Simon Hawke - Timewar 2 - The Shapechanger Scenario

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Simon Hawke - Psychodrome 02 - The Shapechanger ScenarioPSYCHODROME 2:
THE SHAPECHANGER SCENARIO
Coyright © 1988 by Simon Hawke.
Ebook ver. 1.0
For Ginjer Buchanan, with thanks
PROLOGUE
It's hard enough being a psycho without having a paranoid looking over your
shoulder all the time. The paranoid's name was Coles-at least, that was the
name
I knew him by. He was good. He was so good, he could insinuate himself into
my
mind without my even knowing he was there. But I was getting better. So far,
I'd
caught him at it twice. The trouble was, I didn't know how many times I
hadn't
caught him at it and that was making me paranoid. Of course, professional
psychos aren't supposed to let things like that bother them. Amateurs
generally
don't last long in the high-risk scenarios of Psychodrome. Most of them quit
after their first round, assuming they survive it. You either learn fast or
you
die. Or perhaps you only go insane. It depends on whether you're dealing with
something that's real or a programmed hallucination. How do you know? Well,
that's just the trouble, you don't. Once the Psychodrome computers start
interfacing with your mind, all sorts of strange things start to happen.
As a pro, I was still fairly new at the game, though after fighting as a
corporate mercenary on an undeveloped planet, being stalked by gangsters of
the
Yakuza in Tokyo, trailed across half the universe by genetically engineered
assassins, and almost eaten by an ambimorph on a quarantined world, the
novelty
was starting to wear a little thin. Not that Coles really gave a damn. You
tend
not to give a damn when you're one of the people who controls things.
And Coles controlled a lot of things. At the moment, he was controlling me in
a
little game that could easily turn deadly and the fact that I had Rudy Breck
as
backup was no small consolation. Breck used to be a major in the Special
Service, or the SS, as they're more commonly called-genetically engineered
commandos, created from a matrix of human and animal genetic material, known
as
hybreeds. Conceived in a Petri dish, raised in a creche, and trained for
mayhem
from the moment they can crawl. Breck had retired from the service to play
Psychodrome professionally. Their loss, my gain. I was starting to lose count
of
all the times he'd saved my life.
Breck was supposed to be somewhere close behind me, in position to move in
quickly if the bait was taken. Since I was the bait, I would have felt a
little
more secure if he were close enough for me to see him. For all I knew, he had
stopped off somewhere for a drink. That was the trouble with Breck, you could
never count on him to react quite the same way a normal human being would.
His
strength and reflexes were far superior to those of ordinary men, but certain
things were missing. Fear, for instance. The instinct for self-preservation
was
not one of the ingredients that went into an SS hybreed matrix. The emotion
of
fear and the instinct for self-preservation in the face of danger were
entirely
lacking in him. With Breck, self-preservation was merely a matter of
self-interest, not instinct. A subtle difference, perhaps, but an important
one.
I was getting knots in my stomach and feeling chills running up and down my
spine, but Breck was probably strolling along casually somewhere behind me in
this rat's maze of screamers, whistling to himself while he checked out the
sights. There were a lot of sights to be checked out on the Lower East
Side-or
the Downside, as the locals called it-and some of them could be pretty scary.
Both the sights and the locals.
Almost every major city had a neighborhood where only the truly desperate or
the
seriously crazed ever ventured out at night. On New York City's Downside, it
was
always night. Sunlight never penetrated down to the lower levels of the city.
Streetlights provided some illumination and multicolored laser signs strobed
over doorways you really wouldn't want to go through unless you were a twist,
but mostly, there were small pools of light around the street lamps
surrounded
by large areas of shadow through which people moved like scuttlefish. Jack
the
Ripper would have felt very much at home here.
