Original Sin by Richard A. Lovett
Any tool can be put to alternative uses, some of which are ... tempting. 
Eight thousand meters isn't really all that far to run. But it can be a hell of a long way to race. Especially on a tough cross-country course like this one, where mud and hills turn the legs turn to jelly until, by the final circuit, you're running solely on willpower.
I knew. It was my second time through, feeling that I was on the ragged edge of collapse but continuing, nonetheless. I'd run the race of my life the first time. Now, I was doing it again, for Dylan.
I was doing it because nobody had faulted him when at fifteen, he'd coasted to first place in the Wyoming high school championship, then won again and again and again. Instead, they'd rewarded him: running was now paying his way through college.
Last year had been more of the same under the coach who'd preceded me. But no longer. Not if I had anything to say. Today, Dylan couldn't slow down. He would have tried by now and found it didn't work. Hell, at the start of that final lap, I'd tried. But I'd just kept on running, like an out-of-control Energizer bunny: going and going and going.
How much longer? Four minutes? That would be about 700 steps. Seventy would be a tenth of the way. I could imagine keeping up the pace for that much longer--barely. Once, Dylan had admitted to thinking that way in practice, when I pushed him harder than any coach ever had before. Now I could hear him, softly counting. "Cut that out," I said, and he gasped at the unexpected sound in his ear.
I felt as though I should be wheezing from the effort, but my voice was nearly normal. "You're trying to disengage," I said, "but you have to stay in the moment. Welcome the pain. Tell yourself you're going to punish the parts of your body that hurt by make them hurt more. That's what real racing is about."
Ahead, the course slanted into a ravine. It was a good chance for a breather, but we sped downhill, barely on the edge of control, legs and lungs working as hard as ever. At the bottom, a slight stutter-step set us up to leap a narrow creek with dry feet, then we were dashing up the other side.
"The finish is at the top," I said. "Now is when great racers run like there's no tomorrow. None of that half-assed, cruise-in-for-the-cameras crap you've been getting away with all your life. This time it's going to be the real thing."
Not that he had any choice. We were in what, in our present condition, passed for a full sprint, dashing uphill. It felt like running through molasses, but the runner we'd been shadowing for the last 800 meters--the one with the fringe of salt-and-pepper hair surrounding a Friar Tuck bald spot--didn't have what it took and we shot by him like he was standing still.
Now we were at the top, and there was the finish line and the clock. Dylan gasped again, and it took me a moment to figure out why. Then I realized that the time was, for him, far too slow. Minutes too slow. It was a good finishing time for me--a spectacular one, in fact--but there was no way Dylan could work so hard and not be a lot faster.
For the moment, though, it was enough to be across and no longer running, gasping for air that still would not come fast enough, walking--pacing because if we didn't keep moving, we'd keel over in a dead faint. Except, of course, that I was the only one who'd actually run a race like this anytime in his life. The only one who'd truly been at risk of fainting, because Dylan always finished looking as though he could do it over again--always held something back because he didn't want to look like this at the finish.
He was saying something, but I couldn't catch it. Most likely, he was still confused about the time, because the illusion was so gripping that the first time you tried it, it was hard to remember what was really happening.
I cut the feed and finally there was enough air. In fact, there was a lot of it, and we were no longer pacing. We were sitting in my office and I was unjacking the virtual reality players that had been so unbelievably good that halfway through, I too had had trouble not believing I was out there in the grass and mud and that it wasn't my lungs, or at least not my lungs in the here-and-now, that were about to explode. As it was, my pulse had quickened and I was bathed in a thin sheen of real sweat. I could even swear that I felt residual fatigue in my legs, though that had to be simply an afterimage of the VR, which had been more real than any game program Dylan would ever have encountered: so real it had never crossed his mind that he could make the whole thing end simply by ripping off the headset and telling me what he thought of my little "experiment" in racing strategy.
But now he was thoroughly back in the present. "You tricked me!" he protested, as though coaches hadn't been tricking athletes since the dawn of sport.
I grinned. "No permanent harm. I wanted you to understand how much you'd been slacking. Just because you're fast doesn't mean you're anywhere close to your potential."
"But who cares, if the time sucks? I could jog faster than that. Who the hell was I, anyway?"
I could feel the grin stretching. "Me. Last weekend, in the national masters championships, with an honest-to-goodness gold medal on the line." The medal had only been in the 55-59 age group, but that was beside the point. It's been a while since I could keep up with the forty-year-olds.
I didn't add that the decision to record the experience might have made the difference between gold and silver. I'd never beaten Friar Tuck before, but I'd known I couldn't show Dylan the recording unless I went after him with everything I had. "Learn to race like that and you can take it to the next level. Maybe even beat the Kenyans in the Olympics. Continue backing off from the pain, and you'll never truly amount to anything." I let that sink in. "As for the gadget, it's a VR trainer. A friend made it for me, and I used it to record my race."
Dylan didn't ask where the device came from, and I didn't tell him. There is an old thought experiment, called "six degrees of separation," which postulates that nobody on the planet is more than a half-dozen "friends of friends" removed from anyone else. I have no idea whether it's correct, but if it is, it must rely strongly on what I think of as nexus people: those whose connections run in multiple, unexpected directions.
