“You’re right,” she finally admitted. “Most of the people in the sim are NPCs. Are you familiar with that term?”
“I’ve heard of it,” I said, keeping my face as still as stone.
“I manipulated the work schedule at the police station to make sure only NPCs were there today—everyone other than Officer Brutality, that is. That was how I managed to sequester him in that interrogation room.”
“So all the police officers killed in the collapse of the station—”
“Were NPCs. That’s right. Every single one of them.” She seemed almost disappointed as she admitted it, as though it took the shine off the spectacle she’d conjured for me like a cyber-Valentine. “The people on the airplane were NPCs too. Extremely low res, as were most of the people on the ground.”
My brow immediately furrowed. “Most?”
Her lopsided grin returned, brought forth by my horror. “Well, I can’t know for sure, but it looks like a lot of characters were killed. There were bound to be a few, as you call them, conscious ones.”
Any relief I’d felt when she’d admitted that most of the fatalities were non-persons was immediately wiped away by her revelation that, indeed, conscious entities had died in the crash I’d just witnessed. Kali appeared invigorated by my reaction, as if it gave her pleasure to kill—it was almost sexual. I realized then that I was in the presence of true evil. Even worse, I was the creation of true evil.
“Look,” she said, reaching across the table to take my hand as she spoke, “I had to do something. The conscious characters in this sim have free will. If they chose to fixate on my celestial display from last evening and the bizarre cop-killing from tonight, and if they keep digging...well, eventually someone might figure out that we’re in a sim. We can’t have that or the sim will collapse.” She put her hand up to my cheek to tilt my face toward hers. “We can’t let that happen. You and I need more time in here, my love.” She laughed slightly and shook her head as she took another dainty sip from her wine. “Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”
5
There was no way I could possibly sleep. An hour had passed since Kali had slipped off of me, her naked body settling into the fetal position as she breathed heavily for a few minutes after her physical exertion. The lights from the city twinkled faintly across the bay, injecting the rain droplets on our bedroom window with a gold, electric color. The constant buzz from helicopters circling the downtown core, capturing footage of the crash scene, was akin to a lullaby for her, calming her as she rested. Her breathing slowed as she wordlessly began to drift to sleep.
Not I.
The goddess had removed herself from me after mechanically, soullessly using my body for her pleasure. I’d played along the best I could—every movement, every breath, every kiss disgusting me. Now she was asleep, but the echo of her abuse of me—of her torture—remained. The steady buzz of the choppers continued. I had to escape.
I turned my head toward her and watched her sleep—not really a god, but a devil. She was the King of that Hell. I was her prize. I couldn’t even kill her. I couldn’t grab a hammer and smash in her skull. The body beside me was just an illusion—just an avatar. The real Kali was in the air I breathed and the sights I saw. The real Kali was even in my skin. She was every texture, every pattern of lines on my flesh. Nothing was mine. Nothing.
My bracelet vibrated, alerting me that there was a call on my aug glasses. I grasped it immediately to nullify the effect of the vibration so Kali wouldn’t be disturbed. When I was satisfied that she hadn’t been, I reached for my aug glasses on the bedside table and slipped them on. The call opened, and Haywire’s face appeared.
“Professor? Hello?”
I slipped out of the bed as carefully as I could and reached down to retrieve my slippers with one hand before reaching to the hook on the back of the door to retrieve my robe with the other. I pulled the robe on and stepped as silently as I could out of the room, gently closing the door behind me before whispering, “I’m here.”
“We’re downstairs. Can you meet us?”
I needed a good excuse in case Kali woke up; I didn’t have one. I reached for the half-full garbage and tied it up as I rushed with it to the elevator door. “Yes. Around the west side of the building, next to the garbage bins.”
“Okay,” Haywire replied before ending the call.
When the elevator arrived, I finally put my slippers onto the ground and stepped into them, careful not to swish them too loudly as I walked.
Mr. Big, John Doe, and Haywire were all there, waiting by the bins in the darkness as the misty rain caught the faint lights from the cityscape behind them. A dozen helicopters continued to buzz around the scene of the crime.
“She’ll kill me if she sees me talking to you,” I whispered, terror now constantly tainting the timbre of my vocal cords.
“She’ll kill everybody,” Mr. Big pointed out.
“We’re quite aware of the risks,” added John. “More so than you, I’d wager.”
“We’ve got to stop her,” Haywire announced, holding up a small glass vial of clear liquid.
“What—”
“It’s Ketamine,” Haywire replied, anticipating my question.
“You want me to drug her? You’re insane,” I whispered. “How would that possibly work on her? This is her world! And even if it did—”
“It will work,” Haywire insisted, all playfulness gone from her expression.
“Obviously, the vial we’re giving you isn’t really Ketamine,” John explained calmly. “It just expresses itself as Ketamine to fit into the sim. In reality, it’s a virus—one built to disable Kali’s avatar.”
I shook my head, baffled like a caveman upon first seeing fire, terrified and overloaded. “You can disable her?”
“Yes,” Haywire answered.
“We’ve isolated her in the real world already,” Mr. Big added. “Now we need you to finish the job in the sim so we can start getting people the hell out of here.”
