now soaked with enough two-cycle oil and grease so it was nearly black.
The fifteen-horsepower motor caught, bur bled and rumbled.
He shut off the electric, geared the Mercury, and twisted the throttle.
The smell of gasoline and lubricant enveloped him.
The bateau surged against the slow flow. He angled toward the east
bank to avoid a half-submerged log floating toward him. Or was that a
gator?
On the shore, a big snapping turtle sunned itself on a rock. The
approaching boat made it nervous, and the turtle slid from the rock and
vanished into the dark water.
Michaels smiled. Jay had done a terrific job on this scenario. It
felt so real.
Ahead, the virtual reality construct that represented the HAARP
facility's computer system stood on the east bank of the bayou, the
image of a backwoods bar, a juke joint.
The building was wooden, painted white with a slanting, corrugated
metal roof, and the exterior walls were hung with metal beer and
soft-drink signs whose paint was flaking and peeling: Falstaff, Jax,
Royal Crown Cola, Dr. Pepper.
A small mountain of rusting steel cans avalanched toward the riverbank
to the side of the ramshackle building.
Michaels was close enough to see that the empty cans had pairs of
triangular-shaped holes punched into the tops--opened with what his
father used to call a church key, long before pull-or pop-tops were
invented.
He guided the boat toward the shore.
Virtual reality hadn't turned out quite the way the early computer gee
ks had imagined. With the power and input devices available, virtual
reality could be, well, virtually anything--it was up to the person who
designed the scenario.
The constructs were analogies, of course, but con 9
figured so that people could relate to them intuitively.
Normal people didn't want to push buttons or click on icons, no matter
how cute these things were. What they really wanted was to be
surrounded by a setting in which they could behave like people. Instead
of tapping at a keyboard, they could hike a mountain trail, ride a
horse through the Old West, or--like Michaels--take a small boat down a
dark and slow-flowing bayou. There were no limits to what you could do
in VR, save those of imagination. You could buy off-the-shelf
software, have it custom designed by somebody who knew about such
things, or do it yourself. Michaels was the head of Net Force, so he
had to at least have a passing familiarity with doing it himself, and
he did, but it was much easier to let Jay Gridley or one of the other
hotshot ops build them. These guys were detail oriented, and they
really got into it.
You could go places, interact with other people, get into computer
systems, and what you saw and did might have no relationship to what
other people in the same location saw or did. It was personal, unless
you opted for the default scenario, or agreed to a consensus reality. A