I'm one of them. I've always been into athletics--running paid my own way through college--but the connections that got me the VR gadget involved basketball and computer games. Last summer, I'd been complaining to my old college roommate, Derrick, that the basketball team could have won the NCAA tournament if only it could shoot free throws. I'm not sure exactly what I said--multiple beers had been poured and I was merely telling him about my new job and the school's overall athletic prowess. But six months later, the headsets arrived. They came with a recording of some NBA star doing his thing at the free-throw line, and by the time I'd played it a few times, I felt as though I could hit nothing but net every time.
Derrick didn't know the basketball coach and asked me not to show him the headsets. But I'd also told Derrick about Dylan and his Olympic potential. Officially, I was beta-testing the interface for a hush-hush video game. Unofficially, I was living a coach's dream.
Coaches have always wished they could read their athletes' minds. Now I could do the next best thing, because one of the headsets doubled as a recorder.
"Do you want a shot at the Olympics?" I asked.
Dylan nodded. What athlete didn't?
"Then I want you to wear this thing during workouts and races." I handed him the recorder, a nicely miniaturized contraption about the size of a music player. I showed him how it worked and handed him one of the recording chips. "Bring this back next week." Distance runners by necessity do a lot of their training out of sight of the coach, but with the headset, I could monitor every step he took. It really was a coach's dream.
* * * *
That week, Dylan showed a new fire in his training. He'd always been the fastest on the team, but never the emotional leader. Now I wondered whether he might mature into next year's captain. It was hard to tell because Dylan had a lot to learn, not just about running but about emotional maturity, and the chip didn't really allow me to read his mind. It merely captured sensory inputs.
The collegiate cross-country season had ended several weeks before my masters race, so we were now gearing up for track, where Dylan's event was the 10,000 meters. As the weeks progressed, he continued using the chip, but now he seemed to have two modes. One was the slacker, who always kept enough in reserve to look good to whoever might be watching. The other was new: an overachiever who did his workouts slightly faster than called for. I could shift him from one mode to the other by catching him at it, but it was like flipping a switch: "A" or "B," with no midpoint. That puzzled me until I realized that both behaviors represented the same thing. He was still showboating; he'd just found a new way to do it.
For Dylan's remaining collegiate career, the new mode wasn't necessarily a bad thing. But in the long run, that overachiever stuff is worse than slacking because it burns you out and increases the risk of injuries.
My job doesn't require me to worry about the long run. I'm paid to bring glory to the university by winning collegiate meets, not to train iffy Olympians. College coaches are notorious for wringing as much as possible out of their athletes during their years of eligibility, with no thought of what happens later, but I've never been one who could advance his own career over the bodies of the kids he's supposed to mentor. Call me altruistic; call me a fool. I'm either good enough to do both the paid job and the real one, or I'll find a new career. One advantage of being a nexus person is that I know how to do so, if necessary.
From the chips, it was obvious that Dylan's showboating was at its worst when the women's team was training at the same time. In retrospect, I should have addressed the underlying immaturity directly, but instead I chose to focus on his running. My theory was that if I could help him mature there, he would in due course do so in the rest of his life, as well. It's an approach that's worked for plenty of other athletes, but if there was ever a decision I wish I could reverse, this was it.
I began by changing his schedule to avoid the women. Then I told him that the best way to show off was by impressing me, via the chip. "What I want to see is discipline," I said. "The closer you can get to doing exactly what I tell you, the more impressed I'll be."
Every Friday, Dylan handed me that week's chip, and I spent my weekends playing back every minute of it. Since he ran eighty miles a week, that was a sizeable time commitment, but luckily my wife is the understanding type. Our daughter had gone off to college two years ago (on a track scholarship, what else?) and I was the one who most strongly felt the empty-nest syndrome. If I wanted to adopt Dylan as a special problem child, my wife was willing to humor me. Someday, I owe the woman a trip around the world, but probably not before I retire. Until then, there will always be some Dylan who I can't abandon for that long.
For a month, he ran strong. Then in the fifth week, I felt a pain in his right knee. He'd said nothing about it, but when it comes to injuries, athletes fall into two camps: hypochondriacs who fret that each twinge is the one that will ruin their careers, and macho-types who'll tell you they're fine, even when they obviously aren't. Dylan had never been a hypochondriac, and with me tantalizing him with dreams of glory, it was no surprise he'd gone macho.
One of the hardest parts of coaching is figuring out whether such injuries are worth worrying about, and there have been myriad occasions on which I'd wished I knew exactly what an ache or pain felt like. Now, I could. I played the chip over and over again, concentrating on how it felt at each part of his stride. Eventually I decided it was trivial, and the next week proved me right when the pain vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.
But the experience set me thinking. A few days later I called up Derrick and told him the story.
"Can you imagine what it would be like if every doctor had one of these?" I asked. "No more, 'Does it hurt when I do this?' You'd just wear the headset, then give the chip to the doctor."
