Instantly a vast carpet of glowing small print appeared beneath his feet, laid out and vanishing away into the virtual middle distance like the crawl in some old-fashioned space movie. It said:
© JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES 2018–2025. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS VIRTUAL DOMAIN IS A WORK OF FICTION. ANY RESEMBLANCE OF ANY MANIFESTATION TO PERSONS ALIVE OR DEAD IS COINCIDENTAL. THIS SITE IS TO BE USED FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. YOU MUST BE SIXTEEN YEARS OF AGE TO ENTER. BY ENTERING THIS VIRTUAL DOMAIN YOU STATE AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ AND UNDERSTAND THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE OF THIS FACILITY. YOU EXPRESSLY ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU INDEMNIFY AND HOLD BLAMELESS JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEES FOR ANY ADVERSE AFFECT WHATSOEVER WHICH MAY BE INCURRED BY THE USE OF THIS FACILITY, AND JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEES ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR SUCH EFFECTS…
Nick walked on down the carpet of words with his hands stuffed in his pockets, amused, half wishing his mom could see him, half dreading her reaction, now minutes away, when she found out where he'd been. Well, it doesn't have to happen right this second…
YOU ALSO WAIVE IN PERPETUITY YOUR RIGHT AND THE RIGHT OF YOUR HEIRS OR ASSIGNS OR ANY OTHER RESPONSIBLE PERSONS IN WHATEVER LEGAL RELATIONSHIP TO YOU TO MAKE ANY CLAIM WHATSOEVER AGAINST JOEY BANE ENTERPRISES AND ITS AGENTS AND LICENSEEES IN ANY JURISDICTION NOW KNOWN OR ANY OTHER WHICH MAY HEREAFTER BE DISCOVERED, IN PERPETUITY. THIS AGREEMENT IS BINDING IN THIS FORM IN ALL U. S. JURISDICTIONS EXCEPT THE FOLLOWING: MD, NY, ME, VT. MARYLAND LAW REQUIRES THE FOLLOWING DISCLAIMER: THIS FACILITY MAY CONTAIN CONTENT INTENDED TO SHOCK OR DISTURB…
Nick snickered at that as he walked past it. He hadn't been all that shocked. Maybe people in Maryland were just too delicate to live. But he was made of sterner stuff. " `Nicey-nice,' " he sang under his breath as he walked down the long strip of text, as if down a red carpet, "wasting your time, smiling at folks without reason or rhyme: life is too short as it is; it's a crime… only death's certain to call… "
The music came up around him as he left, Joey Bane's voice singing, with Camiun providing the growling harmony under the main line, and the pulse beat rhythm driving it all. There was supposed to be a new version of "Nicey-Nice" out now. Nick resolved to break a little of his saved-up ticket money loose for it right away.
He turned off his implant, and vanished.
In the virtual realm Deathworld suddenly accrued another sixteen dollars and fifty-three cents of credit.
And in the real world, several hundred miles away, someone who had been in Deathworld only an hour before was found dead.
Chapter 2
Charlie Davis was sitting in his virtual workspace, wondering how to get the steam engine to work. He could have cheated and called up the software company's help line, which would have sent him a helpful "ghost" of James Watt, but the prospect of doing so struck him as an admission of failure. So instead he sat on the floor of the workspace, staring at the pressure gauges all over the engine's shining brass outsides, and wondered what the heck to do next.
Charlie knew people whose workspaces were marvels of the "special effects" end of virtuality. One of his buddies in the Net Force Explorers kept her workspace on one of the moons of Saturn. Another one had built himself a perfect replica of Windsor Castle, which he had filled with expressions of his own hobby, model trains. Charlie had found that a little bizarre, especially the miniature train shed which Mikey had installed in St. George's Chapel. "You should talk," Mikey had retorted. "Your workspace used to be used for medical research the hard way-vivisection… "
That hadn't been precisely true, but it wasn't the kind of discussion that Charlie much felt like having with someone pointlessly argumentative as Mikey, and he'd let it pass. Charlie had built his workspace into a duplicate of the eighteenth-century operating theater of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It was a splendid if not very sterile space in which concentric circles of mahogany "bleachers" surrounded an oval area in which was set a scrubbed wood table on which some of the most important experiments in the medicine of that time had been done. The circulation of blood had been explored there, and the structure of human bone, and Pasteur had dropped by to lecture on germ theory. If the professors working there had occasionally gone a little loopy and tried things like transplanting the head of one dog onto the body of another, well, that was then, not now, and everybody was entitled to have a bad day, experimentally speaking. Meanwhile, Charlie loved the place, the warm wooden gleam and polished-brass shine of it. It was the birthplace of modern medicine, and Charlie was going to be a doctor one of these days… though he intended to become an operative for Net Force as well. The only question was which of these goals he was going to manage first.
Then Charlie sighed heavily. "Actually," he muttered, "the only question is how I'm going to get this stupid thing in front of me to work."
It was, of course, not a real steam engine, just a mathematical simulation of one. If it _ was built properly, it would look and run like a real steam engine in the virtual world. Now, any workspace software worth its purchase price, if you told it to create such a thing out of nothing, would do just that and not bother you with the sordid details. But Charlie was learning how to write simulations in the programming language Caldera II, the language which virtual environments used to create things out of nothing so that they would behave real. And Caldera was desperately complex, difficult to control, easy to screw up, and otherwise just a major pain.
Charlie was not particularly interested in steam engines. What he really wanted to use Caldera for was to model the activity of neurons in the living human brain. But to create such models in any programming language, even Caldera, was an immensely subtle and difficult business-if you were interested in building models that actually worked like their counterparts in the real world, anyway, and suggested reasons for the way they behaved as they did. The steam engine was one of the "sample" simulations which came with the most current Caldera software package, and a good place (the software company said) to start practicing before going on to the more involved simulations. The program which the tutorial coached you in writing was one that described in maddening detail the way the virtual environment running it was supposed to act, so that you would put out your hand and feel hard cold brass or polished wood instead of air or fog that just looked like brass or wood, and so that the article you created in virtuality would act like a real thing, obeying real rules of science, and reacting appropriately to whatever you did to it.
That was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, Charlie had so far managed only a steam engine that looked like brass but felt like rubber, and which produced something that looked like steam, but was just cold vapor. He got up from the floor, walked around the engine, looked at it one more time.
"Okay," he said to the air. "Main program, routine five…"
A "window" opened in the air near him, showing the first of the lines and lines of code he had written so far, coached by the tutorial. Somewhere in here there was a statement that was wrong that the debugging routine hadn't found, and that the program thought was a genuine and valid instruction. And it would be, Charlie thought, annoyed, if people built rubber steam engines.
"Scroll down three," Charlie said. "Scroll down one. Scroll down one." He stared for several moments at that particular screenful of text, chewing his lip. After a moment he said, "Line sixty. Change statement. Old statement: `vis 15 hardness 80 spong 12'. New statement: `vis 15 hardness 120 spong 12.' "