Free This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams

tavern, where the player-characters could swill ale, eat hearty stew, and find like-minded individuals with whom to embark on quests.
    Presumably there was a similar place in the Planet Nine setup.
    If there was a room somewhere in the Planet Nine world where only the players of Dagmar’s ARG could meet to exchange information, that would be useful to the game.
    But what, she thought, if bad guys had a place to meet, too?
    People who played in MMORPGs lived all over the world. They adopted online identities and knew one another only by those identities.
    They could be anybody. Students, lawyers, teachers, truck drivers, or—as in the old New Yorker cartoon—dogs.
    They could be criminals. Killers. Terrorists.
    Suppose, Dagmar thought, some bad people were meeting in the Planet Nine world to anonymously plan their activities? Suppose they were overheard, by another player or a systems administrator?
    Suppose that person then ended up dead, not in the game but in the real world?
    That, she thought, was your rabbit hole.
    And if the rabbit hole led to the woman in the hotel room—if the woman was the lover or daughter or sister of the man who died—then what Dagmar had was the shape of her story.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    This Is Not a Flashback
    “Are you afraid?”
    Dagmar sat up in the bed, stared wildly into the darkened hotel room with the telephone handset pressed to her ear. Shots crackled in the distance. Sweat dripped from her chin onto her chest.
    “Are you afraid?” the woman said. “It’s all right to be afraid.”
    Through a film of sleep and fear, Dagmar thought she recognized the voice. “Mrs. Tippel?”
    “You can call me Anna, dear.”
    Dagmar put her head between her knees and sucked in air.
    “I’m not sure I understand what this call is about,” she said.
    “We hadn’t seen you since yesterday. We thought you might be lonely and afraid, especially after what’s happened to that building.”
    Another dose of fear, this one slow and terrible, crept up Dagmar’s spine.
    “Building?” she said.
    There was a moment of silence before Anna Tippel responded. “Oh my God, you didn’t know. I’m so very sorry.”
    “What building?” Dagmar demanded.
    “There’s another hotel. The Palms. It’s on fire. I’m sorry you didn’t know.”
    Dagmar bounded out of bed and slapped aside the curtains. The burning building was in plain sight, one of the many great towers just to the north of the Royal Jakarta. Black, dense smoke poured from broken windows at the level of the eighth or ninth floor. The fire had burned upward from lower stories: the windows on the lower levels were all shattered, the walls all black.
    She imagined the fire rising, driving the people upward floor by floor until there was nowhere else to go, nowhere but into space, spilling by twos and threes from the blackened roof.
    Dagmar licked her lips.
    “I’m looking,” she said, and her voice dried up. She coughed to clear her throat, and said, “I’m looking at it now.”
    “I thought we might have breakfast together,” said Anna Tippel. “If you were feeling lonely.”
    “It’s safe to have breakfast?” Dagmar said. Her words seemed spoken out of some great void: her mind was entirely taken up with the sight before her, the fire eating its way upward floor by floor.
    “Breakfast is as safe as anything,” Anna Tippel said. “And we must eat.”
    Through the horror, Dagmar recalled that she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous noon, not having dared the lower levels of the hotel in case looters were still present.
    “All right,” she said. Tears welled into her eyes, and she could barely speak the words. “I’ll meet you.”
    Yes, she thought, answering Anna Tippel’s first question. Yes, I am afraid.
    The breakfast room was crowded, and Dagmar and the Tippels shared their table with a businessman from Sumatra, a man named Dingwangkara. The menu was limited: there were no Western egg dishes and no fresh fruit save