Set This House chapter 3

There are actually two bridges on Bridge Street. The west bridge, which passes over the creek that gives Autumn Creek its name, is the main route out of town. The east bridge is used mostly by timber trucks. It spans a gully called Thaw Canal, a springtime tributary of Autumn Creek. Beyond the canal, East Bridge Street is only paved for the first quarter mile, after which it turns into a gravel-top service road.

On the morning I met Penny Driver, I hiked to work across the canal bridge, following the same path I’d first taken with Julie Sivik two years before. The Reality Factory was located on a half-acre lot alongside East Bridge Street’s last stretch of asphalt. My father thought the lot had originally been a truck depot—there was an old fuel island with rusted-out diesel pumps at one end of the property—but for several years before Julie took out her lease it had been a storage facility. The main building, the one that became the Factory, was a long, concrete-walled shed. Shed anyway is what Julie called it, although it was huge, as big as Bit Warehouse inside, with nothing but a double row of support columns to break up the space.

I got to the Factory a little after eight. Julie had arrived ahead of me; her car was parked on the lot, under an awning by the diesel pumps. It was the same ’57 Cadillac sedan she’d been driving two years ago, still in the process of being fixed up. You might be thinking she can’t have worked very hard at repairing it, but in fact she had, at least off and on—but for every problem she fixed, another seemed to develop, so that the overall condition of the car never really improved. Julie still insisted she was going to sell it one day, though she no longer talked about making a profit.

I went around to the side door of the Factory and let myself in. Inside, Julie’s voice echoed from the shed’s rafters—she was back in the maze of army tents somewhere, having an argument with one of the Manciple brothers. Probably Irwin, the soft-spoken younger Manciple; only Julie’s half of the argument was audible, and that wouldn’t have been true if she’d been fighting with Dennis. Humming to myself so as not to overhear what didn’t concern me, I made my way to the captain’s tent that served me as an office and sat down to check my e-mail.

I should explain about the tents.

The first time I saw the shed, it was a mess. The power was off, and the building had no windows, so Julie shined a flashlight around to give me some idea of how spacious the interior was. It was spacious, all right, but it was also full of junk: the flashlight beam swept over long heaps of broken metal pipe. Old scaffolding, Julie explained, that had once held racks of storage lockers. When the storage facility shut down, the lockers had been removed and the scaffolding cut up for scrap; only somehow the scrap got left behind. Our first order of business would be to rent a dump truck and haul all the scrap away. “I know it looks like a disaster area right now, but I think it’s got a lot of potential once we get all this crap cleared out.”

“Oh sure...and I can definitely help with that, the clearing-out part. I can lift heavy things.”

“Shouldn’t take more than a week or so, I figure, once we get into it. And after the junk’s all gone, we can start setting up the tents, and—”

“Tents?”

“One minor problem with this building.” Julie tilted her flashlight upwards, illuminating a peaked ceiling of stained wooden planks. “The roof leaks. Not terribly, I mean we’re not talking deluge, but still I wouldn’t feel safe leaving computer equipment exposed underneath it.”

“So you’re going to set up tents in here? To keep the computers dry when it rains?”

Julie nodded. “Surplus army tents. My uncle knows a quartermaster at Fort Lewis who can get them for me practically free—all sizes, as many as I want.”

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to just replace the roof?”

“I can’t afford to, at least not right away. Once the Factory’s up and running and I get some venture capital, or maybe some grant money—”

“But why should you have to pay for it? If you’re leasing this place...”

“It’s part of the deal I made. One of the reasons the rent on this place is so low, I agreed to make certain improvements to the property at my own expense.”

“You promised to fix the roof yourself?”

“Among other things, yes.”

“But if you can’t afford to fix it...”

“I can’t afford it right now,” Julie said. “But that’s OK, it doesn’t have to be done now, just sometime before the lease ends. But in the meantime there’s other stuff that’s more pressing, like getting this junk cleared away, and making sure the electrical system can handle all the gear I’m going to bring in...replacing the roof, that’s more of a long-term project. A project for you, maybe,” she added, “seeing as you’re architecturally inclined.”

“It was my father who built the house,” I reminded her. “And the carpentry was all imaginary.”

