The Barsoom Project

BRRRRRNG!

“I’d hoped,” he said, “they’d keep that thing off until eight tomorrow.”

Millicent’s smile broadened. “No rest for the wicked.”

“I’ve been on duty for twenty hours straight. Millicent, I’m plagued with these things called ‘griffins,’ nasty little nocturnal animals that only come out at night. They usually”- BRRRNNGG! — ”manage to wake up just about the time that my mating cycle is running riot. I remember sex. Why, back in naught-six-” BRRRRNG!

“Alex, the beeper.”

“Aye aye. Griffin. Telephone.” The comets vanished, replaced by the smooth round face of Dwight Welles. Twenty-four-year-old Dwight Welles was senior computer tech for all of Dream Park, a man whose four-poster at Cowles Modular saw him far less than his cot at Research and Development.

“What’s up, Dwight?”

“Griff, we got a problem here.”

More Arab madness? “Tell me.”

“Alex, somebody’s messed with my program for the Fimbulwinter Game. I know I got all of the bugs out of it-”

“Hold it hold it hold it. Tell me what happened first.”

“Somebody got killed out of the Game.”

Drown me! “What? How-” Suddenly he felt very foolish. “Sorry. Killed out. Right. My heart will return to normal presently.” He thought for a minute. “I thought none of the Gamers got killed out of Fat Rippers.”

“Not for the first two days. Definite glitch.”

“A glitch. Hmmm. It wasn’t Charlene Dula, was it? Or Marty?”

Then it wasn’t really a Security matter. “So? Don’t you leave room for random-”

“Random events? Sure we leave room for random events, but you don’t understand. It wasn’t ‘one of those freak things.’ It wasn’t an accident. A monster came up out of sequence. We call it a ‘burrowing mammoth.’ According to legend, they die on contact with air. This one lived long enough to target and kill a Gamer. It shouldn’t have been possible. The thing hunted her. I want to know who’s been tampering with my friggin’ program.”

The other line was beeping now, and Millicent was suddenly all business. “Alex, should I…?”

“No, no, wait…” Dwight Welles’s voice muted as the second line flashed to life. The screen divided into two, and on the other side was Dr. Vail. He seemed tight, tired, agitated.

“Mr. Griffin, something unusual has happened here.”

“I’m on it. Somebody has gotten killed out of the Game.”

“Hah! If that was all. The problem is that the Gamer who was killed out is coming apart!”

“I’d be a little pissed myself.”

Vail shook his head. “Watch.”

The screen split again. The new entry was a chunky redheaded woman. Her gaze was all daggers as she studied first Vail, and then a slender Japanese nurse. “I don’t know why or how you did this, but I know this is a trick,” she said. Griffin recoiled from the raw hatred in her voice. “Tell Ahk-lut he’ll get nothing from me, do you understand? Nothing! You have warmth here, and food. People are starving by the millions, and it’s your doing.”

Ahk-lut?

“Miss Rivers.” Vail’s recorded tones were carefully soothing. “The Fimbulwinter Game is just that, a Game. There was an accident, and you were killed out. Now, we are prepared to refund-”

Her face twisted with anger, and for a moment, Griffin heard martial music in the air. He looked for insanity, but saw only righteous wrath. In that moment she was beautiful, a Valkyrie, a leopard protecting her young. “You call the death of civilization a ‘Game’? You call the slaughter of millions an ‘accident’? You wait. My people will come for me. They’ll come!” She paused, and her next words were delivered with lethal calm. “Unless I get you first.”

The recorded image froze, and then the real-time Vail returned.

Alex was on his feet. “I’ll be right down there.” He clicked that part of the screen off. “Dwight. Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m coming right in. No, wait. First, pipe the records in on the office com line. I want to see what happened to this Rivers. Then I’ll come.”

He looked at Millicent. “Damn, I’m so sorry about dinner-”

“I’ve eaten it, Gruff.”

“Oh. Yeah. You want to go home, or come with?”

“Can I come with? Sounds like old times.”

