“Right. Shit. Damn.” Charlie hesitated. “Do you think I should put out a warning to our employees? ”

“They might overreact.” Dagmar thought for a long moment. “But if you failed to put out a warning and someone got hurt, then you might be liable.”

That decided it.

“Right. I’ll have Karin send out an email when she gets back.”

Dagmar hesitated. “There’s another problem,” she said.

“Can it wait? ”

“No.” Again she hesitated. She didn’t want to acknowledge this.

“The Video Us site,” she said, “has had nearly half a million hits since the video was posted.”

Charlie’s lip twisted. “Sick fucks,” he said.

“No,” Dagmar said. “Confused fucks. Consuelo’s a gamer-she posted the link on Our Reality Network and nowhere else. Nobody knows whether the video is real or a part of the game. The Our Reality people have been speculating on their live feed continually since eight o’clock last night, and they’re not slowing down.”

“Jesus.” Charlie rubbed his eyes.

“The buzz is huge,” she said. “It’s spreading outside the usual channels. And normally we want buzz, just not the kind we’re getting.”

“Screw the buzz,” Charlie said. “You’ve got a subscription to their live feed, right? ”

“Yeah. Under one of my handles.”

Anger edged Charlie’s tones, burned in his eyes. He jabbed a finger into the laminate surface of his desk.

“So go online,” he said, “blow your cover as Dagmar, and tell them that Austin’s death was not a part of the game but a real-life tragedy. And they should shut the fuck up already. Got that? ”

“Right.” Again she hesitated. “But it might be too late.”

“Too late for what? ”

Dagmar looked at the savagery crackling behind Charlie’s eyes and decided not to answer.

“Never mind.” She rose. “I’ll go post the announcement.”

Unspoken objections still clattered in her mind, objections that had nothing to do with Austin’s death or the investigation.

They had to do with the shape of the game.

When Consuelo had posted the video and linked to it from Our Reality Network, the shape of the game had changed. The players had shifted their energies in an unanticipated direction.

Alternate reality games worked in a complex synergy with the player community. During the course of previous games, Dagmar had been forced to change the game when players moved in an unexpected way.

TINAG-this is not a game. The game only worked when both players and puppetmasters acted as if everything was real. When Dagmar, as puppetmaster, addressed the players directly, it shattered the illusion-it broke the fourth wall, as in theater when an actor turns to the audience and speaks to them directly.

If Dagmar posted a notice telling players that Austin’s death was real, all the player momentum that had been generated by the release of Consuelo’s video would come to a screeching halt.

Dagmar was loyal to her creations-to their integrity, their own internal sense. She wanted their shape to be logical, their interior purposes fulfilled. She didn’t mind changing her work if the change was for the better, but arbitrary changes made her crazy, and she completely hated changes that destroyed the illusion she had worked so hard to create.

But, she then realized, in this case her loyalty was ridiculous. What was the game-what was a mere story-against Austin’s tragedy?

Charlie was right. Dagmar had to make the announcement. Austin’s real death could not become a part of Dagmar’s alternate reality amusement.

She mentally composed the message as she walked to her office. As the executive producer for Great Big Idea she had a spacious corner billet and a desk filled with high-powered hardware. The rest of the office featured desks and shelves filled with souvenirs of Dagmar’s frenetic, complicated life. There were books, disks, manuals, file folders, and toys. There were posters from gaming conventions, graphic designs from the past four years of Dagmar’s games, portfolios of actors, technicians, and software designers, maps of areas where live events had taken place, books about the history of Los Angeles and other cities, and lists of the go-to people in half the cities of the world.

On a coat stand near the door hung her panama hat, the one she had worn in Jakarta.

She had always assumed that when she had some free time, she’d systematize her room into a streamlined, efficient, highly organized office that reflected her personality. But then, as the years passed and the clutter only grew, she’d finally conceded that the room already reflected her personality, and then stopped thinking about it.

She sat at her desk. Her computer was already logged on to Our Reality Network under one of her aliases, and she checked the message boards to see if there had been any developments in the last half hour.

And there it was.

Oh Christ.

FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

For once I am not going to demonstrate how I learned this, as I very much like my day job and want to keep it. But thanks to Consuelo’s excellent snaps, we’ve got a ton of biometric data, and it gives us the identity of the shooter.

Our man is one Arkady Petrovich Litvinov, age 28, a Russian national born in Latvia. He is a member of Russian organized crime and is suspected of a string of murders in Russia and Western Europe.

This is his first appearance in North America. I doubt he arrived in the U.S. under his own name.

I’ve posted his rap sheet here-sorry, but it’s in Russian. You might have better luck with his sheet from Interpol.

I’m afraid this will end our long and ultimately fruitless discussion of whether the killing Consuelo caught on camera is part of Motel Room Blues. Great Big Idea is known for its innovative approaches to gaming, but I very much doubt they would hire a genuine Russian killer to play an assassin.

Maybe it’s time to leave this issue behind and return to the actual game that GBI is giving us.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Damn, Chatty! What are you in your other life? Some kind of spook?

FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

I’m afraid I can neither confirm nor deny.

FROM: Desi

Are you a cop?

FROM: Chatsworth Osborne Jr.

Let’s just say I have access to biometric data, and leave it at that.

FROM: LadyDayFan

I think we should stop harassing Chatsworth and thank him for his first-rate work.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

Amen! Most excellent detection, dawg!

FROM: Hippolyte

Customs should be able to ID him from biometric data and find out the passport he’s used to come into the country.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

It’s not our problem any longer.

FROM: Hippolyte

I’m just sayin’.

FROM: Chatsworth Osborne, Jr.

I’m not in a position to alert Customs myself. But perhaps someone reading this is better situated.

FROM: Desi

(At least we now know that Chatty doesn’t work for Customs!)

FROM: Hippolyte

You know, we’re not devoting every minute of every day to Motel Room Blues. If we could solve a real-life murder, we could earn a lot of good karma. Like we did by helping Dagmar.

FROM: Corporal Carrot

But the victim won’t give us all a thank-you dinner, the way Dagmar did.

Dagmar looked at the bulletins lined up on her screen and simply stared for a long moment. Then she let out the air she’d been holding in her lungs and reached for the phone on her desk.

She had Lieutenant Murdoch’s number somewhere, if she could find his card with her trembling fingers.