The comment didn't go unnoticed by the others, nor did the fact that Gray waited in silence for them to leave. Hoblenz was the last one out, and he slapped the plate to close the door manually.
Gray and Laura were left alone. Laura's last glimpse of Hoblenz was of his hard stare.
'I thought maybe I would log on for a while longer,' Laura said, 'before turning in.'
'The computer's too sick to talk right now,' Gray replied, staring off into space. 'Are you ready for another dose of the truth?'
'If you want,' she said just above a whisper.
Gray focused on the polished conference table as if reading from a TelePrompTer, but he read his lines too slowly and unnaturally. 'I know how the soldier died last night. I've known it all along.' He looked straight at her. 'I killed him.'
She stared into his eyes, concentrating all her attention not on what she saw there but on what she thought the man to be. 'I don't believe you.' She shook her head. 'You ripped his head off? What? With your bare hands?'
'It might as well have been.' He went back to his script, again not looking at her. 'Last night I was working in Krantz's facility, trying through the terminals there to establish a link with the Other. The computer paged me, and I logged on to my cellular laptop. The computer told me it was having a nightmare. It happens sometimes — strange reports of fleeting perceptions — and it's been happening more frequently now that its world model is fragmented. This one was of strange animal noises from the jungle in the vicinity of the computer center. I got Hoblenz to send out a patrol. When the computer told me it'd heard the sound again, I started to get nervous.'
He paused to take a long gulp of coffee from his mug. 'The computer couldn't see the area, because it's lost those cameras to the Other, so the fastest thing I could think to do was to climb into one of Krantz's VR workstations. They're connected to the Other and to its model of the world. When I powered up the workstation, the VR picture of the nuclear lab seemed complete so I took off running. I ran down the coastal road into the Village.' He looked up at Laura. 'I amplified the audio, and I could easily hear the screams and breaking branches. When I got into the Village I ran into a trash bin behind the grocery store.'
'Wait a minute,' Laura said. 'You're talking about where the kid at the town meeting said he saw something, right?' Gray nodded. 'But this was virtual reality. I mean, you were really just in the workstation.' He nodded again. 'So how could that little boy have seen you? You weren't really there.'
'The boy was in virtual reality with me. After the town meeting, I took him and his parents into the basketball coach's office — just the four of us. His mother is in Filatov's virtual-reality section, and it turns out she'd taken one of the clunky old VR helmets home and wired it up for the boy to play games. The kid had hacked his way onto the main computer's world model and was going out exploring at night. Probably peeping in people's windows, things like that. With that helmet and a simple game joystick, he'd head out through his bedroom window. That led straight down into the grocery store's parking lot.'
'How'd you get him to admit all that?'
'I didn't have to, really. I'd seen him in the parking lot — or at least a cartoonish picture of him carrying a ray gun. The computer represented his presence by an 'avatar'—an image chosen by the boy. It looked like a character from a game we're working on in new-product development—'Space Invaders.''
'I don't get it,' Laura said. 'He used a game program and that hardware to hack his way into the computer's world model?'
Gray nodded.
'On the Other's side of the partition?' Again a nod.
'And you met by accident there in virtual reality?'
Gray nodded a third time. 'He could see me, and I could see him, just like you and I could see each other when we went for our walk through the computer center only at a distance. It didn't matter what equipment we used to get there. We were both in the same world. We were both in the computer's head — in cyberspace.'
Gray's eyes drifted off. 'After I saw the boy, I ran off toward the sound of the screams. By getting down low — in a crouch — you can really get the treadmill moving and go fast. I found them easily. The thermal trail left by the man's body heat looked… phosphorescent.'
'You found who? The soldier?'
'And a Model Eight. I ran right up to them. The soldier was exhausted and drooping. He was being carried by the robot. I was invisible to him, in a virtual world that the soldier couldn't see. But the Model Eight saw me. It looked right at me.'
'But wait! The Model Eight was real, right? He was there in the real world.'
'Yes, but his mind was in the virtual model. It was dark. The robot was out where it shouldn't be and maybe hadn't ever been before. It had an open socket right into the same model I was plugged into, and when I came up he saw me immediately. I thought for a second he'd drop the soldier, but he didn't. He took off running — heading straight into the swamp and carrying the screaming man with him.'
Everything Gray was saying swirled in Laura's head. She couldn't force herself to think straight, and she gave up — settling back to let Gray's story sweep her along.
'I followed them into the jungle. It's like running through a generic jungle repeated over and over. I had to go on the sounds of breaking branches and the man's shouts up ahead. When the robot stopped, it did what we call a refresh scan. It gathered data about its immediate surroundings through its own sensors and then uploaded that data to the main computer. When I caught up with them' — he looked up in pain—'the place where we found the body was completely scanned. It was an accurate picture of… everything. The soldier was lying on the ground.'
'Was he still alive?'
Gray nodded, then took a deep breath and went on. 'I had no way of communicating with the robot, so I positioned myself between it and the soldier. The Model Eight was standing down in the water. It must have learned how not to make tracks. It made a wide circle around the whole area to try to get to the man and I tried to scare it off as best I could.'
'What does that mean? How could you scare the robot?'
'It didn't know I wasn't real. It saw me waving my arms like a madman and didn't know what I was. The only problem was that I wasn't strong or big enough. What it saw and thought was that there was a six-foot-two, two- hundred-pound human trying to keep it from its toy. It wasn't enough. Maybe if I'd had time to reprogram the computer to give me a different representation.' He heaved another deep sigh. 'So, it grabbed the soldier. That's when it happened.' Gray fell silent.
'What? Joseph, listen. You weren't even there, no matter what you think about cyberspace.'
Gray ignored Laura's remark and pressed on. 'I pretended to grab onto the soldier's legs. The robot saw me do it. The whole point of me doing it was for the robot to see that I wouldn't let him take the soldier off. You're right that I wasn't there in the real world, but the distinction is meaningless. My actions had consequences. The robot reacted to them. And I should've known!' he burst out, slamming his fist onto the table.
Laura jumped with a start at the sound. 'Known what?' she asked softly, frightened by the tortured look on his face.
'I don't know how many tactile room sessions I've watched — a hundred, two hundred. I should've known! The juveniles are possessive. You can't try to take their favorite toy away!' He shook his head. 'The Model Eight had been dragging the soldier by his head, Laura, by his head. When I grabbed the soldier's legs, the robot paused, gathering itself. I saw it coming and even let go, but…'
Gray covered his face with his hands, then rubbed his eyes and temples. 'The soldier's feet slung around like a rag doll. The body landed on the raised muddy clearing. The robot still held the man's head in his hands.'
Gray fell silent — reliving the ghastly scene, Laura imagined, in the vivid color images of his mind. 'What happened then?' she asked.
'The robot was distraught. It started waggling its head from side to side and stamping its feet like it was marching in place. The head it was holding seemed too awful either to put down or to hold onto. Finally, it tossed the head toward the body and disappeared.'
Laura felt vicariously the weight that was crushing Gray.
'Joseph, that wasn't your fault. You didn't kill that man.'
