Read Online This Is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams - Free Book Online

games were, in a word, diabolical.
    His given name was Boris Jan Bustretski, and he came from the same eastern working-class background that had produced Dagmar. He was tall and stocky and blond and had inherited steelworker’s arms and shoulders from his father, who had worked for Bethlehem until the bankruptcy, and for a trucking firm thereafter.
    BJ thought very well of his own intelligence. He was happy to tell people how smart he was and boasted of his plans for a successful career as a master of Internet 2.0. Despite that, he didn’t seem to know how physically attractive he was, a trait Dagmar found endearing.
    His games were full of twists and cunning. Traps lurked around every corner. His nonplayer characters all had agendas, and all were faithless. The character who hired mercenary characters for a mission had no intention of paying them at the end of it; the venerable old lady who provided information to the players was an agent of the opposition; the weapons with which the adventurers were provided were faulty, or were cursed, or would give their position away to anyone with the right tracking devices. Characters would appear who would offer the players their heart’s desire in order to betray their fellows.
    BJ’s campaigns kept his players sharp. Austin, Charlie, and Dagmar became experts at anticipating the treacheries and multiple loyalties of others. It was a paranoid worldview that was, in its way, comforting. You knew everyone would betray you; the question was when.
    Sometimes the campaigns would simply change. Players who had been adventuring in twenty-first-century North America suddenly found themselves translated to alien worlds. A perfectly realistic historical campaign involving Vásquez de Coronado’s march into the Midwest, a campaign that had gone on for weeks, would suddenly encounter Indian tribes worshipping world-threatening Lovecraftian monsters. BJ was a good enough craftsman that all these switches eventually made sense, if tenuously, but he admitted that he got bored with his creations and that the sudden switches from one genre to another were intended to keep him interested in his own games. Sometimes these attempts failed; BJ abandoned more campaigns than he finished.
    Dagmar was a woman on a campus populated largely by males. The gaming group had an even larger percentage of men than the campus as a whole. For the first time in her life, she found herself a social success.
    The attention was pleasing, but she viewed the possibilities with a cautious eye. She was perfectly aware that the only experience she had had in relationships was watching her mother remain in a hopeless marriage to an alcoholic.
    Austin and Charlie had expressed polite interest in her. BJ hadn’t—he was much more interested in working out the details of his future life as a billionaire. So of course—after a couple of years exploring other possibilities—BJ was the one that she fell for. They had a glorious nine months together before BJ’s change in attitude grew too great for Dagmar to ignore.
    The relationship had simply ceased to interest him. He’d gotten as bored with Dagmar as he had with Vásquez de Coronado’s march along the Arkansas.
    Dagmar managed to survive the blow to her self-esteem. Her principal regret, over the long term, was not so much having left BJ as having broken up the gaming group. Austin and Charlie had to decide which of the two to invite to their games, and without the chemistry of the four core members, the games became less interesting.
    But Dagmar wasn’t a part of that scene much longer. On the rebound from BJ, she fell for her English professor. Not that he taught English: he was a chemistry professor on sabbatical from Churchill College, Cambridge. When Aubrey’s sabbatical at Cal Tech expired, Dagmar dropped out of school to marry him.
    Now it was Dagmar’s turn to be bored. Not with Aubrey, not at first, but with her situation. Her visa didn’t allow her to