by Larry Niven
Richard spoke, and the computer automatically adjusted for decreased volume and pitch change: Richard had lost a lung four years back.
A small dark man with introspective black eyes and a pencil-thin mustache, he always hesitated over his words, as if writing them on a mental slate before speaking. "This is the Game I always wanted to conduct," he said. "I am happy to have you with me, El. Doris. This one will be remembered."
Hell, yes. It would be argued about, debated, and replayed for years.
And even after costs, and dividing up almost seven million dollars in guarantees among the players, the Park would still profit mightily. Worldwide pay-per-view, virtual simulations, theatrical re-creations, and licensing rights would reap over thirty million dollars.
Damned little of which would find its way into Tony McWhirter's hands.
Richard and Chi-Chi huddled silently against the bar. How long had it been since Tony had seen them? Eight years? Chi-Chi was tall and slender even when seated, the elegant curve of her back accentuated by a fluff-fringed yellow dress that clung like body paint. If anything, she looked younger and more alive. Richard, smaller and darker, seemed shrunken. Could his health be a liability in the coming Game?
No. Richard Lopez never gave less than one hundred percent. Never. It was what made him great.
They were all great, in their individual ways-the Lopezes with their holograms and overall Game design, the Whitmans with their choreography of Virtual mimes and Non-Player Characters.
Four Game Masters. And Tony made five. A junior member he might be, but, by God, a member.
Tony's fingers tapped again. A window zoomed on the shoreline, framing schools of bathers. All those Dream Park employees tended to cluster, leaving lots of empty space. The roof was too big for them, dauntingly large.
The water was green, covered with lily pads and shoals of moss. Pure artifice, it looked as if half a thousand years of neglect had allowed a real swamp to take over Meacham's toy bayou. But that was Game reality. In truth there hadn't been water in the rooftop lake since the Quake of '95, when the tilt of the roof changed and the lake emptied into the desert.
There had been several levels to the roof, even before the Quake. Now it sagged to the west, and the whole western edge had collapsed. Twelve thousand gallons a minute flowed from the swimming pool through a safety grid and over the edge, plummeting two hundred feet to a fountain below. What was the rate of evaporation? It boggled his mind-only the power of the Cowles fusion distillery in Long Beach could have furnished sufficient cheap water to make the lake viable.
Tony zoomed in on the roof party: some of the celebrants were almost at the edge, near the vine-camouflaged barricades. Narrow focus: he watched them enjoy the view. Meacham's architects had never planned that waterfall, either!
"Barsoom Project" was the designation for the projected terraforming of Mars. The dead planet would gain a breathable atmosphere, arable land, and enough water for an expanding human population. The Barsoom Project would take decades, and would involve the natural, industrial, and scientific resources of almost every nation on Earth, but MIMIC would house the beginnings. The vast spaces within Meacham's arcology, and the spaceport now being built nearby, would be the Mars terraforming project for decades to come… unless thirty Gamers and four hundred Non-Player Characters, under the supervisionof Tony McWhirter and four senior Game Masters, tore the building apart during the
California Voodoo Game.
Something buzzed at the edge of his attention.
Tony ignored it-not a computer sound, not an alert, nor yet the sound of data disappearing in randomized bubbles as unimportant. A notion had come to him. Fingers and thumbs tapped as inspiration took hold. Pictures jumped around him on the white half-dome of MIMIC Security: windows into all the corners of the huge building, windows projected onto windows.
Conversation behind him, a woman speaking. "…Voodoo Game is ready?"
A man's. Deep and musical. "Yeah. McWhirter wanted to tear the building apart. Travis said no."
"So the Boss finally did something right. Aside from being born into the right family."
Tony recognised voices: Alex Griffin, and that woman from Cowles Security in Tacoma. He couldn't resist a comment. "Buildings are hardware. Software is as cheap as dreams."
"Tony?"
"We did our work in DreamTime. You'll think we spent a billion dollars. I'm finished here in a minute, Griff."
