It didn’t surprise him that those who left the sim usually wanted to go right back in.
But this wasn’t about escaping reality. He wouldn’t lose himself to the sim. Not with that image of destruction always looming at the edge of his mind. His brother had earned the right to survive—and hadn’t gotten his due. Taren had only ever been lucky.
And like he’d told Lake, luck runs out.
“You okay?” Lake asked, leaning in the doorway of the stasis chamber. “If you’re not up for this—”
“I’m up for it.” He hadn’t downed more liquid algae for nothing. “Are you, though? You look like you haven’t slept in months.”
She rubbed a hand over her lined face. “Using the sim gives me weird dreams.”
“Nightmares?” He’d had his fair share of those.
“I have this recurring dream where I’m stuck in a place between night and day. Blue and purple trees, everything in twilight.”
“Doesn’t sound bad.”
“Sometimes I’m being chased.”
“Oh.” He looked down at the bed and was suddenly eager to change the subject. “How do I do this?”
Lake glanced in at the nest of bundled wires and nodes and metal brackets. “It knows what you want. Just crawl in and relax. Pretend it’s a slumber party.”
“But how does it—”
“Not a mechanic, remember?”
She doesn’t actually know how it works.
He imagined the plastic shell lowering over the bed, shutting him into a high-tech coffin. And then he would have to just lie there and hope everything worked the way it was supposed to.
He forced himself to sit on the bed. “Is this the kind of slumber party where we tell ghost stories first?” he joked.
“I’m not much for ghosts anymore, are you?”
Taren pictured a hot egg bursting in space, the particles drifting forever. “Not so much.”
He still couldn’t bring himself to lie down. Lake must have sensed it because she pushed on his chest enough to convince his weak body to go horizontal.
“You know the tiled steps at Sixteenth Avenue?” she asked. “That’s where we’ll meet up in the sim. Just picture it and you should end up there.”
“Just … picture it? Are you sure that’s going to work?”
Lake stood outside the doorway and reached around for the door handle, ready to shut the panel for him. “I’ll be in the next chamber over.”
Taren wanted to nod, but something cold and metallic pressed against the sides of his head.
Don’t get trapped, he told himself. This ship isn’t going to last much longer.
A click at Taren’s temples cut off his thoughts.
Only darkness for a moment, and then letters flickered across his vision:
PARACOSM: THE WORLD WE CREATE TOGETHER
Everyone used Paracosm back home—for VR-calls and gaming and homework and shopping. It wasn’t surprising that the billionaire genius who’d invented it had also put it on his own ship. It was only surprising that, here on the ship, it didn’t seem to work so great.
The letters vanished, and then Taren was surfacing from a dream instead of descending into one. A fog of vagueness, the sleepy ritual of digging his fingers into his hair. He realized with a jolt that the bed was no longer underneath him. He had a sudden sense that he was falling—but no, he was standing. Feet firmly on the ground.
The scene before him sharpened into focus: a tall staircase leading up a steep hillside, its steps embedded with blue and white tiles that gave the impression of swirling ocean currents. For a moment, Taren’s reality swirled just as strangely, and then a hand gripped his elbow, anchoring him.
“We’re not going up,” Lake said. “This is just a spot for us to meet up. Come on.”
She steered him from the steps. When they turned, Taren discovered a row of crumbling houses, a neighborhood sinking into a thicket of weeds.
“I’ve been to this pocket before,” Lake said. “Empty—no sleepers.”
Taren peered at the row of houses: railed balconies and shuttered windows. He recognized this neighborhood. Except now, the balconies tilted and the windows held no glass.
“My house isn’t far from here,” he said. He spotted a pale shape in the grass at the end of the street—his dog, waiting for him. “That’s my dog. Or anyway, it’s the dog I found wandering the streets.”
“That’s not your dog,” Lake said. “None of this is real.”
“He’s right there. Just give me a minute to tell him I’m sorry I left him behind.”
“A minute to let you forget you’re in the sim.” Lake gestured at the houses. “None of these houses are real. Someone was feeling sorry for themselves and re-created this place so they could pretend they were home.”
Taren squinted at the pale spot in the distance. “That’s not my dog?”
“We’re going to move on, okay? We can’t stay here.” Lake pulled him to the door of the nearest house, opened it, and led him through …
Into a pub where hundreds of pennies glinted on the walls. “Where are we?”
Lake walked along a line of wooden booths. “Just checking on someone.”
A metallic sound rang through the place. On the bar, the ruins of a toothpick sculpture made the shape of a toothy jaw. Next to it, a coin spun, as though someone had only just left the room. “What…?” It went on spinning, impossibly.
I’m in a simulation.
His head hurt.
Lake was watching him, frowning with concern. Taren did his best to shake off his confusion. He straightened his back. Man, it felt good not to have the post-stasis shakes.
He looked over the empty booths. “No one’s here.”
“But he was.” Lake watched the coin spin on the bar. “Recently.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. I’ll find him later. I just like to make sure he’s okay.” She turned back to the door. “The first thing we need to do is go someplace where you can change your appearance. If anyone recognizes you in the sim, they’ll give you trouble later on the ship.”
