'All right, you little shit?' the woman said, pausing in the corridor and taking a sip of her Coke. She swung her free hand slowly through the air her opposing fingers and thumb pressed together like a robot gripper. 'The next time it pecked at my face…' she said and then snatched viciously at thin air with the pretend claw.
They laughed and proceeded down the hall toward Laura and Gray.
Both wore identical T-shirts and gym shorts bearing the logo of the Gray Corporation. The woman swabbed her bald head with a towel that hung around her neck.
'You gotta be careful!' the man said in a lighthearted tone.
'You'll get some animal-rights nuts circling the island with protest signs.'
'Oh, the hell with them!' the much smaller woman replied, knocking him off stride with a good-natured bump of her hips on his.
They passed by Laura and Gray, completely oblivious to their presence.
'There must be ten zillion fish at the outlets of those cooling ponds. It's just that yellow one had an attitude problem.'
The door to the control room slid open just long enough to allow Gray's employees to exit. The sounds of activity from the crowded room flooded the hall, then the door closed again to leave everything quiet. Laura turned to Gray to await his explanation.
'They're virtunauts,' he said, 'and now so are you. Congratulations.'
'Virtunauts?' she asked. 'Like astronauts but in virtual reality?' Gray nodded. 'And they couldn't see us?'
'Of course not. We're inside those chamber things, remember? We see them; because the computer is displaying a model of the world on the walls of our workstations. The computer knows who and where those two people are and what they're doing, and it simply reproduces their virtual images for us to see.'
'Man,' Laura mumbled, 'this is Peeping Tom heaven.'
Gray abruptly turned to face her. 'We take great pains to ensure privacy,' he said, bristling at her offhand remark.
Laura curled one side of her mouth into a smirk and arched her brow. Her expression of skepticism about the success of Gray's measures was apparently faithfully reproduced in his workstation.
Gray looked away, frowning.
'So what were your two virtunauts talking about?' she asked.
'They've obviously been working in the new 4Cs down the hall,' he replied glumly, jabbing his thumb at the room from which they had appeared. 'Doing some maintenance on one of the pipes that return water back to the sea, it sounded like.'
'Wait a minute,' Laura objected immediately. 'What do you mean doing maintenance? I thought they were in virtual reality just like us.'
'They were, but these workstations were built for work. They were teleoperating a robot — probably one of the submersibles we use for offshore jobs. You see, the water that comes out of the cooling ponds is warm. A lot of algae and plant life builds up around the outlets and has to be cleared.'
'Hold it!' Laura said, shaking her head. 'What are you talking about? How do you get into one of those workstations, and end up cleaning algae off a pipe out in the ocean — the real ocean.'
'Well, you and I are now in the 'simulation mode.' It's not interactive. We can just observe what's going on like invisible tourists. But if you set the workstation to 'teleoperation,' you can slave a robot off the motions of your skeleton. When you're wearing a full-body suit like in the 4Cs, for all intents and purposes you are the robot.' He raised his black-clad arm in the air. 'You lift your sleeve, and the robot lifts its arm. The computer takes care of the motion translations and the feedback into your skeleton from the robot sensors. It really doesn't matter whether the robot is ten feet or ten miles away.'
'So they were just scraping away at a picture of a pipe in virtual reality, and some underwater robot was doing exactly the same thing for real a few miles away?' Laura asked, absolutely incredulous.
Gray pursed his lips and nodded nonchalantly. Laura took a deep breath, held it, and exhaled slowly. 'Okay. If you say so.' She held her hands out and shrugged, letting her black gloves fall to her jeans with a slap. 'What next?'
'Let's go for a walk,' Gray said. He headed toward the door to the main control room.
Laura followed. It was more natural this time. She just walked.
The floor moved beneath her feet, she knew. But the only hint she had of that fact was a slight difference in the traction. There was a subtle lack of certainty requiring greater care like walking on a rug that might slide unexpectedly across a slippery floor.
The door opened in front of them, and Laura carefully edged her way through the opening. The control room was filled with the same people they had passed earlier on their way to the workstations. On closer inspection, all the people who were busy working at their consoles looked like the two 'virtunauts' — not quite as realistic in appearance as everything else. The colors of their clothing were washed out. They even appeared faintly translucent.
'You want to fill me in on what's happening here?' Laura asked.
Gray turned to her, then looked out across the bustling room. 'Oh, you mean the people?' he asked, and Laura nodded. 'We kept getting run over. Since they can't see us, it was like bumper cars trying to get across a busy room, only we couldn't bump back. To fix the problem, we had the computer reduce the representation of animate objects to non-solids. Filatov walked right up to them, the ghostly image of the sweater he wore almost brushing against Laura before she stepped back. Filatov raised a hand and reached into Gray's torso. His hand disappeared into Gray's chest and reappeared as it protruded from his back. Filatov pressed a button on what looked like an ordinary thermostat mounted to the wall. Gray just smiled at Laura as he stood there impaled by the fuzzy image of an arm.
Filatov huffed and bent over to peer inside Gray's chest.
Margaret walked up wearing a heavy winter coat that she clutched tightly around her neck with both hands. 'Well?' she asked.
'It's all the way up,' Filatov answered as he rose from Gray the ghost.
'It's freezing!' Margaret burst out as she leaned over to take a look at the thermostat — her face also disappearing in Laura's chest.
'That cheapskate Gray doesn't care about anything but his precious computer!' Filatov said.
Gray winced and looked away as if from the discomfort of having overheard the complaint. He reached up and tapped both ears with his fingertips — a gesture Laura thought highly unusual.
Margaret rewrapped herself even more tightly in the coat and said, 'You can damn sure bet his house isn't forty-two goddamn degrees.'
'Let's go,' Gray said and headed toward the duster. Laura lingered.
Filatov smiled at Margaret. 'I know how to make you warm,' he said in a thickly seductive voice.
Laura gasped and said, 'Oh my God.'
'No-o-o,' Margaret replied in playful outrage, grinning broadly and looking around to confirm they were alone.
Laura rushed to join her departing guide. 'Mr. Gray,' she said, but he ignored her. 'Mr. Gray!' she called out, finally catching up with him and tapping him on the shoulder.
He spun around to face her. 'I try to respect privacy!' he said as if she had just lambasted him.
'I didn't say anything!'
'Wait.' He raised his fingers to tap his ears again. 'I muted the sound. What did you say?'
Laura had intended to comment on the game of chase played by the two lovers — Filatov, the pursuer, and Margaret, the pursued.
'Nothing,' she said instead.
'Here, let me show you this,' Gray said, and he turned.
Behind his back Laura tapped her fingertips to her ears. Nothing seemed to happen. She could still hear the hum of noises in the control room.
Gray walked over to a door labeled 'Women's Rest Room.' He turned back to Laura and waited, an odd look on his face. 'What?' she asked.
