Michael uttered a sigh. So many ways he could take his investigation now, so many loose ends he could follow, but what was the point of it all?
The scene was observed from a single point of view: his own. At the time, his vision had been impaired not only by the dim light of dusk but also by trees, bushes, and rocks that hid the victim from sight at critical moments. So, there was no way for him to know, with any degree of objectivity, what had happened.
Michael turned to go back in, to check if Ash was awake, but then he stumbled upon an idea, a brilliant idea that once implemented, might impress her. Perhaps he could place events on a timeline, so as to gauge the movements of each character.
“Create old man with a beard,” said Michael. “Name him Fool.”
Entering the scene with a clunky step was a flimsy stick figure. Its head was shaking loosely over a twisted wire, which represented a neck. Its beard was made of silvery fibers, some of them knotted, others separating into finer fibrils.
Michael zoomed into a particular spot, a ledge hanging over the lower elevation, where a couple of benches materialized.
“Place Fool on this bench from 8:15pm until 8:20pm. Play!”
Time darted into motion. Between 8:03pm and 8:15pm, the bench was empty. Then, the stick figure came to perch on the bench, legs bent sharply into a sitting position. A few minutes later, the figure stirred and seemed to be about to get up when suddenly, it became transparent.
At first you could somehow tell it was still there, due to a certain lack of clarity in the pixels around it. But after a while, the figure had completely lost its head, legs, and arms, indicating the uncertainty of its whereabouts after 8:20pm. That was the time he, Michael, had gone down the trail, in pursuit of the woman in white.
“Bring in Lace.”
Rising magically to life from her collapsed position over the rock formation, there she was, her two-dimensional face marked by blue eyes, plump lips, and an impression of a braid wound around a wiry neck.
“Fix her position at Cliff Drive, at this intersection.”
Michael marked a second position farther down the trail, by the two benches, and a third one down below, where she had danced into the shadows. For each position he specified a body posture and an estimate of time. He also specified the time span where she had disappeared from his view.
“Play!”
At the accelerated rate, her wiry legs went into a blur. Like a ghost she crossed the shadow of the simulated lamppost.
Lower down the trail, Lace became transparent, which marked the time he had lost her from vision. After a while her limbs turned solid again. Her moves grew increasingly shaky. She seemed to hesitate, perhaps because of some randomly generated sound. Her neck spiraled and the two-dimensional face turned back over the wiry shoulders.
That was the moment she had glanced over her shoulder and for a heartbeat, met his eyes. He remembered: In some ways she had reminded him of Ash.
“Pause.”
There was no fleeting perfume, no white folds flowing in the wind, whipping across her hips, no light playing over the braided hair. Nothing but bare wire—a record of sorts—and simulated evening rays coming at an angle through a two-dimensional face.
No virtual reality could match what he had witnessed in real life. This whole investigation was silly, he thought. Utterly silly. So much detail lived in his memory! So many rich nuances! And yet, all he could render was a meaningless copy of things, a copy that fell short of looking halfway convincing.
Michael was about to go back to Ash, but something held him in place, something he couldn’t name, perhaps an addiction to staying immersed in this world.
“Create bird. Call it Gull.”
At the center of the sky, an object appeared to forage in flight for some prey. Based on a quick search in Wikipedia, his code created it with default features, associated with its definition of California Gull: A yellow bill with a black ring. Yellow legs. Brown eyes. A rounded head.
“Create Fish.”
With the sound of a spit, a generic-looking fish flew out of the blue surface of the ocean, the gills at its side opening for a breath, its silvery scales shining as it plunged back underwater.
Michael wanted to release himself from all limitations, all flaws of seeing things only from his own point of view. His subjective impressions of the scene were unreliable. Of course, every speck on every ledge, rock, trail, tree, and cloud was stored internally in terms of its three-dimensional coordinates, which allowed the software to build the landscape. But once constructed, it could be surveyed—in his mind, another word for imagined—from multiple directions.
Why not explore the scene more fully, see it through the eye of someone else? Why not fix that eye somewhere up on the cliffs or out there, at sea? Better yet, why not set it in flight? His software could instantly project the changing view, by computing the shortening of shapes according to their distances away from that moving eye.
“Select a new observer: Gull.”
To his astonishment, here was a new perspective, one that seemed to change in flight from one second to the next. It made him feel as if he himself were soaring, rising up with a chilling speed. This was something Michael had never experienced before. In a blink, his head started spinning. He became one with a bird.
Far below him, the details of the landscape became incredibly small. No, not just small: insignificant. The distant figure passing down there, by two tiny benches, seemed minute. She looked like a petty little bug, turning to and fro along the path, toiling pitifully to make her way down the dirt to that puddle, which you might call an ocean. Then with a clink, she stretched out her limbs, sprawling across a few pixels that signified a formation of rocks.
This was Lace no more.
There was no life in this minuscule thing, no movement. The wiry arms lay utterly still. It was in the flooded pit that formed next to the body that he suddenly noticed a signal—an eye—a Fish eye. In a blink, rings of water were marked around it, rippling their way out.
