by Chuck Wendig
“It’s not a god. Not in the old-world way. But…maybe in a new way, it is? I mean, imagine it, Shana, it’s a sentient being, not human, that created this place out of nothing. We’re inside its mind now, and—”
“But it didn’t create us. We were here first. We made it, it didn’t make us. It’s not a god, Mom. It’s just a less shitty version of Windows, or a really sassy PlayStation.”
A sudden flare of anger from Daria when she countered with: “Be respectful. Black Swan saved your life, Shana. Don’t you forget that.”
“Is that you talking, Black Swan?”
“You’re being insufferable.”
The roar of the waterfall filled the space, like the rush of blood behind one’s eardrums. A pumping, gushing susurrus. Finally, Daria said:
“Nessie is going up.”
“Going up where?” But Shana already knew the answer, so when her mother said it was to meet Black Swan, she wasn’t surprised.
But it hurt her just the same.
“No, she’s fucking not,” Shana said.
“Shana, she wants to go—”
“You told her to go. She thinks you’re really our mother, you know that? I don’t know if artificial intelligence is capable of feeling guilt, but if so, you should be feeling it right now like a kick in the stomach. She missed you so bad she’s willing to follow you into Hell. But not me.”
“Shana. Don’t you want to go, too? Black Swan has answers. Don’t you want to know what will happen to your baby—”
Whap.
Shana slapped her mother across the mouth.
“Don’t talk about that. I can’t control what happens there and I don’t want to think about it so keep it out of your mouth.”
Her mother nodded. “I know what it’s like to not want to talk about things. I respect that.”
“Fuck you.”
Shana turned heel and walked back up the grated metal stairs, the rock wall on her right, the roar of the waterfall retreating behind her.
It was time to talk to Nessie.
* * *
—
SHE MARCHED BACK toward town—“town”—past the sign that showed the various stops and landmarks along the way toward the falls: STUMP WALL, THE SCOTTISH GULLIES, THE FIVE FINGERS, GAZEBO WALL, SHITHOUSE WALL. Shana didn’t know what the hell a Shithouse Wall was; she didn’t care to find out.
The path wound down toward Ouray, slick and muddy, with roots and stones peppering the way. Songbirds flitted overhead. Mountain bluebirds, somebody said they were. Trilling and chirping as they went from pine to pine, hiding in the dark needled boughs. All part of the simulation, she thought. She looked up to the blue sky and banded clouds, and toward the farthest peak she saw the black coils looping in the sky, turning slowly, dreamily, as if underwater.
Black Swan.
Always up there. Over everything.
Crunching numbers. Making the simulation donuts.
She headed to the terminus of the path, where it opened up to the sidewalk on 3rd Avenue in the southwest corner of town. Sometimes this legitimately felt like a real town—people did what people in towns do, they swept stoops, they pruned bushes, they looked out windows as you passed. They talked. Laughed. Ate ice cream. Bullshitted. Loitered. Jaywalked.
But other times, the illusion was clear, too. And not just because of the presence of Daria Stewart’s new god, little-g, writhing up there in the sky. It was because nobody drove cars; no cars were around at all. No pets, either—nobody walking dogs, no dogs barking, zero cats skulking about on fencerows. The sound wasn’t always quite right, in fact, sometimes like it was too real, but also not real at all—like noises were missing, the sounds of the wind, or the sound of distant music, or the sound of a plane overhead.
The imperfections of the simulation were small—but like a fleck of dust in your eye, it grew more noticeable the more you tried to pretend it wasn’t there, working hard to blink-blink-blink it away.
Some people waved as she passed. She saw Bella Brewer leaning up against a mailbox, chatting with Bob Rosenstein; when they saw Shana, their fingers tickled the air in a little toodle-oo wave. Others simply watched her from porch swings or from behind the shadows of curtains. Elsa Carter was inside one of those windows—from here, Shana spied the woman standing in front of a big canvas. Shana couldn’t see what she was painting, only that she had thumb-streaks of paint across one cheek and more on her forehead. Her father, Carl, stood behind her, watching, smiling.
