by Larry Niven
There was no way across? Her team might well fight and die here…
"Captain Cipher!"
An odd, fat, pale little man came waddle-jogging to join her. Corby Cauldwell was as nimble as a somnambulant geriatric. He had the personal hygiene habits of a water buffalo. A bumper crop of potatoes could be grown on his scalp. But his alter ego, Captain Cipher, was not only a certifiable genius, but also one of the highest-ranking Magicians in the International Fantasy Gaming Society.
She needed him now. "There's a way across," she said urgently. "Find it for me."
Light erupted from Cipher. Its radiance revealed a loop of rope sitting on a tree branch beside the abyss.
Acacia reached for it, then hesitated. What was the trick? Was it as easy as that? She sensed nothing menacing…
"Reveal danger," the Captain whispered.
At first, nothing. Then…
"Look," Acacia whispered. On the far side of the falls danced a tongue of red fire.
"This is your baby," Cipher said happily.
Acacia retrieved the coil of rope and balanced it in her hand. There was something wrong with it-a metal bulb buried in the trip? But a quick scan by Cipher showed nothing. That meant that it was Dream Park business, not hers.
She made a long cast over the water
The rope stood straight out
And hung there, like an Indian rope trick performed on the horizontal. And then the rope elasticised, began to stretch out and out… until it connected on the other side.
Acacia's tummy did a sour little dance, recognising the next part. She reached out a sandal-shod foot and tested the cord.
It would bear her weight.
"Vision," she said brusquely. "I want magnified vision."
There on the other side of the abyss was the rope bridge. The rope didn't quite reach. Someone would have to cross and attach a lariat to the magical bridge, and then haul it back across.
Or could her team cross on the rope? Hand over hand? Tightrope walking? "Captain Cipher? Do you think that you could — ?"
"Captain Cipher loves your sense of humor," he said.
"Just checking." She shucked her pack. "All right. Let's see what we've got."
Acacia drew her sword, balancing it easily in one hand. Her Physical rating was high enough she could actually perform a fifteen-foot tightrope walk without Dream Park assistance. But in winds, and over a gorge, and in a Game-that made it a little scary.
She stepped out on the line…
Tammi stretched out a long, muscular arm and shushed her companions. There was a bridge ahead of her, a catwalk rising on crisscrossing wooden supports that rose up from a deep gorge. The bridge led nowhere, terminating against a sheer crystal cliff. A perfect location for an ambush, Garcia-style.
She looked at her wrist sensor and noted Acacia Garcia's movement pattems. Acacia was approaching the center of the Maze, but taking the long way around. Tammi's esteemed opponent was famous for direct assaults. The apparent indirection had to be a trick. To assume anything else would be suicide.
She called to the thin young man behind her. "Mouser, what do you think?"
He touched his goggles absently. "I can see a door," he said, his voice adolescently nasal. "I think I can riddle the lock, or break it."
Mouser tested the bridge and then walked out into the center. It swung gently from side to side. Below it glistened a field of fire blossoms. They were much like morning glories and grew on long, glassy stems. Their petals unwound slightly, hissing.
"Kiss my pistil," Mouser hissed back.
"Mouser!" Tammi warned.
"Sorry, Mom," he said sheepishly, only mildly chagrined. His Gaming buddies at Medford Academy would howl when they heard that line. He was sorry that he'd gotten the gender wrong, not that he'd said it. "Kiss my stamen" had like zero impact.
The bridge was narrow enough that he had to be cautious with every footfall. Above him, through the ceiling, he saw the sun, or something that could have been the sun, rising. As it rose, the petals of the flowers opened. Tiny flaming mouths shimmered within them.
As he watched, the mouths spit threads of fire. Flames began to crawl up the bridge's support struts.
Mouser smirked, humming with cavalier disregard for his own safety. He had at least fifty seconds. He knew this world; he understood its rules.
He removed a lockpick from his leather belt pouch and faced the blank wall.