I'd spent a few years on the Ginza Strip of Tokyo and I'd also seen the
ground
level of that city, a squalid, ugly, fearsome warren known as Junktown. I had
even spent some time in Tokyo's Combat Zone, a place so wild and depraved
that
it had been sealed off to keep the screamers in. The seamy side of life was
nothing new to me, so the prickly feeling at the back of my neck wasn't just
a
sense of apprehension at being in a nasty neighborhood. It was the certain
feeling that I was being stalked.
I was moving through a ghetto teeming with all sorts of predators. That would
have made the stalker difficult to spot in any case, but there was a good
chance
that this stalker was an ambimorph, which meant he would be impossible to
spot
until he-or it, since shapechangers do not have gender-was right on top of me.
I could imagine people tuning in right now, coming home from work and turning
on
their psy-fi sets, plugging into the net and selecting a vicarious adventure
from any one of dozens that Psychodrome was running-maybe even mine-and for a
while, they'd be able to tune into one-way telempathic contact with a psycho
star and experience a fantasy.
I thought of Stone, who had once performed on the lust channels because she
was
turned on by the idea of having sex with billions of people at the same time.
The thrill had eventually worn off and she had switched to high-risk game
scenarios, searching for a stronger fix. She never really knew what she was
looking for. For a while, she thought it might be me, but she had died before
she could find out for sure. I wondered if the same thing that had killed her
was now stalking me.
The home audience sharing my experience was getting a good heady dose of
sudden
fear and an adrenaline rush-emotions and reactions that were modulated
carefully
by the fail-safe biofeedback sensors on their psych-fidelity sets. It
wouldn't
do to give some excitable old fart a coronary just because my heart was
pounding
like a trip hammer. For them, it was all show. Shared perceptions with
cybernetic safeguards. For me, it was the real thing.
"Coles?" I said.
He could hear me back at Game Control, but the home audience would never hear
me
say his name. That was because the home audience only knew about the surface
levels of the game. They did not suspect that they were much more than
spectators. In a way, they were participants, only they didn't even know it.
So
far as the home audience was concerned, Coles did not even exist. So far as
Psychodrome International, Inc., was concerned, Coles did not exist. So far
as
every government agency you could reach through normal channels was
concerned,
Coles did not exist. Sometimes I wondered if even Coles knew he existed, if
he
actually saw a reflection when he looked into a mirror. In any case, he
apparently did not exist for me right at that moment, because there was no
answer. Perhaps he wasn't there. Perhaps he wasn't as omnipotent as he often
seemed. Or perhaps he simply didn't want to talk to me.
"Coles, damn it . . ."
I wished I knew where Breck was. I hoped to hell he was somewhere close. Real
close. I felt as if crosshairs were centering on the back of my neck. I had
that
feeling you get sometimes when someone is staring at you intently across a
crowded room. You sense it somehow and you turn, your eyes meet . . .
Yellow eyes. Red-flecked, yellow eyes with vertically slit pupils. Iridescent
snakeskin stretched taut across high cheekbones. Upper lip protruding
slightly
over modified incisors. Tall, spikey crest of feathery white hair streaked
with
silver, ending in a long pony tail cascading down the back. Sleek, black,
metal-studded skinjac with chain-mail epaulets; silver and black lycras and
black, high-heeled boots. A cyberpunk. But unlike most of them, whose biomods
were merely artifice- trendy weekend monster makeup easily removed when it
was
time to go to work-this one had gone the hardcore route with cosmetic
surgery.
They called it getting "hardwired." He grinned at me and gleaming alloy
hydraulic fangs slid out of his two large, hollowed-out incisors.
Was this an ambimorph I was confronting or was it only some hardcore kid
looking
to finance his next score? Either one was dangerous, it was just a matter of
degree. The safest thing would be to frag the punk, whether he was an
ambimorph
or not, but Coles wanted a live shapechanger. And that meant there was a good
chance he'd wind up with a dead psycho- namely one Arkady O'Toole, yet
another
casualty of the ratings war.
