Headcrash by Bruce Bethke

Author:Bruce Bethke [Bethke, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Virtual Reality, General, Virtual Reality - Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 9780446673143
Google: 3atwHAAACAAJ
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 1995-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

12

UP THE LOOKING GLASS

Decisions, decisions. One million dollars. The interface. One million dollars. The interface.

I went for it. Slathered the ProctoProd with conductance gel, bent over forward and grabbed my right ankle with my left hand, and then—I don't want to think about it, and I don't want to talk about it.

LeMat's face was white when we made eye contact again. "Are you, uh—?"

"Ready," I snapped. "Let's go."

He turned to the computer (with a certain sense of relief, I thought) and launched the initialization routine. "Interface enabled," he said. "Video synced. Audio online. Datagloves—er, data under—er, softwear engaged. Switching over to line feeds." He plugged his audio headset into the A/V jack on the computer. I fumbled for the transparency control on my video goggles and flipped them to opaque.

"Virtual reality boot on my mark," LeMat said. "Three, two, one . . ."

I was someplace.

Actually, I was still in our big empty office space on the eighth floor of the Hill Building, of course, standing about twenty feet away from LeMat. But that's not what my senses were telling me. According to my eyes and ears, I was standing in a large, cube-shaped, virtual space, about a hundred meters on a side. The walls, floor, and ceiling were empty and black, save for a white one-meter grid pattern on the walls and floor and a jumbled pile of polyhedral objects in the far left corner.

Oh. And I was wearing a ProctoProd. Don't imagine for a minute that my senses stopped telling me that.

"Jack?" LeMat whispered in my ear, via the headset.

"There is no Dana, only Zul," I rumbled at him.

"Huh?"

"Max," I said. "I'm Max Kool now, remember? Gunnar?"

"Oh. Oh, yeah. Sorry." Gunnar was silent a few seconds. "So, uh, Max. This looks like our test reality, no?"

"Yes."

"How's it calibrate?"

I looked down at the floor, then over to the right-hand wall, "Seems to calibrate okay. The one-meter grids look to be about one meter. Up, down, left, and right all seem to be in the right directions."

"Watch the fast head movements. You're making me seasick."

I thought about suggesting that we trade places, but settled for, "Suffer."

"You're right," Gunnar said. "Sorry for complaining Okay, next series. What's your aspect look like?"

I took a long minute to study my arms and legs, rotate my hands, run my fingers through my hair, and just generally do everything I could do without a mirror. It all seemed to he there: black jacket, black shirt, black jeans, black boots, greasy pompadour, big sideburns. "I'm Max Kool, all right," I said at last, "but my hands and my head are the only parts of me that seem to be real. Everything else is cartoonish. Thin. I mean, insubstantial. Lacking texture and solidity."

"Well, we can fix that later," Gunnar said. "But now, let's go for the big one. Try walking."

I took a step. It calibrated nicely; one meter forward.

"Whoa!" Gunnar shouted in my head.

I stopped. "What's wrong?"

"You're really moving. I mean out here, in reality."

"Am I going to trip over something?"

"Not right now.

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