Death Dream (6 page)

"JACE?" a voice boomed through the stadium loudspeakers. "COME ON OUT OF THERE, JACE. IT'S ME, DAN."

Jace hunched, hands on knees, to watch the play at the plate. Campy tagged the runner out! The inning was over! The fans erupted into wild cheers, throwing a blizzard of straw hats and scorecards out onto the field in celebration.

"COME ON, JACE. COME OUT AND SAY HELLO. I"VE BEEN WAITING FOR DAMNED NEAR AN HOUR."

"Terminate," said Jason Lowrey.

The baseball stadium disappeared. He lifted the visor of his helmet. He was standing alone in the low-ceilinged VR chamber of blank walls, wearing a plastic visored helmet and a pair of metallic gloves, all of them connected by a tangle of hair-thin optical fibers to an assembly of gray electronics boxes mounted on a table beneath the one-way window in the otherwise bare room. The helmet seemed very heavy all of a sudden. He lifted it off and shook out his long, tangled hair. He felt tired, let down, annoyed at having to come back into what people called the real world.

Jason Lowrey was a genius. Everyone knew it, and if anyone doubted it Jace would immediately set him straight. He looked the part and dressed it. Tall and thin to the point of looking gaunt, he always wore faded old blue jeans and tee shirts. And Indian moccasins. A heavy Navaho belt buckle of silver and turquoise clasped a decrepit old leather belt around his thin waist. His sandy-blond hair was unclipped, uncombed, and often unwashed. His pinched face looked emaciated, all angular cheekbones and stubborn jaw and prominent patrician nose, with big yellowed teeth like old ivory tombstones. His narrow eyes were set too close together; it made him look almost cross-eyed. His skin was pasty pale from a lifetime spent first in childhood video parlors and then in front of constantly more sophisticated computers.

Dan waited patiently for Lowrey in the cramped narrow control booth of the simulations lab, his blazer hanging from his arm, his conservatively striped rep tie pulled loose from his collar. The two technicians who had been monitoring Jace's run in the chamber got up and left, mumbling their greetings to the new employee.

"I'll leave you two guys alone," said Gary Chan.

Before Dan could object he too slipped out into the hallway and let the door click shut behind him. Dan got the feeling that Chan was afraid of Jace, or at least fearful that Jace would be pissed about Dan's calling him out of the simulation.

The solid metal door to the simulations chamber opened and Lowrey stepped through. Dan saw the motto on Jace's tee shirt:
Reality is a crutch for the unimaginative
.

For a moment the two men simply stood facing each other. Then Jace burst into a huge smile and flung his skinny arms around Dan's neck.

"You're here! You're here!" he sang, prancing around in the narrow control booth as if he were dancing with Dan.

"I'm here," Dan said, grinning at his partner. "It's really me, not a simulation."

"It's great! Why the hell didn't you call me out earlier? You said you've been waiting a friggin' hour?"

"Well, you were busy and the technicians—"

"They should've called me out of the sim. You coulda come in with me. Those fart-brains!"

Jace brushed past Dan and leaned over one consoles, pecking at its keyboard.

"We're gonna do great things here, Danno. Terrific things. These dumb games are just the beginning."

"That's what I'm here for," said Dan.

"We got a lotta work to do, though," Jace muttered, typing with two lean fingers. "Nothing around here works right. Got the best friggin' equipment money can buy but still it's not doing the job."

His words had an edge to them that Dan did not recall from earlier days. Jace's voice had always been rasping, almost hoarse. He could be nasty, biting. But never with Dan. Now he seemed wired, clanked up.

"What's wrong?" Dan asked.

"Every frigging thing. That's why I told Muncrief I had to have you here. Just like at Dayton: I dream up the programs and you make 'em work. Right? Right!"

Dan shrugged resignedly. Jace's attitude had not changed much in the year since he had last seen him. He was a precocious brat who had never grown up. Working with Jace was like trying to work with Mozart: frustrating, exasperating, and—every now and then—exalting beyond words.

"Come on in," Jace said, jerking a thumb toward the chamber door. "Lemme show you what I've been doing."

"Not now . . ."

"Come on, come on, come on!" Jace tugged at Dan's shirtsleeve like a little boy urging his daddy to buy him candy. "Only a coupla minutes. You gotta see this you gotta!"

