by Ross Welford
“Don’t worry, guys,” says Dr. Pretorius behind us. “It gets better. Here.” She holds a bicycle helmet in each hand and waits for our reaction. “Well, put ’em on,” she says eventually. “Adjust them so they’re a good fit, and make ’em tight: tighter than you’d normally wear.”
A tiny earbud plugs snugly into each ear. She helps us with the straps and buckles, fiddling and pulling, till Ramzy says, “Argh! It’s too tight!”
“Can you breathe?”
“Yes.”
“Then it isn’t too tight. OK—follow me. The dog stays here.” She leads us out of the control room and back into the studio, and we stand with our backs to the foamy green wall.
I look down and realize for the first time that we’re standing on a kind of path that runs round the whole of the circular floor. The floor itself is a huge disc filled with…what? I bend down to look closer.
“One-millimeter matte-black ball bearings,” says Dr. Pretorius beside me. “Billions of them, half a yard deep. You can walk on them—it’s OK. They’re packed tight. You won’t sink.”
She stands before us, checking the helmets and finally lowering a curved steel bar that attaches to the helmets like a visor. It rests above our eyes. “That’s the 3-D generator,” she says. “It’ll dazzle a bit but you’ll get used to it. You’ll probably also feel a little discomfort on your scalp, but it’s nothin’ to worry about.”
Ramzy says, “This is just like the Surround-a-Room at Disney World!”
I get the impression that that was not the right thing to say, although I can’t be sure. Dr. Pretorius blinks slowly and takes a deep breath through her nose, as though considering her response. Eventually, she says, “Dead right, sonny. Only this is waay better. This is a game that’s gonna change the world. OK, this way.”
She leads us toward the deck chair. The ball bearings feel odd underfoot, like walking on soft gravel. “When the program starts,” Dr. Pretorius says, “the floor will shift a little beneath you. It might feel strange at first but you’ll get used to it.” She turns and goes back into the control room, pulling the curtain behind her and closing the door with a thunk. In my ear, there’s a crackling noise; then I hear her say, “Ready? OK—let’s do this!”
It is only then that I realize I have no idea what I’m doing. I have just gone along with this unquestioningly, strapping on a weird bicycle helmet, stepping onto a floor made of tiny balls, beneath a vast dark dome, while outside people stroll around and eat ice cream, and…
I have exactly the same feeling as the first time I went on a roller coaster. I must have been about six. I was with Dad, and we were in the front car. It had crawled up a steep slope, and it was only when we got to the top that I looked down and realized that I was much higher than I wanted to be.
Five minutes before now—less!—I was banging on the big double door with a wolf-head knocker and now I’m about to test some new…what? A game? Who IS this woman?
I am terrified. How, I am wondering, did I end up here?
“Ramzy? I don’t like this.” I reach out and grip Ramzy’s hand; then I call out, “Stop!” and then louder, “STOP!”
But it’s too late. The pin lights in the ceiling all go off and everything goes dark.
Exactly where we’re standing in the Spanish City was—till very recently—a restaurant, although I never went inside it. Years before that it was a ballroom, then a discotheque, with cafes and amusement arcades; outdoors there was a permanent carnival dominated by a huge white dome, and the whole thing was called the Spanish City.
Granda, who grew up here before he moved to Scotland with Gran, says he remembers an ancient, rattling roller coaster made of wood and iron called the Big Dipper. By the 1990s, though, the Spanish City was almost a ruin, and it stayed like that for years apparently.
It was all refurbished a few years ago, and there’s no carnival now, and no Big Dipper. But there are still ice cream shops and cafes in another section—swanky, expensive ones like the Polly Donkin Tea Rooms that make Granda suck his teeth and go, “You’re kidding! That much for a pot of tea! I tell you, when I was a kid…,” and so on.
The king visited the Spanish City once, before he was the king. I was a baby, and there’s a picture of me and Mum, and the king looks like he’s smiling at me, although that’s just the angle of the picture. He was smiling at something else. It’s in a frame in our hallway.
