Page 33 of Blow Me Down
“The VR glasses do more than just flash images at you. A transmitter is built into them that plays on sympathetic brain waves. That’s how you can taste and touch and smell things here—the transmitter sends the data to your brain, interrupts the signals that tell you what your current environment is, and instead tells you that right at this moment, you’re sitting on a ship docked at a tropical island.”
“You’re messing with my brain?” I asked, horrified. “Am I a vegetable now?”
“No, no, nothing like that. The program only interrupts signals that tell you things about your environment. Nothing more. As soon as you take the VR
unit off, your brain will recognize the return to reality.”
“All right,” I said. It didn’t sound like it made much sense, but I couldn’t dispute the fact that the world I was in seemed remarkably real. “But what has that got to do with the fact that even now, my daughter is probably calling paramedics to come and revive my catatonic body?”
“The game would be unplayable if it were run in real time. People would lose interest. Ships would take weeks to sail from island to island. No one would have fun. So the software is written to give the appearance of taking place in real time, but in actuality, a day in Buckling Swashes takes about a quarter of an hour in real time, give or take a few minutes, depending, on your activity level.”
“A day takes fifteen minutes?” I asked, astounded.
“Yes. It’s like when you dream, and you swear you’ve been dreaming for hours but it’s really just been a few minutes or less—your brain can actually function much faster than you know. We use that fact to condense a day’s activities down to a reasonable amount of time.”
“But… I slept,” I said, trying to understand how a day could be compressed down to fifteen minutes and still seem like a full day.
“Youthinkyou slept. The program plays on the fact that your brain learns certain truisms and expects them to apply until informed otherwise. You see nighttime fall, and your brain tells you that you feel sleepy, so you go to bed and sleep seven or eight hours. But in this world you don’t really—the program tells your brain that you’ve slept, and you wake up feeling refreshed and ready to tackle another adventurous day sailing the Seventh Sea.”
I thought about what he was saying. “You’re absolutely sure?”
“Absolutely. Let’s see, if you have been here for five days, that means you probably logged on around nine p.m.?”
I nodded.
“If your daughter sees you, she’ll just think you’re involved in the game, nothing more. Your body isn’t doing anything odd, just sitting at the computer, pretty much relaxed, as a matter of fact. We coded in some subliminal relaxation commands so people wouldn’t get stiff sitting too long.”
I allowed myself to be mollified. “All right. I won’t worry anymore that my body is doing odd things without me. But as for the rest—you’re saying that even though I know that I’m not here, my brain has been fooled into thinking I am?”
“Yup. Your mind is given a set of circumstances, and based on past experience, it makes judgment calls. All the VR unit does is take advantage of that, and gives you positive feedback that your brain is making the right choices.”
“But if that’s true,” I said slowly, trying to think my way through the strange new world of virtual brain napping, “then I should be able to tell myself that none of this is real, and get out of the game.”
He smiled. “Go ahead and try it.”
I did. I told myself that none of this was real, and that I wasn’t really sitting in a chair on a gently swaying boat, teased by a fragrant salty breeze that slipped in through an open window, adrift in a reproduction of historic Caribbean; no, I was sitting at home in my comfy leather office chair, hooked into a laptop, and probably starting to get stiff from sitting still for an hour.
“Hmm,” I said, looking around the cabin.
Corbin stood up. “Doesn’t work, does it? That’s because of the positive reinforcement the VR unit feeds your brain.”
“I just wasn’t trying hard enough,” I said, annoyed. No one controlled my brain but me! “Now I’ll really focus.”
I marched over to the captain’s bed and made myself comfortable, or as comfortable as I could be in a lotus position. I closed my eyes. I took several deep breaths, allowing my mind to clear itself of all the detritus that it normally stored. I thought of blizzards and snowflakes on white sheets, and gallons and gallons of white paint. Then, when my mind was reasonably focused, I instructed it to ignore the signals coming from the VR unit, and recognize reality.
When I opened my eyes, instead of my beautiful hunter green and cream den, I was staring into the eyes of a deranged pirate.
The pirate smiled. “I’m good, huh?”
“No comment. We’re stuck?”
He sat down on the bed next to me, wrapped one arm around me, and pulled me up close. “You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“No. You’re poking me.” I squirmed uncomfortably.
“I’m nowhere near poking you, sweetheart, although you only have to say the word and I’ll be happy to fulfill your every wanton desire. Unless it includes another man, a ferret, or grape jelly.”
“I meant, your sword is poking me,” I said, squirming to the side.
