Headcrash

by Bruce Bethke

  “Only if you wear it out in public!” He started to laugh again, then saw the murderous look in my eyes and stopped.

  “Seriously,” I said calmly, albeit through clenched teeth. “Isn’t there a risk here of, like, some security program frying my brain, or something? Y’know, lethal feedback?”

  “Actually, Jack,” LeMat said equally calmly, “ignoring for the moment the fact that the final link between the desktop unit and you is wireless and therefore about as dangerous as the remote control on your mom’s TV, the makers did envision the possibility of lethal voltage. To guard against it, they’ve installed a fascinating little in-line surge protection device. Perhaps you’ve even heard of it. It’s called, a fuse.”

  What he said soaked in. I blinked. I took a breath and sighed. “Oh.”

  “And now if you’re done being ignorant,” LeMat said as he picked up the EKG harness and a tube of conductance gel, “we should probably get on with this.”

  I raised my arms and presented myself. “Lick ‘em and stick ‘em, doc.”

  Fifteen minutes later my scalp and chest were plastered with electrodes, the monitor wires were patched into a spare channel on the transceiver belt, and my cardiac and brainwave traces were displaying cleanly in a window on my desktop computer. “See, Jack?” LeMat said as he pointed to the traces. “I’ll have an eye on your biotelemetry at all times. I’ve also taken the liberty of adding a panic button: if anything looks the least bit out of whack, I just punch this key,” he pointed to F12, “the program goes kerflooey, and you’re back in reality.”

  I nodded. “What about my emergency parachute?”

  “You mean BUGOUT? Yeah, that works, too. The important thing to remember is to shout it real loud. I’ve changed it so it doesn’t trip unless it’s one hundred and three decibels or louder. You’re just lucky no one else ever discovered they could virtually kill Max Kool just by saying that word.”

  Actually, I’d never thought of it in quite those terms, but I had to admit LeMat was right. I didn’t have to admit it out loud, though.

  I leaned forward and tapped another window on the monitor. “What’s that?”

  “Echoed video feed. I’ll see what you see.”

  “And that?”

  “Net traffic status. Just in case this puppy,” he slapped the transceiver on my back, “is programmed to do something tricksy, like broadcast a homing signal.”

  I nodded again, and noticed the pen-sized micro TV camera velcroed onto the left side of the monitor, pointed at where LeMat would be sitting. “I’ll be able to see you?”

  “There should be a pull-down window in the upper right corner of your field of view. You can overlay this,” LeMat tapped the microcamera, “into any scene.” LeMat picked up an audio headset and strapped it on. “You’ll be able to hear me, too, though I don’t know if the audio will be encrypted.”

  “So watch out for telepaths?”

  “Exactly.”

  I took one last look at what was on the screen, then turned to LeMat. “Well, I suppose it’s time, then.”

  LeMat shook his head. “Not quite. There’s one last piece to connect.” He smiled at me in the smug and infuriating way that meant he’d been holding something back all along, and then with a flourish, produced—

  “Okay, it’s the cylinder-thingie again. Did you ever figure out what it was?”

  “Yes!” LeMat said proudly. “This, Jack, is the one piece that makes this a truly radical user interface! Everything else you’ve seen so far is just an incremental improvement over stuff you’ve already used, but this, my boy, is unique!”

  I stood there with my hands on my naked hips, staring at it. “Yeah, so? What is it?”

  “Jack Burroughs?” LeMat said dramatically, “allow me to present,” he twisted a little something, and it became apparent that the cylinder was just some kind of packing case, “the Sacroiliac Neural Induction Device!” He whipped it out of the case and waved it in my face.

  “It looks like a cucumber,” I said, as I backed away from it. “A big pink cucumber, with the spines and vine attached.”

  “Ah!” LeMat said. “I will admit that it looks a little, er, phallic. But this device was developed over a two-year period under a multimillion-dollar NEA grant! No longer will you have to be content with merely seeing and hearing virtual reality. This device uses neural induction technology to enable yon to feel, taste, and smell virtual reality!”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s your point?”

