Post by mullauna on May 29, 2017 4:04:15 GMT -5
"What do you think he's whipped up for us this time?" Beth asked me.
"I have no idea, but he sounded very excited over the phone."
"But what could it be? A game? Another one of those robots?"
"Just calm down, okay? How should I know? It could be anything."
My wife Beth and I were driving to our friend Jacob's house. House-hell, it
was more of a mansion. Jacob had been our friend since our college days
fifteen years ago; we had all shared the same off-campus house. But while
Beth and I were history majors, Jacob had majored in computer sciences. And
while Beth and I had found comfortable but low-paying jobs teaching history
together at the same college we'd graduated from, Jacob had become... well,
rich.
Not just well-off, mind you, but rich. Incredibly wealthy.
Never-work-another-day-in-your-life, buy-a-different-Porsche-for-
every-day-of-the-week stinking filthy loaded.
I don't know if it's right to toss around words like this, but if Jacob
wasn't a genius, then I don't know who is. He just had a wired- in genius for
computers and every sort of technology you could think of. That's what made
him such a valuable commodity; he was a brilliant programmer, a brilliant
engineer, a brilliant inventor. He didn't need anyone else; he'd just hole up
in his laboratory tinkering around with his computers and his tools,
whistling happily all the way, the rock music blaring from the stereo, and
he'd be doing the work of twenty men.
And he invented one brilliant device after another after he graduated-that's
where all his money came from. He patented a cheap hologram-camera that took
three-dimensional "Help me Obi- Wan" photos as easily as, and for the same
price as, a normal flat photograph. Just point and shoot! He invented a new
music- recording format that gave you the depth and detail of sound that
vinyl LPs gave you, but with the clarity and durability of a CD-and here was
the lucrative part: it was completely impossible to pirate. The record
companies paid him millions for the initial rights and within two years it
was the standard format for all albums, and then home videos. The royalties
alone must have amounted to a hundred million dollars a year.
Not all of Jacob's inventions were as practical as those; he was a playful,
carefree guy who was just as likely to invent a computer game or a toy as
some groundbreaking computer language. It all depended on what happened to
catch his interest. We had become good friends with Jacob back in college-I
think he was a lonely kind of guy, and he was on his own away from his
hometown for the first time in his life and he really appreciated the
friendliness we showed him. Beth and I kind of loosened him up a little from
the shy kid he was when we first met him; we gave him his first hit of
marijuana, we took him dancing at clubs with us, we introduced him to single
girls we knew (even though none of the romances we tried to arrange for him
ever took; Jacob was more interested in his inventions).
And we were still good friends. Jacob invited us on vacations and trips to
his mansion all the time, and we went whenever we were able to. Jacob gave us
stock tips on companies that were about to buy inventions of his, which made
our standard of living a lot more comfortable than it normally would have
been. And more important than that: Beth and I were usually the very first
people Jacob tried out his new inventions on. He had a laboratory built right
into his house-even after making all his money and inventing all those
things, he still kept busy trying to come up with new ones. And he still
worked virtually on his own. It was kind of a thrill to be the first people
to catch a glimpse of the new Jacob Kurland invention. He worked in such
secrecy-Internet newsgroups were always abuzz with speculation about what his
next creation might be. One time it was the first truly interactive video
game, another time it was a housecleaning robot with a 10,000-word
vocabulary. Whatever they were, they were always astonishing, delightful and
so technologically advanced that they almost seemed magical.
"I can't wait," Beth said as our car rounded a curve in the road and Jacob's
mansion rose into view.
"Neither can I, neither can I."