His Thief's vision revealed a tiny flutter in the crystal. A keyhole. He slipped his key into the slot and began to manipulate it.
Two eyes, a nose, and finally a mouth appeared in the crystal before him. They watched him speculatively. "Hello there, young man. Are you ready for a test of skill?"
"Bring it on."
The pick slipped in, and his field of vision expanded. He could see the workings of the lock. Within his gloves, his fingers tingled. It was a pleasurable sensation, not yet a warning buzz; it felt rather like snowshoed ants scampering in rhythmic patterns over his knuckles. The flames were closer now. His vision was edged in flame even when he focused his attention down to a narrow line. Now he felt as though he actually were hot in fact, he was burning up. The air around him was crackling, and the flames were closer…
He maintained focus on the job at hand, and suddenly the flames disappeared. There was a crack in the crystal wall, one just tall enough for Mouser.
The metal framework of the catwalk remained, and he beckoned to the others. Come on over!
His teammates swarmed across.
Tammi checked her scanner and chuckled grimly. That task had netted seven hundred points, easy. Her adversaries were just the other side of this tunnel. She would take the lead, and with just the smallest bit of luck the adventure would be won in time for lunch. She shucked her cloak and wiggled through the crack.
2
ScanNet
Alex adjusted his reimaging field, zooming in on one section of the fractured, inverted L-shape that was MIMIC.
This was no holographic animation or DreamTirne synthesis. Most of the rotating image was piped in from thousands of scanners, coordinated by ScanNet's Cray 181 computer.
Sharon was perched on the edge of her seat, watching every move intently.
Alex chuckled contentedly as the image rotated like a pie in a microwave oven. "Want to see?"
"How deep can you scan?"
The building wheeled until they were behind it, gazing west across the rooftop recreation facilities. He zoomed out far enough for the roof to look like a roof, a three-story cap of glass and concrete built onto the shelf of rock called Clark's Ridge. Alex's fingers were a soft blur. "I'm not totally sure," he murmured. "Shall we see?"
The visual field flashed from hyperrealistic to an X-ray display. Rock and steel became transparencies, MIMIC's awesome bulk a glass model barely three feet tall.
MIMIC blinked red on the third floor of the southeast quadrant and then expanded to fill their field of vision. They passed through the walls, then phased into a world of computer reconstruction. ScanNet was only forty percent operational at the moment: unsecured zones were represented by pulsing orange light. When fully implemented, the system would turn the concrete, steel, and plastic of MIMIC into a kind of ant farm, with every ant individually tagged.
Thousands of tiny human figures labored and strove within that maze of walls and corridors. With the merest touch, Alex dove in, guided them smoothly through the maze, and brought them to level three.
Eerily, they were looking into the circular security room. Its white-domed ceiling arced away, desks and workstations collected at the central axis. In the center of the room sat Alex and Sharon.
"Hall of mirrors, isn't it?"
Sharon reached out and pushed her forefinger into her own miniature back. "Can we rotate that?"
"Easy." His voice dropped and steadied. "Rotate one-eighty." As if mounted on a carousel, the entire image flipped. Sharon was facing herself.
She stuck out her t
ongue, then waved her right hand. The mirror image waved its right hand, too.
"Want that reversed?"
"Nah." She examined her flawless complexion, leaned close, and wiped a strand of blond hair away from her forehead. "Scan me, baby," she said huskily. "Scan me good. "
A stream of physiological data materialised in the air beside her image.
Height: 69 inches
Weight: 140 pounds
Body fat: 14%
Pulse: 54
Alex brushed her throat with his lips, and the pulse corrected to 67.
Temperature: 98.8
"I've always been a tick warm," she said.
"I'd noticed."
"Do you mind?"
"Please, Miz Fox, don't throw me in that briar patch…" He shut down the scan. "We'll be able to do a full medical on anyone in MIMIC, and they'd never know it. Impressed?"
"Be more impressed if you promised to stay off duty for the next four days. You've got the leave." She nibbled on his ear, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Things got interesting last night. At least I thought so."
