by Jeff Wheeler
I waved good-bye and bent my head between my knees, fighting unconsciousness. I lost and blacked out.
* * *
There were wires, and tubes, and something covered my face. I was too weak to pull it away. Dark metal. Plastic ... rigging? My hands felt thick and cumbersome and the ringing in my ears wouldn’t stop. I shook my head and giddiness spun me into the black again.
* * *
I woke up in bed. Gia stood over me, with Dad just behind her.
“He’s coming around,” she said, relief on her face.
“The doctor’s on her way,” Ma said from the bedroom doorway. “Oh, love, you’re awake!”
“Don’t crowd him, Rita,” Dad said. “The lad needs to breathe.”
“What happened?” I asked, still feeling faint.
“You passed out,” Gia said. I’d always teased her about the frown line between her eyes. It didn’t seem so cute when she was worried. “I couldn’t wake you ... I called your parents. Your dad helped me get you up here. How do you feel?”
“Weak ... hungry. I had the strangest dream.”
“I’ll get you some soup and bread, love,” Ma called, already on her way downstairs.
“I didn’t know you could dream while passed out.” Dad looked puzzled.
“It was horrible.” I leaned back into the pillows. “Frightening and claustrophobic.”
“It’s all right, bear.” Gia kissed me on the forehead. “You’re safe. You’re going to be fine.”
I closed my eyes for a while and wished Toshiko were here. Much as I loved my family, their fretting wasn’t helping. Toshiko would have ushered them all out and delivered remedies in her sensible, pragmatic way. Where was she? I fought tears, feeling miserable and pathetic. I wasn’t myself. This wasn’t right.
“The doctor’s here!” Ma called from below.
I struggled to haul myself upright, and the room spun a dance around my bed. No ... please ... not again ... Nausea crept up my throat and my consciousness dissipated once more. Gia’s anxious face was the last thing I saw.
* * *
Can you wake up in a dream?
That’s how it felt the second time; not as though I’d fallen into the sleeping awareness of a dream reality, but as though I’d regained consciousness and found myself somewhere else entirely. The ringing in my ears was louder this time and I plunged into claustrophobic panic. Disorientation fuzzed my brain as I sought my bearings. Everything looked dim, as if through sunglasses. Goggles. I pulled at them, but they remained in place, and my fingers felt nothing as I touched them. My hands weren’t my hands. My motions were slow and fluid, as though I was suspended in something. My heart fluttered in increasing terror as I flailed and yelled and tried to free myself, aware of nothing but the blank, all-consuming panic shoving out any rational thought.
After a minute or an eternity, I ceased my struggling, exhausted and breathless. I forced myself to calm, to breathe, to extend my senses and figure this out. The ringing wasn’t in my head, I realised. It sounded like some kind of alarm. I lifted my clunky hands in front of my face and saw they were encased in firm gloves. The backs looked like plastic robot hands, and the fingertips and palms were padded. My T-shirt and shorts had been replaced with a skintight suit. When I yanked off one of the gloves, it dangled from the sleeve by wires like a child’s mitten on a string. My skin looked pasty. With my fingertips free, I felt for the goggles again and discovered they merged with the suit, which covered my head. Only my mouth and nose were exposed. I scrabbled at the back of my neck, searching for a fastener that would release me from this inexplicable second skin.
I found it. A tiny concealed zip began under my chin and wound around my neck and down the back of the suit. Despite my trembling fingers, I managed to unzip the hood, peeling it back from my face and ridding myself of the clumsy goggles. I looked at them in bewilderment. Their surface resembled a screen rather than a clear lens, and there were more wires and exposed microchips on the inside.
I could see properly now, although my surroundings made no sense. The dizziness, worse than ever, didn’t help either. I was rigged up to some sort of mesh hammock, inside a black metal frame with wires and screens and tubes running along the inside. My feet were locked into boots connected with more wires to what looked like a sophisticated treadmill. To my left was an opening. Beyond it, I could make out a metallic floor and dusky, yellowish lighting.
