"Just step out," Gray said to Laura as if the act was of no particular significance.
Laura shook her head uncertainly. She'd never imagined you could leave the bullet-shaped enclosure with its now-invisible walls.
Laura was petrified merely by the thought of abandoning the round island of the workstation's treadmill.
"It's easy," he said, coaxing her in a soft tone. "Just take my hand and walk normally."
She grabbed Gray's hand, which wobbled — not supporting her weight.
A slight feeling of warmth spread along her grip, and when she squeezed, Gray squeezed back. She had to force herself to remember she was really just looking at a picture of Gray's hand projected onto a screen. Her mind kept slipping into the warm bath that inundated her senses. She was succumbing to the illusion that was virtual reality.
Laura took a deep breath and held it. Moving quickly so as to trick the slower agencies at work in her brain, Laura stepped off the black surface. The tread beneath her feet moved.
Everything suddenly seemed disorienting as if she was on the slanted floor of a fun house. Laura flailed her arms to regain the balance she only imagined she'd lost. When her nerves settled, she straightened and looked around.
Laura was standing on the floor outside the chamber, looking back at where the walls should have been.
"This isn't happening," she said, shaking her head again.
"You're really still standing inside the workstation," Gray explained. "The floor underneath you is a universal treadmill. It'll move to keep you roughly centered in the workstation just out of reach of the walls, so you've got to be careful. The actuators are very sensitive. They'll start and stop the tread with the slightest of cues. If you don't want to go anywhere, just stand still. If you want to move, start walking and the treadmill will roll automatically."
Laura held one foot up to take a step, and nothing happened.
"Put both feet on the tread and push off," Gray instructed. She followed his advice… and moved through the world as she saw it.
She walked slowly among the rows of black pedestals, hardly noticing the rolling treadmill amid the feast served up for her senses.
"But… but I'm still in the tube thing, right?" she asked as she wandered through the room, taking hesitant baby steps.
"It's a workstation. And yes, you're still inside it. I haven't perfected teleportation yet."
Laura had to look at his face to see that he was kidding.
"Come on," Gray said, and headed for the door. It slid into the wall just ahead of him. He paused there and waved for her to follow.
Laura took another step, and the pictures changed around her. There was no flicker or jerk of the images. The edges were razor-sharp. There were no artifacts or imperfections to hint that Laura was standing inside a 360-degree high-definition television theater.
She took one more step, watching her three-dimensional perspective on the room change seamlessly.
"It's easier if you just start walking and don't think about it," Gray advised.
Laura swallowed hard. She turned and aimed herself at the open door beside Gray. Taking a deep breath, she took off. It worked.
Laura was walking through cyberspace.
She rammed her left shoulder into the doorframe and let loose a startled grunt.
"You okay?" Gray asked.
"Yeah." Her shoulder didn't really hurt, but she'd been surprised by the sharpness of the blow. The wall had felt hard, and her skin itched where the "contact" with it had been. That impact had not been with the wall, she realized. It had been with pockets inside her skeleton, which had filled suddenly with air on the computer's perfectly timed cue. But however artificial the source of the experience, the effect on her senses was complete.
Laura looked clown at the black skeleton that covered her upper body. She rubbed her arm with her glove-covered hand. She felt the movement of her hand across the skeleton's sleeve. The skeleton inflated membranes in a coordinated pattern on the inside of the thick fabric as the glove passed over. They rippled across her skin, interpreting her caress and artificially mimicking the sensations.
Laura frowned. "Why don't you make it so that people just walk through walls without getting bumped like that?" she asked Gray.
"It really hasn't been a very big problem," he replied.
Laura made a face, and Gray laughed.
"Now how did you know I made a face?"
"There are tiny cameras the size of a needle embedded in the workstation's walls. They make a three-dimensional topographical map of your body's position with a resolution right down to facial expressions." His lips moved perfectly in time with his speech.
Gray held his hand out through the open doorway. "After you, Dr. Aldridge."
