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Stil more wires descended from the ceiling to the laser scanners which were broken open, their circuit boards exposed. Everyone seemed to be talking at once. And in the center of the room, looking like a teenage Buddha in an electric blue T-shirt that said “Reality Sucks,” was Don Cherry, the head of Programming. Cherry was twenty-two years old, widely acknowledged to be indispensable, and famous for his impertinence.

    When he saw Sanders he shouted: “Out! Out! Damned management! Out!”
    “Why?” Sanders said. “I thought you wanted to see me.”

    “Too late! You had your chance!” Cherry said. “Now it's over!”
    For a moment, Sanders thought Cherry was referring to the promotion he hadn't gotten. But Cherry was the most apolitical of the DigiCom division heads, and he was grinning cheerful y as he walked toward Sanders, stepping over his prostrate programmers. “Sorry, Tom. You're too late. We're fine-tuning now.”
    “Fine-tuning? It looks like ground zero here. And what's that terrible smel ?”
    “I know.” Cherry threw up his hands. “I ask the boys to wash every day, but what can I say. They're programmers. No better than dogs.”
    “Cindy said you cal ed me several 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 wel you didn't.”
    Sanders looked at the complex equipment scattered al 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 final y got the bug out of the main loop, last night at midnight. The refresh rate doubled. The system real y rips now. So we have to adjust the walkers and the servos to update responsiveness. It's a mechanical problem,” he said disdainful y. “But we'l 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?”
    “Wel , 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 smal round trampoline, its surface was composed of tightly packed rubber bal s. It functioned like a multidirectional treadmil ; walking on the bal s, 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 al 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 ful y modeled in 24-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 stil do,” Cherry said.