by Joe Schembrie
* * * *
Illustration by William Warren
* * * *
Literature, we’re often told, is “universal and timeless...”
* * * *
The elevator doors parted onto the third floor of the Customer Service Building on the corporate campus of Real Life Technology, and there stood Ramathustra in a checkered flannel shirt, holding his Number 1 Dad coffee cup.
“I was beginning to wonder,” he said, raising his immense eyebrows.
“I was beginning to have lunch,” I said, slipping on my sneakers. I’d been wearing sandals from doing yard work when Ramathustra’s call came, and hadn’t had time to dress for action. And Ramathustra had stressed there would be action.
“The university information technology chief is most anxious.”
Stowing my carry-bag under my arm, I hopped out of the elevator, still tugging on the heel of a shoe. I was standing erect in a semblance of professionalism by the time I entered the conference room, whose main plasma wall screen was filled with an inflated glare that followed us as we slipped into our seats at the table.
“This is our best simulation software consultant,” Ramathustra said to the guy on the screen. “He will be able to resolve any issues in short order.”
Suppressing a blush, I nodded toward the camera, but the swollen image only boiled. The voice was terse and low: “This situation is under warranty, you know.”
Ramathustra finished a sip of his coffee and placed the cup next to his computer pad with the deliberation of a chess grandmaster placing his queen upon the board.
“Lives are at stake,” he said. “Time is short. Please summarize for him.”
The IT chief trained his full glare on me. A career-threatening crisis had come, I sensed, and he wanted desperately to make it seem that we were obviously to blame.
He recited from his pad: “At 1:13 PM, a professor and two students from the literature department entered the Moby Digital simulation and—”
“Excuse me,” I blurted. “Moby Digital?”
“That’s the name of the virtual reality simulation.” He gave me the what-kind-of-idiot-are-you look. “You’re going to troubleshoot, and you’re not familiar with it?”
“He is certified in Real Life Technology’s Virtual Reality Operating System Version 6.1,” Ramathustra replied smoothly. “He is the best freelance consultant available. We are fortunate to have him on short notice, as he was about to have lunch. Please continue.”
I returned the IT chief’s stony stare, for my first response to confrontation has always been paralysis. For better or worse, in the business world, this is interpreted as being the “strong, silent type.”
Finally, he resumed reading. “The university central VR system conducted a routine status check at 1:30, which pinged normal. Around 1:43, however, the university master control program reported a breach of the university computer system firewall, in which several hundred gigabytes transferred from the internet—”
“Can you determine the exact amount of data transferred?” Ramathustra asked. “It is relevant.”
“I’ll get it. Let’s see—the data stream transferred from the internet, replicated and vectored into the VR system, infiltrating the School of Medicine’s heart, brain, and lung surgery simulations and several School of Engineering factory environment simulations. They were shut down and rebooted without incident.
“However, during the 2:00 PM status check, user IDs within the Moby Digital simulation failed to respond. The sys admin undertook manual pinging, no response. At 2:11 she contacted me, and we determined to evacuate all other users from the entire system. At 2:17, I contacted RLT Customer Service—and here we are.”
According to geographical coordinates provided by the screen caption, his “here” was actually over a thousand miles southward, though still in the same time zone.
“Out of contact for over an hour,” I said. My legs shifted unconsciously as I tried to diplomatically frame my next question. “Do you know if, if they’re still, uh...”
“Breathing? Yes, we’re still registering biotelemetry.”
“Have you, uh, verified that it’s not, uh, bogus?”
He stared blankly. “How would we do that?”
Ramathustra interjected: “Let’s assume the users are yet unharmed.”
“Agreed,” the IT chief said. “Now, could we get them out before membrane fatigue squeezes them all into a puddle of blood?”
Ironically, he still wanted to talk, but mainly to assert that it wasn’t his responsibility, and RLT would be liable for injuries. Ramathustra courteously but hastily bade farewell. In the corridor, he said, “The company will pay a double bonus.”
Don’t get me wrong, I like money. But as head of RLT’s Customer Service Field Response Group, Ramathustra is notoriously frugal. He doesn’t offer added financial incentives to freelancers unless there is, as he phrases it, “a significant challenge.”
Perhaps I should have asked for triple. But it was all I could do to keep my curiosity from betraying me. Ramathustra has been known to reduce payment offers if he knows you’re attracted to an assignment by more than the money.
“Moby Digital,” I said casually. “In a university literature department. This sim wouldn’t have anything to do with the novel Moby Dick would it?”
“I have been informed that it does,” he replied. “I trust that as a native-born citizen of America, you are intimately familiar with this literary icon of your culture.”
“Uh, it was written in the nineteenth century by Herman Melville. It’s about Captain Ahab, who hunts a white whale named Moby Dick. You know anything more?”
“Just that the whale kills everyone.” Ramathustra drained his coffee and gazed toward the Immersion Unit Room. “Make a point to stay out of its way.”
* * * *
Ramathustra wound through the nine-foot-wide spheres within the IUR toward the control console, where the operator spoke via video screen to a woman whose immaculate clothing clashed with hair that had become unkempt since coming to work.
While Ramathustra addressed them, I bee-lined for the restroom. Like the man says, I’m experienced. Go before you go, as my parents used to say on road trips.
After that, I washed off the sweat of yard work to make way for the sweat of whatever VR activity I was about to encounter, for I knew that Ramathustra almost always selected me for the grunt jobs. The man seemed to think I was invulnerable, an impression I’d love to disillusion him of, except that it brought me more assignments.
Stay out of its way, I thought. Did he suspect the physical-safety programming was compromised? That would explain the double bonus.
With a sigh and headshake at the mirror, I opened my carry-bag. I slipped on my personal pair of sky blue VR coveralls and returned to the IUR.
Ramathustra was flitting his fingers across the control console keyboard. The operator frowned at the movements and said, “You can’t do that, it’ll override—”
“Thank you for your input,” Ramathustra said. “It is most appreciated and valued. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off? Please lock the door on your way out.”
The console squeaked like annoyed mice. Behind me, I heard the door click. Ramathustra ignored my rapidly respirating presence and said to the woman on the screen: “Okay, ready to transfer control of our unit to your system.”
The woman, whose badge identified her as the university VR system administrator, replied coolly, “You do realize you could be walking into a trap.”
Ramathustra met my wide-eyed gaze. “You do realize that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. Now, I thought.
He observed me carefully, but not well enough to hear my pounding heart.
They worked in tandem. Across a thousand miles of fiber optics, control of Immersion Unit One was transferred to the university VR system. The unit hummed and chugged for a few seconds, then was quiescent.
“Before we go further,” the system administrator said. “I want to check on user status. Is there a back up procedure in these situations?”
“Certainly,” Ramathustra said. “Go over to the unit and listen.”
“What?”
“Go over to one of the occupied units. Press your ear against the side. Listen.”
She raised an eyebrow. While we waited, Ramathustra unlocked a cabinet and took out a pair of microphone-earphone headsets, sprayed disinfectant, and wiped.
The sys admin returned. “I heard their voices!”
“No groans or shrieks of agony or terror?” he asked.
She blinked. “No ... just voices. Conversational tone, I’d say.”
