Society of the Mind

by Eric L. Harry

  He stood there waiting. She got to her feet and joined him.

  They went not to the exercise room but to the computer center. Laura was prepared for the "duster" this time: her hair pulled back and her T-shirt tucked in at the waist of her jeans. Gray led her through the control room to a door she hadn't noticed before. First Gray, then Laura stared into the dark retinal identifier. The light flashed in Laura's eyes, and the door slid into the wall.

  Beyond lay a long hallway. A series of closed doors were evenly spaced down its length. The first door on the left opened when they entered the corridor.

  Laura followed Gray through the open doorway into a room.

  Eight gleaming white compartments rose from the floor in two rows. They were shiny and cylindrical and domed at the top like stubby bullets — ten feet high and six feet in diameter. Everything in the room was bright white like in a laboratory or a clinic.

  Gray stopped at a nondescript console near the end of the aisle running between the two rows. A flat membrane covered the console, and Laura raised her hand to feel its shiny black finish. A loud beep caused her to jerk her hand back. The dark membrane came alive in a checkerboard of bright light. Square mounds in the shape of keys rose like magic from the panel, each grouped by color and described with bright labels glowing from the buttons themselves.

  "How did it do that?" Laura asked in a tone of wonder.

  "Do what?"

  "That," Laura said, pointing at the complex groupings of glowing buttons.

  "Oh, it morphs to the button configuration required for a particular mode of operation."

  Laura nodded, then asked, "How did it know what 'mode' we needed?"

  "The computer saw us coming," was Gray's answer. He poked two of the buttons, which pinged lightly under his touch.

  Loud hisses of air made Laura jump as first one, then a second of the bullets cracked open. Two thick doors parted slowly to reveal dark interiors.

  "Come on," Gray said, and he led her to the first of the compartments. "These are called virtual workstations. They're older models, but they're a little easier to get into and out of than the new version." Laura peered inside the dark chamber. Its black walls were featureless on first inspection, but when she looked closely she could see they were lined in a fine grill like the screens on Gray's televisions.

  "It gives you three hundred and sixty degrees of high-definition visuals — from the walls, ceiling, and floor. The audio is mounted in planar speakers just behind the grills." Laura stuck her head in, but she was unwilling to go further for fear the doors would shut behind her. Besides, there was absolutely nothing of any particular interest to be seen. She crinkled her nose at the strong smell of plastic.

  Gray appeared at her side holding a shiny black jacket that looked like medieval body armor. Black sleeves made of stretch material hung limply beneath the semi-rigid frame. Thick gloves tugged down on the sleeves. "This goes on over your head, and you put your arms through here like football pads."

  He stood there offering the sinister suit to Laura. Fat ribs fanned out across its surface into tubes of ever-decreasing diameter — rippling the fabric in a highly complex pattern. The jacket was clearly made of some high-tech synthetic, but its design reminded Laura of an animal's hide complete with a web of veins wrapped over hidden bones and sinews. Or [unclear], she thought — the faint blueprint of a living organism discernible in the pattern beneath the black skin.

  "What's that thing?"

  "It's called a 'skeleton,'" Gray said simply.

  Laura laughed nervously, loath even to touch what Gray held so casually in his hands. "That figures," she mumbled.

  "It's short for 'exoskeleton.' Stick your head in here, and your arms through the sleeves."

  Gray lowered the contraption onto Laura's head as he explained his even newer toy. "Our latest workstation — the version 4C — requires that you remove all your clothes and get fairly aggressive with a razor. It's a full head-to-toe skeleton, instead of an upper-body only."

  Laura could see nothing from inside the dark shoulder pads. "The good thing about the 4C, though," Gray said, his voice muffled, "is that it's a full-size room. Some people get a little claustrophobic in these old 3Hs."

  "Well, you know…" Laura began, but couldn't find the words to express how nervous she was. The thing settled to her shoulders, and her head slipped through the elastic turtleneck, finally free of the black skeleton. Laura struggled to find the sleeves while Gray supported the device's weight. "Maybe…" she began again, "maybe you could just, like, describe virtual reality to me."

