Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

“How’s that feel?” the VR tech asked.

“Hmm? Oh, ah, fine, I guess,” Larry said. Actually, the straps were rather tight, but minor things like that didn’t seem to matter just now. They wanted him to die again, and no one seemed to think that was asking a lot.

But even if they had understood his terror, they would have strapped him into the TeleOperator control system all the same. Even a chance of cracking open the Lunar Wheel’s Heritage Memory could easily be worth a life or two—even if the lives in question were his and Lucian’s.

“So was he a friend of yours?” the tech asked.

“Hmm? What?” Larry said.

“Lucian Dreyfuss.”

“Oh, I knew him all right.”

“So you were friends.”

“No,” Larry said, looking straight ahead, determined not to look at the tech. “We weren’t friends. I never much liked him. And he blamed me for… for well, what happened.”

“Oh,” the tech said. “Sorry. I didn’t—”

“It’s okay,” Larry said. Now he turned to look at the man, and forced himself to smile. “It was a while ago. I’ve gotten over it.” Now there was a lie. The Abduction, the disaster in the Rabbit Hole, pushing the button that killed Pluto and saved the rest of the Solar System. He was nowhere near over those things. There were days he had hopes of getting past those memories—but this was no such day.

“Oh. Well, um… ah, hold still now while I attach the electrodes,” the tech said, clearly embarrassed.

But Larry was only vaguely aware that the tech was still there. Memories. This whole thing revolved around memories. His, Lucian’s, and the Wheel’s. The Wheel’s Heritage Memory, with the sum total not only of its own experience, but that of all its ancestors as well. Find that, and they could read the history of the Charonians.

There was no end to the information, the answers, the discoveries that might be found there—if the Heritage memory had not been destroyed when the Lunar Wheel died, if it were still accessible, if Lucian’s dead mind could show them the way in.

“Okay, VR view-helmet coming down,” the tech said. “You’re going to be in the dark for a second until we get this thing hooked up.”

The tech placed the helmet on Larry’s head and swung the visor down, and Larry’s world went black.

He sat there, waiting in the dark, wishing it wouldn’t happen at all, wishing it would hurry up and be over with.

Dream on. If Larry was sure of one thing, it was that this was going to be a long haul.

Finally, after some space of time that might have been a minute or an hour, it began. The exoskeleton came alive, a tiny thrill of motion quivering through it as the power came on. The view-helmet visors lit up, a miniaturized video screen in front of each eye, their views just slightly offset from each other so as to provide realistic binocular vision and depth perception. Larry found himself—or his simulated robot body—in a featureless room, with various rather generic objects and obstacles scattered about. A warm-up room.

Marcia MacDougal’s voice came over the helmet’s earphones.

“All right, Larry. We’re all set here in control. Try out the suit for a few minutes, and then let’s see if you can get Lucian’s attention.”

“Okay,” Larry said, “but bear with me for a few minutes. It’s, ah, been a while since I did this. I’m probably very rusty.”

“That’s all right, love,” Selby said in some sort of attempt at an encouraging tone of voice. “Once you learn, you never forget. Just like riding a bicycle.”

“That’s good to know,” Larry said. “But I’ve never ridden a bicycle.”

Larry stood up, and the exoskeleton moved with him, smoothly, all but silently. He lifted his left foot, moved it forward, set it down. The feedback system provided him with a slight jolt as his foot came down. He moved his right foot, set it down a bit more gently, and he was walking. His field of view lurched from side to side a bit as he moved. He came to a set of steps in the imaginary warm-up room. He paused at the foot of the stairs, then walked up them as carefully as he could, tottering a bit here and there. There was a wide platform at the top. He turned around and made his way back down the stairs, having a bit more trouble keeping his balance. He got back to ground level without incident, though, then walked over to a pair of pyramid-shaped objects, each with a handle at its apex. The red one was marked “100 kilograms” while the blue one said “300 kilograms.” Larry bent down and moved “his” arm to pick up the red one. The exoskeleton was far stronger than a human being, and Larry was able to pick the weight up easily. The weight might be wholly imaginary, but the computer simulator did a very credible job of giving it a realistic heft. Larry straight-armed the weight, held it out to his side, and let it go. It fell to the ground with a heavy thud, and Larry felt the non-existent floor vibrate beneath his feet. “Very realistic,” he said to the team in the control room.

He turned toward the heavier weight and tried lifting it. At first, he couldn’t budge it. He pulled harder and managed to get it off the ground, though it felt as if he was about to pull his arm out of its socket. “Maybe too realistic,” he said, and set it down.

Larry worked the warm-ups for a minute or two longer, getting the feel of the suit, finding that his old training was coming back to him after all. Someday he would have to learn to ride a bike.

“All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready for it. Link me into Lucian whenever you’re ready.”

“Ah, you don’t want to do a few dry runs first?” Selby asked. “We can put you in the virtual reality sim of the Rabbit Hole without Lucian in it for a while. Let you get used to it first. Beat up on some simulated Charonians for a while?”

“No,” Larry said, his voice a bit sharper than he had intended. “Maybe that makes sense, but to be perfectly honest, I’m more worried about losing my nerve than not being well-rehearsed. This isn’t easy for me.”

“That I can believe,” Selby said. “Stand by. We have to jam the optical and audio signals coming from the Wheel and substitute our own. Might take a minute to get it working.”

“Just give me a heads-up when you’re ready,” Larry said.

“Will do. Selby out.” The line went dead as Selby cut her mike, and Larry moved around the warm-up room a bit more as he waited. He tried a few jumping-jacks and push-ups, just to see what the hardware could do. Very smooth. Very nice work indeed. Intellectually, he knew that he was still right where he had started, in the exoskeleton, not in the imaginary warm-up room he saw through the video screens. He had lifted nothing at all when he had picked up the hundred-kilo weight, and exactly the same amount of nothing when he had strained over the three-hundred-kilo one. The exoskeleton had simply put the appropriate strain on his arm and body to mimic the weights. But there was no point in reminding him that it was not real. Not when the whole point was to make the illusion as believable as possible.

What was taking them so long? You’d think they’d have had the whole thing set up before getting him into the suit. Take it easy , he told himself. This is a complicated lash-up . Any number of things might go wrong or need a last-minute adjustment. Larry knew he was being unreasonable, but he didn’t care. He was scared.

He realized he was pacing nervously, back and forth, up and down around the warm-up room. He drew himself up short, forced himself—or at least his projected self inside the VR simulation—to stand still.

“Larry?” It was Marcia MacDougal’s voice. “Ready when you are.”