by A. L. Davroe
I sit up. I’m on a green lawn, in a huge garden. Lush rose bushes gush in full bloom all around me. White, red, yellow, and every color in between. Fat bumble bees, vibrant butterflies, and sparkling dragonflies flit from plant to plant. I hear water burbling nearby. I get to my feet wondering if this is a type of Utopia Zone.
I’m not in my warrior costume like before. Now I’m in a midnight-blue gown, one that looks like it belongs in Evanescence and from the looks of it? One I designed myself back in my second year at Paramount. I remember really liking this dress because I think it’s the first dress that actually drew some attention from the Elite attendees of my school.
Slowly, I walk between bushes. I lean down and examine a flower. It smells as delicate and feels as velvety soft as the bouquets of roses Gus used to sometimes buy for me in Nexis. The VR in this version is just as detailed and perfect, the sensory projections just the same.
I find the source of the sound of water. A lovely fountain set into a clearing in what I’m seeing is a geometric pattern to the rose garden. The stone of the fountain is as white as the marble in the Oracle’s temple. The statue from whose urn the water is flowing into the large stone basin is of a woman. My mother. At the base of the fountain, sitting with a book in his hand and a small teacup of something steaming, is my father.
He’s dressed in an old sort of outfit, something I remember seeing in Canal Town back in Nexis, although the color set for this is a somber black and white.
“Dad?” I ask.
He looks up, smiles. “Well hello, Ella.”
I swallow a fat lump in my throat. It’s so good to see the handsome Custom features of my father, to see those warm eyes and that sparkling grin. I take a step, ready to run to him, throw my arms around him. But I remember how I’d thought the Oracle was my mother and she wasn’t. She just knew me. And perhaps this Dad look-alike is the same. “Are you really him?”
He glances down at both his arms. “Last time I checked. But then, we’re never the equivalent of the bodies we’re given, are we? You’ve learned that this past year, haven’t you?”
Either this game is very clever, able to read my memories, or this man is actually my father. But how?
As if reading my thoughts, he says, “G-Corp has been able to download people onto the Main Frame since PA 135, but it was kept secret from the general public. They just… Copied and uploaded at will at various intervals throughout one’s life.”
I come closer to him. Sit beside him. It’s everything I can do not to lunge at him. “So, you’re really you.”
In answer, he reaches out to me and pulls me against him. A sob escapes me and I fling my arms around him, wrapping him tight, so tight that no one could pull me away if they tried.
“Oof, you’ve gotten strong.”
I ease up and, giggling, pull away. “Yeah, sorry. I’ve been working out.” I flex my arms to show my muscles.
He lifts a brow, impressed. “You? Working out?”
“I know, right? It wasn’t my decision, either. Meems practically forced me.”
His face grows grave. “Android boot camp. I can only imagine.”
I laugh again. I’m smiling so hard it hurts my face, but I can’t stop. “It’s so good to see you.”
He reaches out, tweaks my chin. “You, too.”
“Back up, Warren, I want to see her, too.”
Startled, I glance up at the voice that came from behind us. There’s no one there but the statue.
“You’d get a better view if you came down off that pedestal of yours and actually talked to your daughter like a grown-up, Cleopatra Drexel.”
To my utter dismay, the statue moves. She slumps, rolls her eyes, and lets out a sigh like the most dramatic teenage Aristocrat I’ve ever seen. Then, she abruptly drops her urn into the fountain. It splashes, making water slosh out the side of the basin so Dad and I both get soaked. Then she lifts her skirts, steps down off her pedestal, and walks through the water.
Wide-eyed, I gawp at her when she transforms stone-to-flesh as she steps over the lip of the basin. She shakes her legs like a discerning cat, drops her skirts, and smoothes them. “There. You happy?”
“Minus a wet behind?” Dad asks, leaning in and kissing her temple. “Very.”
Mom turns her gray eyes on me and draws away. “Let’s have a look at you.”
