Read Craig Kreident #1: Virtual Destruction for Free Online

powered by neutron bombs.   The Lab should dump this end-of-the-Cold-War martyr complex and move into new areas without the apologies.
    He caught only the tail end of Aragon’s comment, “ — mind telling the boys and girls a little about your machine?”
    “Sure.”   Lesserec stood straight outside the door to the VR chamber.   Every tiny face watched him.   “Anybody know what virtual reality is?”   He didn’t wait for an answer, though a chubby boy on crutches raised his hand.   “It’s like playing a smart videogame, one that can respond when you twist a dial, pull back on a lever, or even touch a screen.   Virtual reality is going somewhere that you’ve never been before—without leaving your room.”
    “Like dreaming,” interrupted the blond-haired girl to his right.
    “Kind of like dreaming.”   Lesserec pointed into the VR chamber where they all waited.   “This white room is about the size of a typical living room—twenty feet on a side.   But inside this chamber we broadcast computer-generated images, like what you see on TV, except these are much bigger, three dimensional holograms, and a lot more real.   We’ve got special technology that lets you feel some of it, too.”
    “Like the holodeck on Star Trek ,” one of the children said.
    Lesserec smiled.   “Exactly, in principle at least.   I think the Enterprise system might be, uh, a little more advanced than ours.   But ours is real—and that alone makes it a lot more interesting.”
    The kids chuckled.   Lesserec sighed with relief, happy that things were going well enough.   “Still,” he continued,   “we can transport you to places nobody can ever hope to go—say, to the center of the Sun or to the center of an atom,.”
    “I hope to go to Disneyland,” said one boy.
    Before Lesserec could figure out how to respond, Aragon stepped up.   “Mr. Lesserec has a demonstration to show you how his special chamber works.   Would you like to see it?”
    The room buzzed with a great deal of enthusiasm.   Aragon whispered to him, “No problem.   I’ll accompany them.”   As if that comforted Lesserec one iota.   “Just show the kids something they’ll remember.”
    “I think they’ll remember this.   Just hang on.   I’ve got to push the auto start.”
    Leaving the vault door open, he hustled to the banks of workstations inside the large control room and punched the run command.   The images would begin projecting as soon as he sealed the chamber door behind himself.   This would be a perfect test run.
    Inside the chamber, the gray-white walls remained featureless as the door clicked closed.   “This’ll be better than any movie,” he promised, killing time as the images loaded up.   “Just don’t touch the walls—that’s where the pictures are made.”   He lowered his voice to Aragon.   “If you think anyone’s getting motion sickness, I’ll stop the simulation.”
    Aragon looked suddenly worried.   “You’re not going to use that fighter plane sequence are you?”
    Gary smiled.   “No—this is a little more benign than that.   We used this as one of our first sensor tests.   I took the images myself during a long hike this summer.”
    He suddenly found himself transported to the top of a rocky mountaintop, along with the room full of children and their escorts.
    Sheer granite walls plunged down thousands of feet in front of them to a green valley below, where a languid river snaked along the centerline, flanked by a thin gray road and tiny vehicles that flashed sunlight.   Overhead the sky was crystal clear, blue, showing the blurred white line of a jet trail.   A soft wind blew through the chamber, bringing a sharp ozone smell mixed with pine needles.
    In tactile response the rock itself was smooth, a blister of whitened granite with flakes of loose shingle flanking smooth sinkholes where murky water collected.   Dazzling waterfalls, ribbons of white, danced down the rugged