The fluid he was breathing made diving at this depth a little easier, because it didn’t compress the same way a gas would. Although it still hadn’t been approved for general use, military and special research units all over the world had started using Perfluorocarbon fluid for deep dives once they’d solved the carbon dioxide removal and inertia problems.
Weird.
He felt like he should be choking, but he had plenty of air, didn’t feel faint at all.
The silt pile he’d identified earlier was just ahead on the right. Jay activated the deep-dive Sea-Doo seascooter he’d brought with him, and it pulled him toward the pile of silt.
As he neared it, he could see that it seemed to be regularly shaped, which gave him hope; the regularity of man-made shapes was a big part of finding salvage in the sea.
He cut the forward motion of the seascooter and let it hang in the water. Green and red lights circled it, so he could find it at this depth, even if his suit lights went out.
The cold dug at the suit, trying to get in.
His left arm was still feeling clamped, and he had a moment where he knew he was in his own home. For that moment, everything seemed artificial before he suspended his disbelief and let himself come back to the VR scenario as his baseline reality.
He shook his head. He was still fighting this, as bad as a first-timer exploring the near edge of VR.
Jay let himself sink toward the silt pile, careful to move slowly. He wasn’t just looking for lost treasure; he was searching for a specific gold bar from a specific sunken chest — one that was shaped like an octagon. Part of a shipment of Incan gold intended for Spanish royalty, the conquistadors had chosen the mold shape to distinguish it from gold being brought back from Mexico.
Of course he wasn’t really looking for gold at all. That was just the VR equivalent. He was really hunting for the man who’d shot him.
The metal detector built into his boots signaled a positive. There was metal down there, all right.
He touched down on the sea floor and took a few seconds to look around. He’d done a good job on this — there were little eddies of water moving the silt slightly, tiny, ugly lichen-like things, and a very real feeling of desolation.
He reached for the pain from the binder clip on his arm again, and suffered a slight disorientation.
He was down.
He let his feet and then his ankles sink into the silt, and before long found himself up to his knees.
Whoa, there…
He adjusted his buoyancy again, and once he’d stopped, he reached slowly into the silt pile. He could feel something hard in there, and heavy. He pulled it out with both hands, and saw that it was a gold bar.
But not the right one.
He let it fall behind him and reached in again. There were more bars in there, but he couldn’t tell them apart.
The binder clip.
He stopped moving. If he removed the binder clip he’d be able to focus on the gold bars, and might be able to find just the right one. But of course, that would remove any connection to the outside world.
Now that I’ve moved some of the bars, I might lose this spot.
He’d been in such a hurry to get this over with, and so focused on the details, he hadn’t built in the functionality to stop mid-program; no save point.
How bad do I want to do this?
He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. Cut off from visual, it was easier to reach over and pull the clamp off his arm. He let it drop, and imagined he could hear it clatter to the floor of his office.
Then he opened his eyes and looked at the silt pile again.
The VR seemed clearer and sharper than it had before. He reached into the muck again and fished around, feeling bar after bar of Spanish treasure. Only now, he could feel their shapes.
Rectangle, rectangle, rectangle…
Jay kept it up, enjoying the feel of the soft muck and the hard contrast provided by the gold.
Man, I’m good.
So when he found it, one slightly differently than the rest, larger, heavier, and shaped like an octagon, he was already grinning.
He pulled the bar out and shook the accumulated muck of over four hundred years off of it.
Gotcha!
He felt pretty good about this. Of course, he knew he’d had something to prove. Being shot was bad enough, but it was how he had felt just before the gun had gone off that bothered Jay the most: He’d been terrified. Worse, after being stuck inside his own head, he had been afraid to go back into VR — him, Jay Gridley!
Yeah, well that was then. This was now!
And now, Jay had vengeance to inflict.
Now to call and let everybody know.
He routed the Com to the office through his virgil, to make sure it was properly scrambled, and logged into a VR conference room at HQ. It only took a few minutes for Thorn to get the crew together and call him back.
“Okay, Jay, we’re here.”
Jay shifted into VR, and found himself sitting in the conference room at the virtual table with Thorn, Howard, Kent, and Fernandez.
Jay said, “I got the guy.”
Thorn said, “You sure?”
“Positive, Boss.”
“Run it down for us.”
Virtual Jay tapped a control on his virtual flatscreen. The images of the man they believed to be the man who’d shot him and later killed a suspected Russian spy appeared and floated holographically over the tabletop. A ’proj within a VR, nice.
“We came up empty on matches from any official government sites — no driver’s license or check-cashing ID, no service record, nothing from the passport folks, jails, prisons, like that. So either the guy hasn’t got any records there, or he’s wearing a disguise that hides enough facial features that the Cray can’t tag him. You might be able to tell, but the computer can’t.”
“That seems stupid of the computer,” Julio said.
Jay grinned. “Said the man who hates the things with a passion. It has to do with how a machine looks at something, which is different than how people do. You see a brand new Corvette tooling through an intersection, even if you’ve never seen it before, and you can’t read the name, and even if it isn’t the same size or design as last year’s model, you still know it’s a ’vette, right?”
“Sure.”
“How?”
“Because it looks like a ’vette.”
“Right, to you. There are design elements that give it away. But if the car is longer, lower, has slightly different angles, a computer matching it to last year’s model might not make the connection. It depends on what you give it for reference. Open the tolerances, factor in silhouette profile, and then maybe it does, or maybe it offers up the nearest match, like a search engine might give you. But if you give it last year’s stats and tell it to match, it will miss the new car.”
“So you’re telling me I’m better than a computer,” Julio said. “I already knew that.”
Jay grinned but let it pass. “In facial recognition software, you have numbers. Put a blob of mortician’s putty on the earlobes or the top curve, and the ears aren’t the same size anymore. Polarizing glasses hide eye color and spacing, and part of the nose. Plugs can make the nostrils wider. If you comb your hair down, you can screw up the forehead sizing. A thick moustache and beard hides the chin and lips. On and on — anybody who knows what the computer looks for can get around it. We have to assume this guy knows that. Whatever the reason, he isn’t in the system where we’ve looked.”