Out of the corner of his eye he watched Griffin, Dream Park's security chief, a tall man who carried his seventy-five inches and two hundred pounds with animal assurance. His hair was shaded a burnt strawberry, dark enough to make
Tony look almost blond. When Griffin answered "Fine," his voice exuded enough casual confidence to make Tony wince.
The woman at Alex's side was a stunning brunette. Sharon something
… Court? Griffin's left hand lightly touched her arm, while the other gestured with the relaxed authority of a plenipotentiary. "Sharon, there's working room for sixty people here. MIMIC-"
"You like that name?"
"Seems appropriate."
"I like 'Meacham's Folly,' " she said. "That's what the locals call it."
"All right, Folly. ScanNet breaks it into overlapping quadrants, with variable scan depth. The entire building gets a standard four-stage coverage, but some countries have contracted for more. Half a billion dollars' worth of security.
Quite a system."
"Are you jealous?" she asked innocently.
"Cowles asked me to join up. I get all the stretch in the Park." Irritation had touched Griffin's voice, very lightly
Tony's fingers kept moving in the hologram, sensors picking up finger movement and wrist position, inputting far faster than any mechanical keyboard. The sensors "learned" eccentric movements and habitual errors, the individual shorthand of the operator, and together with voice cues created an ideal programming environment. Minimum size of portable units was no longer limited by the physical dimensions of a keyboard. He was trying to keep his mind on programming. The last thing he wanted to think about was Alex Griffin. But it wasn't working.
Persecutor… betrayer… woman-thief… savior.
Eight years before, a disguised Griffin had entered one of Dream Park's infamous live-action role-playing games to solve a case of industrial espionage. In the commission of that crime, a guard named Albert Rice had died. Very accidental it had been, but as even Tony's own lawyer had observed, dead is dead.
Griffin had taken six years of Tony's life.
He had also taken Tony's lady, Acacia Garcia. Eventually, she had taken him or somebody had dumped somebody. Tony had never been sure which.
Alex pointed in the video windows, picking out familiar faces in the rooftop press. "Quite a party."
"Everybody's getting the time off?" Sharon asked.
"Sure. The Folly's almost finished. The Barsoom Project is cooking. Fiftieth anniversary of groundbreaking for Dream Park is right around the corner. Everybody's feeling pretty good. Dream Park's closed to the public for a week. Some folks are taking off. Four hundred of us are staying right here as NonPlayer Characters-NPCs." He stretched, yawning hugely. "Nice to be just another head in the crowd. For once. "
"Say not so. The Griffin actually taking a day off?"
"Scout's honor." He squeezed her waist, glanced back at Tony, and released her.
Good old Griff. So considerate. So quick to hire Tony out of Chino, get him a job, set him up with psychological readjustment sessions. Mother hen…
And why did something at the very core of Tony McWhirter take offence? How could he respect this man, and be grateful to him, and never warm to him at all?
Gracious McWhirter. He shut out his thoughts and began building dreams again. What good is a dream without internal consistency, settings, and a rigorous timeline? A good dream had detailed settings, plus special effects to make the dreamer blind to the illusion. He had become very good at computer dreaming du
ring the six long years. Dreams and computers, after all, were all he had had in Chino State Penitentiary.
Alex Griffln, like so many security execs before him, had decided that anyone good enough to beat his systems was a man to recruit. He had turned Tony loose in Dream Park, then gone further still. He had pled Tony's case with the International Fantasy Gaming Society, the organisation that monitored and brokered points for Gaming worldwide. They had screamed foul, but Dream Park hired its own personnel, and Griffin chose McWhirter. Tony went on-line as Dream Park's liaison to the Game Master, coordinating security and computing time.
And now, not two years later, Tony McWhirter, novice Gamer turned gentleman thief turned (murderer) turned…
The current wasn't buzzing through his fingers anymore. Hardedged ideas dissolved into a mushy jumble in his head.
Dammit, when would he forgive himself? He had made good. Now he was coordinating the efforts of four Game Masters as they unleashed their finest work. The killing was behind him, his debt for the untimely, unintended strangling of Albert Rice paid in full.
(Okay with you, Albert?)
