Headcrash

by Bruce Bethke

  Gunnar hmmmed. “Let’s see: at one horsepower equals five hundred and fifty foot-pounds per second—”

  I shook my head. “Don’t bother with the math. It’s just, would you say I’m in the same power class as, oh, a locomotive?”

  Gunnar was befuddled. “What’s a locomotive?”

  Oh, mother, this was getting nowhere fast. “Last question. Any chance you could map a tall building into this virtual space? I’d like to see if I could leap it in a single bound.”

  “Hold on.” Gunnar looked away from me and started punching keys. “Okay, I can give you the White House, the Great Pyramid, or the Chrysler Building, all scaled to fit. Any preference?”

  There were times when I just could not believe how thick Gunnar could be. “Let’s try this again. Faster than a speeding bullet? More powerful than a locomotive? Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound? Does this suggest anything to you?”

  “Yeah,” Gunnar said. “A lawsuit. Now if you’re done dicking around, can we please move on to the final phase of the test?”

  Sometimes Gunnar was just no fun at all. “Yes, Mother.”

  “I heard that!” Gunnar grinned and went back to the keyboard. I decided having his smiling face in the upper right corner of my field of vision was distracting, and closed the window. For a half a minute or so all I heard was the clackety-clackety-clack of the keyboard, then—

  “NetLink activated. We should have—correction, we’ve got an ack. We’re connected.” Pause. “No unusual signals coming out of the interface.” Another long, tense, breathless pause. We’d figured, if the interface was programmed to do anything like broadcast a homing beacon, it was either going to do it in the first thirty seconds, or else it was going to wait for some as-yet-unknown trigger condition to be met.

  The thirty seconds passed. No warning flags went up. “Okay,” Gunnar said, “it seems to be stable. I will be unlocking your end of the link in three, two, one—” A two-meter circle of light irised open in the far wall, slightly above floor level.

  “I see it,” I said. “The portal is open. Now what?”

  “What else?” Gunnar grunted. “Go toward the light, Max.”

  I walked the first few meters, cautiously at first, then decided what the hey, as long as I could fly and it didn’t seem to cost me any energy, I’d go for it. Springing lightly into the virtual air, I spread out my hands before me and coasted gently toward the circle of light, exactly like—

  Like some guy in a cape, okay? Admit it. Haven’t you always secretly wanted to be able to fly like that?

  Oh, and a point of advice: if you ever do learn to fly, watch out for the suction around NetLink portals. I had a few moments of genuine terror there when I suddenly realized I was accelerating toward the portal, with all the control of a soap bubble going down a bathroom drain, and I didn’t have the least idea of how to veer off. I did a few flying somersaults and barrel rolls, started fluttering like a butterfly plastered on a car’s grille, and was maybe another half-second away from hitting my emergency bailout when—

  Pop! It was over, and I was floating ten feet above the crest of a peaceful virtual hillside, overlooking the Information Superhighway rushing by in the valley far below.

  “Well,” Gunnar said, “offhand I’d say this proves you can fly in Net VR, too.” I looked around, picked a promising spot, and swooped in for a landing. When I didn’t answer right away, he tapped his headset microphone. “Max? You there?”

  I winced and grabbed at my ears. “Yes, and for chrissakes don’t do that again! Ouch!”

  “Sorry.” He didn’t sound sincere. After a pause he added, “Since you’re probably wondering, I say we stick with our original test plan. You can fly around and move mountains all you want after we’ve finished debugging the interface, but for now, would you please try to be a little bit subtle and not go out of your way to attract attention?”

  “Yes, Mother.” I sighed heavily, and then with a snap of my very realistic fingers, summoned my virtual Harley Ultraglide back into existence.

  It looked flat. Cartoonish. Insubstantial. Too many simple planes, too many primary colors, too few of the fractal details of reflection and texture that make a virtual object seem real, if difficult to transmit over the Net in real time. I walked in a slow circle around it and realized the Harley wasn’t so much an object as an engineering drawing made animate in 3-D.

  “Get on the damn bike, Max,” Gunnar hissed in my ear. “We can remap the surface textures later.”

