“You’re the one always cracking jokes, clown boy. Now just sit down and be quiet.”
Grant takes a few steps back and drops to the floor, crisscross like a preschooler waiting for story time. I refocus on the dual systems. Their coding is linked, almost as if they’re codependent, but still completely separate systems. It’s like a dummy corporation fronting for a drug lord. Everything looks kosher, but there’s always a way to tie them together. I just have to find it.
“This is taking too long.”
“You’re asking me to do in five minutes what it would take another hacker weeks to do. Patience and faith, man. Patience and faith.”
“You’re the one who’s on the line. I’m just the invisible boy who—”
“Got it. The HR systems are tied into each other. Now I just have to…” My fingers double time through the newly revealed system. “I’m in. Now tell me where to go.”
Grant jumps up and hovers over the back of my chair. “Access the camera that monitors the room where they put you in the coma.”
I don’t even question him, locating the camera for room 224 in seconds and pulling the feed up on the secondary monitor on the desk. The image flashes to life, and my fingers fall off the keyboard.
There I am. My comatose body resting in the sterile hospital bed, a half dozen machines all hooked up to my fingers, chest, and head. Mama is there too, chatting away on the silent feed, fussing with a vase of flowers she knows I’ll never open my eyes to see. I watch in disbelief as she pulls over a chair, smooths down my grandmother’s quilt, and takes my paper-thin hand in hers. My on-screen body gives no indication that I have any idea she’s even there.
She keeps on talking, probably telling a story about something crazy that happened in her classroom today. She loves the kids she teaches, even though the hours are long and the pay is low. Even if we had all the money in the world, she’d never give it up. Just like even though I’m not there in that room with her, she refuses to give up on me.
I’m staring at myself pulled up on this feed, but I’m sitting here at this desk on another floor. I’m lying in a bed, completely unaware of anything around me, and I’m hacking into a complicated dual system. I’m in a coma, but I’m awake.
“Ghost in the Machine.”
“Not yet.” Grant perches on the edge of the desk so he can look into my face. “The real ghosts are like me. We live here, but not really. We can’t interact, change, or impact. But you’re in charge right now. This is your world.”
My world. “What the hell does that mean?” This isn’t my world. My world is staring back at me through a security camera feed.
“I was like you. All the ghosts were.” Grant stares off into the empty row of cubicles. “When I was the controller, I thought I was alive. My world swam around me just as it had every day of my life. No one told me any different, so I went along with it, even with all the weird idiosyncrasies that I knew in the back of my head didn’t add up. I ignored them until I couldn’t.”
I don’t want to ask, but I have to. “What happened?”
“I met one of the ghosts, and they explained it all. I had about a week living in a weird state of fighting with myself over believing what was real. Then one day I woke up and it wasn’t my world anymore. No one could see me. I couldn’t do anything. And someone else walked out of the VALR building thinking they’d been given a second chance at life.”
I stare at the monitor where my mom still sits in an uncomfortable chair talking to a body that is never going to talk back to her. The reality of the situation hits me like a bucket of cold water dumped over my head. I never woke up. “Someday I’m going to be just like you. Stuck here as ghost code, living as a nobody in someone else’s world.”
Grant shrugs, not even flinching when I called him a nobody. “Yes. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
He stops and takes a moment to really look at me, as if he’s deciding right then if he should say what he’s about to say.
“Unless you shut it all down.”
C:>ELEVEN.exe
I power the workstation down and dash out of the building as fast as I can, ignoring the concerned questions from the security guard, and Grant’s shouts to wait. Outside, night has finally settled. There’s just barely enough sunlight left to see that almost all the non-descript black sedans have left for the day.
“Hey there, Butterfly.” Grant’s voice is soft and cautious behind me. “You wanna talk about it?”
“None of this is real.” Saying the words out loud gives them a certain finality.
“You and me. We’re real. Or at least I think this is our consciousness or something like that.”
“My mom, Dr. Spencer, the perky waitress at the coffee shop…”
Grant sighs, and I can imagine his body deflating behind me. “No.”
I turn around and lean against my truck, grateful that the darkening sky hides my tear stained eyes. “I think I knew it all along. Everything was just a little too perfect. Too ordered to be real. But I wanted it to be so bad, I let my brain ignore all the warning signs.”
“I guess there’s no ignoring watching your own body from a monitor down the hall.”
“What I don’t get is why? Why have this elaborate virtual reality? Why trick my brain into thinking I’m better when obviously I’m not? What does VALR want?”
Grant walks over and leans against the truck next to me. “I don’t have your hacker skills, so I don’t have all the answers, but there are others like me, and I think we’ve pieced together at least some of the puzzle.”
My brain stumbles over the word others. More ghosts just like Grant, walking around in a fake world where no one even knows they exist. I don’t want anything to do with them, but I want their answers. “Spill the beans, clown boy.”
“AI.”
I turn so my shoulder is against the car and I can look directly at Grant. His face is barely visible in the soft glow of a distant street lamp. “Want to run that one by me again?”