Derrick is the opposite of a nexus person, deeply wrapped up in his own narrow field. But that doesn't mean he has no imagination. "EMTs would love it, too," he said.
"Parents could use it with young children."
"Cops could screen drunk drivers."
That set off a brainstorming session that I cut short a few minutes later with a question that had been nagging at me ever since I'd played the recording of Dylan's knee.
"Would you really want to spend a whole day experiencing other people's pains?" I asked. It was one thing to play the chip of Dylan's knee pain again and again. It had never been more than a twinge. "That could get rather unpleasant."
"Yeah," Derrick said. "It needs a gain control." There was a brief silence, and I pictured him staring out the window, thinking through a nifty technological problem, like he'd often done back in our dorm room. "Intensity of playback was a problem in the first prototypes," he said a few seconds later. "The first was so powerful you could barely wrench yourself out of it before the end, even when it was something mundane, like looking out the window. Then I overcorrected, and got nothing more than a weird shadow image." He paused again. "It would be easy enough to make it variable. Good idea."
* * * *
Two weeks later, Dylan ran his first race wearing the headset. He ran hard, though still not all-out. I told him so, and the following week he was better. Two weeks after that, he was better yet, and then we were on a roll until the NCAA finals loomed. The team had no chance--I'd recruited some good underclassmen but they needed another season or two to develop--but Dylan made the finals on individual merit.
This time, I told him not to wear the headset. It didn't weigh much, but in a 10,000-meter race each unnecessary ounce costs you half a second, and the headset weighed six ounces. Dylan would either do well or he wouldn't. Either way, the season would be over.
* * * *
He was eighth, a major improvement from the year before. He'd have done better yet if he'd not ignored my advice and grabbed the lead in the first lap, where he stayed until he ran out of gas with a mile to go. It was another show-off move, but at least he was running hard, and we had all of next year to work on strategy. Overall, I was pleased. If he continued to improve, he had a shot at winning by his senior year.
It was now summer, and Dylan went back to Wyoming with the recorder and a stack of chips. For the next few weeks, his regimen was simple: keep running, but take a few weeks off from hard workouts. Perhaps that's why I wasn't overly dismayed when, on the first Friday, he left a voice mail message saying he had no chip to send me.
"Sorry, Coach," he said. "I seem to have misplaced them."
The chips looked a lot like the latest music and video cartridges, so I figured they were lost in a stack of look-alikes. I was out of blanks, but I didn't really need the ones we'd recorded during the winter and spring, so I erased a few, labeled them carefully as VR chips, and sent him enough to see him through the summer, along with a stern admonishment not to lose any more.
Meanwhile, Derrick sent me a new pair of headsets, with variable gain control. "I realize you're doing fine with what you have," he said, "but it was your idea, so I thought you might like to try it out."
"Do you want the old ones back?"
"Nah. Keep 'em."
As long as he was in a generous mood, I told him about the lost chips.
"No problem. I've got a whole boxful. It's the type of thing that once you make the first one, it's not a lot more expensive to make a thousand. How many do you want?"
I pulled a number out of the air and he promised to get them into the next day's mail.
* * * *
As luck would have it, I'd not reused the chip that had recorded Dylan's sore knee. The gain control on the new headsets was a simple dial, with an arrow indicating what I presumed to be the high-gain end. The thing about prototypes is that nobody invests time in fancy labeling; all that matters is that the designer knows what the controls do.
Since there was some chance that the arrow indicated the low-gain direction rather than the high-gain one, I set the dial in the middle of its range and skimmed for the right segment of the chip. When I found it, the playback felt about like what I remembered.
I turned the dial down and the pain decreased. I turned it up and yelped. Dylan's twinge had become an excruciating stab, his stride was a pounding rhythm that hit like a sledgehammer, and his breathing felt like the chugging of an old-fashioned steam engine. The entire experience was also more intense--far more real than reality itself, but with a wrongness you didn't realize until afterward. If I'd not been playing back chips for months, I'd have sat there entranced until the playback ended.
Nobody needed a gain control with that wide a range, but Derrick had never been one to do anything by half-measures.
* * * *
By August, Dylan was back on campus with the rest of the team, which needed to start practice well before the start of classes.
He showed up with a sporty new car--a nice little gas/electric hybrid. At the time, I didn't think much of it because track and cross-country aren't the type of sports in which rich boosters buy such things for the stars. Runners are much more likely to get into trouble over trivia, such as cash or merchandise prizes in summer road races--anything of sufficient value to turn them into professionals.
The main reason the car caught my attention was that it got me thinking about poverty. With gas prices heading toward ten dollars a gallon, the old gas-guzzlers have become dirt-cheap. That makes them the most common cars for students, even though most can barely afford to drive them. It's one of those ironic little poverty traps in which you can save a lot of money by buying a more efficient car, but only if you have the money to begin with. I wasn't sure how well-to-do Dylan's parents were, but his running was saving them a lot on tuition, so I figured they'd used it to give him a gift.
* * * *
Then, as it is sometimes prone to do, life became infinitely more complex.
It began with a phone call from Derrick.
