“I know everything I really need to know,” BJ said. “I know how to evaluate a new idea or a technology. I know how to arrange financing, and I know how to run an office. Austin’s dad-his name is Aram-is coming out to supervise until the arrangement gels. He’s run a business forever. He’ll be my backup.”

BJ had met Mr. Katanyan for the first time at Austin’s memorial and had charmed his way into Austin’s place. Dagmar had to give BJ credit: he had seen his chance and acted on it.

She wondered what he had said to Austin’s father to give himself this chance. She wondered what Austin’s partners would say when a complete novice was promoted over their heads. She wondered if he had any idea how pissed Charlie was going to be when he heard.

She wondered what BJ would say at the first staff meeting. He’d better not walk into it with that grin on his face-that she knew for certain.

“Well,” she said. “Good luck.”

The elevator doors slid open. Neither of them moved.

“I told Aram I had to finish the game writing first,” BJ said. “He was cool with that.”

“Did you know that Charlie owns a piece of the company?” Dagmar asked.

“Yeah. Aram will buy him out.”

BJ spoke with perfect confidence. Dagmar was not certain that Charlie would sell once he discovered the current arrangements. He might hold on to his shares just to fuck with BJ.

The elevator door tried to slide shut. BJ blocked it with a hand.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Don’t tell Charlie right away, okay? He doesn’t own enough of the company to stop Aram from doing whatever he wants to do, but he could cause problems with the partners.”

No shit, Dagmar thought.

“No problem,” she said.

Charlie had enough on his plate without this news.

And besides, she thought, BJ deserved his chance. If he could pull this off, it would mean happy endings for everybody.

Unless, of course, Charlie’s bots wiped out the financial system, in which case the fate of Katanyan Associates would be a minor tragedy in a world full of sudden, bright, brilliant, and unending pain.

She went to her office to claim her coffee cup, filled it at the snack station, and then dragged herself to the conference room. As she entered, her stomach turned over at the scent of one of Jack Stone’s Frito pies.

Most of her creative team looked at her. Some didn’t: a few hadn’t arrived, and Jack was devoting himself to eating his breakfast with a plastic spoon. Dagmar took a place at the head of the table, put her handheld down, and opened her notes on the display.

She was too nervous to sit still. While she waited for the late arrivals, she got up and looked out the window to make certain that Joe Clever wasn’t across the highway with his laser eavesdropper.

No James Bond vans lurked.

She turned on the white-noise generator to baffle any eavesdroppers she hadn’t spotted. As she returned to her seat, she passed behind Jack and wondered if the sound of Fritos being masticated, echoing over the Big Ears, was enough to make Joe Clever crazy.

It wasn’t doing much for Dagmar’s nerves, that was for certain sure. Said the big wall monitor,

Read the Schedule

Know the Schedule

Love the Schedule

The last few members of the team wandered in with apologies. Dagmar looked down at her notes again, then looked up.

“Charlie’s decided to move the game in an interesting direction,” she said.

There were no actual groans. She supposed that was the best she could hope for.

“What he’s found,” she said, “is that there are unauthorized copies of AvN Soft agents floating around. Specifically Rialto. He wants us to get the players to take them out.”

Suddenly they were all interested.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw BJ listening intently, his eyes staring sightlessly into the shiny finish of the table, one big hand fiddling with the pearl buttons of his new shirt.

Dagmar explained the plan she had worked out over the weekend. When IP addresses came in, the players would have to perform certain acts, and in a certain order.

First, they’d try sending Charlie’s patch to the gold-farming bots at each IP address. If the computer was inadequately firewalled, the bots would rewrite themselves, reboot, send a message to the player indicating that the patch had been installed, and then erase themselves.

Before wiping themselves out, the bots would liquidate their accounts and send the results to the Forlorn Hope account, though the players wouldn’t know that.

If the patch bounced off a firewall, then the player would have to try to find out who the IP address belonged to, contact that person, and tell him that there might be unauthorized software on his machine and how to get rid of it, referencing the AvN Soft patch, which would be found on that person’s Web page.

“Do we have solutions for any of those problems?” Helmuth asked.

“No. The players will have to dig around in reality.”

“You mean,” said Jack, “that we’re going to send millions of people Dumpster-diving in every major brokerage in the world? And following that, we’re going to organize the largest coordinated hacking attempt in the history of the Internet?”

Tension stiffened Dagmar’s spine.

“Yes,” she said.

Helmuth absorbed this, looked at Jack, and nodded.

“Cool,” he said.

Jack nodded back.

“Wicked cool,” he confirmed, and took a spoonful of Frito pie.

Dagmar felt her tension ebb.

“It is pretty cool,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

“I have another whole idea, a better one,” Charlie said. “I’m working on Patch 2.0.”

It was Tuesday morning, and Dagmar was talking to Charlie on the phone. He was in his Moorish extravaganza of a hotel room, and she was in the break room at Great Big Idea, watching her plastic cup of beef barley soup rotating in the microwave.

“Tell me,” Dagmar said.

The cup of soup rotated. The microwave hummed. The odor of beef stock crept into the room.

“The agents are linked in a peer-to-peer network, right?” Charlie said. “So Patch 2.0 rewrites the program to spread the patch itself along the network. It’ll be like a killer virus aimed right at the whole population of agents.”

Dagmar considered this.

“You mean,” she said, “we only have to succeed once? And then the whole network gets infected and goes down?”

“No,” Charlie said. “The peer-to-peer network is organized into smaller groups, and there are bound to be gaps even in those. Gaps where the program’s been wiped by an alert systems administrator, or where a disk drive blew up, or where the computer was shut down and stuck in a closet somewhere, or where the machine was just tossed away.

“Redundancy,” he said, “is still our friend.”

“But it’ll make the job easier.”

“A lot easier.”

World saved, Dagmar thought. Charlie still rich, game still cool.

What could possibly go wrong?

The microwave gave a chime. Dagmar opened the door, gingerly took out her cup of soup by the handle, and put it on the counter.

“Okay,” she said. “When can you have the new patch ready?”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “I hope.”

After the call ended, Dagmar stirred her soup with the plastic spoon, then returned to her office. She found BJ there, peering at her computer screen, his fingers poised over her keyboard.

“What do you need?” she asked.

“I’m looking for the script for Week Six, Part One,” BJ said. “I wanted to make sure I included the bit about Carlo leaving the matchbook behind in the Russian restaurant for David to find.”

“I think you did,” she said, stirring.

BJ was still staring at the screen, his hand busy on her trackball.

“Can we make sure? Because I don’t want to leave that detail out.”

“Let me,” said Dagmar. She put down her lunch, and BJ rolled her office chair out of the way. Dagmar bent over the computer and said, “Open file Briana Assets 6.1.” When the file popped open, she instituted a search for matchbook.