Changing of the Guard

He reached out with his mind, flicking the off switch which would take him out of the scenario.

Nothing happened.

He frowned. What was going on?

Had his hardware glitched? Maybe an interface problem? The neural stimulators were so good these days it was possible to forget you had a body. One of the new guys he’d hired over the summer had gotten stuck one day when he’d removed the safety and alarm on his stims. That was strictly forbidden, and hard to do without some skill. The poor kid might have stayed there all day if he hadn’t had a dentist appointment and they’d called looking for him. Jay had done a hardware shutdown to pull him out of the figure eight. A bit of bad programming that could have been serious, and a lesson learned: Don’t shut off the safeties.

While Jay didn’t run his stims that high, he did get focused so intently that the effect was sometimes the same.

Well. No matter, he’d break it off now.

He focused on becoming aware of his body; he reached out to feel his index finger, crooking it slightly toward the cutout sensor he knew was there.

Got it…

But once again, nothing happened. The scene stayed on, the waves lapped inward, and a few seagulls, their feathers pearly white, flew by overhead.

Well.

Whatever was happening definitely had his attention now. He’d been feeling a little funny, kind of unfocused when the scenario started, but that was fading fast. His mind searched through alternative fixes for the problem.

Time to try software.

He’d route to an outside link, contact someone to go check on him in the lab. If someone had been messing around with cheap software in his VR rig, they were going to be sorry they had ever been born.

He couldn’t find the link. A moment of panic enveloped him.

Wait a second, hold on. Maybe he wasn’t in VR?

Could he be dreaming?

It was an occupational hazard that VR programmers often developed extremely realistic dreams. All the time that they spent coding sensations into a scenario wore a groove in their own heads. He looked at the perfect sunset and frowned. He’d like to think he’d dream something better than this.

There was an easy way to find out. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.

Which is there because I programmed it? Or dreamed it?

He’d taken the idea from an old book about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreamers were people who were aware that they were dreaming. Once this synaptic jump was made, they could control their dreams, a very attractive proposal prior to VR. The dreamer would carry a card around in his wallet that said, “If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.”

The wallet trick worked because, in a dream state, your brain had a hard time keeping text together. Lucid- dreamer wannabes would pull the card out in their dreams and read it. When the text didn’t work — usually it slid around the page, or faded out — they’d know they were dreaming.

Jay had used the technique to separate himself from his dreams several times and had offered it to other VR jocks he knew. He’d done it often enough that he’d actually managed to have a few lucid dreams as well. VR without the hardware.

He looked at the card.

If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.

Well, that answered that.

He glanced away from the card and then looked back to be sure.

If you can read this, you’re not in VR, either.

A chill frosted his shoulders.

Uh oh. What was going on here?

He tried to remember his day… It had been calm — he was going to see Saji, and then—

As if the thought had conjured her, he suddenly saw his wife across the beach, almost at the opposite end.

Saji! He felt a sense of relief. Saji would know what was going on. He’d talk to her, see what kind of VR he was stuck in.

As he drew closer to her, he could see that she held something. A little white bundle.

The wind on the shore suddenly carried to him a thin cry over the crash of the surf.

The baby!

What was going on? She’d just been diagnosed — well that wasn’t the right word, she’d… found out she was pregnant, just a few days before.

Something was wrong. He looked over toward Saji, and noticed that even though he hadn’t been moving slowly, she seemed to be farther away than before.

And in the same glance, he noticed that the water had pulled back from the sand — way back. Fish were flopping in the suddenly empty bay, seaweed and kelp beds were exposed, out past the coral reef.

He looked far out to sea and it was as if his vision had suddenly turned telescopic.

A huge swell moved toward the shore.

Tsunami!

Jay had gone on a holiday a few years back and had seen a sign on the shoreline: TIDAL WAVE ESCAPE ROUTE. The words had cast a shadow over his short foray on the beach — that and the fact that an old man had looked at his pale skin and asked, “Where you from, boy, Alaska?”

When he returned to the hotel, he hit the net and did a little studying on tsunamis. Shortly after that he moved to a hotel farther inland. The power of the water in a tidal wave could wipe out entire villages in seconds, and you never knew when one was just going to show up and swamp everything before the warning could do you any good.

And there was Saji and his baby right in front of one.

No way. VR or dream, or whatever. He was Jay Gridley, he was not going to let this happen!

Jay ran, using every trick he could think of to alter the scene: imagery, focus points, meditation, and VR conjurations.

Nothing worked. The wave kept coming.

He ran faster, figuring that at least his body — or what passed for it, wherever he was — was operating with a set of consistent physics.

But he wasn’t going to make it. He got closer, though, close enough to see little fingers grasping his wife’s shoulder as she started to breast-feed.

She doesn’t see the danger.

The sound of the water coming had grown, and there was a feel of imminent threat, death coming, everybody out!

“Saji!” he yelled, as loud as he could, “Get out of here! Run!”

He kept yelling as he ran, getting closer and closer. He thought about what he would do if and when he reached her. Run with her toward high ground, or at least try to find some kind of shelter—

He glanced to his left and saw it. The swell had jumped up in size, the seabed forcing higher as it approached. He had seen some surfers once on TV, riding on sixty-foot waves, monsters that dwarfed them, making them look like toys.

This wave was bigger.

A lot bigger.

He screamed Saji’s name again, and this time she heard him. She looked over, her eyes widening in surprise, and a smile beamed across her face.

No, no! Run! Run!

He gestured frantically toward the sea, and finally, chillingly, she looked.