FROM: Corporal Carrot

Hi, Consuelo! Have we met?

FROM: Consuelo

I’ve just subscribed to this forum, though I’ve been lurking for a while. I was waiting for an ARG to start at a convenient time for me, and this is it.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

You’re not a puppetmaster, are you?

FROM: Consuelo

A lady never tells. But notice that the Planet Nine invitation has a

serial number on it.

FROM: Desi

Has anyone noticed that there’s a DVD sitting atop the TV set? I bet

we can get a video if we solve the right puzzle.

Of course we have to find the puzzle first.

FROM: Consuelo

6518124 doesn’t get much when typed into the YouTube search

engine.

FROM: Desi

But the binary string works when you look on Video Us!

Here’s the URL.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Binary after all! PSYCH!

FROM: LadyDayFan

Nice work, Desi.

BTW, I observe a high gloss to this production that suggests the

house style of Great Big Idea. Not to mention the woman-in-the

hotel motif that might be viewed as autobiographical in view of the

recent history of a certain friend of this bulletin board.

So hi there, Dagmar, if it’s you! We’re on Briana’s trail!

Dagmar stood in the lobby of Burger Angeleno and watched the hostess chat on the phone. The hostess was very young, maybe just out of high school, and was talking about somebody named Vincent, who was involved in some soap opera issues with another person named Janis. As she talked, the hostess stood behind the cash register and watched Dagmar with an indifference that was perfectly without affect. It was as if Dagmar wasn’t there at all.

Dagmar wondered if she should just grab a menu and seat herself. She peered around the divider between the dining room and the lobby to see if Austin was waiting for her, but she didn’t see him.

She decided she could wait.

After several minutes the hostess wound up her phone call. She hung up the phone and looked at Dagmar for a long moment, again with that affectless expression, as if she saw nothing worthy of interest.

Dagmar looked back at her. Two could play at this game.

Eventually the hostess was stirred to action. She looked up and to the left, as if she were trying to remember something.

“Can I like help you or anything?” she asked, having at last recalled an approximation of the correct line.

“Table for two,” said Dagmar.

The hostess took two menus out of the rack and led Dagmar to a booth.

“I didn’t know if you wanted anything or not,” she said.

“I wanted to sit down,” said Dagmar.

“You might have wanted to pay,” said the hostess.

“I didn’t have a check,” Dagmar pointed out.

“You don’t have to be so rude about it,” the hostess muttered as she returned to her station.

Dagmar stared after her for a long moment, then reached into her pocketbook for a pen.

A few minutes later, Austin arrived and found her writing on the back of her paper place mat.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“A flow chart,” Dagmar said.

Austin dropped his canvas shoulder bag onto the table and sat. “For the game?” he asked.

“No. For our hostess.”

She finished the chart and took it with her to the lobby. The hostess was back on the phone, talking about someone named Tashi. Dagmar walked up to the hostess and held out the flow chart and tapped it with her pen. The hostess looked annoyed.

“I’m talking,” she said.

Dagmar reached out and pressed down the telephone toggle, disconnecting it.

“Tashi can wait,” Dagmar said. “I want to show you something that can help you keep your job. This is a flow chart.”

“A what?”

Dagmar ignored the question. “There’s a box at the top, see. You’ll notice it says Customer stands in lobby. And then there’s an arrow from this to the next box, which says Does the customer have a check?”

The hostess stared at her.

“You’ll see,” Dagmar continued, “that the second box has two arrows, marked Yes and No. If the answer is Yes, you follow another arrow to the box marked Take his money. And if the answer is No, you follow that arrow to the box that says Ask the customer if you can help him. And there’s an arrow leading from that box to the next, which says Does the customer want to be seated?

“If the answer is Yes, the arrow goes to the box that says Seat him. And if the answer is Customer is looking for someone, the arrow takes you to Help customer find his friend, and then to Seat him.”

Dagmar put the flow chart down in front of the hostess.

“I left off a few unlikely situations,” she said, “like Does customer have a gun? which would lead to a box that says Give him money, but I figure in that situation the customer will tell you what to do. But in the meantime, all you have to do is follow these simple instructions, and you’ll do fine.”

The hostess didn’t say thank you, but then Dagmar hadn’t thought she would.

Dagmar returned to her seat and opened the menu. Burger Angeleno was an upscale diner, the kind of place that served you grass-fed bison patties on your burger, offered the option of soy milk in your shakes, and assured you that the chicken nuggets were free-range and had never been within pecking distance of an antibiotic.

“What’s new?” Austin said.

“We launched the new game yesterday,” Dagmar said. “The site had nearly a hundred fifty thousand hits as of noon today, so I’d say we’re in business.”

“Someday,” Austin said, “I hope to have enough time to actually play one of these games.”

“So do I,” said Dagmar.

They looked up as a man approached. He was about twenty, with a spotty complexion. His slim body was neatly encased in a dark suit. He wore a single earring.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m the manager. I understand there’s a problem here?”

“I could use a new place mat,” said Dagmar.

“Donna,” said the manager, “said that you have a gun.”

“Donna,” said Dagmar, “is too stupid to know what the fuck I said.”

A few minutes later, as they drove away in Austin’s car, Dagmar rolled down the window and threw a finger at the receding restaurant.

“I’ve never been thrown out of a restaurant before,” Austin said. “And I liked that place.”

“Plenty of places to get soy milk shakes in L.A. ”

He looked at her from beneath the brim of his Yankees cap.

“Sometimes I worry about you,” he said. “Do you think you might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?”

Dagmar thought about it, then shrugged.

“Who isn’t?” she said.

Austin was a Type One Geek, which is to say he was well over six feet tall and very thin. Because he was now rich, he wore Armani sportswear and custom Ray-Bans and drove a 1957 Corvette, but to Dagmar’s mind he still looked like a Type One Geek, only playing dress-up.

Not that she didn’t love him, of course.

And at least he wasn’t shaving his head, even if he was going bald. You could forgive a rich man a lot for not shaving his head.

And clean on the other end of the scale, he didn’t wear a motoring cap. Points for that, too.

Austin had become a legend in the local world of venture capital because he only had a 63 percent failure rate. Normally 80 percent of start-ups failed, but the 20 percent that succeeded made so much money that they paid for the failures and then some. Austin had somehow made a success of another 17 percent, nearly doubling his company’s income.