The Never Game

Maddie had ID’d Knight as a possible suspect because his company published a survival action-adventure game in the same vein as The Whispering Man. Knight’s product was called Prime Mission.

“Let’s see if it came first. If it did, maybe Knight believes Marty Avon stole his source code. He tried to sue and lost and now he’s getting even.”

It took only a few minutes to find that, yes, Prime Mission preceded The Whispering Man by a year.

Maddie reminded Shaw that she wasn’t particularly familiar with either game — they were action-adventures, which were too slow for her — but she did know that Tony Knight was known in the industry to have a raging ego, a ruthless nature and a short fuse... and a long memory for slights.

“How close are the games?” Shaw asked.

“Let’s find out.” She nodded to his computer and scooted her chair close to his.

Lavender? Yes, he smelled lavender. Freckles and lavender seemed like a good combination.

And what was that tattoo?

She logged on to a website and an image of a labyrinth appeared — the Knight Time logo — then the words Tony Knight’s Prime Mission.

A window appeared. Shaw expected ads for insurance or discount hotels. It was an actual news broadcast. Two attractive anchors — a man and a woman, both with fastidious hair and wearing sharp outfits — were reporting on the news of the day: a trade meeting of the G8 in Europe, a CEO of a Portland, Oregon, company under fire for suggesting the government was justified in interring U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II, a shooting at a school in Florida, a Washington congressman under investigation for texting a gay teenage prostitute, an “alarming” study about the cancer risks of a brand of soft drinks...

Cable news at its finest...

She nodded at the screen. “Most video games’re cheap to buy but you can’t really play without the add-ons — things to help you win or just be cool — power-ups, costumes for your avatars, armor, weapons, spaceships, advanced levels... You can spend a ton of money.”

“The razor’s free,” he said, “but the razor blades...”

“Exactly. Knight Time never charges for anything — the game, the extras. You’ve just got to sit through this.” The newscast faded to a public service announcement encouraging voter registration. Maddie then pointed. “See?” The announcer said players could get five hundred “Knight points,” to be used to buy accessories for any Knight Time game, if they did in fact register.

Whether or not Tony Knight was in some way behind the kidnappings, Shaw had to give him credit for the public service. As a professor of politics, Ashton Shaw believed it was a travesty that the U.S. didn’t have mandatory voting like many other countries.

And, finally, the logo for the game Prime Mission appeared.

“Watch,” Maddie said, nodding as type scrolled onto the screen.

YOU ARE THE PILOT OF A UNITED TERRITORIES XR5 FIGHTER SHIP. YOU HAVE CRASH-LANDED ON THE PLANET PRIME 4, WHERE UT FORCES HAVE BEEN BATTLING THE OTHERS. YOU HAVE LIMITED AIR AND FOOD AND WATER. YOU MUST REACH SAFE STATION ZULU, TWO HUNDRED KILOMETERS TO THE WEST.

The rest of the crawl revealed, in effect, that the character must take three items from the spaceship to use to survive on the trek. It ended with the admonition:

You’re on your own. Choose wisely. Your life depends upon it.

“It’s The Whispering Man in space,” Shaw said. “Even those lines at the end are similar. In The Whispering Man, it’s ‘You’ve been abandoned. Escape if you can. Or die with dignity.’ I want to see more about Knight.”

He logged out of the game and called up more articles about the CEO and the company.

Shaw learned that Knight Time fell into the mold of several big tech companies — cofounded by two men in a garage. Like Bill Gates and Paul Allen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Knight’s partner was Jimmy Foyle, both from Portland, Oregon. Knight handled the business side of the company; Foyle designed the games.

The press accounts of the company revealed details that echoed what Maddie had told him about Knight’s nature.

The stories pointed to Jimmy Foyle as the model of a professional tech industry expert, who’d spend eighty-hour weeks perfecting the code for the company’s gaming engines. He was described as a “gaming guru.”