A double penance. He would also miss guitar practice tonight to deal with this.
There was a heavy steel crucible, lined with some kind of protective ceramic. He put on heavy gloves, a welder’s mask, and lit the oxyacetylene torch. He fined the flame down and it was but the work of a few seconds to reduce the wooden stocks to ash. He dumped in the smaller parts — screws, springs, and so forth, which melted slowly under the steady play of the pale fire, flaring now and then as they went from dull red to cherry and yellow-orange to blue-white and then fluid.
To this, he added the barrel segments, the frame, and the cylinder. It took a lot longer to finish these, especially the fat cylinder — this was not a smelter, and not what the torch was designed for, but it developed enough heat to do the job, eventually. When the steel was roiling liquid, he shut the torch off and poured this into three small molds that looked like pyramids with their tops sheared off.
When the molds had cooled sufficiently, he removed the blocks of steel, and put them into a water trough to steam and hiss and cool further.
He took the little chunks of steel and put them into a small leather sack. A five-thousand-dollar handgun, reduced to high-grade scrap metal.
Nobody would be comparing rifling patterns to any bullets fired from the Korth.
He would cautiously and carefully drop these blocks into the East River later, where they would spend however many thousands of years it took before they rusted away. Even if they were found, nobody would ever be able to connect them to a weapon used to shoot a federal agent. Just more junk at the bottom of the river, good for nothing, of no concern to anyone.
What an awful shame it was to do such a thing to a weapon like the Korth.
Jay stood in the sand, watching the surf come in. Everything was gorgeous: The waves lapping at the shoreline were a deep blue, the sun overhead gave the sand a glow that made it seem pure gold, and a gentle breeze caressed his skin.
After a few moments, he realized he must be in VR.
This is too good — it’s got no teeth.
The phrase had originated with his instructor in VR 101, an undergrad course that had been new when he’d been in college. The old man had always said it: “Reality bites. Nothing is perfect. Remember that.”
Even the most beautiful beaches had sand mites, stinking seaweed, or rotting fish that marred their perfection. A good VR programmer would include details like this, little teeth, to at least nibble a bit at a VR viewer and thus make it seem more real. Well, except for fantasy VR guys — in those, reality wasn’t supposed to bite.
Had he accidentally jacked into someone else’s datastream? Grabbed an old datafile he’d used for research by mistake?
He reached out with his mind, flicking the off switch which would take him out of the scenario.
Nothing happened.
He frowned. What was going on?
Had his hardware glitched? Maybe an interface problem? The neural stimulators were so good these days it was possible to forget you had a body. One of the new guys he’d hired over the summer had gotten stuck one day when he’d removed the safety and alarm on his stims. That was strictly forbidden, and hard to do without some skill. The poor kid might have stayed there all day if he hadn’t had a dentist appointment and they’d called looking for him. Jay had done a hardware shutdown to pull him out of the figure eight. A bit of bad programming that could have been serious, and a lesson learned: Don’t shut off the safeties.
While Jay didn’t run his stims that high, he did get focused so intently that the effect was sometimes the same.
Well. No matter, he’d break it off now.
He focused on becoming aware of his body; he reached out to feel his index finger, crooking it slightly toward the cutout sensor he knew was there.
Got it…
But once again, nothing happened. The scene stayed on, the waves lapped inward, and a few seagulls, their feathers pearly white, flew by overhead.
Well.
Whatever was happening definitely had his attention now. He’d been feeling a little funny, kind of unfocused when the scenario started, but that was fading fast. His mind searched through alternative fixes for the problem.
Time to try software.
He’d route to an outside link, contact someone to go check on him in the lab. If someone had been messing around with cheap software in his VR rig, they were going to be sorry they had ever been born.
He couldn’t find the link. A moment of panic enveloped him.
Wait a second, hold on. Maybe he wasn’t in VR?
Could he be dreaming?
It was an occupational hazard that VR programmers often developed extremely realistic dreams. All the time that they spent coding sensations into a scenario wore a groove in their own heads. He looked at the perfect sunset and frowned. He’d like to think he’d dream something better than this.
There was an easy way to find out. He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet.
Which is there because I programmed it? Or dreamed it?
He’d taken the idea from an old book about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreamers were people who were aware that they were dreaming. Once this synaptic jump was made, they could control their dreams, a very attractive proposal prior to VR. The dreamer would carry a card around in his wallet that said, “If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.”
The wallet trick worked because, in a dream state, your brain had a hard time keeping text together. Lucid-dreamer wannabes would pull the card out in their dreams and read it. When the text didn’t work — usually it slid around the page, or faded out — they’d know they were dreaming.
Jay had used the technique to separate himself from his dreams several times and had offered it to other VR jocks he knew. He’d done it often enough that he’d actually managed to have a few lucid dreams as well. VR without the hardware.
He looked at the card.
If you can read this, you’re not dreaming.
Well, that answered that.
He glanced away from the card and then looked back to be sure.
If you can read this, you’re not in VR, either.
A chill frosted his shoulders.
Uh oh. What was going on here?
He tried to remember his day… It had been calm — he was going to see Saji, and then—
As if the thought had conjured her, he suddenly saw his wife across the beach, almost at the opposite end.
Saji! He felt a sense of relief. Saji would know what was going on. He’d talk to her, see what kind of VR he was stuck in.
As he drew closer to her, he could see that she held something. A little white bundle.
The wind on the shore suddenly carried to him a thin cry over the crash of the surf.
The baby!
What was going on? She’d just been diagnosed — well that wasn’t the right word, she’d… found out she was pregnant, just a few days before.
Something was wrong. He looked over toward Saji, and noticed that even though he hadn’t been moving slowly, she seemed to be farther away than before.
And in the same glance, he noticed that the water had pulled back from the sand — way back. Fish were flopping in the suddenly empty bay, seaweed and kelp beds were exposed, out past the coral reef.