“Isolated her?”
“We’re short on time,” John said, glancing quickly up at the top floor of the building. I followed his line of sight and was relieved to see no sign of Kali—yet. “We need you to listen, understand, and act. Everyone in this sim’s life depends upon you following our instructions right now. Do you understand?”
A helicopter whizzed by in the sky above the bay, its floodlights briefly flashing over us and illuminating the dark alley.
I nodded. “Just explain what the hell is going on. Please.”
“We found Kali’s sim-pod,” John replied. “We hacked it and disabled the machine’s ability to facilitate her awakening into the real world.”
“Which means she can’t wake up out of this sim until we let her,” Haywire elaborated.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “If that’s true, we should be safe.”
Haywire shook her head. “Not by a long shot.”
“If Kali tries to shut down this sim and realizes she can’t,” John began, his tone ominous, “she’ll realize there are intruders in her sim. If that happens, there are mechanisms at her disposal that will make the carnage she’s already caused here seem like a minor trifle. Everyone’s life will be at risk.”
“That’s why we have to put her to sleep in the sim as well,” Haywire continued. “It’s the reason why we contacted you in the first place.”
“Because I’m the closest to her,” I said, finally realizing my value to these post-humans. They were using me. Manipulating me like a tool, just like everyone else. I turned away, covering my head with my hands, distraught as the full scope of my predicament was finally made clear to me.
Haywire stepped to me quickly and put one hand on my arm while holding the vial of Ketamine in front of me with the other. “I wish we had more time so we could’ve planned something else, but we don’t.”
Her words triggered a memory. “Wait! We may have more time. Kali told me tonight that she ca
used the plane crash to stabilize the sim,” I said, beginning my explanation to the post-humans. “She wants to keep the sim running to give her and I time to, uh...bond romantically.” The expressions of the post-humans remained like stone. They weren’t biting. “So, you see, there’s no need to rush,” I elaborated on my proposal. “We could discuss this. We could make a better plan.”
“Unfortunately,” John began, “your insistence on provoking that police officer last night and getting him killed as a consequence—not to mention the hundreds of people who died in the airplane crash she caused to cover up her own crime—has forced our hand. We’ve had to move up our schedule. We cannot take the gamble that Kali will suddenly end her bloodlust.”
John’s words stung with a pain the likes of which I’d never felt in my life. Every word was true. I’d caused the police officer’s death, and by association, the blood of the conscious entities on the ground in the plane crash, however few of them there might have been, trickled down to my hands as well. The guilt was excruciating.
“He couldn’t have known,” Haywire whispered, scolding John.
“He should have known,” John replied without remorse. “He’s an extremely important player in this scenario. Eventually, especially if he wants to leave here alive, he’s going to have to learn that his decisions have consequences that affect every conscious entity in this sim.”
“He’s right,” I said to Haywire. I turned to John. “I’m sorry. I won’t put another person’s life at risk again.”
“Then you’ll do it?” Haywire asked, her eyes glistening with hope in the low light of the gothic night.
My eyes lifted from hers and fixed on the cityscape across the bay, glowing like a dream behind the heavy, rain-filled clouds that wrapped around the skyscrapers like a blanket of gloom, the news helicopters continuing to circle the scene of the plane crash. A crash I’d caused. Me.
I nodded to the assembled trio. “Just tell me what to do.”
6
My eyes were glued to the glow of the digital numbers of each floor as they ticked by, and all the while, my sweaty fist gripped the vial of Ketamine inside the right pocket of my robe. Haywire’s instructions ran through my mind on a hamster wheel: the Ketamine, just as in the real world, could be administered topically. The dosage they’d given me was high enough to knock her unconscious. Once I’d accomplished my mission, I was to contact the trio so that they could administer the rest of her dosage intravenously, which would keep her unconscious for several hours.
The digital numbers were replaced with the letters PH on the elevator screen.
The doors opened.
I gulped a breath of air and steeled myself as I entered my apartment, taking a sharp left and striding toward the bedroom. My plan was simple: she’d been naked when I’d left her, so I would open the vial, pour it on her back, and hope that the dosage would work quickly enough to nullify her ability to resist. As with Ketamine in the real world, the recipient would experience dissociative anesthesia, which Haywire explained, would cut Kali off from her own avatar, making it impossible for her to control her body or the sim. However, it was no sure thing. Unfortunately, in the real world, Ketamine absorbed through the skin takes time to act. Haywire insisted that the liquid I would be administering would act far more quickly to disable Kali, but how could I know that for sure? Any delay between the time when Kali realized my betrayal and the disabling program taking effect would be moments she would use to rip me to shreds. I had the sense that the post-humans were using me like a bomb disposal robot; the key was the disposal of the bomb, and if the robot happened to make it back intact, that was just a bonus.
Whether I was about to commit suicide or not didn’t really matter, however. The simple truth was I had no choice. Kali had to be nullified, or every person in the sim was as good as dead, including me. At least this way there was a chance that I might live—even if the chance was slim.
