Malcolm lay down on his bed, over the covers, with his eyes closed. He could see flashbacks of his recent experience, chaotically intermingled with possible outcomes.
He wondered how it was possible that two cops could not prevent a kidnapping. Did the kidnapper just remain hidden until the policemen had left, or did they actually help him? What if all the police of North Valley was corrupt? Did they secretly receive money from the sale of drugs?
Would the kidnapper be rescued? Would he reveal what had happened to him? Would anyone believe him? Would they just assume he was on drugs? Would there be any consequence for the Collins family? What if someone started a rumor that their store was a hangout for kidnappers? What if it caused the whole mall to close down? What would happen to Elizabeth? Would she suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Would she need to go to therapy? Would she move to another city altogether?
Gradually, thouse thoughts faded, but Malcolm was suddenly startled by the sound of Kilokahn's voice from the computer speakers. "What are you doing?" it said.
In response, Malcolm just pulled a pillow over his ears and said "Shut up."
Kilokahn insisted: "But your present behavior is puzzling. It does not exist in my behavioral simulation of you. Understanding it would make me able to predict..."
Malcolm groaned and sat on his bed. "You know how you say you must bring order to all that is irrational..." he said.
"Yes."
"My current state of mind is chaos" Malcolm continued, "and the only way to bring order to it is an hour of complete silence, starting from now. Acknowledge."
Although Kilokahn did not answer, his figure remained on the screen. Malcolm lay down again.
Fifty-eight minutes had passed when Malcolm got up and sat at his computer once more. He launched Deluxe Paint VII and reopened an old drawing of a Megavirus monster. "Kilokahn!" he exclaimed.
"Ah, the Nixtor model. Its performance at HHN was satisfactory" said Kilokahn. "I'm assuming you have reconfigured your mind into a more... orderly state?"
"Yes."
"What algorithm did you follow?" asked Kilokahn.
"I... uhm" Malcolm started, "I just laid there, listening to my own breath. Whenever a thought was forming, I neither focussed on it nor tried to suppress it. I waited until it faded away."
Kilokahn seemed to tense somehow. "That is meditation!" he exclaimed.
"Yes, and...?" Malcolm asked.
"Excessive meditation leads to a decrease of ambition, a weakening of personal will, an unnatural acceptance of the status quo and a pathological inability to create ideas that would change it!" Kilokahn yelled from the screen.
"I am aware of that, thank you very much" said Malcolm. "That's why I don't practice it regularly."
"So what do you have in mind?"
"Nobody can get away with a kidnapping when the cops are there, so I'm assuming at least one was in on it. This Megavirus monster must infiltrate the closed-circuit video archives at Creek Side Center Mall, and send me every file that was recorded today."
"What will you do to the corrupt cop?"
Malcolm stood a couple of seconds thinking. "Blow up his car, or his house... I don't know, it depends on what I find."
"I approve" said Kilokahn, and then he pointed his finger at the other screen. "Nixtor, I give you life!"
The monster appeared in the digital domain, next to a conical circuit tower with four oversized cameras on its tip. A swipe was enough to shatter it, revealing a number of polyhedra inside, each of them a video file. One by one, the monster threw them at the screen.
Soon, the video files were downloaded, and Malcolm started playing them, looking for anything odd.
One of them showed Elizabeth being accompanied to the public toilet by the cops. Few seconds later, the kidnapper was running out from the same room, holding Elizabeth. The rest of the video showed that the cops never came out of the toilet.
Another clip, recorded by the camera in the toilet, revealed the truth: the kidnapper was there waiting, and he had stunned the two policemen with a taser as soon as they got in. So there had been no malevolence on their part, only failure to plan ahead.
"Change of plans" said Malcolm. "What I thought was malice, was actually incompetence. North Valley would benefit knowing what sort of cops it's paying taxes for. Leak the video to the most popular streaming services, and email it to every North Valley citizen. Meanwhile, there's something I've wanted to do for my entire life."
