I was right. I can't believe it. I couldn't find my old workspace, and then - well, let me tell it in order.

The fifth game of Tajaswi and Gong-he's Shajat series was today. The whole series has been good, but this last game, the decider for the world title, was fantastic - the kind of game you know is going to be famous even before it's over. There was plenty of hype before anyone laid down a single stick, of course: Sandra Tajaswi, the reigning world champion for over 15 years, probably the greatest player the game has ever had, facing the young, photogenic attacking master Charli Gong-he. Taj had defended her title 31 times, and Gong-he was the first challenger - ever - to force her to play a full five games. So expectations were pretty high, and both players delivered.

Taj picked a quiet opening with a long stick off the Tower for Low 1, Gong-he answered patiently on the side for High 1, and both players settled in for a gentle, territory-based game. More Taj's kind of game, with no openings for Gong-he's flash, startling attacks, so by move 40 I thought Taj was going to take it, even though she was technically a little behind on territory, and the commentators agreed.

Then Taj played Low 41. That's what everyone's talking about - that's what I spent all night double-checking.

It looked like a mistake: Taj placed a single short stick, placed to claim a large domain from Gong-he's low-left fortress. It should have been easy to attack, but as the 'casters dug in they found they found that none of the obvious counter-attacks worked at all. The less obvious lines dissolved into a maze of subtle variations filled with catastrophic traps for both sides. The 'casters stopped performing for the cameras, and started to argue for real. Presently they laid down a second board to speculate with, and then a third. Viewership doubled, and then doubled again. After twenty minutes of frantic calculation - during which Gong-he had not moved at all - they concluded that how Gong-he chose to counter-attack would decide the game. Decide it in whose favor? They declined to guess, speculating only that the whole thing would be over, one way or another, within the next 20 moves.

Gong-he stared into that whirlpool for another ten minutes, almost half his total match time...and then declined to attack at all, instead adding a long tile to the structure on his right. The game lasted another 80 moves, and ended in a small territory win for the challenger. Post-game analysis supported his choice completely: Low 41 could not be safely attacked. By rejecting a complicated fight, Gong-he had shown that he had maturity and wisdom to match his legendary attacking skills, and proved that he was a worthy successor to Sandra Tajaswi, blah blah blah. In the post-game interview, all Taj said about the move was, "God offered me a chance to test him, and he passed. Charles Gong-he is the world's greatest Shajat player, and my worthy successor."

Well, I guess Gong-he probably deserves his title, and I don't know anything about God, but I know for sure that Taj wasn't testing him. Taj didn't do anything at all. She didn't play that game; a computer program did.

I know, because I recognize it. I wrote it myself, ten years ago.

I should back up a little, and explain about Shajat programs. After the Rediscovery and the return of real automation to Marsen's Rock, it took about ten minutes for someone to train a lattice program to play better Shajat than any human ever could. It'd be easy to be bitter about that; it took humans centuries of study to reach that level of play, and it's not like we have a lot else to offer the galaxy, culturally speaking. But the human race has fusion motors, too, and people still run races, so maybe it's not a surprise that people kept playing Shajat, and kept competing at it, even decades after the Rediscovery. People competed at training programs in it, too, and when two state-of-the-art programs face each other nowadays the games are completely incomprehensible to human eyes.

It was different for me. I was nineteen, bored at university, and wanting to noodle around with lattice learning theory. In honor of the classics I decided to try to pass a sort of Shajat Turing Test: instead of making a strong Shajat program, I'd make one that was weak at Shajat in a particular, recognizable human style. For my subject, I of course chose the one person with more published games than any other human being, the game's greatest living master: Sandra Tajaswi.

It turned out to be mostly easy, and after a few months of screwing around I had a pretty believable Taj-in-a-box. I put it up on the university net, where it enjoyed a brief wave of popularity: she was already semi-retired by then, only coming out a few times a year to defend her title. There were even a couple of local news articles, which I sent to my mother.

But my ersatz Tajaswi wasn't perfect. For one thing, it was deterministic: every time you gave it a particular game state, it would give you back the same continuation. It doesn't have to work that way, but it was easier to debug so I never changed it. No one complained, or even noticed, as far as I ever heard. Another thing was that it would glitch sometimes, and play these weird aggressive moves that Taj would never make. They were good moves, just...not quite right. I spent a lot of time fiddling with it, and I got to where those moves were pretty rare, but I could never get rid of them completely. I must have seen hundreds of moves like that, over the three months I spent working on it. Maybe even thousands of them.

So when I saw one again, in the middle of the most exciting Shajat match I'd ever watched, it didn't matter that I'd graduated years ago, that I'd started a career, that I'd married. I knew right away what I was looking at.

Proving it took all night; the copy I'd left on the university machines was gone, probably years ago, so I had to dig up a local copy from the archival storage in my basement. And then it was too old to run on my shiny new home machine, so I had to find an emulator. And then...well, eventually it worked, and I didn't have to touch the core at all, so when I finally had it running, and I showed it the game through High 40, it immediately suggested a short attack on the low-left fortress. The same weird, eye-catching move that Taj had played. Just to be sure, I played out Gong-he's side of the other four games: every single move it suggested was the same move Taj used in the real series.