  “My point, Jack, is that this is not just another VR point-and-shoot device. With the Sacroiliac Neural Induction Device,” he waved it in my face again, and I brushed it aside, “we have the first fully realized interpretive dance interface!”

  Oh. “Sounds swell,” I said. “I’m sure it’ll be a big hit on the club scene. Bigger than amyl nitrate.”

  LeMat shook his head, but fortunately didn’t say “Oh, ye of little vision.” “Jack, Jack. I guess the only way to convince you is to hook it up and let you try it out. Turn around.” When I didn’t move fast enough, he made little circular motions with his left hand. “Turn around, Jack.” I did, and he started futziny with the wireless transceiver belt on my back.

  “The ‘vine,’ as you called it, connects right here, and the induction device simply mounts right—right—” He put the pink cucumber in my right hand. “Here, hold this a minute, would you?” He darted over to the worktable and started flipping through the pile of manuals. “Ah!” I heard him say.

  This was followed a short time later by, “Oh.”

  Another minute or so passed, and then, “Ohhhhh.” I turned around. LeMat was staring wide-eyed at the manual and rubbing his forehead as if he had a spectacular headache.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  LeMat looked up. “Er, yes, Jack?” He tried a grin. It looked sickly.

  “Care to tell me what’s going on?”

  He glanced down at the manual in his hands, gulped, and grinned again. “Well, yes Jack, it seems I, er, uh—”

  “You what?”

  “Well, I kind of missed one teensy little point here.”

  My patience was wearing thin. It was probably a predictable side effect of being dressed like a cybernetic transvestite and holding a thirteen-inch pink electronic cucumber. “And that is?”

  “You know how I told you it was developed on an NEA grant?”

  “Yes?”

  “I, uh, didn’t immediately recognize the name of the dance troupe that got the grant.”

  I’d run out of words. I started tapping my foot.

  “I should have. They were very famous at the time.”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “Rather, notorious. And given that, the way the neural induction device works shouldn’t be a surprise.”

  Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “Really, I should have guessed when I saw that it came out of the MDE biomedical internal prosthetics department.”

  TAP. TAP. TAP.

  “It’s all here.” LeMat waved the manual nervously. “The note from MDE Trademarks and Legal. They decided Sacroiliac Neural Induction Device was too much of a mouthful, and SNID was a stupid acronym.” He tried another weak grin.

  TAP. TAP. TAP.

  “So they decided to find a new name. Convened focus groups, the whole bit. And they finally came up with one they liked.”

  TAP. TAP. TAP.

  “They call it the ProctoProd™, Jack.”

  My foot froze in mid-air. “The what?”

  “That’s how it works.” LeMat gulped, took a deep breath, took a good long stare at it, and then looked me straight in the eye and nodded.

  “You stick it up your ass and dance, Jack.”

  Like a frozen, horrified, clockwork figure, I slowly turned to look at that—that pink thing in my right hand.

  “I may be your best friend, Jack,” LeMat said, “but you’re going to have to deal with this by yourself.”

  12: UP THE LOOKING GLASS

&nbs
p; Decisions, decisions. One million dollars. The interface. One million dollars. The interface.

  I went for it. Slathered the ProctoProd with conductance gel, bent over forward and grabbed my right ankle with my left hand, and then—I don’t want to think about it, and I don’t want to talk about it.

  LeMat’s face was white when we made eye contact again. “Are you, uh—?”

  “Ready,” I snapped. “Let’s go.”

  He turned to the computer (with a certain sense of relief, I thought) and launched the initialization routine. “Interface enabled,” he said. “Video synced. Audio online. Datagloves—er, data under—er, softwear engaged. Switching over to line feeds.” He plugged his audio headset into the A/V jack on the computer. I fumbled for the transparency control on my video goggles and flipped them to opaque.

  “Virtual reality boot on my mark,” LeMat said. “Three, two, one…”

  I was someplace.

