We followed him in raising ours.
“To Lacy Mills,” he said, the tears flowing freely now.
“To Lacy,” we chorused, and clinked glasses.
As our words and the ringing of glass died away, I was surprised to find that my cheeks, too, were wet with tears.
The whole world was starting over.
The sun rose above the ocean, a bright-yellow coin hovering over the waves. The birds sang and darted through the branches of the big beautiful weeping beeches of New Port City. The children of Keepers stepped out into the streets and the parks and on sidewalks to play. The refugees who’d filled up once abandoned mansions and apartment buildings and houses opened their eyes to a Real World on yet another day. And everywhere there had been plugs, in the caverns of Briarwood and in the various underground locations where everyone was taken after the failure of the Body Market, there were people beginning to walk again on their real legs, to see again with their real eyes, to speak again with their real mouths after decades of a virtual existence. Fingers and toes twitching, knees and elbows bending, lips murmuring speech still unintelligible, eyes opening and closing, lashes fluttering, vision blurry and confused but growing clearer, surer, by the day.
Keepers everywhere were at work helping with the unplugged, with the care everyone needed, shifting people from the glass coffins where they’d lain, day in and day out for years, to any and every available space they could find to care for them. Refugees teemed on every green, every park, in every available house and warehouse, mansion, and apartment, spilling well beyond the borders of New Port City into the surrounding area. My Keeper had spent all the time we were in the App World recruiting every available and willing hand to help, managing to convince some of those who’d voted against taking in more citizens from the App World to chip in. She’d even recruited the Body Market refugees to the effort, since anyone with at least some time spent in their real body was in a good enough place to assist the recently unplugged to begin to adjust to life in New Port City.
As I traveled from one site to another, I was amazed by the work ethic I encountered everywhere I went. The Keepers worked with purpose, as though driven by something far greater than just the basic need to get things done and settled. The refugees did the same, bustling about, led by Andleeb and Rasha, shuttling food to the camps and help centers, being willing to simply be present, by the bedsides of those who were older, more in need of rest and time to emerge from their body’s long slumber.
Even Ree, with her long red hair, was tireless.
The real her reminded me of Lacy.
Well, the virtual her had as well.
Despite the losses, despite the reality that not everyone made it, people did the best they could.
Funerals were planned for the dead, memorials and cremations.
But weddings were planned, too.
Zeera and Sylvia.
Adam and Parvda.
There was a lot to look forward to for many of us.
For now, at least, New Port City was at peace.
With Rain, though, I wasn’t so sure.
Rain and I had made up, though we both knew that things would never be the same, that he might never be the same after Lacy. But then, one afternoon, I saw him talking to Andleeb, caught the spark in his beautiful eyes as he spoke to her and she looked back at him, and I thought, well, maybe they would. Or at least, they wouldn’t be the same, but I thought they might be okay. Even happy, eventually.
One could hope.
We all could.
Those of us who’d lived to see the end of the App World and had come through on the other side.
Every morning now, so many questions flowed into my mind.
Would today be the day when the App World would finish its reboot? Would it suddenly exist once again, out of nowhere, restoring itself to its former glory? Would it restart in the place where it once was, a great and populous virtual City? Or would it be a mere shell, diminished, broken, waiting for people to abandon their real lives once again and give it life?
And what about my father, my sister? Did they still somehow exist in the ether, tiny ones and zeroes circulating, reordering, waiting to be arranged in the impossibly unique order that was an individual, virtual person, waiting to feel the breath enter their virtual lungs once more?
Or was it all over, forever? The App World an experiment gone wrong, a failure, soon to be a mere history lesson in the lives of future generations? A warning about technology and hubris?
It would be months, maybe years, before we’d know the answers.
But I could live with these questions.
I was alive.
I was real.
A real girl with a real body and a Real World to live and breathe in.
To love in.
It wasn’t perfect. Nothing real was ever perfect or sure.
I turned my head on the pillow.
Kit was still fast asleep.
But sometimes, it was close.
EPILOGUE
Skylar
the world as it is
THEY LEFT BY boat.
They left on foot.
By car, too, though cars were still scarce.
Kit and I were down by the water, watching a ferry pulling out of the harbor. People spilled in from the windows, all over the decks, despite the cold, wintry air. We still looked for his parents amid the refugees. Maybe one day we would find them. Maybe we never would.
I leaned over and kissed him on the lips.
He smiled, but then his smile fell away. “This is how it all started,” he said, his eyes on the ferry, then shifting to the long line of people walking over one of the bridges, on their way to new towns, old cities, to find more permanent places to settle. “You know, before the App World came into existence. This was what led to the split between the real and the virtual. It’s happening again. . . .” His voice trailed off in a whisper.
I let my gaze follow his. “We don’t know that.”
I said this because I wanted to be hopeful.
But it was the same way everywhere we turned.
A woman. A man. A child. Each one of them with a tiny tablet in their hands. Each one of them staring down at the smooth, colorful screen. Some held them so close their noses nearly touched the device. Others held them high, like they were looking into a mirror. But one thing was uniform—that they stared, they looked, they couldn’t tear their eyes away.
They were, uniformly, transfixed.
“Zeera’s idea seemed like a good one,” I said, defending her as we stood there, taking in this now-common scene unfolding around us. “She thought it would be the humane thing to do, and it is, isn’t it? Providing the refugees access to old-world technology helps them manage the transition to the Real World.”
“Or makes it so they never manage it at all,” Kit countered. “Makes it so they live for another virtual place even as they move and breathe in their real bodies amid real people.”
Right then, a child on the upper deck of the ferry looked up and waved toward the shore. I waved back, a smile finding its way onto my face again. “I’m choosing to be more optimistic than that.”
Kit turned his attention to me now. Even as I watched the child, took in the joy that lit up his beautiful young face, I could feel Kit’s eyes on me. “Well, Skylar,” he said.
“Well, Skylar, what?” I asked, when he left it at that.
Kit stepped into my line of vision, so he was all that I saw. Not the ferry or the line of people walking over the bridge, all of them looking down. “Well, Skylar, your optimism is one of the things I love about you,” he said, and finally smiled again. “That, and the fact that you never remember to bring your own tablet anywhere no matter how many times your friends scold you about it.”
“Not everyone is obsessed,” I reminded him. “Plenty of people are like me. Besides”—I gestured toward the harbor, the boats, the bridges—“they’ll get bored of those things eventually. The Real Wor
ld is pretty great once you get used to it.”
“I guess we’ll have to wait and see,” Kit said.
I nodded. Then we turned our backs on the sea, on the harbor and the boats and the bridges, on all the people looking down at their screens. We made our way toward the very real cottage that sat perched up on the hill and overlooking the ocean, with the single beautiful tree that stood next to it, just as the first snow of winter began to fall from the very real sky.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit Allen Murabayashi
DONNA FREITAS is the author of the Unplugged series as well as other young adult and middle grade novels, including The Possibilities of Sainthood, The Survival Kit, and Gold Medal Summer. Donna is also a professor in Fairleigh Dickinson’s MFA program and at Hofstra’s Honors College. Her nonfiction book The Happiness Effect is based on research about young adults and social media. Donna lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she likes to spend most of her time unplugged. You can visit her online at www.donnafreitas.com.
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BOOKS BY DONNA FREITAS
Unplugged
The Body Market
The Mind Virus
CREDITS
COVER ART BY COLIN ANDERSON
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE MIND VIRUS. Copyright © 2017 by Donna Freitas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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EPub Edition © December 2017 ISBN 9780062118684
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FIRST EDITION
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