Terminal Connection (24 page)

S
teve stepped through the portal into the Children’s Hospital, an open room suspended in the sky just above the cloud line. The floor, walls, and ceiling were plain and white. All the surfaces were smooth with no distracting pictures, fixtures, rugs, or furniture. Still, the architecture was striking.

The room was shaped like a five-pointed star and had a sunken floor in its center. Full-length windows made up the room’s walls, blending it into its heavenly backdrop. The ceiling was vaulted and domed, and although there were no light fixtures anywhere in the room, it was bathed evenly with a diffused white light.

Steve levitated several feet above the floor. He swam toward the floor but stayed in place.

“Don’t be alarmed,” a voice said. “If you want to move, simply say where you want to go, or point and tell the computer how far you want to travel.”

Steve looked around and did not see anyone. “Are you the automated attendant?”

“Yes.” A woman materialized, levitating in front of him. Unlike Jan, she had a full feminine frame, which sat crossed legged while suspended above the floor. Deep blue eyes and sandy blond hair complemented her inviting smile. Her manner was enticing, flirtatious, and it caused Steve’s distant corporeal body to blush a little.

“I’m Jennifer. I’ll familiarize you with this environment for the press conference.” She took his hand and pointed to the center of the room saying, “Computer, thirty feet please.” They moved to a position a few feet above the floor in the center of the room.

“Why can’t we just walk?” Steve asked.

She smiled. “It’s for the children, of course. Remember, some of them have been disabled from birth. They are not accustomed to moving their legs or arms.”

“But no other site on the Internet allows you to move like this. Doesn’t this limit them to just this site?”

Jennifer touched his hand. “Yes, you’re correct; but Steve, there’s another hurdle these children have to overcome that you’re forgetting. Walking requires both the legs and the brain. The brain directs and controls what the legs do. The Nexus Transporter replaces their legs with virtual ones, but it cannot replace the region of their brains that controls walking. Just like the nervous system, the Nexus depends on the brain to direct and control their movements within VR, responding to the signals sent to and from the brain.

“Most of these children have either forgotten, or never learned how to walk. The area of the brain that controls walking is just as disabled as their bodies. This region needs to be retrained; they need to learn how to walk again, or perhaps for the first time. So, they often are just as disabled in VR using the Nexus Transporter as they are in reality using their own legs. Even in this virtual hospital they need assistance in moving around.”

“Oh.” Back in reality, Steve blushed.

Jennifer laughed. “It’s not as bad as it sounds. In fact, it’s the only reason why a virtual hospital works. The Nexus Healer solved the physical problem by replacing the function of the spinal cord, but it cannot train their brains. The Nexus Transporter enables them to relearn how to walk. The children can now learn to walk from their own homes using their own VR gear. They do not have to visit an actual hospital. You cannot begin to imagine what hope the Nexus Healer and the Nexus Transporter have given these children. We’ve been able to reach out and touch so many lives, thanks to you.”

Jennifer’s sincerity moved him.

“Pretty lifelike, huh, Steve?” Jamie said.

Steve turned abruptly.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. I thought you’d be walking through your outline by now.”

“Interesting choice of words,” Jennifer said.

Jamie cringed. “Sorry. Let me start again. I’m Allison’s mom, Jamie Hwang.” She extended her hand.

Steve shook it.

“My daughter said you had something for me?”

Steve nodded, handing her a VR clip. “When I tell you to, I want you to broadcast this.”

“What is it?”

“A Nexus recall announcement.”

The recall would be played around the world. She understood this was her big break.

“I don’t know what to say,” she stammered.

He smiled. “Thank you is fine.”

She hugged him. “Thanks.”

Steve spent the remaining half hour before the conference reviewing the outline. As the time drew near, he moved into position, levitating behind a podium at the base of a star point. He faced the center of the room. Abruptly, Steve and the podium were bathed in a bright pool of light. Steve put the speech on a heads-up display, the words levitating two feet in front of him. Only he saw it. The speech would be fixed there, displaying two lines at a time, scrolling forward as he read, allowing him to make roaming eye contact. The audience grew as more and more people stepped through portals and joined the levitating crowd.

