OtherLife

by Jason Segel

  Elvis says places like this have become the ultimate status symbol for the ultrawealthy. Every multibillionaire now has a fortress where they can hide from their fears. Some worry about water wars. Most are waiting for the poor to take up arms. Our hostess lives in terror of global economic collapse. That’s why she’s constructing a remote island stronghold. The old colonial mansion is just for show. Eventually it will be turned into an office and guesthouse. Her real home will be built into the rocky mountain in the center of the island. I haven’t seen the work site—none of us has. I doubt Abigail would give us a tour if we begged. I suppose we belong to the class who’ll soon turn against her. She does make a pretty good case for her vision of the future, I gotta say. She can tell you exactly how a rise in the price of pork belly will eventually end with the extinction of the human species. Knowing what I do, I’d say extinction is the least of our worries.

  “Are you ready to go back?” Kat asks. I think it’s her way of asking if I’ll be okay.

  “We told Elvis and Busara we’d be back in an hour. We’ve only been gone fifteen minutes.”

  “Not to the house,” she says. “Back to New York.”

  I look around at the sparkling white sand, turquoise water and vibrant jungle. “Yeah,” I say. I can’t fucking wait to get off this island. The whole place gives me the creeps. Whatever happened here in the past will never wash away.

  We turn to make our way back and see a woman walking toward us, wading through the foamy edges of the waves. She’s watching her feet as if waiting for the sand to open up underneath them. Her cheerful yellow dress is at odds with her somber expression.

  That was one of the other tweaks Busara made to the simulation. She hid her mother’s whereabouts from the Company. After her husband disappeared, Nasha Ogubu and her daughter moved to the East Coast. Busara enrolled in school in Brockenhurst, New Jersey, but her mother’s life seemed to stall. She’s still struggling to adapt to an existence without her husband.

  Convincing Nasha to join us on the island wasn’t as hard as Busara expected. Getting her mother to visit James Ogubu’s avatar in Otherworld has been a whole different story. Before he died, James uploaded his consciousness into an avatar. Aside from a body, everything that made him human is in Otherworld. Busara keeps asking Nasha to go see him, and her mother always refuses. She seems to think James’s avatar is a ghost—a bit of lingering energy that’s taken the form of a man. She says it’s not how she wants to remember her husband.

  Nasha Ogubu offers a warm smile when she sees us on the beach. Then she silently carries on. All she ever does is endlessly walk the island, as if the grief will overtake her if she ever comes to a stop.

  * * *

  —

  Kat and I reach the mansion’s living room just as a movie screen is descending from an opening hidden between the two-hundred-year-old ceiling beams. I start to wonder what the evil slave-owning bastards who once ran this island would have done with technology like ours. Then I realize it’s a stupid question. The answer is all around us. Technology has changed. Humanity hasn’t. We’re still the same species that tortured and terrorized its own kind. Now we just use different tools.

  “Welcome back.” Busara’s trying to play it cool, but the way she’s eyeing me says everything.

  “Nervous breakdown averted?” Elvis asks, and I have to laugh. What else could I do? “Good. ’Cause I’m not sure I’d want to find out what kind of mental health facilities might be available here on Paranoia Island.”

  “Stop!” Kat snickers as she puts a finger to her lips.

  “Oh, come on,” Elvis replies. “You think it’s news to anyone? Besides, if she’s spying on us, she deserves to hear it.”

  The subject is making me anxious. Crazy or not, our hostess is not someone to be toyed with. Anyone who builds a fortress like this is a person who takes herself very seriously. “What are you guys planning to watch?” I ask to change the topic.

  “The Company just released two new OtherEarth ads,” Busara says. “One’s for the regular game. The other is for the exclusive disk version. It was sent to potential clients and got leaked to the press.”

