Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [82]
And yet, he told himself, it must be a virtual environment, because no such real environment exists. However improbable it seems, this is a charade. I don’t know who has the equipment to play such a trick, or how they’re doing it, or why, but it’s a trick and nothing more. It’s just a trick.
“You can open your eyes, Damon. It’s perfectly safe.” Damon didn’t recognize the voice.
He opened his eyes, hoping that the VE into which he’d woken might have changed into something far more accommodating.
It hadn’t. The impossible building still sat atop the impossible mountain, against the backdrop of the impossible sky. He knew that he was safe, but it was extremely difficult to believe it. Damon’s reflexes fought to shut his eyes again, but his consciousness fought to keep them open. It was a hard fight, but reason won.
During the last five years Damon had spent a great deal of time in VEs of every marketed and marketable kind, searching for better illusions of reality in order that he might become a better architect of artificial spaces. He needed to be able to cope with this—indeed, he needed to come to terms with it, to master it, and, if possible, to find out how it was done and how he could do likewise.
When he was sure that he could keep his eyes open he deliberately moved back to the rim of the ledge and extended his head into the position it had been in when he first opened his eyes. He wanted to look down again. He needed to look down again, in order to sustain his credentials as an artist in virtual realities, a virtuoso of illusion.
Vertigo seized him like a vice, but he fought it. Knowledge conquered sensation. He looked into the abyss and knew that he would not fall.
Only then did he move again, coming back from the rim and scrambling into a sitting position. He set his back against the upper cliff face and extended his legs so that his ankles were balanced on the lip he had just vacated. Then he turned, to look at the person who had spoken to him.
The figure was as strange as the world which contained him. His shape was human, and recognizably male, but his body was literally mercurial, formed as if from liquid metal. He shone with reflected radiance, but the light which flowed across his contours as he moved was as deceptive as the light which flowed through the walls and spires of the crystal castle, defying all the experience of Damon’s educated eyes.
For a moment or two, Damon wondered whether this gleaming silver exterior might be a new kind of synthesuit—a kind which extended into the mouth and nasal cavities as well as covering the eyeball, and which needed no input cable. Could it be a monomolecular film of some kind, as perfectly reflective as a mirror or chrome-plated steel? It was just about plausible, although meetings in VEs usually hid the equipment required to produce and perpetuate the illusion. When he worked on his illusions from within, Damon typed his instructions on a virtual keyplate.
He looked down at his own body, half expecting to see that he too had turned to mercury, but he hadn’t. He recognized the blue-and-gray suitskin he seemed to be wearing as one of his own, but it was not the one he had been wearing when Steve Grayson had carried him away to Rajuder Singh’s island.
“Who are you?” Damon demanded of the mercury man. The shape of the apparition’s face did not seem familiar, although he was not sure that he could have recognized someone he knew reasonably well were their features to be transformed to a fluid mirror in this remarkable fashion.
“I think you can probably figure that out,” the other replied. “My name doesn’t matter. It’s what I am and where we are that counts.