Again he soared, and a tiny translucent window appeared telling him to acquire three more targets to locate extreme eye focal points.
Fantastic.
It was like calibrating an old PDA’s stylus. He completed that stage of the calibration, and went to a testing range where his eye movement allowed him to change VR views almost instantly.
Eye movement tracking. That was brand-new. Such technology had been around for ages for helping paralyzed people, but coupled with the sharpness? It was very impressive.
Jay tilted his head slightly and moved his eyes, and the device compensated. Apparently there was some kind of tilt sensor in the glasses as well that read head inclination and mixed the data with the eye sensors.
Nice.
But best of all was the extreme resolution. VR was fairly realistic — at least his scenarios were — but this was like when his folks had gotten their first High-Definition TV set. He remembered how amazed he’d been to suddenly see how sharp TV looked — the sweat on the announcer’s head, the seams in scenery — things had reached an entirely new level of reality.
This is great.
He called up the documentation and checked his suppositions. Sure enough — there was a new Texas Instruments gyro chip that read head movement, and the tiny holes in the lens corners tracked his eye movements, then bounced three low-power laser beams off the mirrors — made by Nikon to the highest standards, if you could believe the rap — into his eye, painting directly on his retina. Things looked real, because as far as his eye was concerned, they were real.
Very clever work here.
Time to play.
He called up a favorite test scenario, a glade in Japan looking toward Mt. Fuji, cherry blossoms falling around him.
It looked…
It looked like crap!
Jay walked over to the cherry tree and peered at it. Had the glasses malfunctioned?
No. There was the texture he’d programmed — it had looked great on his flexscreen glasses because their resolution was so low.
Holy cow.
The resolution on these glasses was so sharp that he could see the edges of the pixels. It was like stepping into a comic book from the real world.
Hmmm, I’ve got some work to do.
It wouldn’t do to have anyone else seeing his VR with these glasses, that was for sure. He’d have to amp up the textures, improve the bump-mapping, and double or triple the data throughout for this scene. No way he was going to be caught looking amateurish.
No wonder these things needed optical. It was like giving somebody who had 20/60 vision a pair of glasses that corrected for near-sightedness. They could see all right before the glasses, but afterward would be ever so much better.
Which gave him an idea.
He called up a firewall he’d been trying to break, looking to find the cracks where he could drive a code-breaking spike.
On his older VR visual gear he hadn’t been able to see any difference in the smooth, black obelisklike wall. But with the Raptor’s resolution, he could suddenly see a pattern of cracks where data structures joined together and made up the firewall. Yeah, sure, it was part metaphor and part construction, but he’d take it.
Just glancing at the wall with these new glasses, and he could see exactly where to crack that wall. He was sure of it.
Now, that was cool.
Net Force was going to be outfitted with these within a few days — hours — if Jay had his way. As soon as they hit the commercial market, there was gonna be a boatload of VR reconstruction as other makers suddenly saw their constructs in a bright new light, but until then, wearing these babies would make you at least a prince in the land of the blind, if not the king.
Until these things became common, the bleeding edge of technology was gonna be something with which Jay Gridley could slice the bad guys.
He couldn’t wait to show this to somebody.
“Jay?”
The voice brought him back to the moment. He looked up and saw his assistant standing there. He blinked at her. “Huh?”
“I have Mr. Chang here to see you.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah. Sure. Send him in.”
A moment later, she was back, leading a short and definitely Chinese-looking man in a gray suit.
“Mr. Gridley. My honor to meet you.”
Jay waved that off. “Mr. Chang.” He stood. The two shook hands.
“Cal Tech, right?”
“Class of ’03,” Chang said.
“Come on in. Take a look at this.” He waved at his computer. “You’re not gonna believe these visuals!”
13
After they introduced themselves and sat back down, and before Thorn could say anything else, Charles Seurat nodded at the corner behind and to the right of Thorn’s desk. “You fence?”
Thorn had his gear bags in the corner of his office, and the only way Seurat could have known what was in them was to recognize the logo on the épée bag. Most non-fencers would not have a clue what the name meant. And because he obviously did recognize it, then that meant Seurat, too, was a fencer or a serious watcher.
“A little,” Thorn said with a small smile. “Don’t look for me in the next Olympics.”
“Nor me,” Seurat said. “Would that I had brought my blades. We could have worked out.”
That was a pretty obvious hint, Thorn thought. It was not what he would have expected, even if he had known that Seurat was a fencer as well. Even avid fencers didn’t normally throw down the gauntlet within moments of meeting another fencer — and certainly not under circumstances like this.
On the other hand, he had known that Charles Seurat was anything but ordinary — something, Thorn acknowledged, that could be said for himself as well. And the Frenchman did have the right idea. After all, what better way to measure a man’s mettle than at the point of one’s sword?
“I have extra,” Thorn said with another small smile. “Just down the hall. It wouldn’t hurt to stretch a little after sitting at this desk all day.”
Seurat returned the smile. “Lead on,” he said.
The two men went to the gym, which was empty at the moment. Thorn opened his locker, wherein he had an extra set of practice gear — blades, including foil, épée, and saber, along with gloves and a mask, and a variety of jackets. He kept hoping that some of the other Net Force personnel would decide to try their hand at fencing, and so had a small array of gear to fit a variety of sizes.
“Excellent! I see you use first-rate gear.”
“What is your pleasure, Charles?”
“Foil, I think. I’m a bit sluggish and out of practice.”
“Foil it is. Help yourself.”
Thorn smiled again, but privately, when he noticed that the Frenchman chose a blade with a German Visconte grip rather than the traditional — and expected — French grip. This just might be fun, he thought.
The two men changed clothes and donned fencing gear. They each went through a series of stretches and warm-ups. Thorn noticed that Seurat moved very well for a man who claimed to be sluggish and out of practice.
Warmed up and looser, they took their places on the piste, or fencing strip, Thorn had taped out on the floor and regarded each other.
It had been a long time since Thorn had fenced foil, and even longer since he’d fenced it for real. It was the weapon he’d first learned, back in high school, and as such it was his first love, but he’d pretty much abandoned it after he’d discovered the épée and the saber. And lately, of course, thanks to the promptings of Colonel Kent, he’d been focusing almost exclusively on iaido.