Chapter Three
Tuesday
Building 433—T Program
Virtual Reality Chamber
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
With their noise and bustle and unpredictability, little kids had a peculiar way of getting on Gary Lesserec’s nerves, no matter how understanding he tried to be. It wasn’t so much the incessant whining, the tear-filled eyes, or the blatant refusal to obey simple commands—it was more the indefatigable lack of logic. Children didn’t make sense, and that scared him.
Still, he had a role to play as the T Program deputy, now that Michaelson had left him in charge. Smile, put on a good face for the PR show. Associate Director José Aragon was watching as he led the tour group of “challenged” children for the Coalition for Family Values, happy as a dung beetle deep in his element. Aragon was going to get a lot of good coverage for this event.
Lesserec pretended to be happy as he greeted the visitors, the smile burned on his face to cover his alarm at the group of wheelchair-bound, emotionally disturbed, Down’s syndrome, or otherwise crippled children. Even normal, rambunctious kids threw a complex situation into chaos, but this group created even stiffer problems, required more careful watching.
But it also gave him a marvelous opportunity, without watchdog Michaelson looming over him, and he could finally install those new NanoWare chips and give them a whirl. He took it as a challenge. If Lesserec intended to reach out to a huge market share with his own VR breakthroughs, perhaps children like these, who had so little to start with, had the most to gain from his simulations.
Lesserec watched the last of the children ushered through the open security door into the T Program exclusion area. Aragon stood like a cable-car conductor, motioning everyone to come forward. Escorted by nurses, attendants, or parents, the children moved into the common area. Upon hearing the first high-pitched tiny voices, the scuffling of feet, the bumping against wobbly modular office furniture, he thought, Show time!
He felt tense, unlike any time when he had stood up to Hal Michaelson or any of the other head-up-their-butts management types. The mob of children descended upon the Virtual Reality laboratory like a plague of locusts.
Lesserec scanned the room in reflex, all the other T Program engineers who had slapped together Aragon’s demo in record time. “Everybody ready?” he muttered, only loud enough for the technicians to hear.
Danielle, one of the programmers behind a workstation, punched in an access code, prepping the simulation run. “Equipment’s all set up, Gary. You’re the MC. You know which buttons to push. It’s your show … solo.”
“Hey, where are you guys going?”
Danielle jabbed her fellow programmer in the side and motioned with her head for him to follow. “Errands. We skipped lunch today so we could head out to Lab supply this afternoon.”
“Yeah, Gary,” said Walter, the other programmer, nodding. “You okayed it, remember?”
“Hey, that was before we set up this tour!” Lesserec pushed weakly up from his chair. “You’re not leaving me alone?”
“Of course not,” Danielle said with a parting shot. “You’ve got all those kids to keep you company.”
Lesserec muttered something he would never have wanted the children to hear, then looked up to see José Aragon extending a hand to him. He smelled of strong aftershave. His dark hair glistened with hair oil, sculpted in place like meringue on a baked Alaska. “Ah, Gary! It’s good to see you again. Thanks for all your help.”
Lesserec made sure his smile remained firmly in place as he shook the associate director’s hand, squeezing firmly into the other man’s clammy palm sweat. Aragon wore a leisure suit, as usual, and trousers just a tad on the short side.
“Welcome,” Lesserec said to the audience, rubbing his hands together. “We’ve got a good show for you today. I’m sure the kids will enjoy it.”
He cleared off the front of his computer console, leaving a small plastic model of Snoopy, a picture of him and his girlfriend Sandra standing outside their new condo by Lake Tahoe, and a small bumper sticker that said PORSCHE DRIVERS DO IT AT 150 MILES AN HOUR.
With a stage manager’s bustle, Aragon continued to look around the workstation area, his dark eyes carrying a glazed shallowness. “So, Hal didn’t stay to show us around?”
Lesserec erased his scowl before it could show. “He’s in Washington for a high-level meeting. Don’t worry, though, Mr. Aragon—I can handle it.”
“Yes, of course.” Aragon seemed flustered, as if he didn’t know how to deal with a change of routine. “Glad you could find time to show the children around, Gary.”
“My pleasure,” mumbled Lesserec, meaning exactly the opposite.
“Excuse me,” Aragon said. “I have to help the rest of these youngsters in.” He patted Lesserec on the shoulder and moved over to help the group enter the secure facility through the unsealed emergency exit, though it looked as if he were only getting in the way. A Protective Service Officer stood watching the slow progress.
Lesserec watched, having no idea how many visitors they were expecting. It would take all morning long just to get a dozen of them inside. He wondered whose idea this crazy spectacle was anyway. Probably Aragon’s.
Now alone in the control area, Lesserec turned to his computer console and called up a file from his private directory. He decided that would be best, and Michaelson wasn’t here to breathe down his neck, anyway. Normally, he would have arranged for a computational physics simulation of one of the Lab’s new high-priority “dual-use” missions, something that would feed into the commercial sector, or perhaps even be used by the Pentagon.
