empty beer cans.
Mikey went back into the kitchenette and opened the refrigerator. “Want a
beer?”
Craig plopped himself down on the leather-and-chrome sofa. “No thanks.”
Then he saw what was on television and his jaw dropped.
A luscious brunette was squatting before a man who was hung like a horse.
The man’s pants were down around his ankles and the woman was completely
naked. The camera closed in tight on the man’s crotch and the woman’s
mouth.
“X channel,” Mikey said as he came back into the living room with a beer
in his hand. “Satellite feed.”
“Wow. I thought you couldn’t get those here.”
Mike smiled. “They’re up on the satellites if you know where to look.”
Craig watched the action on the screen some more. “Wow.”
“How’d you find me?”
Craig tore his eyes away from the television.
“The day you-uh-came over to my place. I got your license number.” He
shrugged. To any true system breaker the rest was obvious.
Mikey grunted. “Pretty cute. So what brings you here?”
Craig tore his eyes away again.
“You know Judith Conally?”
“No.”
“Well, I game with her and . . .”
Mikey grinned. “Is she a good fuck?”
Craig colored. “I never . . . I mean, I don’t know her that well.”
Mikey’s grin got even wider. “So if she’s not a good fuck why play games
with her?”
Craig stopped dead. That was the thing about Panda. He had a way of
derailing your train of thought. And you could never be quite sure when he
was kidding.
“Well, she’s in the hospital, see? She had a real bad accident. I’ve been
going to see her and sometimes she, like, talks, you know? Like she
doesn’t know what she’s saying.
“Anyway,” he hurried on, “she’s been talking about this world where magic
works and there are dragons and wizards and all that kind of shit.”
Mikey popped the top of the beer. “So?”
“So I don’t think it’s just a story.”
“Get real!” Mike took a hefty swig from the can and turned back toward the
TV. A skinny blonde with a haystack hairdo and basketball breasts was
being caressed from behind by a black man.
“No, listen man. She went someplace last year, her and a bunch of other
people. They were recruited at an SCA war and they were gone for maybe six
months. Everyone who went has been real secretive. It was right after
Judith came back that she started trying to write fantasy.
“And,” he concluded triumphantly, “they got paid in gold! I remember
Judith bitching about how hard it was to get it changed into money.”
Mike turned back to his visitor. “And you think they went to Middle Earth
or something?” he said contemptuously.
“They sure as hell didn’t go to Redmond, Washington. Microsoft doesn’t pay
its people in gold.”
Mikey turned back to the television. “Bullshit.”
“Wait, there’s more. They were recruited to, like, program magic. Over
there you can hack magic the way you can computers. Programmers are
super-wizards in that world.”
“And you believe her. This cunt’s wacked out of her mind in the hospital
and you still believe her.”
“I’m telling you it all fits!” Craig said desperately. “It’s gotta be
true.”
“It’s still bullshit. And even if it’s true, so what? What’s that got to
do with us?”
“Don’t you see, we can go there too!”
Mikey set the beer down. “Why the fuck would we want to do that?”
Craig stopped with his mouth open. In all his planning, in all his
imagining this meeting, that question never occurred to him. “Well,” he
said lamely, “it would be an adventure.”
Mikey snorted.
“There’s gotta be all kinds of treasure and stuff laying around. They paid
all those people in gold, man! And we’d be wizards. Super-powerful wizards
over there.”
Mikey stared at the television and said nothing. On the screen the blonde
was pistoning up and down on the black man. Her breasts were flapping like
tethered balloons, but not a strand of her haystack hair was out of place.
“So what do you want me to do?”
“I, uh, need help figuring out how to make the stuff work. I need someone