The Shattered Sphere

Fifteen Puppet on a String

Three days after the first attempt to contact Lucian Dreyfuss, they were almost ready to try again.

Larry Chao was doing his best to sit still as the techs hooked him in to the virtual reality system, trying not to think about what came next. They were going to fire this thing up and run him through the moments leading up to his own death. All right, not his death, but as close to it as Larry wished to come. When the Charonians had attacked in the tunnel five years ago, the T.O. had been destroyed while Larry was controlling it, and it had been realistic enough to convince Larry he had died, at least for a while. The nightmares had taken a long time to go away—and they had come back last night. But no, don’t think about it. The one bright side was that Larry had been “killed” a few seconds after the Charonians grabbed Lucian and made off with him. Lucian, therefore, had not witnessed Larry’s death and, therefore, was not reliving it, over and over again. Larry would not have to re-enact his own decapitation.

The down side was that, for whatever reason, the slice of time Lucian was looping through over and over started just a few seconds before the Charonians attacked. The idea was to break the loop before the Charonians hit, force Lucian to perceive a sequence of events fed to his optical and audio centers, not by the Charonians, but by the human virtual reality teams. In effect, they would feed Lucian a hallucination to break him out of psychosis. Of course, Larry had been dropped into psychosis by experiencing the real events through the TeleOperator five years ago, but that was beside the point. Even Larry had to admit the possible reward was worth the risk.

They had used a limited-mobility setup the first time they had tried to break through to Lucian, but this time they were using a full TeleOperator control rig, identical to the one Larry had used five years ago in the Rabbit Hole. This time, the T.O.‘s inputs and outputs were not hooked up to an actual robot body, but to a computer simulation of a robot body.

Larry’s entire body still had to be completely encased in the T.O. control unit, which was, in effect, an exoskeleton with the operator inside. Later, when they had the thing powered up, the machinery would respond to his slightest motion, and he would be able to move his arms and legs and head freely. But until the power-amp circuits were on, the T.O. was so much inert metal and his body was completely immobilized by the weight of the machinery. Even when the thing was powered up, Larry would not actually walk when he moved his legs—the rig had him suspended in mid-air. His body would stay still while his simulated self moved about. He was, and would be, in the center of it all, but absolutely unable to move. That summed up the last five years of Larry’s life pretty well.

“How’s that feel?” the VR tech asked.

“Hmm? Oh, ah, fine, I guess,” Larry said. Actually, the straps were rather tight, but minor things like that didn’t seem to matter just now. They wanted him to die again, and no one seemed to think that was asking a lot.

But even if they had understood his terror, they would have strapped him into the TeleOperator control system all the same. Even a chance of cracking open the Lunar Wheel’s Heritage Memory could easily be worth a life or two—even if the lives in question were his and Lucian’s.

“So was he a friend of yours?” the tech asked.

“Hmm? What?” Larry said.

“Lucian Dreyfuss.”

“Oh, I knew him all right.”

“So you were friends.”

“No,” Larry said, looking straight ahead, determined not to look at the tech. “We weren’t friends. I never much liked him. And he blamed me for… for well, what happened.”

“Oh,” the tech said. “Sorry. I didn’t—”

“It’s okay,” Larry said. Now he turned to look at the man, and forced himself to smile. “It was a while ago. I’ve gotten over it.” Now there was a lie. The Abduction, the disaster in the Rabbit Hole, pushing the button that killed Pluto and saved the rest of the Solar System. He was nowhere near over those things. There were days he had hopes of getting past those memories—but this was no such day.

“Oh. Well, um… ah, hold still now while I attach the electrodes,” the tech said, clearly embarrassed.

But Larry was only vaguely aware that the tech was still there. Memories. This whole thing revolved around memories. His, Lucian’s, and the Wheel’s. The Wheel’s Heritage Memory, with the sum total not only of its own experience, but that of all its ancestors as well. Find that, and they could read the history of the Charonians.

There was no end to the information, the answers, the discoveries that might be found there—if the Heritage memory had not been destroyed when the Lunar Wheel died, if it were still accessible, if Lucian’s dead mind could show them the way in.

“Okay, VR view-helmet coming down,” the tech said. “You’re going to be in the dark for a second until we get this thing hooked up.”

The tech placed the helmet on Larry’s head and swung the visor down, and Larry’s world went black.

He sat there, waiting in the dark, wishing it wouldn’t happen at all, wishing it would hurry up and be over with.

Dream on. If Larry was sure of one thing, it was that this was going to be a long haul.

Finally, after some space of time that might have been a minute or an hour, it began. The exoskeleton came alive, a tiny thrill of motion quivering through it as the power came on. The view-helmet visors lit up, a miniaturized video screen in front of each eye, their views just slightly offset from each other so as to provide realistic binocular vision and depth perception. Larry found himself—or his simulated robot body—in a featureless room, with various rather generic objects and obstacles scattered about. A warm-up room.

