by Len Vlahos
Also by Len Vlahos
The Scar Boys
Scar Girl
Life in a Fishbowl
For all the writers of speculative fiction who have inspired me over the years, especially those I discovered when I was a kid: Isaac Asimov, Lester Del Rey, Robert Heinlein, Ursula Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and so many others. Thank you for helping me stretch my notion of what the future might be.
Contents
Part One
Chapter Zero
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part Two
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Part Three
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Part Four
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Epilogue
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Shout-Outs
PART ONE
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
—The Wizard, The Wizard of Oz
00
I stand at a precipice.
If I don’t tell my story now, I’ll never have the chance. That may sound dramatic, but it’s true.
Most everyone who will read this has heard of me. I saw a statistic online that mine was the seventh most recognizable name on planet Earth, after only the president of the United States, the pope, the Dalai Lama, two mostly talentless pop stars, and one very talented athlete.
Celebrity is a funny thing. If people have heard of you, they think they know you. They make up their minds based on one-sentence extracts they see scrolling across their screens. O.J. was guilty; Trump stole the election; I’m a monster.
Maybe all those things are true. Maybe none of them are.
And maybe, because those same people don’t seem to have the patience to click past the headline, no one will ever read what I’m about to write, or not all of it anyway.
But I have to try.
The people who do read this will come with a wide variety of motives. Some will be gawkers; people stopping on the side of a road to watch a brush fire consuming a mountainside. There will be plenty in this tale at which you can gawk. Some will have a baser interest, wanting to read about the experiments performed on me by supposedly well-meaning scientists. They won’t be disappointed either.
But I’m not doing this for them. I’m writing for the few people who want to learn the truth.
The media seems to think my story begins with the lawsuit I filed against Princeton University and my own father. Why not? It’s a juicy story—Fifteen-Year-Old Boy Sues Father for Freedom. But that was more akin to the moment of a rocket’s booster separation, when my life was propelled into orbit in earnest. The moment of launch, the real beginning, happened months before, in a coffee shop, where I was lying on the floor, unconscious.
Again.
01
“Wake up, Quinn.”
My return to the world of the living is abrupt. One minute there is nothing, the next there is everything. I open my eyes to a circle of silhouettes standing over me, blotting out the fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling. The effect forms a halo around each of their heads, like they’re angels, and for a second they don’t seem real.
“What happened?” I ask.
“You passed out, again,” says one of the shadows. Leon.
It all comes flooding back. I’m in Enchanted Grounds; my friends and I are at a Magic the Gathering tournament.
“You okay, dude?” Jeremy. He ends every sentence with “dude.” As in, Not my problem, dude. Or, Have you played the new release of Gears of War, dude?
Besides Leon and Jeremy, Luke is here, too. He’s the quietest member of our little troupe, but still one of my best friends. “You want some water?” he asks. He hands me a glass as I sit up.
“Thanks,” I say. And in answer to Jeremy, “Yeah, I’m okay. This isn’t my first rodeo.” And it’s true. I’ve been passing out like this for the last eight years.
When I was seven, my dad died. Pancreatic cancer. They don’t tell little kids the survival rate is effectively zero, and for a long time I thought my dad was just sick, not dying sick. I kept thinking and believing he would get better.
Someone looking in on our family from the outside would have seen how hopeless the situation was. My father’s skeletal frame, the grayish color of his skin, the hair loss. But when you live with it every day, it’s like the story of the frog and the boiling water. If the frog jumps into boiling water, it jumps right back out. If the frog starts out in cool water and heat is slowly added, it doesn’t notice until it’s too late, and voilà, frog soup.
Anyway, my father was the center of my universe. When he died something in my young brain snapped, and I developed a syndrome called vasovagal syncope. It’s a medical disorder in which unusual stress causes a person’s blood pressure to plummet and they pass out. You can look it up. The doctors said I had some sort of “emotional realignment” when my dad passed away (duh), leaving me with a kind of free-floating syncope that can be, and is, triggered by any situation in which there’s high stress. Lately, the episodes have been getting worse. Case in point, tonight.
The evening had started out normal enough.
I breezed through the early rounds of the tournament and made it to the final four. My opponent in the semifinals was a kid who I swear couldn’t have been more than ten. We were playing a tight game when, about twenty minutes in, he slammed a card down and said, “I play Cruel Ultimatum. You have to get rid of three cards, sacrifice a creature, and you lose five life.” He said this with such conviction, it sounded like my actual life was in danger.
I smirked at him. He was new here and didn’t really know who he was up against.
“What’s your name?” I asked my young opponent.
“Charlie.” He wasn’t used to playing against high schoolers, and I could tell he was nervous.