“Glad to have you. Got a bad feeling about this.”

He beeped for a shuttle, and one was waiting at the rail by the time his side door hissed shut. The hatch lifted, and he and Millicent scooted in. The pressure of her thigh against his was more comforting than stimulating. His mind was already on the job ahead.

Cowles Modular Community, dwindling behind the shuttle, looked to Alex like a spreading clump of young mushrooms. Irregular, eccentric, but very organic. The people who worked for Dream Park had a lot of respect for the environment, for the way things fit together, for elegance. Something about this action, the way Michelle Rivers had been yanked unceremoniously from the Game, was jarringly inelegant.

By the time that the Modular Community had faded into the distance, Millicent had collected her thoughts.

“Ah… if it’s not a glitch, and Welles seems certain that it’s not a glitch, then… what is it?”

“A glitch. People who say that they have all the bugs usually haven’t turned over enough rocks. What do you think?”

“I think you sound like a man trying to convince himself.”

The shuttle sank into the labyrinth beneath the largest entertainment complex in the world. And kept sinking, three stories deep. There, hidden beneath the surface, were the concrete, steel, and plastic guts of the Park. No one mind knew all of the thousands of turnings, the hundreds of miles of tunnels. Here were the transportation systems, sewage systems, food networks, walkways, slideways; the routes for cars, trucks, transports, the monorails; the conduits that kept the water and electricity flowing, the people moving. Here were millions of feet of superconducting wire, steel pipe, PVC tubing, and fiber optic cable. As they slid along in the shuttle, passing through the center of the labyrinth, endless connecting corridors stretching off in all directions like Krell tunnels, Dream Park felt more myth than reality. Who was to say that there weren’t trolls in those tunnels, demons in those depths? Perhaps the real illusion of Dream Park was the pretense of technology.

The shuttle eased to a stop. They hopped out and took three steps to the elevator. The sealed tube rose swiftly to the seventh floor of the security building.

His office was a storm-struck anthill. Cary McGivvon met him at the door with a stack of printouts, their initial security file on Michelle Rivers. The flat photo showed intensely red hair around a pale, heavily freckled face, very plump, with high cheekbones under the padding. The girl was trying to look angry, or competent, or dangerous. She was none of those, really. To Griffin’s eye she seemed depressingly young and plain.

“Wasn’t she with Ambassador Arbenz’s niece? Christ-no wonder we’ve got so little on her.”

Cary sniffed. “Charlene Dula sneaked her buddy in on a diplomatic pass. We didn’t match her ‘Michelle Rivers’ name with anything in our files, computer just assumed she was a first-timer.”

“Great,” Alex said. “But everyone in the Game went through Psych. Why the hell didn’t they catch this looney tune?” She was short. One look would tell anyone: this was no old friend from the low-gravity places. This was someone the Ambassador’s niece had met on Earth, maybe a terrorist’s plant, and they’d want to examine her brain.

“No answers yet.” Cary seemed almost defensive. “It just happened, Griff.”

“Sorry, Cary. Honest. She got through me somehow too. That damned diplomatic override.” He slammed his hand down on the desk hard enough to scatter papers. “Why the hell didn’t we catch her?”

“She has a real Social Security number. She was clean. She’d worked as a clerical assistant in Montana, spent some time in a hospital in Utah, applied for credit with NipponAmericard.” She cleared her throat uncomfortably. “It’s starting to look like some of her previous history might have been… falsified.” Cary brightened. “We matched her fingerprints, though.”

“Fingerprints?” Millicent asked. You always try fingerprints, just because it’s easy, but it’s not supposed to work. “Does she have a police record?”

“No, she has no record at all, but she’s been here before. We had trouble with her under the name ‘Michelle Sturgeon.”

Alex’s ears perked up. “What kind of trouble?”

“Damned if I know. It’s in a sealed file. Haven’t been able to find the access code.”

“Who sealed it?”

“Harmony.”

“Did you get in touch with him?”

