by Sean Platt
“She’s been waiting for you,” said the kid, pacing, barely looking up. His fingers traced the interior edge of the liquid desk, following its contours.
“Who?” said Leo.
The kid gave Leo a brief look. It wasn’t impolite or unwelcoming, but it wasn’t like the look he’d already given Leah. She was supposed to be here. Leo, on the other hand, was tagging along.
“The headmistress,” said the kid, speaking to Leah.
“What is this place?” Leah asked.
“It’s a school.”
“What do you do here?”
The kid shrugged. “Learn about the world.”
“The world?”
The kid nodded.
“Like what about the world?”
“The way the world is. Where to go. How to use it.”
“How to use the world?”
“How to travel the world. How to make the world,” said the kid. Then, without slowing his pacing, the lobby’s floating clouds winked out of existence. The strange, fluid reception desk seemed to vanish as it blended into the walls and floors. The entirety of the lobby’s surfaces became moving images of a beach. Waves seemed to crash from one side as a hologram plugged the doorway through which Leo and Leah had entered. Leah felt a breeze touch her bare shoulders and looked out at the surf, her senses already buying that it was real surf rather than projection. Out in the surf, enormous rocks jutted up from the breakers like fingers jabbed at the sky. Leah looked down and saw sand. She was wearing sandals and standing still, but the reality was so complete that Leah felt certain that if she slipped off her sandals, she’d find herself standing in actual sand. So she did. She slipped off a sandal, stepped down, and felt sand.
“We’re in a simulator?” Leah asked the kid.
“No,” said the kid. “We’re in the world.”
“But we’re in a simulator in the world,” Leah clarified.
The kid stopped pacing and looked at Leah, earnest and confused at the same time. “We’re at a beach in the world,” he said.
Leah watched Leo trying to get his bearings, amused by his wonder. Leo knew simulators existed, of course, but he’d probably never experienced one this good, or this fully.
“No,” Leo said to the kid. “She means this room. This school lobby. We’re still in the lobby. The lobby is a simulator, and it’s simulating a beach.”
“We’re at a beach,” said the kid.
“A beach that was made by a simulator.”
The kid scrunched up his face. Leah saw his innocence and felt vulnerable in its glare. “What’s a simulator?”
Rather than stretching the argument, Leah let it go. She sighed, closed her eyes, and accepted the breeze on her skin. She listened to the breakers. She smelled the air. It was an astonishing simulation, and an astonishing simulator.
“Whatever it is, it’s beautiful,” she said. “I almost feel like I could throw a rock into those waves.”
So the kid, because he was a kid, picked up a rock and threw it. The rock whistled and skipped, plunking into the surf twenty or thirty yards away. Leah felt like she’d been punched. Something in the world had just gone very wrong, but it took her mind a few seconds to realize what it was. Then it came to her: the rock hadn’t hit the real walls of the school’s lobby as it should have.
“What is this place?” she whispered.
“It’s the world,” said the kid. Then the beach faded, and the lobby reappeared around them, the kid back behind the liquid-looking reception desk. That was another thing; he’d never come out from behind the desk. Yet a moment ago, she’d been standing beside him and had seen his whole body.
Leah didn’t know what to say. So after an odd moment, the kid finally came out from behind the desk then took Leah’s hand as if she were the child and began to lead her down a long hallway.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
The kid said, “Somewhere else.”
At the end of the corridor was a door, and behind the door was another corridor. They walked it for a long time, passing rooms that were bright and sun-filled despite the fact that they were clearly at the building’s interior. The suites were filled with children and looked like sparsely furnished classrooms. The hallway itself was spotless and reminded Leah of the secret Quark lab in Chinatown, but she wasn’t sure if the surfaces were Beam surfaces or not. Nothing seemed to be responding, but everything was familiar. Yet Leah knew her past well enough to know she’d never been there.
“You’re intuitives,” said Leah.
“We’re kids,” said the boy, still holding her hand.
“You’re anthroposophists. You walk The Beam.”
“We learn about the world,” said the kid.
