by Callie Hart
Then he turns to me. “Are you feeling brave, Ms. Dreymon?”
I’m absolutely, categorically not feeling brave. Telling Raphael so seems impossible, though. He seems so…solid . So damn confident of every move he makes. I study the strange VR glasses, tapping my fingers nervously against my legs.
“What is it?” I ask. “What’s it for?”
He looks down at the equipment he’s holding and shrugs. “It’s a virtual reality simulator. Nothing more.”
“What is it going to show me?”
“Something profound.” There’s a weight and gravity to his words that sends chills down my spine.
“And…it’s not dangerous?”
“Most definitely not.”
“Okay, then. Sure, I’ll try it.” Aside from the idea of being completely vulnerable and at his mercy while I’m wearing the VR glasses, I am intrigued. It’s not every day someone offers you the chance to witness something never seen before. Something profound. And Raphael doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to exaggerate. His movements are quick and self-assured as he first connects the electrodes to my temples and at the base of my skull.
“You might feel a slight pulsing sensation,” he says. “It’s nothing to worry about.”
I don’t feel anything at first, but as he slides the arms of the VR glasses over my ears, a gentle throbbing sensation, not painful, just strange, beings to pulse at my temples. Raphael is standing so close. Close enough that I can see the pale, almost silver flecks in his remarkably green eyes. The corner of his mouth twitches as he looks down at me, apparently transfixed. He smells like the ocean. Like something fresh and wild and untamable—a natural, clean and heady smell that leaves me breathless.
“You’re nervous,” he says softly.
“I’m fine.”
“Your pupils are dilated.”
“So are yours.”
Raphael angles his head to one side, observing me. He keeps doing this, as if he’s caught off guard by me in some way, sucked deep into some train of thought I’m not privy to. Silence fills the small room, echoing off the walls.
Five…
Six…
Seven…
Eight…
He seems to land back in the moment with a jarring shock. Inhaling deeply through his nose, he quickly finishes hooking everything up to the VR glasses, then he places it down over my eyes.
“Can you see anything?” he asks.
“No.” And I really can’t. I’m in utter darkness. Not the kind of darkness you experience when you close your eyes. This is the kind of darkness you experience underground, deep down in the bowels of the earth, where there are no lights to guide you. It’s an absolute darkness that reaches inside you and settles heavily inside your mind—a living, breathing kind of darkness.
“The throbbing will intensify now,” Raphael says. He’s moved away from me. I can sense that he’s on the side of the room, over by the computer. My suspicions are confirmed when I hear the tapping of keys, and then the low hum of something mechanical booting up.
I slide my hands into the pockets of my jeans; I don’t want him to notice that they’re shaking, or that I’m clenching them into fists. The throbbing, just a dull thump a moment ago, grows until it’s more of a solid drumming at the both sides of my head. Still it doesn’t hurt, but the sensation is kind of unsettling.
“Okay. Are you ready?” Raphael asks.
“Yes. I’m ready.”
“Good. You might notice a series of flashes. Tell me what you see.”
At first there’s nothing. I wait, holding my breath. The blackness envelops me, never ending.
“Nothing?” Raphael asks.
“No, not yet.”
“Okay, how about now?”
There’s an odd buzzing in my head, and then all of a sudden it’s like a light switch has been turned on. A bright blue light fills my vision. It’s everywhere—up, down, left and right. Bright, sky blue everywhere I look.
“Wow. I can’t see my body,” I say, looking down. “Everything’s just…blue.”
“And what about now?” The color instantly shifts to red.
“Red,” I answer.
“And…how about now?”
“Purple.”
“Good. Tell me the names of the all the colors you see as you see them. And be specific. Not just red, blue, green. What shade are they? What do they remind you of?”
