"Larry Niven & Steve Barnes - The California Voodoo Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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