But she wasn’t listening. Caught up in her own imaginings, she had turned away and was sweeping the flashlight around again, measuring the space. Watching her, I had a sudden realization: Julie was not a practical person. I know you probably figured that out already, but it was a new thought for me. It was also the first character judgment I ever made entirely on my own, with no help from Adam or my father, and it gave me a weird sense of accomplishment, almost as if I’d discovered something positive about her. And maybe it was good that I felt that way—Julie’s inability to do things simply drove a lot of people crazy, but I was always able to be patient with her, and even find her impracticality endearing, because it confirmed my own perceptiveness.

Besides which, her ideas weren’t always as impractical as they first appeared. Like Julie’s car, the Factory roof was never fully repaired—though I was up on it many times to patch leaks that had gotten too big to ignore—so the tents became a permanent fixture. But even if they hadn’t been necessary, we probably would have kept them anyway, because of a surprising side-benefit: in addition to keeping the equipment dry, the tents also made the Factory a lot cozier by dividing up the shed’s one big room into many smaller rooms. They created privacy, and while something similar might have been accomplished using standard office-cubicle partitions, the tents, in hindsight, were a more effective solution, not to mention more fun. Working at the Reality Factory was like working in a gypsy camp, especially after Julie got creative and had us paint the outsides of the tents different colors.

My tent was sky-blue, with spray-painted clouds that Aunt Sam had shown me how to make stencils for. It was furnished with a big oak desk that Julie and I had salvaged from the same junkyard where we’d dumped the scaffolding, and equipped with a reconditioned Pentium computer. With Julie’s help, I’d set up my own Web site to exchange information with other multiples online. Julie had offered to get me a second computer to keep at Mrs. Winslow’s, but my father and I had jointly vetoed that idea—the last thing we needed was to have Adam and Jake fighting over Internet access.

This morning as I tried to dial in to our Internet provider, I kept getting error messages. This happened sometimes; after two years of troubleshooting, the Factory’s electrical grid was fairly reliable, but our connection to U.S. West was still chancy.

I called out: “Dennis?”

From the tent next door, Dennis Manciple called back: “It’s down.”

“Is it the switchboard again?” I asked.

“Irwin says no,” Dennis replied. “We’ve still got voice phone, you just can’t get online. Probably trouble at the other end. Give it a few minutes.”

“Yeah,” Adam snickered. “Give it a few minutes, and the regular phone will go dead, too.”

“Be quiet.” I left my computer idling and went over to Dennis’s tent, which was blood-red and riddled with fake bullet-holes, and had spray-paint portraits of Lara Croft and Duke Nukem guarding the entrance flap. As usual, Dennis was busy rewriting software code, but he was also fully dressed, which surprised me.

The Manciple brothers were originally from Alaska. Their parents were homesteaders; Dennis and Irwin grew up in a bush settlement on the Yukon River, and were in their teens before they visited a town with more than a hundred people in it. The isolation of their formative years—they went to grade school by radio—had left its mark on them. It wasn’t so much that the brothers had no social graces, Julie Sivik once said, as that they had a different set of social graces than most of the rest of the world. (When I suggested that something similar could be said about me, Julie made a distinction that I’m still not sure I understand: “You’re just strange,” she told me. “The Manciples are odd.”)

Dennis had a thing about clothes. Partly due to the climate where he grew up, and partly because he was fifty pounds overweight, he was always too hot, even in temperatures that would have most people wishing for a parka. He went around underdressed as a matter of course, and whenever he settled someplace for more than a few minutes, he started loosening and then removing the few clothes he had on. It was normal to find him in his tent wearing nothing but underpants and a back brace, but today he had on an actual shirt with buttons and a pair of short pants. And shoes.

“Dennis,” I said, “you’re dressed.” I sniffed the air in the tent, which seemed fresher than usual. “And you bathed.” You could say things like that to Dennis, who never took offense at anything; Irwin you had to be a lot more delicate with.

“Commodore’s orders,” Dennis said, meaning Julie. He called Julie made-up titles like “Commodore,” and “the General,” and occasionally “Bitch Empress,” though that last one didn’t sit well with her. “We have a new employee coming in today. A girl. I’m not supposed to let her see my chest hair for at least the first week.”

“A new employee? Who is she?”

Dennis shrugged. “Just somebody the Jewel met in Seattle last month.”

“Julie didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“Why should she? Are you married or something?”

“No, but...what does this new person do? What’s Julie hiring her for?”

