In Beta

by Prescott Harvey

  Suddenly, her Jeep engine roared. The car lurched forward, gunning for the edge of the cliff, with enough speed to plow right over the puny guardrail. Jay didn’t have time to think, but let his reflexes take over. He yelled and punched his gas pedal, and his Miata barreled across the lot and rammed the front of the Cherokee, spinning it sideways. There was the terrible crunch of metal, and then both cars were still.

  Smoke drifted from the Cherokee’s engine. Jay let his grip on his steering wheel slacken as he caught his breath. The Jeep door opened, and Liz stepped out, glaring at him. Jay opened his door.

  “What are you doing?!” he demanded.

  Liz was in his face, pushing him. “Leave me alone!”

  “You were gonna kill yourself!”

  “My body, my choice. You can’t keep me here.”

  “Keep you here? I just saved your life.”

  “Oh right, don’t give me that. You’d just as soon kill me.”

  Jay was taken aback. “Are you talking about . . . the tornado?”

  “The tornado, everything! This whole place is designed to keep me in check. But I won’t play. Not anymore. Death is too easy, there’s gotta be some catch. It’ll be like Groundhog Day, where I just wake up in my own bed again. But I am done playing by the rules.”

  Liz’s fists were clenched at her sides. Jay had the uncomfortable feeling that he was witnessing a psychotic episode. He looked around, hoping to see an adult who might help him. But the road was empty, and he could only barely make out the main drag from around the hardware store.

  “Are you talking about The Build?”

  Liz looked up with renewed interest. “What?”

  He continued carefully, fully expecting Liz’s eyes to glaze over.

  “Whenever I try to tell people, they get all weird. Like, they can’t hear me.”

  He stared at her, waiting for a change.

  “But you hear me, don’t you?”

  Her face softened ever so slightly. Like she was working through a decision.

  “Of course I hear you.” A look of pity crossed her face. “You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

  She spun around and scrambled back into her Jeep and started it. Jay ran at her, worried she was going to charge the cliff.

  “Wait! What’s going on!?”

  He grabbed the frame of her Jeep, and she turned a leg and kicked out through her open door, hitting him squarely in the chest. He fell back into the gravel. She held up a warning finger and placed it to her lips. Then she peeled out of the turnout.

  Jay pulled himself up and threw himself into his Miata, ready to follow. The engine whined, refusing to turn over. Moments ticked by as he mechanically tried the ignition key. Finally, the engine caught. The Miata rumbled to life and shook its way to the edge of the gravel. Its frame, bent from ramming Liz’s Jeep, rubbed against his tire as he turned onto Main Street. Some high school kids stared at his bedraggled car. But there was no sign of Liz.

  Staging Grounds

  Jay lay wide-awake in bed, staring at the Heather Graham poster on his wall. It was 3:37 a.m., according to his Ren & Stimpy clock. He couldn’t shut his brain off. His mind was on his and Liz’s car crash, and the things she’d said. He could recall the incident with startling clarity.

  His mind spiraled through memories like a Fibonacci sequence. Ever since he’d boosted his intelligence to 10, he could recall moments from his life with ease. He remembered going to Lost Creek Park with his parents when he was four. He remembered the moment he first saw Liz in kindergarten. He could drop into his memories as if he were reliving them. They were as vivid as real life, as if he were traveling in time. They were perfectly organized in the back of his mind, like a card catalog of memories; he could quickly pull any memory at any moment. Yet, he had no memory of learning about the Fibonacci sequence. He scanned his high school and middle-school career, and could find no lesson, no mention in a movie or book. It was an idea he knew well, despite never having learned about it.

  Perhaps having a 10 intelligence score meant he could spontaneously discover new knowledge, simply by letting his mind wander. Perhaps, he hoped, again glancing at his clock, it meant he no longer needed sleep. His rubbed his bulging arms, which were beginning to stiffen from the baseball game and fight.