  Actually, I was still in our big empty office space on the eighth floor of the Hill Building, of course, standing about twenty feet away from LeMat. But that’s not what my senses were telling me. According to my eyes and ears, I was standing in a large, cube-shaped, virtual space, about a hundred meters on a side. The walls, floor, and ceiling were empty and black, save for a white one-meter grid pattern on the walls and floor and a jumbled pile of polyhedral objects in the far left corner.

  Oh. And I was wearing a ProctoProd. Don’t imagine for a minute that my senses stopped telling me that.

  “Jack?” LeMat whispered in my ear, via the headset.

  “There is no Dana, only Zuul,” I rumbled at him.

  “Huh?”

  “Max,” I said. “I’m Max Kool now, remember? Gunnar?”

  “Oh. Oh, yeah. Sorry.” Gunnar was silent a few seconds. “So, uh, Max. This looks like our test reality, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “How’s it calibrate?”

  I looked down at the floor, then over to the right-hand wall, “Seems to calibrate okay. The one-meter grids look to be about one meter. Up, down, left, and right all seem to be in the right directions.”

  “Watch the fast head movements. You’re making me seasick.”

  I thought about suggesting that we trade places, but settled for, “Suffer.”

  “You’re right,” Gunnar said. “Sorry for complaining. Okay, next series. What’s your aspect look like?”

  I took a long minute to study my arms and legs, rotate my hands, run my fingers through my hair, and just generally do everything I could do without a mirror. It all seemed to be there: black jacket, black shirt, black jeans, black boots, greasy pompadour, big sideburns. “I’m Max Kool, all right,” I said at last, “but my hands and my head are the only parts of me that seem to be real. Everything else is cartoonish. Thin. I mean, insubstantial. Lacking texture and solidity.”

  “Well, we can fix that later,” Gunnar said. “But now, let’s go for the big one. Try walking.”

  I took a step. It calibrated nicely; one meter forward.

  “Whoa!” Gunnar shouted in my head.

  I stopped. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re really moving. I mean out here, in reality.”

  “Am I going to trip over something?”

  “Not right now. But you’ve only got about twenty feet before you walk into the south wall. We’re going to be in deep shit if all your virtual movements have to map to real space.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Gunnar hmmmed, and cleared his throat. “Try pantomime.”

  It took some trying, but eventually I figured out to walk in VR while staying in one place. I made about twenty meters, out to the center of our virtual room. “How’s that?”

  “Aside from the fact that you look like Marcel Marceau in drag, not bad. Try walking into the wind.”

  “Huh?”

  “Or bicycling. Or better yet, try this: pretend you’re trapped inside a big glass box and you’re feeling your way along the walls.”

  “Gunnar?”

  “Yes, Max?”

  “Shut up, Gunnar. Just, shut up.”

  I took a few minutes to stroll around the place, do some bends and twists, and just generally get the hang of moving my virtual body. In time the ProctoProd stopped being an obsessive misery and became just a nagging discomfort. When my confidence had increased to a sufficient level, I oriented myself toward the virtual wall furthest from where I was standing at that moment and moved to the next stage of our test plan.

  “Okay Gunnar, I’m going to try running in place now.” I took a deep breath, shifted my weight onto the balls of my feet, and started into a gentle jog.

  BAM! I slammed into the far wall with a violence that would have knocked me silly if it was real. As it was, all I felt was a gentle thump through the, uh, the thoracic, uh—

  “Wow!” Gunnar said. “Watch the velocity, kid! Did you get any kind of kinetic feedback out of the bra?”

  “Yeah.” I really wished we could find a better name for that thing. “And by the way, that was just jogging. Any chance you could get a time on my next run?”

  “Give me a minute.” I heard Gunnar start pounding on the keyboard. “Okay, the timer is set. Hundred meter sprint?”

  “Yup. This one’s for the record. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Stand by. On my mark… GO!”

  Had the far wall been made of something less substantial than the absolute edge of the virtual universe—say, six feet of tempered steel—I would have put one hell of a dent in it.

  “Holy Moley!” Gunnar gasped. “Point-two-five-one-seven—Max, you just went supersonic!” He paused. “Max?”