I pulled off the other glove and twisted to work out how to free myself from the hammock contraption. Elastic clips joined it to the suit, so I unclipped them and managed to stand up in the weird, springy boots. My head spun and I clutched at the framework in order to remain upright. Something heavy hung at my side. I looked down and saw, to my horror, that I appeared to be attached to a large bag of my own waste. Had I slipped into some sort of coma? Was this a hospital? Repulsed, I tried to pull the bag away, but a sharp, gurgling tug in my gut dissuaded me. I had no idea how to disconnect the tubes entering the suit and my flesh beneath.
I swayed as nausea bulged up from my stomach. Just how ill was I, anyway? And where were the nurses who’d clearly been caring for me? No one had come at my panicked yelling, and that alarm was still ringing.
Still leaning on the frame, I freed my feet from the boots and stepped out through its opening. I emerged into a room that looked nothing like a hospital. The walls were the same dull metal as the floor and supported several banks of machinery. The dim yellow light came from a panel in the ceiling, and the incessant alarm emanated from a computer bank to my left. Directly opposite was a machine framework identical to the one I’d woken up in. Its opening faced me, and I could make out another patient suspended inside. At least, I hoped we were patients. My mind tried to suggest alternatives, but they left a frightening chill in the pit of my stomach and I pushed them away.
I no longer believed I was dreaming.
I turned to the alarm’s source. A red light blinked in time with the high-pitched beep. The display panel flashed an Urgent Message alert. I looked around, still half expecting someone to come in and take over. There was a door panel at one end of the room, but it remained closed. The effort to extricate myself from the mechanical structure had drained every last drop of my energy. I didn’t even have the reserves to walk the few paces to the door. I turned back to the display instead, and touched the screen.
The alarm stopped, although the light continued to blink. The message appeared on the screen, pale text against a dark background. I read it three times before it began to register.
Carlos, if you’re reading this, something must have happened to me. You need to do three things immediately. First, open the panel below this screen and remove one of the nutrient packs inside. Unhook the spent pack from your feeding tube and replace it with the new one. Second, repeat the procedure with the colostomy bags on the shelf below. Third, you’ll find a datacard secured to the inside of the panel door. Remove it, insert it into the slot below this screen, and return to your harness unit. Hook yourself up, and I’ll explain everything. I’m so sorry you have to face this alone. —T
My body shivered. The combination of fatigue, hunger, and bewilderment had dissolved my nerves and I wondered whether I was hallucinating. Feeding tube? I looked down and saw a nozzle protruding from my abdomen. Reminiscent of a hose connector, it was clearly designed to attach to something. I stumbled over to my contraption and saw a squat mechanism tucked behind the hammock mesh. A loose tube dangled from an empty bag attached to it. I must have dislodged the tube during my initial panic. The mechanism whirred softly, and I deduced it was a pump for pushing the bag’s contents into my digestive tract. I felt queasy.
T.
T ...
I didn’t want to think about it. A horrible, creeping certainty uncoiled itself from my stomach and tingled up my spine. My back was to the other unit. I told myself I was imagining the scent of decay that lay over the barren room. Dread seemed to permeate the air as I turned towards what I�
�d assumed was my fellow patient. With leaden feet, I approached the unit and looked in at the figure hooked up to a harness identical to mine. The goggles were in place, the gloves and skintight grey suit encased the body, but it hung limply in the harness, the mesh hammock loose around it. The stench of death clung to my nostrils and I gagged.
I tried to look away. I tried to tell myself the sunken cheeks and sallow flesh made her unrecognisable. I tried to believe her remains belonged to someone else, someone I’d never met and had no reason to mourn. But I knew. I knew as soon as I saw her. I knew when I looked through the dim screen of the goggles and put her features together, however lifeless and hollow. I’d known her face all my life.
I sank to the hard floor and let the pain take me.
Toshiko ...
I clutched my lank hair in my hands and wept, long and hard. I had no reserves to draw on, save the agony of grief.
