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times."

    "I did," Cherry said. "We had the Corridor up and running, and I wanted you to see it. But maybe it's just as well you didn't."

    Sanders looked at the complex equipment scattered all around him. "You had it up?"

    "That was then. This is now. Now, we're fine-tuning." Cherry nodded to the programmers on the floor, working on the walker pads. "We finally got the bug out of the main loop, last night at midnight . The refresh rate doubled. The system really rips now. So we have to adjust the walkers and the servos to update responsiveness. It's a mechanical problem,"
    he said disdainfully. "But we'll take care of it anyway."

    The programmers were always annoyed when they had to deal with mechanical problems.
    Living almost entirely in an abstract world of computer code, they felt that physical machinery was beneath them.

    Sanders said, "What is the problem, exactly?"

    "Well, look," Cherry said. "Here's our latest implementation. The user wears this headset," he said, pointing to what looked like thick silver sunglasses. "And he gets on the walker pad, here."

    The walker pad was one of Cherry's innovations. The size of a small round trampoline, its surface was composed of tightly packed rubber balls. It functioned like a multidirectional treadmill; walking on the balls, users could move in any direction. "Once he's on the walker," Cherry said, "the user dials into a database. Then the computer, over there-"
    Cherry pointed to a stack of boxes in the corner, "takes the information coming from the database and constructs a virtual environment which is projected inside the headset.
    When the user walks on the pad, the projection changes, so you feel like you're walking down a corridor lined with drawers of data on all sides. The user can stop anywhere, open any file drawer with his hand, and thumb through data. Completely realistic simulation."

    "How many users?"

    "At the moment, the system can handle five at one time."

    "And the Corridor looks like what?" Sanders said. "Wire-frame?" In the earlier versions, the Corridor was outlined in skeletal black-and-white outlines. Fewer lines made it faster for the computer to draw.

    "Wire-frame?" Cherry sniffed. "Please. We dumped that two weeks ago. Now we are talking 3-D surfaces fully modeled in z4-bit color, with anti-alias texture maps. We're rendering true curved surfaces-no polygons. Looks completely real."

    "And what're the laser scanners for? I thought you did position by infrared." The headsets had infrared sensors mounted above them, so that the system could detect where the user was looking and adjust the projected image inside the headset to match the direction of looking.

    "We still do," Cherry said. "The scanners are for body representation.

    "Body representation?"

    "Yeah. Now, if you're walking down the Corridor with somebody else, you can turn and look at them and you'll see them. Because the scanners are capturing a three-dimensional texture map in real time: they read body and expression, and draw the virtual face of the virtual person standing beside you in the virtual room. You can't see the person's eyes, of course, because they're hidden by the headset they're wearing. But the system generates a face from the stored texture map. Pretty slick, huh?"

    "You mean you can see other users?"

    "That's right. See their faces, see their expressions. And that's not all. If other users in the system aren't wearing a headset, you can still see them, too. The program identifies other users, pulls their photo out of the personnel file, and pastes it onto a virtual body image.
    A little kludgey, but not bad." Cherry waved his hand in the air. "And that's not all. We've also built in virtual help."

    "Virtual help?"

    "Sure, users always need online help. So we've made an angel to help you. Floats alongside you, answers your questions." Cherry was grinning. "We thought of making it a blue fairy, but we didn't want to offend anybody."

    Sanders stared thoughtfully