A sob rises in her throat. “I watched you die,” she says. “The worm smashed you. Back on Paradox. What happened?”
He shakes his head, a tiny motion, but she sees it. “I’m not dead … yet.”
“How did you get back?” Ana asks. “Are you okay?”
As if in answer, Todd breaks out coughing. Ana looks at the display above his bed, which shows a series of numbers and graphs. Moving instinctively, she reaches up and touches a button on the far right side. The display changes to an ultrasound-looking readout, and Ana gasps. It’s the image of a brain. Todd’s brain.
Below the image is a line of text.
Scope of infection: 81.3%
As she watches the number shifts: 81.5%
A bubble of blood starts in the corner of Todd’s mouth, and Ana pulls the edge of the sheet up to wipe it.
“So much for our plan, huh?” Todd says.
Ana just shakes her head, trying to make sense of all the chaos inside her mind. This infection is killing everyone in the world, and now it has its grip on Todd, too.
“You don’t remember anything, I know,” Todd says. “I’m sorry. I wish I had”—he coughs—“told you more.”
Ana takes his hand and squeezes it. “I know a little bit,” she says, wishing she never had to let him go again, wishing she could will him back to health or strength or whatever he needs to fight this thing. Can you even fight this thing? “I know about the disease, and that everyone’s dead or dying. The papers say there’s no cure. Is that true? There’s no
hope?”
Todd smiles sadly at her. “Hope,” he whispers. “That’s always the starting point, isn’t it? Before everything starts to go wrong. It all begins with hope. A new planet, a new world. Paradox. Where it all began.”
“Paradox,” she says. “We were there.”
“We were,” Todd agrees. “But not the way you think. Not the way you remember.”
“What? I do remember it all—the Dead Forest, the rocket.” She swallows. “Ysa and Chen …”
Todd sighs. “It really is out there, you know,” he says. “Paradox, the planet. But that wasn’t it. That wasn’t Paradox at all.” He looks right up into her eyes. “What we were in, all of that stuff you remember—that was the simulation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The sim was designed as a training device,” he says. “An exact replica of the planet, reconstructed based around the specifics of the first mission, APEX1. Right down to the rockets and weapons and nasty gray jumpwear.”
Ana can still feel the tearing pain in her shoulder, can hear the roar of a monster with breath as sweet as death itself, can see the twin suns, the jagged mountains, the sky and the sand and the sea.
“It wasn’t real? None of that was real?”
“It was real,” Todd says. “Just … inside your mind. Your body was lying in the bed in the room next to this one, while you were exploring Paradox. Virtually.”
It’s too much to take in. And yet … Ana rotates her shoulder again, touches her unmarked skin—no scabs, no wounds, not a single mark. She frowns as she looks at her scarred hands.
“But why—”
“We volunteered for this, you know,” Todd says. “The PX37 trials, that was the official name.”
The name tickles something in her brain. Where has she heard that term?
Of course. Jackson. Bailey. PX37. The trials. Ana thinks back to Bailey’s experiences: Jackson demanding results from the testing. The screened-in area where the subjects were lying. The trials, which were still active after everyone else was dead or dying.
What had Ana’s letter said, way back at the start of it all when she first woke up in the rocket? Your body is its own record. She’d never imagined it would be so literally true. Her body, their bodies, in the lab. On Earth. Monitored, measured, recorded.
They were here all along.
“So we never even left Earth?” she says slowly. There’s something in this thought that doesn’t fit, somehow.
Todd’s body shakes in a deep cough, then he says, “There’s more to it than that. This trip was a simulation. But we did travel to the planet, the real one, over a year ago. APEX2. The second manned space mission. We were there—me and you and Chen and Ysa. You don’t remember any of this, do you?”
She doesn’t. But in some deep place, she knows that it’s all true, everything he’s saying.
