Virtual Sabotage

by Julie Hyzy

  Kenna nodded.

  Jason must have sensed her concurrence because he continued, “Whenever we hit a certain target, or whenever we made a correct choice, the program rewarded us in some way.”

  Kenna picked up his thought. “And we’ve been in this hole for a little while now, and there’s been no change.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How tall are you?” he asked.

  “Five foot four.”

  “I’m six two,” he said.

  “And we’re surrounded by solid stone,” she said. “No way out but up.”

  “How do we know there isn’t a stone ceiling preventing us from escape?”

  “Only one way to find out,” she said. She sought his bulk in the darkness, realizing that he was facing her. With both hands on his shoulders, she said, “Give me a boost.”

  They tried reaching the top with Kenna sitting on Jason’s shoulders, then with Kenna standing on them. No matter how high she stretched, her fingers encountered nothing beyond the vertical concrete wall. Sweaty and frustrated, she stood on tiptoe, feeling Jason’s slight flinch when her foot dug in.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “S’okay,” he said, but his voice was tight. “Anything?”

  “No, just more wall.”

  His hands clasped around her ankles. “Skinny thing, aren’t you?”

  “Hey, how about you boost me up, cheerleader-style?” she asked. “I’ll get as high as I can.”

  “You sure?” he asked. “I mean, you’re small enough that I should be able to hold you high for a few seconds, but hurry it up, okay?”

  “Yeah. Count of three?”

  His hands moved from around her ankles to beneath her feet. She locked her legs and tensed, facing upward into the abyss, ready to go. “One…two…,” he said, and she felt herself lower slightly as he bent his knees, readying himself for the boost. “Three.”

  Her fingers skimmed along the concrete as she moved upward. Scrambling with her hands, she crawled them high above her head, searching with blind desperation for any opening, even a crevice. But the wall continued upward, with no apparent end. “Damn,” she said, as sweat, beading from her hairline, dripped into her eyes. She blinked the sting away and swore again. “Damn it all to hell,” she said, as Jason brought her back down to his shoulders. His hands walked up the backs of her calves, and in moments she was back down on the ground.

  He released a long noisy breath. When she felt its warmth against her face, she instinctively stepped back.

  “Well,” he said after an extended period of deep breathing, “we never expected this one to be easy, did we?”

  “No.” Kenna sat on the floor. Knees up, she wrapped her arms around them, and put her head down. Jason sat next to her.

  “Sorry,” he said, when his leg knocked into hers.

  She scooched over a few inches, lifting her head. “We’re missing something.”

  “You hungry?”

  “A little. Why?”

  “During one of the other challenges, you said, ‘You won’t like me if I get hungry.’ So I figure maybe we wait long enough, get you hungry enough, you’ll turn into the Incredible Envoy and knock these walls down and get us both out.”

  Kenna laughed. “Sorry to disappoint you. I don’t get super strong when I’m hungry, just super cranky.”

  “More than normal?” Jason asked. “I can’t wait for that.”

  Again, the sting. She stood. “Come on, let’s figure this damn thing out.”

  Kenna explored the wall from floor to about waist-height; Jason searched as high as he could reach. They ran their hands up and down the concrete. While it had seemed smooth at first, the constant chafing against their hands started to wear at their fingertips.

  Jason had pulled off his shirt and left it on the floor at their starting point so they knew where their circular exploration should end. A few minutes into the search, Kenna said, “Hey.”

  “What?”

  Kenna stood, her surprised fingers exploring cold metal. “I found something. It’s—” Despite the dark, she instinctively closed her eyes, focusing on her tactile sense. “It’s steel, I think. It feels like a handle of some sort. An indentation in the wall.”

  “A handle?” Jason said.

  “It’s about eight inches square, about six inches deep.” She stopped talking when Jason’s fingers joined hers. They encountered, recessed into the hollow, a vertical rubber handhold.

  “Feels like a grip,” he said.

