by Elliot Burns
The truth was that Jack had asked Sarah out himself around fitty times – in his head. He just couldn’t seem to make the words leap from his brain to his mouth. He guessed that maybe it was a rejection thing. If you didn’t try, you didn’t fail. Right now, he classed it as Schrodinger’s date. If he didn’t actually ask Sarah out, then her answer right now was both yes and no.
“So, there are two things I wanted to tell you,” said Sarah.
“You’re looking a little too serious for me right now. What’s going on?”
“It’s like this, Hal. I wanted to tell you last night, but it was late. Like, three o’clock in the morning. So, I left it. And now I’m wondering if I’m doing the right thing telling you at all. Maybe its best you don’t know.”
He was getting worried now. “Is Alfie okay?” he asked.
She nodded. Her pupils looked especially large. “Alfie tried to communicate with me last night.”
He didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this. He hadn’t heard so much as a sound leave his uncle's lips since he’d come back. “Did he speak to you?” he said, trying to keep the urgency out of his tone so that he didn’t worry her.
She shook her head. “Nothing like that. I was changing his pillows, and when I lifted his head, something didn’t feel right. I don’t know what it was. A feeling, I guess. I went cold all over. When I stepped back and looked at Alfie, he was staring right at me.”
Jack could hardly contain his shock. “He was actually looking at you? Are you sure you didn’t just move his head by accident?”
“He was staring at me, Jack. He started blinking as if he wanted to tell me something. I got the feeling he was doing it on purpose, and I didn’t know what to do. I glanced over at his bookcase and saw the old Scrabble game we used to play. You know, the one with all the ‘C’s missing? I got an idea.”
Jack couldn’t believe it. All this time and he’d gotten no hint of life from Alfie. He’d come here day after day to visit. He’d always hoped that one day he’d open the door to find his great uncle sat up in bed, smiling, but it had never happened.
“Are you okay?” said Sarah.
“I’m fine. Keep going,” he said.
Sarah crossed her arms. “I laid out all the plastic blocks with letters on them, and I pointed at them one at a time. Whenever your uncle blinked at a letter, I wrote it down. It took ages, and I could tell he was feeling the strain. But we got there. When we finished, I had a message.”
Jack’s heartrate had tripled. He thought he was having a heart attack. It was all he could do to keep himself calm. “What did it say?”
Sarah stared at him. “By the end, he spelled out ‘Henry is trapped’.”
“’Henry is trapped?’ What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know. Sorry, Jack.”
What an anti-climax. He’d given up on the idea of Alfie ever coming around and hadn’t expected him to communicate in any meaningful way before he inevitably passed away. Either that, or Jack would be forced to give authority to turn off the machines that kept Alfie breathing.
He knew that the twelve-hour shifts he pulled in the printing warehouse wouldn’t cover the care home fees for long. Besides, Mom’s problem was getting worse, and the day was coming when she’d have an episode that threw her off the deep end. She’d get a credit card from somewhere, because there was always a company willing to let you borrow money, and she’d gamble herself into debt. Then, Jack would have to spend all his money digging her out of her problem. What would happen then? Would he have to switch Alfie’s machine off?
The thing was, he’d already been told that Alfie wasn’t going to wake up. And he knew it might have been fairer on everyone to switch off the machine, but his mum wasn’t strong enough to do it. When it came down to it, Jack knew he wasn’t strong enough to make the decision either.
“There was something else,” said Sarah.
“Another cryptic message?”
She shook her head. “I was clearing away some of his notebooks, and I found something.”
When Jack visited Alfie at the care home, he’d quickly discovered that spending time with a coma patient was boring, for want of a better word. To occupy himself, and in the hope that Alfie was there somewhere, listening, he started taking Alfie’s notebooks to his room, and he’d read to him from them. If Alfie heard or appreciated what Jack did, the coma didn’t let him make a sign.
“Sorry, Sar,” said Jack, “I shouldn’t leave the books lying around.”
“It’s okay. It’s not that. I know how messy you are, believe me. It’s just, when I was clearing the books away, I felt something come loose in one of them, and then this fell to the floor. It must have been stuck to one of the pages with sticky tape.”
She held up a silver key. The metal part of the key was long and had a complex series of notches, whereas the head was made of plastic. Jack had never seen it before. He took the key from her and turned it over. Words were printed on the plastic head: ‘O’Reilly’s Lock-ups.’
“You ever heard of O’Reilly’s lock-ups?” asked Jack.
Sarah looked at him strangely. She lifted her wrist and spoke into her bracelet. Unlike Jack’s, her bracelet worked. “Hexa,” she said, speaking to her bracelet AI, “Where is O’Reilly’s Lock-ups?”
The bracelet made a ding sound, and then a computerized voice spoke. “O’Reilly’s lock-ups is located on Whitchurch Road.”
“Whitchurch road, Whitchurch road,” murmured Sarah. “Where do I know that from?”
Jack couldn’t answer her at first, because a cold feeling had seeped across his chest. His throat felt tight.