“Good.” Finished with the polishing, he handed one of the headsets to me. We inserted earplugs and adjusted mikes. Facing me, he said: “Communications check.”
“Loud and clear.”
The sys admin squinted. “Mind if I ask what you’re doing?”
“Given that we have lost conventional intersystem communications,” Ramathustra replied, “we must improvise with our own independent method of communication.”
“Won’t the membrane block the signal? I was told phones wouldn’t work in the IUs.”
“Cell phone and immersion unit operations interfere because they transmit in the same multi-gigahertz frequency band. These devices transmit in kilohertz, at which the membrane is quite permeable.”
“We should get a pair of those. How much do they cost?”
“I don’t know. My wife bought them for our children. Check the toy stores.”
He jabbed a console control. On the sphere with the big red “1” on the side, the indicator lights lit. The hatch swung open, revealing the membrane-swathed interior.
“In you go,” Ramathustra said. “Break a leg.”
His tone was so light that in I went indeed, forgetting to ask for a bigger bonus until after the hatch closed. By then it was too late—and I was curious anyhow.
* * * *
Once the immersion unit sealed, I waited while Ramathustra continued to hack the system in ways that I probably didn’t want to know about. Eventually, the gray membrane walls rippled and oozed, covering the hatchway.
The compartment light faded and the tricolor laser mounting began tracking my head movements, always positioning itself to be just out of reach. Then the red, blue, and green beams flashed, painting my eyeballs with computer generated imagery.
To my sight, the syrupy membrane vanished, replaced by a circular platform beneath a black sky filled with stars.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”
The sys admin’s disembodied voice spoke: “No, you’re not. You’re only into the university VR system, not the Moby Digital simulation itself.”
“How do I get there?”
“Before you do that,” Ramathustra said, “I wish for you to try the Tilt Test.”
“Roger. Here goes.”
I raised my hands in front of my chest, palms outward. I leaned forward. My fall accelerated until my body reached a forty-five degree tilt—and then the membrane mushed about my legs, torso, and head, and gently set me erect once more.
“You all right?”
“The operating system kept me from hurting myself, if that’s what you mean.”
“‘And in their hands they shall bear thee up.’ Good.”
“I can communicate with you but not with the users in the sim,” the sys admin said. “That could mean the safety routines work outside but not inside.”
“Suspension of safety routines is an extremely rare occurrence,” Ramathustra replied, “and exclusive to military and police simulations.”
“What about that item in the news, about a heart attack at a theme park?”
“That person might have had the same heart attack while driving a car. It was a matter of timing, not software.”
I thought—and hoped—we’d get down to business then, but the sys admin blurted with vigor: “Well, I just don’t like your company’s whole approach to immersive VR. A system crash could be fatal, since the default mode of your membrane cells is to expand to maximum size and crush the user. It’s insane, if you ask me.”
Ramathustra said in a tone as measured as the sys admin’s was emotional, “I do not see how we can engineer otherwise. Each cell in the membrane is simply a tiny spring, which is compressed by a tiny electromagnet. Depower the magnet, and the spring uncompresses. It is very simple, and therefore inexpensive, which is why it is popular.”
“But not safe, if all the magnets depower at once.”
“There is risk in every mode of transportation, even virtual. Now, let us proceed with deliberate haste, as your supervisor expressed concern about membrane fatigue.”
“I thought that took several hours to—”
“Let’s not cut our time margin more than we must.”
No doubt he was also thinking of my billing rate, but membrane fatigue was no joke. Unless the system depowered, the spongelike cells of the microprocessorlike membrane would eventually bloat. As IU occupancy volume shrank, all virtual transport tickets would be downgraded from First Class to Squish.
“Follow the arrow,” the sys admin said, with resignation.
On the platform at my feet, a large “painted” arrow pointed toward the ledge. I followed it, the membrane underfoot gliding smoothly backward with each step as if I were on a treadmill, so that in the real world I remained centered in the immersion unit.
At the edge of the platform, I came to a walkway. I took a couple of steps, then looked down at the image of Earth that someone had aesthetically placed there. Big mistake. My head spun and my stomach tossed, and I staggered back.
“What’s wrong?” the sys admin asked. Evidently she could see me too.
“Sorry,” I said, massaging my temples. “A little vertigo, that’s all.”
“Don’t tell me you’re susceptible to Evocation.”
“Well...”
“How can you be a VR troubleshooter and be susceptible to Evocation?”
Before I could answer, Ramathustra replied, “It is because of his enhanced sensitivity toward his environment that he is good at his work.”
Only an illusion, I thought. Not looking down, I stepped off the platform again.
The walkway branched toward translucent globes that shimmered among the stars, like planet-sized eggs deposited by a cosmic Easter bunny. Beneath the domes played images of factories, jungles, gargantuan human organs. In the astronomy section, a larger-than-average globe was filled with pinwheels of ghostlike luminosity, and modestly labeled THE WHOLE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.
The Literature Section had only a single globe. Approaching, I realized that Evocation had deceived me; the globes were only room-sized. The path terminated at the equator of the globe. Above, the hovering sign read, MOBY DIGITAL (AKA MOBY DICK, OR THE WHITE WHALE). Through the aura of the dome, I peered down a thousand-foot drop at a sail-masted wooden ship plowing across a choppy sea.
“How do I get inside the sim?” I asked.
“Step forward,” the sys admin replied.
I was afraid of that.
* * * *
Stars spun during the fall. It was as if I were tumbling head over heels, though I stood straight the whole time. It was dizzying and I came close to throwing up, which concerned me, since there’s no safety routine to prevent that.
In my nausea, I lost count of how many revolutions. Got to get a desk job, I remember thinking. Then wooden planks ascended to greet me.
Smack! The ship’s deck (okay, the membrane) struck hard. So much for the Tilt Test, I thought, as pain stung my kneecaps.
I steadied myself and reached for the rail. Alerted by the VR system of the approach of my fingers, the membrane’s microscopic cells mimicked the shape and texture of the wood with perfection—at least to my Evocation-distorted touch.
I propped myself and examined my physical transformation. My jumpsuit was concealed beneath a computer-generated coat, trousers, boots. Being part of the simulation, my body was painted by the immersion unit’s laser projectors, my computer-generated skin matching the pixel resolution of the rest of the environment.
I looked around, absorbed my surroundings, and almost gasped.
The imagery approached photorealistic. I saw the grain of the planks, the ripple of sunlight upon the sea, the delicate shading of the sky from deep blue at zenith to misty white at the horizon. With all but a handful of users evacuated, the entire university VR system was churning out polygons for just this one simulation, and it was more detailed than anything I’d experienced short of prototype.
I almost got seasick. I reminded myself it was the horizon, not me, that swayed.
“Hello,” I said. I lifted my eyes unto the clouds. “Anyone out there?”
“Yes,” Ramathustra said, but only faintly through my earplug. “We have lost system communications, and the sys admin can’t monitor you. You’re all right?”
“Been better,” I said, still feeling the quease. “Shall we try Administrative Eject?”
“I shall prepare to flip the switch. On this count: three, two, one—eject!”
The deck creaked, the waves tossed. The IU ventilation system blew a cool sea breeze and I swear, I smelled seaweed. That’s Evocation for you, but I had other matters on my mind just then. Like how I had become trapped in a machine that could kill me.