  “Yes, Mother.” I climbed onto the bike, started it rolling down the hill, and popped the clutch into first. The 1100-cc two-cylinder engine roared to life with—well, frankly, with a rather tinny and cheap sound, as befits an 11-KHz audio sample. I bombed down the hill, accelerating all the way, hit the drainage ditch at the bottom, and jumped the bike over three lanes of traffic to land in the express lane to the InfoMall.

  “Nice going, Max,” Gunnar muttered. “Real subtle.”

  I knocked the knock on the door to Heaven. The gorilla slid open the peephole. “What’s da passwoid?”

  Interesting. “Are you copying this?” I said to Gunnar.

  “Wrong passwoid, chump,” the gorilla growled as he slammed the peephole shut.

  “No,” Gunnar said, “I didn’t quite—Let me crank up the magnification on my end, and then let’s try again.” Clickety-clickety-click. “Okay. Ready.”

  I knocked the knock. The gorilla slid open the peephole. “What’s da passwoid?”

  The gorilla, I should point out, looked way different from the last time I’d seen him. Before, he’d always been a fairly ordinary cartoon gorilla, with a bowler hat, a bowtie, and an ill-fitting tuxedo. Now, he was a sort of fractured, complex, angular thing, with his old cartoon aspect painted in flat two-dimensional colors on one facet, and a twisted knot of rods, gears, and algorithms churning away on another. A third facet seemed to be like a splinter of an old video monitor, with lines of glowing green text scrolling by too fast to read.

  “Fascinating,” Gunnar said in my ear. “Either our door-beast has been redesigned by some deranged Picasso fan, or else…”

  “Or else what?” I said.

  “Wrong passwoid, chump,” the gorilla growled as he slammed the peephole shut.

  INFONUGGETS

  No, no, I can fight this, I can resist the temptation to… AUGH!

  “Max,” Gunnar asked, “do you know anything about Cubism?”

  I strained for the memory. “Why, yes,” I said at last. “I remember that it was a word I had to use in the essay question in order to get a C+ on my Art Appreciation final.”

  PICASSO

  Pablo, Spanish painter and sculptor, b. 1881, d. 1973. Now recognized as one of the premiere practical pranksters of all time, for his dumping of a pile of shipyard welders’ scraps in the center of Daley Plaza in Chicago and convincing the city fathers it was a “statue.”

  “Cubism,” Gunnar said, “was the name applied by art critics to the new style evolved by Pablo Picasso in the early nineteen hundreds. Derived from both the Post-Impressionist and Parisian Fauves schools, and following closely on the end of Picasso’s own Blue Period, the driving concept behind Cubism was the destruction of both the classical conception of beauty and the interpretation of Euclidean space through conventional perspective. As evidenced by Picasso’s 1906 work, Les Desmoiselles d’Avignon, as well as the collages of Georges Braque and the landscapes of Joseph Stella, the Cubist school attempted to illustrate through two-dimensional media a three-, four-, or even poly-dimensional—”

  And right about that point is when I screamed. “STOP!”

  Gunnar was puzzled. “Why, Max? All I was attempting to do was explain how the artist’s use of solidified space and abstract volume have provided the translucent structural units—”

  “STOP, GODDAMMIT! I will not have gratuitous lectures about Modern Art inserted into my story!”

  Gunnar tched. “I’d hardly call it gratuitous
, Max. After all, the ability to drop artistic references nonchalantly into casual conversation from time to time is essential to simulating the appearance of erudition, or dare I say, pretentiousness, which in turn is the hallmark of a truly literary—”

  “Gunnar?” I interrupted, in a voice much like Norman Bates discussing his new girlfriend with his mother, “I have a loaded .45 automatic in my hand, and if you do not cut this artistic crap right now and get on with the story, I am going to come over there and shoot your balls off. Is this clear?”

  .45 AUTOMATIC

  Specifically the Colt Model 191 1, designed by John Moses Browning, the engineer who also created the Winchester lever-action rifle and many other enduring designs. I’d give you his vital dates, but he’s not in the Noted Americans database. Obscure jazz saxophonist Zutty Singleton is there, but not one mechanical engineer. It figures.

