Fool's Experiments by Edward M Lerner Read Free Book Online Page A

told?"
    Ferris wore earbuds; he pretended not to hear. She tapped his shoulder and repeated herself when he looked up.
    Jeff suspended his game before answering. "Nope. Got a problem with that?"
    He was as obsequious as ever to AJ. As a short-timer, she must be unworthy of his time. "It's a mystery to me why AJ pays you, but that's between the two of you. It's clearly not for any useful contribution. I'll be damned, though, if I'll let you put our experiment at risk."
    He arched an eyebrow at her. So?
    I have a thesis to finish, you little twerp. Linda flipped the power switch of his laptop. With a flick of the finger she popped his Ethernet cable from its wall receptacle. "Jeff, do not ever connect your laptop to the local area network in here. We work hard to keep viruses off the LAN, and you can't ever be sure what's gotten into your machine."
    "Give me a break," Ferris said snippily. "The LAN connects to the university network. UniNet is part of the freaking Internet, and I'm online through UniNet all the time. Although outside this lab, it's simply WiFi—there's none of this prehistoric business with wires."
    "Look there." Linda mentally appended, You imbecile. A vein throbbed in her forehead. She pointed to the equipment rack that stood beside the team's supply cabinets. The rack terminated two fiber-optic cables, one tagged "UniNet" and the other "Lab."
    "It would seem you've also forgotten about our security gateway. It isolates the lab LAN from the main net. I wouldn't want to bore you with details."
    Too late, he mouthed.
    Words failed her. Linda turned and stomped away.
     
    Brown and white shards flew as the pressure of the butter knife exceeded the strength of the bread stick. 'That," Doug explained for Cheryl's benefit, "was for the practice. Not just anyone can truthfully say they eat cholesterol for science." The Neural Interfaces Department had, as usual, gathered for lunch in the BSC cafeteria. Someone down the table— from where she sat, Cheryl could not tell who—referred to this tradition as "better living through chemistry." She didn't find the food that bad, but then again, she had only been eating here for a few weeks.
    Dick Conrad, a programmer with an Einsteinian shock of hair, flicked crumbs from his otherwise-empty bread plate. "So, who has plans for the weekend?" The chorus of answers included mostly yard work, deferred shopping, watching the Skins game, and possible theater trips. Cheryl's plans were laundry and a stop at the grocery; she didn't bother to contribute.
    Doug grabbed another bread stick. "I generally get that question from people hoping for someone to ask them their plans. Dick, what are you doing this weekend?"
    "I expect to spend it here. New M-and-M game."
    Cheryl groaned mentally. Dick didn't mean candy. They were—yet again—talking magic and mayhem. Strange quests in imaginary castles and labyrinths, pretending to fight equally nonexistent wizards and monsters for their fictional treasures. As far as she could tell, all these games were alike. And all equally pointless.
    Game consoles sold in the tens of millions, but the revolution in VR technology had given arcades a rebirth. VR goggles and instrumented gloves and wands—not to mention the superfast computers to take full advantage of them, to paint the goggles' screens with synthesized worlds, and to update those images in real time to correspond to every movement of the adventurer's head and hand—were quite expensive. The cost, at least, limited the amount of time that teens could spend at the games. Adults were another story, especially adults at companies like BioSciCorp that maintained fully equipped VR rooms for more serious purposes.
    The difference between a man and a boy is the price of his toys.
    The men babbled on for what seemed like forever about M-and-M. Cheryl was relieved when someone at last noticed that time was passing, and that they needed to get upstairs and back to work.
    Relieved, that was,