“You okay, Jack?”
He nodded. “Whitchurch Road is where Alfie was found after the car hit him.”
Chapter Two
The key was for a storage unit located in O’Reilly’s Lock-ups on Whitchurch Road, not far from where a car had hit Uncle Alfie. Jack couldn’t stop thinking about it all day. He wanted to sprint the two miles to Whitchurch Road and then see what was in the lock-up, but he was supposed to work a shift that day, and he wasn’t the type of person to ring his manager and pretend to be sick. So, worked his twelve-hour shift in a complete daze. By the time it ended, he couldn’t remember a single piece of work he’d done. He knew he must have done some work, since his boss hadn’t yelled at him, but his mind had been transfixed by the lock-up and what belongings of his uncle’s that it might contain.
It was close to midnight when he finally finished work. He was dirty, tired, and his bed was beckoning him. As he wondered what to do, he felt his cell vibrate against his leg. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the screen. It was Mum. When he’d left the house earlier, she’d been in bed. When she was at her best, Mum was an energetic person, up at five am, and not in bed until midnight. If she happened to still be in bed when he left the house, Jack knew something was wrong.
“Mum?” he answered. “Are you okay?”
There was silence for a few seconds, and then she spoke. Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper. “We had a call from the landlord,” she said.
“Is everything alright?”
“I’m so sorry,” she said. Her voice worried him. “I know I said I paid the rent, but I haven’t. I spent it on-”
“You’ve been gambling again,” he said.
There was more silence. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, and it wouldn’t be the last. He’d asked about getting all their bills transferred into his name, but his mum had refused. He guessed that she was trying to cling on to one last bit of control, and he didn’t have the heart to force it away from her. He knew he had to grip the problem by the throat and deal with it, metaphorically speaking, but something held him back. He felt like he wasn’t ready to face up to a problem like that. It seemed too adult.
He sighed. “How long do we have to pay it?”
He heard movement on the end of the line, like Mum was shifting position. “He’s only giving
us a week. After that, he’s serving notice to evict us. He said he’s ‘sick of our shit.’”
“Okay, Mum. I’ll deal with it,” he said. “Try not to worry.”
He mentally juggled his finances. There was no question of them being evicted – he couldn’t let that happen. Mum was a creature of habit to the point that switching coffee brands shook her up. Being forcibly made to move home would be devastating. That meant he would have to do something, and the worst part was that Mum knew that. She knew that he’d been saving for college, and that he had a bank account with money in it. At his current rate of saving he’d just about be able to afford the first year’s college fees, but it’d be tight, what with Alfie’s care fees and all. Paying for a month’s rent would throw everything out. By all rights he should have been god-damned furious, but it was hard to feel like that when it was his Mum. None of this is on purpose, he told himself. She’s got a problem.
That solved the dilemma in his head. There was no way he was going to go home right now, because he was too wired up. He needed to escape from things, just for a little while. Instead of going home, he left the warehouse and went to Whitchurch Road, where he found the storage building. It was a large brick building with no windows. A sign at the front read: ‘O’Reilly’s Lock-Ups, open 24-7.’
Given that it was late, it seemed like nobody was working the front desk, and he wondered how he would get in. He approached the front doors. There was an oval sensor on the door. It was lit by an amber hue. He held the plastic head of his uncle’s key against it.
For a second, nothing happened. It made sense, he supposed. After all, Alfie wouldn’t have been able to pay the invoice for the lock-up rental while he was in a coma. Then, he heard a latch click, and the door opened inwards. Alfie must have paid for the rental in advance, he thought.
O’Reilly’s Lock-Ups consisted of four different levels, each with a dozen storage units. On the plastic head of the key, on the opposite side to the one that read: ‘O’Reilly’s Lock-ups’, the numbers 3-3 were printed. There was an elevator across from him, but Jack walked away from it and found the staircase instead. He’d never been a fan of elevators. Something about closed spaces brought him out in a sweat. He walked up the stairs until he reached the third floor, and there, he located storage unit number three.
He stood outside the door. His heart was a hammering in his chest. What would he find inside? More notebooks? Something that his uncle wanted to keep secret? It could have been anything.
He pressed his key against a sensor on the door, and the storage unit opened. When he stepped inside, he found that the room was pitch black, so he turned and searched the wall behind him for a light switch. As he traced his fingers along it, he couldn’t find one. Then, a light overhead buzzed and flickered. A dim yellow light seeped out over the room, until Jack could finally see what was there.
The storage unit door suddenly hissed, then slammed shut. The movement made him jump, but he guessed that the door was programmed to automatically shut. It wasn’t like he was trapped, or anything. Casting that out of his mind, he looked at the room.
The unit was no bigger than Alfie’s apartment. The walls were painted a basic white color. There were no boxes, no furniture, and no books. The was only one thing in there, but that one, single thing was amazing enough to make the trip worthwhile. In the centre of the room, there was a plastic capsule, tall and wide enough for a person to stand inside it. There was a sensor shaped like an eye on the front of the capsule. On the side was a rectangular metal box, with Nutrition / Waste Recycler’ printed in a bold font. On the clear-plastic of the capsule itself were the letters, ‘KSP.’
