Larry Niven: The California Voodoo Game

Persecutor… betrayer… woman-thief… savior.

Eight years before, a disguised Griffin had entered one of Dream Park's infamous live-action role-playing games to solve a case of industrial espionage. In the commission of that crime, a guard named Albert Rice had died. Very accidental it had been, but as even Tony's own lawyer had observed, dead is dead.

Griffin had taken six years of Tony's life.

He had also taken Tony's lady, Acacia Garcia. Eventually, she had taken him or somebody had dumped somebody. Tony had never been sure which.

Alex pointed in the video windows, picking out familiar faces in the rooftop press. "Quite a party."

"Everybody's getting the time off?" Sharon asked.

"Sure. The Folly's almost finished. The Barsoom Project is cooking. Fiftieth anniversary of groundbreaking for Dream Park is right around the corner. Everybody's feeling pretty good. Dream Park's closed to the public for a week. Some folks are taking off. Four hundred of us are staying right here as NonPlayer Characters-NPCs." He stretched, yawning hugely. "Nice to be just another head in the crowd. For once. "

"Say not so. The Griffin actually taking a day off?"

"Scout's honor." He squeezed her waist, glanced back at Tony, and released her.

Good old Griff. So considerate. So quick to hire Tony out of Chino, get him a job, set him up with psychological readjustment sessions. Mother hen…

And why did something at the very core of Tony McWhirter take offence? How could he respect this man, and be grateful to him, and never warm to him at all?

Gracious McWhirter. He shut out his thoughts and began building dreams again. What good is a dream without internal consistency, settings, and a rigorous timeline? A good dream had detailed settings, plus special effects to make the dreamer blind to the illusion. He had become very good at computer dreaming during the six long years. Dreams and computers, after all, were all he had had in Chino State Penitentiary.

Alex Griffln, like so many security execs before him, had decided that anyone good enough to beat his systems was a man to recruit. He had turned Tony loose in Dream Park, then gone further still. He had pled Tony's case with the International Fantasy Gaming Society, the organisation that monitored and brokered points for Gaming worldwide. They had screamed foul, but Dream Park hired its own personnel, and Griffin chose McWhirter. Tony went on-line as Dream Park's liaison to the Game Master, coordinating security and computing time.

And now, not two years later, Tony McWhirter, novice Gamer turned gentleman thief turned (murderer) turned…

The current wasn't buzzing through his fingers anymore. Hardedged ideas dissolved into a mushy jumble in his head.

Dammit, when would he forgive himself? He had made good. Now he was coordinating the efforts of four Game Masters as they unleashed their finest work. The killing was behind him, his debt for the untimely, unintended strangling of Albert Rice paid in full.

(Okay with you, Albert?)

At the moment he was at work on the setting: a dreamscape superimposed on the real, redesigned MIMIC, a building intended to feed, house, and entertain 25,000 people. Fifty years earlier, water had poured down the wrecked building, into broken balcony doors and windows, until the tilted rooftop swimming lake was nearly empty. Now the waterfall flowed again. In the context of the California Voodoo Game, the roof and its artificial lake housed a fishing and farming community half a thousand years old. Who knew what supernatural terrors lurked beneath its filthy waters?

The Shadow do. McWhirter chuckled nastily.

Scattered within the California Voodoo Game were a total of fifty talismans, far more than the number necessary to win. Some were in the rooftop lake, requiring scuba gear. Currently, such gear was available on the Mall level, but could he make it easier? "Of course," he muttered, and his fingers began to move.

"Of course what?"

"Of course it's obvious." He couldn't delay acknowledgments any longer. "Hi, Griff. Hi, Sharon… Caine?"

She was small and dark-haired and pretty; she looked quite military in her crisp, blue Cowles Security uniform. "Crayne. Sharon Crayne. Good evening, Game Master." Her smile was incandescent. He wondered how it tasted.

He bet Good Ol' Griff knew.

"I'll finish this later. How goes?"

"You're changing the Game," Crayne said disapprovingly.

"Is a bear Polish? But only just a little bit, Sharon, and I'll record all changes for Security, and it's trivial anyway. We've put snorkels and scuba gear in the Mall level, right?" His fingers were a floating blur in the keyboard. "The Gaming teams have to use it on the flooded levels, but getting it there will be an exercise in masochism."

"That's a fair description of the whole Game," Alex Griffln said. "five teams of masochists submitting themselves to the tender mercies of Tony McWhirter. "

"Well… me and four other gentle souls." Tony felt warm and chummy. Alex could do that to him, if they were face to face. It was easy to forget the intense intelligence behind those dark green eyes and the tremendous strength and technique that had once held Tony McWhirter as helpless as a baby. Tony grinned like a minstrel. "Yes, boss. Isn't it obvious? If there was diving gear for sale before the Quake, somebody must have been buying it. So I'll put some in the upper apartments, too."

Griffln chuckled. "You're getting sly in your old age. Why aren't you partying?"

"I thought if I went through the territory again, I'd come up with something more."

"You've got four hundred NPCs out there, all partying their hearts out in the forty hours left before your Game begins." Alex Griffln was being just a little bit careful with his tongue. Might have been drinking, yes? Never seen Alex drunk. Might be interesting to douse his punch with a little Kleerlite 190 proof. "Why not go out and get a little adulation? Your public awaits. "

"Uh-huh." Tony's cheeks were getting tired, and he relaxed the grin. "What are you doing here?"

"Routine check. We need our screens back, Tony. Wrap this up, would you?"

"Oh, Lord. How long?"

"Give me an hour. If everything checks, you can have it all back. The damn Game is done, isn't it?"

Tony bit back a retort: No Garne is ever complete while the authors live, Alex. He stood up, and Alex slid into his chair.

Dream Park's security chief was at work almost instantly. He had a running view of the train depot on levels one and two. Then the Mall on level three. The Mall extended up to level six, with another two stories of light-well. Escalators ran from there down to the train gates. The gates had been there already, but with only one set of track laid, a split-level station carved into the ground and the cliff face.

"How much of this did you actually build?" Sharon asked.

Griffin didn't seem inclined to answer, so Tony said, "We cleaned out the broken glass and planted merchandise in the stores, and bombed out the stinks and the vermin. Otherwise we left it alone. There're some clues in the Mall-"

"What about the rest of the building?"

"Ah. Well, most of it was in place. MIMIC had eleven thousand in residence, and was going slowly broke, on May twenty-third, nineteen ninety-five."

"The California Ouake," said Sharon.

"Yep. You can see for yourself, the place wasn't totaled. California's always been antsy about quakeproofing. MIMIC stood up pretty well. Part of the west face is sagging. See how it's distorted, like someone slammed the oven door on the souffle? Maybe two thousand people were trapped. Rescue was a long time coming, because the whole damn state needed rescue. Over eight hundred died. The building wasn't a total loss, but who'd want to live here after that? Cowles stole it at auction. Hell, everything in California was going for nickels.''