At the moment he was at work on the setting: a dreamscape superimposed on the real, redesigned MIMIC, a building intended to feed, house, and entertain 25,000 people. Fifty years earlier, water had poured down the wrecked building, into broken balcony doors and windows, until the tilted rooftop swimming lake was nearly empty. Now the waterfall flowed again. In the context of the California Voodoo Game, the roof and its artificial lake housed a fishing and farming community half a thousand years old. Who knew what supernatural terrors lurked beneath its filthy waters?
The Shadow do. McWhirter chuckled nastily.
Scattered within the California Voodoo Game were a total of fifty talismans, far more than the number necessary to win. Some were in the rooftop lake, requiring scuba gear. Currently, such gear was available on the Mall level, but could he make it easier? "Of course," he muttered, and his fingers began to move.
"Of course what?"
"Of course it's obvious." He couldn't delay acknowledgments any longer. "Hi, Griff. Hi, Sharon… Caine?"
She was small and dark-haired and pretty; she looked quite military in her crisp, blue Cowles Security uniform. "Crayne. Sharon Crayne. Good evening, Game Master." Her smile was incandescent. He wondered how it tasted.
He bet Good Ol' Griff knew.
"I'll finish this later. How goes?"
"You're changing the Game," Crayne said disapprovingly.
"Is a bear Polish? But only just a little bit, Sharon, and I'll record all changes for Security, and it's trivial anyway. We've put snorkels and scuba gear in the Mall level, right?" His fingers were a floating blur in the keyboard. "The Gaming teams have to use it on the flooded levels, but getting it there will be an exercise in masochism."
"That's a fair description of the whole Game," Alex Griffln said. "five teams of masochists submitting themselves to the tender mercies of Tony McWhirter. "
"Well… me and four other gentle souls." Tony felt warm and chummy. Alex could do that to him, if they were face to face. It was easy to forget the intense intelligence behind those dark green eyes and the tremendous strength and technique that had once held Tony McWhirter as helpless as a baby. Tony grinned like a minstrel. "Yes, boss. Isn't it obvious? If there was diving gear for sale before the Quake, somebody must have been buying it. So I'll put some in the upper apartments, too."
Griffln chuckled. "You're getting sly in your old age. Why aren't you partying?"
"I thought if I went through the territory again, I'd come up with something more."
"You've got four hundred NPCs out there, all partying their hearts out in the forty hours left before your Game begins." Alex Griffln was being just a little bit careful with his tongue. Might have been drinking, yes? Never seen Alex drunk. Might be interesting to douse his punch with a little Kleerlite 190 proof. "Why not go out and get a little adulation? Your public awaits. "
"Uh-huh." Tony's cheeks were getting tired, and he relaxed the grin. "What are you doing here?"
"Routine check. We need our screens back, Tony. Wrap this up, would you?"
"Oh, Lord. How long?"
"Give me an hour. If everything checks, you can have it all back. The damn Game is done, isn't it?"
Tony bit back a retort: No Garne is ever complete while the authors live, Alex. He stood up, and Alex slid into his chair.
Dream Park's security chief was at work almost instantly. He had a running view of the train depot on levels one and two. Then the Mall on level three. The Mall extended up to level six, with another two stories of light-well. Escalators ran from there down to the train gates. The gates had been there already, but with only one set of track laid, a split-level station carved into the ground and the cliff face.
"How much of this did you actually build?" Sharon asked.
Griffin didn't seem inclined to answer, so Tony said, "We cleaned out the broken glass and planted merchandise in the stores, and bombed out the stinks and the vermin. Otherwise we left it alone. There're some clues in the Mall-"
"What about the rest of the building?"
"Ah. Well, most of it was in place. MIMIC had eleven thousand in residence, and was going slowly broke, on May twenty-third, nineteen ninety-five."
"The California Ouake," said Sharon.
"Yep. You can see for yourself, the place wasn't totaled. California's always been antsy about quakeproofing. MIMIC stood up pretty well. Part of the west face is sagging. See how it's distorted, like someone slammed the oven door on the souffle? Maybe two thousand people were trapped. Rescue was a long time coming, because the whole damn state needed rescue. Over eight hundred died. The building wasn't a total loss, but who'd want to live here after that? Cowles stole it at auction. Hell, everything in California was going for nickels.''
