Marcia MacDougal stepped from behind the control panel, snagged another chair, and sat down in front of him. “You’re tired,” she said. “We’ll try it again in the morning. You need to rest.”
Selby Bogsworth-Stapleton brought him a glass of water and squatted down in front of him. She handed him the water and gave him an encouraging pat on the knee. “Have a rest,” she said. “We can have another go at it later.”
“No,” he said. “Neither of you understand. I can try again, right now, if you want. That’s not what I mean. What I’m saying is I can’t do it. You’re projecting my image into his dream, or nightmare, or whatever, but he’s not seeing me. He’s not aware of me. He is not consciously refusing to react. He can’t see me at all. The visual inputs are getting fed to his brain, but his brain isn’t accepting. All he’s seeing is his own memory. He just keeps looping through the last few minutes of his life, over and over again.”
“No change at all?” Selby asked.
“Oh, yeah, it changes,” Larry growled. “It gets more vivid every time. You saw the repeater screens on the console. That last run was solid, sharp as a tack. First time we barely got anything at all but static. The run time’s getting faster too, I think. Hard to tell from inside the VR and the view-helmet, but it seems like it.”
“It is,” Selby said. “By about a factor of ten since the first time.”
“That’s the computer getting better at its job,” Marcia said. “We’ve fed it more angles of the playback from the real event, the real first trip down the Rabbit Hole. It’s processing faster, doing better data-smoothing and integration of—”
“That’s some of it, yes,” Larry said, cutting her off. “But there’s more. We’re feeding Lucian direct stimulus, and it’s—well, it’s stimulating him. There’s more power behind his thoughts. He’s seeing more clearly each time, feeling it all more powerfully, running through it faster.”
“We are getting an uptick in his brain-wave amplitude,” Marcia admitted, “and it is speeding up. But he has to be able to see you. We’re pumping your image straight to his optic center.”
“You’ve never owned a cat. I can see that,” Selby said.
Larry and Marcia both looked at her in confusion.
“Cats!” Selby said. “They refuse to see what they don’t believe in. Put some strange object that they don’t want to deal with in front of them and they’ll act as if it’s not there. To them, it isn’t there.”
“So what you’re saying is that Lucian doesn’t see Larry because he doesn’t believe in Larry,” Marcia said.
“I suppose that’s one way to say it,” Selby said. “The thing of it is that we can manipulate what goes into his optic nerve and into his auditory receptors, but that’s not the same as changing what he thinks. It’s what he thinks he’s hearing and seeing that matters.”
“And what I’m saying is that we have to look at the, ah, other way of doing this,” Larry said, forcing himself to be firm, determined. He did not want to do this. “It’s not enough for me to be there, shouting to get his attention. We have to break him out of the rote pattern of his memory. We can’t just tell him what he is seeing isn’t happening. We have to change what he’s seeing.”
Selby and Marcia exchanged glances at each other, and Selby cleared her throat, a bit awkwardly. “We were both rather hoping that it wouldn’t come to that,” she said. “We were a bit worried that might not be the most pleasant sort of thing for you to do. It would be rather—stressful.”
“You think it might make me go nuts,” Larry said bluntly. “I don’t think it will. And if it does, well, I’ll get better after a while. If we don’t try it, Lucian is stuck in his own death forever, and I can’t wish that on him.”
Neither of the women said anything.
“Look, I don’t like it either,” Larry said. “But I wasn’t there. Larry Chao wasn’t there. The TeleOperator was. And floating an image of the T.O. around with a joystick won’t work, either. We’d have to hook a full-movement, full-action VR system up, let it drive the imagery of the TeleOperator, have me speak through the T.O. to Lucian, and find ways to shift the imagery. And be ready for it to take five or ten or twenty times before we can break Lucian out.”
“We’d have to be ready to disrupt the Charonian inputs to his optic nerve,” Marcia said thoughtfully. “Be ready to substitute our own inputs. Work up a whole script, a whole plan, to snap Lucian out of it. We’d have to have the techs back in here,” she said, thinking it over. “It’d have to be a much more invasive setup. All we’ve been doing is trying to overlay your image onto Lucian’s existing memories. You’re talking about revising the images he already has.”
“So be more invasive,” Larry said, his voice clipped and hard. “It might disrupt Lucian’s brain-wave patterns,” Marcia said. “It could kill him if we do it wrong.”
“You think being dead isn’t better than the way he is now!” Larry demanded. “He’s been reliving the same moments of terror over and over again for the last five years, experiencing what amounts to his own death again and again, all that time—except he never gets to die. I know the information we might get is important, but I almost don’t care about it just now. I just can’t leave him like that. Either we kill him and let him be dead, stay dead, in peace, or else—or else do something so he doesn’t have to watch his own death anymore.
Twelve
Signal and Noise
“Straight/Strait science rotz when it leans twoheavy on mind games, and the simmy-shimmies we do these daze iz just mindgames bigtime. They query, most bleary, what if?, not what’s happening? Every suit inna lab jacket has lost it now/then frum knot/not knowing bee/tween sim-sham and coldhard-here.
“Lotsatime the jacket runs the muddle-model and seez reallife ain’t dancing with the dream. The punchline is a jacket doping out a new gag to show why the dream-up is cool, reallife the fool. We go downhill from thar, tweaking to peak a way cool muddle-model, not whoa-stopping to pull the jokers from the deck and deal a new game.
“We take sim one and fake anew sim two from one, butt one was de-based on sim zero wayback. Our/are thinking goes too deep into keen dream perfectland, all hot mat and cool pics, farout from real-word and we dig that more, get pulled in more than by our/are sights of realworld. Waymuch we hand the lab jackets one taste of cleanandtidy perfectland, and a core sample of the crap coming out of Momnature’s dirty old reallife kitchen. Which they gonna want for dinner, may-be without even knowingjno-ing they lose cuz they dunno they choose?
“Science/seance liketime takes a dive when it bites into tha tumor of rumor, whennit scoops up pocket- fulla oldtimes know/no/ledge and duzzent check that change for itself. We know we screw the pooch plenty times. How cum we figure alltha houndz inna past wuz safe? Rule one: ya don’t believe what you don’t add up yerself. Say-another-way: It ain’t stitched right for the labjack if you can’t show it ain’t so/sew. If it be real science and no seance, ya gotta cookit yerself and show it’s right with every bite.
“Science supposed to be knowing growing by showing, and count thoz cards. Nowdaze straight/ strait/ jacket/ suit science looks like we’re/whir suits and labjacks getting close/clothes to being handed a marked and burning deck—and willing 2 take Monte Monty’s word 4=(how many cards)*R/ innit.”