by Sarah Harian
Reprise believes that the Division of Judicial Technology was collecting data on us—data that required facing our sins in the wild—judgment and amped survival instincts. I take a moment to try and see through the eyes of a high-level engineer, and what they would have seen watching us in the midst of our simulation.
Four of us fell in love way too quickly. Stella went crazy. Gordon got the power trip he always wanted. I became more violent—blood-thirsty even.
I glance to Casey, hard at work over the stove. Casey—from the beginning, when he held me up by my neck and threatened me, to the end—it was like he learned to separate himself from all of that pent up anger.
Then again, I see him in a light that makes me biased.
I turn back to Wes. “So how the hell do I get inside that Vault and find out?”
Wes grins. “We start training today.”
***
Training. Not like training for a marathon. Not like training for a job. Piper was clever in not telling me what the project in the woods was when I asked, probably because she knew I’d freak out.
We have to snowshoe to the construction site. Maliyah, Piper, and Wes lead the way as Casey and I walk behind them. He squeezes my hand, and I wonder if he’s as nauseous as me.
When the trees clear, we walk into a frozen tundra. The land is barren for a mile at least, and on either side of us are a series of vehicles, cabins, and portable shelters.
Reprise.
We can’t be more than a mile away from the base, and it’s insane to think they’ve been here all along in their little snowy community, working in the cold. Handfuls of hackers dressed in arctic gear walk to and from portables. Others snowshoe across the tundra, their gadgets illuminating the snow in bursts of neon blue and green, like they’re taking readings of some sort. The ones who pass us always shoot a smile at me and Casey, their faces red, lips chapped. I’ve never seen these people before in my life, and yet they know exactly who we are. I know that mine and Casey’s journey is somehow already embedded into this mysterious wintery project, even though I have no idea what these people are working on, or what I’m even looking at.
A bearded man walks up to us and shakes Maliyah’s hand. “Is it ready?” she asks.
“Laid it out last night. Thank the heavens it didn’t snow or we’d all be in for a world of pain.”
Maliyah looks back at Casey and me and my throat starts to close, panic building in the pit of my stomach. Call it intuition.
Wes pulls two small black objects from his bag and hands one to both me and Casey. Earpieces. He and Piper both pull on a pair of black gloves. When they wave their hands in front of themselves, a virtual screen appears, showing the same image of what we’re standing on—a white tundra. “This is how I’ll watch you,” says Wes.
“I know this may feel like we’re throwing a lot on you at once,” Maliyah says. “But it’s much easier to learn kinesthetically. Now, who would like to go first?”
I stare at her dumbfounded, and I have a feeling that Casey is doing the same thing, since he isn’t speaking.
Finally, I utter, “Go first in what, exactly?”
Her smile is more of a cringe. “Go first in testing out our little homemade Compass Room.”
***
The Bot isn’t capable of killing me.
I have to keep reminding myself that this is just a test. A completely non-lethal test.
I walk across the field of snow. Clouds have coated the sky, and the dismal gray is foreboding. I look back right as the wind picks up, tugging my coat tighter around me with one hand and giving a thumbs-up with the other.
Through my earpiece, I hear Wes’s voice: “Testing.”
“Loud and clear.”
“Don’t be alarmed, no matter what happens. But if you panic, or you need the simulation to stop, code word is piña colada.”
“Can I sing it?”
“Sure, smart ass.”
Casey paces back and forth in the snow, which looks a little ridiculous with his snowshoes strapped on.
“This is just a test,” I say out loud. Kind of for myself, and kind of in the hopes that Wes will re-clarify.
“Just a test,” says Wes. “All lethal aspects of the Bot have been terminated.”
“But it can still beat me up.”
“Technically, although I’ve turned down the violence levels tremendously compared to what they are in the Compass Room.”
I can’t help but guffaw. This feels like a video game.
“Okay. Ready, Evalyn?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
The howl of the wind picks up in the distance, and I have to plug my other ear to listen to Wes.
“Look down at your feet,” he says.
I do. My boots are securely snapped into the snowshoes and caked with ice.
“You’re standing on the same nanotechnology used in the Compass Room.”
“Okay,” I respond warily.
“It’s called a mock box, and I’m about to show you why.”
Beneath my snowshoes, the ground transforms. Snow dissolves to dirt and spreads from me in all directions. Trees sprout upward. They don’t grow like trees, but form like the blade—pixelated pieces locking into place. The mock box paints a world of granite boulders and jagged alpine mountains, of a clear sunset sky. Orange burns to purple and blue, casting the warm forest in shadow.
I exhale, fear inside of me revving up like a motor. My mind remembers this place and screams at me to run.
Run.
“Holy shit,” I whisper.
“I’m right here,” says Wes. “Right here. You okay?”
“Yes . . . no . . . I’m fine.”
“You remember your safe word?”
“Safe word.” My laugh sounds hollow. “I’m guessing this won’t be as kinky as most situations that require safe words.”
“Most definitely not.” There’s no humor in his voice. “Okay, so it used to be that once a trigger object popped up, it remained in its location until the end of the simulation. That was until you manipulated the system by using old trigger objects. Now, their appearance and disappearance is completely dependent upon the engineer.”
