Delos 2 - Futureworld

by John Ryder Hall

  If he thought about his wife, it was with the hope she was having “fun” as well. The few times he considered the sexual aspects of the Delos experience, he likened it all to a training exercise. He had to force himself to think of Maiden Fair as a robot; it was easier and much more natural to think of her as a human—a lovely, responsive woman who had found the man she was looking for. Thinking of her as a collection of circuitry was no fun at all—and, when he looked at her, almost impossible.

  But Reed did hope his wife was finding the sort of vacation they had both wanted. They had talked about it often, and had planned to visit Delos much earlier, but then the big Westworld scandal had broken and they had been afraid to come. Nevertheless, when the publicity started on the “new” Delos, they had just itched to go.

  “They say all the problems are worked out,” Mrs. Reed had said. “And look at these picutres! Doesn’t it look just gorgeous?”

  Her husband had agreed; but then he had always wanted to go. He hadn’t needed much convincing that all the problems had been solved. “All new projects have glinches,” he said to his wife. “But they seem to have things running smoothly now. If it’s all right with you, I’ll write in for a reservation.”

  “Yes, dear,” his wife said. “The price is high, but I think we’ll get our money’s worth, don’t you?” Her eyes had been on the muscular, smiling young man depicted in the brochure.

  Reed had written in quickly enough, even signing up for an extra day when he saw more of the resort’s publicity. “What the heck,” he said to a friend, “Delos is something special, not just a trip to the circus or Disney World, or the Bahamas. It’s . . . well, it’s Delos.”

  The beautiful face and figure of Maiden Fair intrigued him. But, more importantly, it was the attitude and the ambience of Medieval World that struck a deep chord in him. It reminded him of reading Ivanhoe and about Camelot, of pretending (when he was a child) to be King Arthur or Sir Lancelot and using wooden swords and garbage-can lids for shields. It was something he had thought he had put aside, something forgotten.

  “Maybe you don’t forget your earliest dreams,” he said to himself. “Maybe you can’t.”

  “Milord?”

  Reed laughed with embarrassment. “Just talking to myself,” he said. “It’s a bad habit I have.”

  “Would milord care for more wine?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  Wine; smooth, prime flesh; the feel of chain mail; and the sound of trumpets. A broadsword in his hand. Pennants fluttering in a fair, English, spring breeze. Adoring ladies; prancing steeds; sturdy men-at-arms. Pointed pikes; rough, stone castle walls; good English bowmen; grass so green you could hardly believe it.

  And a noble task.

  Rescue the Princess.

  Avenge the honor of the Queen.

  Protect the King.

  Go forth to do battle, behind the regal banner, before the foot soldiers, heart pounding, the feel of a great stallion between your legs.

  Battle.

  Fighting a noble cause. Defending the Faith. Protecting England against the invaders. Stalwart knight to good King Arthur . . . to Athelstan . . . to Richard the Lion-Hearted . . . to Henry II . . . to the Black Prince . . .

  Reed sighed. “Fetch my armor, woman,” he commanded.

  “Yes, milord.”

  “And my sword!”

  “Excalibur, milord? Or Curtana, the sword of Edward the Confessor? Or beautiful Ar’ondight, of Launcelot of the Lake?”

  “Ar’ondight, Maiden Fair, for I go forth to do great deeds!”

  • • •

  The slumbering camp was beneath stately oaks, at the foot of a wooded incline, and not far from a bubbling stream. The fires had all but burned out. Only faint traces of smoke arose, and a morning breeze lightly touched the dark leaves of the old oaks. The tents were colorful and the high-backed saddles of the horses had been set outside each tent. The steeds themselves were hobbled near the stream, where thick, lush grass grew.

  The calm of early morning was abruptly broken by the clatter of hooves, then by wild yells, as a group of horsemen rode down the wooded slope right into the center of the camp. Takaguchi’s fierce yell brought sleepy, half-dressed warriors from their tents. They were cut down in the Japanese warrior’s first charge through the camp, cut off as they were from their tethered horses.