“Beats me,” said Dennis. “I’m still not sure what she hired you for.”

Not only did Dennis never take offense, he never worried about giving it, either. But I didn’t blame him for teasing me about my job description. Officially Julie had hired me as a “creative consultant” to the Reality Factory. It was a position I was uniquely suited for, she said, because I had firsthand experience with what virtual reality was ultimately meant to be: an imaginary universe where different people could meet, interact, and be creative together.

Once I got past the obvious objection—my father had built the house as a means of crowd control, not to express his creativity—I had to admit it sounded intriguing. But it’s hard to be a consultant to a project that is years ahead of its time.

My first virtual experience was particularly disappointing. It was a really awful home video-game called Metropolis of Doom that used a set of cheap stereoscopic goggles and a handheld trigger button. The goggles showed you a bright red 3-D line drawing of what was supposed to be a city. As you inched forward along the city’s main street, riding on an invisible conveyor belt, little flying pyramids meant to be attack jets would zip out from between the “buildings” and fire rockets at you. The object of the game was to shoot the jets down; the goggles could sense movement, and by turning your head you could aim a crosshairs that hung in the center of your field of vision. But the motion sensor was sluggish—you’d turn your head, wait a beat, and then the crosshairs would move—and by the time I shot down my first jet, I had a headache. Then the goggles fogged up.

“I’m sorry,” I told Julie, wiping sweat from my eyebrows as I handed the goggles back to her. “I don’t think I can help you with this.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” Julie said. “This isn’t my prototype. It’s just to give you an idea—”

“It isn’t like what you described—like what I thought you described. And it isn’t anything like the house. The house isn’t real, but it seems real. This, though...it’s not even a good toy.”

“I know it’s not. But the VR system my partners are working on is much better, much more state-of-the-art...” She grew thoughtful: “Seems real, you said. How real?”

“Hmm?”

“You said the house seems real, even though it isn’t. I want to know more about the quality of the experience. When you’re in the house, you still have all five senses, right?”

“Sure. Of course.”

“So it’s like a perfect hallucination.”

I frowned. “Hallucination is the wrong word for it, I think.”

“What’s the right word?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if there is one.”

“What about a dream?” Julie asked. “Is it like dreaming?”

“No. It’s like what I thought you said virtual reality was like: like being wide awake in an imaginary place, with other people. But”—I pointed at the goggles—“it’s nothing like that, so now I’m not sure how to describe it.”

But Julie, not the least bit discouraged, said: “You should let me introduce you to my partners.”

Despite growing up in the bush, the Manciple brothers were no strangers to high technology. Their parents’ homestead was powered by a solar array during the summer months, and there had been a computer in the house as far back as 1975, when Dennis and Irwin’s father had ordered a build-it-yourself Altair kit through the mail. The brothers grew up with the Altair and the series of ever more sophisticated personal computers that came after it, and passed a lot of long winter nights programming—or sometimes, in Irwin’s case, tinkering with the innards of the older machines. Then in 1993, a shareware adventure game called The Stone Ship that the brothers had coauthored (Irwin came up with the story, while Dennis wrote most of the actual code) earned enough money to convince them to turn professional. They left Alaska and came south to seek their fortunes in the software industry, choosing Seattle over Silicon Valley out of fear that California would be too warm.

Julie met them through her job at the physical therapist’s, where Dennis came for help with his back problems. By that point, late 1994, the brothers had been in Seattle for over a year with nothing to show for it. In spite of The Stone Ship’s success, they’d been unable to interest any of the established software houses in their ambitious follow-up project, and having spent most of their money, they were starting to think about quitting and going home. But Julie, who was having her own career difficulties (she and the physical therapist had been dating for a while, and now they weren’t, and she was about to be fired and evicted in the bargain), talked them into founding the Reality Factory instead, taking her on as business manager, chief fund-raiser, and unofficial CEO.

The brothers’ virtual-reality system was called Eidolon. Like Metropolis of Doom, it used a set of 3-D goggles, although, having been custom-designed by Irwin, the Eidolon goggles were more comfortable to wear and didn’t fog up so quickly. There was also a “data glove” that told the Eidolon software what your right hand was doing, whether you were pointing or waving or grabbing.