  I take a seat on the arm of the sofa. The Company has produced six ads for OtherEarth so far, and sixteen million sets of the augmented reality glasses have been preordered. That’s almost twice the number of people who live in New York. Soon the entire island of Manhattan will become a giant playground. Unlike virtual reality, which makes you leave your world behind, augmented reality merely adds layers of fantasy to what you ordinarily see. You can hunt down aliens in Central Park or explore Manhattan in 2300.

  It’s all fairly harmless—until you sync the OtherEarth glasses with a disk. Like the disks used in Otherworld, they allow you to experience a fantasy with all five senses. But with OtherEarth, those fantasies take place here on Earth. And you get to pick the “people” who’ll share them.

  Busara clicks the Play button on the remote, and the screen lights up. The first OtherEarth ad starts with a view of the ocean on a sunny day. Then something black appears on the surface, like the back of a massive whale. It keeps rising as the camera pulls back. The Statue of Liberty appears. This is New York Harbor. A pair of burning red eyes emerges from the murky gray water, and the beast they belong to continues to grow until it towers over the Statue of Liberty. All we can see is its massive legs as it crushes the statue beneath one of its feet. The camera trembles as the beast issues a deafening roar and makes a beeline for the Freedom Tower, leaving a wake of rubble through lower Manhattan.

  “OtherEarth,” says the announcer. “It’s your world, only better. Available August fifteenth.”

  “Meh,” Elvis says dismissively. “I’m not so impressed by this one. I mean, the Company could create any monster they want, but they have to steal their ideas from a twentieth-century Japanese film? Lame. Give me thirty minutes and I’ll come up with a million better ways to destroy Manhattan.”

  I get the sense that Elvis has spent a lot of time pondering the subject. It’s hardly a testament to his psychological health, but at the moment, I’m far more concerned about my own mental state. I’m wondering why I’ve been staring at the ocean since I got to this island, waiting for something to rise out of it. I played the Godzilla game after Alexei Semenov’s brother gave me the OtherEarth headset. Maybe that’s how the giant reptile got stuck in my brain. Maybe not.

  “Let’s have a look at the next ad,” Busara says.

  A beautiful sunset appears on the screen. We see a man resting on a chaise longue, looking out over a city that resembles Los Angeles. The scene’s shot from behind—we can’t see the man’s face. But it’s clear from his salt-and-pepper hair and opulent surroundings that he’s an older man of means. He picks up a pair of glasses from the table beside him and puts them on.

  I hear Busara gasp.

  “What the fuck?” Elvis shouts.

  I feel the sofa bounce as Elvis jumps to his feet, but I don’t take my eyes off the screen for a second.

  A woman has appeared in the chair beside the man in the ad. Her face remains out of sight, but even from behind, her close-cropped hair and deep brown skin look all too familiar. She holds out a hand to the man and he takes it. The camera pans in on the hands as she caresses his thumb with her own. It’s like half the commercials you see for erectile dysfunction—except the women in those ads are real. In OtherEarth you can order up any companion you like.

  “OtherEarth,” says the same announcer. “You can feel the difference.”

  The commercial ends. The screen goes black. No one in the room says a thing. Elvis is standing frozen in the center of the room. Then the spell breaks and he spins around.

  “How did they get footage of Busara?” he demands. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this agitated before. He looks like he’s going to explode.

  “We don’t
know for sure that it’s me,” Busara says calmly.

  “Trust me. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at you from behind. That was you.” Then Elvis stops. “Shit, that sounded bad. Sorry.” He’s been trying to cut back on the dirty jokes. We all know it’s been hard for him. I don’t think any of us really care; we’re just impressed he’s making the effort.

  “Let’s not get bent out of shape. The Company’s trolling us,” Kat says. “They don’t know what we have. It’s all psy-ops. They’re doing their best to freak us out.”

  “Well, ding, ding, ding!” Elvis shouts. “Guess what! We have a winner.”

  “Come on, Elvis,” Busara says. “It’s not that big a deal. There’s a reason they didn’t show my face. They didn’t have enough footage to re-create it.”

