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It was one of those offers you get in the mail. You know the kind. "Special offer! $759 worth of top of the line software for just $59. Act now. Offer expires any minute. Send check for $59 with two floppy disk box tops toÉ" Something like that. I read these ads with skepticism, but I still read them. I'm on the lookout for something for nothing as much as the next guy. This particular ad read:
Virtuality is Reality!
SPECIAL OFFER
Get Virtuality for only $29, Ordinarily $429
Your life will never be the same.
I like getting packages. Every time I watch The Music Man "Oh, oh, the Wells Fargo WagonÉ" strikes a special cord somewhere between my heart and my third vertebrae. I opened it up and it looked like typical cheap software. A simple manual made out of 8 1/2" by 11" inch paper stapled and folded in two and a single floppy disk. At first glance even the bargain special offer once in a lifetime price of $29 looked a little steep, but there was more. Not much more, but enough. There was an odd cable with a sort of box in the middle, a connector that would fit onto my printer or modem port on one end, and on the other end a sort of chintzy headset. I mean it looked like my head was the only thing the other end of that cable might fit onto. I read the manual.
Some programs are meant to be loaded and used, damn the manual and full speed ahead. This was one of those. I couldn't understand the manual any more than I could understand the flyer. There was one rather cryptic illustration that lead me to believe that my guess about the headset was correct. So I did what any red blooded Maccer would do, I plugged the cable into my printer port, booted up my Mac, loaded the program onto my hard disk, and launched it. Up popped a dialog box telling me to put on the headset. Ha! Didn't I tell you I knew a headset when I saw one? I put it on my head. I was surprised by a sort of pricking electical buzz behind my temples. A headline flashed in front of my eyes. "Engineer/Playwright and Occassional MacValley Voice Contributor Electocuted in Pursuit of Ultimate Computer High." It was not a pretty thought. Only the headline was. It floated in space in front of my eyes pulsing in rainbow hues. I reached out to touch it and when I did it tumbled across the room, bounced off the wall, and shattered into a zillion multi-colored pieces. I have never done drugs. My father was a doctor. One night when I couldn't get to sleep he gave me a pill. I spent the night marvelling in the strange things that pill did to my coordination but the one thing it didn't do was put me to sleep. This was stranger than that, and more unexpected. I set out to explore Viruality.
There wasn't much to the onscreen menu. The usual Apple, File, and Edit menus, containing only the most basic, bare bones commands. In addition to these standards there was only one more item on the menu bar. "Choose" it said. Under the "Choose" menu were "Reality" and "Virtuality". I chose "Viruality". The first thing that became apparent was that there was an image just like the image on my monitor displaying itself about twelve inches in front of the screen. My eyes aren't perfect and I almost always forget to wear my glasses when I'm at home so it was much easier to read that much closer to my face, but I wasn't as concerned with reading what was on the screen as with trying to understand what in the world was going on. I poked my head around the virtual, floating screen, and saw that my real screen was doing just fine behind it. In fact, if I poked my head around far enough I could see behind the virtual screen, "Made in Taiwan" it said. This was neat stuff. My hard disk ground for a moment then a dialog box popped up on the virtual screen. There was a single button in the center of it. "Push me" it said. I moved the mouse but there was no cursor. So I reached out with my finger and pushed the button.
The only thing I noticed was that there was nothing to notice, except a gnome sitting on the corner of my desk. I have read a lot of books with gnomes in them but I never expected to meet one. It pulled a cigar out of its vest pocket, bit off the end and spit it out in the general direction of my printer, and then lit it. Virtual smoke smells even worse than the real thing. When I finished coughing it shook its head and knocked the ashes off its cigar into my wine glass. It was cheap wine, I admit, but the glass was full and I was beginning to get annoyed.
"Would you like a tour?" He said.
"What?" I replied, wondering if the cord would stretch far enough to empty and refill my wine glass.
"Would you like a tour? We give tours, just like those virtual reality bozos. Two bits a minute." "I bought the program, and it's running on my machine." I told him.
