Chrysalis

17

Rosalind came into view again. Logan noticed she had put on a pair of thin latex gloves and was holding a metal tray. She stepped into the cage. Approaching Logan, she took something from the tray resembling the earpiece of his Venture, a little larger but still sleek and streamlined. She next picked up a device like a doctor’s otoscope. Stepping closer, she held it up, and a narrow beam of red light streamed from an opening in its front. Bending over Logan, she examined the area around his ear, apparently taking readings of some kind, because she murmured a series of numbers to a tech standing at a monitor a few yards from the cage. Then, putting the device away, she used a tool like a dental pick to make a few modifications to the earpiece. At last, she fitted it gently behind his ear, making a few adjustments for comfort. The final step was to fit a minimalist set of glasses over his nose, not unlike those of the Venture unit Wrigley had so brusquely disposed of. Then she picked up her tools and tray and stepped out of the cage, nodding to the man at the control station. He typed in a series of commands. Logan felt a brief pinch behind his ear, but he shifted and it went away.

Sitting in his chair outside the cage, Wrigley sighed. “Okay,” he said. “Since Asperton brought you here, I’m guessing you know what it is we’re up to?”

“I have a general idea. You used the first-generation Omega units, Ventures, to get people accustomed to using VR for watching music videos, playing games, searching the internet. Thus ensuring those same people are ready for phase two — which, apparently, takes a little more getting used to.”

“Crude, but reasonably accurate. So: How about phase two itself? Voyager?”

“Asperton was a bit more vague about that.”

Wrigley snorted. “Well, she did say you had the full whack of security clearances. So it’s not my problem. If you learn something you shouldn’t in here, she can damn well arrange for your firing squad.”

From the corner of his eye, Logan saw Wrigley nod to Rosalind.

“What’s with this cage?” Logan asked. “Seems kind of retrogressive, especially after all of the burbling about moving forward.”

“Spoken with remarkable ignorance. Phase two of the project requires people to complete a personality profile, so we can tailor the experience to their parameters. Like fitting a virtual pair of skis — only a lot more sophisticated. In your case, barging in here at the last minute demanding a tour, we don’t have time to fill out tests and questionnaires or to obtain your medical history. The glasses are a way of compensating. And if you haven’t noticed already, I can assure you they won’t use glasses anymore. The synaptichron renders them unnecessary.”

“The what?”

“A part of the device Roz placed on your ear. The Voyager. Now shut up, will you? My God, you talk more than the board of directors did.”

“You—” Logan began, but then fell silent. Something strange was happening. It was as if he were registering events — simultaneous, yet distinct — from every angle of his peripheral vision. There was no pain, or any other sensation, beyond the sheer strangeness of this visual phenomenon.

“Dr. Wrigley,” he said, “I’m not sure this—”

And then — quite suddenly — his vision blurred; dimmed; then snapped back smartly. He was seated in a chair. Except it was not the chair within the cage of the VR lab. It wasn’t even in the Torus. Instead, it was one of a series of seats in what he quickly realized was the shoe department of a large store. Beyond the shoe department, he saw racks with clothes, signs atop them adorned with traditional Neiman Marcus branding, and other departments in the distance. And yet this was not possible; he knew he was not here — he was seated in the production lab of Arc E, Matthew Wrigley’s subdivision of the Torus. But he could feel that the shape of the chair had changed. One of his feet was resting upon a shoe-fitting stool. And there was more: he could hear, as well. There were voices in the background that were not from the lab. There was music — or rather, Muzak. Even the air felt different: cooler, overly air-conditioned.

And then, of course, there was the woman. She was about fifty, perched demurely on the far side of the shoe stool, wearing a formfitting knee-length floral dress, smiling at him. Her nametag read brenda, and she looked absolutely real, down to the subtle dimple in her chin. He felt a tug at his foot, and realized it was being withdrawn from a Brannock foot-measuring tool.

