California Voodoo Game.
Something buzzed at the edge of his attention.
Tony ignored it-not a computer sound, not an alert, nor yet the sound of data disappearing in randomized bubbles as unimportant. A notion had come to him. Fingers and thumbs tapped as inspiration took hold. Pictures jumped around him on the white half-dome of MIMIC Security: windows into all the corners of the huge building, windows projected onto windows.
Conversation behind him, a woman speaking. '…Voodoo Game is ready?'
A man's. Deep and musical. 'Yeah. McWhirter wanted to tear the building apart. Travis said no.'
'So the Boss finally did something right. Aside from being born into the right family.'
Tony recognised voices: Alex Griffin, and that woman from Cowles Security in Tacoma. He couldn't resist a comment. 'Buildings are hardware. Software is as cheap as dreams.'
'Tony?'
'We did our work in DreamTime. You'll think we spent a billion dollars. I'm finished here in a minute, Griff.'
Out of the corner of his eye he watched Griffin, Dream Park's security chief, a tall man who carried his seventy-five inches and two hundred pounds with animal assurance. His hair was shaded a burnt strawberry, dark enough to make
Tony look almost blond. When Griffin answered 'Fine,' his voice exuded enough casual confidence to make Tony wince.
The woman at Alex's side was a stunning brunette. Sharon something
… Court? Griffin's left hand lightly touched her arm, while the other gestured with the relaxed authority of a plenipotentiary. 'Sharon, there's working room for sixty people here. MIMIC-'
'You like that name?'
'Seems appropriate.'
'I like 'Meacham's Folly,' ' she said. 'That's what the locals call it.'
'All right, Folly. ScanNet breaks it into overlapping quadrants, with variable scan depth. The entire building gets a standard four-stage coverage, but some countries have contracted for more. Half a billion dollars' worth of security.
Quite a system.'
'Are you jealous?' she asked innocently.
'Cowles asked me to join up. I get all the stretch in the Park.' Irritation had touched Griffin's voice, very lightly
Tony's fingers kept moving in the hologram, sensors picking up finger movement and wrist position, inputting far faster than any mechanical keyboard. The sensors 'learned' eccentric movements and habitual errors, the individual shorthand of the operator, and together with voice cues created an ideal programming environment. Minimum size of portable units was no longer limited by the physical dimensions of a keyboard. He was trying to keep his mind on programming. The last thing he wanted to think about was Alex Griffin. But it wasn't working.
Persecutor… betrayer… woman-thief… savior.
Eight years before, a disguised Griffin had entered one of Dream Park's infamous live-action role-playing games to solve a case of industrial espionage. In the commission of that crime, a guard named Albert Rice had died. Very accidental it had been, but as even Tony's own lawyer had observed, dead is dead.
Griffin had taken six years of Tony's life.
He had also taken Tony's lady, Acacia Garcia. Eventually, she had taken him or somebody had dumped somebody. Tony had never been sure which.
Alex pointed in the video windows, picking out familiar faces in the rooftop press. 'Quite a party.'
'Everybody's getting the time off?' Sharon asked.
'Sure. The Folly's almost finished. The Barsoom Project is cooking. Fiftieth anniversary of groundbreaking for Dream Park is right around the corner. Everybody's feeling pretty good. Dream Park's closed to the public for a week. Some folks are taking off. Four hundred of us are staying right here as NonPlayer Characters-NPCs.' He stretched, yawning hugely. 'Nice to be just another head in the crowd. For once. '
'Say not so. The Griffin actually taking a day off?'
'Scout's honor.' He squeezed her waist, glanced back at Tony, and released her.
Good old Griff. So considerate. So quick to hire Tony out of Chino, get him a job, set him up with psychological readjustment sessions. Mother hen…
And why did something at the very core of Tony McWhirter take offence? How could he respect this man, and be grateful to him, and never warm to him at all?
Gracious McWhirter. He shut out his thoughts and began building dreams again. What good is a dream without internal consistency, settings, and a rigorous timeline? A good dream had detailed settings, plus special effects to make the dreamer blind to the illusion. He had become very good at computer dreaming during the six long years. Dreams and computers, after all, were all he had had in Chino State Penitentiary.
Alex Griffln, like so many security execs before him, had decided that anyone good enough to beat his systems was a man to recruit. He had turned Tony loose in Dream Park, then gone further still. He had pled Tony's case with the International Fantasy Gaming Society, the organisation that monitored and brokered points for Gaming worldwide. They had screamed foul, but Dream Park hired its own personnel, and Griffin chose McWhirter. Tony went on-line as Dream Park's liaison to the Game Master, coordinating security and computing time.
And now, not two years later, Tony McWhirter, novice Gamer turned gentleman thief turned (murderer) turned…
The current wasn't buzzing through his fingers anymore. Hardedged ideas dissolved into a mushy jumble in his head.
Dammit, when would he forgive himself? He had made good. Now he was coordinating the efforts of four Game Masters as they unleashed their finest work. The killing was behind him, his debt for the untimely, unintended strangling of Albert Rice paid in full.
(Okay with you, Albert?)
At the moment he was at work on the setting: a dreamscape superimposed on the real, redesigned MIMIC, a building intended to feed, house, and entertain 25,000 people. Fifty years earlier, water had poured down the wrecked building, into broken balcony doors and windows, until the tilted rooftop swimming lake was nearly empty. Now the waterfall flowed again. In the context of the California Voodoo Game, the roof and its artificial lake housed a fishing and farming community half a thousand years old. Who knew what supernatural terrors lurked beneath its filthy waters?
The Shadow do. McWhirter chuckled nastily.
Scattered within the California Voodoo Game were a total of fifty talismans, far more than the number necessary to win. Some were in the rooftop lake, requiring scuba gear. Currently, such gear was available on the Mall level, but could he make it easier? 'Of course,' he muttered, and his fingers began to move.
'Of course what?'
'Of course it's obvious.' He couldn't delay acknowledgments any longer. 'Hi, Griff. Hi, Sharon… Caine?'
She was small and dark-haired and pretty; she looked quite military in her crisp, blue Cowles Security uniform. 'Crayne. Sharon Crayne. Good evening, Game Master.' Her smile was incandescent. He wondered how it tasted.
He bet Good Ol' Griff knew.
'I'll finish this later. How goes?'
'You're changing the Game,' Crayne said disapprovingly.
'Is a bear Polish? But only just a little bit, Sharon, and I'll record all changes for Security, and it's trivial anyway. We've put snorkels and scuba gear in the Mall level, right?' His fingers were a floating blur in the keyboard. 'The Gaming teams have to use it on the flooded levels, but getting it there will be an exercise in masochism.'
'That's a fair description of the whole Game,' Alex Griffln said. 'five teams of masochists submitting themselves to the tender mercies of Tony McWhirter. '
'Well… me and four other gentle souls.' Tony felt warm and chummy. Alex could do that to him, if they were face to face. It was easy to forget the intense intelligence behind those dark green eyes and the tremendous
