by Olga Werby
“Everybody just calls him Dude,” I said. How did she know?
“It doesn’t matter. The police already pulled him from class for an interview.”
“They did?” Now real panic was gripping me. It was one thing to lie when you had the upper hand; it was very different when the other person knew things and you didn’t know what they knew. My headache was beating an intricate samba rhythm behind my eyes.
“I’m telling you all this, Jude,” Ms. Evil said, “so you’ll just tell me what you know now. There’s nothing wrong with going on a date to the cyber arcade. All the kids are doing it. I told your dad as much.”
“You did?”
“Sure. It’s not a crime. He was going to get angry with you for sneaking into cyberspace behind his back. But I told him he was being silly. Teenagers date. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Nothing,” I echoed. There was a loud hum in my ears. If I was still out there, my rhythm app would have been on overdrive, pulsing waves of color in time with my pounding head.
She nodded. “Nothing, as long as you didn’t go to The Far Cinct and engage in… illegal activities.”
In my head, I quickly replayed everything I did last night. Did I do anything against the law? There was the theft of the eels. But I didn’t really do it. It was more like they volunteered to follow me. I didn’t even know about the slick fish until much later. Then there was the assault on the receptionist. But I didn’t think she was a real person, just some ghoul program. It’s not an assault if it’s not real, right? Then there was the frying of the gray cell with my Lazer Glance. And all those destroyed street vendor stalls…and the wig place. Did any of that amount to an illegal activity? Damn. I hoped there was some way to desenrascanço myself out of this situation.
“Why don’t you sit here for a bit and think about it. The cops will be here any time,” Claudia said and stood up. “Oh, and if you do think of something to tell me, just click this button.” She handed me a keychain trinket with a red button and a logo stamped into it. It sort of reminded me of an awkward lopsided apple drawing that kid would make. “It’s a little Vade Mecum my company makes—a panic button if you will. If you press it, I’ll know that there’s something you want to tell me privately. And I’ll help you. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to hide the tremor in my fingers and the worry from my voice.
“Good. I’ll leave your door open so you can hear our conversation with the police.” And with that, Ms. Evil left me alone in my room.
Moments later, I heard banging on the front door. The police had arrived. I felt sick.
My head felt like it was underwater. I had trouble listening to my dad and Ms. Evil reciting the facts about Bartholomew’s disappearance to the detective. I had to get back to Pixie, and Ghost, and Sleazy, and the other one, whatever his name was. Slinky? I couldn’t remember. I needed to tell them to hurry up, that I was in trouble, that they needed to get Doc well again. Fast!
I ran to my bathroom and locked myself in again. I slammed my CT connection on and materialized back around the corner from the cyber arcade. I ghosted immediately, mimicking the characteristics of a scary Far Cinct ghoul, but I was surrounded by the authorities. I was pinned to the wall, unable to move—not there in cyberspace or back in my bathroom. I wasn’t tied up and there was nothing really holding me down, but I had an overwhelming compulsion not to move.
“We got her,” I heard one of the cyber cops announce.
I tried to cateye and simultaneously bring up my map app and Mirror-Mirror. But before I could use them, they dissipated. I had nothing. I couldn’t move. I felt someone rip off my CT connection. I was back, sitting on my toilet, feeling like I was going to throw up. The detective was holding my connection.
“You must be Jude,” he said. I couldn’t answer. “It’s time you tell us what you did with your little brother.”
Nothing! I’d done nothing! I let out a groan and pressed the red button.
The next thing I remember was waking up in my glass coffin. Well, my mind was awake but my body wasn’t.
9. The Third Message
I am guessing it has been days since they caught me in their cyber trap, but of course, I have no way of knowing how much time had passed. I lay in that glass coffin, unconscious. How, you may ask, did I know it was a glass coffin and not one made out of granite? Well, Doc found a way of showing me things, little snippets of reality. That’s why I have hope as opposed to completely flipping out and going insane, locked inside this unresponsive body.
