by Jenn Polish
He ignored everything, outside of whatever it took to get up to his and Mir’s room unscathed. Or relatively unscathed. The bruises from his rough-and-tumble journey would not bother him until later, when he would poke at them and relish the soft aches they brought.
Time slowed to a near-complete standstill for Peter as he looked at their abandoned room, the other boys long since at their various jobs. The only pod left perfectly made, as always, was Mir’s. Already, it had the number of a boy, a new boy, etched into its edge.
Already, they’d replaced them.
Forcibly forgotten them.
Erased them.
Peter fell to his knees in front of the pod, breathing through the thin oxygen leaking into the room from the rest of the stead, and—as though Mir had known Peter would collapse on seeing the pod empty, even though he’d left in such a hurry to get away from the boy who’d enlisted, who shattered all their dreams of ever being together, of ever staying alive long enough to discover what graying hair felt like—as though Mir had known Peter would be back and in a pain that would bring him to his knees on finding Mir gone—his knees crumpled into a note Mir had left. On their last sheet of ancient paper, an expensive piece of memorabilia Peter had gotten for them for their last birthday, combining the practical with the beautiful, the wondrous with the tragic, in a way Mir would never fail to love.
Peter lifted one knee, the knee that had crunched the thin white sheet, and took the page up between trembling fingers.
It reminded him, forcibly, of the creatures in his dreams. The dragon. No. The butterflies. Their wings.
Peter,
I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry I ambushed you with the information. I should have told you the moment I signed up.
No. I should have told you before I did.
I have to fly, Peter. VR isn’t enough for me anymore. It never has been. You know that.
I’m not sure why flying. I just know I feel it in my bones. In my back. I don’t know if that makes sense. I just feel it the same way you feel hunger in your stomach, when you get all empty and irritable and pained until you eat. But nothing can quench this, Peter. Except the Hub. Even if we both hate the war. And I do. I do hate the war. I’ll do my best not to hurt anyone. I want to just fly on reconnaissance missions. I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want wings.
I also don’t want to hurt you. I’ve never wanted to hurt you. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m selfish, usually. This is selfish. I don’t know whether to apologize for that part. You’re always telling me to be more selfish. Hello! I tried. This is me trying. Bet you’re not too happy for giving me that particular brand of advice now. Whoops.
I am not planning to die. I am planning on doing every single thing with you that we ever dreamed of. Except avoiding the choosing. Because, like I said, I want this. I want to fly, Peter. I just want to fly. I need it. Almost like I need you, but different. I don’t know how to explain it.
Anyway. I am not planning to die. But if I do, Peter—and actually listen to me here, don’t roll your eyes and pretend to listen like you do when you know you don’t want to hear what I’m going to say next—if I die, it won’t be because I wanted to leave you. I don’t want to leave you. If I die, your face will be the last thing I see, your lips on mine the last thing I feel. And that will be a great comfort. Because your love will hold me, if I die.
Not that I will. I won’t. I’ll be back. I hope you can forgive me by the time I do.
Love, Love, Love,
Mir
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Chapter Four
HE WANTED TO believe them. He did.
He wanted to believe in them.
Believe in them when they said they wouldn’t die, when they said they wouldn’t leave him. Believe them that they weren’t just…lost.
Because their plan had always been to get lost together, if ever their number came up.
He wanted to believe in them. He couldn’t. He refused.
Because believing in them would be accepting Mir’s fate. Accepting that Mir would be… lost. Forever.
His hands shook and his stomach quaked and he heaved everything in it—acid mostly, because he hadn’t had a thing to eat since their keeper gave him and the other kids rations the night before—onto the steel floor next to Mir’s pod.
Even in his agony, even in his rage, he kept the paper—the precious, ancient paper onto which Mir had inscribed their love—safe from his own sickness, from his own hands, from his own bile and his own arrogance.
He tucked it into the pocket of his green trousers.
And he snuck back down to their—his—refuge. He would save Mir. Whether Mir wanted to be saved or not.
And he knew just how to.
“The Hub will train them with VR,” he muttered to no one in particular as he ran calculations more with his fingers than his brain. “And if they’re hooked into a VR, they can be diverted into another VR. My VR. That island in my dream. That’ll do. They’d like them. The butterflies. They fly.”
His shoulders were racked with a wave of unexpected sobs, and his fingers stilled on the keypad—he flexed his palm out to interface his hand chip with the processor in their hideaway—for a few long moments, pressing down, hard, next to the keys, trying to steady himself.
“They fly,” his broken voice repeated, and he ran a shaking hand through his soft hair, wishing the hand was Mir’s.
