Dan and I threw ourselves into it headlong, trolling the Net for address lists of Mansion-otakus from the four corners of the globe, spreadsheeting them against their timezones, temperaments, and, of course, their Whuffie.
“That’s weird,” I said, looking up from the old-fashioned terminal I was using—my systems were back offline. They’d been sputtering up and down for a couple days now, and I kept meaning to go to the doctor, but I’d never gotten ’round to it. Periodically, I’d get a jolt of urgency when I remembered that this meant my backup was stale-dating, but the Mansion always took precedence.
“Huh?” he said.
I tapped the display. “See these?” It was a fan-site, displaying a collection of animated 3-D meshes of various elements of the Mansion, part of a giant collaborative project that had been ongoing for decades, to build an accurate 3-D walkthrough of every inch of the Park. I’d used those meshes to build my own testing fly-throughs.
“Those are terrific,” Dan said. “That guy must be a total fiend.” The meshes’ author had painstakingly modeled, chained and animated every ghost in the ballroom scene, complete with the kinematics necessary for full motion. Where a “normal” fan-artist might’ve used a standard human kinematics library for the figures, this one had actually written his own from the ground up, so that the ghosts moved with a spectral fluidity that was utterly unhuman.
“Who’s the author?” Dan asked. “Do we have him on our list yet?”
I scrolled down to display the credits. “I’ll be damned,” Dan breathed.
The author was Tim, Debra’s elfin crony. He’d submitted the designs a week before my assassination.
“What do you think it means?” I asked Dan, though I had a couple ideas on the subject myself.
“Tim’s a Mansion nut,” Dan said. “I knew that.”