Chapter 7
Zap, the Lord High Muse of New Phoenix tore off the VR Goggles, gloves, and ‘trodes stuck to her temples. She calmly got up out of the reclined neoprene rubber chair and stood up and stretched.
She looked around the room at the crowd of nervous onlookers. She then looked over at the large humming black supercomputer in the middle of the chilly room. Green and red lights on the data exchangers still blinked busily as the computer busily maintained the construct of "Fan Fiction World Test Beta v3.2."
A pasty faced wiry young man in torn jeans, sandals, and a tattered Hawaiian shirt that looked like he could use a few years in the sun walked up.
"What did you think?" he asked nervously.
"The quality of the VR is first rate," she replied slowly. "I’m glad you finally got the rendering problems ironed out. I don’t get a headache from the background detail anymore."
"We scaled the color and resolution back for out to the horizon detail. No sense rendering something past human visual acuity. We think that trying to feed that level of detail through the optic nerve was what was causing the headaches, since that is more detail than it normally processes or can see. That freed up huge amounts processor clock time that we could use to boost the frame rate up to something sick. So people sensitive to the strobing in fluorescent lights won’t even notice, and the VR construct won’t get choppy when there is a lot going on."
"That’s good." Zap told him. "Is there something we can do to increase the visibility of the ‘Author’s Notes’ in three space? They were hard to see."
"We are making adjustments to both the server and the font. When we have it fixed the text will always be facing the viewer no matter which way they are looking, and the color will always contrast the background."
"That’s good too. Will that take too long to fix?"
"Naw. We’ll have that cleaned up by the end of the week."
Zap stretched again. The programmer shuffled nervously again.
"What did you think of the VR?"
"A little bland. And there were still some ghosting and choppiness."
"You didn’t give us that much to work with. The computer had to fill the holes in the detail database with it’s own data."
Zap gave him a hard look. He began to squirm nervously. "We need to have a talk about how the computer fills those holes."
"What do you mean?" he asked meekly.
"I realize I wrote that when I was young, and didn’t put in very detailed descriptions, but somehow I’m almost certain that I didn’t envision Robin as an overgrown Sailor Moon."
The programmer blushed and began to squirm with embarrassment.
"And don’t think I didn’t notice how Ben Cotton looked like Val Kilmer in Heat."
"You noticed?" the programmer said with a meek smile.
"I think the black gloves, gray suit, body armor and M4 Carbine from the bank robbery scene gave it away."
The programmer squirmed with embarrassment again.
"You’d better get all that crap cleaned out of the memory before Sleepyside 1.0 goes online."
"Oh we will," he assured her. "Just wait. With the amount of information and detail you gave us, it will be the best VR construct ever. Even better than the one we made with the yak, plastic tubing, car batteries and . . . ."
"STOP!" Zap shouted at him. "I DON’T want to know."
"Sorry," he meekly apologized.
"You geeks!" she admonished. "I’m glad I gave you something useful to do. Sometimes you’re worse than this total nutball from New Mexico that used to hang out at my web-site."
"Yes. You told us all the stories. And about how after the nuclear war, nobody in his home town noticed. . . ."
Zap just smiled and wandered out of the computer lab.
"Fix your toys. I’m going to curl up with a good book. At least I know that will work properly."
"See you later ‘Terrica’," the programmer called with a smile.
"Don’t make me hurt you."
Chapter 8
Much later that day, the geek took a break from programming and looked out the window of the Metrodome as the people mover took him to the Monorail station. The sun was going down, and the high amount of dust and debris in the atmosphere made it very orange. If it weren’t for the fact that he knew he was under a protected dome of New Phoenix it looked very much like the desert sunsets he had seen pictures of from before World War Terminus.
Once again the stupidity of humans had led to global conflict, and once again the consequences were devastating. Most of the damage had been done in the initial volley of ICBMs and was over in half an hour.
And once again through dumb luck and serendipitous technical breakthroughs, humanity had been spared from complete destruction and went back to work rebuilding the world they had destroyed. Most lived under domes now, and VR promised to be breakthrough that would allow them all to see and know what the world had been like before it had been torched.
But the VR technology was only half of it. The other thing that was going to enable the people to know the old world through Virtual Reality was a breakthrough in medicine, in specific nanotechnology. The miracle micro-machines developed to repair tissue and genetic damage from radiation at a cellular level and clean the body out of fission byproducts like Strontium and Cesium isotopes had an added bonus. The whole process of cellular regeneration they used seemed to halt the aging process or slow it down a great deal. So most of the survivors of the war were still alive and in remarkably good health. Those with special knowledge and memories of the world before the war were revered as scholars and historians and story tellers, and it was by working with one of these scholars that he was going to be able to bring a part of the old world back to life again for a new generation to enjoy.
The End