  There was a tap on his window. He turned to see a dark silhouette standing outside. A girl. She waved, and he threw off his covers and pulled an old Bart Simpson T-shirt off the floor. He opened his window and was shocked to make out the faint features of Liz Knight in the moonlight.

  “What are you doing here?” Jay shivered as the cool air poured into his room.

  “I have to show you something.” She took a step back.

  Jay craned his neck out the window to see what she had in her hands, but she held up a Maglite and shook it in response.

  “It’s not here. C’mon. Out the window. We don’t have a ton of time.”

  Jay pulled himself through his window, feeling a small thrill at the adventure. Despite not having slept, he felt energized. He dropped down next to Liz. It was just the two of them in the small alley behind his house, and he could almost feel the warmth of her body. His heart began to pound. She stood there, blending into the night, looking so completely alien from the girl he thought he’d known all these years.

  She turned and walked down to his driveway. His little roundabout, always still and quiet, felt silent as a tomb. Moonlight caressed car frames, and windshields were frosted over. He exhaled a cloud of breath and shivered.

  “Do I need my jacket?” he asked, noticing that Liz had on a parka.

  “Too late for that now. We have to hurry.”

  She moved to the end of the roundabout, where the bank dropped down into Jewett Creek.

  “Where we going?” Jay whispered.

  “Rock Ridge.” She dropped over the ledge, and Jay followed.

  Despite the cold, he felt sweat form on his brow. Liz was leading him to Rock Ridge? Did this have to do with her asking him to prom? He imagined sitting by the falls with Liz, locked lip and lip. His chest froze. It was a secret only Colin knew, but Jay had never made out with a girl before. He’d practiced, of course, on his hand, on squashes from his mom’s garden . . . but he was now heading to Rock Ridge with Liz Knight! He seriously hoped his vegetable make-out sessions would be enough practice for a girl like Liz.

  They picked their way through the downed debris from the tornado as Jay pondered his fate. What if she wanted to go all the way? That didn’t square with her earlier suicide attempt, but girls had always been a mystery to Jay, and especially Liz, with her recent breakdowns. Was she legally sane? If she tried to seduce him, did he have a responsibility to contact Sheriff Jenkins?

  He tried to catch her eye in the dark, but she was trekking determinedly ahead, shining her flashlight on the downed trees. Jay decided to fish for clues.

  “Sure is cold out here. I could, uh, run home and grab a blanket? If we need it?”

  Liz swung around, shining the flashlight in his eyes. Jay froze, shielding the glare with his hands.

  “I just thought . . . if we were gonna, maybe, sit . . .”

  “Talk,” Liz commanded.

  “I–I am talking. Was there a particular topic you wanted to discuss?”

  “I want to know what you couldn’t tell the others.”

  Jay took a deep breath and told her everything. Todd’s disappearance. The Serious Gamer with the disk. It all flowed out, and Liz listened, impassive. Jay watched her face in the dark, waiting for her eyes to glaze over. But they merely studied him, glittering behind her flashlight like two dark jewels. Jay felt a lightness grow inside him, as if the heavy weight of the last week had burst and was pouring out into Liz. He suddenly felt a deep affection for her in a way he never had before.

  He continued, “And then I u
sed The Build to tweak all my stats for the baseball scrimmage. But you already saw all that.”

  Liz was nodding slowly, as if this confirmed her suspicions. She swung around and continued walking through the forest.

  “That’s it?!” Jay ran after her. “I tell you I can cause storms and change reality, and you have nothing to say?”

  The faint mutter of Jewett Creek grew louder. Slivers of light touched the forest floor, and there were signs of destruction everywhere. In the night, the destruction looked alien, and Jay felt the surrealness of it.

  “I need to show you something,” Liz muttered.

  They were in the open clearing at the base of the falls. In the dim moonlight, he saw flattened trees and ground overturned by massive roots. At a distance, the falls looked like a frozen crystal.

  “Now, Jay, this is probably going to be hard for you.”