Jacob greeted us in person-no butlers or servants for Jacob- and ushered us
into his living room. We got caught up on each other's news as one of Jacob's
robots served us drinks, and eventually Jacob led us into the dining room,
where we had an excellent, gourmet four-course meal. The evening was so
pleasant that it helped for a while to take my mind off the fact that my
marriage wasn't what it used to be. Beth and I still got along all right, and
it wasn't as if we were fighting all the time. There just wasn't much spark
anymore. I could even pinpoint exactly where everything went wrong, not that
it was of much use: it was when we decided to postpone having children until
we both got our careers solidly established. I think I could tell even then
that Beth very badly wanted to have a baby, but she agreed against her better
judgment. And of course, in the academic profession, your career is never
firmly established, and the years went by, until it started to seem like we
were too old to think of starting a family. We had gone on in the same vein,
just the two of us, for year after year-both of us slowly seeming less and
less sexually attracted to each other-and, while we still loved each other
and weren't thinking of a divorce, I still worried about turning into one of
those cold, formal couples who simply exchange pleasantries over breakfast
and dinner, go out occasionally to a movie, have a night of planned sex maybe
once every week or two and gradually become unhappy strangers.
"All right," Jacob said once he'd finished his after-dinner glass of cognac.
"I suppose the two of you are wondering what I have in store for you
tonight."
"I thought you'd never tell us, Jake," my wife said.
"Well, to be honest with you," he replied, "it's taken all my concentration
just to get through dinner. I can't wait until you try it out! Come on! Come
follow me!"
Jake got up from the table and led us through a long, wood- panelled corridor
and down a flight of stairs into a lushly appointed multimedia room. There
was an enormous, very expensive looking stereo, a wall-sized TV screen, video
players, computer screens and remote controls of every description, not to
mention a long wall lined with nothing but cases of recorded music and home
video titles. There was also a row of comfortable-looking padded leather
chairs along another wall-six of them-that looked like high-tech
electrocution chambers because of the metal helmets attached to them just
above the headrests.
I inspected one of the chairs. "What is this, Jake? Not one of those
virtual-reality chambers."
Jake made a contemptuous snort. "Virtual reality?" he said.
"You've been watching The Matrix once too often. VR is the technological
biggest dead end since CD-ROMs. No, this is, like, two hundred times better
than that VR bull."
"What do these things do, Jake?" Beth asked, gingerly fingers one of the
series of sharp needles that lined the inside of each helmet.
"All right. Let me think," said Jake. Whenever Jake had to explain one of his
devices, he always needed a moment to think, so that he could figure out a
way to put all of his complex thoughts into language ordinary people like
Beth and myself could understand. "What I've been able to do is-OK, this is,
like, the fourth generation of those 3-D cameras I invented, right? Where
they're able to look at a given... uh, panorama, right?... and convert it
into digital information and turn that into 3-D information, right? OK, well,
what I've figured out a way to do is to take a movie, right? Like, any movie
on a Kurland disc, a KD, or even an old VHS tape, right?, and do the same
thing. Can you believe it? It, like, measures shadows and angles and
everything and in, like, a nanosecond, it figures out the 3-D configuration
of everything in the screen, right?
"Okay," he continued. "So I figured that out, right? Then I was able to feed
in all this, uh... tactile information, all this stuff I stole from the VR
guys but building on it, right?, correcting everything those dickwads did
wrong, right? You know how computer screens can differentiate, like, millions
of colours? Well, these things can differentiate between millions of, like,
sensations. And I've got another layer to the program, right, where the
computer can, like, extrapolate from the image within the frame, to what the
entire rest of the movie environment must look like."
"You've lost me, Jake," I said. "What is this, some way of making videos with
sharper images?"
"God! No!" Jake said, exasperated. "Would I call you over here for that? What
do you think I am, one of those geeks who, like, restores Vertigo so you can
see the pattern of Jimmy Stewart's tie a little better? God! No, what I've
done is to, like, turn any movie- you understand? Any movie at all-into, like
a complete, 360-degree, digital information world, with all the sounds and
the smells and the touches. And I've done the same for all the characters in
the movie, too. You get me? Huh? You get me? You put on one of those helmets
over there, and you can be, like, inserted into the movie. You get to be one
of the characters!"
Beth gaped at him. "You're kidding."
"No! I'm not!" Jake said, grinning. "Can you believe it?"
