Game of Death (10 page)

‘How do I do that?’

‘There are a few different ways. The simplest is to choose one of the preset LifeScenes that are built into the system. We have thousands that range from pure adrenaline to purely social.
Then we have tools that let you choose a fairly standard LifeScene and modify it, within limits, to your particular tastes. And finally, for those people who are proficient with a computer, you
could create your own from scratch, using some fairly malleable templates. We have some people who have come up with some of the most amazing stuff you could ever imagine.’

‘I’m sure.’ There is a hint of judgment in his voice.

‘Why don’t you just choose one of the options off the main menu?’ I tap a few times on the keyboard that is attached to the sensory unit and I can see the menu that appears on
the screen, so I know what he is looking at. I watch as he lifts his hand and air-fingers through the menu, browsing. I’m curious what a man like him will choose.

Yvette tugs at my elbow. ‘Ten bucks says he chooses Strip Club,’ she whispers. I reach out and shake her hand to seal the bet. There are several hundred options on the main menu
listed alphabetically, and I’m not convinced he’s even going to get to S. I’m watching as the standard LifeScenes pass by. Most on the main menu are of the family-friendly
variety. The really hardcore options that so many of our users seem to favor have to be searched for. They are usually two levels down on the menu, so we know that the people who get there are
really interested in them. We have never been looking to entice people into the adult sections; it’s just that’s what so many people are looking for. It often makes me wonder about the
true nature of the human race.

Killkenny is through P on the menu. He’s passed favorites from ‘Amazon Zipline’ to ‘Prehistoric Africa’. He’s paused a few times, but just for a moment.
It’s possible that he’s flipping through the menu to see all the options before going back to choose one. That’s what I did the first time around. I went through all the options
that were available at the time – there were considerably fewer back then, when we were still in Beta – and then I went back and chose ‘Grand Canyon Excursion’. I’m
still not sure why, other than it seemed the most foreign option to a kid who grew up on the street of Charlestown. I’d never been anywhere out of the area, and the pictures I’d seen of
the American southwest had always fascinated me. The place seemed further away from where I was from than the moon. And I’ll say that the hour I spent during that first LifeScene hooked me. I
genuinely felt like I’d been out there, and it was all so beautiful. It took some time before I got my head around the fact that none of it was real.

As he scrolls to the end of S, Killkenny’s fingers slow down. ‘Strip Club’ is one of the options right in the middle of the screen. ‘No,’ I whisper. I hate it when
Yvette is right about something like this, and I know I’ll hear about it forever.

His finger hovers for a moment, and I think he’s going to move on. I am just starting to breathe a sigh of relief when he reaches out and taps his choice.

‘Strip Club,’ I say quietly to Yvette.

‘You’re all the same,’ Yvette chuckles.

‘You’re painting with a pretty broad brush, don’t you think?’

‘My brush isn’t broad; men are narrow.’

‘Touché.’ I look down at Killkenny sitting in the seat. It appears that he’s settled in and his attention is rapt. ‘I’m not sure I can watch this,’ I
say to Yvette. ‘You want to grab a cup of coffee?’

‘Sure. Twenty bucks’ll buy a couple high-end lattes.’

I lean in toward Killkenny and speak loudly enough for him to hear through the headphones and the din of the virtual strip club he has entered. ‘We’re grabbing coffee. We’ll be
back.’

‘Okay,’ he calls back. ‘This is remarkable!’

I stand and look at Yvette. ‘Like I said,’ she shrugs. ‘You people aren’t all that complicated.’

‘Hopefully that’ll make it easier to catch
De Sade
,’ I point out.

‘I doubt it,’ she says. ‘Every guy has something in him that’s only a few ticks off
De Sade
. He could be anyone.’

‘You think?’

‘Trust me, I’ve GhostWalked enough male fantasies to know.’

She and I head out to get some coffee. As we walk in silence, I wonder if she’s right.

‘It’s impressive.’

