Most people could buy off-the-shelf software and be perfectly happy. Most people weren’t Net Force’s top VR honcho, Smokin’ Jay Gridley. If he couldn’t do it right, he didn’t want to do it.
The captain finished his directions. The team started into the building, dragging a stiff and heavy pressurized hose. The power was out, so they switched on helmet and hand-carried lanterns. The sounds they made were loud in the darkness, and the roar of the fire a couple of stories up was muted but audible, the building vibrating as it was being eaten alive by the orange monster. A lot of firefighters anthropomorphized fire, Jay knew that much. They talked about it as if it were some kind of malevolent creature rather than what was essentially a real fast version of rust-oxidation and combustion…
Back at Net Force HQ, Jay and his team were working their computers, trying to find the source of the problem at Blue Whale — and they weren’t alone — but in this scenario, he was about to take a turn up a dark hallway by himself to get closer to the source of the fire. Not something any sane fireman would do, and certainly not alone, he knew at least that much.
As the team moved to the location where it was supposed to deploy its hose, Jay slipped into the stairway and started climbing. The smell of burning material and the hint of smoke in the stairwell was a nice touch, he thought, congratulating himself.
As he climbed to the second floor landing, then past it, he suddenly thought about Saji. Despite her life-is-about-suffering Buddhist thing, she was very excited about their upcoming wedding. And while the idea of being without her and back like he’d been before they had met was as bleak a scenario as Jay could imagine, he had to confess to himself that he’d had some second thoughts. Getting married had never really been in Jay’s life plan. Oh, sure, he had figured there’d be women in his life, maybe even children someday, but the reality of it was different than the vague imaginings he’d had. That he would marry a Buddhist he’d met on-line while recovering from an induced-stroke — a woman whose net persona had been that of an old Tibetan lama — had never figured into his fastasies. And now that the actual date had been set and the plans were being carefully laid, the idea that he was going to be married to somebody had begun to hit home.
One woman, for the rest of his life. Day in, day out, always around…
Yeah, the sex was great, and yeah, he loved her, couldn’t really imagine being alone, no Saji around; still, there was this… finality about the idea of saying “I do” and signing a lifelong contract that had never really occurred to him until it was actually staring him in the face…
He got to the third floor. Took off his right glove, pressed it against the door. The door was cool to the touch. He took a couple of deep breaths of the stale-tasting compressed air from his bottle, then reached for the doorknob. Worry about getting married later. Right now, he had a job to do. Some guys were screwing with the web, and he was the guy who was going to track them down and stop them.
They obviously didn’t know who they were messing with…
The fire scenario was okay, but overblown. Jay had always been too gaudy about such things, spending too much time on how good something looked when he should have been concentrating on how well it worked. Style and not substance.
Still, as Keller stood there in his fireman’s gear, watching Jay work, he had to give him credit. He was sniffing in the right direction.
Keller waited until Jay went past, heading for the source of the “fire.” Maybe he could figure something out, maybe not, but he wasn’t going to get the chance. Keller followed Jay up the stairwell, being careful to stay out of sight, tracking him by the sound of his boots on the steps.
Once Jay was on the right floor, Keller moved in. It was dark, smoky, hot, all in all, a pretty good representation, as such things went. Jay was always big on details. But that was the curse of a small picture man, wasn’t it? Couldn’t see the forest for the trees in the way. No long-range vision.
From a cabinet near the door, Keller pulled a thermite bomb, shaped like a bowling ball. He triggered the timer for ten seconds, then rolled it across the floor toward the unseen Jay Gridley. Heard Jay stop and listen.
See you later, Jay. You lose this round.
The bomb went off in a flare that destroyed the scenario as Keller dropped out of VR and back into his cabin on the Bon Chance. He pulled off the sensory gear, laughing. “You never had an opponent like me, Jay. I know all your best moves. You don’t have a prayer.”
11
An old man, maybe seventy-five or so, sat in a recliner in a low-rent room, pointing a remote at a battered television set, pushing buttons, but getting only scrambled, frantic pixels whirling on his screen.
A deep, masculine voice said, “Tired of losing your net service? Unable to log onto the web because your server can’t get its act together?”
The old man clicked the remote a couple more times, then shook his head and tossed the control onto a scratched table next to the worn and scuffed leather recliner.
A big, happy-looking German shepherd padded over to the old man. In his mouth, the dog held another remote, a silvery, glittering, truncated cone-shaped device. The old man looked at the dog, who dropped the device into his lap and gave him a dog smile.
“What’s this, boy?” the old man said.
The dog gave one sharp bark.
The old man picked up the remote.
The opening notes for Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra” began playing quietly in the background.
A deep voice said, “We at CyberNation understand your frustration. And we have a guarantee — if you are ever kept off the net for more than an hour on a CyberNation server, we’ll not only give you your money back for that entire month, we’ll give you your next month of service absolutely free.”
The music grew louder. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom-boom…
The old man looked at the dog and raised one eyebrow in question. The dog barked once, and it was obvious what he was saying. “Go for it!”
“At CyberNation, we are always here for you, twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. You have our word on that, and we put our money where our mouth is.”
The old man pointed the remote at his television set.
The music’s volume increased so that it rumbled over the old man and dog as if a full symphony orchestra was in the next room.
The set morphed, changed into a giant window that expanded to cover the entire wall. People stepped out and into the shabby living room. There was an Indian holy man in a turban and long flowing white robe; a black woman in a grass skirt, bare from the waist up; a cowboy; an Arctic explorer; a big-game hunter. In addition, a rhino, an ostrich, and a small dinosaur stepped from the window into the suddenly expanded living room. All of them seemed to get along famously.
The music reached its peak, thundering Strauss, horns blasting their dramatic sting.
“Anywhere, anytime, anybody you want to be — CyberNation can take you there. Come along. Join the millions of satisfied citizens of the net in mankind’s greatest experiment. The future is waiting for you.”
The old man and dog both smiled as the music faded.
“What do you think?” Chance said.