Ramathustra said calmly: “Try again. Three, two—”
Not a flash, not a glimmer. “This ain’t good.”
“We’ll get you out. I have tried the authorized way, now I’ll try some not-so-authorizeds. Why don’t you attempt User Verbal?”
“Karma Eject,” I said to the mast. “Karma Eject,” I said to the sails. “Karma Eject,” I said as succinctly as possible, to the sky. All refused to vanish.
From another world, Ramathustra mumbled: “Nothing seems to work....”
“Well ... should I go ahead and blow my brains out?”
“Hold off for now. Let’s find the users first.”
I had sensed the sim characters as mere blurs, but on close look the detail astonished. Maybe not every strand of hair was numbered, but—wrinkles, warts, the dilation of pupils with lighting—each sailor was unmistakably individual. I recognized only a few faces from the Virtual Basic stock character set. Someone had been creative.
The sailors swabbed decks, pulled ropes, milled about. I doubt a real ship would be half as busy. With the deck crowded, the users—undoubtedly in costume and rendered at sim-resolution—didn’t pop out. Which normally was the whole idea.
The utility satchel was clipped to my hip, just like Ramathustra always programs it to be. I delved my arm deep within the larger-on-the-inside interior and sifted through the tools of my trade: the Golden Dragon Slayer sword, various projectile weapons, grenades, the action-hero thingy that shoots a grappling hook. Floating at the side was the Tablet of Destinies—i.e., RLT’s standard In-Simulation Diagnostic & Control Device.
I pulled on the ISDAC’s frame, expanding the device to notebook size. I tapped buttons and held the screen at arms length. In that mode, the screen was a window, and virtual objects seen through it were color-coded: blue for inanimate, green for AI, red for avatar. I glimpsed red near mid-deck and walked over.
The three, an older man and a younger woman and man, were dressed the same, exactly like me, even the same cap that had been plopped jauntily on my head. In the midst of the deck’s flurry, they stood still while the older man lectured. I waited politely.
“This is the ‘try-works,’“ the professor said, gesturing at a brick box on the deck ahead of the main mast. “It’s basically for boiling whale oil out of blubber. Melville devotes an entire chapter to the try-works, but God knows what the metaphorical meaning is—”
While the professor was fixated on the try-works and the boy was fixated on the girl, the girl met my eyes and interrupted the lecture: “Professor, I think this is a real person, and he wants to talk to you!”
“What? You should have come earlier! Just be quiet and—”
“I’m not a student,” I said.
He looked me over. His tone changed from drill-sergeant authority to one of uncertainty: “You do seem rather old to be one.”
“I’m a consultant for the company that developed the software for this VR simulation,” I replied. They perked at that sentence, which quite possibly never emerged from the lips of a real nineteenth century employee of the whaling industry. “There’s a problem and we need to get you out. Do you have an assigned ejection procedure?”
They each held out their left arms and pulled down their sleeves. Each wore a wristband with a red button.
“Go ahead and press them.”
They exchanged glances and I wondered if I’d have to pick a guinea pig, but then they all pressed at once. And again and again. And then they exchanged glances, with vastly changed expressions.
“This is clearly unacceptable,” the professor said. “Do you realize how much the university paid for this simulation? We were assured there was no physical danger—”
“If you read the licensing agreement,” I replied, “you’ll see it’s worded the same as the licensing agreements for personal computer applications.”
“Oh, man,” the boy said. “We’re toast, aren’t we?”
While the professor’s face went red and he tightened his fists, the girl politely asked, “What do we do now?”
She may have been only eighteen or so, but I sensed she was the only one of the three who had the maturity to appreciate that I was risking my life to save them. It didn’t surprise me that a female was the only one to show courtesy because in my experience, males inside even noncompetitive “experiential” VR simulations tend to subconsciously lapse into gamer mode.
Speaking of that, the boy was frowning at me. He obviously didn’t like me looking at her. I didn’t like his possessiveness, but I wasn’t there to compete.
Regaining composure, I said, as business-like as I could: “There’s a verbal code phrase that’s ingrained into the operating system.” Not wanting to vanish in mid-sentence in case it was working now, I phrased cautiously: “You say the words, ‘Karma,’ and ‘Eject,’ but without the ‘and’ in the middle.”
“Karma ... Eject?” she asked.
“Yes, but a little faster, no pause inbetween. Like it’s a command.”
“Karma Eject!” she declared.
The others repeated, again and again. Around us, the crew went about its hyperkinetic business. The breeze hissed through the ropes and ruffled the sails. Above the splash of waves and the creak of the hull, they chanted: “Karma Eject! Karma Eject! Karma Eject!”
Eventually they wearied, and their voices trailed off into a murmur. You didn’t need Evocation to sense the tinge of despair.
Ramathustra intervened: “I need to speak to you in private.”
“Sure,” I said. I held my forefinger in a just-a-moment gesture to the others, and stepped from earshot. “What’s up?”
“Are you out of hearing range of all simulation characters?”
I saw them reading my frown. I moved toward the bow, found a deserted spot near the rail, and faced the sea. With a good idea and a bad feeling as to what he was about to say, I visually swept the horizon, verifying that neither seagull nor dolphin was in range to read my lips.
“All right,” I said, tweaking the earphone volume. “We’re private.”
“The system administrator has reported regarding the size of the data stream that breached the firewall into the university system,” Ramathustra replied. “The file length was exactly seven hundred and seventy-seven gigabytes.”
My breath caught and my heartbeat skipped.
“You’re sure? I mean, are they sure?”
“I asked twice myself. Yes, it is our old friend. Mister Pazuzu.”
In ancient Babylonian myth, Pazuzu was a demon. Three millennia later, Pazuzu was incorporated as a character in RLT’s premier demo simulation, Virtual Babylon. Then one day, a geek on the project development team thought it would be “schweet” to merge Pazuzu’s AI with a common computer virus. His progeny was unleashed—or it escaped, the story isn’t clear—onto the internet, whereupon it became legend.
A somewhat unholy legend.
Through a dry throat, I asked: “Do we know what it wants?”
“They are interrogating a copy. It invariably responds with, ‘Up yours.’”
“You’ve encountered it before. Can you guess what it wants?”
“He is the most formidable of VR system viruses, wiser than Apollyon, Prestige, or even The Beast. Yet if this version remains true to the strain, he desires only to survive.”
I noted the lapse into “he.” Ramathustra had been a virus hunter in his early career. I suppose that takes a certain mindset.
“So is ... ‘he’ ... holding us hostage?” I asked.
“That would imply he trusts humans enough to negotiate. No, he breached the university firewall with the simple goal of taking residence in one of the simulations without detection.” With voice lowered, he added: “However, in shutting down the simulations, the system administrator made him aware that he had not avoided detection.”
“So what’s ‘his’ plan now?”
“I doubt he has one. His sole objective is to keep the users trapped in the simulation, so that the simulation will not be rebooted and he will not be erased.”
“But that only works until membrane fatigue!”
He paused. “Yes, he will take the lives of the users, merely to extend his own by hours. Yet he is not vicious, only self-absorbed.”
