James Hogan - Entoverse

Then Gina was standing on a barren, rocky ridge, looking down into a huge crater of molten magma, dull red and turgid, bubbling sullenly below yellow vapor and oily smoke. She could feel the heat on her face, and a choking, sulfurous odor seared her throat. The far rim was invisible through the haze, and behind her a tortured landscape of jagged peaks and bottomless fissures vanished into banks of dark, stormy cloud.

“I can take you where you couldn’t survive physically,” VISAR’s voice said. “Here’s a new world being born. The heat and fumes that you feel are just to give the flavor. In reality you’d be asphyxiated instantly, roasted in seconds, and flattened under two tons of body weight.”

“This doesn’t make sense. Do the Thuriens actually put sensors in places like this? It’s crazy. How many visits does it get in a thousand years?”

“Actually, this is largely simulation-interpolated from data being captured long-range from orbit.”

“Too hot and stuffy,” Gina pronounced.

Then she was in a sea of fantastic, mountain-size sculptures of shining white, rising and curving into delicate pinnacles against a sky of pale azure, fading into pink lower down in every direction. “A wind-carved ocean of frozen methane, not much above absolute zero in temperature,” VISAR said. “Again, interpolated reconstruction by instruments in orbit. Cool enough?”

“Too much. My bones feel cold, looking at it. But you don’t have to use sensor data at all, do you? It could all be pure simulation?”

“Sure-I can make you a world. Any world.”

“Let’s go home, then. How about Scotland? I’ve always wanted to go there but never have. I imagine it with mountains and lochs, and little villages tucked away in glens.”

She was sitting on a hillside by a rocky stream, looking across a valley over the tops of pine trees at green slopes topped by craggy bastions of gray rock. Off to one side, rooftops and a church spire huddled together before an expanse of water. Birds were chirping and insects humming. The air was cool and moist with spray from the stream.

“Is this real?” Gina asked, frowning. It couldn’t be, she told herself. Scotland wasn’t wired into VISAR.

“No,” VISAR answered. “It’s just something I made up-from what you said and what I know about Earth. I told you, I can make any world you want.”

“It’s too modern,” Gina said, studying the offering. “The road down there is built for automobiles. I can see power lines by the houses, and there’s a tractor in a tin shed.” She could feel herself being carried away by the novelty of it all. Perhaps she was feeling a sense of relief in being back among surroundings that she understood. “If we’re getting into fiction, let’s go back a bit and make it more romantic,” she said. “Maybe somewhere around Bonnie Prince Charlie’s time.”

“Those times weren’t really very romantic,” VISAR observed. “Most of the people lived lives ravaged by disease, poverty, ignorance, brutality. Three-quarters of the children died before they were-”

“Oh, shut up, VISAR. This is just a game. Leave that kind of stuff out, and make it the way we like to pretend it was.”

“You mean like this?”

The roadway turned into an unfenced cart track, while the power lines, tractor, communications dishes, and Other signs of the twenty-first century disappeared. The houses changed into simpler affairs, with roofs of thatch and slate, and a steel footbridge crossing a brook below transformed into an arched construction of rough-cut stone. A dog was barking somewhere. As stipulated, everything was neat and pretty.

For a few moments Gina was astounded, even though she should have had a good idea by now of what to expect. She stood up, staring hard and consciously going through all the impressions being reported by her senses. She could feel a pebble under her shoe, and a branch from a bush beside her brushing her arm as she moved. It was uncanny. The sensation of being there was indistinguishable in any way that she could find from the real thing. Her clothes felt unusually heavy and enveloping. She looked down and saw that she was wearing a shawl and an ankle-length skirt of the period.

She was curious again. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t look around?” she asked.

“Go ahead.”

She followed the stream down to a path that joined the cart track. It led to the outskirts of the village. There was a small marketplace with stalls and crude, wooden-shuttered shops displaying meat, vegetables, dairy produce, all plentiful and fresh, fabrics and linen, pottery and pans. And there was a cast of players to complete the scene, correct in character and role: farmers, merchants, tradesmen, housewives; gentry on horseback, a miller with a cartload of sacks, a jolly-faced innkeeper, two Highlanders in kilts, and children, rosy cheeked and well fed, playing around doorways.

All of it crushingly bland, empty, and uninteresting. It came across as a not very imaginative stage set, populated by moving pieces of scenery added to finish the effect. Which, indeed, was what the inhabitants were.

Gina stopped by a gray-haired old man sitting on a doorstep, smoking a pipe. Alongside him was a sleepy-looking, black-and-white collie. “Hello,” she said.

“Aye.”

“It’s a fine day.”

“‘Tis an’ all.”

“This looks like a nice place.”

“It’s no’ sa bad.”

“I’m not from around here.”

“I can see that.”

Gina stared at him. His gray eyes twinkled back at her with good-humored, imbecilic indifference as he continued puffing his pipe. Her frustration turned to exasperation. “I’m from three hundred years in the future,” she said.

“We dinna get vera many o’ those around here.”

“VISAR, this isn’t going to work,” Gina flared. “These are just dummies. Don’t they know anything? Don’t they have anything to say?”

“What do you want them to say?”

“Use your imagination.”

“It’s your imagination that matters.”

“Well, can’t you figure it out from whatever you see in my head?” Gina demanded.

“I’m not permitted to,” VISAR reminded her.

“Okay, then, I’m permitting you. Go by whatever you find. Don’t take any notice of the things we humans fabricate to fool ourselves.”

This time the transition was not quite instantaneous.

There was music, muted to a background level. Gina found herself clad in a plain but gracious, classically styled gown. It felt deliciously light and sheer. She was standing among others in a reception room of a large house. It was a solid, mature house, dignified but not pretentious, with high, paneled rooms, lofty gables, and intricately molded ceilings, and it stood by the sea. Across the hall was her library, and off the landing at the top of the curving stairway, the office where she worked, with its picture window framing a rocky shoreline. How she knew these things, she wasn’t sure. But she smiled inwardly and gave VISAR full marks. Yes, it was a kind of life that she had sometimes conjured up in her daydreams.

The room that she and her guests were in had tall windows with heavy drapes, a fine marble fireplace, and furnishings in character. Above the fireplace was a crest, showing arms: unicorn and lion rampant, and a fleur-de-lis surmounted by… a shamrock. The music, she realized, was Celtic harp and flute. But from the dress of those present, and as she knew, somehow, anyway, the times were modern.

The words from one member of a group of people talking nearby caught her ear. “Ah, yes, but it would have been a different thing if this country hadn’t overcome its internal squabbles and resisted the English.” The speaker, a roundly built man with thinning hair and a pugnacious bulldog jaw, stood holding a cigar in one hand and a brandy glass in the other. He spoke with an English accent; his voice had a rasping tone and a hint of a lisp. “Ireland might even have gone solidly over to Rome when Henry VIII went the other way.”