The cyberpunk and I stared at each other like two competing predators
circling
before a fight for turf. Neither of us moved as the sea of people flowed
around
us. I couldn't see Breck anywhere, but I spotted two more cyberpunks slowly
closing in from my left and right. One had himself done up as a pussycat,
complete with lion's mane and whiskers; the other one looked like something
you'd find on a used cyborg lot. Maybe all three were no more than what they
appeared to be, but maybe one of them was a shapechanger who, in his
cyberpunk
disguise, had joined up with a couple of wild boys to take me out. Either way,
I
was in trouble. Snakeskin started to move toward me through the crowd, his
hands
in the pockets of his skinjac. I didn't think he was just trying to keep them
warm.
I ducked down into a-stairwell leading to a doorway below the sidewalk level.
A
laser sign over the entrance depicting a writhing double helix alternately
flashing blue and purple read, "Blue Genes." I paid the cover and walked into
a
wall of sound.
A band up on the small stage was filling the club with enough volume to
poleax
an elephant. The lead singer was snarling through an implanted vocoder throat
mike, rhyming "insect eyes" with "mesmerize." I didn't catch the rest of the
lyrics. They would have been difficult to understand in any case, since the
band's sound engineer chose that moment to switch the singer's throat mike
from
multiplex-overlay human mode to something that sounded like a mosquito big
enough to eat the Bronx.
The rest of the band was pounding out a driving beat that sounded like the
screaming inner workings of a giant machine about to explode. The musicians
were
shirtless, their fingers dancing over keyboards that were hardwired into the
puckered, livid white skin of their skinny chests. In addition to getting
themselves hardwired for sound, cyberpunk musicians often spent the extra
money
to hook up their instruments to their pleasure/pain centers as well,
obviating
the necessity for drugs by giving themselves the ability to orchestrate their
own highs. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase, "playing with yourself."
I threaded my way through the undulating bodies on the dance floor, looking
for
the back way out. I figured it would be behind the stage, where the musicians
changed and the bar took its deliveries. I glanced over my shoulder and saw
Snake-skin moving through the crowd, looking for me.
I spotted a door in the back, near the stage, marked "Employees Only." A
muscular young man with red and black hair leaned against the wall beside the
door. He was dressed in skintight orange and black lycras with a flame
pattern.
His head was nodding slightly in time to the music. He spotted me heading
toward
the door and stood in front of me, blocking my way with a hand on my chest. I
didn't have time to argue with him and the music was too loud in any case, so
I
grabbed his arm, spun him around, and slammed him against the door, using his
body to push it open. Once inside, I shoved him into a pile of boxes and made
for the back door that led into the alleyway behind the club.
I kicked the door open and bolted out into the alley, straight into the arms
of
the other two cyberpunks. The door behind me opened once again and Snakeskin
came out into the dark alley. They'd suckered me. Snakeskin had followed me
into
the club while the other two had cut around the back. They proceeded to slam
me
against the building wall a few times to take some of the fight out of me.
Snakeskin grinned, opening his mouth and hissing like a cobra, teeth bared.
His
trick fangs slid out again, curved and-needle-sharp.
I didn't know where the hell Breck was and I didn't have time to worry about
it.
There's only one thing to do when the odds are against you and you can't run
away. Attack and attack hard. Of course, running away was vastly preferable,
but
the cyberpunks had me by both arms and they showed no inclination to let go.
I
leaned back against them suddenly, kicked out, and caught Snakeskin under the
jaw with my right foot. His teeth clicked together and he fell back, blood
streaming from his mouth where his alloy snake fangs had impaled his lower
lip.
The cyberpunks who held me recovered quickly and ran me at the wall. I barely
had enough time to turn my face aside before they slammed me against the
brick.
It felt like doing a belly flop into a swimming pool that had no water in it.