“He hasn’t answered his beep, Griff.”

“Play it for me again. The death scene.”

Cary punched her console and the wall disappeared. Griffin saw the mammoth rise from the earth, the attack, heard the screaming, felt his own adrenaline pump. He saw the flicker as the monster stalked and killed the redhead.

“Hate to meet that glitch in the dark,” Dr. Vail said, just behind him.

Vail was sipping at a cup of coffee. The aroma was heavenly. Alex took odd satisfaction that Vail didn’t look quite so damned hearty at eleven at night. “Glad you made it, Doe. Yeah, I don’t believe it either.”

“It’s worse,” Cary said glumly. “We have an Actor stranded in the game. What’s going on in there?”

“Stranded… right. The monster did stalk her, it’s obvious. Was it supposed to stalk somebody else? Because-”

“Yes, Yarnall, the National Guardsman, later tonight. Now he’s in there with no script. Mr. Griffin, he’s a recovering alcoholic. He’s in there as an Actor, but it was supposed to be therapy too. This Game, we’re watching the Actors as well as the Gamers.”

Vail said, “Maybe we can work on a player’s head better if he thinks he knows the script. It’s worth a try, and we’re trying it this run.”

“What are the other Gamers doing? I mean, right now.”

“Eating,” Vail said. “In an ordinary Game this would be their down time, their rest and meal time. Because this is a Fat Ripper, we’re using this to program. The Game is still live, it’s just a different phase.”

“Show me.”

The Gamers were all sitting around eating, and it was a queer spectacle indeed, reminiscent of nothing if not the banquet sequence at the end of Through the Looking-Glass.

The food on their plates was… alive. It was smiling at them, occasionally talking back to them. Some Gamers seemed to have adjusted; others had pushed their plates aside, appetite vanished.

The computer was coding and recognizing the players so that their names and ID numbers appeared below their images.

Yarnall was quiet. He seemed to be uneasy, restless, and Griffin could understand why. He should have been home by now. On the other hand, salary-wise he was probably on Golden Time.

Marty and Charlene Dula were sharing a flat-topped rock for a table. They seemed companionable enough, but didn’t have much to say to each other.

A hefty guy named Max Sands looked uncomfortable too. He kept casting eyes at one of the Dream Park temporary Actors: Gwen Ryder Norliss, an Actress in the Game. She was garbed as an Eskimo, and she was sitting next to a warrior with the same last name… a husband. Sands would be suffering from thwarted lust. Griffin could sympathize.

He keyed in the audio.

Orson Sands: “The thing is, we’re carrying gear from Falling Angel. The frames in some of our backpacks, the medicines, this”-he hefted a spool of thin line-”that Eviane was carrying: it’s all magical. It’s all been run around the world enough times to make the Cabal sick with envy.”

Gwen Ryder: “That’s wonderful, but don’t underestimate the Cabal.”

Kevin Titus was the skinniest one out there. Alex winced at the sharpness of cheekbones under tightly stretched skin. Bone-thin fingers leafed through a somewhat dog-eared folder: “Did you see this? My dossier has changed. It read different this morning.”

Someone said, “You’re crazy.” But there was a brief flurry of files, and yelps of amusement as the Gamers discovered that the print in every file had miraculously changed.

Kevin brayed victoriously. “Switched! Mine talks about Pewitu, taboos. I can’t kill a seal until it’s on the land.” He pulled a hand-held computer from an inner pocket, started one-finger typing on it. “Sounds easy enough,” he said distractedly. “What about you, Trianna?”

There was a lot of energy in that glance. Trianna didn’t seem to notice. “My friendly-ghost assistant is named Kaspar. Clerk from Oregon, white, died in Nome in 1910. Shot. I mustn’t eat eggs, but I can eat the birds after they hatch. Yucko! If we follow these taboos, do you think we can win?”

She was looking at Johnny Welsh, but Kevin answered. “Why not? We kicked their butts first time we saw ‘em. We’ll do it again.” He tucked his computer away.

