“That’s right,” I said enthusiastically. “You can move in the simulated environment and make changes in it.”
Kelso was frowning puzzledly. “You mean we could fight a duel in a virtual reality setting. . .?”
“Right,” I said. “Share a VR world, whack the hell out of each other, and nobody gets really hurt.”
A slow smile crept across his devilishly handsome face. “Whack the hell out of each other. Yeah.”
I didn’t like the sound of that.
“Winner takes all?” Kelso asked.
I nodded.
“Oh no you don’t,” Lorraine snapped. “I’m not some prize you win in a video game. I don’t want anything to do with this macho bullflop!”
And she flounced off without a backward look at us, her long dark hair bouncing off her shoulders. We both stared at her as she just about stomped down the corridor.
Rats, I thought. Here I wanted her to fall for the romance of it all, and all she did was get sore. Double rats.
I shrugged. “Well, it was an idea, anyway.”
“A good idea,” said Kelso.
“Whattaya mean?”
He gave me a narrow-eyed look. “This is between you and me, Zepopolis.”
“But Lorraine—”
“You and me,” Kelso repeated. “We fight our duel and the loser swears he won’t go after Lorraine ever again.”
“But she—”
“Lorraine won’t know anything about it. And even if she does, what can she do? I’ll whip you in the duel and you stop bothering her. Got it?”
“Got it,” I muttered. But I thought that maybe—just maybe—I’d beat Kelso’s smug backside and he’d be the one to stop sniffing after Lorraine.
So that night, after even the most gung-ho of the techies had finally gone home, Kelso and I went down to the VR lab and started programming the system there for our duel. I knew the lab pretty well; I used it all the time to check out the cockpit simulations we created for the Air Force and Navy. It wouldn’t take much to modify one of the sims for our duel, I thought.
The lab was kind of eerie that late at night: only a couple of desk lights on, pools of shadows everywhere else. The big simulations chamber was like an empty metal cave, except for the wired-up six-degree chairs in its middle.
Kelso and I talked over half a dozen ideas for scenarios—a medieval joust with lances and broadswords, an old-fashioned pistol duel aboard a Mississippi steamboat, jungle warfare with assault rifles and hand grenades, even a gladiatorial fight in ancient Rome.
I slyly suggested an aerial dogfight, World War I style. I didn’t tell Kelso that I’d spent hours and hours playing WWI air battle computer games.
“You mean, like the Red Baron and Snoopy?” he asked, breaking into a wolfish grin.
“Right.”
“Okay. I’ll be the Red Baron.”
I tried to hide my enthusiasm. “That makes me Snoopy, I guess.”
“Flying a doghouse!” Kelso laughed.
“No,” I replied as innocently as I could muster. “I’ll fly a Spad XIII.”
“Okay with me.” Kelso agreed too easily, but I didn’t pay any attention to it at the time.
“We’ll start with an actual scenario out of history,” I suggested, “a battle between the Red Baron’s squadron and a British squadron, over the Somme sector in—”
“A duel in the Somme!” Kelso punned. “Get it? Like that old movie, Duel in the Sun.” He laughed heartily at his own witticism.
Me, I smiled weakly, disguising my elation. I had him where I wanted him. I had a chance to beat him, a damned good chance. So I thought.
It wasn’t cosmically difficult to plug the WWI scenario I had used so often into the VR circuitry. I got the specs on the Spad XIII and the Fokker Dr. 1 triplane easily enough through the Web. The tough part was to get the VR system to accept two inputs from two users at the same time without shorting itself into a catatonic crash. I spent all night working on it. Kelso quit around midnight.
“I’ve got to get my sleep and be rested for the weekend’s exertions,” he said as he left. “With Lorraine.”
He went home. I continued programming, but my mind filled with a beautiful fantasy of Lorraine and me together in the ski lodge, snuggling under a colorful warm quilt.
That was before I found out that Kelso flew real airplanes and was a member of a local stunt flying organization. Good thing I didn’t know it then; I’d have slit my throat and gotten it over with.
So the next night, after a quick takeout salad (with low-cal dressing), I headed down to the VR lab. I bumped into Kelso, also heading for the sim chamber. With Lorraine! They had eaten dinner together, he informed me with a vicious smile. And there were almost a dozen techies trailing along behind them.
“But I thought—”
“You thought I didn’t know,” Lorraine said to me. “Like anybody can keep a secret in this jungle gym for nerds.”
