The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  Breck glanced at me. "Are you all right?"

  "Yeah, I'll live. I'll probably have nightmares for a while, but these days, what's the difference? Awake or asleep, reality or hallucination, seems like it's all the same damn thing."

  "You mean it isn't?" Breck said, grinning and flexing his nysteel fingers. He had lost his real arm in the service and the prosthesis had some interesting modifications built into it, such as the knife blades that sprang like stilettos out of his artificial fingers. Not to mention that the nysteel alloy itself was damn near indestructible. One shot with it was all it had taken to pulverize my door.

  "You ruined my door with that damn thing," I said.

  "Sorry. I didn't mean to knock quite so hard."

  I grimaced ruefully. "I guess I should stop complaining about the scan crews monitoring us on our own time. For all the damn good it did. If I hadn't shot that creature, their monitoring my readouts wouldn't have helped me much. You would've arrived too late. No one saved my ass this time but me."

  Breck raised his eyebrows. "Are you quite certain of that?"

  I glanced at him sharply. "What do you mean?"

  "Game Control scanners registered abnormal levels on your readouts, resulting in a signal alarm that alerted them to tune you in. I suspect that confronted with the spectacle of Cassandra Daniels in her scanties, or what you thought was Cassandra Daniels, you reacted with predictable excitement. Add the fact that you'd been drinking, which affects the bio signals, and the result was an abnormal readout of some sort. The real Miss Daniels, still on duty back at Game Control, thought it prudent to tune you in and check on your activities. Imagine how surprised she must have been when she tuned in and saw that you were about to make love to her] The ambimorph apparently plucked your current fantasy straight out of your mind the moment you walked in. However, the significant thing about all this is that the creature didn't pick up on the fact that you were being monitored, either because it couldn't or because it was too intent on plucking a familiar and compelling image from your mind to throw you immediately off guard. It suggests that ambimorphs are not infallible mind readers. And that's encouraging news."

  1 was slow on the uptake. "Wait a minute. If Cassandra tuned me in and saw what was happening, why didn't she contact me?"

  Breck looked amused. "What makes you think she didn't?"

  I suddenly remembered that nagging little feeling at the back of my mind, that insistent, prodding sensation which had burst into a powerful attack of paranoia, and I realized what must have happened.

  "She knew you were in trouble," said Breck, "and distracted by a rather powerful sexual stimulus. Rather than throw you off balance by using voice contact, which might well have caused a fatal hesitation on your part, she simply activated your strongest defense response and amplified it. You did all the rest. I think it was an excellent judgment call on her part. She saved your life."

  I stared at him, stunned. I'd been wondering why Coles bothered with someone like me, when he could easily have recruited more hybreeds like Breck, with superior strength, responses, and powers of concentration. The answer, of course, was that someone like Breck would be a lot harder to manipulate. Breck was "wired differently." Coles could not tiptoe through his mind without Breck knowing it. The degree of mental discipline and control that came so easily to Breck was excruciating work for me. I was getting better at it, but Breck, being a hybreed, would always have the edge. Consequently, Breck was a good choice as an operative, but a poor choice as a subject for experimentation to see how much cybertech could do applied to ordinary humans as behavior modification.

  I began to see that I was much more than a covert government agent playing Psychodrome professionally as a cover. I was an experimental prototype, as well. When Coles learned where all my buttons were and how to push them, he could do the same thing more easily with others-and in such a manner that they would never be aware of it. It was as if I were the vehicle and Coles and his people were sitting behind the wheel-learning how to drive.

  "I see," I said softly, trying not to think about the worst nightmares of George Orwell. "I suppose I'm going to have to thank Cass Daniels for pushing the right button."

  Breck gave me a wry smile. "Just make certain that it's really her this time."

  There had been some changes at the corporate headquarters of Psychodrome International since Coles and his people took over. They were subtle changes for the most part, such as the security system that relied not only on hidden scanners, but on human receptionists and guards plugged into the security matrix, their senses monitored by Security Control.