“Okay, Charlie. That was a good play. It cost you a lot of manna, but it was a good play, and it hurts.” The kid, who had one of those faces made for a TV sitcom—big front teeth, a glisten to his eyes (probably because it was after his bedtime), a thick mop of tangled hair—couldn’t help but smile. “Well, it would hurt,” I added, “if I didn’t have this.”
I placed a Murder card in the battle area, which wiped out his attack and moved the killer card to his graveyard pile. I gave him a sympathetic smile.
“Quinn
,” Leon said, shaking his head and laughing. He and Jeremy were engrossed in their own game next to me and had paused to watch this encounter.
The kid, Charlie, was deflated but took it well.
“This your first time here?” I asked.
Charlie nodded.
“Don’t sweat it. You’re playing really well for a newb.”
He rolled his eyes and said “thanks” with more sarcasm than I had at his age.
The weekly Magic the Gathering tournament at Enchanted Grounds, the gamer coffee shop just a few blocks from my house, draws all kinds of people. There are businessmen, stay-at-home moms, construction workers, college kids, and, of course, a lot of guys (mostly guys) in high school, like me, Jeremy, Leon, and Luke.
I’m not going to lie, the four of us are really the center of gravity here. We’ve been coming every week for more than three years, and we’re almost always the group at the final table. My personal win streak stands at seventeen consecutive tournaments.
The tables at which we play are scattered in and among shelves loaded with strategy games, Dungeons & Dragons books, and a boatload of specialty dice. Running along one wall is a coffee bar, where the people not playing engage in animated conversations. Rows of lights embedded in the ceiling march from the front door to the back wall, punctuated by halogen spotlights that add warmth to the room. The thrum of voices—“had you not blown up my land,” and “screw my curfew,” and “the code has a flaw in line three million seventy-four” (whatever that means)—mixes into a seamless whole and rises above the din.
Enchanted Grounds might just be my favorite place on Earth.
I dispatched Charlie and moved on to the final game against Leon, a position in which we’ve found ourselves more than once.
There are nineteen thousand nine hundred eighty-nine unique Magic cards in existence, and in this tournament, we play with a deck of exactly seventy-three cards, so the number of permutations, while large, is knowable.
And I have a photographic memory.
BOOM.
After Leon and I laid out our Land cards and a few Creature cards, I played an early attack. Leon didn’t flinch. He was up to something. I pretty much know his entire deck—not just the seventy-three cards he brought tonight, but the more than five hundred he’s amassed over his Magic career, and he was definitely up to something; I just didn’t know what. That’s when I felt my pulse quicken.
The whole night had been kind of . . . off. Like earlier in the evening when Jeremy kept twitching. Well, not twitching, pausing. He would stop midsentence, get a blank look on his face, and then snap back to the moment. It was probably only a millisecond, but it was enough for me to ask if he was okay. “Just tired, dude,” he’d said. It felt like the world was trying to shift five pixels to the left.
Leon continued to lay out his army, playing way more Land cards than normal. That would signal he was planning to lay down something big, so I countered with all sorts of defensive cards.
“What gives?” I asked. But Leon just smiled. My heart amped up another few beats per minute.
Leon and I have been best friends since the fifth grade, when his family moved here. I was a quiet kid then—very quiet—which didn’t seem to faze Leon at all. He did enough talking for the two of us. We started spending time together at recess and lunch, and before long were hanging out at each other’s houses.
Leon was scrawny in elementary school, a scarecrow in corduroy pants and a polo shirt, but he filled out in high school. For a guy who plays Magic instead of sports, he’s built. Come to think of it, so are Jeremy and Luke.
I attacked with a Vampire Sovereign, a really good play, but Leon just sloughed it off. It was like he was throwing the game.
What.
The.
Hell?
Everyone was gathered around us, watching (maybe this is why they call it Magic the Gathering), and I could feel them pressing in on me. I started to sweat.
“You okay?” Leon’s concern was real. He knows me. Knows about the syncope.
I nodded.
Leon played even more manna cards, and now my brain was on fire. It did not compute. He was wasting valuable turns planning for some kind of attack I knew—and I mean, I knew—he could not make. It was counter to every and any strategy a smart Magic player would employ, and Leon is a very smart Magic player. What was worse, the people around us were oohing and aahing at his every move. I was basically kicking his ass, but the gawkers hovering over us seemed to think it was the other way around.
Leon played another Land card. He was definitely throwing the game. But for some reason, everyone cheered when he laid the Swamp card down.
The blood drained from my face.
My heart felt like it was exploding.
I saw stars.
It’s happening, I thought. Shit. It’s happening.
“He’s crashing again,” I heard Luke say just before my head fell to the table, scattering cards and dice as I passed out.
