Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  Dear Mrs. Williams,

  I know you must hate me for what I did to Justin. You’re right to. What happened that night was my fault, and I hope you can believe that however much you hate me, it’s nothing compared to how much I hate myself for what happened.

  I only want you to know I’m sorry. I know I can’t ever make it up to you, but I want to help in any way I can. I keep seeing news reports about Justin and every time, I think it should be me. I wish it had been. It isn’t fair.

  Please, if I can do ANYTHING, let me know.

  I know I don’t have any right to ask this, but if Justin is okay, if he’s recovering, could you tell me? It’s hell not to know.

  I’m so sorry.

  Sincerely,

  Tina Castro

  Mary stared at the message and fought a lump in her throat while her eyes stung with hot tears. It isn’t fair.

  She was damned right it wasn’t fair. It should be Tina in a hospital bed right now, Tina who might never wake up, her parents who—

  Her heart seized at that thought. If it had been, her parents would be at her bedside. They would lie awake at night, afraid to go to sleep because they knew they would see her grave in their nightmares. They would watch her cheeks grow gaunter by the week, and they would rage at the fact that she was so close to them, still breathing but unreachable.

  And her parents would never have received the offer Mary and Tad had. They wouldn’t have been in the news to catch PIVOT’s attention, and they wouldn’t even have had the offer of a bribe. They wouldn’t be able to give her a dragon for her birthday.

  Mary couldn’t wish her pain on anyone, and it would be worse for them.

  Her breathing slowed. She no longer needed to sit on her hands to keep from typing an angry tirade. She could close the email without wanting to make Tina’s pain worse.

  But she couldn’t find kind words yet. Not yet. She couldn’t face the woman who’d taken Justin’s life away and exposed Tad to threats of blackmail.

  Not yet.

  She snatched her purse, powered the computer down, and left for the PIVOT labs.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The two young engineers stared at the breakfast burrito on the kitchenette table. It had been thirty minutes since Jacob had arrived with the four burritos and twenty minutes since they had finished theirs. Now, with Amber still not there, both of them began to wonder how dead they would be if they ate hers as well.

  DuBois, meanwhile, wandered into the kitchenette with his hand over his sternum. “So heavy,” he complained.

  “You can’t only eat popcorn, man.” Jacob gave him a hard look. “I’m…worried about you. And I lived on ramen and vodka for a year.”

  “Two years,” Nick corrected him and said to the other man, “And you should take him seriously. He knows what he’s talking about. He got scurvy. Literal scurvy.”

  The doctor swung to face them, clearly interested in this development. “Really?”

  “We don’t need to go into this,” Jacob said grumpily.

  “He didn’t work it out for a while,” Nick said wickedly, “because when he’s sick, he gets himself two cartons of orange juice and drinks them straight. You should have seen his face when he finally put two and two together.”

  His teammate grumbled and looked up as Amber wandered into the room. She wore the same clothes she had the day before, and the shadows under her eyes were so dark that he had to double-check to make sure she hadn’t been in a fight.

  “Hi,” she said distractedly and made a beeline for the coffee.

  “We got you a breakfast burrito,” Jacob said.

  “Thanks.” She drained an entire cup of coffee, wiped a drip off the edge of her mouth, and threw the mug in the trash. “Wait. That doesn’t go there.” She fished it out and put it in the little dishwasher. “More coffee.”

  “Did you sleep at all?” Jacob asked her.

  “No.” She came to sit, cradling a new mug in both hands. When she realized it was empty, she stared at it blankly until Nick stood and retrieved the pot. “Thanks.”

  “Why were you up?” Nick asked her.

  “Uh…”

  “She was researching the reporter who got in,” DuBois said. “And who she tackled,” he added darkly.

  “You did what?” Jacob gave her a horrified look. “Wait—someone got in?”

