“Has he really been crypping down my GoMotion code from West West?” I demanded. My heart was beating fast and my face was flushed. I was badly rattled. Old fart? Well, I was forty-three, and certainly older than anyone I’d met so far at West West-with the possible exception of Otto Gyorgyi, who really was an old fart.
“It’s a damn good thing he crypped your code,” said Ben Brie. “What with you off the Net and your home system thrashed.” Not that I’d told him my home system was thrashed. These guys were total cryps and pirates. Was there anything about me they didn’t know?
“West West should spend some money on individual decks,” interrupted Sun Tam, impatiently filliping a fingernail against the beige crinkle-finish sheet metal housing of the Sphex. It was Sun’s style, I would learn, to propose concrete physical solutions to disagreements. “Why should we fight over these two machines every single day? On the street you could get six individual decks for the price of a Sphex. With enough machines, we could all be working at home, Ben. The commute is also a cause of stress, for that matter. The daily grind.”
Clearly Ben had heard this many times before. “These two Sphexes are top of the line,” he insisted. “Check it out, Jerzy.” He picked up a sensor bead and clipped it to a piece of hair on the top of my head.
Sun Tam got up and I sat down in his place. The swivel chair in front of the Sphex was a complex custom job with a rocker swivel and a rotating base. I pulled on the gloves and drew the Abbott screen closer to my face. The software showed my gloves with matchstick man arms coming out of them and leading toward me. The screen showed a low workbench with a bunch of machine parts. Faint lines connected the parts, showing how they should hook up. The images were very finely shaded and rendered.
What the sensor bead did for me was to make the screen seem like a glass window with things behind it. If I leaned to the left, then more stuff came into view at the right of the screen. When I was a kid I once tried to peek down a televised woman’s dress by standing up and leaning over the TV-if Mom and Pop’s TV had been a Sphex deck, this would have worked. I moved my head slightly from side to side, looking things over, getting a feel for the three-dimensional volumes of the objects in the scene.
A cluster of tool icons hovered over the bench: “tools” like a magnifying glass, a pair of goggles, a coiled spring, a screwdriver, a telephone, a compass, a clipboard, and so on.
I stuck my hands forward under the edge of the hanging screen, and computer images of my hands appeared. I picked up a few of the machine parts and turned them over. This was obviously a disassembled robot. I recognized many of the component parts from our Veep design; I recognized very many. Of course there were only so many brands of sonar units, motors, struts, wheels, etcetera-but this design’s overlap with our proprietary GoMotion design was more than coincidental, it was obvious and excessive. I was looking at a premarket pirated clone of the GoMotion Veep.
“Sketchy wasn’t kidding about downloading information from GoMotion, was he?” said I. “I can’t believe this is such a rip off. GoMotion will sue West West for everything they’ve got.”
“Let them sue,” said Ben Brie carelessly. “Ownership is theft-or a good out-of-court settlement. Some reality therapy, Jerzy: your job here and now is to get a product on the street. Frankly, I’m glad the Adze looks familiar to you. It’ll be that much less effort for you to get up to speed.”
I sat there not saying anything, just moving my head around and looking at the parts of the machine.
“Have you used this kind of deck before, Jerzy?” asked Sun Tam. The simple, factual question soothed me. Managers, cryps, lawyers-they’re all leeches. Only programmers are worth talking to. Programmers and women, that is. I remembered that this afternoon I was going to visit the home of Nga Vo.
Once I’d paid a formal visit, would Nga’s family allow me to take her out on a date right away? She looked truly hot, though of course that kind of presentation was often bogus. I thought of an I Ching fortune I’d once gotten: “Beware of the marrying maiden.” But-the way Nga’s muscles moved under the skin of her cheek-how would it be to kiss that cheek?
Sun Tam was looking at me. The question at hand: when had I last used a scarce-resource super-duper machine like the Sphex?
“Couple of weeks. We use one in meetings at Go-Motion. But not with this kind of chair. What does the chair do?” It was mounted on a thick base with a serial port cord that led into the back of the Sphex.
