Analog SFF, June 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  “What?"

  “You heard me. I shredded all my files today and threw all of my own prototypes into the incinerator. You've got the only ones left."

  “But it's a miracle. Dylan's—"

  “I don't care! I've been stupid. Really, really stupid. I got a visit this afternoon from a pair of government types. They tried to search my office but didn't have a warrant and my boss managed to chase them away, but not before my secretary heard them tossing around a phrase that sounded like ‘humane torture.’ I'd never even thought of it, but that thing's too real. With the right recording, you really could use it for torture. If they want a gadget like that, they've got to invent it themselves. Don't let them get yours.” Then there was a click and I was listening to an empty line.

  It was Friday evening, and my wife and I had just come back from dinner and a movie. Dylan had one headset, but the others were in my office. Could this wait until Monday?

  The trouble with miracle gadgets is that there's always someone who can figure out how to turn them to anti-miracles. My brother is a Baptist minister and he's always talking about Adam and Eve, original sin, and human depravity. I suspect that this tendency to create anti-miracles is exactly what he means, but when we try to discuss such things, we don't speak the same language, so I'm never sure.

  One thing I was sure of was that the baddies wouldn't wait. I sighed and decided I probably shouldn't, either.

  * * * *

  The headset and chips were right where I'd left them. I probably could have waited until Monday, though Derrick and I had talked enough on the phone that anyone who was serious about tracking down people who might know about his invention would find me soon enough.

  But now I found myself hesitating. Destroying the headsets wouldn't solve the problem forever; if the government knew such devices were possible, some secret lab would reinvent them sooner or later.

  Still, it would slow them down. Another of my old friends is in the wilderness-preservation field. She tells me that the only way she stays sane is by thinking of everything in terms of buying time. In her field, victories are only temporary because each time you save a tract of land from one threat, there's always another. But losses are forever. So you work to string together enough temporary victories that new attacks at least face an increasingly uphill battle. She and my brother wouldn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but I suspect she would appreciate his concept of original sin.

  Destroying the prototypes might not keep them from being reinvented, but in the interim, it would save an unknown number of people a lot of pain. Most would deserve it, but one drawback with torture is that you're never sure who's who until afterward. My friends were right. Even if the victory was only temporary, I didn't want to be the one who caused the “forever” loss.

  * * * *

  The headsets might be prototypes, but they were solidly made and I wasn't sure how best to destroy them. I could break the moldings easily enough, but what mattered were the electronics inside, and even if I broke those, I didn't know whether a good electronics whiz could figure them out from the pieces.

  Derrick had burned his, but that wasn't something I could do in my office. I stuffed them in a bag, wondering whether I could take them home and burn them in my fireplace without creating dangerous fumes. Probably a bad idea. Maybe I should just run over them a few times with my car and scatter the pieces out the window on the freeway.

  I was halfway to the parking lot when my cell phone rang. I presumed it was Derrick, checking up on me, but it was a local number—and not my wife, either.

  “Hello,” I said, still trying to figure out who might be calling. Maybe Derrick's government types were already on my tail.

  What I heard, though, was a torrent of static, kind of like the sound you get when someone forgets to lock their cell phone keyboard and it dials you at random, giving you a chance to listen to the inside of their pocket. There was a wailing sound in the background and a torrent of syllables from which I could catch only fragments: “...Coach ... Highway 36 ... cops."

  “Dylan?” The transmission was so choppy I wasn't sure, but it had to be him. “Slow down. You're breaking up. Are you okay?"

  If he heard me, it didn't help. “...blood ... need help..."

  Someday, someone's going to design a cell phone network that works when you really need it. Highway 36 put him west of town, on a two-lane that had once been a favorite drag-racing site—a bit of trivia I'd picked up from colleagues who'd been around since before rising fuel prices put the kibosh on that dangerous pastime. I thought of Dylan and his new car and shuddered.

