Strange Exit

by Parker Peevyhouse

  She looked down at the metal wings in her hand. “No.” Then she turned and vanished through the door.

  22

  LAKE

  As Lake stepped out of the pub, a hand locked around her forearm.

  She tried to pull free—but too late. In a moment, she had left the pub for a new pocket of the sim, and she wasn’t alone. Taren stood next to her, still gripping her arm.

  She wrenched free. “What’re you—”

  “Wait, Lake.” He held his palms out. “I just want to talk.”

  Behind him: a desert landscape. Heat rippled over red-brown dirt. Low mountains slumped at the horizon.

  Lake edged back from Taren. “What you did in the Battery…”

  Dark circles showed under Taren’s eyes. He lifted an unsteady hand to clutch the side of his head. “I don’t feel right. I’m in a nightmare, and there’s nothing to wake to.”

  The despair in his voice pulled at her. “You shouldn’t be in the sim. Go back to the ship.”

  “The ship—another nightmare.”

  She couldn’t dispute it. “You can’t come with me.”

  “Why not? Where are we?”

  Lake turned. Found proof that sometimes the sim gave you things that were only as strange as real life: Row after row of gleaming jet planes stretched to the horizon. Red-and-blue-striped fuselages, dolphin-nosed cockpits, dirt-streaked bellies. They all stood lined up in the desert, mechanical wonders never to be used again. “We’re in an airplane boneyard in the Mojave Desert,” she told Taren.

  “The door in the middle of the desert,” Taren said, his voice lowering to a rasp. “You told me about this once.”

  A small voice behind Lake said, “Don’t let her go in there, Taren.” Lake turned back to find Willow standing next to Taren, squinting into the bright distance. “It’s a graveyard. She’ll never come out.”

  “No, Will.” Lake stepped close to her and pushed her messy hair behind her ears. “A boneyard. It’s just a place where people come out and scavenge for parts for other planes.”

  “Why are we here?” Taren asked.

  “The captain of the ship has a pilot’s license,” Lake said. “You don’t start out flying a spaceship without practicing on something smaller first.”

  “She’s going to talk to him,” Willow said.

  “What, you think he’s just been sitting in a cockpit this whole time, pretending to steer a dead airplane?” Taren said.

  “No, he’s not on an airplane.” Lake lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the glare. In the distance, she spotted what she’d come here for: a Boeing 747 with a curious cabin door.

  Taren followed her gaze. “What’s in there?” Panicked edge to his voice. “Willow, what’s through that door?”

  Willow eyed him warily, edged closer to Lake. She hadn’t forgotten about the Battery either, it seemed. “A simulated version of the ship, best guess. It looks just like the doors on the ship, right, Lake?”

  “The captain’s through there,” Lake said. “He has to be.”

  Taren caught Lake’s arm again. “You want to go into a pocket of the sim that looks just like the ship?”

  She speared him with a look that made him let go. “I didn’t ask you to come with me,” she said.

  “She’ll never come out,” Willow said again, and Lake’s ribs tightened around her lungs.

  “Willow’s right,” Taren said. “How are you going to remember you’re not really on the ship?”

  Lake’s breath kept coming short. “You know another way I can talk to the captain?”

  “And what’s he going to tell you? You think he knows a better way to wake the sleepers?”

  “No. I don’t think he’s interested in waking the sleepers at all. But if he knows how we got into this mess, maybe he knows if there’s any way out.”

  “There is a way out. Wake the sleepers. Get off the ship.”

  “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. You don’t understand what’s at the heart of the sim.”

  “Don’t do this. It’ll only make everything worse—one more sleeper trapped in the sim.”

  Lake glared at him. The heat of the desert air was no match for the heat of the anger and shock that had been bubbling inside her since the Battery. “Are you going to lock me up, like they do on the ship?” Or worse—“Are you going to find some tar?”

  Taren shrank back, wounded.