  “Well,” Gunnar said, clearing his throat. “Offhand, er, I’d, uh, say this new user interface we’ve gotten from Amber has, ah, given you a multidimensional view of code objects, such as the door gorilla.” He gulped. “Um, on one facet, you’re seeing the conventional ‘front’ of the object, while on another facet, you are able to perceive the inner workings of the object, much as Ferdnand Léger’s The City reveals the Utopian control and—”

  I racked the slide on the virtual .45.

  “Right!” Gunnar said brightly. “On with the story, then. Let’s try a test. Summon the gorilla, would you?”

  I knocked the knock on the door to Heaven. The gorilla slid open the peephole. “What’s da passwoid?”

  “Look at the center facet,” Gunnar whispered. “I believe that bluish bar is the locking routine. Can you see where it connects to the audio pattern-recognition algorithm?”

  I was getting smarter. I nodded, but said nothing.

  “Good,” Gunnar said. “Now, try reaching inside him and tripping the lock by hand.”

  I tried it. I reached out with my virtual right hand, through the virtual skin of the gorilla, until my fingers were resting on the locking routine. Then I took a deep breath, steeled my courage, and exerted a slight pressure—

  Click.

  The gorilla snarled, but opened the door. I stepped through, into the a-grav tube, and ascended.

  “Gunnar?” I whispered, while in transit up the tube. “What the hell did I just do?”

  “Confirmed a theory, Max. I think I know how the interface works now.”

  After a few seconds, it became obvious he wasn’t going to say any more unless prompted. “And that is?”

  “An old UNIX system administration concept. Not used much anymore, because it’s so potentially dangerous. Max, you are going to have to be exceedingly careful. One reckless gesture, one thoughtless word, and you can do serious, permanent, damage to the fabric of collective Net virtual reality.”

  I flooped out of the a-grav tube into Heaven, went directly into a dark corner, and thought it over. “Okay, you’ve impressed me. It’s dangerous. Now what exactly did I do?”

  “You’ve been transformed, Max,” Gunnar whispered. “You’ve gained powers and abilities far beyond the reach of ordinary users. You can see things that no one else can see, do things that no one else can do, boldly go where no man has gone—”

  My patience was running out. “No shit, Sherlock. But what did I do?”

  “Max?” Gunnar said portentiously. “Brace yourself. You, my young friend, have become—

  “A superuser.”

  That took a few seconds to sink in. I straightened up, turned around, and walked out of my dark corner. “Sounds silly,” I muttered, for Gunnar’s ears only.

  “Of course it sounds silly,” Gunnar answered. “It’s UNIX. Everything about UNIX sounds silly. We’re talking about an OS with commands like chown, awk, and grep here, where you have to periodically kill demons to keep your system running smoothly, and where ‘zombie children floating in the pipe’ is a legitimate description of an error state. Hell, even the name UNIX is a joke. It’s called that because it’s a ‘simplified’ version of the MULTICS operating system, in much the same sense as a gelding is a ‘simplified’ stallion.” Gunnar suddenly stopped talking.

  It’s just as well, because I’d suddenly stopped listening.

  Remember Heaven? Remember all my loving descriptions of the people and the scenery, from back in chapter 5? Well, forget them. Because now, with my Superuser Codeview Vision, I could see the place as it really was.

  And what it really was, sad to say, was a Cubist nightmare. All the scenery, all the details, all the objects were fractured, multiplanar things, with their algorithmic guts exposed, like the gorilla. And the people? All those cool, happening people—the ones who were even real at all, and not just synthelic figments? They looked like a bunch of geek kids on Halloween. Glossy, flashy, chintzy costumes; rigid, vacuum molded, plastic masks held on by rubber bands. They swaggered around the place and roared and laughed like drunken morons playing pirates. Some of them couldn’t even keep their masks on, I noticed, and when I looked at them closely, I could tap into their data streams and follow them all the way back to the real-world person. The DJ in the dance room, for example: Rapmastah MC Ruthless. In the real world he was a skinny, pimply, seventeen-year-old white loser named David Berkowitz, and he was playing the house music from a rancid dorm room at a second-rate junior college someplace in outstate New Jersey.

  “This,” Gunnar said in my ear, “is really disillusioning.”

