Sheentastic Voyage

by Gary D. Snyder

Chapter 5:

"Okay," said Sheen. "Let's get this party started!"

"Wait a minute." Despite her determination to help Sheen Libby was still cautious. "How exactly does this virtual interface thing work?"

Sheen shrugged. "I'm not exactly sure," he admitted, "but I think that it's probably some kind of virtual reality thing. Jimmy uses it to work on Vox so it must work pretty good."

"Well…" Libby hesitated.

"Okay, okay. It must work pretty well." Sheen rolled his eyes. "Geez, what a stickler."

"What?" asked Libby after doing a double-take.

Sheen, however, was not listening. "Okay, Vox, let's crank it!"

"Unrecognized command," was Vox's only response.

"Let's roll?" Sheen tried, with similar results. "Let's kick it? Let's do this thing?"

Libby passed a hand over her eyes and shook her head. "Activate interface," she said.

"Activating virtual digitization interface," Vox announced. A ring of bright light encircling Libby and Sheen appeared on the platform while a similar ring appeared above their heads. The two rings passed over the two young people, moving slowly together as until they passed through each other and faded into nothingness. By the time the rings had disappeared both Libby and Sheen had also vanished.

From Libby and Sheen's point of view, however, it was the lab that had vanished, leaving them in what seemed to be a deserted room, approximately ten feet square, with a single door set in one wall and empty except for a platform similar to the one they had been standing on. They looked around them in bewilderment and then at each other. "Okay, what happened and where are we?" asked Libby.

"I don't know," Sheen answered. "I just got here."

"Vox! Status!" Libby called. There was no answer.

"Let me try," Sheen offered. "Vox! What happened?" When Vox failed to respond to his query Sheen shrugged. "I don't get it. Maybe there's someone around here who can tell us what's going on."

"Yeah," Libby replied. "Maybe. Let's check out the door and see where it leads."

Together they approached the door and Sheen, after a brief pause, carefully tried the knob. It was unlocked and he opened the door cautiously, not sure what to expect on the other side. It turned out to be a long, empty hallway with intersecting corridors every hundred yards or so. Along both walls, evenly spaced about twenty feet apart, were doors bearing some sort of sign. Checking the door he had just opened, Sheen saw that it also bore a similar sign reading:

VDI PORT

0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFE3

Sheen scratched his head. "'VDI port'?" he said aloud. "I wonder what that means?"

Libby also studied the sign. "I don't know. But it sounds familiar somehow. Let's check out some of the other doors. Maybe we'll find a clue about what went wrong."

Having no better ideas Sheen agreed. The sign on the next door they checked read:

INTERSPATIAL TELECOM CARRIER PORT

0xFFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF FFE2

"Okay, that doesn't sound familiar at all," Libby said.

"I wonder what's inside?" Sheen wondered. "Think we should open it and find out?"

As they stood there debating on whether or not to investigate what was behind the door it suddenly burst open and what seemed to them to be a young person dressed in a plain single-piece uniform, rushed through the door and dashed past them down the hall. After recovering from her initial surprised Libby called out, "Excuse me! Could you tell us –"

"Synchronous data!" the person called back faintly. "Have to meet the timing!" As Libby and Sheen watched, still baffled, the person halted at the first corridor and stood there motionless. Moments later what seemed to be a wave of light, almost too fast to see, sped through the intersection. When it had passed the person who had raced from the room was no longer there.

"What the heck is going on?" Sheen wondered aloud. "And who was that?"

Libby shook her head. "And what did he mean by 'synchronous data' and 'have to meet the timing'?"

"You mean, 'she', don't you?"

"It was a guy," Libby insisted.

Sheen shook her head. "I don't think so."

"You really think that was a girl?" Libby challenged.

"Oh, I'm sure of it," Sheen countered. "I have an instinct for these things."

Libby simply sneered at that. "Then you'd better look twice when your instincts tell you to invite somebody to be your prom date. You might just get a shock when you pick them up."

"As if." Sheen looked up and down the hallway. "Where to now?"

"Since we don't have any better choice, why not just go where that guy –"

"That girl," corrected Sheen.

"- that person," Libby compromised, "went?"

Sheen nodded. "Sounds good to me. We have to find and stop that virus pretty quick. We only had about an hour when we started and it's been a while now."

"How long?" asked Libby.

Sheen checked his watch, and then took a closer look. He shook his arm and held his wrist up to his ear. "That's weird."

"What is?" Libby wanted to know.

"My watch isn't running. Look."

He held his wrist out so that Libby could see. As she watched she suddenly grabbed his wrist to took a closer look. After nearly a minute she released his arm and said, "Yes, it is. Take another look."

Sheen looked and at first couldn't understand what Libby had meant. As he continued to watch, however, he noticed that the hundredths of seconds display on his digital watch were almost imperceptibly changing, with some segments gradually darkening and others slowly fading. As he continued to watch the "2:23:45:13" appeared to be changing to "2:23:45:14", although it would be some time for the change to complete. Sheen looked up in surprise. "I've heard of watches running slow, " he began, "but –"

"It isn't running slow. We're running fast."

"Huh?"
"We're moving thousands or maybe even millions of times faster than normal. I guess it makes sense that we'd have to be."

Sheen still didn't understand. "Why does it make sense?"

"Don't you get it? We haven't gone anywhere. We're still in Jimmy's lab. But now we're inside Vox. That interface thing didn't just give us access to the system. It actually put us into the computer." She pointed down the hallway. "That person who ran past us was a data packet. And that room we found ourselves in was the hardware port for the V.D.I. - the virtual digitization interface. We're operating at a speed consistent with the operating speed of the computer."

"Come again?"

Libby tried again in terms Sheen could understand. "We've been tronned into Jimmy's computer."

That sank in. "Oh, man, no!" Sheen cried out. "The computer effects in that movie were horrible!" He looked at his hands as through expecting to find scales or claws. "But if I've been turned into a computer-generated entity I hope that someone at least used decent computer modeling and rendering software to do it." A thought suddenly struck him. "Hey, wait a minute. Computers don't have rooms and doors and hallways. They have circuit boards and wires and chips and other stuff like that."

"I know. I guess this interface thing lets us see the parts of the system as things we can understand. It must make it easier for Jimmy to find and fix things."

"Okay," Sheen said. "So how do we find and fix the virus?" He suddenly clutched his throat. "We're in here with it. It won't affect us, will it?"

Libby scoffed at that. "No. We're not programs." She paused and added, "I think." She resumed marching down the hallway with Sheen following behind her. "But I'd say that the first order of business is to get a handle on how things work around here and see what's going on."

"And where do we go to do that?" Sheen asked.

Libby pointed to a sign hanging from the ceiling of the intersection. "There."

Sheen read the sign. On it was the legend:

SYNCHRONOUS PERIPHERAL DATA BUS

Below it were several arrows labeled:

LEVEL 4 MEMORY CACHE

HARDWARE I/O SUBPROCESSING UNIT

CENTRAL PROCESSING UNIT

"It looks we're riding the data bus," Libby commented.

End of Chapter 5

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