But Hiram's mansion—a giant geodesic dome, all windows—looked as if it had just landed on the hillside, one of the ugliest, most gaudy buildings Kate had ever seen.
On arrival she handed her coat to a drone. Her identity was scanned—not just a reading of her implants but also, probably, pattern-matching to identify her face, even a nonintrusive DNA sequencing, all done in seconds. Then she was ushered inside by Hiram's robot servants.
Hiram was working. She wasn't surprised. The six months since the launch of his wormhole DataPipe technology had been his busiest, and OurWorld's most successful, ever, according to the analysts. But he'd be back in time for dinner, said the drone.
So she was taken to Bobby.
The room was large, the temperature neutral, the walls as smooth and featureless as an eggshell. The light was low, the sound anechoic, deadened. The only furniture was a number of reclined black-leather couches. Beside each of the couches was a small table with a water spigot and a stand for intravenous feeds
And here was Bobby Patterson, presumably one of the richest, most powerful young men on the planet, lying alone on a couch in the dark, eyes open but unfocused, limbs limp. There was a metal band around his temples.
She sat on a couch beside Bobby and studied him. She could see that he was breathing, slowly, and the intravenous feed he'd fitted to a socket in his arm was gently supplying his neglected body.
He was dressed in loose black shirt and shorts. His body, revealed where the loose clothing lay against his skin, was a slab of muscle. But that didn't tell much about his lifestyle; such body sculpting could now be achieved easily through hormone treatments and electrical stimulation. He could even do that while he was lying here, she thought, like a coma victim lying in a hospital bed.
There was a trace of drool at the corner of his parted lips. She wiped the drool away with a forefinger, and gently pushed the mouth closed.
"Thank you."
She turned, startled. Bobby—another Bobby, identically dressed to the first—was standing beside her, grinning. Irritated, she threw a punch at his stomach. Her fist, of course, passed straight through him. He didn't flinch.
"You can see me, then," he said.
"I see you."
"You have retinal and cochlear implants. Yes? This room is designed to produce virtuals compatible with all recent generations of CNS-augment technology. Of course, to me you're sitting on the back of a mean-looking phytosaur."
"A what?"
"A Triassic crocodile. Which is beginning to notice you're there. Welcome, Ms. Manzoni."
"Kate."
"Yes. I'm glad you took up my, our, dinner invitation. Although I didn't expect it would take you six months to respond."
She shrugged, "Hiram Gets Even Richer really isn't much of a story."
"Uhuh. Which implies you've now heard something new." Of course he was right; Kate said nothing. "Or," he went on, "perhaps you finally succumbed to my charming smile."
"Perhaps I would if your mouth wasn't laced with drool."
Bobby looked down at his own unconscious form. "Vanity? We should care how we look even when we're exploring a virtual world?" He frowned. "Of course, if you're right, it's something for my marketing people to think about."
"Your marketing people?"
"Sure." He "picked up" a metal headband from a couch near him; a virtual copy of the object separated from the real thing, which remained on the couch. "This is the Mind'sEye. OurWorld's newest VR technology. Do you want to try it?"
"Not really."
He studied her. "You're hardly a VR virgin, Kate. Your sensory implants are pretty much the minimum required to get around in the modern world."
"Have you ever tried getting through SeaTac Airport without VR capabilities?"
He laughed. "Actually I'm generally escorted through. I suppose you think it's all part of a giant corporate conspiracy."
"Of course it is. The technological invasion of our homes and cars and workplaces long ago reached saturation point. Now they are coming for our bodies."
"How angry you are." He held up the headband. It was an oddly recursive moment, she thought absently, a virtual copy of Bobby holding a virtual copy of a virtual generator. "But this is different. Try it. Take a trip with me."
She hesitated—but then, feeling she was being churlish, she agreed; she was a guest here after all. But she turned down his offer of an intravenous feed. "We'll just take a look around and come back out before our bodies fall apart. Agreed?"
