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
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 tongue, then waved her right hand. The mirror image waved its right hand, too.
'Want that reversed?'
