The door closed, squeaking as it shut tight. It was molded so finely into the wall she couldn't even tell where it had been. Laura decided it would be safer on the floor, so she sat cross-legged in the center of the cylinder.
Nothing happened. It would take a little time, she presumed, for Filatov and his team to depart. She rested her chin on her clasped hands and heaved a deep sigh.
"Just a moment, Laura," a woman said. Laura turned to see that the door was still closed. The sound system was very good — highly directional.
It had been a woman's voice, but Filatov's two operators had been men. And she had said, "Laura," not "Dr. Aldridge." Laura opened her mouth to speak, but the lights went out.
"Hello?" she said loudly.
"Are you ready?" the pleasant woman asked.
"Excuse me, but I don't think we've met."
"It's me, Laura! I'm sorry you had to go to all this trouble, but you're gonna love it."
The voice was natural. It was totally realistic, unlike the computer's speech on the virtual treadmill or even in the version 3H.
This had to be some sort of joke. "Look, I don't know what to say…"
"I sense some doubt in your voice."
"Well…" Laura began, but she was beginning to wonder. Could it possibly be the computer?
"Here we go."
"Wait!" Laura said, sitting up straight and lowering her hands to the floor. "Okay, I'm ready. But nothing radical, okay?"
"Cross my heart," the computer said warmly.
With barely a hiss of static electricity from the walls Laura was sitting in a sun-streaked forest. She flinched and loosed an involuntary cry.
I'm in a forest! her senses told her, but she knew it wasn't true.
Her heart began to pound and she felt a prickly, sickening fear spread its grip across her skin. She jammed her eyes shut and buried her head in her arms, raising her knees into a quasi-fetal position.
A bird chirped in the distance. A cool breeze brushed softly by.
Laura slowly opened her eyes and looked down at the dirt and leaves in the shadows underneath her legs. She could feel the rough forest floor under the seat of her pants. [Unclear] blades of grass sprouted from the dark soft below. When the wind blew, the grass tickled the insides of her legs. The branches of the tree overhead swayed ever so slightly in the breeze. Their shadows gave way to the warming rays of the sun before returning to lay their cool touch on her skin.
There was a fire somewhere. She could smell burning wood in the air — a sweet, familiar smell like ski villages in winter.
"Laura," the sympathetic girl's voice came, "I know total immersion can be a difficult experience, but—"
"I don't know if I can do this!" Laura interrupted.
"Sure you can. This is your world. I've re-created it for you. But your reaction is totally normal. Some of the trainees never get past the stage you're in. What's happening is a major conflict between your senses and your reason. You know you're not in a forest, but your senses are slavishly reporting what they see, hear, feel, and smell. There's a titanic clash going on in the part of your brain where senses meet expectations. You've got to let your senses win. That means you've got to suspend your disbelief. You are in a forest, and the year is one hundred million B.C."
"Oh! That helps! Thank you."
The girl laughed, and Laura felt a smile creep onto her face.
"Okay," Laura said. "I'm going to try to get up, but slowly, all right? No surprises."
"No surprises, I promise."
The forest floor spread out in front of her. There were trees whose trunks seemed to start aboveground instead of below, their roots exposed. There were simple weeds of every shape and variety all around. She raised her hand without thinking to scratch where the grass had tickled her leg.
She looked up. The sky shone blue through the branches above her. The forest continued into the distance in all directions. Everything seemed normal for as far as she could see.
She was sitting on the ground in the middle of a forest.
"I can tell from your heart rate you're doing better. How do you feel?"
"A little woozy," Laura replied. She reached out for the grass and brushed the palm of her hand over the tips of the blades. She remembered in a rush of emotion the Model Eight running its hand over the flowers on the hillside. It was exploring a world that was every bit as strange and fascinating to it as virtual reality was to Laura.
"Do you feel like standing?" the friendly woman asked.
"No… not yet."
She again had the almost indefinable feeling of being outdoors.
The smell of wood smoke came and went with the breeze. There was constant "white noise" — the everywhere and nowhere sound of the breeze through the trees. There was the warmth and coolness on her skin, which seemed to change from moment to moment. Sun, shade, breeze — they all affected temperature very slightly, and the suit recorded the minute variations with indescribable precision. All of that computing power just to create such a minor background effect!
She felt guilty for using it — guilty and consumed by curiosity. A desire to know more, she thought, and the mobility to acquire that knowledge. Is this a lesson about mobility? To the computer, that lesson had seemed an important one for her to learn.
She took one more deep breath and then reached out to touch a weed rising from the soil a few inches away. It bowed under the pressure of her hand, and she felt the detail of every blade as if her bare palm were pressing down upon it.
What she wasn't ready for, however, was when her hand passed behind the plant… and disappeared. She pulled her hand back, then lowered it again on the other side. The weed obscured her hand.
"Don't be frightened, Laura. I can explain. Since your exoskeleton is itself a high-definition television screen, it's relatively simple to interpose an object." Laura waved her hand behind the plant. It disappeared and reappeared at exactly the expected times.
"The glove on your hand and the walls behind it display a seamless picture of the same object. By adjusting focal distances, it tricks your eyes into accepting the object's position in space. But I guess it would be better if I didn't teach you all the tricks. Total immersion is easiest to achieve if you allow an almost complete acceptance of your senses."
"No, no, no. I don't work that way. I want to know that it's just an illusion. It makes me feel better, more in control, okay?"
"Have it your way. Now, are you ready to get up yet?"
"Do I have to?" Laura asked.
"Here, I can help." The voice again came from the direction of the door. A woman stood there in full white body suit and hood.
"A-a-a-h!" Laura exclaimed, pushing herself away from the startling apparition.
The woman held her hands up in plea for calm. "Laura! It okay." She was small, slim, non-threatening. And it was the woman talking, not the walls and ceiling. The voice came right from her lips, which protruded from the white glove-like ski mask she wore.
Just above the hole for her mouth were two slits for nostrils and two more for her beautiful green eyes. She was smiling pleasantly, calmly.
"I'm your guide. I'm here to help you navigate in this world."
She walked over to Laura, who had to will herself not to flee through the brush again. "I don't really need this," the guide said, pulling the hood off her head. Her luxurious black hair tumbled out, falling onto her slender shoulders in a perfect, full-bodied coif. She held her white-gloved hand out to Laura.
The hand looked so real, hovering in three-dimensional perfection right before Laura's eyes.
Laura reached up and grasped it. She was amazed to find it right where it was supposed to be! She let go, but then regripped the warm skin. The girl's hand moved freely, giving a little but then resisting the pressures of Laura's touch in a fluid and lifelike manner.