"Any movie?" I asked.
"Once the program was written and the bugs gotten out of the technology, it
was easy," Jake said. "The computer reads the movie and boom! In you go!"
"And we just hang around the movie?" Beth asked. "Won't the characters bump
into us?"
"No!" Jake explained. "Are you dense or am I just a bad explainer? Probably a
little of both." He grinned good-naturedly. "No, see, that's the marketing
point of it. You get to be one of the characters. Right? You, like, take over
the body of one of the characters. You see what they see! You go where they
go! You feel what they feel!"
"We get to be characters in the movie," I repeated doubtfully.
"Anyone you like!" Jake said. "You can be Indiana Jones, Rhett Butler,
right?, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Batman... Anyone! Or at least, anyone
I have a KD of here."
Beth could barely stifle her excitement. "My God, Jake!" she said. "I'd say
this thing would make you rich if you weren't so incredibly rich already!
And... and, is that what you've called us over for tonight? Are Doug and I
going to get to, like, be in a movie?"
"You bet!"
"My God..." I said, trying to take in the possibilities. A thousand questions
ran through my mind. "But... but... what happens to us? Do we just do
everything the characters do, like, with no control over anything? What
happens if we die?"
"You don't die," Jake said. "If your character dies, you just get bumped out
of the program and you wake up back here. As for control, as far as I can
tell, you have a certain amount of control over what happens. You can't
change the plot or anything, but you can change your dialogue to some extent
and move around on your own a little bit, too. But you can just go on
automatic pilot, too, if you want to and let the character or the movie sort
of do the thinking for you, you know, like, flip back and forth between doing
the movie dialogue and saying your own words. You can kind of MST3K the
situation if you want to-the other characters won't mind! It's, like, so
cool, you will not believe it. You just have to strap yourself in and ride
the story out to the end."
I was always amused by how this brilliant guy, this visionary, who invented
such astonishing devices could be so square when it came to using slang
expressions.
"So," Jake concluded. "What movie do you guys want to try?"
"King Kong," I said jokingly. "How about it, honey? How'd you like me to
carry you up the Empire State Building?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Beth said. "It can't do anything like that."
"No, wait, no!" Jake said. "That's not true. If it's in the movie, you can do
it. You can be Bambi, Jiminy Cricket... I can load in King Kong vs. Godzilla
and you two can ravage Tokyo together if you want to."
"Well, I'm not going to live through King Kong, thank you very much," Beth
said sternly. "Can't we do something romantic? Like Sleepless in Seattle?"
I stared at her in astonishment. "You can be anything in the universe and
instead you want to experience life as a woman who listens to the radio?!?" I
shouted. "They barely even meet in that movie! Forget it! Let's have
something with a little action in it! The Replacement Killers or something."
"Oh man, that would be so cool," Jake said.
"You know I hate those violent movies," Beth said. "And there's never any
women in them anyway. What am I supposed to do for the entire movie?"
"But Mira Sorvino's in it!" I said, knowing I was fighting a losing battle.
"You'd get to be Mira Sorvino! She's an Oscar-winner, Beth!"
"Can't we do, like, an Audrey Hepburn movie, maybe?" Beth asked. "Oooh, I'd
so love to be Audrey Hepburn for a night. Do you have Breakfast at Tiffany's,
Jake?"
"Who's the guy in that one?" I asked.
"George Peppard."
"Hannibal?" I said. "f**k that. No way am I being Hannibal."
Beth and I argued back and forth like that for fifteen minutes more. Each
time one of us would make a suggestion, the other one would find fault with
it. Beth was too staid and queasy to want to do any of the action movies and
I thought it was a waste of a great opportunity to do some boring romantic
movie when you could be flying through outer space or living through some
exciting spy adventure. And every time we'd thought we'd come up with a
compromise-Romancing the Stone or The Mask of Zorro-Jake would turn out not
to own the KD. We almost agreed on doing The Spy Who Loved Me, but at the
last minute I absolutely refused to be Roger Moore instead of Sean Connery.