"I've been trying to reach you for hours," he began, breathlessly enough that he obviously believed every second mattered. "You know those VR headsets I gave you?"
"Sure. They've worked wonders for my runner. This year I'm hoping he'll--"
"Tell me some other time. I'm calling from a pay phone and I don't think anyone can trace me, but I don't want to talk any longer than I have to. I just want you to destroy them."
"What?"
"You heard me. I shredded all my files today and threw all of my own prototypes into the incinerator. You've got the only ones left."
"But it's a miracle. Dylan's--"
"I don't care! I've been stupid. Really, really stupid. I got a visit this afternoon from a pair of government types. They tried to search my office but didn't have a warrant and my boss managed to chase them away, but not before my secretary heard them tossing around a phrase that sounded like 'humane torture.' I'd never even thought of it, but that thing's too real. With the right recording, you really could use it for torture. If they want a gadget like that, they've got to invent it themselves. Don't let them get yours." Then there was a click and I was listening to an empty line.
It was Friday evening, and my wife and I had just come back from dinner and a movie. Dylan had one headset, but the others were in my office. Could this wait until Monday?
The trouble with miracle gadgets is that there's always someone who can figure out how to turn them to anti-miracles. My brother is a Baptist minister and he's always talking about Adam and Eve, original sin, and human depravity. I suspect that this tendency to create anti-miracles is exactly what he means, but when we try to discuss such things, we don't speak the same language, so I'm never sure.
One thing I was sure of was that the baddies wouldn't wait. I sighed and decided I probably shouldn't, either.
* * * *
The headset and chips were right where I'd left them. I probably could have waited until Monday, though Derrick and I had talked enough on the phone that anyone who was serious about tracking down people who might know about his invention would find me soon enough.
But now I found myself hesitating. Destroying the headsets wouldn't solve the problem forever; if the government knew such devices were possible, some secret lab would reinvent them sooner or later.
Still, it would slow them down. Another of my old friends is in the wilderness-preservation field. She tells me that the only way she stays sane is by thinking of everything in terms of buying time. In her field, victories are only temporary because each time you save a tract of land from one threat, there's always another. But losses are forever. So you work to string together enough temporary victories that new attacks at least face an increasingly uphill battle. She and my brother wouldn't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things, but I suspect she would appreciate his concept of original sin.
Destroying the prototypes might not keep them from being reinvented, but in the interim, it would save an unknown number of people a lot of pain. Most would deserve it, but one drawback with torture is that you're never sure who's who until afterward. My friends were right. Even if the victory was only temporary, I didn't want to be the one who caused the "forever" loss.
* * * *
The headsets might be prototypes, but they were solidly made and I wasn't sure how best to destroy them. I could break the moldings easily enough, but what mattered were the electronics inside, and even if I broke those, I didn't know whether a good electronics whiz could figure them out from the pieces.
Derrick had burned his, but that wasn't something I could do in my office. I stuffed them in a bag, wondering whether I could take them home and burn them in my fireplace without creating dangerous fumes. Probably a bad idea. Maybe I should just run over them a few times with my car and scatter the pieces out the window on the freeway.
I was halfway to the parking lot when my cell phone rang. I presumed it was Derrick, checking up on me, but it was a local number--and not my wife, either.
"Hello," I said, still trying to figure out who might be calling. Maybe Derrick's government types were already on my tail.
What I heard, though, was a torrent of static, kind of like the sound you get when someone forgets to lock their cell phone keyboard and it dials you at random, giving you a chance to listen to the inside of their pocket. There was a wailing sound in the background and a torrent of syllables from which I could catch only fragments: "...Coach ... Highway 36 ... cops."
"Dylan?" The transmission was so choppy I wasn't sure, but it had to be him. "Slow down. You're breaking up. Are you okay?"
If he heard me, it didn't help. "...blood ... need help..."
Someday, someone's going to design a cell phone network that works when you really need it. Highway 36 put him west of town, on a two-lane that had once been a favorite drag-racing site--a bit of trivia I'd picked up from colleagues who'd been around since before rising fuel prices put the kibosh on that dangerous pastime. I thought of Dylan and his new car and shuddered.
I hung up, counted slowly to ten, and hit the callback button. Sometimes that's all it takes to get a good connection. Instead I got Dylan's voicemail, clear as a bell. I left him a quick message that he might or might not think to pick up, sprinted for my car, and broke a lot of traffic laws heading west.
* * * *
Luckily there weren't any cops around to see me. That's because they were all out on Highway 36, about where I figured they'd be. There were also several ambulances, but their crews didn't appear to be doing much, which is either very good or very bad, depending.
Given the state of Dylan's car, the answer had to be the latter. It was upside down in the ditch, crumpled practically beyond recognition, with glass and plastic strewn along two hundred meters of roadside. A paunchy policeman tried to wave me on when I pulled to the side, but relented when I told him one of the victims had called me.
"He's over there," the policeman said, gesturing toward a space-blanket-wrapped figure talking to a notepad-wielding officer. "He's one lucky boy. Apparently he was in the backseat when the car went off the road. See if you can talk him into letting them take him to the hospital. We can get his statement later."