Steve sighed and glanced at the time: 12 p.m.

He felt a hand on his shoulder. Jennifer had reappeared.

“Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. Just be yourself. That’s all they are looking for.” She turned to the audience. “Welcome to the Virtual Children’s Hospital. It is good to see so many supporters of the hospital assembled here today. Your hard work and financial support have helped create a miracle.

“When the Children’s Hospital was founded two years ago, it had a goal: to ease the transition of disabled children into their new lifestyles. Today that vision has changed for the better, thanks to the Nexus Healer. Now, I’d like to introduce Steve Donovan, CEO of Nexus Corporation.”

The room broke out into applause.

“Thank you,” Steve said. He repeated these words several times before the applause died down.

“Good afternoon. It is a great pleasure to be here for the official Nexus Healer announcement. The VR industry is the most exciting industry in the world today. By connecting people together in virtual worlds over the Internet, we are changing the way people do business, the way people learn, and even the way that they entertain themselves. People are no longer limited to the reality into which they were born. Now, people can explore new perspectives, even those that don’t exist in reality. They can live out their dreams in VR.

“VR is a fast-moving industry, faster than any other. Keeping up with these advances does not come cheap. It requires a huge investment from the entire industry. It’s part of the reason you see Nexus Corporation expanding its research and development investment fifty percent each year. We see incredible opportunities here and we’re investing in those areas.

“The marketplace has validated our direction. This was certainly true for the introduction of the Nexus Transporter. It was very exciting, and the success of this product around the Internet has been really quite phenomenal. It laid the foundation for a series of advances in user interface technology. At the heart of this revolution was the effectuater. The effectuater enabled, for the first time, true thought control.”

Abruptly, the whine of a portal broke his concentration. Steve stumbled on his words. In the back of the room, he saw a figure step out. He saw only a silhouette, but it made his skin crawl. Could it be him? It couldn’t be. The lighting in the room was playing tricks on his mind. Steve realized the crowd was waiting.

“Uh, the effectuater … the effectuater is the so called
brain interface
that revolutionized VR. With it, we are no longer tied to reality at all. Before the Nexus Transporter, we were limited to VR devices that fed our senses and captured our muscle movements. Today the Nexus Transporter bypasses the senses and muscles altogether and speaks directly to the brain. It allows quicker and more real images, sounds, and movement. It has enabled the addition of the elusive senses of smell and taste while tremendously enhancing the sense of gravity. The Nexus Transporter, to put it simply, is the next step in the human-machine interface.”

“We developed a dream that went beyond the Internet, beyond the virtual realm. The
brain interface
solves a real-world problem. Across the globe, over five million people suffer from spinal cord injuries. Their minds and bodies are willing, yet the two cannot communicate, until now.

The room erupted into applause again. Steve looked back to where the figure had been, but it was gone. The applause died down. Steve returned to the speech.

“The Nexus Healer is able to create a bridge between the mind and body. It allows people to attain a degree of freedom they have either lost or never had—mobility. Here at the Children’s Hospital we have pioneered this technique. The path to recovery is not easy, and the final work with the Nexus Healer must be done outside of VR. I would like to welcome our first pioneer, Sarah Applegate. She’s the first of a new generation of recovered quadriplegics.”

Steve’s floodlight dimmed and reappeared in the star point next to him. It presented a three-dimensional bubble, a window into the real world. Inside this sphere was the image of a ten-year-old girl standing in the center of a playroom, wearing a thick headband and neck bracelet, which was the Nexus Healer. A nurse was waiting attentively a few feet to one side of her.

Sarah walked forward with the nurse monitoring her movements but providing no assistance. The crowd erupted into applause again. As it died down, Steve turned to face Sarah. “Sarah, tell us about your recovery.”

