Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

“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.

“We moved the Gamers out and sealed the area. Game ended. The woman who actually pulled the trigger was shattered emotionally. Arrangements were made with her father.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, indicating money. “He was a real winner-didn’t give a damn about her, thought she was from Venus anyway. ‘All that sci fi drove her nuts.’ We threw in some mumbo-jumbo about Dream Park Syndrome, coughed up a generous annuity, and he never peeped.” Harmony’s face was so dark Alex could barely read it. “We sent her to Brigham Young. They’re the best. I wanted to keep track of her, but the doctors didn’t want us meddling. I prayed she’d come out of it. She was so frail… Alex, for years I’ve watched the faces come in and out of this place, and I’ve seen the portfolios on the Century Club-the people who have been here more than a hundred times. She was just a poor lost thing, Alex.”

Harmony stood, throwing out his arms for emphasis. “This was realer than real, Alex, bigger than life. It was her refuge from a world that had no room for magic, a family that didn’t care. We let her down. Then we buried her.”

For a long time Harmony was silent, and Alex thought he was finished, but then he began to speak again. “We never found out how the gun got in.”

Alex said, “It was an inside job, wasn’t it?”

“It had to be. Everything was perfect. Someone knew exactly how to get through the holes.”

“I hate to think about that.”

“We cleaned up Security afterward. More complacency. There shouldn’t have been holes. Still, no outsider could have done it.” Harmony stood next to the fire, the flames and shadows laying his body with a shifting mask of black and red. “I’ve had eight goddamned years to sit here and think about it. Every time I deal with someone who worked here in ‘48, I think about it. Why do you think I had you brought in from up north in ‘49? Why do you think I went right over good people, damned good people like Bobbick, and promoted you? Why? Because I didn’t know who to trust. Do you know how that makes me feel? I sit here, and I eat with these people, and I play with them, their children… I’ve watched some of their kids grow up. I know most of them love what we’re building here, that they believe in what Arthur Cowles dreamed all those years ago… and one of them is a killer.

“One of those wonderful wackos at R amp;D. One of the Gaming staff.. what would you bribe ‘em with, for Christ’s sake? What could you give ‘em that they haven’t already got? But somebody did. Somebody got to ‘em. Somebody gave ‘em something we couldn’t give.

“And so, I work here because I love it. But all the time I work here, all the time I do, I look at the faces, Alex, I look at the faces and I wonder, ‘Which one? Which one?”

Alex let Harmony wind down, waited for the great body to relax before he spoke again. “So what happened, Thadeus?”

“Oh, the whole thing was hushed up. The kid who died, Calvin Izumi, was out of R amp;D. He was only there because he had the right facial characteristics for the Game. Lucky Calvin. Calvin, his brother Tom, and his mother were all rabid for Dream Park. They had their lives, their money, everything wrapped up here. Drowned if they were going to let some goddamned terrorists get away with this. They helped us hush it up.

“We bought off the coroner, Alex. I hope you don’t want me to pretty it up. We greased palms. We made it look like a hunting accident, we covered up murder. We had to. It’d have knocked our stock through the floor. There were about twelve of us who knew everything that had happened. Twelve of us with blood on our hands. Four have retired. I don’t know how they handle it. We don’t talk much anymore.”

“And you think Fekesh?”

“Fekesh. I know it in my guts, and can’t prove a thing. When the Barsoom Project came along they told me to just forget the whole thing, you know, close my eyes and think of England. And like a good little monkey I did.”

Griffin waited to see if Harmony was going to add anything else. The only sound in the room was the slow crackle of the fireplace. Then he threw his ace onto the table, and watched his friend carefully. “Was this woman’s name Michelle Sturgeon?”

Harmony turned snake-quick. His gunmetal eyes were level and cold. “How did you know that?”

“She’s back, Thadeus.” Griffin smiled. “Do you believe in Providence? She’s come back to Dream Park, and at the same time as the man who destroyed her. What are the odds of that? We’ve been making miracles for everyone else for so long, maybe we’re in line for a little one ourselves.”

Harmony leaned forward. His eyes were intense. His thick fingers, templed against each other, trembled. “She’s come back?”

“And Fekesh knows it. Somebody kicked her out of our replay of the Fimbulwinter Game. Almost destroyed her mind.”

Griffin had seen piranha with more kindly, inviting smiles. “Lovely timing, don’t you think? The bastard who originally seeded that rifle into the Game must be fudging his shorts. Poor girl’s mind must be like a scrambled egg, but maybe she still knows something.”