At first I think this must be make-up for some kind of fancy-dress costume, even though Lily’s just wearing a normal black top and jeans.
“Lily?” I ask, unable to process this picture of my sister. “Is that really you?”
“I’m sorry,” Lily replies. “I didn’t know if you’d recognise me like this.” Her hand reaches up to her face in a self-conscious gesture. On her inner wrist I catch a glimpse of a black loop of ink, a tattoo of a Möbius strip. “I must look so old.”
“I don’t understand,” I say, the sight in front of me even more confusing than everything I’ve seen so far. “What happened to you?”
A single tear creeps out of the corner of Lily’s eye and I watch this roll down her face.
“Life,” she replies, brushing the tear away with the back of her hand. “Life happened to me.”
I don’t know what Lily means. She’s only fifteen years old. She’s got her whole life ahead of her – just like me.
This must be some kind of optical illusion, like that picture of an old lady where if you stare at it for long enough you see a young woman appear instead. I just need to keep looking at Lily and she’ll go back to how she’s supposed to look.
“You’ve got to help me, Lily,” I tell her, trying to force my brain to see things the right way. “You won’t believe what’s happening out there. There was an infinite staircase outside your bedroom and a black hole in the bathroom. Our house is being erased and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
I can’t stop myself from crying and through my tears I see Lily’s face crumple too, the wrinkles on her forehead furrowing into a frown.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” she says, shaking her head in disbelief. “I thought that deleting the code would just reset the reality. I didn’t think it would have a physical manifestation in the virtual world and erase the house around you.”
I don’t know what Lily’s talking about. This doesn’t even sound like Lily.
“What do you mean, ‘reset the reality’?”
Looking around the bedroom, Lily slowly wipes away her tears. Then she looks up at me.
“I’m sorry, Maisie, but none of this is real. This is a computer-generated reality.”
I laugh out loud.
“That’s ridiculous,” I say, unable to understand why Lily would even say something so stupid. I point to the birthday badge that’s pinned to my pyjama top. “I know this is real,” I tell her. “I’ve got my own reality check.”
Taking the badge off, I jab the pin into my finger, feeling the pain flare like a firework in my mind. Wincing, I watch a droplet of blood well from the pinprick and thrust my hand forward for Lily to see.
“Look, I’m bleeding. This isn’t Fun Kart Fury – this is reality.”
Lily stares as the droplet of blood falls from my finger.
“That was one of Dad’s games,” she whispers. “It’s been a long time since I thought about Fun Kart Fury.”
The pain in my finger might be fading, but my confusion is only growing. Why’s Lily talking like this? It might’ve been a few months since we last played Fun Kart Fury, but she’s making it sound like it’s been decades.
“And you’re right,” Lily continues, her voice barely more than a whisper still. “This isn’t a videogame. I wanted to make it better than that. I wanted to give you the ultimate virtual reality.”
I look around the room. Everything seems so real – the revision guides piled up next to Lily’s bed, her make-up arranged in front of the dressing-table mirror, tiny specks of dust swirling in the beams of reflected sunlight. But then I look back at Lily’s middle-aged face and reality seems to fall apart again.
“But this is too complex for any computer to generate,” I protest, scrabbling to make sense of what Lily’s saying. I wave my hand through the air and watch the specks of dust dance. “Look,” I say. “Even Dad couldn’t model the random motion of these particles of dust. It would take hundreds of billions of teraflops of computer power. And that’s not all: I can see, feel, hear, taste and touch everything around me. My brain is processing trillions of bytes of information every second. There’s no computer that’s been built that could create a virtual reality like this.”
“Maybe not when Dad was making videogames,” Lily replies with a mournful look in her eyes. “But computers have changed a lot since then. There’s something called Moore’s Law, which predicts that computers become twice as powerful every two years. Everything that a computer allows you to do from playing games to sending satellites into space is controlled by its microchips. You know that computer chips used to consist of billions of tiny silicon switches that flicked on and off billions of times every second. All the information a computer uses is either a zero or a one – a binary code – depending on whether the switch is open or closed. But today’s optical computers flow photons of light between the switches, meaning there’s no limit to the amount of information they can process. An entire universe can be replicated in a single microchip.”
My head’s spinning as I try to make sense of this. Moore’s Law, binary code, computer chips powered by photons of light… How does Lily even know any of this stuff? She failed her mock GCSEs in science and computing – I’m the one who’s supposed to be academically gifted.
I look at Lily’s face, the lines around her hazel eyes creased in concern. I still don’t know why she looks so old.
“If what you’re telling me is true,” I say, still trying to hold on to some sliver of reality, “then why have all these impossible things been happening? I’ve watched the kitchen expand to fill the universe. I’ve seen Mum’s favourite glass cat get smashed to pieces and then put itself back together again. Outside the front door is an infinite blackness that makes my head hurt. If this is some kind of virtual reality, then why’s it so weird? If you can fit the whole universe on a microchip, why isn’t it finished?”
For a moment, Lily doesn’t answer. She just sits there in silence, staring up at me through a brimming veil of tears.
