Holy shit!
"Hey!" Huynh shouted. "The Hacek bums have stolen GenGen equipment!" And now that he looked closely at the other side, he recognized fellow employees! There was Katie Rosenbaum. She waved her battle axe and leered at him.
Rosenbaum — > Huynh:
He'd had lunch with Katie and her friends only yesterday. He knew there were Hacek sympathizers in regulomics, so of course his crew had kept their plans under wraps. And all the while the treacherous Hacekeans had been doing the same!
Dangerous Knowledge continued its merry dance through the spider troops, mocking the Scoochis' surprise. It shouted, "Indignant, be ye now, wee Huynhling? Could it be ye just cheated with too little imagination? What ye brought is old and slow, well matched to the petty concept of your imagery!"
The art behind Dangerous Knowledge was astoundingly good, without precursors. But whoever was pulling the strings was even more impressive, certainly a world-class professional actor. For a moment the Scoochi ranks wavered and their mob of virtual supporters began to melt away. In the view from above, Huynh saw still more Hacekeans piling up around the other sides of the library. If the balance shifted too far, the Scoochis would end in humiliation and defeat.
Then Sheila Hanson's voice came loud on the public venue, audible across the entire participating world. "Look! The Greater Scooch-a-mout!"
Behind Huynh, one of the forklift mechs stirred to life. Ah! That was just the thing Huynh should have thought to do. Thank goodness Sheila was on the ball.
The forklift stepped forward as delicately as could be imagined for a machine that was twelve feet tall, with a center of gravity that now was over six feet up. It certainly wasn't running autonomously, but he hadn't thought Sheila could drive it this well.
Its foot-platters descended slowly, giving humans and chirps and sal-sipueds plenty of time to clear out of the way. It was impressive, but it was just a forklift. Then Huynh realized he was still watching it with his driver's view. Meshing with the belief-circle view it was —
Sheila had morphed the blue ioniped into something even more spectacular than Dangerous Knowledge. Now it was the Greater Scooch-a-mout, the most popular of the Scoochi critters. In its short career, the Greater Scooch had been the subject of refurbishments, spinoffs, spinups, mergers, and attempted government takeovers. It was the maximum hero to millions of schoolchildren across the poorest lands of Africa and South America, the champion of little people improving their place in the world. And this vision of it, tonight, topped everything in sight.
What's more, this vision, tonight, had four tons of haptic truth clunking along inside.
The Greater Scooch-a-mout reached the edge of the Scoochi lines, and advanced into spider-bot territory. Now it moved fast , as fast as its stabilizers and motors would carry it. Whoa, who is driving that thing ? It danced through the Hacek robots and bellowed insults at Dangerous Knowledge.
Knights and Librarians, pofu-longs and dwelbs and baba llagas — everybody on both sides went wild. Special effects blossomed in the air above them. And then the shouting got even louder. The robots surged into combat. Huynh looked at the melee of robotic special effects. Mega-munches and xoroshows were coming out from the bushes; Sheila was throwing their reserves into the maw of battle.
This mech battle was real! When the Greater Scooch-a-mout tap-danced on the backs of spider bots, fragments of carapace and leg flew into the air. In his technician's view he could see damage reports. Twenty regu-lomics spiders were listed as "nonresponsive" on the lab's real-time roster. Dozens of his tweezer bots were destroyed. Three of the sample carriers had lost mobility.
Huynh — > Hanson:
Sheila was at the other end of the front. It looked like she was trying to get the robots to advance into the Knights and Librarians. On Tim's end, the Greater Scooch-a-mout had already accomplished some of that by dancing toward the edge of the real human players.
Hanson — > Huynh:
His coworkers and the virtual thousands pushed forward. In the network view… jeez, GenGen was getting coverage like you couldn't pay for, better than in the twentieth century when millions were forced to watch just what the few had decided was Important. There were backbone routers in the UCSD area that had run out of capacity! That wouldn't last long, since there were endless ad hoc routers and dark fiber everywhere. But the whole world was here tonight.
Step by step, the Scoochis advanced.
"We want our floor space!"
"We want our library!"
"And most of all, we want our REAL books!"
Belief circles normally competed from within, based on their own popularity. Here, tonight, was a grand exception: belief circles fighting each other directly for attention and respect. In minutes they might burn up months of creativity, but reach an audience beyond all their earlier dreams.
And whoever was driving the Greater Scooch-a-mout chatted with Huynh directly:
Greater Scooch-a-mout — > Lesser Scooch-a-mout:
Okay! Huynh fired up the other forklift. He often dreamed of kicking ass with one of these monsters. He walked carefully through friendly lines, drawing the smaller robots along behind him. From somewhere across the world, Scoochi artists draped the forklift every bit as brilliantly as the Greater Scooch-a-mout. But this vision was mercurial as smoke: Huynh's forklift was tricked out as Mind Sum, the ambiguous spirit that sometimes helped Scooch-a-mout when enemies were at their wiliest. Its vapors both lagged and led the real device. Dozens of helpers and helper programs made sure that the effect was always in place. The forklift's hull was dark composite plastic. Unless you looked carefully in the real view, you couldn't be sure just where the robot might really be.
Tim Huynh took advantage of all this, stomping like a steel mist across the bottish battle zone, high-fiving the Greater Scooch-a-mout… and treading with ambiguous location toward the Knights and Librarians. The Scoochi chant boomed from the forklift's speakers:
"We want our floor space!"
"We want our library!"
"And most of all, we want our REAL books!"
The advance was a combination of beauty, surprise, and physical intimidation. The Hacek forces fell back and Huynh's chirps and salsipueds hustled forward to claim new ground. But Katie Rosenbaum's critters still outnumbered them and were far more agile. The spider bots raced backwards, keeping a battle zone between the contending human forces.
Smale — > Night Crew:
As Huynh walked forward behind his forklift Mind Sum, he was also looking down from above and tracking the reviews. There were more than a hundred million people watching what the two belief circles had created. Not quite a game, not quite a work of art, this was a contest where you won with imagination and calculation and impudence. So far, the world thought that the two sides were matched as to imagination, but the Scoochis were way ahead on calculation and impudence. They had created real physical destruction — all around and among real humans!
Yard by yard, the battle moved round the library. The Scoochis now occupied parts of the south esplanade, the principal axis of the campus. On the roads around campus, cars were bringing people from all over town, the physical counterpart of the far more numerous virtuals. Forty percent of the backbone routers were saturated. The audience had surged past two hundred million. Hundreds of thousands were players, tricked out with new imagery from the depths of Hacek and Scoochi design. The participants, real and virtual, spread out around the central hub that was the university library. Seen from journalist viewpoints a thousand feet up, the conflict looked like a strange spiral galaxy, its arms glowing the brightest where the battle was the fiercest.