“We have to keep going with the plan. I’ll see what I can do to get them to stop this in the meantime.” He clenches his fists, the anger visible in the blood flowing through the two bulging veins on his right temple. “We don’t have much time to make this work. Fuck, I don’t know how I’m going to launch this in time. Even after it…”
“What are you trying to say?” I lean forward, the anxiety building inside as I watch the confidence in his body slowly crumble underneath the pressure.
“I hope they don’t kill me for saying this.” He gulps, and chills cascade down my spine. There is a look of horror in his eyes, an expression that is trying to tell me all the things he can’t say aloud. They must have inserted a tracker or some sort of listening device inside him too. The very thought makes me want to throw up again, this time involuntarily. They must be hearing everything.
“Wait, do you have a freaking mic embedded into you? Can they hear us?” I speak frantically, Jake’s eyes widening as he comes to the same realization as me. “Are you able to say if you do or not?”
He gulps, sweat running down his face and dripping in thick beads down the sides of his unshaven neck. “I hope they don’t kill me for saying this,” he repeats, this time slowly, being careful to keep a reassuring calmness to his voice. “They want all the power to themselves. They are afraid that I am going to destroy the foundation of the very thing they built their empires off of. They don’t just want the patents to the pods, the brain computer interfaces, or even the other research we are doing; they want access to my company so they can destroy it before it topples the status quo. And their access is you.”
A rush of adrenaline courses through me at his words. The hairs on my arms stand up, a series of chills running through my body as a deep silence permeates the air.
“Well, how can we make sure I stay safe—that we all stay safe?” There is a nervous excitement to my voice. The same thing about having a group of rich killers after me that makes me scared to leave the house also drives me to beat them. I feel more alive and at the same time more hopeless than I ever have before.
“We have to take away their power—their wealth—before they use it against us.” He brushes a hand through his hair and exhales. “I never intended to do this. I never wanted to do this…”
His voice trails off as he closes his eyes. Jake looks at me, emotion devoid from his expression. Normally this would be the moment where he would crack a lighthearted joke or make fun of one of us in the way only someone who doesn’t mean it does.
“Seeing that monster. Seeing that demented man talk to you. Knowing that he touched you.” My dad motions with his arms in the air, his biceps vibrating with his sudden release of emotion. “It makes me feel okay about all of this. About what we have to do. About what I have to do. It makes me feel justified in the fact that I have the power now—all of it. And I’m the one who will benefit from it. We all will. We just have to destroy them first.”
There is a tone of vengeance in his voice that sends chills down my spine. In a way, he said it as much to Jake and I as he did the people listening in on the other side of the device inside him. He wants them to know he means business. He wants them to know that they will lose in the end.
“How do you expect to do any of this, Dad?” I outstretch my legs in the back of the car, growing increasingly more skeptical of him as he continues to allude to his big goals with no obvious plan to get there. For all I know, he could be just as crazy as they are.
“They want to kill you in twenty-two days ’cause that’s when we plan to have our testing of the Life Pod nearing completion and for the rollout of the product to begin. We are building a wait list now and want to scale that out to the tens of millions over time. We believe the potential for this technology is limitless. And right after its release, right after we allow people to live semi permanently or permanently in virtual worlds, it will mark the beginning of the end for them. The foundation of their wealth, which lies in the existence of inequality, will begin to reach its demise. We won’t take their power away, that isn’t the real goal. They will still have ungodly amounts of money, literal fuck-you money, but losing that isn’t what they’re scared of. They are afraid of anyone gaining more power and more wealth than them. And we will be those people.”
Saying those words seems to provide a soothing reminder to my dad. The tension in his jaw relaxes the moment his mind connects back this horror to his mission and justifies it with the fact that he will become the wealthiest man to live—or at least, that’s what he hopes. “I can’t wait. This has been hell, trying to combat the billions of dollars they have thrown at federal regulators to stop us, but there is finally a light at the end of the tunnel. Unless everything hits the fan, we will be ready for operation in about three weeks. Now we need to launch the best marketing campaign ever to attract as many people as possible to the service, and that all actually begins with Riva.”
“Wait, what?” I butt in to interrupt the flow of his thoughts. This is one of the rare moments in which my dad actually took the time to dive into his freakish, yet visionary mind in front of me and let me see it in action. “Did I mishear you?”
“We need Riva Oldago. She needs to be the face of this campaign. She is the icon for kids desiring to grow up and play virtual reality games, and adults who desire to escape this world in a similar fashion.” He smiles, a sparkle in his eyes whose meaning I cannot discern. “She will be the face of our brand. She will establish trust. An open-arms invitation for our society into a new and better world.”
“As great as that sounds,” I speak calmly, trying to hide the frustration from my voice. Even though I’m an adult, there is still a part of me that is afraid of going against my own father. I still want to be the perfect man he always hoped for me to become.