“I got things muddled up,” she says finally, her voice thick with emotion. “I activated your code before I finished building the world. And once I realised my mistake it was too late. You were awake.”
“What do you mean?” I say, feeling even more confused than I was before. “I’ve been awake since my alarm clock went off at nine o’clock this morning. It’s my birthday – I’m ten years old today. Don’t you remember?”
Lily’s really crying now, her shoulders heaving as she tries to hold herself together.
“I remember,” she says, each word a stuttered sob. “I remember every moment of that day. Don’t you, Maisie?”
Since I woke up this morning I’ve seen black holes and Möbius strip staircases, a tidal wave of nothingness wiping my home away, but as I stare at Lily’s crumpled face, I’m starting to feel really scared.
I shake my head.
So Lily tells me and I remember everything.
14
As Lily disappears around the corner of the bridge, I gradually slow to a breathless halt. I’m already starting to get a stitch. I really shouldn’t have eaten that second banana pancake for breakfast.
I thought I’d be able to beat Lily now that I’m ten, but I was wrong. She’ll be back home in five minutes flat and I’ll just feel like a little kid again.
Through the broken railings I can see the back of our house on the other side of the railway line. The back garden is hidden from view, but I can just catch a glimpse of white canvas through the gap in the fence that Dad’s been promising Mum he’ll get fixed for weeks. If I could take a shortcut across the tracks, I’d be inside the gazebo before Lily had even opened the front door.
When you grow up next to a railway line, you get a bit bored of your mum and dad telling you that you face certain death if you try and get your ball back when you’ve kicked it over the fence. To drum the message home, Mum once made me and Lily watch this health-and-safety film on
YouTube that showed this boy getting hit by a train after he got the laces of his football boots caught on the track. Lily reckoned the film was from the nineteen seventies because the boy had a really bad haircut, but she still stopped playing football in the garden with me after that.
I rest my hand against the fence, the metal railings bent back by the teenage boys who hang around on the parade. I never see them get squashed flat when they sneak on to the tracks at night. Beneath the power lines that stretch overhead, the steel rails glint in the late-morning sunshine.
I glance at my watch. The next train’s not due past for another three-quarters of an hour. If I walk across quickly, I’ll be at the back fence in just a couple of minutes. All I’ve got to do then is sneak through the gap there without Mum or Dad seeing, and Lily won’t even know how I beat her home.
Ducking my head down, I squeeze through the railings. Sacks of gravel are piled up immediately in front of me, but skirting around the edge of them I can see a straight path to the other side of the tracks. There’s a traffic cone abandoned halfway across, left over from the last time the bicycle muppets tried to play chicken with a train.
Lily says I don’t know what real life is like, but as the loose stones crunch under my trainers I know that she’s wrong. I can feel the Sun beating down, sweat causing the ribbons round my wrist to stick to my skin. The Sun is a star one hundred and fifty million kilometres away and everyone on this planet is falling around it at over a hundred thousand kilometres per hour. With every step that I take, we’re zooming through the vacuum of space into an ever-expanding universe. Life is an adventure and as I cross the tracks I feel so alive.
Stepping over the steel rails, I look up into the clear blue sky and that’s when I see the gold balloon touch the power line.
BANG!
The sound of this starts at the B and then stretches into infinity. A bang so loud it instantly makes me forget everything else. The noise seems to come from every direction at once, inside and out. A bright white light surrounds me like a galaxy of stars being born. And then I feel the pain.
My muscles clench, my body locking up in agony as a burning fire sears through my veins. Inside my head I’m screaming as every pain receptor sends a simultaneous signal to my brain. I can smell burning from somewhere and then I realise it’s me.
In what seems like slow-motion, I crumple to the ground, my gaze still fixed to the sky.
In the human body, there are three essential components that keep you alive. Your heart that pumps blood around your body, the blood vessels – arteries, veins and capillaries – that carry this blood to every cell inside you, and the blood itself delivering the oxygen and nutrients you need to keep you alive. This is your circulatory system and it stretches for nearly one hundred thousand kilometres inside you. And every millimetre of mine is burning with a living fire. The pain is excruciating.
Through white-hot eyes, I watch the red balloon float up into the sky. The ribbon holding it to my wrist must have burned through. But that doesn’t matter now.
My body is stopped, trapped inside this bubble of pain. It feels like now is forever.
Between zero and one there is an infinity of numbers: 0.1, 0.01, 0.101… The numbers go on forever, stretching past the decimal point into infinity.
The helium balloon is getting smaller, dwindling to a red teardrop as it rises high in the sky.
My eyelids flicker, the only part of my body that I seem to be able to move. The pain is slowly starting to fade, but it’s leaving behind a terrible cold.
I blink and start counting to infinity.
And then I see darkness.
15
“So I’m dead?”
Still sitting at her desk, Lily looks up at me with eyes that have seen too much. She nods her head, tears still sliding down her face.
“When you didn’t come home, we all went out looking for you – Mum, Dad, me. We were walking back over the bridge towards the shops, calling out your name. I was the one who saw you lying next to the railway line.”
