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this any more or really appreci-ate what everybody was saying about it unless
I tried it my-self. I think maybe half the staff's done it at least once now."
"What about Les Cohn?"
Tanaka grinned. "Oh, Les was one of the first once we got in the new
head-mount units. He'll have to tell you about it. Not one I'd pick, but I can
see why he did it. Through there."
I went into Dr. Lester Cohn's infirmary and he was sitting there waiting for
me. He studied a chart which I assume was my vitals, then gestured for me to
sit on the table, which I did.
"Well, since you slept here last night, I'm pretty sure you haven't had
anything in your stomach," he commented, "unless you swiped something on the
way in here."
"I'm clean. Starting to get hungry, but clean."
"We'll fix that. By the time you get your enema and we do the final blood
stuff you'll be ready to go home. Don't. It's worth it."
"I understand you've done it."
He nodded. "I got curious, that's all. They wanted volun-teers to check the
more elaborate and complex ones, people who'd never been through it before. We
just can't trust the old guard, not yet. There's too much danger.
So, you remem-ber the one I was talking about? The one that was just the same
as here except that it postulated you were born the op-posite sex?"
"Yeah? You didn't!
"
"Yeah, I did. Thirty-six hours' worth, subjectively anyway. It's not just the
normal curiosity you have in having lived all your life with that barrier,
either. I mean, I'm a doctor. I spent half my life studying to be an internist
and the past twenty years being one, and I had blithely worked with both men
and women mostly confident that I knew just what I was dealing with.
I can tell you that things were different. More than I thought they'd be.
It's a bit disturbing, really, some of the as-sumptions you make as a man and
some of the things you just never think about. I found a woman who'd done the
same thing in reverse and she pretty well said exactly the same thing. Not
just the physiological, either. Men react to women differently than they react
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to other men, and vice versa. We know that, but it's another thing to
experience it from the other side." He paused a moment, then said, "Well,
let's get you on the road. It's uncomfortable setting things up, but until you
do this you can't understand the experience."
He was right; with two nurses to help in the torture, I man-aged to have an
extremely unpleasant next hour. Finally, though, he seemed satisfied.
"Okay, that's the lot. We're going to have to look a little closer at your
diet and blood sugar after this, but there's noth-ing here that would
disqualify you," he told me.
"Huh? What about my blood sugar?"
"I'd say you're pre-diabetic. Not over the edge yet, but getting there. Poor
diet, not enough exercise, and a bunch of genetic markers for it. Don't
worry think of it as a side ben-efit. If we catch this early and you get
serious, there's no rea-son to think it'll bite you before you're really old
and gray. Shall we proceed with this?"
I nodded. "I guess so."
"Okay, don't be surprised if your vision is different or your balance is a bit
off or something of that nature when you inject into the Sim. There are all
sorts of subjective color shifts, slight differences in the eyes can be
disorienting, ears can have a greater or lesser range of hearing, that kind of
thing. You get used to it quickly, but it can be disconcerting."
I hadn't thought of that. "Um, do you know just which sort of reality he's got
picked for me?"
"Yeah, I do. I should be shocked, repulsed, and all that, and I am, and it's a
real Tanaka special, but in this case it's a very good range of experiences
for you in a limited circum-stance. Somebody back then had the sexual
fantasies of a teenage boy. Kind of wonder what their real sex life was.
Still, it's a near-perfect demo, I think, and there's not much danger or
trauma. Just don't let it go to your head. It's as harmless as a dirty
magazine, which isn't to say that some folks here might not want it destroyed
because they think porn makes rapists and bang bangs make murderers. You're
grown-up. Go ahead. Unless you have some real serious moral objection to it.
Dan's one experience with it actually toned him down a lot, sort of took the
urges and needs out of him, so it might be cathartic."
"You make it sound like I'm going to wake up in the middle of a porn movie."
"Nothing that elaborate. No plot, just a situation. What you do with it is
strictly up to you."
We went out and they had one of their high-tech coffins open and ready. I
climbed in, and found that it was tight but not really uncomfortable. The
helmet I'd tested out many times, of course, but this was the newer, lighter,
thinner improved design and it felt almost like there was nothing there at
all. I lay down, naked in the chamber, and feeling more and more nervous about
all this. Was I nuts? Could I back out?
I had the sudden urge to do just that, to scream at them to stop, but I
didn't, even as they inserted the IVs, hooked up the spacesuitlike covers and
tubes to my ass and genitals just in case, and fully energized the pod.
The lid closed, and I felt myself moving backward into a chamber where the
inner connections would be matched to ones in the chamber wall. Only when
everything was hooked up, fully energized and tested, and approved by the
comput-ers, would I be "injected," in the parlance of the project.
It was damned quiet in there. I was absolutely awake, feel-ing not the least
bit tired and full of energy, but tense as all get-out.
Why didn't they start this? What was taking them so long?
I could actually hear my breathing and my pulse and began to mentally count my
beats per minute.
It felt itchy and a bit sweaty inside the head unit, which was strapped tight
on my head and adjusted to conform to my less-than-perfect cranium. I
wondered if I was feeling a sig-nal of some kind or just the hair against the
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plating or per-haps a slight static charge due to the interaction of hair and
plating. I'd had a short but presentable haircut of the kind Wonderland
recommended; you could almost tell all the people in the project who'd been on
this ride at least once by their hair, the women more dramatically so than the
men. At least I didn't have to deal with a shaved head or a hair weave...
What was taking them so damned long? Was something wrong?
There was an emergency intercom in the module, but it was strictly for dire
situations and was generally powered by them from their end. They didn't like
radios inside the mod-ules unless they had to, because of the risk of
interference this close. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]