"You choking or something? Need a Heimlich?" The programmer glanced at the BrainChild's stubbornly blinking status board. "You haven't shut that thing down yet, Smith?"

"No, I haven't." Ibrahim's had meant his voice to throb with barely-concealed anger. Instead, it squeaked just a little.

"Want me to look at it? Don't know why they don't have a programmer working on the BrainChild, anyhow. No offense. For a Warden, you're not bad with code, but you're still just a Warden."

"I swore the Oath. You didn't."

"Oh yeah. 'I swear allegiance to the Park, and to the entertainment for which it stands…'".

Ibrahim grunted, acknowledging the allusion, which he, Raver, and maybe – just maybe – Siraj over in records might have gotten. Under different circumstances, Ibrahim supposed he and the programmer might have been friends. Gone for pizza together. Watched re-runs of Warriors of the Fold.

Circumstances being what they were however, some degree of enmity was inevitable. Raver had been maintaining Murkworld's systems for nearly seven years. How it must have galled him to have Ibrahim working next to him. Not only the new kid on the job, but brought in with the sole purpose of shutting down the heart of the programmer's livelihood.

"Seriously," Raver continued. "What's the hold-up? I thought that all the access codes were in the manual."

"They are. A thousand of them - almost a hundred just for shutting the system down under all kinds of conditions. Killer virus attack. Volcanic eruption. Water leak in the staff washroom leaking into the datacore chamber at the same time a janitor is plugging in a floor polisher with a frayed chord. You know – everything. Problem is none of them works. Not one. I don't even get a proper error message. It's like everything I key in is dropping into a black hole."

"No error messages? That's not right." With a creaking of unoiled wheels bearing too much weight, Raver dragged his chair around the partition and peered at the corner of Ibrahim's dataport, which was serving as a terminal to the BrainChild system.

"Mind if I check it out, see if your communication channel's OK?"

Ibrahim weighed the risk of Raver straying into classified territory against the possibility of trying to work through a bad connection for the next twenty hours. "I guess so," he finally conceded. "But only if you swear not to go near the BrainChild itself. Just the dataport and the comm channel."

"You got it." Raver reached around him to punch the keys which would transfer control of the port from the archaic keyboard Ibrahim had been assigned to his own datapad and stylus. Then he went to work on the datapad, using the stylus as an artist would use a brush. Ibrahim grasped some of what the programmer was doing - the formulas he scratched onto the pad looked familiar (those that were legible enough to be read by the merely human eye). But when Raver ventured into the purely symbolic code so jealously guarded by the Programmer's Guild, Ibrahim gave up even pretending to get any of it.

With nothing better to do, he scooted around to Raver's cubicle and rapped on the programmer's datapad, calling up a planet-side view on Raver's dataport. A black speck crawled across the surface of the clouds for a few seconds, then disappeared beneath them. A shuttle, Ibrahim supposed, sent to ferry another load of guests out of the park. So small from that distance, but large enough, he knew, to accommodate nearly five-hundred people. He'd ridden one down to the Glory of the Ottomans world six years earlier. Then he'd been alone, and had felt like a child lost in a hangar.

From his own cubicle, he heard the stylus stop for a moment. "Well, that's not…. That doesn’t…." The scratching of stylus on pad resumed, then stopped again. The squeal of Raver's chair preceded the programmer as he popped his head around the partition.

"You've used this terminal to access the BrainChild system before, haven't you? It's got all the right permissions to get in?"

"Yes, yes of course. Just yesterday I ran a check on the input-output fields." A sudden conviction came over Ibrahim that he had somehow broken the terminal or, worse yet, the Park Management System itself. If he'd damaged the BrainChild before it could be brought down properly…well, he could only hope he'd have time to update his résumé before they fired him.

Raver's head disappeared as he turned back to Ibrahim's dataport. "It's just that your dataport's fine, and there's an open channel there. But nothing's coming back from the other end."

Something moved across the screen of Raver's dataport, and Ibrahim swung his attention back to the view outside. Though he'd only seen it out of the corner of his eye, he could have sworn - yes, there it was again. A ship, buzzing past so close to the asteroid that it appeared on Ibrahim's visual node as nothing more than a dark shadow. He didn't have to see the ship to guess at its origin - only one kind of maniac would fly something as fragile as a spacecraft moving at that speed that close to something as hard and unforgiving as an asteroid. For the moment, at least, Ibrahim forgot about the BrainChild, lost in awe of the madman piloting that ship.

"Bedu! Raver, some Bedouin's counting coup," he said, all the awe of his eight-year-old self, weaned on ‘Tainment Net spacepirates, in his voice. If Raver heard him he gave no sign: stylus flying across the datapad, the programmer had gone back to banging his head against the brick wall that was the BrainChild Park Management System.

The angular shadow of the Bedouin's ship swept across the dataport again. Ibrahim tapped at the datapad, cycling through the visual nodes which studded the outside of the Booth until he found one which showed the craft in proper perspective.