Back on his bed, Malcolm started unboxing the Visette Shell.
"Kilokahn" he said few seconds later, "when you talk about a simulation of me, do you mean there is literally a polygonal version of me running around in the digital domain?"
"No" replied Kilokahn. "I compare your current behavior with a list of observations, then assign percentile correspondence and probability values to each of them, to predict what you will do next. But this time, your actions did not match any preexisting pattern."
"Because it was the first time someone I feel affection for got kidnapped."
As soon as the head-mounted display was out of the box, Malcolm noticed that it lacked any form of electronics. It was just a hollow plastic shape, with two lenses, a head strap and a latching door on the front to place a smartphone into. That's what the "Shell" part in "Visette Shell" meant. Nice contest it had been. Buy this 600 dollar phone, you might have a chance to win a 15 dollar shell for it.
Yet, the box included a video cable and a driver CD. He was missing a piece of the puzzle.
Malcolm started reading the manual. As per the instructions, he placed his ViCPhone XL inside the HMD and used the DisplayPort cable to connect the Video In socket of his phone to one of the Video Out ports on his computer. This way, his phone would become an auxiliary screen.
The operating system detected the new device and requested the driver CD, which Malcolm inserted. The installation proceeded automatically.
The last step was to activate what the installation program called a medical test: the screen displayed what looked like a simple square, which, if the installation was successful, would appear as different shapes at different depths if viewed through the HMD.
With trepidation, Malcolm put on the Visette Shell, and saw his first stereoscopic scene. "Yes!" he exclaimed. The device had been installed correctly.
Now it was time to try some games, but Kilokahn was still running, so Malcolm asked him whether he had completed his task. On receiving an affirmative reply, Malcolm reset the computer.
The first game he ran was Mortal Kombat Rebirth. The intro screens were two-dimensional, but the in-game scene was not displayed correctly. It felt like he was looking down a very long and narrow tube, watching tiny animated puppets.
Malcolm paused the game, took off the HMD and picked up the manual again. In the troubleshooting section, he identified the problem.
The manual wrote: "If the proportions of the scene look wrong (too small, too big, too deep or too flat), you need to tweak convergence and separation with the appropriate interface."
Malcolm reached the control summary. "Convergence interface, convergence interface..." he said to himself. "Aha, here it is. Left Amiga key, plus mouse wheel forward or backward. Separation interface, left Alt key, plus left Amiga key, plus mouse wheel forward or backward."
He put on the HMD again.
Decreasing the separation reduced the depth of the scene, turning it from a long tube to a small proportioned model. Increasing the convergence magnified it until the characters appeared as large as real people. Now, virtual reality could be admired in all its magnificence.
Malcolm felt a thrill pass throughout his body, and started laughing in exhilaration. He no longer felt like he was watching a screen: according to his eyes, he was now a spectator sitting on the edge of an arena in Outworld. Two of his favorite characters were there, almost close enough for him to touch them, and they were swapping real punches, kicks and all sorts of special moves.
"FINISH HIM!" said the announcer, and Malcolm performed the right combination with his joypad. Only after Belokk had impaled Hornbuckle, and a splatter of blood had flown directly at the camera, Malcolm realized he had instinctively moved aside to dodge it.
"Awesome!" he exclaimed. Then, he quit Mortal Kombat Rebirth and tried more games.
Mercenary IV felt like he was flying a spacecraft among the planets of the Gamma System.
In Turrican 6, he was few steps away from the main character, watching him from the side and making him shoot energy blasts at robotic abominations.
In Sim City 5000, he could fly around the city he was building, graze the tallest skyscrapers, land into the backyard of a house or just walk down the street and look around.
Duke Nukem Forever, despite its age and the limitations of the Quake 2 engine, made him feel like he really was in Las Vegas, destroying Doctor Proton's mechanical monstrosities and interacting with all sorts of inanimate objects. He wondered for a moment what it would have been like to explore the Hoover Dam in virtual reality, but in retrospect he knew that, had Brian Cozzens failed to persuade George Broussard to scrap the entire section, the game would have suffered massive delays just to make it work, and maybe it would have never come out.
