After supper, the stewardess told us that in Swissair business-class, the in-flight entertainment was cyberspace, with the fees to be charged to your credit number. When she got to me, I told her I had no credit number, and she let me buy two hundred dollars worth of prepaid credit. She told me that was generally enough for three hours.
The steward behind her issued me a bottom-of-the-line headset/gloves kit that plugged into a socket on the top of the seat in front of me.
When I put on the headset, I was in an Alpine meadow with three guys off to one side blowing long Alpine horns. There was a crossing of two trails nearby. An Alpine guide strolled up to me; he was a software daemon like Kwirkey Debug. “Hello, Mr. Schrandt,” said the daemon. “My name is Karl. I will be your guide for this session. There is an urgent cy-mail message for you. Do you want to view it?”
It seemed Sandy Schrandt was quite the up-to-date engineer. But I had no desire to look at his cy-mail- it would probably turn out to be some dweeb holding up a circuit diagram and talking about it.
“No messages now, thanks.”
I walked over to the signpost at the trail crossing and looked at it. Some of the little signboards read:
Duty Free Shops-›
Entertainment-›
Information-›
I decided to try some exercise first. As I started down the trail in the indicated direction, my guide caught up with me and told me that when I pressed a certain button on the arm of my seat, bicycle handlebars and pedals would pop out from the floor. He said that I should take off my headset, push the button, get myself positioned on the pedals, and then put the headset back on so we could continue.
“Where will we go?”
“We’ll mountain-bike up the Matterhorn,” the guide replied. He had cheery, twinkling, pale blue eyes. He pointed up to the left, and there was the Matterhorn itself: huge, rocky and snowcapped. Its crag castles made wondrous silhouettes against the blue sky. A gauzy puff of cloud trailed from the downwind side of the mountain’s crooked peak.
I slipped off my headset and pushed the special button on my seat. The floor opened up and a heavy-duty pair of bicycle pedals appeared, with a sturdy pair of handlebars sticking out over them. I leaned back, put my feet on the pedals, and grabbed the handlebars. The setup felt more like a pedal boat than a bicycle-but it worked for me. I put on my headset.
“You can adjust the drag with the left handgrip and the motion-speed with the right,” Karl told me. “Let’s start by heading for the Hornli Hutte-it’s a mountaineers’ hut up on that ridge.”
I pedaled along, watching the lovely mountain scenery go by. No matter how fast or slow I went, the guide always stayed in front of me, pointing out the path I should take. When I ran over big rocks it didn’t matter-they’d flatten out under me. It was fun. At the top of the Matterhorn I finally caught up with the guide.
“What do you want to do now?” he asked me. “Ride back down?”
I felt good and aerobic. “That’s enough exercise. Let me retract the pedals.” I slid my headset up and pushed the button to fold the pedals back down. All the other passengers were asleep or in their headsets. I returned to the pristine summit of the Matterhorn.
“What would you like to do next?” repeated the guide daemon, eager to spend my money.
“Can I find out the address of somebody in Switzerland?”
“I can try for you. If the person has a telephone they will be in the telephone directory, as there are no unlisted phones in Switzerland. What is the name?”
“Roger R. Coolidge.”
“Yes, we have a Roger Reaumur Coolidge in Saint-Cergue,” responded the guide in a flash.
“Can you show me where Saint-Cergue is on a map?”
“Hold my hand,” said the guide. “We’ll fly.” I took his hand, and then he leapt up into the air. It was a fabulous feeling to fly straight up from the top of the Matterhorn. Soon we were at such an altitude that our virtual Switzerland had become its own map.
“Saint-Cergue is near Geneva,” said the guide. We flew out of the Alps and up the great curve of Lake Geneva. Soon we were near the city of Geneva at the far end of the lake. The guide pointed away from Geneva toward a meek range of rounded mountains to our right. “Those are the Jura Mountains,” he said. “See that little peak? That is the Dole. Saint-Cergue is in the saddle of the pass beside the Dole.”
He flew us lower, showed me the Geneva airport, and jovially instructed me to make steering wheel motions so as to remotely pilot a distant virtual car up the serpentine road that led from the Geneva/Lausanne Autoroute to Saint-Cergue. The simulation reminded me of a recurrent nightmare that I’d had when I’d been in my twenties-a dream where I’d be driving a car with a steering wheel column that grew to be hundreds of yards long. I declined the simulation, and the guide flew us straight on up to Saint-Cergue.
“Do you know which building Roger Coolidge lives in?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the guide, and one of the properties began blinking. It was a compound of two large buildings up in a meadow two or three kilometers above the main drag of Saint-Cergue. I stared for a few minutes, fixing landmarks in my mind. I could rent a car at the Geneva airport and drive right up to Roger’s. I’d buy a big hunting knife at a Swiss knife shop first. It was kind of too bad I’d never gotten that plastic gun Keith had told me about.
“Was there anything else?” the guide asked.
“Okay, yeah, I’d like to see a movie. How’s my credit holding up?”
“You have more than enough credit for a movie. We have several special made-for-cyberspace productions, and many of our standard films have been cyberized.”
“Take me to your interface.”
We jumped to a room with thousands of tiny screens showing small images. There were some big posters. Off to one side of the room a live cyberspace action film was being acted out, a fight-it-out shoot-’em-up kind of thing.
“I guess you don’t have any hard-core pornography?” I asked the guide.
“We have a selection of tasteful erotic films available for the passengers of our business-class.”
“No thanks, I don’t think so. And I’m kind of tired, so I don’t want the stress of a cybershow. Maybe an old movie. What do you have with Natalie Wood?”
“Fortunate choice, Mr. Schrandt! We have two movies available with Natalie Wood. First is Rebel Without a Cause, released 1956, featuring James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood. Critic Lester Seda terms Rebel Without a Cause ”An early cult movie of teenage anomie in the computer age.“ Second is Brainstorm, released 1977, a classic science fiction thriller featuring Natalie Wood as a mystical scientist who records her brain onto reflection hologram memory ribbon. Of Brainstorm, critic Lester Seda says, ”Released after Natalie Wood’s death, Brainstorm is eerily prescient and campily elegant.“
I watched Brainstorm. They’d cyberized it enough so that it wrapped around about half the field of my vision. It was a good flick.
When the credits started running, Karl the guide daemon reappeared like a person coming up to you in your seat at the movies.
“What,” I said.
“It’s about your cy-mail message, Mr. Schrandt. The sender has been steadily pinging us. He knows you’re on this flight. Wouldn’t you care to view the message now?”
“All right,” I sighed. “Let it come down.” I really dreaded this, whatever it was. I kept both hands poised on my headset, ready to tear it off lest I suffer another burn.
There was a buzzing, the Brainstorm credits melted, and then I was looking at Roger Coolidge, Roger sitting there looking at me from an armchair in a shitty unfinished drywall room. He was wearing gray pants and a short-sleeved white polyester shirt.