The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  "Shall we drink to my demise?" I said, sitting up slowly and rubbing my temples. I glanced around at the scan team and noticed that they weren't the same psychocybernetic engineers who were on duty when Coles brought me out of the hallucinact. "How long have I been down, Cass?" I asked the crew chief.

  "About eight hours," she said.

  "Nothing like a good night's sleep," I said, though strictly speaking, downtime wasn't really sleep. It was a psychocybernetic trance state. A way to turn people off when you didn't need them for anything. "So what's the prognosis, Miss Daniels? My readings all okay? Nothing in the red? No maintenance service required?"

  "No therapy is indicated," she said, consulting my chart printout. "I'd advise against consuming alcoholic beverages, though I doubt you'd listen. At least try to stop short of getting completely intoxicated. It really throws the readings off."

  I stared at her and mentally undressed her. She was wearing a loose-fitting white laboratory jumpsuit, but one of the monitor screens behind her suddenly showed her standing there in a sheer black lycra bra and bikini panties, dark stockings and spike heels. I wasn't on line, so the image stayed in the control room, but it wouldn't have been broadcast anyway. Not even psychocybernetic engineers can totally control the output of a human mind-at least, not yet-so there's always a slight delay between the biochip reception and the tachyon broadcast, allowing for some highly sophisticated editing. One of the other engineers cleared his throat softly. She turned around, saw the screen, and raised an eyebrow.

  "You flatter me, O'Toole," she said, in a disinterested, clinical sort of tone. "Unfortunately, I'm not quite as narrow-waisted as you seem to imagine. The result of a sedentary job with too little time for exercise, I'm afraid. And aside from considerations of style, if I were to wear shoes like that, it would lead to serious orthopedic problems."

  The image on the screen broke up into snow briefly before resolving itself once more into what I actually saw before me, an attractive and apparently completely humorless young woman in a white laboratory jumpsuit. It's hard to maintain a decent fantasy without at least some cooperation.

  "Besides," she said, and for a moment I could have sworn I saw the barest trace of a smile, "you left out my tattoo."

  "She isn't normally so personable," Breck said as we were leaving. "I think she rather likes you."

  "You think she really has a tattoo?" I said.

  "A black king scorpion on her left inner thigh," Breck said, with a perfectly straight face.

  I stopped and stared at him.

  "Only joking," Breck said, with a smile. "For all I know, it's a snake and dagger on her biceps. However, I would resist the temptation to find out for sure if I were you. Considering her position, she probably knows more about you than you know about yourself."

  "That's a large part of what makes it so tempting," I said, grinning.

  Breck sighed. "You still have a great deal to learn, O'Toole."

  He was undoubtedly right. Compared to Breck, I was a rank beginner at the game. Unfortunately, novices tend to make mistakes and Psychodrome can be very unforgiving.

  My involvement started as an accident. Perhaps even a lucky accident. The jury was still out on that one. I was born on Mars, in Bradbury City; Irish on my father's side, Russian on my mother's. My father was a hard-drinking, hard-gaming, two-fisted wild man named Scan O'Toole. My mother, Irina, was a long-suffering, self-effacing, beautiful and moody woman who believed that nothing really good would ever happen to her until she hit the afterlife and even then, who knew? My dad was ruled by leprechauns and she was spooked by generations of Russian Orthodox archbishops. A mismatch of a marriage if there ever was one, but it lasted due to equal parts of stubbornness and love. As a result of this somewhat unlikely mixture, I never did get settled all the way. Archbishops and Little People didn't get along too well. The Irish part of me believed in luck, but my Russian half kept telling me I'd never get it.

  I came to Earth as a freshly mustered-out serviceman looking for some fun on Tokyo's Ginza Strip. I suppose I must have had some, because the morning after I arrived, I woke up in a Junktown slum with almost all my money gone, a tattoo of a dragon (never mind where), and a brand-new wife who was perhaps all of fourteen. As things turned out, the marriage wasn't legal because Miko and her family were non-regs. If you're non-registered, then you're not legally a citizen and you haven't any rights. How can you have rights if you don't exist? Of course, I didn't know about that then, because on Mars and on the outworlds, people are still too valuable a commodity to ignore. Only Mother Earth neglects her children. All I knew was that I had, as my father would have said, really farted during vespers this time. I've been in straits considerably more dire since, but at the time, things seemed pretty grim. And they proceeded to get grimmer.

  I'd always been a hustler, but unlike my dear father-roast his soul-I was strictly small-time. The terrifying prospect of living out the remainder of my days in Junktown, saddled with a child wife and her starving non-reg family, made me throw caution to the winds. I did what any self-respecting Irishman would do when he was truly up against it. I went looking for a game of poker. I found one. And I made a very serious mistake. I won.

  I know it flies in the face of logic, but there is such a thing as a hot streak. Most gamblers live for it; however, if you're not very careful, it can utterly destroy you. I don't know what causes it, but when it strikes, you know it without the faintest scintilla of a doubt. It's magic. It's as if a ghostly finger taps you on the shoulder and the voice of Fate whispers in your ear, "Okay, kid, this is it. It's your turn to be God."