  I hung up, counted slowly to ten, and hit the callback button. Sometimes that's all it takes to get a good connection. Instead I got Dylan's voicemail, clear as a bell. I left him a quick message that he might or might not think to pick up, sprinted for my car, and broke a lot of traffic laws heading west.

  * * * *

  Luckily there weren't any cops around to see me. That's because they were all out on Highway 36, about where I figured they'd be. There were also several ambulances, but their crews didn't appear to be doing much, which is either very good or very bad, depending.

  Given the state of Dylan's car, the answer had to be the latter. It was upside down in the ditch, crumpled practically beyond recognition, with glass and plastic strewn along two hundred meters of roadside. A paunchy policeman tried to wave me on when I pulled to the side, but relented when I told him one of the victims had called me.

  “He's over there,” the policeman said, gesturing toward a space-blanket-wrapped figure talking to a notepad-wielding officer. “He's one lucky boy. Apparently he was in the backseat when the car went off the road. See if you can talk him into letting them take him to the hospital. We can get his statement later."

  Dylan spotted me before I got halfway to him. “Coach!” he called, breaking away from the officer and half-running to me. He seemed eager and needy, not at all the Dylan I'd always known.

  “What happened?” I asked, fighting down panic. “Are you hurt?"

  “Oh, Coach, it was so awful.” He embraced me—also wildly out-of-character—then with his back to everyone else, his mood shifted. “You're going to kill me when you see this.” He slipped a hand into his pocket, then pressed a VR chip into my hand. “But better you than them. I tried to erase it but I didn't know how. I threw the headset somewhere off over there.” He inclined his head slightly toward the roadside. “They'll probably find it, but without the chip they won't know what it is."

  I looked at the chip, wondering how it related to the accident. “What happened?” I repeated.

  “Andrew and Thomas are dead,” he said, and fleetingly, I felt a guilty relief that I'd never heard those names before and that Dylan hadn't managed to kill off two of his teammates.

  “How about you? Are you hurt?"

  “I can still run,” he said, and for a moment I wondered if he'd seen my relief and was too young to realize that none of us are exempt from such things. All we can do is recognize them when they occur and try to fight them off. More of my brother's original-sin doctrine, I suspected. Then I saw tears in his eyes and realized he was merely trying to cover them with macho.

  “Go to the hospital,” I said. “I'll take care of things here."

  * * * *

  It was 3 A.M. by the time I finally got home. There wasn't that much to do at the accident site, but I waited for the tow truck and watched as the police cars gradually dispersed. When I had no excuse to stay, I went to the nearest convenience store, bought a coffee, and sat in the parking lot staring at Dylan's chip, nerving myself to view it. I couldn't decide whether I was glad or disappointed that I'd not had time to destroy the headsets.

  At last, I put on one of the new ones, with the gain turned down far enough that whatever was on the chip wouldn't be too overpowering. The index showed seven tracks, so maybe it was merely one of Dylan's running logs and he'd simply been trying to help keep the whole project secr
et.

  The first recording, in fact, was merely a training run, and I nearly disconnected in relief. But something told me to keep going. I skimmed the rest of the first track, sampling every few minutes, then jumped to the middle of the next one.

  Even at low gain, the transition was jarring. This track had nothing do with running and everything to do with vigorous, enthusiastic sex. I immediately hit the cutoff, but still felt mentally polluted. At least I hadn't been Dylan. There are some things I most emphatically did not want to know about him.

  I popped the chip out of the player and considered my options. Two cups of coffee later, I decided I really did need to know the rest—but preferably at an even lower intensity. I put the chip back in the headset and resumed scanning at the lowest level that would allow me to understand what was going on.

  In track 3, I was a woman. Were these souvenirs, or porn? Most likely the latter. In track 4, I was male again, but this time I was gay. And so it went through two more permutations. I was beginning to get a hunch about where the sports car had come from. With only one headset, Dylan couldn't mass-market this stuff, but there would be people who'd pay a tidy sum for one viewing of any of these.

  Then came the final track.

