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liberties, starting a collection of snide remarks from the numerous movies she watched.
    Here I need to finally mention television, a.k.a. the zombie box, the invention of which had shattered AlterWorld just as much as the arrival of tobacco. While regular players couldn't care less about it, television had produced a nostalgia epidemic among the permas, forcing them to stare for hours at poor-quality holograms.
    Some could finally catch up with the latest soccer championship, others gorged on the recent Hollywood blockbusters while yet others revisited good old comedy flicks.
    I, too, had been forced to install three public-access 3D boxes in the castle's halls. In the evenings, Harlequin and his crew lodged themselves in the Small Hall watching all sorts of cartoons till the early hours. Sometimes their noisy goblin crowd would dissolve into a howling protest which meant that the Hell Hounds were back from their daily hunt and in for their nightly dose of Pluto with whom they identified with all the passion of their infernal hearts.
    The fight over the right to watch TV ended predictably every time, with the slapping sounds of powerful paws and the scared patter of tiny goblin feet. Then later in the night when everyone was fast asleep, the zombie box would go on again, filling the castle with the sounds of a scratchy old-fashioned soundtrack,
     
    Winnie the Pooh,
    Winnie the Pooh,
    Tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff;
    He's Winnie the Pooh,
    Winnie the Pooh,
    Willy nilly silly old bear...
     
    No points for Lurch's telling me who it was sitting there, sniffling his sad nose and wiping his eyes with those fluffy ears of his.
    As I looked at the ludicrous invention in the light of day, I somehow didn't believe the Admins had anything to do with this steampunk monster. The machine was a tiered concoction of complex artifacts, biomagical devices, and spells woven into multilevel structures. Each of its parts was quite functional in its own right, be it the infocrystal playback unit, the illusion-forming circuit or the necrochains of zombie group controls. This was exactly what a magic machine would look like, had someone decided to get one over on the admins by building it himself. And as all our attempts to contact the world's administration had been futile for quite a while, it meant that Dimka Khaman wasn't the only genius crafter around.
    Our two worlds seemed to be parting their ways like ships on a virtual sea. The last passengers jumped on board in a desperate hurry not to get left behind. The command bridge was deserted as the last of the admins had already lowered a life boat and were rowing away frantically, trying to put as many miles between us and themselves as they still could. Actually, the opposite scenario could have been also true. The entire top management could have already been here on board, busy welding up hatches and bulkheads trying to insulate their VIP cabins from our third-class deck. Not a very clever move, was it, guys? If we indeed were looking at an eternity, we had plenty of time to check the ship's every nook and cranny for our ex-puppeteers. Then they'd better pray our grudge had subsided somewhat, otherwise we'd remember every tear shed in the torture basements that had flourished with their unspoken permission.
    But I digress.
    Back to the subject, the very idea of copying the video stream to an infocrystal was quite original. Illusion casting was entirely the enchanters' domain. They'd long since taken over the market in 3D portraits, complexity being no object. They had tried to do the same with video streaming. Having found a suitable double functionality in the IRL-to-virtuality personal message system, they attached a small video to the message, sent it, then digitized the result. Easy money.
    As if! Apparently, our internal interfaces had a very limited memory. All those archived messages, maps and screenshots were small fry compared to a 900 Gb 3D-ray movie. Interestingly, the