He raised his voice. “All right, Gary. Disengage the accelerometer part. I feel like I’m on the Star Tours ride at Disneyland.”
“Oh, come on, Hal — we’re much better than that!” Lesserec chided over the loudspeaker.
Michaelson’s seat ceased its convulsions, and once again he sat back as an observer inside the fabric of the tactile scenario that engulfed him totally. When he was certain he wouldn’t be thrown off balance by his own misguided equilibrium, Michaelson unbuckled and stood through the image, plowing through the aircraft’s illusory control panel. All around him in the inverted bowl of sky, the dogfight continued to play out — the visual cues were enough to disorient him, but at least he experienced no physical motion to trip him up.
Walking to the center of the chamber, Michaelson raised his voice to be heard over the screaming jets in their air battle. “Okay Gary, now put me ten kilometers over the flight range, large scale so I can get a view from a distance.”
The scene in the chamber flicked and bounced, like a switching channel on a television set.
Michaelson stood miles above the ground, his feet invisible through the clouds below. He had a sudden fairy-tale vision, like Jack and the Beanstalk with his own legs rising from the ground in a towering trunk.
Just above the clouds tiny fighter craft chased each other about the sky, around his ankles. Contrails spewed from their engines. Through torn openings in the blanket of clouds, Michaelson saw splotches of brown desert, barren mountains, and in the distance toward the blurred horizon, a glint of silver civilization where Las Vegas should be.
The spectacle made him reel. Michaelson felt as if he were a god on Olympus, standing above his sprawling kingdom of Nellis Air Force Base. With a few giant steps he could stroll into Las Vegas, or over to the Hoover Dam, like the Amazing Colossal Man.
He drew in a deep breath inside the sealed chamber… he thought he smelled faint traces of the pungent JP-8 jet fuel, no doubt sprayed into the air by the new odor synthesizer package Lesserec had been working on; artificially generated wind blew past him, ruffling his thinning hair. He felt giddy.
He was a god, in a certain sense. He had supervised the construction of this chamber; it had been his idea, his political arm-wrestling with the good-old-boy network that had broken the impasse between the boobs who had no vision left for the national laboratory system and the enthusiastic hydrocode designers who had no worthwhile work left to do.
Without Michaelson’s controversial and unorthodox strongarm tactics, this VR project would have gone the way of his former baby, the Laser Implosion Fusion Facility — an unrealized promise for cheap and clean fusion power, borne on the shoulders of incompetents, a victim of too much talk and too little planning.
The buzzing jets miles below him looked like flies darting among his legs. They continued to twist and roll, executing perfect maneuvers real pilots only dreamed of.
One more test, thought Michaelson. He purposely hadn’t drawn attention to the next phase, working on his own and hoping not to arouse suspicions from Lesserec or the technicians. They didn’t need to know his real plans for the Virtual Reality technology.
He cleared his throat. “Hey, Gary, do you still have access to those outside test sensors you installed at the Lab pool?”
Gary Lesserec’s voice rang over the wind and faint droning of the jets below. “Piece of cake. We’ve got the feed if you’re ready. It’ll be a letdown after this sexy stuff, though.”
“Indulge me.”
“Always do, don’t we?” Lesserec quipped back, just this side of sarcasm.
Again, the universe around Michaelson flickered and bounced, a TV changing channels. This time his vantage placed him standing just above an expanse of too-blue water with black depth lines painted down and coming up the other side of the Olympic-sized swimming pool. He hovered there, invisible to the crowds below, as the sensors piped in a three-dimensional, tactile, realtime simulation. Like Jesus walking on the water, Michaelson thought. It must be my day for delusions of grandeur.
From behind and below him he heard the sound of children squealing, playing a riotous game of Marco Polo. Turning, he watched a slender young woman bounce off of a diving board, arc gracefully into the air, and slice directly through him on her way to the pool. Sparkling droplets splattered in the air around his image, falling back into the water. The children continued to shout, their voices flattened by the water.
The outdoor swimming pool was crowded with employees of the Livermore Lab and their families enjoying a lunchtime swim. Unnoticed and hanging in midair, he stared at where the walls of the Virtual Reality chamber should have been, but saw no break in the image.
“I give up,” said Michaelson. “Where did you hide the sensors? Is this a live feed?”
“We put up six of them.” Lesserec’s voice came to him strangely disembodied in the air around the Lab’s pool. “One at each corner of the pool area mounted on the fence above, one anchored to the bottom of the pool, and the last on a wire strung out twenty meters over the water. They’re so small nobody notices them. The six sensors give more than enough overlap, and we’re getting near real-time smoothing from the computers.”
“Okay, this is perfect. Shut down.”
Before the images sparkled into nothingness, Michaelson groped his way to the door of the chamber, reaching his hand through two sunbathers to find the right spot. The heavy vault door split from the wall, disrupting the entire illusion as Michaelson left the chamber.
Sterile white fluorescent lights gave the boring cubicles and computer workstations of the T Program trailer complex a washed-out, unreal quality. Michaelson allowed himself a smile, wondering how the catch-phrase would go over in Washington. ‘More real than reality.’ Everyone would compare it to the Star Trek Holodeck, perhaps even be disappointed because they had seen so much flashier stuff done with special effects in science fiction stories. But this was real, done with real technology, the most perfect remote-sensing surveillance system ever developed.
Sunlight from a clear California day splashed through the miniblinds on the trailer windows. The VR chamber’s control room was no more than a large common area of large-screened workstations walled off by low, fabric-covered partitions that a man of Michaelson’s height could peer over easily. He always thought of the movable fabric partitions as “illegitimate walls,” but they were inexpensive and changeable as programmatic needs shifted — and they fostered a closer teamwork atmosphere among the programmers.
A half dozen men and women stood at various workstations in the common area, dressed in blue jeans, unusual t-shirts, and garish Hawaiian shirts, as if in an effort to prove they were all oddballs, which ironically made them all look the same. Everyone wore a bright green Lawrence Livermore laminated badge, complete with obligatory photo and a bright yellow stripe bearing his or her name. Clipped beside each green badge was a homegrown blue badge, also with photo, made by Tansy Beaumont, the administrative assistant down the hall in Michaelson’s main office.
The green badge indicated the employee had a security clearance and allowed access through the guard gate into the Livermore Lab itself; but you needed the special blue badge for access to T Program behind its additional security fences. Not many people had blue badges, and even though it wasn’t immediately obvious why the additional security was needed for a mere image-processing project, Michaelson had convinced the right people. The additional access security allowed him greater freedom for handling classified material and software in the programmatic trailers. Hal Michaelson could be very persuasive when he needed to be.