Fool's Experiments (5 page)

For the fourth time that evening, the words on the screen seemed to blur. It was time again to get up and walk around. Doug pushed away from his desk, hoping to find something to graze on in the vending machines.

It was almost 9:00
p.m.,
and the end was not in sight. The end of the workday, that was. The proposal due date for their NSF grant renewal approached with perilous speed. The National Science Foundation had so far coughed up half the money for development of the experimental prosthesis. Doug needed to keep that cofunding flowing. BioSciCorp would have enough of a financial stretch going it alone once the technology was ready for commercialization. Lose the grant and NSF would take on its banking definition: non-sufficient funds.

A Coke and a granola bar perked him up. He made the rounds of the offices to see how things went with his fellow stuckees. At his third stop, he found Cheryl gazing fixedly at her PC screen, surrounded, as always, by dead trees. She was doing her damnedest to synthesize a set of generalized arm-motion rules for the grant progress report. "Can you use some help, or is it beyond that?"

She stood and stretched, graceful as a cat and a testimonial to aerobics. "That felt good. Sure, if you can spare a few minutes."

"What's the problem?"

Cheryl gestured across her desk. "I'm drowning in data. Do you have any
idea
how many arm motions you make in a day? And they're like the proverbial snowflakes: No two are exactly alike. Besides, the longer you use the prosthesis, the more data it accumulates and the bigger its lessons-learned file grows. There has
got
to be a better way to look at all this data."

Doug perched gingerly on the single uncluttered comer of the desk. "Have you synchronized the data from the arm with the physical-training videos?"

"I tried." She plopped back into her chair to keyboard something. A window opened up on the display, in which a tiny, sweaty, begoggled Doug dashed randomly about an empty white room, swinging and swatting with a short rod. The counter in a comer of the window, its rightmost digits changing with blurring speed, observed the passage of time down to the millisecond. "It doesn't help. No offense, boss, but you look like a marionette on drugs."

"An unstrung marionette, at that," he agreed. "This is how you've been looking at the videos? Try this." He leaned over, trying with limited success to ignore their proximity. He keyed a command that dramatically changed the video. The visualized room doubled in size and developed various- colored markings, the wand in mini-Doug's hand blossomed into a proper racquet, and a similarly equipped opponent materialized. Thuds and thwocks of the bouncing red ball, and grunts from the hardworking players, burst forth in surround sound from PC speakers.

Cheryl's jaw dropped. "Was everyone having a little fun with the new girl? Someone might have
told
me what was going on in these so-called exercise videos."

Doug straightened up hurriedly. Crouched over Cheryl like that, unavoidably smelling her hair, all he needed was the suggestion about having fun with the new girl. It didn't matter that that was not how she meant her words. "The old hands find it easier to analyze the motions with the graphics filtered out. We slipped up in not emphasizing the VR view. I'm sorry."

"You slipped up in not mentioning there
was
a VR view!" Her jaw now jutted out belligerently.

Hell, what did the team talk about at lunch most days, if not VR? This was nuts. Of course while Cheryl ate with the group, she didn't say much. She stayed at a distance, as though any friendliness on her part would be misinterpreted. He had asked his administrative assistant about Cheryl; Teri's reading was the same. What else important had Cheryl's standoffishness caused her to miss?

He made a snap decision. "We both need a mental break.

Let's go play some racquetball."

"We've got too much work to do.
I
have, anyway."

"This
is
work. You need to understand the exercise videos." She stood and glared. "I do understand them.
Now.
I would have days ago, if you had shared your little secret."

Everyone was cranky from overwork, Doug told himself, including me. That he took Cheryl's tantrum more personally meant that maybe she was right. At some level maybe he didn't see her as simply "one of the guys."
Damn
it. Who was he mentally cursing? Maybe both of them. Probably both. "Ever done virtual racquetball? Any VR sport?"

"No." Her tone revealed a disdain for VR of which he had previously seen only glimpses. "I'll stick with the real world."

"Not if you want to reverse-engineer what the arm has taught itself."

