“I saw the explosion,” he said. “I held it in my hands but… not just high explosives—a nuclear device! I saw it down-hole. I touched it and then… and then it went off in my face.”
An Asian man with lanky black hair and dark-rimmed glasses leaned over Lesserec at his workstation. His voice was loud enough and filled with sufficient alarm that Paige and Goldfarb both looked over at him.
“Gary!” the Asian man said. “What are you deleting? You said we could all watch that simulation.”
“Shut up, Walter,” Gary said and hammered a command into the computer.
Goldfarb left Craig’s side and dashed over to Lesserec’s chair, clamping his hand on redhead’s left shoulder like a bear trap slamming home. “I think that’s enough, Mr. Lesserec.”
“Leave me alone,” Gary said. “We have to shut down the simulation before anyone else sees it. You saw what it did to Craig.”
To emphasize his point, Goldfarb reached with his other hand and physically lifted Lesserec’s wrist away from the keyboard.
“I don’t think so. I saw something happen to Craig — but what exactly was it? Just the simulation, or are you running something else here? Playing some sort of game?”
Walter Shing squinted at the workstation, at the line of commands Lesserec had punched in. “Gary, what the hell is this ‘auto enhance’ routine? You haven’t told us about anything like that. I though we were working as a team.”
“Shut up, Walter!” Lesserec said again.
“That wasn’t just a test run,” Craig said, hissing his words. He pushed the water away and looked around. “No way that was a high-explosive simulation. Lesserec changed it.” He shook his head, and droplets of sweat sprayed out like a dog flinging water free from its fur after a bath.
Goldfarb hauled Lesserec back from the workstation, pulling his wheeled swivel chair toward the center of the control area. “Is that what you did to Michaelson? Put hydrofluoric acid in the chamber, ran one of your ‘enhanced simulations’ for him so that he died without even knowing what he was getting into?”
“No way!” Lesserec said with an expression of scorn.
“We’ve got the files here. I’m impounding all of your workstations. I don’t care if it’s National Security Information. The Bureau has authority. A crime was committed here. A man died — and all of T Program’s work is currently frozen.”
The rest of the T Program members, already in an uproar, pressed closer to Lesserec and Goldfarb like an angry mob.
“You can’t do that,” Danielle cried. “We’ve got the President coming and the foreign nationals in two weeks.”
“What about our demonstration?” Walter Shing added. “We’ve worked so hard.”
Lesserec slumped back in his chair, pouting. Spots of red appeared on his skin, showing how much anger he was holding inside. “Screw the fucking demonstration!” Lesserec said. “This was the demonstration.”
Everyone turned expressions of confusion or amazement at him. Lesserec looked as if he wanted to spit.
“Yeah, Kreident saw an enhanced version of the explosion. He couldn’t tell the difference between a pile of high explosives and a nuclear device going off underground. That was my point—and if I didn’t show it now, we’d make total fools of ourselves with the President and the foreign nationals. Better we have a postponement than an international embarrassment in a couple of weeks.”
“Gary, what are you talking about?” Walter Shing said. “We’ve worked day and night on this.”
“And I was trying to get us all some benefit from it. National Security! Shit, Michaelson had his head up his butt all along, as usual. Virtual Inspectors. International Verification Initiative. What a crock!
“Michaelson just bulldozes ahead when he gets an idea in his mind and he loses his ability to perform rational thought. Did he stop to think what good one of these Virtual Inspectors is? If anyone with a little know-how like me can doctor the results and make an observer see anything I want, what good would the verification be then?”
As Paige and Goldfarb looked at him, perplexed, Lesserec made a noise of disgust. “The first thing foreign nationals will do is figure out how to bypass the system, show a nice filmloop to our long-distance inspectors. They’ll fool us into happily observing some peaceful washing-machine assembly line. But it’ll all be an illusion. They’ll really be building warheads — and we won’t even know it.
“On the other hand, you can bet the United States is gonna hire me first thing,” he gestured with his hand, “or any one of you, to bypass the system we’ve created ourselves. Virtual Inspectors won’t work.”
Goldfarb moved toward him, fists clenched, but Lesserec stood firmly on his soapbox now.
“But what we’re missing,” he continued, “is the real application for VR technology. It could be worth tens of billions of dollars to the American entertainment industry. Think of it. The Nintendo Corporation and Sony, all the Japanese conglomerates will vanish like a puff of smoke because we’re decades ahead of them in virtual technology. Think of amusement parks, movies that you can experience as well as watch!”
He took a deep breath. “And there’s medical possibilities, too. Physical therapy, treatments for handicapped people, letting them go places they’ve never dreamed of! You should have seen the tour group we had here last week, very sick kids who had never been to Yosemite, never even been swimming. I’ve got one test case, a little boy with cerebral palsy, who was practically in Heaven because I took him to the top of Half Dome. His father provided me with the kid’s entire medical history — think of how this virtual technology could help people like him!
“Yet, because we developed the techniques here at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, people like Michaelson can only think about the defense applications. They want to use this incredible technology I developed in order to be better spies? How ridiculous!”
Craig croaked from across the room. “So you killed Michaelson because that would let you run T Program down the toilet, and secretly sell the applications to toy companies.”
“What?” Lesserec said, flushing a deeper red and starting to stand up. “Give me a break!” But Goldfarb pushed on his shoulder, shoving him back down in the chair.
“Yes,” Paige said. “You got hydrofluoric acid from the Plutonium Facility during one of your sensor installations and sprayed it on Michaelson when he came in to try out your new simulation.”
Lesserec rolled his muddy green eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake! Of course I didn’t kill him. I never heard of hydrofluoric acid before Michaelson got killed. Yes, I ran one of my enhanced simulations for him on the night he died. Tested the new beta chips. It was a prehistoric landscape, nothing harmful in the least. I wanted to show him just what I could do, and how far behind he had fallen in his own game.
“I’m the one who came up with all this stuff, you know — and Michaelson always took the credit for it. I needed to let him know who the real brains was. I hoped we could work out some kind of deal to let me sell spinoffs on the side.”
“Cute,” Goldfarb said.
“Well, why the hell not?” Lesserec bellowed, twisting around in his chair. “This is supposedly Secret National Security Information — and here we are bringing in a team of high-level observers from every country in the world, even our enemies. We’re handing it to them on a silver platter.”
He snorted. “Sure, we can do that — but the moment we try to sell it to an American company, the moment we try to exploit it for the good of this country instead of someone else’s, then everybody has a fit. Then it’s espionage. Then it’s illegal. We have one set of grossly screwed up priorities if you ask me.”