The Dragon Man - Brian Stableford [28]
It was, of course, impossible to ask. She was old enough now to know where the most significant taboos of adult life were set out, and to steer well clear of any violation.
Then the dragon began to descend again. It was, she had to suppose, a long way from home—much further than she was. Perhaps it would pick up another rider before it set off on the journey—or perhaps, for now, it had earned a rest.
“How was it?” Father Lemuel asked, when Sara emerged from the cocoon, stumbling as she readjusted to the drag of actual gravity.
“It was great,” she said, trying hard to sound suitably enthusiastic, so that Father Lemuel would think that his money had been well-spent. Actually, she felt dazed and disconcerted, not yet ready to evaluate the experience accurately.
Father Lemuel nodded, understandingly. “But not so very much different from watching them through a picture window?” he suggested. “Not quite as gripping as climbing the hometree.”
Sara looked up at her oldest father with a slight frown, but she didn’t say anything. She wondered exactly how good he was at following the train of her thought.
“It was different,” she assured him. “The new IT made it feel much more real.”
“It’s new to you,” Father Lemuel observed, implying that it was far from new to him. “You’ll get used to it.” Obviously, her parents—one of them, at least—were not as innocent in the ways of “entertainment IT” as Sara had assumed.
“If you get used to it...,” she began, before the suspicion that she might be asking a forbidden question made her pause.
Father Lemuel didn’t seem to mind the personal nature of the implicit enquiry. “Why do I spend so much of my time in virtual worlds, if the experience is always inferior?” he finished for her. “Some people argue that it ought not to be reckoned inferior just because it’s different, but that isn’t really the point. All VW addicts point out there’s an awful lot you can do in the virtual world that you wouldn’t attempt to do in the real world because it would be too dangerous—but that isn’t really the point either. You already understand that the real purpose of synthesized experience is to open up opportunities that have no parallel in the real world. Dragonriding is only the first step. In a VW you can reduce yourself to the size of an insect or a bacterium, ride a spacecraft through the solar system and beyond, etcetera, etcetera...and you can visit hypothetical worlds very different from ours, where everything—including the laws of physics—has been altered, not according to anyone’s constructive imagination but by manipulating the generative code. Do you understand what I mean by the generative code?”
“I think so,” Sara said. “At bottom, everything in a machine is just a matter of switches being on or off. What you see in a window or a cocoon is a translation of a long string of ones and noughts.”
“That’s right. A lot of what you see on your desktop screen or through a window starts out as a picture, which is converted into generative code so that it can be reproduced—and the picture can then be made to move by means of an animating program. But you don’t have to start with the picture. You can use code to generate imagery that no one has ever seen or imagined before: whole virtual universes, which can then be explored at the sensory level. Do you see what I mean?”
“And that’s what you do all day—explore imaginary universes?”
“I used to, when I was working full-time. I wrote code to generate alien virtual environments from scratch, then checked them out, to see whether any of them were interesting. In those days, I was looking for commercial exploitability. It’s how I made my money. Nowadays, it’s more of a...well, I suppose Steve would call it a hobby, because that’s what I’d call his junk-collecting. I’d probably call it a vocation, because that sounds much more serious. Not that I turn down the opportunity to earn more credit if I find