“Look, I don’t know what the tech is like now, but when I was in the real world, AI was at the top of every tech company’s list of wet dreams. Everyone wanted it. No one knew how to do it. Now you’ve got VALR literally downloading your consciousness into an elaborate computer program. I have a hard time believing they are acting out of a desire to make your brain more comfy while your body gives out on you.”
“How did you get here?” I jerk my chin at him, my face serious “You know, like here in this virtual world with VALR?”
Sticking his hands in his pockets, Grant stares out at the darkening sky. “I didn’t know anything about VALR before this. I was in a car accident…a bad one. All I can remember is the crash and then waking up in a hospital bed. My mom said I was in a coma, but VALR was able to save me.”
I snort. “Sounds familiar.”
Grant tips his head at me in confirmation. “Everything was fine after that. I had some pretty bad headaches, but the doctors said that was normal given my head trauma. I tried to ignore them and live my life, but that didn’t last long. One day I went to bed and woke up outside on the other side of town. Also, spoiler alert, you aren’t actually sleeping. You lay down on a bed, close your eyes, and two seconds later you “wake up.” The computer simulates the whole thing. I don’t even bother going through the motions anymore.”
“And there are others? More ghosts like you? Where are they?”
Grant shrugs and then nods, answering all my questions at the same time. “There are others. A ghost for every controller like you VALR has ever put through the program. The others are…not my crowd. I usually try to avoid them, and they generally ignore the controllers.”
I could respect that. Nothing wrong with avoiding other people. “So did you try to go back home?”
“I tried.” He nods. “The rest of us are stuck inside a perimeter of the controller. Right now, that’s you. For thirty days, we’re stuck existing wherever you are. When the contr
oller dies, we all go dormant, and then reactivate again wherever they’ve uploaded a new controller.”
I pinch at a headache brewing in my forehead. It’s too much information, but I still have a million questions. “So wherever I go, you have to go too?”
“Pretty much. It’s like a bubble that travels around you. We don’t have to be right next to you, but I can’t just hop to the next town over while you’re chilling here.”
“What happens after thirty days?” I ask him, but I already know the answer.
“Your human body will give up. That’s when everyone’s consciousness lets go of the system.”
My shoulders sag under the weight of the truth. “So, that’s when I die.”
Grant nods. “From what I understand, they tweak the system each time, trying to get a controller to stay in control of the program after their body has died. They obviously haven’t gotten it to work yet.”
“How many different controllers have you known?”
Grant sighs so softly it could be the gentle flap of a butterfly wing. “A lot.”
A terabyte-sized ball of dread forms in my stomach. “How long have you been in here?”
“Time is different inside the VR.” Grant looks over my shoulder instead of directly at me.
“It’s 2024. How long?”
He freezes and slowly moves his gaze over to look in my eyes. “Sixteen years.”
Bile rises in my throat. How long has this been going on? “I have to go.” I pull open the door to my cab and pull myself up onto the bench seat covered with a strip of duct tape to hold in the foam cushion. “I can’t take any more information today. I’m sorry. I’ll talk to you tomorrow or whatever. After I sleep for two seconds.”
I back out of the parking spot and pull around toward the exit. Grant is there. His silhouette, illuminated by the headlights, looks every bit like the ghost he is.
C:>TWELVE.exe
When I get out of my car at the park the next morning or whatever it is, Grant is already there, leaning against a tree.
“How did you know I’d be here?”
Grant doesn’t take his eyes off the too bright sky with the perfectly puffy clouds floating by. “Controller perimeter, remember? You’re kinda stuck with me.”
I nod, unease with last night’s conversation sinking back into my stomach.
“Hey, what did the sushi say to the bee?”
I fight back an involuntary grin, hiding it before Grant catches me enjoying his annoying joke. “I don’t know. What does the sushi say to the bee?”
“Wasabbee!” Grant finally looks at me, poised on an imaginary surfboard, his fingers bent into the worst California surfer pose I’ve ever seen.
“Is it tiresome being so pathetically corny all the time?”
Grant pushes off from the tree and walks over to where I stand next to the truck. “Are you kidding? Chicks dig my unique brand of wit.”
“Right.”
“So what’s on the agenda for the day, Butterfly?”
“First things first.” I stick my hand out toward him. “Hi, my name is Viv.”
Grant stares at my hand but doesn’t take it. He smiles up at me tentatively and waves. “Nice to meet you, Viv.”
“As for an agenda, I have no idea.” I pinch the bridge of my nose where the beginning twinge of a headache is already coming on. “I was going to pick up some more drives to wipe today, but that seems a little…”
“…silly since none of this is real, and we’re just uploaded consciousnesses in an elaborate virtual reality?”
I puff out a laugh that isn’t even a little humorous. “Something like that.”
“Alright then. If you are planless, there’s something I think you should see.”
I nod, fighting back the growing nausea in my stomach. It’s going to take longer than one night to get used to the idea of all this being fake.
Grant walks further into the park and motions for me to follow. We walk silently side by side, past the jungle gym full of kids and a heated pick-up game on the basketball court. We take a small bridge over a trickle of a creek to an open grassy area. The branches of the mesquite trees bounce about in the warm wind. Grant stops, and my attention jerks to the open space in front of us.
