by Sean Platt
“Let’s ditch the fundraiser,” Isaac said, hearing his words come out warbling and weak. “Let’s take a rail to District Two.”
Natasha’s fingers slid beneath Isaac’s hair, turning what had to be a mask of horror and shock to meet her deep green eyes.
“Come down here,” she said, “and kiss me.”
EPISODE 17
October 3, 2081 — Grid-Neutral Appalachian Territories
Crumb was counting prime numbers, kicking at the dirty floor, thinking about the squirrels.
The squirrels seemed interesting for a while, but then they moved on to their tree-bound homes, or the ground, or wherever squirrels lived. Where did they live, anyway? Crumb thought he might once have known the answer to that question. Or maybe, the answers to many others. Different questions with difficult answers. What those questions and answers might have been, Crumb had no idea. All he knew was that the perimeter needed guarding and that seven became eleven became thirteen became seventeen.
Pick at the edges. Keep the loose ends close. Recite what you find to keep it fresh. Your mind will do the rest.
What did that mean? And did it matter?
Crumb looked down at his hands. There was no knife in them, or grinding stone to hone its edge. And yet he’d been so sure that he’d been sharpening a knife.
After a moment of looking down at his empty hands, Crumb felt the knife’s invisible, nonexistent edge growing dull. He needed to keep sharpening it, but that was tricky if it didn’t exist.
Eventually, he forgot about the knife, and his mind returned to the numbers. Somehow, after he’d resumed counting, his worries about the dulling edge faded away.
Nineteen. Twenty-three. Twenty-nine.
Crumb sat on the stone wall, feeling the numbers like tangible things, sure in a distant way that continuing to keep those numbers close was every iota as important as guarding the village perimeter and keeping an eye on the squirrels. As vital as watching the sky for intruders and keeping an eye out for invading Indian braves, like in Leo’s movie.
Thirty-one. Thirty-seven.
Stephen.
Forty-one.
Stephen.
Crumb looked up. Someone was interrupting his important work. He looked at the twin fenced pastures and the rutted dirt path between them. There was a single horse in each pasture. Was that a coincidence? Crumb thought not. He was wearing boots today. Sometimes, there were balloons in the air.
Forty-three. Forty-seven.
Stephen.
“Shh,” Crumb said. “Important work. Vital. Can’t be interrupted.”
But again, nobody was there. Nobody speaking, and nobody they might be speaking to. It was just Crumb. Crumb and the perimeter. Crumb and the blue sky and the few clouds that looked like animals and the perimeter, and Leo was counting on him out here, and Dominic, from the city, who’d passed not long ago and was with Leo now. Dominic, who might be his friend, who carried the spark.
Crumb looked back down at his feet, but was now only acting. The interrupter was still around, and Crumb knew how to get him to reveal himself. He had to pretend a return to important work, without taking his attention from the perimeter. Because it was threatened.
Stephen.
Crumb looked up. There was a man directly in front of him. Interestingly, the man didn’t have feet. He just kind of ended before reaching the ground. He didn’t seem to have a body, either. Not like Crumb’s. If Crumb were to gather some nuts and throw them at the man, those nuts would probably fly through him and hit the ground beyond. Crumb wished he had some nuts. Because it was something worth trying.
I know you’re in there, Steve.
“Who the fuck are you?” Crumb snapped at the strange hovering man. He had no business floating here. No business at all. He wondered if Leo would be proud if he apprehended the man or made him go away. The only question was how. He’d once seen a cartoon, from Leo’s library, where a mouse had frozen a ghost, and that had given the ghost substance enough to contend with. Maybe Crumb could do something similar.
Or maybe Crumb could let Gregory deal with the newcomer. He could see Gregory now, coming in from one of the paths that went down between the hills that looked like breasts. Gregory was large. The man in front of Crumb was not. He looked like an accountant. Quiet, neat hair. Small round glasses.