  Max? DON_MAC’s voice said in my head. Is that you? I shook myself out of disappointment, and swept the room, looking for DON_MAC. I don’t know why he was hard to spot. In a room full of poorly drawn cartoon characters, socially challenged misfits in cheap costumes, and wispy half-realized electronic ghosts, the gleaming chromium form of DON_MAC was suddenly, solidly, real. More real than he’d ever seemed before, in fact.

  “DON_MAC?” I subvocalized.

  “He definitely looks different,” Gunnar noted.

  Max? DON_MAC sent again. And Gunnar? This is strange.

  “Uh-oh,” Gunnar whispered.

  Gunnar? Have you finally gotten the hang of camouflage? I hear you, but I only see Max.

  “Open my window, Max.” Gunnar’s audio line went dead. It took me a few seconds to figure out what he meant, then I pulled down the video window that let me look “out” through the micro TV camera attached to Gunnar’s video monitor.

  Gunnar had disconnected his microphone and was frantically scribbling something on a piece of paper. He finished and held the paper up so I could see it. DON_MAC CAN HEAR ME? it said.

  I nodded.

  Max? DON_MAC telepathed again. Whatever this piggyback thing is that you and Gunnar are trying, it’s not working. I don’t hear him anymore, but now you have developed a video echo. You’ve got a contrail behind you when you move; if I was feeling ambitious, I’d measure the echo gap and use it to figure out how far away you really are.

  I closed my internal video window; the one that let me look at the real Gunnar.

  Better, DON_MAC telepathed. You still have an echo, though.

  “Lose the audio and video,” I subvocalized.

  Gunnar reconnected his mic and came back online. “But—”

  Lose it, Gunnar, DON_MAC thought. You’re making MAX_KOOL look like a newbie putz.

  “Okay,” Gunnar said. “But this means you’re on your own, Max. All I can do now is watch your biotelemetry.” With a final, peevish, click, I heard Gunnar yank his headset jacks out. For the first time since I’d started using the new interface, my head felt strangely—and pleasantly—quiet.

  DON_MAC lifted his chrome robotic body out of his customary chair and started navigating across the crowded floor toward me with surprising speed and fluidity of movement. “Hello, Max,” he said when he got within conversational range. His audible voice sounded just exactly like his telepathic voice. Stopping a yard short of me, he raised his huge right claw, and with whining servos, extended it to
wards me to offer a—er, handshake.

  “Welcome to the next level.”

  13: DOWN THE OUBLIETTE

  DON_MAC and I sat with Don Vermicelli, watching the parade of Cubist strangeness through Heaven and tucking into an absolutely exquisite cervella al burro. “I can’t believe this,” I said, around a mouthful of—whatever it was. I didn’t want to know. “I just can not believe this.”

  OUBLIETTE

  A dungeon with just one opening, at the top. From the French verb oublier, “to forget.”

  Don Vermicelli finished his glass of vino and set it down on the table. Bambi immediately leaped to refill it. Bambi, I could see clearly now, was without question male in real time—as was Thumper—but both of the Silicione Sisters were also clearly very confused about this whole gender thing.

  “I can’t believe this,” I repeated.

  “What?” Don Vermicelli responded. “That I also have the interface and am a superuser? Did you really think I would let Max Kool have something I did not already possess myself?”

  “No.” I shook my head and stuffed another forkful of the cervella in my mouth. “I can’t believe that I can really taste this virtual food! This is incredible! Delicious!”

  “Chew with your mouth closed,” DON_MAC suggested

  Don Vermicelli took another drink and set his glass down, “Ah, Max. Perhaps now you understand why I am what I am,” He leaned back in his chair—the hydraulic supports creaked and groaned—slapped his incredibly rotund belly with both hands, and let out a laugh worthy of Santa Claus. “In the real world, I walk three miles a day, live on rabbit food, and still must fight constantly to keep my weight below one-seventy! But here, ah! There are no triglycerides in Heaven!”

  Thumper scampered up to the table at that moment, bearing a large bowl of something that smelled totally divine. “Granchio di mare in zuppiera,” Don Vermicelli announced as he tucked a napkin the size of a bedspread under his fourth chin and seized a fork in each hand. “Marinated blue crab claws! Mangiamo!”