"All right. How are the personality programs running?"
    "Running fine, we still have everybody moving the way they're supposed to be."
    "Cameras running?"
    "Yup. Microtechnology's wonderful."
    "Everything's according to plan."
    "Let's go grab some coffee." They opened a twenty-mile-high door and went out.
    They had not yet noticed the blinking light indicating a break in the dome.
    Scott extruded the rest of himself cautiously, and I enlarged the hole—it seemed awfully easy, as if I was stronger than I normally am. Matter of scale, I suppose, since in reality I was only moving a few inches worth of material. The rest of us joined him on the outside of the world, blinking at the shift in perspective.
    "I will admit to being impressed," I said aloud.

[Aside: Two Scenes]

    We began the journey toward the computer banks. At the fastest speed I could muster it seemed to take forever, but we hadn't died of old age by the time we got over there. The keyboards were set into trays in the wall, designed to fold up and down. Only two were down, so we went to those, stopped a ways away to read the monitors. One board apparently controlled population units Delta and Epsilon, the other traffic patterns; didn't seem terribly useful. When the door opened we scattered for hiding places, which wasn't difficult at our size.
    "Everything's running fine on those, set the date... film date... gah, that's a problem. Hey!" he yelled to the other man, outside the room. "You didn't set the film date right!"
    "What?" a fainter voice replied.
    As he turned away, we all made it into the pocket of his lab coat. He crossed the room and opened another keyboard, tapped for a few minutes. "Film date, 27th. And all of this is feeds running properly, they should be receiving this in Boston just fine. Now that we've got the date set...."
    "Sorry about that," the other man replied from the doorway.
    We sorted ourselves out in the pocket, hanging on wherever we could.
    "You know, I was really hoping that I would spend the rest of my life without ever having to say that I feel like Daffy Duck under any circumstances," I muttered, for some reason unable to get that "Jack and the Giant Bean Stalk" version out of my head.
    "Don't talk about ducks," Thunderbolt replied grimly. "I hate ducks."
    "You know, I just love the marvel of technology," one man was saying. "They're editing this in Boston and everything, it's a computer-generated city. It's like playing with a giant toy."
    "I'm gonna kill you, too, but you're way down the list," Talon growled.
    "Calm, Talon, calm," I suggested. "We're all plenty upset."
    "All right, everything's set up in here," the giant went on. "Billy?" He pushed the jacket aside to reach into his pants pocket, giving us all a few moments of vertigo as we swung freely, and pulled out a vast quarter. "Heads or tails?"
    "Heads."
    He flipped it. "Tails. Looks like you gotta stay here and watch all of this. See ya later." We peeked out and saw that we were through the door and moving down the corridor at what seemed an amazing speed. We saw a door labeled Clean Room, and one labeled Janitors Closet, and then one labeled Offices, which we passed through. The guy took off his jacket and hung it on a peg, sat down and checked some more equipment.
    "Transmissions running fine," he muttered. "Everything's good. I always wanted to work in television, I just didn't expect this. Now, let's see individual scenes.... Did their PG-13 rating system hold? Yeah, they're in separate beds, good." We could see the scene from Thunderbolt's apartment on the screen. I winced. "Good, we can just run that unedited." The phone rang; the scene kept playing as he talked to the caller, but he wasn't paying attention. "No, no Billy's in there tracking that. I know there's supposed to be two people, but there's not enough work in there. Everything's running fine. Yep. Okay. Okay. Listen, Mr. Paulson, everything's working fine. There's nothing for you to worry about. All right. Yep. Oh, yeah, the security people? Yeah, they're on it. All right, I'll talk to you later."
    "I think that counts as proof," Talon announced. "As your teammate, as your partner, I'd like to take this opportunity to say 'I told you so.'"
    "Well, this time you actually have something approaching proof behind it, so?" Scott shrugged.
    "Let's go check the clean room out," I suggested, but Talon wasn't done crowing.
    "You all thought I was paranoid. You said 'he's not a spy.'"
    "Well, we knew you were paranoid...." Scott riposted.
    "Agglomerated MegaCorp doesn't contain the Toy Man? But no, I was right!"
    We heard a beeping noise outside.
    "Yeah Billy, what's up?" our impromptu transport asked.
    "We have some sort of a crack in the dome."
    "What?"
    "I'm thinking clean room, guys," Scott said more firmly.
    "All right." Not-Billy flipped through a manual. "You need to put a patch on that, make sure there's no light coming through there, double-check the programming, and... I have to contact Security? Why the hell would Security care about the fact that there's a crack in the... well, it's on the list."
    We took that as our cue to get the hell out. There was the Clean Room door. Huge, vacuum-sealed, with a keypad lock. At our size we could see that the 2, 3, and 5 had been used, but it might take a while to guess the code, and little emergency lights were flashing at intervals in the corridor.
    Up over the door was the vent system grid; they had to have air coming into the room, however filtered, and were maintaining slightly negative air pressure through the ventilation outflow shaft to keep out any dust. Of course, at our size, "slightly negative air pressure" meant a wind almost blowing us off our feet. We had to get through the wall of air, then the shaft bent downward and out of sight. According to our scale, it was about 250 feet away.
    Scott took Phoenix Talon's grapple and began inching a pseudopod along the corner of the vent, where the wind was slightly less strong. When he broke through the zone, the pressure difference was so great that he would have gone hurtling down the other way if Talon hadn't been holding onto his other end. Scott planted the grapple, and the rest of us began hauling our way along. They had to tie the rope around me, giving me a nice burn around my ribcage.
    "You really need to wear some more clothes, there," Talon remarked.
    "I'll kill you after the Toy Man," I replied pleasantly.
    At the other end of the vent we saw our huge bodies laid out, with IV tubes running into our arms and electrodes hooked up to some sort of machinery which was obviously transferring our consciousness into these toys.

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