“Do you still play?” Frankie asked.
“I haven’t for months,” I said. I’d almost said years; it felt like that long. “It got to be pretty time consuming, especially after Rob decided that he needed someone else to judge so he could concentrate on experiencing the game as a player, and I got drafted. Being judge is a whole lot more work.”
“You’ve played the judge?” Frankie asked.
“Oh, my God,” Keisha exclaimed. “Do you realize who she is?”
The others looked at her, puzzled. For that matter, so did I.
“She’s Judge Hammer!” Keisha said.
The others looked at me openmouthed.
“You were, weren’t you?” Keisha demanded.
“Yeah,” I said. “Rob was already Judge Langslow, so I picked hammer. For my blacksmithing.”
“Wow,” Frankie said.
They were still looking at me, with the sort of awestruck expressions they usually wore when listening to Rob’s pronouncements. As if I were some kind of heroic figure out of legend.
Which to them, I suppose I was. Although he had little or nothing intelligible to say about topics such as game mechanics, marketing techniques, or the future of the electronic entertainment industry, Rob kept getting invited to speak at conferences. And to many people’s astonishment, he’d become a highly entertaining speaker. He confined himself largely to telling anecdotes about things that had happened during the development of Lawyers from Hell. Lightweight stuff, but Rob managed to make the development of the game seem like a scientific quest at least as important as the Alamo Project. Occasionally, someone who heard one of his tales would find it a powerful metaphor for some business truth, and if they told Rob about their insights, he was always happy to add them to his repertoire. And otherwise sane people, after hearing his nostalgia-laden tales of playing the early version of the game, seemed to regard those late nights in my parents’ family room with the same kind of envy other generations would feel for people who’d actually experienced Paris in the twenties or Haight Ashbury during the Summer of Love.
“Would you consider judging a game for us?” Frankie asked, and several others began clamoring, as well.
None of us ought to be here at all, I thought, on a work night; I should confiscate Rob’s paraphernalia and send them home, so I could get on with studying the floor tiles.
“Just a short game,” I said.
In my fit of nostalgia about the good old days of playing the original Lawyers from Hell, I’d forgotten a few small details, like how absolutely horrible you feel the next day if you’re trying to survive on two and a half hours of sleep.
At least I’d identified another of Ted’s blackmail targets. Frankie, ringleader of last night’s gaming party, was almost surely the Luddite.
I was too exhausted to protest when I discovered that the box of Affirmation Bears had reappeared in the closet. From time to time, Dr. Brown would trudge through the reception room and deposit several disheveled bears in the box. In between her trips, various staff would sidle into the room to abscond with an armful of bears. I couldn’t focus well enough to keep count, but I got the feeling she was losing ground steadily.
The effort of punching the buttons to answer phone calls was almost more than I could manage, and I cringed when one call turned out to be Mother.
“I’ve got exactly what you need, dear,” she said.
Please don’t let this be about faux finishes, I thought.
“That veterinarian of yours has quite an interesting history,” she went on.
“Just how interesting?” I said, uttering a silent prayer of thanks for gossip, the only thing on Earth that could distract Mother from interior decorating.
“He used to belong to one of those militant animal-rights organizations,” Mother said. “Remember how Aunt Cecily told us about the protests they kept having at dog shows a few years ago?”
“Only vaguely,” I said. As a child, I’d found Aunt Cecily fascinating, because she was the only grown-up who got away with talking about sex - not to mention using the word “bitch” - at my grandmother’s dinner table. But like most of my cousins, I learned to tune Aunt Cecily out once I’d reached the age where hearing about Pomeranians mating became boring instead of titillating.