  Lake felt a pang of guilt. But it quickly vanished as she turned toward the boneyard, the rows of sand-blown airplanes. “Come on, Willow. If you’re coming.”

  They left Taren.

  A gust of warm wind sprayed dirt over tufted desert weeds and against their shins as they plodded toward the plane in the close heat.

  “You know how the Egyptians buried their leaders in the desert?” Willow said. “Or, entombed them, I guess?”

  “The captain’s not inside the airplane,” Lake said. “He’s no mummy. This is just where the door to the sim-ship is.”

  “They killed cats and put them in the tombs with the mummies. Servants, too.”

  Lake stopped short of the plane. She leaned down so she was eye level with Willow. “The captain isn’t a pharaoh. We aren’t his cats.” She did her best to ignore the gnawing in her stomach as she straightened. “Or his dead servants.”

  “Not yet,” Willow said.

  Lake started up the wheeled staircase, her feet heavy as lead. “When we step through that door, you have to stay close. Help me remember it’s a simulation.”

  Sweat trickled down Lake’s back. She focused on that, and on the pounding in her head, instead of on the dread creeping over her. She opened the slick black door.

  A hallway greeted her, exactly like the hallways on the ship. Flickering lights overhead, metal floor beneath her boots.

  Her heart pounded as she crept along the passage. Hum of air vents, roar of her breathing. She looked over her shoulder, past Willow, to the door they’d come through, wondering if she’d remember how to find it again. I said my goodbyes.

  Not very good ones.

  Her heart sank with the weight of what she’d left behind: Taren, alone and confused in the desert, and Ransom …

  The boy she’d spent her frozen days with—days when time stood still and they didn’t want anything more than each other.

  The boy she’d invented. A figment.

  Her heart sank further, and she forced herself to keep walking. At the end of the hallway: a door. Locked, like so many of the doors on the ship were.

  She touched the handle. Pushed.

  The door opened. But then, the sim often surprised her.

  She held the door for Willow, who passed her with a worried look. “Cats,” she said darkly.

  Lake swallowed. She let the door close behind them and slipped past Willow to lead her down another hallway. Is this the way to the captain’s controls? She didn’t know what it would look like—if the captain had to fly the ship in a cockpit that looked out at the stars, or if he only sat in a room full of computer screens. She turned the corner, oddly interested to find out.

  It wasn’t a cockpit, or a computer lab, or anything Lake would have expected. It was several rows of leather airplane seats, like a first-class cabin. A flight attendant pushed a cart up the aisle, her smile firm, her gaze empty. A figment.

  The cart stopped three feet from where Lake stood. Rattle of ice. Pop of soda tab. Smell of scotch. A voice from one of the seats said, “Don’t forget the straw.”

  Lake inched forward until the passenger came into view: a man with wispy yellow hair, lightly sweating in a blue suit jacket.

  Yeah, she knew him.

  Had seen him on TV, and lingering with the principal in the halls of her school, eyeing students like you’d inspect eggs in a carton at the grocery store.

  Captain of the ship. Pied piper.

  Master of the broken vessel that was taking them all down with it.

  She drew in a breath so hot with anger it might sear her lungs
, and took another step forward.

  The line between his brows said he’d noticed her. “You the captain of this ship?” she asked him.

  The line deepened. Did he remember, or did he think he was on an airplane?

  The flight attendant held out his drink. He didn’t take it from her, just sipped from the straw.

  Willow leaned around Lake to get a look. “This is him?”

  “A real sleeper.” Lake couldn’t stop watching the captain sip the drink the woman held, as distasteful as she found the sight.

  “Can we order a drink?” Willow whispered to Lake. “Just root beer or something?”

  Lake stepped up to the cart and grabbed a can of root beer, passed it back. “You’ve been sleeping a long time,” she said to the captain. “Don’t you think it’s time you woke up?”

  He pushed his straw away with his lips and leaned his head back against the seat. “You know, I recognize you. Took me a minute. Not as sharp as I used to be.”

