Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

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.

His fingers closed on warm flesh-and then dissolved. The flesh of his hand ended at the wrist, and two sets of finger bones intertwined.

He gritted his teeth.

The skeleton laughed heartily. “That was priceless,” it said. “Just the expression on your face. Excuse me.”

It turned its head. Alex expected to hear a creak of tortured bone, but what he got instead was that bemused, cultured voice saying, “Izumi. Save program two-eight-internal and mute.”

The air shimmered, and Tom Izumi appeared. He was of medium height, with straight black hair and an incongruously small mouth. For an embarrassing moment, he reminded Griffin of a villain from an old Dick Tracy comic strip, the kind whose physical features mirrored and indicated their criminal tendencies.

“What in the hell was that?” Griffin asked.

“A real-time holographic medical analysis simulator. Utilizes ultrasound projectors built into the walls.”

“Don’t you need lasers to make a hologram?”

“Heavens no. Any form of energy that can be carried by waves: sound, light, microwaves, or X-rays.”

“Whatever happened to ‘turn your head and cough’?”

“There’s a ton of diagnostic devices in here. I’ve been scanned up and down and sideways. We just create a three-dimensional model and project it onto the patient.”

“What kind of… ah, depth? I guess ‘depth’ is the word I’m looking for.”

“Oh, we can adjust it to any level. Izumi, circulation.” His skin disappeared. Alex looked into a coursing network of veins and arteries, with the contracting fist-sized muscle of Izumi’s heart pulsing queasily in stage center. The room behind the missing flesh shimmered as if he was seeing it through a heat mirage.

“Could you disappear entirely?”

“Here, in the room? Sure. Could I play invisible man out in the street? Nobody’s miniaturized the equipment that far, but I suppose it’s possible. The problem would be in reproducing every conceivable angle, so that anyone looking from any direction would see what he expects to see. A little adjustment for focus, maybe…” He became thoughtful. “Come back next month.”

“Great.” A security chief’s worst nightmare, available next month from the gentle lunatics at Research and Development. “Mind turning that off? It’s giving me a headache.”

“Sure.” Izumi smiled toothily, and appeared, fully clothed.

“You’re Alex Griffin,” he said. “Tomisuburo Izumi.”

Alex shook the man’s hand again. It was soft, like a baby’s. There was something curiously childlike about the man. He had that soft round cheekiness, without the angularity which normally intrudes during adolescence. There was no trace of a beard, and the black hair was undisciplined. The eyes didn’t fit in that face. Dark and deep-set, they were fiercely intelligent. “What can I do for you?”

“I don’t feel comfortable in a room with so many scans hooked up to it. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?”

Izumi thought for a moment. “There’s the party room. Come on.” Izumi carefully locked the door behind them and escorted him down the hall.

“Party room?” Alex asked.

“Yes. Our rotation doesn’t come up until two in the morning. Australia and Canada will keep things going most of the day.”

“What’s the record?”

“Nonstop holo party, thirteen months. With the feeds we’ve got right now, there’s no reason to assume that it will ever stop. We’re at eight months and cruising.”

They stopped in front of a small green door with the legend: “Environmental stress workshop. Please sign in.” Alex stifled a laugh as Izumi thumbed the door open, and they entered.

The room buzzed with activity. People laughed, drank, ate from a buffet table. A couple in the far corner were dancing a rumba. Some of the guests looked a little tired. They raised their glasses as Izumi closed the door, and a male voice said, “Tommy y’old slacker! G’day, ey? Good to see you. Who’s the straight?”

“This is Alex Griffin, Chief of Security here. Griffin, meet Robin Schultz.”