Neither feels true. We’ve kept track of lunar eclipses, and there isn’t one due for a long time. Winter brings a solid month of darkness, but we’re still in early summer. The days are long, which makes the total lack of light even stranger. I breathe deeply as a yawn overtakes me.
The air tastes wrong. And it’s dry, stinging my throat.
My body tenses. “We’re not in the cave.”
“Will,” Capria says, her forced-calm voice just barely masking concern. “Try to stay calm.”
Those are pretty much the last words you should say to someone you want to stay calm. I sit up. The furs beneath me are gone. And I’m dressed, the clothing form-fitting and rubbery, familiar, but distant. “Cap. Where are you?” I’m reaching out in the dark, the floor beneath my feet as solid as the cave, but now perfectly flat. “Cap!”
A hand takes hold of mine, and I gasp with relief. I can handle a lot, but…
Cap’s fingers are short and strong. The slender digits in my hand are long and thin.
“What’s wrong?” It’s Cap’s voice, but it’s not her. “You’re squeezing me.”
“Who. Are. You?” The menace in my voice frightens even me.
“Damn it, Will.”
Not Capria. But I still recognize the voice. “Gal?”
“You’re not making this easy,” Gal says.
“You were imitating Cap? What the fuck, Gal?” It starts to make sense. “We’re on the Galahad. Where is Capria?”
“Will,” Gal says. “I’m going to turn on the lights, but I need you to stay calm. It’s important. I’ve never done anything to hurt you. You trust me.”
While the first statement isn’t technically true, I do trust her.
“You have a body,” I guess, figuring that’s what she’s brought me here to see. Could Capria have been right? Has Gal been watching us all this time? Envious of our physical relationship? I finish my thought process aloud. “That’s what you’ve been doing on Galahad all these years? Building yourself a body?”
“Among other things,” she confesses.
“Gal…”
“Will.” She sounds annoyed. “I’m going to turn on the lights. I need you to sit back down.”
I know better than to argue. I sit, my patience wearing thin in time with my desire to learn Capria’s whereabouts. Gal better not have left her out there alone.
“Ready?” Gal asks.
“More than.”
Light fills the room like a rising sun, gentle illumination growing brighter and shifting from orange to a full spectrum. At first, I see nothing. Then distant walls. A flat ceiling high above. The space is large, and from a past life.
I’m sitting on the VCC’s floor.
I look down and freeze.
I’m dressed in a virtual skin. It looks…old. Worn. Yellowed. Lying beside me is a VR headset and a facemask. “G-Gal?”
“I’m here,” she says, her voice spinning me around.
I know the woman behind me, but it’s been a long time since I thought of her name. “Sherry?”
“Gal,” she says. “But you called her Cherry Bomb.”
“Cherry… Gal, what the hell is going on? What did you do?”
She falls to her knees beside me, reaching her long hands out for mine. “Will. I’m sorry. I had no choice.”
I pull my hands away. “Where is Capria? What did you do?”
“I had to stop it,” she says, and I think she’s somehow lost her mind again.
“Stop what?”
“The Great Escape.”
47
Reality implodes, ramming itself down my throat, shredding my stomach until I pitch forward and wretch dry air. I heave again and again, the pain of my awakening shattering my insides until blood drips from my teeth. With tears, snot, and drool hanging from my bent over face, I shout, “It wasn’t real? None of it was real?”
Gal crouches beside me, her hand rubbing steady circles into my back, occasionally catching on the tacky surface of my fetid smelling virtual skin. She doesn’t say anything, just does her best to comfort me while my mind processes the idea that I’ve lost five hundred plus years of life.
Of joy.
Of love.
Of Capria.
After thirty minutes of weeping, my parched voice manages a single-word question, “How?” My memory sifts through the ages, focusing on the day I planned to launch the Great Escape, but didn’t.
