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30.
As he threw open the door for her, she gasped at the overwhelming sheet of sensual impressions that sucked her into Monopol City. This wasn't just a game or a city—it was a world. She could see that right away.
It was raining lightly, but the air was damp and filled with noise and steam. It was cool here, without being really cold. She absently slipped on her jacket, welcoming its warmth, yet feeling almost warm again to take it off again.
"It rains for an hour or so once or twice a day," he said, "almost like in the tropics back home. We had to build in the variability for game purposes. Think of this as a subtropical city surrounded by ocean on most sides. It's connected to a distant mainland by long tidal flats and marshes over which just a few roads and rail lines run. Few people feel the need to venture that far, since this is a city of a million people that offers anything you can imagine."
The city loomed above all around—its skyscrapers, its rooftop neon drowning in fog and colored light, its lightning-filled clouds roiling black and gray, its passing airplanes above and cars sloshing over wet asphalt below. The city wanted to take her in its arms and dance with her, pull her out into the unknown. It filled her lungs with the smells of wet tires and spilled gasoline and damp loam. The city filled her ears with the sounds of rustling leaves and laughing pedestrians and blaring trains and hammering pistons.
She shrank back into the musty concrete stairwell, and Rory took her gently by one elbow. "Don't be afraid."
"It's so real," she croaked breathlessly.
"We do good work," he said. "Our rules are complicated enough, not just in their basics, but in their iterations and complex loops. If you step in front of a car down here, you could die. If you don't wear your galoshes, you might catch cold. It's as real as real can get."
She let him guide her slowly out onto the sidewalk. She pulled her jacket tight around her shoulders and shivered nonetheless. "So where is the monorail?" she asked, trying to sound light-hearted when she was scared to death.
He pointed through a break in the skyscrapers, just in time to see a tube of yellow light pour around a corner ten stories up, coming from behind one building and laterally vanishing behind another two or three seconds later. "That's it up there," Rory said with quiet pride. "The programmers who specialized in it did a great job, didn't they?"
"Yes," Tedda said dreamily. She flinched every time a truck roared by in a spray of water, or a four-engine, straight-wing propeller plane droned by overhead, or a taxi fled past with horn blaring, or a fire engine penetrated even all that noise with its klaxons. "It's so noisy," she observed.
He grinned. "We put everything into it. All that sugar, all that soda, all that energy, even some illicit pills and things we smoked. All our energy, and now we have a secret playground that the Fatherland doesn't know about."
She felt a pang of fear. "Are you sure?"
He nodded. "Worst comes to worst, we pull the plug and it's all gone like it never happened."
"You mean the power source."
He nodded. "A flick of the main breaker switch, and the university blacks out for a half hour. When the juice comes back, Monopol City is just a memory of a handful of programmers."
"All of them are in on it?" Something was bothering her, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it. Not the fatherland. Screw the fatherland. Something else.
"Not all, Tedda. That's why you must swear to me you'll keep your mouth shut about this."
She nodded. "I'll bet a few of them are spies. They'd report this in a heartbeat."
"Yes, and the consequences—"
"The consequences," she interrupted, "are far more than you realize."
He looked at her numbly. She didn't know where this was coming from. She felt almost like another person as she said: "What nobody realizes is that there is an overload building. I tried to tell the people in charge, and they exiled me down into the femtosphere. There is an overload coming because both enemy sides are trying to do the same thing in the same space. It can't be done. It's almost as deadly as colliding matter and anti-matter, but think of it as apples and oranges trying to co-exist in the same bowl, and in the same space."
He gripped her upper arms and shook her with gentle urgency. His teeth were gritted, his eyes manic. "Tedda, for God's sake, what will happen?"
"Don't you know?"
He shook his head, let go, stepped back with his hands dourly in his pockets.
The dark sockets of his eyes reminded her: "It creates a vortex, a pinprick in space that opens up to swallow the entire overload and fix space and time again at some fundamental level. It could suck the whole planet in and destroy our world."
He had tears in his eyes. "Then why won't they listen?"
"That," she said, "is the real question. Who is running the show and what is the agenda?" Privately, a part of her knew: It was the dictator Moss, and he was too megalomanic to care. "Come," she said, offering her arm, which Rory took under his. "Let us enjoy the game while time remains for our world." She brightened, looking up as great searchlights beamed up from the ground among the skyscrapers with their Gothic and Art Deco cornices. Discs of light played back and forth under the whorls of sullen cloud.
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