“By using The Beam.”
“Well,” said the kid, “what do you use?”
“I don’t know. Eyes. Ears. Hands.”
“The native five,” said the kid.
“Excuse me?”
“You just use your first five senses. It’s cool. Most people do. The others are better.”
Leah felt lost. “What do you mean, ‘others’?”
“The other senses,” the kid replied, seemingly unable to accept Leah’s naiveté.
“The Beam isn’t a sense,” she said. “You’re learning technology, not reality.” But then she thought about the rock falling into the surf thirty yards away.
“What’s the difference?” he said.
They’d reached a wide set of double doors. The kid let go of her hand.
“Just wait in here,” he said, smiling. “The headmistress will be here soon.”
He pushed the doors open then nodded at Leah and Leo to enter. Leo looked at Leah. Leah looked at Leo. She wanted Leo to see trust in her eyes, but she couldn’t summon the feeling herself. They settled on mutual uncertainty. Leah looked at the kid. He looked back at her, placid.
Both Leo and Leah turned to look into the room. There, in a large chrome-framed bed with bright-white sheets and a heavy comforter, was Crumb.
They entered as the double doors slowly closed behind them. The room was large and stark, with windows every few feet. Outside the windows was a bucolic meadow with a red barn in the distance. The red barn had white trim and an arm mounted above the loft door, swaying slightly in a breeze that made the grass puff and dance. The room’s interior was simple; other than Crumb sleeping in the large bed, there were only a few chairs and a small end table with four glasses on top. Beside the glasses was a clear glass pitcher, empty.
Behind them, the kid had vanished. Neither had heard him go. The room itself was quiet. The corridor hadn’t been loud, but kids’ laughter had rumbled through the air like a machine’s constant hum. But inside the room — which almost looked like a lush hospital suite, minus the machines — the silence was absolute. Leah could hear her sandals squeak as her body shifted and balanced.
Leo turned to Leah.
“I’m tripping, right? We did a lot of moondust.”
Leah knew Leo was kidding. Moondust didn’t work like that. It enhanced sight on The Beam and made you mellow but didn’t make you see things.
“A hell of a lot,” said Leah, smiling.
“I guess I believe you,” said Leo. “About that crazy shit with Crumb and The Beam. Because here we are. And there he is.”
They walked forward. Crumb seemed to be asleep, his breathing low and regular. Leah wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was sure it was sleep that had him, not coma. Whatever damage she’d done to his brain back in Bontauk was healed. Leo looked at him closely then at Leah. Crumb shifted in his sleep, rolling onto his side.
They backed up, speaking in half whispers.
Leo said, “He’s better.”
“I know.”
“They cleaned him up. I think his hair and beard have been trimmed,” Leo added.
“I don’t see shit in his beard. No crumbs for Crumb.” Leah laughed, but the sound was hollow in the big white room and made her want to look ar
ound self-consciously.
“I don’t want to be here,” said Leo.
“We need to be here.”
Leo swallowed. “I still don’t want to be.”
“You think we’re in danger? That he’s in danger?”
Leo looked at the end table. “I want a drink of water.”
Leah didn’t know what to say, so she told him to go ahead. But of course, the pitcher was empty.
“We passed a bathroom on the way down,” said Leo. “At least I think it was a bathroom. I intuited that it was a bathroom using my native five senses. But it’s cool. Most people do that.”
“Maybe it’s a beach,” said Leah.
Leo told Leah that he was going to fill the pitcher. He said it with a swallow, as if announcing he was about to cross a minefield. Leah told him to go ahead. It sounded odd, her giving him permission, but he seemed to be asking. So Leah gave her blessing. And after Leo had taken the pitcher and ducked out (strangely, the sound of kids from the hallway didn’t enter the silent room even while the door was open), Leah approached Crumb. She resisted the urge to pet his hair. It seemed like a cliché, and no matter what she’d learned about Stephen York, he was still mostly Crumb to her, and touching Crumb was gross.