"I just spent half an hour playing space pilot."

"Charlie Chan's game? Kid stuff! What'll you see what fun doing here!"

With a mixture of reluctance and anticipation Dan draped his blazer on the back of a chair and took off his tie altogether while Jace paged his technicians over the phone on the console desk top. The two techs showed up. Chan did not. Within minutes Dan was outfitted with a helmet and gloves. He followed Jace through the metal hatch into the simulation chamber.

"I haven't even sat down in my own office yet," he complained.

"We'll just play one inning. You pitch, I'll bat."

"We play against one another?"

"Yep." Jace's grin was smug. "I call 'em conflict games. Nothing like it anywhere. You'll see."

Jace walked over to the far corner of the chamber in long-legged strides. Dan closed the heavy metal door firmly, then started connecting his helmet and gloves to the color coded hair-thin optical fibers that plugged into the electronics. He saw that Jace had already finished his connections and was waiting impatiently for him, arms crossed over his narrow chest. Dan nodded an apology and pulled down the visor of his helmet. Utter darkness. Like being blind.

"Okay you guys," he heard Jace's impatient voice in the helmet earphones. "We're waiting. Make it pronto, Tonto."

Lights flickered before Dan's eyes and swiftly coalesced into a recognizable scene. Dan saw he was in a baseball stadium, three tiers packed with a restlessly murmuring crowd, bright blue sky above. The crowd was flat, lacking detail, but he could hear the bullfrog voice of a vendor hawking peanuts.

He was standing on the pitching mound, wearing a regular baseball uniform, complete down to his spiked shoes. Jace stood in the batter's box, batting left-handed, grinning at him with those big yellow teeth of his from under the bill of an Oakland A's cap. The catcher was flashing signals, the umpire crouching behind him. Dan felt the baseball in his right hand. He looked down at it: real to the tiniest detail, even the signature of the league president. The stitches felt slightly rough in his hand. The ball had the proper weight and solidity. Great stuff, he said to himself.

Jace was waving his bat, waiting for the pitch. He's probably loaded the game in his favor, Dan thought, knowing Jace. He doesn't like to lose. Well, what the hell, Dan thought. It's only a game. Taking a deep breath, Dan swung his arms over his head, kicked his left leg high, and threw as hard as he could.

The crack of the bat sounded like a pistol shot. The ball rifled past Dan's ear, a solid hit into center field. Jace pulled up grinning at first base as the fielders got the ball back to Dan. And another Jace came up to the plate, bat in hand, an identical toothy grin on his long angular face.

After four Jaces had batted, three hits and a long fly ball that resulted in two runs scored, Dan let the ball drop out of his hand.

"That's enough," he called down to Jace.

"Don't you want a turn at bat?"

"At this rate I won't get to bat until Christmas!"

"Okay, okay! You bat, I'll pitch."

Dan envisioned Jace pitching against him, saw himself striking out ignominiously. He felt the slightest tendril of an asthmatic wheeze in his chest, as if somebody had run a sheet of sandpaper along the inside of his lungs.

"I've had enough," he said.

"Come on," Jace called from the batter's box. "We're just getting started."

"I'm having trouble breathing," Dan half-lied. "My damned asthma's starting up." It was an excuse and he hated it but he also knew it always worked.

Jace scowled, narrow-eyed, but said, "Terminate."

Dan lifted his helmet visor. They were standing in the bare chamber again.

"You just don't have the competitive instinct, do you?" Jace said.

Dan shrugged. "You've got enough for both of us." They returned the helmets and gloves back into the control booth.

"You can see what I'm up against," Jace said as he squeezed past the technicians in the narrow booth and opened the door to the hallway outside. "If I get good definition on the players, the background goes flat. Try to sharpen up the background and the players get fuzzy."

Following him, Dan asked, "What're you using?"

"Got a pair of Cray Y-XMPs and a brand new Toshiba Seventy-seven Hundred that's supposed to put the Crays to shame. But I think you gotta talk Japanese to the friggin' Toshiba to get it to do what you want."

"That was a Toshiba I saw in the computer center?"

"They're not in the pit," Jace snapped. "I've got 'em in my lab, out back. I don't share my machines with the rest of the slobs."

"Oh."