He considered bringing up the jet fighter dog-fight sequence—normal, red-blooded kids should get a blast out of that—but the thought of these handicapped children disoriented by Top Gun maneuvers made him pause. He couldn’t think of anything more appropriate than the Yosemite simulation he had shot and dimensionalized himself last month. He hoped Aragon wouldn’t squeal about his fooling with the VR chamber for other than “official” business; but if the kids were satisfied with the show, he didn’t suppose that would be a problem.
Aragon seemed to be having a field day, walking around to each of the sixteen kids taking their places in the VR chamber, squatting down and speaking to them on their eye level, then standing and patting them on the top of the head as if they were puppies. A photographer seemed attached to Aragon’s elbow; no accident, Lesserec supposed.
One scrawny little girl with patchy blond hair stared around the lab, her big eyes big drinking in the sights. Her sinewy neck seemed to ratchet as she moved it, as if she were unable to control her muscles.
Computer screens as big as a school blackboard filled one of the walls; circuit boards from the patchwork control rack, optical fibers, and computer keyboards were stacked unceremoniously on one of the desks; a poster on the far wall displayed a futuristic scene with the words JEDI ACADEMY emblazoned underneath. The place looked much cleaner and more organized than it had the day before, sanitized of all classified information.
“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 plopped down in a chair, 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.
“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.
The image moved forward with a change in perspective from the sensors, edging toward the drop-off. Several children cried out in alarm. Lesserec stepped into the center of the chamber. “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, who seemed to be the boy’s father. The boy’s scarecrowish arm smacked against the hologram that had been solidified with three-dimensionally patterned microspheres suspended in electrostatic fields.
The palsied boy’s expression changed, though Lesserec could not read subtleties in his uncontrolled facial muscles. Lesserec took hold of the small hand and brushed it back and forth against the illusory rock.
Other children moved forward to parts of the images, making sounds of amazement as they touched the mountain. José Aragon wandered the circumference of the chamber, prodding and stroking, a fascinated grin on his face.
“Just don’t press too hard,” Lesserec warned.
The simulation paused a moment, before dropping toward the ground in a gut-wrenching fall. Several of the children cried out, but the plunge slowed until they reached the rocky, forested ground below. Hikers and people in cars started moving toward them, all wearing puzzled expressions.
Lesserec popped open the chamber door, disengaging the simulation and letting a wedge of fluorescent light spill into the room. Yosemite vanished like a snapped rubber band, and the tour group found themselves sitting in a featureless VR chamber. The children and their escorts sat stunned and breathless for a moment, looking around in disbelief.
“That’s all for today. Be careful on your way out,” Lesserec said, pointing toward the door. “Please keep away from the walls—we don’t want you to harm the sensors.”
Aragon bustled over to him. He seemed genuinely moved. “Gary, thank you for allowing us to experience this magnificent demonstration! I will speak with Hal about opening this up as part of a general Lab tour.” He nodded at the excited children on their way out of the chamber. “This is just the type of thing we need to improve our image with the community.”
Lesserec smiled tightly, aware that Aragon was looking at more than pure community relations—if pitched properly, this would ensure Aragon’s directorate wouldn’t be short of funds as well. Well, they all fed out of the same trough.
“I’m sure Dr. Michaelson would enjoy that,” he said without the slightest trace of sarcasm.
He kept his smile in place as the children made their way out, each one thanking him in their own way. He felt like a flight attendant watching passengers file out of an airplane. The last pair out the door was the boy with cerebral palsy and the slight man with stooped shoulders. The boy seemed delirious with happiness.
The tired-looking man nodded to him and extended his hand. “Thank you, sir. I’m Duane Hopkins—” He fingered his green Livermore badge as if to prove it. “I just wanted to thank you. Stevie, my son—I’ve never seen him so happy. This was really special for him.”
“No problem,” Lesserec said. He was pleased with their reactions. The simulations seemed very marketable.
Hopkins looked down at the floor, then back up, as if he were afraid to meet Lesserec’s gaze. “Stevie has been sick for … well, he’s always been sick, and I just can’t take him out very often. I work in the plutonium building, and we don’t get to show off—”
“Mr. Hopkins, we’re leaving now,” interrupted the woman from the Coalition for Family Values. “Come along.” The others had made their way out the emergency exit door where the security guard continued to watch. The woman from the community group gave a stern smile and raised her eyebrows, motioning for him to hurry.
Hopkins mumbled his thanks again, and rushed after the others, pushing Stevie’s wheelchair.
As the chaotic tour group left, Lesserec relaxed back in his chair, thinking how well received the simulation had been. He ran over the possibilities, wondering how people might respond to something really exciting, exotic, not just a vacation snapshot. He couldn’t wait to test out some of the stuff he had been developing at home.
Through the dollar signs in his daydreams, he saw a real chance to make it big. He had Aragon snowed—leaving only Hal Michaelson.