  At any other time, I would have known better and exercised restraint, but at any other time, I wouldn't have been there to begin with. Those guys were way too heavy for me. The secret to handling a hot streak and coming out ahead is knowing when to stop. It's a principle that every gambler knows. However, there is a lesser known corollary that separates the winners from the losers in the long run. And in some cases, it separates the living from the dead. Unless you're in a large casino, which likes to have a big winner now and then because it draws in all the losers, don't ever win too big. Engrave that on your greedy little heart. The smart hustler is not a barracuda. He lives on little bites. He just moves around and makes a lot of them. I wasn't smart. I knew that I was on a streak and I got greedy. And I bit off a lot more than I could chew.

  The guy who got chewed up the worst was a sore loser named Hakim Saqqara, who just so happened to be a warlord of the Yakuza. If I'd known that when I took his money, I probably would've committed hara-kiri on the spot. It would've saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. If he felt like it, he could have had me killed that very night, but I had pricked his pride and he wanted to draw his satisfaction out a bit. He decided to continue the game, so to speak, away from the table. So he waited. He gave me time to parlay my winnings into a comfortable life-style. The money I pulled off him allowed me to buy citizen registrations for Miko and her family and loan her enough funds to buy an education so she could get a job. I never thought I'd see it back, but I didn't really give a damn. I'd had a run of bad luck and I had somehow managed to turn it all around. Then Saqqara made his move and gave me an education in major league hustling that I'll never forget.

  By the time he was finished with me, I was so well and truly on the hook to him that when he snapped his fingers, I was in the air before he finished saying, "Jump." He took me for everything I had. In the process, I learned a bit too much about him, so when he decided I had nothing left to lose and could be no further use to him, he told his boys to drop me in the bay. Without a doubt, I would have wound up fish food if the leprechauns hadn't delivered a miracle.

  My number was selected in the Psychodrome lottery.

  Now Psychodrome was never my idea of entertainment. I found reality challenging enough, thank you, I didn't need fantasy tripping. I hadn't even bought the damn ticket. Before we parted company, my wife Miko once mentioned picking up a
couple of tickets for us and I had forgotten all about it until mine was drawn for the grand prize-a chance to play an adventure game scenario with a couple of Psychodrome's hottest stars. There I was, trying to hide out from Yakuza assassins and the next thing I knew, I was famous. All I wanted was to go someplace where no one knew my name and suddenly everybody knew my name.

  I didn't have a lot of options. I was broke, without even enough money to buy another meal. I had been all the way up and down the scale. I'd gone from an ex-serviceman with some money to burn to a pauper down in Junktown to a high roller on the Ginza Strip to a stockbroker in Hamamatsu. And then the downward slide had started as Saqqara wrapped his tentacles around me and in five short years I was right back where I'd started, no worse off than before, except for one slight detail. There was a contract out on me. Psychodrome was a way out. If I had known back then what I was letting myself in for, I might've stayed in Tokyo and taken my chances with the Yakuza.

  There were different levels to the game known as "the ultimate experience." Some of them provided harmless fantasies built around luxury and pleasure. Whatever turns you on. Others provided adventure, challenge, and great risk. Players rich enough to afford the entry fees could choose their own scenarios from the adventures Psychodrome had to offer. The less fortunate could buy tickets in the lottery, with the grand prize being the chance to play. However, there was a catch. Winners of the lottery didn't get to choose their game scenarios and they had no control over their experiences. In that respect, there were two levels to Psychodrome; one in which wealthy players got to use the game for interactive, exhibitionistic entertainment and one in which the game got to use the players. Those who fell into the latter category were generally diehard thrillseekers, gamblers, or desperate individuals. In other words, people very much like me. And there's never been a shortage of such people.

  Players about to embark upon "the ultimate experience" were taken to the headquarters of Psychodrome International, the megacorporate entity which operates the game. There, the prospective player was given a full medical and psychological examination and a definitive player data base was assembled. The player was then taken into surgery, where a special semiorganic, psychocybernetic biochip was implanted into the cerebral cortex. Permanently. You couldn't take it out even if you could afford psychocybernetic surgery. The chip grew directly into the brain matter like a rooting seedling. It gave the player the ability to interface directly with the Psychodrome computer banks, as well as with Psychodrome's playermaster satellite network.

  The game began when the players were transported to a selected, location where they were supposed to interact with people and situations they encountered in order to achieve specific game objectives. It was possible to win, but still more possible to lose. And losing could mean death. Which made for great entertainment, you see. The game scenarios could be located anywhere on Earth or on another world or from a fantasy hallucinact devised by Psychodrome. In other words, it could be real or a programmed hallucination. Only the playermaster knew for sure.

  As the players pursued their game objectives, the playermaster was capable of interfacing with them to provide guidance or game clues, but never direct assistance. If you got into a jam, it was up to you to figure out how to get out of it. And the fun part was that the playermaster satellite network enabled instantaneous tachyon transmission of your experiences to Psychodrome Game Control for broadcast on mass media psych-fidelity entertainment channels.

