by Stan Lee
As far as the police could tell, Batshit Barry was the last person to see William Ackerson before he disappeared.
Cameron’s father would have driven this same route to the docks ten years ago, early in the morning, just as the sun was coming up. Not many people would have been awake to see him pass by, but Barry was; when the police knocked on his door the next day, he told them that yes, he’d caught a glimpse of William’s pickup as it rattled past the house, taking the right turn that led to the lake. No, he didn’t think there was anyone else in the truck apart from the driver. No, he hadn’t seen or heard anything unusual that day.
For the cops, Barry only confirmed what they already knew: that Cameron’s father had driven to the docks along the usual route, parked his truck in the usual place, unmoored his boat from its usual slip, and left on what he’d told his wife would be an all-day solo fishing expedition. Depending on whom you asked, this was either savvy planning or terrible luck: by the time Cameron’s mom had gotten worried enough to call the police and report her husband missing, it had been nearly eighteen hours since anyone had seen him, and it would be another six before there was enough light for the search to begin in earnest. Nobody wanted to say so at the time, but by then the chances of finding William Ackerson alive were slim at best.
Instead, they never found him at all.
Lost at sea: that’s how Cameron always describes it in his own mind, even though the lake is no ocean, and even though there were suspicious signs after the fact that Dad had planned to do more than fish that day: a duffel bag full of clothes missing, a secret savings account drained. He’s heard the whispers. He knows the story. Once, William Ackerson had been a man with big dreams, and bigger prospects: a pioneer in the untamed wilderness of the early internet. He’d been among the first on the scene, the architect of a digital enterprise called Whiz. At the start, it was a garage project—just William and his partner, a bearded and bespectacled MIT dropout named Wesley Park—but by the year 2000, it had blossomed into a utopia full of eager cybercitizens, all of them entering wide-eyed into the glorious new world of online, where everything was fresh and shiny and so full of untapped potential. Investors lined up to throw money at them, and Whiz surpassed every local industry to become the biggest employer in town. Not even the departure of Park after a rumored falling-out over some proprietary software could topple William Ackerson from his place at the top of the empire.
Instead, it was the abrupt burst of the dot-com bubble that did him in, tumbling William into debt and obscurity the same year that his only son came into the world. Cameron was too young to remember the worst of it, the constant calls from angry creditors and the hasty move from a leafy suburban enclave to the cramped, crumbling townhouse on Walker Row. And of course, he hadn’t been around to see the best of it. He’d never known his father as anything but a man who’d lost everything, and whose bitterness was outweighed only by his desperation to claw his way back.
That was where the whispers came in—that the onetime titan of Whiz had fallen deep into the seedy underbelly of the web. Identity theft, credit card scams, online gambling, even blackmail: the news reports Cameron unearthed never came right out with it, but he could read between the lines. One local blogger even floated the theory that William Ackerson got into bed with the wrong people, that he’d been murdered and dumped at the deepest part of the lake by members of the mob for knowing too much about . . . well, something. Mom had laughed outright when Cameron asked her about that one, a rough barking sound with no humor in it.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” she’d said. “In a way, it would be easier if it were something like that and we had someone to blame. But the truth is, your dad had his eye on the door for years. He couldn’t handle how things had turned out—he couldn’t figure out a way to be happy with what we still had when it wasn’t what he wanted. He talked about leaving all the time. I was the foolish one, thinking it was just talk, thinking he’d never do it.”
That might have made sense to Mom, but it didn’t make sense to Cameron. If Dad had really left, on purpose, where had he gone? The boat was never found; neither was a body. No one ever used his social security number to apply for a job or a credit card; nobody matching his description was ever caught on camera, hurrying through a bus station or passing through airport security on his way to a new life. There was nothing in his internet history—no telltale searches like “starting over in Mexico” or “how to fake your own death.” And nobody, from his parents to his old girlfriend to his drinking buddies to his former collaborator, Wesley Park, ever heard from him again. Not an email, not a postcard, not even a friend request from a pseudonymous Facebook account.
And that just wasn’t how these things worked. Was it? If Dad were still out there, living a new life somewhere else, there would be some kind of trail—digital footprints, the kind that even a tech genius like William Ackerson couldn’t totally wipe away. You can’t hide from the internet. People don’t just vanish. Something strange must have happened, something out there on the lake.
Not that it matters, Cameron thinks, with a furious belligerence he doesn’t really feel. If I get the truth about what happened to Dad at the same time I get famous, that’s just extra. A bonus. He wouldn’t even care except that it makes the story better. People love when you make it personal, when there’s some kind of past trauma in the mix. That’s the only reason he’s thinking about it. Maybe he’ll even intercut his next recap with some old footage of his father, to tweak everyone’s heartstrings a little.