Crumb watched the man who hadn’t responded to his demand to identify himself and decided to simply hold his attention. That would be Crumb’s job. To keep the stranger distracted until Gregory’s arrival. He was coming now, on a brown horse named Tim or Tom, or actually, Crumb had no idea what the horse’s name might be.
“Morning, Crumb,” Gregory said.
“The perimeter is threatened. Noah fucking West!”
“Okay, Crumb.”
Then he rode Tim or Tom through the floating stranger toward the village center.
After Gregory was gone, Crumb locked eyes with the strange, placid-faced floating man without real feet. The man looked back, seeming to say, Now you see the score, pilgrim.
Crumb almost opened his mouth to speak a time or two, but whenever his lips began to part, something inside his memory tickled, from the same place as the numbers he counted over and over. From the same place as the voice that kept telling Crumb to pick at the edges, keep loose ends close and recite because his mind would do the rest.
You do recognize me, don’t you? the man asked.
“Noah fucking West,” Crumb said.
Instead of asking again who Crumb thought he was, the man nodded. Crumb could see a swaying tree through his ghostly head. Maybe he’d grown tired of playing this game. If Crumb didn’t recognize him, maybe now he was okay with it.
You don’t have access to much, I know, the man said, but it’s still there. I promise.
Crumb almost asked what was “still there,” but instead he went for the issue’s throat.
“How the fuck do you know that?”
I can see it. I can see the wall. It’s intact. But there is interplay — because there was meant to be.
“Who are you?”
What you’re doing, you’re doing right, the man told Crumb.
“It’s threatened. The squirrels.”
I promise, Stephen, that it will all be okay in the end. And I’m sorry.
“Are you from the government?” Crumb asked.
The floating ghost-man seemed to ignore him. I don’t have long, he said.
“Why the hell not?”
The firewall has a few intentional leaks. But I had to make it convincing, so it detects and repairs. I couldn’t get it approved if it had obvious holes that lasted.
“Get it by who?” Crumb demanded.
Ironically, by you, the ghost answered.
Crumb was becoming annoyed by all this doubletalk. He decided to make the man go away, the way he could sometimes make other odd things go away when they came in the night. Sometimes, there were incursions. Sometimes, there was a kind of noise. The trick was to ignore and not fight it then turn your back.
Crumb turned around on the stone wall. But when he looked up in the opposite direction, the man was still there, now behind the left-side fence.
“Why are you here?”
The temporary leak was activated when Captain Long passed you.
“You know Dominic?”
Part of me knows him.
“Why don’t you talk to him?”
Because I’m not in him, Stephen. This part of me is in you. If you focus, you’ll remember. You’ll see. Can you see, if you focus?
“Noah fucking West!”
In front of Crumb, the man’s face seemed to become sad. It was a strange expression to see, considering that the man’s face was always proud or angry or, on rare occasions, smug and satisfied. This man didn’t do sadness or love or friendship. Not outwardly, anyway. Crumb knew it because he’d never seen the man before and had no idea who he was.
Focus, Steve. I know you can focus. Inside, there’s a hol
e in a wall. I extend through it, and when it closes, I will have to go back. But you can see through it, can’t you?
“Go away,” Crumb said.
Close your eyes. Look inward. The man’s face became sadder. Maybe even guilty. I know you can do it, Steve. You’re still in here. I can see all of you. You were my right hand. I know you’re still who you were, even now.
“I’m Crumb. Who are you?”
It’s me, Stephen. It’s Noah.
“Noah who?”
Even sadder. As if the ghost man couldn’t believe what he was seeing, and maybe even wanted to cry.
Noah West, Steve. Tell me you remember.
Then Crumb got it. He did recognize the man, Noah fucking West. “The squirrels,” he said. “You’re with the squirrels.”
I’m sorry. This was the only way. They sent someone after you. It was the only way to hide you and keep you safe. But you’re more than hidden. And one day, it’ll all be all right. I promise. You’re special, Stephen.