He clenched his jaw. It would be Mir’s soon. He’d program it so Mir could fly, without the Hub. Without the war.
Everyone told them it would never, never happen. Flying.
Peter clawed at his own skin for having dismissed this as impossible before Mir signed up. Perhaps he wouldn’t have dismissed it if Mir had told him how serious they were about needing to fly. How determined. He ground his teeth, clenched his fists, and flexed out his hands before he forced himself to keep calculating, keep working. Keep programming.
Make sure that when he did rescue Mir, they wouldn’t hate him for going against their wishes. Better program a safeguard for that in there too, he figured. His right hand tingled where his chip was humming in sync with the processing console.
Everyone said humans could never, never fly.
Peter would create a land where they could. Where Mir could. A different land. The island he’d seen in his dreams.
Neverland.
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Chapter Five
HE WORKED UNTIL his fingers were sore, until his wrists were tired of punching in number after number, calculation after calculation. He worked until he could close his eyes and imagine a perfect projection of Mir’s face in the island he was quite literally dreaming up for them, bleeding into existence for them.
To get them away from the Hub. Away from jets that exploded and crashed and got shot at and got ordered to shoot people, even when they were only on
recon missions.
He didn’t want to imagine Mir dead. But he also didn’t want to imagine Mir a killer. He’d help them fly. He’d help them see. With a little help from programming and a little help from brain chemistry.
And hell, maybe he’d even stop the war while he was at it.
Maybe other volunteer recruits like Mir who just wanted to fly could come to his island instead of joining the Hub, instead of signing up for a war against an enemy no one seemed to know much about. Except, of course, the fact that the others needed to be obliterated.
He sighed as he slipped on his VR helmet, his fingers’ final contribution to his creation. He gasped immediately. He’d done it.
The island. He was back on the island. The sights, the smells, the sounds. He’d programmed them all perfectly.
Almost perfectly anyway. He could always add more details, more creatures, through the chip embedded in his palm, without even having to go back to his alleyway hideout.
He linked his tired fingers above his head, stretching them toward the sky—so, so, so unbelievably blue—and he took a deep breath of sea air. He licked the faint remnants of salt already accumulating on his lips. And then…
Then he jumped.
Because then there was a beeping sound—no, beeping was too mechanical a way to describe it—it sounded more like wind chimes, like a tinkling bell made of the most delicate materials. Peter turned on his heel, kicking up sand as he did so, wondering what could possibly be on his own island that would surprise him.
He’d created the place, after all.
At first, he thought it was a butterfly. A dull steel-gray butterfly, but massive. Perhaps it was about his height, though he couldn’t tell, since it was hovering above the ground, metallic and still-delicate-looking wings flapped. But when he squinted, he realized the flyer didn’t have eyes. Just wings, and a heavy-duty processing chip where a face might be, and tendril-like sensors where hands and fingers and feet and toes might be, and a screen where a stomach would be, if the creature had one.
Analog interface activated, green letters flashed across the stomach-screen, wings holding the interface steady enough for Peter to read without a problem. A series of rhythmic chimes twinkled into his ears as the words processed in his brain. He blinked.
“You’re the interface?” he asked, eyebrow arching as the beginnings of a smile formed on his lips.
Affirmative, the interface flashed, along with another distinct series of chiming tones.
“Okay, uh, let’s cut it out with the chimes for your interface tone, yeah? It’s windy here, it’s gonna get hard to hear you. Can you simulate English?”
“Affirmative,” the interface repeated, the word still appearing on its screen, but with a thin, mechanical voice replacing the chimes.
Peter grinned. “Mir’s gonna love this.”
“Mir?” the interface inquired.
“Mir. My partner. The…the person I programmed this island for. The person I programmed you for.”
An audible whirring stalled the interface’s communication, and it rapidly lost height as its wings fell still. Peter reached to catch it along the sides of the screen. It whirred in his hands but with a different pitch than before.
“Having trouble processing something, Interface? Should I crack back into your code? Or is it a hardware issue?”
He went to open the panel behind Interface’s stomach screen, but it flew up and out of his hands. Peter startled.
“No correction is necessary. Awaiting further codes, sir.”
Peter grinned at the form of address, the alarm from a moment before melting from his face.
“Peter,” he told Interface. “You can call me Peter.”
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Chapter Six
HE WANTED TO get to work on the portal right away. He was going to get hungry soon, and though he was confident in his skills to synthesize protein and other necessary nutrition, synth food of his own creation wasn’t his favorite thing to eat.