Lily’s face crumples in pain as she relives the memory again.
“Your helium balloon must have hit one of the power lines. The ambulance came but there was nothing they could do. The paramedics said you would’ve died instantly.”
I remember the white light surrounding me. Twenty-five thousand volts of electricity sent surging through my body. An instant that lasted for infinity.
Lily shakes her head, a loose strand of grey hair falling across her tear-stained face.
“Why were you even on the tracks, Maisie?”
I’m crying now too. How could I have been so stupid? The answer tears me apart even as I speak it out loud.
“I just wanted to beat you home.”
Lily’s shoulders shake as a fresh wave of sobs rack her frame.
I remember Lily sitting on the edge of the bath on the morning of my birthday, her whole body shaking as she stared at the tattoo on her wrist. She might look like a grown-up now, but I can still see my teenage sister sobbing inside. But this time I don’t know what to say to stop her from crying. I don’t even know how to stop myself from crying.
“Lily…”
“Mum and Dad blamed me for the accident,” she sobs. “They said I should’ve never left you on your own.”
It wasn’t Lily’s fault, but all I can think about now is Mum and Dad.
“Where are they?” I ask, barely able to get the words out.
“Dad passed away last year,” Lily replies, her voice still shaking. “He was only sixty-two, but the cancer came back. That’s when I moved in with Mum. She’s not been coping that well. I think she’s starting to forget stuff, just like Nanna Pegg used to…”
Lily’s words tail away as she buries her head in her hands.
I feel numb.
Inside a computer chip, information can be stored as either a zero or a one – on or off – yes or no. But inside my head, every single switch is screaming out a single word. NO!
I can’t speak, unable to process everything that Lily has told me.
Lifting her head to see my broken expression, Lily reaches out a hand towards me. On the underside of her wrist I see the tattoo of the Möbius strip, its edges blurred where the ink has faded over time.
“I’m sorry, Maisie,” she says, rising to her feet. “It wasn’t meant to be like this.”
Through the skylight window I can see the Sun shining down out of a clear blue sky, but there’s no warmth to it. It’s just like a picture plastered over the cracks that let the dark in.
“What is this?” I sob.
“My life’s work,” Lily replies, the lines on her face softening around the corners of her mouth. “A simulated universe where we could be together again.”
Lily gestures towards the laptop computer that’s behind her on the desk.
“Everything you can see, everything that you hear, everything you taste, smell and touch is part of this computer-generated reality. After you died, Maisie, I felt I owed it to you to follow your dream. I studied computing at university, learned as much as I could from Dad about videogame design and how to build a virtual world. And as computers got more powerful, the complexity of the world I could create grew too. Our house, our street, our town, our lives – all starting again on the day you left us behind.”
I stare at my big sister, now looking even older than Mum. It’s like Lily has been trying to live my life for me.
“But you wanted to work in fashion,” I say.
“It’s not really that different,” Lily replies with a wry smile. “It’s all about design. And besides, I’ve managed to drop in a few fashion tips here and there.”
She points towards the top pocket of my pyjamas and, glancing down, I notice for the first time the designer label that’s stitched there.
Reaching up, I run my finger over the stitching, feeling the letters spell out a very fashionable name. A tiny smear of red underlines this as a fresh droplet of blood weeps
from the pinprick on my finger. I wince, worrying that it won’t come out in the wash, but then I realise that I don’t have anything to worry about now.
It’s not real.
I look down at the tip of my finger, every line and whorl of my fingerprint completely unique. If this is a computer-generated reality, what does that make me?
“Am I real?” I ask.
Lily nods her head.
“You are to me.”
Inside my head, I flick through my memories. Snuggling up with Mum as we read stories on the sofa, kicking a ball in the back garden with Dad, starting school, quitting school, sitting at the table with Mrs Bradbury as she taught me about the universe. I remember playing Fun Kart Fury with Lily, the two of us collapsing in laughter as our videogame characters farted their way around the track. How can I remember any of this if none of this is real?
I don’t even have to ask the question out loud before Lily starts to answer.
“When the ambulance came, Mum and Dad begged them to save you. The paramedics couldn’t find a heartbeat, but they still hooked you up to their life-support machines to do everything they could. You’d stopped breathing, there was no pulse, no sign that you were still alive, but the EEG recording still showed brain waves, even after you were clinically dead. A delta wave burst of brain activity that slowly faded into nothingness. Dad managed to download this before it disappeared.”
Lily’s gaze searches mine, wanting to make sure that I understand.
“Since you’ve been gone, Maisie, scientists have learned so much about how the brain works. They’ve mapped the eighty-six billion neurons that make up the human mind, discovering exactly how these cells communicate information by sending electrical charges to each other – just like the transistors inside a computer chip – and decoding the thoughts that these sparks create. With the help of a friend of mine who’s a neuroscientist, I managed to turn the recording of your brain activity that Dad downloaded into data, the beginning of the code that makes you you.”
The Infinite Lives of Maisie Day Page 8