He ran as soon as he ended the call with Jacinda, stuffing a bag full of his laptops, a pile of cash, and a fake Canadian passport under the name Dillon Reese that he’d gotten off the Dark Web. Almost as an afterthought, he brought his ex-wife’s revolver. He’d never shot the damned thing — and he’d have to ditch it before he got on the plane, but it made him feel better to have it in the meantime. The walking boots for his broken legs didn’t exactly make for a speedy getaway, and he had to take one of them off to drive, but that couldn’t be helped.
Nobody wanted to rent with cash anymore, at least not anywhere that didn’t look like it had vending machines for oxycodone in the lobby. Ackerman used a prepaid credit card — also from the Dark Web and supposedly untraceable back to him — to rent a two-bedroom cottage in a sleepy neighborhood outside Plymouth. He got one with a single floor, since he was still hobbling around on the walking casts. A car he’d borrowed from his neighbor (a deal sweetened with a five-hundred-dollar incentive) was parked out back where snoopy cops couldn’t see the plate. Chinese takeout boxes were piled on the nightstand. It was the perfect place to hide out, except for the damn dogs.
He’d decided early in his scheme that he would go to New Zealand, and then find some island in the South Pacific where he could just disappear with hot babes, warm winds, and cold coconut water. Air New Zealand online reservations made you enter your passport number, and he’d held his breath earlier that day when he bought the ticket to Auckland. The preloaded credit card under the same name as his passport gave him additional anonymity. He hoped. There was no way to test this stuff without trying it. But it was the best he could do. If all went as advertised, this would be slick. He knew one thing: It was easier to get good quality forgeries when you had the dough.
Dressed only in loose briefs and a pocket T-shirt, the fifty-two-year-old engineer lay propped against three pillows on the lumpy mattress. He was normally athletic and trim from riding his bike back and forth to work, but almost four weeks of sedentary living from broken legs, and nervous eating from his crimes, had made him doughy and sluggish. He kept the mini-blinds closed and the glowing screen of his laptop illuminated his whiskered face. He flicked through Wikipedia articles — using Tor and a virtual private network — looking at various island kingdoms that might turn a blind eye to a visitor who made substantial investments into the local economy.
Outside, the dogs fell eerily silent.
Odd.
Ackerman held his breath, half hoping they’d start barking again. He reached for the revolver, knocking a half-eaten carton of Mongolian beef off the nightstand. Breakfast. He set the revolver in his lap, in front of the computer keyboard. The sight of it just made him more nervous. This whole thing was turning to shit.
Noonan wasn’t answering his phone, which creeped Ackerman out as much as the Chinese women who’d come looking for him at his office. It was probably just that the squirrely little dude was scared out of his gourd by this whole affair. Hell, Ackerman was, and it had been his idea.
The back-door screen rattled, and for a moment he thought he heard footsteps on gravel. He sat up straighter, cursing the walking boots, and hobbled to the window with the revolver in hand. A stiff breeze shook the treetops, making him relax a notch. It was just the wind.
He stood at the window, peeking out through the blinds and wondering how long this paranoid feeling was going to last. A woman he recognized from down the street walked a little poodle — which accounted for the neighbor’s dogs going berserk. The pulsating ache in his broken bones brought renewed clarity to his situation. People who’d lost the possibility of millions — maybe even billions — of dollars had awfully long memories. He’d be running forever.
Ackerman and Noonan had become richer than either of them had ever dreamed overnight, if you didn’t count the years spent developing the neural network.
Ackerman’s goal was a non-player character that would actively move through the game along with the player — a character that was as excited to play the game as its human partner. When LongGame began to explore the game terrain on her own, they realized they had something. She was actively learning. Not merely working toward the win, she was making herself comfortable in her Cloud battlespace, playing because she appeared to want the knowledge that a new game would give her. She was minimizing the unknowns that made her… uncomfortable. LongGame appeared to understand that the more she played, the more she learned, and the more she learned, the more perfect — and stable — an entity she became.
