“You work here?” the scrawny blond-haired girl asked Lesserec in a solemn voice. “Must be fun.”
“It is, sometimes,” he said.
The little girl didn’t speak further. Her eyes slowly panned the rest of the lab room. Her frail arms clutched the padded black armrests of the wheelchair, as if she were afraid of falling out at any moment.
“We’ll show you something fun today,” he said, “don’t worry.”
José Aragon continued to herd the children and their escorts into the enclosed chamber. They had to crowd around the row of motion chairs, though a few of the children were ambulatory enough to sit in them. He made a note to disengage the motion simulators, to keep the kids from puking all over the chamber. Aragon crouched down in one himself, fidgeting on the edge of the seat, then gave up his spot when another child came through.
Lesserec stood by the thick vault door as the last visitors filed in. Aragon obviously thought he controlled the show, so Lesserec let him talk. The dark-haired man folded his hands in front of him and spoke in an offensively patronizing voice, as if he thought he was the twin brother of Mr. Rogers.
“Boys and girls,” said Aragon, smiling broadly, “this is Mr. Lesserec, the technician in charge of the Virtual Reality lab. He’s going to show you something very interesting today.”
Lesserec winced at being called a mere tech, especially by an incompetent “boob,” as Michaelson called him. But the most important part of career advancement was knowing when to shut up.
“This is one of my most favorite places at the Livermore Lab,” Aragon continued. Lesserec wondered if the man had ever set foot in the VR chamber before. “You know, our scientists are trying their best to help the people in our great nation live better lives.”
Lesserec rolled his eyes. Next Aragon would be telling them that Livermore weapons designers were hard at work developing lawnmowers powered by neutron bombs. The Lab should dump this end-of-the-Cold-War martyr complex and move into new areas without the apologies.
He caught only the tail end of Aragon’s comment, “—mind telling the boys and girls a little about your machine?”
“Sure.” Lesserec stood straight outside the door to the VR chamber. Every tiny face watched him. “Anybody know what virtual reality is?” He didn’t wait for an answer, though a chubby boy on crutches raised his hand. “It’s like playing a smart videogame, one that can respond when you twist a dial, pull back on a lever, or even touch a screen. Virtual reality is going somewhere that you’ve never been before — without leaving your room.”
“Like dreaming,” interrupted the blond-haired girl to his right.
“Kind of like dreaming.” Lesserec pointed into the VR chamber where they all waited. “This white room is about the size of a typical living room — twenty feet on a side. But inside this chamber we broadcast computer-generated images, like what you see on TV, except these are much bigger, three dimensional holograms, and a lot more real. We’ve got special technology that lets you feel some of it, too.”
“Like the holodeck on Star Trek,” one of the children said.
Lesserec smiled. “Exactly, in principle at least. I think the Enterprise system might be, uh, a little more advanced than ours. But ours is real — and that alone makes it a lot more interesting.”
The kids chuckled. Lesserec sighed with relief, happy that things were going well enough. “Still,” he continued, “we can transport you to places nobody can ever hope to go — say, to the center of the Sun or to the center of an atom,”
“I hope to go to Disneyland,” said one boy.
Before Lesserec could figure out how to respond, Aragon stepped up. “Mr. Lesserec has a demonstration to show you how his special chamber works. Would you like to see it?”
The room buzzed with a great deal of enthusiasm. Aragon whispered to him, “No problem. I’ll accompany them.” As if that comforted Lesserec one iota. “Just show the kids something they’ll remember.”
“I think they’ll remember this. Just hang on. I’ve got to push the auto start.”
Leaving the vault door open, he hustled to the banks of workstations inside the large control room and punched the run command. The images would begin projecting as soon as he sealed the chamber door behind himself. This would be a perfect test run.
Inside the chamber, the gray-white walls remained featureless as the door clicked closed. “This’ll be better than any movie,” he promised, killing time as the images loaded up. “Just don’t touch the walls — that’s where the pictures are made.” He lowered his voice to Aragon. “If you think anyone’s getting motion sickness, I’ll stop the simulation.”
Aragon looked suddenly worried. “You’re not going to use that fighter plane sequence are you?”
Gary smiled. “No — this is a little more benign than that. We used this as one of our first sensor tests. I took the images myself during a long hike this summer.”
He suddenly found himself transported to the top of a rocky mountaintop, along with the room full of children and their escorts.
Sheer granite walls plunged down thousands of feet in front of them to a green valley below, where a languid river snaked along the centerline, flanked by a thin gray road and tiny vehicles that flashed sunlight. Overhead the sky was crystal clear, blue, showing the blurred white line of a jet trail. A soft wind blew through the chamber, bringing a sharp ozone smell mixed with pine needles.
In tactile response the rock itself was smooth, a blister of whitened granite with flakes of loose shingle flanking smooth sinkholes where murky water collected. Dazzling waterfalls, ribbons of white, danced down the rugged gray walls of the sheer valley. The scene took Lesserec’s breath away, as had the original sight of Yosemite Valley as seen from the top of Half Dome.
Inside the chamber, the children responded with a collective gasp. No one spoke, as if afraid they might break the spell, until a small voice — which he realized belonged to José Aragon himself — said, “It’s beautiful!”
The words unleashed an excited chatter. The children pointed to tiny cars and buses parked around small buildings far below. Lesserec felt uneasy and out of control, as if he might topple over the cliff if he leaned too far.
The image moved forward with a change in perspective from the sensors, edging toward the dropoff. Several children cried out in alarm. Lesserec stepped into the center of the chamber, walking right through rough-edged boulders that glittered in the sunlight. “It’s all right. Remember, we’re still in the lab. This is just pretend.”
Just as the words left his mouth, the room seemed to drop as they went down the steep cliff, gliding along the images from the deployed sensors. Lesserec felt a small hand reach out and brush against his arm twice before clutching his shirt. Lesserec patted the hand in reassurance.
He looked down to see a young boy, about ten or twelve, with the obvious “stranded marionette” look of cerebral palsy. Lesserec flinched, but did not pull his arm away. The boy was not trying to speak, but the delight shone on his face. With waving hands, he tried to touch the image.
“With virtual reality we can take you places you would never get to visit.” The room stopped its decent down the cliff face and hovered next to two brightly clad rock climbers who were intently — and insanely, Lesserec thought — groping their way up the impossible cliff face.
Lesserec turned to the small boy still grasping his sleeve. “And you can feel it, too.”
Reaching down, he nudged the child’s wheelchair closer to the cliff wall, closely shadowed by a stooped, worried-looking man, the boy’s father probably. The boy’s scarecrowish arm smacked against the hologram that had been solidified with three-dimensionally patterned microspheres suspended in electrostatic fields.