I was so scared, I didn't think about how much it hurt. I only knew that if I
didn't do something drastic right away, it was going to hurt much worse. They
yanked me back and ran me at the wall again. I leaned back against them at
the
last minute and ran two steps up the wall, flipping over backward to land
behind
them. It actually worked and they lost their grip on me. Unfortunately,
unlike
all the swashbuckling heroes who always land on their feet after trying such
stunts, I went over backward and fell right on my ass.
I rolled and clawed my gun out of its holster underneath my jacket. To hell
with
Coles and his bring-'em-back-alive instructions. My first shot went wild,
whining off somewhere down the alley, but my second one struck one of the
punks
right in the chest, exploding on penetration and making salsa out of his
entire
upper torso. I missed with my third shot and the other punk took off down the
alley. I got to my feet, aimed carefully, and squeezed off another round. It
caught him in the back and he went down.
Then I heard something move behind me. I spun around, saw Snakeskin lunging
at
me, and fired. The bullet hit the wall behind him and exploded. Suddenly he
wasn't there anymore. He had simply disappeared.
For a moment, it didn't sink in. I stood there in a daze, staring at the spot
where he had been a second earlier. Then I realized he must have shapechanged
and even as I realized that, I felt something wind itself around my legs.
I looked down and saw the head of the cyberpunk on the body of a serpent
thicker
than my thigh winding rapidly around my legs, climbing up my body. I froze
with
horror and then my arms were pinned against my sides, the coils crushing me,
the
head with its obscene travesty of a human face drawn back, fangs gleaming,
dripping poison-
I screamed.
"No, no, no'." said Coles, bending over me and grasping me by the shirtfront,
shaking me.
I was still screaming. He slapped me twice across the face, hard enough to
make
my head ring, but it had the desired effect of snapping me out of it.
"You froze'." said Coles. "You panicked!"
I gasped, trying to stop hyperventilating. My heart was beating like a wild
thing trying to claw its way out of my chest. The scan crew was anxiously
monitoring my readouts. They could have helped by inducing a calming alpha
state, but Coles wasn't going to let me off the hook that easily.
"You panicked and you died!" said Coles, grabbing me by the shirtfront and
shaking me again, lifting me half off the laboratory couch. He grimaced in
disgust and let me go. "Damn you, O'Toole, you're going to be no use to me at
all if you panic at the slightest provocation!"
I stared at the son of a bitch, hating him.
"Mistake number one," he said, ticking them off on his fingers, "you ducked
into
that club, putting yourself on the defensive and giving the initiative away.
Mistake number two, you failed to take advantage of the people in the club to
outflank the opposition. Instead, you continued to retreat, continued to
remain
on the defensive, and you ran right into a trap. Mistake number three, you
caved
in to pressure and disregarded my instructions by shooting to kill. Mistake
number four, you allowed your emotions to overwhelm you and you left yourself
exposed. Mistake number five, you hesitated when the cyberpunk shapechanged,
a
mistake you compounded by freezing when you saw the snake climbing up your
legs,
thereby giving it enough time to pin your arms. And any chance you might have
had left then, you simply threw away by giving in to terror. How many times do
I
have to tell you? You go on the defensive, you lose the initiative and give
up
half the battle. You panic, you die."
"Sir," said one of the technicians on the scan team, "the subject's blood
pressure is dangerously high. We're registering critical stress levels. I
urgently recommend that he be taken down before-"
"Hell, do whatever you want," said Coles impatiently, dismissing me with an
irate gesture. "By all means, put him on downtime before he self-destructs.
I've
got no use for him the way he is right now."
They started bringing me down even before he finished speaking and Coles
slowly
receded into a dim haze as they eased me into downtime, turning off my mind
before it built up a critical mass of stress and started a chain reaction of
delusions no one could control. The last conscious thought I had before I
drifted off into limbo was that it might be nice if they just left me there,
suspended in a thoughtless, dreamless, nearly lifeless state, where neither
reality nor nightmare could intrude. Perhaps deep down, that's what every
psycho
really wants.