* * *
The wave of sorrow receded and left me drained and aching. I had never felt weakness like it. Toshiko’s message flooded back to me, and I knew I had to meet my body’s needs before it failed me altogether. I crawled to the panel below the computer screen. Inside were stacks of pouches, fat with nutritious fluid. Below them were empty bags, ready to receive the fluid’s remnants after my intestines had processed it. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have food. Was there something wrong with my stomach? I felt the warm weight of the bag against my hip and supposed maybe there was.
Swapping empty and full bags was straightforward enough, though surreal. I wondered again just how long I’d been out cold and who had performed these surgeries. My brain was too hazy to decipher my predicament, but I needed answers. Had someone kidnapped me and Toshiko? What had happened to her? She’d clearly been alive when I got here, or she wouldn’t have left me her message.
It was time to fulfil the final part of that message.
I found the tiny datacard and inserted it into the slot. Returning to the harness contraption, I connected the feeding tube to the port in my abdomen and set about clipping myself in. I attached the hammock, pulled on the hood and goggles, and donned the gloves. I had no idea what to expect, but Toshiko’s instructions were all I had in this bizarre, alien environment.
The goggles darkened to opacity. A disorienting sensation washed over me, from my fingertips to my toes, with a dip of fresh vertigo. I think I passed out again.
* * *
I stood at Aunt Toshiko’s front door on a bright, sunny day. The intoxicating scent of her hanging baskets would have placed me there even if I’d had my eyes shut. I looked around. Was I home, safe, as if nothing had happened? The accursed blackouts were messing with my brain. The door stood open, as if inviting me in. I entered, expecting police or detectives.
But it was Toshiko’s voice that called to me from the garden.
“Carlos? I’m out here. Come through.”
I had to be dreaming. I walked through her cottage, as real and familiar as ever, and found her on the back patio, secateurs in one hand, a straw hat on her head, and a bonsai on the table before her. She turned to me and smiled.
“You made it.”
Emotion choked me. “You ... you’re here. You’re all right.”
Her expression saddened. She put down her cutters and came to me, wrapping her arms around my chest. Her head reached my chin, and I placed my cheek on her hair and hugged her.
She pulled away gently. “Come, sit with me. I have things to tell you.”
I sat on a patio chair and she took the one beside me. “I got your message. But I don’t understand how you’re here. You were ... I saw you.” My voice trembled at the memory and the discrepancy of her sitting with me now.
She took a breath, as if steeling herself. “I died. Didn’t I?”
“Yes, but ...”
“Carlos, I’m so sorry. I tried to protect you from all this, but I should have told you before now. I just couldn’t bring myself to shatter your world. And now I have to, and it breaks my heart.” Her eyes shimmered with tears. My belly was a knot of ice.
She gazed around her fragrant garden and caressed one of the bonsai’s gnarled branches. “This world—our world—is an illusion. It’s a simulated environment, a place I created for us to live. Everything you’ve ever known was designed just for you. Every moment of your life since toddlerhood has been spent inside a virtual reality. This reality.
“I built it. I’ve maintained it. I’ve kept our bodies healthy while our minds have lived here, experiencing a life we could never have had otherwise. I always knew you’d be in trouble if something happened to me. That’s why I set the alarm and coded the program to infiltrate your perceptions if I failed to come around at my weekly time. I wrote this program, the one we’re in now, to provide you with answers. I’m a simulation, Carlos. Until now, you’ve always interacted with the real me, just as I’ve interacted with the real you. But now I’m a message I left you in case you needed it.”
I couldn’t breathe. I could barely take in what she was saying.
“You’re not making any sense, Toshiko. You’re telling me, what, the world isn’t real? How can that be? I’ve lived in it all my life!”
She took my hand in that immediately calming manner she had. “I know you have. I designed it for that very purpose.” She paused. “Where did you think you were when you woke up?”
“What, when I found your message?”
“Yes.”
“I thought it was a dream. When I realised it wasn’t, I thought it was some kind of hospital, that maybe I’d been in a coma or something.”
