“What do you mean?”
“You can figure out the cycle timing any way you want, but I want to interleave Atlas’s writing of data to the socket with Atlas reading data from the socket. I want a feedback loop so that Atlas can monitor my reactions to the signals it’s feeding me.”
“But it won’t know what those signals mean! It has no dictionary to use to interpret them.”
“So? I’ll tell it what they mean. I’ll describe what I see. It already knows how to translate my subvocalizations. It can associate what I tell it with the signals it reads and it can learn on its own how to interpret the data. That’s the whole idea of a super neural-net computer, isn’t it?”
“But, Royce, you’re risking—”
“The hell with the risk. What more can possibly happen to me? Just do it, Jacob—and right away. We’ve only got four and a half weeks left.”
Hunter slouched back in his go-buggy with his eyes closed as Jacob inserted the virtual reality plug into the socket at the back of his skull. The multipin connector slid in smoothly, then locked in place with a metallic click.
“In and locked,” Lattyak announced, and a technician made a notation in his log. “For the record,” he went on in a harsh tone, “I want to state that in my professional judgment this procedure is both dangerous and foolish.”
“Yes, Jacob, we all know. You’re on record; now throw the damn switch!”
“Here’s the button, Royce,” said Jacob coldly as he placed a small control panel into Hunter’s artificial hand. “You press it.”
“Thanks, Jacob, I will.” Hunter’s finger pushed the Activate key and the world around him instantly dissolved into a gray fog.
For several seconds—it seemed like seconds to his wondering mind—he was alone in a dim gray nothingness. Then slowly his normal senses began to return. Brief flashes of vivid color and odd bits of jarring sound engulfed him as millions of bits of random data swept through the VR connector to bombard the sensory areas of his brain.
Now he had to tell Atlas what he was seeing.
*I’m seeing flashes of lots of different colors,* he subvocalized. *Try to turn everything into a solid tomato red. I’ll let you know when I see it.* A sickly green aura tinted the edges of the fog. *No, that’s a dull pea green, and just around the edges. Keep trying.* A moment later he was dazzled by a vivid teal-blue light that pulsed uncertainly for a moment, then abruptly vanished. Doggedly he maintained his dialog with Atlas. Half an hour passed, an hour. Eventually he found himself sitting in a generic brown chair in front of a generic brown table in a windowless room with fuzzy beige walls. The soft strains of Mozart issued from no discernible source: Atlas had been using aural communication from the very beginning and sound had proved to be a fairly easy problem to resolve.
*Atlas, let’s see if you can call up a more complex scene. Something from my memory.* What scene should he try Hunter had begun to wonder, when, without conscious thought, the walls of the room disappeared and he found himself on a flat, open, horizonless plain. An instant later a warped tree appeared to his left, its branches black and twisted, its diseased leaves a sickly yellow. The ground beneath his feet became splashed with neon-green splotches. A house sprang up in the distance, its planks weathered and every angle askew.
Hunter stopped trying to speak. No, it couldn’t be! He watched in horror as three figures blinked into existence. The taller one’s body was twisted, misshapen, with lank yellow hair falling over its face. It raised an arm and pointed to one of the smaller shapes, a gnome-like body bearing a dented pumpkin head. The thing turned and waved to Royce and an incredibly life-like sound issued from its mouth. “Daddy,” it shouted in a voice he could never forget.
*Maureena!* Hunter screamed. *No!*
The smallest of the three monstrosities turned and bounded toward him on distorted legs.
*Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!* Hunter shrieked before Charlie-Boy’s voice could escape the monster’s throat. *Stoppppppppp!* Hunter howled, and once again the world went dim.
“—It out, get it out!” Hunter dimly heard Lattyak ordering the technician stationed behind his chair.
I’m fine, he tried to say, I’m fine, but his lips didn’t seem to want to open properly. He tried again. “I’m fine, fine,” he finally gasped. “No problem at all. I’m all right.”
“No problem!” Lattyak halfshrieked. “You screamed like all the banshees of hell were after you. I thought you were going to have a stroke!”
Hunter blinked in the relentless white lighting of the laboratory. “Just a little mistake,” he said softly. “It’ll be OK. Just plug me back in—we’ve got a long way to go.”
“Not until your heartbeat and blood pressure get back to somewhere near normal,” muttered Dr. Devore from her panel of monitoring instruments. “Let’s see how you feel half an hour from now.”
“We don’t have the time! It’s already going too slowly as it is!”
“What on earth are you talking about? You were only connected for about forty-five seconds.”
“Forty-five seconds! It seemed like I was there for at least an hour! There must be a time compression factor.”
A tight smile began to brighten Lattyak’s broad features. “If that’s true, then that’s the single best bit of news I’ve heard since this wretched business started. This could be the edge we need in the negotiations—time enough to think.”
The conference room had been completed and waiting for over a week now. Given the fact that they knew so little about Trajendi physiology, the technicians had installed a remarkable array of sensors. Chairs, tables, and floor were wired to record the slightest of sounds. Microscopic chips by the dozen were ready to read the exact components of Trajendi breath and sweat, assuming that they breathed and perspired. Electromagnetic sensors were poised to catch the faintest of changes in the electromagnetic fields surrounding the Trajendi’s brains and bodies. All of the output from these devices would be dumped directly into Atlas’s data bus.
For the last six days Hunter had conducted an endless series of discussions, arguments, and mock negotiations with the best negotiators, trial lawyers, con men, and flimflam artists on the planet. For recreation he would break off to play poker with the finest gamblers Las Vegas and Sahara City could produce.
The initial trials had gone poorly but towards the end of the third day Atlas began to learn. It was, Hunter admitted, possibly nothing more than dumb luck on his part. For want of anything better to do, he had idly told Atlas to generate a virtual reality room where the two of them could retreat to discuss matters in absolute privacy. After several false starts, Hunter eventually settled on a plain wooden table set in the shade of a lush garden.
He visualized Atlas not as the stereotyped bronzed muscleman holding up the world but as a wily old Down East lawyer who had forgotten more about negotiating a settlement with city slickers and bamboozling a jury of his hard-headed rustic peers than Hunter could have learned in a dozen lifetimes.
*Cyrus,* said Hunter with a pleased grin, *that’s you. When we’re in conference, you’re not Atlas any longer, but Cyrus T. Lodge, the toughest, shrewdest, meanest gunslinger ever to come out of a New England courtroom.*