A horrible chill ran through me. “I don’t have the glasses anymore. There’s got to be another way out!”
He shook his head, holding his hand up to stop me. “No, I mean the real-life glasses, not ones you might be wearing in game.”
“That’s what I’m talking about!” I said, the chill growing.
“If you didn’t have the glasses, you wouldn’t be here,” he pointed out.
“Well, I am! Look, no glasses!” I ran my fingers around the eye region of my face. “Feel for yourself—there’s nothing there.”
“I wouldn’t be able to feel them,” he said, his eyes puzzled. “Reach up to your temple. You should feel the arm of the glasses, and follow it back to the hinge.”
“All I have here are temples,” I said, panic joining the chill as I felt the sides of my head. “Don’t tell me there’s no other way out?”
He frowned.
Again.
“This is impossible. You can’t be here without having the glasses on. Look, I’ll show you. I’ll log out and log back on, so you can see. Now watch my hand. I follow the line of the arm to the hinge of the glasses . . .” He put his hand to his head, an odd, confused expression flitting across his face. He tried the other side, the expression turning to one of deep concern.
“Oh, my God! You don’t have them, either, do you? We’re stuck here! Forever! Aaaack!”
Chapter 8
The midnight hour is past,
And the chilly night-air is damp. . . .
—Ibid, Act II
“Amy, you’re being irrational.”
“I’m being irrational?
I
am? I’m not the one who failed to write a back door into the program. I’m not the one who wrote software so devious it traps innocent players in some sort of mental limbo. I’m not the one who created a world of murderous pirates so real that it was almost impossible to tell them from the real thing.”
Corbin glanced down to where I was holding his knife to his crotch. “No, but you are the one threatening to emasculate me if I don’t get you out. I’m doing my best, I assure you. And what do you mean
almost
impossible? Holder and I spent six months researching the history of piracy just so everything was accurate.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said straightening up from where I had been bent over Corbin in order to threaten him with the knife. “You trap us in a form of cyber-hell, and the only emotion you feel is to be insulted by the fact that I could tell reality from a virtual world?”
“If you didn’t know this was a VR game, you’d believe you were back in pirate days; it’s just that realistic,” Corbin argued.
“I’d also probably be insane.”
“Granted, but you’d still think it was real. You can’t imagine the countless man-hours that went into designing the environment and artistic renderings in this game.”
“It’s very nice, but—”
“We digitized videos of hundreds of actors and actresses,” he said. “We used the same technology movie studios use.”
“The people look very real—”
He stood up and spun the chair he’d been pinned to around so I could see it. “Every object in the game, every item of furniture, every building is authentic to the period.”
“Yes—”
“Everything right down to the smell of lime in the privies is realistic,” he all but shouted at me.
“Stop yelling at me,” I yelled. “I saw the privies! They’re disgusting!”
He stopped for a moment, glaring at me before speaking. “Aha! You wouldn’t find them disgusting unless they struck a realistic chord with you. I rest my case.”
I rolled my eyes, setting the knife down on the desk. I didn’t really need it, nor had I meant to threaten his noogies with it; I was just upset on finding my sole hope of getting out of the game turn into a pipe dream. “I’m not going to argue about this. Whether or not the game is realistic—”
“It is,” he said.
“—is of no matter. What does concern me is how you’re going to get us out of here.”
Corbin stopped looking annoyed at me and looked thoughtful instead, half sitting on the edge of the desk. I slumped into the chair upon which I’d formerly been held prisoner, and tried very, very hard not to cry. “What I want to know is how it happened in the first place.”
“Who cares how it happened. I just want out!” I wailed. “Wait—there was a storm when I logged on. Could lightning have something to do with it? I think it hit a power line near me. Maybe that zapped us into the game?”
“Lightning? Oh, the storm.” He looked slightly amused. I wanted to kick him. “I’m afraid you’ve been watching too many sci-fi movies. The lightning couldn’t have done anything to drag us into the game. It was just a coincidence.”
