by Ruth Owen
Okay, so maybe some of it was her fault. On her first day with his department she’d learned that the simulator waste products weren’t being recycled properly. Environmental issues had always been her hot button, and when the doctor’s secretary told her Sinclair couldn’t see her that day, Jill had simply stormed into his office anyway. His cool gray eyes had met her fiery brown ones, and the battle was joined. For three months they’d argued about everything from environmental responsibility to simulator safety standards. They couldn’t be in the same room for five minutes without fighting about something. Jill chalked up their battles to a deep-seated loathing for each other. Or she had, until the night of Harry Griffith’s farewell party.
Dragons …
Sinclair checked his watch, then started a quick march toward the simulator without sparing so much as a glance in Jill’s direction. “Step on it, Ms. Polanski. We’re wasting time.”
Jillian fell in behind him, noting the strength of his stride, the certainty of his confidence. Jill, whose life was a rabbit warren of human fears and failings, had been drawn to his self-assurance like a magnet to steel. Yet ultimately she’d been drawn by something even stronger—the flashes of emotion she’d glimpsed in his metal-hard eyes, the brief frowns of human uncertainty, the diamond-rare smiles. A champion of lost causes, she’d been incapable of turning her back on a man who appeared to be at war with himself.
But appearances, as always, were deceiving. Every attempt she’d made at friendship had met with at best renewed arguments, and at worst cruel indifference. The contradictions in his character had torn her apart like storm winds, ultimately coming to a head at Harry’s party. She’d been dancing with several of her tech friends, when the music turned slow and intimate. She’d started to leave the floor, but suddenly, impossibly, found herself in Dr. Sinclair’s arms, dancing to the sultry song.
At first courtesy kept her from pulling away, but courtesy was quickly eclipsed by a stronger and much more potent emotion. Sinclair’s British heart may have been ice, but he danced with all the passion of a Latin lover. Jill let him lead her, meeting his passion with the forbidden feelings she’d kept locked inside, finally admitting to herself what she’d been fighting so hard to deny—that there was a man beneath the hard exterior, a man she’d been attracted to since the first time they’d met. Sighing, she lifted her gaze to his, opening herself emotionally in a way she hadn’t done for years, and—drew back in shock at the look of cold, almost cruel interest in his eyes. He was studying her reaction, like one of his damn experiments.
Luckily, the song ended at that moment. She’d left the party and gone back to the safety of her home, feeling betrayed by his clinical curiosity, and by her own traitorous emotions. She’d gone to work the next day determined to put the episode behind her, but the moment she met Sinclair’s cool gray gaze she’d felt the same potent attraction—and the same icy betrayal. And the more she tried to deny it, the stronger it became.
Jill wasn’t a quitter. She kept up the farce for two months, stuffing down her unwanted emotions, trying to pretend that moment in his arms had never happened. But the effort took its toll, and the dishonesty began to sap her spirit. When she heard about the Sheffield cybertech job, she jumped at the chance, knowing it was the coward’s way out, but taking it anyway.
Now her affection for Einstein had forced her back to Sinclair’s side. In his dire clutches, she thought, smiling wryly at the melodramatic image. After all, this was a high-tech laboratory of the nineties, not some gloomy Yorkshire castle of the last century. And she could certainly keep her silly schoolgirl infatuation under control for the short time they’d be working together.
Besides, she thought as she looked over the doctor’s head at the small “eggs” suspended in the center of the huge metallic scaffolding, I’ve got plenty of other things to worry about.
She was without a doubt the most uncooperative woman he had ever worked with.
“I don’t care if you wrote the book on the simulator procedures,” Sinclair said as he placed another self-affixing sensor on her temple. “You’re going to listen to them again.”
Jillian strained against the egg’s bright yellow rayon-mesh harness, almost as if she were straining against his commands. “Haven’t got much choice, have I? I’m a captive audience.”