I feel myself straighten and stiffen with anxious tension as she steps around me, scrutinizing and examining with the eyes of a painter. I follow her with my gaze. Medium build with ample curvature and what I learned is called “meat on one’s bones” when I was living in Discoland, my mother cuts a voluptuous form. Like me, her skin is a medium-brown color, her springy curls about thirty hexadecimals darker. Although my skin is a few shades lighter and my hair a little darker and my body a little more lithe and leaner—from my Custom father, no doubt.
Our eyes are the same, our brows. I have Dad’s nose, her cheek bones. His mouth.
Finally, Mom straightens and looks to Dad. “She’s shorter than I hypothesized. There’s an obvious difference between her avatar and her Real World form. Do you think that’s going to matter to them?”
Dad shrugs.
“Matter to who?” I ask.
Mom blinks at me. “To the Disfavored, dear. They’ve come to know you one way, we don’t want them suspicious of you.” She crosses her arms, examines me again. “I am pleased with how well I did, though. They’re almost exactly the same.” She elbows Dad in the side. “See, I told you she’d lose those chubby cheeks of hers.” She leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “He wanted me to make you chubby.”
Dad rolls his eyes. “Oh for heaven’s sake, Cleo, don’t tell her that. She’ll be demanding Mods in seconds flat.”
“Of course she won’t. She’s changed, our Ella, haven’t you dear?”
“Um, I’m not sure I follow.”
“Of course you don’t,” Dad says. “No one has explained anything to you. Well then, come along. You’ll get a chance to be yourself in Redux for a while, see what your other self has been up to. Not something you get to do every day.”
“Other self?”
“He’s talking about your avatar.”
Dreading the implication of what he’s implying, I loop my hand around Dad’s offered arm and follow him through the garden and out under an arch that leads into Evanescence. As I glance back, I realize we’re in the location where the Imperial Garden is, but instead of the holographic garden there’s now a real one.
“You,” I begin. “You’re talking like a day hasn’t passed since you died.”
Dad stops short, blinks at me. “I’m dead?”
At my horrified jaw drop, he starts guffawing.
“Joking! Joking!” he howls, cackling.
“Oh, you’re awful,” Mom mutters. She looks to me. “We’re both dead, we know.”
“But… You’re talking like you know what’s been going on,” I reason.
“That’s because we do,” Dad says. “Or relatively. Whatever we can get from the Internetwork. We live in the system now.”
I open my mouth, feeling like I should somehow respond to that, but the reality of it is just too much to even question. Quent did say this was possible. He wasn’t kidding when he challenged me by asking if I’d bring my parents back if I could give them bodies. I really could do it. The thought is overwhelming.
The city is structured much like I remember it, except on the holo-screens which were flashing Persevere last time I was in the city, there is now my face, Dad’s face. It’s the posters from the Gaming House.
In Drexel We Trust.
Ella the Savior.
A group of children run past us on Citizen’s Way and they make some sort of hand signal to us as they pass. They run into the square, where a large statue of me has been erected, my foot planted on what looks suspiciously like President Cyr’s head.
“What is this?” I whisper.
“This is Redux,” Mom says. “So
rt of a Nexis 2.0.”
“2.0?”
“A better version.”
“Better is relative,” Dad says. “It’s a…well, I don’t want to say brainwash version. It’s just highly persuasive.”
I glance back and forth between the two of them. “And just what were you trying to convince these people?”
Mom blinks. “Were?”
“Yeah, were, because no one’s playing this game anymore, Mom. All the Disfavored have moved into the city.”
Her face explodes with joy and she claps her hands together. “Wonderful!”
“Wonderful?” I repeat. “Do you have any idea what the hell has just happened in Real World?”
The joyful faces of my parents fall a bit as they see my rage.
“Everyone is dead!” I scream. “Everyone in Evanescence is dead. The androids killed them all. The city has shut down, the nano-net has fallen, the Disfavored are doomed. It is not wonderful.”