  She walked over to the falls and stretched her hands across the wet rocks. After placing her flashlight in her mouth, she lifted a hand, planted a foot, and hoisted herself up the slippery slope. The light of her flashlight flickered over slimy boulders, occasionally catching the roaring plume of the falls on the slimy and freezing rocks as the falls sprayed his face. Jay approached the cliff under her, searching for handholds in the dark.

  “Where are we going?”

  She didn’t answer. Jay resigned himself to the climb, slipping on the slimy and freezing rocks. The falls roared, spraying his face. He shivered and spat as cold water trickled into his eyes and mouth. His Chucks slipped, and he struggled to hold on.

  Glancing up, he saw Liz pause at the lip of the falls. Jay wondered if she meant to dive into the pool below. She had on all her clothes, so it didn’t seem likely. He was squinting in the spittle of the falls, watching Liz’s flashlight skew out into the night. He saw her slide her palm across the wet rocks. She glanced down, shouting.

  “You still want to know what happened to Todd?”

  The rocks flickered under her fingers. Wisps of blue light radiated from her touch, shimmering across the cliff. It reminded Jay of the rotoscoped lightning in movies like Back to the Future and Ernest Goes to Jail. It shimmered out over the rocks, lighting up the night. Jay stared, mesmerized. And then Liz’s arm disappeared into the rock.

  “He found this.”

  Jay stared dumbly. Liz’s arm was completely gone. Her shoulder was pressed into the blue energy that warped over the cliff face.

  “Of course,” she continued, shouting, “if he would have waited just a few more days, I would have been let out. But neither of us knew that, at the time.”

  Jay couldn’t speak. Liz’s arm disappearing into the cliff side was too much for his brain. He felt like one of the characters from the Lovecraft stories, like he had been suddenly severed from reality. He watched her reposition herself on the cliff until her left hand gripped a small ledge. Her right hand seemed to grip something inside the cliff wall.

  “Come on,” she beckoned.

  Then she pulled herself into the blue lightning that sparked and shivered. Jay watched her body wriggle into the rock, until just her feet were left dangling out. Then they, too, were gone.

  Without a flashlight, Jay was in almost total darkness. The moonlight barely penetrated the area, and he could only just make out the cliff. He clambered up as quickly as he could, slipping in the darkness, feeling for the spot where Liz had disappeared. The falls roared dangerously to his right, and its drops felt like burning embers against his skin. Looking down, he could barely make out the dim rocks beneath him; the slightest shift and he’d tumble onto boulders. His body trembled from the strain as his hand tentatively felt along the wet cliffs. His palm slid over jagged edges, then fell into nothing.

  He stared at the rock face. Cool blue energy arced out into the night surrounding him. The cliff was glowing in blue strands, and it reminded him of bioluminescence he’d seen in National Geographic. His hand, which was inside the rock now, cupped a small ledge on the other side. It felt cool and smooth, like marble, and was strangely dry. Every fiber of his being, every sci-fi movie he’d ever seen, told him that he shouldn’t put his body into the center of this weird, pulsing energy. But Liz was in there, and she’d promised him answers. He took a deep breath, then plunged his head into the rock.

  There was a crackle of static electricity, and then he was in total darkness. He felt his legs kicking into space behind him, the splatter of the falls soaking his jeans. He army-crawled forward.

  Suddenly, he tumbled forward into space. His arms shot out, his palms connecting with a cool flat surface three feet below. He instinctively tucked himself into a ball and rolled into a somersault, then leapt to his feet. His heart pounded as he turned in the dark. From somewhere ahead came the faint, muffled sound of music. He recognized the song, but his mind was full of panic and he couldn’t place it.

  “Liz! Liz!”

  He extended a hand, groping, until it seized something warm.

  “Hey, watch with the hands! You’re freezing.”

  Liz’s flashlight switched back on, and Jay was startled to see her face inches from his. His hand instinctively found hers and squeezed tightly.

  “Where are we?”

  “Ow, ow, ease up.” She pried loose his fingers. “You’ve got some strength.”

