that you know what they do in interrogation.”
“I have a general idea.”
“Then you understand this might be your last chance for clemency.”
“But I didn’t do it,” she objected. “How can I reveal information about something I didn’t do?”
Her companion looked at her for a long time. When he spoke, his voice was grave.
“My God, I hope you’re right.”