  Lake’s stomach twisted. She should probably be happy he wasn’t totally deluded, but it only made her feel like an egg in a carton. “You took us from our parents.”

  His eyes widened. “Yes, I saved you.”

  “Like a person saves dessert for the end.”

  The captain frowned at her. The flight attendant stood smiling next to him, her hand still holding out the drink. Such a disorienting picture.

  “You decided the situation was hopeless, so you came out here to hide from it all?” Lake asked.

  The line appeared between his brows again, but this time a shadow passed over his expression. “Hide…” he said quietly.

  Unnerving.

  The captain jerked his head, signaling to the attendant to take his drink away. “You see the situation I’m in,” he said to Lake.

  Lake pushed the cart and took a reluctant step forward so that the captain came into full view.

  His back was pressed deep into the seat, and his arms in their blue suit sleeves—

  They were melded to the armrests. Sunk so deep in leather and plastic, it almost wasn’t accurate to say he had arms anymore.

  She swallowed her revulsion. “What’s happening to you?”

  “I made sure the ship knew that when everyone else woke up, I should go to sleep forever.” The captain nodded at the attendant and she pressed a wet towel against his sweaty forehead. “My plan has always been for you children to make your way safely off the ship—and for me to make my exit from the world. I’m not fit for starting over.”

  Safely off the ship. Lake swallowed the bitterness creeping up the back of her throat.

  “You’re dying?” Willow asked the captain.

  “Yes,” the captain replied with a rueful smile. “I’ve used Paracosm to leave reality so many times. But this will be the last. Death will be the strangest exit yet.”

  Lake couldn’t find it in her heart to feel sorry for him. “If you wanted us to get safely off the ship, why’d you program it not to let us off until everyone leaves the sim?”

  The captain frowned. “I didn’t. But I’ve long suspected that the ever-growing simulation was straining the ship, keeping it from following protools.”

  “Then it amounts to the same thing—we can’t control the ship until all the sleepers wake and their pockets of the sim close. Why didn’t the ship try to wake us sooner?”

  “The ship sends out probes once a year,” the captain explained. “The probes collect data about the surface conditions, so it knows when to wake us.”

  “Yes, I’ve seen the data. Craters and fire and smoke and—”

  “No, those are the pockets of the sim the passengers created themselves. Out of fear for what they would find when they went home to the surface.”

  “Then what’s Earth’s surface really like now?”

  The captain’s cheek twitched, and Lake half waited for the attendant to scratch it for him. “The probes went out. Year after year, decade after decade. But the improvement we hoped for … never came.”

  Lake gripped the back of a seat, hit hard by a wave of disappointment. She’d known, hadn’t she? As soon as she’d realized that the captain had created that lovely home with the shelters under the trees—she’d understood that he believed they’d never get home. “Then the ship woke us only to die. And you made the world at the heart of the sim to ease our passing.”

  The captain squirmed in his seat. His eyes went unfocused. “There’s a creature at the heart of the simulation. That’s why we had to leave that place.” He mumbled something more, words Lake couldn’t make out.

  She leaned closer, listening. But she couldn’t make sense of his mutterings. “A creature?” she tried. “In the sim?”

  His head sank back so deeply into the seat, Lake wondered if it would lodge there forever. “I didn’t create it.”

  “You didn’t create the creature? Then where did it come from?”

  He no longer seemed aware that anyone else was with him, just went on whispering to himself about things Lake could not make sense of.

  “Hey,” she growled. “You can’t just check out. Your ship is falling to pieces. We’re not going to get safely off. We’re going to die unless you can find some way to fix it.”

  The captain blinked up at her.

  “You took us from our families. Said you were going to save us.” Lake gripped the seat back. “You told us we could find a way to start over once we woke from stasis.”

  “Start over. Yes, but you see what we’ve done to our home. What’s to keep us from making the same mistakes again? We’re set in our ways—but that’s why I brought only young people. It’s our only chance for doing anything differently.”