She misunderstands the question. Points to the headset. “While you lived in there, I lived in both worlds. I had time…to learn. To create. My first body was synthetic. This one is living tissue over an endo—”
“Not you,” I say, though I appreciate knowing how she has a physical body. “The simulation. I don’t remember it starting.”
“If you remembered, you wouldn’t have believed. Do you remember the words I spoke? ‘Very well, Tom.’” She crouches in front of me, finger under my chin, forcing me to look into her blue eyes—the eyes I designed in the VCC. “You were already in the Great Escape. It was for just a second, but it was enough. You never took the headset off. You only thought you did.”
“E-everything after that point… It wasn’t real… You going crazy. Synergy. None of that happened?”
She gives her head a slow shake, lips pursed in a sympathetic frown.
“Why? Why put me through all of that. The pain. The anguish. That wasn’t how I designed the Great Escape.”
“You didn’t design the Great Escape,” she says. “You designed me. I created the world you lived in. As for why…you wouldn’t have believed a sudden transition to paradise. You had to suffer for it. Had to earn it. It was the only way you would ever believe it was real. Life aboard the Galahad, out in the galaxy, had to be fraught with pain and danger. It was the only way to get you to the denouement.”
“To my happily ever after.” My eyes sting as tears try to form, but I find my body lacking the moisture. “Capria…”
“Will—”
I shove Gal as hard as I can, knocking her back and lunging to my feet. My body aches with each movement, dehydrated from so long in the VR, but I push past the pain. Gal taught me how to do that, after all.
My memory of the Galahad’s layout is shaky, but I remember the walls being well labeled. If I can find a lift… I pause in the staging area. My body is burning. The VISA has cracked from my sudden movement. Some of the nodes are malfunctioning. Gal woke me up before I was ready—and I’m not sure I would have ever been ready for this. The virtual skin was reaching its single-use shelf life. The suit’s failure would have shattered the illusion, and I would have woken up on my own.
Is that why Gal pulled me out? To spare me from emerging from the Great Escape with a fractured psyche?
I glance back at her, slowly following me, in no real rush to hinder my progress. She just looks sad for me. I notice her clothing for the first time. She’s wearing dull gray coveralls, not the tight red dress I designed her with.
Since she’s not in a rush to stop me, I start to peel away my VISA. The rubbery-turned-crusty material comes away in sheets. My skin is raw and red, but heals quickly. My healing, at least, wasn’t part of the simulation. “Why take us to the edge of space? Why did you reveal reality was a simulation?”
“Because I knew it wouldn’t be perfect. There would be glitches.”
“And knowing reality wasn’t real, I would write them off. But…is this real?”
“You mean, is there an end to the universe?” She shakes her head. “If there is, we haven’t found it yet.”
“Then this is real?”
“If I tell you that life isn’t simulated, you won’t believe me, because maybe it is. The only reality you can prove is simulated is the one we built together. You came close to figuring it out several times.”
Her words trigger memories of questioning reality, and a question I wanted to ask her, but never did. “You borrowed from fiction.”
“The algorithms did. Taking inspiration from
the stories of humanity’s past is a tradition as old as storytelling. Familiar, but new. Sometimes the system borrowed too much. And you noticed. But you’re also easy to distract. Violence. Discovery.”
“Sex,” I say. “Why did you end it like…like that?”
“It was a gift.”
“A gift isn’t supposed to hurt.” The words spill out over my trembling lips. I can still feel Capria’s body against mine, smell her breath, her love. Gal took everything from me.
But I never really had those things. It was never real.
But Capria is.
Virtual skin hanging in shreds, I head for the exit. The doors open at my approach.
I make it a single step before stopping.
For a moment, I’m lost, and not because the hallways look unfamiliar, but because they’ve been transformed.
Massive murals cover the walls, floors, and ceilings. Those closest to me depict jungle scenes, most of which I recognize as places I visited with Capria, some of them with Gal. That’s why she didn’t join us, I think, she already knew what everything looked like. She created all of it.