  “Yes.” Amber gave him a weary look and gulped her coffee. “I didn’t hurt her and I didn’t confirm that Justin was here, but I spent the night trying to find out who she worked for and also to buy a better security system. The landlord agreed to let us put in whatever we wanted.”

  “Did he agree to that because you called him at an ungodly time of the morning and he simply wanted to go back to sleep?”

  “Possibly.” She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t judge my method. I get results. I’ll need you to scrounge up another ten grand for the system, though.”

  “Didn’t we get five million from our mystery donor?” Nick interjected.

  “It goes more quickly than you’d think,” Jacob said. “Between the servers and everything else, we don’t have much left, especially with trying to stabilize the power fluctuations.”

  “Oh, we resolved that last night, too.” Amber finished her second cup of coffee and Nick poured her another. “I switched a few of the servers to a different block of circuits and also unplugged the most power-hungry machine we had.”

  “You killed Justin?”

  “No, you idiot.” She rolled her eyes. “There’s one thing in this office that sucks a wildly variant amount of power and was made with zero thought to efficiency, and that’s the giant, deluxe popcorn machine.”

  The two young men looked at DuBois, who regarded the ceiling with sudden, fanatical interest.

  “The…the popcorn machine,” Jacob said after a fairly tense silence.

  “Yep.”

  “That’s why we kept having blackouts.”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, selling it will get us some of our security money.” He sighed. “It looks like it’s back to store-bought popcorn for you, buddy.”

  The doctor muttered and headed into the lab as Mary entered the kitchenette. She looked almost as distracted as Amber and raised her eyebrows to see all of them.

  “I only saw one car in the parking lot.”

  “Well, DuBois never leaves and Nick and I carpooled,” Jacob explained. “But…Amber, where did you park?”

  “I took an Uber,” she said. “Do you honestly think I should be driving?”

  “Good point.” He smiled at Mary. “How are you?”

  “I’m…not important. Did you say something about security?”

  The three members of the PIVOT team looked at one another and tried to reach a silent consensus before Jacob explained. “The press seems to have found out where we are, and we’d like to make sure no one can simply walk in.”

  “You should call my husband,” Mary suggested.

  “I really wouldn’t want to bother him,” he said.

  “No, I mean it’s possible he could get you funding.” She raised an eyebrow. “Senators are always meeting with donors and quite a few have had funding for their pet projects pushed through. Why shouldn’t we?”

  “Uh…” Unsure what to do with this sudden change in perspective on her part, he gave her a blank smile. “I’ll…um, I’ll give him a call. Nick, would you like to walk Mrs. Williams through the pod setup?”

  “Please call me Mary,” the woman said as she moved away with the other engineer. “I feel old enough as it is around you three.”

  Jacob smiled and followed them but returned a moment later to pull gently on Amber’s arm. She shambled along in his wake, still sipping at her coffee and her eyes focused on the middle distance. He wondered idly if she’d notice if he thunked her over the head with a brick.

  Not that he’d risk it, of course. In a fight between a sleep-deprived, zombified Amber and anyone up to and including a rabid bear,
he’d bet on her every time.

  As they had requested, Mary had come dressed in more casual clothes than she usually wore. From what Jacob could tell, she had purchased her sweatpants and long-sleeved t-shirt specifically for this experiment, and she looked—ironically—very uncomfortable when she took her coat off.

  “Okay,” Nick said. His tone was very soothing and he had realized she was worried. “You remember how the game started for Justin? He was alone and had to hunt rabbits, avoid wolves, and all of that. You won’t have to do anything like that, okay?”

  The woman nodded. Her arms were wrapped around herself now and she stared at the pod as she shivered nervously.

  “When you get into the game world, you’ll be in a comfortable room,” he continued. “You will see windows that lead to a pleasant seaside view, and there will be sounds like waves and birds singing. You can stay there as long as you want.”

  Mary looked heartened at that.

  “There will be different challenges around the room.” He opened the pod and gestured for her to sit, smoothly beginning the preparations as he kept her mind occupied with the details. “Objects to pick up and fit together, a thin carpet on the floor for you to try to walk along, things like that. This will help you get used to the game controls.”