  She pressed her hands into the gloves.

  "Relax," Gray said in a reassuring tone. "Almost everyone alive has experienced cyberspace, they just don't know it." He pulled hard to adjust the jacket's fit. "The telephone was the first virtual reality device. You pick it up and talk to someone like they were in the room right beside you. You can't see them or touch them, but the audio quality is good enough that the experience is comparable to a face-to-face conversation. You forget all about the wire that runs from their house to yours carrying electrons. In your mind, the two of you meet — not in real space, but in cyberspace."

  "But that's just an illusion," Laura objected. "Cyberspace doesn't really exist. It's just a fiction."

  "You're right," Gray said. He closed large Velcro straps at her sides, sealing the jacket tight around her torso. "But then so is reality. It's just a show in the theater of your mind."

  The conversation was not doing much to calm Laura. Nor was the skeleton. It wasn't heavy, but she felt its presence. It had fat black canisters that formed a belt of sorts around her waist.

  "I've used the telephone before, you know," Laura said. She held her arms up — the black gloves missing only metal spikes to complete the picture. "I don't see how the two experiences are at all comparable."

  There was a quiver in her voice she'd not expected to hear.

  "Dr. Aldridge," Gray said calmly, "trust me. The only difference is that we've added feedback for your other senses, that's all."

  Laura was growing more and more unsettled the nearer the time came to enter the cylinder. This was not at all what she had expected when she'd agreed to follow Gray into cyberspace. She hadn't really even agreed, technically speaking, but she had followed.

  "Uhm, Mr. Gray…?" she began, the voice from her dry throat an octave too high. He arched his brow as he fiddled with her suit, pressing buttons that dinged lightly. "Mr. Gray, I'm not really all that sure I want to—" There was a loud whoosh of air, and Laura's entire skeleton inflated like an air bag… but on the inside. In an instant, the suit had grown totally rigid all across her upper body.

  The flat bladders and meandering channels had puffed full of air. It was tight from her waist up her chest to her shoulders and down her arms to the tips of her fingers. She jerked her arms against the stiff sleeves in panic, barely bending the inflated bones just under the surface. The board-stiff straitjacket jammed into her back or sides with every hard push of her arms.

  "Is that uncomfortable?" Gray asked.

  "Get this thing off me!"

  He laughed. "Now you see why it's called a skeleton," Gray said as if that somehow excused her entrapment. A high-pitched ring and the sound of rushing air preceded a rapid loosening of the suit. Her arms were freed, and in seconds she could move about without encumbrance.

  "There," Gray said as if the matter had been put to rest, and he climbed into his own suit.

  Laura mustered all the composure she could manage for the effort of sounding reasonable. "Mr. Gray, I don't think I want to do this."

  "Dr. Aldridge…"

  "No, I've made up my mind."

  "But you're a scientist. Surely you're curious." He pulled his head through his own turtleneck. "Look, the skeleton does three things. It provides pressure and temperature sensations to the nerve endings on your skin to simulate the sense of touch. It has pneumatic 'bones' that lock up to create the impression of rigidity
. And the exterior of the fabric," he said, holding his gloves up and turning them from side to side, "is a flexible, rear-projection, high-definition screen."

  Laura raised the thick gloves she wore to study the faintly visible ridges on the surface. "You mean I'm wearing a television?"

  Gray chuckled. A burst of air suddenly filled the bladders of his suit. "This is just a systems check," he said quickly — trussed up inside and waiting patiently until the tone sounded and the suit deflated. "The interior of the workstation," he continued, now able to point at the white cylinder, "provides pictures and sound just like TV and stereo." He ushered her toward the open door. "There's absolutely nothing weird about any of this."

  "I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Gray, but everything about this is weird."

  Gray knelt and unlaced her running shoes. When he slipped them off, he sat back on his heels and said, "You have really big feet."

  "What?" Laura replied in alarm and looked down. She heaved a loud sigh of frustration. "I'm wearing three pairs of socks."