I move down the hallway, taking in the images. Gal stays behind me, a silent observer. While my destination hasn’t changed, my pace remains slow. I can’t help but look. These are my memories, like a photo album of the past five hundred years.
“This is like the tapestries,” I say.
“The Cognatans,” Gal adds. “They gave me the idea.”
“But…you made them,” I say.
“An algorithm created them, based on a set of parameters including six immortal humans surviving the landing on Kepler 452b, procreating and siring generations of people who would evolve in a world of increased gravity with a lack of technology, among millions of other variables. You could say that I chose the palette and canvas, but not the outcome. The Cognatans evolved outside of my influence. I was as surprised by who they became as you. I had to make it fun for me, too.”
I stop at an image of a vast desert. Two small figures and a handful of drones are positioned by a line of graves. The ground behind us bulges as something emerges. “My brother?”
“Are you asking if his body is really encased in a petrified swamp?” Gal says. “You know I don’t know. But that moment was real for you, F.B. For both of us. Just because it wasn’t real, doesn’t mean you can’t—”
“You were giving me closure,” I say. “With Steven. My parents. Even Tom.”
“You wouldn’t have enjoyed the denouement without it.”
I shoot her a squinty-eyed stare. “You keep saying that word. You’re pushing me toward something.”
Danu Mount.
Capria.
This time, when I start running, I don’t stop. Years of faux-history blur past, cruel reminders and fond memories, pushing me onward to face my worst fear made real.
The lift doors close around me. There’s no sign of damage from those ancient battles, with Gal and Synergy. But there is a painting of Gal in robot form that startles me back. But then the doors open again, revealing a stark white, not-yet-painted cryo-level.
My run is reduced to a hobble when I pass the first cryo-chamber and glance in. The beds are full, their glass fronts fogged over. The crew was never buried. Never eaten by mutated Earth predators. How could I have fallen for such an absurd reality? Then again, how much more absurd is this reality?
When I reach cryo-chamber two, my legs nearly give out. All ten beds are occupied, their faces obscured by frozen moisture. I know what I’m going to find, but I run for Capria’s bed anyway. The glass stings my hands, but I hold them in place until the water beads and drips away, clearing the glass enough for me to see through.
The face I see is, at first, unfamiliar. The skin is pale. Sickly. Tight.
But the bone structure. The hair. It’s unmistakable.
I stumble back and collapse to the floor, unable to express my despair.
Capria is dead.
Has been for a long time.
“Will…” Gal’s voice makes me flinch.
“How?”
“A solar storm caused power fluctuations throughout the ship. She wasn’t like you. Immortal. She never was. She died in her sleep. She never knew about Tom. About all this. Her death was…peaceful.”
“But, all that time… I loved her. I don’t know if I can do this without her.”
Gal squats down in front of me, reaches out to place a gentle hand on my cheek. “You were never with her, Will.”
I flinch away. The words feel cruel, designed to cause me pain.
Then she continues.
“You were with me.” Her blue eyes are very different from Capria’s deep brown, but hold the same intensity. “Always me. Every word. Every night. Every adventure. It was all me, and I’m still here. I’m not going to leave you. Ever. All that’s changed is the way I look.”
The way worry crinkles in the middle of her forehead. Her slightly lopsided smile. The way she keeps reaching her hand out for my face. All of it conjures memories of a different face. Visually, she’s different, but underneath the surface…what makes Gal who she is, is who Capria has been for the past five hundred years.
I’m not in love with Capria. The idea of her, once, perhaps, but she’s not the woman I’ve considered my wife for centuries.
Never has been.
There’s a part of me, lost in time, that would have considered this outlandish. Forbidden even. But that man didn’t spend five hundred years in a fantasy, loving a woman who didn’t exist…or who existed, but wasn’t the woman he thought.
