Agency

28 Sim

Netherton gingerly settled the controller across his forehead. It fit as worryingly well as he’d assumed it would. Closing his eyes, he swiped the tip of his tongue across the backs of his upper front teeth, right to left. The resulting feed was the sort of squashed circle sometimes employed in older full-surround devices. Its lower, thicker half showed the view ahead, the upper, narrower half the view behind. On the lower half, the simplest possible game space. Featureless blue sky, a horizontal plane of yellow, gridded to the horizon in black-lined perspective.

He opened his eyes, finding the headless figure, smaller now, arms at its sides, alone on that yellow plane.

“Grid’s in meters,” Ash said. “Here’s a jump from standing, knees bending backward.” It bent its knees backward, shoulders canting slightly forward, and sprang toward them, a full three squares.

“Like a bird,” he observed.

“No. Birds have knees like ours, but we mistake their ankles for their lower legs.”

Could that be true? he wondered.

“Regardless,” she said, “each wheel has its own motor. They’re extended now, under power.” It rolled smoothly toward Netherton, legs immobile, turned, circled back. “It can also jump with wheels under power.”

“How did you learn to do this?”

“Practice, on this period sim. Easier than you’d think.” She raced it toward the horizon, executing a leap that amounted to flying. To land again, still speeding along. “Stop making those tense little sounds,” she said.

“I wasn’t.”

“You were subvocalizing.”

“How will I be controlling it?”

“It’s not a Wheelie. Nor a peri,” she said, doing something that caused the circular feed to fold seamlessly around his head, a full 360 of vision.

He stood alone, as if he were the thing itself, upright on the metrically gridded plane. “Neural cut-out’s in effect,” she said. “Raise your right arm. It will do the same, but your right arm won’t actually move.”

He did. “Like a peri.”

“It can’t emulate the movements of a human body as accurately, given its form. It somewhat approximates them, within available ranges. What you’re going to be doing now, for the most part, is internalizing those ranges. Advance your right foot.”

He did.

“Your left.”

He did, seeing the perspective change slightly.

“That’s with your wheels retracted,” she said. “Now repeat, indefinitely, as we learn to walk. Toward the horizon.”

“Will it all be this tedious?”

“Jumping at speed is quite euphoric, with a little practice, but first you must learn to walk.”

“How far?”

“Until you don’t have to think about it.”

He got on his way then, toward the horizon that seemed to grow no closer, meter by square yellow meter.