Death Dream Read online

  "I carried a Top Secret clearance most of the time I worked for the Air Force," Dan said, barely keeping the anger out of his voice. "I know how to keep my mouth shut."

  "Good," said Muncrief.

  As he walked down the corridor toward the simulations lab, where Jace waited, Dan did not wonder why Muncrief was so afraid of the media. His mind kept echoing Muncrief's words, I hired you to keep Jace happy. He hired me because I'm cheaper than a supercomputer. I'm cheaper than buying new hardware.

  "No more hardware," Dan answered Jace, who was still slanted rigidly across the wooden chair. "I thought he'd have a stroke right there in his office, he got so worked up."

  "Maybe he'd leave us enough in his will to buy the extra machine."

  Dan grinned, despite himself. "Intel's working on a teraflop machine," he mused.

  "Yeah, the Paragon XP/T," Jace muttered. "Probably cost a mint and have more bugs in it than Guatemala."

  "It's not ready yet, anyway," said Dan.

  Jace opened both eyes and lifted his chin a little.

  "Muncrief must be really strapped for cash. He's always bought me whatever I asked for."

  "Like me," Dan said, repeating silently that he was not worth as much as a new machine.

  Jace ignored the thrust. "You're just gonna have to come up with something brilliant, Danno."

  "Hey, you're the genius. I'm just a glorified technician."

  It was a standing joke between them, sometimes a bitter joke. Jace took all the credit for their work and Dan stayed in the background, telling himself that Jace could not get along without him. But he knew that it was a lie; Jace did not need him. He might have found his life a little easier with Dan around, but if Dan disappeared off the face of the earth Jace would barely notice he was gone. Dan had been surprised and hurt when Jace had left him behind in Dayton; his comfortable view of their partnership and his own worth had crumbled. His work deteriorated; he was hell to live with and he knew it. Dr Appleton tried to straighten him out; Susan tried to be understanding and supportive. But then Jace had phoned and asked Dan to come to Florida with him and Dan's world bloomed into spring.

  Until he realized that he would be leaving Dr Appleton, the man who had given him his chance, his career. The man who had been better than a father to him.

  "I'll be able to develop VR systems for teaching," Dan had said to Appleton. "Medical systems for surgery, systems for operating spacecraft remotely—all the things we've dreamed about."

  Appleton had nodded understandingly. "You might as well go with Jace, Dan. You haven't been much good to us or yourself since he went away."

  Dan straddled the plastic chair backwards and leaned his chin on his forearms. "Why don't we just let the background details fuzz out? We can make the individual batter stand out when you're in the field, and the infielders and the pitcher when you're at bat. The details of the stadium and the crowd don't matter that much, do they?"

  "The hell they don't!" Jace sat up in his chair, both eyes snapped fully open.

  "But—"

  "This is supposed to be an experience, buster. A full friggin' three-dimensional experience with sight and sound and feeling. The background is important. Vital. I don't want the user to think he's in some friggin' video arcade! I want him to be there! Yankee Stadium or Wrigley Field or whatever, he's got to be there with full detailed sights and sounds. Even smells."

  "The smells are easy!" Dan said. "We can just pipe some vapor into the VR chamber."

  "That's cheating."

  "But it would work."

  "Yeah. Maybe. It's the friggin' visual details we've gotta sharpen up. We can't go brute force if Muncrief won't spring for another Toshiba."

  "It would make the price of the game a lot higher than Cyber World wants it to be, that's for sure."

  "So we've gotta go smart instead of brute force. And we gotta do it pronto, Tonto. How can we get more detail without more computer power?"

  Dan puffed out a breath. "Good question."

  Jace went back to his rigid posture."

  "What is this, yoga or something?" Dan asked. "I never saw you do this before."

  "Shut up and lemme think." Jace closed his eyes and folded his arms across his scrawny chest.

  With a shake of his head, Dan got up from his chair and started pacing the length of the lab again. There's got to be some way to put more of our existing power into the visual details, he told himself. Without sacrificing the background details. Got to be.