No doubt then that this was a Bedouin ship. It was a constant source of wonder to Ibrahim that the austere life of the nomad would produce the likes of one of those vessels. The Bedouin spent years in the unutterably deep gulfs between the stars, the monotony broken only periodically by planetfall on some frozen moon or shattered asteroid. Someplace distant or dangerous enough for the settled worlds to overlook and yet rich enough in water or ore to resupply the nomads' fleet.

But look at that ship! The Bedu brought himself around for another swing at the Booth, his craft illuminated by the guidance lasers of the asteroid's defensive cannon. Where the lasers struck they revealed a surface crawling in color. Crawling, not just seemingly, but really crawling: the writhing flow of those colors wasn't an illusion, a trick of the light. The exact composition of the substance with which the Bedouin coated their vessels remained a mystery to outsiders. Able to withstand the extremes of temperature and radiation, notoriously slippery when targeted by plasma cannon, and alive with movement and color, the material had never been recreated in any planetside laboratory. Nor had anyone outside the Bedouin community ever learned its exact origin, or the name of the scientist who had first synthesized it.

Muzzle-flashes flared across the surface of the Booth. Not plasma cannon, not against a Bedu. The death of that harmless daredevil would serve only to invite the retribution of his tribe, and the tiny ship was clearly a short-range planet-hopper, which meant the rest of the Bedu's clan must be within easy striking distance. For now, at least, the asteroid would be trying to paint the annoying little ship with swarmer beams, designed to disable, not destroy it, to allow for boarding.

"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit!"

Only Raver's voice speaking in exactly that desperate tone could have torn Ibrahim away from the spectacle on the dataport. The dread he'd been feeling before the Bedu's run on the asteroid clutched his stomach with renewed force. He propelled himself around the cubicle partition and nearly collided with Raver as the programmer did the same.

"What? What is it?" Ibrahim leaned forward, craning his neck past Raver's bulk in an attempt to see the calamity on his dataport.

"Surge, I think. I don't know. I've never…. Some sort of surge through the circuits, and then…oh God, there's nothing there now! It's down! It's down!"

"Nothing there? What does that mean? What do you mean 'it's down'?" They’d kill him. Who “they” were he couldn’t say exactly – there were so many potential candidates in the Misr hierarchy, from his agent Ms. Jamjoom to Amjed Setna to the man, Namar al-Misri, himself. He'd not only given an unauthorized programmer access to the BrainChild, but that programmer had…what? Had broken it? Namar Al-Misri himself would pull the trigger. No, of course they wouldn't kill him. They'd give him a mop. A mop and broom, and send him off to clean the bathrooms.

"What does that mean, Raver?"

Raver didn't answer him: the external view on his own dataport held his attention now. "That, Smith. It means that."

Ibrahim again pushed back from his own dataport and scooted around the partition to the programmer's cubicle.

What he noticed first was the Bedouin vessel spinning out of sight - one of the Swarmers must have clipped it, probably shut down its external thrust sensors. He could see that Raver wasn't watching the Bedu, however. Raver looked beyond the kaleidoscopic Bedouin vessel to the blue-green swell of Murkworld itself.

Oh dear Lord, Ibrahim thought. Ya Rabb, ya-Arraheem, ya-Allah….

Night had fallen on Murkworld's continental mass. The lights of thousands upon thousands of simulated watch fires, campfires and primitive oil-fed streetlights flickered up through Murkworld's atmosphere, all anachronistically bright enough to allow Park guests to stay up much later than any self-respecting medieval citizen. Ancient Earth hadn't offered such a display to the heavens until the 20th century of the Common Era.

A circle of darkness marred that brilliant face. Ibrahim didn't need to consult the map-overlay which Raver had summoned up to know what lay at the heart of that darkness. The Mount of the Oracle and, at its heart, the BrainChild. Even as he watched, the darkness spread.

Black-out. Whatever had happened to the BrainChild had done some serious damage to the power grid. On the planet below, thousands of Guests and a million Sprites were swallowed by darkness.

When Ibrahim tried to speak, he could only manage a high-pitched squeak, followed by a staccato burst of hiccups. When he finally found his voice, it sounded to him like a cartoon mouse was speaking, words now, but still all squeaks and hiccups.

"What did you do, Raver? What did that?"

Raver's rasping reply was inaudible.

"What? What did you say?"

"I don't know," the programmer said. "Nothing. I don't think I did anything…."

"Then what…." Ibrahim's voice failed, so he merely pointed at the disaster on the dataport.

"I don't know, Ibrahim. I don't know…."

Ibrahim could almost feel hard ridges of callus forming on his fingers. Mops and brooms. For the rest of his life, mops and brooms.

He took a deep breath, then let it out with a shuddering exhale. There was nothing else for it, and no point in delaying. Ibrahim-the-Park-Warden-Smith did the only thing any good company man could do in a crisis this serious. He called home office.

He tapped the datapad to activate a voice channel and scratched in the access codes for an interplanetary transmission. When the datapad flashed to indicate the opening of a comm link, Ibrahim felt a sudden and nearly overpowering urge to vomit.

Instead, he started to talk.