Larry Niven: The California Voodoo Game

"Kiss my pistil," Mouser hissed back.

"Mouser!" Tammi warned.

"Sorry, Mom," he said sheepishly, only mildly chagrined. His Gaming buddies at Medford Academy would howl when they heard that line. He was sorry that he'd gotten the gender wrong, not that he'd said it. "Kiss my stamen" had like zero impact.

The bridge was narrow enough that he had to be cautious with every footfall. Above him, through the ceiling, he saw the sun, or something that could have been the sun, rising. As it rose, the petals of the flowers opened. Tiny flaming mouths shimmered within them.

As he watched, the mouths spit threads of fire. Flames began to crawl up the bridge's support struts.

Mouser smirked, humming with cavalier disregard for his own safety. He had at least fifty seconds. He knew this world; he understood its rules.

He removed a lockpick from his leather belt pouch and faced the blank wall.

His Thief's vision revealed a tiny flutter in the crystal. A keyhole. He slipped his key into the slot and began to manipulate it.

Two eyes, a nose, and finally a mouth appeared in the crystal before him. They watched him speculatively. "Hello there, young man. Are you ready for a test of skill?"

"Bring it on."

The pick slipped in, and his field of vision expanded. He could see the workings of the lock. Within his gloves, his fingers tingled. It was a pleasurable sensation, not yet a warning buzz; it felt rather like snowshoed ants scampering in rhythmic patterns over his knuckles. The flames were closer now. His vision was edged in flame even when he focused his attention down to a narrow line. Now he felt as though he actually were hot in fact, he was burning up. The air around him was crackling, and the flames were closer…

He maintained focus on the job at hand, and suddenly the flames disappeared. There was a crack in the crystal wall, one just tall enough for Mouser.

The metal framework of the catwalk remained, and he beckoned to the others. Come on over!

His teammates swarmed across.

Tammi checked her scanner and chuckled grimly. That task had netted seven hundred points, easy. Her adversaries were just the other side of this tunnel. She would take the lead, and with just the smallest bit of luck the adventure would be won in time for lunch. She shucked her cloak and wiggled through the crack.

Alex adjusted his reimaging field, zooming in on one section of the fractured, inverted L-shape that was MIMIC.

This was no holographic animation or DreamTirne synthesis. Most of the rotating image was piped in from thousands of scanners, coordinated by ScanNet's Cray 181 computer.

Sharon was perched on the edge of her seat, watching every move intently.

Alex chuckled contentedly as the image rotated like a pie in a microwave oven. "Want to see?"

"How deep can you scan?"

The building wheeled until they were behind it, gazing west across the rooftop recreation facilities. He zoomed out far enough for the roof to look like a roof, a three-story cap of glass and concrete built onto the shelf of rock called Clark's Ridge. Alex's fingers were a soft blur. "I'm not totally sure," he murmured. "Shall we see?"

The visual field flashed from hyperrealistic to an X-ray display. Rock and steel became transparencies, MIMIC's awesome bulk a glass model barely three feet tall.

MIMIC blinked red on the third floor of the southeast quadrant and then expanded to fill their field of vision. They passed through the walls, then phased into a world of computer reconstruction. ScanNet was only forty percent operational at the moment: unsecured zones were represented by pulsing orange light. When fully implemented, the system would turn the concrete, steel, and plastic of MIMIC into a kind of ant farm, with every ant individually tagged.

Thousands of tiny human figures labored and strove within that maze of walls and corridors. With the merest touch, Alex dove in, guided them smoothly through the maze, and brought them to level three.

Eerily, they were looking into the circular security room. Its white-domed ceiling arced away, desks and workstations collected at the central axis. In the center of the room sat Alex and Sharon.

"Hall of mirrors, isn't it?"

Sharon reached out and pushed her forefinger into her own miniature back. "Can we rotate that?"

"Easy." His voice dropped and steadied. "Rotate one-eighty." As if mounted on a carousel, the entire image flipped. Sharon was facing herself.

She stuck out her tongue, then waved her right hand. The mirror image waved its right hand, too.

"Want that reversed?"

"Nah." She examined her flawless complexion, leaned close, and wiped a strand of blond hair away from her forehead. "Scan me, baby," she said huskily. "Scan me good. "

A stream of physiological data materialised in the air beside her image.

Height: 69 inches

Weight: 140 pounds

Body fat: 14%

Pulse: 54

Alex brushed her throat with his lips, and the pulse corrected to 67.

Temperature: 98.8

"I've always been a tick warm," she said.

"I'd noticed."

"Do you mind?"

"Please, Miz Fox, don't throw me in that briar patch…" He shut down the scan. "We'll be able to do a full medical on anyone in MIMIC, and they'd never know it. Impressed?"

"Be more impressed if you promised to stay off duty for the next four days. You've got the leave." She nibbled on his ear, wrapping her arms around his neck. "Things got interesting last night. At least I thought so."

"Want to see a playback?"

"Alex!"

"Joke! ScanNet doesn't peep into executive bedrooms."

She pushed herself away from him a little. "It wasn't a joke to me, Alex. Maybe it was a mistake to get involved on the job." Her mouth curved in a calculated pout. "I'm not sure you're a free man."

"So I'm married to the job-"

"These are the Fabulous Fifties." Her eyes were challenging. "Cheat a little."

"Just wait till the Voodoo Game is over, and we get Barsoom on line. " He snaked his arms around her and pulled her in close. She smelled of strawberries and lime and healthy female animal. He kissed her throat. "I promise I'll make it up to you."

"Uh-huh. When Barsoom is on line, you'll be back in la-la land, and I'll be up to my ears." She intertwined fingers with him and leaned over, soft and warm and supple as they kissed. Then she pushed herself away, suddenly one hundred percent professional. "I've seen your dossier, Alex. I know people who knew you in Intelligence. You're wasting yourself at Dream Park. The terraforming of Mars will bring out the very best and worst of humanity. Worst is your domain, yes?"

His eyes had become distant.

She stopped. "I said something wrong."

He managed a dry, unconvincing laugh.

Sharon took the hint. "Let's leave that, okay?"

"Might be best."

"Truce. All right I know the internal ScanNet system is coordinated with the externals: synchsec satellite network, groundlevel sensors, that stuff. You have to teach me the rest."

Suddenly, levels seven through twelve flashed with orange neon urgency.

"Another damn blackout," he muttered. "Bugs in that software. "

"It should be finished by now."

Alex was relaxing a little-he understood the irritation in her voice. "I've heard it was a miracle ScanNet got written at all. The problem isn't gathering the information, the problem is organizing it. ScanNet's an artificial brain. Well, if the scanners are eyes and ears, and the central processor is the frontal lobes, then according to Norman Vail, ScanNet's substations are the reticular activating mechanism."

"Duh…"

Alex laughed. "They filter the information. Each substation decides what is important and what isn't, before it sends it upline. Only about a thousandth of that reaches the main banks, and that's still probably a gigabyte a minute."