The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Oh no,” said Bonny, staring at me, and I stared back at her, helpless, thinking she was looking straight through me, right back through the root server, back to the real world, into my head, or wherever “Sylvie” really lived—

  “Oh, no!” groaned Qua’as. “You’re real children, aren’t you?”

  “Y-yes?”

  Mr. Parker smacked both his hands to his cap and held on, bug-eyed.

  “Oh, man. We are so busted! GAME OVER!”

  “What’s wrong?” I quavered. “What is this place, er, game? Have we, did we, er, hack into a research level or something?”

  I realized what was going on, with a rush of relief. They were test pilots. Dev and I had copped a sneak preview of a new, hyper-real immersion game in development. That explained the weirdness I had felt, the strange, super-convincing feel of this whole venue. So now our cheats were in trouble because the game was supposed to be dead secret until it was launched—

  They looked at each other, tight-lipped.

  “We thought you were colleagues of ours,” said Qua’as the Transformer.

  “Or the mind-police,” growled Mr. Parker, with a wry grin. “We can insert ourselves into the hub games; we do it for light relief. We’re not supposed to.”

  “You’re test pilots. Game-development test pilots.”

  “Close,” said Bonny, grimly. “But no cigar.”

  Qua’as heaved a sigh. “This is not a game, little girl. It’s a planet. We are neuronauts. You are approximately five hundred and sixty light years from home.”

  My brother cried out, “Mom!” and fell over, legs still tied, curled into a ball.

  Cold sweat broke out all over me, all over this body that wasn’t real. I couldn’t speak. I was too busy fighting, refusing to believe this insane story. I knew there were such people as neuronauts. I knew that they were making experiments in hyperspace: from a lab in Xi’an, in faraway China, and from another lab at a place called Kiowa Taime Springs, in the Black Hills. I’d seen it on the news. That just made me feel worse, like in a nightmare where someone says something you know is true, and the fear ramps up and up, because then you know you’re not just lost for a night, the nightmare is real—

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’d better believe us, little girl,” said Mr. Parker, dead straight. “Because this is not funny. You are handling this, but your friend isn’t—”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Okay, your brother. You have to accept what we’re saying, and trust us to get you back, or your brother’s going to die. Not die as in wake up at home. Plain dead.”

  “What are your names?” asked the pirate queen, more gently.

  “I’m Sylvia Murphy-Weston, and my brother is Devan Murphy-Weston.”

  “You have hub access; are those names your hub access IDs?”

  “Yes.”

  I could tell she was wondering how come we had such a level of access and whose children we were. But Qua’as put his hand on her arm. “That’s all we need. Be calm, let’s relax. We know the situation now. We’re all friends . . . ?”

  He raised his eyebrow at me, and I nodded.

  “So we’ll get onto it, Sylvie, and you and Devan will be fine.”

  They cut us loose and retired inside their shelter. I got Dev to sit up. I told him we would be all right. Mr. Parker came out again, bringing blankets, sugar water for us in a skin bottle, and a meal of jerky strips.

  “Is this the friendly golden spiders?” asked Dev, unhappily.

  “No, it’s another animal, a kind of small eight-legged sheep.”

  “Is it real?”

  “It’s analog, if that’s what you mean. And so are you. When you dropped into normal space, with us, our support code caused your digital avatars to draw the necessary chemicals out of this planet’s information complex and made analog bodies for you. You became material. You can eat, you can die.”

  “So . . . so I have two bodies right now?” said Devan, hesitantly.

  “Yeah. It’s just about possible, but it’s extremely dangerous.”

  We ate the jerky, and I didn’t tell Dev that I suspected the “eight-legged sheep” was a little white lie. It was cold, but not as cold as a night camped out on the high range country, where I have never been in my body, only in an immersion game. We slept for a bit, hugging each other for warmth. Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up, when the pirate queen came out of the shelter and headed off down the ravine. Dev was awake too. We looked at each other and agreed without a word to follow.

