Virtual Destruction

CHAPTER 41

The huge explosion took place deep in the Nevada desert, five hundred miles from Livermore. But the spectators within the T Program laboratories witnessed it through status lines that scrolled across the workstation screens. PROCESSING.

The sealed door of the VR chamber looked like a bank vault slammed shut, holding Craig inside. Paige watched the silent door and wondered what Craig was seeing even now.

The explosion itself had lasted only a second, but the enhancements from the VR software manipulated terabytes of transmitted data and slowed the explosion down so that the human mind could grasp and experience every instant, stretching time so that an observer could truly witness hands-on, holding a nuclear explosion in his lap.

Paige heard the sudden sharp rumble of sound inside the chambers. An outcry of what might have been Craig’s voice, muffled and insulated through the thick walls of the chamber — and then silence.

They waited.

The computer monitors showed that the simulation had continued running. Gary Lesserec moved about like a demon, checking screen after screen with a broad grin on his face, showing his teeth like a manic Jimmy Olson. His pale skin was flushed, his reddish hair mussed and damp with sweat.

“How long do we sit here?” Paige asked.

Lesserec whirled as if he had been yelled at. “It should be about done by now. I don’t know why he hasn’t come out.”

Ben Goldfarb stood alarmed, yanking down on his conservative FBI tie. “Let’s get him out of there now. We don’t know what we’re dealing with here.”

“You don’t know,” Lesserec snapped back. “I know damn well what I’m doing. Let a professional handle this.”

Goldfarb spoke with an Antarctic chill. “I am a professional, Mr. Lesserec, and I know when things aren’t going the way they’re supposed to.” He grabbed Lesserec by the collar of his X Men t-shirt; with his other hand he pulled on the young man’s badge chain. “Use your magic code and get Craig out of there. Pronto.”

“I’d do what he says if I were you,” said Jackson, quietly.

“All right, all right,” Lesserec answered with an expression of disgust as he slapped at Goldfarb’s hand, but the special agent would not let go.

Paige stood by the badge reader at the access panel and pounded on the door of the VR chamber. “Craig, can you hear me? Are you all right?” Hearing no answer, she turned to shout, “Lesserec, get your damn badge over here!”

Lesserec lurched to the device, assisted by Goldfarb’s anxiety. When Goldfarb released his grip on the t-shirt, Lesserec smoothed the cotton fabric, then slid his laminated badge into the magnetic strip reader. After he punched in his access code, the locks disengaged with a heavy mechanical thump, and the insulated pneumatic seals unseated themselves. Goldfarb and Paige dug their fingers into the crack and pulled the heavy door open.

Inside, the room was lit only by dim, flickering sparks projected in holograms — the aftermath of the fading explosion out at the Nevada Test Site.

Craig Kreident lay on the floor in a veritable lake of his own sweat. He had toppled out of the automated chair and sprawled with an expression of extreme stress on his face. His eyes were squeezed shut, surrounded by wrinkles like tight slits. His mouth had been pulled back in a grimace. His skin seemed dry and desiccated, as if he had been mummified.

Paige rushed over. “Craig!” she said, dropping to her knees in front of him. She grasped his soaked shirt and pulled on his shoulders to raise him to a sitting position. He breathed shallowly, but at least he breathed.

“Let’s get him out of here. Help me,” she said.

Around them, the grayness and flickering static of the Virtual Reality chamber muted all sounds. Goldfarb and Jackson helped her lift Craig, shaking him until he groaned. His papery eyelids flickered open.

Paige shuddered when she saw the expression behind them, as if the holocaust were still playing inside his mind.

“I’ll get help,” said Jackson and took off.

Gary Lesserec’s muddy green eyes bugged out at the sight. He turned and ran back to the computer workstations.

“Hey, help us here!” Goldfarb said. Lesserec made no response as he disappeared.

“Asshole,” Goldfarb muttered and slung Craig’s right arm over his shoulders. Paige grabbed his waist. Craig groaned and his legs dangled from his body, twitching as if his nerves kept misfiring.

“Craig, are you all right?” Paige said. “Can you hear me? Say something.”

His breath rattled through his mouth, but Paige could decipher no words. Goldfarb and Paige moved forward, hauling Craig along with them. His shoes caught on the carpeted floor, and his jittery legs staggered forward, but Paige thought that might be more of a reflex action than a voluntary effort to assist them.

They walked him out to the main laboratory areas. T Program people scurried around, amazed at Lesserec’s sudden frenzy, but he wouldn’t speak to them at all. He had gone directly to his own workstation, knocking Danielle aside.

“Hey, somebody! Get me some water!” Paige yelled as she and Goldfarb let Craig slump into one of the swivel workstation chairs. His arms dangled behind him. Rivulets of sweat trickled from his fingertips to the floor.

“What did you see, Craig?” she said, whispering in his ear.

His gray eyes flew open. “I saw!” he said in a croaking whisper. “I….” But he could say nothing else.

Danielle hurried up with a cold can of Diet Coke she had yanked from the refrigerator. Paige grimaced at it, then popped the top and pressed the cool aluminum rim against Craig’s parched lips. He sipped some, then coughed, spewing soft drink.

Paige looked wildly around. “Get me some water!”

Tansy Beaumont brought a coffee mug half filled with water, knelt and handed it to Paige. Craig slurped from the tilted cup. Once his lips were wet, Craig began to gulp and gulp.

He gasped, shook his head, and the fog behind his eyes seemed to clear somewhat. He tried to focus on his surroundings again.

“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.”

“Oh, we’ll be asking you,” Goldfarb said. “We’ll be asking you a lot of things.” His voice changed, became flatter, harder. “By the authority vested in me by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, I’m placing you under arrest.”

“But I didn’t kill Michaelson,” Lesserec protested. “I didn’t do it!”

“You’ve done enough,” Goldfarb said. “That’s a start.”