The Shapechanger Scenario

by Simon Hawke

  Demand for the crystals as rare ornamental and industrial gems led to the formation of the Draconis Combine, a multinational conglomerate with enough clout to circumvent the quarantine and establish orbital habitats above Draconis 9, housing a new species of professional who was part adventurer, part gambler, part mercenary, and part scum-the crystal hunter. They went down to the surface of Draconis to hunt their crystals and kill each other to protect their digs and annihilate anything living that came close to them, just in case it was an ambimorph. They went down equipped with state-of-the-art weapons and skimmer sleds and specially coded transceivers so they could be scanned when they came back, have their humanity verified, be placed into protective quarantine, and exhaustively examined just to make sure no ambimorphs got through. Well, it didn't work. The shapechangers broke the quarantine.

  Coles, in his infinite deviousness, had directed Psychodrome to announce the creation of a brand-new, continuing adventure game scenario. "Coming up soon-Alien Invasion! Tune in and share the fantasy! Stalk the ambimorphs who walk among us! Join the elite team mobilized to save the human race!" It was billed as the most realistic game scenario the company had ever run and only a small group of people knew that it was real. Trust Coles to find the perfect way to desensitize the public to an alien invasion. Make it into a media event.

  Breck and I were part of an inner group of psychos answering only to Coles. I don't recall ever being asked to join. At first, it scared me silly. And then I started to get excited about it. I tried to tell myself that it was only my gambler's instinct responding to a challenge, the lure of the big game, the charge in laying it all right on the line. I really wanted to believe that. But there was a little chip inside my brain, a miracle of modern psychocybernetic engineering, and ever since they'd put it in there, I never really knew for sure where my ideas came from anymore. But, of course, psychos aren't supposed to let things like that bother them.

  Breck lit up a bang stick and leaned back in his chair, inhaling the vaguely minty smoke and holding it in his lungs a moment before exhaling slowly. He claimed the devilish stuff actually relaxed him. I tried not to inhale too deeply. The last thing I needed was a contact adrenaline rush that would make me start climbing up the walls. Breck ordered a beer and I asked the waitress for an Irish whiskey. It was ruinously expensive, what with the import tariffs, but there simply was no adequate domestic substitute. Just as there was no adequate substitute for cocktail waitresses.

  The unemployment statistics being what they were, any service establishment using robotics was liable to get boycotted, if not trashed, so most places in the city had disposed of their robots and gone back to using human help. And they made an astonishing discovery-people actually preferred being waited on by people. There were fewer mistakes involved in taking orders, it made the atmosphere more congenial, and customers were far less likely to assault a human waiter than to demolish a robot server, so the overhead went down. Besides, no robot could beat a cocktail waitress with great legs.

  Solo's wasn't very crowded yet. The action didn't really pick up until after midnight, so we didn't draw a great deal of attention. Breck only signed about ten or fifteen autographs. I signed five, but then I wasn't as big a star as Breck was. Not that I minded very much. I watched the way they approached him, the expressions on their faces a mixture of awe, lust, and envy. It made me nervous.

  It's only natural to want people to like you, to accept you for who and what you are, but you want it on your terms. You want to be able to decide how much of yourself you're going to reveal at any given time and you want to control how close you're going to let other people get. Psychos didn't really get to do that. We had more than just a sensory link with the home audience, we had an emotional link, as well. It wasn't true telepathy, but someone plugging into the net and tuning in a psycho often got more than just sight, sound, smell, and feel. Some psychos "projected" better than others. There was a greater sense of empathy. Apparently, I let a great deal of my self seep through and people who tuned in on me not only got the sensation of sharing my experiences, they got a strong sense of what it felt like to be me.

  I found that out the hard way. I'd fallen in love with Stone Winters and kept it to myself, but when she plugged into a rerun of one of our adventures and tuned me in so that she could see how her game partner reacted, she experienced my feelings about her. And during the broadcast, so did everyone else who tuned me in. I started receiving fan mail from women who liked the way my feelings felt. It was embarrassing, to say the least, but there was nothing I could do about it. Blame it on my heritage, I was apparently one hell of an emoter.