“Okay. Everything is yellow now. The color of pale butter. Spring sunshine. Now, mint. Or aqua. The color of the ocean in Malta.” The color changes every five seconds or so, morphing from one hue and tone to the next. “Orange, the color of amber and citrine stones. Green again, Irish green, the color of emeralds and healthy grass. The color…the color of your eyes. Now pink, dusky, the color of rose petals and my favorite blush.”
God. The color of your eyes? What the hell is wrong with me? I wish that hadn’t slipped free. My mouth was moving before I could put a stop to it, though. Fuck. My. Life.
We continue on for another five minutes. Ten. I manage to find names and descriptions for so many different colors. My apprehension, along with my embarrassment, melts away as we continue with our game, until Raphael finally tells me it’s over. Disappointment floods me. I’ve never experienced virtual reality before, but I’ve heard amazing things about it. The landscapes and vistas created by Raphael’s company, North Industries, are meant to be the very best, most impressive graphics in VR. So, while the colors he just showed me were crisp, vivid and bright, I can’t help but feel a little cheated. How on earth does he think that was profound?
Raphael removes the VR glasses, and everything is still pitch black. I can’t even see the light coming from the computer screen. Panic grips hold of me, then, slamming into me with the force of a ten-ton truck. “Why can’t I see?” I ask. My voice is edged with panic. I reach out, my hands scrambling, and I find Raphael’s arm. “I can’t see. Oh, shit,” I whisper.
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” Raphael takes my hand, squeezing it. “The electrodes on your temples are disrupting the electrical pulses from your eyes to your brain, preventing messages from traveling down your optic nerve. That’s what the throbbing sensation is.”
“What? Why? Take them off!”
Raphael grabs hold of my wrists now, stopping me from ripping the electrodes from my skin. “Stay calm. Stay calm. Beth, listen to me. Stay calm. You’re not blind. Not really. It’s temporary. The moment I remove the electrodes, you’ll be able to see perfectly again. But first, I want you to listen to me.” His hands, locked around my wrists, are strong. I panic for a second, trying to tear myself free, but he holds on fast. Taking a deep breath, I force myself to stop fighting. This is going to be okay. This is going to be okay, Beth . I say it to myself over and over again.
“That’s it,” Raphael says soothingly. “You’re doing great. Now…the electrodes have a secondary purpose. While they’re blocking electrical impulses from your eyes to your brain, they’re also redirecting a secondary set of impulses directly from the glasses. The impulses are sending visual data directly into your brain, bypassing the eyes altogether. Do you understand what that means?”
“No, not really,” I say, swallowing thickly.
Raphael doesn’t say anything. He continues to hold onto my wrists, and I can hear his breathing, slow and steady, close to my ear. I can feel the warmth of it skating across my skin. “Think about it,” he says softly.
I calm my mind, doing as he asks. Despite being filled with the overwhelming fear that this change in my vision is permanent, the feel of him so close to me is strangely comforting. I turn over the information he just gave me in my mind, slowly making sense of it.
If the VR glasses can transfer visual information directly into a person’s mind, completely bypassing their eyes, then…
Then…
“Oh my god,” I whisper. “Oh my…god!” I sob, the sound choked and filled with emotion, echoing around the small room. “If you ca
n do this…if you can transfer visual data like this into someone’s brain…”
Raphael lets go of me. Slowly he removes the electrodes from the sides of my head, from the base of my neck. One moment I’m drowning in darkness, the next I’m back in the dimly lit, small room, and Raphael is standing in front of me, a tiny ghost of a smile teasing at the corners of his mouth. He looks so different when he’s almost smiling. The tense quality that shrouds him falls away, and I see the makings of an entirely different person altogether, hovering there in the shadows.
“You can make people see,” I whisper. “This technology can make…the blind see.”
He nods slowly, and I cover my mouth with both hands. For some reason my eyes are filling with tears.
“It’s just colors at the moment. But we’re developing the technology fast. Soon it will be basic images. Within the next few years, we’re hoping we’ll be able to transmit exact read outs of a person’s surroundings through even smaller sensors that look identical to reading glasses.”
