It felt like molasses as his feet sank into it. He resisted the urge to shake his head; the TACPAD helmet weighed heavily on his neck, and his vision was blocked by the pad of the cyberlink completely covering his eyes and wrapping around his head. The helmet was fastened on very securely, the location determined after four hours of fitting by two members of Hammond's staff in a white room that was completely sterile. They’d told him the location had to be exact, within one hundredth of a millimeter. And they had only been able to do that after doing complete MRI, CAT, and PET scans of his brain.As they worked, the two technicians had talked in a lingo that Dalton had not understood. They had sent cryoprobes and thermocouples into his brain to test locations, reading results off a bank of machines and then making adjustments to the inside of the TACPAD. Hammond had been right: the insertion of the little wires had caused no pain, or any other sensation for that matter. Still, it had been disconcerting to simply lie there, knowing that they were penetrating directly into his brain, over and over again.Just putting the fitted TACPAD on had taken forty-five minutes, with another thirty of testing, before they had strapped him into the lift harness in the main experimental chamber and lifted him into the air and swung him over the isolation tank.He wore a slick black suit that covered his torso, leaving his arms and legs free.
