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vertigo. And force feedback--actual shoves applied to the body--could make you feel like you were in microgravity, or blasting off in a rocket.
    The problem was, on someone who couldn't sense anything beneath his neck, these types of feedback would be lost.
    Jamie pulled the HMD off his head and rubbed his hands over his face. He w asn't even aware he'd sighed in frustration until Maggie put down her book and came to stand beside him. "Tough day at the office?" she said, rubbin g his shoulders.
    "Impossible," Jamie admitted. "How do I go about making someone feel some thing they're not physically capable of feeling?"
    Maggie frowned. "I'm not following you."
    "VR for the handicapped," Jamie explained, passing her the HMD. "Quadripl egic wants to play tennis."
    He knew, by the smile that curved Maggie's lips beneath the high-tech helmet
    , that she was delighted with the visual images of the tennis center in Flus hing Meadow--the lined courts, the perspiring crowds, the smoggy blue of the sky. He watched on the flat screen as Maggie flickered her eyes, making a t ennis racket appear at the edge of her virtual vision and swing in a forehan d. "He wants other friends to be able to connect into the virtual space. And he wants a neural network thrown in, a 'smart enemy,' in case no one else i s around to play against him."
    "Why are you stuck?"
    Jamie shrugged. "Because I can't make him feel the sweat on the grip of his racket. Because I won't be able to make his legs tired from running."
    "That's hardly your fault," Maggie said. "Couldn't you over-compensate som ewhere else? You know, like a scent--sun tan lotion waving in from the sta nds, or that rubbery smell you get when you open a can of tennis balls?"
    "He can already smell," Jamie said. "He wants to walk." Maggie sank down on his lap. She pulled off the HMD and
    Jodi Picoult
    touched her hand to the screen, shaking her head. "It always amazes me how much better it looks with the helmet on."
    "That's the idea." Jamie smiled.
    "Imagine," Maggie said. "To be so active, and to have that taken away from you. If I ever get into an accident and become a quadriplegic, you have m y permission to shoot me."
    Reflexively, Jamie's arms tightened around her. "You shouldn't even joke abo ut that," he said. "And you don't really mean it." Maggie raised her eyebrows. "You'd want to live as a vegetable?"
    "You're not a vegetable. You still have your mind."
    "And you're stuck in it," Maggie added. "No thank you."
    "You have all five of your senses," Jamie argued. "You can still see, you can feel with the skin on your face, you can smell, you can taste, and you can h ear."
    "Taste is a stupid sense," Maggie muttered absently. "No one would miss it.
    "
    "You would if you didn't have it," Jamie said.
    "I'd rather be blind, deaf, and dumb than quadriplegic." Even with the whir of the computers in the back of the lab, the room was too silent for Jamie's liking. He kept thinking that if they continued to talk like this, they'd be tempting fate. "I hope you never have to make that choi ce," Jamie murmured.
    Maggie took her hand and pressed it to his cheek. "You could stand not feeli ng me touch you here," she said, moving her fingers to his forehead and over his lips. "And here, or here." Then she slid her hand down his chest, betwe en his thighs, to cup him. "But to forget what this feels like?" He felt himself growing into her palm. He could not believe that the sensa tions Maggie could create by touching him were something he would ever hav e trouble remembering. Maybe that was the clue for his program, too--evoke a memory of what used to be, so that the mind made up the parameters the body physically couldn't. He would use the sounds and smells of a game of tennis, and mount a small fan in the HMD to give the sensation of wind cau sed by movement. If there were enough bombarding stimuli to elicit a recol lection of running, of serving a tennis ball, why couldn't your head make you think it was