My mother’s clasped hands slowly lower and fall to her side. “I-I don’t understand. That wasn’t in the plan.”
“Your plan? Whatever it was? It backfired.”
Mom plops down on the street. Dad crouches down beside her, pats her back. “What went wrong?” she wonders, her expression vexed.
“That doesn’t matter,” I snap, trying to hold on to my rage despite my overwhelming relief that my parents are, in fact, not evil genocidal maniacs. “What matters is how am I gonna fix the mess you two and Uncle Simon started?”
Dad’s head snaps up. “Simon? What did he do?”
“Oh nothing much,” I say sarcastically. “Only modified your virus to cause all the G-Chips to fail horribly and—”
“Simon,” Mom growls, interrupting me. “That rat bastard, he ruined the whole plan!”
“Plan? What plan?”
Dad looks up. “Ella, do you understand what the Anansi Virus was supposed to do?”
I squint at him. “Uncle Simon said it was to create a power outage.”
He nods. “Yes. The power outage would allow a small group of rebel infiltrators to gain access to the city.”
“Quentin said as much. He said they were supposed to assassinate the President.”
“They had two objectives. The first was to assassinate President Cyr. It was a risky task and I wasn’t fully onboard with it, but it was the only way we could get Kit to cooperate with us. The second was for the rebels to plant the Redux Program in the Main Frame while the power was down.”
I lean forward, despite myself. This is the first I’m hearing about the Redux Program being planted in the Main Frame. “What’s that?”
“It’s a hybridized version of this game,” Mom explains. “The Redux Program was polished and honed while it was being beta tested on the Disfavored. By the time the Anansi Virus was planted, the Program would be ready and it could be planted in the Main Frame so that the second protocol could take effect.”
“What was the second protocol?”
“A mass brainwash,” Dad explains. “A real one, via the G-Chips.”
I blink at him. “What?”
Mom says, “We were trying to overthrow the Aristocratic rejection of the Disfavored. We thought if we could get them to somehow psychologically accept the Disfavored, they might let them into the city. Or, at the least, give them a little more aid. Something. Have you seen the way those people live? Been to a Doll House?”
I swallow hard. This makes sense. Far more sense than any explanation up to this point. “The secondary protocol didn’t work because of Uncle Simon. He did something to the Anansi Virus, caused the chips to fry. I don’t know what he did or why. Maybe we never will. Either way, your Redux Program didn’t get a chance to happen at all.”
“That does explain some things,” Dad muses.
Mom nods. “Though, there had always been a risk of something like that happening.”
“Why didn’t you try to plant the Redux Program through Nexis instead?” I ask. “I mean, you could have just written the Anansi Virus so that it introduced the Redux Program as a piggyback program, right?”
Dad looks almost surprised I’d ask that. “Because it’s just as your mother says, there was risk involved. We didn’t want that weight on your shoulders.”
A scowl fights its way to the surface. “So it’s okay for me to pave the way for destruction, open the door for it, but not invite it in?” I demand. “It’s that fine of a line for the two of you?”
Mom and Dad glance at each other.
“Well,” I go on, “it didn’t happen the way you theorized and now things are incredibly messed up. So, thanks a whole bunch.” I turn and walk away from them. They let me go, perhaps because there is little they could say to hold me, and they both know it.
I head down Citizen’s Way. To either side of me, Disfavored and Aristocrat alike are living in harmony alongside each other. They all wave at me, like they know exactly who I am. A little girl even runs up to me and clasps her arms around my legs before her mother comes and apologetically pulls her away.
I grow more and more confused the farther I walk. This doesn’t seem like a game that would teach Disfavored to hate Aristocrats even more than they do. I turn it over and over in my head, but I can’t find a solution. Finally, I give up and catch the arm of a passing Disfavored man. “Excuse me.”
“Oh, Miss Ella,” he says, grabbing his cap from off of his head and grasping it between his two meaty hands. “What can I do for you?” He looks mildly anxious, like he’s afraid of me.