Anyway, last winter the restaurant under the dome closed down. No one knew why. Saskia Hennessey’s mum worked as a waitress there and one day she was called in and told she no longer had a job. But…she was given a boatload of money. The family all went to Florida and had brand-new laptops when they came back, and Mrs. Hennessey got a job at the Polly Donkin Tea Rooms.
It was the same for everyone who worked there, according to Sass.
One day: busy restaurant. Next day: removal vans being loaded with tables and chairs. Week after: builders moving in with sledgehammers and dumpsters.
It all still looks the same from the outside. But no one knows what’s going on inside. Well, no one knew—till Ramzy and I met Dr. Pretorius.
* * *
—
Once, before the October half-term, Ramzy and I were walking home from school and I was talking to him about all this, and about me meeting the king, wondering out loud what on earth was happening, when he just marched up to a guy in an orange jacket and a hard hat who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks and broken wood by the big back doors of the Spanish City building.
“Excuse me, sir—what’s happening in there?” Ramzy asked him, while I cringed with embarrassment. (Sir!) Mr. Springham, our teacher, says Ramzy has “no social filter”: he’ll talk to anyone.
The man seemed glad of the chance to rest his load.
“Haven’t a clue, son. Perfec’ly good restaurant, aal ripped oot! Big shame, if y’ask me. Looka that….” He pointed at a large slab of shiny stone in his barrow. “Big piece of Italian marble, that is. Come to think of it, I’ll have that for meself, like. It’ll make a nice garden table!”
“So…what’s going in instead?” says Ramzy.
The man took off his hard hat and wiped his brow with his forearm. He looked up at the dome. “Dunno, son. Some sort of music or film studio, I reckon. There’s a load of fancy equipment goin’ in next week. Y’know: lights an’ projectors, an’ computers an’ that.” He nodded to an elderly looking lady in a hard hat who was crouching and checking the labels on a stack of silver canisters like fire extinguishers. She turned and stared at us fiercely.
“Aye, aye. Can’t stay here gabbin’ wi’ yous. Ol’ Dr. Wotsit over there’ll be on to us.” He picked up his wheelbarrow and resumed his work.
Ramzy turned to me. “See? You’ve only got to ask!”
As we walked away, I looked back, and the old lady had stood up and was still staring at us. She was tall and thin, and I looked away. A few yards farther on, I dared to glance back again, and she was still looking at us, and I felt as though I’d been caught doing something wrong.
I recognized her: I had seen her sometimes down on the beach, swimming. Even in the winter.
Whatever she was building was huge as well. The silver canisters I recognized as Liquid Weld: Dad uses it in his car workshop, but he only has one of them. The old lady must have had about twenty.
I looked back again, and something happened. A look? A connection? I don’t know, but I had the definite feeling that she was watching us both for a reason. I think she even smiled to herself, satisfied with something, or perhaps I was imagining it.
Back in the dead-dark dome, without warning, the curved metal band above my eyes glows a dazzling blue-white—a light that is so sharp it almost hurts. I squint, and as the brilliance fades away, shapes begin to form in front of me. Within seconds, long, thin poles become palm trees, and the dark fl
oor turns white as it’s transformed before my eyes into a tropical beach.
And I mean a real beach: not some corny yellow virtual-reality beach, with clunky graphics, viewed through a heavy headset. This is much, much more realistic than anything I’ve ever seen in any VR device.
I let go of Ramzy’s hand and he says, “Whoaaaaa!”—a long sigh of amazement.
In front of us is the deck chair, and now, to either side of it, stretches a wide crescent of creamy-white sand, fringed with palm trees, leading down to a rippling turquoise ocean a few meters in front of us.
I turn round 360 degrees. The illusion is perfect. I look up, and the blue sky has little clouds in it, and there’s a darker gray cloud on the horizon.
Then I notice the sounds: the breeze; the scratching noise that palm leaves make in the wind; the breaking of the little waves; an old moped going past on a distant road. From behind me is the sound of tinny music. I turn, and there’s a shack selling drinks where the music is coming from. Behind the counter stands a grinning barman. I smile and lift my hand in greeting.
He waves back. His movements are not at all jerky, although his arm becomes a little pixelated, and there’s a slightly dark outline around him.
