‘I think I may be sick.’
Her muffled voice sounded worried. ‘That shouldn’t happen. It’s calibrated to keep in sync with your head movements.’
‘No,’ Owen teased her, ‘I mean that I hate cheese and onion. Ouch!’
Toshiko had rapped hard on the top of the helmet with her knuckles. ‘Pay attention, this is the science bit.’ As she spoke, Owen could tell exactly where she was in the room from the way her voice moved between the two speakers. ‘This is my early prototype. It should keep you happy while I try to sort out my stress test harness for the main implementation without the attached input devices.’
‘Sounds kinky.’
‘Software test harness, you perv.’ He could hear her typing away at his computer keyboard while she set things up. ‘The next stage will be to use projectors so that the user’s not encumbered by the headgear and gloves. A proper, 3-D immersive environment, with natural interaction gestures. So you’ll be able to touch objects, physically sculpt the world to make things.’
Owen nodded, and the green grid nodded with him. ‘You mean I could make things happen by doing stuff, not just by describing stuff?’
‘Exactly. Hang on, nearly there. Yes, there you go. As it is, what you’re wearing there is a thousand times better than the commercially available version of Second Reality. I’ve debugged a lot of their stuff, so you’ll get fewer system crashes.’
‘Smartarse.’
‘And as you can see, with the processing power we’ve got available through the Hub, the user environment is more photo-realistic too.’
Owen knew how Toshiko loved to talk technogeek. He was letting her chatter away without trying to understand it, but that last bit begged a question. ‘What do you mean, photo-realistic?’
There was a pause. ‘Ah. Sorry. Let me plug your helmet into the grid.’
Owen could hear her looking for a connection, scrabbling around between his knees. This looked promising…
And then he didn’t need an explanation about this new system any more. He could see what she meant. He could experience it, right now. Because the world had come to life.
He was in the Lunatic Fringe. Sitting in one of the barber’s chairs. Only they weren’t the blocky shapes in primary colours that he’d last seen on his flatscreen display. These looked like cracked red leather, the machine stitching clearly visible, some of it fraying on the arms where a thousand previous customers had levered themselves in and out of position for a haircut.
The chipped linoleum floor was strewn with hair clippings, patches of black and brown, blond and ginger that bore witness to previous customers. One of the previous customers, Kvasir, was still there, also on the linoleum, his body and limbs spread out clumsily in the scattered hair. His severed head, still implausibly in its horned helmet, lay against the bottom of the panelled wall, with black blood coagulated around the base of the neck. ‘Change for a tenner,’ remembered Owen. The realism of the dead body in front of him somehow made the earlier fracas more embarrassing.
He turned at the sound of horses clopping by the shop window. A neon sign flashed beside the entrance door, weirdly illuminating the armour of the passing pedestrians. Something alarmed a passing horse. The animal gave a shrill whinny, and it half-reared up. The mounted rider attempted to rein it in, but the horse’s nostrils flared and it reared again. A nearby maid in a mob cap shrieked in surprise — ‘Oh my Lord!’ — and dropped her bundle of provisions.
‘What do you think?’ asked Toshiko’s voice.
He considered for a moment. ‘Nice tits. You look good in pink.’
Penny Pasteur was standing in front of him, talking in Toshiko’s voice. She tutted and sighed. She held out her bare arms and waggled her fingers in the air. The bangles on her wrists jingled as she moved, but Owen could also hear keys clicking, as though she was using an invisible typewriter. Penny spun on her heel like dancing a pirouette, and was instantly transformed.
Now she looked more like Toshiko Sato, down to the skin tone and short, black hair. Instead of a fluffy pink bikini she wore a smart black trouser suit, with a Nehru jacket buttoned up to the neck. Owen pouted, and pointed to a martini glass and cocktail shaker on the kitchen counter beside her. ‘I see you haven’t finished the washing-up either.’
‘Don’t make me slap you,’ she warned him. ‘This was the nearest character I could use to interact with you. Unless you count him.’ She indicated the headless corpse. ‘I think I’d better tidy him up, don’t you? Nothing stays dead for very long in here.’ She typed in mid-air again, and Kvasir’s corpse snapped silently out of existence. ‘There, I’ve even mopped the floor. I’ll leave the dishwashing for you.’
‘This is just amazing, Tosh.’
‘Tell me I’m a genius.’
‘You’ve made your bum smaller, I notice. Are you glamming yourself up?’
‘You can talk,’ she retorted. ‘Have you seen yourself? I think you may have issues. “Glendower”, indeed!’
He squared his broad virtual shoulders. ‘So what? It’s a computer game, not a psychology session. I have to admit, I am gobsmacked. This is fantastic, even for you.’
‘Did I mention that I’m a genius?’
‘You’re a genius.’ He stood up and stepped towards her, but banged his knee on an invisible desk. He could hear pencils and DVD cases scattering onto the floor, though he couldn’t see them.
‘Stop, stop,’ urged Toshiko. ‘You have to stay sitting at your desk. Don’t go wandering off! You’re still attached to your computer.’
Owen fumbled behind himself for his office chair in the real world, and settled back into it as though it was the leather barber’s seat.
Toshiko glided over to him with an unfamiliar sinuous grace. ‘Try gesturing with your data-gloves. They can move you about as though you’re using your keyboard.’
Owen tried a few movements. At first he managed to upend himself, which had the disorienting effect of giving him an inverted view of the barbershop while his body told him he was still the right way up. Soon he’d mastered the gestures, and was striding around the Lunatic Fringe as though he owned the place. Which, virtually speaking, he did.
‘When I get it sorted out,’ Toshiko explained, ‘it’ll be able to use positional info from the cameras and sensors here in the Hub. The tracking devices in our mobile phones. That kind of thing. And the resolution will be good enough to be close to real life.’
‘Fleshspace,’ he told her.
‘Eww. What?’
‘That’s what players of Second Reality call the real world.’
‘One day, I’ll be glad to welcome you to the real world, Owen.’
‘I don’t imagine I could do this in fleshspace.’ He reached out and fondled virtual Toshiko’s breast through the material of her Nehru jacket. The sensors in his gloves pressed softly against his fingers and the palm of his hand. A series of smacks on his real-world head made his ears ring. ‘Ouch! Come on Tosh! Stop slapping my helmet.’
Toshiko’s attack ceased. ‘I bet you wouldn’t say that to Penny Pasteur if you made contact in fleshspace.’
From outside the shop came the sound of a shrill whinnying. Owen wafted a gesture, and his virtual self walked to the front of the shop. A hunter was half-rearing up, snorting nervously, startled by something. A maid in a mob cap and a dusty overcoat was shying away from the creature.
Owen grabbed for the door handle, in the hope of rushing out and pulling the maid to safety. Before he could seize it, the door wrenched itself open, and he was in the street. The maid leapt to one side with a cry of ‘Oh my Lord!’ and dropped her bundle of shopping. A large ham bounced out of its wrapping and onto the pavement. By the time the hunter’s rider had calmed the creature, the maid had recovered her composure and her ham. Owen watched her scurry away down the street.