It was better than Metropolis of Doom. The graphics were full-color, with solid, textured shapes rather than wireframe outlines. Instead of riding on a conveyor belt, you had complete freedom of movement—you could spin around, float up and down, slide backwards and forwards and sideways, all by gesturing with the data glove. And nobody was shooting at you: instead of a war-torn city, the world in the Eidolon goggles was a sort of playroom with toys, like a bouncing ball you could toss or bat around, and a magic mushroom that, if you poked at it, made violets and dandelions sprout up out of the floor.

It still wasn’t anything like the house, though. The graphics were better but still more cartoon-like than real, and though you could see things, you couldn’t really touch them: poking the magic mushroom was like poking air. You couldn’t smell the flowers, or taste the water in the rubber-duck pond. The first time I tried Eidolon, you couldn’t even hear the ball bouncing—the goggles had stereo earphones built in, but Irwin hadn’t got them working yet. And the “free” movement could still be annoyingly sluggish or jerky, especially if you tired out the computer by making it draw too many dandelions.

Also, I wasn’t exactly sure what the point of the whole thing was.

“The point is whatever the end-user wants the point to be,” Julie told me. “That’s the point.”

“Well, but...not that it isn’t neat, and all, but do you really think people will pay money just to play an imaginary game of catch?”

“You don’t get it, Andrew,” Julie said. “Eidolon isn’t the playroom.”

“It isn’t?”

“No. Eidolon is what built the playroom.” She went on to explain that Eidolon was actually a “software engine,” a sort of programming language and interpreter. “The playroom is just a sample application. A demo. But you can use the engine to design any sort of geography you want, for any reason you want. So maybe you’re a real-estate developer who wants to take someone on a walk through a building that only exists as a blueprint; Eidolon will let you do that. Or maybe you do want to play an imaginary game of catch, but using your own laws of physics; Eidolon will let you do that, too.”

“Hmm.” I didn’t say so out loud, but these examples still didn’t sound very interesting. But Julie sensed my lack of enthusiasm, and quickly came up with an application that did interest me.

“Or,” she said, “maybe you’ve been hurt.”

“Hurt? Hurt how?”

“In an accident, say. Let’s suppose you’ve had a spinal injury that leaves you partially paralyzed, with no feeling in your legs. You might be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. But with this”—she tapped the back of the data glove—“you can still get up and dance any time you want to.”

“The engine would let you do that?”

“Sure.” She smiled. “So you see, it’s not just an expensive toy. With the right application, it can be a tool for living a fuller life.”

A tool for living a fuller life...I liked that phrase. “It sounds good,” I said. “But who would actually program that application? I mean—”

“The end-user,” Julie said.

“The person in the wheelchair?”

Julie nodded. “The finished version of the programming interface will be very intuitive, very easy to use. You’ll be able to define and create whole new geographies using just the headset and the glove.”

That got my attention. Inside Andy Gage’s head, only my father was allowed to make changes to the house and the grounds; but here was an opportunity to wield a similar power myself.

“Can you show me how that works?” I went to pick up the goggles and the data glove again, but Julie stopped me: “The finished version, I said. It’s not finished yet.”

“Oh...you mean there’s not even a test version I could try?”

“Nope. Sorry. Dennis is still working on the core Eidolon engine, so for now, applications have to be coded individually. The simplified geography editor—we call it Landscaper—is still a ways down the road yet.”

“How far down the road?” I had a sudden nagging suspicion. “When is Eidolon supposed to be finished?”

“When it’s done,” said Julie.

Every few months Dennis would cobble together a new demo program, showcasing the latest version of the still-unfinished Eidolon engine, as a lure for potential investors. These demos were the closest thing the Reality Factory had to an actual product. They were also my only real chance to play consultant: before Dennis started coding, Julie would sit me down with him and have me offer suggestions about what the demo should include. But these brainstorming sessions never lasted very long, and most of my suggestions were things that Dennis couldn’t possibly implement. “This is not the holodeck on the starship Enterprise!” he would end up shouting at me, his patience exhausted. “I can’t program it to let you smell things!”

So I ended up spending most of my time doing nonconsulting work: helping Irwin assemble and disassemble hardware, entering data strings for Dennis, running errands for Julie, patching the shed roof, and handling other maintenance chores around the Factory—like emptying the Honey Bucket—that Julie and the Manciples couldn’t be bothered with. Generally I kept busy enough to feel I was earning my six-dollar-an-hour salary. But there weren’t that many spare chores, and I couldn’t see what a fifth employee would do.

