PATRICIA CORNWELL. Unnatural Exposure

She picked up a remote control and two video displays blinked on, and I recognized the photographs deadoc had sent to me. They were big and in color on the screens, and I began to get nervous.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked my niece.

‘The basic question has always been, does an immersion into an environment actually improve the operator’s performance,’ she said, typing computer commands. ‘You never got a chance to be immersed in this environment. The crime scene.’

Both of us stared at the bloody stumps and lined-up body parts on the monitors, and a chill crept through me.

‘But suppose you could have that chance now?’ Lucy went on. ‘What if you could be inside deadoc’s room?’

I started to interrupt, but she would not let me.

‘What else might you see? What else might you do?’ she said, and when she got like this, she was almost manic. ‘What else might you learn about the victim and him?’

‘I don’t know if I can use something like this,’ I protested.

‘Sure you can. Now what I haven’t had time to do is add the synthetic sound. Well, except for the typical canned auditory cues. So a squelch is something opening, a click’s a switch being turned on or off, a ding usually means you’ve just bumped into something.’

‘Lucy,’ I said as she took my left arm, ‘what the hell are you talking about?’

She carefully pulled a DataGlove over my left hand, making sure it was snug.

‘We use gestures for human communication. And we can use gestures, or positions as we call them, to communicate with the computer, too,’ she explained.

The glove was black lycra with fiber-optic sensors mounted on the back of it. These were attached to a cable that led to the high-performance host computer that Lucy had been typing on. Next she picked up a helmet-mounted display that was connected to another cable, and fear fluttered through my breast as she headed my way.

‘One VPL Eyephone HRX,’ she cheerfully said. ‘Same thing they’re using at NASA’s Ames Research Center, which is where I discovered it.’ She was adjusting cables and straps. ‘Three hundred and fifty thousand color elements. Superior resolution and wide field of vision.’

She placed the helmet on top of my head, and it felt heavy and covered my eyes.

‘What you’re looking into are liquid crystal displays, or LCDs, your basic video displays. Glass plates, electrodes and molecules doing all kinds of cool things. How does it feel?’

‘Like I’m going to fall down and suffocate.’

I was beginning to panic the way I had when I’ d first learned how to scuba dive.

‘You’re not going to do either.’ She was very patient, her hand steadying me. ‘Relax. It’s normal to be phobic at first. I’ll tell you what to do. Now you stand still and take deep breaths. I’m going to put you in.’

She made adjustments, tightening the display around my head, then returned to the host computer. I was blind and off balance, a tiny TV in front of each eye.

‘Okay, here we go,’ she said. ‘Don’t know if it will do any good, but can’t hurt to try.’

Keys clicked, and I was thrown inside that room. She began instructing me about what to do with my hand to fly forward or faster, or in reverse, and how to release and grab. I moved my index finger, made clicking motions, brought my thumb near my palm and moved my arm across my chest as I broke out in a sweat. I spent a good five minutes on the ceiling and walking into walls. At one point, I was on top of the table where the torso lay on its bloody blue cover, stepping on evidence and the dead.

‘I think I might throw up,’ I said.

‘Just hold still for a minute,’ Lucy said. ‘Catch your breath.’

I gestured as I started to say something more, and was instantly on the virtual floor, as if I had fallen from the air.

‘That’s why I told you to hold still,’ she said as she watched what I was doing on the monitors. ‘Now move your hand in and point with your first two fingers toward where you hear my voice coming from. Better?’

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