marvelously complete experience.
'You're going to get me in trouble, you know,' Laura tapped out, hearing faint plastic clacks as each key was pressed.
<You wanted to get inside my head. What better way than in a VR workstation, right? A picture is worth a thousand words. Are you ready?>
'Take it easy on me. No running with the bulls or bungee jumping or anything, okay?'
<Okeydoke.> The chamber around Laura dissolved in a crackling of static electricity. This time, however, instead of seeing the well-lit room, the computer center projected onto the 360-degree screens, Laura found herself standing among row after row of cars in a darkened parking lot. [Unclear] lamps high above bathed everything in a faint orange hue. The keyboard was still in its place — superimposed in space over an old Saab of indeterminate color.
Laura turned slowly to see the corrugated steel walls of a large factory dominating the parking lot behind her. At the center of the building was a brightly lit entrance. 'Gray Consumer Products Division' read the large letters of a sign above the door. The words were arched over Gray's logo — the profile of a human head drawn in crosshatched diagonal lines. 'Erlangen, Germany,' the smaller letters beneath read.
Laura turned back to the keyboard. 'I'm in a parking lot in Germany?'
<Yes. It's our main consumer products manufacturing facility. Would you like to go inside?>
The door was a fair distance away, and this nighttime excursion wasn't nearly as stimulating as her walk around the island with Gray had been. Plus, there were easily a hundred fairly solid-looking cars between Laura and the door.
'No, not really,' Laura typed.
<Is this boring?>
'A little.'
<Okay, hang on just a second.>
The picture changed so abruptly that Laura flinched, her arms groping the air to her sides for balance. The snapping of static electricity from the walls gave way to a flood of noise.
Laura was standing now on the upper level of a busy shopping mall. The ghostly images of people flashed by as they rushed up and down the walkway. She turned to see Gray's televisions mounted in displays all along the walls of the crowded store to her back.
The keyboard remained fixed in its place before her. 'Where am I now?' she typed.
<The new Tyson's Corner in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. I can map about 85 percent of the mall by tapping into the high-def security cameras. There's a sale at Bloomie's. Wanna go and check it out?>
Laura laughed and shook her head. It was amazing; Here she was, standing in a busy mall! 'Unbelievable,' she mumbled, grinning.
She waited for a small break in the pedestrian traffic and then headed across the walkway. She was invisible to the passersby, however, and they didn't break stride to allow her to pass. Several times people walked straight through her — momentary blurs as the translucent haze of a woman's hair or a man's jacket flashed before Laura's eyes. She made it to the railing at the far side of the aisle and clung to the cool, rounded metal.
The high ceilings and the trees and fountains of the central atrium below combined with the hum of noise from everywhere at once to give Laura the physical sensation of being in a large, open space.
Just below her vantage the marble floors and upscale shops glittered in striking resolution. She turned once again to the keyboard.
'How many places have you modeled like this mall and the factory in Germany and the island?'
<Not that many large areas, really. I have lots of cameras, but to make a model I need to correlate numerous different angles. Security cameras are good for that if there are enough of them and they're high- definition. Tyson's Corner is actually a prototype for a computer-monitored security system the Gray Corporation plans to market. One day there'll be lots of models like this and I or another net like me will be a cop, so watch yourself.>
Laura found the idea of computer cops unsettling. And it wasn't only the unblinking eye of the computer that troubled her. It was also the prospect of unauthorized 'virtunauts' hacking their way in and roaming unfettered through malls and homes and bedrooms. Of being ogled and groped by hordes of invisible net surfers who would populate the dark alleys of cyberspace.
Laura shook off the quiver and returned her attention to the here and now. To the mall in which she was, for the time being, all alone in her alternate universe. Laura confirmed that everyone was indeed of the translucent variety.
A girl suddenly caught Laura's eye. She was about fifty feet away, but her white T-shirt and blue jeans appeared bright and solid. She stood out among the ghostly figures. The girl had clearly been looking in Laura's direction, but she quickly slipped into the entryway of a store. Laura kept her eyes on the storefront, but the girl didn't reappear.
She must have been mistaken, she thought. There was nobody in the mall but the ghosts. Laura was alone in the virtual world.
Shoppers hustled by in a never-ending current of activity. The model seemed complete to Laura right down to the last detail. Everywhere there was the commotion of life and activity.
Laura turned back to the imaginary keyboard. 'What do you use models like this for?' she typed.
There was a pause. <What do you mean?>
'I mean why go to all the trouble of creating a model of a shopping mall? It must take a lot of processing time.'
Laura was distracted by the crowds. Most of the shoppers were women. Girls who traveled in giggling packs. Well-dressed businesswomen whose valuable time was spent speeding from store to store. Foreign tourists taking leisurely strolls down the air-conditioned American boulevard.
'Why don't you just call him?' a passing girl asked.
'Oh, like, I'm sure!' her nervously giggling friend replied.
'Is he in?' the confident voice of an adult came from behind Laura.
She turned to see an attractive woman in a business suit holding a cellular phone to her ear with one hand and an open Filofax sagging limply in the other. The strap of a Neiman-Marcus bag was looped over her arm, and she stood on a small balcony jutting out over the ground floor. 'Mr. Owen?' she said suddenly and in a cheery tone. 'This is Rebecca James. How are you?'
A man hovered not far from the woman, leaning casually against the rail and staring at the businesswoman quite openly.
The woman was aware of the man's gaze and stood half turned away from him. 'Yes,' she said in an upbeat, can-do manner. 'We'll have the papers to you first thing in the morning, you've got my word.' She was nodding her head and said 'absolutely' twice before hanging up with a gracious good-bye. Without closing the phone she quickly redialed.
Her voice changed completely. 'Don't give me that shit, goddammit! If you miss Fed Ex you get your butt out to the airport and do counter-to-counter!'
She hung up and dropped the small phone into her purse. The man still eyed her. She steered a wide path around her unwanted admirer and departed in a power walk.
Laura looked back down at the floating computer monitor.
<Is it a crime to want to have some fun?> the computer had asked.
'What are you talking about?' she typed.
<You asked why I maintain a model of the mall. I'm just curious. That's what I was programmed to be. In the early days, we had this system of checkers, which was really helpful. Mr. Gray hired thousands of people to help correct some of my more obviously flawed conclusions. People could log on from their homes and get paid by the hour. When they canceled the program, I was frustrated at having so little interaction with humans. That's when I began creating the virtual worlds.>
Laura was increasingly drawn from the crowds in the mall to the words on the screen. 'Wait a minute. Do you mean you created the virtual worlds independently of the virtual-reality workstations?'
<Sure. I created the virtual worlds first. One night, Mr. Gray plugged in an experimental VR helmet and I took him for a spin. He loved it. The next day he started a major new hardware program that resulted in the version
