“You’ve got the idea,” Eric’s voice said. “The other functions can wait till later. In the meantime, why not try a walk outside?”
“Which way’s out?”
“Turn around.”
Michelle looked down and at her arms to get a better feel of herself, and was curious to see that she was colored red and orange. She turned back to face the frosted glass wall and saw that it was opening outward and upward on an overhead hinge, like a huge garage door. Outside was a mountainside, green in the sunshine, and beyond it an ocean . . . except that it couldn’t be, of course. She thought rapidly over what she could remember seeing, trying to make sense of the situation. “Where am I?” she asked. “Somewhere down by the shore?”
“Go and find out,” Eric suggested. Michelle guessed that, as before with the lab setup, he had a monitor that reproduced what she was seeing.
She walked out into the sunlight. Although the mec was several times larger than the one she had used in the lab, the power for its weight was still enormously greater than what a lifetime of everyday experiences had conditioned her to think of as normal. It gave her a feeling of moving without weighing anything at all, of limitless energy and unbounded strength. Too much so. In her exuberance she forgot that coordination required a different “feel,” and pitched full-length onto the white rocky ground outside. The jolt hit her solidly in the hands and knees. Strangely, she felt herself winded and gasping—whether through some reflex association or another of Eric’s ingenious neural feedback connections she was unable to tell. Fortunately, he had not taken realism so far as to stimulate pain receptors. She turned over awkwardly, making metallic rasping noises on the rock, and sat up. There were no Great Tweezers In The Sky to put her back on her feet this time—everybody was still in the house, while the mec that she was occupying was God-knew-where, possibly hundreds of yards away. With her weight effectively nothing, getting up was more a matter of balance control than effort. What made it difficult was the light-headed and mildly nauseating feeling that came with having to rely on vision, without help from the normal internal balance sense. It was like having to consciously focus on coordinating movement after having too much alcohol, which probably accounted for the giddiness. But with some experimenting she succeeded in tottering upright again, and looked around.
The white rock looked artificial—a coarse, flat expanse stretching away on either side and ending abruptly in a straight-line edge a short distance ahead of her, like an elevated beach. Behind her and overhead, the “door” was a side of what she could see now to be a gray plastic box standing as high as a house, with molded ribs like cathedral buttresses and shiny metal screw-heads the size of garbage-can lids. Behind the box, the ground rose steeply, forming what looked like the side of a mountain: broken slopes of earth and rock interrupted by sheer cliffs, with plants the size of trees, though formed in the wrong shapes and with enormous leaves resembling pointed green sails. Beside the plastic box was a sequoia trunk without branches: a huge wooden cylinder transformed by height into a foreshortened tower rising far above her. She almost lost her balance again craning her head back to follow it, and saw a red-and-yellow pennant at its top, bright against the sky.
The “beach” that she was standing on, she realized, was concrete—a block, or a piece of block, forming a ledge in front of the gray plastic box. The box had to be a kind of movable base, at the moment placed somewhere down by the water’s edge, that Kevin and Taki operated their battlemecs from—it would protect the mecs from the weather and save having to traipse down from the house every time the boys wanted to use them. Since the box was facing the water, Michelle guessed it to be on the mounds at the bottom of the slope that she had seen from the window, facing away from the house. She turned back and moved to the edge of the concrete block to view the ground below.