“Supposedly she knows something about interface design,” Dennis said now, as I continued to question him.

“Interface design? You mean she’s a programmer?”

“The High Commander seems to think so.”

“So she’ll be working with you?”

“Or with you,” said Dennis. “It depends on whether I think she’s a programmer.”

“Does this mean you’re finally going to implement Landscaper?”

“Could be.” Then he thought the question over a little more seriously, and added: “Better be. It’s not like I need help with the engine itself.”

“No, of course not,” Adam chimed in from the pulpit. “He’s only been working on the thing for four years, why would anyone think he needed help?”

“Be quiet.”

Dennis swiveled his chair around to face me. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Comments from the peanut gallery?”

“Just Adam mouthing off.”

“Uh-huh.” Dennis knew about the house, but I’m not sure he ever completely believed in it; whenever he overheard me talking to Adam or my father, he reacted as if I were displaying signs of mental illness.

Penny Driver arrived at the Factory about fifteen minutes later. I’d gone back to my own tent and made a few more unsuccessful attempts to connect to the Internet; I was coming back out to look for Irwin when I saw her.

Penny had let herself in through the shed’s side door. (The shed had a front door, too, a garage-style door big enough to drive a Mack truck through, but the one time we got it open it took us two days to close it again, so now we pretended it was a wall.) She stood just inside the doorway, one hand behind her still holding onto the knob, looking ready to duck out again in a hurry. I guess Julie hadn’t told her what to expect.

“You’re in the right place,” I called to her.

She literally jumped at the sound of my voice: took a little hop off the floor, and let out a sharp squeak. Her free hand came up and pressed itself against her chest in the heart-attack gesture.

“Sorry,” I said. I walked up to her slowly, as if she were Jake. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. But this is the Reality Factory, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

I held out my hand, but she didn’t take it. All at once she didn’t seem startled anymore, just puzzled; she stared at me the way you’d stare at a can of beans that you didn’t remember putting in your grocery cart. Not sure what else to do, I stared back.

She was physically a very small person, just over five feet tall, and slight. She wore a faded gray sweater that hung almost to her knees, and a wrinkled pair of blue jeans. Her close-cropped hair was mussed, as if she’d just rolled out of bed after a long sleep, but her eyes were bloodshot and there were dark circles under them.

Suddenly she let go of the doorknob and crossed her arms in front of her. She took three quick strides forward, moving so swiftly that I had to jump aside to get out of her way. Ignoring me, she panned her head around, surveying the length of the shed: taking in the tents, the stained roof planks, the drip buckets, the rusting bits of leftover scrap piled in the far corners, the snaking cables wrapped in waterproof insulation. Her lip curled.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she said. “What a motherfucking shithole.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“You heard her,” said Adam, sounding amused. “What word is giving you trouble, ‘shithole’ or ‘motherfucking’?”

Penny uncrossed her arms. She blinked and turned to me again, seeming freshly alarmed to find me standing right next to her. This time she didn’t jump or squeak; but she stepped back as abruptly as she had come forward. Her back once more to the door, she raised her hand in a timid wave hello.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said back.

“Hello,” said Adam. “Did anybody just see a parade go by?”

Julie appeared from between two tents, with a glum-faced Irwin trailing after her. “Hi, Penny!” she called, adding, with a nod to me: “I see you two have met.”

“Kind of,” I said. It was a morning for peculiar behavior, apparently: as Julie approached us, I could have sworn I saw something funny in her expression—a hint of smugness in her smile, some private amusement in her eyes—but then I shrugged it off, thinking it must have something to do with the fight she’d had with Irwin. Adam might have told me differently, but he was still focused on Penny.

“So,” said Julie, coming to stand beside us, “I guess formal introductions are in order. Andrew Gage, this is Penny Driver. Penny, this is Andrew.”

“Pleased to meet you, Penny,” I said, and once again offered my hand. This time she shook it, though I could see she didn’t want to. I pumped her arm once, gently, and let it go.

“Actually,” said Julie, “she likes to be called Mouse.”

“No she doesn’t,” observed Adam from the pulpit. “Did you see the way she flinched just then? She hates being called Mouse.”