Dylan spotted me before I got halfway to him. "Coach!" he called, breaking away from the officer and half-running to me. He seemed eager and needy, not at all the Dylan I'd always known.
"What happened?" I asked, fighting down panic. "Are you hurt?"
"Oh, Coach, it was so awful." He embraced me--also wildly out-of-character--then with his back to everyone else, his mood shifted. "You're going to kill me when you see this." He slipped a hand into his pocket, then pressed a VR chip into my hand. "But better you than them. I tried to erase it but I didn't know how. I threw the headset somewhere off over there." He inclined his head slightly toward the roadside. "They'll probably find it, but without the chip they won't know what it is."
I looked at the chip, wondering how it related to the accident. "What happened?" I repeated.
"Andrew and Thomas are dead," he said, and fleetingly, I felt a guilty relief that I'd never heard those names before and that Dylan hadn't managed to kill off two of his teammates.
"How about you? Are you hurt?"
"I can still run," he said, and for a moment I wondered if he'd seen my relief and was too young to realize that none of us are exempt from such things. All we can do is recognize them when they occur and try to fight them off. More of my brother's original-sin doctrine, I suspected. Then I saw tears in his eyes and realized he was merely trying to cover them with macho.
"Go to the hospital," I said. "I'll take care of things here."
* * * *
It was 3 A.M. by the time I finally got home. There wasn't that much to do at the accident site, but I waited for the tow truck and watched as the police cars gradually dispersed. When I had no excuse to stay, I went to the nearest convenience store, bought a coffee, and sat in the parking lot staring at Dylan's chip, nerving myself to view it. I couldn't decide whether I was glad or disappointed that I'd not had time to destroy the headsets.
At last, I put on one of the new ones, with the gain turned down far enough that whatever was on the chip wouldn't be too overpowering. The index showed seven tracks, so maybe it was merely one of Dylan's running logs and he'd simply been trying to help keep the whole project secret.
The first recording, in fact, was merely a training run, and I nearly disconnected in relief. But something told me to keep going. I skimmed the rest of the first track, sampling every few minutes, then jumped to the middle of the next one.
Even at low gain, the transition was jarring. This track had nothing do with running and everything to do with vigorous, enthusiastic sex. I immediately hit the cutoff, but still felt mentally polluted. At least I hadn't been Dylan. There are some things I most emphatically did not want to know about him.
I popped the chip out of the player and considered my options. Two cups of coffee later, I decided I really did need to know the rest--but preferably at an even lower intensity. I put the chip back in the headset and resumed scanning at the lowest level that would allow me to understand what was going on.
In track 3, I was a woman. Were these souvenirs, or porn? Most likely the latter. In track 4, I was male again, but this time I was gay. And so it went through two more permutations. I was beginning to get a hunch about where the sports car had come from. With only one headset, Dylan couldn't mass-market this stuff, but there would be people who'd pay a tidy sum for one viewing of any of these.
Then came the final track.
I was sitting in the driver's seat of Dylan's car. Beside me was a young man I didn't know, and in the rearview mirror was Dylan. The car was stationary, but then Dylan said, "Let's get this show on the road," and there was the nervous banter of college students egging themselves into action. The driver revved the engine and paused as it vibrated with power. We put it in gear, the tires squealed, and we were off. Just because it was a hybrid didn't mean it didn't have power, and whoever I was handled the curves like a pro--which was probably why Dylan had picked him to drive, rather than himself.
Still, I couldn't figure out why he had switched from porn to this. Then I recalled the one-time popularity of drag racing. This wasn't a race, but there'd definitely be people who'd pay to experience it. I thought of the missing chips and wondered how big a VR library Dylan had amassed, and how many people might have tried out the headset. So much for Derrick's big secret. Word of his VR miracle was probably on dozens of Internet chat rooms.
The car was going faster and faster. It wound through the mountains, then out onto the flats favored by the former drag racers. I/we/the-driver floored the gas and the car leapt forward, the speedometer hitting 80, 90, 100, 110, 120...
Somewhere around 130 the front right tire blew. Or did it? Somehow it didn't feel right, but things were happening too fast to be sure. For one precarious moment, the car ran in a reasonably straight line, then it yawed onto the shoulder and suddenly I was flipping, sideways and end-over-end, like a running shoe in a clothes drier. An airbag inflated in my face, then burst as something, maybe a piece of the roof, was thrust through it from above. Then something else struck me, and I looked down and it was sticking out of my chest and even at low gain my world exploded in pain...
...and it was all happening so fast that it was only now that I finally found the off switch.
I sat back, shaken and terrified. What would be the result if I played it to the end? I knew what had happened to the driver. Had Dylan managed to reach him and turn off the recorder before he died? If he hadn't (and given the extent of the injuries, I doubted it), I was holding the ultimate in porn-myth: a snuff film. Not just a snuff film, but a VR experience in which you were the one who died.
Cautiously, I played back the first part in slow motion, concentrating on the blown tire, running through those moments again and again at increasing intensity, just as I had with Dylan's sore knee. My first impression had been correct. The tire hadn't blown. The wheel had fallen off. From the corner of my/our eye, the driver and I could see it bounding off into the ditch, although I doubt he'd had time to understand what he was seeing before we'd begun that endless series of flips.