Marcia MacDougal’s voice came over the helmet’s earphones.

“All right, Larry. We’re all set here in control. Try out the suit for a few minutes, and then let’s see if you can get Lucian’s attention.”

“Okay,” Larry said, “but bear with me for a few minutes. It’s, ah, been a while since I did this. I’m probably very rusty.”

“That’s all right, love,” Selby said in some sort of attempt at an encouraging tone of voice. “Once you learn, you never forget. Just like riding a bicycle.”

“That’s good to know,” Larry said. “But I’ve never ridden a bicycle.”

Larry stood up, and the exoskeleton moved with him, smoothly, all but silently. He lifted his left foot, moved it forward, set it down. The feedback system provided him with a slight jolt as his foot came down. He moved his right foot, set it down a bit more gently, and he was walking. His field of view lurched from side to side a bit as he moved. He came to a set of steps in the imaginary warm-up room. He paused at the foot of the stairs, then walked up them as carefully as he could, tottering a bit here and there. There was a wide platform at the top. He turned around and made his way back down the stairs, having a bit more trouble keeping his balance. He got back to ground level without incident, though, then walked over to a pair of pyramid-shaped objects, each with a handle at its apex. The red one was marked “100 kilograms” while the blue one said “300 kilograms.” Larry bent down and moved “his” arm to pick up the red one. The exoskeleton was far stronger than a human being, and Larry was able to pick the weight up easily. The weight might be wholly imaginary, but the computer simulator did a very credible job of giving it a realistic heft. Larry straight-armed the weight, held it out to his side, and let it go. It fell to the ground with a heavy thud, and Larry felt the non-existent floor vibrate beneath his feet. “Very realistic,” he said to the team in the control room.

He turned toward the heavier weight and tried lifting it. At first, he couldn’t budge it. He pulled harder and managed to get it off the ground, though it felt as if he was about to pull his arm out of its socket. “Maybe too realistic,” he said, and set it down.

Larry worked the warm-ups for a minute or two longer, getting the feel of the suit, finding that his old training was coming back to him after all. Someday he would have to learn to ride a bike.

“All right,” he said. “I think I’m ready for it. Link me into Lucian whenever you’re ready.”

“Ah, you don’t want to do a few dry runs first?” Selby asked. “We can put you in the virtual reality sim of the Rabbit Hole without Lucian in it for a while. Let you get used to it first. Beat up on some simulated Charonians for a while?”

“No,” Larry said, his voice a bit sharper than he had intended. “Maybe that makes sense, but to be perfectly honest, I’m more worried about losing my nerve than not being well-rehearsed. This isn’t easy for me.”

“That I can believe,” Selby said. “Stand by. We have to jam the optical and audio signals coming from the Wheel and substitute our own. Might take a minute to get it working.”

“Just give me a heads-up when you’re ready,” Larry said.

“Will do. Selby out.” The line went dead as Selby cut her mike, and Larry moved around the warm-up room a bit more as he waited. He tried a few jumping-jacks and push-ups, just to see what the hardware could do. Very smooth. Very nice work indeed. Intellectually, he knew that he was still right where he had started, in the exoskeleton, not in the imaginary warm-up room he saw through the video screens. He had lifted nothing at all when he had picked up the hundred-kilo weight, and exactly the same amount of nothing when he had strained over the three-hundred-kilo one. The exoskeleton had simply put the appropriate strain on his arm and body to mimic the weights. But there was no point in reminding him that it was not real. Not when the whole point was to make the illusion as believable as possible.

What was taking them so long? You’d think they’d have had the whole thing set up before getting him into the suit. Take it easy, he told himself. This is a complicated lash-up. Any number of things might go wrong or need a last-minute adjustment. Larry knew he was being unreasonable, but he didn’t care. He was scared.

He realized he was pacing nervously, back and forth, up and down around the warm-up room. He drew himself up short, forced himself—or at least his projected self inside the VR simulation—to stand still.

“Larry?” It was Marcia MacDougal’s voice. “Ready when you are.”

Larry suddenly realized he was sweating profusely. “Go—go ahead,” he said, his voice tight and dry.

The warm-up room faded away, and Larry Chao stood in uncharted darkness.

“All right,” MacDougal said. “Here we go.” The darkness faded, and the base of the Rabbit Hole—the base of the Hole as it had been five years before—bloomed up out of blackness. “This is our feed now,” MacDougal whispered in his ear. “We’re feeding the same scene to both you and Lucian.”

Larry felt his heart pounding, and his vision blurred for a moment. But then it cleared, and nothing had changed. This was the place, the horrible place where he had died. And there was Lucian, directly ahead of him, standing there in his pressure suit, looking past Larry’s shoulder at whatever was behind him. Lucian, alive, exactly as he had been.

