Red

by Ryan Rinsler

  “This is us,” said Mana, pointing to a large gas car in the center of the parking lot.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a P.O.S. is what it is.”

  The heavy door creaked as it opened, and Connor jumped in quickly. He immediately smelled leather — real leather, the seat creaking and squeaking as he sat down. Mana slowly dropped himself into the driver’s seat.

  “My host isn’t as young as he used to be,” he said, closing the door. He turned the key and the whole car start to shake until eventually the engine started, and as they set off Connor couldn’t help but remember the fury and excitement of Red’s Cadillac. I wish I’d had more time there, he thought. Now it’ll never be the same.

  He watched intently as the world passed by, old gas cars everywhere, police sirens in the distance. He pictured how he felt as he watched from Red’s car on their way to the warehouse — the overwhelming awe of such a living, breathing city. Here he was again, in this environment, but this time it was different. In Red’s world he was admiring what the Silk engineers had accomplished, wishing he’d experienced a world just like the one they had created. Now, here in Detroit, almost a hundred years in the past, he was seeing it with different eyes. This is real. This is the real world.

  “Do they know? The hosts I mean. Did he know you were going to take him over?” he asked, pointing to Mana’s torso.

  “We have an arrangement,” replied Mana. “We make contact and they prepare.”

  “Is that what they do for Pure Reality?”

  “Have an arrangement?” asked Mana, with a tone of sarcastic disbelief. “No, no, they don’t suffer the burden of our moral standing, put it that way.”

  “Do they know about it? At the time, do they know they’ve been taken over?”

  They turned off the main road and into a residential area, passing row after row of generic houses.

  “Like I said, we have an arrangement.”

  “You know this area?” asked Connor, noticing Mana wasn’t following any kind of map.

  “I’ve been here many times,” he replied with a laugh. “Patience, Connor, the answers are coming.”

  18

  The front door of a modest semi-detached house opened, and in the doorway stood a tall woman, maybe mid-forties, very strange librarian-esque hair, and brown clothes.

  “Connor, I would like you to meet the most amazing person I know. Dr. Rachel Mura.”

  He shook her hand and smiled. Her eyes gave a flash of excitement as they flicked to Mana and back to Connor, and she smiled enthusiastically.

  “I’m excited to meet you, Connor,” she said in a beautifully soft and deep voice. “Here, take a seat,” she said, showing him into the living room. “There’s much to talk about.”

  He sat on a lounge chair, the rough, felt-like material itchy to the touch. Placing his strange plastic briefcase down next to him, he had a look around. The decor was much the same as the hotel room — garish to the point of nauseating, as though the decorator had gone out of their way to choose the most random and conflicting set of colors and patterns imaginable.

  “Coffee?”

  “I’ll do it!” said Mana. “You get talking.”

  “I like what you’ve done with the place,” said Connor, attempting to sound genuine.

  She laughed as she sat down. “I don’t know,” she said. “I kind of like it.”

  She was very particular with the way she pronounced words. There was no laziness in the way she spoke, not like him or anyone else he would generally speak to for that matter. She instantly appeared highly educated, and Connor was excited to hear what she had to say.

  “I had to wake Lawrence, um, your host, an hour after he went to sleep,” said Mana as he entered with two mugs of coffee. “This stuff should help. Back when coffee was real.”

  Connor smiled. Having drinks hand-delivered by the boss, he couldn’t help but feel like the golden child on his first day in a new company that he was expected to get back in the black. It didn’t sit well with him, but still, it was better than his first time in the bunker. The animosity and hostility he’d experienced in the mess hall still gave him anxiety when it crossed his mind. He took a sip of much-needed coffee.

  “Doctor Mura is the greatest mind we have,” said Mana. “Everything I told you on our first meeting was just regurgitated from what this wonderful human being has told me, only far less eloquently. I’ll leave you now. Connor — try and absorb as much as you can. There is still a lot you need to know.”

  “Where to begin...” said Rachel, removing her cardigan and sitting down.

  “So she is a host? The person I’m looking at now,” he asked. “I mean, you’re not from this world?”

  “No, I’m from the same timeline as Mana. I came here to talk to you, to give you some information and important guidelines when traversing the sill.”

  “The sill?”

  “The threshold between your world and ours. It’s more dangerous than you know, and it’s imperative you know the basics before we go too far down the line. We don’t want any accidents.”

  “OK, well, I’ll do my best to take it all in.”

  She smiled.

  “What is it?”

  “I’ve never seen him but you seem markedly different to what I’ve heard. I’d like to meet your personality with his face, just to see what I’d feel.”

  “Well, I’m also looking forward to meeting him so I can see what that feels like.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She opened her mouth to speak but seemed to change her mind. “Let’s get started. Now you have access to our world via Nolan’s equipment, there are several things you need to know. Some small things, some big things. One very big thing.”

  Connor held his breath. His cheeks tingled with anxiety for a moment as he watched her face change from friendly to serious, as though she were searching for the right thing to say.