  But another part of his mind argued, You can't get something for nothing. If you put more MIPS into the close-up details you're going to have to take bytes away from something else. That's all there is to it.

  Dan started to agree with himself, but suddenly a new thought struck him. The persistence of vision. He had read the phrase somewhere, something about the earliest attempts to make motion pictures, a century or more ago.

  The persistence of vision. What is there—

  The phone rang.

  Jake's chair was two feet from the desk where the phone sat, but he remained fixed in his rigid closed-eyed position.

  Dan hurried toward the desk as the phone rang again. It was starting its third ring when he picked it up and snapped, "What is it?"

  Susan's voice answered, "Dan, I'm sorry to bother you at the lab—"

  "What's wrong? What's happened?"

  "Nothing too terrible," Susan said. Her voice sounded steady and almost calm. Dan thought he heard a slight tremor in it. He waited for her to continue.

  "I'm at the school. Angie's had a fainting spell. The doctor thinks it was just from excitement. She was using one of the VR games when it happened and she just seems to have screamed and fainted but there was nothing physically wrong and she seems okay now."

  Dan thought that if Susan really believed Angie was okay she wouldn't have called him.

  "Are you taking her home?" he asked.

  "Yes. Mrs. O'Connell and the doctor both think it's best to take her home and let her rest for the remainder of the day."

  "Mrs. O'Connell?"

  "Eleanor O'Connell. Angie's teacher."

  "Oh."

  "I'm going to drive her home now."

  "I'll come right home. Is Angie really okay? Can she talk on the phone?"

  "You can talk to her when you get home."

  "Yeah. Sure. Okay, I'm on my way."

  He hung up the phone and found that Jace was sitting up. Peering narrow-eyed at him.

  "What's wrong?" Jace asked.

  "Angie fainted at school."

  "Fainted?"

  "While she was in one of the VR games."

  Jake's face contorted into a frown. "How can she faint in a VR game? It doesn't make sense."

  With a shake of his head, Dan reached for his jacket. "I'm finding out that twelve-year-old girls don't make sense very often."

  "I told you not to have kids!" Jace called out after him as he headed down the corridor for the back parking lot, his jacket flung over his shoulder.

  Vickie Kessel was on the telephone, promising the principal of Pine Lake Middle School that she would send a technician to check out the VR equipment that ParaReality had installed in the classrooms. A student had fainted while using the equipment and the principal insisted on a thorough check.

  "Of course," Vickie soothed. "I'll have a team over there in less than an hour and they'll work all night, if they have to. We want that equipment to operate properly just as much as you do."

  As she hung up the phone she saw Jace storm past the open door of her office, his lantern-jawed face set into an angry grimace. There could only be one person the company's resident genius was headed for. Curious, Vickie got up from her chair and headed for the corridor.

  Sure enough, Jace ducked through the doorway to Kyle Muncrief's office and slammed the door behind him. She heard Jace's voice, but it was too muffled for her to make out the words. Then Kyle said something, loud and impatient.

  Glancing both ways along
the corridor to make sure that she was alone, Vickie tiptoed to Muncrief's video conference room and closed its door softly. Through the door that connected to Kyle's office she could hear the two men arguing. She went to the door and pressed her ear against it.

  "What did you do?" Jace's voice.

  "I just manipulated the game a little. That's all."

  "You went too friggin' far!"

  "Nonsense."

  "Don't bullshit me, man. She's just a kid!"

  "I didn't hurt her. How could I possibly hurt her?"

  "She passed out, for chrissakes! You musta scared the crap outta her."

  "We needed to get her reaction, didn't we?" Muncrief said, his voice high, defensive. "Okay, so we got it."

  "Not so friggin' soon! She's just a kid. You shoulda worked up to it one step at a time."

  "I didn't think it would hit her so hard. I don't want to hurt her, that's the last thing I want."

  "She's just a kid," Jace repeated.

