Like now.
He counted over three switches and turned the next two off. Now he could see and feel everything in VR, but the system couldn’t read his nerve impulses.
Any excitement his body registered in RW wouldn’t show in VR.
He looked down, just to be sure.
There was that little brown mole, right there on his—Jesus! He was wearing his real body. How had she done that?
Lewis was still talking.
“The carrier waves are the people on the beach. My scenario shows them naked, so that I can see if they’re hiding anything.”
She must have used an old copy from the MIT lab, used an aging algorithm to extrapolate the rest. Pretty sharp, Lewis.
They reached a set of sunbathers on green reclining chairs. Lewis sat down on a chair nearby, motioning to Jay to do the same. She straddled the chair as she sat down, giving him something more to see.
“Take a look,” she said.
He realized she meant the couple next to them, and saw that there was a slight discoloration on the man’s body. And a bulge wiggling under the skin of his belly, like some implanted alien monster about to erupt.
The man stood up and walked away. Jay looked around.
If the scenario had him as a metaphor to a data pipe, anything he was carrying was data. Hidden data, in this case.
Nice.
“Clever,” he said to Lewis.
Jay and Rachel followed. Strains of brassy music with bass and guitar drifted across the beach. The music added to the scene, but there was no immediate explanation for it.
Jay looked at Lewis and raised his eyebrow. “That a five-five-five, Lewis?”
She grinned. “Nope—ahead on the right. Hell, I haven’t heard that term in years. Professor Barnhardt would be proud.”
Jay looked ahead. There it was—a radio on a piece of driftwood next to the beach bar.
Barnhardt had been a drama instructor who’d transferred to the VR department. There had been some controversy about that, since the old man had hardly had any programming experience. But he’d been smart.
His specialty was teaching the programmers how to be more real. He’d termed anything that threw you out of the VR illusion a “five-five-five”—taking the name from the fake phone number prefix used in movies and TV. Every time you see that, he’d say, you remember you’re looking through the third wall.
Her code was sharp, she’d figured out she had a leak on her own, and she created VR as good as—well, almost as good as—his own. He was impressed.
The man stopped at the beach bar. He looked behind him, saw them, and then jumped over a large piece of driftwood and ran.
Jay and Rachel hurried to catch up. Jay marveled at how well the TFU worked—he’d swear wind was rushing over his naked body, and he could feel parts of his body swinging.
When they reached the driftwood and looked on the other side, the man was gone.
Well.
It looked like this might take more trips to the beach. Jay looked over at Lewis and saw her looking at him.
He wondered if that was a good idea or not.
6
Alice’s Restaurant
University Park, Virginia
“You jivin’ me,” Jamal said.
Thorn smiled. “Nope. You get on the American team, I’ll cover your expenses to the World Games. Airfare, hotels, food, walking-around money.”
Jamal shook his head. “I appreciate it, but—why?”
“Two reasons, Jamal. One, I can afford it. Two, it’s not every day I get to sponsor a world-champion fencer.”
“I ain’t even got on the national team yet, Mr. Thorn, and you got me winnin’ the worlds?”
“Aim high, hit high,” Thorn said.
Jamal shook his head in wonder.
Thorn’s smile slipped into something more serious. “Look, Jamal,” he said. “Up until now, if you lost a big bout, you could just shrug and say, ‘Well, so what, I couldn’t have afforded to go anyhow.’ Now, you have to come up with another reason.”
Jamal looked at him for maybe five seconds without saying anything. “You a mind reader, too?”
“I grew up on a rez in Washington State, and we didn’t have any spare change lying around. ‘No money’ was my favorite excuse—until my grandfather went out and hustled enough from the tribe my senior year of high school to pay my way to the nationals.”
“You win?”
“Nope. Came in third in épée, fifth in foil, didn’t place in saber. Bronze wasn’t gold, but it might as well have been when I brought it home. No kid from our rez had ever won squat against a room full of white guys. That medal is still hanging in the trophy case outside the principal’s office.”
Jamal laughed. “They put a trophy case in my school, the whole thing would be gone the next morning, right down to the bolts holding it to the floor.”
“Yeah, yeah, your school is bad. You ever scalp a white man?”
Thorn kept his face deadpan, and for just a second, Jamal looked at him as if he was serious.
“Get out my face with that,” the young man said.
Thorn laughed. “Had you for just a second there, didn’t I?”
“No way.” But he grinned, too. “So, Mr. Thorn, what’s the deal with you and the fine sistah? You serious about getting married?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“Salt and pepper. You gonna catch grief on both sides of the table.”
“It’s the twenty-first century, Jamal. Fifty, a hundred years from now, it is gonna be like Julian Huxley said, we’ll all be tea-colored, and the world will be better off for it.”
“Uh huh.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I don’t think the world is as far down that road as you do.”
Thorn shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Marissa is worth any amount of grief anybody else has got to offer. Screw ’em if they don’t like it.”
Now Jamal’s grin got real big. “That’s what a man says about his woman. You all right, Mr. T.”
Thorn grinned back. He hoped so.
U.S. Army Recon School
Fort Palaka, Hana, Maui, Hawaii
The Army base at Hana was brand-new, small, specialized, and nobody local much liked it being there. Some kind of land swap with the government was the only reason it was. It wasn’t enough that the tourists filled the narrow road leading to Hana so you never could get anywhere. Now there were soldiers clogging things up—that’s what a man paying attention at a local cafe would hear, and certainly Carruth was a man who paid attention. . . .
As he lay in the lush growth ten meters away from the still-shiny chain-link fence surrounding the base, Carruth wasn’t so sure this mission was worth the trip. Still, it was what Lewis wanted, and it was her command. On the one hand, she was a fine-looking woman and he’d love to get to know her better; on the other hand, she was a cold bitch and he didn’t doubt she would shoot a man just to watch him bleed. But for the moment, he was willing to go along with her, because if things went the way she planned, he was going to walk away with enough money to buy his own tropical island and stock it with as many good-looking women as he wanted. He could put up with a little ball-busting for that.
Carruth had only two men with him on this one—Hill and Stark—and they were backup. Carruth was the only guy going onto the base proper.