“Then—how—”
While I sputtered, a tingle came over me. Know how you can sense when someone’s standing behind you? Maybe it’s how their body muffles ambient noise. Anyhow, it’s one way Evocation comes in handy. I knew they were there before I turned.
“So what’s the story?” the professor asked.
Overhearing, Ramathustra whispered: “You can’t confide anything until you ascertain their allegiance.”
“All right, let me think—”
“It can’t be anything in their personnel files,” Ramathustra added, “or on their personal web pages. Pazuzu may know them better than do their friends. You must—”
“Stop!” They winced at the shout. But an idea had come, and I said to them: “Listen, do you have a place in the real world that all of you are familiar with, say somewhere on campus?”
“Heh,” the boy said, chuckling. “‘Real world.’ That’s what we call off campus.”
“Well, the classroom of course,” the professor said.
“Is there a web camera in the classroom?”
“What does that—”
“It’s very important. Does it have a web cam?”
“No...”
“Is there a web cam outside, that can see into the classroom?”
“I don’t think so. See here, what—”
“Please. I’ll explain in a moment. I want each of you to describe something about the room. Not a commonplace element, not a clock or flag. Something distinctive.”
The girl got it first. “There’s a poster of King Ludwig’s castle.”
The professor pursed his lips. “The pencil holder is a ceramic Napoleon.”
The boy shrugged. “On the door, there’s a scuff mark, uh, like a boomerang.”
“You all agree?” I asked.
They nodded. Assuming the virus hadn’t been able to replicate itself three-fold while under the constraints of the simulation, I motioned them into a huddle.
“The simulation has been infiltrated by an intelligent virus,” I said. “It can impersonate any character, including user avatars. Just now, I verified it’s not one of you, but it could be anyone else here.”
The boy squinted. “How do we know it’s not you?”
“Because I’m getting you out before membrane fatigue.”
“What’s that?” the girl asked.
The boy pinched thumb and forefinger. “When we go squish.”
“Unfortunately,” I replied, “that’s correct. And we’ve got just a few hours.”
The professor’s immersion unit, accurately I presume, portrayed color draining from his cheeks. The boy lost his bravado and paled also. The girl froze and stared. I guess I’m not the only one with that problem.
I continued: “We’ve tried administrative and auto eject procedures, and the virus has blocked those. We can try suicide, but that can be ... messy. No telling how much the physical safety routines have been compromised. Although, I don’t think we have a choice.”
I was reaching for my satchel when the professor said, “Why don’t we just wait for the story to end?”
I lowered my hand. “What do you mean?”
“I was head of the specifications development committee for this simulation. The simulation tracks the plot of the novel, then it ends, and we walk out unharmed. That’s how it was designed, and that’s how it’s worked all the times I’ve been in here before.”
I said to Ramathustra: “What do you think?”
“Hmm,” Ramathustra replied after a lengthy pause. “The sys admin says he is correct. It is a narrative-type simulation. End the story, end the sim, the membrane retracts, the IU unlocks. The inevitability is such that the virus cannot prevail.”
“So our best course of action is to wait and do nothing?”
“To not interfere with the narrative flow, yes.”
Thinking of the tiring membrane, I addressed the professor: “How long do we have to wait? Isn’t Moby Dick a big, thick book?”
“I suppose.” His tone was dismissive. “But the simulation is intended only as a supplement to reading. It contains only the climactic scene, in which Captain Ahab confronts the whale. Once that occurs, the story concludes immediately.”
“When does the confrontation start?”
“Actually ... it should have happened by now.” He raised his hand as visor and scanned the sea. “The whale always appears directly ahead, but I don’t see the spout yet.”
“Aren’t we supposed to chase it?” the girl asked.
The professor wore a blank look, and I had the notion that he wasn’t sure about the answer, even though it seemed obvious.
“The whale didn’t chase the ship,” she said. “The ship chased the whale. But right now, we’re not moving fast enough to catch it.”
“Ah,” the professor said, examining the waves. “Yes, it does seem we are moving slower than usual. But as none of us are skilled in seamanship, how do we fix that?”
“We could raise the sails,” the girl said.
She pointed at the masts. The sails were at half height, rumpled and sagging. The boy started for the lines, but I motioned him to stop.
“There’s an easier way,” I said. I tapped the screen in my hand. A list of simulation characters scrolled. “I’ll just impersonate the captain and give the order.”
“You can do that?” the professor asked.
“No problem.”
I tapped Ahab, Captain—and instantly bent with agony.
“Auggh!” I cried. “My leg!”
“He’s an amputee!” the girl shrieked.
I jabbed the screen. The pressure eased on my calf, ankle, and foot. I staggered against the rail, took a few breaths, reexamined the list. “Who’s next in command?”
It was the girl, not the professor, who replied: “First Mate Starbuck.”
Tap. They watched in curiosity as my face sprouted a beard and my coat lengthened and changed color. I seemed to grow a couple of inches, too. At least the transformation was painless. Regaining my stance, I faced the deck crew and drew a deep breath.
“ALL RIGHT, MATIES—COME OVER HERE AND LISTEN UP!”
Ramathustra muttered: “You need to warn me before you do that.”
The crew shuffled into a loose mass. They were definitely an eccentric bunch, but one would have been noteworthy at a Halloween party for zombified goths: towering head and shoulders, his grim visage patterned with pinprick scars, muscular calloused hands gripping a harpoon. If I were a virus—
“Okay,” I said. “Now we need to, uh...”
Humans and AIs alike, they waited as I contemplated my near-zero knowledge of nautical terminology. I looked to the girl.
“All hands, make sail?” she prompted.
“ALL HANDS—MAKE SAIL!” I bellowed.
They shouted and uttered cries and clambered up the masts and yanked on ropes and raised the sails. Unfurled, the sheets fluttered and caught the wind tautly. Briskly, waves glided by and the sea breeze whipped my cheeks (the unbearded parts, that is). I stood squarely on the deck, clasped hands behind my back, and resolutely faced the whitecapped waters ahead.
I’ll tell you, I’ve flown star fighters and decapitated dragons, but nothing in a simulation gave quite the same rush as being on that deck, knowing I was in command.
Enjoy it while it lasts, I thought, watching Harpoon Guy from the corner of my eye.
Well, it got old fast. Once the ship was under way, there weren’t any more orders to give. The sea was empty, and one wave looked like another, which I am told is how it goes in the real world, too. The immersion unit membrane rocked with the motion of the ship, and Evocation got to my stomach again.
The professor monopolized the conversation with the students, and I moved to the bow and tried to speak to Ramathustra, but out in the real world they were still attempting a technical means for ejection, and he was preoccupied. I tried talking to the simulation characters, but the gamut of their responses was “Aye sir,” “No sir,” and blank stares. Finally, I took position at the rail, reflected that Master & Commander wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, stared at the waves, and drifted into a state of semihypnosis.
After a few minutes, I noticed a shadow across my arm. The girl was at the rail alongside me, holding out her cell phone.
“I can’t get this to work,” she said.
I shook my head. “It won’t work in here. Sorry.”
She studied my face. The system must have been reproducing the green hue. She frowned.
“You don’t look well.”
I forced a smile. “Motion sickness.”
“We’re not really moving, though.”
“Maybe not in terms of distance, but we’re rocking back and forth.”
