Her stormy brow cleared like magic. “You can use my account. We get four characters per account, and I’ve only made one. You can make one, just to see if you like it. It won’t cost you anything. Here, I’ll write down my password and user name.” She snatched up a sticky notepad and scribbled out the nameTerrible Taraand the name of our deceased dog. “Later on you can get your own account so we can play together at the same time. Maybe I can get a second VR unit.”
“Whoa, I just said I’d take a look. I have no intention of doing anything more—”
She stopped in the doorway, her eyes dark with mutiny.
“I knew it! You won’t go into it with an open mind! You’ll just look and say it’s a silly time waster!”
“Hey, now. I am just as capable as the next person of keeping an open mind,” I said, giving her my best quelling look. It didn’t do any good. It seldom did.
“You will not. Your mind is already made up to think it’s silly.”
I held up my hand to stop her. “I admit to being a bit biased, but I will promise to give the game every chance. Happy now?”
“No,” she answered, her face still stormy.
“Are you questioning my word of honor?” I asked, frowning.
“Yes. No. Maybe. It’s just that you are so… so…”
“Dedicated to my job?”
“Dead,” she answered, throwing her hands up in a frustrated gesture.
“Honestly, Mom, you don’t do anything fun! This VR game has all sorts of things that you’ll like, if you just give it a chance. There’s tons of economy stuff.”
“I do have interests beyond those of a fiduciary nature,” I pointed out, vaguely insulted.
“Name one,” she countered.
I glared at her and ignored the challenge. “I have said I would give the game a fair chance. That’s the best I can do.”
Her eyes narrowed as she chewed on her lower lip for a moment. “I know! You have to make officer.”
“I what?” My gaze strayed back toward the computer screen and my work.
“You have to make officer. It’s a goal. You like goals; you’re always telling me to have them.” She hurried on before I could point out that the two things weren’t the same. “If you advance in the game to officer status, I’ll know you really kept an open mind.”
“How hard is achieving officerhood?” I asked, flipping to a spreadsheet of the current year’s budget.
“Piece of cake. I was an officer in, like… well… really quickly.”
I knew how those computer games worked—to advance you had to open a secret passageway or collect some object or run over a magic spot or something silly like that. It shouldn’t be much of a challenge, and if it kept the peace, it would be worth the sacrifice of my time. “Hmm. All right, since it means so much to you, I will give the game an hour or so and become an officer.”
“Woohoo! You can use my laptop—it has the game client on it already. I’ll bring it and the VR parts down here right now. You can play on the battery so you don’t have to be plugged into the wall in case the power goes out. Thanks, Mom!” She gave me a quick hug before running out of the room. “I’m going to go tell my captain really quickly that you’re logging on later, so if he sees you he’ll be nice to you and stuff.”
“Wait. Tara, I didn’t mean this second—oy.” The door to her bedroom upstairs slammed. I started to roll my eyes again but switched to a flinch when another loud peal of thunder and gust of wind made the windows rattle. As quickly as I could I finished typing up the press release, e-mailed copies of it to the organization’s director, the media contacts, and my work e-mail address, then made a quick backup of all my recent work.
“You are so anal it’s not even funny,” Tara said fifteen minutes later as she deposited her laptop on my desk, plugging the power cord into the wall. On top of it sat a pair of thick black wraparound glasses.
I filed the CDs I’d burned with the week’s work away with the other backups, one in the collection organized by date, the other in the one organized by subject. “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth having backed up. Why are you plugging that in? The storm is almost on top of us.”
We both were silent whileanother flash-boom! shook the house.
“I don’t get a good connection to log on to the system on the battery. It’s just to log on. Once you’re into the game, you can unplug it. Here is the VR unit.
Cool, huh? Looks just like a pair of shades. There’re speakers built into the part of the glasses that sits behind your ears, so you hear everything, and here”—she flipped down a fiber-optic-sized black extension from the sides of the glasses—
“here is your microphone. The software has speech recognition capabilities, so you can talk to other characters just like you normally would. It’s so totally cool.”