OK, I think. This is pretty good. No, it’s more than pretty good—it’s excellent, but, you know…
I don’t want to sound cynical and spoiled, but I mean, I have played virtual-reality games before. This is good, and definitely better than the one at Disney World, but…well, why the big secrecy?
“It’s pretty good!” I say out loud, looking around again.
“ ‘Pretty good’?” shouts Dr. Pretorius through the earpiece, and it makes me jump. In just a few seconds, I’d almost forgotten that I was actually inside a large dark dome in Whitley Bay. “ ‘Pretty good’? Is that the best you can do? ‘Pretty good’?” Her normally deep voice has become a squeak.
“I…I’m sorry. I mean, it’s excellent. It’s…”
“Touch the sand! Go on—it won’t bite you! Touch the sand!”
I hunker down, stretch my hand down into the sand, and give a little squeal of amazement. You see, I know that under my feet is a half-meter-thick layer of tiny metal balls. But that’s not what I touch. Instead, I touch…
Sand. At least, that is what it feels like.
The grains trickle between my fingers. I gasp and hear Dr. Pretorius’s throaty chuckle. “It’s better than ‘pretty good,’ isn’t it?”
I nod. “Yes. It…it’s perfect!”
“Ha! Not quite, but thank you anyway. Touch the sand again and feel it carefully.”
I reach out and pick up another handful of sand. Ramzy does the same and says, “It’s…cold? Shouldn’t it be warmer from the sunshine?”
“Hmph,” she says; then there’s a rattling of the keyboard. “How is it now?”
Suddenly the sand is warmer. “Not too warm?” she asks, and I shake my head, stunned into silence.
“What the…?” I look over at Ramzy and his face is contorted in pure terror. “Georgie! Behind you!”
I swing round and I scream. About five yards away, a scorpion the size of a coffee table is raising its huge pincers at me, its quivering tail arched over its back, and it’s advancing toward me.
I have only ever seen scorpions in pictures and on TV. They’re not—I’m very glad to say—native to the northeast coast of England. But I know this much: they’re no bigger than your hand, and they’re usually poisonous.
This one reminds me of a huge, shiny black lobster, tinged with red, with an extra-long jointed tail that curves over its back. There’s a dark orange bulb at the end with a long spike. Its claws are like a crab’s and they snap together menacingly as the scorpion scuttles forward and then sideways on its eight jointed legs. I can see slight imperfections at the scorpion’s edges: a bit of blurring in the movement, like when the barman waved at me before.
Unfortunately, knowing that it’s a virtual-reality scorpion doesn’t make it much less scary.
“Dr. Pretorius!” I shout. “Ramzy!”
Ramzy is frozen in fear, and all I hear in my ear is Dr. Pretorius muttering, “Oh, for cryin’ out loud: not him again.”
The creature takes two scuttling steps toward me and I aim a desperate kick at it. To my astonishment, my foot connects with its claw. I feel my foot kick it—but still it comes forward. Without thinking, I run up the beach, away from the scorpion, which has raised itself up on its legs. It doesn’t appear to have eyes: instead, there are raised mounds on top of its head like glistening black half-footballs, but still—they seem to be looking right at me.
I notice a strange sensation as I run: it’s not exactly like running on sand. More like running on a bed of tiny metal balls, which shift beneath my feet, although right now I’m more interested in putting distance between me and a massive black scorpion.
“Dr. Pretorius! What is that thing?” I yell. Ramzy has picked up the deck chair and throws it. His aim is good, but the chair passes straight through the scorpion, as though it is a ghost.
“Tsk. Don’t worry,” says Dr. Pretorius through my earpiece, sounding more frustrated than anxious. Then she says, “Why, you little…,” but I think she’s talking to the scorpion.
Together, Ramzy and I retreat farther up the beach, but still the scorpion comes at us, scampering through the sand two or three little steps at a time.
Then, without warning, it opens its pincers, rises up on its jointed, hairy legs, and starts to sprint toward me. I turn to run and stumble forward, landing with my face in the sand at the exact moment that the band above my eyes goes dark.
Everything is silent.