We’re back in my office, sitting around a conference table that’s chipped and stained. It’s the closest thing to a desk that I have in the room. The evening has progressed to
the point where the commuter traffic outside has died down, and the foot traffic of the neighborhood, which crawls with college kids and locals even on weeknights, is picking up. Yvette and I are
sipping our coffees; we brought one back for Killkenny, too, but he hasn’t touched it. I can’t tell whether he doesn’t drink coffee or whether he is simply too overwhelmed by his
first NextLife experience to take further stimulation.

‘We have some impressive people working at the company who’ve developed the technology.’

‘Clearly.’ He looks at the coffee, but doesn’t reach for it. ‘And this guy – this
De Sade
– he created his own LifeScene involving the girl with the
feathers?’

I nod.

‘So, how does that work?’

‘It’s a little like what you just did; it’s just more sophisticated. NextLife gives the user a huge amount of freedom in constructing their own LifeScenes. You’re
basically limited only by your technical ability. Take the strip-club LifeScene you chose from the basic template options: that’s a fully realized LifeScene that anyone can step into.
It’s sort of the “beginner” level. Even with that, though, you have the option of making things brighter or darker, increasing or decreasing the volume – simple options that
you can exercise. At the next level down, you could take the scene and change it in more fundamental ways. You could create your own dancers from the avatar options library; you could set the place
in a different city; you could add a casino. As you break down the elements of a LifeScene further and further, you get to the point where the user is literally in control of everything.’

‘So
De Sade
uses the design tools in the system to create these LifeScenes where he kills the girls he creates. Can’t we just look up who he is on the system?’

I shake my head. ‘The system isn’t designed in that way. One of the things that we promise our users is complete anonymity – particularly when it comes to the LifeScenes.
Without that assurance, no one would use the site.’

‘How do you provide that anonymity?’

‘It’s complicated. When you sign up, you give your name and basic information, including credit-card information if you are going to use any of the pay services. At that point,
you’re assigned an internal identifier by the system, which is a series of letters and numbers that only the computer can recognize. That identifier changes every ten minutes, and the system
overwrites the previous identifier. The system keeps track of each user’s activities by category, not by specific action – so it can tell that you’ve used email, or that you have
Skyped or been in a LifeScene, but because the identifier for your actions is overwritten, the system has no record of what you specifically did on the site. This provides a much higher level of
security and anonymity than on a normal site.’

‘How so?’ Killkenny asks.

‘Take a normal site, like Google or Yahoo. Say you use their email system, and you delete an email. That email is never really deleted. It can almost always be found in the system and
identified with you. Most people don’t really understand that. On our system, the email technically still exists – because data is almost never fully destroyed – but because of
our encryption and the shifting identifiers, it can never be traced back to you.’

‘How about if someone hacks into the system to crack the algorithm?’

I shake my head. ‘Not possible.’

Killkenny mulls this over for a moment. ‘Is there any way to trace
De Sade
by the LifeScenes themselves? Can you search for elements in the LifeScenes – feathers, for
example – that would lead us back to him?’

‘No,’ Yvette answers.

‘How can you be sure? Have you tried it?’

‘It doesn’t work that way. When someone creates a LifeScene, it doesn’t exist on our servers – it’s not stored here. The servers make the tools and the software
available, but the data for a user’s specific LifeScene actually resides on their own computer server. So even if we had things to search for, there’s nothing on our servers to search.
The only time the LifeScene is accessible by us is when the user is actually in it. The LifeScene is inoperable without interacting with the NextLife software.’

‘But you can access it when he’s actually in a scene?’

‘We can GhostWalk through the interface with our system, but we can’t access the code for the individual’s LifeScene,’ I say.

‘Does he know you’re watching him?’

Yvette and I look at each other. The tracking that we do is not only against our users’ expectations, but there are also questions about the legality of the practice. ‘He
doesn’t,’ I admit.

‘Can you track the signal back to him when he’s on?’

‘No,’ I say.

‘Why not?’