The criticism stung, but she was too angry to back down. She indicated her slacks and sweater. "These aren't racquetball clothes, and I don't have a racquet." The answer conceded his point without any move toward cooperation.

Doug got off the corner of her desk. "You've mentioned aerobics after work. Whatever you wear at your health club will be fine. Meet me outside the VR labs in ten minutes. I'll change and bring spare gear." Hoping to reduce the tension, he added, "Ask the game program to put my face on the pseudoball. Rumor has it that can be very therapeutic."

He took the brief up-twitch of her lips for success. "Great. I'll see you in ten."

With so much left to do, why was she playing? Cheryl stood, ill at ease, the VR rod awkward in her hand. Through borrowed VR goggles she saw only the webless wand, herself in leotard and sneakers, and an all-white room. She had lectured herself while changing clothes about the need for an open mind. Doug would probably describe that as free advice and worth every penny.

"Speak up if you can't hear this." Doug's voice was loud and clear in her goggles' tiny earphones.

"Whatever." She assumed that the room had hidden microphones.

"Open sesame," she heard next, and Doug appeared in the suddenly enlarged chamber. His cutoffs were frayed; his well-worn T-shirt declared: "I'm virtually certain that I'm real or really certain that I'm virtual. Or vice versa." Her senses rejected what she knew: that he stood in another room down and across the hall. The cameras here must be capturing her with equal verisimilitude. She suddenly felt self-conscious in her leotard.

"You say it, too."

"Do I have to?" She sounded petulant even to herself. Damn it. She had cooled down enough to know she had serious fence-mending to do. "Okay, then." Imaginary drum- roll. "Open sesame." The room sprouted virtual lines on its floor and varicolored zones on its walls and mythical midcourt center plane. The rod in her hand became the handle for what looked like a conventional racquet. She knew, however, that she held an expensive piece of electronics. The wand captured every nuance of her grip and its own exact position and attitude in the room. The handle reported continuously, by infrared beams, to sensors in the walls. In other games, this same instrumented rod became a golf club or a baseball bat or a wizard's staff.

With quips and examples, Doug taught her how VR racquetball worked. An unseen computer responded to voice cues (that every serious gamer personalized) for such functions as serving the ball and changing handicap levels. ("What handicap? I don't need any damned charity," she had protested— until he slammed a ball past her via a pro-level, triple-speed purple zone. She might as well have swung at a meteor. "Well, if you insist.") Multiple video cameras and a
lot
of computing power triangulated their exact position at any point in time.

The revealed mysteries of her VR goggles most surprised her. A low-power infrared source shone continuously into each eye; the reflections off her retinas helped reveal, instant by instant, precisely where in the virtual scene she was looking. ("Helps?" He had gently suggested that the position and orientation of her head in the room were useful. Infrared transmitters in her goggles signaled that, too.) The gear was surprisingly sophisticated. Maybe her opinion of VR games
was
a bit knee-jerk.

"All right," Doug said. "Enough about the mechanics. Time to volley for first serve." To some unseen computer, he added, "Roll 'em."

"Shit!"
Dick Conrad snarled. Like sentiments echoed in the halls, often punctuated by the pounding of fist on desk. Invading text slithered impudently around his PC screen, devouring, with Pac-Man-like determination, Dick's section of the NSF grant-renewal paper.

Dick removed wire-rimmed glasses to massage the bridge of his nose. He had a sudden bitch of a headache. Those nearly concurrent shouts meant a coordinated, time-delayed viral attack. Every computer at BSC, and the backup file copies going back who knew how long, could be infected. To have a prayer of meeting the deadline on the grant renewal, they would have to get virgin computers and recover from hardcopy drafts scattered around the office. He couldn't bear to think about the many edits he'd made since his last printed draft.

The grant was
important
to Doug. Dick couldn't imagine how Doug would take this incident.

In thus discounting his imagination, Dick was absolutely correct.

"Beep."

Focused on the pseudoracquetball, Doug found the electronic tone disorienting. Balls in midair make no noise. It took a moment to realize that the sound had no bearing on the game. Once he decided that the sound came from his wrist, its meaning became obvious: His watch had chimed the hour. The watch ran ten minutes fast, a bit of subterfuge that usually got him to meetings on time. That made it about ten minutes before ten.