  He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged as if to accept her eccentricity. She stepped into the black slippers he held, which were made of the same material as the skeleton.

  "You know, because that office is cold," Laura offered in further explanation. The black shoes she wore momentarily inflated before loosening with a faint hiss.

  Gray gently guided Laura to the door of the dark chamber. She stopped just outside.

  "This isn't going to turn me into a fly or anything, is it?" she asked.

  Gray laughed. "You'd be surprised how rarely that happens."

  She stepped onto the raised black floor, standing just inside the open door. It seemed quieter in the enclosed chamber — the sounds deadened by the solid walls and ceiling that surrounded her.

  "Have fun," Gray said before leaving.

  She looked around at the dark walls, turning back just in time to see the door close in her face. A metallic latching sound sealed her in.

  She pounded on the grill with both hands. "Mr. Gray!" The walls were at least a foot thick. He couldn't possibly have heard her.

  She was locked in the chamber now, and she tried to calm herself as best she could — to get a grip on reality before venturing into its alternative. The lights in the compartment were dim and diffuse, and she couldn't detect their source. They seemed to come evenly from the walls, ceiling, and floor.

  She took a deep and ragged breath.

  "Hello?" she asked after waiting as long as she could. Her voice shook, and there was no answer. There was no sound of any kind.

  Laura wrapped her arms across her chest but obtained little comfort from the alien touch of the skeleton. "Hello? Mr. Gray?" she called out again.

  "I'm here," he said from just behind her.

  Laura spun around and stared at the curved black wall.

  "Where?"

  "Right here." The sound was amazingly clear. It was as if he was standing right beside her — pinpointed in space.

  "Where?"

  "Calm down. I'm in the workstation next door. Hang on while I load the program." Her heart was pounding against the skeleton.

  The ceiling of her mouth was so cold, her tongue practically scraped across it. Turning slowly in the center of the chamber she felt trapped. It was like being strapped into a seat at an amusement park waiting for the ride to begin.

  The lights were suddenly extinguished. The small compartment was now darker than the blackest night.

  Game loaded.

  In an instant, the walls and ceiling of the chamber disappeared with a crackling of static electricity from all sides. They just dissolved into thin air, leaving Laura standing on a raised black pedestal staring at the brightly lit console right outside.

  She covered her mouth with her hands — a panicked moan escaping from deep inside her chest.

  Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She flung herself around and lost her balance, smashing into the invisible curved wall and sliding to the floor. The black pedestal rolled underneath her — moving her away from the wall until she lay in the center of the black disk.

  "Careful," Gray said.

  "Or what? I might fall down?" Laura asked as she rose to her knees.

  Gray stood on an identical platform a few feet away from hers. "The treadmill can be tricky at first. Are you okay?" Laura stared wide-eyed at the room — awestruck. No longer was she confined inside the small chamber… or so it appeared from where she knelt.

  Arrayed across the room were seven low pedestals [missing] Laura knew the other tall cylinders to be. The chamber [missing] all [missing] ceilings were [missing] no wall [missing] invisible — transparent.

  "Hi," Gray said as he raised his hand and waved from the pedestal next to hers.

  "My God," she whispered. Moving carefully, she struggled to her feet. "What the hell's going on?"

  "Welcome to cyberspace, Dr. Aldridge," Gray said. "The real cyberspace."

  Laura slowly turned in a circle. What she saw wasn't the room, she realized; it was a picture of the room, projected onto the walls of the chamber that surrounded her. But the picture was incredibly realistic.

  "I hate to start pointing out the imperfections," Gray said in a casual tone, "but if it'll make you feel any better look really closely at my hair."

  Laura looked at Gray's head. His hair had a cartoonish quality to it. "It's not really worth the processing time to provide complete detail for every feature." The depiction of Gray's face, Laura noted, was also slightly unrealistic. The virtual Gray had a perfect complexion. His skin tone was totally uniform, with no blemishes or shadow of a beard or variations in color of any kind.

