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  Eric was not as severely affected by the project's cancellation as might have been expected. He had completed all the interesting and challenging theoretical part of the project. With just the practical donkey work left to do, it was more his income he was worried about. He would be comfortable for the time being anyway. He always had a bedroom full of satellite cards...

  Karen looked around at a room becoming whiter as it grew bare, patches of clean wall revealed as charts came down. Tomorrow this will all be gone. Tomorrow there would be no work.

  In a fit of rage she pulled all the wires she could out of the prototype helmet resting on her bench and threw the remains across the room vaguely towards the rubbish box. Eric and Bob applauded in muted approval.

  * * *

  Pixel People

  Elsewhere in a dark and gloomy bedroom, a teenage computer enthusiast taps away at his grubby keyboard. It was termed a bedroom but it was more like a scruffier version of Psi's labs. Disks and PCB cards were strewn all around. Computer magazines, circuit diagrams, printouts and notes of all descriptions covered every available space where they could be left, frequently toppling over only to be stacked up just as hurriedly and precariously. Pens, pencils, screwdrivers and unrecognisable electrical components were equally widespread. A triple-double-triple plug combination fuelled the central, glaring cathode ray tube which glowed a bright blue.

  A face barely visible amongst the blackness. The reflecting blue glow reveals a youthful face intense in concentration. Two miniature versions of the screen reflecting in his spectacle lenses.

  Buttons clicked and the black wireframe outline of an aircraft revolved in space. Some menus flicked at the top of the screen to be followed by a gradual rendering of the skeleton. Raster by raster the frame filled with texture, showing a near-real representation of the aeroplane fully decked in its metallic grey panelling.

  As the calculations became complete, the shadowy figure nodded - visibly impressed by this new program. Again he held down a few keys and the image similarly revolved, displaying its every face from all angles.

  A series of deep clumping footsteps could be heard nearby, shortly to be followed by the bedroom door squeaking open behind him.

  "That's smart, Simon." remarked Jeff on entry, flicking the light switch on and immediately making himself at home. Simon cleared a space at the end of his bed for his imposing guest.

  "I've just come round to drop off the video you wanted taped. It was only a load of nothing about computers that everyone knows anyway. I don't see what was so special about it." groaned Jeff as he struggled to get the tape out of his coat's undersized pocket.

  "Oh, my dad wanted to tape something on the other side and I needed this taped. It wasn't so much what the programme was about that mattered but rather who was on it." Simon took the tape and placed it on top of an already unstable pile of books, still speaking as he did so.

  "It was for this program." He tapped on the screen. Jeff was still puzzled at how it could be even remotely connected.

  "I just downloaded this yesterday from some place in Finland. It needs 40 times more memory to run than I had, and it's out of the reach of most people, but I recently got an old wreck to break up. I had all the memory chips out of it and luckily enough they are compatible, well - after a fashion anyway. I stuck them all in the motherboard and now I've got 48 times more. I've only just unpacked it and installed it and this is about the first thing I've managed to render." He tapped at the cursor keys again and demonstrated the plane, revolving it on its axis.

  "Yeah, I follow that - but where does the tape come into it?" Simon still hadn't answered the question and the answer wasn't apparent by any means.

  "Well... you know they were talking to all the managers and directors of all the big computer firms?" Jeff hummed in agreement.

  "I needed one of their faces. Digitised." Simon sat back down by the computer and cleared the plane's data, causing the wireframe to become a single black pixel.

  Skulduggery

  Karen was packing away all she could bear to under the circumstances. She couldn't be bothered with such drudgery when her future was hanging in the balance; impatiently slinging equipment together, apathetic about the condition it left her in. She'd soon be gone.

  She felt like running out of the place but as she was still due this week's pay she was rather compelled to stay. She gave herself another coffee break. She wasn't really doing much work today and hoped nobody had noticed.

  She dropped a red reel of solder into the packing case as a token effort and walked out of the labs in the direction of the toilets.

  In the corridor she met one of the software developers, Mickey Pederson, who she was supposed to be overseeing. Karen hardly knew him - he worked mainly with the rest of his team. She only ever delegated work to his colleague. Despite this she decided to ask him why he was looking so cheerful on a day when they had all been dealt such a blow.

  He stopped his quiet whistling, and after the initial shock he easily explained away his merriment. He too had been offered another job. Three to be precise - all with Psi's sister companies. Karen hid her surprise, congratulated him insincerely and they both went on their way.

  Why hadn't she been offered a new job? It would explain the lack of redundancy money forthcoming, her being the odd one out. Everyone else didn't need paying off - they all had new jobs to go to. Eric was the only other one genuinely left out. Sedgwick wasn't exactly in tears. Would it be too much to suspect that he just might have something lined up too?

  This train of thought further angered Karen and by the time she arrived at the toilets she was fuming. The toilet was a small room. Their were far fewer women than men in this building and it was unlikely she would get disturbed.