  Breck was different. Rudy was larger than life. He gave them a sense of what it felt like to be a hero, a swashbuckler who quite literally knew no fear. He was immensely popular because he gave his audience a chance to experience what it felt like to have power in their world. It wasn't really theirs, it was Rudy's, but for a while, they got to share it with him. It made their desperate working lives a bit more bearable. Perhaps that was a good thing in some respects, a beneficial therapy, but on the other hand, coming home from a long grind at the office and "becoming" Rudy Breck was a heady experience.

  Someone who did not possess Breck's physical perfection, his superior hybreed strength and reflexes, his "leap into the jaws of death and devil take the hindmost" approach to life could tune him in and get a fix of what that felt like-only with safety valves incorporated into the delusion. No real danger, no real stress, no risk, no pain, no gamble. It could be incredibly addictive, turning people into passive receptors, dreamers whose fantasies became more real to them, more meaningful, than the lives they actually led. It was both sad and scary. And I was part of it, somewhere in the middle, not quite sure where I fit in.

  "You're looking very pensive," Breck said, glancing at me over his beer glass.

  I tossed back the whiskey. I had promised myself I wouldn't drink anymore, but an Irishman trying not to drink is like a politician trying to be sincere. It's against the laws of nature. "I was thinking about the life we lead," I said. "It doesn't really belong to us, does it? It belongs to Coles; it belongs to the company; it belongs to the audience, to everyone except us."

  Breck made a wry face. "You're not going to get drunk again, are you, O’Toole? You always become maudlin when you're drunk."

  I sighed. "I'm just tired, Rudy. I don't think I've had more than six hours to myself since I got back from Tokyo. If Coles isn't running us ragged, he's got me on downtime or he's staging hallucinacts in which I'm dying half the time and I can't tell the difference between what's real and what isn't anymore. I'm on the verge of overload. And in answer to your question, yes, I'm going to get drunk."

  'There's nothing more tedious than someone who's half Russian, half Irish, and all drunk," said Breck. "The last time you were in your cups, you got up on a table and made an incomprehensible speech about the virtues of ethical conduct. Then you sang a little song, received a great round of applause, and passed out on the floor. I had to carry you home and put you to bed. I wouldn't have minded so much if I hadn't been reprimanded by Coles for not keeping a tighter rein on you, as if that were my responsibility."

  "A man's got to unwind somehow," I said weakly.

  "Yes, unwind, not cease running altogether," Breck said. He pointed his index finger at me. "I'm watching you this time, O'Toole. The minute you start running your sentences together, I'm cutting off your booze."

  "He doesn't do it to you, does he?"

  Breck frowned. "Who doesn't do what to me? What are you talking about?"

  "Coles! Who else?"

  "Ah, the hallucinact training sessions, you mean." He shook his head. "No, he's been having scan crews working round the clock, debriefing me, trying to prime my subconscious so they can reconstruct that miserable mission to Draconis 9 all those years ago. It's an experience I dearly wish I could forget and he's been making me relive it. All he's doing to you is trying to bring you up to speed;
something you should probably thank him for, believe it or not. It will increase your 'survivability quotient,' as he puts it. Bureaucrats seem to have a language all their own, don't they? In any case, buck up. At least you've still managed to retain your sanity. That puts you ahead of the game."

  "You could die playing this game," I said. "And I sure don't feel like I'm ahead. I feel as if I'm losing touch with my own reality." I drained the glass and ordered another whiskey.

  "On the contrary," Breck said. "Your own reality is the one thing you're not losing touch with. Do you remember the advice I gave you when we first met? You were worried about how to tell if what you were about to experience would be real or a programmed hallucination and I told you not to concern yourself with that, to treat each and every experience as if it were absolutely real, because if you allowed yourself the luxury of doubt, your mind would cling to that doubt in moments of extreme stress and that could kill you." I nodded. "I remember. I didn't even know the half of it then."