When the pin lights come on again in the dome a few seconds later, I’m still in the center of the studio, panting. Ramzy is kneeling next to the upturned deck chair on the black floor where the scorpion was. Dr. Pretorius comes out of the computer-control room and walks toward us over the floor of tiny steel beads, beaming with delight as I blink and pant.
“Welcome to MSVR—multisensory virtual reality, kiddos! And congratulations on being the first people in the world to experience it.” She clasps her long hands together and shakes her head, her halo of white hair quivering. “Nearly there,” she says. “Nearly there!”
I’m still breathless after my encounter with the huge scorpion. Dr. Pretorius notices and adds, “Aw, hey, honey. Sorry about Buster! He’s kind of a bug in the system. I must do somethin’ about that. He wouldn’t have hurt ya.” Then she adds, “I don’t think, anyhow, ha!”
* * *
—
Ramzy and I sit on the long desk in the control room while Dr. Pretorius bashes violently at the multicolored keyboard like she’s playing Whac-A-Mole. In front of us we each have a can of supermarket cola and cookies from a packet. If Ramzy is disappointed—I promised him homemade scones—he doesn’t show it as he crams another two cookies in his mouth. At our feet, Mr. Mash snuffles around for dropped crumbs.
Dr. Pretorius doesn’t look at us while she speaks.
“You”—bash-bash-tap—“just sit there”—tap-tap-BASH—“and I’ll be with you in a minute”—tappity-tappity-BASH-BASH—“darn you! No—not you. Ah, the heck with it: I’ll sort it out later.” She whacks the keyboard one last time and turns to us in her swivel chair. “It’s that darned scorpion. He’s gettin’ ahead of himself. He shouldn’t even be there.”
Ramzy and I nod as though we understand everything she’s saying.
There’s a slightly awkward pause before Dr. Pretorius says, “So how was the Disney World Surround-a-Room?” She practically spits the words and turns back to her keyboard as if the answer doesn’t matter, although it obviously does.
“It was awesome,” I begin, and then decide to backtrack. “I mean, ‘awesome’ is probably overstating it. It was good. Very good. Pretty good. I mean, th
ere are probably better ones. That is…” I’m jabbering and I’m not even sure why.
Ramzy rescues me. “Do you know Surround-a-Room?” he asks Dr. Pretorius, more conversationally.
“Know it? A little.” She’s pretending she doesn’t care.
Ramzy and I exchange looks. For some reason, I think she knows it more than a little.
“I just wrote some of the code, that’s all,” she says. “The program that created it? The visuals, the audibles…that sorta thing. The massive goggles you had to wear. The rain forest Surround-a-Room is…well, it was like a child to me. A child that never grew up.”
Dr. Pretorius gets to her feet suddenly and her voice is louder, the words tumbling out. “Remember the sand you touched? Remember how you could feel it—even though there was nothing there?” I nod. “And the scorpion—when you kicked it, your foot connected, yeah? You felt it. But when you”—she points at Ramzy, who jumps—“threw the deck chair at Buster, and it went straight through him? Did you wonder about that?”
“Yes?” we both say slowly. I mean, I did wonder about it, but it was just one bit of a load of wondering I’ve been doing in the last ten minutes.
Dr. Pretorius picks up the bicycle helmet that I was wearing and turns it upside down. The inside surface is dotted with tiny metal bumps.
“Everything we see and hear and touch is processed in the brain. Without our brain, there’s nothing. Are you with me?”
Ramzy and I glance at each other, unsure where this is going, but Dr. Pretorius isn’t even looking.
“But your brain can be tricked. Optical illusions, magic tricks, déjà vu—they’re all tricks of the mind. We’ve been doing it since we lived in caves. And now this!”
She holds the helmet aloft like a trophy, glaring at us.
“This, my friends, is the greatest illusion of them all. Or will be. The projector here”—she runs her finger round the curved metal band that sat above my forehead—“deceives your eyes into seeing whatever scene is programmed. No more heavy goggles! But it is these that make the big difference. These nodes here, and here, and here…” She’s pointing out the little metal bumps on the inside of the helmet that connected with my skull. “They send signals to the parietal lobe, and—”