Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  Filatov stretched the bottom of the sock open and lifted it to her head. She dodged out of the way and stepped back. "What's that?"

  "It's a hood! It goes on over your head and face." His irritation grew, Laura sensed, with each minute wasted on this joyride of hers. "Since you didn't choose to use the razor, the sensory feedback will be dulled somewhat by your body hair. But you still need to put it on. If I'm going to spend the damn resources, then you're going to get the full treatment, now [garbled]."

  Laura gathered her hair in back, and Filatov slipped the hood over her head. "Ow!" she said as it pulled her hair on its way down.

  Filatov kept tugging at it, however. It briefly covered her eyes, and then her mouth, but when he was through it fit her face like a ski mask. Her eyes, nostrils, and mouth were clear, and there were small holes over her ears through which Filatov stuck his fingers to adjust the lie.

  When he stood back satisfied, she looked up at him — every pore of her face, scalp, and neck pressed and pulled in an unnaturally confining fit. "Is this supposed to seem, like, normal?" she asked, the pressure on her lips distorting her speech. "Because I feel like a mummy."

  "Trust me, you'll forget all about it in no time. Think of it as the space suit you have to wear in your new world." Laura's stomach turned cartwheels inside her.

  "Okay," Filatov said, "these skeletons give you high-resolution feedback. The glove will, for example, give you even pressure and cool temperature to simulate immersion of your hand in water. They'll also lock up the joints at full inflation to create resistance like the version 3Hs. But the big difference between the old workstations and this one is that these floors, walls, and ceilings morph."

  "They do what?"

  "They reshape themselves. The surfaces are flexible, just like the grill of your suit, and elaborate servomotors change their shape. They bulge them out or suck them in to give their surfaces low resolution textures. To simulate a rock lying on the ground, the floor will morph into the general shape of the rock. But if you run your hand across it, the vibrations that feed back the rock's texture are produced in your glove. There's a crossover point between the walls' and floors' low-resolution feedback and the gloves' high-resolution tactile imaging."

  Laura didn't understand half of what he said. "Shouldn't I read a manual or something?"

  Filatov rolled his eyes. "The training course is five months long, with forty hours of classroom work for every hour in the workstation. My boss, however, said to put you in and turn it on, so that's what I'm doing. There is one thing, though, that you need to keep in mind for your safety. The morphing of the floor and walls and ceiling — it's real. If you're walking along and you see a pipe or something hanging low, duck! If you don't, you're going to come out of here with more bruises than you got last night when you fell off the roof. This isn't a toy, it's built for work. When these morphing units make something 'hard,' it's hard. Understood?"

  She nodded, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Okay, so what do I do?"

  "Whatever you want. Just be careful, that's all. Don't run. Watch your step. No horseplay. And remember — if it looks hard, then it's hard. The morphing is a simulation and it's real."

  Laura realized just how much the distinction between those two terms was being blurred. "Any questions?"

  "How do I get out of here?"

  "Oh, yeah. Just ask, that's all."

  "You mean speak the words?"

  "Yes. The 4C supports complete voice-recognition capabilities. It'll let you out if you ask."

  "What if it doesn't? I mean, you're going to leave me in here."

  "We'll come check on you. I promise."

  "Every ten minutes."

  "What?"

  "I want you to check on me every ten minutes. That's what I want."

  Filatov frowned, thinking only, she was sure, about the imposition on his schedule. He nodded. "Okay. Every ten minutes I or one of my people will check the monitors in the ready room."

  "You — I want you, not one of your 'people.' And I want you to ask me how I'm doing. I want to know you've been there and checked. Is that a deal?"

  Filatov nodded and shook her hand. She could feel almost nothing at all through her glove. The suit was powered up and active. Only the computer's simulation would feel real to her now.

  The door closed, squeaking as it shut tight. It was molded so finely into the wall she couldn't even tell where it had been. Laura decided it would be safer on the floor, so she sat cross-legged in the center of the cylinder.