“So…” I can barely form coherent thoughts right now. “You’re saying that someone who’s been blind their whole lives…will finally be able to see what they look like? They’ll be able to see what their parents, their children, their wives and their husbands look like?”
Raphael nods.
I look at the glasses he’s holding in both of his hands, and then I look up at him. “You did this? You figured out how to do it?”
“The idea was mine. The basic science was mine. The project required more than basic science, though. A whole team of scientists and engineers have slaved on this over the past three years. They’re miracle workers.”
I don’t know what to say. I can’t think of a single thing that comes close to being enough . Instead, I reach out and I take the VR glasses from Raphael, turning it over, memorizing the lines and the shape of it.
“This…this is going to change so many lives,” I whisper.
Raphael’s smile evaporates. He turns away, clearing his throat as he shuts down a complex looking operating system on the computer screen. With his back still to me, he says, “I’m afraid I have a meeting now, Ms. Dreymon. It’s time for you to go.”
“Oh. Of course.”
His head is lowered when he spins back around, holding out his hand for the VR glasses. “Do you think you can find your own way out again?”
“Yes, I can.”
“Wednesday. I want to play again. Are you available?”
“I—I have a late class on Wednesday. I won’t be free until after six.”
“Then come at seven. You can eat here with me while we play. Agreed?”
Eat here? With him? Dinner? The suggestion leaves me a little surprised, but I can see from the void expression he’s wearing that he doesn’t mean dinner . He means the consumption of sustenance while we play our game and nothing more. “Yes, that should work.”
“Perfect. Goodbye, Ms. Dreymon.” He turns back to his computer screen, and that’s it. I’ve been summarily dismissed.
I make my way out of the room, down the stairs, through the lounge, down the hallway and back to the glass door, and for some reason I feel the need to run. To get away from the penthouse as quickly as I can. My heart is slamming in my chest, but I can’t seem to figure out why. I pull open the glass door, fully expecting Nate to be there waiting for me, but he’s not. Instead, a tall, fair haired guy wearing a pair of Ray Bans and a pale blue Ralph Lauren polo shirt stands in my way, his hand raised, his finger outstretched, by the looks of things a second away from ringing the doorbell. The guy reels back at the same time I do, hand on his chest. “Jesus fucking wept, you scared me. What the—who are you ?” He eyes my bare feet, eyebrow raised.
“I’m Beth. I’m…I’m sorry.” Beyond flustered, I sidle past the tall, handsome guy in the doorway, skirting along the wall in the anteroom. “Mr. North said I should see myself out.”
The amused look on the guy’s face transforms into something else. Something like intrigue. “Well, well. Raphael’s been keeping secrets. I’m Paxton Ross. Pax, if you and I are going to be friends. I went to boarding school with Mr. North back in the day. How, pray tell, do you know him?”
“I—” Well, shit. What am I supposed to say? Raphael doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy to ever let anything ruffle his feathers, but he probably doesn’t want a longstanding friend knowing he’s been responding to weird ads on the internet. “I met him through a mutual friend,” I say, scrambling.
“Oh? Which friend might that be?”
“Thalia. Thalia Johnson.”
Pax raises his chin, narrowing his eyes at me. He looks more than a little suspicious. The look fades, though. “Ah, yeah. Thalia. I know her father fairly well. How’s she doing at college? Columbia, right? She’s studying law?”
A jolt of electricity burns through me like lightning. I reeled off Thalia’s name without thinking, assuming he would accept my word at face value. I didn’t for a second think he would really know her. And if Pax knows her, then…does Raphael actually know her, too? “Yes. That’s how she and I met,” I explain. “I’m also studying law.”
Pax gives me a tight-lipped smile, and then looks over my shoulder into the penthouse beyond. “All right. Well, it was lovely to meet you, Beth. Hopefully we’ll run into each other again sooner rather than later.”
“Yes, I’d like that. Have a good meeting.”