  I was sitting in the driver's seat of Dylan's car. Beside me was a young man I didn't know, and in the rearview mirror was Dylan. The car was stationary, but then Dylan said, “Let's get this show on the road,” and there was the nervous banter of college students egging themselves into action. The driver revved the engine and paused as it vibrated with power. We put it in gear, the tires squealed, and we were off. Just because it was a hybrid didn't mean it didn't have power, and whoever I was handled the curves like a pro—which was probably why Dylan had picked him to drive, rather than himself.

  Still, I couldn't figure out why he had switched from porn to this. Then I recalled the one-time popularity of drag racing. This wasn't a race, but there'd definitely be people who'd pay to experience it. I thought of the missing chips and wondered how big a VR library Dylan had amassed, and how many people might have tried out the headset. So much for Derrick's big secret. Word of his VR miracle was probably on dozens of Internet chat rooms.

  The car was going faster and faster. It wound through the mountains, then out onto the flats favored by the former drag racers. I/we/the-driver floored the gas and the car leapt forward, the speedometer hitting 80, 90, 100, 110, 120...

  Somewhere around 130 the front right tire blew. Or did it? Somehow it didn't feel right, but things were happening too fast to be sure. For one precarious moment, the car ran in a reasonably straight line, then it yawed onto the shoulder and suddenly I was flipping, sideways and end-over-end, like a running shoe in a clothes drier. An airbag inflated in my face, then burst as something, maybe a piece of the roof, was thrust through it from above. Then something else struck me, and I looked down and it was sticking out of my chest and even at low gain my world exploded in pain...

  ...and it was all happening so fast that it was only now that I finally found the off switch.

  I sat back, shaken and terrified. What would be the result if I played it to the end? I knew what had happened to the driver. Had Dylan managed to reach him and turn off the recorder before he died? If he hadn't (and given the extent of the injuries, I doubted it), I was holding the ultimate in porn-myth: a snuff film. Not just a snuff film, but a VR experience in which you were the one who died.

  Cautiously, I played back the first part in slow motion, concentrating on the blown tire, running through those moments again and again at increasing intensity, just as I had with Dylan's sore knee. My first impression had been correct. The tire hadn't blown. The wheel had fallen off. From the corner of my/our eye, the driver and I could see it bounding off into the ditch, although I doubt he'd had time to understand what he was seeing before we'd begun that endless series of flips.

  What were the chances of a wheel coming off a new car by accident? I'd never driven at this speed and had no data on the risks, but it seemed unlikely.

  I wondered again why Dylan had shifted from porn to this. With only the one headset, he needed recordings that could command a high price per viewing. Porn obviously fit the bill. But driving? Yeah, gas was expensive, but if you wanted to waste a gallon or two, any of those student gas-guzzlers could go as fast as you wanted. And no matter how good the VR was, the real thing had to be a bigger thrill. That meant there was a limit to how much he could charge for the recording he'd intended to make, and given the fact that he couldn't mass-produce, it didn't seem worth the effort.

  Unless someone had hired him to do it. Someone who was hoping for a wreck, maybe even a snuff film. Someone who was willing to risk losing the headset in a crash because he thought he had a way to get more.

  * * * *

  I drove back to the crash site, again courting tickets. If I was right, the people who'd set Dylan up had planned on retrieving both the headset and the chip. I wondered why they hadn't beaten the police to the crash site. Maybe they'd expected the wheel to come off in the curves and were waiting in the wrong place. Maybe they'd not counted on Dylan surviving and phoning for help. Hopefully they'd not seen him throw the headset into bushes, or they'd already have it.

  The one thing I was sure of was that I wasn't dealing with feds. The more I thought about it, the fishier Derrick's visitors sounded. “Government types,” he'd said, not “FBI” or “CIA” or anything else shadowy but specific. That meant he'd not gotten a good look at their IDs. Nor could I imagine real feds being so unprepared for the resistance they got from Derrick's boss. Or careless enough to be overheard talking. For that matter, I couldn't imagine them using a phrase like “humane torture.” They'd say “humane interrogation” or something even more indirect, like “personal data retrieval.” Most likely, Derrick's visitors had been trying to bolster their image as government agents, in an attempt to secure his headsets before the car accident.