All of it reminded Shana of that game, what was it? Nessie liked it. The Sims, that’s what it was. Buncha digital people you made up, bobbleheading around town, babbling at each other in their own made-up language.
The town felt alive, even in its unreal state.
She knew some of the names of the other townsfolk, either from when she was a shepherd or from her introductions around town over the last—well, how long had it been? Weeks? Months? As Nessie pointed out, time here did not move like time anywhere else.
(Even now, she closed her eyes for just a moment and found herself in her own eyes, her real eyes, staring out at the backs of the flock ahead of her, diligently walking ahead. The sun was setting over a desert vista. The sky was a pale, powdered blue, the clouds like pillars of talc. She didn’t see Arav right now. But she knew he was near. And she wished like hell she could feel her limbs—her real limbs, not the mental facsimiles she had hanging by her not-real simulated side. That way, she could reach out, grab him, hold him. She thought strongly, loudly, I miss you, I hope you’re okay. But of course he wasn’t. He was sick behind the mask he wore. He was different now, too—though every day he cared for her the way she cared for Nessie, he was twitchy, guarded, paranoid. Which was actually pretty reasonable, when she thought about the shooting on the bridge.)
When again she opened her eyes, she saw two people coming toward her: Mia and Mateo. The two were fraternal twins, and when Mia was a shepherd and Mateo was her walker, you could see the resemblance—the thick, dark hair and the thick-dark eyebrows and the full lips between sharp cheekbones the way a hammock hangs between trees—but now that they were both together, their twinness, if that could be a word, was crystal. They each looked bored, but also somehow on the verge of not being bored? Like they knew something you didn’t. As if they knew about a secret party or where to find the guy with the good drugs.
They loped and bounced toward her.
Mia smirked. “Hey, you. Back up at the falls again?”
“Yeah,” Shana said, wearing a smile like a mask.
“That place is cool,” Mateo said. One of the ways he differed from his sister was that he was significantly less intense. Easygoing. Honestly, like he was always juuuuuuust a little bit high. Eyes half lidded he said, “I like to go there and just…Zen the fuck out.”
“Cool, cool,” Shana said, not really thinking it was cool, or that any of this was cool. “I gotta go talk to Nessie about…stuff.” She started to step past them, but then stopped and whirled around. “Hey, either of you been…up there yet? Not to the waterfall but to see the, y’know, the wizard behind the curtain?”
Mia lowered her voice: “You mean Black Swan?”
“Yeah.”
“Bitch, no way. I’m not going to talk to some scary-ass flying devil snake. This homie”—she juggled a thumb to indicate Mateo—“has been thinking about it, though.”
“Don’t,” Shana said. A stern warning—though one without any reason behind it, she knew. Just a gut feeling.
“People say it wasn’t scary,” Mateo said. “Plus, I can ask it questions, I dunno. Like, I feel weird that a lot of other people have gone up and I haven’t yet. At the same time…”
“At the same time, idiot, the whole thing is fuckin’ weird,” Mia said. “I mean, I’m super-happy to not be dead and shit, and if I could send that creepy cloud-snak
e a fruit basket, I’d do it, but I don’t wanna go hang out with it. I’m good down here, thank you very much. And you,” she said to Mateo, “aren’t going up there so quit thinkin’ you are.” Those last words she accentuated by punching him in the arm.
“Ow, ow, shit, okay.” He frowned at her and rubbed his arm. “Fine, if I’m not going to meet Black Swan, let’s at least go up to the falls. Oh, man.” He looked suddenly like a revelation just punched him in the face. “Can we jump off it? Would that hurt us? You punching me hurt. But can we die?”
“Dude, I dunno,” Shana said.
“See,” he said. “If I could go talk to the wizard, I could ask.”
Mia shoved him forward. “Bye, bish.”
“See you, Mia. Bye, Matty.”