Laura carefully edged her way between Gray and the wall and headed into the empty hallway outside.
She had left the room with the eight black pedestals.
"Come on," Gray said.
"Wait a minute," Laura replied, pausing to take another deep breath. "Okay, now I'm still standing inside the workstation, right?"
Gray pursed his lips and nodded, looking back into the room which they had just exited.
Despite the fact that Laura got the answer she expected, she felt highly unsettled. It was easier just to believe that she was standing in the hall outside the room with the white cylinders. The confusion of her senses and her expectations left her totally disoriented.
She tried to remind herself it was just a trick of the eye and to imagine the curved walls, ceiling, and floor that surrounded her [missing]. She grew instantly lightheaded.
"Neat, huh?" Gray asked, smiling.
Laura flashed a brief smile in acknowledgment, fighting the queasy feeling in her stomach. She turned to look through the doorway at the pedestal from which she'd descended. Where I'm still standing, Laura thought, taking a deep breath to feed her lungs, which suddenly felt starved for oxygen.
Her heart beat rapidly in her chest. "Do I have to, like, get back into that chamber thing to return to reality?"
"It's a workstation, not a chamber. And no. There are all kinds of macros you can run with hand gestures that execute simple commands no matter where you are in the world model. I'll teach you one if it'll make you feel any better. Signal a time-out, like in football."
Gray raised his black gloves and pressed the outstretched fingers of one hand toward the flat palm of the other, forming a T without quite bringing his hands together.
After hesitating a moment, Laura repeated Gray's gesture.
When her fingertips touched the palm of her glove, the hallway disappeared. It was replaced by the black screens and dim lights of the cylinder's interior lining, which crackled with static electricity.
Laura's head spun, and she almost lost her balance and fell.
She was standing again in the workstation. She had returned to reality — to the dark and lonely cell with its solid walls and hermetically sealed door.
"You want to come back?" Gray asked, invisible but sounding as if he still stood right beside her.
She hung suspended between the two worlds, her head swimming from the high-tech games being played with her senses.
"Okay, I guess. Yes."
"Then, just signal time-out again," Gray said.
Laura braced herself and raised her gloved hands to form a T. The walls again lit up with a crackle, and she was standing amid the bright lights of the hallway — Gray at her side where she'd left him.
The effect was stunning. She was overwhelmed by the radical change and had to close her eyes to battle the nausea. She bent over and grabbed her knees — a prickly, hot rush spreading down her arms and torso.
Gray spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. "Time-outs are useful when you have to go to the bathroom and you want to pick up right where you left off. It's kind of like the pause button." Laura kept her eyes shut, focusing on her breathing. "But the transition back and forth between the virtual and real worlds does tak
e a little getting used to." Laura opened her eyes and stared at the floor. "You're doing very well for your first time. A good number of trainees actually get ill. Some even drop out of the program after their first total immersion."
With great force of will, Laura stood erect and looked at Gray.
He was beaming with pride over his machine.
Just then one of the doors at the far end of the hallway parted with a hiss. Through the opening emerged two people — a man and a woman — engaged in an animated conversation. Both had heads shaved right to the skin. But there was something else that was different about their appearance. Their forms weren't quite as vivid or distinct as everything else in the virtual world that surrounded them.
"All right, you little shit?" the woman said, pausing in the corridor and taking a sip of her Coke. She swung her free hand slowly through the air her opposing fingers and thumb pressed together like a robot gripper. "The next time it pecked at my face…" she said and then snatched viciously at thin air with the pretend claw.
They laughed and proceeded down the hall toward Laura and Gray.
Both wore identical T-shirts and gym shorts bearing the logo of the Gray Corporation. The woman swabbed her bald head with a towel that hung around her neck.
"You gotta be careful!" the man said in a lighthearted tone.
"You'll get some animal-rights nuts circling the island with protest signs."