"Agreed," he said. "Pick a couch. Just fit the headset over your temples, like this." Carefully he raised the virtual set over his head. His face, intent, was undeniably beautiful, she thought; he looked like Christ with the crown of thorns.
She lay down on a couch nearby and lifted a Mind'sEye headband onto her own head. It had warmth and elasticity, and when she pulled it down past her hair it seemed to nestle into place.
Her scalp, under the band, prickled. "Ouch."
Bobby was sitting on his couch. "Infusers. Don't worry about it. Most of the input is via transcranial magnetic stimulation. When we've rebooted you won't feel a thing..." As he settled she could see his two bodies, of flesh and pixels, briefly overlaid.
The room went dark. For a heartbeat, two, she could see, hear nothing. Her sense of her body faded away, as if her brain were being scooped out of her skull.
With an intangible thud she felt herself fall once more into her body. But now she was standing.
In some kind of mud.
Light and heat burst over her, blue, green, brown. She was on a riverbank, up to her ankles in thick black gumbo.
The sky was a washed-out blue. She was at the edge of a forest, a lush riot of ferns, pines and giant conifers, whose thick dark foliage blocked out much of the light. The heat and humidity were stifling; she could feel sweat soak through her shirt and trousers, plastering her fringe to her forehead. The nearby river was broad, languid, brown with mud.
She climbed a little deeper into the forest, seeking firmer ground. The vegetation was very thick; leaves and shoots slapped at her face and arms. There were insects everywhere, including giant blue dragonflies, and the jungle was alive with noise: chirping, growling, cawing.
The sense of reality was startling, the authenticity far beyond any VR she'd experienced before.
"Impressive, isn't it?" Bobby was standing beside her. He was wearing khaki shorts and shirt and a broad hat, safari style; there was an old-fashioned-looking rifle slung from his shoulder.
"Where are we? I mean..."
"When are we? This is Arizona: the Late Triassic, some two hundred million years ago. More like Africa, yes? This period gave us the Painted Desert strata. We have giant horsetails, ferns, cycads, club mosses... But this is a drab world in some ways. The evolution of the flowers is still far in the future. Makes you think, doesn't it?"
She propped her foot on a log and tried to scrape the gumbo off her legs with her hands. The heat was deeply uncomfortable, and her growing thirst was sharp. Her bare arm was covered by a myriad sweat globules which glimmered authentically, so hot they felt as if they were about to boil.
Bobby pointed upward. "Look."
It was a bird, flapping inelegantly between the branches of a tree... No, it was too big and ungainly for a bird. Besides, it lacked feathers. Perhaps it was some kind of flying reptile. It moved with a purple, leathery ruse, and Kate shuddered.
"Admit it," he said. "You're impressed."
She moved her arms and legs around, bent this way and that. "My body sense is strong. I can feel my limbs, sense up and down if I tilt. But I assume I'm still lying in my couch, drooling like you were."
"Yes. The proprioception features of the Mind'sEye are very striking. You aren't even sweating. Well, probably not; sometimes there's a little leakage. This is fourth-generation VR technology, counting forward from crude Glasses-and-Gloves, then sense-organ implants—like yours—and cortical implants, which allowed a direct interface b
etween external systems and the human central nervous system."
"Barbaric," she snapped.
"Perhaps," he said gently. "Which brings me to the Mind'sEye. The headbands produce magnetic fields which can stimulate precise areas of the brain. All without the need for physical intervention.
"But it isn't just the redundancy of implants that's exciting," he said smoothly. "It's the precision and scope of the simulation we can achieve. Right now, for example, a fish-eye map of the scene is being painted directly onto your visual cortex. We stimulate the amygdala and the insula in the temporal lobe to give you a sense of smell. That's essential for the authenticity of the experience. Scents seem to go straight to the brain's limbic system, the seat of the emotions. That's why scents are always so evocative you know? We even deliver mild jolts of pain by lighting up the anterior cingulate cortex—the center, not of pain itself, but of the conscious awareness of pain. Actually we do a lot of work with the limbic system, to ensure everything you see packs an emotional punch.
