Chapter 25

David
David returned home to a mixed bag. Cassidy looked guilty, Dare was moping, Corvus was excited, and Ruth looked pissed. It was unsurprising that he decided to talk to Corvus.

“We fixed it!” the young man shared.

“No more getting dizzy and losing your lunch?” David asked.

“Using 135 synchronized cameras was too much for the VR software to handle all at once without a lot more processing power. But it did help us figure out some stuff.”

“Like what?”

“The best placement of the three camera clusters is at 120-degree separation at a 60-degree down angle. When placed like that, the VR software gives us a flat eye-level view,” Corvus explained.

“You’ve used Google Maps?” Dare asked as he finally warmed to their conversation.

“You mean where you pick the little guy to walk you down the street?” David asked.

“That’s the view we’re talking about, but far more sophisticated. Now that we have the camera angles worked out, we’ll add multiple 360-degree cameras around the field from above to allow for amazing VR eye-level images,” Dare shared.

“But we need more processing power,” Corvus blurted.

“We can keep the cost down if we build a PC ourselves,” Dare quickly added.

Corvus nodded vigorously. Cassidy raised her eyebrows at David to ask if he was really falling for their ploy to build a kick-ass PC. David was enough of a guy to be sucked in because he could only imagine how he would rule the gaming world if he had one.

“If you made a second PC for me, would it give me an edge in gaming?” David asked.

“If you let us have some bitcoins, I could get you AMD’s experimental Atomic Threadripper. There’s talk that they may only sell this model to the military, but we found a Chinese source on the darknet that claims to have access to the processor. It’s rumored to have more than twice as many cores as the current state-of-the-art and double that many threads, and...”

Corvus started jabbering about multiple GPUs and numbers of lanes, but Dare held up his hand to stop him and then turned to David.

“Not too long ago, this kind of processing power would have cost millions. It would make your gaming opponents look like they were all on dial-up modems,” he said to dumb it down. “Old ones.”

Cassidy walked out of the room when David started dancing an excited little jig. She knew that Dare had just talked David out of more money.

“You realize that Darius is playing you, right?” Cassidy asked when David came to find her.

He chuckled.

“It makes him feel superior, so I play along.”

“His ego did need a boost,” she shared.

“Veronica?”

“Yep. She got invited to sail on some rich USC donor’s yacht to Cabo San Lucas for the next three weeks. She told Dare he was a nice distraction, but she couldn’t miss an opportunity like this.”

“Distraction?” he asked, and she nodded. “That sucks.”

“It gets better. Dare and Corvus wanted to get some real Mexican food, so I took them to that taco place you like.”

“The one in the sketchy neighborhood?” he asked with a bit of worry.

“They got propositioned. I’m pretty sure Corvus took the girl up on her offer.”

“You don’t know for sure?”

“I wasn’t about to go into the alley and watch,” she said, drawing him a graphic picture.

David rubbed his temple, trying to make his sudden headache go away. He understood now how his mom used to get when he did something stupid. The two boys were old enough to make their own decisions, but he somehow felt responsible for keeping them safe.

“Did Dare?” he asked.

“No. This was before Veronica told him about her trip.”

“No more tacos for those two,” he ordered.

“Maybe the housekeeper could...”

“No! They can use their hands like most guys do while they’re here.”

When they’d lived in the dorm, Alex had paid their housekeeper extra for special services. David had walked in on his roommate getting head more than once. Alex was much more worldly than these two, even though it didn’t sound like it right now.

“How did that work for you once you started having sex?” Cassidy asked.

He gave her a dirty look and left her chuckling. David might not be the best example of circumspect behavior.

He did have one evil thought. When he lost his virginity, his mom quickly found out. As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, the girl had shared with his mother how big his dick was.

His mom had then stuck the dagger in and twisted it with her comment that ‘at least she didn’t call you “pencil dick.”’ The absolute topper, though, was that his mom had then taken him to buy condoms. David still shuddered when he relived that experience.

Maybe Dare’s mom should be filled in on Veronica. Then again, the kid would probably die if his mother discovered her little boy was now a man. Thinking back, David might have helped dig the grave if he’d known what would happen once his mother learned of his activities.

One of the team managers stopped by David’s locker to give him a note. He was being summoned to Coach Clayton’s office. He had a pretty good idea of what the meeting was about.

Over the last few days, they’d been testing the VR stuff. Yesterday, Dare announced that it was time to do full-scale testing. David had to agree because what he’d been able to see in the latest sessions wowed him.

They’d filmed him working with his former high school teammate, Bill Callaway. Bill was penciled in as either a wide receiver or slotback this fall and was willing to practice with anyone who’d throw him passes. They’d focused on running fade routes into the end zone since that was where the cameras were set up.

By the time David had finished practice and spent some stress-relief time with Colleen, Dare had sent him a text saying the practice session had been rendered and was ready for him.

As soon as David put on the headgear, he was hooked. He had selfishly checked himself out first, which turned out to be a massive mistake. David would watch thousands of hours of game and practice footage of himself throwing a football. It was utterly different when he was able to see each pass from every angle.

Being a student of the game, David had a better idea of how a quarterback should throw a ball than most. When he saw himself in VR, David discovered he wasn’t nearly as good as he thought he was. David found hundreds of nitpicky things that all added up to him only being average.

If he got nothing else from this VR equipment, this would be enough. It was a wake-up call that if he expected his teammates to bust their butts to stack days, he had to as well. To this point, he’d thought he had been.

David had been concerned enough that he’d reached out to his former quarterback coach, Bo Harrington. Bo’s wife hadn’t been thrilled that the call came at three in the morning, their time ... which David felt terrible about. He hadn’t realized he’d been on the system that long. When she’d finally woken her husband up, Bo had been more understanding.

David had promised to ship him a tablet and VR headgear so he could see what David was talking about. In return, Bo made David promise that once Dare and Corvus had everything working, Western Michigan would be the second school to get the VR system.

The following day, David had called Jaxson Pettis, who reached out to Hank Manalo to install cameras around all the practice fields.

Someone—Matt Long—had tattled. Coach Clayton came out to stop the installation, but the facilities manager held his ground, saying he worked for the athletic department, not Coach Clayton. It seemed that was news to the head coach.