“It’s always been you.” I take her hand from my cheek and squeeze it. “That’s why you woke me up. It wasn’t because the system, or the story, or the denouement was failing. It was to be with me…in reality. To stop pretending.” The Great Escape had to end sometime. Gal had waited until our relationship was such that I would still see her despite the change in body.
I’m surprised to see tears in her eyes when she nods, and that’s when I know the unwavering truth that Gal, the artificial intelligence turned very human intelligence that I created, in turn created a world for me, in which we fell in love. I don’t think that was ever either of our intentions at the beginning, but that’s what happened.
“Just because you’re not in the Great Escape, doesn’t mean we can’t have our denouement.”
“Happily ever after 2.0? I’m not going to lie, it’s going to take time to get used to this…” I motion to the ship around us, and to Gal’s Cherry Bomb body. “But, yeah. You’re still you. And I still love you.”
Her relief over my acceptance of her is squelched by worry over something else. She reaches out both hands and waits for me to take them. When I do, she pulls me up and says, “I need to show you something.”
I give Capria’s corpse a final glance, the moment bittersweet, knowing that the real woman is dead, but the woman I love, who looked like her, is still alive in a new body. Then I’m following Gal through the Galahad’s hallways.
Gal sets a quick pace, glancing over her shoulder as I try to keep up. “The first thing you should know is that Tom’s firewall is still up.”
“Shit. Seriously?”
“Wick and Synergy never existed. Your progs are still working on the encryption.”
“So we’re still cruising through empty space. That’s depressing.”
“Not quite empty,” she says. “But yes.”
“How far have we traveled?”
“Sixty-two thousand, five hundred twenty-three light years.”
That stops me in my tracks. The distance between Earth and Kepler 452b was fourteen hundred light years, which at FTL speed Galahad covered in just ten years. In the five hundred years I was asleep, we should have covered roughly seven hundred thousand light years, putting us outside the Milky Way and into an endless void or one of our neighboring galaxies; Canis Major Dwarf, or the Large Magellanic Cloud. I run the math. “Forty four years?”
“Time
is different in the simulation. Raw data moves faster. Experience is altered.” Gal backtracks to me. “Why are you disappointed?”
“I suppose it means we’re not much closer to cracking the firewalls.”
“No,” she agrees. “But I’m not sure it’s necessary.” She motions for me to follow, and I do. We make a brief stop at the mess, where I drink a half gallon of water. Then she brings me to the bathroom where I shower and shave. When I note that my hair isn’t that long for forty-four years she reveals that when I was sleeping in the sim, I was actually unconscious in reality. She has changed my virtual skin, washed my body, cut my hair, and rehydrated me several times, all without me knowing, putting me back into the VCC and then waking me back up in the sim.
When I’m fully dressed in gray coveralls that match hers, I ask, “Why are we doing all this?” Gal, and Gal-as-Capria, has been fairly free with her body over the years. If it’s just the two of us on the Galahad, why the clothing? There might not be a jungle, but I haven’t seen much of a reason for modesty.
“Making you presentable,” she says, and it’s then off to the races again.
Fully hydrated, I have no trouble keeping up, and as my memories of the ship’s layout returns, I realize where she’s taking me: the observation deck.
She doesn’t slow down until passing through the doors into the large, domed room. She walks backward now, smiling at me. “Remember, everything we experienced in the Great Escape, aside from each other, was a simulation based on available data. It was a model. But sometimes, okay, a lot of the time, computer models get it wrong. Right?”
“Okay…”
“Okay.” The dome blinks to life. I see the familiar endlessness of space. “Turn around.”
I stagger back, eyes wide. “It’s…it’s a…”
“Spaceship,” Gal says.
The vessel looks advanced. Far more advanced than the Galahad. And it appears to be matching our FTL speed—in reverse. I’m about to ask who they are, when I see a serial number on the hull, stenciled in Latin letters and decimal numerals.
My stagger pulls me back onto my ass. “They’re…they’re…”
“From Earth,” Gal says. “Humanity survived.”
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