  “What is it?”

  “I imagine you’ve been wondering what that device is that Mana is making you carry around with you?”

  He looked down at it. There wasn’t much to it, just a black box with a handle on the top, a clasp under the handle keeping it closed.

  “I had, actually.”

  “Do you remember when you came to see us, and you used Kyle Singer as the host? Well he had something in his pocket. The same thing that Mana told you about when you jumped into the Silk Gala as Sean.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  “You remember the device?”

  “Yeah it was like a small box with a few buttons on.”

  “It’s called a Primer. This device you have by your side is one of those also. It’s bigger and more cumbersome because the technology here is not as developed, so we can’t make them quite as small. Have you ever learned what it’s for?”

  “No, Mana never told me what it was, he just said it was really important.”

  “This is the most important thing you will carry while you are here,” she said. “And whenever you jump. You need to guard this, and every Primer, with your life.”

  “OK.”

  “You need to guard that with your life, Connor,” she said purposefully, leaning forward, “because your host’s life depends on it.”

  What? He looked down at the innocuous device. “How?”

  “When a user connects to a host, what you are doing is essentially hijacking every nine in ten synapses in the host’s brain, and using them to basically control every aspect of their body, from movement to senses.”

  “And that’s a lot, right? Nine in ten?”

  “There are hundred trillion synapses in the average human brain and you, right now, are in control of ninety nine trillion of your host’s.”

  She paused and took a deep breath.

  “Here is the very big thing I told you was coming, now listen carefully. The consequence of connecting to an unprepared host, is that th
e host, once the user has disconnected, will not survive the event.”

  He blinked slowly, and became conscious of his breathing as he tried to digest what she just said. “They, uh—”

  “Every host,” she continued, seeing Connor struggling and deliberately interrupting, “that Silk Corporation connects to via their Pure Reality program, is an unprepared host.”

  “So… wait, so when I connected to Red, he was a real person who would have died anyway even if I wasn’t shot?”

  “Red was your character in Pure Reality?”

  He nodded.

  “Then yes, he would not have survived after you had disconnected.”

  “So Pure Reality chooses someone, some host, and just connects to them without them knowing, and then even if the person playing the simulation doesn’t actually die, they just leave and get on with their lives and the host they connected to… dies?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And they know this? Silk Corp? They know what happens?”

  “Oh yes, of course they know this. They also make damn sure nobody else does, as you can see. This device,” she said, pointing to the Primer, “is in constant contact with the brain of the host to help keep it as intact as possible.”

  “A hundred trillion synapses?”

  “Well, it’s actually only a tiny percentage of that which needs to be taken care of by the Primer,” she said. “Once the user has disconnected, and this small amount of data has been restored by the Primer, the rest of the brain is capable of repairing itself and getting pretty much back to normal.”

  He held his forehead in his hand, now absolutely conscious of the brain just millimeters from his fingertips.

  “Now you understand why it is so important.”

  “I kinda wish you hadn’t told me about it,” he said, his hands trembling as he slid it closer to him. “Now I’m terrified of losing it or breaking it.”

  “As long as it’s within about twenty meters of your location then it will be fine.”

  He looked aimlessly around the room trying to take this information in, all the while contemplating the implications of what they were doing at Pure Reality. “Wait, they have thousands of people in the simulation every month! So each one of the people they become dies?”

  “Every one.”

  “And… and how do they die?”

  “The autopsy report would show a brain hemorrhage.”

  He placed his hands on the side of his head. “This is too much.”

  “Take a moment,” she said in her soothing tone. Connor picked up his coffee and took a few thoughtful sips, his hands shaking so much the coffee danced around in the mug as he tried to drink.

  “As if to pile on the weight even more,” she continued, “There are thousands of people per month entering Pure Reality in just your world. Multiply that by infinity and you are closer to the magnitude of the problem.”

  “And, why?” he asked, feeling rage well up inside him. “Why are they doing this?”

  “The Pure Reality program was designed to explore the human mind. The best way for their researchers to extract the most information was to examine human brain activity under stress, excitement, tension, the moment before death. For them, they killed a lot of birds with one stone by developing Pure Reality.”

  “But why? What’s their end goal?”

  “His end goal was one thing — control. You’ve already come into contact with the result, albeit only briefly, last time you were here. Nobody knows the complete truth behind how or why they do it, how they control people, but we are slowly connecting the dots.”

  “And what do you know?”

  “Well, at the moment we only have two dots. One dot is that they know the intricate workings of the human brain, even down to a subatomic level. The second dot we have is their NanoTech program.”

  “NanoTech?”

  “This was another area of their research and development they kept under wraps.”

  “So, they’re like microscopic robots?”

  “Yes, well, nanoscopic. To give you some idea, the average diameter of a human hair is around 75,000 nanometers. The smallest NanoBot we know of is around three hundred.”

  Connor sat back. “Three hundred thousand?”