I stop so suddenly I have to throw out one foot to keep myself from face planting.
“What the hell?” The grassy open field looks like a scene from a zombie horror movie.
“Remnants.”
At least fifty of them roam around the grassy area, the sun almost shining through their nearly invisible bodies. A woman with a flower-patterned dress, a man with long black hair and a bowtie, an elderly woman still gripping a metal cane. I stand motionless, waiting for one of them to spot us, but they don’t. Blank eyes stare straight ahead as they trudge across the grass and then trudge back in the opposite direction. Some don’t even move at all, just standing and staring into nothing.
“Who are they? What are they?”
Grant walks over to a wooden bench, and I follow him, never taking my eyes off the slow-moving herd.
“They are what we’ll become eventually.”
I swallow back the bile threatening to make its way up my esophagus.
Grant’s voice takes on that ‘talking to a terminal patient’ tone again. “The human mind can only take so much. We aren’t meant to exist outside of our physical bodies. After so long of not being able to interact with reality, we lose touch with it completely.”
“They were like us.” My voice is a whisper. It isn’t a question.
Grant nods. “And now, they’re trapped. Just like us.”
“This is why you want to shut the program down, isn’t it? So we don’t end up like them.”
Grant nods again, his eyes glassy from unshed tears.
I squirm a bit on the bench. Human emotions from other people are not something I know how to handle. If Mama were here, she’d pull Grant in for a hug and soothe his hurts with soft words and gentle hands. I’m not Mama, so I settle for a pat on the shoulder. Except that doesn’t really work. My hand goes right through Grant’s shoulder as if he isn’t even there. His body flickers as my hand passes through and then solidifies again.
“What the…”
Grant chuckles, his face coming back to life. “I’m not really here, Butterfly. The program doesn’t recognize my code anymore, so I can’t interact with it and you can’t interact with me. Physically anyway. Sorry to crush your dreams of a month-long romantic tryst.”
Now it’s my turn to laugh. “Sorry to crush your dreams, clown boy, but you’re not really my type.”
“Don’t tell me you’re into the muscle-necked beef cake type.”
“More like I prefer a good coding session over interactions with pulse-carriers.”
“Um…you mean people.”
I shrug my shoulders in answer.
“Wow, I’m going to try really hard not to be insulted by that. My lack of a pulse should make it a bit easier.” He waggles his eyebrows at me. “So…no boyfriends? No girlfriends?”
I shrug again. My lack of a desire to be with people isn’t exactly a topic of conversation I enjoy. It was bad enough being the girl in school that everyone knew was dying. But at least it kept me from having a conversation about my non-desire to date…anyone.
“Alright,” Grant says, standing and turning his back to the still roaming Remnants, “I can work with that. It’ll be easier to work together if I don’t have to constantly fight off your efforts to seduce me.” Grant winks at me with his ‘everything is hunky-dory’ smile.
I breathe out a quick sigh of relief. Maybe he’s not so bad after all. “Now what? You want to shut this down, but how?”
“That’s where you come in. As far as I know, they’ve never had a computer geek in the VALR program before.”
I plant my fists on my hips and give Grant my best stare down. “Computer geek? Do I look like tech support to you? I’m a hacker.”
“Hey.”
Grant holds his hands up in surrender. “I’ll call you queen of the known universe if you can shut this baby down.”
I ease off my stance and head back over the narrow bridge. The Remnants are starting to creep me out. “Alright, yesterday made it clear that the levels of separation between the existing VR and the programs controlling it are pretty tight. This isn’t something I can do remotely. I’ll need to get direct access to the system and brute-force an attack on the programs.”
“Any thoughts on how to do that?”
“Yes, actually.” I recall my conversations yesterday with Mama and Dr. Spencer. “It seems the VR is trying to steer me toward getting on with my life. Probably so I’ll integrate further into the program. What better place for a hacker than as a system analyst at a high tech medical facility.”
“Oh, I like the way you’re thinking.”
I give Grant a smug smile. “I’ll go talk to Dr. Spencer today. Tell her I’m ready to move on, and see if she can put in a good word for me. If I can get in, I’ll have full access to the system. From there I can figure out how best to integrate the programs controlling the VR and wipe them out.”
“We’ll need to take down all the research and information they’ve collected, too. We don’t want them to do this to anyone else.”
“Oh, I’ll bomb the hell out of the whole system. It would take them decades to recreate it all.”
“Viv.” Grant stops, forcing me to pause my march back to my truck. His face is back to serious mode, and it pings at my building headache.
“What?”
“I…” He digs his toe at the dirt, though his brown loafers don’t make even the tiniest impact. “I want to make sure you understand what you’re doing. If you blow up the program—”
“We die.”
Grant nods, his eyes flickering up to meet mine briefly.
I swallow the lump growing in my throat. “When I joined the VALR program, that’s what I signed up for. My days were already numbered.” I glance back toward the grassy field of Remnants. “I’d rather go out now, on my own terms, than end up like one of them.” Going out on my own terms was all I ever asked for. “What about you?”
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