I glance at Jake, who sits silently in the front seat, not wanting to look at me the wrong way to set my anger off the rails. “Can’t you pick someone else besides the one girl that I actually have begun to talk to? Don’t act like you didn’t see the pictures online somewhere. We went out to dinner last night, and I know it doesn’t mean much, but you practically are omnipresent everywhere else in my life. I want something that’s mine. And maybe it will be her for a while, maybe not. But please don’t claim this girl for your business too. Don’t let her get caught in the same mess that we are a part of.”
“Sam, our lives depend on this.” His thin eyebrows narrow at me. It is clear he didn’t take what I said well. Most of the time he has his head so far up his own ass that he can’t even fathom the world from any other perspective than his own. “I have to.”
“Stop saying our lives depend on this.” I sit up tall, trying to look serious despite the sharp pain that sears through my side. My dad said the wound wasn’t severe enough to go to the hospital for, but the burning sensation beneath my ribs says otherwise. “I didn’t hear anywhere in that speech of yours anything about saving our lives—saving my life. All I heard was your plan to make us the richest people on Earth, and more powerful than the jealous, greedy people trying to kill us at the moment. But nowhere in there do you say how we manage to survive before that all happens.”
He swallows. This is the part of his plan where I can tell his methodical thought process has some holes, when it comes to our very own lives. The look of displeasure dissipates on his face as he utters softly, “I’m worried about you. I’m not even gonna sugarcoat it. Every day I think about this, and the thought haunts me about what they are going to do to my son. What else can they do to this family?” Tears well up in his eyes again. “What else will they take away from me after all these years of pain? Who else are they willing to hurt to maintain their way of life, the old, broken order of things? What else do I have to sacrifice before my dream can come true?”
He lets his questions echo against the glass windows of the car as the airport comes into view a few hundred yards in front of us. “Can I be honest?”
“Yes,” Jak
e and I both respond.
“I have no way to protect either of you from this present threat. I can’t stop them from killing you.” He pauses, his lips sticking together as he struggles to get out his next words. He has a look of paranoia in his eyes, a look that fears having to go through all the same hell that has haunted his past. Something about this all seems too familiar to him. “I would get law enforcement involved, but they will manipulate them too, and kill you both before you even have the chance to go into protection.
“I can’t save you. I can’t end this.” He looks me directly in my eyes. “My only hope is that they won’t kill you because they need you. That deadline is because of the product launch anyway, and even if that fails, they will still need you to eventually try and break me—after all, they can’t kill me. They can’t kill me, that would break every rule. But they can destroy everything I love. Everything.” He suddenly breaks down, all the anxiety wound up in his muscles released in a single instant. “I failed. I fucked up. I fucked up! And it’s too late to get myself out of this, to get us out of this now. I wish I could tell you why. I wish I could tell you why.” He hits his fists against the leather console between the two front seats. “But I’ve probably already said too much, and if I said the truth, they would be sure to kill us all in an instant.”
He takes a deep breath, seeking to regain his composure as the car comes to a stop in front of Terminal C. “Our only hope is the future. We will either live a life that feels like a dream, or we will never be able to dream again. And I don’t know what’s gonna happen. I don’t know the answer. I hope I’m right. I hope everything will work out for us—that it will all end up being worth it. I have hope.”
His words hang in the air before the doors to the SUV open and the raucous sounds of the car horns, dozens of people talking, and the monotonous droning of the announcements of flights greet us to London International Airport. We all exit the car and step out onto the sidewalk outside of the terminal. None of us even attempt to make any small talk as we walk out of the late-evening dusk and into the bright lighting of the airport.
I don’t need to say the truth. I don’t need to say the one simple fact that we all already know. Hope doesn’t mean shit. Hope is placed in things out of our control, but so is fear.
I’m scared.
Chapter 20
I made a mistake.
At least, I think I did. It was another one of those moments where I am overthinking, my fingers fumbling pathetically as I type on the holographic keyboard. I try asking Riva if she wants to hang out, which really means typing “are you around sometime over the next few days” several times. Each time I type it, I delete it, deciding my text isn’t good enough, only to type the exact same text again. Frustrated with myself, I finally cave in and press send.
After witnessing a man get stabbed to death with her our first time together, and then preceding to not respond to her text that said she would always be there for me, it’s safe to say that things could be going better between us.
Despite my fears, I send the text. That feat alone sends a rush of adrenaline through me and makes me feel the tiniest bit proud in myself. I can still remember the excited thoughts racing through my mind. Yes, I did it. I want to pump my fist in the air, a sign of victory, until I realize how sad that would be. What have I become? I’m now celebrating about successfully texting a girl without peeing my pants. It’s not like I had to actually ask her in person after all this crap… now that would truly be a feat.
The true excitement doesn’t come until she texts me back, minutes later. To make a long, boring conversation short, both of us joked with each other over our favorite movies, only to decide we weren’t going to watch a movie anyway. We are going to make our time together “business” related by doing a joint Deadwave live stream. After all, she says she doesn’t have any time for too many distractions (gotta admit, being labeled a distraction wasn’t the best thing for my ego) and that she wants to have a normal, friendly conversation with someone. I was ready to jump off my couch and head to her the moment she said it.