  Takaguchi and his friends rode briskly among the tents, then wheeled their powerful warhorses and charged again. One of the commander’s friends loosed the arrow from his crossbow, which sank itself into the chest of a charging knight. Takaguchi crossed swords with another, narrowly missed losing his leg, then cut his blade into the side of the knight’s neck with a sickening crunch.

  The Japanese businessman and his fellow-kmghts wheeled their prancing horses for a third charge. A wide, dark-browed man came at Takaguchi swinging a huge, double-bladed ax, but the Oriental jumped lithely from his horse and engaged-the ax wielder with his flying blade. The ax-man was powerful, but slower; and after a few narrow escapes, Takaguchi sank his steel into the warrior’s throat. The ax fell to the ground, where it stuck, and the owner of the mighty blade next to it, gushing blood.

  The Japanese proudly put his foot upon the corpse and grinned happily at one of his friends, who hung his crossbow over his saddlehom and pulled out a Nikon to begin snapping more pictures.

  “I thought we arranged to smash that camera last night,” a technician said into his mike to a subcontroller.

  “Yes, sir, we did,” was the reply.

  “Well?”

  “He had two of them, sir.”

  • • •

  Ron Thurlow sat gloomily in the Space Safari lounge, stirring a Bloody Mary and staring out one of the nearby ports. Spacewalkers were drifting by as the Moon loomed up on schedule. Ron barely looked up as Eric, smiling handsomely, sat down next to him.

  “Good morning, sir. Are you going to spacewalk with us today?”

  Ron took a sip of his morning drink. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “Good!” Eric responded, as if the answer had been important to him.

  “Uh, say, Eric . . . uh . . . can I ask something?”

  The dashing robot had been about to rise, but he stopped and said, “Yes, sir,” very politely.

  “Have you ever been in love?”

  “No, sir. I am not programmed for sex.”

  Ron shook his head. “No, I don’t mean sex . . . I mean love.”

  “I know the word, sir, but—” Eric began.

  “What I really mean is . . . uh, like the girls here, like the ones I was with last night? I mean, do they have any feelings?” Ron looked even more unhappy. He took another sip, then stared out at the spacewalkers.

  Eric smiled happily. “They are programmed to simulate all human feeling.”

  Ron nodded gloomily. “Yeah, yeah. But they don’t really feel anything—for one person, I mean. You know, like people?”

  Eric frowned very slightly. “You mean a disturbance in their circuits because of a single-person readout?”

  “Uh, yeah, I guess that’s what I mean. Kinda.”

  Eric looked firm. “No, sir, that would be incorrect programming. They must relate to every guest equally,” he lectured. “You all pay the same.”

  Ron waved his hand vaguely, staring at his drink. “Yeah. Well, it wasn’t anything. I just wondered.”

  “Quite all right, sir.” The handsome robot stood up. “See you at the docking hatch.”

  “Sure,” Ron answered, poking his forefinger at the ice cubes in his drink. “Sure . . .”

  • • •

  In the huge octagonal chamber that housed the rocket, Harry Croft was tightening the bolts that held a piece of safety rail to the side of the iron platform. He was squinting, cursing almost silently to himself, and struggling to get at one difficult bolt. Far below him, a number of colorfully garbed guests followed one another along a wide catwalk into the interior of the huge projectile.

  Harr
y’s wrench slipped and he hit his knuckles. Jamming them into his mouth, he mumbled curses around the bruised bones. When his radio beeper went on, he snatched it savagely from its belt clip and snarled into it.

  “Yeah? This is Four-Two-Seven! What do you want?”

  “We have an emergency in the Roman bath. Please proceed immediately to Station Five.”

  “I haven’t fixed this railing yet,” he complained, glaring at the offensive metal.

  “I’m sorry, Four-Two-Seven. Four-Five-Nine and Four-Three-Six are unavailable. You’ll have to come back to it later.”

  Harry signed out and stuck his radio back; then he picked up his tools, his mouth grumbling silently all the time. He shook the railing before he left, and it was, indeed, still very wobbly.

  “Damnfool iron,” Harry muttered as he clumped away.