  “No, three hundred. Silk are developing at an alarming rate, and our research team is, well, small isn’t really the word. There’s only so much we can find out. Couple our limited resources with the fact our members are under constant attack and you’ll see why it’s difficult to progress with our research.”

  “But you’re safe in the bunker, right?”

  “For now, yes, but not all research can be done in the confines of an underground bunker, you must understand.”

  “And what about the world I’m from? Does that have these NanoBots?”

  “You remember Dr. Chen, yes?” she asked.

  “Stanley?”

  “That’s him. The intel we have from him is that they do have a NanoTech division, which we know has developed some form of NanoBots for the medical sector, but as for the way they’ve applied them here? No idea.”

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “Well, he was in a rather similar position to you, albeit on a far less grand and terrifying scale. Dr. Chen in our world was ultimately responsible for the final development of the NanoTech hardware that Silk used to, for want of a better term, take over the world. The Stanley you know, the one in your timeline, well, once he found out he separated himself from that and has been helping the resistance ever since.”

  Connor nodded. “He felt an obligation.”

  “He got out as soon as he learned of his involvement. He risked everything then, and he risked everything getting you to us in the first place. We all have a lot to thank him for.”

  “Is that why the world I’m from isn’t like yours? Because he stopped being involved in the NanoTech?”

  “No, the reason for that is one that we all would like to know, and there’s only one person who knows the answer.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You.”

  19

  “Quick, give me a pen,” called Connor as he woke suddenly in Jacob’s house. Jacob reached for a pen and paper from a nearby desk and handed it to Connor, who stood up and began quickly making notes. “659… 11…”

  There was silence in the room for thirty seconds while he scribbled frantically, until finally he dropped the pen and rested back down onto the bed.

  “Everything OK?” asked Jacob.

  “Yeah, I think so.” He turned to Matt who was fast asleep on a chair. Nolan was sat on the floor messing with the Seeker device. “What time is it?”

  “Just past eleven. Do you want anything?”

  “Sugar. Anything with sugar,” he said, holding up his quivering hands. Jacob left the room and came back with a juice drink and a chocolate bar.

  He gulped down the drink and guzzled the chocolate, barely taking a breath. “I need to go to bed,” he gasped, wiping his mouth.

  The next morning he woke with a jolt as the cockerel shouted him awake. For a few moments he struggled to determine where he was, having woken violently from a troubled dream. The daylight seeped through the gaps in the curtains and the birds were in full song, calming him as he lay back down in the soft white sheets.

  I wish I could forget. I wish I could go back just two months and lie here with no worries. He had a long road ahead of him and there was no turning back. But would I want to go back? Back to that life? Back to normality? This change in his life wasn’t quite at the level he’d been anticipating.

  As he made his way downstairs he could hear chatting in the kitchen, and as he entered he saw the three of them sitting around the breakfast table, eating.

  “I didn’t want to wake you,” said Jacob as he jumped out of his seat. “Here, take a seat, I’ll get you some coffee.”

  Connor sat down and rubbed his eyes.

  Matt stared at him while chewing slowly. “So? How’d it go
?”

  “It goes deeper than I thought,” he replied, croakily. “It’s, umm… I dunno. I’m going down the rabbit hole a bit.”

  “One step at a time,” said Jacob, returning to the table. He placed a big mug of coffee in front of Connor and sat down. “Let’s have something to eat for now, shall we?”

  Connor took some toast and slowly buttered it, taking a sip of coffee every minute or so. “I feel like I’ve been hit by a Gyro.”

  “You look like shit, bro.”

  Nolan sat with a half-eaten piece of dry toast in front of him and a full glass of milk.

  “Are you OK Nolan?” asked Connor.

  The only response he gave was a quickening of breath as he stared at him. Connor rolled his eyes. “One day,” he said under his breath. “There’s a lot we need to do,” he said to Matt. “Well, you and Nolan. You need to work together.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “At the moment we can’t connect to any world with a Silk Corporation in. They have security apparently.”

  “They can through Pure Reality.”

  “Yeah ‘cos it’s Silk connecting to Silk. We’re basically going through a back door and they have, umm… a… ummm....”

  “A firewall?”

  “Yeah that’s it. How’d you know?”

  “Basics, bro.”

  “Well, whatever it is, Mana seems to think you can hack it. With Nolan’s help.”

  “Are you joking, bro? That stuff he writes looks like Intercal!” He laughed loudly and even got a chuckle from Nolan. Connor was as confused about their reaction as he was about what he’d actually said.

  “It’s either you or me buddy,” he said.

  “Or me,” said Jacob with a grin.

  “I can have a go, man, but don’t hold your breath.”

  “An infinite number of universes are screwed if you don’t.”

  Matt nearly choked on his coffee. He gathered his laptop and accessories and stood up. “Come on, Nolan, let’s get to it,” he said with a huff, grabbing a few more pieces of toast and a banana from the middle of the table. The two of them left the kitchen, Nolan grasping at the trail of wires dragging behind Matt.