"Uh-huh, I really do. This is the best birthday present I ever got, ever!"
"It your birthday today, Jimmy? December eighteenth?"
"Uh-huh. Mommy says I was her "Christmas Baby."
She let me watch The Searchers on tape and then she gave me some pizza money."
Something cold and ugly crept up my back.
"How, uh .. . how old are you today. Jimmy?"
"I"m seven," he said proudly, pointing to his chest.
Then he saw his hand---the thick hair on his arms---felt the beard on his face---and before I could I activate the autopilot and stop him from doing so, he grabbed the rearview mirror and turned it toward himself, getting a good look at his face.
"That ain"t me!" he cried, his voice breaking.
"Where"d I go, mister? Where"d I go?"
I had to sedate him a few seconds later. If I hadn"t, we would have crashed.
Jimmy was one strong child.
I put the hover-car down in a clearing right smack in the middle of a patch of woodland that surrounds three quarters of our safe-house. A long time ago Parsons and I agreed that the more remote our workplace, the better. This area was nearly impossible to get to by standard automobile, and if anyone ever did manage to get this far, there was only one road leading to the house. Even without the hidden security cameras that lined the final stretch of that road, we"d see them coming from three miles away.
I radioed in for a medical team to bring a stretcher.
Parsons got on the horn and asked me if I"d managed to get any information from the kid--and kid is how I thought of Jimmy, his age be d.a.m.ned.
"Just enough to give me the creeps," I replied.
Jimmy was still out of it from the tranquilizer shot I"d given him earlier, and as I stared at his peaceful, sleeping form, I figured it was probably for the best.
I didn"t know which VR cult this kid had belonged to--there were dozens that had temples in this part of the country--but what I did know was that none of them were in the habit of simply dumping their 242 Gary A. Snmnbeck converts in the street and then calling the likes of us to come and clean up the mess.
The VR cult phenomenon didn"t really get going until 2003, though it had its genesis back in the mid1990s.
Back in the "90s, personal VR equipment was bulky, clumsy to use, and expensive--forget that virtual reality itself on the net was more of a curiosity than anything else, and most of the VR worlds were fairly crude by today"s standards. Then there were the computers and servers themselves; the "90s saw the beginnings of the ISDN proliferation, the introduction of NFSnet--G.o.d bless fiber-optic cable--but even those couldn"t manage a transfer rate faster than 2Gb/ sec. Then, around 2002, slowly but surely, the faceless Powers-That-Be began giving people a taste of the Next Big Thing, and like lemmings to the sea they lined up.
Now.--Christ, now you were in the dark ages if your system functioned under 1000 MIPS and transferred less than four million polygons sec The power required for color- and illumination-rendered, realtime, user-controlled animation of (and interaction with) complex, evolving, three-dimensional scenes and beings was widely available. The VR equipment needed to function in these worlds was streamlined into little more than a pair of thin black gloves, a lightweight pair of headphones, and some slightly oversized black gla.s.ses with a small pair of sensory clips; one for your nose (to evoke smell) and one that you tucked into the corner of your mouth (to evoke taste). In a world overrun with people, where personal s.p.a.ce was moving its way up the endangered species list, VR worlds and servers offered people the chance to "get away from it all" without leaving the confines of their computer terminal.
Problem was, when you give an apple-pie American something with endless possibilities, they find a quick way to either pervert or trivialize it. It wasn"t long before "cyber-diets" were all the rage--Lose Weight Fast! Slim Down for Summer! Log in, and we"ll give your senses the illusion of being fed. 3D interactive kiddie p.o.r.n. Sites where you could virtually torture your enemies.
Oh, yeah--and the G.o.ds of cybers.p.a.ce. Any nutcase with a religious manifesto could buy s.p.a.ce and set up a virtual temple to beckon worshipers. Create-ADeity, online twenty-four hours a day for your salvation, can I get a witness. Some of the bigger ersatz religions--Mansonism, Gargoylists, Apostles of the Central Motion, Vonnegutionism (my personal favorite, they used a cat"s cradle as their symbol), the Resurrected Peoples" Temple, and the Church of the One Hundred-and-Eightieth Second--were granted licenses to set up their own servers--and because of that. Parsons and me would always have jobs.
There would always be lost souls like Jimmy. First get them hooked on the net, alienate them from the world they know, then draw them into your virtual fold, blur the lines between the person they are on the net and the person they are oft the net until you trap them forever in the s.p.a.celess s.p.a.ce between, imprison them in the consensual loci.
I was snapped from my reverie by the medical team, who gently loaded Jimmy onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. I signaled them I would walk to the house.
I had a feeling that walk was going to be the last quiet time I"d have for a while.
Jimmy was still asleep in the recovery area when Parsons met me outside the computer room.
"You say he thinks he"s seven?"
"Yes. You should have seen him flip out when he finally got a look at himself."
"Did he give you any indication what cult he belonged to?"
"None."
"So where does that leave us?"
"We know his name. Let"s run it through and see if any bells go off."
"You just love talking in tough-guy cliches, don"t you?"
I grinned.
"Watched too many Clint Eastwood movies when I was a kid."
Parsons laughed.
"You were never a kid."
"I feel so good about myself now."
I liked Parsons a lot. A former VR cult member himself, there was no scam, no form of reasoning so out there, no logic so convoluted, that he couldn"t work his way through it to awaken what lay at a subject"s core. In the six years we"d been working together, I"d only seen him lose two subjects--one to suicide after her family took her away too soon, the other to law school.
Parsons hates that joke, too.
One of our latest residents, Cindy (she wouldn"t yet tell us her last name, even though we already knew what it was), age seventeen, approached Parsons and asked him about Jimmy.
"I saw them bring him in downstairs," she said.
Parsons put a rea.s.suring hand on her arm.
"You don"t need to worry about him, Cindy; Jimmy"ll be fine."
"You don"t know him, do you?" I asked"I don"t think--I mean, I don"t know. Something about him seems familiar, I guess." She thought about it for a second, then shrugged and said, "I guess not.
Sorry."
Parsons looked at his watch.
"Shouldn"t you be helping with dinner preparation in the kitchen?"
"Omigosh, I forgot all about it." She hurried away toward the elevator.
I stared after her.
"She seems a lot friendlier than she did last week."
"I know," whispered Parsons.
"Amazing how fast she"s progressed, don"t you think?"
We looked at each other.
"Think she"ll try it tonight?" I asked.
"Not tonight, but definitely before Christmas."