The Barsoom Project

“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.