"Oh, the hell with them!" the much smaller woman replied, knocking him off stride with a good-natured bump of her hips on his.
They passed by Laura and Gray, completely oblivious to their presence.
"There must be ten zillion fish at the outlets of those cooling ponds. It's just that yellow one had an attitude problem."
The door to the control room slid open just long enough to allow Gray's employees to exit. The sounds of activity from the crowded room flooded the hall, then the door closed again to leave everything quiet. Laura turned to Gray to await his explanation.
"They're virtunauts," he said, "and now so are you. Congratulations."
"Virtunauts?" she asked. "Like astronauts but in virtual reality?" Gray nodded. "And they couldn't see us?"
"Of course not. We're inside those chamber things, remember? We see them; because the computer is displaying a model of the world on the walls of our workstations. The computer knows who and where those two people are and what they're doing, and it simply reproduces their virtual images for us to see."
"Man," Laura mumbled, "this is Peeping Tom heaven."
Gray abruptly turned to face her. "We take great pains to ensure privacy," he said, bristling at her offhand remark.
Laura curled one side of her mouth into a smirk and arched her brow. Her expression of skepticism about the success of Gray's measures was apparently faithfully reproduced in his workstation.
Gray looked away, frowning.
"So what were your two virtunauts talking about?" she asked.
"They've obviously been working in the new 4Cs down the hall," he replied glumly, jabbing his thumb at the room from which they had appeared. "Doing some maintenance on one of the pipes that return water back to the sea, it sounded like."
"Wait a minute," Laura objected immediately. "What do you mean doing maintenance? I thought they were in virtual reality just like us."
"They were, but these workstations were built for work. They were teleoperating a robot — probably one of the submersibles we use for offshore jobs. You see, the water that comes out of the cooling ponds is warm. A lot of algae and plant life builds up around the outlets and has to be cleared."
"Hold it!" Laura said, shaking her head. "What are you talking about? How do you get into one of those workstations, and end up cleaning algae off a pipe out in the ocean — the real ocean."
"Well, you and I are now in the 'simulation mode.' It's not interactive. We can just observe what's going on like invisible tourists. But if you set the workstation to 'teleoperation,' you can slave a robot off the motions of your skeleton. When you're wearing a full-body suit like in the 4Cs, for all intents and purposes you are the robot." He raised his black-clad arm in the air. "You lift your sleeve, and the robot lifts its arm. The computer takes care of the motion translations and the feedback into your skeleton from the robot sensors. It really doesn't matter whether the robot is ten feet or ten miles away."
"So they were just scraping away at a picture of a pipe in virtual reality, and some underwater robot was doing exactly the same thing for real a few miles away?" Laura asked, absolutely incredulous.
Gray pursed his lips and nodded nonchalantly. Laura took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly. "Okay. If you say so." She held her hands out and shrugged, letting her black gloves fall to her jeans with a slap. "What next?"
"Let's go for a walk," Gray said. He headed toward the door to the main control room.
Laura followed. It was more natural this time. She just walked.
The floor moved beneath her feet, she knew. But the only hint she had of that fact was a slight difference in the traction. There was a subtle lack of certainty requiring greater care like walking on a rug that might slide unexpectedly across a slippery floor.
The door opened in front of them, and Laura carefully edged her way through the opening. The control room was filled with the same people they had passed earlier on their way to the workstations. On closer inspection, all the people who were busy working at their consoles looked like the two "virtunauts" — not quite as realistic in appearance as everything else. The colors of their clothing were washed out. They even appeared faintly translucent.
"You want to fill me in on what's happening here?" Laura asked.
Gray turned to her, then looked out across the bustling room. "Oh, you mean the people?" he asked, and Laura nodded. "We kept getting run over. Since they can't see us, it was like bumper cars trying to get across a busy room, only we couldn't bump back. To fix the problem, we had the computer reduce the representation of animate objects to non-solids. Filatov walked right up to them, the ghostly image of the sweater he wore almost brushing against Laura before she stepped back. Filatov raised a hand and reached into Gray's torso. His hand disappeared into Gray's chest and reappeared as it protruded from his back. Filatov pressed a button on what looked like an ordinary thermostat mounted to the wall. Gray just smiled at Laura as he stood there impaled by the fuzzy image of an arm.