  “I’m okay. It’s just—I got some negative feedback when I hit the wall, but not nearly as strong as I expected. There must be some dandy kinetic transient dampers in the system.”

  “Either that,” Gunnar pointed out, “or else this version of Max Kool has more hit points than Gamera.”

  “Could be.” I finished inspecting my virtual self for damage—none found, my hair wasn’t even mussed—and decided to move on. “Okay, I’m going to try the polyhedrons now.” I carefully strolled across the virtual room, got to the base of the pile of polyhedrons, and allocated a few moments to looking it over and wondering where to begin.

  The polyhedron test was kind of an afterthought. We wanted to see how the new interface handled manipulating objects, so we slapped together a few hundred polyhedrons ranging in size from baseballs to Volkswagens and piled them in one corner of our virtual test chamber. Then at the last minute we also decided to see just how subtle the tactile feedback was, so we grabbed a dozen or so surface textures at random out of our library and mapped them onto as many objects as we could easily reach.

  As a result, I now stood before a jumbled heap of knotty pine cubes, polished marble tetrahedrons, snakeskin soccerballs, and at least one dodecahedron of raw steak. We’d also assigned density and mass factors pretty much at random; that little chrome pyramid by my left foot, for example, was so heavy it should have bent the fabric of space/time around it.

  I kicked the pyramid. It went sailing about thirty feet.

  “Max?” Gunnar asked in my ear. “Was that the—?”

  “It was.” I stooped over, picked up a granite sphere about the size of a bowling ball, and lobbed it the 100-meter length of the room. It shattered against the far wall. “Either something is way out of calibration here, or I don’t know what.” I climbed up on top of a large raccoon fur cube and started touching all the different surfaces I could reach. “The tactile feedback is very clear. I can feel the subtle differences in all these surface textures.” Something registered in my mind then, and I took an extra moment to wiggle my toes in the fur and check it out. “I can even feel texture with my feet, which is odd when you consider that I’m wearing virtual engineer boots.” I spotted another texture about ten feet higher in the stack and climbed on top of a milk chocolate icosahedron to reach it. “I can—” Oh, darn, i
t was just a few inches too far. I leaned out and stretched. “I can—” I grabbed onto the projecting point of something or other, and strained further. “I can—”

  “Look out!” Gunnar shouted. The point snapped off in my hand. Something broke loose and went bounding down the slope. Then another something, then the whole heap of polyhedrons began to collapse. I jumped.

  I bounced off the ceiling.

  I hit the floor at the far end of the room, rebounded into a two-cushion shot off the corner, and grazed the ceiling again. About the time I noticed I was heading right back into the middle of the polyhedron landslide, I got pissed off and decided to stop. In midair.

  “Uh, Houston?” I asked. “Are you copying this?”

  “Roger, little buddy,” Gunnar answered. “You seem to be, uh, experiencing a local gravitational anomaly of, uh—” He- gave up trying to sound like the voice of NASA. “Aw, screw it, Max? You’re flying!”

  “Yep. That’s what it looks like to me, too.” I wasted a second or two considering my position—and wondering if this was like a Road Runner cartoon, and I was going to plummet to the dusty canyon floor as soon as I noticed that I wasn’t standing on anything solid—then picked a spot on the floor well away from the still-tumbling polyhedrons and gently descended for a landing, as graceful as Baryshnikov coming off of a jeté. I resisted the urge to bow.

  Gunnar was still hyperventilating. “You were flying, man!”

  “Uh-huh.” I wasted another few seconds considering my marvelous virtual body, finished working through an idea, then pulled down the virtual window that let me look at Gunnar’s face. “Say, guy, can I try a concept out on you? Would you say that my time in the hundred-meter was, oh, faster than a speeding bullet?”

  Oops. I’d forgotten that weapons talk always put Gunnar in literal mode. He stroked his chin and thought it over. “Well, a medium rifle or handgun bullet,” he said, nodding. “Your hot .357 Magnum or high-powered rifle loads, on the other hand—”

  “Never mind. Next question. Based on my apparent strength, would you care to take a guess at how powerful I am?”