ONE
"I heard you died," said Breck, laconically.
He stood looking down at me with a wry smile, his flaxen blond hair in
disarray.
The cracked-ice intensity of his blue eyes was heightened by his use of bang,
a
hybrid plant developed from a mutated strain of noncarcinogenic tobacco and
an
offworld herb called bangalla. Smoking it had the effect of stimulating
adrenaline production, increasing visual acuity, and amplifying tactile
perceptions. Smoking bang would make an ordinary human being burn out and
self-destruct, but then Breck wasn't an ordinary human being. Prolonged use
of
bang also had the curious side effect of making the eyes lambent. With Breck,
whose hybreed matrix gave him cat's eyes to begin with, it had the
disconcerting
effect of making his eyes strobe when the light hit them just right.
"Shall we drink to my demise?" I said, sitting up slowly and rubbing my
temples.
I glanced around at the scan team and noticed that they weren't the same
psychocybernetic engineers who were on duty when Coles brought me out of the
hallucinact. "How long have I been down, Cass?" I asked the crew chief.
"About eight hours," she said.
"Nothing like a good night's sleep," I said, though strictly speaking,
downtime
wasn't really sleep. It was a psychocybernetic trance state. A way to turn
people off when you didn't need them for anything. "So what's the prognosis,
Miss Daniels? My readings all okay? Nothing in the red? No maintenance
service
required?"
"No therapy is indicated," she said, consulting my chart printout. "I'd
advise
against consuming alcoholic beverages, though I doubt you'd listen. At least
try
to stop short of getting completely intoxicated. It really throws the
readings
off."
I stared at her and mentally undressed her. She was wearing a loose-fitting
white laboratory jumpsuit, but one of the monitor screens behind her suddenly
showed her standing there in a sheer black lycra bra and bikini panties, dark
stockings and spike heels. I wasn't on line, so the image stayed in the
control
room, but it wouldn't have been broadcast anyway. Not even psychocybernetic
engineers can totally control the output of a human mind-at least, not yet-so
there's always a slight delay between the biochip reception and the tachyon
broadcast, allowing for some highly sophisticated editing. One of the other
engineers cleared his throat softly. She turned around, saw the screen, and
raised an eyebrow.
"You flatter me, O'Toole," she said, in a disinterested, clinical sort of
tone.
"Unfortunately, I'm not quite as narrow-waisted as you seem to imagine. The
result of a sedentary job with too little time for exercise, I'm afraid. And
aside from considerations of style, if I were to wear shoes like that, it
would
lead to serious orthopedic problems."
The image on the screen broke up into snow briefly before resolving itself
once
more into what I actually saw before me, an attractive and apparently
completely
humorless young woman in a white laboratory jumpsuit. It's hard to maintain a
decent fantasy without at least some cooperation.
"Besides," she said, and for a moment I could have sworn I saw the barest
trace
of a smile, "you left out my tattoo."
"She isn't normally so personable," Breck said as we were leaving. "I think
she
rather likes you."
"You think she really has a tattoo?" I said.
"A black king scorpion on her left inner thigh," Breck said, with a perfectly
straight face.
I stopped and stared at him.
"Only joking," Breck said, with a smile. "For all I know, it's a snake and
dagger on her biceps. However, I would resist the temptation to find out for
sure if I were you. Considering her position, she probably knows more about
you
than you know about yourself."
"That's a large part of what makes it so tempting," I said, grinning.
Breck sighed. "You still have a great deal to learn, O'Toole."
He was undoubtedly right. Compared to Breck, I was a rank beginner at the
game.
Unfortunately, novices tend to make mistakes and Psychodrome can be very
unforgiving.
