Jack L. Chalker Wonderland Gambit 1 The Cybernetic Walrus

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staircase into this area from the rooftop conservatory when I heard a woman
singing. This was unusual in and of itself, unless I commanded it or there was
some sort of entertainment coming up, but this was something else again, and
its familiar refrain bounced off the cold, sterile walls and seemed to swirl
around me in the shad-ows and come from everywhere at
once.
"...Ask not why we sing this song, 'cause ev'rything you think you know is
wrong..."
I stopped dead, and the hairs on the back of my neck seemed to rise a little.
The singer and the song stopped as well.
"Who's there?" I called out, my own voice bouncing back and forth in the
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stairwell.
There was a distant-sounding chuckle, a woman's voice, that seemed to be a
living thing in and of itself and to come from nowhere and everywhere at the
same time.
Finally, it almost whispered, "Cor-eeee! Deah Cor-eeee! You ah so damn'
gullible it huhts!"
"Matalon? Cynthia Matalon? Is that you?"
"That name'll do, dahlin', at least foah now. My oh my, y'all suah ovahdid it,
didn't you?"
"Are you here somewhere or is this one of your mind tricks?" I asked, feeling
irritated and vulnerable on the one hand and totally relieved to have a
lifeline, somebody to talk to, on the other.
"Don't know what you mean by 'heah' and 'theah,' 'cause, see, they're the same
thing. You ain't nowheahs, Cor-eeee. Ain't none of us ah nowheahs, y'see. I
just want t'wahn y'all befoah the next stage. Don't let 'em, don't let nobody
talk you back heah, y'heah? You come back in heah one moah time and you won't
be the Loahd of the Manah, you'll be one of them gals.
McKee found Matthew's little
Playboy set, y'see, and she put in a neat little spidah's trap. Beweah anybody
that tries t'get you back heah, y'heah?
That's all, dahlin'. Take caha, 'til we can get you out. I
told you not to go with deah old Al, but you didn't listen. Didn't figah
y'would. But even if you don't remembah who you ah, Al does..."
And she was gone, fading faster than the wind. I could feel her presence
leave, although I hadn't felt it before.
What the hell? Did she go back and forth without any modules, without anything
at all? Or was she, perhaps, not of our world at all? What if
Madoc's world had people in Brand's own project, maybe even made sure that he
wouldn't solve it and might disappear into the system? Keep us un-washed
primitives off the grass, wouldn't it?
For all that Cynthia Matalon had been a nut and a scare and a pain, she hadn't
harmed me and she had warned me on Al Stark, although so far I
couldn't see how he was any real threat to me.
Her message this time, though, had been a clear and direct warning on two
fronts. That this had been booby-trapped, long ago, and that anybody who came
back a second time now became not the sadistic and insatiable master Lord
Madoc but one of the adoring slave girls, doomed to do his bidding and unable
to act differently.
That also implied that I was soon to get out of here, and that the plot was to
talk me into coming back. Well, they wouldn't be able to talk me back here no
matter what, al-though there was nothing to stop them from loading the wrong
program in the console while I lay there helpless.
When I went to sleep that night, without doing anything but heading for bed
and lying there, staring at the ceiling in the darkness and trying to think,
it was with both hope and that increased paranoid suspicion. Who the hell was
Matalon in this Wonderland play? The Cheshire Cat, perhaps?
Not the White Rabbit. The White Rabbit was Stark, pure and simple, and the
Queen was Matt Brand somewhere in the unknown distance of the forest.
I finally drifted off into what was a fitful and light sleep with odd dreams
that made no sense to me, and then, suddenly, there were rough hands all over
me and I was hot and itchy as all hell and a man's voice a man's voice was
yell-ing, "Come on! Come on out of it! What's your name! Tell me your name!"
I stirred slightly, totally confused, opened my eyes a bit, and found that
they didn't focus well. Blurrily I saw several figures in white and heard what
sounded a lot like Doc Cohn's voice.
"What's your name?"
"Cor Cory Maddox," I mumbled. "That you, Les?"
"Yes, it's me! Okay, he's back! Just lie back and we'll de-tach the tubes and
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get you to a bed."
"I got it all worked out!" I told him proudly, then col-lapsed into the
deepest sleep I had ever experienced in my whole life.
The funny thing was, when you did wake up from the post-injection coma, you
felt great
. Hungry, and with oddball sensations here and there, but not at all as weak
as you really were.
They brought me breakfast, and Les came in, looking tired. "Well? What did you
think of it?" he asked me. "When you're done I've got to give you a physical
and check you out, but we can start debriefing if I can have some of that
coffee."
"Be my guest," I urged him, chomping away.
As I went along, I told him of my experiences and my the-ories about the
process, the "bug," and all the rest. He listened very patiently, nodding
sympathetically and asking an occasional relevant question, but otherwise
not interrupting my tale and my theory until I was done. I felt very proud of
myself, very sure, and I wanted to hear how brilliant I was from him.
"So where's the evil mad scientist Madoc during all this?" he asked me in his
clinical voice.
"Huh? Here, I suppose..."
"If so, he'd be in your brain, and I didn't sense any dualities nor measure
them. You yourself never woke up, and the readouts and interconnects were
normal."
"Les, that can't be virtual reality! I don't care if Madoc ceased to exist or
was in limbo or whatever, but there isn't enough computer capacity in the
known universe to account for that level of detail."
"I agree, but it works and it is virtual reality, not interdimensional
anything.
Cory, that box is actually one of the simplest ones. It's a program. I
haven't the qualifications to know a thing about it, but I
do know that it came from a specific scenario that is written out and all of
the stages are clearly and carefully documented. Sort of the Marquis de Sade
in the
Playboy Mansion with unlimited love slaves. It is fiction. All of it. Fiction
plus all of the experiences and feelings of all those who have used it before
you."
"I I just can't accept that. I can accept that it looks like that, but..."
"It's more than that. You want to know where Madoc came from? The computer
flagged us that you were putting in a re-quest for a logical background and
that it didn't have suffi-cient data to build or provide one. I
watched Dan and three assistants two of them young women, I might add create [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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