“Let Gull prey on Fish.”
There was no time to pinch his skin, to recall that this was virtual, not real. Somehow, the simulation Michael had created managed to do what he never thought possible: fool his senses. Within a split second, he found himself in a free fall, swooping down like a bird of prey.
A cliff spiked by. Holding back a shriek, Michael flew into the mouth of an opening shadow. He started spinning over a rock formation, amazed at the sharper vision he had gained, recalling that birds can pursue agile prey through woodland and avoid branches and other objects at high speed.
Then a cry—a shrill, devouring cry—and he plunged underwater. There was no sense of wetness, which for an instant, reminded him that the water, all around him, was not real.
Even so, the illusion was compelling. A pleated wave capped with white foam was starting to rise. It was rising upon him from behind, and it was then, under the wiry arm of Lace, that he could see clear into the flooded pit, where he faced the eye, the gleaming eye of Fish.
And in its reflection, an image appeared. It stirred him out of his immersion in the imaginary world. It was Ash, stepping into the garage with a little smile.
“What,” she said, “did you forget about me?”
Chapter 9
Michael had programmed his code to eliminate the view of all things blue, so that the virtual environment would be projected in their place—but this time, the result amazed him. He rubbed his eyes. Coming towards him, Ash seemed bodiless. Her midnight-blue dress was nearly invisible, which allowed the virtual seascape to glimmer as it rolled gradually through it, right up to the hint of her cleavage.
“You did forget about me,” she said, with a touch of amusement in her voice. “Didn’t you?”
“Sorry,” he said. “I should’ve called you earlier, but thought you were asleep—”
“Uh-uh. Try again.”
“I should’ve called you earlier, but was immersed way too deep
into my work.”
“Now that I believe!”
“And I wanted to prepare this as a surprise—”
“So did I! Look, here’s a little something for you.”
“Sweetheart, you know I don’t like surprises—”
“I know no such thing.” She opened the palm of her hand and raised it to his eyes.
“What’s that?”
“It’ll make coming up for air even less tempting for you than it already is.”
On her palm was a glove so thin, he could hardly believe it could be used for his particular purposes. All the virtual reality gloves he had tested so far were as bulky as the ones meant for motorcycle riding.
“I’ve designed it for you,” she said.
“It’s thin,” he said, “but a bit too large for my hand, isn’t it?”
“I thought the fabric will shrink after the first washing.”
“So? Why didn’t it?”
“Because.” She took his hand in hers, “There’s more than fabric that makes up this glove.”
At her touch, the blood in his veins quickened with desire, but a moment later, when she began stretching the glove over his hand, he could no longer feel what was real. He lost the softness of her skin and didn’t yet know yet what he was about to gain.
“This glove is truly magical,” she said. “It contains a gyroscope, an accelerometer, a magnetometer to measure the orientation of your hand; five fingertip sensors to perceive finger movement; and a pressure sensor for the thumb, to measure its rotation. All this is designed to help you feel the shape, texture, even temperature of whatever you’re holding in the virtual world.”
“So from now on,” he said, “objects here won’t feel empty to the touch?”
“Exactly.” She slid each one of his fingers into place, bringing them into contact with the sensors. “Now, try it!”
Michael raised his hand to reach the simulated clouds overhead, and in a blink, he felt light raindrops. He waved it through the creek milkweeds and Belladonna lilies swaying by the side of the trail, and sensed every petal, every leaf, every stem as they ran through his fingers.
“Wow,” he said. “Just wow!”
He hurried over to the rock formation just as Fish wiggled out of the blue surface, signifying water. When he placed his palm in front of it, Fish leapt into his hand, its gills opening for a breath, giving him a ticklish sensation. Michael stroked every scale along its body and they fluttered slightly in response to his touch, feeling ever so delicate, ever so flimsy.
He knew that what he saw, what he felt around him were merely imagined objects, coming into being inside his garage by the power of software computations. But knowing seemed meaningless.
He had to trust his senses.
“You have to experience this,” he said, eager to share it all with her. “Put on your headset.”
“I’m wearing mine already,” said Ash.
Her headset, he noticed, was even more lightweight than the one she had designed for him. It looked like a jeweled tiara, except that those jewels housed wireless sensors.
From the tiara, a lens swung around her temple and came into contact with her eye. Now, just like him, Ash could see the characters he had already introduced into the murder scene: Fool, sitting motionless on the bench, Lace, lying on the rock formation next to the eye of Fish, Gull, spreading its wings just under the reddish clouds, and farther away in the ocean, Mr. Strong, wrapped in a thick life jacket, stuck in an infinite loop of slipping off his sailboat and climbing back again.
“This is where it happened last night, right?” Ash whispered.
“Yes,” said Michael. “Let’s get to work.”
❋
Typing on his laptop, Michael retrieved the images he had obtained by hacking into police data banks. In a flash, black-and-white photographs appeared, glistening at the rim of the sky dome, above the model of the landscape. It was time to bring each image into place along the trail.
