In Death 30 - Fantasy in Death

off.”
    “Then we’ll call that a draw, too.”
    What was the point in arguing about it? she asked herself. They’d just start it all up again, and nothing would change what he did, who he was. Nothing would change what she did, who she was.
    Sometimes that middle ground between them was narrow and slippery. The trick was figuring out how to navigate it.
    “It’s a good game,” she told him. “Realistic, compelling, involving.”
    “We barely touched the surface.”
    “This.” She touched a hand to her hip, examined the smear on her palm. It looked like blood, felt like it, smelled like it.
    “Illusion. It involves sensory enhancement, the scan of your vitals, your physicality, the motions, reactions.”
    “What if you cut off a limb—or a head.”
    “End of game. Or in multiplayer, end for the player who lost the limb or head.”
    “I mean, would you actually feel it, see it?”
    “Not the human players. If you were playing the comp, a fantasy figure, and got that kind of hit on it, you’d see it.”
    “What about a droid?”
    “Well, you could program it to play against a droid. Same results. The droid is solid. Therefore, the game would treat it as it would a human. The weapons aren’t real, Eve. They can’t harm anyone.”
    “Which is what the vic would have assumed, whether he played against a human, a droid, or a fantasy character. Just a game. But it wasn’t.” She continued to study the blood on her palm. “I felt the hit—not like a cut, not like you’d just sliced me with a sword—”
    “I’d hardly have done so if you would have.”
    “But I got a jolt. Like an electric shock. Mild, but strong enough to let me know I’d taken a hit. And it throbbed—when we fought. I was fighting wounded.”
    “Which would be the point.”
    “I get that. I get it. But the vic had those burns. Up the voltage, you’d get burns.”
    “Not without direct contact. The game reads the hit, registers it, transmits it.”
    “Okay, but if somebody reprogrammed the game, and used an actual weapon.” She sat up, pushed her hair back—surprised and disconcerted by the length of it.
    “It’s different. Your hair.” His gaze ran over it. “Interesting.”
    “It gets in the way.”
    When he smiled, she ran a long, loose lock between her fingers. “It feels real. If I tug it, I feel it, even though it’s not really there. My weapon’s over there. I can’t see it, but it’s there. It’s real. So if his killer brought it in—like I did—oh yeah, forgot. Sets it down in a specific place. He’s only got to remember where it is, pick it up, use it. But why do all that? Why go through the motions of the game first?”
    “More sporting?”
    “Maybe. Maybe. The bruises, the burns. If the game was sabotaged ahead of time, the levels bumped up beyond what they could be for code, for sale, that ups the competitive level, too, doesn’t it? And if the killer used a droid, he wouldn’t have to be here. Alibis, none of them would matter with that angle. Talk Bart into testing the game at home with a droid.”
    “The droid would have to be sabotaged as well, or built and programmed off code. The weapon would register as real, as lethal, so it would have to be programmed either not to register the weapon as lethal, or to discount it. Then to clean up and reset the security. Some of that would involve computer use, and that should have alerted CompuGuard.”
    “You could do it.”
    “Yes, I could do it. But I have unregistered equipment and the privacy to do the work without sending out flags. EDD combed the warehouse. There’s no unregistered equipment there. And none in Bart’s apartment.”
    “Which only means, potentially, someone else had a copy of the disc, and worked on it off-site. You know this whole thing is showy. Showoffy,” she added and started to rise.
    And remembered she was naked, and her illusionary clothes torn and bloody. “Ah, let’s shut this down.”
    “If we must. Game end.”
    The hillside vanished, the sounds of war faded away. She watched the blood on her palm do the same. She picked up her shirt, studied the ragged tear down the back.
    “There was no dagger,” Roarke explained. “So essentially I tore the shirt you actually had on to remove the tunic you didn’t.”
    “Different cause, different method, same result. That’s what we’ve got here. Somehow. A mix of illusion and reality combined to murder.” She held up the ruined shirt. “Essentially