"We don't lack for equipment, Danno. It's not like the friggin' Air Force. Muncrief bitches and complains about the cost but he comes through for me. Anything I want, just about. That's how I got you, pal. But he's been getting antsy lately. Keeps moaning about the money."

Dan had worked with Jace for nearly ten years at the Air Force laboratory in Dayton, the quiet guy in the shadow of Jace's brilliance. No one noticed Dan, except their boss, Dr Appleton. Dan had been just another electronics technician, a civilian working for government pay, when Appleton had teamed him with the wildly eccentric Jason Lowrey. Their task: to make flight simulations as realistic as actual combat missions. To train fighter pilots to fly and fight under brutally vivid lifelike conditions—in the safety of a laboratory on the ground.

The answer was virtual reality: simulations that are as utterly lifelike as human ingenuity and high technology can make them.

"I wanna create worlds where you can't tell the difference from reality," Jason Lowrey had proclaimed to anyone who would listen. "I wanna build whole universes of nothing more than electrical impulses fed into your nervous system. I wanna be God!"

Jace didn't look much like God, Dan thought as he followed his old buddy down the corridor to his cubbyhole of an office. Didn't smell much like God, either.

"Jace, when's the last time you took a shower?"

Lowrey interrupted his monologue of problems to look down at Dan. He frowned, then quickly broke into a sheepish grin.

"That's another reason I wanted you here," he said. "You guys were a mother hen to me."

His office was a certified disaster area. It looked as if a tornado had struck a library: papers strewn everywhere. Dan could make out the shape of a small desk and a pair of cheap plastic chairs beneath snowdrifts of loose papers. Bookshelves on every wall stuffed with reports and journals. No decorations of any kind; or if there were, they were buried beneath the papers. One window, which Jace had painted black. Dan saw that Jace must have painted it over himself; the paint was streaked and lumpy, the work of a man who had no time or interest in careful workmanship.

"Lemme tell you, Danno," said Jace as he pushed papers off his desk chair and plopped down on it, "We got the chance here to do great stuff. Really great stuff."

"That's what you told me in Dayton, That's why I came down here."

"As if he hadn't heard Dan, Jace went on. "Muncrief's got the kind of vision I need, pal. Thinks big. We're gonna put Disney out of business, you watch."

Dan grinned at his partner and tossed his rumpled blazer onto one of the paper piles. "Good. Maybe I can work the glitches out of my symphony orchestra program."

"The conflict games are the quantum leap, Danno," Jace rattled on as if he had not heard Dan. "Get two people to share a simulation, share a world together. This baseball stuff is just the beginning, pal. Just the beginning."

"I'd still like to develop the symphony orchestra program," Dan said, raising his voice slightly.

Jace glared at him. "Don't start that again! Let me do the creative stuff; you handle the details."

"I can do it on my own time," Dan said. "It won't get in the way."

But Jace was already off on another tangent. "Two people sharing the same dream, that's gonna be powerful, man. You can fight duels, settle court cases—and sex! Better than real life! Better than anything you ever imagined!"

Same old Jace
, thought Dan.
His mind races ahead of everybody else and he leaves me to make his ideas work.
But inwardly he was grinning with anticipation.

"Hey," he said, interrupting Jace's monologue. "Why don't you come over for dinner?"

"Huh?" Jace blinked at him like a man suddenly awakened from a nap. "When?"

"Tonight. Now."

Jace had been such a frequent dinner guest back in Dayton that Susan had called him "my oldest child."

"Uh . . . I don't know . . ." Jace hesitated.

"Come on. Sue hasn't seen you in more than a year. And you haven't seen Phil yet, have you? And Angie! You wouldn't recognize her, she's grown so tall."

"Angie," said Jace, his eyes shifting away from Dan's. "Angie. Yeah."

CHAPTER 6

The heavy traffic surprised Dan. Glancing at the dashboard digital clock, he complained to Jace, "Jeez, look at all these cars."

Jace shrugged. "Orlando's a big city, pal."

Then Dan remembered that he had driven to work in the middle of the afternoon. Still, it was damned near eight o'clock and the broad, palm-lined avenues were choked with cars inching along from one stop light to the next. He saw a highway overpass where the traffic was zooming by at a good clip, but there were huge semi-trailer rigs roaring by up there, spurting black diesel smoke and running up the back of anyone doing less than seventy.

"Does the highway go past Pine Lake Gardens?" he asked Jace.