After five minutes or so he decided it was time to try some other olfactories.
“Outdoors, swamp,” he said.
He stood in a swamp, looking out at cypress trees thick with Spanish moss. The trees weren’t as well rendered as they could have been — he would have done better if he’d written the calibration proj — but he was here for the smells, not the visuals.
The air had just the right combination of suffocating murkiness he remembered from his one trip to a real swamp. Jay was pretty much a VR guy, not much RW, but a VR programmers’ convention he’d attended in New Orleans back in the early days of VR had included a tour of the surrounding bayous as part of the “get it right, make it real,” theme of VR work. He’d been bitten probably ten or twenty times by mosquitoes while he’d sniffed, touched, and looked around the swamp, and had contemplated briefly going into another less nature-based life of coding.
But no. VR was the way — using human senses to interpret digital data. It worked with what nature had given man and extended it. Jay had always wanted to be at the cutting edge of things, and VR was it. So he’d put on anti-itch cream and gone back to the convention, and every time since he’d taken whatever tour was available for wherever that year’s meeting was.
He inhaled slightly and got a hint of woodsmoke. A thin breeze wafted against his face, and the smell intensified.
Nice. Good resolution on this hardware.
“Clear scenario, reload Pulp Hero.”
The scene flickered for a second, and suddenly he was at the New Jersey docks again, dressed as he had been when he’d traced CyberNation’s payment to the clerk when it had entered the U.S.
Let’s see — he’d been over
Jay moved across the rooftop, the cold wind blowing against him as he headed for the vantage point where he’d had the stinky fog glitch.
SOAP was an acronym one of his college professors had been fond of using. The man had repeated it so often it was just about the only thing Jay could recall about him. Old Doc Soap. The word’s letters stood for the steps taken while troubleshooting: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan. Jay had found out later that his teacher had borrowed the method from the health profession, where it was used to assess a patient’s state of mind, but it served equally well in the tricky business of finding soft- and hardware bugs.
Subjective. What had happened? He’d been standing
Okay, so much for the subjective. Objective: He’d done a full check of drivers after the VR run and everything had been up to par. He’d also just finished checking out his own code and knew for sure that the problem wasn’t his fault. The properties of the fog object had
Assessment time. It wasn’t the drivers, it wasn’t the software, but there had definitely been a problem. So try a new reeker, which rolled him right into Plan.
A thin tendril of fog rolled past, and as he had before, Jay reached out to touch it. This time there was no sensation other than a slight coolness on his fingers. The fog smelled a little like the ocean. Perfect.
So it had been the reeker after all. Another problem solved.
He snapped out of VR and disconnected his gear, and then decided that as long as he was working on his system, he might as well load another little item he’d gotten in the mail recently. This one was a small package sent to him by Cyrus Blackwell, a sensory artist and one of the best.
Cyrus took real-world scenery and collected it into VR: odors, tastes, visuals, feelies — everything. While it was true that Jay worked hard to get every detail right for his VR scenes, it helped sometimes to have the legwork done for him. He’d had Blackwell do a custom set of scans on a series of bank vaults for a robbery scenario he’d been planning.
Jay took the data cubes out of their media protectors and jacked them into the computer terminal he was using. He put his VR rig on again and went to a blank workspace.
This was supposed to be an analog for his next firewall breach, a huge bank that he was going to “rob.”
He called up the directory, and large red letters appeared in front of him. He scrolled them up until he saw what he wanted.
An info blurb explained that the vaults and bank interiors were taken from several large metropolitan areas in both the U.S. and Europe. He reached forward and pulled out the VR thumbnails, tiny models that were slightly translucent so he could see inside of them.
There was one with gorgeous neoclassic columns on the exterior, and high-vaulted ceilings within. Jay threw it on the blank space in front of him and activated it. The tiny model grew rapidly in size, translucent walls giving way to RW textures, and Jay enjoyed the perceptual shift that made it seem as though
Suddenly he was inside of the bank. He could hear an air conditioner running, and there was a clean but not overpowering scent to the place. The ceilings were high, like something from a movie set, and a long row of teller cages stretched from one side of the large room to the other.
Jay scrolled through the building, working his way to the vault. There was a set of stairs leading down to an underground chamber with a barred door in front of it.
Jay brought up a list of individual items and scanned for vault doors. He popped out several that looked promising before he found one that he liked. It was a huge circle, maybe a foot or two thick at the center, with huge gears that had to be thrown by a large wheel before it would operate. The door was shiny chrome steel, an ultramodern crimestopper that had just the look he wanted.
He grafted it onto the opening in the bank cellar and saved the file. He had the basic form now; he would work on some of the functional elements later.
Michaels decided to skip lunch and hit the gym instead. He’d been indulging in snacks a little more than he should have lately. He had found that he tended to eat when he got tense, and had decided that being unhappy wasn’t as bad in his mind as being
As he changed into a pair of baggy cotton shorts and a T-shirt, he thought about his morning. It wasn’t as if the lawsuit was the only thing on his plate, but every time Michaels saw another cart stacked high with papers go by, it reminded him that it was a pretty big chunk of it.
He hadn’t gotten into federal law enforcement to spend his time playing games with lawyers. It was a waste of time and energy, and he was finding it increasingly frustrating.
Back in the early G-men days, the bad guys had taken their lumps when they’d been caught, gone off to prison, and done their time. It would never have occurred to them to sue the cops who’d caught them doing wrong. Definitely a better class of criminal in the old days; guys who knew what they were.
He shut the locker door, spun the combination lock, and grabbed his towel. Toni was coming in at noon. John Howard’s boy had been watching Alex half-days, and that seemed to be working out okay. Guru was supposed to be back soon — her great-grandson had gotten worse, then better, then worse again, and as of this morning was still in the hospital. Apparently the doctors were worried about some kind of secondary infection, maybe a virus. The worry was that it was one of those things that mice carried.
As he padded out onto the workout mats, Michaels wondered for the hundredth time if maybe it wasn’t time to get out of this business. He had gone about as far as he could, he figured — farther than he’d ever expected, to be honest. He had, on a couple of occasions, even briefed the President himself — pretty high circles, admittedly, but his chances of moving any higher in the federal system were very slim. The director of the FBI was a political appointee, as was the CIA’s head. NSA usually had a working agent or military officer running the show, but you