He knew what KSP stood for. After all, his uncle had talked to him about it for hours and hours. He’d read stories about it to Jack for years. ‘KSP’ stood for ‘Kingdom Stone Project’, and it was the name for the fantasy world he’d created; the one he used to read bedtime stories from, and the one he’d committed to paper in the form of hundreds of notebooks.
Jack realized what the capsule was straight away. He’d spent enough time in the VR arcades to know that the plastic capsule was part of a virtual reality game. He’d never seen a ‘Nutrition / Waste’ unit on one before, but he’d heard about games that had them. They were made for players who wanted to spend days, and even weeks, at a time in a game.
He approached it. The capsule was so dirty that he couldn’t see inside of it. He put his hand on the plastic and began to wipe away the dust. When he did, he hit the eye-shaped sensor with his arm. He heard a beep. When he looked at his wrist, he was amazed to see that his uncle’s black bracelet had lit up. He couldn’t believe it. For so long, he’d thought the bracelet was a dud; after all, he’d tried everything to get it working. Now, it seemed that not only did it work, but it was linked to the capsule. With a whoosh of air, the capsule door opened.
A question occurred to him. How had his uncle gotten into the capsule if it could only be opened by a bracelet? It didn’t make sense. He guessed that his uncle must have made a copy. One bracelet for himself, and another that he kept in his apartment as a back-up. This meant that Jack’s bracelet wasn’t just a piece of broken tech that was only good for being a keeps-sake; it was so much more than that.
Jack looked at the now-open capsule. Then he glanced back at the unit door. He didn’t know what to do. Should he go home, get some sleep, and come back fresh in the morning? Should he try and talk to the O’Reilly’s lock up staff when they were back on shift and see if they could tell him anything?
Then he looked at the capsule again, and he knew exactly what he was going to do. He was going to step inside and see if it worked. He was going to see what this was, see what his uncle had created. Now that he was here, he knew it was the only thing he could possibly do. This was a link to his uncle. It was a secret that he’d hidden, and there was no way in hell Jack could just go home and forget about it until the morning. He knew that even if he tried to sleep, he’d just spend all night staring at the ceiling and thinking about what he had found. Not only that, but the real world, with all its stresses and problems, was beginning to seem like too much right now. He needed an escape, even if it was only for an hour or two. He just needed something to take his mind off it all.
With his bracelet beeping and flashing a white, blinking light at him, he stepped inside the capsule. The door slammed shut behind him, trapping him inside. His fear of small spaces sent a flurry of panic fluttering inside his chest. He put his hand against the door and grasped for a handle. His brain went into overdrive. It panicked, it told him that he was stuck and that somehow, this was a trap. He knew it was an irrational thought but when someone is faced with their fears, their thoughts are rarely ever rational.
A blinding white light flashed inside the capsule. It was so pure, so concentrated, that Jack couldn’t see out of the capsule anymore. If the room outside was still there, he couldn’t see it. The white light suddenly subsided, replaced by a pure, utter darkness. Jack felt his pulse start to slow. He felt like he couldn’t breathe. Everything was silent, and he wondered if he had blacked out.
After a while, a question occurred to him; if he was wondering whether he had blacked out, then he could still think. The very fact that he could think, meant that he hadn’t blacked out. You couldn’t process thoughts while you were unconscious, could you? Should he try to do something? He realized that his eyes were shut, and opening them seemed like the obvious first step.
He opened his right eye, and light flooded in; greens and yellows, blurry streams of light at first, but when he opened his other eye the colors started to take more definite shapes. Gradually, he became aware of something pressing against his chest.
He moved. He realized it wasn’t something pressing against him, but rather him pressing against it. The ‘it’ was a path made of dirt, and he was spread out across it. What the hell? His head throbbed. Part of his skull stung, like it had been cut. When he put his finger there, rubbed it, and then pulle
d it away, there was no blood.
The storage room and capsule were nowhere to be seen now. Instead, all Jack could see were fields of green and yellow grass. He was in a countryside area, that much was certain. To the west, he could see patches of farmland where crops had been planted. In the distance, the peaks of jagged mountains loomed over the landscape. He couldn’t think of anywhere he knew where there was so much greenery. In the distance, a flock of creatures flapped around in the sky. They looked like birds, but bigger, and they were oddly shaped. There was something familiar about them, but they were too far away for him to see clearly.
Farmland and crop fields aside, there didn’t seem to be much around. Then, when he looked to the east, he saw a castle. It was close enough that he could see that the stonework was broken in places. Debris was scattered around it, and most of the windows were smashed.
He needed to think. He knew that he was in a game now. It felt so real that it must have been a full-immersion VR game. This was heavy-duty stuff. Whatever his uncle had been doing with the capsule in the storage unit, he wasn’t playing around.