It was a ridiculous argument, I realize, but it seemed symbolic of the rift
in our marriage somehow... Beth turning down all chances of adventure, me
avoiding all chances of experiencing sweeping movie-style romances. Finally,
Jake spoke up.
"Listen," he said. "You two are never going to agree on anything. I've got
one final suggestion."
"Let's hear it," I said.
"I've got all my movies stored in a central data bank. Why don't I just hook
the two of you up and have the computer select a movie at random?"
Beth and I looked at each other. "Fine," I said.
"I think that's the only way we'll ever get this started," Beth said.
"Great!" laughed Jake. "Okay... uh... why don't the two of you take a seat?"
We did as Jake commanded, taking the two leftmost seats in Jake's row of six.
"Those needles look kind of dangerous," I said warily.
"Don't worry," Jake said, affecting a Romanian mad-scientist voice. "I won't
feel a thing."
With that, he pushed a button on the rear of both our seats and the helmets
descended over our heads. A hidden visor descended and covered both of my
eyes so that all I could see was total blackness. I felt a cool spray being
vented all over my head-some kind of local anesthetic, I guess-and then a
strange, tickly sensation as the network of needles entered my scalp. Jake's
jokes aside, he was correct; the experience was completely painless.
"Are you still there, Beth?" I asked.
"Yes."
"How do you feel?"
"A little bit scared. You?"
"Scared, but more of it's excitement," I said.
"We're ready to go," said Jake. "Countdown!"
"What are you going to do while we're in the movie?" I called out to him?
"Watch it?"
"No," he said, a little poutily. "I haven't figured out a way to watch while
other people play at the same time. I'm just going to be over here working on
my water-fueled car, okay?"
Beth and I laughed because it sounded like a joke, but I suspected Jake
wasn't joking. If he could turn Beth into Godzilla, I imagined inventing a
water-powered car would be easily within his reach.
"Five!" Jake called out. "Four! Three! Two! One! SHOWTIME!"
*** To be continued ***
"I have no idea, but he sounded very excited over the phone."
"But what could it be? A game? Another one of those robots?"
"Just calm down, okay? How should I know? It could be anything."
My wife Beth and I were driving to our friend Jacob's house. House-hell, it
was more of a mansion. Jacob had been our friend since our college days
fifteen years ago; we had all shared the same off-campus house. But while
Beth and I were history majors, Jacob had majored in computer sciences. And
while Beth and I had found comfortable but low-paying jobs teaching history
together at the same college we'd graduated from, Jacob had become... well,
rich.
Not just well-off, mind you, but rich. Incredibly wealthy.
Never-work-another-day-in-your-life, buy-a-different-Porsche-for-
every-day-of-the-week stinking filthy loaded.
I don't know if it's right to toss around words like this, but if Jacob
wasn't a genius, then I don't know who is. He just had a wired- in genius for
computers and every sort of technology you could think of. That's what made
him such a valuable commodity; he was a brilliant programmer, a brilliant
engineer, a brilliant inventor. He didn't need anyone else; he'd just hole up
in his laboratory tinkering around with his computers and his tools,
whistling happily all the way, the rock music blaring from the stereo, and
he'd be doing the work of twenty men.
And he invented one brilliant device after another after he graduated-that's
where all his money came from. He patented a cheap hologram-camera that took
three-dimensional "Help me Obi- Wan" photos as easily as, and for the same
price as, a normal flat photograph. Just point and shoot! He invented a new
music- recording format that gave you the depth and detail of sound that
vinyl LPs gave you, but with the clarity and durability of a CD-and here was
the lucrative part: it was completely impossible to pirate. The record
companies paid him millions for the initial rights and within two years it
was the standard format for all albums, and then home videos. The royalties
alone must have amounted to a hundred million dollars a year.
