The Barsoom Project

“Well, I’ve been able to do some things for him there. Anyone who can break through my security system is someone I want on my side. Hell, he’s turned Chino into a career college. When he gets out next year he’s got a job waiting for him. I still work with him sometimes.”

“Yeah. That’s okay. I had to do worse than that. I had to turn my back on murder. I knew who the son of a bitch was, and in the end I had to turn around and smile at him.”

“Smile at him?”

The corners of Harmony’s mouth tugged up, hard. Alex supposed that the result had to be called a smile, but in the firelight it looked like something peeled off a jack-o-lantem. “That’s the worst thing in the whole world.” His next drink emptied the glass. He turned it upside down, shook it. “The whole mess started about two years before you came, Alex, in ‘46 or so. We’d had problems around here, some real problems at Dream Park. We’d been so damned successful that we’d had psycho-sclerosis: hardening of the attitudes. Our creative arteries were blocked with administrative fat. Hell! We had it made. Everybody loved Dream Park. We were so damned good, and what was bad was we knew it.

“So we made some bad mistakes. A couple of ninety-milliondollar movies bombed. We tried to push through that Dream Park coproduction deal in the Mediterranean. Remember that synthetic island? Hell, we lost a quarter billion dollars in three years.

“We couldn’t even get the idiots out of here, because half of them were related to Old Man Cowles. Well, to say we were cash poor would be like calling Australia ‘an island in the Pacific.”

“I see,” Alex said, not seeing at all.

Alex watched Harmony study his glass and decide that he really, really didn’t want another just now. “This was all happening at the same time that an interesting new theory was evolving in the Surgeon General’s psychological services office. It really started with the development of the Show Scan system back in the 1970s, the system that old Doug Trumbull created. Superfast film projection, enough frames flashing per second that your brain can’t tell what’s real and what isn’t. The big problem was, not only were the images as real as real, but they were also bigger than life.”

“A ‘hot’ medium,” Griffin offered, struggling to remember an ancient college lecture. “Twentieth-century television was a ‘cool’ medium, because the images were smaller than you.”

“Bingo. When Cowles Industries introduced Interactive Holography, ‘hot’ went ‘supernova.’ They called it ‘Reality Distortion.’ The papers called it ‘Dream Park Syndrome.’ Confusion, nervous exhaustion, memory disorders, the whole lot. Too many people don’t realize that Dream Park techs can make it look even realer than they do. We’re afraid to. Afraid of overloading people. Two thousand years of civilization does not undo a million years of genetics. Rumor has it that the original Haunted Mansion at Old Disneyland was so realistic that people were fainting and vomiting.”

“Story probably grew in the telling.”

“Maybe.” Harmony took a pull at his drink. “The upshot of all of this is that there was a slight but unnerving downward stock market trend for Cowles Industries. As the price dropped, somebody out there was buying it up. Now, at the same time, Cowles management was being raided by corporate headhunters.”

“Hitting us hard?”

“Made Jivaros look like altar boys.”

“Kind of odd that all of this was happening at the same time.”

Harmony smiled sarcastically. “Yes, isn’t it? It was not, in the immortal words of Bartholomew Cubbins, ‘something that had just happened to happen and was not very likely to happen again.’ It was a massively well financed, utterly ruthless takeover bid. Wasn’t even that hard to figure out who. Our Saudi Arabian friend.”

“Fekesh? Kareem Fekesh?”

“The very one. Funded by oil, backed by the same radical assholes who tried to blow up a space shuttle forty years ago, he’s built an empire like few in the twenty-first century. He thrives on destabilization-of people, organizations, countries. Hell, he doesn’t give a shit about OPEC, or Allah, or anything.

“Well, once we knew what was at stake, we were able to kind of circle the wagons, act with a little common sense and foresight. Then it happened-the one thing we’d always been afraid of. It was in the first run of the Fimbulwinter Game.” He paused, noting Alex’s take. “Oh, yes, the same game that’s playing right now in Gaming B, drastically altered, of course. A real gun got in there. People got shot.”

“Oh, shit. How badly?”

“Two down. One badly injured but recovered. One got nailed square in the hooter, dead before he hit the ground.”

Alex drained his glass and headed back to the bar. He was going to need some help with this one.