“It’s not a hospital. It’s a room in the real world. Your body’s there right now. So is mine.”
My head was spinning again. I pulled my hand from hers and stood up to pace her lawn. The garden was a sensory banquet of colour and scent and birdsong. The grass felt springy under my feet. The air was soft and cool in my lungs. How could it be an illusion?
Yet the cold room in which I’d awoken, stripped of life and colour, had felt just as real. Its hard walls, blaring alarm, yellow light. The claustrophobic suit. The weight of my own waste against my leg. The sickly odour of death. I suddenly understood that if one was real and one designed, the designed one would be bright and safe and welcoming. If reality was bleak and harsh, what better way to escape it?
I turned back to Toshiko. Her expression was patient and sad.
“Why?”
She sighed and spoke in slow, measured tones. “You and I are all that remain of an extraterrestrial colony. Our parents were scientists who left Earth with two dozen others to found a satellite habitat to orbit and study Venus. I was a child when my family emigrated into space; you were one of the new generation born on board the space station that became our home. We established ourselves and thrived above the yellow planet for decades before a catastrophe destroyed us.
“Venus doesn’t have the protective magnetosphere of Earth, and of course it’s nearer the sun.” She took a deep breath and met my eyes. “A massive solar storm hit the planet and swept us out of orbit. It knocked out our communications, destroyed half our solar panels, and left us hurtling through space. We were helpless, adrift, with no means to contact Earth and no way to know how badly they had been affected by the storm. As a satellite, we had no long-range propulsion. Our power source was halved. We had to crowd into a fraction of the station’s living space to conserve energy.
“Some blamed the crowded conditions, others said our radiation shields had been damaged, and without the power to grow enough food we were certainly malnourished, but whatever the cause, illness took hold. Contagion spread. I managed to fight it off. You seemed to have a natural immunity and escaped it altogether.” Her voice faltered. “By the time it finished its rampage, we were the only two left alive. Me, a thirty-one-year-old programming engineer, and you, an eighteen-month-old boy at the very beginning of life. There was still no contact with Earth. I couldn’t maintain the station’s full systems on m
y own. I couldn’t face a blank, lifeless future, and I couldn’t consign you to one.
“So I adapted the station’s VR equipment and built onto its existing software to develop the most sophisticated program I’ve ever encountered. I programmed the surgical bots to fit us with neural implants and digestion tubes. I created us somewhere to live.”
I slumped back into my seat. Numbness crept over me. I didn’t know how to begin processing what she was saying. I cleared my throat and grasped the first coherent thought that came to me.
“What about Gia? And Ma and Dad? Are they on Earth, or in another colony, hooked up to other machines?”
Toshiko closed her eyes before answering. “No ... Carlos. I told you. Even if Earth escaped the brunt of the storm, we have no way to communicate with them.” She took my hand again. Hers was slender and warm. “Your family, my family, all of our friends and loved ones ... they’re part of the simulation. I wrote them. For us. So we could live normal lives and engage with other people. You and I are the only ones with physical counterparts.”
My insides felt as though they’d been plunged in freezing water. I couldn’t register Toshiko’s words. “Are you saying they’re not real?” My voice came out as a whisper.
A tear rolled down her cheek. “They’re as real as I could possibly make them. They’re as real as they are to both of us. I wanted you to have a family, Carlos. Parents to love and cherish you. I could have played that role, but ... I wanted you to know people of all ethnicities. I wanted to populate your world with as many kinds of people as I could, so you’d get to experience humanity. It was a sort of tribute to them too ... all those we’ve lost.”
I thought of everyone I knew. I’d never noticed it before. My parents—Latino. Gia—fair-skinned and freckled, with auburn hair. My best friend at school—tall, with dark skin. Toshiko—petite and Japanese. She’d made our world a memorial for everyone she’d known. A requiem for humanity.
But how could I go back, knowing it was all fabricated? How could I begin to accept that everything I’d ever known was an elaborate pretence?
