Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to Gene Roddenberry and is it Warner Bros.? No idea, I'm no trekkie, anyway, I own nothing, I make no money, I have no money, so there …
oooOooo
12. Dr. Jim Watkins (2)
He looked at Jarro McCourt's smiling face and asked himself whatever she was doing in the game at the moment. About half an hour ago what exactly she had been doing had been pretty obvious, and he had experienced a sudden, inexplicable burst of jealousy.
He was not a neurologist or something fancy like that, but only a very junior member of the emergency room at one of the large hospitals in London. It was not a very well paid job, so when his superior had asked who would be willing to take on this additional job on Saturdays, he had agreed. Not because of the promise of participating in important research or the possible glory that would be connected with discovering a new dimension not only of computer games and the knowledge about the human mind, but simply because it was an easy job and extra money.
And now he was staring at the print outs that captured the progress of this new computer game and watched how funky lines on a screen told him that this pretty girl was shagging some figments of her imagination.
How sick could this world get?
He had tried the game himself, doing a short game of Star Trek. He had been a smashing Mr. Riker, and the game had felt as real as anything. It had certainly been more interesting to play than to watch other people play …
But, oh well, he was very well paid for the few hours of watching the test runs, and it was easy work, just watching the monitors, checking pulse, blood pressure and stuff like that.
He looked back at the smiling face of Ms. McCourt.
He would take a heart. He would ask her out to dinner.
Now he smiled himself, imagining a lovely dinner and joking about the game,
teasing her a little about what she had experienced. Promising to be even
better in real life … No, he told himself, reining in his fantasy. That would
not do at all! But he would gather up
his nerve and ask her out. He would do that, he promised himself.
He left the room to look at another tester.