  "The new 4Cs are much more realistic," Gray said, his lips moving in exact synchrony with his words.

  "More realistic than this?" Laura asked. She reached out to touch the walls of the chamber for reassurance. Her black-gloved hand stretched across the room as if it were made of rubber and touched something else instead — a straight, sharp edge, suspended in space.

  She drew the glove back from the countertop on which it had momentarily rested and rubbed her thumb across her fingertips. Her skin tingled from the contact with the hard counter, and her fingers felt as if they were skin-to-skin.

  She slowly reached out again. At a certain point her arm grew elastic. She reached all the way across the room again to touch the edge of the white counter along the wall. Laura groped along the flat surface with a ten-foot-long arm, then reached up to touch the cabinets suspended above.

  She grasped a handle! It was so amazingly realistic that she felt like vomiting.

  "Extension of the suits' arms is set to logarithmic scale," Gray explained. "The farther out you reach, the greater the distance your virtual hand travels. At full extension, your arm would be something like fifty feet long."

  "How does it…?" She pulled her rubbery arm back, and it shrunk to normal proportions again. When she reached out, the black sleeve and glove seemed to keep growing longer and longer.

  "It's the screens on your skeleton and on the wall behind it," Gray said. "They project a continuous image, blending the focal points so you can't tell where the image on your sleeve ends and the one on the wall begins."

  The cabinets felt solid to her touch. She tried pushing her hand into them. There was strong pressure against her fingertips.

  The joints at the skeleton's shoulder, elbow, wrist, and fingers all inflated soundlessly, locking. Laura could push her hand no farther.

  She tried to cheat the system — to make her hand press through the imaginary cabinet door. She pivoted her hips and tried walking into the resistance, but the treadmill beneath her feet reacted instantly.

  It rotated and rolled away to compensate. It felt like she was walking on ice. Her body turned but her rigid arm remained planted against the smooth cabinet door.

  "We've obviously thought this thing through," Gray chided her.

  Laura's virtual arm probed the lights under the overhangin
g cabinets, and she felt their warm glow on the back of her hand.

  "And heat?" she asked, now totally and completely fascinated.

  "The air that circulates through the skeleton is thermostatically controlled. It's heated or cooled by the unit in your belt and sent through insulated tubing to the appropriate membrane."

  A trancelike state of wonder came over Laura. "This is… unbelievable!" When she found the handle again she pulled. The cabinet door swung open. "Wow!"

  "This is virtual reality, Dr. Aldridge. Everything obeys the laws of physics… unless, of course, I reprogram them."

  "But I didn't just open that cabinet door, did I?"

  "You did, in the virtual world. If the computer knows what's inside you can look in the cabinet and check it out. But no, you didn't just open the cabinet door in the 'real' world. I think you'll soon find, though, that the distinction you're drawing is losing its relevance."

  Laura was too busy sweeping her hand across the room to pay attention to Gray. She looked closely at where the ceiling of the chamber should meet the walls, searching for seams — distortions, imperfections of some kind. She could find none. [Garbled] chopped into something not quite as hard or sharp as the counter top.

  It was Gray. "You have to be kind of careful," he said grabbing the hand at the end of her lithe black arm.

  She gasped and pulled her hand from his — distinctly feeling it slip through each of his fingers. Her stomach churned as if she were on a wild carnival ride.

  "I… I think I'd like to get out now," she said.

  "You want to go for a walk?" Gray asked.

  "Yes. Right now, please." A walk was exactly what she wanted just then. Her lungs felt robbed of air, and she took deep, slow breaths to compensate.

  Gray stepped down off his black pedestal onto the floor. He walked across the room to stand beside Laura's workstation. He extended his hand through the invisible wall — beckoning her to join him.

  Laura stared at the hand Gray held out to her through the walls of the virtual workstation. There were really walls surrounding her, but it was hard to convince herself of that fact. In reality they rose all around her, sealing her inside the chamber. It was the picture of Gray's hand projected on them that was the fiction. But this wasn't reality, it was virtual reality.