  Kenna nodded. “Let’s pull it.”

  “Stand back.”

  Kenna frowned at him in the dark. “I’ll do it,” she said. “You stand back.”

  They’d gotten better at avoiding collisions in the dark, and now, as he stepped away, Kenna wrapped her fingers around the rubber grip. A lot like an extra-thick bicycle handle—but solid—set on a low hinge. She wrapped her fingers around the thing and yanked downward. Smooth, it moved with the clunk of a bolt sliding into place.

  The moment the grip went horizontal, lights flooded the area.

  Jason blinked, raising an arm to shield his eyes. Kenna did the same.

  “Let there be light,” he said.

  Still blinking, Kenna let her gaze travel around their enclosure and then wander upward. “I didn’t expect the walls to be yellow,” she said, fighting to keep her eyes open against the onslaught of brightness. In addition to an overhead lamp that illuminated them from above, the surround had six high-beam lamps set about five feet apart just below the top rim. They extended outward from the wall like cannon barrels, pointing their beams downward with stark streams of brilliance.

  “We’ll get used to it.” He moved to inspect the handle.

  Kenna blinked until she was able to focus fully.

  Machinery kicked on, and they were enveloped by a sudden blast of cool air. “Nice,” Jason said. “At least it’ll counteract the heat lamps.”

  Hands on hips, Kenna stared up and shivered as the chill danced across her sweaty limbs. “Wow. We’ve got to be twenty feet deep,” she said. “No way could we crawl out.”

  Jason fiddled with the handle. “Maybe we’re not supposed to.”

  Making a small circuit of the area, facing upward, Kenna nodded. “Good point.” She pondered that for several seconds. “Or maybe…” She tilted her head, thoughtful. “We’re envoys, right? And this is VR.” Arranging herself dead center of the hole, she called out in an authoritative voice, “Program. Provide ladder.”

  No response.

  Too specific, maybe. “Program,” she tried again, an edge of condescension in her voice, “provide means of exit.”

  No response.

  Jason joined her at the center. “Teamwork is the goal, right?” he asked. “Let’s try it together.”

  Their voices joined, they ordered the program to respond, but still nothing happened.

  Puzzled, Kenna pursed her lips and tried to think like a computer.

  Jason stared upward next to her. “All right, Fortranna, what do we do now?”

  She twisted to look at him. “What did you call me?”

  “Fortranna. You know, from The Mainframe Files?” he asked. “You ever watch that?”

  “God, yeah. Watched ’em by the hour when I was a kid. I love old movies and television shows. Even some of the crazy ones from the twentieth century.”

  “You did? So did I.” Jason’s voice was animated, and dimples appeared on either side of his wide smile. The dimple on his right was far deeper than the one on his left, and it gave his expression a cheerful crookedness. Kenna found herself smiling back. She glanced away.

  Turning to him again, she asked, “Are you starting to feel a little claustrophobic?”

  He didn’t answer, but his eyes gave him away.

  “Me too.” Kenna
reached for the horizontal handle. “Might as well get started,” she said. “Any suggestions?”

  “None that you haven’t already considered, I’m sure.”

  Kenna wondered if he was being sarcastic, but his expression remained neutral. He directed his gaze toward the rubbered grip. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  They levered the handle up and down, discovering that when it was slid back up into the vertical position, the lights went out. They tried forcing it downward past its horizontal stop, but there was no give whatsoever. They attempted wiggling it from side to side, with the same result.

  “So it’s no more than a switch,” Jason said.

  “I guess if we get too hot under all these lights, we can shut them off. Which brings us back to the first assumption—that we’re stuck here until we’re ready to kill each other.” Kenna waved the air to indicate Mellow Mary’s dire warnings. “Or one of us is in danger of heart failure.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” Jason said.

  “Neither do I.”

  Kenna gripped the front of her T-shirt with two fingers, flapping it back and forth to air herself out. The initial cool rush of air had reduced to a light breeze no longer enough to combat the heat. “But it is getting miserable in here.”

