The Archimedes Effect (21 page)

Jo would learn to like tree houses, chimpanzees, and swimming in the pool naked with Jay, only it would never get that far.

Jay smiled. It was all so . . . simple. Ah, those were the days, when nobody asked the hard questions, and the bad guys got their just deserts. . . .

What Jay was looking for was a link from the dead terrorist to his live friends. A hoard of jewels was as good a metaphor as any.

How had such a king’s ransom of diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and assorted gold chalices and the like come to be in a mountain cave in the middle of the unnamed African country’s deepest, darkest jungle? Bother that. There never had been any civilization here higher than daub-and-wattle huts and subsistence natives—the Aztecs and Mayans had been in South America. The gems were all polished and set, requiring expert jewelers and gold workers, none of which had ever existed here. And why would people capable of producing such a hoard of priceless baubles haul it fifty miles through the deepest, darkest, animal-infested, malarial jungle to stash it in a cave anyhow?

Because the screenwriter willed it so, Jay knew. No other real reason, despite whatever throwaways the writer would toss off about ancient civilizations and other such rot. Jay was just using the setup, he hadn’t created it. . . .

Jay grinned. Well, realism wasn’t exactly primary in a scenario wherein he swung through the trees yodeling, knocking down bad guys, and rescuing fair damsels. . . .

But back to the conversation. Jay was here to learn something, and eventually it would come out. Where exactly was the cave? He didn’t know that, but if he stayed with this group long enough, he would.

As the five sat around the fire, front-lit by the orange glow, with fitful sparks flying into the darkness, Jay of the Jungle sat on his branch, master of it all, listening.

In the night some unseen creature went, “Ooh-wow! Ooh-wow! Ooh-wow!”

Nice touch that, if he did say so himself . . .

“Jay?”

It took him a second to track. Here was a voice that didn’t belong—

Thorn. One of two people with overrides to reach into Jay’s VR world.

He would have to get back to the evil hunters later. If the boss was calling and willing to interrupt Jay while he was in VR? That meant it had to be important.

“End scenario,” Jay said.

The jungle faded away, leaving Jay in his office, wired in his suit.

Thorn stood in the doorway.

“ ’Sup, Boss?”

Thorn said, “I just had a wonderful discussion with General Hadden,” he began.

“Uh oh.”

“Yeah, you got that part right . . .”

The FBI and military intelligence had ops chasing information on the dead terrorist, too, and after talking to Thorn, Jay decided that his time might be better spent working on things they couldn’t find as well as he could. So after Thorn left, Jay bagged the jungle-man scenario and flew off to the other side of the Moon.

From the lip of the crater where he stood, Jay had a good view of the alien base. For all that it was the “dark” side of Luna, there was a good amount of light—unnatural light, to be sure, but still. The terrain was rocky here, just north of Mare Ingenii—the Sea of Cleverness, which seemed an appropriate location.

He was at one of the final levels of the bug game. And it was stumping him—he couldn’t figure out which military base it corresponded to in the RW.

He jumped, falling down the wall of the crater. Gravity was only 0.165 that of Earth, but there was inertia, so he used his braking rockets to slow his descent even more. He floated downward like a broad leaf.

The VR was gorgeous. Dynamic lighting and particle effects added to the visuals, making him feel that he was really
here
. The stark lighting and eerie silence combined with the very realistic alien base to give him the creeps. Smooth, powdery dust flew from his boots as he bounded down the steep slope, ghosting into the vacuum and back down in slow motion.

He wasn’t live in this mission—the goal here was to evaluate the base and see if he could find out what his team had missed. So the game was frozen as he roamed around the set.

He trotted toward the base, kicking up more slo-mo dust.

Good thing this
isn’t
real-time, or they’d see me coming for sure
.

The base was roughly hexagonal, the most unusual layout he’d seen yet. It was a deep blue color, and slightly translucent, as if made from huge sapphire crystals. There were alien-sized air locks on all six sides, with larger, vehicle-sized locks on three walls.

The walls had a monumental look, like something built in ancient Sumeria or Babylon. He almost expected to see huge bull-gods emblazoned on the wall, or ziggurats peeking up from inside.

Some memory nagged at the back of his mind. As if he’d seen this before—something like it, but not this, exactly.

He hit a button on his space suit and was propelled upward by a small rocket on his backpack. The wall was well-defined VR, but not quite as sharp as the rest of the scenario. The crystalline texture seemed to have been overlaid on somewhat older code. It wasn’t as . . . integrated as the rest of the scene.

He reached the top of the wall and looked at the roofline.

Here was a sharper, more defined VR—a herringbone of giant crystals.

Jay paused the scenario and shifted frame of reference, which grew larger as the base shrank to the size of a coffee table.

“Remove newer base sections as defined by these parameters,” he said to the analysis program. He rattled off some code.

The base shimmered for a moment, and then it reformed, still six-sided, but now looking more like an ancient walled city, without a roof.

He
had
seen this before. But—where?

Jay paused the scenario and exited to personal cyberspace. He was in a wood-paneled hallway with leather-wrapped doors leading off it. Here was the Game Room, the repository of games he had gathered over twenty years, going back to when he was a kid. Each door had a brass plate with a year engraved on it.

When had he seen it? What year had it been?

A few VR glove motions later, the walls of the corridor morphed outward, expanding into a cavernous space. Acres of blond oak floor stretched out toward art exhibits, each representing a favorite video game he’d played.

Here, a Rodin-like pose by Gordon Fremaux from
Half-Life 4.
There, a model of the Ghost Attack Craft from
Halo
. Over on the wall opposite was an oil painting from the tenth level of
Goldeneye
—the updated Nintendo-21 version.

None of these, of course. But he was sure it was this way.

He reached the section of VR games made up of realistic dioramas.

