The Dead Slam: A Tale of Benevolent Assasination (20 page)

“Now I get it,” said Max.

“Get what?”

“Who’s who, and who’s looking out for who. I get it.”

Molly rolled her eyes. “For whom! Uh huh, sure. Yeah you — get it?”

“Yeah. I get it.”

“I guarantee you, you do not — get it. You wouldn’t get it if it bit you.” She danced off toward the hospital, yelling over her shoulder, “Remind me to tell you the story about the price tags.”

“The price tags?”

“Forget it! You wouldn’t get it.” She ran up the hospital’s steps, gawking at Max with adolescent disdain, then stopped and flung his coat at him. “I can’t be seen in this,” she said in an overly hoity-toity voice, sweeping a self-deprecating hand over her beat-up canvas apron.

What a delightful little girl,
thought Max. But there were now even more men watching them. And he quickly noticed that the Watchers were all dressed appropriately for the weather. They all wore hats with ear muffs, long scarves wrapped like small blankets around their necks, and warm gloves. The rest of the crowd appeared to have been caught out in the weather without proper consideration.
Utility is a fashion statement,
thought Max, stroking his fabulous red coat. He really was sharpening his powers of deduction — saxophone solo.

He tucked the coat under his arm; he wouldn’t need it in the hospital, although it was far from warm inside. Molly veered unexpectedly off-course for the front doors and headed toward a thick crowd by the Emergency Entrance. At the crowd’s edge, a group of armed men made room for her.
How curious,
thought Max.
Who is this girl?
She waved at him impatiently.

There was a thick cordon of Watchers, now obvious to Max, surrounding the Peregrine. His friend’s Peregrine.

“Cool car,” said Molly.

“I came here in that.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Have it your way.”

“No wait,” she said, grabbing his arm. “Maybe you’re not so — rural. Just old.”

“I’m eighteen! In a couple days.”

“Yeah, and by the time I’m eighteen, you’ll be an antique.”

Max had never considered aging, until now. This girl was a cluster bomb of unsettling revelations. Molly dragged him across the terrace and through the revolving doors. As they entered the lobby a woman with a clipboard aimed it at Molly, who pretended not to see her.

“Young Lady?!”

Molly pulled up and curtsied sarcastically as the clipboard lady blocked their path. “Why we have to play this way? You know better.”

Molly was not in the least intimidated. “We’re visiting . . . a woman?” she looked to Max for a name.

“Otis,” he said.

The clipboard lady zeroed in on Molly. “Never heard of a woman named Otis. What do you want with Otis?”

“Otis is his friend. Jon asked me to bring him. He’s staying with us. Otis too.”

Max liked the sound of that, staying with friends in the city.

The clipboard lady wagged her clipboard at both of them. “Jon is lord almighty out there. In here, he’s a high probability gunshot victim.”

“Yes ma’am,” mumbled Molly, tactfully conceding with a curled lip.

“Wait out there,” she said, fanning her clipboard in the general direction of anywhere but here. Apparently, Molly’s status meant nothing to the clipboard lady.

They pushed through the revolving doors and crossed the terrace to a waist-high brick wall topped with a granite capstone. Molly jumped up and twisted into a seated position on top, gesturing for the coat.

He slipped the coat around her and leaned against the wall. “OK. Tell me the price tag story.”

Molly deflated and stared straight through Max.

* * *

A
bleary-eyed
Camille swung open the refrigerator door. She was starving, but the thought of food was repulsive. So she grabbed a bottle of wine, dumped a half-full water glass into the sink and filled it — just enough for the mood she was in.

The doorbell rang.

She grabbed the Uzi lying on the island, tiptoed to the door and looked through the peephole. The ghostly absence was mortifying. She dropped down on all fours and looked under the door. There were no shoes, but there was a blocked-out space. Maybe a box? She reached up to the doorknob, raised the Uzi, then cracked the door just enough to see what was on the floor outside. There sat a brand-new laptop computer just like MacIan's. She poked her head out, panned the hall, grabbed the computer and slammed the door.

She slid onto a tall stool, sat the laptop squarely on the kitchen island, took a deep breath, and belted down the last of her wine. With two gentle fingers, she flipped open the lid. To her delight, a charming computer-generated woman wearing cartoon-cool sunglasses was waiting for her on screen. “Good evening, Camille. My name is MISH.” Her voice was a little droidish and her words were echoed in subtitles onscreen.

Camille felt a reckless buzz coming on. “Evening, MISH. Is that short for Michelle? How’d you get in my building?”

MISH’s response was preprogrammed. “Camille Gager. I am inviting you to join The Tuke Massive. You may open an account by filling out the registration form that appears after this message. A link to our tutorial will be sent to the email address you will set up in your account . . . @ The Tuke Massive.net. It is semi-prime secure. We strongly advise you to keep this laptop with you at all times, and to confine all your communication to this device from now on.”

The message was over, just like that.