“Why did they used to leave the old objects?”
“Laziness. Managing a room is mentally exhausting, which you’ll soon find out. Take off your snowshoes.”
I want to ask more questions to keep him talking and ease the swelling anxiety in my abdomen. I crouch down and unsnap my snowshoes, my legs turning to jelly the second I step out of them. I unbutton my coat and let it fall to the ground. “So I made the engineers have to work harder? Well, that’s at least an accomplishment.”
“Start walking forward.”
“So demanding.” I do as he asks.
“You’ve worked on controlling the nanotech in the knife already, so today, we’re going to focus on controlling illusions.”
I pause amid the sliver of a trail in the darkening forest. “Engineers can do that?”
“The same way they can control the environment. Reimagining the illusion.”
My heartbeat thrums in my throat. “Reimagine the illusion?”
“Remember when Casey’s father appeared, and he chased the two of you and beat him with a shovel? That was the engineers manipulating the illusion to do exactly that.”
“Why?”
“They wanted to see how violently you’d react in order to save him, Evalyn.”
The engineers are capable of rendering illusions to fit the scenario just to see what would happen. I skate through the memory of Wes telling me about the conspiracy. The Compass Room is about collecting data. The scenarios we were put through didn’t just determine whether or not we were moral or evil. They served the division’s agenda in every moment.
I imagine those engineers within their lair beneath the ground, the walls covered in screens like the one Wes is in front of now, watching Casey and I as his father marched down the hill toward us, shovel in hand. Mayb
e they were reading our levels already and knew I’d do anything to protect Casey, even if it meant killing a man who wasn’t even real. Maybe one engineer whispered to the other, “Let’s see what she does.”
And with a blink of his eyes, he used the chip in his brain to manipulate the illusion to beat the shit out of Casey.
But it made no sense. If engineers could manipulate the illusions, surely they could have saved the people who weren’t supposed to die, like Blaise and Stella.
Right?
I want to ask him, but he distracts me. I’m sidetracked by the object in front of me. The desk blocking the path—the peeling plywood and cracked chair.
I know how this works now, but that doesn’t mean I can’t stop it.
“Relax, Evalyn.”
“You relax,” I say through gritted teeth.
“We’re keeping track of your levels. You’re panicking. There’s no reason to be so frightened.”
I want to scream at him. No reason to panic? “Don’t fucking tell me when I can and cannot panic, asshole. You’ve never been in a Compass Room.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry, I’m just trying to calm you down.”
But then Nick appears, and it’s impossible to calm down.
How long has it been since Compass Room C? Seven, eight months? Eight months since I’ve last seen him, in the flesh. Or the illusion of the flesh. He has become a character in my mind, a cartoon, and facing him again seems so wrong. So unnatural.
“Swallow your fear, Evalyn.” Wes’s voice is strong, and finally something that I want to take seriously.
“What do I need to do?”
“Everything you did with the knife, you are going to do with the illusion. You are rewriting it. You are becoming the author.”
“How?” How do I disillusion myself? How do I pretend that what happened isn’t the truth?
“However you can.”
I blink, and suddenly it’s not just him and me. Meghan sits at the desk, and the trail is scattered with all of those boys. Masked and faceless, they are inhuman. They are unreal.
You are becoming the author.
Nick struts up to me, his eyes alive like blue fire. He is nearly salivating. I feel the gun to the back of my head as he pushes his own into my hands.
“Kill one of them. I don’t care who. Anyone. And I will spare her life and yours.”
You are the author.
I reimagine the situation before I play it out. Growing giddy, I realize this is what I’ve always wanted. A way to solve my mistake.
I meet Nick’s step until I’m level to him, eye to eye. I cup my hands before me. Half a second before he drops the gun into my waiting hands, I ball them into fists.
“Go fuck yourself.”
He doesn’t flinch, or frown, or scream in rage. He doesn’t evaporate like some wicked story villain, disappearing into the ether.
He cocks his eyebrow and smiles. “Too bad. I would have enjoyed sparing you.”
He nods to the boy behind me.
This is what would have happened if I’d chosen to defy Nick when he gave me instruction. With my faux suicide note written on the bathroom mirror, I’d still be to blame for Meghan and what happened in the faculty banquet. Nick wouldn’t have gotten exactly what he wanted. I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger, but with Meghan and me both dead, Nick would have gotten enough.
A green light flashes through the sky, and the boys and a sniffling Meghan disappear. The trees unwind themselves from the atmosphere, shriveling into nothing. The sunset scrapes itself from the sky at the same time an arctic wind nearly knocks me off my feet, and I shriek in shock.
My feet sink into the snow and I wrap my arms around myself, my eyes first darting to my abandoned coat and snowshoes, and then to Reprise and Casey off in the cloudy distance.
“Congratulations,” Wes says in my ear. “You just did the exact opposite of what you were supposed to do.”
“And w-w-what’s th-th-that?”
“You committed suicide, dumbass.”