“What was that?” I ask Leon now as I sip my glass of ice water. The crowd has dispersed; even Jeremy and Luke have wandered off.
“You passed out,” Leon answers. “You always pass out. Don’t let it spook you.” Leon and the other guys are so used to seeing me faint it’s become routine. That’s a depressing fact all on its own.
“No, I mean the cards you were playing.”
“Oh.” His cheeks blush, and he kind of shrugs his shoulders. “I brought the wrong deck. I didn’t have anything I could beat you with, so I tried to psych you out. It never occurred to me it would trigger an episode. I’m really sorry, Quinn.”
I suppose that makes sense. Sort of.
The guys help me into Luke’s car—he’s the only one of us old enough to have a license—and drive me home. I hear them telling my mom about the episode as I trudge up the stairs and off to bed. This is almost definitely going to mean more doctors. Ugh.
I put a pillow over my head and try to fall asleep, hoping I’ll finally be able to dream. Because that’s the other thing that changed when my dad died. I haven’t had a single dream—not one—since that day. The doctors say it’s that I haven’t remembered a dream, but I don’t buy it. I’m pretty sure I’m not dreaming. At all.
Like I said, doctors. Ugh.
02
By Monday, everything seems back to normal. None of my friends mention my fainting spell over the weekend, so I don’t either. My mom gave me a pretty intense cross-examination the next morning, but I played it down well enough to avoid an emergency trip to the neurologist.
My attention wanders from the history teacher’s droning lecture about the disputed presidential election of 1876. I read the material and already know everything he’s going to say—and besides, I’m sitting next to Shea.
How can anyone think about American history when they’re sitting next to Shea?
Her eyes, supposedly hazel, are actually the color of mahogany wood, and her black hair is cut short, curling under her ears. Her smile—she seems to be always smiling—sparkles. Literally. Plus, she has perfect posture. I know that’s a weird thing to notice, but it makes her look elegant, classy, like she’s out of my league. Which, she is. Way out. Shea and I sit next to each other in history and share two other classes, but I’m not sure she knows I’m alive.
I’m jolted back to the moment when a folded note lands on my desk. Leon is sitting behind me.
Just ask her out already, the note reads.
Leon knows I’ve been crushing on Shea and has been relentless in bugging me to ask her on a date. It gets under my skin enough that I jot down, You like her so much, you ask her out.
I wait for the teacher to angle away from where I’m sitting and toss the note over my shoulder, smiling at the little thud it makes when it lands on Leon’s desk. It comes back a minute later.
Maybe I will.
Crap. Leon probably will ask her out, just to light a fire under me. I decide to play it cool. Well, not cool, but smart-a
lecky.
You wish.
I add a crude drawing of a hand with its middle finger extended and toss the paper back. Only, I miss, and the note lands on the floor.
Before Leon or I can react, Shea bends down to pick it up. My pulse and breathing go to DEFCON 1, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to faint when Shea, still smiling, hands me the note. Then she looks at the teacher, who has his back to us, looks back at me, and holds a finger to her lips, as if to say, be careful.
My little crush just became an H-bomb.
“She picked up your note?” Jeremy can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Dude!” We’re in the cafeteria eating lunch.
“Keep your voice down!” My command is a whisper, so it loses some of its force.
“Weren’t you worried she was going to read it?”
“Duh. Of course I was worried!”
“How’d that make you feel?” Leon asks.
He loves to talk about feelings. Sometimes, I wonder if he thinks he needs to save me, you know, because of not having a dad and all that stuff. It’s like he’s trying to be a shrink, or worse, a father.
Anyway, I ignore Leon’s question.
My peripheral vision catches Shea standing up, and I instinctively look in her direction. She looks back at me—I mean she looks RIGHT AT ME!—and gives this little smirk. I’m about to melt into a puddle of Quinn, but try to play it cool so the other guys don’t notice. It doesn’t work. All three of them turn around in unison to see what’s caught my attention. Shea looks at them, looks at me, then gives a dramatic little bow and laughs.
If I die right now, I’ll die happy.
Shea and her friends turn to leave.
“Oh, come on already,” Leon says to me.
I’ve been told I have a pretty high IQ (intelligence quotient) but a pretty low EQ (emotional quotient), and this is one of those moments that proves the truth of the statement. Just as my brain catches up and I’m about to shush Leon, he does the unthinkable.
“Shea, wait.” She and her friends stop, turn, and do as Leon asked; they wait. “Quinn has something to ask you.”
Luke does a spit take with his Gatorade, and Jeremy claps his hand over his own mouth to stifle a laugh or a scream of surprise or maybe just a long-drawn-out “Duuuuuuude.”