The woman seated before him glanced at the device, still smiling. “Looks like eleven D,” she told him. Her voice was clear and crisp and without auditory artifacts. “You said you preferred loafers to oxfords?”

She was looking directly at him, clearly waiting for a response. “Yes,” he said, feeling it would be rude not to answer.

She nodded. “Tassel, penny, or something traditional like horsebit?”

If he worked hard enough, Logan realized, he could — just barely — see through the store; make out ghostly images of the lab that, in real life, surrounded him. But it was difficult, and after a few moments of mental effort he gave up and let himself slip unresisting back into the scenario. “I prefer simple, classic designs,” he told Brenda. “Low-slung.”

“And color?”

“Cordovan or black.”

“Any brand you prefer?”

“Bally. But I have a difficult time finding any that fit.”

“Swiss shoes do tend to run a little smaller. But that won’t be a problem.” She stood up, smile growing even more dazzling. “I’ll be right back with a couple pairs.”

As Logan watched her move toward a rear section of the store, he heard a cynical voice sound in his ear. “Bally, huh? Good taste. I would have taken you for a Weejuns kind of guy.”

It was Wrigley, speaking to him — somehow. Logan looked around, but except for a few other shoppers — at a fair distance, where the illusion of realism grew somewhat compromised — he was alone. “How are you doing this?”

“Quiet. You don’t want people in that store to think you’re talking to yourself. I’m out here in the lab — hooked into your sensory feed.”

“No. What I mean is… how the hell is this so real? The sound and sight and touch—”

“Genius, basically — and a fuck ton of hard work. Forty million man-hours at last count. Oh, and yes: Voyager, its vestibular implants and synaptichron, and the satellites and server farms that push the data, have something to do with it.” A dry laugh.

There was that word again: “synaptichron.”

The woman was returning with three boxes in her hands, all Ballys. “I compensated, knowing how European shoes run.” She opened the boxes one at a time, showing him the choices.

Feeling just a little silly, Logan said: “I’ll try the topmost. Yes, that one, thanks.”

She took the pair out of the box and slipped one onto his foot, using only the slightest pressure of a shoehorn. Logan was amazed at how realistically the Omega software, and the neural interface or whatever it was, mimicked the experience of putting on a new, slightly stiff leather shoe.

“What do you think?” the salesperson asked.

“It’s beautiful.” And it was.

“It’s a twelve triple-E.”

He looked at her. “Triple-E. Really?”

She nodded as she put on its mate. “Like I said, European shoes run small. Why don’t you walk around and see how it feels while I get you one or two others in that size?” And with another smile, she turned and walked off again.

“How real are they?” Logan said into the air.

“As real as it gets,” the disembodied voice of Wrigley replied. “Real shoe, real size, real measurement. If your credit was good here, you’d get them in the mail tomorrow. The software takes care of everything.”

“And this is part of the rollout? The Voyager device that drops on Monday?”

“You got it. Obviously, it’s designed so the reality of the environment is the most impressive thing. Fact is, you’re interacting with an area no bigger than twenty square feet — if you tried to walk farther, the matrix would collapse — but you have no idea, no idea, how difficult implementing those twenty feet were. This isn’t some primitive CAVE system. This is total immersion, combined with total interaction. True telepresence — and we’re half a dozen years ahead of the competition. More, if we get lucky with some of the patents.”

“So on Monday, a hundred thousand people will be able to buy shoes.”

Logan didn’t mean this to sound snarky, and Wrigley didn’t take it that way. “We chose shoes for an initial demo because they’re hard to fit properly. Would you ever buy a five-hundred-dollar pair of shoes online? It’s not like a hair dryer or a box of lightbulbs. We felt that this best demonstrated how realistic our technology is. It’s a way to familiarize the average Joe with VR. But you wait: though the experience will be limited at first, people won’t fire up a Voyager just to buy shoes. They’ll fire it up just to sit in that chair. That’s how realistic it is.”