  "What happened in your last hallucinact?" said Breck. 'The ambimorph got me," I said, staring down at the table. "I screwed up and I died."

  "But did you ever doubt that you were really about to die?"

  I frowned and shook my head. "No. It seemed so real..."

  "Precisely," Breck said. "Even after repeated training sessions in psychocybernetic computer simulations designed to subject your mind to continually increased levels of stress, you still maintained your grasp on your perceived reality. You stayed grounded, in other words. You did not retreat into denial. Even faced with what appeared to be imminent death, you continued to integrate your perceptions into your own reality, instead of allowing your sense of reality to disintegrate."

  I stared at him. "But don't crazy people do exactly the same thing? If what you perceive isn't real and you act on that, is that sanity?"

  Breck smiled, "It depends on how you respond to what you perceive," he said. "Schizophrenics, for example, tend to have completely unpredictable responses. If you react to your sensory input in a normal manner, it doesn't matter if your perceptions are based on something that isn't real. The brain is essentially a computer and a computer is only as good as its input. If Coles inputs a hallucinact in which you are about to die, what matters is how you react to that situation, not whether or not the situation is actually real. Because your perceptions are all you have to go on. You might say a hallucinact bypasses your 'reality circuit.' Since it's the only input you're receiving, it becomes the only reality you can respond to."

  "You mean as in 'garbage in, garbage out'?" 'That's a rather peculiar way of putting it, but in principle, it's essentially correct. Another way to look at it is to think of it as problem solving. All life is, after all, is a series of problems that we have to solve. A hallucinact is merely a model of the real thing. Both require the same problem-solving approach. However, if you start to doubt your own perceptions, questioning your input, then that becomes the equivalent of ignoring the problem. That doesn't mean it's going to go away."

  "I understand that part of it," I said, "but what has me worried is that Coles seems intent on confusing my sense of reality. He'll send us out on a real-life exercise, then he'll program a hallucinact that mimicks that reality and I never know which one it will be."

  "Would you believe that it doesn't really matter?" ; "Now that's crazy," I said.

  "Not from his point of view," Breck said, with a shrug. "The most effective way of training someone to cope with life or death situations is to place them in life or death situations. That's why the Asian martial arts purists always trained with real edged weapons and why the Special Service always trains with live ammo. Coles is getting you accustomed to facing death. Once you become accustomed to it, the threat itself doesn't affect your response time anymore. It's a rather novel way to use hallucinacts. The service should probably look into it. It's certainly more economical than going on maneuvers."

  "But if I keep encountering life-threatening situations in hallucinacts and waking up to find out that it was all a' psychocybernetic dream, then won't that have the effect of desensitizing me to the idea of dying?"

  "That seems to be the general idea," Breck said, nodding.

  "But fear is a function of self-preservation."

  Breck shrugged. "I wouldn't know. Personally, I'd rather depend on knowledge and ability for my survival."

  I couldn't argue with the man. He'd been through more hell than I would ever see and he'd survived it. But then, that was what he'd been designed to do. He was a high-performance model and I was strictly economy class. I wondered why Coles bothered. A man in his position could easily recruit more hybreeds like Breck or even ordinary humans, who were much more suited to the task than I was. Why me? It couldn't have been simply because I knew too much not to be on the inside. I had no illusions that my civil liberties would mean anything to a man like Coles. If he thought it would be more cost effective to wipe me like a slate, he wouldn't hesitate a moment.

  I worried away at it oh the way back to the hotel. I had stopped at the point where I had a pleasant buzz on instead of getting drunk, and that was fortunate, because when I got home, I found out I had company.

  As I walked in the door, Cass Daniels came out of my bedroom, wearing my black silk robe and carrying two glasses of champagne. She leaned against the doorframe and held one glass out to me. As I took it, the robe fell open and I saw that she was wearing a sheer black lycra bra and panties, dark stockings and spike heels.