"Then there's proprioception, body sense, which is very complex, involving sensory inputs from the skin, muscles and tendons, visual and motion information from the brain, balance data from the inner ear. It took a lot of brain mapping to get that right. But now we can make you fall, fly, turn somersaults, all without leaving your couch... and we can make you see wonders, like this."
"You know this stuff well. You're proud of it, aren't you?"
"Of course I am. It's my development." He blinked, and she became aware that it was the first time he'd looked directly at her for some minutes; even here in this mocked-up Triassic jungle, he made her feel vaguely uneasy—even though she was, on some level, undoubtedly attracted to him.
"Bobby, in what sense is this yours? Did you initiate it? Did you fund it?"
"I'm my father's son. It's his corporation I'm working within. But I oversee the Mind'sEye research. I field-test the products."
"Field-test? You mean you come down here and play hunt-the-dinosaur?"
"I wouldn't call it playing," he said mildly. "Let me show you." He stood, briskly, and pushed on deeper into the jungle.
She struggled to follow. She had no machete, and the branches and thorns were soon cutting through her thin clothes and into her flesh. It stung, but not too much—of course not. It wasn't real, just some damn adventure game. She plunged after Bobby, fuming inwardly about decadent technology and excess wealth.
They reached the edge of a clearing, an area of fallen, charred trees within which small green shoots were struggling to emerge. Perhaps this had been cleared by lightning.
Bobby held out an arm, keeping her back at the edge of the forest. "Look."
An animal was grubbing with snout and paws among the dead, charred wood fragments. It must have been two meters long, with a wolflike head and protruding canine teeth. Despite its lupine appearance, it was grunting like a pig.
"A cynodont," whispered Bobby, "A protomammal."
"Our ancestor?"
"No. The true mammals have already branched off. The cynodonts are an evolutionary dead end... Shit."
Now there was a loud crashing from the undergrowth on the far side of the clearing. It was a Jurassic Park dinosaur, at least two meters tall; it came bounding out of the forest on massive hind legs, huge jaws agape, scales glittering.
The cynodont seemed to freeze, eyes fixed on the predator.
The dino leapt on the back of the cynodont, which was flattened under the weight of its assailant. The two of them rolled, crushing the young trees growing here, the cynodont squealing.
She shrank back into the jungle, clutching Bobby's arm. She felt the shaking of the ground, the power of the encounter. Impressive, she conceded.
The carnosaur finished up on top. Holding down its prey with the weight of its body, it bent to the proto-mammal's neck and, with a single snap, bit through it. The cynodont was still struggling, but white bones showed in its ripped-open neck, and blood gushed. And when the carnosaur burst the stomach of its prey, there was a stink of rotten meat that almost made Kate retch...
Almost, but not quite. Of course not. Just as, if she looked closely, there was a smooth fakeness to the spurting blood of the protomammal, a glistening brightness to the dino's scales. Every VR was like this: gaudy but limited, even the stench and noise modeled for user comfort, all of it as harmless—and therefore as meaningless—as a theme-park ride.
"I think that's a dilophosaur," murmured Bobby. "Fantastic. That's why I love this period. It's a kind of junction of life. Everything overlaps here, the old with the new, our ancestors and the first dinosaurs..."
"Yes," said Kate, recovering, "But it isn't real."
He tapped his skull. "It's like all fiction. You have to suspend your disbelief."
"But it's just some magnetic field tickling my lower brain. This isn't even the genuine Triassic, for God's sake, just some academic's bad guesswork—with a little color thrown in for the virtual tourist."
He was smiling at her. "You're always so angry. Your point is?"
She stared at his empty blue eyes. Up to now he had set the agenda. If you want to get any further, she told herself, if you want to get any closer to what you came for, you'll have to challenge him. "Bobby, right now you're lying in a darkened room. None of this counts."
"You sound as if you're sorry for me." He seemed curious.
"Your whole life seems to be like this. For all your talk of VR projects and corporate responsibilities, you don't have any real control over anything, do you? The world you live in is as unreal as any virtual simulation. Think about it: you were actually alone, before I showed up."