It seemed as if time stopped in that one moment—and maybe it did. Maybe it was not some trick of his mind, but a glitch in the computer program, that had frozen time.

Where am 1? Larry asked himself. Am I inside the computer, inside Lucian’s mind, just here to feed a figment to his imagination? Am I inside the TeleOperator the computer is simulating? Who is the puppet, and who is pulling the string?

Yes, I know I’m in the VR exoskeleton, but what does that matter? The VR video is not what I see, or hear. I see the past, the real past, the moment just before I died.

And suddenly he realized that it was not just Lucian who needed to break out of this moment. He had died here too, and had lived to tell the tale. But I never did tell the tale to anyone, not really. Never talked about it. Never dealt with it. Never faced it. Now I can. I can make it go away, make it never happen.

“Behind you!” Lucian called, the dead man speaking the dead man’s words in the dead man’s voice.

Larry turned around, and saw the two wheeled Charonians, just as they had been. For a moment, fear flared anew in his heart. But this time he would not let them kill him. This time the computers were controlling the sims, and the Charonians were programmed to lose.

With a strange sense of exaltation, Larry lunged for the closer Charonian, grabbed at one of its manipulator arms, yanked it from its socket and hurled it away. Larry smashed the TeleOperator’s fist through the thing’s carapace, and the machinery inside sparked and flared. He spun about, kicked the other one in the midsection, flipped it over so that its wheels spun helplessly in mid-air. He grabbed at the left rear wheel and pulled it off.

“Oh my God,” Lucian said. Larry spun around and looked at— what? at Lucian? at Lucian’s computer projection as directed by the simulator? At a projection of Lucian’s body as controlled by his mind?

“He’s still in it,” MacDougal’s voice, whispering. “We’re getting his visual output here, and he still sees it the old way. It’s a bit muddled here and there, but he’s seeing what he’s always seen—”

“They know we’re here,” Larry’s voice said through the headphones, though he had not spoken. It was Lucian’s memory of his voice, of what he had said five years before. Larry was hearing his own ghost, and the idea terrified him.

Then Lucian’s body flew up in the air, lifted by invisible arms, and he was carried away, down the tunnel, by enemies unseen.

“Good God,” MacDougal said. “I’m watching Lucian’s optic nerve output, and he saw the Charonian you just killed pick him up and run out of the tunnel with him. He didn’t see your actions at all. The computer sim matched what Lucian thought was happening to him and carried him out, even if the simulated Charonians weren’t there to move him. Incredible.”

“Yeah,” Larry agreed, panting. He realized he was still holding the Charonian’s left rear wheel, and he flung it away.

“We’re going to have to reset, try again to snap him out of it,” MacDougal said. “Do you think you can do it again?”

Larry looked down at the computer-generated phantoms of the things that attacked him, killed him five years before. He was whole, and they were bits of mangled metal. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “I can do that as often as you like.”

Two more times, three, four, a dozen more times, until Larry lost track of how long ago he had lost track, until even the idea of revenge had lost its savor. The simulated Charonians would always lose. Killing them the first few times had been good for Larry’s soul, but by the twentieth time—if this was the twentieth time—his strongest reaction to killing the wheeled Charonians was that his arms were getting tired. He grabbed at the second one and kicked a hole clean through this time, just to give his arms a rest.

Larry turned around and watched Lucian being borne away by invisible hands once again—but there was definitely something jerky, uncertain, about the motion. Lucian was still heading down that damned tunnel, but it was less smooth every time.

“Okay,” MacDougal said. “One more time, from the top.”

“Right,” Larry said, his voice weary. The base of the Rabbit Hole faded to darkness, then reappeared once again. Lucian—or at least the computer image of Lucian in his pressure suit—was back where he had started.

But Lucian’s image—Lucian—didn’t stay there. He stepped forward toward Larry, did not cry out a warning. He had changed.

Changed. Larry turned and saw the wheeled Charonians there. Should he attack again? No. Nothing brutal, nothing violent this time. Enough of destruction. Show Lucian something else. Make it different. Larry raised his hand, palm out, to the simulated Charonians, praying that whoever was operating their images would have the wit to follow his lead. “Stop,” Larry said. “Go away. Don’t bother us anymore. We don’t want you here.”

The two alien machines regarded him for a moment—and then wheeled backwards, turned around, and rolled away. Larry watched them going, knowing that at least some of his own nightmares were leaving with them. He had exorcised his own demons.

But what of Lucian?

Larry turned back, toward Lucian’s image as it came toward him, moving slowly, awkwardly, the image a bit jerky, Lucian’s mind moving his body in ways it had not used in a long time. “Lar-ree?” Lucian asked. “Lar-ree… tha you?”