'Calm down. I'm in the workstation next door. Hang on while I load the program.' Her heart was pounding against the skeleton.
The ceiling of her mouth was so cold, her tongue practically scraped across it. Turning slowly in the center of the chamber she felt trapped. It was like being strapped into a seat at an amusement park waiting for the ride to begin.
The lights were suddenly extinguished. The small compartment was now darker than the blackest night.
In an instant, the walls and ceiling of the chamber disappeared with a crackling of static electricity from all sides. They just dissolved into thin air, leaving Laura standing on a raised black pedestal staring at the brightly lit console right outside.
She covered her mouth with her hands — a panicked moan escaping from deep inside her chest.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She flung herself around and lost her balance, smashing into the invisible curved wall and sliding to the floor. The black pedestal rolled underneath her — moving her away from the wall until she lay in the center of the black disk.
'Careful,' Gray said.
'Or what? I might fall down?' Laura asked as she rose to her knees.
Gray stood on an identical platform a few feet away from hers. 'The treadmill can be tricky at first. Are you okay?' Laura stared wide-eyed at the room — awestruck. No longer was she confined inside the small chamber… or so it appeared from where she knelt.
Arrayed across the room were seven low pedestals [missing] Laura knew the other tall cylinders to be. The chamber [missing] all [missing] ceilings were [missing] no wall [missing] invisible — transparent.
'Hi,' Gray said as he raised his hand and waved from the pedestal next to hers.
'My God,' she whispered. Moving carefully, she struggled to her feet. 'What the hell's going on?'
'Welcome to cyberspace, Dr. Aldridge,' Gray said. 'The real cyberspace.'
Laura slowly turned in a circle. What she saw wasn't the room, she realized; it was a picture of the room, projected onto the walls of the chamber that surrounded her. But the picture was incredibly realistic.
'I hate to start pointing out the imperfections,' Gray said in a casual tone, 'but if it'll make you feel any better look really closely at my hair.'
Laura looked at Gray's head. His hair had a cartoonish quality to it. 'It's not really worth the processing time to provide complete detail for every feature.' The depiction of Gray's face, Laura noted, was also slightly unrealistic. The virtual Gray had a perfect complexion. His skin tone was totally uniform, with no blemishes or shadow of a beard or variations in color of any kind.
'The new 4Cs are much more realistic,' Gray said, his lips moving in exact synchrony with his words.
'More realistic than this?' Laura asked. She reached out to touch the walls of the chamber for reassurance. Her black-gloved hand stretched across the room as if it were made of rubber and touched something else instead — a straight, sharp edge, suspended in space.
She drew the glove back from the countertop on which it had momentarily rested and rubbed her thumb across her fingertips. Her skin tingled from the contact with the hard counter, and her fingers felt as if they were skin-to-skin.
She slowly reached out again. At a certain point her arm grew elastic. She reached all the way across the room again to touch the edge of the white counter along the wall. Laura groped along the flat surface with a ten- foot-long arm, then reached up to touch the cabinets suspended above.
She grasped a handle! It was so amazingly realistic that she felt like vomiting.
'Extension of the suits' arms is set to logarithmic scale,' Gray explained. 'The farther out you reach, the greater the distance your virtual hand travels. At full extension, your arm would be something like fifty feet long.'
'How does it…?' She pulled her rubbery arm back, and it shrunk to normal proportions again. When she reached out, the black sleeve and glove seemed to keep growing longer and longer.
'It's the screens on your skeleton and on the wall behind it,' Gray said. 'They project a continuous image, blending the focal points so you can't tell where the image on your sleeve ends and the one on the wall begins.'
The cabinets felt solid to her touch. She tried pushing her hand into them. There was strong pressure against her fingertips.
The joints at the skeleton's shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers all inflated soundlessly, locking. Laura could push her hand no farther.
She tried to cheat the system — to make her hand press through the imaginary cabinet door. She pivoted her hips and tried walking into the resistance, but the treadmill beneath her feet reacted instantly.
It rotated and rolled away to compensate. It felt like she was walking on ice. Her body turned but her rigid arm remained planted against the smooth cabinet door.
'We've obviously thought this thing through,' Gray chided her.
Laura's virtual arm probed the lights under the overhanging cabinets, and she felt their warm glow on the back of her hand.
'And heat?' she asked, now totally and completely fascinated.
'The air that circulates through the skeleton is thermostatically controlled. It's heated or cooled by the unit in your belt and sent through insulated tubing to the appropriate membrane.'
A trancelike state of wonder came over Laura. 'This is… unbelievable!' When she found the handle again she pulled. The cabinet door swung open. 'Wow!'
'This is virtual reality, Dr. Aldridge. Everything obeys the laws of physics… unless, of course, I reprogram them.'
'But I didn't just open that cabinet door, did I?'
'You did, in the virtual world. If the computer knows what's inside you can look in the cabinet and check it out. But no, you didn't just open the cabinet door in the 'real' world. I think you'll soon find, though, that the distinction you're drawing is losing its relevance.'
Laura was too busy sweeping her hand across the room to pay attention to Gray. She looked closely at where the ceiling of the chamber should meet the walls, searching for seams — distortions, imperfections of some kind. She could find none. [Garbled] chopped into something not quite as hard or sharp as the counter top.
It was Gray. 'You have to be kind of careful,' he said grabbing the hand at the end of her lithe black arm.
She gasped and pulled her hand from his — distinctly feeling it slip through each of his fingers. Her stomach churned as if she were on a wild carnival ride.
'I… I think I'd like to get out now,' she said.
'You want to go for a walk?' Gray asked.
'Yes. Right now, please.' A walk was exactly what she wanted just then. Her lungs felt robbed of air, and she took deep, slow breaths to compensate.
Gray stepped down off his black pedestal onto the floor. He walked across the room to stand beside Laura's workstation. He extended his hand through the invisible wall — beckoning her to join him.
Laura stared at the hand Gray held out to her through the walls of the virtual workstation. There were really walls surrounding her, but it was hard to convince herself of that fact. In reality they rose all around her, sealing her inside the chamber. It was the picture of Gray's hand projected on them that was the fiction. But this wasn't reality, it was virtual reality.
'Just step out,' Gray said to Laura as if the act was of no particular significance.
Laura shook her head uncertainly. She'd never imagined you could leave the bullet-shaped enclosure with its now-invisible walls.
Laura was petrified merely by the thought of abandoning the round island of the workstation's treadmill.
'It's easy,' he said, coaxing her in a soft tone. 'Just take my hand and walk normally.'
She grabbed Gray's hand, which wobbled — not supporting her weight.
A slight feeling of warmth spread along her grip, and when she squeezed, Gray squeezed back. She had to force herself to remember she was really just looking at a picture of Gray's hand projected onto a screen. Her mind kept slipping into the warm bath that inundated her senses. She was succumbing to the illusion that was virtual reality.
