Ultimate Game: A Novel - Hardcover

It begins when Eric, Charles, and Andreas come upon the video store of their dreams, featuring war games they've never even heard of (and they've heard of, and mastered, all of them). But amid the stacks of lurid boxes and scenes of carnage, the most remarkable game of all is the one pressed on them by the store's old proprietor, a cunning sample of computer warfare called "The Ultimate Experience." Though contained in a single diskette, the game surpasses their wildest Fantasies: the graphics are better than a movie, the simulated battlefields are historically perfect, and the action seems to put you right inside the screen.

But soon the three friends realize that the Game has a will of its own, and that far from being a dream, it has drawn each of them into his own personal nightmare -- one that they enter and exit without any control. For Charles, it means suddenly finding himself at the head of a doomed French battalion in the darkest days of World War I, forced to choose which men to send to their deaths. Eric, meanwhile, is a resistance lighter in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, on the very day in 1937 that German bombers reduce the town to ashes. And Andreas, the oldest and most troubled of the three, must face up to his own demons, discovering that, far from being terrified of the carnage around him, he revels in it. Little by little, the Game takes over their lives, leaving Eric, Charles, and their loved ones at its mercy -- while an increasingly violent Andreas plunges ever deeper into its seductive and deadly power. As the final showdown looms on the stageof virtual history, the three boys are inexorably drawn toward a memorable and horrifying conclusion.

Christian Lehmann has fashioned a spellbinding adventure in cyberspace, a tour de three of contemporary technology and historical recreation that will stay with you long after the last page has been turned.