  • • •

  Duffy gestured at the large round hall. “We call it our Inner Space chamber and we hope to make it a regular part of Futureworld.” He grinned at Tracy and Chuck. “The idea is to actually make a videotape of a dream.” He smiled at the expressions on the reporters’ faces. “You can take it away with you, play it back, and find out what you were dreaming about.”

  “That’s incredible!” Tracy said. There was doubt in her voice, but acceptance, too.

  “Do you want to try it?” The Delos representative asked pleasantly.

  Tracy glanced at Chuck, then turned back to Duffy. “Sure, why not? Maybe . . . hey, maybe I could use the tape on the program!”

  Duffy nodded happily. “I think you’ll find it a unique experience.” He pointed at a large console complex just outside an entrance to the big round room, which they had been skirting. Several technicians were at the monitors. Duffy turned to the tall newsman. “Chuck, if you’ll wait here . . .”

  “Sure. Go get ’em, Socks,” he told Tracy. “This I gotta see!”

  Tracy stopped. “Wait a minute!” She stared at Duffy in surprise. “You mean he can watch?”

  “Unless you object . . .”

  She frowned. “I don’t know whether I do or not.” She shot Chuck a look, then glared at the monitoring screens. “It depends on what I dream!”

  “I’ll never tell,” Chuck drawled, crossing his chest with an index finger. “Cross my heart!”

  She laughed. “All right, wise guy. Maybe it’s about time you learned something about women!”

  “This way,” Duffy explained.

  Tracy followed him to the airlock entrance to the round hall. She glanced back at Chuck as she went through and he waved at her. Making a wry face, she went into the console room.

  The walls of the room were black. A large contour chair stood in the center, perched on a circular pedestal lit rather dramatically from underneath. Huge lights with reflective mirrors were positioned to point at the chair; and around the entire chair-pedestal complex was an intricate “fence” composed of metal units that linked together in a geometrically exact grid. Duffy led Tracy to a “gate” in the fence and gestured for her to enter.

  The reporter hesitated. “You’re sure I won’t have a nightmare?” She looked around at all the gleaming equipment. “This looks pretty frightening!”

  Duffy smiled reassuringly. “We’ll see to it that that doesn’t happen.” He led her through the gate to the pedestal. “This contour chair is designed to remove any pressure along the spinal column. And the material ‘bleeds’ air at the exact temperature of your body.” He took her hand and she stepped up and sat down. “You will see nothing, feel nothing, and hear nothing. Your mind will begin to feed on itself.”

  Tracy sighed comfortably, but the questing reporter in her was still there. “Something like sensory deprivation experiments, where you can start hearing the sounds of your own body?”

  Duffy smiled. “Something like that—only this is mental. Now, just relax and I’ll get out of the way.”

  He stepped down, closed the “gate” in the geometric fence, and quickly left the room. As he came out, he saw Chuck peering through one of the observation ports.

  “You’ll see more by looking at the monitors, Mr. Browning,” he said. “She’ll just be sitting there, apparently doing nothing the whole time.”

  Chuck tore himself away from the window and stood behind the technicians. On a screen labeled BRAIN WAVE MONITOR he saw a series of bursts: a complex pulse and flow of brain waves. A technician touched a control and suddenly a different color of waves was flowing across the screen.

  Duffy pointed at various other screens, which were showing different waves, superimposed images, matching brain-wave flows, and many things Chuck did not understand. “Every thought,” Duffy explained, “like every eye blink, heartbeat, footstep, or yawn, releases currents of electricity which can, be transformed into waves.”

  “She’s got a lot on her mind!” Chuck chuckled tipping his head toward the busy screens.

  “All human brains do, Mr. Browning.” Duffy gestured at the consoles. “We are recording two thousand and ten different waves from five thousand eighty-six separate brain locations. Millions of bits of information.”

  Duffy moved along a bit, to another area where stood two large machines with hooded viewscreens; these were manned by two technicians. “We take it all in . . . and then we put it back together on these.”

  “What are they?” Chuck asked.

  “Take a look,” Duffy offered.

