Today's book opens in 2025. How old will you be in twenty-four years?
I might be a grandmother by then. Do you think Tom Clancy's view of the
future is probable?

Enter you response

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND; APRIL 2025

The sky was a bright, cloudless blue, marked only by the thin white
contrails of an aerospace plane's jet engines passing high above.
Matt Hunter squinted his brown eyes, staring up from his seat in the
Camden Yards stadium. Must be just about ready to switch over to the
rocket engines, he figured.

An elbow in his ribs brought his thoughts back to Earth. "Nice job
on these seats, genius," Andy Moore complained. "We're going to
broil out here in the sun today." The blond boy ran a hand over the
fair skin of his forehead. "Anybody bring the sunblock?"

"Out of luck from this end, junior." David Gray rolled back his
shirtsleeves, exposing muscular brown arms. "My sunblock comes
courtesy of my African ancestors." He shifted on his seat, however.
"You'd think that after renovating this place, they'd put some
comfortable padding out here."

Leif Anderson stretched back in his seat. "It's comfortable enough
from where I'm sitting."

Matt gave his friend a look. The seat that Leif seemed to occupy was
actually empty, the space filled with a hologram. Leif was actually
sitting in his parents' apartment in New York City, no doubt
sprawled in a very expensive--and comfortable--computer-link chair.
Implants beneath his skin connected him to the world Net, allowing
his image to be seen here in Baltimore, while he experienced
everything that was happening in the stadium nearly two hundred
miles away.

"You'd better tune up your sim a little, Anderson," Matt joked.
"Otherwise, you won't be catching any hologram home runs." To his
other friends, both real and holo, he offered an embarrassed shrug.
"Hey, it's the first home game of the season for the Orioles. These
were the best seats I could get."

He shifted uncomfortably on the thinly padded bleacher seat. Any
seat was worth the show they were about to see--and he didn't mean
the baseball game. Matt and all his friends had an interest in
anything to do with computers. They were fascinated with the global
computer Net that ran so much of the world, and with Net Force, the
organization that policed that computer webwork. That was why Matt,
Leif, Andy, David, and the others had joined the young people's
auxiliary, the Net Force Explorers.

Getting in had not been easy--they'd had to survive a training course
nearly as tough as that faced by Marine recruits. But then, Net
Force had grown from a Marine/FBI task force, and shared its main
headquarters with both groups in Quantico, Virginia, so it was
understandable. And getting through that training had given Matt and
his friends access to an unbelievable computer education. In a world
where operating a computer was more like flipping a light switch,
Matt and his friends knew how the magic boxes worked.

The thing that had brought them to this game wasn't the seats or the
teams, but the stadium itself. Camden Yards had undergone a complete
renovation, wiring in a huge computer system to operate a virtual
reality--veeyar--simulator. Lots of sports arenas featured
holographic projectors in the seats. But here, the whole field was
set up for a huge-scale display.

Leif sat up a bit taller in his seat as the opposing teams finished
their warm-ups. "Here it comes," he said.

An announcer's voice rumbled through the stadium. "Welcome to the
first home game of the Orioles' 2025 season. But we have "more" than
just a great game waiting for you. No, you'll spend an inning in
Baseball Heaven, thanks to our new veeyar system. Some of the
all-time All-Stars of the game, the greatest sluggers in baseball
history, will step into the batter's box against an ace pitcher and
a dream defensive team. Can heavy hitting defeat great pitching and
fielding? Let's find out!"

For a moment, a shadow seemed to fall across the field as the last
of the live players trotted off. Then, eighteen ghostly figures swam
into existence in front of the opposing dugouts. They wore a variety
of uniforms, all of them old-fashioned to Matt's eyes, some of them
belonging to teams that didn't exist anymore.

Some of the virtual players waved or tipped their caps to the crowd.
Leif Anderson whistled and clapped. "None of this is scripted," he
said. "It's all being randomly generated by the system's computers,
based on the players' records, the chances they took swinging and
fielding, even the way they reacted to the fans."

"Who's the fat guy on the Sluggers team?" Andy Moore asked.

Leif stared at Andy as if he'd burped out loud in church. "That's
Babe Ruth. The 1927 Babe Ruth--he hit sixty home runs that season.
And a little farther down the line is Ty Cobb. He got on base more
than four thousand times in his career--and got into more fights
with the fans than anyone else I ever heard of."

"I hope you've got an info-dump whispering all this stuff in your
ear," Matt said. "Because if you're blowing brain cells on
hundred-year-old sports statistics..."

Leif just grinned. "If you take a close look at those All-Stars out
there, you'll notice that at least half of them are wearing the
uniforms of New York teams--the Sluggers have Ruth and Lou Gehrig
from the Yankees, Franke Frisch from the old New York Giants, and
Don Drysdale was with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Fielders have Joe
DiMaggio and Bill Dickey from the Yankees, Keith Hernandez from the
Mets, and Willie Mays and Christy Mathewson from the Giants. They
all played for my hometown!"

"Big yawn," Matt said just to annoy his friend. "Why have they got
all these ancient guys?"

"There was a cutoff--nobody who played in this century," Leif replied.
"Some of these guys played into the 1980s, like Ozzie Smith, Mike
Schmidt, and Johnnie Bench. Keith Hernandez played into the '90s."

Matt laughed. "What I want to see is how they play `now.'"