The first vision Doc managed to send me was of him and his friends—Pixie, Ghost, Sleazy, and the fourth one, Slick. Yeah, I remembered the little hairball’s name. They were standing around my body, swaddled in the glass coffin—some kind of a closed-environment life-support incubator. The view was from above. I saw my body splayed out on the table with only a thin sheet for modesty. My dad and Doc were there along with Doc’s dad, Dr. Tom Blake. Doc’s friends weren’t really there because I saw them as their avatars—a clowder of weird cyber cats. But Doc was in his human form, so he must have really been there in person. The image was a mélange of the real and cyber worlds. That’s what I understood. I think the message to me was that they were all working on getting me better and that I was not okay. I figured out the “not okay” part on my own, but I really appreciated knowing that they were all trying to help me. That was good. Necessary.
In that visual message, Doc was looking me in the eyes—not into the eyes of my body, but into the eyes of my soul, for lack of a better word. That’s how I knew he did it; he was the one to send the message. Of course, the unspoken mokita—the truth that everyone agrees on but doesn’t talk about—was that my time was limited. I was obviously close to dying. Why?
So something bad happened to me. The last thing I remembered as a fully functioning human was pressing the stupid button my stepmother gave me. And now that I had time to mull over the whole episode in detail, that strange apple button was familiar for a reason—it was the logo of the company that awarded Doc’s dad a genius prize, Daedal Design Award, when he was just my age. Geez, that guy is brilliant—what had I ever done in my life up to now? Nothing. Torschlusspanik anyone? Yes, I feared my opportunities to do something worthwhile with my time in this world were diminishing rapidly. I was dying, for goodness sake! Okay, enough of that. Self-pity is not very useful.
The second message from Doc was that same image of the Daedal Logo in detailed close-up—a spinning carbon ring molecule made out of strings of zeros and ones. It represented the merging of the digital and the biological—apps for life electrical, or some such nonsense. It still looked like a badly drawn apple to me. So, my intuition that my suspended consciousness state had something to do with that stupid button I pressed was probably right. Ms. Evil tried to kill me. I hope Doc and friends were aware of that and were being careful.
The third message was the most interesting. I don’t know why the world of information should come in threes, but three is a cool number. I have had three different phones; I attended three different schools; my third class period is lunch—my favorite. But perhaps I am just putting too much significance into numerosity?
So, the third message. Somehow, Doc managed to show me an old newspaper article about his dad, Tom Blake, and his best friend from high school, Roman Chernovsky. In the photo accompanying the article, the goofy teenagers stood together next to what looked like a school science fair project. The newspaper made a big deal about their backgrounds: Tom, a white South African, and Roman, a black Russian. Since they were both immigrants, I didn’t get it. The news has a talent for focusing on the irrelevant.
But it wasn’t only the photo; it was the whole article that was important. It described a terrible tragedy—Roman’s death. The science project those two worked on together was the precursor to the code-augmented molecule that won Tom his big prize and international recognition. Something went wrong during one of the tests.
Roman got exposed to the molecule and his brain was fried. At least, that’s how I understood what happened—there was a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo in the article. The end result: a fifteen-year-old kid was dead. You would think someone would have stepped in and put an end to Tom’s experiments, but, apparently, he was allowed to continue, death and all.
At the bottom of the article, Doc appended an image of Roman wearing old-style CT connection goggles. In red ink, Doc wrote: “Roman was plugged in when he died.” Then there was a picture of Ghost, the cool gray cat avatar I met a few hours back. Or was that days? You know? I am no longer sure. Time is so slippery when you are on life-support.
It took me a while to digest the meaning of the third message. I never heard that part of the story. It happened a year or two before Tom entered the Daedal Design Award competition and the press focused on him together with his future wife, Claudia Elisabeth von Reichenstein. I knew that part of his history well—I had done my own research after my dad got interested in Ms. Evil. But I had never heard of Roman before now. And while Doc didn’t spell out the significance of his being plugged in when he died, he obviously thought it was important. Then it hit me—Ghost. Roman. Ghost. Roman! Ghost! Oh my god! Roman is Ghost—Ghost, as in the ghost of Roman Chernovsky in cyberspace!