Not all of Jacob's inventions were as practical as those; he was a playful,
carefree guy who was just as likely to invent a computer game or a toy as
some groundbreaking computer language. It all depended on what happened to
catch his interest. We had become good friends with Jacob back in college-I
think he was a lonely kind of guy, and he was on his own away from his
hometown for the first time in his life and he really appreciated the
friendliness we showed him. Beth and I kind of loosened him up a little from
the shy kid he was when we first met him; we gave him his first hit of
marijuana, we took him dancing at clubs with us, we introduced him to single
girls we knew (even though none of the romances we tried to arrange for him
ever took; Jacob was more interested in his inventions).
And we were still good friends. Jacob invited us on vacations and trips to
his mansion all the time, and we went whenever we were able to. Jacob gave us
stock tips on companies that were about to buy inventions of his, which made
our standard of living a lot more comfortable than it normally would have
been. And more important than that: Beth and I were usually the very first
people Jacob tried out his new inventions on. He had a laboratory built right
into his house-even after making all his money and inventing all those
things, he still kept busy trying to come up with new ones. And he still
worked virtually on his own. It was kind of a thrill to be the first people
to catch a glimpse of the new Jacob Kurland invention. He worked in such
secrecy-Internet newsgroups were always abuzz with speculation about what his
next creation might be. One time it was the first truly interactive video
game, another time it was a housecleaning robot with a 10,000-word
vocabulary. Whatever they were, they were always astonishing, delightful and
so technologically advanced that they almost seemed magical.
"I can't wait," Beth said as our car rounded a curve in the road and Jacob's
mansion rose into view.
"Neither can I, neither can I."
Jacob greeted us in person-no butlers or servants for Jacob- and ushered us
into his living room. We got caught up on each other's news as one of Jacob's
robots served us drinks, and eventually Jacob led us into the dining room,
where we had an excellent, gourmet four-course meal. The evening was so
pleasant that it helped for a while to take my mind off the fact that my
marriage wasn't what it used to be. Beth and I still got along all right, and
it wasn't as if we were fighting all the time. There just wasn't much spark
anymore. I could even pinpoint exactly where everything went wrong, not that
it was of much use: it was when we decided to postpone having children until
we both got our careers solidly established. I think I could tell even then
that Beth very badly wanted to have a baby, but she agreed against her better
judgment. And of course, in the academic profession, your career is never
firmly established, and the years went by, until it started to seem like we
were too old to think of starting a family. We had gone on in the same vein,
just the two of us, for year after year-both of us slowly seeming less and
less sexually attracted to each other-and, while we still loved each other
and weren't thinking of a divorce, I still worried about turning into one of
those cold, formal couples who simply exchange pleasantries over breakfast
and dinner, go out occasionally to a movie, have a night of planned sex maybe
once every week or two and gradually become unhappy strangers.
"All right," Jacob said once he'd finished his after-dinner glass of cognac.
"I suppose the two of you are wondering what I have in store for you
tonight."
"I thought you'd never tell us, Jake," my wife said.
"Well, to be honest with you," he replied, "it's taken all my concentration
just to get through dinner. I can't wait until you try it out! Come on! Come
follow me!"
Jake got up from the table and led us through a long, wood- panelled corridor
and down a flight of stairs into a lushly appointed multimedia room. There
was an enormous, very expensive looking stereo, a wall-sized TV screen, video
players, computer screens and remote controls of every description, not to
mention a long wall lined with nothing but cases of recorded music and home
video titles. There was also a row of comfortable-looking padded leather
chairs along another wall-six of them-that looked like high-tech
electrocution chambers because of the metal helmets attached to them just
above the headrests.
I inspected one of the chairs. "What is this, Jake? Not one of those
virtual-reality chambers."
Jake made a contemptuous snort. "Virtual reality?" he said.
"You've been watching The Matrix once too often. VR is the technological
biggest dead end since CD-ROMs. No, this is, like, two hundred times better
than that VR bull."
"What do these things do, Jake?" Beth asked, gingerly fingers one of the
series of sharp needles that lined the inside of each helmet.