The ball changed course with a healthy
thwock,
sign of a solid hit with a firm grip on the racquet. The novice level at which he had Cheryl playing slowed his returns to a quarter of their usual speed. The molasses-in-January return gave him ample time to analyze the stroke. Perfect. The prosthesis had done precisely what he had intended. Remember that, right arm of mine.

Subvocalization of the control phrase triggered a neural response, mastered in lengthy sessions of biofeedback. His brain initiated a nerve impulse, an electrochemical chain reaction that traveled from brain, to spinal cord, to nerve branch. Sensors in the prosthesis, in due course, picked up the signal. Circuitry then recognized the unusual character of the pulse pattern. Instead of commanding a muscle to relax or contract, this signal told the prosthesis to write a "well-done" notation into its embedded memory. Arm motions that he flagged this way were automatically retained whenever he interfaced the arm to a lab computer for data extraction.

Still, it was nearly ten. There was work left to do that he meant to finish tonight. "As much as I'm enjoying this, we've got to get ba—"

Pain jolted his arm. He stared in horror at the hand that suddenly clenched his racquet handle with agonizing intensity. For a bewildering instant, the prosthesis signaled conflicting sensations of boiling heat and numbing cold, of featherlight tickling and viselike pressure.

After an endless moment, the forearm lost all feeling.

It didn't help, Cheryl decided, that Doug kept referring to the incident as "a disarming experience." The remark was typical: a play on words and a deprecating reference to his disability. The bitter tone—that was another matter. She didn't like it.

"I'm so sorry, Doug," she said.

He looked up from the inert prosthesis lying on his desk. "Unless
you
set loose the virus, I wish you'd quit saying that."

The tension in his voice registered. Sympathy was the
last
thing Doug wanted. This project—his whole professional life—was a struggle against long odds. A struggle that some juvenile asshole seemed to have, if only temporarily, derailed. Sympathy only made things worse. She said, "You're right; I'm
not
sorry. I'm
pissed."

"You're not
that,
either. I currently hold the exclusive, worldwide franchise. I can assure you, it didn't come cheap." Maybe so, but some emotion was wringing her gut. As awful as she felt, she knew Doug felt worse. How could she help?

"Thanks again for the job," she blurted.

The subject change made him blink. "You earned it. Don't make a big deal of it."

She didn't know if this was a way to get Doug's mind off his problems or only something that she needed to get off her own chest. Either way, she plowed ahead. "I'd guess you haven't been on the job market recently."

He finally looked her in the eye. The triumph of curiosity over depression? "Things are bad?"

"Only in our niche." It was her turn to sound bitter. "Only in neural interfacing."

Doug seemed to first notice the disembodied limb on his blotter. He opened a desk drawer and tucked away the inoperative prosthesis. "I
have
seen more resumes than usual," he conceded. "Look, I know the research program shut down at your old place. I knew that before I interviewed you. Feinman was the soul of the program, and he had a stroke. It's a real shame, Cheryl, but it happens."

How about a frozen expression of terror so awful the mortician can't do anything about it? Ben Feinman had had a closed-casket memorial, but Cheryl
knew.
She was good friends with Fran Feinman, and Fran had had to tell someone. Does that happen, too, Doug? But all that Cheryl could bring herself to say was, "And Yamaguchi?"

"She wrapped her car around a lamppost. My friends at NeuralCorp say she'd been preoccupied with something. Believe me—car wrecks happen." He glanced self-consciously at his stump. "Shit happens."

It was the first time he had ever alluded in Cheryl's presence to the loss of his arm. She wanted to respond. She wanted, suddenly, to know him. To know Doug the person, not the wisecracking boss. After years of keeping her distance from men at the office, she wasn't sure how. And as she hesitated—

"I can't face cleaning up this mess tonight." She followed his gaze to a wall clock; it was past midnight. "Correction— this morning. I'm going home to catch some Zs."

Unhappy with an opportunity lost, too confused by her stymied impulse to think to ask if he could drive himself home, she followed him to BSC's all but empty parking lot.