Eagle Strike

panic and claustrophobia to fade away. Then he looked up.
    He was kneeling on a straw-covered floor in a room that was bathed in yellow light. Three of the walls seemed to have been built with huge blocks of stone. Blazing torches slanted in towards him, fixed to metal brackets. Gates at least ten metres high stood in front of him. They were made out of wood, with iron fastenings and a huge face carved into the surface. Some sort of Mexican god with saucer eyes and solid, blocklike teeth. Alex had seen the face before but it took him a few moments to work out where. And then he knew exactly what lay ahead of him.
    He knew how Cray had programmed pain synthesis into his game.
    The gates had appeared at the start of Feathered Serpent, the game that Alex had played in the Pleasure Dome in Hyde Park. Then it had been a computerized image, projected onto a screen—
    and Alex had been represented by an avatar, a two-dimensional version of himself. But Cray had also built an actual physical version of the game. Alex reached out and touched one of the walls.
    Sure enough, they weren‟t really stone but some sort of toughened plastic. The whole thing was like one of those walk-throughs at Disneyland …an ancient world reproduced with high-tech modern construction. There had been a time when Alex wouldn‟t have believed it possible, but he knew with a sick certainty that once the gates opened, he would find himself in a perfect reconstruction of the game—and that meant he would be facing the same challenges. Only this time it would be for real: real flames, real acid, real spears and—if he made a mistake—real death.
    Cray had told him that he had used other “volunteers”. Presumably they had been filmed fighting their way through the various challenges; and all the time their emotions had been recorded and then somehow digitally transferred and programmed into the Gameslayer system. It was sick.
    Alex realized that the darkness of the underground passages hadn‟t even been part of the real challenge. That began now.
    He didn‟t move. He needed time to think, to remember as much as he could about the game he had played at the Pleasure Dome. There had been five zones. First some sort of temple, with a crossbow and a sword concealed in the walls. Would Cray provide him with weapons in this reconstruction? He would have to wait and see. What came after the temple? There had been a pit with a flying creature: half butterfly, half dragon. After that Alex had run down a corridor—
    spears shooting out of the walls—and into a jungle, the home of the metallic snakes. Then there had been a mirror maze guarded by Aztec gods and finally a pool of fire, his exit to the next level.

    A pool of fire. If that was reproduced here, it would kill him. Alex remembered what Cray had said. The comfort and the quiet of death. There was no way out of this madhouse. If he did manage to survive the five zones, he would be allowed to finish it by throwing himself into the flames.
    Alex felt hatred well up inside him. He could actually taste it. Damian Cray was beyond evil.
    What could he do? There would be no way back through the tunnels and Alex wasn‟t sure he had the nerve even to try. He had only one choice, and that was to continue. He had almost beaten the game once. That at least gave him a little hope. On the other hand, there was a world of difference between manipulating a controller and actually attempting the action himself. He couldn‟t move or react with the speed of an electronic figure. Nor would he be given extra lives.
    If he was killed once, he would stay dead.
    He stood up. At once the gates swung silently open, and there ahead of him was the temple that he had last seen in the game. He wondered if his progress was being monitored. Could he at least rely on an element of surprise?
    He walked through the gates. The temple was exactly how he remembered it from the screen at the Pleasure Dome: a vast space with stone walls covered in strange carvings and pillars, statues crouching at their base, stretching far above him. Even the stained-glass windows had been reproduced with images of UFOs hovering over fields of golden corn. And there too were the cameras, swivelling to follow him and, presumably, to record whatever progress he made. Organ music, modern rather than religious, throbbed all around him. Alex shivered, barely able to accept that this was really happening.

    He walked further into the temple, every