What were the chances of a wheel coming off a new car by accident? I'd never driven at this speed and had no data on the risks, but it seemed unlikely.
I wondered again why Dylan had shifted from porn to this. With only the one headset, he needed recordings that could command a high price per viewing. Porn obviously fit the bill. But driving? Yeah, gas was expensive, but if you wanted to waste a gallon or two, any of those student gas-guzzlers could go as fast as you wanted. And no matter how good the VR was, the real thing had to be a bigger thrill. That meant there was a limit to how much he could charge for the recording he'd intended to make, and given the fact that he couldn't mass-produce, it didn't seem worth the effort.
Unless someone had hired him to do it. Someone who was hoping for a wreck, maybe even a snuff film. Someone who was willing to risk losing the headset in a crash because he thought he had a way to get more.
* * * *
I drove back to the crash site, again courting tickets. If I was right, the people who'd set Dylan up had planned on retrieving both the headset and the chip. I wondered why they hadn't beaten the police to the crash site. Maybe they'd expected the wheel to come off in the curves and were waiting in the wrong place. Maybe they'd not counted on Dylan surviving and phoning for help. Hopefully they'd not seen him throw the headset into bushes, or they'd already have it.
The one thing I was sure of was that I wasn't dealing with feds. The more I thought about it, the fishier Derrick's visitors sounded. "Government types," he'd said, not "FBI" or "CIA" or anything else shadowy but specific. That meant he'd not gotten a good look at their IDs. Nor could I imagine real feds being so unprepared for the resistance they got from Derrick's boss. Or careless enough to be overheard talking. For that matter, I couldn't imagine them using a phrase like "humane torture." They'd say "humane interrogation" or something even more indirect, like "personal data retrieval." Most likely, Derrick's visitors had been trying to bolster their image as government agents, in an attempt to secure his headsets before the car accident.
There was also the question of what Derrick could have done to bring himself to the attention of the government, while it was obvious how Dylan's clients could have found him. The headsets bore the logo of Derrick's company, which was small enough that anyone inquiring about VR would be referred to Derrick pretty quickly.
If they knew of Derrick and Dylan, they knew of me. I wondered if I dared destroy the headsets I already had. Would they believe it, if I did?
* * * *
The crash site was deserted. Until the cops took a good look at the fallen-off wheel, this was merely an accident. Still, multiple-fatality accidents are rare enough that the investigators would be back, first thing in the morning, so I had limited time to find the headset.
Wondering if I was being needlessly paranoid, I parked a mile down the road and pulled on a worn-out pair of running shoes. I couldn't avoid leaving footprints, but at least they wouldn't match the ones I'd left before. And I could throw away the shoes before going home.
Then I jogged back and began scouring the bushes for the headset. It took an hour, but eventually I found it, happy for the deserted highway, which only occasionally required me to hide from oncoming headlights.
If anyone was watching, I certainly didn't see them.
* * * *
The phone pulled me awake sometime before 5 A.M. "Urrmph," said my wife, or words to that effect, followed by something vaguely like, "Saturday morning."
I let the voice mail pick it up, but thirty seconds later it was ringing again. Someone wanted me badly, and I wasn't going to get any more sleep until I found out who.
Grudgingly, I picked up the receiver. "Yeah?" Damned if I'd be polite at this hour.
"Hello, Coach," said a voice I'd never heard before. The tone was way too chipper for the crack of dawn, but something about it carried an undercurrent of menace. "You have something we want."
It was a line right from a bad movie, and I half-expected the next one to be "and we have something you want." But extortion is easier than kidnapping.
"What are you talking about?" I asked, trying to buy time, fearing that I might need to think fast and be unable to do so. Which was probably why they'd phoned at 5 A.M.
"Your boy calls it a VR headset," the voice said. "He says there are two of them and that by now you should have both. Plus a chip." He paused, then continued conversationally, "You know, you runner types really are wimps. A little persuasion and you cave right away. Don't worry; we merely paid him a visit. But if you want him to stay safe, bring everything to Fremont Park in one hour. Park in the main lot, and we'll find you."
"I can't get there that fast," I said, now wide-awake. "I've got the headset but it's not here." Not true, but it sounded reasonable and bought me time.
"Get it quick," the voice said. "We'll give you ninety minutes. Don't be late. It's amazing how easy it is for runners to have little, uh, accidents." He chuckled and my waking-up brain thought: It's not me who's in the bad movie. It's these guys. Maybe that meant that while they were dangerous, they weren't all that sophisticated.
* * * *
When this was over, I'd be furious at Dylan, but at the moment, that was a luxury I couldn't afford. I toyed with calling the cops, but I couldn't imagine explaining things quickly enough to convince them to stake out the park before Dylan's thugs got nervous and disappeared.
I dressed quickly, thinking I had two advantages. One was that they saw runners as wimps, which meant they might underestimate me. The other was that they didn't know that I actually had four headsets because I'd never shown the other two to Dylan.