My involvement started as an accident. Perhaps even a lucky accident. The
jury
was still out on that one. I was born on Mars, in Bradbury City; Irish on my
father's side, Russian on my mother's. My father was a hard-drinking,
hard-gaming, two-fisted wild man named Scan O'Toole. My mother, Irina, was a
long-suffering, self-effacing, beautiful and moody woman who believed that
nothing really good would ever happen to her until she hit the afterlife and
even then, who knew? My dad was ruled by leprechauns and she was spooked by
generations of Russian Orthodox archbishops. A mismatch of a marriage if
there
ever was one, but it lasted due to equal parts of stubbornness and love. As a
result of this somewhat unlikely mixture, I never did get settled all the
way.
Archbishops and Little People didn't get along too well. The Irish part of me
believed in luck, but my Russian half kept telling me I'd never get it.
I came to Earth as a freshly mustered-out serviceman looking for some fun on
Tokyo's Ginza Strip. I suppose I must have had some, because the morning after
I
arrived, I woke up in a Junktown slum with almost all my money gone, a tattoo
of
a dragon (never mind where), and a brand-new wife who was perhaps all of
fourteen. As things turned out, the marriage wasn't legal because Miko and
her
family were non-regs. If you're non-registered, then you're not legally a
citizen and you haven't any rights. How can you have rights if you don't
exist?
Of course, I didn't know about that then, because on Mars and on the
outworlds,
people are still too valuable a commodity to ignore. Only Mother Earth
neglects
her children. All I knew was that I had, as my father would have said, really
farted during vespers this time. I've been in straits considerably more dire
since, but at the time, things seemed pretty grim. And they proceeded to get
grimmer.
I'd always been a hustler, but unlike my dear father-roast his soul-I was
strictly small-time. The terrifying prospect of living out the remainder of
my
days in Junktown, saddled with a child wife and her starving non-reg family,
made me throw caution to the winds. I did what any self-respecting Irishman
would do when he was truly up against it. I went looking for a game of poker.
I
found one. And I made a very serious mistake. I won.
I know it flies in the face of logic, but there is such a thing as a hot
streak.
Most gamblers live for it; however, if you're not very careful, it can
utterly
destroy you. I don't know what causes it, but when it strikes, you know it
without the faintest scintilla of a doubt. It's magic. It's as if a ghostly
finger taps you on the shoulder and the voice of Fate whispers in your ear,
"Okay, kid, this is it. It's your turn to be God."
At any other time, I would have known better and exercised restraint, but at
any
other time, I wouldn't have been there to begin with. Those guys were way too
heavy for me. The secret to handling a hot streak and coming out ahead is
knowing when to stop. It's a principle that every gambler knows. However,
there
is a lesser known corollary that separates the winners from the losers in the
long run. And in some cases, it separates the living from the dead. Unless
you're in a large casino, which likes to have a big winner now and then
because
it draws in all the losers, don't ever win too big. Engrave that on your
greedy
little heart. The smart hustler is not a barracuda. He lives on little bites.
He
just moves around and makes a lot of them. I wasn't smart. I knew that I was
on
a streak and I got greedy. And I bit off a lot more than I could chew.
The guy who got chewed up the worst was a sore loser named Hakim Saqqara, who
just so happened to be a warlord of the Yakuza. If I'd known that when I took
his money, I probably would've committed hara-kiri on the spot. It would've
saved everyone a lot of time and trouble. If he felt like it, he could have
had
me killed that very night, but I had pricked his pride and he wanted to draw
his
satisfaction out a bit. He decided to continue the game, so to speak, away
from
the table. So he waited. He gave me time to parlay my winnings into a
comfortable life-style. The money I pulled off him allowed me to buy citizen
registrations for Miko and her family and loan her enough funds to buy an
education so she could get a job. I never thought I'd see it back, but I
didn't
really give a damn. I'd had a run of bad luck and I had somehow managed to
turn
it all around. Then Saqqara made his move and gave me an education in major
league hustling that I'll never forget.