"All right. Let me think," said Jake. Whenever Jake had to explain one of his
devices, he always needed a moment to think, so that he could figure out a
way to put all of his complex thoughts into language ordinary people like
Beth and myself could understand. "What I've been able to do is-OK, this is,
like, the fourth generation of those 3-D cameras I invented, right? Where
they're able to look at a given... uh, panorama, right?... and convert it
into digital information and turn that into 3-D information, right? OK, well,
what I've figured out a way to do is to take a movie, right? Like, any movie
on a Kurland disc, a KD, or even an old VHS tape, right?, and do the same
thing. Can you believe it? It, like, measures shadows and angles and
everything and in, like, a nanosecond, it figures out the 3-D configuration
of everything in the screen, right?
"Okay," he continued. "So I figured that out, right? Then I was able to feed
in all this, uh... tactile information, all this stuff I stole from the VR
guys but building on it, right?, correcting everything those dickwads did
wrong, right? You know how computer screens can differentiate, like, millions
of colours? Well, these things can differentiate between millions of, like,
sensations. And I've got another layer to the program, right, where the
computer can, like, extrapolate from the image within the frame, to what the
entire rest of the movie environment must look like."
"You've lost me, Jake," I said. "What is this, some way of making videos with
sharper images?"
"God! No!" Jake said, exasperated. "Would I call you over here for that? What
do you think I am, one of those geeks who, like, restores Vertigo so you can
see the pattern of Jimmy Stewart's tie a little better? God! No, what I've
done is to, like, turn any movie- you understand? Any movie at all-into, like
a complete, 360-degree, digital information world, with all the sounds and
the smells and the touches. And I've done the same for all the characters in
the movie, too. You get me? Huh? You get me? You put on one of those helmets
over there, and you can be, like, inserted into the movie. You get to be one
of the characters!"
Beth gaped at him. "You're kidding."
"No! I'm not!" Jake said, grinning. "Can you believe it?"
"Any movie?" I asked.
"Once the program was written and the bugs gotten out of the technology, it
was easy," Jake said. "The computer reads the movie and boom! In you go!"
"And we just hang around the movie?" Beth asked. "Won't the characters bump
into us?"
"No!" Jake explained. "Are you dense or am I just a bad explainer? Probably a
little of both." He grinned good-naturedly. "No, see, that's the marketing
point of it. You get to be one of the characters. Right? You, like, take over
the body of one of the characters. You see what they see! You go where they
go! You feel what they feel!"
"We get to be characters in the movie," I repeated doubtfully.
"Anyone you like!" Jake said. "You can be Indiana Jones, Rhett Butler,
right?, Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, Batman... Anyone! Or at least, anyone
I have a KD of here."
Beth could barely stifle her excitement. "My God, Jake!" she said. "I'd say
this thing would make you rich if you weren't so incredibly rich already!
And... and, is that what you've called us over for tonight? Are Doug and I
going to get to, like, be in a movie?"
"You bet!"
"My God..." I said, trying to take in the possibilities. A thousand questions
ran through my mind. "But... but... what happens to us? Do we just do
everything the characters do, like, with no control over anything? What
happens if we die?"
"You don't die," Jake said. "If your character dies, you just get bumped out
of the program and you wake up back here. As for control, as far as I can
tell, you have a certain amount of control over what happens. You can't
change the plot or anything, but you can change your dialogue to some extent
and move around on your own a little bit, too. But you can just go on
automatic pilot, too, if you want to and let the character or the movie sort
of do the thinking for you, you know, like, flip back and forth between doing
the movie dialogue and saying your own words. You can kind of MST3K the
situation if you want to-the other characters won't mind! It's, like, so
cool, you will not believe it. You just have to strap yourself in and ride
the story out to the end."
I was always amused by how this brilliant guy, this visionary, who invented
such astonishing devices could be so square when it came to using slang
expressions.
"So," Jake concluded. "What movie do you guys want to try?"
"King Kong," I said jokingly. "How about it, honey? How'd you like me to
carry you up the Empire State Building?"