He rigs the Sunfish and shoves off, a soft but steady wind filling the sail as the city fades away behind him. He flips down his navigation visor and scowls; the digital readout assures him that there’s nothing ahead but clear skies and regular currents, nothing unusual, and his livestream is up and running but the viewer count is sitting obstinately at zero—no, wait, one. One viewer. His mom, probably. At least it’s a beautiful day to be out on the lake. He flips a cocky salute to the bow-mounted camera, then uses the tracking rig on the mast to follow a gull wheeling overhead.
“Ahoy!” he says. “Well, here we are. I’m out on Lake Erie looking for trouble, but all I’ve found so far is this seagull. Keep watching, though! Anything could happen. Maybe he’ll poop on me.”
God, I hope he doesn’t poop on me.
Then he remembers the view count on Archer Philips’s last video and thinks, Okay, so maybe I hope he does.
He doesn’t realize everything is about to change.
He doesn’t realize everything already has.
Cameron Ackerson—Great Lakes adventure pirate, YouTube wannabe, and, above all, ordinary human—is about to have the last normal day of his life.
4
Awakening
The boat. The storm. The lightning strike. The sound of someone screaming.
Cameron’s mind cycles through these moments until they blur and flicker, coming apart.
I’m going to die, he thinks, again.
And then: Or am I dead already?
* * *
He’s still in the boat, somehow, gazing into the storm, which seems to have no beginning and no end. He doesn’t remember how he came to be here; maybe he never left. Maybe this is heaven—or hell. An afterlife that picks up exactly where your life-life left off, so that you don’t even know at first that you’ve left the mortal realm.
* * *
The storm is just as it was, but time itself seems to be running at half speed. The air is dead and heavy, broken only by the sizzling, slow-motion bolts of lightning that rise out of the lake and crash down from the skies, merging together in the center. The water is churning, yet strangely clear; he can see straight down into it, into the depths of Erie, where a vast tangle of electric light shimmers like interconnected filament below the surface. A lone fish swims through the glowing web—and as Cameron sees it, the fish sees him back, changing directions and swimming straight for him, until its head pops above the surface.
“Hey, bro,” the fish says. “Does any of this seem weird to you?”
Cameron nods. Even if he is dead, in which case the standard for “weird” is set higher than usual, this all seems a little peculiar. In his pocket, his phone begins to vibrate.
“Oh, excuse me, I hate to be rude,” he says, but the fish flips a fin and says, “It’s cool.”
Cameron looks at the screen. It’s a news alert from an app called Clickbait Buzz; the headline reads, “EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: This High School Senior Sailed Naked into the Erie Triangle and We Can’t Stop Screaming.”
The boat in the video looks like his. The figure in the boat in the video looks like him.
That’s when Cameron looks down and realizes he’s wearing a life jacket, but no pants.
The fish looks disappointed. “Party foul, bro,” it says, then disappears.
Cameron looks up just in time to see the lightning bearing down on him. He screams, and everything goes black.
* * *
But only because his eyes are closed.
I’m dreaming. His consciousness flickers and the storm around him disappears.
Drifting in the darkness, he begins to feel things. The firmness of a mattress beneath him, the light drape of a blanket over his legs. There’s a gentle pressure on the index finger of his right hand—a heart rate monitor, he realizes. His pulse is sixty-two beats per minute. He’s not sure how he knows that.
The pressure on his left hand is less gentle; someone’s small, cool fingers are wrapped tightly around his palm. Mom, he thinks, and that makes sense. Who else would it be? But what doesn’t make sense is that he knows she’s been sitting there since exactly 6:14 a.m., texting her sister updates with the hand that isn’t holding his. He knows she called work and spoke to someone for three minutes and thirty-six seconds. And he knows that before she called work, she called Juaquo . . . and he knows Juaquo is here too. Juaquo, who texted his boss about needing a personal day for a family emergency before he’d even finished talking to Cameron’s mom; Juaquo, who lied at the nurses’ station and said he was Cameron’s brother. But how does he know? How?
The answer comes to him automatically.
It’s in the system. He lied, and they logged him in as family.
The next question supplies itself just as automatically.
How do I know what’s in the system?
This time, no answer comes, and the question floats away. He can’t hold on to it; he can’t focus, and when he tries, his thoughts go staticky. All frayed around the edges. Cameron doesn’t know how he knows; the information is simply there. Mom called Juaquo, and Juaquo came. He’s close by, too—very close, somewhere in the room, scrolling a news story on his phone.
The headline reads: “Area YouTube Star Found Alive After Lake Erie Shipwreck.”
The accompanying photo is a picture of Cameron.
For a split second, his mind focuses on those words with total, blazing clarity.
They called me a star!