  People using their psy-fi sets at home could follow the adventures of their favorite players and experience the game with them by plugging into the net. Psy-fi entertainment systems allowed them to achieve an electronic sensory link with the players. Each player's experience was broadcast on a separate channel of the system. By switching channels, the home audience could switch players, vicariously "becoming" those players. Sort of like renting someone else's body to have a fantasy adventure, sharing all the sensory experiences from the safety of your living room. Or bedroom. Like I said, whatever turns you on. And if things got a bit too hairy, the fail-safe biomonitors built into the system would protect you from becoming too excited.

  Home viewers were also capable of some limited interaction with the players by voting on selected game options. The vote was electronically tallied and the results instantaneously transmitted to the players via tachyon beam. The players then had the option of following the advice of the home audience or not. However, since ratings were important, there was a certain amount of pressure on the players to please the audience. And they could be a bit bloodthirsty on occasion.

  Realized game objectives resulted in fabulous cash prizes, as did accumulated "experience points." Psychodrome professionals-psychos-were cult figures living out a life of fantasy most people could only dream about (or experience vicariously). It wasn't the sort of career I would have selected for myself, but as somebody once said, life is just what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. Besides, what gambler can resist the lure of a big game? And though Psychodrome seemed to be the biggest game around, it turned out that there was an even bigger game being played out behind the scenes- the clandestine game that Coles seemed to be running.

  I had always assumed that there was someone running Coles, because the thought of Coles being accountable to no one but himself was a bit too unsettling to deal with. There had to be an order to things. Even Einstein had insisted that God didn't play dice with the universe. Of course, Einstein dealt with things on a far larger scale than I did, but if Coles wasn't God in my own small corner of the universe, he was certainly one of His Four Horsemen. He was one of Them, the mysterious and omnipotent They you're always hearing about, the ones who run things, the ones with all the power. He appeared out of nowhere, waltzed right into Game Control, and started giving orders.

  I'd always wondered about Psychodrome International wiring all those people up. The biochip was presented to the world as the latest thing in cybertech, a boon to all humanity. There was nothing like a brain/computer interface for increasing human potential. Take a short nap and wake up with a college education, or fluency in a foreign language, or have yourself programmed with an advanced-level technical course. All you had to do was pay for the data, competitively priced; the computer time, expensive; and the implantation of a biochip, a mere king's ransom.

  The operation was a relatively simple one for a psychocybernetic surgeon to perform and the actual cost of manufacturing a biochip, even allowing for a whopping profit, was still considerably less than what they charged. But then when something is ruinously expensive, it becomes that much more desirable to those who can afford it-namely, the rich and powerful, the movers and the shakers. If you want to hook that crowd, price your product accordingly and they'll line up for blocks to get one. And if you offer it as a grand prize in a glamorous lottery, a prize that not only lets you participate in the adventure of a lifetime, but gives you a biochip to keep forever as a souvenir, something that can increase your life potential (providing you can pay to have it programmed), well, you can sell all the tickets you can print. Everybody, but everybody, played the lottery.

  However, on the other hand . . .

  Inevitably, over a period of time, you'd have more and more people with biochips permanently implanted in their brains, which not only allowed their minds to interface with a computer, but could also conceivably allow someone to broadcast coded signals to their biochips and access their minds. Without their even knowing it. Of course, only a paranoid would think like that.

  Enter Mr. Coles.

  I never would have met Coles or learned how insidious Psychodrome could be if it hadn't been for a gaming round that took me to a planet called Draconis 9. The dominant form of life on Draconis 9 were creatures known as ambimorphs-in other words, shapechangers.

  The first corporate development team to set foot on Draconis 9 did what humans always do whenever they encounter a new wilderness. They started killing things. Until the humans came,
the ambimorphs were simple creatures who survived by instinct. But after ignorant humans started killing them, the ambimorphs' instinct for survival led them to imitate the strange new predators. They took human form and mutated in the process, becoming sentient. And that's when they became a real problem.

  Breck had been with the Special Service unit sent to rescue the humans on Draconis 9. The mission had been a miserable failure. There had been no way to differentiate between the humans and the shapechangers. The ambimorphs were one-way telepaths. They communicated by reading one another's minds. And their shapechanging was more than superficial. They not only took on human form, they became human. They were so plastic a life form that one of them could read my mind and take my shape and become completely indistinguishable from me. It would sound like me. It would act like me. It would know everything I knew. It would duplicate my biology and essentially become another "me." And it could take any other form at will, with lightning speed.

  No one knew how they could do it. No ambimorph had ever been captured alive and studied. Dead ambimorphs did not revert back to whatever their "natural" form was. They became fixed somehow in whatever shape they had taken on before they died and even a detailed autopsy could not penetrate the secret of their morphology. They had been harmless, uncomplicated, unreasoning beings with a bovine placidity-until they encountered us. Then, just to survive, they changed and became the most terrifying life form in the universe, chameleons with human cunning and, worse still, human instincts. We had created the enemy and he was us-only it was a superior design.

  Draconis 9 was quarantined. A military base was established in orbit above the planet to maintain the quarantine and it might have ended there except that there was something on Draconis 9 that people wanted-fire crystals.