  The reporter peered over the shoulders of one of the technicians, looking in under the dark, hooded screen. What he saw was chaotic—a rushing stream of dots, lines, blobs, vague shadowy shapes. They flowed out of the center of the screen in an onrushing cone of pale colors. The technician dialed a vernier scale and the colors deepened. Then the indefinite shapes began to take form . . . Some were blurred, and some repetitive; but they, became more definite with each repetition. Some were sharp, and some floating and sustained, moving but not getting anywhere. Some were flurries that lasted only a second or two—little meteor showers of impressions and of bright images, flashing, darting. Some were streaks of pure color, writhing past, sometimes vivid pictures of things Chuck recognized.

  He saw his own face, then Duffy’s, then an old photograph, its edges wavy—something out of Tracy’s past. A lake . . . birds . . . a Christmas package being opened . . . a house on a street . . . the steps of that house . . . a tricycle . . . a bicycle . . . a window . . . a doll . . . a man and woman whom Chuck did not recognize and who were smiling. A table was set for dinner . . . then he saw a street . . . a car . . . a Ferris wheel . . . cotton candy . . . a kitten . . . a cat . . . several kittens . . . a book . . .

  “Do you know what you’re seeing?” Duffy asked.

  “I can’t believe it!” Chuck exclaimed, amazed and completely captivated. On the screen now were flowers, buildings, faces, dresses, books, knights, dragons, faces. Faces . . .

  “Well, it’s true. You are looking directly into her mind. We have learned how to convert thought waves back into the images the mind creates. It’s not perfect, of course . . .”

  “It’ll do,” Chuck whispered, staring fascinated at the screen.

  Faces: men, women, children . . . Then dogs, cats, an elephant, a tiger . . . trees, grass, houses all mixed in with heros and maidens, villains and castles. The faces became older, young adults and then more mature. A man’s face formed slowly, faded out, came on again . . .

  “The most difficult part of the invention was decoding the personal and quite intimate ‘code’ that each person uses when he or she files information. Quite difficult, really, considering the difference in behavior, language, early programming, and subsequent conditioning.”

  Chuck was not paying much attention to Duffy as he talked on.

  “But we solved it at last. That is, we are solving it. We get better with each experiment. We are refining our program so that we can more quickly get right to the visual imagery.”

  On the screen were more and more faces, and more hints of flesh, of bodies, o
f hands and shoulders.

  And faces.

  “At first it took us hours before we could move to the video-recording mode,” Duffy went on. “Now we’ve shortened the response time practically to seconds. As you can see, she is becoming quite visual.”

  A distinct face had formed—then slipped away—then came back changed. Chuck pulled his gaze away and looked at the other screens. On one of them he saw Tracy sitting quietly, apparently asleep. He looked back at the hooded viewscreen.

  A man’s face had indistinct features. He was speaking, but when the technician flipped a switch and sound came in there was music instead of words.

  “Who’s that?” Chuck inquired.

  “Reference?” Duffy, bent under the hood, too, asked the technician.

  “Beta Gamma Prime. Model Twenty Slash Ninety-Two, sir.”

  “What’s that in English?” Chuck asked.

  “A fantasy lover,” the technician answered without emotion.

  Chuck looked up, his face somewhat flushed. “I’m not sure I’m ready for this . . .”

  The technician flipped two switches and turned a dial one setting. “She’s beginning to dream. Start video recording on my mark . . .”

  • • •

  In the Red Room, a technician suddenly became more than ordinarily alert. On his monitor screen, brain-wave patterns danced before his eyes.

  “Patterns of Ballard recording. Mental: Alpha and Beta strong reception. To Inner Space chamber, need clearer angle on Six-Point-Oh area.”

  “Roger. Turning up angle on Six-Point-Oh,” came a reply.

  • • •

  Chuck bent to look under the hood again. He noticed that the monitor was labeled MIND FLOW, ALPHA.

  The technician continued, “. . . Three . . . two . . . one . . . Mark!”

  Behind him a number of video recorders whirled into use, their wide tapes winding swiftly. Chuck watched, intrigued, as the images began to form a more coherent scene upon the screen.

  The mists cleared. The streaks of color faded and the technician seemed to dial them out. The random images were depressed and eliminated, until there was only a single scene, somewhat edged in mist. The color was soft, pastel, and somewhat unreal.