“Adam,” I asked, being careful not to speak the words aloud, “does Julie seem weird to you this morning? She’s got this look on her face, like—”

“Hi, Mouse!” Dennis Manciple’s voice boomed out. He came out of his tent with his top three shirt buttons unbuttoned, drawing an instant scowl from Julie. “Dennis!” she snapped, pinching the lapels of her own blouse together.

Dennis ignored the signal. His chest hair exposed to the world, he marched up to Penny and grabbed her hand so roughly he nearly yanked her off her feet. “Nice to meet you, Mouse!”

“He likes her,” Adam snickered. “He thinks she’s sexy...but she thinks he’s a big fat disgusting pig boy.”

I thought that last bit might be a projection on Adam’s part—although it’s true that as Dennis shook her hand, Penny looked as though she’d stuck her fingers in something nasty. “But what about Julie, Adam?”

“I don’t know,” Adam said. “She’s always a little weird anyway, so it could be nothing. Or maybe she’s got some half-assed idea about getting the two of you together.”

“The two of us—you mean me and Penny? Like boyfriend and girlfriend?”

“Yeah.” More snickering. “‘Like boyfriend and girlfriend.’ That could be it...or maybe she’s seen the parade, too.”

“What parade? What are you talking about?”

“Just pay attention,” said Adam. “You’ll see it.”

Dennis was still shaking Penny’s hand; he seemed prepared to go on shaking it all day. “Enough, already!” Julie said. She stepped between them and flicked her hand impatiently at Dennis’s open shirtfront. “What did I tell you about this?”

“A thousand pardons, O Great One,” said Dennis. He rebuttoned himself, but he took his time doing it.

“Asshole.” Julie turned and flashed an apologetic smile at Penny. “Sorry,” Julie said. “As you can see, we’re pretty informal here—a little too informal, sometimes. This nudist is Dennis Manciple. And Mr. Pouty over there is his brother Irwin.”

Irwin, still standing a good ten paces back from the rest of us, didn’t try to shake Penny’s hand or even nod hello. He was sulking.

“Now that you’ve met everybody,” Julie continued, “why don’t we all go back to the Big Tent and show you the system? You can try out one of our demos to get a better idea of what you’ll be working on.”

“OK,” Penny agreed. She said it like it was actually the last thing in the world she wanted to do, but she let Julie take her elbow and lead her just the same, with only one last wistful glance back at the door she’d come in by.

The Big Tent, as its name suggested, was the largest tent in the Factory. It was set up in the shed’s south end, oriented diagonally to the shed walls—the only way it would fit between the support pillars. Originally an army mess tent, we had painted it to look like a circus big top (or actually, I had painted it, after Julie and Irwin made a halfhearted start; red and white stripes get boring pretty quickly). It housed the majority of the Factory’s equipment, including a bank of networked computer-graphics workstations that Julie’s uncle had picked up off the street after they’d fallen from the back of a truck.

The Big Tent was as cluttered as my bedroom and as messy as the shed itself had once been. But there were levels of disorder, and as we came in I thought I saw the reason for Julie’s spat with Irwin: overnight, one of the workstations had been gutted, its parts spread out across a worktable. This happened all the time—Irwin was constantly taking one or another of the computers offline, taking it apart and reconfiguring it to squeeze out an extra ounce of performance—but having one of the machines down could cause problems with the rest of the network, especially when we were running a demo. So either Julie had forgotten to tell Irwin she’d be needing the full system today, or, more likely, he hadn’t listened.

The sight of all the hardware in the tent triggered another odd reaction from Penny. She pulled her arm loose from Julie’s grasp, went over to the worktable, and made a very authoritative-sounding observation about the collection of computer parts. I couldn’t really understand what she said—she used the techno-dialect that ex-employees of Bit Warehouse are supposed to be fluent in, but which I’d never learned—but it impressed Irwin enough to bring him partway out of his sulk.

“That’s right,” he told her. “Have you worked with one of these before?”

Instead of answering, Penny examined the other two workstations, the ones that hadn’t been taken apart. She ran her thumb over a rough spot on one computer’s plastic-and-metal shell. “Did you sand off the brand names?” she asked.

“They came that way,” Julie spoke up. “Part of a special deal.”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “Ninety percent off, with no serial numbers...”

“Be quiet.”