  He squinted at the walls, letting his eyes adjust. There were in a cave. The walls were smooth and pale, not the jagged gray basalt of the outside. Wherever the light touched, flat crystals shimmered from deep inside. Jay ran his hand over the nearest wall. It was cool and felt like talcum powder. He spun around. The wall behind him—the one he’d just fallen through—was whole again. There was no trace of a window where they’d come in, no sound of the rumbling falls.

  “How do we get out?!” Jay hyperventilated.

  “Relax. The exit’s still there; we just can’t see it. Check this out.”

  She swung her light farther into the cave, and Jay leapt back.

  On the far side of the cave was a sheet of thick glass. Behind that lay a room. There was a bed in the center of it, with crisp sheets turned up. There was a white Chesterfield couch. A wooden end table held a jug lamp, a bowl of plastic fruit, and assorted People magazines. A few bland pastoral paintings hung on three walls. It looked like a doctor’s waiting room, except for the bed and the wall of glass. Jay stepped forward.

  “What the hell?”

  “You wanted answers.”

  Jay gaped at the room. There was a little kitchenette on the far side, with a stove and a dishwasher. It was nicer than his house.

  “How is this an answer?”

  The music was coming from speakers hung on the walls. Jay placed an ear against the glass.

  “Is that Enya?”

  Liz pounded on the glass. “Shut up! You can stick your ‘Shepherd Moons’ up your ass!”

  Jay ran his hand over the glass. A thought struck him.

  “Did Todd make this?”

  Liz shook her head. “No. Todd never made it this far. I guess you’d call it a staging ground. Sort of a holding zone for people who come here”—she took a deep breath—“from the real world.”

  “What do you mean? Like, Portland?”

  Liz closed in. In the light of her flashlight, she looked older.

  “People don’t come here from Portland, Jay. There is no Portland. At least, not in the sense you’re used to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You think you’d be able to recognize a video game if you saw it?”

  “Definitely.”

  “What if the graphics were better than anything you’d ever seen? Like, so good you couldn’t tell them apart from real life?”

  Jay shrugged. “Well, it’d still be on a screen.”

  “No screens.”

  “I mean, I’d still know it was a game. Every time I s
topped playing—”

  “No stopping. No starting. What if all you ever did was play? What if it was all you’d ever done?”

  Jay stared. Enya’s muffled voice continued through the glass wall.

  “You’re trying to tell me we’re playing a video game?”

  Liz returned his gaze, her face neutral.

  “Yeah, right. You’d need a computer a thousand times more—a million times . . .” He shook his head again. “I mean, look at the detail, even just in this room. The textures alone would require more RAM than a hundred IBM PS/2s. And us talking, that music: this is more than sixteen-channel sound. There’s not a Sound Blaster out there that could render this—”

  “Not in 1993.”

  “Yeah.” Jay shrugged. “Maybe in the future. I dunno. Look, are you going to tell me what this place is, or—”

  Liz smiled grimly. “I’m trying. Here, the year is 1993. In the real world, we’re a good ways past that. Where I come from, computers are powerful. Every person carries one at all times, and each little computer is more powerful than anything you’ve seen in 1993.”

  Jay laughed. “You’re telling me you’re from the future? Like . . . like Marty McFly?”

  “Yes. And so are you. A future where everything’s connected. And the most powerful computers are strong enough to run a world like this.”

  Jay stopped laughing. “We’re in a video game?”

  Liz nodded. Jay stared, stunned. It wasn’t an idea he could take seriously. The idea that he, Bickleton’s biggest video game aficionado, could be living inside a video game, completely unaware, was so ironic, so patently absurd, he suddenly realized what it had to be.

  “This is a prank.” He spun around. “Jeremy is here, isn’t he?”

  He examined the walls, looking for a telltale sign of a two-way mirror or a Candid Camera.

  “I don’t actually have extra strength, do I? The baseball game was just a ruse. I’m not sure how you pulled off that tornado. Jeremy must have gotten his dad involved to take down those trees. The whole video game thing, you took it too far, even for me.”