“Then what does it matter how the game trapped us? We’re stuck here. That’s the important thing.”
“If I knew
how
the fail-safes were corrupted, then I could get us back to reality,” he pointed out.
I sniffled pathetically.
“Aw, Amy, don’t cry.” Corbin dropped to his knees before me, resting his hands on my legs, his pretty gray eyes all clouded with concern. “Big pirates don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying. I already went through that. Crying is a waste of time. Corbin, what are we going to do? What’s going to happen to us? And what is happening to our bodies? Oh, dear God, I’ve been away from home for five days now. What happens when I have to go to the bathroom?” With each sentence my voice rose higher and higher. I hate being out of control, and the thought of my body sitting in a chair, brainless, alive but not cognizant, soaked in bodily effluences, filled me with a sharp, cutting sense of panic. “What about my daughter, Tara? She’s never been left alone longer than a weekend—oh, my God, she could be in any God-knows-what sort of trouble, not to mention probably panic-stricken over my catatonic body! You’ve got to get me out of here!”
“First of all, calm down,” he said, his hands warm on my legs.
“But I’ve been here for five days—”
“So have I. But it hasn’t really been five days,” he said in a soothing voice, his face filled with compassion. A rogue thought flitted through my mind that any other man would have told me to get a grip, but Corbin was a nice guy, and nice guys don’t like to see people in pain.
“I’ve slept four nights,” I pointed out, ignoring the rogue thought. I could think sweet, romantic things about him later, after I was out of the game.
“You only
think
you’ve slept,” he said in that same reassuring voice. I opened my mouth to tell him I knew the difference between sleeping and not sleeping, but he continued before I could get the words out. “The human mind is remarkably easy to trick, which is why virtual reality works so well.”
I forbore to point out that this program wasn’t what I would call “working well.”
“The VR glasses do more than just flash images at you. A transmitter is built into them that plays on sympathetic brain waves. That’s how you can taste and touch and smell things here—the transmitter sends the data to your brain, interrupts the signals that tell you what your current environment is, and instead tells you that right at this moment, you’re sitting on a ship docked at a tropical island.”
“You’re messing with my brain?” I asked, horrified. “Am I a vegetable now?”
“No, no, nothing like that. The program only interrupts signals that tell you things about your environment. Nothing more. As soon as you take the VR unit off, your brain will recognize the return to reality.”
“All right,” I said. It didn’t sound like it made much sense, but I couldn’t dispute the fact that the world I was in seemed remarkably real. “But what has that got to do with the fact that even now, my daughter is probably calling paramedics to come and revive my catatonic body?”
“The game would be unplayable if it were run in real time. People would lose interest. Ships would take weeks to sail from island to island. No one would have fun. So the software is written to give the appearance of taking place in real time, but in actuality, a day in Buckling Swashes takes about a quarter of an hour in real time, give or take a few minutes, depending on your activity level.”
“A day takes fifteen minutes?” I asked, astounded.
“Yes. It’s like when you dream, and you swear you’ve been dreaming for hours but it’s really just been a few minutes or less—your brain can actually function much faster than you know. We use that fact to condense a day’s activities down to a reasonable amount of time.”
“But . . . I slept,” I said, trying to understand how a day could be compressed down to fifteen minutes and still seem like a full day.
“You
think
you slept. The program plays on the fact that your brain learns certain truisms and expects them to apply until informed otherwise. You see nighttime fall, and your brain tells you that you feel sleepy, so you go to bed and sleep seven or eight hours. But in this world you don’t really—the program tells your brain that you’ve slept, and you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to tackle another adventurous day sailing the Seventh Sea.”
I thought about what he was saying. “You’re absolutely sure?”
“Absolutely. Let’s see, if you have been here for five days, that means you probably logged on around nine p.m.?”
I nodded.
