The world was operated from a jagged shard of asteroid in orbit around it. The asteroid was marked on nav maps as Erickson's Moon, the sole satellite of one of three planets orbiting a star at the furthest explored end of the space-time Fold which ran like a river through the galaxy. To those who worked on the asteroid it was known as the Booth, an archaic reference to the control booth of ancient theaters, which had served more or less the same purpose as the asteroid: to control the complex web of technology, illusion and performance which ensured that the ticket holders got their money's worth.

On the planet, the single vast continent seethed with frenzied activity. Beautiful maidens were rescued or ravished, handsome princes the same. Elves fought dwarves and both slew trolls and goblins, barbarians slaughtered villagers, Crusaders stormed castles and conquered or were repelled by courageous Mujahideen. Powerful wizards seized kingdoms and established tyrannies founded on magic; weaker wizards sold spells on the cheap from shadowy street-corners. And men and women who had paid dearly for the privilege raced through it all, swords, daggers and magic staves in hand, slaughtering or saving as the whim struck them.

In the Booth, the artificial moon that looked from the surface of Murkworld like a glaring, malevolent eye, Ibrahim Wilson Smith sat in his cluttered cubicle almost smack dab in the middle of a long row of cubicles. On a keyboard so old its worn lettering could scarcely be made out, he keyed an alpha-numeric sequence copied from a manual so old it had actually been printed on paper, and hit the transmit button. The sequence, translated into the chain of "0"s and "1"s that had always been and would always be the language of computers, dropped through the asteroid to the twist transmitter, which translated the message encoded in electrons into a rapid series of minute distortions, "twists", of space-time. On the vast continent below, buried in the bedrock beneath a massive upthrust of volcanic rock known to the locals as the Mount of the Oracle, those distortions were received and retranslated into "0"s and "1"s.

On the planet, beneath the mountain, the ancient BrainChild Park Management System thought its deep thoughts. Waiting for its response on the asteroid above, Ibrahim actually started to believe he'd finally be able to finish work and get back to his quarters in time for Starsong 3000: Tariq's Lament.

The BrainChild stuttered out a final burst of garbled data, then fell silent. Received and translated by Ibrahim's terminal, that final outburst sounded very like a raspberry.

Ibrahim swore. Not as colorfully as some might have – but colorfully enough to make him blush a bit once his somewhat limited supply of profanities had run dry.

The BrainChild endured Ibrahim's cursing in stoic silence. A quick glance at his watch told him he'd been working on the blasted machine for just over five hours. That meant he had just under nineteen hours left in which to figure out how to turn the thing off. The problem, of course, (well, one of the many problems), was that no one had ever turned the BrainChild off before. The computer at the heart of Murkworld’s Park Management System had been discovered, not built, by Misr Entertainment, left behind by King Joseph Halverman when he abandoned ship – well, planet – with Misr’s band of mercenaries. Misr had managed to cobble together an interface that gave them access to the system – but once they’d figured out how to get the thing to make elves and fairies – and later simulacrums of actual historical figures – instead of the gigantic robotic death-machines of the Halverman Conflict, they’d decided to leave well enough alone for fear of breaking what they wouldn’t be able to fix. They reverse engineered enough of the system to build much larger, much slower, significantly less sophisticated versions on the other Parkworlds and abandoned further tinkering.

The schedule for the dismantling of Murkworld looked down at him from the screen of his dataport. Twenty-four hours to transfer the BrainChild’s functions to the military-grade systems on the carrier Lahab-u-Din, in orbit around the Park World, and then shut the system down. During those same twenty-four hours, the last guests in the Park to be ferried up to chartered pleasure yachts and sent Down-Fold to their respective planets, palaces and multi-billion dinar corporations. The guests safely out, the Sprites to be rounded up, placed in re-education camps and prepared for their new roles as servants of the Caliphate.

What the Caliphate could find for nearly a million Sprites geneered for a faux-medieval fantasy world to do in the civil service Ibrahim couldn't imagine. Tax collection, maybe.

He tried to imagine a broadsword-wielding Murkworld barbarian in the cubicle next to his. Too late he realized his mistake: as always, the thought of Sprites summoned up Paris, and the fur-clad warrior transformed in his mind's eye to something far more terrifying to Ibrahim, a tall man with auburn hair and eyes glinting with a dangerous mix of fanaticism and genius.

He felt his throat convulsing with a gulp of fear and swallowed in a desperate attempt to keep it down. He succeeded only in reducing the sound to a high-pitched hiccup.

Which sound invoked the Beast. With an angry squeal of straining metal, his neighbor swiveled his chair around, and Raver Singh leaned his candy-bar built bulk around the partition that separated their workstations.