“I’m going for another ride?”
“Sure. That’s what you’re here for.”
Michelle turned and lowered herself down into the seat. It was not as restful as the specially made model that she’d tried earlier, but she had endured hours in these on enough occasions. Kevin and Taki occupied the other two, Kevin taking the modified lounge chair. They seemed to have the connections and adjustments preset, slipping into the equipment without needing assistance.
Unlike the headsets that she had seen at Neurodyne, this one included plug earphones and a stem microphone. “We added sound to the mecs that the boys use here,” Eric explained. “It’s not something that we need in the labs, as you saw. But for the kind of thing they do, it adds a whole new dimension.”
There was another visual test pattern and checks of field motion correlating with imagined head movements. “Does everything look good?” Eric asked. His voice didn’t sound close by her as before, coming through the phones this time. “Can you hear me okay?”
“Everything feels just fine. . . .”
She had expected to find herself somewhere in the miniature landscape of straight lines and flat surfaces that she had seen on the tabletop. Instead, she was in some kind of large room, dark inside but with light coming through the wall facing her, made of what looked like frosted glass. A metal band that had been clamped around her waist as a restraint sprung open on release of a catch, freeing her. There was a warm, pleasant sensation in the middle of her back, roughly where her shoulder blades would be if she’d had any. She turned to investigate. After her familiarization that afternoon, adapting to being in a mechanical body again came more easily this time.
She had been standing in one of four vertical recesses in a block of whitish, waxy-looking material that formed most of the near wall and extended to the ceiling. Several rounded golden pads projected a few inches on the inside of the recess, a little below shoulder height. Another mec, with a squat, angular body and froglike, football-shaped head carrying eyes at the extremities, was inactive in an adjacent recess, secured as she had been by a metal band around the waist. It was painted yellow with black stripes, like a tiger. The remaining two recesses were empty. Oddly curving pipes snaked through the shadows to the sides of the room, down to the corners, and overhead.
The transition had been so sudden that it took Michelle a few seconds to accommodate to her situation. The “room” had to be a box of some kind—a receptacle that mecs were stored in. The pipes were wiring, she decided. And the gold pads looked like electrical contacts.
“Can anybody hear me?” she said.
“We’re reading,” Eric’s voice answered in the phones.
“What’s this funny feeling in my back? It’s not unpleasant at all. Just . . . ‘funny.’ ”
An image appeared superposed on her visual field of a dial-type gauge colored red at the left-hand end, amber farther toward the center, and the remainder of the arc green. A white pointer sat hard to the right, in the green. The caption below read Charge. Along with it were several other gauges, a thermometer symbol with its column again showing green, and more figures whose meaning was not obvious. “You’ll start feeling cold in your back as you run down,” Eric’s voice said. “Neat, eh? We wanted to link it to the hunger response, which would have been even neater—but it never worked properly. You can activate the display yourself at any time.” The superposed data vanished. “Wag your finger sharply to cue the system, then point it to select status from the menu.”
Michelle was unsure what he meant. She extended a finger—one of three, formed from jointed, square-section metal segments actuated by rods protruding from grooves—and waved it vaguely. “Like this?”
“No, sharply. As if you’re ticking someone off.”
She tried again, this time as if she were trying to shake something sticky off the end. A bar of boxes containing words, like the pull-down menus on a computer screen, superposed itself on her view this time, listing status, keyboard, map, and other options, along with associated icons. She pointed to highlight status, and then stabbed her finger in the standard manner used with VR systems. The display that she had seen previously returned. She wagged her finger once again, and it vanished.