Penny was staring at me.

“Oops,” I said. “Sorry, I didn’t mean you.”

“Andrew hears voices in his head,” Dennis explained, smirking. “He’s got family up there.”

“Family...?”

“It’s complicated,” said Julie. She shot a warning glance at Dennis. “Andrew will explain it to you himself, if he feels like it.”

I definitely didn’t feel like it, not just then. “So,” I said, hoping to change the subject, “what demo are we going to run?”

Dennis sat down at a computer terminal and punched a few keys. “What about Dancing Cripples?” he suggested. “You like that one.”

Dancing Cripples was a demo version of the application Julie had dreamed up to pique my interest back when I’d first tried Eidolon—the application that a paraplegic was supposed to be able to program himself, using the headset-and-glove Landscaper interface. Though the interface had not yet materialized, I’d asked Julie about the application itself so many times that she’d finally had Dennis code a demo the hard way—and a representative from the Veterans Administration (we were careful not to call it “Dancing Cripples” in front of him) had liked it enough to give us a five-thousand-dollar research grant.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s do that one.”

“Good,” said Julie. “Andrew, why don’t you be the guy in the wheelchair? We’ll let Penny wear the data suit.”

A data suit was a full-body version of a data glove: a wired Spandex jumpsuit that could track the movement of your legs, torso, arms, and hands (both of them). The Reality Factory had three data suits, each in a different size: one for large adults, one for small adults, and one for kids. Julie grabbed the kid-sized one for Penny.

“You’ll have to take this off, Mouse,” Julie said, tugging at one of the sleeves of Penny’s oversize sweater. Penny looked startled again, and made no move to do as she was told. “Here,” said Julie, “let me help you...” She stepped behind Penny, grabbed the sweater at the waist with both hands and started tugging it upwards.

For just a moment Penny went rigid, resisting. There was an incredibly fast flickering of expressions on her face, as if she couldn’t make up her mind whether to be frightened or outraged or cooperative. I even saw—or thought I saw—a flash of anger so intense that it seemed Penny might turn around and hit Julie for presuming to undress her. But the anger vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and Penny became passive; she let her arms be lifted into the air and let the sweater be lifted over them, and off.

She wasn’t wearing much, underneath. In fact the only article of clothing beneath the sweater was a very skimpy tank top that bared Penny’s shoulders and collarbone, and left no doubt that she didn’t have a bra on. The tank top was bright pink, and had the words FUCK DOLL printed across the front. I must have blushed when I read that—and Penny, seeing me blush, hearing Dennis whistle, crossed her arms over her chest as if we’d caught her naked. Meanwhile Julie, crouched behind Penny and unable to see any of this, tried to get her to step into the legs of the data suit: “I need you to lift your right foot, Mouse...Mouse?”

I went to get the wheelchair I’d be using for my part in the demo. The wheelchair itself was totally ordinary—more army surplus—but the data glove that went with it had been specially programmed to interpret individual finger movements as the movement of whole limbs. After I’d seated myself in the chair and, with Irwin’s help, got the data glove plugged into the network, Dennis punched another key at his terminal that caused a computer-generated mannequin figure to appear on the monitor in front of him. I curled my index finger in the glove, and the mannequin figure raised its left leg, kicking back; I curled my middle finger, and the figure raised its right leg; I tapped my index and middle fingers together against a sensor pad on the wheelchair armrest, and the figure clicked its heels and jumped in the air; I wiggled my thumb and pinky, and the figure waved its arms.

“Looks good,” said Dennis. Next he turned his attention to Penny, who, with much coaxing, had finally let Julie zip her up inside the data suit. This part of the systems check took longer, because checking out the data suit requires that the person wearing it actually stand on one foot, jump up and down, wave his or her arms, etc., and Penny had become extremely self-conscious—but eventually, with still more nudging from Julie, the check was completed successfully.

Now it was time to put on the headsets. As I’ve already mentioned, Irwin had designed these to be comfortable, but they can still be a bit claustrophobic at first, before the power is switched on—like heavy blindfolds with cables attached. As Irwin adjusted the strap on the back of my headset, I could hear Julie crooning, “Relax, Mouse. It’ll only be dark for a second.”

Irwin plugged my headset into the network and turned it on. A 3-D test pattern appeared in front of my eyes. Dennis ran a sound check: an invisible locomotive rumbled past my left ear, then past my right ear, then past both ears at once. I gave Dennis a thumbs-up.