  “I think he’s jealous,” Kat stage-whispers to Busara. “He wants to be in an OtherEarth ad too.”

  I turn to Busara, who’s struggling to hide a grin. I’m far too anxious to be amused. “You’re sure they don’t know about Max?” I ask.

  Her grin fades. “Positive. In the simulation, your mother gave you George Reynolds’s name and told you he was the lawyer defending the homicidal director. You got back to the hotel and showed it to me. I took the name and number and said I’d call for you, but I never did. There’s no way the Company could know what Reynolds sent us in real life.”

  “They saw the list Alexei Semenov gave me, though? The one with all the OtherEarth users who ended up dead or in jail?”

  Busara frowns, annoyed by my line of questioning. “I did everything exactly the way we planned it, Simon. I let them see Semenov’s list so they’d chase the red herrings. What’s going on? You don’t sound like you trust me.”

  “I trust you,” I tell her. And I do. “I’ve just got a really bad feeling about all of this. I think—”

  I stop abruptly when I hear the clicking of stiletto heels. We all know who it is. The four of us spin around in unison.

  A deeply tanned blonde dressed in ivory silk is approaching. It’s impossible to say how old she is—or to guess what she might once have looked like. The world’s best surgeons have transformed her into a feline beauty who’s both attractive and terrifying. Having gotten to know Abigail Prince during our stay, I’d say that’s exactly the look she was after.

  Abigail focuses her gaze on my face. She always speaks to me as if I’m the only person in the room.

  “Good afternoon,” she purrs. “I’m afraid we have a problem.”

  The last time I saw my mother in person, we were at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. She gave me some money and George Reynolds’s phone number. The lawyer had recently acquired a new client—a well-known movie director who’d tried to murder an actress. At the time of his arrest, the director had been wearing a pair of chunky black glasses.

  I called the lawyer as soon as I got back to the hotel. And as soon as I told him why I was calling, he promptly hung up on me.

  Thirty minutes later, there was a knock on the door of our suite at the Waldorf. A porter handed me a plain white envelope. Inside was a single piece of paper, and on that paper was a name and a phone number. Abigail Prince. At the very bottom were two sentences scribbled out by hand: Destroy the note and envelope immediately. Don’t make any more calls from your room.

  I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. It had taken a lawyer only half an hour to track me down. The next time, it could have been the Company at the door, not a porter. After I showed Busara what had arrived, I ripped the paper and envelope to shreds and flushed both down the toilet. I was about to get Googling when Kat and Elvis emerged from Otherworld. The distraction saved us. Later, after the Company searched our room, they checked our browsing history and call logs. Thankfully, Abigail Prince wasn’t on them.

  When Kat and I were captured, Busara and Elvis didn’t know where to turn. Then Busara took a chance and reached out to Abigail Prince, a discount-store heiress who happens to be the tenth richest person in America. Abigail paid a team of mercenaries to free Kat and me from the Company, then whisked us all to her private Caribbean island. It wasn’t just a good deed, of course. I doubt Abigail ever feels driven to do the right thing. No, she wanted our help getting her hands on one of the few things her money can’t buy her—the freedom of her beloved and only son, Max, who’s wasting away in a jail cell in Queens, awaiting trial for murder.

  * * *

  —

  Abigail may be one of the wealthiest people on earth, but if you’re in the under-twenty crowd, her son, Max, is the Prince you’re likely to know. By age sixteen Max Prince had ten million YouTube followers. Every thirteen-year-old in the United States could probably recite one of his play-throughs by heart. Unfortunately, his fame didn’t break through with older audiences until he murdered his stepfather in the most gruesome way possible.

  A maid found Abigail’s fourth husband, a former captain of the Argentinian national soccer team, chopped into bite-size pieces in Max Prince’s bathtub. There was no doubt regarding the identity of the murderer. Everyone on the planet knew Max and his stepfather had despised each other. And in case that wasn’t proof enough, Max was found lounging next to the bathtub in a pool of his stepfather’s blood.