“Not really. It’s just visual cues, an optical illusion.”
I felt more than a little jealousy. For her, it was just a sedate literary simulation.
“It’s different with me. I’m highly suggestive to audiovisual stimuli. Sometimes I feel hot and cold, smell and taste, even though the system doesn’t actually provide those sensory inputs.”
“Isn’t there a name for that? ‘Synesthesia.’ When one sense triggers another.”
I was familiar with the term; the company therapist had mentioned it. “Well ... I don’t smell colors or taste shapes. Officially, my psychological condition is called, ‘Evocation.’ It means that I tend to be more immersed in simulations than most people are. It’s not that I can’t tell the difference between reality and a sim. It’s that the sim comes across just as vividly as reality.”
“Hmm.” She hunched over the rail. “I don’t feel that. I feel like I’m in a booth in a room, watching a cartoon.”
“Well, then you’re a hard-nosed realist.”
“Not at all. When I read a book, it’s like I’m in another world. But here, it’s like all the technology is trying to manipulate me—pushing and poking. I think I subconsciously rebel, so it ends up being less immersive.”
As she gazed across the sea, I took a closer look at her. Maybe she wasn’t such a kid. She sure wasn’t a moron. Not like that boy. But then, as I thought about it some more, I began to wonder if maybe he wasn’t such a moron, either.
“That guy you’re with...” I said.
“Oh, I’m not ‘with’ him. He asked me on a date a while back, but—noooo, thanks.”
“Well, what I mean is—”
Suddenly she looked at me directly. “You think he’s the virus?”
“A scuff mark on a door isn’t all that distinctive. The more I think about it, the lamer it sounds.”
She laughed. “He’s kind of a lame guy. I think he takes this class just to pick up chicks.”
Mea culpa, I thought, recalling my own college days.
“It’s not him,” she continued. “He’s been in our sight the whole time. But—who do you think it is?”
I casually glanced at Harpoon Guy and made a single short nod.
“Queequeg? If I were a virus, I wouldn’t impersonate him. He stands out too much.”
“Who would you impersonate?”
She thought a moment, then said: “The whale.”
“Huh?”
“It’s the most unexpected, isn’t it? Besides, at the end of the story, the only characters who survive are the protagonist, Ishmael, and the antagonist, Moby. Well, all the users are collectively assigned the role of Ishmael—so that leaves Moby for the virus.”
I scrolled the tablet. There were four Ishmaels, one for each human. And yes, Moby was on the character list.
“I will keep that in mind,” I said. I didn’t meet her gaze as I put the tablet away because frankly I felt a little stupid that an amateur could see the obvious and I couldn’t.
“I don’t understand, though,” she said. “Why would a computer virus want to take on the identity of a VR character?”
In hindsight, I wonder if she was patronizing me, but at least I had the answer for that: “If you’re an artificially intelligent virus, you take a lot of file space and you need a big place to hide. VR simulations are the biggest memory and processor hogs there are. Even a 3D game on a personal computer can have a file size larger than the database of a national telephone directory.”
She blinked and turned toward the sea.
“It’s just so outrageously metaphorical,” she said. “Biological viruses and computer viruses, reality and virtual reality. I hate metaphors.”
Perhaps it wasn’t my place to ask personal questions, but I did: “So why are you taking a literature course?”
She made a face. “I want to be a writer.”
“So you’re studying Moby Dick to learn how to write?”
“How not to write. I don’t care if it is a classic, this novel is awful. It’s one dreary metaphor after another. Everything is symbolic. Omens, Fate, Destiny. God moving people around like chess pieces. You just want to grab Melville by the scruff and shake him and shout, ‘That’s not how life is!’”
“So ... you believe in free will.”
Her response was a mumble: “Until I got trapped in a computer program.”
“THERE SHE BLOWS!”
The shout came from above. One of the crew was hanging onto the top of the central mast. We turned to the direction of his outstretched arm, straight ahead, and saw nothing.
“It’s still over the horizon from our point of view,” she said. She sniffed. “You know what? I think I’ve got it, too.”
“What? A cold?” A thousand miles distant, I stepped away.
“No! That thing you have. Evocation. I mean, I smell land. That’s what Melville said Moby Dick smells like, because the whale snags all the floating refuse in the sea—”
“Something’s wrong,” I said.
Subconsciously, Evocation had directed my gaze downward. The hull was almost wakeless. Feeling a tingle at my back, I whirled around and saw—him.
I walked over for close inspection, and he stopped issuing orders long enough to eye me as I eyed him. He was the same height as me and wore the same coat, trousers, and boots that I did, and his beard was the same length and color as the one that the simulation had recently sprouted onto my cheeks.
He gave me a nod, then emphatically gestured upward at the masts, where the sails were rapidly being lowered by the crew.
“Don’t just stand there, man!” First Mate Starbuck said. “Help reef those sails. Captain’s orders!”
I sighed. I calmly reached into my satchel. I pulled out the .357 magnum, flipped off the safety, and shot him in the chest.
As he thudded to the deck, I shouted to the crew: “All hands—make sail!”
Without missing a beat, the men reversed their activity. The ship shuddered with increased speed. I dragged the body of the original Starbuck to the rail and dumped it over the side. She watched in silence.
* * * *
In simulations constructed with the Virtual Basic Object and Physics Language, the default shape of the world is round. Thus the guy atop the mast had seen a lot farther over the horizon than we could. Minutes passed, minutes we didn’t have. Finally, ahead at the rim of the world, a pillar of white gushered.
“The spout,” she said.
It spread into a fan and dissipated, then burst again. We closed swiftly. She stared distantly, declining to meet my gaze.
“It was either him or us,” I said.
“I know.”
“I mean, he wasn’t real—”
“I know.”
Again the spout burst, fanned, faded.
I sighed. “Well, maybe I’m the one who’s bothered. The AIs get better every year, and sometimes I wonder on which side of the trigger is the being who’s the most intelligent and self-aware.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. I don’t think she was really listening.
Just a few hundred yards away, the whale breached, flinging the entirety of its body out of the water, creating a hollow with its splash as big as the ship. But then, the creature was as big as the ship to start with.
For what little I had thought about it in the course of my life, I’d the impression that Moby Dick was a pure albino, but that wasn’t quite right. His forehead and hump were white, but the rest of his skin was streaky and mottled. The general shape was that of a baseball bat, a really big one. I saw a bead reflecting sunlight from the side, about six feet ahead of the flippers. It was the eye, and it was staring back.
“Pazuzu,” I murmured.
“What?”
“The name of the virus. Originally, the name of a Babylonian—”
The cabin door slammed open, loudly enough to be heard down the length of the ship. I heard a clopping noise. We turned at the same time.
Coming toward us was a man, whose wrinkled and weather-beaten features placed him in his sixties. He wore black clothing, a black hat, and a dense black beard. One side of his face had a scar that ran ragged from forehead to neck, where it spread into a vertical slit so deep that I expected blood to gush out. There was another slit, exactly the same, on the other side of his neck, but what caught my attention most was his wooden leg. That was the source of the noise.
Clop. Clop. Clop. He limped to the bow and met my gaze.
“Starbuck,” he croaked.
“Captain,” I replied.