Logically Sinclair knew he should ignore her sarcasm just as he ignored everyone else’s. Acknowledging slights was a waste of time in his opinion. It redirected one’s mind and energy away from more important matters—like getting the job done. As a rule, both praise and insults rolled off him like water from a duck’s back. But Jillian’s comments stung.
Looking away, he reached behind him and picked up another sensor wire. The close quarters of the egg made it an uncomfortable maneuver, but Sinclair ignored the twinge of pain. Acknowledging physical discomfort was another waste of time. “When you first become ‘immersed’ in the virtual environment, you’ll experience a minute or two of disorientation, like—”
“Like a sailor gaining his sea legs,” she finished. “I know, Doctor. I’ve played Dactyl Nightmare and other virtual reality arcade games.”
“So have I, Ms. Polanski, and those games are Tinker Toys compared with what you’re about to experience. That’s one reason I’ve limited a cybernaut’s time to an hour in the simulated environment. After that, a person’s higher reasoning skills begin to deteriorate—similar to a scuba diver’s rapture of the deep. Now, after you become accustomed to the virtual surroundings, you’ll see the power grid.”
“The lines of light that map and stabilize the virtual world,” she stated in a singsong voice.
His jaw tightened, caught between annoyance and admiration. She’d obviously studied the revised documentation carefully before returning, but why she had to repeat it to him in such an irritating manner … But then, Jillian Polanski had always been insubordinate. Insubordinate, argumentative, challenging, stimulating, exciting—
He cleared his throat in a loud harrumph. “They’re more than just lines of light. They transmit energy units to the environment. If you cross one while you’re in the virtual world they present no danger, but … do you recall what happens when a consciousness leaves the simulated environment?”
She reached down, apparently to tighten one of the harness straps. “Yes,” she said quietly. “The grid lines reenergize to full capacity. Anyone standing in one could receive a significant—possibly fatal—shock.”
She continued to worry the harness strap. The low artificial light in the egg blurred the clarity of her profile, but Sinclair was a detail man, and the details of Ms. Polanski’s features were something he’d made a study of more than once.
With scientific detachment he’d logged the fact that she was an attractive woman with a delicate, almost ethereal bone structure. Her smooth, soft skin was saved from bland perfection by a spray of freckles over a pert nose that another man might have called adorable. There was an energy about her, a vitality for life that others might have found stimulating, even intriguing. Bending nearer, Sinclair caught a whiff of the elusive scent that always surrounded her, a hauntingly familiar aroma that might have kept another man awake nights, that—truthfully—had kept him up for a night or two since the evening of Griffith’s party, when he’d held her body against his for that one, slow dance—
Bloody hell! He swore inwardly, clamping down on an image that had no place in his efficiently streamlined simulator, or in his efficiently streamlined life. “This is not an arcade game, Ms. Polanski,” he said, his voice a trace rougher than it had been before. “Once you’re in the virtual environment, everything you see, hear, touch, smell, and even taste will come to you through the computer. The ‘real world’ will cease to exist. You’ll be trusting your very sanity to the simulator.”
“And to you,” she added softly.
Her words unnerved him. He’d taken cybernauts into the simulator before—Dr. Miller, and at least a half-dozen others. Each of them
had placed themselves in his hands, and he’d accepted that responsibility as part of his job. But as he stared into Jillian’s wide brown eyes, that responsibility suddenly took on an awesome weight. Swaddled in Miller’s hastily cut-down harness, she looked impossibly small, and fragile as a porcelain vase. For the first time the risks of the cybernaut seemed to outweigh the value of his research. For the first time, he hesitated.
“Ms. Polanski, you don’t have to go through with this. We can find someone else, someone with more experience—”
“There isn’t time to find someone else,” she said with killing honesty. “Besides, I know this machine almost as well as you do. And I know Einstein like I know my own brother. There’s no one more qualified than I am.” She squared her shoulders and proudly pulled herself up to her full height, which was a good ten inches shorter than his own. “What’s the matter? Don’t you think I’m capable?”
Sinclair didn’t get the chance to answer. A voice came over the egg’s speaker, the familiar Brooklynese of senior technician Sadie Hedges. “Ready when you are, Doc.”