‘The system is designed to obscure the IP address of our users.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Every computer that connects to the Internet has an IP address and a computer identifier that is used to find it. When you “access” a website, what you are really doing is
sending a request from one computer to another to send back the information on the webpage you’re trying to access. In order for the information that’s sent back to reach your computer,
there needs to be identifying information. That’s true whether it’s a laptop or a smartphone or whatever. Our servers are set up so that the signals are routed through several dummy
sites that obscure the IP address, so it can’t be identified once the data is sent.’

‘Yeah, but those are the company’s servers, so they could reprogram them to identify the IP address if you wanted to, right?’ His cop eyes bore into me. We’re in a
basement, and I have no windows in my office, so the place is musty and getting hot. I’m sweating a little, and I feel a bit uncomfortable.

‘It wouldn’t be possible without configuring the entire system for everyone.’

‘But you could still do it.’ It’s like he doesn’t need to blink. ‘These are multiple murders we’re talking about.’

‘The company wouldn’t put our users in that sort of a situation,’ I say. It sounds a little weak to me, as the words come out, but it’s the truth.

‘Three girls are dead,’ Killkenny says, as though I need to be reminded. ‘You don’t think your users can live with that sort of “situation” so that no one
else dies?’

‘It would disable the entire system,’ I point out.

‘I can’t believe—’ Killkenny’s voice is rising, but Yvette cuts him off.

‘Detective, even if we could reconfigure the system internally, it wouldn’t help. Anyone with the kind of computer skills this guy has is already routing his signal through blind
servers, before anything even gets here. For five dollars a month you can sign up for access through a Russian Internet service that will wipe the signal clean, and there’s no way to trace
that.’ Killkenny stares at her now, but she isn’t sweating. ‘There must be another way,’ she says.

We sit in silence for a few moments. ‘Maybe we can start with the girls,’ Killkenny says at last.

‘What do you mean?’

‘How does someone create one of these avatars – like if I wanted to create a new stripper, and I had a particular person I wanted it to look like, how would I do it?’

‘You’d have to start with one of our templates. You’d find the one that looks closest to the person you’re thinking of, and then you’d adjust it. I assume
that’s what he did – he designed avatars to look like the girls he wanted to kill, and then used those for practice.’

‘Where do the templates come from?’

‘We have a library of several hundred looks that people may want.’

‘No, I mean how were the templates created?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answer honestly. ‘I wasn’t involved in that process. I assume they used models.’ As I say the words, their implication hits me. ‘They
used models,’ I say again.

Killkenny is nodding. ‘Amanda Hicks was a part-time model. Four and a half years ago she did a modeling job for NextLife. We found deposits from NextLife in the bank accounts for the other
two girls right around the same time.’

‘They were models who were used to create the templates,’ Yvette says, grasping Killkenny’s point.

‘He doesn’t create avatars to look like girls he wants to kill,’ Killkenny says. ‘He kills the avatar girls in the template library, and then goes out and finds the girls
they’re based on in the real world.’

‘But how would he find them?’ Even as I ask the question, I know the answer.

‘He would have to have access to the company records at NextLife,’ Yvette says quietly.

Killkenny is nodding. ‘Yeah, he would.’

It’s late. The records for the models who were used to create the templates for the NextLife avatars wouldn’t be at the basement facility in Cambridge; they’d
be at the corporate offices in Brighton, and that office is closed, so Yvette and I agree to meet Killkenny there in the morning. Yvette lives just a few blocks down from Ma’s house, so I
give her a ride back to Charlestown. We’re both quiet for the first half of the ride. I’m watching the road; she’s looking out the passenger side window, watching the Charles
River roll by, the lights of Boston rising above it on the other side, like Oz.

‘It’s got to be someone at the company,’ she says at last. I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t voice what we were both thinking.

‘We don’t know that,’ I say.

‘You’ve got a better explanation?’

‘You want me to make rational sense out of murder? Who would do something like this? Why? I can’t answer any of those questions.’

‘We have to find him,’ Yvette says.