“If it wasn’t in the car with us when we left . . .”
“It can’t have disappeared!”
“We still have the copy, right?” Colin held up his black floppy. “We can make a copy of the copy.”
“Dude.” Jay fished a hand under a dusty oak dresser. “What if someone else finds it? What if some knuckle-dragger from shop class gets his hands on it?”
“You think they’d know what a floppy is?” Colin was lying on his chest, peering under the dresser. “You’re sure you didn’t leave it in the computer?”
Jay rifled through his book bag again. “Positive. We put the games in your trunk, we went back to the classroom, it was gone. Oh God, what if someone took it?”
“Who?”
Jay didn’t have an answer. He sat on the cold, hard floor, running his infallible memory back through the last six hours.
“We have to go back and look for it.”
It was already almost 3:00 a.m. They sat in a rat’s nest of sleeping bags and blankets, open bags of Doritos and cans of Mountain Dew strewn all over the floor. The title screen for Donkey Kong Country danced on the screen. The truth was, neither of them wanted to go back to Tutorial. Colin’s basement was warm and cozy, and on the other side of the glass door was fog and pitch darkness.
“Tonight?”
Jay sighed, going toward the door. “We can’t risk any—AHH!”
Jay stumbled backward. There was a girl’s face behind the sliding glass door. It was Liz, and she was motioning to be let in. Heart pounding, Jay stepped forward and unlocked the door. Liz shivered and slid into the basement.
“Jeezus, you guys are hard to find!”
“Shhh!” both boys admonished, glancing fearfully at the ceiling.
“I tried calling earlier; didn’t you hear?” Around midnight, the phone had rung several times. Jay had star-69’d the call, and when he didn’t recognize the number, he’d taken the phone off the receiver. Liz stared at the mess of wrappers and cartridges that covered the floor. “Looks like a homeless camp down here.” She sniffed. “Smells even worse.”
“Well, we weren’t expecting company.”
He didn’t mention the relief he felt at seeing her again. He still felt crummy after her cold dismissal earlier. She was, after all, the only real person in Bickleton. Liz slid the basement door shut.
“I’m sorry, but we couldn’t really talk at my place. Not with Hal potentially watching.”
Jay glanced around the basement. “How do you know he’s not watching right now?”
“Because he’s asleep. Now listen, we don’t have much time.”
Liz shut off the TV. “You know what I do, in the real world? I’m a veterinarian. And before Hal brought me here, I saw some things in his house that scared the hell out of me. He keeps a bottle of propofol in his bedroom.”
Jay remembered Dr. Shrek’s office, when Liz had mumbled something about propofol.
“You know what propofol does? It’s a sedative. Knocks you right out.”
Jay and Colin looked at each other and shrugged, so Liz continued.
“You know what else he had? Two more bottles. Pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. I didn’t know what those were either, at first. Had to go digging through the library card catalog. But I found out. Pancuronium stops your neuro system: it paralyzes you. And potassium chloride is a salt that’s so powerful, it induces cardiac arrest. It stops your heart. propofol, potassium chloride, and pancuronium bromide. The lethal cocktail, the formula they use to kill death-row inmates. And Hal happens to have those three bottles on his guest room nightstand. Next to his virtual-reality helmet. Next to my body. So what do you really think he plans to do once my brain is finished uploading?”
Jay felt his insides freeze. He felt as if he couldn’t move. Colin let the controller slip out of his fingers and clatter on the floor.
“You mean he plans to kill you?”
Liz was pale. She suddenly looked very old. For a moment, Jay thought he saw the real Liz peeking out at him through eighteen-year-old Liz’s face. He saw so much pain there; of all the alcoholics in Bickleton, he’d never seen such striking intensity. She looked as though she were on the verge of collapse.
“Yes,” she continued quietly. “He means to kill me. I have tried to escape this world. And every road leads me back to you, Jay. Hal has selected you to share his power. And I need it, bad.”