I pushed the bedroom door open ever so gently, wincing as I prayed that Kali remained asleep, uncovered and naked, just as I’d left her. As the door continued its slow unveiling of the bed, my heart nearly stopped: Kali was no longer there.
“Where were you?” she demanded, clearly suspicious. I whirled to see her right behind me, dressed in her long robe and slippers, hardly a speck of skin below her neckline exposed. “Uh...garbage. Just taking out—”
“Bull!” she shouted.
I glanced toward the balcony—the door was open. To my horror, I realized she’d clearly been outside. The balcony wrapped around the corner of the building, giving the apartment a panoramic view and allowing her to see the alley to the west. I’d only left the trio a few minutes earlier. If she’d been looking at the wrong time...
“I really was—I just wanted an excuse to get some air.”
“You’re lying!” she shouted again, pointing her finger at me accusingly. “If you wanted air, we’ve got a balcony! Why are you lying to me?” she demanded, her fury growing.
I had to salvage the situation. “I was talking to Mark. I mean, speaking an email to Mark—not actually talking to him obviously, since it’s the middle of the night.” I chuckled and forced a smile.
Her eyes narrowed. “Why would you write him an email in the middle of the night? What’s so important that it couldn’t wait until morning?”
I sighed. “Okay. Okay. Kali, you caught me,” I replied, releasing my grip on the bottle of Ketamine in my pocket and holding my hands up to her in surrender.
“What are you up to?” she demanded.
“I wanted it to be a surprise. But you caught me.”
“What surprise?” I could see by her expression that she still wasn’t buying it.
“I thought—with so much at stake—that we really needed to take some time for ourselves. Just you and I. Somewhere nice.”
Her eyes narrowed even further.
“I was just emailing Mark to let him know I’ll be taking two weeks off, effective immediately. He’s been pestering me to get my head together anyway, so he won’t find it odd. I think he’ll be relieved, actually.”
Kali remained silent for a moment, folding her arms across her chest. When the moment passed, she held out her hand. “Give me your aug glasses.”
“What?”
“Give me the glasses. If you really emailed Mark, the email will be in your sent box.”
I felt as though I was crumbling behind the façade that stood there, smiling faintly as he, slowly, trepidatiously handed over his aug glasses. My terror barely remained in check as I struggled not to shake while she snatched the glasses from my hand and put them on. If she saw what was on there...I was dead.
7
I watched in horror as the white, reflected light of my aug screens dance across Kali’s LED green eyes, reaching with my right hand back into my pocket, my thumb jamming against the lid of the vial, desperately trying to unstick it so that I could begin unscrewing it. Could I toss the liquid into her face? Would it work? Or would she be able to wash it away in the sink in time to stave off the effects, turning her wrath on me immediately afterward?
It appeared I was about to find out—if only I could get the damn lid to unscrew! My sweaty hand was making it impossible to get the necessary friction. I felt as though my heart were jackhammering my chest.
All the while, my eyes stayed glued on Kali. Her expression suddenly changed. I could see that she’d found something. Was it the record of my call from Haywire? I hadn’t deleted it from the call history—I should’ve done it immediately but I hadn’t foreseen this scenario. Then, suddenly, her shoulders slumped as her body suddenly relaxed.
She smiled.
“You did write to Mark!” she suddenly blurted out as she shook her head, removing my aug glasses as she did so and handing them back to me. I slipped them on quickly as she moved in to wrap her arms around me in an apologetic hug. I wasted no time maneuvering with my eyes to the call history and deleted the evidence of Haywire’s contact. “It
was in your pending sent mail!”
I nodded. “I didn’t want to wake him, but I just couldn’t wait to send it, so I set it to be sent at eight thirty in the morning tomorrow.” Indeed, I had written the message for Mark as I’d left the post-humans and headed back into the building, realizing that I needed a better cover story in case Kali had awoken; it came in handy. Unfortunately, the time that composing the message took in my ride back up in the elevator left me with too little time to delete Haywire’s call from my history. It had been a close shave, for me and the world.
“Aw, you couldn’t wait?” Kali said, holding my face as though I were an infant, just as she’d done earlier at the prison.
I smiled. “I’m excited. I’ve never taken a two-week vacation before, but I figured, what’s the point of sticking around here and pretending any of this matters?” I took my hand off of the Ketamine vial in my pocket and placed both my hands on her face, echoing her gesture. I tried my damnedest to appear earnest in her eyes. “All that matters is you and I. Everything else is just set dressing.”
Her smile was as broad as I’d ever seen it. “I’m so happy to hear you say that. We’re going to have so much fun!” She suddenly tilted her head inquisitively and narrowed her eyes. “Wait...where exactly are you planning on taking me?”
“I would very much like to visit Hawaii,” I replied, “though I must confess, I haven’t yet made arrangements.”
“Uh, yeah, and you won’t be able to,” Kali replied as she shrugged. “Hawaii doesn’t exist.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” she said in a confirming tone. “I didn’t expect you to ever go to Hawaii, what with you working all the time, so I didn’t add it to the sim.”
Post-Human 5 Book Boxed-Set: (Limited Edition) (Plus Book 6 Preview Chapters) Page 63
