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 games were, in a word, diabolical.

His given name was Boris Jan Bustretski, and he came from the same eastern working-class background that had produced Dagmar. He was tall and stocky and blond and had inherited steelworker’s arms and shoulders from his father, who had worked for Bethlehem until the bankruptcy, and for a trucking firm thereafter.

BJ thought very well of his own intelligence. He was happy to tell people how smart he was and boasted of his plans for a successful career as a master of Internet 2.0. Despite that, he didn’t seem to know how physically attractive he was, a trait Dagmar found endearing.

His games were full of twists and cunning. Traps lurked around every corner. His nonplayer characters all had agendas, and all were faithless. The character who hired mercenary characters for a mission had no intention of paying them at the end of it; the venerable old lady who provided information to the players was an agent of the opposition; the weapons with which the adventurers were provided were faulty, or were cursed, or would give their position away to anyone with the right tracking devices. Characters would appear who would offer the players their heart’s desire in order to betray their fellows.

BJ’s campaigns kept his players sharp. Austin, Charlie, and Dagmar became experts at anticipating the treacheries and multiple loyalties of others. It was a paranoid worldview that was, in its way, comforting. You knew everyone would betray you; the question was when.

Sometimes the campaigns would simply change. Players who had been adventuring in twenty-first-century North America suddenly found themselves translated to alien worlds. A perfectly realistic historical campaign involving Vásquez de Coronado’s march into the Midwest, a campaign that had gone on for weeks, would suddenly encounter Indian tribes worshipping world-threatening Lovecraftian monsters. BJ was a good enough craftsman that all these switches eventually made sense, if tenuously, but he admitted that he got bored with his creations and that the sudden switches from one genre to another were intended to keep him interested in his own games. Sometimes these attempts failed; BJ abandoned more campaigns than he finished.

Dagmar was a woman on a campus populated largely by males. The gaming group had an even larger percentage of men than the campus as a whole. For the first time in her life, she found herself a social success.

The attention was pleasing, but she viewed the possibilities with a cautious eye. She was perfectly aware that the only experience she had had in relationships was watching her mother remain in a hopeless marriage to an alcoholic.

Austin and Charlie had expressed polite interest in her. BJ hadn’t-he was much more interested in working out the details of his future life as a billionaire. So of course-after a couple of years exploring other possibilities-BJ was the one that she fell for. They had a glorious nine months together before BJ’s change in attitude grew too great for Dagmar to ignore.

The relationship had simply ceased to interest him. He’d gotten as bored with Dagmar as he had with Vásquez de Coronado’s march along the Arkansas.

Dagmar managed to survive the blow to her self-esteem. Her principal regret, over the long term, was not so much having left BJ as having broken up the gaming group. Austin and Charlie had to decide which of the two to invite to their games, and without the chemistry of the four core members, the games became less interesting.

But Dagmar wasn’t a part of that scene much longer. On the rebound from BJ, she fell for her English professor. Not that he taught English: he was a chemistry professor on sabbatical from Churchill College, Cambridge. When Aubrey’s sabbatical at Cal Tech expired, Dagmar dropped out of school to marry him.

Now it was Dagmar’s turn to be bored. Not with Aubrey, not at first, but with her situation. Her visa didn’t allow her to work, though she did manage to wangle some under-the-table consulting jobs in computer departments in and out of Cambridge. When her resident immigrant status finally allowed her to look for jobs, her lack of a degree precluded meaningful employment.

Out of sheer boredom she created an online role-playing game called Earth/Tea/Paper. It consumed her completely for nine months and was a modest success. She decided that the Chinese backstory she’d written for the game was more interesting than the game itself and thought she might give writing fiction a try.

The first short story, “Stone/Paper/Tea,” took her six months: one month to write the story, and five to work up the nerve to send it to an editor.

The story was accepted by Orion Arm, a British science fiction magazine. The magazine folded before they could publish, but during that time Dagmar had written four more stories, all of which eventually sold to better-paying markets than Orion Arm.

More stories followed, all science fiction. Her life orbited a college that specialized in science and engineering, and her own literary tastes had always tended toward the fantastic. Aubrey, she was pleased to discover, was proud of her achievements.

The stories were followed by a novel and two sequels, all sold both in the U.S. and the UK. In New York, Dagmar’s acquiring editor left shortly after buying the series. Her replacement was promoted elsewhere in the company, and the next, fired. By the time the fourth editor wrote an email assuring Dagmar of his admiration for her work and his hope for a successful collaborative relationship, the series’ doom was sealed.

In the UK, the books died because of a lifestyle change on the part of their editor. She had risen to a position of power within the company, fueled by potent cocktails of alcohol and cocaine; but when she went on the wagon, her personality changed. From amiable and energetic, she became critical, angry, and vocal. She found fault with her superiors at meetings; she fired or drove away her assistants; she insisted that Christmas and birthday parties be alcohol-free.

The higher-ups at the company desperately wanted to get rid of her, but they couldn’t find an excuse-she was, in fact, making them millions of pounds. So the company decided they really didn’t need those millions of pounds after all and dropped their science fiction and fantasy imprint. To Dagmar it seemed an extreme reaction to a personnel problem, for all that it was a typically English one. Dagmar’s books were reassigned to a new editor, an amiable man who had never read a science fiction novel in his life. The books were published, but as literary fiction, a change that only served to confuse everyone.

Dagmar’s commercial destruction was thus assured on two continents. The books were never actually reviewed on paper, so far as she knew. The few online reviews were respectful, even enthusiastic, but the sales figures were catastrophic.

That was the end of her writing career, at least under her own name. She had become a literary unperson. Her sales figures were recorded in electromagnetic form in computers in the offices of the major distributors. The figures proved that her books didn’t sell-no publisher in his right mind would take a chance on her.

That none of this was her fault was not on record anywhere.

That her career track was not at all untypical-that the career of practically every other SF or fantasy writer at her two publishing houses also cratered-did not make the situation any easier to bear, but only filled her with a rage that had no point and no direction.