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couples designing their first home walk through houses that had not yet been built; he gave paraplegic men a chance to walk again; he let med ical students do surgery on patients that did not suffer or bleed. As the president and founder of Techcellence, a conceptual-design computer compan y specializing in virtual reality, he had joined the cutting edge of a rad ical technological movement and had become a symbol for the entire field. Maggie, whose computer skills extended to booting up WordPerfect, used to say it was much simpler than that. "You're the Wizard of Oz," she would te ll him. "You make people's wishes come true."
    He'd sort of liked that image. It was true--people tended to seek out Techc ellence to do things no other conceptual-design firm would do. Because Jami e wasn't afraid to take a challenge and shape it with his mind and his hand s until it fit on a seven-by-nine screen, his company often produced the sy stems and models for virtual worlds that became prototypes for other firms to copy.
    Jamie had a high-end computer system at his house in Cum-mington, comple te with a bodysuit and glove and head-mounted device, but most of the de sign work was done in his lab. Located downtown, it had computers with m ore technological expertise, as
    Jodi Picoult
    well as the big equipment--the SGI Onyxs, graphics machines which could ge nerate the real time in the virtual world. There were about ten people who worked full-time for Jamie, and when Tech-cellence secured a contract wit h Nintendo or the Defense Department or a teaching hospital, there were tw o hundred more people he could hire on as subcontractors--digital sound mi xers, artists, story writers, texture mappers, producers, directors, progr ammers. In many ways, Jamie was like a chef--finding cooks who had already made dishes that he could combine into something even more flavorful, in spite of the fact that he'd grown none of the ingredients himself. He often came into work on weekends, when it was quietest; and he'd bring Maggie with him. One Saturday, a few years after they were married, Jamie had come in to fiddle with a program for a private client, a formerly seed ed millionaire tennis player who had become quadriplegic after a heli-skii ng accident. Maggie, who openly admitted to being terrified of so many com puters, sat curled with a book on a Salvation Army wing chair where some o f the best brainstorming was done.
    Jamie was stuck. It wasn't creating the virtual world--any savvy hacker coul d jump on the Internet and download to do that. This client had a specific r equest: he wanted to play tennis again.
    Had Jamie wanted to milk him for his money, he could have simply set the p rogram up like some of the other virtual reality systems developed for han dicapped people. A sweatband around a quadriplegic's head could measure th e magnetic field given off by the optic nerve, so that the guy would be ab le to move a cursor--or a virtual tennis racket--simply by shifting his ey es. But Jamie, who had always been something of a perfectionist, wanted to give his client more. It would not be enough to see a racket swing on a c omputer screen and know you had connected with a ball, like those archaic Pong games on the old Atari video game systems. He wanted his client to be lieve he was on his own feet again.
    Ordinarily, this wasn't a problem when creating a virtual world. A good HM
    D tracked your head movements and isolated your views to computer-generate d images, in a 190-degree field. With the addition of a glove, a bodysuit, and a motion platform, there were three kinds of feedback a designer coul d generate. Tactile
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    feedback produced vibrations at specific parts of your body, which your brai n would interpret along with visual and auditory clues--if you see and hear oozing slime, you'll feel it. Auditory and visual feedback employed subtleti es, such as subfrequencies outside the hearing range, to give the sensation of motion, or flight, or