Sicora Online_The Sorting
Page 21
Veda heard again the needle spinning, the bee’s buzzing. She already knew. Amy was only confirming a truth, one Veda had known for some time. She might have known it since the preliminary—or since the day Dairy appeared. But some truths were nearly impossible to look at straight on. “They integrated her.”
“You mentioned that word before,” Amy said. “What the hell does it mean?”
“It means her mind was separated from her body, imported into the game,” Veda said. “They do it with clones all the time—you just don’t hear about it.”
“It wasn’t accidental?” Amy asked.
“No,” Veda said. “She didn’t get stuck or overstimulated. Nothing except a meeting with Mother ever stressed her out.”
Galen shifted on the seat. “She came to me, terrified, the night before it happened. She said she was in there for hours—”
“That’s days in Sicora,” Amy interjected. She might have been partially integrated, maybe as a test. Integrated in the same way Veda had been for a time after Issverold, her mind floating in the void. Was that intentional, or a weird symbiosis between her and the AI? In any case, it was a terrible half-existence—particularly for someone like Prairie.
“—and then she gave me the note for you. She could have left the trial then. I was stupid.”
“Why were you stupid?” Veda asked.
“I just let her go back in. I only told her to leave once.”
She shook her head. “It always takes at least three times with Prairie.”
“It was so important to her,” Galen said. She sensed that his face was in his hands now.
“You couldn’t have stopped her, Galen,” Veda said. “She didn’t have a choice about going back in. And she wanted to prove a point about us—about clones. We don’t have mothers or fathers, but we’re people. That was what she believed.”
“You’re referring to her in the past tense,” Amy said.
“That’s because I’m almost certain the Prairie we knew is gone,” Veda said. She pushed down the fizzing in her chest, her throat’s desire to close. “Her body, at least. And if she’s been in the game for the past year—”
“—twenty-four years,” Galen said. “She’s been inside for a quarter of a century.”
Amy sat back, balled her hamburger wrapper. “Well, that’s a fucking trip.”
Veda pressed her finger across the table in the shape of the note’s letters. Her sister had been inside Sicora for longer than she’d been alive. If they ever did find her, she might have forgotten Columbia City, the apartment, her job, even Veda. She didn’t know if they could ever put her back inside a real, corporeal body.
But none of that mattered.
“Why did she ask me to give you the note, Veda?” Galen asked.
She finished tracing the last letter: mayday. It was clear to her now. “Because I’m a clone, too. Because she always thought I was more capable than I gave myself credit for.” She slid her hand into her pocket, pulled the note out. She held it up, the flap slipped open to the braille lettering. “Because I love my sister, and she knew I would come for her.”
“Where do we even start?” Amy asked.
“We start on the inside,” Veda said. “You last saw her in Equity, right?”
“Right, but Sicora doesn’t repeat levels. At least, we’ve never seen her do it,” Amy said.
“So it’s not impossible—it just hasn’t happened yet,” Veda said.
“Okay, so how do we get back into that world?” Galen asked.
Veda set her cup on the table. “I have an idea. Of course, the only way to test it is to go back in.” She waited, listening. Beside her, Amy shifted in the booth. Across, Galen said nothing. “Are you with me?”
“Of course we are, dummy,” Amy said. “We were just waiting to hear this idea.”
Veda smiled, lowered her face. She felt a brief and familiar shyness before those words came back to her: Be brave. Be smart. And then she lifted her eyes, began to explain.
TO BE CONTINUED…
About the Author
S.W. Clarke is the author of the Sicora Online series. She’s a lifelong gamer currently living in Houston, Texas.
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