  "Was this more or less what you had in mind?" she said, raising her eyebrows.

  It felt as if there were something stuck inside my throat. I drained the glass in one gulp. She sipped her drink and watched me over the rim of the glass.

  "Cass ..." I said.

  She approached me, holding the glass in her left hand and putting her right hand on my chest. She smiled as she started to undo my shift. "I thought we should get better acquainted," she said huskily. "All you really know about me is that I'm one of the scanning engineers at Game Control." She looked up at me and smiled. "But I know a great deal about you."

  Her lips came closer, her slowly moving hand dropped lower as it stroked gently and there was something nibbling away at the back of my mind, only I was having trouble paying attention. I felt her warm breath as her lips brushed my cheek and she pressed herself against me.

  "Wait," I said. Inexplicably, I suddenly felt paranoid and backed away from her, trying to catch my breath.

  "Why?" she said, letting the robe slip to the floor and reaching around to unfasten her bra.

  She looked exactly as I had imagined she would look without that loose-fitting jumpsuit. Exactly the way I had pictured her in my mind. Only I suddenly recalled her saying that she was actually somewhat heavier around the middle. I didn't see any love handles. And there was no tattoo. Perhaps she had been joking, but I suddenly wondered what would happen if I called Game Control. Would I find out that she was still on duty?

  She suddenly threw the glass aside and opened her mouth in a snarl. Gleaming hydraulic fangs slid out of her incisors. Her skin became iridescent and developed scales. She was turning into a nightmare plucked right out of my mind. Without thinking, I clawed for my gun and fired. The bullets passed through empty air where she had been an instant earlier and exploded against the wall.

  And then I felt something climbing up my leg.

  The thick serpent's body with the travesty of a human female head coiled around me and I wanted to scream, but instead I jammed my gun right into its gaping maw and squeezed the trigger. The back of the creature's head exploded, and I kept firing until the magazine was empty.

  I fell to the floor, trapped by the serpent coils as the creature stiffened in death. I hammered against its body with my empty gun, trying to free myself. After struggling for a few minutes, I managed to extricate myself from the coils and I stood over the thing, covered with its blood and breathing heavily.

  "All right, Coles, damn you," I s
aid through clenched teeth, "this time I didn't die!"

  Only Coles did not respond. And the scene did not dissolve around me and I didn't come out of it lying on a laboratory couch at Game Control. I was still in my hotel room and there was an alien creature lying dead on my carpet and I had its blood all over me.

  I was still shaking when Breck broke down the door.

  TWO

  The entire floor of my hotel had been secured so fast, my neighbors must all have been in shock. So far as they would ever know, someone had made an attempt on my life and I'd shot him in self-defense. They'd see the body bag being removed, but they'd never suspect what sort of thing was actually inside it. I wondered how they'd have reacted if they had known.

  "I wish you hadn't killed it," Coles said, his voice manifesting itself in my mind.

  "Well, now what the hell was I supposed to do?" I said out loud, still feeling badly rattled. The men sealing the body bag glanced at me. They hadn't heard Coles, of course, and they looked puzzled for a moment, then they figured out what was going on and wordlessly went back to their task.

  "I didn't mean that as a criticism," said Coles. "I was merely expressing regret that we missed an opportunity to capture one of them alive. It obviously intended to kill you and take your place. If it had succeeded and we weren't monitoring you, your death would not have registered before the creature could assimilate your biochip and it might have penetrated our security. We were very lucky. It was a close call."

  "Yes, I'm so relieved that 'we' came out of it all right," I said.

  "I want you both to report in immediately," Coles said. "I don't want either of you talking to the news media, so I'm having you picked up in the lobby. Not a word to anyone. Understood?"

  "Understood."

  I watched the men carry the sealed body bag out into the hall. "Doesn't seem to bother them," I said. "You'd think they bagged human-headed serpents every day."