And so he did.
It didn’t take long. A professional player of Alice’s calibre understood immediately that he had a perfect count of the cards at all times, even when she switched from a six-deck shuffle to a nine. Simulating more players didn’t do anything, either – it merely increased the speed at which he accumulated the data set. Moreover, he lacked the potent combination of dopamine and adrenaline necessary to create true addictive behaviour and loss of inhibition and discipline; he could make the same small, boring bets for hours at a time, and he could do it with a massive shoe on multiple hands, with a nearly infinite number of splits.
Between the fifth and sixth round, he asked to use the bathroom to wash his face and rearrange his hair. After that, he took a peek inside Alice’s medicine cabinet, and her cosmetics bag. She kept all of her pills, patches, and gels in custom biometric containers, but the whole collection in an attractive wooden box inlaid with mother of pearl. Javier didn’t need to spend much time with the box to understand what her game really was, and how she intended to cheat. So he returned downstairs, and continued the game.
At dawn, Alice was finally ready to quit. “You’re a…”
“Machine,” Javier said.
She laughed. The laugh turned into a cough. Javier poured her a glass of water, and she drank it eagerly. “I suppose it was too much to hope for,” she said. “But you should see their offer. It’s incredible. With the rebates, it’s like playing 50/50 odds.”
Javier nibbled on a dish of Flexo Fries they’d ordered up from the Electric Sheep. He considered. He was up a significant amount of money, and he could probably leverage those winnings into points. But he couldn’t really leave the issue alone, either. “The rebates are invalid if you cheat, right?”
“Of course.”
“And there’s no getting out of it?”
“It’s a ten million dollar buy-in. It’s feeding the bankroll, so it’s non-refundable. No one is walking away from that money.”
Javier shook his head. “It’s a sunk cost. Think of it that way. Get out now, while you still can.”
“I haven’t lost that kind of money in years, and I don’t intend to start now.” Her eyes narrowed. “What are you thinking?”
Javier stood up. He moved toward the window. The sun was beginning to rise. He felt it in his skin. “I think your fellow players are going to cheat,” he said. “And there’s only one way to cheat successfully when playing with a vN. You have to trigger the failsafe.”
Alice joined him at the window. Reflected in the plate glass, she seemed more tired, older. She wasn’t looking at the ocean, or the sunrise. She was watching him. “And how would you do that?”
“You would h-have to c-cause harm to another human being,” Javier said.
“So you would need a team. One to play the game, and another to slip on a banana peel in the background.”
He turned to her. “Or one to give a player the wrong dose of her medicine, so she could take all her winnings early in the event of a forfeit.”
She paled. “Are you accusing me of cheating?”
“We’re just talking. But it would certainly be a good reason to keep a human lover, and not a vN. Because then the mistake would be more plausible.” Javier put his drink down. He took hers and put it down, too. He looked up at the loft. Manuel had long since gone to sleep. “Life is for the living,” he said. “A high-roller like you should know that.”
She sighed. “It’s not like that at the end. There’s a certain law of diminishing returns at work.”
He reached around and unclasped the pearls from around her neck. She stiffened, and her hands came up, but the cold fingertips only skimmed him. Carefully, he set the pearls beside the glass of water near the piano. He coiled them up in a nautilus pattern so they wouldn’t roll away. When he turned back to her, he put his hands where the pearls used to be. Beneath his fingers, her pulse was high but steady.
“It can still be good, you know.”
Her voice came out high and tight and small. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
He bent and kissed her. She tasted of vermouth and yuzu and salicylic acid. She kissed back very gently, as though her mouth were just waking up.
“Don’t go all demure Chinese stereotype on me now, Alice. You sent your boy to find me. And trust me, he knows what I can do just as well as you do.”
She gripped the front of his shirt. “Take me upstairs. Please.”
“That’s more like it.”
For her part, Alice didn’t participate until later. She sat in a chaise and directed the action. Manuel came awake for him slowly, inch by inch, and he finished almost before becoming truly aware of what was happening.