***
If I’d taken on such a ballsy move in Compass Room C, nothing would have happened. But since I have an engineer chip in my head now, and if I’m not careful, I’ll end up doing the same thing that Gordon did to Blaise and Stella. Except I’ll do it to myself.
“I recreated the alternate situation,” I say on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and sipping a mug of cider laced with brandy. “I thought that’s what I was supposed to do.”
“You’re limiting yourself to the realms of reality,” Wes argues. “It doesn’t have to be choice A or choice B. With that chip in your head, you are completely rewriting the situation.”
I grind my teeth together. “Rewriting the situation . . . how the fuck am I supposed to do that?”
“You’ve been manipulating reality in your painting and you’re asking me . . .”
“Don’t talk to me like you fucking know me,” I snap.
Wes raises his hands. “Alright, alright, Jesus. Why don’t you get some sleep, and we’ll work on this again in the morning.”
He doesn’t give me a chance to respond, leaving me in the common room beneath the dull yellow light of the lamp. Before me the fire crackles, and Piper works on her mural of us—her virtual corkboard of Compass Room candidates.
I’m tired.
It is beyond the physical sense of tired. Even the intangible parts of me—my thoughts and emotions—somehow ache. I down the rest of my drink as Casey sits next to me. He looks as exhausted as I must look, but manages a cockeyed grin, peeling away the top corners of my blanket to plant a warm kiss against my collarbone.
“I can’t fall asleep without you,” he whispers against my skin. “I feel like tonight is going to be a bad one for dreams.”
“I’ll be right there,” I assure him. With another kiss, he’s gone.
I watch Piper for several quiet minutes. I wonder if she realizes I’m in the common room before she looks back at me, twisting her blue braid around her finger. She bites her lip.
“What?” I ask. “You look like you want to tell me something.”
“I do, but I don’t know how.”
“Just spit it out.” I yawn. “I’m exhausted and need to go to bed soon anyway.”
I watch her try and formulate the words for solid moments, dragging her jaw back and forth as if that will somehow help her. “Nick’s journal. I’ve been reading through it. Digesting it over the past few weeks. Wanted to know if you cared to learn what I found.”
Nick’s journal. Piper really has everything on us. I should be begging for her to tell me. He had been my obsession in prison after all, and I’d been stuck in a cell with limited information, only capable of dissecting his fascination with chaos theory with all of the knowledge I had on the topic.
Which was very, very limited.
“The cops had this journal, right?” I ask.
She nods. “Nothing in here that really acquits you. In fact, he never mentioned his plan at all.”
I stand and drop my blanket, walking to the wall, where pages of Nick’s journal are projected. I begin to read them out of order. He rambles about nothing—about everything—science and religions and philosophy. I can’t make sense of any of it.
“Before the shooting, I asked him if his grand plan had something to do with chaos theory.”
“And he said, yes, I’m guessing.”
I nod. “I never understood it though. Not fully.” I pace in front of the wall. “I thought that if I understood, I’d get a sense of closure, but the furthest I ever got was that the shooting was the first domino. He wanted to create a legacy—”
“Stop,” she says.
I stare at her, too exhausted to attempt to figure out what she means by the command.
“You can’t try and make sense of him. Nick was psychotic and everything he did was because he was sick. Nothing more. I know, trust me. I’ve studied far too many people and I know a delusional psychopath when I see one.
”
I glance back at the pages—a map of Nick and his delusions.
“He’d been different since he was a child, and he was very aware of this. Before anything else, before his plan to kill himself had even fully formed in his mind I’m sure, he used chaos theory to dissect his own life. Cause and effect. Why did he feel different? What caused him to have such dark, twisted thoughts and desires? There had to be a reason. A key.”
I read one page:
A few days before my fifth birthday, I got into the kitchen cabinet and spilled bleach all over the floor. Mom wiped it up with her hand and smeared it across my face. She told me it was what I got for not listening to her. I remember the burning. I remember acknowledging as an almost-five-year-old that I may never see again as I sat in my room alone and tried to wipe away the bleach with the arm of my teddy bear. I remember thinking that I wouldn’t be able to see the candles on my cake. I wouldn’t know where to blow and I wouldn’t extinguish them all in one puff, and then my birthday wish wouldn’t come true.
My eyes dart to the next page.
Alone in my room . . . she never came and apologized . . . I could have fantasized about killing her. Did I?
My birthday wish was that the house would catch fire while she was asleep and she’d know what it was like to burn, just like I did. . . .
. . . It couldn’t have started here . . .
“Nick broke his life down into fractals, and then those fractals into more pieces, trying to understand what made him the way that he was. Theoretically, he was using chaos theory to evaluate his own life. He was trying to find the random, miniscule event that turned him into the monster he was very aware he had become. And when he couldn’t, it was as though he needed to utilize all of that information he had dedicated his life to learning.”
I know what the butterfly effect is. It’s part of chaos theory, a seemingly random event that could trigger a much larger event in the future. The flapping of butterfly wings could cause a hurricane on another continent several weeks later. “So Nick fabricated an act of terror to create his butterfly wings in the hopes that he would initiate some massive, groundbreaking event?”