"Don't be ridiculous," Beth said. "It can't do anything like that."
"No, wait, no!" Jake said. "That's not true. If it's in the movie, you can do
it. You can be Bambi, Jiminy Cricket... I can load in King Kong vs. Godzilla
and you two can ravage Tokyo together if you want to."
"Well, I'm not going to live through King Kong, thank you very much," Beth
said sternly. "Can't we do something romantic? Like Sleepless in Seattle?"
I stared at her in astonishment. "You can be anything in the universe and
instead you want to experience life as a woman who listens to the radio?!?" I
shouted. "They barely even meet in that movie! Forget it! Let's have
something with a little action in it! The Replacement Killers or something."
"Oh man, that would be so cool," Jake said.
"You know I hate those violent movies," Beth said. "And there's never any
women in them anyway. What am I supposed to do for the entire movie?"
"But Mira Sorvino's in it!" I said, knowing I was fighting a losing battle.
"You'd get to be Mira Sorvino! She's an Oscar-winner, Beth!"
"Can't we do, like, an Audrey Hepburn movie, maybe?" Beth asked. "Oooh, I'd
so love to be Audrey Hepburn for a night. Do you have Breakfast at Tiffany's,
Jake?"
"Who's the guy in that one?" I asked.
"George Peppard."
"Hannibal?" I said. "f**k that. No way am I being Hannibal."
Beth and I argued back and forth like that for fifteen minutes more. Each
time one of us would make a suggestion, the other one would find fault with
it. Beth was too staid and queasy to want to do any of the action movies and
I thought it was a waste of a great opportunity to do some boring romantic
movie when you could be flying through outer space or living through some
exciting spy adventure. And every time we'd thought we'd come up with a
compromise-Romancing the Stone or The Mask of Zorro-Jake would turn out not
to own the KD. We almost agreed on doing The Spy Who Loved Me, but at the
last minute I absolutely refused to be Roger Moore instead of Sean Connery.
It was a ridiculous argument, I realize, but it seemed symbolic of the rift
in our marriage somehow... Beth turning down all chances of adventure, me
avoiding all chances of experiencing sweeping movie-style romances. Finally,
Jake spoke up.
"Listen," he said. "You two are never going to agree on anything. I've got
one final suggestion."
"Let's hear it," I said.
"I've got all my movies stored in a central data bank. Why don't I just hook
the two of you up and have the computer select a movie at random?"
Beth and I looked at each other. "Fine," I said.
"I think that's the only way we'll ever get this started," Beth said.
"Great!" laughed Jake. "Okay... uh... why don't the two of you take a seat?"
We did as Jake commanded, taking the two leftmost seats in Jake's row of six.
"Those needles look kind of dangerous," I said warily.
"Don't worry," Jake said, affecting a Romanian mad-scientist voice. "I won't
feel a thing."
With that, he pushed a button on the rear of both our seats and the helmets
descended over our heads. A hidden visor descended and covered both of my
eyes so that all I could see was total blackness. I felt a cool spray being
vented all over my head-some kind of local anesthetic, I guess-and then a
strange, tickly sensation as the network of needles entered my scalp. Jake's
jokes aside, he was correct; the experience was completely painless.
"Are you still there, Beth?" I asked.
"Yes."
"How do you feel?"
"A little bit scared. You?"
"Scared, but more of it's excitement," I said.
"We're ready to go," said Jake. "Countdown!"
"What are you going to do while we're in the movie?" I called out to him?
"Watch it?"
"No," he said, a little poutily. "I haven't figured out a way to watch while
other people play at the same time. I'm just going to be over here working on
my water-fueled car, okay?"
Beth and I laughed because it sounded like a joke, but I suspected Jake
wasn't joking. If he could turn Beth into Godzilla, I imagined inventing a
water-powered car would be easily within his reach.
"Five!" Jake called out. "Four! Three! Two! One! SHOWTIME!"
*** To be continued ***