“Special how?”
When you recite the numbers, said Noah, Noah fucking West, can you feel what you’re honing? Can you tell what you’re keeping alive inside, like a revolving concrete mixer keeps rock from hardening?
“Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven.”
Can you see it, Steve? Do you know why you do that, why you keep saying them, over and over?
“Vigilance.”
But as he mouthed the word, an image bloomed in Crumb’s mind that was so complete, he momentarily couldn’t see Noah standing in front of him. For the space of three or four seconds, there was no Organa village and no horse pastures and no rutted dirt path and no stone wall. No Leo, Gregory, or anyone else. But Noah was still there. Not as a ghost, but as a memory. As something present in wherever he was.
In front of Crumb was a screen like the one Leo pretended he didn’t have in his office. Only now, Crumb understood it completely. For a blink, he knew what it was and where its wires led and where its lack of wires went to. He knew the way everything tied to somewhere else. He saw a dark man in a dark coat. He saw a white room. He felt Noah — not as a ghost, but as a man — behind him. There were words on the screen, and for a moment, Crumb understood all of them and more. And for the first time he saw the subtle way the screen always flickered and flashed. He felt internal building blocks rearranging, building something day by day.
Then he was back outside the pastures. Noah was again in front of him as a shimmering, transparent thing rather than as a dominating presence behind him. Noah was again a leak coming from inside, somehow poked through an internal wall when Dominic had passed by. He was no longer the man who’d programmed Crumb’s old screen to flash as it had, in a way that Crumb hadn’t even noticed in the far long ago. Only now did it made sense. Something being coded inside him, shard by shard, for years and years and years.
And now he didn’t understand at all.
Noah was half as substantial as he’d been.
“You’re going away.” Crumb’s mind tried returning to his vision, but it was gone. And he’d never understood it anyway.
The firewall is repairing the leak, Noah said. It won’t be long now.
Something seemed to click inside Crumb. He realized something he’d missed before. Noah was a friend. Somehow, he was on Crumb’s side. And now he was being taken away because others were out to get them.
“When can you come back?”
Not until the end.
“I’ll help you,” Crumb said.
You can’t help me until the end.
As Noah faded, Crumb felt desperation mount. Somehow, this man was very important. He was Noah fucking West, after all.
“What should I do?”
Keep it sharp. Keep it close. Wait until it’s time.
In front of Crumb, the ghost-man was almost gone. “Time for what?” he blurted.
For Buddha to unlock the box.
A moment later, Noah’s ghost dissolved into nothing.
A moment after that, Crumb forgot the ghost had ever been there.
He stood near the stone wall and watched the perimeter. The squirrels were regrouping.
When Dominic left the village for District Zero, he nodded his farewell to Crumb at the gate. And as he passed, something inside Crumb seemed to call out to the police captain, seeking its mate.
Stephen York wasn’t sure if he was tired or not.
He was having a harder time focusing on the unreal surroundings than he had before, but it was possible that had something to do with his disorientation. He wasn’t sure if he was in his normal body (which may have been miraculously transported to this new place) or somehow still in the apartment in front of his old laptop canvas, where that Kimmy had forced his mind to jack into a Beam immersion without permission.
Could he be tired if the body he seemed to be in wasn’t real?
Or, if this was his real body in its interesting new clothing, was he tired because he’d walked from place to place in the digital-looking transport? He’d studied old Internet-and-earlier games as a kid, and the first electronic ones had looked a lot like the place where he and the girl now found themselves. She kept saying it was an old sector of The Beam, but to Stephen it looked like Pong, Asteroids, Centipede, maybe Pac-Man.
Her warnings about loose program fragments and perilous “holes” and recursive loops only underscored the impression. Stephen had dealt with all of those things as a programmer, but he’d never found himself surrounded by them. Looking out the transport’s windows, he kept picturing fragments attacking like the bad guys in Q*bert, or holes appearing as the angular blue-line vortexes in Tempest.