  Jacob was impressed. The woman was scared—as, he had to admit, he would be if he’d never used this technology before. The only person she had ever seen in this world was locked inside it.

  Nick took her hand to help her lie inside the pod, then clipped a pulse monitor on her finger while he attached electrodes to her head. DuBois hovered at the side and watched carefully. He did not intervene, however. The group had decided together that, when it came to Mary, it would be best to have someone with a good bedside manner to introduce the world.

  “We’ve taken your pulse every time you’ve been in recently,” Nick told her, “so we have a good idea of your resting pulse rate. If we sense that you’re stressed or uncomfortable, we’ll stop the simulation—you’ll see the world fade out like a sunset. You can also stop the simulation at any time by saying, ‘stop the simulation.’ We’ll be able to hear your voice, remember, exactly like with Justin.”

  “Right.” She looked at them. Her face was pale. “What will happen if it…doesn’t work?”

  “It could go wrong in a number of ways,” DuBois said. He fell silent when Amber gave him a death glare of epic iciness.

  “It boils down to one of two possibilities,” she told Mary. The coffee must be kicking in because she looked mostly human by now. “Either you won’t be able to get the input and you won’t see or hear anything, in which case you can tell us that. Or the game won’t take your input, in which case you won’t be able to move. We’ll be able to see either of those two things happen, so we’ll simply stop the simulation and one of us will troubleshoot.”

  The woman nodded wordlessly.

  “Okay,” Nick said. “Now, close your eyes and when you open them, you should be in the seaside room and you’ll hear my voice.”

  Mary closed her eyes and he pressed the button to begin the simulation. Her muscles twitched and her eyes began to move behind her closed eyelids. He watched her carefully and examined the vital sign feeds before he closed the lid of the pod.

  “Mary, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.” The voice was surprised. “How am I speaking?”

  “I’ll have Amber show you the mechanism.” Nick smiled. “What do you see?”

  “I’m in a room like you said. I think it’s a castle.”

  “Describe it in as much detail as you can.”

  On the screen, the team could see the room she was in—thanks to the recent upgrades the mysterious donation had purchased for them—and Amber was poised to take notes on any differences they saw between her description and reality.

  “The stone is gray,” Mary said. “There are rugs on the floor. One is an oriental rug, another is a very long, thin rug. They look thick—oh!” The floor rushed up as her character fell. “How do I get up?”

  “Relax for a moment,” Nick told her. “Breathe. Give me a long breath—in, two, three…hold…out, two, three. Now stand up.”

  The camera righted itself and she asked, “How did that work?”

  “The game responds to your intent and what your body thinks it’s doing,” he explained. “You sent the nerve impulses to stand, so that’s what you did in the game. But it’s like juggling or knitting. If you think about it too hard, you can’t do it—you have to do it subconsciously.”

  “Huh.” She took a few unsteady steps to the window. “Oh, it’s beautiful. You wanted me to describe things, right? I must be high up. I can see the water and the sunlight on it. There are no clouds. Oh, a bird! The water is so lovely, and I hear the waves, even though I don’t think I should be able to. There’s wind.”

  “Good, good. Do you smell anything?”

  “No.”

  “That one seems to take longer,” Nick said to Amber, who nodded. Justin had also taken a while to smell and taste things in the game, and the feed still wasn’t perfect.

  “Can you run through some of the tests?” Nick asked her. “Try picking things up and putting them down, stacking them on top of one another, et cetera.”

  “Okay.” Mary walked slowly to the table on one side of the screen, and they watched as she began trying to pick things up. It took her a few attempts to close her fingers around something successfully, and her depth perception was a little off at first.

  “Mary, do you wear glasses?”

  “When I read,” she said. “Oh. Oh. I see.”

