The Administration Series Read Online Free PDF Page B

was clearly everything Warrick could have wished. Obviously showing off, he clapped his hands, and a tray holding two glasses of something clear and fizzy appeared in the air beside him. He took the tray and set it down on a table.
    "Here, have a drink." He proffered a glass.
    Toreth took it, pausing to brush a finger down the side. Beaded condensation ran at his touch and he watched a drip splash onto his leg. Except, of course, it didn't. The sim had fed the tiny impact and small, spreading chill directly into the nerves. He touched the spot, acutely aware of the separate sensations making up the simple gesture.
    "Go on," Warrick said.
    When Toreth took a sip, he discovered it was gin and tonic — the flavour was wonderfully real. He felt the cold liquid in his mouth and all the way down his throat.
    "That's amazing." Toreth was beginning to get annoyed with himself for sounding so overwhelmed, but it
was
pretty fantastic. He took another mouthful, licking the drops from his lips, marvelling at the fizz on his tongue. Worth a trip here, even if the demo was all he got out of it. However, judging by the meditative way Warrick was watching him drink, it wouldn't be.
    Warrick took a taste from his own glass. "Won't get you drunk, either, which is good or bad depending on how you look at it. I want to put in a controlled ethanol release eventually, but unfortunately all the pharmaceutical add-ons are still in testing. Stand up."
    "Why?"
    "Because I'm going to shift the scene and it makes some people queasy if they start out seated and end up standing. It's an inner ear problem."
    Toreth stood and waited as Warrick returned to the controls.
    "Now, this one we're
very
proud of. Not my personal work, but . . ."
    The glasses vanished from their hands as the walls dissolved away completely to reveal a vast expanse of water meadow. They stood at the foot of a long gentle slope leading up to a distant tree-topped ridge, dark against the vivid blue sky that arched over them. Elsewhere, the flat meadow stretched away until it finally shimmered into a summer heat-haze.
    "Jesus fucking Christ," Toreth said, giving up any attempt at intelligent comment.
    Warrick laughed. "Beautiful, isn't it?"
    "Is there anything you
can't
do?"
    "Not a great deal, although there is plenty we haven't done yet. This is one of our more ambitious rooms. Come on." They started to stroll through the meadow, following a faint path.
    "We have relatively few outdoor scenes so far. This, a beach I'm afraid I won't have time to show you, a few places around the city — mostly on the campus because it's easy to take the measurements to create them. There is an experimental live shadowing program which covers a small area outside the AERC — what you see there should be exactly what happens in the real world. Then there is a good deal of the inside of the AERC — we're working on techniques for generating basic suites quickly from plans and photographs. And we have a number of more characterful indoor rooms, to keep the sponsors happy."
    Listening with half an ear to Warrick's dark, rich voice, Toreth took a deep breath, savouring the air. It was warm and heavy with the scent of sun-drenched flowers. Bees hummed lazily past them and a soft lapping of water sounded from the river-bank a few yards away. The illusion was perfect, and he said so.
    "Not quite. This room reaches the limits of the hardware — it exists primarily to test techniques for pushing the boundaries without impairing the user experience." Warrick pointed up the slope. "Notice how the rippling of the grass blurs with distance? 'Over there', as it were, we're modelling sections of grass, not individual blades. Also, the trees at the top ought to move more irregularly. And the clouds just drift; they don't break up and reform. Tricks like that allow us to dedicate more processing power to making the physical interaction point look and feel real."
    Warrick knelt down and stroked a clump of sedge, as