Neither option for fatigue made sense. His legs shouldn’t feel sluggish if he was merely jacked in and not moving a real body, but if this was his real body and he was in some sort of immersion, it still didn’t make sense. They didn’t seem to be in a real place. He couldn’t be here. Impossibilities stacked one on the other like Tetris blocks.
Stephen looked at the girl, Kimmy, now behind a steering fork that hadn’t been in the transport at first. Again, he considered asking her again where they actually were. But the answers, such as she gave, only made him more tired.
We’re searching for Alexa, she’d say.
Or: We’re in an ASCII neighborhood.
And when he’d asked if they were truly here at all or still in their separate apartments, participating in an advanced shared immersion, she gave his favorite of all non-answers: What’s the difference?
She wasn’t being obstinate. She honestly didn’t seem to understand the questions. And Stephen, after staying up all night, had no energy left to find new ways to query.
“What time is it?” Kimmy asked.
“Here? Or in the real world?” Stephen answered.
“What’s the difference?”
Stephen sighed. “I don’t even know how to find out.” It’s not like he wore a watch or had brought a handheld. They were online for sure, but despite having supposedly built most of what they were traveling through, Stephen had no idea how to access any of the billions of little chronographs embedded in every piece of The Beam, Crossbrace, and the old Internet. Normally, he touched his screen to interact. But in here, the world was a screen with nothing to touch.
Kimmy gave him a look that said he was a bummer, a bore, impossible, or all three. Then she seemed to think and said, “It’s 6:15.”
“A.M.?”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, of course.”
Stephen sat on what looked for all the world like a digital bench. It seemed to have no real substance; it was all dark and lines of light. If he was wireframing a new sim, he’d have given the bench more depth. And that had been in his day, back in the ‘60s. Now, in 2097, the construction software had to be AI-controlled and billions of times more sophisticated. The only way to make a bench this skeletal nowadays would be to specifically ask for one.
“We’ve been here for sixteen hours,” he said.
“You’re surprised? You didn’t really think it was only 6 p.m., did you?”
“I was hoping.”
“Toughen up, old man,” she said. “Alexa Mathis has been gone forever — since even before people started acting like she was dead. You’re not going to find her in four hours.”
The girl smiled. She had a pixie’s face — the kind that seemed incapable of guile. There had been a short window when Stephen had wondered if he could trust her, but in addition to a bones-deep certainty about her trustworthiness that he couldn’t explain, the issue was moot. This had stopped being his quest the moment she’d sucked him into…well, into whatever this was.
“Sure,” he said.
He’d tried to discuss all of this earlier, but Kimmy had led him in circles. He couldn’t tell her why he was after Alexa because he didn’t know himself. But he was tired, and his resolve was slipping, so the time when he’d confess might still come.
All he knew was that somehow, Noah was out here. He’d blown apart like a bomb not long after hitting The Beam, but the Noah who’d appeared in Bontauk hadn’t been just another avatar. That had been Noah; Stephen would bet on it. And if Noah had told him to find Alexa Mathis? Well, it’s not like he’d ever disobeyed that demanding son of a bitch.
“Be glad you’re not steering,” Kimmy said. “This sector is falling apart.”
“What do you mean?”
She nodded toward the transport’s side. “See for yourself.”
Stephen walked to the window and looked out. He saw the same Centipede-Tempest landscape, only now the straight lines of light seemed to have splintered. Many jutted into the air and stopped dead. Others dove below his sight, seeming to drop off into nothing.
“Why, do you think?” he asked, past the embarrassment of asking a kid for information.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t always like this, I don’t think.” She pointed. “Look. See there?”
Stephen looked. Below, beings that looked like user avatars seemed to be glitching. They’d walk forward a few steps then disappear and blur back to where they’d started. The same few steps looping on repeat.