  Where was she going? To the secret lab? To the door in the air that would lead out of this game, back to the hub, back to normality? She climbed up onto a big fat boulder. We followed her up there, trying to be quiet, and found her lying on her back there, with her hand behind her head and her hat beside her, just gazing at the stars.

  I don’t know stars, but they looked different. They were very bright.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Hi,” said the pirate queen, smiling at the great jeweled abyss.

  “If it’s so dangerous to have two bodies,” I said, “where are yours?”

  “Ah.”

  She sat up, and mugged a you got me face. “I was afraid you were going to ask me that. We don’t have any bodies back home, Sylvie.”

  “Huh?” said Dev.

  “Technically, er, physically, we are dead. And we don’t know if we will ever die, which is quite a trip.” She looked at me seriously. “That’s the way it has to be. It’ll change—we’ll find a way around the problem. It’s going to be possible for other people to fly to the stars, but so far, only ‘nauts who can handle having no body left at home can survive this kind of travel. We’re the forerunners.”

  “Nobody would do that,” breathed Dev, after a moment. “Now I know you’re faking. You’re cheating on us, telling us weird lies. This is a game. You’re nothing but big cheats.”

  “Yeah?” said the pirate queen. “And what are you?” She was still looking at me, not at Dev, in a way that made my stomach turn over. “You’ve been messing with us, making the jumps we make, getting in deep, playing with the code as if it’s your little Lego set. We thought you were two of our colleagues, psyching us out, because you were cheating the same way we can. It’s rare. When it combines with someone who . . . well, someone who doesn’t have much use for their physical body, that’s when you get a neuronaut candidate.”

  “No,” said Dev. “You’re in a lab somewhere. Hooked up to life support.”

  She shook her head, slowly, sad and happy at the same time.

  She was like an outlaw angel, breaking all the rules.

  The crew—they were called the Kappa Tau Sigma Second Crew (KTS, for Kiowa Taime Springs)—had turned themselves in, for our sakes. You see, apparently it’s okay on the Earth-type planets, where they’re finding out what they can do with analog bodies, out there on alien soil, in the real no-kidding spaces between the stars. But it’s hard on them (in some weird way), making the straight leaps from normal space to information space—the plane where everything exists in simultaneity, and a journey of 560 light years is pretty much instantaneous. The ‘nauts get burnout, they get tired and irritated, so instead of doing it the hard way, they take shortcuts through the human datasphere, the code-rich hub games that are like playtime to them. They’re not supposed to do it—it’s supposed to be dangerous for our consensus reality or something, but they do. And the scientists hate them for it, and call them cheats, just the way we did.

  Anyway, we got hauled back. Dev woke up on life support, in the hospital. I woke up in my bed at home. Then it was nightmare fugue for a while. We had the choice between angry, scared, tearful parents and psych tests, science questions, and medical procedures, when we were awake, or going to sleep and finding out what our sickeningly ripped-up neuronal mapping wanted to do to us next in the way of vile nightmares. Horrible, awful! When we talked to each other screen to screen, the conversation c
onsisted mostly of me saying Bad! Bad! and Dev saying Bad! Bad! . . . We couldn’t deal with sentences or anything.

  But we got better. We came out good as new.

  The morning after Dev came home from the hospital, I got into my wheelchair, which I hate to do, because it takes all my strength and reminds me that I keep on getting worse. Two years ago I could casually sling myself into the chair; now it’s like climbing Mount Everest. I got my head in the support, I dehooked and rehooked all the tubes I needed, which is something else I hate to do, and I whizzed myself along to Dev’s room. I hardly ever visit my family anymore. I prefer my bed. I used to fight like a tiger to keep myself going. There were years when I insisted on walking in a frame without motor assist, years when I insisted on getting up every day and going around in my chair. Now I love my bed. It’s the only territory I’m still defending, the only place I have left to stand. Although, of course, I’m lying down.