  She put the toilet lid down and knelt on it so that she could see out of the window behind, the small mottled-glass pane already open. It was nearly four in the afternoon and the alley below was growing dark. She opened the window fully, pushed the frame right up to the horizontal, before closing it again. The cold draught immediately vanished as it squeaked shut.

  The fixture on the window had been painted over long ago, but was held by two large flathead screws. She only had a tiny screwdriver in her back pocket, much too small to turn these. She put the screwdriver in one end of the slot and, taking the yellow pliers from her pocket, hit the end to force the screw around. Each of the two screws took several hits to loosen them, stiffened by age as they were. She turned and turned, removing the screws and taking care not to chip the paintwork too much. She squeezed at each screw with the pliers in a vain attempt to cut the heads off. They were strong and she had to put them on the floor and stamp on them repeatedly before they finally broke off. Karen opened the window again and threw out the stems into a pile of rubbish below, closing the window immediately after.

  Carefully she arranged the bracket as it had been on the windowsill and placed the screw heads back in their holes. She turned them softly to match the paint and slightly drive them back in. It was late in the working day and it was unlikely anybody else would touch the window today. She would have no trouble.

  On leaving, she was surprised to find a cleaner standing outside the door.

  "Was that you hammering?" the cleaner asked nosily.

  "No." lied Karen, walking away.

  Stoneface

  A wireframe head was just finishing being rendered. The mouth was open and the whole face looked as though it was constructed from many many polygons, which it was. Jeff was disappointed at how badly the face had turned out, but Simon remained unperturbed.

  Simon explained that this was only a trial rendering and that now he was going to perform the raytracing in finer detail, with a thirty-two-fold increase in polygons. Simon also wanted the whole object texture-mapped this time and, as he didn't have many textures at hand, he chose "Marble.tru" from his hard drive.

  The busy "ZZzz.." symbol appeared while the computer performed its myriad calculations.
Simon turned around while the picture filled in line by line behind him, much slower than before.

  Simon then scurried through a pile of recent magazines, frantically flapping pages over until he found what he was looking for.

  "There Jeff. See why I wanted that documentary programme now." Jeff looked at where Simon was pointing but still nothing was clear. There was just a photo of some awards ceremony where Dreamland had won another trophy for best VR game. It was nothing unusual - they won it just about every year. The only thing that Jeff found in the slightest bit strange was that the top selling game was not VR, but a regular, old-fashioned arcade game. Even such, he was none the wiser.

  Simon further pointed at the photo before his attention wandered to the caper he had planned for the near future

  "Oh, you're going to ...?" Jeff pointed at the photo and at the screen repeatedly as he struggled to put his point across.

  "Not exactly..." replied Simon.

  Simon Allen was a seventeen-year-old computer fanatic. He was unhealthily interested in anything and everything even partially to do with them. He began by learning the ropes at school, above-board maths and algorithm methods, but his darker side soon got the better of him. He read every article he could find on hacking, phreaking and social engineering, and by now he was becoming quite adept at obtaining goods and services by illegitimate means.

  He was not fantastically bright by any means - just better than average; but his dedication had compensated for this. He had been left to fend for himself during his formative years: his family could barely make ends meet. His parents worked all the hours they could and hardly interfered in his affairs. They could never provide all the computer equipment he wanted and so it was left to him to 'acquire' it.

  When the odd credit card or telephone scam was made known, he was one of the first on to it. He had run up phone bills (to Finland) well beyond his means and had, several times previously, wiped his bill down to just the standing charge by fraudulent methods. Other times, he had paid the bill with someone else's credit card number, and other times he had run up somebody else's bill. Occasionally, he would even pay it. Variety was the spice of life.

  Equipment was a different matter though. He couldn't order too much for fear of being rumbled and having 'his' credit cards taken away.

  Where many had traded computers from model to model in the unsettled years, Simon had been forced to keep his older, 70000-based PC through lack of funds. It was approaching three years old - an antique by today's standards, but still it was a formidable machine sharing much in common with the state of the art models. Through time he had come to know it better than he knew anything else. He knew all the loopholes, backdoors, shortcuts in every standard program. He had connections with the underground who could obtain copies of any outlawed program. It was through these connections that he acquired his pirated copy of this unreleased raytracing package. It was on a similar site often contributed to by hackers and crackers that he found his other tool of the trade, 'Line 'n' Syncher.'

  Line 'n' Syncher

  A program that had been eagerly-awaited, but long in coming, Line 'n' Syncher was meant for just such a scam as Simon and Jeff were about to pull. It was written by a European hacking team in Holland and leaked across borders by an underground network. It was highly illegal. (It was claimed to have legitimate uses, but its intended use could not be disguised.)

  Line 'n' Syncher worked by quickly displaying frames from a data bank in synchronisation with the line of text entered. The user would have to render or scan a series of sequential images and store them on a hard disk. These would be pictures of a single face in all the poses required by the program. The programmers supplied specimen versions along with the main file but these were old and rendered before raytracing had come into its prime.