The shock of what she was saying made him feel dizzy. “But . . . he said he was going to let you go?”
“Hal lies, Jay. If he lets me go, what happens? He’s kidnapped me. That’s a felony. I’ve been under his spell for two weeks now. He’s feeding me intravenously. I probably have bedsores by now. You think, if he let me go, I’m just going to get up, thank him, and be on my way?”
“Could you pretend that you wouldn’t press charges? Maybe he’d trust you?” Colin offered.
Liz scoffed. “Hal doesn’t trust anyone. Except, apparently, Jay.”
Jay looked up suddenly. “How did he trap you?”
Liz looked disgusted. “I let him.”
Liz’s Story
The television throbbed and flickered in the basement, casting a cool blue glow over the floor. Onscreen, Donkey Kong characters remained frozen in pause. Jay and Colin had their backs to them, waiting eagerly as Liz pulled up a beanbag chair and hunkered down. Except for a few creaks upstairs, the house remained still.
“It started in Bickleton,” Liz whispered. “And for the record”—Liz looked accusingly around the basement—“this is not Bickleton. This is a rough replica of the real Bickleton, as it was in 1993. Back when Hal and I went to high school together, almost thirty years ago.”
Colin raised a hand. “So you’re . . .”
“Forty-six.” She did some quick math. “Forty-six? No, forty-seven. Forty-seven years old.”
Jay and Colin looked at each other in horror. That was as old as their moms. The beautiful, popular senior across from them was actually being controlled by someone their mom’s age? Jay glanced down at Liz’s hands, as if he expected to see signs of age. His stomach lurched. Of course it made sense, if her world was decades in the future. He’d known she was older, but he never would have guessed she was that much older. She looked so young. Liz gave a thin smile, as if guessing his thoughts.
“I know, it’s weird. Being back in this body. I haven’t looked this way in a long time. I’ve served my time. I hacked my way through the horrors of high school. I left Bickleton behind to live my life. Let’s see, I went to UC Berkeley, did a stint in Seattle, then traveled abroad for three years, before enrolling in a veterinary college in Vermont. Where I met my husband.”
She stopped, looking at the increasing horror on Jay’s face. “Yes, I’m married. In fact, we have two children, about your age. We live in Laguna Beach now, which is where he’s from. He’s a writer, and I run my own clinic.”
Liz looked down at her white T-shirt and ripped jeans. “It’s been a long time since I could fit into these jeans. It’s messed up, but being back isn’t all bad. You leave high school thinking you’ll go back, that people won’t change. That you’ll always have those same friends, that you’ll always laugh so hard, that your little crushes will always be a matter of life and death. But really, nothing in life compares to those four brief years. And as much as I hate Hal, I’ve got to hand it to him: he’s got a memory for details. The greasy stench of C-Court tater tots. The way everyone freaks out when Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’ plays on MTV. The way Principal Oatman turned a blind eye, letting certain kids get away with anything.”
Jay wasn’t listening. He was thinking about Liz with her husband, his strong hand wrapped around her waist. He felt a surge of jealousy and confusion over his feelings.
“What about us?” Colin ventured. “Were we there, back in high school?”
She stared at Colin. “Yeah.”
“What about the guy you and Jay keep talking about? Hal.”
“Yep, he was there. He was the skinny kid who’d had the same mustache since kindergarten. He was the butt of every prank, the punch line of every joke. When he got mad, he’d swing his fists in circles like a windmill. Or curse you in Shakespearean prose. He, uh . . . he didn’t have many friends.
“Anyway, he obviously figures into the story more. So we graduated. The memory of high school faded. Except it didn’t for Hal. I didn’t stay in touch with him. I don’t know anyone who did. But whatever the kids in high school did to him, it stuck. He’s been thinking about it ever since. I heard that he got into one of the good technical universities. MIT, I think. Then at some point, he apparently moved back to Bickleton—the real Bickleton—with enough money to retire.”
“So he’s running this simulation of Bickleton in the real Bickleton?”
