Larry Niven: The California Voodoo Game

Now, looking into the vid monitor and the coldly confident gaze of Tammi Romati, who had never lost a game of Crystal Maze, Acacia wondered if her confidence had been misplaced.

The door to the Crystal Maze opened to a cloud of flaming pink smoke.

A little man walked out of the smoke. He stood only waist-high, his thick grey skin mottled with warts the size and shape of half-dollars. His hand brushed smoke from his stubby nose, then waved Acacia and her companions forward. "This way," he whispered, raising a gnarled finger to his lips.

Acacia followed the troll, trusting in her instincts and sword arm to save her. Her opponents hadn't had time to subvert the locals… had they?

The wall slid shut behind them.

"Eyes open for a double cross," she whispered to "Prez" Coolidge, the tall, stocky African-American at her left. His eyes were focused intensely. He would miss nothing, and she had seen him catch flies in midair, on a summer day…

The walls of the Maze throbbed around them like the chambers of a titan's heart. Faces flared momentarily behind crystal panels, mouths leering or laughing. If she turned to look at the faces they dwindled, then vanished altogether, their laughter echoing mockingly through the corridors.

Acacia glanced at her wrist monitor. She brushed a button on it and gained an aerial view of the Crystal Maze. The Troglodykes were clearly visible as a cluster of red dots. She could keep track of them-it was the only sane thing to do. But the monitor's special ViSiOII had cost dearly.

Both teams were expected to struggle to the center of the Maze. Then, equally drained of power, they would slug it out for the pleasure of the audience. There might be another, better way…

She punched buttons, disabling the wrist monitor.

"What are you doing?" the slender Zulu whispered.

"Trust me," Acacia told him. "I have a plan."

"Jesus. Don't they all?"

A bone-chilling buzz vibrated the walls of the Maze, and Acacia tightened her sword grip. It sounded like… what? A swarm of flies? Bees?

Light flared ahead, light that moved with such impossible torpor that it bounced back and forth between mirrors in a visible sheet. Still, it moved much too fast for her to dodge or avoid. When it struck her face, the world was instantly seared white. Then black specks rose in a mass, black against a screen of white, and swarmed toward them.

Bees. Swords were useless. "Top Nun!"

The small, dark-cowled woman pushed past her to face the approaching swarm. She raised her arms high and began to chant. " fly gevalt! For honey, bees are good. One of your better ideas, God. Stingers on the other hand, pfui!"

A brisk, irresistible wind flared up behind them, striking the bees just as they reached Top Nun's hood. The entire swarm tumbled away, down the corridor and gone.

Acacia hissed air. Top Nun had probably won them five hundred points right there, but… "Too close. Any stings?"

Top Nun scornfully held up unblemished arms. "Stings schmings. Am I a shmegegge now, or what?"

Tuesday, July 19, 2059 — 5:00 P.M.

Late afternoon shadows crept across MIMIC.

Meacham Incorporated Mojave Industrial Community was one of the largest structures in the world, for all of its ruined grandeur, a testament to 1990s optimism and the vision of the late Nicholas Meacham. Built forty miles northeast of Barstow, about twenty miles west of the California-Nevada border, MIMIC looked east with a facade that resembled a nineteen-story rust-colored sandwich board with a vertical convex crease. A thirty-foot-high horizontal row of letters spelling M.I.M.I.C. divided the crease from the tenth to the twelfth floor. The flattened top extended acres of concrete roof onto Clark's Ridge, a natural mesa. At the bottom, MIMIC measured nearly half a mile across.

According to documents found among Meacham's effects after his demise, MIMIC was intended to be the "linchpin of a planned community, an ever-expanding prefab metropolis poised to house and employ the excess population which, in years to come, will boil out of the Los Angeles basin like a crazed yeast culture."

As one might guess, Meacham's genius lay in construction, design, and financing, rather than the realm of prose. If not for a little seismic misunderstanding in 1995, MIMIC might have been all he anticipated.

After the Quake, MIMIC lay cracked and rotting for almost fifty years. Myths about the abandoned hulk multiplied. There was a live nuclear reactor in its guts; mutants prowled the ruins, shambling semi-human Morlocks with a taste for trysting teenagers…

Then, abruptly, the nightmares were dispelled. Life began to return.

And with new life came new dreams.

The rooftop stretched to a convincingly distant horizon, a concrete flat etched with pools and gardens, shadowed with California stucco. Newly installed sensors scanned sun-bronzed tennis enthusiasts as they swished their rackets about.

Monitors translated sounds of thudding feet and gasping lungs, waste-heat silhouettes, and cheerfully exhausted visages into multisensory data for the security banks. Like glowing ghosts, guests roamed through three minimalls, lounged in tiny parks and arboretums, or chased golf balls through the flames of purgatory and the gilded clouds of paradise in Dante's, the best miniature golf course in the state.

A swimming pool glittered in the sun, like a pond touched by King Midas. Here its border was a white sand beach; there a rippling frictionless slide with a vertical loop; elsewhere were black basalt cliffs for diving. A hidden wave generator sent seven white crests rippling across the surface every minute. Here was an expanse of cattails sculpted of bronze; there, swimming in a programmed curve, was a weed-and-palm-covered island. Explorers would find it to be a huge lethargic flatfish with feelers the size of hawsers writhing about its mouth. In the center of the pool rose an island shaded by an artificial banyan tree, beneath which a grass-roofed tavern tinkled with laughter and the clink of glasses. One could swim to that tavern, or stroll a glass pathway hidden beneath the artificial waves.

Four hundred Dream Park employees were partying hard: swimming, minigolfing, playing dominance games, drinking.

Sixteen stories beneath them in level three, Tony McWhirter licked his lips. A drink? Later. He focused on the work at hand, his fingers and thumbs dancing in the holographic display of a keyboard.

He was an intense man in his middle thirties. Light red hair ran thin above a lean face with chocolate eyes. His fingers were long and almost delicate, his forearms still wiry from years of college wrestling and gymnastics. Muscles bunched and corded as he typed. A window jumped into place, superimposed on the projection of the roof. It focused on a view of the bar beneath the island.

Tony knew the man and woman busily mixing drinks: Elmo and Doris Whitman. Both were white-haired, pink with sun and as oval and solid as potatoes. They meshed like well-worn gears.

Tony made adjustments. His viewpoint floated in closer, as if his camera were mounted on a skimmer. He was staring into El's face. Capped teeth and sun-peeled lips filled the visual field at point-blank range.

Sound: the computer picked out El's voice from the surrounding gibberish, matched it to his lip movements, filtered, and compensated.

"…part-time for eight years. Never really thought about being full-time until…"

Doris glided onscreen. She was chunky but esthetically firm and rounded. Her legs looked damn good beneath the barmaid's skirt.

"Tequilla-"

The computer made a fast adjustment, backed itself up, and now she was a vocal pattern, locked into the bank. "-Sunrise for table six. "