‘That’s amazing,’ Dumpy said quietly. ‘And to think, I actually managed to forget all that. I’d have thought it’d have taken three hours with a chainsaw and a jemmy to get all that stuff out of my head.’

Rumpelstiltskin nodded. ‘It’s all been very…’

‘Quite.’

‘And…’ Rumpelstiltskin sat up as if someone had just jabbed a needle up through his trousers. ‘Dammit, we were Japanese.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘We were, straight up.’ Rumpelstiltskin frowned, as if he was trying to grip elusive memories in the folds of his brow. ‘At least, part of us was. About the time the rest of us was playing cowboys. Something suddenly went wrong, and we were…’ He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘forget that. Must’ve been imagining it. For a moment there, though, I could have sworn — OH, JESUS, LOOK OUT!’

‘Look out!’ is, of course, a particularly useless form of warning, because it’s so vague. It can even be counterproductive, since your immediate reaction on hearing it is to look round. If the source of danger is in front of you and closing in very fast, it can be absolutely disastrous.

‘NOOooo!’

In retrospect it was all Mr Nikko’s fault. At a time when young Mr Akira should have been concentrating a hundred per cent on steering the long wooden bench they were using as a makeshift canoe, Mr Nikko had been telling him all about the hypothesis that so long as you’re truly as one with the boat, the direction you actually point the rudder in is irrelevant, since in the higher reality all places are one and the same anyway, and what really counts is not arriving but being in a state of harmonious travel towards (or away from; makes no odds) one of the infinite aspects of the place you’d wanted to go to. In consequence the bench hit the mop and nine people (seven samurai, two dwarves; calculation based on a simple head-count rather than being by weight or by volume) were catapulted into the foam.

Far away, something went Clickcrinklecrinklewhirrrr.

CHARACTERMERGE.EXE was doing its stuff; reintegrating that which had been delaminated, slotting back together the thin strips of what had been blown in all directions. It was like watching one of those shown-backwards sequences of a mill chimney falling down, where the long heap of scattered bricks suddenly seems to pull itself together and stand up as a solid tower once again.

So that was all right; except that where there had been seven samurai and two short plains drifters who couldn’t swim thrashing wildly in the soapy water there were now seven dwarves who couldn’t swim thrashing wildly in the soapy water and, not to put too fine a point on it, drowning.

‘Igor!’

Oh Jesus, now what? ‘Yes, boss?’

Treading suds like an up-ended paddle-steamer, the Baron raised his arms above his head and pointed in the direction of the laboratory. ‘Igor, did you remember to switch the power off?’

‘Me? No, I thought you…’

Zap.

At this point, with half the protagonists drowning and all of them, drowning or not, suffering the effects of a million volts getting loose in a hallful of soapy water, Mr Dawes decided that enough was enough.

When he’d set up the domain, he’d guessed that something like this might happen: a combination of a systems meltdown and a virus infection, quite possibly deliberately introduced by his enemies in the company, very likely exacerbated by further mutations from within the domain itself. It can be rough in virtual fantasy. In cyberspace, nobody can understand you when you scream.

So he’d built in a last-ditch save-all defence mechanism, a digital equivalent of the system that floods a ruptured compartment in a submarine or an airliner with instantly drying foam. That’s where the suds motif had come from, in fact; at the time it had struck him as a piquant little play on themes.

He hadn’t planned on being trapped inside when it went off.

But that wasn’t a serious problem. All he had to do to get out of trouble was what he in fact did — Which was to reach out four inches to his left, feel for the power socket and pull out the plug.

‘That’s it, is it?’ Carl said, clearly disappointed.

Mr Dawes sighed. His definition of suffering fools gladly was giving them a little wave of commiseration as the man in the black hood kicked away the stool from under their feet.

‘What were you expecting, exactly?’ he said. ‘Lethal feedback? All of us trapped the wrong side of the screen and looking for something big and heavy to break the glass with? Grow up, son; and while you’re at it, get a life. It’s only a game.’

‘But…’ Carl held his peace, albeit unwillingly. Not all that long ago, he was sure, he’d been a little wooden puppet, and then a huge humanoid monstrosity with a bolt through his neck; he could remember it all as clearly as if it were yesterday; except that he’d been up all the night before last and had spent yesterday fast asleep. Now he thought about it hard, he couldn’t remember a thing.

They had rematerialised in an office. It was a nice office. It was the sort of office God would have liked to have if only He’d had as much money as Mr Dawes. The Seven Years War was fought to decide who owned an area rather smaller than the square of carpet under Mr Dawes’s desk.

‘In fact,’ Mr Dawes went on, as he lit a cigar the size of a giant redwood, ‘it’s all quite simple.’ Back here, he was quite definitely twenty-nine; a youngish, shortish twenty-nine, the baby-faced sort that gets exceptionally good value out of each razor-blade. Such a small man behind such a big desk; the bizarre incongruity of it made some of the special effects Sis’d seen on the other side of the looking-glass seem positively mundane. ‘There were these guys. They used to be on the board of Softcore till quite recently.’

‘How recently?’ Sis interrupted. Mr Dawes grinned and glanced at his watch.

‘About three minutes ago,’ he replied. ‘Anyhow, they had the same dumb idea about how the domain works as your kid brother here. They thought I could be stranded there permanently.’

‘Gosh,’ Sis said. ‘How silly.’

The door opened, and a secretary brought in the coffee. A jug and three cups.

‘Quite,’ Mr Dawes said. ‘So I stranded them there instead.’

Sis spilt hot coffee down her front. ‘But I thought you said it was all just a game,’ she stuttered. ‘Not for real at all, you said.’

Mr Dawes shrugged. ‘There’s real,’ he replied airily, ‘and then again, there’s real. You want to know how real it is, you go down to the ninety-eighth floor and look for Eileen Suslowicz, George McDougall and Neville Chang. If you can find them,’ he added, stirring his coffee, ‘I’ll give you the company.’

Sis thought for a moment. ‘Snow White,’ she said.

Mr Dawes nodded. ‘That was Eileen. George and Neville were the Grimm boys. You run across them?’

Sis nodded. ‘The wick— sorry, Tracy said they weren’t from inside the, um, domain.’

‘Tracy’s a good kid,’ Mr Dawes said, with a faint hint of fondness in his voice; the sort of slightly mellow tone you might expect from the head of Strategic Air Command talking about his favourite warhead. ‘On reflection — sorry, no pun intended — maybe I should have told her more about what was going on inside the corporation. But then she’d have been worried, afraid she couldn’t handle it herself. Much better she thought they were only pretend people.’

‘I see.’ Sis made a quick inventory on her fingers. ‘So there’s the three bad guys—’

‘Not bad,’ said Mr Dawes. ‘Misguided.’

‘The three misguided guys,’ Sis corrected, ‘and Tracy, all still stuck down there. That’s four real people—’

‘Five, actually. There’s also our chief accountant. But he prefers it down there. Reckons he gets far more work done. He’s a very sad man. You met him, yes?’