“I had a nice lunch out, today,” I said.
“Oh, where did you go?” she asked.
Nippers, a rustic bar in the Bahamas. “The Plum Blossom café,” I lied.
“That’s it! You need to get out more, Dad, the Plum Blossom is just around the corner, try something further afield.”
Which reminded me, I needed to check on Clair and Raith. Immediately, Sally’s voice appeared in my ear. “She’s back on the game, her choice.” Jesus, she’s watching me! Go away, I thought. I wonder if she did?
“I went into the City on Thursday,” I said, murdered a guy I’d never actually talked to.
Maggie left a little before nine that evening, I felt happy and content. It was a respite from Sally, a reminder that there was a real world in my life. Something special. I hadn’t thought much about Mary since my involvement with the people of Cirion, I guess that was a good thing. My children were everything to me now. They’re lives as important as my own. Yet, I had to try hard not to interfere, let them make their own mistakes, as I did. I couldn’t reconcile the craziness of what was happening to me with their everyday existence and I was sure it was going to get harder.
A late Black Label kept me company. I nursed it, lovingly. The weather looked fine for the morning, rain clouds holding off till after lunch. I was going for a ride. My weekly, subject to weather, pleasure. But as the alcohol dug deeper I considered my alternatives. Not an option in past weeks but now a headlight blinding me on a dark night. Breakfast in Rio, or maybe lunch in Paris, oh geez, I could go to Cork and see my brother, Gerry. From a distance though, wouldn’t work to turn up as Dave. So we couldn’t speak, unless I played a stranger, I guess. Hmmm… Or I could practice flying, which made me wonder…
“Sally,” I called out. She appeared immediately, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. “I’m going to practice flying tomorrow, I don’t want to be seen, I guess. Not yet, anyway. Can you make me invisible?”
“Not perfectly, no,” she replied. “You could change into a blue outfit to match the sky, but it wouldn’t work that well. If you are completely still, say on the ground, you can become invisible to one person, by matching you to the background. But if there were two people it wouldn’t work.”
I was struggling to understand. “Say that again,” I said.
“If there was a tree behind you, you could mirror that tree in your clothes from one person’s perspective but not the second person.”
I thought about it and imagined two people looking at me and then it was clear. I couldn’t go invisible, jeez, these guys need to get their act together.
“You can create a holographic image that’s transparent, but that wouldn’t allow you to practice with the anti-gravity technology.”
Now I was confused, “I can create a holographic mirror image of myself?”
“Yes.”
“What can it do?”
“Same as me,” not much.
“But it would look like me, perfectly.”
“Yes, if you wanted it to, or anybody else. It’s just a hologram.”
“If someone touched it, there would be nothing there?”
“Right.”
“Can it speak?”
“Sure, you control the voice, the computer can direct the sound to come from the hologram. That’s how I work.”
“Interesting,” I said.
“Are there other things I should know?” I asked.
Sally looked like she was thinking, but computers don’t think like humans, do they? “There are a couple of things, yes.” I raised my eyes, indicating for her to continue. “There are some safety items that I need to tell you about, but it’s better if we leave them for a while, until you need them.” The soothing effect of the Black Label let that statement wash over me and I just nodded.
“What else?”
“You can speak and understand all languages.”
Wow! That turned me for a loop, “How?”
“The computer will translate the language to English in real time. The delay will vary, based on the complexity of the language and what is said.”
“Okay, I can see that as feasible, but what about me speaking a foreign language?”
“The same, the computer mutes your voice and translates what you say in English to whatever language is required.”
“That will look weird, like dubbing in the movies.”
“Better than dubbing. When your persona is a hologram, the computer changes the mouth to match the language.”
I considered it for a moment, neat. “But the delay would be obvious?”
“Whoever you’re speaking to won’t notice, especially if they’re not looking for it. It will seem as if you just thought more before you answered.”
That is so cool. I just decimated the foreign language education industry.
Chapter 16
RIO
I slept like a log during the night and woke feeling like a new man. It was six a.m. and my mind began turning over the ‘end-of-world’ thing. It was such a long way off, which made it hard to feel any urgency. I could see that if I was to suddenly appear in the media, flying around like superman and bouncing to distant parts of the globe it would solicit a tremendous amount of interest. I reckoned there would be a decent percentage of people that would believe what I said, end-of-the-world predictions were common in history. I think I’d read a few years ago that Nostradamus had predicted the end of the world. But would that cause the governments of the world, specifically the US, to take it seriously? They’d probably want to imprison me, then dice me up to see how I ticked. The idea that they would allocate vast sums of money to study such a wild notion seemed unlikely. Maybe one of those billionaire guys would fund it, a bunch of them were fascinated in space travel. Perhaps that was the solution. Which reminded me of the pills and then it dawned on me why I felt so damn great this morning. It was an idea, bait the rich guy with the life pill and use the cash to figure out how to save the world. It all seems nuts but this last week was right up there with the nuttiest.
I decided to forget it for a while. Sally had said I needed to get used to the technology and it certainly seemed like a great way to spent the day.
Showered and feeling like a million dollars I considered my alternatives for breakfast. I always thought of Rio as south, same time zone give or take. Wrong! Six hours ahead. It’s way east. Seven a.m. now, so one p.m. in Rio, I guess I could grab some lunchtime street fare and call it breakfast. Weather was hot down there, eighty-five degrees, that would be nice. I’d never been to South America, let’s do it.
I changed into shorts and T-shirt with sandals, took on the same persona as the Bahamas surfer-dude and fired up the display to look for a good place to touch down. There was a park right on one end of Ipanema beach with dense trees. Parque Garota de Ipanema. I told the computer to put me down behind a tree, out of sight.
Bounce.
I was there, this time on both feet, that was a first. It took a few seconds to get used to my new environment. The temperature was overwhelming. A middle-aged couple came into view; they took no notice of me. I walked out of the park toward the beach, the sun was bright and an east wind blew strongly off the ocean. The vista along the beach was spectacular. I could see thousands of people enjoying themselves, swimming and sun-bathing, chatting and eating. The beach was lined with high-rise buildings as far as the eye could see. Hotels, no doubt. Breakfast I thought and headed along the sand. It was then that I realized I didn’t have any local currency. Damn. I looked at the cash I’d picked up, forty-five US bucks. What was the currency here? I had no idea. I would have to get help from Sally. Maybe they took US dollars? It was worth a try. I was trying so hard to do this alone.