The tech placed the helmet on Larry’s head and swung the visor down, and Larry’s world went black.
He sat there, waiting in the dark, wishing it wouldn’t happen at all, wishing it would hurry up and be over with.
Dream on. If Larry was sure of one thing, it was that this was going to be a long haul.
Finally, after some space of time that might have been a minute or an hour, it began. The exoskeleton came alive, a tiny thrill of motion quivering through it as the power came on. The view-helmet visors lit up, a miniaturized video screen in front of each eye, their views just slightly offset from each other so as to provide realistic binocular vision and depth perception. Larry found himself—or his simulated robot body—in a featureless room, with various rather generic objects and obstacles scattered about. A warm-up room.
Marcia MacDougal’s voice came over the helmet’s earphones.
“All right, Larry. We’re all set here in control. Try out the suit for a few minutes, and then let’s see if you can get Lucian’s attention.”
“Okay,” Larry said, “but bear with me for a few minutes. It’s, ah, been a while since I did this. I’m probably very rusty.”
“That’s all right, love,” Selby said in some sort of attempt at an encouraging tone of voice. “Once you learn, you never forget. Just like riding a bicycle.”
“That’s good to know,” Larry said. “But I’ve never ridden a bicycle.”
Larry stood up, and the exoskeleton moved with him, smoothly, all but silently. He lifted his left foot, moved it forward, set it down. The feedback system provided him with a slight jolt as his foot came down. He moved his right foot, set it down a bit more gently, and he was walking. His field of view lurched from side to side a bit as he moved. He came to a set of steps in the imaginary warm-up room. He paused at the foot of the stairs, then walked up them as carefully as he could, tottering a bit here and there. There was a wide platform at the top. He turned around and made his way back down the stairs, having a bit more trouble keeping his balance. He got back to ground level without incident, though, then walked over to a pair of pyramid-shaped objects, each with a handle at its apex. The red one was marked “100 kilograms” while the blue one said “300 kilograms.” Larry bent down and moved “his” arm to pick up the red one. The exoskeleton was far stronger than a human being, and Larry was able to pick the weight up easily. The weight might be wholly imaginary, but the computer simulator did a very credible job of giving it a realistic heft. Larry straight-armed the weight, held it out to his side, and let it go. It fell to the ground with a heavy thud, and Larry felt the non-existent floor vibrate beneath his feet. “Very realistic,” he said to the team in the control room.
He turned toward the heavier weight and tried lifting it. At first, he couldn’t budge it. He pulled harder and managed to get it off the ground, though it felt as if he was about to pull his arm out of its socket. “Maybe too realistic,” he said, and set it down.
Larry worked the warm-ups for a minute or two longer, getting the feel of the suit, finding that his old training was coming back to him after all. Someday he would have to learn to ride a bike.
“All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready for it. Link me into Lucian whenever you’re ready.”
“Ah, you don’t want to do a few dry runs first?” Selby asked. “We can put you in the virtual reality sim of the Rabbit Hole without Lucian in it for a while. Let you get used to it first. Beat up on some simulated Charonians for a while?”
“No,” Larry said, his voice a bit sharper than he had intended. “Maybe that makes sense, but to be perfectly honest, I’m more worried about losing my nerve than not being well-rehearsed. This isn’t easy for me.”
“That I can believe,” Selby said. “Stand by. We have to jam the optical and audio signals coming from the Wheel and substitute our own. Might take a minute to get it working.”
“Just give me a heads-up when you’re ready,” Larry said.
“Will do. Selby out.” The line went dead as Selby cut her mike, and Larry moved around the warm-up room a bit more as he waited. He tried a few jumping-jacks and push-ups, just to see what the hardware could do. Very smooth. Very nice work indeed. Intellectually, he knew that he was still right where he had started, in the exoskeleton, not in the imaginary warm-up room he saw through the video screens. He had lifted nothing at all when he had picked up the hundred-kilo weight, and exactly the same amount of nothing when he had strained over the three-hundred-kilo one. The exoskeleton had simply put the appropriate strain on his arm and body to mimic the weights. But there was no point in reminding him that it was not real. Not when the whole point was to make the illusion as believable as possible.
What was taking them so long? You’d think they’d have had the whole thing set up before getting him into the suit. Take it easy, he told himself. This is a complicated lash-up. Any number of things might go wrong or need a last-minute adjustment. Larry knew he was being unreasonable, but he didn’t care. He was scared.
He realized he was pacing nervously, back and forth, up and down around the warm-up room. He drew himself up short, forced himself—or at least his projected self inside the VR simulation—to stand still.
“Larry?” It was Marcia MacDougal’s voice. “Ready when you are.”
Larry suddenly realized he was sweating profusely. “Go—go ahead,” he said, his voice tight and dry.
The warm-up room faded away, and Larry Chao stood in uncharted darkness.
“All right,” MacDougal said. “Here we go.” The darkness faded, and the base of the Rabbit Hole—the base of the Hole as it had been five years before—bloomed up out of blackness. “This is our feed now,” MacDougal whispered in his ear. “We’re feeding the same scene to both you and Lucian.”
Larry felt his heart pounding, and his vision blurred for a moment. But then it cleared, and nothing had changed. This was the place, the horrible place where he had died. And there was Lucian, directly ahead of him, standing there in his pressure suit, looking past Larry’s shoulder at whatever was behind him. Lucian, alive, exactly as he had been.
It seemed as if time stopped in that one moment—and maybe it did. Maybe it was not some trick of his mind, but a glitch in the computer program, that had frozen time.
Where am 1? Larry asked himself. Am I inside the computer, inside Lucian’s mind, just here to feed a figment to his imagination? Am I inside the TeleOperator the computer is simulating? Who is the puppet, and who is pulling the string?
Yes, I know I’m in the VR exoskeleton, but what does that matter? The VR video is not what I see, or hear. I see the past, the real past, the moment just before I died.
And suddenly he realized that it was not just Lucian who needed to break out of this moment. He had died here too, and had lived to tell the tale. But I never did tell the tale to anyone, not really. Never talked about it. Never dealt with it. Never faced it. Now I can. I can make it go away, make it never happen.
“Behind you!” Lucian called, the dead man speaking the dead man’s words in the dead man’s voice.
Larry turned around, and saw the two wheeled Charonians, just as they had been. For a moment, fear flared anew in his heart. But this time he would not let them kill him. This time the computers were controlling the sims, and the Charonians were programmed to lose.
With a strange sense of exaltation, Larry lunged for the closer Charonian, grabbed at one of its manipulator arms, yanked it from its socket and hurled it away. Larry smashed the TeleOperator’s fist through the thing’s carapace, and the machinery inside sparked and flared. He spun about, kicked the other one in the midsection, flipped it over so that its wheels spun helplessly in mid-air. He grabbed at the left rear wheel and pulled it off.