Diamonds in the Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

felt her closed eyes beneath her fingers, but her hands didn’t block the view.

    Now she was getting a little frightened. She pulled her hands away from her eyes and held them in front of herself.

    She couldn’t see her hands.

    She couldn’t see herself at all.

    She felt herself. Her body was there. Her hands could touch it, and she felt her hands on her body. Her simulated hands on her simulated body. If she were actually running her real hands over her real body, she’d feel the straps and the tug of the IV. Was her body writhing on the couch, straining against its straps, or lying passively? She couldn’t tell. Her own body might as well be fourteen billion light-years away, it was so far beyond her perceptions…

    No. Stop it. Don’t panic. There was just some kind of glitch in the system. The HVF software was one-of-a-kind, constantly under development — largely by Computer Science graduate students — and it did have more than its share of bugs. She’d work around this bug the way she’d learned to work around so many others.

    But it was still unnerving not to be able to shut out the view of the universe. Especially since it seemed to be getting more vibrant and dynamic by the minute. In fact, it was becoming overwhelming. The light of a hundred billion galaxies pierced her vision with an almost physical force.

    Unthinkingly, she put up her hands to block the light … and felt them tangle in the threads and membranes of the universe. Trapped like a bug in a spider’s web. Her heart pounded and she thrashed in helpless, irrational panic.

    One of her flailing, invisible hands smacked into the control panel, sending it sailing off into the darkness to her left. She tried to grab it before it got away, but succeeded only in pressing several buttons … including the Hide button in the upper right. The panel vanished, still moving quickly away.

    And she began to fall.

    Dana shrieked as the structure of the universe expanded, or she shrank. Filaments and webs of galaxies whipped past her, stroking and clinging and tickling her hands, her face, her legs … some particularly dense knots of young galaxies burned her skin like hot sparks.

    She must have triggered a continuous zoom toward the center of the simulation; it felt like a factor of ten every ten seconds. She groped for the hidden control panel, but the onrushing galaxies were so bright … and she couldn’t even see her own hands … and her head spun, and she had trouble keeping focus. No matter how far she reached, the control panel was nowhere to be found.

    And if she couldn’t find the control panel, she couldn’t hit the panic switch that would shut the simulation down.

    This shouldn’t be happening, she told herself. As amazing as the universe was, and as impressive as the haptic interface was, she shouldn’t be so overwhelmed by it. It had to be some kind of interaction between the glaucoma drugs and the interface drugs.

    Knowing this didn’t help. She was still
falling
! Plummeting uncontrollably through the universe a quintillion times faster than light. And her heart and guts wouldn’t listen to her brain.

    She was now a hundred million light-years tall, and shrinking rapidly. The bubble-like structure of the universe quickly grew so large that it became invisible, replaced by clusters of galaxies … the forest vanishing, the trees becoming individual. Each galaxy cluster was a loose ball, basketball-sized or so. She collided with one as she fell, sending tiny galaxies scattering in every direction; the sensation on her skin was like sand grains in a sandstorm. Intellectually she knew it was only a simulation, but she still felt guilty for the destruction she’d caused.

    Dana fell through the dense wall of galaxy clusters into the empty space between. Ahead of her another strand of clusters grew and grew, visibly separating into individual galaxies as she watched. They didn’t twinkle like stars seen from Earth — the