  "Look, it's over and done with. She'll be okay and we've got the reaction we wanted. Right here on the laser disc."

  "I oughtta quit," Jace said, sounding furious. "I should never have let you talk me into this. It's crazy. He's my best friend, for chrissakes."

  "He'll never know. Unless you tell him."

  "Why the hell did you hafta pick his daughter? There must be twenty kids in the friggin' class!"

  "I didn't want it to be this way." Muncrief's voice turned almost desperate, pleading. "I need her. She's the one I need."

  "I oughtta just walk out that friggin' door and never come back."

  "You can't do that! You'll never find another company that'll give you a free hand to develop what you like, somebody who'll go to the edge of chapter eleven to buy you all that fancy hardware and get you the assistants that you want. You know that."

  "You shouldn't have scared her so bad." Jace's voice was so low that Vickie barely could hear it through the door.

  "I didn't mean to scare her. It won't happen again, I swear," Muncrief said, smoothly reasonable. "We needed her reaction and now we've got it. I'll make it up to her. Now I can be nice to her."

  Their voices dropped lower and Vickie heard nothing more. She waited in the conference room, her thoughts whirling. They were talking about the student who fainted.

  Kyle's interfering with the VR games at the school. She realized that the girl they were talking about must be Dan Santorini's daughter. That's not smart, Vickie said to herself. Definitely not smart.

  When Dan came through the breezeway door into the kitchen he could hear the TV: some stupid kids' cartoon show, from the sound of it. There was Angie in the living room, sitting on the sofa with her bare feet tucked up under her, the remote control grasped in her right hand, staring rigidly at the screen but otherwise looking completely normal. Susan must be in the baby's room.

  Angie seemed transfixed by the cartoons, seeing or hearing nothing else.

  "Hi, Angel," Dan said as brightly as he could manage. "How are you?"

  She glanced up at him, then swiftly returned her gaze to the TV. "Okay I guess."

  Dan tossed his jacket onto one of the armchairs, thinking that their Dayton furniture looked dull and heavy and totally out of place in this Florida house.

  "Where's Mom?" he asked.

  Angela shrugged.

  Not quite knowing what to do, Dan went back toward the bedrooms. Sure enough, Susan was standing in the doorway of the baby's room, watching little Philip sleeping in his crib.

  "I thought I heard him wheeze," she whispered.

  Dan stared hard at the baby. He had spent many painful nights in Dayton helplessly watching his son struggling to breathe, his tiny shoulders hunched, his frail little chest heaving. Dan knew what the baby was going through. He knew what it was like when you couldn't lift your chest to get air into your lungs. Watching Phil suffer made him feel worse than having an asthma attack himself.

  "He looks okay to me," he whispered back.

  "I had to take him with me to the school. I thought maybe it bothered his breathing."

  Nearly a month we've been in this heat and she still thinks like we're in Ohio in the middle of the winter, Dan groused to himself. "He's okay," he said.

  "Yes, I think he is," Susan said with some relief.

  "What happened to Angie?"

  Susan's face was tight with worry. "Her teacher called me and said she had passed out while she was in one of the VR booths."

  "Fainted."

  "Eleanor said she heard Angie scream and by the time she opened the booth door Angie had fallen off the bench and was on the floor, unconscious."

  "Electric shock?" Dan wondered aloud. Could there have been a short in the circuitry?

  "The school doctor didn't find any physical signs of anything."

  "I'll tell Kyle to send a technician over to check that—"

  "It's already been done. Eleanor got the principal to call Vickie Kessel before I left the school with Angie."

  "Eleanor?"

  "Mrs. O'Connell," Susan said, with just an edge of impatience in her voice. "Angie's teacher. You've met her."

  "Oh. Yeah."

  "They couldn't find anything physically wrong with Angie. It must have been something in the VR game she was playing."

  "What's she doing playing a game in school?" Dan asked.

  Susan huffed, "I wish you'd paid more attention at the PTA meeting. They allow the students to play games if they finish their lessons ahead of schedule."

  "Oh."