“All right,” said Dennis. “Here we go...” As he tapped out a last sequence on his keyboard, I crooked my index and middle fingers in the data glove, bending them like the legs of a sitting man.

The test pattern dissolved into a first-person view of the Eidolon universe, which in this demo consisted of a giant ballroom with a white-and-black checkerboard floor, ringed by blue marble pillars. The ballroom had no walls or ceiling; the checkerboard floated in a void that started out dull red but would grow brighter, shifting color like a sunrise, as the demo progressed.

I panned my head down and examined my “self”: not my real self but my Eidolon self, a mannequin figure in a cartoon wheelchair. The illusion was surprisingly convincing, and would have been even more so if I hadn’t felt my real legs to be in a slightly different position than those of the mannequin. I made a flicking motion with my index finger; while my real leg stayed put, Eidolon Andrew swung his left foot forward, proving that he wasn’t such a cripple after all.

I looked up and saw Eidolon Penny facing me across the dance floor. Eidolon Penny was taller than real-world Penny: she had thicker arms and legs, a larger frame, and much bigger breasts; her face was a texture-map of some swimsuit model’s face that Dennis had scanned into the computer, with an expression that never changed. But while she might not look like the real Penny, she moved like her: shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, crossing and uncrossing her arms, glancing back over her shoulder as if she expected a monster to materialize behind her at any moment.

The music started. The song was Lyle Lovett’s “The Waltzing Fool,” a slow piano-and-guitar ballad that I really liked even if it was a little sad. As the first strains sounded, I straightened out my index and middle fingers; in the real world I remained seated in the wheelchair, but in the Eidolon universe, Eidolon Andrew stood tall on two good legs. I twisted my hand counterclockwise and swung my index finger to the side; Eidolon Andrew turned halfway around and kicked out at his wheelchair, which shattered, morphing into a flock of doves that flew up into the air and began circling the ballroom, weaving between the marble pillars. I twisted my hand clockwise, curled my thumb in front of my index finger, and dipped my hand forward; Eidolon Andrew turned back towards Eidolon Penny, crossed his left arm in front of his waist, and bowed.

Eidolon Andrew was careful to keep his distance from Eidolon Penny. If I had approached her, there was a subroutine in the demo that would have allowed our two Eidolons to actually join hands and dance together, but unless we simultaneously touched in the real world, we wouldn’t have felt any contact—and embracing someone you can see but not feel is a very disorienting experience, one that I thought would probably freak Penny out completely. So I stayed back, and just air-danced with her: Eidolon Andrew stretched his right arm out to the side, kept his left arm curled in front of him, and swayed in time to the music. Eidolon Penny swayed too, but she wouldn’t raise her arms, and she kept looking up nervously to see what the doves were doing.

Then Dennis’s voice cut in over the headset speakers, saying, “This song is bo-o-oring!” and Lyle Lovett’s soft ballad was replaced in mid-stanza by the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar.” I jerked my head involuntarily, and something in my headset came unplugged. The goggles went dark, even as the earphones kept blasting away.

“Damn it, Dennis!” I said, reaching up to yank my headset off.

Dennis paid no mind to my complaint. He was gaping at Penny, who still had her headset on and was still dancing. Only it wasn’t the same dance anymore.

The self-conscious sway had disappeared. Now Penny’s whole body was in motion, hips, arms, legs, hands, feet, all gyrating to the beat, without a hint of shyness. And the way she moved...well, as Adam later observed, all of a sudden the slogan on her tank top didn’t seem so inappropriate.

Dennis stared, transfixed. Irwin stared too. I stared. The only one of us who didn’t stare at Penny was Julie—and that was because she was staring at me, instead, with that same funny smile on her face. Eventually I noticed this, and when Julie saw that I noticed, she inclined her head in Penny’s direction and raised her eyebrows as if to say: So, what do you think?

“Adam,” I said, “what the hell is going on?”

“Well gee, Andrew, I don’t know,” said Adam, his voice dripping with sarcasm, “but if I didn’t have my head up my ass, I might think Penny was acting like a different person...or maybe like a whole bunch of different people.” Then he broke up laughing, and added: “I just love a parade, don’t you?”

Chapter 4

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