Liz nodded. “I don’t know when he started, or why he did it, but he’s been at it for years, apparently, updating graphics, improving sound.”
“So if you went to school with Hal—in the real Bickleton—and you moved away . . . ?”
“How did I end up here? Right. So time went by, my dad passed away, I started thinking about things. Like, who am I, what have I done with my life, yadda yadda. Latter-half-of-life thoughts. I was living in Laguna, but I came up each year to see my mom, who still lives in Bickleton. And on one of these trips, I stopped by the Morning Market—still standing, thirty years later—to get some ChapStick. And who did I run into?”
“Hal?”
Liz nodded. “I hadn’t seen him since high school, and he looked rough. His skin was hanging from his cheeks like it was gonna slide off. He hadn’t shaved in days. His hair was wild and gray and mostly gone. He was yelling at the store manager, not making eye contact, in classic Hal fashion. He was saying things like”—Liz tucked her jaw back into her neck and gave a deep, watery impression of Hal—“‘Hrmm, this is the third time my delivery has been incorrect. I demand an apology!’ And me—stupid me—in this season of guilt and self-reflection, at that moment, I felt so bad for both of them, I went over and stuck my big fat head in the middle of it.”
Colin swallowed. “What’d you do?”
“I just said hi. I could tell Hal recognized me, even though his eyes were still on the floor. I asked him how he was doing, and he mumbled something. The store manager gave me a grateful look and scooted off. Then it was just Hal and me.
“It’s funny, but I’d recently been thinking about Hal. On that last trip home, for the first time in ten years probably, I had been reminiscing about all the crap he used to take in high school. I guess my conscience had been pricked or something, and I wanted to do something nice for the guy.”
Jay leaned forward in his beanbag chair.
“He never even looked at me, but I was startled by how old he seemed. I’d aged—everybody had—but not like Hal. He was mumbling something, and I thought we were done, but then, to my surprise, he asked if I wanted to get lunch.
“I had my flight back to LAX, but it wasn’t until later that day, and everything was already packed. So I had time, and guilt, and a chance to do what I thought was a good deed, right in front of me. So I got in my rental car and followed his old-school Mercedes—which was actually kinda classy—back to his house. Which, by the way, was not where I expected when he said lunch. It was his childhood home, which was weird. And then he directed me to pull into his garage, which was even weirder.
“I should’ve run away right then. As soon as he closed the garage door, I should have known. But the whole situation was just so surreal. I was creeped out, but this was Hal, and Hal had always been harmless. I remained wary, but he wasn’t making eye contact, and I felt pretty certain a firm no would shut down anything he might try. He told me there was something he wanted me to see, something I’d appreciate, and it had to do with high school. He was babbling, and I wasn’t really listening, because now we were inside, and I couldn’t stop staring.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I lived in Seattle, I once helped a friend clean out her grandmother’s place. That was my first encounter with a hoarder.
“Hal is a hoarder, times ten. Almost every square inch of livable space in his house is absorbed by stuff. Boxes full of nineties memorabilia line the walls. Tons of books on the flora and fauna of the Pacific Northwest. Everything is organized in boxes, but there are so many boxes that there is barely room to move. I imagine he had to collect all that stuff to make his simulation. But the smell! I don’t think Hal leaves that house often. It is suffocating. It smells like unwashed socks, compost, and burnt lentils. Oh, it was terrible, and my only thought was to leave. I suggested we get lunch at the Riverside Grill, and I even offered to buy. He agreed, but said he wanted to show me something first.
“I followed him through a maze of boxes, and then, finally, I knew things were really not right. He led me into a little black room, like a sensory deprivation chamber. The only things in the room are a bed, a nightstand, and a helmet with a headlamp, although I could barely make anything out in the gloom. I noticed the propofol on the nightstand, and I wondered what Hal was doing with that. He wanted to show me his VR, and I told him I’d tried VR before, but he shook his head and was all smiley. ‘Not like this,’ he’d said. I could tell he was really proud. He handed me a helmet and told me that what he was showing me would only take five minutes.