“Doc?” Jillian remarked, smiling.
She had a beautiful smile. He’d noticed it from the first—with clinical detachment, of course. It was one of the reasons she was so popular with her coworkers, along with her intelligence and forthright honesty. Jillian Polanski had the rare and invaluable gift of making other people feel important, and the project teams she worked on ran more smoothly and efficiently because of it. It was one of the reasons he’d regretted that she was no longer working for him.
A regret that was also due to the fact that he respected her technical skill and her intelligence, and secretly enjoyed their rousing arguments. It had absolutely nothing to do with the incredible dance they’d shared together. Nothing at all.
“I don’t encourage nicknames, Ms. Polanski,” he stated as he pressed the final sensor node to a spot on her jugular just below her ear. “Not from Dr. Hedges. Or from anyone else.”
She blushed, and he knew she was remembering her friend’s reference to Dr. Doom. Heat rose with her color, sweeping across the skin underneath his fingers to the pulse point at the side of her throat. Her warmth swept through his own body, shining through his inner darkness like a lighthouse beacon in the night. He jerked his hand away, startled and shaken by the unexpected warmth, the unwanted intimacy.
He pulled her display visor down over her face, cutting off her sight, and his view of her remarkably expressive eyes. Then he moved quickly to the door of the egg. “It will take me a few minutes to get into my own harness,” he said more harshly than he intended. “Use the time to reacquaint yourself with the glove and visor controls.”
“Dr. Sinclair?”
He paused at the egg’s entrance, held fast by the poorly disguised uncertainty in her voice. She seemed so young, so impossibly unprepared to deal with the very real dangers of his invention. He gripped the side of the door, fighting an almost overwhelming urge to go back and rip her out of the harness and send her as far away from his simulator, and himself, as possible.
He didn’t, of course. “Yes, Ms. Polanski?”
“I wanted you to know—” She hesitated, her brow furrowing in a rare frown as she searched for the right words. “Well, I just wanted to say that I’m not worried about entering the simulator. I know you won’t let anything happen to me in there. I trust you.”
Trust. Trust was an emotion unwise people assigned based on other fallible emotional reactions. Trust was something one decided not with the head, but with the heart—an unpredictable area of the body even at the best of times. He’d learned the hard way not to rely on anything that could not be documented, dissected, examined, or cross-checked. It would take something stronger than a pair of doe-brown eyes to make him forget it.
“You can trust whomever you please,” he warned the young woman. “Just don’t forget what the simulator can do to you. Or that I am the one who created it.”
Toto, I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Jillian thought as she opened her eyes and looked around. She was surrounded by a relentlessly gray stillness, like a thick bank of fog that was neither cold, nor wet, nor … anything. The fog’s eerie grayness seemed more like the absence of color than a color itself. The air seemed not so much silent as lacking sound. The whole world seemed defined not by what it was, but by what it was not. If nowhere was a place, she’d found it. Again, she recalled with a shiver.
Memories from almost twenty years ago surfaced in her mind. Once again she was eight years old, huddled in the corner of her tiny bedroom, covering her ears to block out the living room shouting match that centered, as usual, around her. As the volume of her mother’s and the latest boyfriend’s fighting increased, Jill pulled her body into a tighter, smaller ball and pressed herself into the hard angles of the corner, pretending with all her childish heart that she was in a place beyond the sound and anger, a place where nothing existed, not even pain.…
“Ms. Polanski?”
She blinked, pulling herself out of the memory as a person pulls off an old pair of boots. You’re in the simulator, she reminded herself. And the long, lean shadow standing beside you is Dr. Sinclair. In the dimness she could make out little more than his shape, a silhouette impression. Considering how easily her face betrayed her emotions, she hoped that was all he could see of her.
“Ms. Polanski, are you all right?”
She couldn’t see his expression, but she heard the resonance of concern in his voice. Lord, was he actually worried about her? “Would it matter to you if I weren’t?”