Taren tore his gaze from the coin still spinning on the bar. “Change my appearance? How am I supposed to do that?”
“Try hard.” At his look, Lake blew out a breath. “The simulation is just like the Paracosm app back home. Just tell it how you want things to look. Or think it.”
“So I just, like … ask for a hat? Right here and now?”
“I wouldn’t recommend a hat for you,” she said, squinting at him. “And you can only change things in areas of the sim you’ve created yourself.”
“But I haven’t created any…” Taren thought of the tiger yard he’d spent the last few months in. His own empty fortress. “The zoo—I created that?”
“Most people stick to houses,” Lake said. “And other places fit for humans.”
Taren’s face heated. “I told you, I went to my house first. But nothing felt right there. I opened the back door and…” It doesn’t make any sense. “… instead of my backyard, it was only a huge crater, like a bomb had fallen right there and hadn’t even toppled my house.”
“That’s sim-logic for you.”
“But you’re saying I created my own house in the sim?”
Lake nodded.
“And I put in a crater in the backyard?”
“If it helps, you’re not the only one who can’t get over what happened after we left the surface.”
“And after I left my house, I must have wanted to go someplace I’d feel safer.”
“You feel safe in a zoo?”
“Whenever I’d go to that zoo as a kid, I would get obsessed with the idea that nobody ever messes with the tiger.”
“The sim can only do so much—pretty sure it can’t change you into a tiger.”
Taren grinned. “That’d be cool, though, right?”
“Okay, sure.” Lake sighed. “But the sim-zoo you were living in is gone now. When you leave the sim, any pocke
t you created closes. Which is half the reason we’re doing this. The more pockets we close, the less strain the sim puts on the ship’s failing systems.”
“But you want me to create a new pocket?”
“A small one, yeah. It’ll close when we leave the sim.”
Taren took a deep breath, thinking. “So, should I create my house again?”
Lake shook her head. “Never go into your own house if you can help it, or into any place that makes you feel like you won’t want to get back out again. Pick something else.” She opened the pub door. Beyond was flat darkness, like a perfectly smooth curtain. “Think of what should show up on the other side of the door. Say it out loud if you want. Choose some place you’ve been in the real world. Nothing too inviting, just a place you’ve been to enough times to remember some details. School, maybe—no one tends to stay there long.”
“That’d be kind of a waste after an apocalypse did me the favor of flattening it.” Taren pictured another place instead, somewhere in his neighborhood, because that felt easiest to do at the moment. He stepped through the door …
Into a tiny convenience store crowded with shelves of packaged food. Smell of a/c coolant, ding of electronic door-chime.
Lake came through after him and stood there a moment surveying the shelves.
“The sim got all of this from my brain?” Taren asked.
“Yeah.” Lake stepped closer to a rack of chips. “This is what you miss from Earth?” She held up a bag of chips identical to every other bag on the rack before her. “Flaming Hot Cheetos?”
Taren slowly pivoted to take in rack after rack of red chip bags. Months of eating dandelion leaves and the bitter roots of strange woody plants, and then waking up to a breakfast of yet more plants, this time blended into goo, so shockingly unfair. And now this—the same food he’d once eaten while playing video games and agonizing over trig homework and taking winding car rides to Santa Cruz.
Bags and bags of it. “Damn.”
“He’s impressed with himself,” Lake said to the bag in her hand. “I bet he dunks them in Mountain Dew.”
“Sour cream, actually.” His mouth was starting to water. “Mountain Dew is for Doritos.”
Lake made a face. “Boys are weird.”
Taren took a few steps farther into the store. A teenage guy behind the counter, thumbing through a magazine, announced, “We’ve got mirrors,” and pointed at the huge security mirrors angled in the ceiling corners.
“Who’s he?” Taren asked, startled enough that the sleepy vagueness finally cleared from his head.
“Figment of the sim,” Lake said. “Like an NPC in a video game. Non-player character. He’s just here to set the scene.”
Taren turned to watch the guy behind the counter swipe aside a magazine page. “We’ve got mirrors,” he said again, and pointed the same way he had before.
Lake pulled Taren back from the counter. “Just focus on changing your appearance. Consider this your chance to try whatever facial hair you couldn’t manage back home.”
“Would it weird you out if I tried a neck tattoo?”
“Absolutely.”
Taren lifted a magazine from a rack near the counter. “Fine. I’ll just go blond.” He focused on the face on the magazine while he moved his jaw, trying to widen it. Scrunched his brow, bugged his eyes. “Is this working or am I just embarrassing myself?” He looked up at an angled mirror and saw an unfamiliar face staring back at him.
“Hey, genius,” Lake said, “you don’t think people are going to notice that you look exactly like their favorite movie star?”
Taren smiled sheepishly. “Okay, sorry.” He rubbed his hands through his hair and the strands shrank. “Better?”
Lake glanced at the tattoo on his right forearm, and Taren tensed at the thought that she might ask him to change it. But all she said was, “Is that a constellation?”
“Taurus,” he said tightly. “My brother Gray and I were both born in May.”
