The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [20]
“Come on,” said Mother Quilla, taking Sara’s hand and drawing her gently away from the spot to which she had become rooted. “He’s not that unusual. You must have seen people as old as him in virtual space.”
It wasn’t until Mother Quilla said it that Sara realized that she had not. She had certainly seen people from the old world—even the world before the Crash—but she had never seen them as she had just seen Frank Warburton, still carrying the damage inflicted on his flesh before the biotechnologists found ways to repair all wounds and set aside all signs of aging.
In virtual space, it was said, you could see everything. All the world was there, and all the world’s accessible history, and imaginary worlds by the thousand as well...but that didn’t mean that if you took the obvious paths through the Global Village you would be certain to see everything it contained. Some things went unheeded, even when they weren’t hidden. That seemed, for a moment or two, to be an important revelation—but then Sara and Mother Quilla lost themselves in the crowd, and in the strange simmering excitement of the possibility of making discoveries.
CHAPTER VI
The first effect of Sara’s unexpected encounter with the Dragon Man was to renew her interest in dragons—an inspiration that took hold of her while she was still in Old Manchester. She used up every scrap of her junk hoard to acquire three more figurines and an old flag depicting a red dragon on a green-and-white background.
When she returned home—after another long lecture from Father Stephen and Mother Quilla about the importance of family life—she dusted off her entire collection of models and repositioned them on her shelves. That evening, she went back to her desktop to discover what reference-texts that had previously seemed “too old” for her had to say about the subject, but rapidly tired of their tedious commentaries on the different kinds of dragon favored by various ancient cultures and the special significance of dragons in Chinese tradition. She was, however, drawn to a number of advertisements on one of the shopping channels, which offered “dragon experiences”.
Sara already knew that there were numerous Fantasyworlds populated wholly or partly by dragons. She had looked out into several of them from her bedroom window. She had even entered one or two of them by means of her hood, which had placed her within the virtual worlds in question, allowing her to “ride” dragons as they flew through their virtual native skies. She had not found such experiences very satisfactory, because they had been far too obviously artificial. The “dragon experiences” that had now caught her eye boasted of a far greater degree of realism, whether one entered the imaginary worlds in question as a dragonrider or as a dragon. The ads promised that “you’ll really believe that you’re there”—and Sara couldn’t help wondering whether they might be able to deliver.
The snag was that the “dragon experiences” in question needed not one but two supportive technologies. They required a cocoon capable of producing the sensations of touch and smell that a mere hood could not provide, and they required an injection of special nanobots whose purpose was to enhance such sensations from within.
Father Lemuel owned a state-of-the-art cocoon, which he was occasionally prepared to let Sara use for educational purposes. The nanobots were another matter entirely. So far as Sara knew, none of her parents was a habitual user of “entertainment IT,” and it was not the kind of thing of which they usually approved. When the price of the bots was added to the Fantasyworld’s access charge, the total was the kind of sum that could