  Simon was about to render a whole series of pictures of the same face - eyes open/closed, mouth open/closed, teeth showing etc. Pieces of the face would be uncompacted from hard disk and overlapped by the main program as they were needed. After the thirty-two pieces were stored, the program could play back these images realtime, in the order governed by the line of text entered. Once the images were rendered, packed and stored, there was nothing the program could not read out. The program knew how to read words. It used the fricatives in a sentence to synchronise the speech with the pictures.

  Best of all, it could be made to synchronise with realtime sound input for the utmost in realism. It was even controllable by the keyboard while it was working. The operator could cause the "cyberpuppet" to blink, or stare around while the talking was in full swing. The whole thing could be treated as a separate entity and overlaid onto a background which remained unaffected.

  Line 'n' Syncher was revered all around Europe for its lifelike and often eerily realistic results. It was unfortunate that the speed and realism were compromised by the power of the processor and also limited by the massive amounts of memory it commanded.

  But that was before. This raytracing package would improve the results tenfold. Far more complex scenes could be rendered, in higher resolution, much more realistically. Simon had just acquired 48Tb - enough to do anything this program could manage. He owned a hard drive, a sound sampler, a phone, an idea and plenty of time on his hands. He was just the sort of person the authorities dreaded having this program.

  Impatient with the slowness of the rendering process, Simon turned the monitor off and paced around the room while Jeff read and the computer continued its calculations. Simon didn't want to see the image going through its stages. He wanted to see it in its full glory when it was ready.

  He decided to do a tiny amount of much-needed tidying up. He strolled around the room, collecting up all the screwdrivers, pens and pencils. After finding about a dozen of each, he stuffed them into an already full pot and bunched the screwdrivers into a small pile beside it. Much better. In his eyes - the place was tidy now.

  He returned to his desk and sat down, cheerfully examining a tiny 50 puff capacitor he had stumbled across. He then picked up the remote control to turn on the monitor a full two feet away and called Jeff.

  Jeff looked up from the magazine slightly reluctantly, having got to the console games by now.

  Simon poked at the red rubber button and the monitor fizzed back into action. As the tube brightened, he found himself staring at what appeared to be a marble statue before his eyes. He was astounded at the quality of the final picture.

  It would be more than adequate.

  * * *

  Sinking Ship

  The development lab had become as bare as the day Psi moved in. Every notice and plan had been removed from the walls; brighter areas indicated where they used to hang. Chairs had been taken out to the corridors - only packing cases occupied the floorspace. Monitors and keyboards had all been collected on a single bench for later shipment. Only one remained.

  Dr. Harvey was not leaving quite as eagerly as everyone else had done. The time was approaching six and the others had deserted him at least half an hour ago.

  Quietly he sat on the one remaining swivel chair, at the one remaining terminal, tidying up files and adding notes for his successors.

  Eric had the most expensive set-up in the lab, with the most storage capacity and consequently the most files to wade through. Everyone else had deleted any files they had safe in the knowledge that Eric held a copy of every important piece of code and that he wouldn't throw away programs without carefully sorting through them beforehand. They could go home early and leave their work for him to do.

  Eric didn't mind. He had no family to rush off home to. He didn't even have a job any longer. There he sat, searching through screens of code, adding the odd comment line where he felt the need. He soon realised he didn't really care whether his successors could understand his work or not and that he was only staying behind through his reluctance to leave a place he had somehow grown fond of.

  He sighed and saved the file, turned the monitor off while the h
ard drive whirred, and then the computer itself. The whirring metal plate spun to a silent stop, and he unplugged all the leads. He picked up the beige keyboard and carried it to a place alongside the other six. He returned to his seat and was winding the many leads around his arm when Sedgwick emerged from his secluded office.

  "Ah, Eric. I'm glad you haven't gone yet." Sedgwick said chirpily as if he was about to do Eric a favour.

  "I was just about to." came the mumbled reply.

  Sedgwick crept over to Eric, carrying his newspaper and briefcase apparently about to leave as well.

  "I've got a proposition for you." Sedgwick declared, as cheerily as before, obviously intending to coerce Eric into some scheme. He hurriedly opened up his paper before Eric's minimal interest had a chance to wane further and pointed at an advert towards the back.

  "I don't want to know." protested Eric, but curiosity made him look nevertheless. He stopped winding.

  "Yes, you do. Yes, you do. Look. This firm here wants anyone with any new innovations in VR to show them with a 'view to buying the rights' and developing it themselves..." Sedgwick was trying to sweep Eric along with his overwhelming enthusiasm for the idea, but Eric only gave a murmur anticipating Sedgwick's all-too-transparent proposition.

  "Now, I rang this place this morning, and told them that we had a headset nearing completion that could read directly from the brain (and even write to the brain if necessary) and that we were willing to hand it over to them. They offered me... us... twenty-five grand each if they take it on. Tell me you couldn't do with twenty-five grand." pitched Sedgwick, targetting Eric's grim financial position. He knew Eric hadn't been offered a job with any of Psi's sister companies because it was he that had prevented it. Sedgwick had a job offer for Eric screwed up in his bin.