  Nothing happened. It would take a little time, she presumed, for Filatov and his team to depart. She rested her chin on her clasped hands and heaved a deep sigh.

  "Just a moment, Laura," a woman said. Laura turned to see that the door was still closed. The sound system was very good — highly directional.

  It had been a woman's voice, but Filatov's two operators had been men. And she had said, "Laura," not "Dr. Aldridge." Laura opened her mouth to speak, but the lights went out.

  "Hello?" she said loudly.

  "Are you ready?" the pleasant woman asked.

  "Excuse me, but I don't think we've met."

  "It's me, Laura! I'm sorry you had to go to all this trouble, but you're gonna love it."

  The voice was natural. It was totally realistic, unlike the computer's speech on the virtual treadmill or even in the version 3H.

  This had to be some sort of joke. "Look, I don't know what to say…"

  "I sense some doubt in your voice."

  "Well…" Laura began, but she was beginning to wonder. Could it possibly be the computer?

  "Here we go."

  "Wait!" Laura said, sitting up straight and lowering her hands to the floor. "Okay, I'm ready. But nothing radical, okay?"

  "Cross my heart," the computer said warmly.

  With barely a hiss of static electricity from the walls Laura was sitting in a sun-streaked forest. She flinched and loosed an involuntary cry.

  I'm in a forest! her senses told her, but she knew it wasn't true.

  Her heart began to pound and she felt a prickly, sickening fear spread its grip across her skin. She jammed her eyes shut and buried her head in her arms, raising her knees into a quasi-fetal position.

  A bird chirped in the distance. A cool breeze brushed softly by.

  Laura slowly opened her eyes and looked down at the dirt and leaves in the shadows underneath her legs. She could feel the rough forest floor under the seat of her pants. [Unclear] blades of grass sprouted from the dark soft below. When the wind blew, the grass tickled the insides of her legs. The branches of the tree overhead swayed ever so slightly in the breeze. Their shadows gave way to the warming rays of the sun before returning to lay their cool touch on her skin.

  There was a fire somewhere. She could smell burning wood in the air — a sweet, familiar smell like ski villages in winter.

  "Laura," the sympathetic girl's voice came, "I know total immersion can be a difficult experience, but—"

  "I don't know if I can do this!" Laura interrupted.

  "Sure you can. This is your world. I've re-created it for you. But your reaction is totally normal. Some of the trainees never get past the stage you're in. What's happening is a major conflict between your senses and your reason. You know you're not in a forest, but your senses are slavishly reporting what they see, hear, feel, and smell. There's a titanic clash going on in the part of your brain where senses meet expectations. You've got to let your senses win. That means you've got to suspend your disbelief. You are in a forest, and the year is one hundred million B.C."

  "Oh! That helps! Thank you."

  The girl laughed, and Laura felt a smile creep onto her face.

  "Okay," Laura said. "I'm going to try to get up, but slowly, all right? No surprises."

  "No surprises, I promise."

  The forest floor spread out in front of her. There were trees whose trunks seemed to start aboveground instead of below, their roots exposed. There we
re simple weeds of every shape and variety all around. She raised her hand without thinking to scratch where the grass had tickled her leg.

  She looked up. The sky shone blue through the branches above her. The forest continued into the distance in all directions. Everything seemed normal for as far as she could see.

  She was sitting on the ground in the middle of a forest.

  "I can tell from your heart rate you're doing better. How do you feel?"

  "A little woozy," Laura replied. She reached out for the grass and brushed the palm of her hand over the tips of the blades. She remembered in a rush of emotion the Model Eight running its hand over the flowers on the hillside. It was exploring a world that was every bit as strange and fascinating to it as virtual reality was to Laura.

  "Do you feel like standing?" the friendly woman asked.

  "No… not yet."

  She again had the almost indefinable feeling of being outdoors.

  The smell of wood smoke came and went with the breeze. There was constant "white noise" — the everywhere and nowhere sound of the breeze through the trees. There was the warmth and coolness on her skin, which seemed to change from moment to moment. Sun, shade, breeze — they all affected temperature very slightly, and the suit recorded the minute variations with indescribable precision. All of that computing power just to create such a minor background effect!