“I had butterflies in my stomach and was starting to panic. I knew something was wrong. I should have punched him in the gut and ran for my life. But I still wanted to make it up to him, so I kept telling myself, What’s the harm? And then, while I was looking at the propofol, he took the helmet and slid it over my head.”
Liz didn’t say anything for a while. Finally, Colin ventured:
“So your body is still in that room?”
Jay saw Liz’s hand tremble. He leapt in. “Yes. And we’re getting her out. Right?”
Colin was silent. Somewhere out in the darkness, a rooster crowed. Outside the window, the light was softening, growing bluer by the minute.
“Right?!”
Colin shrugged. “Well . . . how?”
“We have the disk, don’t we? Could we stop him from inside the game?”
Colin whispered. “Yeah, what happens if he dies here?”
Jay shrugged. “I’m sure he has a million hit points. Even if we did kill him, he could just create a new avatar and come back.”
“So what do we do?” Colin muttered.
They thought silently. Jay looked around the basement. On a shelf behind them, amid a half dozen children’s coloring books and plastic dinosaurs, something caught his eye. He got up and pulled down a dusty faded box. On its front was a complicated Rube Goldberg of stairs, a bathtub, and—in a tiny cage—a captured red mouse. Colin looked up.
“Mouse Trap?”
Jay opened the box and took out colorful plastic pieces, snapping them together. “You said when he kidnapped you, Liz, he put a helmet on your head?”
Liz nodded. “Yeah. It’s like VR, but VR only has sight and sound. Whatever Hal uses does all five senses.”
Jay placed a marble into a tiny yellow bucket. “So, you’re still wearing this helmet in the real world. And you can’t get it off?”
She shot him a sarcastic look.
“And when he’s in the real world,” Jay continued, taking out the game and sliding a green boot over the walkway, “he’s omniscient. We can’t touch him. But when he comes into the game, he’s gotta put his helmet on, and he becomes another character. Like us. A superpowered character, but still. He can’t be everywhere at once, and he’s got to use that little wand to make changes.”
“I guess so?”
Jay stepped back. The board was now a complex Rube Goldberg
of rickety traps and devices. Jay pulled a Stop sign back so it bumped the marble. Colin and Liz followed it down a ramp, sprung the bathtub, and launched the little figurine into the bowl. The basket clamped down around the mouse. Jay straightened, pleased with his device.
“What if we trapped him? It’s not like he’s magic. He can’t enter and leave just by wiggling his eyebrows. He needs his controller to get in and out, the one he’s got in that fanny pack. If we take it away, he’s helpless.”
“We’d have to lure him back into The Build. What time is it?”
Liz looked at her watch. “3:24. When I was in the staging grounds, I’d never hear from him from about 3:00 a.m. until about 9:00 or 10:00. I think that’s when he sleeps.”
Jay was thinking fast. He felt full of purpose. He forced out of his head any thought that he and Liz might end up together. She was too old, she was too married, and—perhaps most importantly—she was too real. She didn’t belong in The Build. Hal had brought her back to punish her and to steal her brain. And Jay could help her get out alive.
“So we have about three more hours until he’s back in front of his computer. Colin, will you get the cordless? We have a call to make.”
The Diner
The room smelled pleasantly of maple syrup. It was still an hour before dawn, and the Morning Market belonged to another generation. It was the earliest Jay had ever been there. At lunch, the rest of Bickleton High was crowded around the tiny deli counter. Before dawn, two dozen millworkers sat at a single table, sipping coffee and speaking in low, gravelly voices.
They were all men, except for two gray-haired women, one fat and one thin, who plodded back and forth endlessly to the kitchen. Jay knew them all by sight, but not by name. He’d never really paid them much mind before. Now, he watched a man with a bushy mustache and a cowboy hat hold court at one end of the table. If Jay squinted, he looked like Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves. He was talking about the weather:
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