Camille laughed as the new account form appeared. She didn’t know if she could do this or not. But she was feeling reckless, and MISH was so damned charming. A computer generated woman? MISH? Machine . . . Intelligence . . . System . . . what was the H for? Human? A Quaker woman? Probably.

She plucked another bottle from the wine rack, unscrewed the top, and raised it to her new laptop computer.

“The Tuke Massive.”

M
olly arranged
herself on the low granite wall surrounding the hospital’s terrace, snuggling into Max’s red coat, deeply regretting having mentioned the price tag story.

“The price tag story,” said Max. “It was your idea.”

“Well,” said Molly. “You were scared. I thought a story might keep you from crying. You’re such a knob.”

Max found Molly’s hard-talking ways hurtful, but expansive. He hoped to learn this lingo. “Back where I live . . .”

She mowed him down. “Back where everyone has a big house and a herd of dogs?”

“Yeah. I live in a big house. I got dogs. So?”

“So! How is it everyone from the,” she made cynical air-quotes, “country, lives in a big house?”

“Everyone lives is a big house, because there are lots of abandoned big houses. Why would anyone take a small house?”

“OK,” said Molly, grudgingly. “I’ll give you that.”

Max couldn’t let it go. “Smaller houses are not as well built as big houses. How stupid would you have to be . . .”

“OK! OK, OK!” Molly fluttered her hands between them.

“We live pretty good up in our little village. We’re satisfied. We have everything we need. All our problems come from people in cities. Smartasses, like you.”

“OK! OK! The stupid price tag story. If that’ll shut you up.” She took a deep breath. “I hate telling these corny Quaker stories.”

Max flipped her a who-cares sneer. “If you didn’t want to tell it, you shouldn’t’a mentioned it.”

“Sorry I did.”

Max rolled his eyes. “Too late.”

Molly cleared her throat, and began. “When the English Quakers fled to Holland, the Dutch couldn’t figure them out, because they had no doctrine, no dogma, nothing the locals could compare to their own ways. Ways the Quakers could not abide.

“Dutch merchants relied entirely on cunning and persuasion. The product didn’t matter. Only the deal mattered. The Quakers found this shamelessly unfair to their mostly illiterate customers. The price was not associated with the product’s value. It was all about bargaining. The peasants didn’t stand a chance.”

Molly’s voice grew hypnotic. “One day, all the Quaker merchants showed up with price tags on their products. This had never been done before. It was shocking. Buyers and sellers haggled for prices. They’d always haggled. A merchant’s worth was measured by how much he could squeeze from each transaction. Not the quality of his merchandise.

“And if no one knows the value of a thing, no one can say the price is too high. The meek, the elderly, those least able to play this game paid the most. Which seemed perfectly OK to the merchants. In their little bubble, God and all the forces of nature said they were right. The price tag was blasphemy. Whether it was fair or not never crossed their minds. Both the customers and the products were irrelevant — only the deal mattered.

“Even the helpless buyers were offended by the price tag’s implication that they could not, or worse, should not, bargain. They believed bargaining to be a valuable personal skill that spoke to the character of the buyer. But the Quakers held to their principle, same price for everyone.”

The story had transfixed Max. The Dutch Village he imagined looked a lot like Lily.

“So Quaker products had price tags and the Dutch merchants’ didn’t. Same products. Fixed price. Everyone pays the same. No favorites. No suckers. The way the Quakers saw it, without a set price, the best deal went to the best liar.

“And, just so you get it, I’ll spell out — the point. Putting a price directly upon the commodity stabilized prices and set product standards. A hallmark of civilized society . . .”

Max gave her a jaundiced frown.

“Anyway! The Quakers were experimenting with something, a new idea. Equality. A dangerous notion in a world governed by the divine right of kings. Guess what happened?”

Max started to make another face, and Molly continued as though talking to herself.

“The Quakers started outselling the Dutch merchants. The Quakers suddenly held the advantage, because the buyers could trust them. They trusted them enough to send their children to market, knowing they wouldn’t be taken advantage of. Ergo . . . the Watchers.

“Soon every merchant displayed price tags, blah blah blah — just as they do today.”

Max thought it over. OK story. Not much to it. He wasn’t sure exactly what the point was, but there obviously was one — it would come to him later.

“I knew you were too thick to get it.” She looked at him with a disappointed face.

Max bristled.

Molly glanced over his shoulder. The clipboard lady was waving to them from the doors. She slipped down from the wall. “I told you — you won’t get it.”

“I got it,” he warbled.

“You got what? The economic ramification of price tags? The value for money proposition? Rational cost benefit? Accumulated advantage? Child safety? Or was this just one more story about — shopping?”

His face blackened. Back in Lily, he was the smartest guy in town, but here he was a, what had Molly called him? A knob.

She tossed the parka to him. “Sorry. Sometimes I’m a little arrogant.”

“A little?! How old are you?”

She twirled in three full circles, tilting toward the front doors. “Twelve!”

