This Is Not a Game Read Free Page A

looking for a sugar daddy, and I bought the company from the bank for eleven point three cents on the dollar. I’ve rehired the original team minus the fuckups who caused all the problems, and beta testing’s going to begin in the next few days.”
    Alarms clattered in Dagmar’s head. “You’re not going to want me to write for them, are you?”
    “God, no,” Charlie said. “They’ve got a head writer who’s good—Tom Suzuki, if you know him—and he’s putting his own team in place.”
    Dagmar relaxed. She already had the perfect game-writing job; she didn’t want something less exciting.
    She sipped her drink. “So what’s the plan?”
    “ Planet Nine is going to launch in October. I want an ARG to generate publicity.”
    “Ah.” Dagmar gazed with satisfaction into her future. “So you’re going to be your own client.”
    “That’s right.”
    Charlie had done this once before, when work for Great Big Idea had been scarce. He’d paid his game company to create some buzz for his software company—buzz that hadn’t precisely been necessary, since the software end of Charlie’s business was doing very well on its own. But Dagmar had been able to build a plot around Charlie’s latest generation of autonomous software agents, and she’d been able to keep her team employed, so the entire adventure had been satisfactory.
    This time, however, there were plenty of paying customers sniffing around, so Charlie must really want Planet Nine to fly.
    “So what’s this Planet Nine again?” she asked.
    “It’s an alternate history RPG,” Charlie said. “It’s sort of a Flash Gordon slash Skylark of Space 1930s, where Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto on schedule, only it turned out to be an Earthlike planet full of humanoids.”
    “Out beyond Neptune? The humanoids would be under tons of methane ice.”
    “Volcanoes and smog and radium projectors are keeping the place warm, apparently.”
    Dagmar grinned. “Uh-huh.”
    “So along with the folks on Planet Nine, there are dinosaurs and Neolithic people on Venus, and a decadent civilization sitting around the canals on Mars, and on Earth you’ve got both biplanes and streamlined Frank R. Paul spaceships with lots of portholes. So Hitler is going into space in what look like big zeppelins with swastikas on the fins, and he’s in a race with the British and French and the Japanese and the New Deal, and there’s plenty of adventure for everybody.”
    “Sounds like a pretty crowded solar system.”
    “There’s a reason these people went broke creating it.”
    Dagmar took a lingering sip of her drink. She’d always had an idea that writing space opera would be fun, but had never steered her talent in that particular direction.
    The writers of ARGs were almost always drawn from the ranks of disappointed science fiction writers. It was odd that there hadn’t been more space opera from the beginning.
    “Okay,” she said. “I’ll think about it. But not while I’m nursing an umbrella drink and watching the Aussie guys at the beach.”
    Charlie sighed audibly. “All right, you’re allowed to have some good dirty fun on your vacation. But not too much, mind you.”
    “Right.”
    “And here’s something else to think about. I’m giving you twice the budget you had for Golden Nagi. ”
    Dagmar felt her own jaw drop. She looked at the carbonation rising in her glass and put the glass down on the plastic table.
    “What are you telling me?” she said.
    “I’m telling you,” said Charlie, “that the sky’s the limit on this one. If you tell me you need to send a camera crew off to Planet Nine to take pictures, then I’ll seriously consider it.”
    “I—” Dagmar began.
    “Consider it a present for doing such a good job these past few years,” Charlie said. She could sense Charlie’s smile on the other end of the phone.
    “Think of it,” he said, “as a vacation that never ends.”
     
    Hanseatic says: I was so totally floored when it was