“It wasn’t easy. After the accident, I felt nothing below my chest. I relearned not only how to walk …”

Movement in the audience distracted Steve.
There!
In the back row, he saw the familiar shape again, but he could not be sure. He had to be sure. The script scrolling in front of him obscured his view. Then Steve realized the scrolling had stopped. He turned back to Sarah. She had finished answering his question.

Steve continued down the script, asking questions in turn, but he kept an eye on the stranger levitating in the back row. The conference concluded shortly and the room broke out into a standing ovation. Even with the script gone, Steve still could not see the figure clearly through the audience. After a minute the applause died. Portals opened and a few people left. Others raised their hands.

“Excuse me for a moment.” Steve slipped out the phaser and pointed at the stranger. “One hundred feet,” he said, and the computer sent him racing through the crowd. He stopped. Steve couldn’t believe it. “You!”

Syzygy turned and regarded him dispassionately with his stoic green eyes. The ten or so remaining guests all turned to see the cause of the commotion. A sardonic smile played on Syzygy’s face.

Click.

“Oh god!” Steve knew that sound. “Everyone get out of here!”

Syzygy’s form shifted, turning to fluid.

“Ten feet up!” Steve shouted, rising straight up.

Steve looked down. Syzygy had jumped, stopping under him. His form changed briefly into a pod and then back. Syzygy glanced around left to right. No one had left. The crowd backed away from Syzygy as he scanned their faces. He was looking for him.

Steve took aim with his phaser.

Syzygy looked up.

Instantly, Steve was trapped in a fleshy cocoon, his arms pinned to his side. The walls of red muscle rolled over him as he struggled. His sense of balance went first. He was falling. Next, hot lines of fire etched their way up his arms from his hands as his vision exploded into a kaleidoscope of color. Steve groaned, feeling his stomach lurch in his distant corporeal body.

Jamie ran toward the pod. “Stop! Let him go. Tell us what you want!” The pod shifted.

Steve struggled.

Jamie stopped.
What am I doing? I could be next.

A voice came from the pod. “We want only what is ours. Tianya Haijiao.”

Fighting fear and panic, her reporter instincts took over. “What?” she asked.

The pod’s shade darkened, turning almost black. “No, who. Tianya Haijiao is who we are—the end of heaven, corner of the sea. True words etched into the living stone on Hainan’s southern most beaches. The stone marked the end of China… that is, until now.”

“I don’t understand,” Jamie said.

The pod shifted, flowing over Steve’s form. “Now we mark the end of China, the confines of her reign. In VR we are boundless; there are no borders. And we are here.

“China no longer ends at Hainan but extends west to Taiwan and south to the Spratly Islands. It is our destiny! It is our
haiyang guotu guan
. The South China Sea is China’s backyard and we’re kicking ASEAN out.”

A part of the pod extended out, broadening, forming a VR mockup of the Nexus. “You talk to me through this, see?”

She nodded.

The mockup flowed back into the pod. “There’s a bug—one that kills. We could kill you now, you know?”

She stiffened.

“Relax, we haven’t, have we? You see, we don’t need to. Don’t want to. The others died to get your attention. We need you to write our story.”

“But who are you?”

“We told you. Tianya Haijiao.”

“Are you terrorists?”

“No, revolutionaries.”

“That’s fine. I’ll print your story, but let him go!”

“Sorry, we have plans for VR man.”

Inside the pod, Steve struggled. He still held the phaser. Using all his strength, he fought the nausea and pain, as he pushed with his left hand, angling the weapon away from his body.

He pressed the button once. Syzygy’s body receded and froze into its native human form. The link had been severed and all that remained was Syzygy’s still image.

Steve collapsed on the floor.

Jamie ran to him.

He saw something out of the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw Vinnie approach.

“Where’d … you … come from?”

Vinnie shrugged.

“Were you here the whole time?” Jamie asked.

Vinnie nodded.

“Why didn’t you step in earlier?” she asked, helping Steve up.

Vinnie ignored her. “We got them this time, Steve. His Nexus GPS gave us their location. We’re going in.”