He pondered that. "Perhaps. But you did show up." He shouldered his rifle. "Come on. Time for dinner with Dad." He cocked an eyebrow, "Maybe you'll stick around even when you've got whatever it is you want out of us."
"Bobby."
But he had already lifted his hands to his headband.
Dinner was difficult.
The three of them sat beneath the domed apex of Hiram's mansion. Stars and a gaunt crescent Moon showed between gaps in the racing clouds. The sky could not have been more spectacular—but it struck her that thanks to Hiram's wormhole DataPipes, the sky was soon going to get a lot more dull, as the last of the low orbit comsats were allowed to fall back into the atmosphere.
The food was finely prepared, as she'd expected, and served by silent drone robots. But the courses were fairly plain seafood dishes of the type she could have enjoyed in any of a dozen restaurants in Seattle, the wine a straightforward Californian Chardonnay. There wasn't a trace here of Hiram's own complex origins, no originality or expression of personality of any kind.
And meanwhile, Hiram's focus on her was intense and unrelenting. He peppered her with questions and supplementaries about her background, her family, her career; over and again she found herself saying more than she should.
His hostility, under a veneer of politeness, was unmistakable. He knows what I'm up to, she realized.
Bobby sat quietly, eating little. Though his disconcerting habit of avoiding eye contact lingered, he seemed more aware of her than before. She sensed attraction—that wasn't so difficult to read—but also a certain fascination. Maybe she'd somehow punctured that complacent, slick hide of his, as she'd hoped to. Or, more likely, she conceded, he was simply puzzled by his own reactions to her.
Or maybe this was all just fantasy on her part, and she ought to keep from meddling in other people's heads, a habit she so strongly condemned in others. "I don't get it," Hiram was saying now. "How can it have taken until 2033 to find the Wormwood, an object four hundred kilometers across? I know it's out beyond Uranus, but still."
"It's extremely dark and slow moving," said Kate. "It is apparently a comet, but much bigger than any comet known. We don't know where it came from; perhaps there is a cloud of such objects out there, somewhere beyond Neptune.
"And nobody was especially looking that way anyhow. Even Spaceguard concentr
ates on near-Earth space, the objects which are likely to hit us in the near future. The Wormwood was found by a network of sky-gazing amateurs."
"Umm," said Hiram. "And now it's on its way here."
"Yes. In five hundred years."
Bobby waved a strong, manicured hand. "But that's so far ahead. There must be contingency plans."
"What contingency plans? Bobby, the Wormwood is a giant. We don't know any way to push the damn thing away, even in principle. And when that rock falls, there will be nowhere to hide."
"We don't know any way?" Bobby said dryly.
"I mean the astronomers."
"The way you were talking I'd almost imagined you discovered it yourself." He was needling her, responding to her earlier probing. "It's so easy to mix up one's own achievement with that of the people one relies on, isn't it?"
Hiram was cackling. "I can tell you kids are getting on just fine. If you care enough to argue... And you, of course, Ms. Manzoni, think the people have a right to know that the world is going to end in five hundred years?"
"Don't you?"
Bobby said, "And you've no concern for the consequences—the suicides, the leap in abortion rates, the abandonment of various environment-conservation projects?"
"I brought the bad news," she said tensely. "I didn't bring the Wormwood. Look, if we aren't informed, we can't act, for better or ill; we can't take responsibility for ourselves—in whatever time we have left. Not that our options are promising. Probably the best we can do is send a handful of people off to somewhere safer, the Moon or Mars or an asteroid. Even that isn't guaranteed to save the species, unless we can establish a breeding population. And," she said heavily, "those who do escape will no doubt be those who govern us, and their offspring, unless we shake off our electronic anaesthesia."
Hiram pushed his chair back and roared with laughter. "Electronic anaesthesia. How true that is. As long as I'm selling the anaesthetics, of course." He looked at her directly. "I like you, Ms. Manzoni."
Liar. "Thank you."
"Why are you here?"
There was a long silence. "You invited me."