  Were they doing anything differently? Retreating to odd fortresses, stockpiling weapons.

  But that hardly mattered now. “Your ship is broken. We can’t go home. Even if there were anything left for us on the surface, we can’t get there.”

  The captain started mumbling again, and twitching in his seat, as if overwhelmed by the venom of her accusations.

  “Why did you even bring us on this ship? You brought us here to die.”

  Behind her, Willow touched her arm. Lake cringed with guilt at the thought that her words had frightened Willow. But then a small, cold hand slipped into Lake’s and squeezed, and Lake realized her sister was trying to comfort her.

  The captain gave up his mumblings and cast his gaze toward the round window that looked out at nothing. “When I first had this ship built, it was meant for exploration,” he said. “It would take us to places as untouched as Earth had once been. A long time ago, the future used to be something to build toward. Technology was a vehicle to bring us into golden days. Now it’s just a game of who’s clever enough to escape.”

  “Of who can manage to own a ship, you mean,” Lake said. “Or a bunker, or a cache of supplies.”

  “You think my wealth makes me evil. But it’s wealth that built this marvel.” He looked around the dusty cabin, as though old airplane seats were worth getting excited over.

  “Your marvel is broken,” Lake told him. “Most of it’s locked down, we can’t access even half of it. We can’t get to any kind of controls to fix anything.”

  “But here in the sim…” He seemed to forget that he was speaking and only stared ahead at the seat in front of him.

  “The sim is different. There might be controls here, but—”

  “Yes.” The captain squinted in thought. “And since the simulation is connected to the program that runs the ship, those controls might just fix the real ship…” He trailed off again, but Lake had heard enough to make her itch with hot, dangerous hope.

  It was a strange idea, using the sim to affect reality. But she could try it.

  But the sleepers will still be trapped in the sim. And the sim will go on straining the ship’s systems until we get them out.

  “Lake?” Willow said behind her. “Are we going to search for the controls?”

  Lake was stil
l lost in thought. “Is there a way…” Her heart thudded in her chest. “Do you know a way to wake all the sleepers at once?” she asked the captain.

  She shrank from the dread her own words awakened in her. There is a way—with the tar.

  But could there be another way?

  “A way that won’t send the sleepers into shock?” she added.

  “Pull the plug on the whole program?” He closed his eyes, and his skin suddenly looked waxy in the low light. “They’re embedded too deeply for that now.”

  Lake swallowed disappointment. “Let’s go, Will.”

  The flight attendant beckoned to them and then pointed to a door at the far end of the room.

  “The ship’s controls are there?” Lake asked, unsettled by the woman’s empty smile.

  She answered only by pulling the cart back and then disappearing through the door.

  Lake glanced back at Willow, unsure. Willow only shrugged and gulped down the last of her soda. She left the empty can on a seat, and then the two of them approached the door.

  23

  TAREN

  Taren left the desert for a more familiar pocket of the sim: the neighborhood where Lake had taken him on his first trip back into the sim.

  The one so close to his own neighborhood.

  “Never go into your own house.” But he had to. He felt as if he were becoming a figment of himself, a hollow ghost of who he had been before all of this had started.

  When he’d walked through that door in the tiger yard and left the sim, had he left himself, too?

  The houses along the street looked oddly one-dimensional, as if painted onto a backdrop. Taren stared at the closest one and realized it was nothing more than a blurry block of color behind a ragged fence of weeds. A hole stood where the door should be, a gaping mouth.

  The street narrowed sharply, and then Taren came to the end of it, a wall painted to give the illusion that the road continued on. He pushed on the wall. It gave.

  “Make this street lead to my house,” he commanded.

  The wall expanded, then melted under his touch, opening the road so that Taren could step through.

  And here was his house. Blistered paint, sagging roof, bowed walls—a house ruined by decades of neglect. This is what it looks like down on Earth. His heart sank.