  To the casual observer, the lobby of the building looked no different than it had before the advent of what some of us referred to as "the change in management." (Personally,.! wasn't at all convinced that there had been a change in management. I had a sneaking suspicion that Coles might have been running things all along. I know, paranoia. ..) Entering through the front doors from the courtyard plaza, you came into the cavernous atrium. The centerpiece was the massive multiplex holocube display. The huge cubes were clustered like quartz crystals, each containing constantly changing scenes, slices of experience from past interactive game scenarios. The whole thing was suspended over a reflecting pool which, depending on the time of day, was either placid or had colored fountains playing in it.

  Beyond this garish testament to our corporate image, there was the information desk, staffed by a covey of bright, young, helpful people whose primary function was to be polite, cheerful, and attractive without being terribly accommodating. If you were able to convince them that you had legitimate business somewhere in the vast corporate hive, they would point you in the right direction, usually down one of the side corridors leading to a bank of lift tubes. However, by the time you'd gotten that far, you'd already been scanned about a dozen different ways, examined by both automated and human sensors.

  While that charming young receptionist was soothing you with her seductive voice and perhaps even flirting with you a little, she was making direct eye contact and her visual impression was being instantaneously transmitted via her biochip to Security Control, where computer enhancement of the image enabled a reading of your retinal pattern for identification. Your voice print was checked as the receptionist listened to you speak and the scanners hidden in her desk made certain you weren't carrying anything antisocial on your person. More of the same took place inside the lift tubes, which were equipped with concealed antipersonnel weapons capable of tracking and zeroing in on individual passengers and rendering them either unconscious or dead without harming the person standing next to them. If necessary though, the entire tube could be destroyed. Needless to say, all but a handful of employees were ignorant of these procedures, just as only a handful of employees knew that there was something .more to Psychodrome than entertainment. In other words, we were so paranoid, we didn't even tell our own people what we were doing.

  So far as I knew, Coles never left the upper levels of the building. Perhaps he felt safer there or maybe he wanted to be right on top of things twenty-four hours a day. Probably both. The maximum security floors of the building were prohibited to anyone who wasn't implanted with a biochip. Everyone with clearance for access to those floors was now monitored by automated scanner banks around the clock. At the first abnormal reading, as had happened in my case, alarms went off and a scanning engineer on duty tuned in immediately. Coles was serious. I wondered if he was serious enough to have had himself implanted with a biochip, as well. I guessed he probably had. Fanatics like Coles tended to be true believers in the system. If it were up to him, he would probably have a biochip implanted in every infant that was born.

  He was waiting for us in his office on the top floor. It was all done in black. Black carpeting, black walls, black ceiling, black furniture, black fixtures and accessories ... it was like the inside of a womb. I always felt slightly disoriented in his office, a little claustrophobic, as if I were visiting a mole in its la
ir.

  "Come in, gentlemen," Coles said, from behind his big black desk. "Have a seat. I'd like you to see something."

  He pressed a tiny sensor panel in the console set flush with the desktop and a panel in the wall slid up to reveal a holoscreen.

  "The footage you're about to see," said Coles, "was obtained from an independent producer who was attempting to sell it to the news media. Fortunately for us, they didn't bite. They thought he was trying to pull a hustle with some special effects."

  The scene flashed on abruptly, showing a beautiful young woman standing on the guardrail of a span way, against the background of the midtown towers, high above the lower levels of the city. She was clearly about to jump. Breck and I both tensed as we recognized Stone Winters-only we both knew that this wasn't really Stone. It was the ambimorph that had returned to Earth with us by assuming her identity.

  What we were watching on the screen had taken place moments after the creature, still in the shape of Stone Winters, had escaped from the very building we were in. Game Control had still been receiving signals from the biochip the shapechanger had assimilated when it had eaten Stone and I knew what was coming up next. The creature had panicked at the sight of all the vehicles bearing down upon it as it fled out onto the spanway and it had leaped over the guardrail, shapechanging as it fell.