  “Yeah.” He considered. “I think we might have to work with things as they are for now. I wouldn’t be surprised if things adjust over time, but you could have trouble with depth perception when you log in and log out.”

  They watched her complete the trials, mostly in silence. Amber, at Jacob’s urging, left him to take notes and headed off to devour her breakfast burrito. DuBois periodically stared longingly at his now-unplugged popcorn machine. Nick fiddled with the controls.

  Finally, Mary picked up one of the objects and, after a pause, threw it out the window of the room. It sailed away and she laughed before she ran to look out. The world tilted dizzily as she gazed at the city below.

  “Oh, dear. Oh, I don’t like heights.”

  “That’s good to know,” Nick told her. “Next time you load in, you’ll be on the ground floor.”

  “Thank you.” The view swung crazily as she looked around. “Where did the plate land? I didn’t hit anyone, did I?”

  “Even if you did, they’re not real,” DuBois said.

  “I still don’t want to hurt them.”

  “That’s illogical.” The doctor opened his mouth to speak again and received an elbow in the side. “Ow! What was that for?”

  “She’s being nice,” Jacob said. “That’s one of the things that’ll stave off the robot apocalypse. Don’t call it illogical.”

  DuBois shut up but he looked deeply skeptical.

  “Okay, Mary,” Nick said, “you can now choose what your character will look like. Three options will pop up in front of you.”

  In the viewfinder, three magical portals appeared. The first, with a white background, showed a woman with blonde hair caught in a high ponytail and a costume reminiscent of a certain warrior princess but with more cleavage. The second, with a blue background, showed a woman with a wide-brimmed pirate’s hat and an eyepatch, her white shirt slightly translucent and thigh-length high-heeled boots over tight pants. She blew a kiss. The third wore a plunging green gown and held a ball of flame in her cupped hands. Her black hair swirled in an imaginary wind.

  Mary seemed dumbstruck. No sound came from the monitor. Finally, she said faintly, “Ah…I’m not sure I’m comfortable wearing any of this.”

  Amber gave Nick one of her trademark Fix-It-Now looks. “I’m sorry, Mary,” she said quickly. “These are some of the default character
s that were here when we acquired the game. This should have been fixed. One moment.” She pressed a few keys to remove the portals and leaned forward to look Nick in the eyes. “This is something I never thought I’d have to say but stop objectifying the senator’s wife.”

  “I’m sorry!” he squeaked. He began typing furiously on another computer. “I loaded the wrong game assets. I swear. Don’t kill me. Okay, this should work. One second…” He hesitated and looked genuinely frightened before he pressed a button nervously.

  This set of characters, Jacob saw with relief, was much better. The first wore flowing red robes. Her face was in shadow but they could see a hint of grey hair, and black power swirled in one hand. The second wore armor much like Zaara’s, although it was brown instead of black, and a deep-red cloak. She was younger but not as heavily made up as the women from the first set. The third had heavier plate armor and wore a sword strapped across her back.

  “I like the first one,” Mary said. She sounded quite pleased. “I see why Justin likes this so much. I’d love to be able to throw spells at people when I get older—and sweep around in fancy robes like that.”

  “I can’t help you with the spells,” Amber said, “but I’m fairly sure the robes are doable.”

  The woman laughed.

  “Okay,” Nick said. “I’ll walk you through a few trials that should show us how well your buffs are working. If everything is good, I’ll port you to Justin’s zone, okay? Head to the door.”

  As they watched Mary emerge improbably into a meadow, DuBois leaned closer to murmur to Amber, “If this works, you have more than merely a recovery tool. You have a way for people to interact with their loved ones while they’re in a coma.”

  Her mouth gaped. She’d been so caught up in tracking their mysterious benefactor that she hadn’t thought about the other applications of their research.

  “We could even use it for people to speak to loved ones after they die,” the doctor continued.

  “Shhhh,” she hissed.

  “Not Justin—anyone. Imagine being able to speak to a parent or a grandparent…or a spouse who’d passed away.”