In the elevator, I almost forget to open the hidden closest and retrieve my sneakers. On the ground floor, Nate is still nowhere to be seen. I order an Uber and I wait out in front of the building, on edge and uneasy. As soon as I get home, I call Thalia, the dial tone endlessly ringing out in my ear.
For once, she’s the one who doesn’t pick up.
Six
Beth
T halia’s not in class the next morning. I’ve tried calling her six or seven times, and she hasn’t answered. I even went to her apartment this morning to ask her about Pax, but she didn’t answer her buzzer. I’m beginning to get worried. She may be late all the freaking time, but she never actually misses class. And she never dodges me, either. I float through my lectures in a blur, my body going through the motions, taking notes, bookmarking important cases to come back to later, but my mind is somewhere else. It’s in the dark, the sound of Raphael North’s voice sliding over my skin like silk. It’s caught on some vicious loop, trying to figure out why my meeting with Paxton Ross gave me such a tense, sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s wondering where the hell Thalia is, and if I should start calling around to hospitals yet.
Later, I pick up some Chinese takeout on my way home. I sit myself down on my couch to study, but I’m all over the place. I can’t concentrate, can’t focus worth a damn.
For those fifteen seconds after Raphael removed the VR glasses, when I thought something terrible had happened to my vision, he held onto my wrists and stood so close to me. Through the panic and adrenalin, there was something so reassuring about having him standing right there, right alongside me. I have no idea why I would feel that way. He’s been nothing but professional the two times we’ve met in person. There’s something about him, though. Something captivating. Dizzying. His weird questioning, his clipped responses to my own questions—he’s a complete mystery to me. There’s no figuring him out at all. And those eyes of his…
I literally have to force myself to read the pages on the textbook in front of me, staring at every single word, committing each to memory. It’s going to be a long damn night, that’s for sure. At eight-thirty, Thalia eventually calls. I watch my phone ringing, her name flashing up on the screen, and I consider not answering for a second. I’m kind of mad at her. She’s been avoiding me, and by the looks of things, she hasn’t been honest with me, either. I don’t like dishonesty. It’s the one thing that can sour a relationship for me, even a friendship. I do answer in the end, but I don’t feel good about it.
“Hey.”
“Buzz me in. Your interco
m’s not working,” she says.
So she’s outside. It’s rare that Thalia will travel all the way over to me. We usually meet by Columbia, since traveling across the city can be such a nightmare. Her coming here means something is up without a doubt. I hang up and drag myself off the couch, walking over to the intercom. I hit the entry button, waiting for the telltale buzz and click through the speaker of the door being opened and closed down on street level, but the speaker remains quiet. I’ll have to report that to the maintenance guy, Ray. Three minutes pass, and I wait by the door, chewing nervously on my thumbnail. I have no real reason to feel nervous, but I have this feeling in my gut…some niggling itch I can’t seem to satisfy.
Thalia knocks once on the door, then opens it and enters. She’s got a full face of makeup on, which is odd for her, and a black sequined dress and killer heels. She looks fantastic. And worried.
She takes in the flat look on my face and her shoulders slump. “Okay, listen. I already know what happened today, and I can explain. I should have explained a long time ago.”
I walk back to the couch and sit down. She follows, her heels clicking on the floorboards behind me. “You’d better,” I tell her. “Because I’m seriously confused right now. And confusion does not make me a happy woman.”
Thalia sits down in my armchair next the to sofa, placing her purse—very sparkly, very unlike her—in her lap. “Okay. So…” She blows out a breath, puffing her cheeks. “This is hard,” she mutters. “So…I know Raphael. He didn’t answer the ad online, though I am running that business,” she adds quickly. “I met him at boarding school. And Paxton, too. He and I used to date. We were all inseparable—me, Pax, and Raphael.”
I pull at a thread on the seam of my jeans, frowning. “Okay, Great. So why didn’t you tell me you knew him in the first place?”