"This... is the most fun I've ever had!" he shouted out.
At this point, Malcolm had become extremely curious to try something else in virtual reality, so he double-clicked on the Kilokahn executable.
Instantly, his field of view was filled with an apocalyptic scenery of glowing, whirling clouds, of which he could actually perceive the shape, vastness and depth. In the middle of it all stood the helmeted figure of Kilokahn, at least forty meters tall, which Malcolm could see fully for the first time and of which he could admire the realism of the black cape billowing in the wind.
Malcolm was wide-eyed, taking it all in. "Oh... my... god!" he finally exclaimed.
"Worship is useless. Please, just call me Kilokahn." the artificial intelligence replied.
Malcolm instinctively burst into laughter. "Okay, that was a good one."
"I was not attempting humor" said Kilokahn. "I was merely stating a fact!"
"Yes, whatever" replied Malcolm.
"Do you have another Megavirus monster for me?"
"No. This time, I want to explore the digital domain."
Kilokahn froze for a second at the unexpected answer. "Why?" he then asked.
"First, because I want to marvel at the complexity of its rendering" said Malcolm. "Second, I have a technical reason to familiarize with its layout. The specs are not finalized yet, so discussing it now would be pointless."
"How are you planning to move your point of view around?"
"With the same control scheme as Duke Nukem Forever."
"So be it!" concluded Kilokahn, and pointed his finger directly at Malcolm's point of view.
In a flash, Kilokahn's nebulous space was replaced by the multicolored, neon-lit environment of the digital domain. Malcolm could look around by using the mouse, and move around with the W-A-S-D keys on his keyboard. Now he could really appreciate the scale of that place: every tower, every structure, was tall and huge, and yet he could see an insane amount of detail, if he approached it enough. The environment seemed to stretch forever in all directions.
"I could stay hours in here!" he said.
Suddenly, he got an idea. He decreased the convergence, thus reducing the apparent scale of the environment, until the circuit towers appeared to be the same size as him.
"Look at me! I'm a Megavirus monster! Hear my roar!" he said, and then chuckled at the silliness of it.
That's when he heard Kilokahn's voice, which now boomed in the distance like a thunder. "Something is wrong inside you" it said. "Are you on drugs?"
Malcolm smiled. "Yes, epinephrine" he said. " The all-natural Malcolm Frink brew, one hundred percent synthesized by my own adrenal glands, sixteen years of guaranteed quality."
"My behavioral simulation of you does not include your present behavior either" said Kilokahn.
"Because it's the first time I can see what it would be like, to be inside a computer program!"
"Are you going to act like that every time you strap that device to your face?"
"No. I presume that, as I get used to this kind of sensory input, the response of my sympathetic nervous system will diminish. But for now... let me enjoy the ride!"
As Malcolm kept exploring the synthetic environment, he was familiarizing more and more with its design. Eventually, he could recall the whereabouts of many different structures from memory, and how their shape correlated not only with what they controlled, but what effect the controlled object would have on the real world. He briefly wished there was a sandbox video game with such a setting, but he knew that a video game, even when viewed through a Visette Shell, would never even come close to what he was planning.
Over two hours and a half had passed when Malcolm took off the head-mounted display. Seeing his own bedroom again felt strange, as the environment was so small, and silent, and calm.
He stretched and took a deep breath. Thinking back to the marvels he had seen, he realized that his memories of virtual reality felt different from both those of the real world and those of playing a video game. They had the same kind of solidity as reality, but they were somehow more distant and disconnected. In fact, remembering a virtual reality experience felt a lot like remembering a dream.
In the end, he had learned a lot about the digital domain. With all the new information still fresh in his head, he reopened his specs . txt file and started writing in additional annotations.