I had another advantage, too, which was that my wife had been a 1500-meter runner, and those folks are the toughest of the lot. She'd heard my end of the phone call and knew something was badly wrong, but when I told her I needed to think, she didn't waste time with questions. Nor were there any histrionics when I filled her in on last night's adventures and the plan that was beginning to take shape.
There was a pretty good chance I wouldn't survive it. But if I just gave the caller what he wanted, I doubted that he'd let me live. And if I refused, he'd either start kneecapping my runners or realize that the way to really get to me was through my daughter.
I had about an hour until I needed to be on the road. As quickly as possible, I jacked two of the headsets together and set about copying selected portions of Dylan's chip. With only one headset, Dylan hadn't been able to duplicate chips, and as long as the bad guys didn't know how many headsets I had, they wouldn't be expecting me to do it, either.
Once I had a master copy, I could make two at a time, one on each recorder. I set my wife to making as many as possible, recording them on top of old running chips that had accumulated in my study and never made their way back to the office. Meanwhile, I dashed to the corner market for a tube of Superglue.
En route, I called Dylan.
He answered on the second ring.
"I'm sorry, Coach," he began before I could speak. "All I meant to do was to show the headset to a couple of friends. Then we got thinking about all the cool things you could do with it. Morgan took it skydiving, and Chris used it with his girlfriend, then someone suggested it was a nice way to make a bit of money. I didn't think--"
"--that you were being really stupid." I said, wishing yet again that someone had been tougher on him, all the way back in high school. "But for now, I only want to know one thing. How many guys?"
"Two. Why?"
I ignored the question. "Describe them."
"One was tall and fat, but looked strong. The other was shorter, with a beer belly. But he was also pretty big. He was getting old--maybe your age--and was nearly bald. Why?"
Again I ignored the question. "You're sure?"
"They never mentioned anyone else. I think they were from Cheyenne. One of my friends found some folks there who'd pay $200 apiece just to view the chip, then a few days later these guys showed up and started offering $500 for special recordings."
Next, I woke up Derrick, who gave a very similar description of his "government types"--minus the bit about being "old." Derrick lives 300 miles away, which is close enough that the thugs could visit him in the afternoon and still get back here in time for Dylan's ill-fated drive, but far enough that they'd have probably sent an associate if they had one. And if they really were from Cheyenne, they were probably small-timers, because anywhere but in Wyoming, Cheyenne would be viewed as a small town.
I hoped I was right. If there were more than two, I was dead for sure.
* * * *
By the time I finished with the glue, time was running out. While I'd been busy, my wife had managed to make an impressive stack of duplicate chips. Now, I handed her the original and one of the players.
"Take these, and go somewhere," I said. "Breakfast, a drive, anywhere. Make sure you have your cell phone. If you've not heard from me in"--I glanced at my watch--"two hours, take it all to the police. Then call Lauren"--our daughter--"and find a way to disappear." That way the real feds probably would get the headset, but there wasn't much I could do about that. If I hadn't called by that time, Dylan's clients would be well on their way to flooding the underground market with the things, and humane interrogation would be the least of everyone's worries.
* * * *
At the best of times, Fremont Park isn't the type of place you go to unless you really want to get mugged. At 6:30 A.M., it was as deserted as I feared it would be. I suspected that my life expectancy could be measured in minutes.
My callers must have been watching, because a moment later a blue sedan arrived and two beefy guys climbed out. Football-player types, gone to seed. Exactly as described, but also just the type to underestimate folks like me. They were supremely confident, having done nothing to disguise their car or themselves. In their eyes, I was already dead.
"Here's what you want," I said, taking the initiative as though I were naÃ¯ve enough to see this as an ordinary transaction. "But I don't know which is the chip you're after. Dylan gave me one last night but I just tossed it in a drawer with the old ones."
The bigger man stared at the handful of chips I was offering. There were eighteen of them, and I suspected these guys weren't long on patience.
"You have no idea which it is?"
I shook my head.
"Crap." He looked at his buddy. "At least there's two headsets." He opened the trunk of his car and for a bad moment I thought he was going to lock me in it. Instead, he pulled out a thick roll of gray tape.
"Duct tape," he said, grinning wickedly. "Never leave home without it. Hands behind your back."
I nearly abandoned the plan and bolted. But the park was crisscrossed with roads and there was nowhere to go where they couldn't chase me in the car. Not to mention that even if I got away, they could still get at me through Dylan and his teammates. At least Lauren was safe.
He wrapped my wrists--tightly enough, despite the football-player mentality that underestimates us skinny types--then opened the back door of his car and shoved me in. He slammed the door, pushed a button on his key chain, and something went snick.
I didn't really want to get out yet, but I knew I was expected to react, so I squirmed around until I could reach the door handle with my fingers. I pulled on it, and nothing happened. I've always hated those child-safety interlocks. Now they had me trapped as effectively as the duct tape.
My captors laughed and I tried to act like a man beginning to realize he's made a big mistake. That produced another laugh, and by this time, the acting was easy because everything depended on timing and there were a lot of little variables that could get me killed. But at least they now had me sufficiently incapacitated that they would be confident about not having to keep an eye on me.