Leah had put him here. But of course, she also hadn’t. He wasn’t Crumb and never had been. This was Stephen York, one of the The Beam’s fathers. All of those deep thoughts in the leather journal stashed in Leah’s backpack had come from this man’s mind. It was impossible to believe. Crumb spoke about squirrels, and conspiracies, and squirrel conspiracies. How could he have thought all of the things in the journal? He’d accomplished unparalleled feats. He’d changed the world and then fretted about the implications of changing the world, asking the question so few people asked: Sure, we CAN do this. But SHOULD we? Some would say that what this man had done had resulted in a kind of utopia. Others would say he’d just forged another set of chains, given the masses another pill to pop.
“Where is Noah West now, Crumb?” Leah whispered.
“I wish we knew,” said a voice behind her.
Leah jumped. Then she turned, finding a girl of maybe eighteen or nineteen standing just three feet to her rear. The room was tomb quiet, like outer space, and still the girl had managed to sneak up on her.
“Hi,” said Leah.
“Hello, Leah,” said the woman. She was wearing a long blue dress and had pale skin sprayed with freckles. Her hair was red and silky smooth, a trim under shoulder length, flowing around her narrow face like the sun’s corona. She was young, but somehow she projected a much older aura. Her manner was upright and confident, infused with authority.
“How do you know who I am?” Leah asked.
“We called you,” the girl replied.
Leah wanted to protest that the girl hadn’t called her at all but knew it was wasted breath. She knew what the girl meant, even if she didn’t understand it…or who “they” were.
“Who are you?” she asked instead.
“My name is SerenityBlue.” The girl extended a pale hand for Leah to take briefly but not shake. “One word. Two capitals. I know, I know. But it’s the name I was created with.”
“Created?”
“We were all created,” said SerenityBlue. She walked to Crumb and fluffed his pillow. Leah followed the girl with her eyes. She was rail-thin and looked almost insubstantial. When she stood between Leah and one of the false windows, her arms nearly vanished as the bright sun tried to wrap around and swallow them. “You came for Crumb.”
“You know his name?”
“It’s the name you registered him with at the hospital. It’s the name he calls himself.”
“But he has another name,” said Leah. She thought about holding back, but going too far was no longer possible. “It’s Stephen York.”
Serenity closed her eyes briefly then opened them and said, “Yes. It is. Thank you.”
Leah felt like she was dreaming. There was nothing unreal about the girl or the room, but the elements within it were like a dream. Everything seemed to crawl. The girl’s voice was hypnotic, her movements ethereal and otherworldly. The room was too clean and too sparse. It looked like a vision of a bedroom created by a person who’d never had one. The bed wasn’t against one wall; it was in the middle, like a showpiece. It wasn’t the way anyone would design a real bedroom, a real sick room, a real classroom…whatever this was.
“You took him from the hospital,” said Leah.
“Yes. We needed him more than they did.”
“For what?”
“I’m not sure. None of us are.”
“But that didn’t stop you. That didn’t stop you from breaking into a hospital, unhooking a man from support he may have needed, and leaving no trace for people who might have been looking for him. It didn’t stop you from erasing records or wiping memories.”
Serenity didn’t seem remotely troubled by Leah’s tone or the undercurrent of her words. She circled Crumb’s bed, adjusting his covers. Beneath her hands, he stirred. Leah thought he might be waking.
“No, it didn’t stop us,” said the girl. “We saw him, and we went to him. I have followers everywhere, and we’ve been looking for minds like his. When his surfaced, we went to it. I went with the others, in my body. We asked his mind to go, and it agreed. So we moved the rest of him. We did not seek to disturb others, and the children wished for them to stay unbothered. We left no trace, each going our own way. Now we’re here.”
Leah didn’t know what to make of any of it. She thought of the kid they’d met earlier, how he had turned the lobby into a beach, and his casual disregard for any line between a person’s native senses and the extra ones provided by The Beam. She’d decided he must have been an intuitive. If they all were intuitives, then at least Serenity’s logic would make sense to her. Whether it agreed with the normal rules of reality was something else entirely.