So, that’s exactly what I do. And two hours later, by the power of a self-driving convertible that I hailed to cruise up Interstate 5, I am in Huntington Beach, where Riva had moved to a few months ago. Now, I didn’t leave right away or have a slight fluttering in my chest for any particular reason. It’s not that I’m desperate or anything—I promise I’m not—just part of me feels like I have something to prove. I feel like I have to be better than my best because I’m not good enough for her. With most people I wouldn’t feel that way, but with her, everything is different. She is the top Deadwave player in the world and drop-dead gorgeous. I am neither of those things.
“I know it’s not the nicest here, but it’s all I need.” Riva comes over from the kitchen, where she insisted on pouring us glasses of water. We are both that boring kind of person who doesn’t drink any coffee, tea, juice, or anything special, and instead sticks to water that is likely polluted with carcinogens even with the filters we run them through.
“Are you kidding? I love it here.” I sit back on her fluffy green couch and take a sip of my water. Her house is a quaint cottage a few blocks from the main strip of Huntington Beach. Although the beach itself has lost the glamor it held in the past, with a permanent sea wall having to be constructed around the island to keep out king tides and storm surges from destroying the entire town, there is still a peculiar mystique to a surfing town that had its waves killed. “Thanks for this, by the way.”
“Not a problem. I’m getting used to serving people nowadays.” She shifts her mouth as she looks up the stairs to the second floor of the home, holding back a few words.
I look around at the paintings and the various beach-themed decorations that are nailed to the walls. Light from the evening sun streams through the windows, casting a lovely blanket of gold upon the beige floor tile and wooden panels that make up the wall and ceiling. It all feels so homey, with the weathered furniture and sliding glass doors that lead to a small porch on the back side of the house, that I want to curl up on the couch and take a nap. “I really like your place, by the way.” I say. “There’s something about it that reminds me of my childhood home. I don’t know exactly what, but there is something about this place that brings warm memories to my mind.”
“Where was your childhood home?” She sits on the opposite corner from me on the couch, a healthy few feet of space between us, as any good business partners would leave.
“La Jolla.” I pause, all the memories of the good old days flooding my mind. “Yeah, it was, um, a house on a cliff. Just about sixty feet above the water. We had a porch that even looked out over the ocean, and caves underneath the house that the ocean had carved into the cliff.”
“Caves beneath your house?” Her eyes widen. “I grew up in North Carolina, seventy miles out of Charlotte and even further from any ocean. That doesn’t even sound safe, but some of these houses in California aren’t even feasible on the East Coast.”
“Oh, no, you’re exactly right. That house wasn’t safe one bit. Eventually the city deemed it uninhabitable, and we were forced to move out. It still stands there vacant today, a large No Trespassing sign with a subsequent warning at the top of my street. Even though I might die, I still sleep in that house on the days when I’m not feeling life. I might even sleep there later tonight. For some reason, I still feel safe there.”
“That must be a nice feeling.” She sighs, her eyes gazing right into mine, yet I can tell she isn’t truly looking at me. “I never felt safe living in my childhood home. It was a trailer park in the middle of nowhere. There were only a few Latino families that lived there, and we all had to put up with the harassment from the children and parents of the racist white people that lived there. They thought since all our parents worked the graveyard shift cleaning out the local meat-processing plant, that we were like subhuman or something. That time sucked so much. I got made fun of constantly. I think someon
e even created a fake account on My Hive just to tear me apart.”
“That sounds awful.” Although our childhoods at the surface are very different, people constantly berating me online is something that became a cornerstone of my middle and high school experience. On one of the matchmaker accounts that everyone looks at, I got paired with a robot—that joke still haunts me to this day. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. After a while, it eventually got a bit better. They lost interest in terrorizing me or belittling my parents. Then my mom and dad eventually saved up enough money so that we could move out of the trailer park and rent a house. Both my parents were unauthorized immigrants from Venezuela, which made the whole process a lot tougher on the legal side of things, especially since ICE officials were trying to root out all undocumented immigrants so that the awful jobs they had to work could be given to citizens whose jobs were taken by robots and AI.”
“Yeah, I remember hearing about all of that.” I inch closer to her, sensing the sadness that is beginning to overcome her as she recalls her past. “There were huge riots in California over it. That’s so crazy you had to live every day with that fear hanging over you.”
“I would say you get used to it after a while, but the fear of the uncertain—the fear of being ripped away from everything you know—that never fades. For some reason, I feel like you get that.”
“I do.” I study her face, impressed that she can read me that well. I always purposefully guard my emotions, usually opting to keep them inside and feel them in the darkness when no one is watching. “That’s something I can certainly relate to, but not at this level. I don’t know what it feels like to be told you don’t belong when you feel like you do, threatened to have your whole life ripped away from you when you know you did nothing wrong.”
I pause, until the answer finally clicks in my head. “Well, shit. Okay, I actually do know what it’s like to have your life threatened. Hell, I am going through that right now.”
Deadwave Page 14
