Free This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams Page B

groups spontaneously formed on the Internet, but there had never been one centered on her before. These people—friends from Caltech, from Britain, friends of her family in Cleveland, people in the gaming industry, players she knew only as Hippolyte or Chatsworth Osborne, individuals who came from different walks of life and whose only point in common was a personal knowledge of Dagmar—had seen news of the burning hotel and responded within hours. Many of them had clearly been in touch with one another, spreading the word that she might be in danger, and the outpouring of concern was touching.
    It was then, as Dagmar decided to give everyone who had queried a personal answer, that the power died.
    The lights flickered and went off, and the whisper of the air-conditioning faded away. An array of tiny plastic turbines, each the diameter of a pencil, switched on to provide her laptop with power. A breathy sound accompanied the ignition, and paper on her desk rustled to the warm exhaust.
    A notice flashed on her display: the hotel’s wireless connection had gone down along with the power. Dagmar checked the room’s phone and found it worked. The phone had an Ethernet jack, and she considered connecting the laptop to it but then decided against using fuel and turned the computer off.
    The screen had just gone blank when the lights wavered on again. They didn’t seem as bright as before, so Dagmar figured either that it was a brownout or that a hotel backup generator had gone on but didn’t have quite the power required.
    She lay across her bed and thought about Planet Nine, and the fictional woman in the hotel room, and what uncanny series of accidents had brought her down the rabbit hole.
     
    Tomer Zan called in midafternoon. Dagmar had just finished doing her laundry in the bidet—she’d run out of clean clothes and was dubious about giving any of her belongings to hotel staff.
    “How are you feeling, darling?” Zan asked. The “darling” sounded perfectly professional, as if it were a substitute for “Miss Shaw.”
    “I’ve been better,” Dagmar said.
    “We’ve decided to pull you off the roof with a helicopter.”
    Dagmar paused to think about this.
    “You’re not moving me to a safer place first?”
    “Putting you on the streets right now would be exposing you to too much risk. The situation is deteriorating fast—most of the police have walked off the job, since no one’s paying them real money.”
    “So the streets are in the hands of the rioters.”
    “That’s about it.” Dryly. “We’ll have a helicopter in Singapore by tomorrow.”
    “So you can pick me up the next day?”
    “Well,” Zan admitted, “no. Singapore’s the nearest place we can stage from—except maybe Sarawak—but Singapore’s nearly a thousand kilometers away, and the copter’s an old Huey from Thailand, equipped for rescue work in the jungle. It doesn’t have the range to reach you. So we’re going to charter a ship in Singapore, put a lot of fuel aboard, and then steam toward Jakarta while the crew builds a helicopter landing platform from scratch. The chopper will land on the ship once the platform is built, refuel, and then fly to you once it’s in range.”
    “What am I going to have to do when it gets here?”
    “Practically nothing. We’ll have rescue specialists onboard. The chopper will hover over the hotel roof and drop one of our people down to you. Then we’ll lower a stretcher, and our guy will strap you into it. We’ll winch you aboard, and then our guy will go up next.”
    “So all I have to do is lie down?”
    “That’s it.”
    Dagmar felt relief mixed with a degree of disappointment. She had hoped for a more swashbuckling exit than being strapped to a basket and winched to safety.
    “Can I bring anything with me?” she asked.
    “A small bag maybe. Emphasis small. ” There was a brief pause. “It’s a pity we can’t go in tomorrow. That’s when the Japanese are evacuating, so our