  She felt guilty for using it — guilty and consumed by curiosity. A desire to know more, she thought, and the mobility to acquire that knowledge. Is this a lesson about mobility? To the computer, that lesson had seemed an important one for her to learn.

  She took one more deep breath and then reached out to touch a weed rising from the soil a few inches away. It bowed under the pressure of her hand, and she felt the detail of every blade as if her bare palm were pressing down upon it.

  What she wasn't ready for, however, was when her hand passed behind the plant… and disappeared. She pulled her hand back, then lowered it again on the other side. The weed obscured her hand.

  "Don't be frightened, Laura. I can explain. Since your exoskeleton is itself a high-definition television screen, it's relatively simple to interpose an object." Laura waved her hand behind the plant. It disappeared and reappeared at exactly the expected times.

  "The glove on your hand and the walls behind it display a seamless picture of the same object. By adjusting focal distances, it tricks your eyes into accepting the object's position in space. But I guess it would be better if I didn't teach you all the tricks. Total immersion is easiest to achieve if you allow an almost complete acceptance of your senses."

  "No, no, no. I don't work that way. I want to know that it's just an illusion. It makes me feel better, more in control, okay?"

  "Have it your way. Now, are you ready to get up yet?"

  "Do I have to?" Laura asked.

  "Here, I can help." The voice again came from the direction of the door. A woman stood there in full white body suit and hood.

  "A-a-a-h!" Laura exclaimed, pushing herself away from the startling apparition.

  The woman held her hands up in plea for calm. "Laura! It okay." She was small, slim, non-threatening. And it was the woman talking, not the walls and ceiling. The voice came right from her lips, which protruded from the white glove-like ski mask she wore.

  Just above the hole for her mouth were two slits for nostrils and two more for her beautiful green eyes. She was smiling pleasantly, calmly.

  "I'm your guide. I'm here to help you navigate in this world."

  She walked over to Laura, who had to will herself not to flee through the brush again. "I don't really need this," the guide said, pulling the hood off her head. Her luxurious black hair tumbled out, falling onto her slender shoulders in a perfect, full-bodied coif. She held her white-gloved hand out to Laura.

  The hand looked so real, hovering in three-dimensional perfection right before Laura's eyes.

  Laura reached up and grasped it. She was amazed to find it right where it was supposed to be! She let go, but then regripped the warm skin. The girl's hand moved freely, giving a little but then resisting the pressures of Laura's touch in a fluid and lifelike manner.

  Laura pulled herself off the ground, rising with ease. She and the woman stood eye to eye, their hands still clasped. Laura let go reluctantly, the feeling of contact with another person having been surprisingly comforting.

  "So, how did I do that?" the girl asked with a smile in her eyes. "Here's how. The wall moved in toward you," she said, pushing her hands out, palms flat, "from this side of the room." She pressed her fingers to her chest just above the slight rise of her breasts. "Here. Feel for yourself." Laura just stood there.

  The girl rolled her eyes and then reached out, grabbing Laura's hand and pulling it toward her. Laura jerked her hand back with a gasp — rubbing her fingers against her thumb where she had felt contact with the guide's soft skin. The girl tilted her head and patiently held out her hand. Laura slowly, tentatively, laid her hand in the girl's waiting grip.

  Laura's fingers were pressed to the guide's chest just below her throat. Her body was hard. There were bones under the girl's skin.

  Laura pulled her hand back, but only slightly. The guide still held Laura's fingers, staring back at her with twinkling green eyes. A mischievous, impish smile turned up one corner of her lips.

  Laura extracted her hand from the girl's, fighting a rush of lightheadedness and a tingling, prickly feeling that rolled in waves across her skin. She felt short of breath, so she inhaled deeply and filled her lungs.

  "So," Laura said, "the walls shape themselves so that I can feel things?"