“For what purpose will the portal reach outside of the holomax?” Interface wanted to know as they worked, Peter programming and Interface whirring with the effort of keeping the island stable.
“Neverland,” Peter corrected, not for the first time. “Can you process that part? Because this isn’t just any old holomax, Interface. It’s not your regular old VR. This is a refuge, for Mir. And I’m calling it Neverland, okay?”
“Request received and processing. Request information regarding the nature of the portal to expedite programming process?” Interface asked again, and Peter looked up from his sprawl in the sand with a soft grin. His toes were dripping with water from the occasional wave, and gritty with sand. He flexed them as he shielded his eyes from the glaring simulated sun he would never know was simulated if it weren’t for the fact that he’d programmed it himself.
“I need to reroute someone from another VR system.” He thought about his fleeting idea, about bringing the whole army here. Saving the whole army.
And possibly dooming his world, because without soldiers…
He gulped. A problem for later. “Maybe a lot of someones. And the best way to do that without causing neurological damage is by creating a tunnel between the systems. A portal. Understand?” he asked, even though he knew Interface would.
Interface probably knew more about this island than he did. Interface was the island, after all.
But when Interface warned him of an imminent systems overload, he just reached up, flicked it into sleep mode, and kept working.
Because Mir didn’t have a lot of time.
Even though he knew time passed much faster in VR than in the outside world. Days in here were hours out there. The better to sell games and escapes to people; more time in VR for less time at work. With the world, people couldn’t just program change and watch the results immediately appear in front of them.
But he didn’t want Mir to wait hours. He didn’t want Mir to wait at all.
So he tore open the first portal while Interface was still in sleep mode. He desperately hoped it was the right one, that it was channeled toward Mir. He’d used every bit of data he’d ever learned about the Hub, about recruitment processes; about Mir’s own brainwaves and biological signals, always monitored in VR situations.
“Come on, dammit,” he murmured as the portal—a hole right in the air above him, above the gentle evening surf—whizzed into existence and then fizzled out. Without Interface awake and working with him, he didn’t know if he could draw enough power.
“I have to,” he shouted at nothing and no one in particular. Because nothing and no one was on the beach with him. No butterflies, no faux dragons. The waves and the trees beyond the sand didn’t respond to him. He was even getting a bit lonely for Interface’s company; but he needed to avoid overload. Because this VR was too old to handle portals, drawing people in from other, newer, more powerful VRs. It could overload at any moment.
And overload would mean the end of Neverland. It would mean the end of Mir. The end of all of Peter’s hope.
So he’d have to do it himself.
“You programmed your way out of your pod almost every night for rotations.
You hacked Mir’s pod like it was your own. You put a chip in your own hand to make sure you could access the alleyway, and now that chip is helping you program and maintain all of this. For you and Mir. This portal is nothing, right? Nothing. You got this. For you and Mir.”
But it wasn’t nothing. Perspiration poured out of his skin, feverish heat refusing to evaporate in the heavy sea air.
By the time he got the portal to rip itself open, his neck was aching with a burn from a sun that shouldn’t have been able to burn, and the moon—the same one Mir had blown up in his dream—was the only thing lighting the island, the calculations pouring out of his lips and into the sky above him. There, the portal looked like a black hole; it certainly felt like one. It roared and sucked wind and water in, in, in. Peter had to dig his feet in the sand to avoid getting yanked into the hole he’d created, just above his eye level, in the air itself.
Peter tried to shift, tried to reach for Interface—curled up on the sand a few feet from him, in sleep mode, wings tucked into the sides like a beetle, or maybe like a fairy—but the wind pulling from the portal was too strong. Until it wasn’t. Until the suffocating pull of air into seeming nothingness stopped, as abruptly as Peter had fallen in love with Mir all those rotations ago. He fell to the sand, on his backside, with the sudden cessation of force. The portal heaved and trembled and glowed, brighter than the brightest butterfly he’d yet seen on Neverland. A shuddering and metallic clacking rang out in Peter’s very bones.
Someone was climbing out of the portal.
Peter scuttled backward on his hands and feet, looking for all the world like one of those strange creatures he and Mir had seen in a natural history museum.
“Crab.” He found the word in his head dimly, even as nervous horror flooded him at who—or what—was emerging from the portal. “Neverland needs crabs.”
And then, all other thoughts were blotted from his mind as the portal gave one final shudder, one final whir of electric light, reflecting eerily off the moon-drenched beach.
“Mir?” he whispered in a small voice, daring despite himself to be hopeful. He squinted up as his pupils dilated, trying to adjust to the now-dead light of the hole in the air.