“Of course,” he said brusquely. “If you experienced an adverse reaction to the simulator, it would jeopardize the mission.”
“Naturally,” Jill said dully. Idiot! She looked around, forcing herself to concentrate on her unusual surroundings. “Is this the inside of Einstein’s computer?”
“It’s the simulated environment of the inside of the computer,” Sinclair corrected her. “Control, mark the time.”
Before she could ask him how he expected her to accomplish this feat, another, more distant voice answered. “Time marked. Like you asked, I’ll give you updates every ten minutes until the hour’s up. Howya doing, Jill?”
“Fine,” Jillian answered, recognizing the voice of Felix Parker, the boy wonder of the project. At twenty-three, Felix was already working on his Ph.D. in cyberphysics, but his sheer zaniness and puppy-dog friendliness prevented him from being classified as a computer nerd. He also didn’t give a damn what people thought of him, a talent Jill had yet to master. “Hey, are you the one who came up with this oatmeal world?”
Felix laughed at her unflattering but accurate description. “Hang on, I’m firing up the topology program now. Dr. Sinclair asked me to come up with something a little more normal for your first time in the simulator. Wanted to make you feel more comfortable.”
“He did?” Jill glanced up at the shadow man beside her, amazed that he would instruct his best engineer to basically “waste his time” on creating an environment designed to make her feel at ease. “You did?”
Sinclair didn’t answer. He wasn’t even listening. Instead, his dark profile showed that he was looking past her, at something beyond her shoulder. She turned around—and gasped.
Rolling toward them across the gray landscape was a tidal wave of color as wide as the horizon and as tall as the sky. Rainbow hues battled through its surface, a chaos of light and motion that was at once the most beautiful and most terrifying sight she’d ever seen. “God,” she said in alarm, swinging her gaze back to her companion. “My God!”
“Don’t worry. It can’t hurt you.” Then Sinclair did the strangest thing. He reached out and took her hand, holding it lightly in his own. Jillian knew he wasn’t really touching her, that his hand was an illusion transmitted via the simulator to her mind’s tactile nerve centers. But in an unfamiliar world with a huge, luminous wave bearing down on them at top speed, she found the human gesture incredibly c
omforting. She clung to his hand, drawing on his strength and reassurance. Then, raising her own head high, she turned back to face the wave.
Sinclair’s prediction proved right, naturally—she barely felt the wave. It passed over her with only a slight tingle, like the brush of a wayward breeze. But it left behind an entire world.
Suddenly she stood in a field of waist-high wild-flowers vaulted by a heaven so radiantly blue, it seemed to shine with its own light. A stand of tall laurel trees stood off to her left, proud as sentinels, dressed in all the brilliant pageantry of full summer. Beyond them lay a tangled forest, a patchwork of greens so varied, they seemed to be an entire rainbow in themselves. And beyond the forest lay a tranquil valley dotted with neat houses and even hedgerows, simmering in the easy laziness of the late afternoon.
Jill took a deep breath of the sweet-smelling air, awed to silence by the incredible change in her surroundings. The simulator environment was real beyond belief! She raised her free hand to shield her eyes from the bright sun, and discovered yet another surprise. Her surroundings were not the only things that had been transformed by the wave.
Her black bodysuit was gone, replaced by a gown of ivory velvet, its puffed sleeves cut with panels of silver and gold. Seed pearls decorated an edge of her bodice, continuing in an exquisite vine-and-leaf pattern from her high-waisted torso all the way down her long, flowing skirt. She’d never imagined that a dress could be so beautiful, and gasped again, this time in appreciation and wonder.
Her wonder was cut short by a sharp oath spoken beside her. “Bloody hell, Parker’s put us in a Dungeons and Dragons game!”
Good Lord, he has, she thought, smiling at Felix’s irrepressible sense of humor. He’d bugged her for weeks to play D & D with him, but Jill had told him truthfully that she didn’t have the time. Apparently her friend had made her a player in spite of herself. She turned to the doctor to explain Felix’s little joke, but the words froze in her throat.