Which meant that, oh God, I had to figure out what to do...

I could tell a reporter. Reporters liked talking about scandals and secrets, and this was a pretty good one, wasn't it? It'd be hard to believe at first, but if I showed them the program, they'd...hm. They'd publish a big story, and the World Shajat Society would get in trouble. What kind of trouble? I couldn't really picture it, but it seemed bad. It might really hurt Taj, and whoever else was involved.

Did I want that?

I could tell my husband, but only if I'd decided not to keep it a secret anymore. I don't think he's untrustworthy, or anything like that, but the first rule of keeping secrets is to not tell people. Telling him meant making a choice I wasn't ready to make.

I could just do nothing, write it off as a weird, funny story I could never tell, and go on with my life. Thinking about that gave me the answer I needed: if I just ignored it, then I'd never find out why they used my program instead of the real-life Taj. That was what I wanted: to know why. So I wrote a letter to the World Shajat Society President, just two lines long:

I know you used my AI to play Sandra Tajaswi's side of the 188 Shajat championship. I have two copies, one of which is archived securely.

I want to know why you did it.

The part about having two copies was a complete lie, but thinking about tricks and secrets was putting me in a strange state of mind. I marked and sealed it, filed for immediate delivery, and tried to think of what I could do if he never answered, or never got it. But my worry was wasted: I got a direct call the very next day, asking if I could meet a WSS representative that afternoon. I said I could, and canceled a conflicting meeting at work.

They'd picked a place, a smoke bar with lots of private little booths. I was early, but their representative was earlier, and stood up to wave to me as I entered. She was elderly lady, conservatively dressed, with sharp, intense features and long silver hair.

Sandra Tajaswi, the Rock's second-greatest Shajat player.

I wanted to rant at her for disgracing the game of Shajat, and I wanted her autograph; the conflict put a jittery uncertainty into my walk as I approached her table, and I didn't even try to smile at her. She didn't seem to care; she sat when I reached her, and calmly pointed me to the other chair.

I'd planned out what I was going to say, but now I was facing a living legend and the whole thing seemed ridiculous. If she'd told me it was all a misunderstanding I'd've accepted it, but instead she said, "The president didn't know about the program, as it happened. He called me, wanting to know what was going on."

Good God, I was so bad at conspiracies. I grimaced at her, and started to stammer an explanation, but she cut me off with a wave. "I told him you're a known crackpot who's been writing to me for years. Strange, but nice enough, and quite harmless."

"And he believed you?" I told myself it made sense to feel relieved, not insulted.

She shrugged. "So far as I could tell. He had lots of reasons to want to believe me, and no reason not to, after all. Samar and I have worked together for many years."

I swallowed. "Who did know?"

"I knew, of course. One gentleman you haven't heard of, from the promotional division - it was his idea originally, he'd kept a copy of your program from his own student days. And we told one of the WSS lattice programmers. We didn't want to, but we couldn't make it work on either of our own machines."

I felt a little vicious satisfaction at that last, but damn it, I was getting logistics when I wanted motives. I tried again. "How long have you been doing this?"

She raised an eyebrow. "You haven't checked?"

"Just the other Gong-he games. It didn't seem like it mattered, once I was sure you'd done it at all."

She smiled at me, a little sharply. "Ah, an idealist."

"I suppose. We play Shajat to learn, don't we? To see whose ideas about the game are better, who's more insightful, more creative. Each game means something, and the championship should mean the most of all. But yours just meant that lattices play better than humans."

Righteous anger was helping me find my balance, in this deeply surreal conversation, but she knocked me off balance again: "I agree. I studied Shajat because I wanted to play interesting games, that was all. I entered lots of tournaments, but I never cared who won them. I remember when I was fourteen, I lost my win-and-in match for the Nine Fingers playoff. I cried all the way home, and my poor father - he kept trying to console me, he thought I was crying because I'd lost!

She chuckled to herself. "It was the same when I won the championship. Poor Gunnar was past his prime by then, and I swept him, three games to nothing, the same way every time. The reporter afterward asked me if I was proud to be the world champion and I said no, mostly I felt disappointed that the games were all so bland."

She smiled slyly. "They didn't print that, of course - it's not the sort of thing a champion is supposed to say. And really, I was sorry I'd said it, I could see I'd hurt his feelings and I hadn't meant to, I just had my head full of Shajat, no room for anything else. Everything was like that to me, back then."

I took a breath, and let it out. "Then why."

She studied me. "You're a student of the game, I take it?" I nodded. "Then maybe it's easier to show than tell." She pulled her screen out of her coat, rolled it out flat on the table, and turned it on. It was already keyed to display a Shajat record, dated three weeks ago. I didn't recognize her opponent's name. The only striking thing about it was that she'd lost; whatever mistakes had brought her there were far beyond me. I looked up at her, confused, and she smiled a little sadly. "My opponent in this game was ranked as a national master."

Then I got it; national master is a good rank by ordinary standards, but as far as the world at large knew, Taj hadn't been ranked that low since she was sixteen. "You could have just said that," I said, which seemed to amuse her.

