There was no one in the white room with the eight tall cylinders. Laura found the exoskeleton hanging from the already glowing control panel and put it on. She fumbled with the Velcro straps until the contraption fit snugly over her upper body and then pressed the power button on the belt in front. The suit inflated, locking the joints of her arms as before. The fleeting image of herself stumbling into the control room trussed up inside the skeleton like a mummy passed through her mind, but the suit deflated and a light on the belt went from amber to green.
All was ready — a fact that registered in a tightening of her chest and a quickening of her pulse.
The pneumatic hatch on the nearest workstation opened with a faint venting sound. Laura entered the dark and foreboding chamber drawing deep gulps of the air that suddenly seemed in short supply.
It was cold in the plastic capsule, or so it felt. Laura took one more deep breath to calm her nerves, then raised her hands, made two fists, and extended her fingers with a brisk snap.
The sound of compressed air announced the closing of the door. All light save the dim glow from the walls was shut off with a squeak of the tight rubber seals. An instant later, the chamber fell pitch-black.
Laura knew she had done the wrong thing in coming. She was all alone — cut off. No one even knew she was… Out of nowhere, a three-dimensional picture of an ordinary computer appeared in midair right in front of her. Laura's initial attempts to focus on the image made her head spin, and she jammed her eyes shut until the dizziness subsided. When she reopened them, her mind seemed to more readily accept the optical illusion, and she raised her hands to touch the imaginary device. Her fingertips tingled as they brushed against the sharp contours of the keys. She even found the small ridges atop the F and the J before she typed "Hello" with a surprising sense of familiarity and ease. The words scrolled out in luminescent letters in the air above the keyboard.
Laura hit Enter.
<Hi! I'm glad you came,> printed out just beneath her salutation.
Laura's eyes still fought the image, trying to focus on the glowing and at the more distant point on the wall from which they were projected. But when she did "look through" the imaginary computer terminal, the image grew fuzzy and Laura instantly felt lightheaded. She again closed her eyes, and when she reopened them, everything was back in focus.
Laura smiled and shook her head at how real the illusion seemed. You just had to give in to it. She ran her hands lightly over the keys. The membranes inside the gloves tickled the tips of her fingers to produce a marvelously complete experience.
"You're going to get me in trouble, you know," Laura tapped out, hearing faint plastic clacks as each key was pressed.
<You wanted to get inside my head. What better way than in a VR workstation, right? A picture is worth a thousand words. Are you ready?>
"Take it easy on me. No running with the bulls or bungee jumping or anything, okay?"
<Okeydoke.> The chamber around Laura dissolved in a crackling of static electricity. This time, however, instead of seeing the well-lit room, the computer center projected onto the 360-degree screens, Laura found herself standing among row after row of cars in a darkened parking lot. [Unclear] lamps high above bathed everything in a faint orange hue. The keyboard was still in its place — superimposed in space over an old Saab of indeterminate color.
Laura turned slowly to see the corrugated steel walls of a large factory dominating the parking lot behind her. At the center of the building was a brightly lit entrance. "Gray Consumer Products Division" read the large letters of a sign above the door. The words were arched over Gray's logo — the profile of a human head drawn in crosshatched diagonal lines. "Erlangen, Germany," the smaller letters beneath read.
Laura turned back to the keyboard. "I'm in a parking lot in Germany?"
<Yes. It's our main consumer products manufacturing facility. Would you like to go inside?>
The door was a fair distance away, and this nighttime excursion wasn't nearly as stimulating as her walk around the island with Gray had been. Plus, there were easily a hundred fairly solid-looking cars between Laura and the door.
"No, not really," Laura typed.
<Is this boring?>
"A little."
<Okay, hang on just a second.>
The picture changed so abruptly that Laura flinched, her arms groping the air to her sides for balance. The snapping of static electricity from the walls gave way to a flood of noise.
Laura was standing now on the upper level of a busy shopping mall. The ghostly images of people flashed by as they rushed up and down the walkway. She turned to see Gray's televisions mounted in displays all along the walls of the crowded store to her back.
The keyboard remained fixed in its place before her. "Where am I now?" she typed.
<The new Tyson's Corner in Virginia just outside Washington, D.C. I can map about 85 percent of the mall by tapping into the high-def security cameras. There's a sale at Bloomie's. Wanna go and check it out?>
Laura laughed and shook her head. It was amazing; Here she was, standing in a busy mall! "Unbelievable," she mumbled, grinning.
She waited for a small break in the pedestrian traffic and then headed across the walkway. She was invisible to the passersby, however, and they didn't break stride to allow her to pass. Several times people walked straight through her — momentary blurs as the translucent haze of a woman's hair or a man's jacket flashed before Laura's eyes. She made it to the railing at the far side of the aisle and clung to the cool, rounded metal.
The high ceilings and the trees and fountains of the central atrium below combined with the hum of noise from everywhere at once to give Laura the physical sensation of being in a large, open space.
Just below her vantage the marble floors and upscale shops glittered in striking resolution. She turned once again to the keyboard.
"How many places have you modeled like this mall and the factory in Germany and the island?"
<Not that many large areas, really. I have lots of cameras, but to make a model I need to correlate numerous different angles. Security cameras are good for that if there are enough of them and they're high-definition. Tyson's Corner is actually a prototype for a computer-monitored security system the Gray Corporation plans to market. One day there'll be lots of models like this and I or another net like me will be a cop, so watch yourself.>
Laura found the idea of computer cops unsettling. And it wasn't only the unblinking eye of the computer that troubled her. It was also the prospect of unauthorized "virtunauts" hacking their way in and roaming unfettered through malls and homes and bedrooms. Of being ogled and groped by hordes of invisible net surfers who would populate the dark alleys of cyberspace.
Laura shook off the quiver and returned her attention to the here and now. To the mall in which she was, for the time being, all alone in her alternate universe. Laura confirmed that everyone was indeed of the translucent variety.
A girl suddenly caught Laura's eye. She was about fifty feet away, but her white T-shirt and blue jeans appeared bright and solid. She stood out among the ghostly figures. The girl had clearly been looking in Laura's direction, but she quickly slipped into the entryway of a store. Laura kept her eyes on the storefront, but the girl didn't reappear.
She must have been mistaken, she thought. There was nobody in the mall but the ghosts. Laura was alone in the virtual world.
Shoppers hustled by in a never-ending current of activity. The model seemed complete to Laura right down to the last detail. Everywhere there was the commotion of life and activity.