“This edge,” said Michael, “separates between the shrubs and the paved path. Which of these photos matches it?”
“This one looks close,” said Ash.
Sliding down into place one by one, the images combined like pieces of a puzzle. They formed a new layer over the surface, a layer that filled with flowing sands at one end and crusty seashells at the other. Populated with traces of bare feet, shoes, and fin blades, the path now recorded things past and things possible.
In one area he spotted a broken bottle, glinting in the shadow of a bush. In another, he looked for the string of pearls he had seen there last night.
He remembered the broken clasp, and the sound—ping!—as its pearls had come loose and started bouncing about, rolling out of his reach.
“There should be a necklace here,” he said. “It belonged to the victim. Can you see it?”
“No. It isn’t here.”
“You sure? A string of pearls—”
“That’s something I would’ve noticed.”
Despite her pronounced certainty, Michael wasn’t convinced. Over and again he examined the photos, particularly those layered over the area of coarse gravel. At last he uttered a sigh. No string, no pearls.
“It’s difficult to see clearly,” said Ash, “because the shadows go every which way, which is confusing.”
“These photos were taken by police at high noon. So the shadows are cast due north. By contrast, my simulation starts in the evening, so the shadows are cast due east.”
“That I can fix.”
Before he could realize how she implemented the change, the photographed shadows swung eastward. In this light, the traces along the trail seemed to peel off the surface, that’s how sharp she’d made them.
She asked, “Who left these fin marks? D’you know?”
“I do,” he said. “Two divers came up from the shore. I saw them on my way down.”
“Why don’t we add them to the scene?” she asked, and immediately added, “Create First Diver. Create Second Diver.”
Two wire figures, whose faces had no features other than a nose, materialized at the shoreline. The remarkable thing about them was that even without eyes, they seemed to know where he was standing. Michael gave them a nod and they nodded in return.
“Give First Diver a snorkel,” he said.
A tube snapped into position on top of the blank face, along with a silicone mask, designed to direct air across its inner passage to prevent condensation and keep the non-existent mouth completely dry.
First Diver took a simulated breath through its marked nose. A bubbling sound percolated through its hollow wire neck as the exhaled air left the mask.
“Give him fins.”
Black rubber fins appeared, designed to propel through water. First diver stepped into the foot pocket and adjusted the heel strap.
“Fit First Diver into its fin traces.”
A note of alarm started ringing, perhaps because there were too many fin traces everywhere, which made his request too ambiguous, too complicated to fulfill. Confusion bells bonged all around him.
Michael tapped a certain grey spot on the photograph. “Fit First diver into the leftmost pair of fin traces.”
The bells faded as the figure planted its fins precisely into their traces.
Meanwhile, Ash repeated each of his commands for the other figure, ending with, “Fit Second diver into the rightmost pair of fin traces.”
The second figure snapped into position next to the first one. Their wire elbows clinked slightly, as if to nudge each other into action.
Michael and Ash said, almost in unison, “Play!”
Climbing up the trail towards them were two masked wire figures. With each step, their fins smacked against the photographed surface. They walked quickly, with long strides, until reaching a particular bend in the trail. Shaking over their feet in an effort to adhere to shorter and shorter distances between one trace and the next, they slowed down.
Michael said, “A snail’s
pace would be faster.”
He expected Ash to giggle in response, but instead she turned serious.
“Did they see something down there, in the cavity of that particular shadow?” she asked.
And he said, “I wonder.”
Meanwhile, wobbling slowly around the mysterious shadow, the two wire figures went on. Restored to their earlier speed, they continued up the trail. And up by the ledge, the ghostly figure of Lace could be seen, coming down opposite them.
Michael gasped. The thing that threw him off balance was the stumble. It was not supposed to happen. Even so, he could hear it coming.
Had he taken the time to fit Lace properly into the traces of her high heels, she would have walked, ever so gingerly, in-between the two divers. She would not have toppled over. Instead, she flew—arms stretched—directly into First diver and Second diver, as sparks flew between the entwining wires.
Twisting their limbs against each other all three figures tried, rather abrasively, to claim the same space at the same moment in time. The fin blades smacked around in their traces to such a degree, that the layer containing the photographs started to cave under them.
Michael was just about to say, “Pause,” when his ear caught another sound, a sound that became increasingly louder, and at last rose over the virtual clashing of bodies.
Ash exchanged a look with him. This sound was for real. Someone was banging, banging at the garage door from outside.
“Police!” bellowed a man’s voice. “Open up! We know you’re in there!”
Chapter 10
Michael pressed the opener button inside his garage, then squinted at the first rays of sunrise, slanting their way into the dark recesses of the place.
The two men standing outside wore black gabardine jackets with shiny badges on their breasts and Police sergeant insignia on their shoulders. The taller cop had his hand at the ready for another bang at the garage door, when it rolled up out of his reach.
Virtually Lace Page 6