"I was a professional performer for many years, I think I can be excused a flair for the dramatic." I didn't follow that at all, and it must have showed. "A Shajat player is just a Shajat player, but a professional Shajat player is a performer, always. If we want championships and holo records and professional commentators with nice clothes and makeup, then we need money, and the money comes from people who watch Shajat but don't understand it."

She stopped, frowning. "That sounds cruel. I've never been cruel on purpose, but accidentally, that's another story. I just mean that almost no one understands the game the way I do, or Charli does. Charli is very, very good, and his way of thinking is different from mine. If only he'd been born thirty years earlier - what games we could have had then! That's been the curse of the Shajat world, you know: we've never had two truly great players on the same stage at the same time, battling back and forth. Well, maybe someone like that will emerge to face Charli in a year or two. And if not, he'll find a way to keep things exciting."

She sighed. "That's what it's about: excitement. If people wanted to see the best possible Shajat they'd watch computers play each other, and some people do do that, but not very many. People are really watching other people, that's what makes the game universal."

"Or," I said, "they think they're watching other people, when really - "

She nodded, and I cut myself off. "I've been declining for years. It's a terrible thing, and nothing we tried could stop it all the way. I study and train more than I did at twenty-two, but I get distracted, I miss things - don't grow old, that's my advice. Upload early. I would have, but I wanted a successor, somebody who'd keep the story going, keep competitive Shajat exciting. I thought Tarn would be it, five years ago, I was all ready to hand off my title, but he blundered in game four and lost it all. He should have beaten me, he was just nervous. He couldn't really imagine that he could beat the great Sandra Tajaswi," she put a sharp ironic spin on those last words, "so he never did. He retired after our second championship match, did you hear?"

I hadn't. Truthfully, I barely remembered those games and had never thought of Tarn Alter as a person at all, just one of the many challengers that Taj had crushed over her long career.

"I thought about throwing that game, pretending not to notice that he'd screwed up, but it wouldn't have worked. The commentators would have spotted it, the whole world would have known. The story wouldn't be about the great game of Shajat, it'd be about how a screw-up defeated a has-been. Who'd watch a cast of that? Who'd buy endorsements for it? And if we don't have those, how do we keep the spirit of the game alive at all?"

She stopped, watching me. "Gong-he was the kind of opponent you wanted," I finally said - I couldn't bring myself to call him 'Charli'.

She nodded. "But he showed up too late. If we played now for real it would be a disaster, he'd have to spend years proving that he really deserved his title, that he hadn't just snatched it from the hands of a woman too old and weak to hold it." She took a deep breath, and continued more calmly. "So we put off scheduling a title match, and put it off, and put it off...and then a man from Promotional came to me with an old program he'd found, years and years ago. I just wanted us to play a real game, me and Charli. In a limited way, because of your program, we could. I - I wanted to thank you, by the way. Without you, we couldn't even have done this much. That was one thing I was sorry about, that I couldn't tell you how happy you'd made me. I shouldn't be glad that you figured it out, the whole world of Shajat is in danger now, but I'm still a little glad. That's funny, don't you think?"

Mostly, I was thinking that she'd wanted to say all that for a long, long time. Whatever she'd said to her unnamed WSS promoter, whatever she'd told her programmer, it hadn't been all of this. The part about narratives, maybe, but had she told them she'd thought of giving up and letting Tarn have her title, even though he didn't deserve it? I doubted it, somehow.

She was still watching me, eyes bright and sharp. I had to say something, but all I could come up with was, "I didn't know what would happen, when I went to this meeting. I was really nervous."

"You sound like you thought we'd send assassins after you," and I blushed, because at some level, a little, kinda, I had thought that.

Taj sighed. "The WSS can't afford assassins. Revenues have been down for years. They need a world champion who's out in the world, doing events. They have that now, but it will take them a little time to turn things around, so I'd say you're safe for a year or two." I laughed a little, despite myself. "Or," she continued dryly, "you could keep yourself safe forever. It's up to you."

That message seemed pretty clear. She was saying, you can mess up the whole world of Shajat, if you want to. But you can't do anything less than that. She watched me process that, then nodded and started rolling up her screen. "Well, I've said everything I've come here to say. I'll have my assistant send you my private code, if you want to hear more of an old woman's stories."

By the time I pulled myself together enough to even say "thank you", she was already walking away.

So, in the end, I kept it to myself.

Sorry if you wanted something more dramatic. It might be cowardly, but I like things as they are. I don't really agree with what Taj did - I think she should have just retired, and let her competitors fight out for the new title. But she spent fifty years at the top of the game, so I guess I can understand why she wouldn't be able to to just stop. People listen to stories about themselves, too, and I think I'd prefer this one too, if I were in her place.

And this way, I can dial her and listen to her stories whenever I want, at least until her Upload date next year. If she meant that as a bribe, it was a remarkably clever one. But I don't think she did. I think she just wanted to tell all her old stories one more time, to someone she knew wouldn't judge her too harshly, before she went wherever Uploaded people go.