Clay took the visor headset to her workbench and methodically took it apart. Its elegant form aside, it served its purpose pretty neatly: full-vision wraparound visor, integrated headsets for sound and a built-in microphone. Clay made a surprised and gratified sound as she took apart the full head ring and discovered electrodes. Ah-ha. That explained part of why the world had felt so real: there was some transcranial brain stimulation going on.

PERSEUS had started to try to integrate such a thing into the Tai-shan sim, but DARPA balked on behalf of the military brass who wanted to keep scientists out of soldiers' brains on general principle. X had hustled along the development of it as far as he reasonably could, to no good purpose as it had seemed at the time. Now Clay knew his plan all along was to integrate cranial stimulation into a game to amp up the sensation of realness experienced by the players: the suggestion of some slight touch, some emotional and mental stimulation. Of course, she thought. Control the brains of the players--well, at least insofar as games had always reached into human psychology to keep people playing and engaged. And incidentally paying money.

The electrodes were not going to be very powerful, not in a unit of this size. This gave her another idea. X had experimented with the simulation feeding information to the brains of the people in the sim. Clay, after leaving X and the PERSEUS project, had worked on another project: one that sought to effect brain control of computers. Essentially what X had tried to do, only in reverse--a human giving instructions to a computer. Certainly, it could be used by the disabled to bring greater independence to their lives--but it wasn't that that the medical science consortium that hired her was interested in. Disabled people were, after all, "limited effectuary assets," meaning they generally had no money. Industry was not interested in helping people just because they could.

Clay set the Crown of Thorns in front of her on the workbench. It'd been named that because of all the pointed electrodes to rest upon the user's head--in contact with skin and providing a strong current while remaining noninvasive. She had a sudden thought, and took off her Dobelle glasses. She considered the one arm and reflected on how it fed visual data to the port located behind her right ear, which was the conduit to her visual cortex. The principle is basically the same, she mused. I wonder...

She opened up medical supply catalogues on her fullscreen computer in between fiddling with the Crown of Thorns and the Everhome headset. Essentially, everything the game fed into the proprietary headset could be "translated" to go through the Crown of Thorns instead. She could have an intermediary set of instructions to tell it to amp up the power as it went to the crown. She would be getting more of the game experience than the gamers. Perhaps more than X had intended. I hope there's not a lot of pain transmission involved, Clay thought. X had never been one for inflicting pain, a minor blessing as she thought back to the physical part of their relationship.

Perhaps she could use the dedicated visor-related visual inputs and devise some sort of transmitter that'd allow the impulses to go directly to her Dobelle implant. That way the macular degeneration wouldn't play a part by taking away the center of her field of vision, and she could get all the visual info she needed. Not that she felt she needed much: the pretty colors didn't really serve all that important a purpose...

Clay stopped. In fact the entirely physical appearance overlay in Tai-Shan and PERSEUS was just that: a paint job over the world. She grabbed a piece of paper and started to make a diagram of the sources of information PERSEUS fed to its users. Everhome may have added to them, but here were the basics. She just needed more information about the specifics from when they built the Tai-Shan simulator.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

In the morning, Clay checked the drone camera footage. She sped through it, stopping only when people entered Anabasis after sundown. As she suspected, several women in scrubs left out the rearmost door, and a couple others went in, using cards they held up to a reader. Clay tried to zoom in close enough to see their ID badges--which doubled as their security cards--but couldn't get a good look.

It was enough to confirm her suspicions. She started making plans immediately, ordering a set of scrubs and printing out a blank of a stiff plastic card. The forged facing would take a bit of doing, but she made a reasonable-looking County Health ID that'd pass cursory, very cursory, inspection.

Next she got to work on her knitting bag. She worked on and tested one small device, which she wrapped in enough yarn that it resembled just another ball of knitting yarn. She tied the end of a knitting needle in with it so that it would stay in position to work as a switch. Next, she did some finer work on an existing knitting needle, hiding its power source inside another "ball" of yarn.

That night, Clay got a car to the Anabasis building. She showed up at 10, when her footage showed her no one had come. She held up one of her yarn balls to the magnetic card reader. She pushed the needle to activate it, holding it in position until the center of her vision through her Dobelle glasses went grey. The light on the card reader went out and a "click" sounded from the door. She pulled on it, and it gave. She set the "yarn" and needle back into her bag and went in.

Once inside, she made a show of being lost and looking around for the benefit of any cameras. She headed toward where the largest room should be, if she remembered anything from her brief contact with the layout many years before. She entered a hallway where light shone from a doorway.

Clay looked in and, seeing a nurse, walked up to her. "Excuse me, dearie," she said. "I'm with County Health and I'm just supposed to give some of the convalescing patients a general check--be sure there's no sign of infection, that sort of thing."

The young woman gave Clay a confused look, but turned back to the kits she was quickly preparing. "Okay, the place you want is just through the pair of doors at the end of this hallway." She indicated the direction with a nod of her head. "First time in the Muttering?"

Clay's brows knitted together in confusion. "Er, yes," she said, and followed the young nurse's directions.

The room she entered was cavernous, though dim lights were set just a few feet above head level to give the impression of a more intimate space. Inside were at least three dozen bed-chairs with occupants hooked up to IVs and monitoring machines. What caught her attention first, though, was the sound.

A low susurrus of quiet speech, like distant conversation, filled the air like a light fog. She walked toward the nearest combination bed-chair and saw an older man staring vacantly up. He was saying something under his breath. Then in a whisper he said, "Yes, m'lord. It shall be done. Shall I bring your regular panoply of weapons and armor?" He muttered a couple of unintelligible things, then his eyes moved around, seeming to pick out Clay in the half-dark. In a low voice he said, "My God, my God, I'm a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood." Then his eyes lost focus and his lips moved without any sound coming out.

She moved on, scanning the room, She wished her Dobelle glasses could feed her a low-light image; she would have to consider adding that functionality herself or seeing if a modification already existed.

On the last row, in the darkest corner, she thought she could see Raf's tightly-curled red hair. She started toward him when a voice behind her said, "Excuse me, what are you doing here?" She turned to see a middle-aged nurse standing there, hands on her hips.