* * *
The next moment, the thought seems to explode in all directions, blasted apart in a flood of white noise. Cameron’s eyes fly open and roll upward, looking at the ceiling without seeing it, then rolling back further into his head, where it feels like every circuit in his brain is firing at the same time. The news story about his accident is obliterated by a thousand images flashing rapid-fire through his mind’s eye, like a slideshow out of control. They’re photographs: a sunset over the lake, a close-up of fallen leaves, a woman smiling with a glass of wine in one hand. A fat baby sleeping next to an even fatter dachshund wearing a hot dog costume. Chickens in someone’s backyard, a rainy streetscape, a dozen pictures of a guy with his shirt off, flexing in a bathroom mirror. He recognizes a few faces in the cascade—Mom, Juaquo, even himself in various younger incarnations—but he can’t focus on them as the images speed by, becoming a blur. A wave of nausea hits him; it’s not stopping, it’s only getting worse. The pictures are only the beginning, those hundred thousand snapshots from the lives of a bunch of strangers; behind them is information, a sea of it, rushing in from all sides to drown him. He knows exactly how many patients there are in this hospital, and why they’re here; he knows blood pressures and heart rates and oxygenation levels and medication schedules. He knows that somewhere in the building, a man has just sent his siblings a group text—“Dad is fading, you should get here soon”—and that in another wing, a screaming red-faced baby just met its grandparents in Argentina over Skype.
He feels like his head is going to explode.
Someone is gripping his shoulders with viselike fingers. The only thing louder than the noise inside his brain is his mother’s voice.
“Cameron!” she screams. “Breathe!”
But he can’t. It’s like every system in his body has gone into low-power mode while he focuses as hard as he can on closing the portal inside his brain that’s letting in too much, too fast. His lips peel back into a rictus, revealing his frantically grinding teeth. Somewhere, a male voice is yelling the word “seizure,” and at the same time, Cameron feels something prick his thigh. A moment later, the noise suddenly blurs and begins to fade—but that’s not it, he thinks. The noise is still there. It’s his own mind that’s gone fuzzy, cycling down, bouncing back the information instead of processing it, refusing to receive.
A brain like an overloaded server.
When he wakes up, he’s going to have to think about that.
5
A Signal Received
In the soundless dark between worlds, Xal drifts, and knows nothing.
She is alone, as anchorless as the shimmering, swallow-bodied ship that carries her: untethered from all things in a place between places, neither here nor there. Outside, there is nothing—nothing but nothingness. This is a dimension out of space or time, a waiting room from which she could pass into any one of a hundred galaxies. There are no stars, and no sounds; only a black silence to match the one in her mind, just as endless, just as empty. She has been here a long time, although she doesn’t know it. Her consciousness is on pause while her body sleeps, suspended in the darkness, waiting to awaken and be reborn. With all her enhancements stripped away, she is small and vulnerable, less than a foot from end to end, curled in on herself like a plump pink worm. She lies cocooned in the tentacled appendages that curl out of her cranium and wrap around her body, hiding it from view. The coils end in a fleshy starburst, splayed like boneless fingers; some of them disappear through small portals in the sides of her sleep pod and into the ship itself, quivering as information runs from Xal through the mainframe and back again. It logs her presence as it has every cycle since she entered.
One networked occupant.
Critical damage to organic tissue.
Medical attention recommended.
For a moment, Xal stirs, and what the ship senses can also be seen: a mess of charred and blackened tissue, just visible among the gently undulating coils of her self-made cocoon. Stretched and unfurled, at her full height, her damaged tentacles would hang limply over one lidless eye, the neural network inside of them plunged into permanent darkness. The rest of her flesh carries an elaborate pattern of fractal scars, but this part isn’t marked; it’s melted, as dead and useless as badly charred meat. And even if there were a crew aboard to give her the recommended attention, there would be no fixing this. They could carve out the necrotic tissue, but the damage goes deeper. It’s why, even in the dreamless sleep enabled by the cryo-pod, Xal’s brainwaves periodically spike as her system floods with stress hormones, all dutifully recorded by the watchful, indifferent sentry program.
The occupant is at rest, but not at peace.
There will be no peace until she destroys the enemy of her world.
If she could dream, she would tear the old man to pieces in every one. She would paint the darkness with his blood and fill the silence with the sound of his screams. She would rip his life away as brutally and thoroughly as he’d ripped away hers, killing h
im from the inside out, taking everything that mattered until death would be a merciful afterthought. She would make it last. And when the dream ended, she’d do it again. The fantasy of vengeance would never compare to the real thing, of course, but it would be a pleasant way to pass the time. An occupation. A distraction. Something to make her forget the vast, terrible emptiness she faces both outside and in.
Inside the ship, all is silent and still.
Until suddenly it isn’t.
The loneliness is the first thing to register as Xal’s awareness flickers, her respiration quickening, the pupils dilating in her sightless eyes. It’s how she knows she’s awake—not because of what she feels, but what she doesn’t. Once, coming out of sleep was like coming home, her mind enveloped by the warm and comforting noise of the hive, her synapses firing with the euphoric rush of connection. Her own inner voice was a strong, sustained note, one of millions in a glorious harmonic cry that went on forever. Now, she comes awake to the aching quiet of too much empty space. The only voice in her head is her own, so small and weak that it barely dents the emptiness.