"Want to see a playback?"
"Alex!"
"Joke! ScanNet doesn't peep into executive bedrooms."
She pushed herself away from him a little. "It wasn't a joke to me, Alex. Maybe it was a mistake to get involved on the job." Her mouth curved in a calculated pout. "I'm not sure you're a free man."
"So I'm married to the job-"
"These are the Fabulous Fifties." Her eyes were challenging. "Cheat a little."
"Just wait till the Voodoo Game is over, and we get Barsoom on line. " He snaked his arms around her and pulled her in close. She smelled of strawberries and lime and healthy female animal. He kissed her throat. "I promise I'll make it up to you."
"Uh-huh. When Barsoom is on line, you'll be back in la-la land, and I'll be up to my ears." She intertwined fingers with him and leaned over, soft and warm and supple as they kissed. Then she pushed herself away, suddenly one hundred percent professional. "I've seen your dossier, Alex. I know people who knew you in Intelligence. You're wasting yourself at Dream Park. The terraforming of Mars will bring out the very best and worst of humanity. Worst is your domain, yes?"
His eyes had become distant.
She stopped. "I said something wrong."
He managed a dry, unconvincing laugh.
Sharon took the hint. "Let's leave that, okay?"
"Might be best."
"Truce. All right I know the internal ScanNet system is coordinated with the externals: synchsec satellite network, groundlevel sensors, that stuff. You have to teach me the rest."
Suddenly, levels seven through twelve flashed with orange neon urgency.
"Another damn blackout," he muttered. "Bugs in that software. "
"It should be finished by now."
Alex was relaxing a little-he understood the irritation in her voice. "I've heard it was a miracle ScanNet got written at all. The problem isn't gathering the information, the problem is organizing it. ScanNet's an artificial brain. Well, if the scanners are eyes and ears, and the central processor is the frontal lobes, then according to Norman Vail, ScanNet's substations are the reticular activating mechanism."
"Duh…"
Alex laughed. "They filter the information. Each substation decides what is important and what isn't, before it sends it upline. Only about a thousandth of that reaches the main banks, and that's still probably a gigabyte a minute."
"How much of ScanNet was developed in-house?"
"Nobody said. 'Need to know' and so forth." His eyes narrowed speculatively at her. "Come to think of it, I should be asking you, lady."
A sphinx.
"Yeah. That's what I thought. " He remembered the complete briefing. ScanNet was a massive neural-modeling project, an outgrowth of speech-recognition and artificial-vision research in the last century. It was able to sample, digitize, and record any sound, light, or vibration in MIMIC. Thousands of miles of copper wire cocooned the corridors, acting as antenna, impedance sensor, and Faraday cage, alternating between modes several thousand times a second. All transmissions would be either authorised and filed, or monitored. ScanNet could block unauthorised transmissions in a few milliseconds.
Sharon interrupted his reverie. "Alex," she asked, "isn't it dangerous letting Gamers in with the system incomplete?"
"There's computer equipment and tools in shops… maybe some industrial diamonds. But those areas are sealed off, and ScanNet's external shield is solid nothing comes in or out unless we know. We can scan Gamers before they leave. Should be pretty safe."
Sharon brooded. "There are a hundred and sixteen countries participating in the Barsoom Project. Most are bringing their best resources into the fold: technology, the nimble minds, raw materials, money. If we don't keep them safe, the Barsoom Project fails."
Virtually indistinguishable black and grey dots, a stream of lilliputian workers labored in MIMIC's central well.
MIMIC rose sixteen stories tall against the cliff, and another three stories above the edge. Light-transport landing systems were up on Clark's Ridge at level sixteen. Heavy cargo chopper pads were at MIMIC's base. Four miles away, landing strips for Earth-to-orbit cargo and passenger transports were under construction. Roads and railroad tracks splayed out from the ''ground" floor.