Onward she went, diligent in her step.
* * *
—
SHE AND NESSIE lived in a hotel. The Beaumont. It was the haunted-feeling inn that she’d woken up in not long after she first got here—that room, she was told, she could keep, if she wanted it. Or she could strike out on her own and find one of the houses or rooms around—plus, Ouray was home to other smaller motels, hotels, and B&Bs. Shana wanted to keep her stay here feeling temporary, and so she chose to remain right where she was.
Bonus points: It was also where Nessie lived.
Nessie had decorated her room to look like her room at home: sheets the color of lemon, a comforter the color of canary feathers, a floofy pink pillow, shelves stocked with notebooks and real books (lots of young adult, sci-fi, fantasy). She put flowers in little jars and vases. Somehow she even found a Twenty One Pilots poster and hung that over the creepy gilded mirror over the porcelain-topped dresser. Her decorative efforts took the dour, Victorian vibe and drowned it out with a wash of bold, punchy colors.
That was Nessie in a nutshell.
Presently, Nessie was putting things in a backpack.
Food, water, a notebook. (Shana knew they didn’t really need to eat or drink here, but it was satisfying and, more important, routine.)
“No,” Shana said, firmly, clearly, the one word barked loud. To emphasize, she stomped over and took the backpack away from her sister, then upended it back on the bed, spilling the food, water, and notebook out. Alongside that fell other objects, too: a couple of pens, a hair scrunchie, and four Lloyd Alexander books—the Prydain Chronicles, a series Nessie loved growing up and read again and again. While all the other kids were wandering Hogwarts with Harry Potter, Nessie had her face buried in these. Dad used to joke that they should’ve cut eyeholes in the books so she could just wear them like masks and complete the transformation.
Shana wasn’t sure where her sister had found those in this town. The library, maybe? Or maybe, she thought, a gift from our new god?
“Shana, it’ll be fine.”
“No,” she said again, injecting iron into her voice.
“We have questions.”
“Who’s ‘we’? You have a mouse in your pocket?” That, another saying of Dad’s, once upon a time. Anytime one of them indicated turning chores into a group activity, he’d always say that—oh, we are going to do the dishes? Who’s “we”? You got a mouse in your pocket?
“Fine. Maybe you’re not intellectually curious about all of this, but I am, and I’m fed up.” Nessie hesitated. “Shana, you’re pregnant.”
“Yeah. I know. I don’t need a lesson in reproductive science.”
“No, I just mean—we haven’t talked about it—”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“What happens to the baby while you’re in here?”
Fear moved swiftly through her. She really hadn’t wanted to think about it but now here she was, thinking about it: Would she die? Would the baby die? Was the baby in stasis like she was? None of the other walkers had been pregnant. Why did Black Swan even choose her? She blinked back frustrated, anxious tears.
“I don’t know,” she said. Her voice quieter than she intended.
“I want to know,” Nessie said. “So I’m going up there. Mom always said I should go, that it would be fine.”
“Daria isn’t someone we should trust.”
Nessie made a the-hell-you-say face. “What? Why?”
“What if she’s not real?”
“She’s as real as you and I are.”
A new chord of fear struck in Shana’s chest: What if Nessie wasn’t real? What if Shana wasn’t real, just the program of her psyche made to run and believe it was real, when in reality she was just a downloaded code from a brain-dead husk powered by little-bitty robots. Or what if that’s what Black Swan wanted from people, to upload into them some kind of virus, some virus of belief and servitude, creating a cult…
Whoa, she told herself, this sounds like when you and Zig would get turbo-high and imagine how the school lunch program and those square pieces of roof-shingle pizza were somehow the result of some far-sweeping global conspiracy. Take it down a notch, weirdo.
“Maybe she’s real, maybe she’s not,” Shana said. “All I know is, this place is good at seeming like a true place, but it’s a simulation. An incredible simulation. Mom went through a lot, but she also left us—”
“She was suicidal, Shana. God, have a heart.”