I didn’t know if this changed anything or everything. Doc was clearly trying to tell me that this was all related: the DaDA competition, the strange molecule Roman and Tom created, the freak accident that killed Roman, and my current precarious state of health. Now, I hadn’t been plugged in at the moment when I pressed the button, but clearly something had a bad effect on me. Hopefully, I am not as bad off as Roman was before he died. Poor kid, he was only fifteen, a year younger than me. But he had lived on in a way…at least according to Doc. My mind was racing from thought to thought, freely jumping chasms between concepts.
I reread the article, looking for any clues I might have missed the first time. Did they bury Roman? They did—cremated him too, for good measure. So there was no human body, just some virtual substance left over from Roman’s visits to cyberspace. Exposure, coma, brain death, body death. That was Roman’s progression into oblivion, but not mine. Wait! Was I in a coma? I had no idea.
If this was coma, then the next stage was brain death. Exposure, maybe—I wasn’t sure, but something got me here, into my coffin. Coma, check. Brain death—that’s why Dad was weeping. Well, I wasn’t there yet. And Roman managed to live on in cyberspace. Was Doc offering me the same fate? Why did that boy make things so complicated? You have something to say? Say it. Don’t make a coma patient guess. And I wasn’t plugged in when I hit that button.
Ice-cold panic gripped me. I could die in this glass sarcophagus! Did I mention I was too young to die? I am too young to die! I screamed and screamed, but there was no way for anyone to hear me. My body wasn’t connected to me in that way anymore.
I screamed until I was hoarse. Well, that’s not really true since I wasn’t using my lungs or throat. But if I had been, I would have been hoarse. But even screaming and self-pity get boring after a while and teenagers have notoriously short attention spans. I went back to a more productive strategy of self-examination—I was trying to remember all the little details I could about my last moments with the police detective and my encounter with Doc’s feline friends.
The Daedal button first. Was that a real button? I tried to think back. I had to press really hard to make it click. Even in my panic to escape from the detective—strangely, he was dressed in white and was taking my pulse—I noticed how hard it was to press. The mechanism was designed so casual handling couldn’t activate it. I had to make a decision to press. Was that relevant? I had no idea, but it was new information. New to me. I tried to remember that moment and expand it in my memory. I had been surprised at how difficult the button was to press, but was that all? That visceral memory of the click made my mind unpack that moment. Time is a relative thing—some moments fly by and some must be extruded with difficulty. I tried to achieve a state of ataraxia—the stoic calm of ancient Greek philosophers. Ataraxia is easier to get to when one can do breathing exercises—not something that was available to me, the comatose patient. Still, I tried to empty my mind and let it float, flit from thought to thought, memory to memory. Slowly, I was able to guide myself back to the moment I desired to inspect. And there it was, clear as day. A small needle popped out of the button and slid into my thumb—I was injected with something! I bet anything it was the stupid molecule Doc’s dad and Roman designed. So, I was infected, just like Roman. In his case, it was an accident. Or was it? But I was contaminated on purpose. Ms. Evil wanted me dead or at least the way I was now. Why? I didn’t have answers to that yet. I was hoping Doc was working on it and on finding the cure.
And that clicked another connection for me—Doc. Why was he unconscious at his friend’s house? Was he infected too? If so, he was obviously better now. Or was he? It is so frustrating being in a coma. I had no way to communicate with anyone, no way to ask questions. I couldn’t even connect and look things up for myself. All I could do was wait and hope that Doc would send me more cryptic messages. Joy. Did I mention teenagers are not wired for patience? Well, we aren’t. Hurry, Doc.