  We were on its trail when it happened. Game Control had been receiving signals from the biochip and Coles had fed the transmission directly to Breck and me. I recalled the terrifying sensation of falling, followed by the feeling of winged flight, the transformation taking place so quickly that there was no sensation whatsoever of the change. What we had experienced through the medium of the biochip interface with the creature, we were now about to see for the first time.

  "This was an absolute fluke," said Coles as he froze the image on the screen. "This guy was shooting a series of background scenes for an ad agency campaign and he just happened to catch this." He started the footage once again, reversing it so that it rewound to the scene an instant before the cameraman had seen "Stone" up on the spanway. "All right, now here's where he spotted what he thought was a woman about to commit suicide."

  He resumed running it once more and we saw the blurring effect as the cameraman quickly panned up to the spanway, catching "the woman" poised on the guardrail. A second later, she jumped.

  "Now hold on to your seats," said Coles.

  The camera followed as "she" fell, tumbling like a high diver out of control, and then suddenly, incredibly, the falling figure exploded, bursting apart into a flock of small birds, pinwheeling around one another and then grouping together into a flight that went soaring out of frame as the picture tilted crazily-

  "Here's where he dropped the camera," said Coles, stopping the holographic footage, and then reversing it. He ran it from the fall and froze the image at the instant of the transformation. The process had been too fast even for a holocamera to capture. One moment, a falling woman. The next, a human figure exploding into birds.

  "My God," I whispered.

  "Amazing," said Breck, staring at the screen. "So that was how it seemed to achieve the impossible and alter its mass. It never altered its mass at all, it simply rearranged it by separating into discrete entities, linked by one intelligence! I never dreamed that they could do that!"

  "What about the people who saw this?" I said. "What about the cameraman? How did you intend to keep them quiet?"

  Coles shrugged. "I have no intention of trying to keep them quiet. They can talk about it all they please. They're even welcome to talk about how we seized their footage. The news media have already decided it's a Psychodrome publicity stunt."

  "But what if somebody believes them?"

  "People believe all sorts of irrational things," said Coles. "They see ghosts, they speak with Jesus Christ, they wrestle with the devil, they're kidnapped by little green men in flying saucers . . . Aliens walking among us is hardly something new. I doubt even the sensational press would find it very interesting. On the other hand, our xenobiologists find this utterly fascinating. The fact that the ambimorphs can do this seems to support the theory that they reproduce asexually, by fission."

  "You mean mitosis?" Breck said.

  Coles shook his head. "I don't know. I'm wary of sticking a convenient label on it until we know for sure exactly what it is they do and how they do it. It could be a form of cell division we've never even seen before. Our people believe it's possible that what we're dealing with here is not a species of individual creatures, but that each ambimorph is a sort of 'colony.' As you said, Breck, discrete entities linked by a common intelligence. But also linked, apparently, by something more than that, something like a common nervous system, possibly based on enzymes or even something on a particle level, micro-molecular. A dead ambimorph becomes fixed, rather like water freezing into a solid block of ice. The cells, I guess you'd call them, aren't completely independent. They can sustain a certain amount of damage, but past some point, trauma becomes irreversible. We know they can be killed. What we didn't know is that we could be dealing with interdependent, symbiotic communities of creatures that behave together in an individual manner."

  "You mean like a hive?" I said.

  Coles raised his eyebrows. "Perhaps. That's an interesting way of putting it. Of course, we won't know any of this for certain until we can manage to get our hands on a live ambimorph. Which brings me to the main reason why I sent for you. Have either of you ever heard of a place called Purgatory?"

  Purgatory.