Todd sighs. “Everyone was so excited for us, all the other ExtraSolar kids, the teachers—they were all jealous too, of course. They threw us the biggest send-off party. We were launching into space, real planetary travelers! But then it all went so wrong. We’d only been there a few months when mission control had us go looking for what was left of APEX1. Not that there was much to find aside from their remains. …But shortly after that trip was when the sickness began.
“We came back, but the disease came back with us. People outside our quarantine started dying, and finally everyone realized the bug was spread by thoughts or memories, brainwaves. But the four of us, we never got sick. There were traces of the Vermiletum protein in our brains, but it wasn’t virulent. At first they thought it had to do with us being young, but then plenty of other kids started dying. Their last theory was that it had to do with being on the planet when we were so young. Formative minds, I don’t know. Somehow it protected the four of us. It couldn’t help anyone else, of course.”
Ana sits suddenly upright. The four of us? She registers the hanging plastic strips on the far side of Todd’s room, identical to the ones through which she entered. “Hold on a second,” she tells Todd. She puts down his hand and starts around the end of the bed.
“Wait,” Todd says. “Ana!”
She pushes through the plastic strips and finds another bed, another monitor, a spaghetti-tangle of wires. And in the bed … at first she can’t tell who it is, can’t even believe there could be a person under all that blood. But then she notices wispy strands of yellow hair. Ysa.
She pushes through the plastic strips to the next room, eyes blurring with tears, already knowing what she will see. It’s Chen, his dark spiky hair matted with blood. Ana notices a puckered burn scar covering the left side of his face. Just as her scarred hands didn’t show up in what she now knows was the simulation, apparently Chen’s burn mark didn’t, either. And why not? If she had something to do with designing her avatar, why not create an idealized version?
Seeing Chen’s scar now, Ana can’t help but wonder if it came about from whatever experience Chen was remembering in his final moments. Not the fire, he’d said. She shudders.
The display above Chen’s head flashes red, the percentage readout showing 100%. Ysa’s showed the same.
But something isn’t making sense. Todd said that the four of them were supposed to be immune to the disease. So how is it that Chen and Ysa seem to have died of it? And something else. Ysa and Chen died in the simulation. Or at least … she thought they did.
Could it be that what actually killed them was the disease attacking their bodies, back here in this lab? She thinks of the way Chen slipped on what clearly was solid ground, falling into the crater. She thinks of Ysa, sucked under by sands that Todd swore were only two feet deep. Was something warped inside the simulation? Did something in there go horribly wrong?
Ana turns and pushes back through the plastic strips. She needs more answers.
EIGHTEEN
“Todd,” Ana whispers, returning to his side.
Todd’s eyes fly open and he sits bolt upright, circling her wrist tightly in a shaking grasp. “Just don’t leave me alone in the dark, will you? That’s the one thing I—” He breaks off and begins to tremble violently. Heart sinking, Ana realizes that though he’s looking right at her, he’s not seeing her at all. His eyes are vacant and glassy.
She glances up at his display: 83.9%
“Hey,” she says, scooting closer, loosening his hand from hers and trying to lower him back down on the bed. But
he pulls out of her grip and scoots backward. He starts twisting his head from side to side, as if scanning the room for something vitally important. “Where have you all gone? I’ve been in my hiding spot for ages, and nobody’s found me. But now—”
Ana’s heart is racing. What can I do?
All she can think of is the way Ysa and Chen fell into these hallucinations—these memories—and never came out. She leans forward and presses her face against his. “Please, Todd,” she whispers. “Come back to me. Don’t go like this. Please.”
His body stills and then, and then—his breath catches. “Oh, Ana,” he whispers, and crumples against her. “I was back there … I was …”
“Shhh,” she says. “It’s okay. You’re okay now. It’s not real.”
His body is still shaking, but his eyes are clear. She props up his pillow and helps him lean back against it. A few drops of blood leak from one nostril, and Ana rubs them gently away. “It’s the Vermiletum doing this, just like with the others,” he says. “You have to keep me talking, Ana. Ask me questions. As long as I’m focusing on you and using my mind, I’m okay. It’s when I’m alone that I start to drift. …”
“Okay,” Ana says quickly. Questions, she can do. “Tell me, why did we go into the sim? What did we hope to find in there?”