By the time he was finished with me, I was so well and truly on the hook to
him
that when he snapped his fingers, I was in the air before he finished saying,
"Jump." He took me for everything I had. In the process, I learned a bit too
much about him, so when he decided I had nothing left to lose and could be no
further use to him, he told his boys to drop me in the bay. Without a doubt,
I
would have wound up fish food if the leprechauns hadn't delivered a miracle.
My number was selected in the Psychodrome lottery.
Now Psychodrome was never my idea of entertainment. I found reality
challenging
enough, thank you, I didn't need fantasy tripping. I hadn't even bought the
damn
ticket. Before we parted company, my wife Miko once mentioned picking up a
couple of tickets for us and I had forgotten all about it until mine was
drawn
for the grand prize-a chance to play an adventure game scenario with a couple
of
Psychodrome's hottest stars. There I was, trying to hide out from Yakuza
assassins and the next thing I knew, I was famous. All I wanted was to go
someplace where no one knew my name and suddenly everybody knew my name.
I didn't have a lot of options. I was broke, without even enough money to buy
another meal. I had been all the way up and down the scale. I'd gone from an
ex-serviceman with some money to burn to a pauper down in Junktown to a high
roller on the Ginza Strip to a stockbroker in Hamamatsu. And then the
downward
slide had started as Saqqara wrapped his tentacles around me and in five
short
years I was right back where I'd started, no worse off than before, except
for
one slight detail. There was a contract out on me. Psychodrome was a way out.
If
I had known back then what I was letting myself in for, I might've stayed in
Tokyo and taken my chances with the Yakuza.
There were different levels to the game known as "the ultimate experience."
Some
of them provided harmless fantasies built around luxury and pleasure.
Whatever
turns you on. Others provided adventure, challenge, and great risk. Players
rich
enough to afford the entry fees could choose their own scenarios from the
adventures Psychodrome had to offer. The less fortunate could buy tickets in
the
lottery, with the grand prize being the chance to play. However, there was a
catch. Winners of the lottery didn't get to choose their game scenarios and
they
had no control over their experiences. In that respect, there were two levels
to
Psychodrome; one in which wealthy players got to use the game for
interactive,
exhibitionistic entertainment and one in which the game got to use the
players.
Those who fell into the latter category were generally diehard thrillseekers,
gamblers, or desperate individuals. In other words, people very much like me.
And there's never been a shortage of such people.
Players about to embark upon "the ultimate experience" were taken to the
headquarters of Psychodrome International, the megacorporate entity which
operates the game. There, the prospective player was given a full medical and
psychological examination and a definitive player data base was assembled.
The
player was then taken into surgery, where a special semiorganic,
psychocybernetic biochip was implanted into the cerebral cortex. Permanently.
You couldn't take it out even if you could afford psychocybernetic surgery.
The
chip grew directly into the brain matter like a rooting seedling. It gave the
player the ability to interface directly with the Psychodrome computer banks,
as
well as with Psychodrome's playermaster satellite network.
The game began when the players were transported to a selected, location
where
they were supposed to interact with people and situations they encountered in
order to achieve specific game objectives. It was possible to win, but still
more possible to lose. And losing could mean death. Which made for great
entertainment, you see. The game scenarios could be located anywhere on Earth
or
on another world or from a fantasy hallucinact devised by Psychodrome. In
other
words, it could be real or a programmed hallucination. Only the playermaster
knew for sure.
As the players pursued their game objectives, the playermaster was capable of
interfacing with them to provide guidance or game clues, but never direct
assistance. If you got into a jam, it was up to you to figure out how to get
out
摘要：

SimonHawke-Psychodrome02-TheShapechangerScenarioPSYCHODROME2:THESHAPECHANGERSCENARIOCoyright©1988bySimonHawke.Ebookver.1.0ForGinjerBuchanan,withthanksPROLOGUEIt'shardenoughbeingapsychowithouthavingaparanoidlookingoveryourshoulderallthetime.Theparanoid'snamewasColes-atleast,thatwasthenameIknewhimby.H...

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