  Just the mention of the name was enough to make my stomach start contracting. I had once spent three months on Purgatory while I was a supply sergeant on a service freighter and those three months had been three of the most miserable months I'd ever spent anywhere, including the Ginza Strip, Junktown, and that bug-infested swamp of a planet where I received my baptism of fire as a psycho, fighting with a brigade of corporate mercenaries.

  I'd heard of a place called Purgatory, all right. I was twenty years old and the barge we charitably referred to as a "ship" had limped into port at Purgatory Station, where our chief engineer finally conceded that it would take more than a crescent wrench and some electrician's tape to effect repairs. What it took was an overhaul of the drive system, which tied up engineering for about three weeks, and debugging a small glitch somewhere in the navigational computer, which only took a little over two months. Those of us who were not in engineering or systems maintenance had nothing to do except mickey mouse make-work and we'd already been doing that for months. So the skipper decided to break down and give us shore leave on the planet surface.

  Five of us never made it back.

  We never did find out what happened to them. They had been drinking-there wasn't much else to do on Purgatory-and they had taken a jet-powered desert sled out beyond the confines of the military ground base. They had been careening around the desert, shooting up the bleeding cactus, when they ran out of fuel. A search party from the ground base made several flyovers and they finally located their desert sled, but there was no sign of our men. No one seemed surprised.

  Their bodies were never recovered. Possibly because there were no bodies to recover. They might have encountered one of several predatory species who lived out on the high desert plains. They might have died of exposure and been recycled by the efficient little scavengers of Purgatory, who wasted nothing, not even the bones. Or they might have been taken by the natives, nomadic tribes whose life in the high country was so harsh that they could always use an extra hand or two. Having found the abandoned sled and no sign of our men within a fifty-mile radius, the ground-base commander had simply shrugged and said, "Forget it."

  Our skipper gave us a choice. Go back up to the orbital station and our ship or remain confined to the ground base.

  The ground-base commander didn't much care what we did. As far as he was concerned, if we were stupid enough to go out into the desert and get lost, that was our own lookout. He had other
things to worry about, such as the fact that it looked as if he was never going to get his transfer. So he did a lot of drinking.

  I wound up doing a great deal of it with him, watching my crewmates, one by one, succumb to the endless heat and drudgery and take the shuttle back up to the ship rather than go bugfuck. I was determined to make the most of my groundside liberty as long as we were there, because I knew it would be a long time before I got my feet on solid ground again, but a choice between staying aboard ship or ground liberty on Purgatory was like a choice between a killer migraine or an infection of the urinary tract.

  I couldn't imagine why in God's name Coles would send us to a place like Purgatory. There was nothing there except for a few refineries and a toxic waste dump or two. However, as I learned from Coles, it seemed that Purgatory had experienced some growth in recent years and the high pay scales and harsh conditions had made it a natural recruiting ground for the Draconis Combine. After a few years spent on Purgatory, workers had more than enough cash to stake themselves to a crystal hunter's gamble in the Combine's Fire Islands' habitats and they were desperate for a thrill. All too many of them wound up getting more thrills than they had bargained for.

  The Combine operated frequent flights between Purgatory and the Fire Islands. The Draconis Combine was not above "selling contracts"-a polite euphemism for indentured servitude. There was always a need for laborers on Purgatory and the Combine liked to maintain a decent turnover in the habitats. It was all too easy to get suckered in by dreams of easy money and adventure in the Fire Islands. Once you got there, you might decide that a crystal hunter's life was far too violent for you and then you wanted out. That was when you fell prey to the human sharks who inhabited the Islands. If you were lucky, you got out on a turnaround. If you weren't, you found out what slavery was all about. If you were lucky, you were "turned around" and had your contract sold-most likely to one of the companies on Purgatory. It was a vicious cycle that trapped a lot of people. There was virtually no escape. Once the value of your contract and the freight had been worked off, you were then free to go anywhere you liked. However, first it would be necessary to save up for the fare, and meanwhile, you had to eat, so you signed another contract . . .