  Ordinarily, such a gory family homicide might cause a rift between mother and son. Perhaps that was the intention. But Abigail Prince stuck by her heir. She knew he couldn’t be responsible for his actions. She was certain the Company had framed him.

  If I’d heard Abigail’s story a year ago, I would have dismissed it as another rich mother making excuses for an overprivileged, fucked-up son. (A dynamic I happen to know all too well.) Max has never spoken a word in his own defense—in public or private. In fact, when his mother visits him, he rarely speaks at all. Which seems kind of odd for someone who made millions insulting strangers and cracking dirty jokes at his stepfather’s expense. But I could have explained that away too—if it hadn’t been for one piece of evidence that made me take Abigail Prince seriously. The maid who discovered the crime scene claimed that Max Prince was wearing black glasses when she found him. Yet the police report makes no mention of them—and Max Prince has 20/20 vision.

  There’s also Max’s relationship with the Company to consider. He’d been among the first to purchase the once-coveted, limited-edition Otherworld headsets. Before the game was shelved by the Company, views of his play-throughs had broken all of his previous records. Forty million people had watched Max slay a hundred-headed monster in a realm known as Lerna. After that, the Company began to court him as a spokesperson.

  Max didn’t need the Company’s money, and he didn’t want his fans to think his opinions were paid for. But he got to be friendly with several of the Company’s lead engineers. He even claimed he’d been given a tour of a secret innovation lab. Shortly afterward, Max showed his mother a pair of chunky black glasses. He told her it was a game that would change the world.

  Then something happened. Max went silent. He stopped posting videos. He wouldn’t answer his phone. He sent his staff away. When Abigail turned up at his apartment one morning, he answered the door in clothes that looked like they hadn’t been changed in days. They were soaked through with sweat, and Max’s face was bright red. He was wearing the glasses he’d shown her. And he had something attached to the back of his skull. He took the glasses off, reached out and poked her as if to confirm she was real. Then he slammed the door in her face.

  The next day, Max murdered his stepfather.

  Abigail is convinced the Company was somehow responsible. No one else has bought her theory. Max confessed to the crime. He had a motive. He was caught literally red-handed. But I believe Max was framed for murder. All of us do. The Company set him up because he knows something. Unfortunately, we can’t call, email or text him. If we want to find out what it is, we’ll need to visit Max in person. Now that the simu
lation is over, we’ll be flying back to New York to see him.

  * * *

  —

  But there seems to be a new problem with the plan. Abigail Prince takes the remote out of Elvis’s hand, switches over to satellite television and scrolls to CNN. A reporter is stationed in front of a Midtown skyscraper, talking to the camera, his face somber. In the background, dozens of police officers stand guard behind yellow crime scene tape. I see the reporter place his index finger on his earpiece. He bows his head for a moment while he listens; then his eyes shoot back up to the camera. He looks shaken.

  “I apologize for the delay. We’ve just gotten word from Columbia Presbyterian Hospital that Scott Winston is still in surgery for injuries he sustained less than two hours ago. To repeat, Scott Winston, billionaire, philanthropist and tech pioneer, is in critical condition after a shooting outside Chimera Corp, the wildly successful software company he’s run for over ten years.”

  “Wow,” Kat gasps.

  I’m too shocked to respond. Winston is one of the tech world’s best-known names, and Chimera is a leading developer of multimedia and creativity software. Winston was twenty-three when he started the business. For six months, he was the youngest CEO in America. Then nineteen-year-old Milo Yolkin founded the Company. The two “boy geniuses” were good friends for almost a decade. Their relationship is said to have soured last year after Winston questioned Milo’s mental health in a television news interview.

  Abigail holds up a perfectly manicured fingernail. “Wait for it,” she tells us. There’s more to come.