The Barsoom Project

Sandy Khresla, a chunky little woman with a Ph. D. in environmental engineering, was the pipe-smoking head of the division. When someone asked her why she chose such untraditional garb, she smiled as if she had been watching her clock and her calendar, wondering when the big brains would get around to asking that question.

“We service the veins and arteries of Dream Park,” she said around a mouthful of sweet, quasi-contraband Turkish smoke. “You guys are the brains or the arms, and transportation is the legs. But we’re the heart. Without us, everything dies.”

Alex Griffin remembered that story as Sandy’s offices flashed by. Three white uniforms huddled in conversation. A pair of eyes flicked in his direction, then indifferently away.

He thought of all the people who took their jobs so damned seriously, toiling for seventeen and twenty hours a day, who often had to be pried away from their desks and terminals. They believed in the dream. How would they feel if they knew? What if they knew of his mission?

The capsule shushed to a halt in the basement of R amp;D, quieted for a moment as it was switched to a rail, and then began to rise. The shuttles sat up to four people, and were completely modular, capable of hooking onto either the vertical or diagonal tracks that could take them anywhere in the Park.

An insanely complex machine. There were problems with such complexity, of course. The more complex a machine is, the more vulnerable it is to sabotage or simple breakdown. Obviously Fekesh had implanted a cancer somewhere in the organism that was Dream Park. Alex hoped it had not yet metastasized.

The shuttle door clicked open. Alex stretched his legs and pushed himself out.

He was standing on his head in the middle of a desert. Date palms hung by their roots below the horizon. A slow-moving line of camels walked upside down in the distance.

Alex stopped, checking his sense of balance. He didn’t think he’d fallen over. So he took a few cautious steps in that direction, to see if the perspective would shift.

It didn’t. He looked down at his feet. He was standing on a cloud. Arms stretched up to their maximum buried his hands in intangible sand.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

No answer, but he thought that he heard a cough. The sun was beating up with unnatural ferocity, but there was no heat. It felt more like the air conditioning was turned up to full, possibly as a minor side effect of turning the entire region upside down. Dream Park had finally figured out a way to make the Sahara livable. How much would Fekesh pay for that?

“Hello? This is Alex Griffin from Security.”

“Oh, shit,” someone said from behind a shimmering dune. The entire illusion flickered, then died.

He was standing right side up in the hall, surrounded by gleaming Formica floors and fluorescent ceilings and all of the usual floating video boards and packed trophy cases. The only unusual thing was the holo projection device out in the middle of the hallway, inverted and poking halfway out of a door.

Curious, Alex approached cautiously. “Ah-hello? What exactly are you doing?”

The young man wiggling from under the machine was brown-eyed and innocent, with long wavy brown hair and an engaging thin-lipped smile. He looked more like a fullback than a lab tech, and was dressed in a pair of blue denim overalls. He spread his hands in supplication. “I don’t know who the hell built this thing,” he said, “but the only way you can reach the main processor is from the bottom. The function keys are on the top. I’m having a wonderful time.”

The device was a standard holo projection unit, an older model, vaguely reminiscent of an old planetarium projector.

“Can I help you with something?” the young man asked.

“I’m looking for Dr. Izumi.”

“Oh, yeah-” He twisted over from his uncomfortable position and pointed down the hall. “Third door to the left. Think he’s in Bioworks today.”

As Alex walked away, man and machine vanished again into the desert, and the young man said “Eureka!” a second before the entire machine shorted out. A colorful stream of adjectives and gerunds followed Alex down the hall.

The second door to the left was standing open. In the midst of a lab filled with monitors, cameras, and floodlights, a human skeleton sat calmly on a folding canvas chair. It turned and looked at Alex, and said, “Yes, can I help you?”

Alex managed a rather lopsided smile, searching for the human being operating the armature. “Ah… yes. I’m looking for Dr. Izumi.”

The skeleton clicked its teeth in a bizarre rictus that might have been a smile. How would you know if a skeleton was smiling? It was the lip articulation that made most of a “smile” happen.

It stood up and stalked across the room like something out of a nightmare. It held out a bony hand.

All right, he’d go along with the joke, and as soon as the hand went through his, he would declare the joke over and force Izumi to get down to business.