They spent a few moments studying the chips, presumably hoping to find one labeled with something more useful than a scratched-out date from its original use. Then, the bigger guy started examining one of the headsets, turning it over and over in his hands. He looked puzzled, and for a moment, I truly panicked, wondering how many times he'd seen Dylan's and if he knew something was wrong. The differences were subtle, and I was counting on him not spotting them.
As it turned out, he'd apparently not used Dylan's often at all. He turned to the bald guy and asked a question I couldn't hear, after which his companion theatrically pushed a chip into its slot and pointed to the start/stop button.
The big guy sat on a bench only a few yards from my window, put on the headset, and pushed the button. His face went slack, his eyes acquired a thousand-yard stare, and I knew he was in another world.
His companion shrugged, gave me a final glance to make sure I was behaving myself, and donned the other headset. A moment later, he too was in another world--the same one as his companion, actually, because all the chips were identical. Right now, he was Dylan, running. Normally, he'd be taking off the headset, disgusted, or clicking straight to the next track. But these were the variable-gain headsets, and I'd turned the gain controls all the way up before using the Superglue to make sure they didn't get jostled out of position. At that level, even I would have found it difficult to break the enhanced-reality's spell.
There was only about six minutes' material on each chip, but that's a long time when you're waiting for someone to die. The running was simply an introduction--something benign, because they were looking for the death scene and just might be sufficiently on guard to wrench themselves out of it, even on high gain, if it was the first thing they encountered. That was followed by several minutes of sex, just to make sure that if one was slow to put on his headset, nothing unpleasant would be happening to his friend. Then came the accident.
I have no idea what virtual death is like at high gain. Making the master recording, I'd been forced to play it at low gain, just to make sure I got the entire thing, and it had been bad enough that I'd felt my own heart lurch when the driver's gave its last beat. At higher gain, the pain and terror would be overwhelming, and everything else, I hoped, magnified beyond the body's ability to endure.
The bigger guy was the first to encounter the accident. During the running sequence, his thousand-yard stare had never faded, but as the chip pulled him more deeply into its reality, his legs and arms began to twitch, his breathing increased, and sweat appeared on his forehead. When he reached the sex scenes, the sweat and heavy breathing increased and a thin stream of drool ran down the corner of his mouth. Pretty disgusting, especially for a non-voyeur like myself.
Then he hit the accident sequence. His whole body tensed, as though trying to brace against the car's rolls and flips. His eyes were wide. The drool turned to froth, his body began thrashing with convulsions that had not been in the recording, and the froth became flecked with red bubbles.
I waited until both men were done thrashing before trying to figure out how to get out of my prison. Then I tried to wriggle over the front seat, but the headrests were too high. Remembering how often vandals break car door windows, however, I braced myself as best I could, got my back and glutes into it, and kick-shoved for all I was worth. It was tougher than I expected, but the window wasn't all that tightly rolled up, and at the cost of bruised heels, my third attempt produced a gratifying shatter of glass.
With my hands behind my back, getting out the window without landing on my head would still have been a difficult trick, but luckily, I didn't need to try. Now that the glass was gone, I could roll onto my back, stick my head and shoulders out the window, and use the extra maneuvering room to contort myself enough to get my hands below my ankles and then, blessedly, out from behind me. Now it was easy to slither out the window, and moments later I was in the street, ripping the duct tape off with my teeth.
The two extortionists lay where their final spasms had thrown them. They looked dead, but it was hard not to believe they were simply awaiting the opportunity to spring to their feet and pummel me.
With some trepidation, I checked both for pulse. I even pinched the bald guy's nostrils and counted to a hundred, waiting to see if he'd breathe through his mouth. He didn't, and if that's not dead, I don't know what is.
I should have felt at least a touch of remorse. If they'd been alive, I could have bound them with duct tape and called the police. But what I felt was relief. Explaining to the police wasn't something I wanted to do.
Chips were scattered across the parking lot, which was still miraculously deserted. Feeling that I was stretching my luck, I collected them and the headsets, climbed into my car, and drove away.
That's when the enormity of what I'd done finally began to soak in. Derrick had been afraid his wondrous invention would be used for torture. Dylan had discovered porn and cheap thrills. But I'd done them one better: I'd turned it into a weapon. Not just a weapon, but an assassin's tool, with which I'd carefully laid a trap and executed two men.
Once I was safely out of the park, I pulled my cell phone from the glove box, where I'd stashed it for safekeeping, and phoned my wife. Then I crushed the headsets with the car and threw the pieces down sewers in three parts of town.
I'd always seen myself as a nice guy--a pacifist at heart. Now, I knew otherwise. True, I'd seen no alternative, but I'd been just as cold-blooded and ruthless as Dylan's extortionists. When it comes to that anti-miracle stuff, it really is true. None of us is immune.
I had to buy a hammer to crush the chips. Smashing them should have felt satisfying, but it didn't. The chips were just a symbol. What I really wanted to smash was something internal, human, and more universal than I'd ever wanted to believe.
Copyright Â© 2006 Richard A. Lovett