He watched the whale a moment, then bellowed: “READY ALL BOATS!”
The crew worked the sail rigging and the ship came to a standstill. They streamed into the boats, took seats, raised oars, readied harpoons. One boat launched, then another. More swiftly than you’d expect of a wooden vessel powered by human arms, they streaked toward their prey, mates shouting the strokes with curses interspersed.
One boat went wide to the left, the other to the right. They were boxing it in.
From less than arm’s reach, well within my personal space, Ahab faced me. His eyes were wide and glistened. His voice rumbled above the waves and the shouts from the boats.
“Starbuck,” he said, “of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes.”
Instantly, I thought: Is he the virus? Slowly my hand reached for the satchel. But the water ahead stirred, and out came a great foaming mass, arousing cries from the boats. Ahab diverted his gaze.
“But in this matter of the whale,” he continued, “be the front of thy face to me as the palm of his hand—a lipless, unfeatured blank. Ahab is for ever Ahab, man.”
From the archaic language, I realized he was merely reciting from the book. Somehow, that was less than reassuring.
His voice rose and quivered: “This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”
I have to admit, I felt a little creeped.
Abruptly, Ahab glared and I flinched and he squared his shoulders and I raised my arms, but he only muttered, “I’ll see you in hell!” and stormed off toward one of the two remaining boats, which he boarded, shouting orders and profanities.
“Well,” I said, regaining some composure. “He’s rather colorful.”
“Yeah,” she said. “One of the great characters of literature. If you go in for histrionics.”
She cradled a computer tablet. I craned to look.
“What have you got there?”
“The novel.” Lines of print scored the screen. “I did a keyword search, to follow his monologue. That last sentence—’I’ll see you in hell’—it’s not in the book.”
“Hmm. You know, the rest of what he said—well, it was weird. It’s what it must be like to be an artificial being in an artificial world.”
“Because he’s a fictional character in a work of fiction. Melville milks it for all it’s worth.” She held out the tablet. “You can read it if you want.”
“I’ll pass.”
Milks it for all it’s worth, I thought, smiling when her back was turned.
The third boat, containing Ahab, lowered into the water and launched toward the whale. The whale made turbulent circles, spiraling inward as the boats closed.
She yawned. “I’m going to nap as soon as I get home.”
I consulted my tablet. It was late afternoon in the outer world. Probably would be evening by the time I got home. If you get home, I qualified. I had a hunch Pazuzu wouldn’t make it as easy as we hoped. The internet got rid of the dumb viruses long ago.
“Dudes!” The boy was waving from mid-deck. “The prof says we gotta get off the ship.”
We filed into the remaining boat. I sat next to the professor. The boy slipped in alongside the girl and grinned and tried to make small talk. Harpoon Guy took position in the front, tying his shaft to a coiled rope. Then the boat rocked, suspended in midair along the ship’s hull, and we waited.
“How come we’re not going?” I asked.
“Possibly,” the professor said, “because you’re in command.”
With a little help from the girl in the terminology department, I ordered the crew to lower us into the water. As the men stroked their oars, I took an encompassing look at the receding ship. The bow had the name, ‘Pequod,’ and a wooden head wearing a Native American headdress of feathers. The deck was deserted save for a small boy with a tambourine. The tiller was bleach white and crooked. At the stern, a man-sized box dangled.
I pointed. “That looks like a coffin.”
The girl replied, “It is.”
“Is there a utilitarian reason why a coffin is hanging off the end of the ship?”
“There is, but the real reason is because Melville has to pile on the symbolism.”
I was beginning to understand her attitude about that. When you’re facing a life-or-death situation, you don’t appreciate ominous omens being shoved in your face. Especially not blatant ones. Well, at least he didn’t have a raven perched upon a mast. Just then, an albatross circled overhead.
* * * *
As our boat glided toward the other boats and the whale, a pair of sharks nipped at the oars. They ignored my hand as I dipped it into the water, but nonetheless pain instantly shot up my fingers. I retracted my hand and frowned at my shimmering, broken reflection on the face of the sea. Sharks, yes, but water wasn’t supposed to bite. The membrane was turning eccentric, maybe even cranky.
“I’m back,” Ramathustra said in my ear. After being filled on the status, he said in a low, slow voice, “The IT chief and the system admin want to try something.”
“You sound like you have misgivings.”
“They intend to rapidly bombard the system with low-level interrupt commands. It is not in itself dangerous, but—we’ll see.”
I rubbed my palm against the top of the gunwale. Though the edges were crisp to the eye, they felt round to the touch.
“You’d better try something soon. Even this unit’s membrane is starting to bloat.”
Ramathustra broke away and I turned my attention ahead once more. Among the waves ahead, the whale was visible most of the time only as a spout. Now and then, the tail flipped high. When it did, I marked the distance between it and the nearest boat.
“They’re not closing,” I said.
“It shouldn’t take this long,” the professor replied.
“Does the whale seem ... sneakier ... than usual?”
“It’s not the whale,” the girl said. “It’s Ahab. Watch—he’s letting the whale get away.”
She stood up. One look at the churning waves and I shook my head, but forced myself to stand as well. In reality the rocking was minor, and the small increase in altitude enabled me to see over the wave caps.
Mere inches beneath the surface, the whale’s bulk slipped past Ahab’s boat. Moby was huge, busloads and busloads of hugeness, big enough to snack on a human, big as a redwood in sheer massiveness. Was it the exaggeration of the novel, or of the simulation design team, or did the real world allow for such monsters?
The harpooner in the captain’s boat tracked their gargantuan prey from the prow, arm poised for the throw, which would have been a clear shot. Seated immediately behind him, Ahab watched without comment as the whale surged away. I watched the cycling oars and compared their motion to ours. They were moving at only half speed.
“You’re right,” I said. “And if Ahab’s giving the wrong orders—well, we’re about to have a mutiny.”
I dove my arm into the satchel and extracted the magnum. Then I judged distance and the motion of the target. I put the handgun back and removed the machine gun.
The boy watched me intently. “I know that weapon, it’s in one of my video games. That’s an old AK-47. Isn’t that kind of, well, last century?”
“We made some mods,” I replied.
I set the control knobs on the rifle stock for infinite rounds and maximum firing rate and velocity, each ten times the performance of the real-world version, then chased Ahab’s back with the laser targeting dot. But before I could compensate for the pitching of the boats, Ahab arose and shouted at the harpooner.
Immediately the harpoon was flung. It sailed in a flat arc, a rope trailing behind it. The point gouged deep into Moby’s skin. With a splash of his flukes, the whale dove. The rope grew taut, and Ahab staggered and pitched over the side of the boat.
His good leg snagged by the rope and towed by the whale, Ahab skidded across the sea, then submerged with flailing arms and a cry cut short.
“Here we go!” the professor said. “Won’t be long now!”
The girl, though, was frowning. “This isn’t how it goes in the book. Ahab drives a harpoon into Moby at close range, then the rope wraps around his neck, then—”
I shook my head at her inquiring gaze and ordered the boat to stop. We waited. With the rifle resting across my lap, I squeezed the barrel. It felt thick and doughy—which made me feel chilled and queasy.
The professor’s expression degraded from enthusiasm to perplexity.