She nodded, toying with her thread bracelet. Then she turned her attention to the shelves and poked a bag of Cheetos. “Chip up and let’s get out of here. This is just a pit stop.”
Taren seized handfuls of chip bags. Anything to get the taste of algae out of his mouth. You’d think that would go away once you’d escaped into a simulation. He glanced at the guy behind the counter. Can a figment stop people from shoplifting?
I just want one normal thing. Taren was ready to explain it to him if he had to. Just one normal thing before I have to wake up in the closet of a spaceship.
“He’s not going to bust you—I think he only has the one line,” Lake said. “Can you carry all those?”
The plastic rustled in Taren’s grip, and he suddenly realized how pathetic he must look to her. All he could think of to say was “I haven’t had Cheetos in…”
No way for either of them to know how to finish that sentence.
“You still haven’t,” Lake said with a glum smile.
Taren’s head hurt again.
“Let’s get out of here, okay?” Lake said. “Find some sleepers to wake.”
“Where to?”
Lake scratched the back of her neck. “Good question. I was hoping you might have an idea.” She flashed him a smile.
“Um, what?”
“There are fifty-two sleepers left in the sim, and probably twice as many pockets. Lots of people seem to be moving on from the pockets they’ve created and heading somewhere together. But I don’t know where. And I keep ending up in pockets I’ve already visited.”
He gaped at her. “You want me to find a corner of the sim you haven’t found?”
“New person, new pockets—sounds like it could work, right?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, just steered him back toward the door. “Clear your mind when you step through the door and see where it’ll take you.”
“Okay…”
Just clear my mind. So easy.
He stepped through the door …
Into a convenience store with racks of Cheetos.
“We’ve got mirrors.”
Taren and Lake turned to look at the guy behind the counter. He swiped aside a page in his magazine.
“What…?” Taren pushed his fingertips over his forehead. His bags of Cheetos lay at his feet. He didn’t even remember dropping them.
“Didn’t get enough Cheetos the first time around?” Lake said lightly. She leaned down to retrieve a bag and handed it to him. “You do remember where you are? Where you really are?”
Taren turned and stared at the red Cheetos bags on the rack under the counter. Turned back and stared at the red bags lining the aisles like rows of inflated tongues. “The sim.”
“A-plus. So when you step through that door, there are about a hundred places you could wind up. Ninety-nine, if you don’t want to wind up back in this convenience store.”
“That isn’t making this any easier.”
“If you want, try thinking of a specific place. The sim is like a dollhouse, but for a city. Each room is a pocket of San Francisco—because that’s the city everyone on the ship is from. Don’t create a new pocket—just let yourself walk into one that’s already there.”
“Walk into a specific place,” Taren echoed.
“Hey.” Lake nudged his shoulder. “Just think of someplace. Where do you want to go?”
Her stare drilled into him. He stared back. “I want to go home. To my parents and my living room and the burger place near school where I hang out with my friends. And to my stupid kitchen, because I swear even though the sim takes away the feeling that my muscles have melted out of my body, it’s somehow still registering that I’m absolutely starving.”
Lake waited patiently, as if he might make a decision now that he’d gotten all that out.
“Where I want to go doesn’t exist anymore,” he said with a sigh. “Simulations don’t count.”
Lake didn’t argue.
He respected that.
“Maybe this was
a bad idea,” Lake said. “It might be too much for someone who only just left the sim.”
“No, it’s not.” Taren winced. “It’s just—all of this is gone, isn’t it? None of it exists on Earth anymore.” He gestured to the museum of Cheetos.
“Convenience stores? No, probably not.”
“I mean, everything. Places, people. We don’t even know how many are left alive back home. They’ve been sitting in bunkers and shelters and ash-covered houses working to survive while we’ve been sleeping. All because some guy decided to let us on his ship.”
Lake put a hand on his arm, the first reassuring touch he’d felt in decades. “Are you telling me these Flaming Hot Cheetos are just punishment for your sin of surviving? Because that makes a lot more sense.”
He couldn’t help cracking a smile. But it didn’t last long. “Am I going to get off this ship?”
Lake held up a bag of Cheetos. “You sure you want to?”
Some of the tension in his chest eased. He batted the chips out of her hand, pretending to be annoyed at her joke.
“Ready now?” Lake held out her hand and nodded toward the door.
I have to get off this ship. Taren took her hand, opened the door, and stepped through.
6
TAREN
The crunch of underfoot snacks gave way to the squelch of wet gravel. The door had led them to a wooded hillside. A road cut through trees and widened into a driveway in front of a house that was all acute angles and vast plates of glass, like a chapel to wealth.
“Where are we?” Lake asked.
“I think I came here to do a homework project once with someone from my school,” Taren said.
Lake turned, and then Taren did, following her gaze. A garden shed sat at the edge of the gravel drive, its shadowed doorway like a portal into the creeping fog.
“Is that the door we came through?” Taren asked.
“Yeah,” Lake said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Wait, what?” Taren sputtered. “Where are you going?”
“Somewhere I can change my appearance,” she said over her shoulder. “Sit tight.”
“You don’t think I should come with—”
Strange Exit Page 4