“What is this place?” Leah asked.
“It’s a school. For children who find themselves out of place, born into a world they can’t control.”
Leah thought of the NAU, the Wild East, the impervious lattice covering the continent, the rich in their spires and the Enterprise poor in their gutters, and the billions in the middle, poor but pacified.
“None of us can control the world.”
Serenity said, “But my children can control their worlds in other ways.”
“The Beam.”
Serenity shrugged, as if Leah were splitting hairs.
“Becoming proficient on The Beam isn’t reality,” said Leah.
Serenity looked at her and smiled — a kind smile that was somehow apologetic.
On the bed, Crumb’s eyes began to blink and open. He looked around, seeming to be momentarily confused by either his location or the presence of the two women — his old friend and his new guardian — here together. He stirred and propped himself up on his elbows, looking at Leah. The crazy was gone from his eyes. He looked like a man who’d seen a lot and had lived long without ever blunting his edge.
“Leah,” he said.
It was only one word, but the way he said it chilled her to the bone. His eyes were steady and steely, his voice calm and sedate and in control. This was not the same man who had wandered the Organa community her entire life, guarding the gates and chasing squirrels and talking about conspiracies with a beard full of garbage. Whatever Leah had started back in the burned-out house in Bontauk, it had clearly peaked, crested, and rolled on to completion. The wall she’d seen in his mind must have collapsed and fallen, leaving Crumb as the man he was supposed to be.
“Crumb?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Though Serenity helped me somehow reach out to you, I dreamed that you found a journal. I think it belonged to me. Did you?”
Leah, finding herself unable to speak, held up the journal.
Crumb looked at Serenity. Her replying look said, I told you.
“Then you know my real name,” he said.
> “Stephen York,” said Leah.
Crumb looked around the room, looked down at his open hands. His eyes rolled back. Then he said, “Yes, that sounds right.”
“Do you remember?”
“I remember remembering.”
“Do you remember Noah West? Quark?” Leah had to rein herself in. She was blabbing too far out of line, revealing too much. She still didn’t know who this strange girl was or what she wanted. She clamped her lips shut and waited.
“No,” said Crumb.
Leah looked at Serenity. For the first time, she wondered where Leo was. Was he really just filling a pitcher of water? He’d looked freaked out enough to run, to head all the way back to the mountains and dismiss his ill-advised return to the city as one long, bad trip. Leah found herself able to sympathize.
“Why are you interested in him?” she asked Serenity.
“I don’t know. His mind feels different on The Beam. It’s stronger, wiser. Maybe you know.” She looked at Leah. Wasn’t Leah supposed to be the guest? She was hardly the guide.
“He worked on The Beam,” said Leah. “He helped create it.”
Serenity nodded. “Thank you. Then what I’ve felt makes sense. The Beam was birthed from the same wellspring we all draw from, when we are inspired and create art. Every artist leaves a splinter of himself in everything he does. Every painting is a self-portrait. Every character in every story is the creator in disguise. Every song is the sound of the singer’s soul.” She turned to Crumb. “If you worked on The Beam, you left a part of yourself in it. We’ve sensed your echo. What’s in this bed is the corporeal piece of yourself, but there may be many others. Those parts may seem separate, but they are all connected beneath the surface. You are like a chain of islands in the ocean. We see many distinct drops of land, but they only appear separate because we can only see their tops. Beneath, they’re all part of the same thing.”
Leah’s skin prickled. Serenity’s message reminded her of what she’d felt during that strange trip in college, after taking the drug and purging into the red bucket. She’d felt that same sense of under-the-surface connectivity, as if she and the trees and the planet and all the other people around her were strands of the same energy, apparently separate but actually connected. She remembered an abiding feeling that it would all be okay, because it always was and could never be otherwise. She remembered feeling as if she’d left part of herself behind in The Beam in the way Serenity had described Crumb doing the same — that strange sense of herself as a spoon made of chocolate, melting pieces of her soul into a pot of hot soup as she stirred.