“It shouldn’t take this long,” he said. “It never takes this long.”
Then water gurgled a stone’s throw ahead. The whale broke the surface and breached high. The body flopped and the bow shock rocked the boats. A wall of flesh with the mass and speed of a train smashed the boat that had borne Ahab with a crack of splintering wood.
Several loops of harpoon rope had wound around the midsection of the whale, and Ahab, hanging limply with eyes closed, was bound to the side. His hat was missing and his head was drooped so much that his chin touched his chest. As the whale rolled, Ahab’s free arm swung broadly from left to right, right to left.
“That looks ... fakey,” I said.
“I suppose you wouldn’t understand,” the professor said. “It’s a metaphor. He’s beckoning us to follow him into death.”
I got that. It still looked fakey. Which seemed very odd, given the exquisite attention to detail manifested everywhere else in the sim.
The whale submerged. It was spooky to see something so massive move as quickly and silently as that, as spooky as the shifting of shadows in the murkiest of dragon lairs. And in my work, I’ve seen my share of those.
The professor’s face had turned ashen. “We’re still here. It always ends here. Always. Why isn’t it ending?”
I ignored his accusing tone. The whale broke the surface, yards away. It plowed toward another boat, struck in midsection, then came about and smashed the other remaining boat. The men, mysteriously, were seemingly consumed within the foaming wave front.
Remaining on the surface, the whale charged toward the ship with all the speed and mass of a rampaging rhino herd. The crash came with a boom and a shower of planks. The masts toppled and the sundered body of the ship was swallowed by the sea. I didn’t need to read the book to figure out Moby’s next move. The whale charged the last surviving vessel—ours. I aimed the AK-47 and pulled the trigger. The gun chittered without smoke or recoil, spewing a stream of lead. Bullets smashed into the barnacled hide and splattered blood. The wall kept coming.
“Oars!” I shouted. “Steer hard right!”
The crew rowed with inhuman vigor. Passing on our left, the whale brushed the oars and broke the tips. The boat lurched and spun in a circle as the idiot crew kept obeying my last order. Then the boy lost his balance and tumbled into the water.
“Help!” he screamed as he flopped. “It’s crushing me!”
“Oars stop!” I shouted.
All three of us pulled him into the boat. Since he hadn’t been in real water, he was dry and aside from freaking out, he was all right. As he sprawled onto the floor of the boat and gulped air, I pushed my hand into the sea. No pain this time, because we weren’t moving as before. But it was thickish, with a consistency between oatmeal and setting concrete.
Moby wheeled around for another pass as the boat bobbed helplessly. The boy watched wide-eyed, still gasping, doubtless wondering if his reprieve had been temporary. If we lost the boat and ended up treading with him in that goop of a sea, the relentlessly compressing membrane would soon squeeze the air from all our lungs, shaving minutes off what little time we had left to come up with a way of escape.
“We’re still here—” the professor said.
“Let me think!” I snapped.
Ramathustra cut in: “What’s going on—”
“LET ME THINK!”
I realized I had to escalate. I pawed inside the satchel and extracted a hand grenade. I cut a segment from the harpoon line and tied the grenade to the harpoon shaft. Handling knots is always clumsy in a VR simulation, and the sluggish membrane didn’t make it easier. By the time I finished a couple of square knots, Moby was back and closing.
I slapped Harpoon Guy’s arm. “Quikwa—Quakwee—”
“Queequeg!” the girl said.
“Queequeg! Throw! Throw now!”
He wordlessly and grimly nodded. He faced the onrushing whale. He cocked his arm back. Barely in time, I pulled the grenade pin. Then he loosed the shaft and it sailed smoothly and hit the whale dead on the forehead. Flame and smoke belched and the concussion rocked me off my feet.
When I regained my seat, the whale had a bloody crater on his head and was drifting amid a pool of blood sprinkled with tatters of blubber—some of which were still raining. The imagery was so vivid, I smelled the stench. I don’t think I was the only one.
“Dude,” the boy said. “This is so politically incorrect!”
The girl was pinching the gunwale and said: “Something weird is happening. This feels twice as wide as it looks!”
I stretched out my arm. My eyes told me that there was nothing in front of me but air. But I sensed the enveloping membrane, just beyond reach. I poked, and the tips of my fingers touched it before it could get out of the way.
“Ramathustra,” I said. “The membrane is degrading too fast.”
“As I feared,” he said, his voice distorted and faint. “The interrupt commands that we inputted resulted in an internal vibration stress, which has accelerated membrane fatigue.”
“Bottom line?”
“You know the bottom line.” Pause. “I am sorry. We—”
I couldn’t make out the rest.
“Hello?” I asked, tapping the headphone.
No answer.
The girl was staring at me. The boy was still on the floor, chest heaving. The professor was hunched, hollow eyes fixated on wringing hands. I nudged his shoulder. Since for me it was made of membrane, it felt bloated and mushy like everything else in my increasingly claustrophobic immersion unit.
“The whale is dead,” I said. “How come we’re not out?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “The story should have ended. It shouldn’t—”
The girl broke in: “The story doesn’t end with the death of the whale.”
We faced her.
“The story ends when Ahab dies,” she said. “But I don’t think he’s dead. I’m sure I saw his chest move.”
I looked over at the limp body. He sure looked dead to me.
“He was underwater for several minutes,” I said. “He’s got to have drowned. This simulation was constructed using the standard Virtual Basic application language, and the characters must obey standard human physiology.”
The professor raised his eyes and spoke. “Not—not necessarily. There ... there was one, uh, slight modification.”
My voice was flat: “What. What modification?”
“We, uh, we couldn’t get Ahab to move his arm ... the, uh, right way. Like I said, he has to move his arm so that it looks like he’s beckoning the rest of the crew to follow him into death. Well, the programmers who designed the simulation, they couldn’t get it to work. Too many variables: the pitching of the sea, the movement of the whale. The best they could do was get the arm to swing like a pendulum. Didn’t look like a wave at all.”
I felt waves of horror washing over me. If the application programmers had hacked a hole into the Virtual Basic command set, then the virus could have entered that same hole and, at the very least, suspended the software protocols that protected human life from physical harm.
“What did the programmers do?” I asked.
“Well, they asked if they could drop the requirement that he move his arm, and I told them, no, Ahab has to be waving, it may seem a small thing, but it’s a key part of the story. So then, they asked if they could kind of, uh, cheat and ... uh...”
“Could what?”
“Give him gills.”
I turned toward Ahab. On each side of his bowed head, there were those long, deep slits. I’d mistaken them for scars, but it was clear from this perspective. They were both exactly vertical, both the same width and length.
“Gills,” I said.
“So he could survive underwater,” the professor said. “Pretend he’s dead, but make his arm wave like Melville intended, for the metaphor.”
The boy groaned. “We’re gonna die for a stupid metaphor!”
“And it’s not even in the novel,” the girl said harshly. “It was added in one of the movies for visual effect.” She glared at the professor. “You made me read all that boring drivel, and now I find out that you didn’t!”
“I—I did read it.” The professor looked away. “It’s just that it was ... a long time ago.”
She threw up her hands. “Nobody reads anymore!”
“Let’s focus,” I said, striving to do so myself. “You’re saying that Ahab never dies. So what event tells the simulation to terminate?”