  My motor nerves are eating themselves. There’s no gene therapy that will work for me; there’s no cure. It’s not fatal. I’m fourteen: I could live for decades . . . treating my brain like a pet animal and trying to ignore the sad sack that used to be my body. My mom and dad still desperately want that to happen. But I had talked to them (I’d recovered from our adventure much faster than my healthy, normal little brother). The Kiowa Taime Springs people had talked to them too. They were coming around.

  I looked down at my little brother, my best friend, thinking about the day he came to me and insisted I had to start playing the games again, because he loved me. I thought of all the wonderful times we’d had, exploring and fighting, skimming over the snow, solving mysteries. I thought of paddling the channels in the reed-beds with him, and the way he’d yelled when he was shooting down the white water. I watched him breathe; his eyelashes fluttered on his cheeks. I knew what he was going to say when he woke. He opened his eyes, and blinked, and smiled. “Hi, Sylvie. What an honor!” But his smile faded. We both knew. We knew.

  “Take me with you,” whispered Dev, reaching out. “Please.”

  There was nothing I could say. I just sat there, holding his hand.

  ANN HALAM was born in Manchester, England, went to convent schools, and then took an undergraduate degree in the History of Ideas at the University of Sussex, specializing in seventeenth-century Europe, a distant academic background that still resonates in her work. She first realized she wanted to be a writer when she was fourteen, when she won a local newspaper’s story competition. She has written more than twenty novels for teenagers, starting with Ally Ally Aster and including Taylor Five, Dr. Franklin’s Island, and most recently, Siberia. She has also written a number of highly regarded SF novels for adults as Gwyneth Jones, notably White Queen, North Wind, and Phoenix Cafe, and the near-future fantasy Bold as Love series. Her collection Seven Tales and a Fable won two World Fantasy Awards, and her critical writings and essays have appeared in Nature, New Scientist, Foundation, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and several online venues. She has been writing full-time since the early 1980s, occasionally teaching creative writing. Honors include the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Bold as Love and the Philip K. Dick Award for Life. She lives in Brighton with her husband, son, and two cats called Frank and Ginger; likes cooking, gardening, watching old movies, and playing with her Web sites (homepage.ntlworld. com/gwynethann and www.boldaslove.co.uk).

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The story “Cheats” was born when I first picked up the controller for a fantasy snowboarding game, and I swear I could feel the cold air; I could smell that crispy, frosty atmosphere you’re in when you’re lying facedown on a toboggan at the end of a downhill glide. Now I keep imagining a future with full-immersion games where your brain reacts to the virtual world exactly as if it’s real . . . and why not? The real world we think we perceive all around us is really just built from a pattern of firing neurons. Plus, in the view of more and more scientists, the real universe is built from information, the same as the games are. I have a wild idea that young people who grow up as expert immersion gamers may come to see themselves as “made of information” in the real world, the way the games are “made of” computer code, and this gives me the wilder idea that there’s a back door from virtual reality, where distance means nothing, into the spaces between the stars.

  ORANGE

  Neil Gaiman

  (Third Subject’s Responses to Investigator’s Written Questionnaire.) EYES ONLY.

  1. Jemima Glorfindel Petula Ramsey.

  2. Seventeen on June the ninth.

  3. The last five years. Before that we lived in Glasgow (Scotland). Before that, Cardiff (Wales).

  4. I don’t know. I think he’s in magazine publishing now. He doesn’t talk to us anymore. The divorce was pretty bad and Mum wound up paying him a lot of money. Which seems sort of wrong to me. But maybe it was worth it just to get shot of him.

  5. An inventor and entrepreneur. She invented the Stuffed Muffin™, and started the Stuffed Muffin™ chain. I used to like them when I was a kid, but you can get kind of sick of Stuffed Muffins™ for every meal, especially because Mum used us as guinea pigs. The Complete Turkey Christmas Dinner Stuffed Muffin™ was the worst. But she sold out her interest in the Stuffed Muffin™ chain about five years ago, to start work on My Mum’s Colored Bubbles (not actually TM yet).