Past the
Doom 5
exhibit he saw a huge building on top of a hill, a great walled city from the Bronze Age, complete with winged bulls.

The city layout wasn’t hexagonal, but that would have been easy to change with a few lines of code. What was important was that, aside from the shape and the new overlays, this was the same basic structure.

Jay read the card posted on the wall of the exhibit.

Siege of Troy—Student MPO, v1, MIT
. The date—day, month, and year—were there. A couple years after he’d graduated.

He remembered it. VR games had been fairly new, and someone had written a massive multiplayer on-line version of a game that had hundreds of players attacking the ancient city of Troy.

A buddy had told him about it, so he’d gone to see it via VR. The experiment had turned into several weeks of multiple-player gaming, culminating in the destruction of the ancient city. It was a beautiful, thoughtful, complex scenario. Jay had been impressed at the time. It was still impressive. Helen, Paris, Achilles, Ajax, the gods . . .

He VR-shifted and was inside the game again.

No doubt about it—same wall structure, same gateways.

The purpose of all the other bug-game levels had been to break into real-world bases, but something was not right here. What was he missing?

“Topographic scan to crater walls, overlay and search for Terran base matches.”

An aural progress bar played—this one the sound of a locomotive chugging closer and closer before Dopplering away. When it was finished, a steam whistle blew. Maybe this wasn’t so much about a real base as it was about something else?

“One match found.” His generic, non-scenario-specific programs usually had a sexy, sultry female voice. This one was no different.

Jay tapped a space near where the steam whistle had sounded and a blue globe appeared in front of him. It spun and rotated. He triggered a flyby mode, and suddenly he was scaled to human size over the globe, flying across it, heading toward where the program had found a match.

He was moving past the northern tip of South America to the Caribbean. Now he was heading toward the water.

He went along with the sim and found himself underwater, looking at a huge submerged base, domed in some sections, more like tin cans in another. A nuclear submarine was docked at the base.

He had his answer. This was an Army VR construct—it wasn’t real. Some kind of practice run, to get the topographic stuff right. A test pattern.

Jay grinned. At least that part of the problem was solved.

So, either somebody who had access to it had swiped the game data from MIT, or maybe whoever had built Troy, the game, was the person who used it as a basis for the bug-war scenario. Either way, it was a big clue. It gave Jay a place to start filtering.

Kent wiped his guitar down with the black silk and put it into the case. Jen put her instrument away.

He took a deep breath. “You, uh, want to get some supper?”

She stopped latching the case for a second, glanced over at him.

“Supper?”

“Yes. Food. Dinner. At a restaurant.”

She didn’t say anything.

He said, “Help me out here. I haven’t done this in a long time.”

“You haven’t had food in a long time?”

He laughed.

“Sure. I’d like that,” she said. “Maybe we should leave the guitars locked up here? Safer than in the car.”

“Sure. You know any good places locally?”

“A couple.”

“You want to drive or give directions?”

“I’ll drive.”

The night was chilly as they walked toward her car. She said, “So, Abe, when was the last time you asked a woman out?”

He thought about it for a moment. “Four, five years ago?”

“Really?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She shook her head. “Wow.”

“Better than that—she turned me down.”

Jen laughed.

“I won’t keep you out late,” he said. “Wouldn’t want your cat to get hungry.”

“Don’t worry about the cat,” she said. “She’s got an on-demand feeder in the kitchen. She won’t starve.”

He smiled. So far, so good . . .

She drove them to a little Italian place maybe a mile away from the music store. Dino’s was one of those checkered-tablecloths, candles-in-wine-bottles kind of cafes, ten tables, most of them full. The guy at the front, a good-looking dark-haired kid of maybe twenty, smiled at Jen when he saw her come in. “Ah, Miss Jennifer, how are you this night?”

“Fine, Gino. Got room for two?”

“We do.” He collected a couple of menus and led them to a small table in a dark corner. “Pasta with clam sauce is the special tonight. Enjoy.”

Before they could do more than sit, a busboy brought glasses of water, a basket of garlic bread, and a bottle of red wine with two glasses.

Kent noted the unasked-for wine as he picked up the menu. “What’s good?”

“Pick anything—never had a bad meal here. I come in once or twice a week. Gino’s father is the cook, his mother the cashier, and there are a couple of sisters who work here.”

The waitress, a young woman who was indeed obviously related to Gino, arrived. “Good evening, Miss Jen.”

“Hey, Maria. This is General Abe Kent, one of my students.”

The young woman smiled at Kent. “Ah, welcome to Dino’s,
Generale
.”

Jen ordered the special, and Abe asked for spaghetti with meat sauce. After Maria left, he took a bite of the bread as Jen poured them each a glass of the house red. Both the bread and wine were excellent. “How did you know I was a general?”

“I have a computer and access to the Internet,” she said. “I looked you up.”

“Ah.”>

“Ah?”

“Well, I looked you up, too. You never mentioned that you had a couple of music CDs out.”

“It’s been a couple years since I did one of those. Old glory.”

“I enjoyed hearing them. I knew you played well, but those were very nicely done.”

She shrugged. “I’m no Ana Vidovic,” she said. “If you get a chance to hear her Prelude to Bach’s Fourth Lute Suite? Best version out there in the last twenty years, for my money, even if it is a little showpiece fast. But now and then, I have my moments.”

She sipped at her wine and looked at him over the rim. The candlelight sparkled in her eyes. “So, we have checked each other out.”

“So it seems.”

“To what end, General Kent?”

“Well, right now, dinner.”

She smiled, large and lazy. “And after dinner? Would you like to come back to my place?”

He paused and took a slow sip of his wine. He had been out of this game for a long, long time.

“Yes, ma’am, I would be honored.”

She smiled at him again.

They drank more wine.