Logan gripped the arms of the chair, felt the resistance increase with the pressure. It was true.

“We’ve partnered with Neiman Marcus to provide a persistent shopping experience that will just keep growing. Monday, it will be the shoe section and a few others. By Christmas, it will be entire departments. Suits, dresses, jewelry — the whole nine yards.”

“Jesus,” Logan murmured. He watched as somebody else sat down three chairs away — somebody who, he assumed, was just a figment of Omega’s imagination. Until next week, anyway. “So what’s the ‘Two A’ stuff, the tour you told Asperton you gave the board?”

“Oh.” Wrigley laughed briefly. “We had more time to prepare for their arrival, so their interfaces were more sophisticated than yours. Depth of focus, mostly.”

“Depth of focus?”

“Those twenty square feet I was talking about. Take a look out past that workman — to the right, there — and you’ll see what I mean.”

Logan looked in the indicated direction. The environment was so incredibly detailed he hadn’t noticed this angle before. At the entrance to the department store, a workman was standing on a ladder, hammering up some sort of sign. Logan looked at him for a minute. Then he looked beyond the man — and abruptly understood.

Outside the entrance to the store lay a wide plaza, and the decorative gallery of what was clearly a shopping mall, stretching into the distance. Beyond the entrance, as elsewhere in this virtual environment, the landscape grew a little pixelated, its details hard to distinguish. Nevertheless, Logan could see other storefronts in the nearer sections of the plaza: Williams-Sonoma, Coach, Pottery Barn. All with opening soon signs on their facades.

“Those storefronts looked a lot sharper and more realistic to the board,” Wrigley said. “But you get the idea. The first step is the hardest, actually — and we’re taking that step with this rollout. The codecs, the infrastructure… it’s all in place. Top-level confidential negotiations are going on right now with two dozen more high-end retailers. Half are already on board, agreeing to pay licensing fees for the APIs needed to build the code for their stores on our virtual platform. And those fees are huge. Why not? With a beautiful world to shop in, hyperintelligent salespeople, and unlimited inventories — why would a consumer go anywhere else?”

“Why indeed?” Logan asked. Then a thought struck him. “And what happens when the shops are in place? What’s phase three?”

Wrigley went silent so long, Logan thought perhaps the man had wandered away. But then he spoke. “Phase three is what happens once the mall is complete. When you can wander anywhere inside, what do you do next? You step outside, of course. Jesus, guy, what do you think? If we can create this, once our matrix is fully extensible we can create anything. You want a vacation in Tahiti? Or an appointment with the world’s most successful psychoanalyst? I’ll bet you could use one of those. How about, instead of taking in a movie, you take in a fantasy — captain of a cruise ship, with all that entails. Or a pirate ship.” The voice paused, and Logan saw the saleslady walking back toward him with more boxes. “I have a better question for you, Logan: What isn’t phase three?”

“You’re taking the ‘virtual’ out of virtual reality,” Logan said. “Like the open-format games you designed at Infinium — except this won’t be just a game.”

Suddenly, he realized his own voice sounded different — louder, more direct, with less reverb. Then the world around him wavered, blinked, and went away — and he was back inside the cage. Wrigley, Rosalind, and the tech who had been manning the nearby console were all standing nearby, looking in at him. Their expressions alone made him go cold.

“What happened?” he asked. “Did something go wrong?”

“No. Sorry about the abrupt exit.” Wrigley sounded uncharacteristically subdued.

Now Rosalind stepped in and removed the glasses she’d given him earlier. “Here’s a new Voyager unit,” she said, handing him a thin box. “It’s been refreshed with your personal information.”

For just a minute, the four of them remained motionless. Then Wrigley spoke. “Don’t you think you’d better go?”

Logan frowned as he opened the box and removed the device. “Go? Go where?”

“Oh,” Wrigley said. “While you were inside, I just now heard from Asperton. You’re needed in the executive suite on the forty-eighth floor. Immediately.”