The scanner's eye shifted just north of the vertical ridge on the west face, to focus on the waterfall. The western edge of the rooftop lake cascaded over the broken masonry in a silvery flood. The viewpoint moved down the torrent in jumps.
"When we finish, we'll turn this back into industry housing. Home base for the Barsoom Project. But first, we get to play with it. We'll run the California Voodoo Game from roof to basement, the biggest role-playing game ever.
"We flooded levels ten and eleven, Sharon. There'll be more flooding by the end of the game. We clean it up afterward. The waterfall, that'll stay part of the building forever. Along the crease "taptap" here we go. This was what
Meacham called 'the modular wall.' "
The view was from the desert floor, straight up the crease. A central track ran the crease, with tributaries splaying out and up like Christmas-tree branches. There were egg-shaped bulges on some tracks, each the size of a camper. Half-crushed eggs lay at the base of the building. One egg hung three hundred feet up from cables that looked no larger than threads.
Griffin spoke. "Tony, you're not going to use those?"
"Oh, hey, Griff, they're not dangerous. Not anymore. I watched the work."
"But you've got a whole apartment dangling there." He leaned closer. "Crap. That's not mine, is it?"
"Ha ha. Your apartment is down a few levels, and anchored tight, Griff. You don't trust me at all…" Could Griffin veto his use of the modular wall? "It's a mock-up, just a bedroom and office and some storage."
"Does it move? Crawl up and down the wall like the others?"
"It does that."
"It looks dangerous."
"Exciting, Griff. It looks exciting. This is a Level Ten Hazardous Environment game. They don't get tougher. Lawyers worked overtime on the waivers, believe me. If Gamers or their families even whisper 'lawsuit,' their firstborns disappear in baby-blue puffs of smoke."
"Exciting, huh?"
"Yeah." A distraction? "Griff, hope you don't mind, but I tied some of the Gaming monitors into ScanNet. Seemed a shame to waste all that wonderful full-spectrum imaging technology-"
Sharon'
s pretty face creased with irritation. "And how did you manage that trick?"
Griffin clucked with feigned weariness. "Don't ask, Sherry. There is madness to his methods."
Tony's grin was pure evil. "Yesss. Seems a shame not to get some use out of it. After all ScanNet will be obsolete in ten years. Five if the Japanese don't sit on their hands. Maybe three-"
"Leave the poor woman her illusions."
"Sorry, Griff. Heh heh. Anyway, even if you don't need it yet, I do, to run the Game. Is that stuff in place?"
"We're still mounting scanners. Sharon, let's do a run. Tony, you can stay or you can party." When Tony seemed inclined to stick around, Griffin added, "I'd party if I were you."
"On my way, chief." Tony saluted and spiraled out of the chair.
He was at the door in three breaths and paused there, casting a final glance behind him. Alex and Sharon were standing close together, generating enough heat to make the air shimmer.
Do you remember Acacia Garcia, Griff? She'll be here, for the Voodoo Game. Did you look at the roster, Griff? Do you know? Do you care?
Tony cared, enough for it to create a sour, aching void in the pit of his stomach. Enough to wonder where she was at that moment, and what she was doing.
The back of Acacia's neck burned with the touch of Wizard's eyes. She longed to check her coordinates on her "location finder," but dared not. She had to save that juice! Tammi would be closing in on her with lethal intent. Tammi would be expecting Acacia to prepare an ambush, or to select the best possible location to stand and fight. Neither approach would work. Tammi was too good at selecting her own sites. There would be no way to sucker the Troglodykes.
But there was one stratagem that had never been tried.
She walked rapidly and spotted a telltale reflection only an instant before her nose bumped an invisible barrier. Thump.
She edged around, both hands spread, searching for the ends of the glass. There had been nothing, just another endless crystal vista, and suddenly Acacia stood on the edge of a waterfall. Victoria Falls? Niagara, in some prehistoric age? The air churned with foam, a million acre-feet of water per second cascading into the dizzying depths.