He looked disappointed. Then he brightened. "Two bits," he said, "shipping and handling." I fished into my pocket and pulled out a quarter. He took it, bit a piece out of the corner of it, and made a face. "You wouldn't happen to have any wooden nickles would you? Two bits ain't never been the same since they took the silver out of it." He took another bite and chewed on it slowly. "Sort of grows on you---like good scotch. I could get used to it." He popped the last piece into his mouth. "What would you like to see?" I didn't really have an idea about how you were supposed to talk to a gnome, but I seemed to be doing all right. "What have you got?" "The usual. Kitchen tours. Living room tours. Bedroom tours - no sex. Office towers. Floating fish and mushrooms. Shoot 'em up galleries. A few fractal mountains." "Anything else?" "A few betas. No guarantees. Full of bugs, but worth the trouble. I'll sell you a can of Raid for a nickle." "What if my machine crashes?" "Simple. It's back to Reality you go." "What's the best beta you've got?" "For two bits I'll give you the Playboy mansion - after dark." "I don't think so. My wife might walk in." "She wouldn't see anything. She's not connected." I fingered the headset. "I don't think so." My wife leads a difficult life. If she saw me touring the Playboy mansion after dark with an invisible gnome it might be more than she could take. "What else have you got?" "Open the door." "What?" "Open the door." He pointed to a door that had formed in place of the virtual screen.
"I can't fit in there." "Sure you can. Just take a piece from the left side of the cake, click your heels three times, and think wonderful thoughts." I was about to question him further but I noticed that he somehow seemed less solid than he had before. In just a few moments he had faded almost entirely away. All that was left of him was an aggravating smirk and that stinking cigar. "Think cheerful thoughts." "What cake?" I called out, but the grin and the cigar popped out of existence, leaving a pile of ash sitting on the corner of my desk. I looked at it and wondered forlornly what to do with the beckoning, and very small door that lay only a foot and a half in front of my nose. Then I noticed that the pile of ash was reshaping itself into a sort of cylinder, a cake as a matter of fact, with pink icing. I wondered if the gnome meant his left or my left, decided it must be my left, took a bite, clicked my heels three times, and thought of a Mac Quadra with twenty-one inch monitor sitting right on my desk. I found myself standing in front of a full sized door, turned the knob, and stepped through.
This was more like it. You remember Toon Town from Roger Rabbit? This was better. I saw twelve dwarfs and a hobbit starting down a road about a hundred yards off. I hurried to catch them as they disappeared over the rise of the hill. It didn't look like much of a hill but I was struggling mightily by the time I reached the top. You'd think the programmers of something like this would at least let you be in virtual good shape, even if you were in lousy shape in the real world, but no, I was sweating buckets and the hobbit and dwarfs were no where in sight. I don't like to think of what was in sight. You might call it a bug. To me it looked like a Sherman tank with six legs, wings, and a pair of mandibles like shovels from a pair of back hoes. I got out my can of Raid and sprayed It keeled over on its back, legs stiffening toward the sky. I felt pretty good. Saint George and his dragon didn't have anything on me and my bug. I wonder if Saint George's dragon had brothers? My bug did, about a hundred of them, and they could all fly. My can of Raid had about one spray left in it and when that was gone I threw the can at the nearest bug and lit out for the trees. Calm down, I kept telling myself, this is not real, this is not real. I stopped under the nearest tree and reached for my mouse. Where was my mouse? I knew it had to be there somewhere to the right of my hand. I was sitting at my desk, right? That is where I really was. The armored insects were closing in. A small creature scurried past my feet. My mouse! I leaped for it, scrambling on my hands and knees in the grass, grabbing at it two times, three times - Ah Ha! I got it! With the mouse in my hand I could see the faint shimmer of my monitor against the tree trunk. The ground shook with the basso buzzing of a hundred hungry Sherman bugs. I clicked on "Choose", pulled down to "Reality", and let go, just as as a heavy metallic jaw began to close in around my back.
The hard disk ground and I was back at my desk. Safe! No more virtuality for me. I've sworn off the stuff. Only sometimes I wonder. I mean things don't quite make sense. Sex kills. The Berlin Wall has come down, Communism has collapsed, and the U.S.S.R. has crumbled. Do you believe that? I don't believe that. And sometimes I feel a prick, and a sort of electrical buzz behind my temples. Help me somebody! I'm trapped in virtuality.
Gregg Writes
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