“And that was still selfish, okay? She was there for herself, not for us. And now she’s there for…whatever that thing is up there in the sky. We have each other, we have to take care of each other, because there’s no guarantee she, or that thing, will.”
“Shana, you sound paranoid.”
“I am paranoid! How can you not be paranoid?”
“I’m going.”
“No.”
“Fine, then I’ll go without my stuff. I was going to write my answers down, but…I’ll just remember them. I have a good memory.” Nessie, defiant, clasped her hands behind her back like some kind of belligerent administrator, and then headed for the door of the room.
Shana blocked it.
“Shana, move.”
“No. No, no, a thousand times, no.”
But she could see the fire in her sister’s eyes. On simple things, unimportant things, Nessie would always back down. Shana never felt herself a bully, not exactly, but if she wanted the channel changed or some nonsense, she just had to demand it a few times and Nessie would acquiesce. “The power of the big sister,” Shana would say, “is absolute.”
Except, when Nessie really had her teeth in something, there was no way she’d let go. When Mom left, Nessie got a bug up her butt about the whole family going to therapy—a suggestion Dad and Shana resisted because, uhh, yeah, no thanks. But Nessie just kept coming and coming, bringing it up at every meal, in the morning, at night before bed…
They gave in.
They went to therapy.
It was horrible. Each session felt like pulling teeth with a pair of clumsy pliers—and going in rectally, instead of orally. But over time, it actually seemed to help. They laughed again. They found some kind of calm and balance and light in the void their mother left for them.
So, Shana knew, when Nessie wanted something, she’d make it happen. Here, she’d go out through the window. Or sneak out at night. Or build a fucking rocket booster with that big brain of hers and launch herself up into the sky like she was the cartoon coyote chasing the roadrunner.
Which meant she had to do some redirection.
Some kung fu business.
“You’re not going, Nessie,” she said.
“Shana—”
“Because I am.”
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
—Alan Perlis
NOW AND THEN
The Ouray Simulation
“THIS IS A BAD IDEA,” Nessie said.
“It’s a fine idea,” Shana said, gathe
ring most of the stuff off the bed and chucking it into Nessie’s neon-blue book bag. She left out the Lloyd Alexander books, but everything else went in there.
“No, you shouldn’t go—”
“You said you wanted answers. And you’re right, I need answers, too. So I’ll go.”
“This isn’t the reaping, Shana. I’m not Prim and you’re not Katniss, you don’t have to go to the Hunger Games in my place, okay?”
She slung the backpack over her shoulder.
“I’m going. If it’s dangerous, then I’ll take the brunt of it. If you’re right, if Mom’s right, and it’s not? Then it’ll be fine. And I’ll come back down here, la-dee-da, and tell you so. Though, if I seem different? Like, weirdly different? Then maybe don’t believe me.”
“Shana, please. I’ll go with you.”
“No. Let me do this.” She reached out and held her sister by the shoulders. “You were always the special one. You’re smart. Smarter than smart, and there’s probably a word for smarter than smart, and the reason I don’t know that word is because…I’m not that smart. Dad had a place in mind for you, a place in the world, in the universe. A special seat just for you. And he was right. You’re special. You’re better than me.”
Nessie wiped away a tear. “You’re a good sister.”
“Well, that’s my gravestone sorted.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
Shana kissed her on the cheek. “Love you, little sis.”
“Love you, big sis.”
“I’m out.”
She went to the door. But Nessie stopped her.
“You think Mom isn’t really Mom? Or that we can’t trust her?”
“I don’t know. But I’m gonna find out.”
OCTOBER 14
Nipton Road at the California-Nevada border
“THIS IS A bad idea,” Arav said. His voice nasal and muffled behind the rebreather mask: a mask meant not to stop the infection from reaching him, but rather, to stop the infection from leaving him. He paced the empty road cutting through the desert. The sky bled purple. The air had gone crisp, the chill nesting in their marrow.