“It’s a Steadiswivel,” said Sun Tam. “New out of LA Spin around and look what’s behind you.”
The problem with fixed-mount displays like the Sphex has always been that when you move, the screen stays put and maybe you can’t see it anymore. The fragile illusion of virtual reality bursts. I pushed my foot against the chair’s base so as to spin my seat to the left.
I expected to see the screen move off to the right and out of my field of view. But instead the screen stayed right in front of me and the Steadiswivel’s base turned out from under me. The image on the screen swept around the virtual machine-room that Sun Tam had been working in. If I stared at the screen, and kept kicking, I felt sure that I was really turning, and that the window of the screen was turning with me. It was as if I were in a spinning cylinder which had a single rectangular window. Really I was sitting still and kicking a wheel with my foot, and the image on the screen was scanning in exact sync with the turning of the wheel. Kind of a cheap trick; but so was cyberspace, especially if you took a close look at the graphics algorithms.
“If you try to rock back,” offered Ben, “then the image on the screen scans upward. It’s pretty convincing.”
I maneuvered back to a view of the parts on the workbench, and reached up to pick the tool icon that looked like a coiled spring. The lines connecting the disassembled robot’s parts began shrinking, with the effect that the components assembled themselves into the image of a small, dome-headed machine with three arms and two small bicycle wheels mounted at the end of single-jointed legs with idler wheels on their knees. It looked a lot like Studly.
“The Adze,” said Sun Tam, who was watching over my shoulder. “It’s a Seven Lucky machine with West West software.”
“What’s with the third arm?” I asked.
“Marketing thought of it,” said Ben. “It’s a way to position the West West Adze as being different from the GoMotion Veep. The third arm is soft and made of piezoplastic. You’ll need to write some new code to run it.”
Even aside from the extra arm, the Adze was not totally identical to the GoMotion design. It had what looked to be a good new feature or two, although I could see that several suboptimal design decisions had been made. With just a little more tweaking, the design could-
“Whoa there,” said Ben, as if reading my mind. “You’re looking at a frozen production spec. This design is what Otto Gyorgyi signed off on, and he’s not going to sign again. Our mode is ship this or die. Let the Adze into your heart just as it is, Jerzy. Love it and help it grow. Teach it to do cool things.”
“How do I drive it?”
“Touch the goggles icon,” said Sun Tam.
I touched the goggles, and my viewpoint shifted so that I saw through the virtual robot’s eyes. I, robot, was now sitting on a three-foot by five-foot workbench. I could see a robotic arm on either side of my visual field. For the moment, the robots arms were not moving with the motions of my own gloved hands. Good, that meant West West was using the standard telerobotic interface.
Recall that there were standard hand gestures for flying your tuxedo about in cyberspace. You’d point and nod to move in some direction, and you’d make a fist to stop. A telerobot in start-up mode was supposed to obey these commands as well. When you wanted to take over a manipulator, you’d make the gesture of slipping your hand into it.
I pointed and nodded and I began rolling toward the edge of the table. The scene lurched as I drove off the edge of the workbench table. I heard the simulated hum as my virtual gyroscope kept me from tumbling. My legs popped out to full extension and my wheels hit the floor. My knees bent, cushioning me from the impact.
I made a fist, scanned this way and that, found the exit door, pointed and trundled out the door and into what looked like the living room of a suburban home-a very familiar home. There was a baby asleep on a blanket in the middle of the floor, and here around the corner came none other than… Perky Pat Christensen! The West West cryps had even ripped off Our American Home.
“Change Baby Scooter’s diaper,” Perky Pat told me. “Don’t go near the baby. Follow me into the kitchen, and stay right where you are! Hurry up, damn you!” Her pinched tan face glared at me in pharmaceutical rage. The Adze waved its arms uncertainly.
Just as I slipped my hands into the left and right manipulators, there was a sudden whoop, and my point of view turned upside down. I glimpsed the sneakers and the blond flattop of Pat’s son Dexter. He’d just turned me