  There was also the question of what Derrick could have done to bring himself to the attention of the government, while it was obvious how Dylan's clients could have found him. The headsets bore the logo of Derrick's company, which was small enough that anyone inquiring about VR would be referred to Derrick pretty quickly.

  If they knew of Derrick and Dylan, they knew of me. I wondered if I dared destroy the headsets I already had. Would they believe it, if I did?

  * * * *

  The crash site was deserted. Until the cops took a good look at the fallen-off wheel, this was merely an accident. Still, multiple-fatality accidents are rare enough that the investigators would be back, first thing in the morning, so I had limited time to find the headset.

  Wondering if I was being needlessly paranoid, I parked a mile down the road and pulled on a worn-out pair of running shoes. I couldn't avoid leaving footprints, but at least they wouldn't match the ones I'd left before. And I could throw away the shoes before going home.

  Then I jogged back and began scouring the bushes for the headset. It took an hour, but eventually I found it, happy for the deserted highway, which only occasionally required me to hide from oncoming headlights.

  If anyone was watching, I certainly didn't see them.

  * * * *

  The phone pulled me awake sometime before 5 A.M. “Urrmph,” said my wife, or words to that effect, followed by something vaguely like, “Saturday morning."

  I let the voice mail pick it up, but thirty seconds later it was ringing again. Someone wanted me badly, and I wasn't going to get any more sleep until I found out who.

  Grudgingly, I picked up the receiver. “Yeah?” Damned if I'd be polite at this hour.

  “Hello, Coach,” said a voice I'd never heard before. The tone was way too chipper for the crack of dawn, but something about it carried an undercurrent of menace. “You have something we want."

  It was a line right from a bad movie, and I half-expected the next one to be “and we have something you want.” But extortion is easier than kidnapping
.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to buy time, fearing that I might need to think fast and be unable to do so. Which was probably why they'd phoned at 5 A.M.

  “Your boy calls it a VR headset,” the voice said. “He says there are two of them and that by now you should have both. Plus a chip.” He paused, then continued conversationally, “You know, you runner types really are wimps. A little persuasion and you cave right away. Don't worry; we merely paid him a visit. But if you want him to stay safe, bring everything to Fremont Park in one hour. Park in the main lot, and we'll find you."

  “I can't get there that fast,” I said, now wide-awake. “I've got the headset but it's not here.” Not true, but it sounded reasonable and bought me time.

  “Get it quick,” the voice said. “We'll give you ninety minutes. Don't be late. It's amazing how easy it is for runners to have little, uh, accidents.” He chuckled and my waking-up brain thought: It's not me who's in the bad movie. It's these guys. Maybe that meant that while they were dangerous, they weren't all that sophisticated.

  * * * *

  When this was over, I'd be furious at Dylan, but at the moment, that was a luxury I couldn't afford. I toyed with calling the cops, but I couldn't imagine explaining things quickly enough to convince them to stake out the park before Dylan's thugs got nervous and disappeared.

  I dressed quickly, thinking I had two advantages. One was that they saw runners as wimps, which meant they might underestimate me. The other was that they didn't know that I actually had four headsets because I'd never shown the other two to Dylan.

  I had another advantage, too, which was that my wife had been a 1500-meter runner, and those folks are the toughest of the lot. She'd heard my end of the phone call and knew something was badly wrong, but when I told her I needed to think, she didn't waste time with questions. Nor were there any histrionics when I filled her in on last night's adventures and the plan that was beginning to take shape.

  There was a pretty good chance I wouldn't survive it. But if I just gave the caller what he wanted, I doubted that he'd let me live. And if I refused, he'd either start kneecapping my runners or realize that the way to really get to me was through my daughter.