Filatov huffed and bent over to peer inside Gray's chest.
Margaret walked up wearing a heavy winter coat that she clutched tightly around her neck with both hands. "Well?" she asked.
"It's all the way up," Filatov answered as he rose from Gray the ghost.
No, Laura thought. In this world, Gray is real and Filatov the ghost.
"It's freezing!" Margaret burst out as she leaned over to take a look at the thermostat — her face also disappearing in Laura's chest.
"That cheapskate Gray doesn't care about anything but his precious computer!" Filatov said.
Gray winced and looked away as if from the discomfort of having overheard the complaint. He reached up and tapped both ears with his fingertips — a gesture Laura thought highly unusual.
Margaret rewrapped herself even more tightly in the coat and said, "You can damn sure bet his house isn't forty-two goddamn degrees."
"Let's go," Gray said and headed toward the duster. Laura lingered.
Filatov smiled at Margaret. "I know how to make you warm," he said in a thickly seductive voice.
Laura gasped and said, "Oh my God."
"No-o-o," Margaret replied in playful outrage, grinning broadly and looking around to confirm they were alone.
Laura rushed to join her departing guide. "Mr. Gray," she said, but he ignored her. "Mr. Gray!" she called out, finally catching up with him and tapping him on the shoulder.
He spun around to face her. "I try to respect privacy!" he said as if she had just lambasted him.
"I didn't say anything!"
"Wai
t." He raised his fingers to tap his ears again. "I muted the sound. What did you say?"
Laura had intended to comment on the game of chase played by the two lovers — Filatov, the pursuer, and Margaret, the pursued.
"Nothing," she said instead.
"Here, let me show you this," Gray said, and he turned.
Behind his back Laura tapped her fingertips to her ears. Nothing seemed to happen. She could still hear the hum of noises in the control room.
Gray walked over to a door labeled "Women's Rest Room." He turned back to Laura and waited, an odd look on his face. "What?" she asked.
His lips moved, but no words came out. She heard every noise in the room but what he was saying.
"Oh, hang on!" she said, and she tapped her ears again. She looked up at him. "Now say something."
"Testing, one-two-three," Gray deadpanned.
"Cool!" Laura said with a grin.
Gray fought the smile that encroached upon his lecture. "I said go on in." He motioned toward the hinged bathroom door.
Laura pushed. The door felt hard and didn't budge at all. A large red ACCESS DENIED flashed in midair just underneath her hand.
She pushed again, with the same result.
"It's a complicated new world," Gray said. "The rules have to change with the technologies. You have to draw the line somewhere."
He turned to depart, but Laura grabbed his arm and said, "You push."
"What?"
"You push the door." Gray stood in front of her, unmoving.
Laura arched her eyebrows impatiently. "Give it a try," she prodded.
After hesitating for a moment, Gray pressed his hand against the door.
It opened a few inches. There was no blaring red ACCESS DENIED sign barring his way. He let the door swing closed again.
"Now why am I not surprised?" Laura said slowly.
"There's a difference between your access level and mine," Gray replied. Laura cocked her head, waiting. "I trust me," he said simply, then headed for the exit.
The climb up from the computer center entrance was difficult. In an attempt to match the picture of the stairs in front of Laura to the experience of walking up them, the treadmill was canted to the same angle as the stairs. The picture projected on the floor of the workstation had a translucent sheen superimposed over the steps, which was necessary given the treadmill's flat surface. The result was that the image of the ramp matched the feel of the flat tread up which Laura labored. She reached the top and almost fell when the slanted floor beneath her flattened.
Society of the Mind Page 18