  "They 'morph,'" the guide said, nodding. "You've got it."

  "Can I see… the wall I mean? Just like it is right now but without any picture?"

  The woman frowned playfully. "Oh, all right. You're the boss."

  She raised her hand into the air. "Get ready. Three, two, one…"

  She snapped her fingers, and the scene disappeared. It took a moment for Laura's eyes to adjust to the dim lights of the room. The wall in front of her was flat save for the bulge right at its center. The bulge was in the shape of a woman — her guide.

  "Not very attractive, am I?" the bulge asked. The "lips" appeared suddenly from out of the otherwise smooth shape of the girl's head and moved faintly around the indentation that was her mouth. Laura could even see the frown — pout, really — formed in the wall opposite her.

  Laura reached out and touched the woman's chest again, careful to avoid the swell of her breasts. Again she felt the bones in their appointed places. The black grill stretched under the tug of her fingers.

  "The finer detail — the subdermal skeletal features, for instance," the moving lips said, "are created by your gloves."

  The bright forest scene reappeared — Laura standing there with her fingers on the guide's chest. Laura stepped back to a more comfortable distance.

  "We're working on four-Ds that'll allow freestanding morphs — shapes that rise up out of the floor to at least human head heights. Right now, there's a minimum height-to-width ratio of about one-to-one. That makes it impossible to morph freestanding figures quite as lithe as our own." She modeled herself by holding one hand up and gracefully turning a full circle.

  "Who are you?" Laura asked.

  "I told you. I'm your guide."

  "What does that mean? Are you the computer?"

  "Mm-hm," she said, nodding curtly. "In the flesh, so to speak."

  "The same computer that I've been talking to? My patient?"

  "In color!" she said, holding her hands out to the sides as if proud of her handiwork.

  "Is this what you wanted to show me?"

  "No-o-o," she laughed. "I'm only a guide! I'm just a tool. All of this" — her hands waved to the forest all around—"is just a tool, Laura. A tool to aid in your understanding."

  Laura felt herself slipping into the world she knew didn't exist. She grabbed for the anchor of reality, try
ing to imagine the walls of the chamber around her. They were out there. She reached for them, took a step, then another, then another. She moved through the forest, stumbling like a blind woman and groping for, but never reaching, the walls.

  "You're just walking on a treadmill, Laura," the guide said from behind — half chastising, half sympathetic.

  Laura was torn between a desire to return to her world and the easy slide into acceptance of the virtual world. The world she knew didn't exist.

  "All right," Laura said, making her mind up — giving in to the illusion being fed to her. "What do I do now?"

  "Just follow me," the chipper guide said, approaching Laura with faint crunching steps. She put her arm around Laura, her body casually swaying to make contact with Laura's arm and hip — pressing warmly against her skin. Laura felt a suddenly extreme social discomfort from the overly familiar gesture. That could mean only one thing. She had accepted the new world as her own. Her senses had won out.

  Laura stepped away from the girl, who again invaded her space. The guide seemed likable but she just didn't know how to behave. "Okay," Laura said, too close to the girl to make eye contact, "what is it you wanted to show me? I know we're eating up tons of your processing power."

  "Oh!" the guide said, waving her hand dismissively, "Screw them. Just us two girls, right?" With a grin and a wink she bumped her hip against Laura's.

  "Where's that smell coming from?" Laura said, stepping away and turning to look for the fire.

  "Come on," the guide said, holding out her hand to Laura and waiting.

  Laura sighed. "Listen, I don't mean to be rude or anything, but I'm not much, you know, into touching or holding hands or anything. I'm sorry, is that okay?"

  "Suit yourself. Just watch your step." The guide took off.

  Laura followed slowly, eyeing the ground carefully. The floor of the workstation was uneven, just like the picture of the ground that shone from it. Both began to fall away very gently as Laura followed the guide downhill.

  "What's your name?" Laura asked. The girl turned but said nothing, the smile disappearing from her face. "I mean, what can I call you? Don't you have a name?"