  "Angie did very well in her chemistry lesson, so she was allowed to play 'Neptune's Kingdom'—which is really a biology/ecology lesson, not just a game."

  "Yeah, I remember now."

  He turned away from his wife, who looked as if she wanted to scream rather than whisper. "I'll go talk to her," Dan muttered.

  Back in the living room he sat beside his daughter on the sofa and said as cheerfully as he could, "So you had some excitement in school, huh?"

  Angie kept her eyes on the TV screen. Phil Donahue held a microphone in one hand and was pointing to someone off-camera with the other.

  Dan picked the remote control from the end table. "Do you mind if we shut this off and talk for a while, Angel?"

  Angela nodded glumly.

  Clicking off the TV, Dan asked, "What happened to you this afternoon, honey?"

  "I don't know," Angela said.

  "You fainted."

  "Uh-huh."

  Susan came into the living room and sat on the armchair facing the sofa, looking drawn with anxiety.

  "Can you tell me about it? You were playing a VR game, weren't you?"

  "Uh-huh."

  "Which one? Do you remember?"

  " 'Neptune's Kingdom.' It was all about fish and the ocean and stuff like that."

  "Your teacher said you screamed. What made you scream?"

  Angela's lip began to tremble. Her eyes filled with tears.

  "Honey," Dan began, "whatever it is that's bothering you, we—"

  "I saw you dead!" she wailed. "I saw you in a coffin and you were dead!" The child broke into heavy terrified sobs.

  Dan stared at his wife. Susan sat open-mouthed, round-eyed with stunned surprise. Angela cried as if her world had come to an end and buried her face against her father's chest.

  "But that's silly, Angel," Dan said as soothingly as he knew how. He wrapped his arms around her. "I'm not dead, you can see that. I'm right here."

  "But I saw you!" Her voice was muffled, tear-filled. "You were in a coffin and your face was all gray and cold and your arms were folded over your chest and the mermaid princess was crying for you and she was me! The princess was me and her father was you and you were dead!"

  Dan held his daughter tightly and rocked slowly back and forth with her. Susan, white with shock, came from her chair and sat on the floor at his feet. She too enfolded Angela in her arms and laid her head against the child's sob-racked body.

  "It's all right,
baby," she murmured. "It's all right—"

  For several minutes the three of them sat there entangled in Angela's fear and grief. Dan felt increasingly uncomfortable. This is all a mistake, he said to himself. If we can just calm her down enough to talk logically to her I can show her that it's all a mistake.

  Slowly Angela's sobs subsided. Susan whisked a wad of facial tissue out of nowhere and helped the child dry her eyes and blow her reddened nose.

  Dan took her gently under the chin and lifted her face up to look at him. Angela's eyes were swollen from crying.

  "I'm right here, Angel," he said. "See? I'm really alive." He wiggled his eyebrows. She smiled weakly.

  Susan got up from the floor and sat on the sofa next to her daughter. "There must be something wrong with that VR game," she said.

  A flash of anger blazed in Dan's gut. There's nothing wrong with the damned game! he snarled inwardly. But he suppressed his anger immediately.

  To Angela he said, "When you're in that game it seems like you're really in the ocean, doesn't it?"

  "Yes." She sniffled slightly.

  "You know, we make those VR games to feel as realistic as possible. we work very hard to make them seem real."

  Angela said nothing. Susan was giving him a doubtful look.

  Dan went on, "Sometimes they can be so real you imagine things that aren't actually in the game."

  Susan's expression was going from doubt to anger.

  "Like your game today, Angel. It seemed so real to you that you thought you saw yourself as the mermaid princess, didn't you?"

  She sniffled again and nodded.

  "But that's not you in the game, honey. It's just a picture that an artist drew. It's very realistic but it's not a picture of you."

  "It was me," Angela said, her voice barely audible.

  "No, it wasn't," Dan insisted. "It wasn't you, and the mermaid's father wasn't me."

  "But—"

  "It really wasn't, Angel. Believe me."