“New information,” Todd says. “Something, anything, we’d missed when we were actually on the planet. To help us crack the disease.”
“Experience, discover, survive,” Ana whispers, thinking of the instructions she found in the rocket hatch. “But Todd, it’s only a simulation. What new information could we hope to learn from it?”
Todd shakes his head weakly. “The sim is more than just code. It’s a real-time experience shaped moment by moment through satellite feeds and probes and the new ParSpace transmission tech. Even user memory affects the grid. It’s an immersive and dynamic construction, cutting-edge stuff.”
“So by going back to the source of the disease, we hoped we could uncover some type of cure?”
Todd nods. “Or something to lead us there. Anything that would help. We were supposed to follow the path we took after APEX2 landed on the planet. Submerge, gather the information, and get out. What could be simpler? Although Chen and Ysa took some persuading; they didn’t want to go back, not even in the sim.”
“They seemed so familiar with the planet,” Ana whispers. “No wonder. They hadn’t been there all along, like I thought—they had been there before, and they were back. Only … not back. Since it wasn’t real …” She trails off, her mind tangling into knots, confusion still threatening to overwhelm her. “So we all made this decision to go back in, really?”
“We did. But you … well.”
Ana looks up. “What about me?”
“You took it a step further. The simulation is rooted in the mind. It builds around existing constructs, forms around what the user already knows, inserting new and updated information as needed. You thought—what if the information we’re looking for is small, or if it’s something easily overlooked? What if the sim doesn’t overwrite or update properly, and we miss it?”
“But if someone was a clean slate …”
“Right,” Todd agrees, coughing and shifting in place. “If someone went in with absolutely no baseline, a first-timer, they’d get the most accurate, up-to-date rendering of the place. The idea was for you to do the route alone, just using the map as your guide. With no preexisting expectations, you figured you would see more details, especially any new details.”
Ana’s mind is reeling. It’s almost more than she can take in.
“Honestly?” Todd continues. “I think maybe you had other reasons, too, for wanting the memory wipe. That this was just part of it. But in any case, Pritchett agreed. They were so desperate they would have tried anything. Our ‘trial’ was a twenty-eight-hour stretch, a half cycle of what goes for daylight on the planet—Torus’s sunrise to sunsmeet. Zero hour was the auto-eject. Meanwhile they could monitor our vitals and see everything we did.” He closes his eyes, then opens them, looking directly into hers. “We got ready to go in, and you took the wipe. Surgical amnesia. Boom.”
“Wait a minute, though,” Ana says. “You had amnesia, too. How come you remember all this and I’m still blank? How did you get it all back?”
“No,” he says, glancing quickly away. “I didn’t get the wipe at all. I lied about that. I’m sorry.”
“What are you talking about? Then why did you tell me you did?”
“I just … wanted you to feel more at ease. It seemed to make sense at the time. Then with the worm after us, it made sense to ditch the original solo plan and stick together. And once I’d started, I had to keep going with the amnesia story. For the sake of the mission, you know, to preserve the original experiment.”
Ana can tell right away that there’s something he isn’t telling her. But one thing’s definitely true—Todd never had amnesia. And if he lied about that, what else was he faking? She has a flash of orange sunlight playing across his hair, kindling it gold and copper. She shakes her head, horrified that she can no longer even trust her own memories, sparse though they are—it was all make-believe, all in my head … in more ways than one!—and pulls herself back to the present.
Todd groans softly and Ana sees, to her horror, blood gathering in his left ear. Above his head, the readout shows 85.3%. His back jerks suddenly and he starts flapping his hands in front of his face. “No! Don’t let it come any closer! LET ME GO!” His back arches and Ana throws herself on top of him, heart pounding, steadying his face with her two hands.
