The Archimedes Effect

the Pentagon to see a computer specialist meant surrendering all data containers, and a close search of anything going out, so he’d had to leave his virgil and his data watch at the front desk. He carried copies of his usual VR avatars in them, along with his VR settings. Going into her scenario without them put him at a slight disadvantage, but it also meant she had to come up with something for him to wear in VR.

It would be interesting to see what she did.

“Ready?”

He gave her a thumbs-up, and activated his gear.

He was on a beach. The sun was nearly straight overhead, which put him closer to the equator, and it was hot. Apparently, the little TFUs worked fairly well. He could feel the sun’s rays warming him, and it felt right. Impressive. A slight onshore breeze tickled his skin, cooling him—everywhere.

Everywhere? He looked down.

Naked as the proverbial, well, bad pun, jaybird.

He looked back up and to his right, and there was Rachel Lewis, also naked, walking in front of him. Her skin was slightly more tanned than she’d been in RW, but other than that, she looked exactly the same. Her figure, as seen from behind, more than delivered what her clothes had promised.

Whoa!

Most VR programmers tended to incorporate some aspect of fantasy in their avatars, particularly for a given scenario. When he played big-game hunter or 1930s pulp hero, Jay would amalgamate his own body’s features onto other bodies, becoming someone else, rather than just himself.

The fact that she apparently didn’t meant something. What, he didn’t know, but it was interesting. Very interesting.

She turned and laughed.

“Oh, sorry, Jay,” she said. “I’d forgotten the naked part—I usually run this one by myself.”

Her front was just as spectacular as her back. Tanned skin, kissed lightly by the sun, had resulted in a beautiful spatter of freckles that topped, um, a bunch of other, um, most attractive attributes he probably ought not to be thinking about.

Jay was struck yet again by how much she looked like her RW counterpart. No enhancements that he could see. As far as he could tell, this was her for real.

He swallowed, feeling even warmer. Cool off, Jay.

“No problem,” he said. “My wife Saji and I spent some time in Europe on a couple of clothing-optional beaches.”

Managed to work Saji’s name in there pretty good.

Still, he could feel himself starting to, ah, react to the sight of her, the surprise of it. Any second his avatar might begin registering his interest in a visible way.

Shit. Got to stop that.

She motioned for him to follow her, and turned, showing him her backside again as she started to walk.

Yes, that’s it. Keep looking the other way.

“I’ve found that this works pretty good for tracking data packets.”

He listened with half an ear as he reached up and tapped the side of his head. It felt slightly wrong, since he was not wearing VR goggles in the scenario, and he slid his hand along the earpiece to what he knew was the box under it. He felt the catch open and felt for the tiny dip switches inside. Back in college he’d played VR chicken with other students. It was a game of sensory overloads—who could last the longest listening to things like fingernails on blackboards, swimming in containers of beetles, or the like. Whoever showed the most reaction in the scenario would lose. He’d sometimes beat the system by learning how to disable the RW sensory interface while in VR.

Like now.

He counted over three switches and turned the next two off. Now he could see and feel everything in VR, but the system couldn’t read his nerve impulses.

Any excitement his body registered in RW wouldn’t show in VR.

He looked down, just to be sure.

There was that little brown mole, right there on his—Jesus! He was wearing his real body. How had she done that?

Lewis was still talking.

“The carrier waves are the people on the beach. My scenario shows them naked, so that I can see if they’re hiding anything.”

She must have used an old copy from the MIT lab, used an aging algorithm to extrapolate the rest. Pretty sharp, Lewis.

They reached a set of sunbathers on green reclining chairs. Lewis sat down on a chair nearby, motioning to Jay to do the same. She straddled the chair as she sat down, giving him something more to see.

“Take a look,” she said.

He realized she meant the couple next to them, and saw that there was a slight discoloration on the man’s body. And a bulge wiggling under the skin of his belly, like some implanted alien monster about to erupt.

The man stood up and walked away. Jay looked around.

If the scenario had him as a metaphor to a data pipe, anything he was carrying was data. Hidden data, in this case.

Nice.

“Clever,” he said to Lewis.

Jay and Rachel followed. Strains of brassy music with bass and guitar drifted across the beach. The music added to the scene, but there was no immediate explanation for it.

Jay looked at Lewis and raised his eyebrow. “That a five-five-five, Lewis?”

She grinned. “Nope—ahead on the right. Hell, I haven’t heard that term in years. Professor Barnhardt would be proud.”

Jay looked ahead. There it was—a radio on a piece of driftwood next to the beach bar.

Barnhardt had been a drama instructor who’d transferred to the VR department. There had been some controversy about that, since the old man had hardly had any programming experience. But he’d been smart.

His specialty was teaching the programmers how to be more real. He’d termed anything that threw you out of the VR illusion a “five-five-five”—taking the name from the fake phone number prefix used in movies and TV. Every time you see that, he’d say, you remember you’re looking through the third wall.

Her code was sharp, she’d figured out she had a leak on her own, and she created VR as good as—well, almost as good as—his own. He was impressed.

The man stopped at the beach bar. He looked behind him, saw them, and then jumped over a large piece of driftwood and ran.

Jay and Rachel hurried to catch up. Jay marveled at how well the TFU worked—he’d swear wind was rushing over his naked body, and he could feel parts of his body swinging.

When they reached the driftwood and looked on the other side, the man was gone.

Well.

It looked like this might take more trips to the beach. Jay looked over at Lewis and saw her looking at him.

He wondered if that was a good idea or not.

6

Alice’s Restaurant

University Park, Virginia