  6. Two. My sister Nerys, who was just fifteen, and my brother Pryderi, twelve.

  7. Several times a day.

  8. No.

  9. Through the Internet. Probably on eBay.

  10. She’s been buying colors and dyes from all over the world ever since she decided that the world was crying out for brightly colored Day-Glo bubbles. The kind you can blow, with bubble mixture.

  11. It’s not really a laboratory. I mean, she calls it that, but really it’s just the garage. Only she took some of the Stuffed Muffins™ money and converted it, so it has sinks and bathtubs and Bunsen burners and things, and tiles on the walls and the floor to make it easier to clean.

  12. I don’t know. Nerys used to be pretty normal. When she turned thirteen, she started reading these magazines and putting pictures of these strange bimbo women up on her wall, like Britney Spears and so on. Sorry if anyone reading this is a Britney fan ;) but I just don’t get it. The whole orange thing didn’t start until last year.

  13. Artificial tanning creams. You couldn’t go near her for hours after she put it on. And she’d never give it time to dry after she smeared it on her skin, so it would come off on her sheets and on the fridge door and in the shower, leaving smears of orange everywhere. Her friends would wear it too, but they never put it on like she did. I mean, she’d slather on the cream, with no attempt to look even human colored, and she thought she looked great. She did the tanning salon thing once, but I don’t think she liked it, because she never went back.

  14. Tangerine Girl. The Oompa-Loompa. Carrot-top. Go-Mango. Orangina.

  15. Not very well. But she didn’t seem to care, really. I mean, this is a girl who said that she couldn’t see the point of science or math because she was going to be a pole dancer as soon as she left school. I said, nobody’s going to pay to see you in the altogether, and she said how do you know? and I told her that I saw the little Quicktime films she’d made of herself dancing nuddy and left in the camera and she screamed and said give me that, and I told her I’d wiped them. But honestly, I don’t think she was ever going to be the next Bettie Page or whoever. She’s a sort of squarish shape, for a start.

  16. German measles, mumps, and I think Pryderi had chicken pox when he was staying in Melbourne with the grandparents.

  17. In a small pot. It looked a bit like a jam jar, I suppose.

  18. I don’t think so. Nothing that looked like a warning label anyway. Yes, there was a return address. It came from abroad, and the return address was in some kind of foreign lettering.

  19. You have to understand that Mum had been buying colors and dyes from all over the world for five years. The t
hing with the DayGlo bubbles is not that someone can blow glowing colored bubbles, it’s that they don’t pop and leave splashes of dye all over everything. Mum says that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. So, no.

  20. There was some kind of shouting match between Nerys and Mum to begin with, because Mum had come back from the shops and not bought anything from Nerys’s shopping list except the shampoo. Mum said she couldn’t find the tanning cream at the supermarket, but I think she just forgot. So Nerys stormed off and slammed the door and went into her bedroom and played something that was probably Britney Spears really loudly. I was out the back, feeding the three cats, the chinchilla, and a guinea pig named Roland who looks like a hairy cushion, and I missed it all.

  21. On the kitchen table.

  22. When I found the empty jam jar in the back garden the next morning. It was underneath Nerys’s window. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure it out.

  23. Honestly, I couldn’t be bothered. I figured it would just be more yelling, you know? And Mum would work it out soon enough.

  24. Yes, it was stupid. But it wasn’t uniquely stupid, if you see what I mean. Which is to say, it was par-for-the-course-for-Nerys stupid.

  25. That she was glowing.

  26. A sort of pulsating orange.

  27. When she started telling us that she was going to be worshipped like a god, as she was in the dawn times.

  28. Pryderi said she was floating about an inch above the ground. But I didn t actually see this. I thought he was just playing along with her newfound weirdness.

  29. She didn’t answer to “Nerys” anymore. She described herself mostly as either My Immanence, or the Vehicle. (“It is time to feed the Vehicle.”)

  30. Dark chocolate. Which was weird because in the old days, I was the only one in the house who even sort of liked it. But Pryderi had to go out and buy her bars and bars of it.