10. Cyber Dreaming
Time is a strange thing. And comatose brain experiences time in a particularly perverted way. For instance, I no longer can tell you with any conviction which of Doc’s messages came first. The story he was trying to tell me was gelling without being bound chronologically. I found myself hopping from idea to idea, making connections. It felt like a free-association exercise; we learned about those in an introduction to psychology class last year.
So, when the dream came, it was jarring, and unexpected.
“Jude? Jude?” Someone was speaking to me.
“Jude? It’s Doc. Can you hear me?”
It took me a while to figure out how to open my eyes. When I did, I was back in cyberspace, in the tiny room on top of the stairs where I first met Ghost and the rest of Doc’s buddies.
“Doc?” I managed. I was pretty sure I was still in a coma, so this encounter didn’t make sense. Not in a normal world.
“Oh good! We managed to get you connected.” I think it was Doc talking, but I still wasn’t sure. My senses were confused. It was like my hearing and sight weren’t plugged in right.
“I’m over here,” Doc said. “Follow my voice. That’s it. A little more. Can you see me now? You’re looking at me,” he said helpfully. And I did see him then. This would take some getting used to, I thought.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I got you hooked up,” Doc said. “You’re still sick. You fell into a coma after exposure to—”
“I know, your dad’s cyber molecule,” I said.
“I was going to say flu,” Doc said, sounding confused.
Sure it was flu. I knew better by now, so I moved on. Doc might not know what really happened to me.
“Tell me about Ghost,” he said.
I told him, and that got more murmurs and excitement from Doc.
“So, my messages got through to you?” Obviously. “Good. We weren’t sure,” he said.
We who? Was his entire cyber cat cartel here? I couldn’t see them. But I couldn’t really control where I was looking—my avatar wasn’t working properly. Not all of my senses were online, so to speak. The room could have been full of ghosts, for all I knew. I felt safe anyway—Doc was here with me. I trusted him.
“I got that Ghost is Roman,” I told Doc. “But what happened to him? And, more importantly, is the same thing going to happen to me?” My speech and thoughts were a bit clipped. I was struggling. This was definitely not like a regular cyber connection. It felt like I was fighting through a sea of mayonnaise to perceive and comprehend the world around me. It wasn’t good, but it was better than nothing. Much better.
“Good, good,” I heard Doc from some far-off distance, yet he was right there in fr
ont of me.
I was glad he was pleased, but I wanted him to get on with it. My time felt limited.
“It’s a long story,” Doc said. Great! “So I’ll give you the condensed version.” Perfect. “Sleazy, Slick, Pixie, and I all go to the same school. We’ve been friends since Kindergarten. My mom…” Ms. Evil. “…had me stealing technology from my dad for years.”
This was new; I had no idea Doc was a cyber technology thief.
“As a reward, she gave me access to The Far Cinct and let me sell some of my ideas and hacks on the black market there. It’s pretty lucrative.”
I bet.
“I needed help, so I brought my friends in on this operation a few years back. And it’s more fun to go on The Far Cinct adventures with friends.”
“Glad it’s working for you,” I said. But I was mad that he’d been working for Ms. Evil all this time and never told me. It made me uncomfortable, like I couldn’t really trust him anymore. But if not him, who? I didn’t have anyone else I could communicate with right now. Being in a coma is so limiting.
“Shortly after I brought everyone out here, we found Ghost,” Doc continued, unaware of my apprehensions. “He was really just a gray specter back then. He’s come a long way.”
“I don’t understand. Is Roman dead?” That’s what I really needed to know, because damn…that could be me.
“Roman did die. Just like the article said,” Doc affirmed. “But part of him lived on out here, in cyberspace. That was totally unexpected. No one knew it was going to happen. No one even looked for Roman out here. So, for years, he just sort of wafted around The Far Cinct. I noticed him first. He was different from other ghosts. He followed me around everywhere. Perhaps he recognized my dad in me? I don’t really know why.”
“Did you ask him?”
“We tried, but that part of his memory is still hazy. All those years just adrift, with no one to talk to, no one who understood who or what he was…”