Pull out the convertible floor panels, close down the Mall levels, and MIMIC's industrial capacity tripled with a considerable loss of population density. The internal structure was being reworked. Foamed steel struts and monofilament from Falling Angels' lunar-orbit research-and-manufacture facility allowed a level of flexibility beyond anything the original planners could have dreamed. Immense inner spaces were open for shops. Twelve stories of eastern wall could roll to the side, to allow repair or modification of gargantuan machinery.
Point of view shifted again and again: now they were completely outside the building, floating at about the eleventh floor, facing the raised bronze letters spelling out M.I.M.I.C.
Now they were above it, a view provided by geosynch satellite, or survey plane, or perhaps computer animation. DreamTime technology was simply too good to show a difference.
"The power of a dream," Alex said contentedly. He leaned back in his seat. "You know, there must be a thousand stories about Earth uniting to face a threat from space. Who ever thought we could do the same thing peacefully?"
"Travis Cowles and all the little Cowlettes?"
"Cowlettes? Are those like raingear for little duckies?"
Sharon scooted in close to the console. "May I?"
Alex watched her fingers sink down into the holographic matrix, felt sympathetic constrictions in his throat as she slid into the controlled mumble an experienced computer operator used in the information maze. "Sharon Crayne," she said. ScanNet accessed her file, analyzed her personal collection of fricatives and glottal stops, and was ready to go.
As she began moving effortlessly around inside the security guts of MIMIC, Alex felt an uneasy mixture of pride and alarm.
The project was so big.
And Dream Park had been essential to its creation. Although the actual physical park lay seventy miles southwest, its influence infused MIMIC's every level.
Sharon was deep into her routine, exploring the labyrinth that was MIMIC. Within a few weeks, he would hand over responsibility of the structure to Sharon, and whomever the board of directors appointed security chief for the Barsoom Project.
And when he no longer carried the weight of both MIMIC and Dream Park, perhaps he could be more human with her. Between now and then they would discover everything they needed to know about each odher, and just maybe…
If the "real world" would just leave him the hell alone…
But for now they were firmly enmeshed in different worlds. Sharon didn't even seem to notice as he slipped out the door and into the outer corridors.
Tammi exhaled as fully as she could and squeezed through the gap in the crystal caverns. She felt th
e walls pulse. Was that music? No
… wait… the walls began to shift, molding themselves to her body.
The walls clamped on her until there was just barely room to breathe. She found enough space to turn her head and look back at her teammates. Interestingly, The walls seemed to flex to make each of them uniformly uncomfortable. From what she could see, Appelion was almost exactly as cramped as lithe Mouser.
There was no room to pull a dagger, let alone a sword. It would have been smarter to let Twan go first. In the Crystal Maze, magic was often stronger than steel.
Tammi stopped in her tracks, chilled by a crackling, creaking sound. She squelched a quick flare of panic. Where had that come from? It sounded like ice breaking…
Tammi had played Crystal Maze seven times, but had never been through this corridor. It might be new. Common sense told her that things were about to get deadly.
The crystal in front of her cracked open. Something disturbing wormed its way out.
At first it seemed like a sea anemone a tiny sprout with tentacles, protuberances that wavered like fronds in a sea bed.
There were four little fronds, and then… it budded an opposing thumb. A tiny hand as large as a newborn child's. It reached for her…
And where it touched, its tiny fingers grew crystal claws. It raked, leaving scarlet creases along her skin. Evil, impish laughter echoed through the Maze.
Tammi strained and reached back along the corridor, breathing gone suddenly ragged. "Appelion!" she panted, and he reached out his hand to her. "Get Twan!"
Appelion reached back and linked hands with Twan, and Twan began to mutter a spell.
As she began, the wall erupted with tiny infants. They laughed insanely. They had pale dead eyes, and red, crinkled skin. And crystal knives for fingers.
Acacia was halfway across the bridge. Wind and mist boiled out of the abyss, and she tottered (Someplace in Dream Park, a computer rolled its electronic dice, and she was saved…)
— She extended her arms to the side, windmilling for balance. She crouched into a ball, steadied herself, and waited.