Max: “But did Eviane break a taboo or something? I don’t understand why it went after her like that.”

As he talked, Max cut into what looked like a swordfish steak, and it squealed on his plate. A face formed in the grain of the steak, and said, “Will you please pay attention to me? Try not to talk so much while you’re eating? Do you have any idea how irritating it is to be eaten by somebody who doesn’t pay any attention to you?”

Johnny Welsh cocked an eyebrow at Max’s plate. “I’ve had dates like you.”

Trianna hit him in the side of the head with a balled napkin.

Max glared at his swordfish. “Now listen. We had a fight. You lost.”

“That’s no excuse for rudeness. I died to keep you alive, and one day you will die to feed my ancestors. Think about it, mister.”

Alice, pudding! Pudding, Alice! Remove the Pudding!

The campfire conversation began to chill.

Vail chuckled maliciously. “A perfect example. It is unconscious and emotional ingestion of food, drugs, alcohol, whatever-for other than conscious motivations, that gets people most deeply in trouble. The more respectful attention you pay to your body and the things you put in it, the less likely you are to abuse it.”

“That’s really interesting, but not what I need.” Alex wished Vail would stop waving his coffee around. The smell was driving him nuts. Then again, Dream Park’s mad psychiatrist might be ghoulish enough to do it deliberately, studying Griffin’s conditioned responses.

Alex gritted his teeth and punched in Marty’s “silent” code, knowing that a steady vibratory trill would alert the security man.

Hippogryph waited a few seconds and then got up and moved away from the others. He walked toward where a line of scrubby bushes shaped a crescent moon; but he turned aside before he reached it. The curve of the hill hid him when he took out his communications kit.

“Marty. What happened out there with this Eviane woman?”

“She was stomped by a ghastly. Griff, we just lost somebody. It’s no big thing.”

“Marty, you don’t get it. No one is supposed to be killed out of a Fat Ripper!”

Beat. “What?”

“This isn’t a Game for points. You read the material. This is a Game to teach people lessons. Why should she get killed out? She didn’t make a mistake. Later on you’ll have opportunities to get killed out if you make a mistake, but not now. What point would there be?”

“I… all right, I see the logic. I suppose this is a secret?”

“You bet. We don’t want everybody knowing we have a problem.”

Marty must have heard the impatience in his voice. “I’m slow catching up, boss. They rap me half to death.”

In truth, Marty looked exhausted. It would not do to forget that others besides Alex Griffin might be having problems. “How are you, Marty? Are you going to get through this?”

“We warriors will carry out our duty, 0 Griffin. Besides, the worst part must be over. Have you been watching, Griff?”

He hadn’t, but Marty would surely expect him to. “A little.”

“That scene in the sauna, the smokehouse? Most of us are overweight, Griff, and we all look like it with our clothes off, and I looked just like them. I felt so… fat.”

“Any sign of trouble? Aside from terminal embarrassment, I mean..?“

“No. Nobody’s trying to off Ambassador Arbenz’s niece, far as I can tell. Gruff, it’s hard to tell what’s funny in this environment. I should have been told that we can’t be killed out.”

“I wasn’t told till this morning. I might have told you, and then you’d have been too relaxed. You’ll be too relaxed, unless you watch yourself.”

“So how did it happen to Eviane?”

“The one thing that I do know is that Eviane-her real name is Michelle Sturgeon-was in Dream Park before, and her file has been sealed.”

“Well, who sealed it?”

“Harmony. I’m going to have to take it up with him. I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Maybe Harmony kicked her out of the Game.”

“I don’t think so. He wouldn’t have interfered without talking to me. Even so it’s awfully queer… and clumsy.”

“Clumsy. So, what are you going to do with her?”

Griffin looked at the picture of Michelle Sturgeon, smiling and happy in the file, contrasted it with the pudgier, angrier woman who had challenged Vail and his nurse: “ Unless I get you first… ”

“I’d… better talk to Harmony,” he said finally. “I guess it’s time I did just exactly that.”