“It still ends when he dies,” the professor replied. “It’s just that instead of drowning, he’s programmed to will himself dead.”
“Which a virus won’t do....”
After repositioning the oars, I commanded us alongside the whale. When we were about ten feet away, Ahab opened his eyes. Alive and yet empty, they locked onto my own.
“Servant of Ramathustra,” he hissed. “See you in hell!”
As he wriggled free of the tangled lines, I fired the machine gun, pouring a torrent of lead into his chest. His torso was blanketed with swelling redness, but he only laughed and yanked out a harpoon and cut himself free and slipped into the water. I fired more and had to have hit several times, but he swam without slowing, and faded into the depths.
Not vicious? Clearly there’d been an upgrade.
“What’s going on?” I demanded, slamming the rifle against the boat. “It doesn’t matter if he has gills! He can’t be invulnerable to bullets! It’s not in the Virtual Basic character specs!”
The girl watched, as my arms ceased flailing and swung limply.
“It’s in the story,” she said quietly.
“What’s in the story?”
“Ahab says to the whale, ‘To the last I grapple with thee.’”
“So?”
“Well, it means that only the whale can kill him.”
“The novel and the precompiled source code are both written in English,” I said, “but they’re two different things.”
“Are you sure?”
“Well, of course I’m—”
Then I realized the real question was: After all the hacking, what were Pazuzu and the computer system that ran Moby Digital sure of? They were artificial intelligences, vastly superior to humans in speed and memory, yet limited in that ephemeral thing called understanding. An AI could scan all of Melville’s novel in an instant, then spend eternity unable to distinguish between narrative prose and an auxiliary instruction list.
I wondered: What if computers don’t do metaphors? What if they just do literal?
The boy was leaning over the side, squinting into the water.
“I can’t see him anymore. You’re never going to catch him now.”
For a moment, I thought he was right. Ahab could dive deeper, stay under longer than any normal human. He’d won. Unless I could think of something, quick.
Touching the useless headset, I asked myself what Ramathustra would do. That was easy: He’d toss the problem back into my lap. I even remembered his reassuring words: It is because of his enhanced sensitivity toward his environment that he is good at his work. Cute, but how could intense awareness of my environment enable me to kill Ahab before our immersion unit membranes hugged us to death?
As I faced out of the boat, the answer, of course, was hard to avoid, even without Evocation. It was after all filling my entire field of view.
To the last I grapple with thee....
I pulled out the tablet and summoned the character list.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. She was about to see. It wasn’t something you could avoid seeing.
I punched the key on the screen.
Instantly, the boat began to shrink, and so did avatars and characters alike. I matched Queequeg’s eye level, then loomed over him, and then he was like a child, a toddler, an infant. At the same time, my legs and arms were squeezed to my side and I toppled into the water.
As the boat dwindled to a toy and the others were reduced to action figures, she rushed to the side and shouted—only it was more like a squeak—”You’re not really a whale! You can’t hold your breath like a whale!”
I knew that. Floating horizontally, I gulped a lungful of air—the noise of my inhale came from behind my skull—and I rolled and wriggled, accustoming myself to the way in which the system mapped my bodily movements onto that of a whale. If I kicked my legs together, that was a flip of the tail. My arms were pressed straight against my sides, but if I flexed my wrists, that acted as a twist of my fins.
The weirdest part was the field of vision. It was no longer forward, binocular. One eye saw the boat on my left, the other saw my dead twin on my right.
I breathed deep and dove. One flip of my massive tail sent me deeper in seconds than I could have gone in a full minute of human-style swimming. It got gloomy fast. The virtual sea may not have had the specks of organic muck of a real ocean, but it was designed to have the same limited visibility. I could see barely beyond arm’s reach—that is, if I could have reached with my arms.
The membrane was smothering against me and was just as unresponsive for a whale as a human, just as exhausting to struggle against. With the system simulating submergence, there was only a tiny pocket of airspace between the laser projectors and my face, and it got stuffy fast.
My lungs burning, I was almost ready to go up, knowing that I would have neither the strength nor the time for a second dive—and then I saw a flicker. Not far below, Ahab was swimming with powerful frog strokes. But his peg leg made his efforts asymmetric, inefficient. I swatted my tail and streaked toward him.
My shadow fell over him and he whirled and poised his harpoon—but I bashed him and knocked it from his hand. I curved a half circle and jetted toward him, my tail kicking with resonant, accelerating strokes.
That final moment, he stopped swimming and simply hovered and watched. Having exhausted all possibility of escape, the virus had no sense of terror. His ultimate reaction was idle curiosity. Me, though, I had enough emotion for both of us.
I’ll show you hell. I swung my jaws shut and squeezed.
Instantly, the sea vanished and the membrane released. My body thudded onto the floor of the immersion unit.
The hatch cracked and Ramathustra stood at the threshold and shouted breathlessly: “We’re losing membrane restraint capacity. Get out of there!”
I grabbed his arm and he pulled me into the real world.
* * * *
Early that evening, after I had completed my post-mission physical with the on-site staff physician, Ramathustra and I teleconferenced with the university’s chief of IT, the VR system administrator, and the other former Ishmaels.
The ITers avoided the Ishmaels’ glares while Ramathustra tapped his stylus upon his computer tablet and reviewed the incident in a singsong voice that I’ve always suspected is intentionally calculated to deliberately bore listeners into acquiescence.
However, just then it wasn’t working. Despite my mental and physical exhaustion, I was wound up and wide awake and parsing every word.
“—and so,” he concluded, “the novel’s theme of predestination seems to have combined with the malevolent intent of a virus AI capable of usurping the persona of the most fatalistic character within the simulation. The situation was unique and is not likely to recur in other simulations, novelistic or otherwise.”
“The situation never would have occurred in the first place,” the system administrator said, “if the internet firewall had been secure.”
The IT chief salvoed back: “You authorized a hack into the command language module, which practically invited a virus to take over!”
“It’s the responsibility of the vendor—”
“What I want to know,” Ishmael-the-Boy said, “is who do I sue?”
“Sirs and madams!” Ramathustra said, flagging them silent. He nodded at his pad. “Obviously there are many issues to resolve yet. Nonetheless, it has been a long day and the principals are exhausted. Perhaps we should now go to our homes and rest, and we can deal with this tomorrow.”
With the unanimous recommendation that the Moby Digital simulation be shut down until further notice, the meeting was adjourned. Ramathustra and I were in the corridor before the screens went blank.
At the elevator, he punched the button, then patted my shoulder and asked softly, “How do you feel?”
Wearily, I said: “Soggy.”
“I will indeed recommend a larger than average bonus.” He read his watch. “And you know what else? You are invited to dinner also.”
“Rain check. Not that hungry at the moment.”
“Oh? I had the impression you were hungry when you went in.”
“Lost my appetite.”
“Motion sickness?”
“Not entirely.” I hesitated, then said, “I had a very strong, very negative Evocation experience in there at the end.”
“Really. From what?”
I grimaced at the flashback: My jaws closing, clamping, chomping...
“Let’s just say it’ll be a while before I get the taste of Ahab out of my mouth.”
The elevator doors parted just then, and I didn’t appreciate the metaphor.