Chrysalis

25

Logan followed Roz out of the theater, across the soundstage, and into a room he hadn’t seen before. It was relatively empty, save for a bank of controls, a worktable, and — at the far end — the large green-screen wall with embedded lights and red X marks at regular intervals.

A chair was placed in front of the worktable, and Madrigal gestured again. “Sit down, please.”

When he did so, she checked that his Voyager unit was adjusted and then moved to the bank of equipment. A minute passed. Then the lights dimmed and he felt the brief, barely noticeable tingling sensation behind his ear he’d experienced during the morning demo. The green screen defocused, then abruptly morphed into the image he’d seen at the close of the demonstration: the storefronts in the wide plaza beyond the shoe department. Except now they were clearer, in realistic focus. He smelled that same cool, refreshing waft of air he had that morning; the distant odor of steak, broiling in a salamander.

Suddenly, on impulse, he grasped the device over his ear and plucked it off. Instantly the plaza, the smells, the indescribable feeling of immersion, vanished and he was once again seated before the green screen, his vision returned to normal. He stared down at the device between his fingertips and thought he caught a glimpse of three tiny fibers retracting into its casing. He blinked and they were gone.

He turned toward Roz, standing by the instrumentation panel, and held the device up almost accusingly. “What were those things?” he asked.

“What things?”

“I felt something tickle me, just behind the ear. It was barely noticeable, but I felt it earlier as well — and I’m sure I didn’t imagine it.”

She hesitated.

“Remember,” he said, “I have the authority to ask any question, see any technology. If you want me to call Asperton to confirm, I’ll be happy—”

“No, it’s fine.” She dragged another chair to the worktable and took a seat herself. Then she sighed. “It’s just… I feel like I’m giving away the keys to the kingdom.”

“This is a request from John Christie himself. Now: please tell me what it is I’m missing.”

“It’s complicated. And it’s exciting.”

“So give me the abridged version.”

“For years, our competition has been chasing existing technology. Old technology. Higher resolutions; outward-facing boundary cameras; 6DoF versus 3DoF.”

“DoF?” Already this wasn’t sounding abridged.

“Degrees of freedom. Translational and rotational axes. The point is, all they’re really doing is sharpening a knife to a finer point, jamming more transistors onto a chip: you can make something sharper or faster, but it’s still the same tool. We do share some limitations with everyone else — 5G and 6G cell technology, high speed throughput down and up. That’s why even with the Voyager, to get the fullest experience you need to be ‘tethered’ to a computer with a fast connection to our servers — obviously, you can’t stuff every last image into a module. But we have a leg up, thanks to Wrigley’s video codecs.”

“That’s why my Omega unit seems a lot stupider when I take it on the road as opposed to when I’m home.” Sorry, Grace. Maybe that was just Pythia.

“Right. And that old Venture of yours especially was limited to a small subset of our satellite network, of course. At home, your device has access to broadband internet. We use fiber optics, client- and server-side, to shave off every possible millisecond of lag: and there’s nothing faster than optical except quantum entanglement.” She laughed. “Anyway, Wrigley’s big idea at Infinium was to leapfrog the bottleneck of existing tech entirely. And it’s a big part of why he agreed to become part of Chrysalis: he could work closely with the neurophysiology department.”

Neurophysiology. “That ‘synaptichron’ Wrigley mentioned?”

Madrigal nodded. “It helps make Omega — the Voyager units and beyond, that is — possible.”

“How?”

“It involves the CS attenuators. Cortical stimulators — those ‘fibers’ you noticed on the underside of the unit.”

“So they are invasive,” Logan said.

“Barely.” A pause. “You’ve heard of BioCertain, right?”

“I visited it briefly. The Chrysalis subdivision that develops new pacemakers, insulin pumps, and the like.”

“Exactly. But that’s not all they do. Like most tech areas here, they have ‘skunk works’ doing things much more interesting. Like cranial robotics.”

“What?”

She hesitated again. “Look, all I do is integrate the technology from Arc B with our own VR software and fiber-optic hardware. It’s true that our achievements in physical space modeling are by far the biggest factors. But, yes… synthesizing BioCertain’s tech with our own makes phase two — Voyager — possible.”

“Cranial… robotics,” Logan repeated slowly.

“One of the research teams in BioCertain is working on embedded products for controlling epilepsy, Parkinson’s, even multiple sclerosis. It involves subminiaturized sEEG anchors instead of old-school electrodes. We were able to leverage that same technology.”

“The cortical stimulators you mentioned,” Logan said. “They’re like… miniature electrodes?”

“Yes. But they only interact with a very specific part of the brain. Other VR technologies merely push image data. They can barely achieve 1080p without lagging and ruining the illusion. Not to mention the ‘vergence-accommodation conflict’ when your eyes can’t truly focus on anything, thanks to their cheesy misalignment of the real and the virtual. We on the other hand let your imagination, and your visual cortex, do a good part of the work. The brain is a more capable projector than any internet connection. That’s how we can achieve perceived reality not just to 4K but — in future releases — 6K quality and beyond.”

Logan wasn’t sure he liked the idea of a company, no matter how large or well respected, manipulating his brain.

“See? The look on your face. That’s one reason the details are kept confidential. It’s only a transitional step, anyway — phase three will use electrocutaneous stimulation, nothing remotely invasive.” Madrigal was shifting to full-on proselytizing. “It’s no different, really, than the signals you get from your eyes, ears, nerve endings. I mean, perceptions have to come from somewhere. Right? This way there’s no outdated interface between your eyes and ears — okay, your brain — and how you interact with Omega.”

Logan heard everything she said, but he was also thinking fast. Did Asperton know about this? Of course she must. Same with John Christie. They were careful, conservative people: they wouldn’t green-light something like this without the most extensive and exacting tests imaginable. Besides, he told himself, how different could cortical stimulators be from BioCertain’s other products? Pacemakers, for example, were far more invasive — and, if they malfunctioned, surely more dangerous.

Even so, he couldn’t stop thinking of the three who’d died… and the much larger number who, at the moment, seemed doomed. Did this revelation — the fact that the new Voyager devices directly stimulated the brain, invasively or not — change the course of his investigation?

“Is there somebody I can talk to about this in more detail?” he asked. “Somebody from this black group at BioCertain that’s partnering with you?”

“It seems you’ve got clearance to talk to anybody you want. I’m sure Wrigley can put you in touch with the right person.” She stood up. “What are you interested in, exactly? Because I can assure you that—”

“If you can just get me a name, that would be great.” He knew Chrysalis would not have taken any chances if there were even the slightest reservations about this technology. Yet he was troubled nevertheless. The brain was a hugely complex organ, and any neurologist who said he or she truly understood it was lying.

He waited as Roz searched for a contact at BioCertain. What concerned him most — now that this Pandora’s box had been opened — was one thing in particular. Spearman had taken a dive through a glass table. Bridger had perished in a plane crash. Williams had slipped and fallen under the wheels of a bus.

Those board members had all died tragically. But there was a possibility all three deaths could… could… have been precipitated voluntarily.

Bridger might have pointed his plane toward the ground. Marceline Williams might have intentionally stepped in front of the bus. Was it possible that, despite all the rigorous testing, something had slipped between the cracks while mating BioCertain’s technology to Omega’s? Because Logan knew that a brain capable of the sensory stimulation offered by such VR was capable of something else, as well.

Induced psychosis. And he feared Omega — and its marvelous new technology — just might cause some of those who experienced it to become suicidal… or insane.