A twelve-year-old girl had just kicked sand in his face and called him stupid. Everything here was upside down. He watched Molly fading into the crowd milling about the entrance terrace, and suddenly it came to him. Playing the game doesn’t change the game. If you want to change the game, you have to change the rules.

Molly returned Max’s jaundiced frown, and said sarcastically, “Price tags are rules!”

C
amille filled
out the registration form, entering [email protected] as her new email address. She hit >Enter and became a Player. A citizen of The Tuke Massive. It felt wonderfully subversive. But she was too pie-eyed to watch the tutorial.
If Tuke’s so damn smart,
she concluded,
this should be totally intuitive. If he’s so . . . Damn him.

She was mad at Levi Tuke. That nutcase Quaker-freak was central to her father’s death. If it weren’t for him, Arthur would be alive. Damn him! She knew that was crazy and she blamed Tuke for that, too.

She clicked the red button in the middle of the screen > Continue. An Account page popped up > The Tuke Massive, [email protected].

Damn it! She had used her own name for this email address. Bad idea. What other drunken blunder had she made rushing through these forms? She hated forms. She scrolled down her account page and changed her email address to,
[email protected]
. But suddenly her attention fixed on the text field at the bottom >Start New Mission.

She didn’t think twice. Start New Mission >Who killed Arthur Gager >Enter.

But to Camille’s amazement, MISH returned to her screen, cartoon cheerful, digital chic, but in real time! Camille perked up, glad for the company.

“I’m here to get you started,” said MISH.

“OK,” said Camille.

“The Tuke Massive is a platform for collaborative play on a massive scale. Millions play upon it every minute of every day, and everyone can win. Because we battle problems here, not each other. Everyone wins when the problem is solved. Your mission will launch a round of collaborative play that ends when your problem is solved.”

Camille propped her head up with both hands, too tired to figure this out, but MISH stoked some embers. “So we’re going to make a game out of my father’s death?”

“Yes. We’ll gamify it. We’ll incorporate game elements into your murder investigation. Things like rules, points, rewards and leaderboards as incentives for people to participate. We'll turn this work into fun by tapping into the player's natural desire for competition and satisfying achievement. The mechanism of play will take what is extremely serious for you, and turn it into fun for your players. Fun motivates participation, and the decisions made by the individual players will have major effects on all players, maximizing the probability of reaching your goal. Finding out who killed Arthur Gager.”

Camille looked overwhelmed. “I hope there’s no math in this.”

“Don’t worry. The Massive is essentially a decision engine and database. It does all those underlying calculations. I see you’ve already launched >Who Killed Arthur Gager. This Mission has been posted to The Massive’s Open Game Board. Murder mysteries are categorized as puzzles. Players who like puzzles will accept your Mission and begin sending you pieces of the puzzle as they uncover them. At first, tiny little tips that might lead somewhere. Those tips lead to other tips. It’ll take off as the data accumulates and continual enhancement will give it momentum. Data wants to be free. But you’ll have to get it rolling.”

“Me? How?”

“You tell them your story.”

“My story?”

“Yeah. Who Killed Arthur Gager is the question. Now give me a story. Make me want to go along. What’s the context? Possible motives? What’s at stake? Potential villains? Who do you think did it? Sell it. Engage me.”

“A story?”

“Your story. A story. The story. We need a story. Just tell me something that’ll make me want to come along.” MISH opened Camille’s Dashboard. “Here is the >Story Window. You can use text, video, spreadsheets, whatever. It’s fun.”

“My story? Fun?”

“Fun is the hook.”

“I can’t make up a story. I’m no storyteller.”

“Look Camille, either you play or you don’t. Tell me a story that makes me want to save the day. Or don’t.”

Camille searched her memory. Nothing.

“Tell us what’s happened so far.”

“Well, my father was killed.”

“Where?”

“In the mountains. In Pennsylvania.”

“OK. We have a murder mystery in the mountains. Why should I help you figure out — who done it? Why should I care?”

Suddenly, it came to her. “Can I post something I scanned?”

“Of course.”

Camille opened a file on her office server and attached two documents from the courier’s pouch she’d scanned the day before. Her eyes flared. “This might do it,” she said.

Her dashboard showed two new files, both of the Tuke Love Letters. MISH noted it, but continued explaining, “You’ll begin to receive posts from players who’ve read this story, if you hook them. Someone will have some tiny piece of information that’s useful. We’ll build on it, enhance, enhance . . . It‘s best to search . . . I . . .”

MISH was obviously reading the love letters as she tried to talk. “I suggest you develop some very clear search criteria. It . . . it will become . . . clearer as you . . .”

Dead silence.

Camille worried she’d lost the signal, but MISH’s cartoon eyes were moving side to side. Time stood still, and the calm drifted over Camille like a warm kiss. A nap was what she needed, and something to eat.

MISH cleared her throat, and said softly, “Camille?”

Camille’s face twisted into a question mark. “How’d I do?”

“Get ready for a shit storm, girlfriend.”

“It’s good?”

“It’s epic. Absolutely epic.”