Circuits, what has my avatar been doing in this game?
I smile, trying to look reassuring. “Can you tell me, did you hate Aristocrats before you came to live in this city?”
He smiles at me. “Of course I did. As much as the next person in Kairos, I’m sure. Wanted every one of them dead.”
“So, why are you living in harmony with them, then?”
“That’s ’cause of you, of course.”
“’Cause of me?”
He nods, his brows indicating his perplexity at my apparent confusion. “Wouldn’t be the glue that holds us together otherwise, would you?”
I frown at him, more annoyed than anything at the lack of answers I’m getting. “Thank you.”
He nods and hustles away, glancing back at me once.
I turn around and return to the Imperial Garden. Dad’s sitting on a wrought iron bench that’s painted white, his head back and eyes closed as if he’s basking in the artificial sun.
“Dad?”
He cracks his eyes open, smiles. “More questions?”
Nodding, I cross my arms. “I’ve been trying to figure out the brainwashing thing. You said you honed the Program while the Disfavored were playing it, using them as a test population, right?”
He nods.
“So, you taught them to like the Aristocrats?”
“No. Not at first. We made them hate the Aristocrats even more.”
“But why would you need to do that? They already hated the Aristocrats,” I reflect, thinking about Gus being beaten to death for just becoming a Doll.
“Brainwashing via a program planted on the G-Chip isn’t the same as brainwashing a normal brain. The only way to fine tune the Program was to explore the full gamut of the human to hate and love. We used the Disfavored as the first batch of guinea pigs.”
“Guinea what?”
He waves his hand. “Test subjects.”
“So, you taught them to hate the Aristocrats and then live with them in harmony?”
“In so many words. When a Disfavored plays this game for the first time, they begin on the Exo-Dome level. They are taught to completely despise the Aristocracy, to live as part of a rebel movement to bring down the President and all the Domites. The game gives them incentives to destroy the Aristocrats, because they gain things that belong to the Aristocrats. Food, valuables, wealth, etc. However, there is a point in the game where everything turns quite badly for the Disfavored. He’s given an opportun
ity to join the Aristocrats inside of the dome. This will save the lives of him and those he loves. But he must learn to love and appreciate the Aristocrats, because they are the ones who keep him alive. He learns that to show cruelty and hate toward the Aristocrats will get him ejected from the dome and he will die.”
“That’s not learning to love. That’s control with fear.”
“At first, yes. But he learns over time that the strongest hate can be replaced with the strongest love—as the brainwashing is meant to do. The game greatly rewards players who excel at this turnaround.”
I’m quiet for a long moment, trying to wrap my head around what he’s implying. “But it’s wrong to manipulate them like that.”
“If you look back at human history, it’s no different than a thousand other similar situations. People chose to fold, to give up hate because it was somehow beneficial to them to try and do so. A generation or two later and everyone lives relatively happily.”
“You can’t be certain that’s really what it was like. Weren’t you the one who taught me that history was written by the victors?”
He narrows an eye at me. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you didn’t agree with our goals.”
“I don’t!” I growl. “I think it’s wrong to control people’s minds. It makes you no better than G-Corp controlling the citizens of Evanescence through the G-Chips.”
He takes a deep breath. “The G-Chip may have been the bane of your youthful existence, but eventually you would have come to accept that it was the only way to control the populace—to maintain peace. Humans are inherently destructive; they need to be controlled to some degree.”
I feel acid at the back of my throat. I’m so disgusted with what he’s saying, and yet, at the back of my logical brain, I know he’s right. My head and my heart don’t agree and I’m confused.
“Sometimes, people don’t know what is best for them. Most times, they want to be told. They don’t want to worry, they don’t want choice.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to step up and assume control for them. The Disfavored played your game in order to be free, not to have their brains tinkered with so you could fulfill your awful idea of a utopia. You’re not God, Dad.”
