Win, Lose, Draw

I’d paid my player’s fee along with the rest of the crowd. I eased past glittering mesh sleeves, a meter-wide plumed wig, implanted biolumes, legs in gold slicks, legs in mock lizard, a jeweled mask, smiles laid on with coats of paint. A cluster of high-fashion leasers with stim bracelets, looking down their noses at the touries and transients. Designs shaved on smooth scalp and a fresh young face bobbing before mine. “Hey, looker! Run me?” It was this year’s lingo. The cybers would eventually put the dampers on it for the sake of word purity. I sidestepped the grin and the invitation, pushing on to the gate.

The lights inside the oversized dome flashed a brief, brave show, wavered, and died. Chromed rods gleamed and retracted.

I handed over my ticket and stepped up to the gate, reaching to my throat for my IDisc. Out of habit I touched my lucky necklace where I hung it, running the red-gold serpent scales through my fingers, one complete circuit. I plucked loose my IDisc and was about to insert it into the gate when I registered the doubled thickness. I glanced quickly behind me, deactivated the cling tab of my IDisc, and freed the attached, contraplan blank data disc. I hastily palmed it. It wasn’t for games I carried such a risky wild card.

The gate acknowledged my code, and I retrieved my IDisc, clipping both discs back together onto the necklace.I hurried up the tunnel, ignoring the hokey spectacle offered by its stressplex “viewing ports”—asteroid belts and galaxies creaking through space via primitive resistance-bulb patterns, not even bothering to approach the realism of a holo. Shaking my head, I stepped through the upper gate.

I stopped short.

Despite myself, I took in a quick breath at the size of the thing hovering over me in the darkness. I couldn’t see the walls of the tinted dome now, only distant sparks of light that did suddenly look like stars and galaxies. The blackness pulsed with the feel of an almost-heard, vast heartbeat echoing inside my ears. Cold air gusted with the suck and whoosh of the breath of the thing. It lowered over me, waving, twirling, extending and retracting blue-flickered rods in the darkness, spinning smoked plasmeld tips and gleaming its central orb like a demented, spacegoing pincushion.

Not that anybody watching beyond the dome was likely to know what a pincushion was. Only a dumb Poindran outie.

The contraption lowered. The orb opened with a gratuitous flicker of ghostly blue light and the deeply reverberating clang I’d finally achieved with acoustic baffles. Mech arms with pincer claws snatched me up with just the right precarious thrill as they stalled for a second and nearly dropped me.

Then the arms yanked me up, the doors sealed, and I was deposited on woven mesh. I hooked in, and the pod rose with a whoosh of air. The rods extended, spun, snapped closed into the orb. There was a shaking roar. Beyond the window, the fake galaxies spun and rushed closer, streaming past in a blur as the dome presented a cybernetically censored version of what human passengers might see from a space transport if we weren’t so cozily shielded in our blind passages during the shifts.

I was floating. Mesh held me against the anti-grav field as the control panel locked its ring around me.

I yanked off the itchy wig, giving it a kick as it drifted by. The hair I’d concealed beneath it tumbled free in an annoying cloud across my face. I pulled the helmet down on its cords and crammed my dark red strands into it.

Handheld joysticks regulated orientation and gimballed spin. I nudged them into a quick test, whirling sideways and upside down and resettling into vertical. The jokes comparing the low-tech manual controls to the sleek, voice-activated games didn’t explain why everyone kept coming back. Maybe it was their one chance to be like the cybers, to sit for a few minutes at the controls and watch a world blossom to their plan.

But if that was it, the psych profilers would’ve shut the game down. The Great Guardian Cybers couldn’t allow their pet humans to get too many high-falutin’ ideas. Our puny little brains couldn’t handle them. I shrugged and punched coordinates. Maybe the cybers were right. They had all the bets covered, and sometimes resistance seemed like it just wasn’t worth it.

The console lit up, waiting patiently for me. I slapped the panel key and answered questions about my credit account. It recorded my wager. I gripped the joysticks that were about to become my only up and down.

A powerful hum built up inside the helmet, broke over me in sense and image enhancement. I caught a quick breath and it took me. I was out there, riding one of those winking plasmeld orbs spinning on its extensor rod, only now it was a planet whirling through space.

No. I was the world. Massive, rolling through infinity.

I told myself it was all lights and razzle-dazzle and cyber-tailored psychologicals. I was the one who’d specified the programs. Outside the domed darkness spectators would be crowding closer as the sizable wager lighted up its display and the ponderous system of irised ports in the orb extruded and intruded the neon-striped, chromed rods and lighted planets at their tips to match the configuration of the solar system I’d selected. They’d be leaning forward as colored lights shot from the selected planet and occasionally connected with a world or two, rarely spinning the shifting web that would win WorldPlan. From outside it was an absurd, mechanical anomaly, a contorted puzzle of spin and rotation, unwieldy and ridiculous as the Zinn puppet shows where you always saw the strings.

But none of that mattered.

Because I was immense and ageless, a frozen rock rolling through airless space, orbiting and rotating as the stars and planets whirled around me. I sent my thin beams of light to harness their energy. Only when the web was complete would its matrix spark my germination. Only then would I be blessed by the power of the Founders and their guardian cybers, holding barren disorder in their hands and shaping worlds from the primordial chaos of War. Burgeoning life would flow through and around me, bringing sound and scent and scurrying creatures to follow the perfect Plan. The world and I would be one.

Maybe this time I’d finally understand that harmony the cybers kept dangling like a tempting sweet, poisoned with dreams.

I could almost feel it, there in the midst of the silly game, could almost feel its air whispering through my head, a barely-heard song, a distant wind over endless kliks of rolling, shivering ripe wheat beneath azure sky, could almost touch the silver-blue wings rising through it and carrying me up....

I hardly registered my fingers twitching on the joysticks, directing my shooting lights, shifting the balance, adjusting my viewers as I claimed first one planet, then another, and the glowing, floating matrix grew around me like the cybers’ awareness net. The crowd outside would be pressing closer to the dome, drawn by that intricate colored pattern, breathing a little quicker even without the stims, thinking maybe they’d try it one more time. I didn’t read the credit numbers melting higher on my scoreboard.