“If your daughter sees you, she’ll just think you’re involved in the game, nothing more. Your body isn’t doing anything odd, just sitting at the computer, pretty much relaxed, as a matter of fact. We coded in some subliminal relaxation commands so people wouldn’t get stiff sitting too long.”
I allowed myself to be mollified. “All right. I won’t worry anymore that my body is doing odd things without me. But as for the rest—you’re saying that even though I know that I’m not here, my brain has been fooled into thinking I am?”
“Yup. Your mind is given a set of circumstances, and based on past experience, it makes judgment calls. All the VR unit does is take advantage of that, and gives you positive feedback that your brain is making the right choices.”
“But if that’s true,” I said slowly, trying to think my way through the strange new world of virtual brain napping, “then I should be able to tell myself that none of this is real, and get out of the game.”
He smiled. “Go ahead and try it.”
I did. I told myself that none of this was real, and that I wasn’t really sitting in a chair on a gently swaying boat, teased by a fragrant salty breeze that slipped in through an open window, adrift in a reproduction of historic Caribbean; no, I was sitting at home in my comfy leather office chair, hooked into a laptop, and probably starting to get stiff from sitting still for an hour.
“Hmm,” I said, looking around the cabin.
Corbin stood up. “Doesn’t work, does it? That’s because of the positive reinforcement the VR unit feeds your brain.”
“I just wasn’t trying hard enough,” I said, annoyed. No one controlled my brain but me! “Now I’ll really focus.”
I marched over to the captain’s bed and made myself comfortable, or as comfortable as I could be in a lotus position. I closed my eyes. I took several deep breaths, allowing my mind to clear itself of all the detritus that it normally stored. I thought of blizzards and snowflakes on white sheets, and gallons and gallons of white paint. Then, when my mind was reasonably focused, I instructed it to ignore the signals coming from the VR unit, and recognize reality.
When I opened my eyes, instead of my beautiful hunter green and cream den, I was staring into the eyes of a deranged pirate.
The pirate smiled. “I’m good, huh?”
“No comment. We’re stuck?”
He sat down on the bed next to me, wrapped one arm around me, and pulled me up close. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“No. You’re poking me.” I squirmed uncomfortably.
“I’m nowhere near poking you, sweetheart, although you only have to say the word and I’ll be happy to fulfill your every wanton desire. Unless it includes another man, a ferret, or grape jelly.”
“I meant, your sword is poking me,” I said, squirming to the side.
“Baby, my sword is all yours . . . oh, that sword. Sorry.” He unbuckled his rapier and laid it on the bed next to him, pulling me back into his side. I thought briefly of objecting to such forward treatment, but decided, upon consideration, that I was due a little comforting. “Now, let me think about how this could have happened, and I’ll see if I can’t find a way to return us to normal life.”
I sent him a quick glare before allowing myself to relax into his side. “You’re awfully cheerful about being stuck in a virtual world.”
He shrugged. “Not much sense in ranting and raving. Besides, what better world is there to be stuck in than this one?”
I let that go without comment. “What about your friend Holder?”
“He’s not logged in right now.”
“How did he get out if we can’t?” I asked.
“I can’t answer that until I know what happened,” he answered, reasonably enough, I had to admit. “But I suspect that he managed to get logged off before whatever it is happened to trap us.”
“Oh. Well, can’t he do something to get us out? Shut down the program or something?”
“Not from within the game. It’s a fail-safe to keep the VR units from overloading. The game can’t shut down until all players are out. Normally we just do a manual log-off and boot people out of the game when we want to shut it down, but with us in here, there’s nothing we can do.”
“Crap. So how do we get a message to Holder?”
“We can’t. Messaging isn’t implemented in this version. It’s on the list for future ones.”
My shoulders slumped. “Maybe if he comes into the game, we can tell him to boot us out and shut down the game?”
Corbin shook his head. “In all probability, when Hold logs on, he’ll be caught in the game just as we are. Thank God the rest of the VR crew is off at a training seminar, so they won’t be trapped here as well.”
“That’s good, but does it help us in any way?”