I laid my hands on the gem with a rush of pride. It had a wonderful heft to it, and I savored it while I covered the Nazi with my pistol. He watched helplessly, casting about for a way to escape, but I had covered every possibility. I set the gem down, and deftly lit a cigarette with one hand (oh, wow, cool!) as I gazed cooly at my enemy. He made a desperate leap at me, and I nailed him with my last bullet as he—
The program shut off, and I peeled off the goggles. What was the big deal? Those were just snippets of the same old game I’d played thousands of times. Why would Grampa be so interested in that?
I scratched my head in puzzlement. I couldn’t figure it out. I pulled on the goggles again, stared at the dull gray of the No Program screen, and triggered the packet to play by itself.
(Oh, wow, cool!)
I stared at the gray screen. It was the neatest shade of gray I’d ever seen. I stared at it in admiration for a minute. Maybe I could paint my bedroom walls that color. If I had a shirt that color, all my problems would be over.
The whole thing didn’t sink in until I took off my goggles again and I realized what had just happened. The packet was a mood and emotion packet! I’d heard of them before—the horror games used a lot of them. But the way they were used in this game didn’t make any sense. It didn’t help the story at all, and it didn’t make anything more exciting.
It just made you think smoking was cool.
I hustled home and pulled out every virtual reality game I had. Following Grampa’s instructions, I went through them on my computer. Half of them had the packet Grampa had flagged. By analyzing the binary fragments, I could tell they all used the same packet.
Now, why would they do that?
I quizzed my parents at dinner that night.
“Dad?” I asked, breaking a long silence. He and my mom looked at me in surprise. How long had it been since I’d said anything at the dinner table?
“Yes, Greg,” my dad said, looking very pleased.
“Is it illegal to advertise cigarettes?”
I could tell that he was trying to shift gears into this unexpected subject. “Well—kind of. Cigarette ads were taken off TV years ago. And radio, I suppose.”
“What about other places?”
“Well—they can still advertise in newspapers and magazines. But more and more magazines are refusing to accept them. And there are moves in Congress to limit them more.” “Why?”
My mom broke in. “Because their ads are aimed at kids.”
“Now, you don’t know that,” my dad demurred.
“I do too,” Mom said. “It’s been proven over and over again. But the tobacco lobby has so much clout, and owns so many senators, that it just about takes an Act of God to get anything done about it.” My mom is a real firebrand on this stuff.
My dad apparently decided that the important thing was to keep me talking, not to argue with Mom, so he turned to me. “Years ago, there was an ad campaign featuring a character called Joe Camel,” he told me. “He was on the billboards for Camel cigarettes. Public opinion polls surveyed kids in elementary school and junior high, and determined that Joe Camel was the second most recognized cartoon character in the country, after Mickey Mouse. Eventually, he was banned and more restrictions were placed on that kind of ad.”
“And that took years,” Mom put in. “Even after it was proven that most smokers started smoking when they were fourteen.”
“Why do you ask, Greg?” Dad inquired hopefully.
“I was just kinda wondering,” I said. “Seems like there’s still a lot of it around.”
“Yeah, they do things like sponsor car races and things,” my mom said. “They make sure their logos are prominently displayed at those events.”
“But they’re having trouble finding new ways to do it,” my dad said. “The restrictions are getting tighter and tighter.”
I’d found out what I needed. Now it made a lot of sense. And if they denied targeting kids, it made sense that they would try to hide these virtual ads. But to kill someone for it?
“What would happen if they were caught violating the advertising laws?” I asked as innocently as I could.
“They’d probably be fined,” my dad said. “Not that that would make much difference to them, because they’ve got so much money.”
“The main thing it would do, though,” my mom put in, “is it would give the anti-tobacco lobby a big PR. boost, maybe spur some major legislation that could really hurt them.”
“What could hurt them?”
“Well,” Dad said, “thousands of people die every day from tobacco-caused diseases. They have to replace them with new smokers just to keep their market share steady. Anything that impedes their ability to do so will have a major effect on profits. You could be talking millions of dollars.”
Yeah, OK, I had everything. People would kill for millions. The newspapers were full of people who killed for a lot less, every day.
Mom looked sad as she poured another cup of coffee. “Your Grampa never much liked the fact that his company was owned by a tobacco company,” she said innocently.
“Oh, really?” I kept my voice as neutral as possible.
“Yeah, he was pretty unhappy when they bought out Advanced Game-Tek,” Dad said. “He had some major disagreements with the new management.”
Mom set the coffee pot down with a bang. “He was even taken off a high-prestige project because of it,” she said disgustedly. “They assigned the virtual reality teleconferencing project to someone who wasn’t as good, but who didn’t make waves.”
My interest was fully aroused again. “Virtual reality teleconferencing? What’s that?”
Mom thought. “Well, you know about the standard teleconferencing, where people in different cities can have a meeting together if they each have a video camera, a monitor and rent some satellite time? If you have it in virtual reality, then it feels like a real meeting. Your slides and graphics are snappy, the audio and visual aspects are realistic, and in general, it makes teleconferencing as good as actually being there. It’s something SKS Holdings ordered after they took over. Your Grampa, being the best programmer with the best team, was assigned to the project—until he made a few choice comments about his new parent company.”
Dad grinned. “Something along the lines of ‘the morals of an alley cat in heat,’ I think. It didn’t go over real well.”
Mom smiled in spite of herself. “Right after he said that, he was taken off the project. He was encouraged to take early retirement soon after that.” She sighed deeply. “I wonder if that’s what did it. I’ve heard about people who die shortly after they retire.”
I stuffed half a pork chop into my mouth so that I wouldn’t say anything.
The days of the hacker who could waltz into any file and look around are long gone. Even the most unsophisticated company has security protection that would defeat outsiders. I would have been stymied, if it weren’t for Grampa helping me again.
There was a bunch of his handwriting on the backs of the pages I’d been using to crack the software codes of the Virtual games. I hadn’t been able to figure it out, and after awhile I ignored it. But after the conversation with my parents, I pulled out the pages from under my mattress (hidden next to a copy of a lingerie catalog’s “Sizzling Sale on Hot New Swimwear!” issue) and looked them over again. They seemed like tips on how to hack into a sophisticated system, and maybe the system was the teleconferencing setup.