“Todd,” she cries, “keep fighting it. Keep talking. Come on! Tell me about the disease, Todd—the new mutation. Vermiletum-V. Is that what finally broke through our immunity?”
“No,” Todd says weakly. He’s back. For now, at least. “We went into the sim clean. We all carried the disease, of course, but it was inactive. What are you doing on top of me?”
Ana laughs shakily, rolls off, and scoots next to him on the bed. “What do you mean the disease was inactive? We were immune? That doesn’t make any sense, unless … The only new variable is the simulation. Maybe there was something new there. Something that reversed the immunity, made us susceptible?”
Todd’s nose is bleeding again, and she sees a trickle starting from his left ear. “Something was there, all right,” he says. “The worm. We went and landed on Paradox after all these millions of years, digging around the worm droppings, and we set those killer spores loose and brought them back to Earth and now there’s no way to stop it!
“Paradox.” He laughs bitterly. “A fully habitable planet down to the oxygen in the air and water under the ground. Even the land formations! And then? It turns out to be not only uninhabitable but downright malignant, since it comes equipped with a mystery bug that kills everybody who sets foot there.”
“So the worm is the new variable,” Ana says. Her mind is working and she’s suddenly seized by an urgent sense of something she might almost figure out if she tried hard enough. “Let’s think about this, Todd. You said the simulation is shaped not only by satellite feed but also by our minds, right? Our memories? Okay, so Vermiletum lives in the brain’s memory center. And going into the sim is like going directly into our own brains … Do you think we brought Vermiletum into the sim with us?”
Todd’s eyes narrow, then widen in realization. “You mean the worm in the sim might be a physical manifestation of the disease in our minds? I don’t know.”
“And what about the disease itself? Think about Ysa and Chen. They shouldn’t have died in that simulation. The Vermiletum must have been warping the land formations, messing with our minds—not to mention pumping in those fear attacks, just like all the other victims had in the real world.” Just like you’re fighting off right now, she thinks, and her heart breaks a little more.
But Todd is nodding. “It makes sense. Somehow going into the simulation reversed our immunity and activated the disease.
We all caught it. Except for you.” He coughs again.
“Except for me,” Ana agrees. “And I think I know why: the memory wipe. Think about it: on the mountain, when the worm had us trapped in front of the cave, it ignored me, went right by me. Remember that? I thought it was chance, or lack of peripheral vision. But what if it was actually my lack of memory?”
“And when we first met, when I pulled you out of the crater?” he asks.
“What if it wasn’t tracking me at all that time? What if it was after you?” She shakes her head, wrings her hands together. “What if it couldn’t sense me at all? Maybe being wiped actually preserved my immunity!”
Todd is shaking his head. “Not for long, though. Don’t you see, Ana? You started out blank, but you can’t stay that way. You can’t live without making memories.”
Memories. Ana thinks about the little shreds of herself that she’s gathered since first waking up from the wipe. Oddly, some of the first—and clearest, strongest—ones weren’t even hers, they were Bailey’s.
Oh.
The memory strands suddenly make perfect sense. While Ana’s mind was connected to the sim, Bailey’s disease-amplified brainwaves found her. Were they drawn to Ana in particular because of her wide-open, empty mind?
“You’re right,” she whispers.
Todd looks up at her so sadly. “Everything you do, every passing moment, you’re forming new memories. If your theory is right, then the more time passes, the more susceptible you are.”
Just then, as if to underscore his words, a cough bubbles up in Ana’s chest. It’s wrong, that cough, and when she pulls her hand away from her mouth, it’s sticky with blood. Todd’s right. The memory wipe didn’t preserve her immunity; it just delayed it. She just took longer to develop the infection.
Frantically wiping her hand on her jeans, she glances at Todd’s display monitor: 87.2%. What percentage would her own screen show if she were still connected? How far along is her infection, just now starting to show symptoms?
Paradox Page 13
