His lips moved, but no words came out. She heard every noise in the room but what he was saying.
'Oh, hang on!' she said, and she tapped her ears again. She looked up at him. 'Now say something.'
'Testing, one-two-three,' Gray deadpanned.
'Cool!' Laura said with a grin.
Gray fought the smile that encroached upon his lecture. 'I said go on in.' He motioned toward the hinged bathroom door.
Laura pushed. The door felt hard and didn't budge at all. A large red ACCESS DENIED flashed in midair just underneath her hand.
She pushed again, with the same result.
'It's a complicated new world,' Gray said. 'The rules have to change with the technologies. You have to draw the line somewhere.'
He turned to depart, but Laura grabbed his arm and said, 'You push.'
'What?'
'You push the door.' Gray stood in front of her, unmoving.
Laura arched her eyebrows impatiently. 'Give it a try,' she prodded.
After hesitating for a moment, Gray pressed his hand against the door.
It opened a few inches. There was no blaring red ACCESS DENIED sign barring his way. He let the door swing closed again.
'Now why am I not surprised?' Laura said slowly.
'There's a difference between your access level and mine,' Gray replied. Laura cocked her head, waiting. 'I trust me,' he said simply, then headed for the exit.
The climb up from the computer center entrance was difficult. In an attempt to match the picture of the stairs in front of Laura to the experience of walking up them, the treadmill was canted to the same angle as the stairs. The picture projected on the floor of the workstation had a translucent sheen superimposed over the steps, which was necessary given the treadmill's flat surface. The result was that the image of the ramp matched the feel of the flat tread up which Laura labored. She reached the top and almost fell when the slanted floor beneath her flattened.
When she was safely on level ground, Gray said 'There are obviously some inadequacies in this system. The new 4Cs use our morphing technology to actually create three-dimensional objects like stairs in real space.'
Laura was no longer listening. She stepped off the curb into the white concrete roadbed and stared at the sights in utter amazement.
Spread out around her was the assembly building, the road leading into the jungle toward the Village, and the open fields surrounding the computer center all lit in brilliant sunshine under beautiful blue skies. Rising above the Village was the mountain, and high atop it were the glass walls of Gray's spectacular mansion. She turned to look at the blue-green sea, which was visible through the cut in the jungle made by the road leading out to the nearby launch pad.
Her perpetually gaping mouth was dry, and she swallowed hard before whispering, 'I can even feel the sun.' She reached for her shoulder and gazed up at the sky, squinting from the intensity of the light. Looking down, she saw the shadow of herself — her arm raised to her warm shoulder.
Laura turned to Gray. She had to fight back the tears welling up in her eyes. This world — Gray's new world — and the mind that had created it were overwhelming. The revelations were coming too fast.
She felt saturated, inundated with novel thoughts and ideas.
Every new experience taxed her nearly depleted reserves of mental and emotional energy. She'd had enough, and yet she wanted to know all.
'This is the world the computer sees,' Gray said quietly, soothingly. 'This is where it lives. This world exists because of the computer.'
'I think, therefore I am,' Laura whispered, and she looked back up at Gray.
There was a silence, a respectful quiet that Laura imagined to have descended upon the open plain around the computer center.
The wind she had felt brush across her bare arms fell still. The sounds of reality had faded into nothingness. No birds. No rustling trees. No distant surf. For a moment, time stood still. There was a total rigidity of all things — a world embedded in Lucite. Focused.
A car sped up to them. Gray held out a hand to move Laura back onto the curb. The winged door rose, and out stepped Dorothy Holliday.
As the car drove off, Dorothy walked slowly by them toward the steps, her small computer in hand and her pen poking at its writing surface.
Laura at first thought Dorothy was talking to herself. But then Laura realized Dorothy was actually singing to the tune of the music that poured through the earphones of the disk player she wore clipped to the waist of her jeans.
'You're not o-old enough — Yes, I am old enough — I'm yo man! — Da-da da-da dah-dah, bah-da bah-da ba- a-wa-a!' She walked right up to the top of the stairs without seeing Laura or Gray — her head bobbing and her face set in a fierce expression. Laura reached out, and her gloved hand went straight through Dorothy — her black sleeve remaining visible inside the girl's ethereal figure. When her elbow locked at full extension, her arm shot fifty feet across the lawn, casting a thin shadow on the grass below. She bent her elbow to pull her hand back, and the elastic limb quickly retracted to ordinary proportions. Laura turned and poked her fingers into Gray's hard chest just for contrast.
He opened his eyes wide in surprise.
While Laura had been watching Dorothy, Gray, she realized, had been focused intently on Laura.
And the sounds of the outdoors had returned. The ocean broke across the reef far beyond the island shore. The white noise and warm caress of the wind mimicked reality right down to the last detail. The wind even tickled the fine blond hairs on Laura's forearms as it blew by.
Laura found it hard to believe that a machine as fantastic as this would exist in her lifetime. That someone like Gray would live to dream it up and make it work. Laura's excitement over the possibilities opened up by the new technology built and built.
'Okay!' she finally exclaimed — grinning broadly. She felt a rush of elation, and laughter bubbled out of her. 'Okay! This thing is amazing. Wonderful! I love it!' She waved her arm through the air, watching the graceful dance of her shadow bend at a right angle up the white curb. All was perfectly timed to her movements.
'What 'thing' are you referring to?' Gray asked.
'What?' Laura replied, momentarily thrown by his question — by the serious tone in which it was spoken. 'I mean this contraption we're standing in.'
'We're not standing in a contraption, Dr. Aldridge.'
Her smile faded quickly, and she looked up at him with renewed unease. She couldn't read his perpetually neutral expression. 'Then where are we?' she asked uncertainly.
'We're not in some thing, we're in a place. We're in a different world, and that world is called cyberspace.'
'Well,' she said, forcing the corners of her lips into a smile but shaking her head and shrugging, 'I understand the metaphysical point you're making. I mean, I've heard plenty of those 'If a tree falls in cyberspace…' debates back at Harvard. But the fact of the matter is we're really inside those big white cylinders — those workstations.'
'Are we?' he challenged. 'Really?'
Laura frowned.
She raised her hands and signaled a 'timeout.' The scenery disappeared instantly and with the usual snapping sounds from the walls all around.
She was surrounded again by the familiar dark screens of the chamber.
She repeated the signal with her hands, and in an instant was back at the top of the stairs beside Gray.
The transition hardly affected her this time. 'And just what did that prove?' Gray asked.
'It proved that I'm really in an oversized phone booth inside a concrete bunker, and not standing here,' she said with a wave of her arm. Laura realized that didn't make any sense, so she said, 'At the top of the computer center stairs, I mean.'
