He walked over to one of the easy chairs, set up in the corner, which was his and his alone. He sat down and let his legs stretch out. "Yeah, I know the difference between vanilla and cinnamon. Jesus, leave me alone, will you?"

Somebody passed over a bottle of spring water, and he greedily drank. More comments were coming in from the crew, cascading over one another, as he sat there and decompressed and tried to take everything in. It was always like this after a test session. Always. And even though he felt dehydrated and irritable and everything seemed too bright and too noisy, he knew he was one of the better testers, one of the more calm testers.

There were rumors on the Net about suicides and test facility shoot-ups from other testers, other competitors, who couldn't handle the quickie decompression from virtual reality to real reality, but the CorpNews uploaders always managed to squelch those stories. Most times.

He kept his eyes closed, as the chatter continued:

"…told you we needed another processor for that part of the horizon…"

"…it was a kludgy fix and you know it. Care to write the specs for something so confusing? Man, if you knew…"

"…I dunno, this scenario still seems too white bread for me…"

"…why a dog? I'd rather use my cat, he's better behaved…"

He opened his eyes, took in the test room. Off to the right was the sim module that he had just emerged from, with cables and output jackets coming off the top like some damn Medusa hair scare. A door leading to the rest of the building was off to the left, locked shut and tight, and with a sign pasted in the middle:

WHAT YOU SEE HERE…

WHAT YOU HEAR HERE…

WHAT YOU DO HERE…

WHEN YOU LEAVE HERE…

Just by the door, on both sides, were coat and helmet hangers. It was a warm day – evening by now? – so the coat hangers were empty. The helmet hangers were full up, with black mirrored V/R helmets hanging there, with the glove inputs dangling below. Another sign to the side of the racks: V/R Helmets Are Not To Be Worn During Compensated Time!

Workbenches lined three out of the four walls, with monitors and terminals of many sizes and shapes. He wasn't sure what they all did, and he didn't care. His job was to test, to evaluate, and he was glad to have a job so simple in such a time and place, even though he had been practically shanghaied at first.

He knew jokes were told at his expense, about the rural atavistic knuckle-dragger who didn't care or didn't do much with the wired world, but Fletcher didn't care. Well, he didn't care what they thought. He cared about a lot of things and most times, he couldn't talk to his co-workers about it.

He took another healthy sip of the water, then put the glass down and scratched at a mark on his forearm, where he'd been injected an hour earlier. The cocktail of drug goodies was what counted. The whole virtual reality industry had slammed up against the big brick wall of real reality years earlier, when the gamers and simulators and sexers wanted more than just sounds and images. They wanted the full tactile experience, from scent to touch and everything in between.

But always and always there were bugs, and this crew was hard at work, debugging their merry way along, while he got doped up and placed in the module, running this program over and over again.

They talked to each other in acronyms and phrases and short-hand language, spent hours working on the white board, scribbling and erasing, arguing and eating bad food and worse drink. And all the while he waited, sipping his spring water, eating simple and plain meals, as simple and plain as possible in this corporate cube, and then – like the members of some enthusiastic firing squad – they would turn and look at him and say, okay, Ken, time to get buttoned up and start tripping.

And luckily – oh sweet Jesus, the luck he had – the program was relatively simple and plain. White bread. Watching a meteor shower from the quiet and comfortable confines of a lake shore, with children and friends and a drooling dog, playing about, enjoying the quiet night, looking up into the fabulous night sky. Thank God it was so blessed simple.

Half the crew were now by the white board, the rest by a large monitor watching the events of the previous half hour. The monitor was split in two, a fuzzy display that showed the interior of the sim dome, while the other half was numbers and codes. That crew was trying to find the little burp that had caused him problems, while the crew at the white board was trying to guess what problem might crop up next.

Though the crews were supposedly equal, he could tell the difference between the full-timers and short-termers. The full-timers moved slow and true and smiled among themselves, knowing that They Had It Made. Stock options, 401 (k), full med and dental, the whole circuit board. The short-termers – hired for specific tasks – were eager and quick to move, wanting to show that they'd do whatever it took to slide in and become a full-timer.

The door opened up and a slim guy walked in, looking like an over-sized bug, V/R helmet on his head. He took the helmet off and a couple of voices were raised up:

"Hey, Collins, decided to join in!

"Collins, what's new?"

Collins hung up his helmet, his short blond hair matted down with sweat. "Man, I almost got nailed in the parking lot. You'd think the pizza delivery boy-o's would know which end of the lot is the exit. Hey, I made the seventh level on Saturn's Rings. Finally!"

He ran his hands across his hair, wiped at his face. "Oh, one more thing. Got a NewsNet flash on the way over here. Saigon got nuked."

Emerson said, "No shit. What does it look like?"

"Suitcase job, what else? Near the Mekong so it could rain glowing water down on mama-san and papa-san. Nasty stuff."

"Credits?"

"Two so far. Both Islamic fundie branches. You bet it'll be a dozen by tomorrow."

A laugh. "And the new Hundred Year's War goes merrily along."

One of the short-termers said, " Saigon? I thought it was called Ho Chi Minh City."

"It was until Dell took over. One of the corporate officers had a dad who was a Viet war vet. Changed the name for sentimental reasons. They had bought naming rights when they set up their first assembly lines. Hey, anybody got stock in emerging Southeast Asia markets?"

Another laugh. "Those markets have been emerging for decades. You'd be an idiot to sock away some stuff in there. C'mon, back to work."

Fletcher finished his water. The new way of the world. Reality wasn't the huddled masses in the Third World and Second World, pressing out from their slums, their apartment high rises, the porous borders. Ships at sea and aircraft in the skies and buses on the ground being hijacked and commandeered by desperate people, trying to get someplace where the phones worked and the lights came on and men with guns didn't come into your home at night, blast you into bloody pieces over some ancient feud. All that didn't matter.

What did matter was the reality in the V/R helmets, the home theaters, the connected Sim Game networks spread across the world. That was the new reality. Everything else was markets and support and raw materials.

He stood up, stretched, felt the tendons and joints creak. He guessed he was raw material, in a way. He had grown up in one of the last wild stretches of Montana, dropping out of school, doing odd jobs here and there – mostly there, since who had money to pay for what passed as an odd job nowadays? – and hunting and fishing and trying to live like the old guys did, like Lewis and Clark. Reading book after book in the free libraries around the county.