  “Uh-oh,” he said, clearly fighting a smile. “You’re not getting hungry, are you? Maybe we should order up something to eat. Like a Flaxibar.”

  Flaxibars again. Kenna steeled herself. She kept getting pulled into this teamwork scenario when she needed to maintain her distance. Patrick had said that envoys were immune, but if there was one thing she’d learned recently it was that there were no guarantees. “We’re in VR, remember. The food isn’t real.”

  “But the act of consuming might be convincing enough to keep you from ripping off my head.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” she said. “Why do you eat those things, anyway?”

  “Flaxibars? They’re the best.”

  “They’re disgusting. But wait—let me guess. You saw an ad for them not long ago and you just had to try one. Now you can’t get enough of them.” She studied his reaction. “Am I right?”

  He shrugged. “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Humor me.”

  He gave a sideways grimace. “My mom bought cases of them. Cases,” he said, with emphasis, “when my brother and I were little. She thought they’d be good for us. Healthier than candy, you know? I hated them at first, but one day, back when I was sixteen or seventeen, I got a craving for one.” He gave an embarrassed shrug. “Now I eat ’em all the time.”

  “Did you get your implant updated to 5.0?” she asked.

  He screwed up his face, evidently confused by the non sequitur. “Why should I? I’ve got an envoy implant—why would I want a consumer-grade one?”

  “Just asking.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t make sense sometimes.”

  Kenna pondered his assertions as she stood before the handle, still horizontal, and pointing toward the cylinder’s center. “How long you think we’ve been down here?” she asked.

  “Half hour?”

  Kenna’s stomach growled. “Yeah.” They’d tried to manipulate the rubber-handled grip every logical way. But they hadn’t tried any illogical ways. She stood facing the handle, her right side to the wall, her left toward Jason. “Let’s think out of the box.”

  “Don’t you mean out of the hole?”

  She rolled her eyes but didn’t laugh. This Jason fellow was growing on her—but she didn’t need new friends, didn’t want to care about anyone, especially not this new partner.

  Patrick had warned that once he took over Trutenko’s position as a director for Virtu-Tech, he’d be calling on her to depart AdventureSome to work directly for him. That meant she’d need to abandon Stewart, Vanessa, and all her friends here. Though the sacrifice would be temporary, and for the greater good, it was hard enough to know she’d be turning her back on them. The last thing she needed was to add more people to that list.

  Business as usual. That’s what Patrick had told her. And to wait for his call.

  “Stand in the center,” she said.

  Jason nodded, took two steps back.

  Grunting, Kenna gripped the handle with both hands, bent her knees, and pushed.

  The wall moved.

  With a triumphant grin, she began walking counterclockwise. She took it slowly at first, amazed at how effortlessly the wall turned.

  “Whoa,” Jason said, with a look of amazement. “Excellent.” He shuffled in place, turning to watch her progress.

  “So we know two things,” Kenna said as she continued. “This wall isn’t solid concrete, and it turns. What do we do with that information?”

  He studied her as she moved. “Go around a couple more times.”

  She did.

  Although the act of pushing wasn’t difficult, brightness blazed down from the overhead lamps, drenching her in heat. “What are you seeing?”

  “The handle,” he said. “Let go for a second.”

  She let go and stopped. But the handle didn’t. It kept moving until coming to rest three-quarters of the way around the room.

  “Check this out,” he said, pointing. “The handle’s slightly lower than it was before you began.”

  Kenna nodded, a little bit breathless from the heat. “You’re right. The wall is spiraling down.”

  “Hmm.” Jason grabbed the handle. “Does it spiral upward in reverse?” He put all his weight behind a clockwise push. The wall didn’t budge.

  “Down it is, then,” Kenna said. “Let’s do it.”

  Once the handle made it where they could lower it no further, they stopped pushing. The wall remained too high for either of them to scale, but they could, at least, see that there appeared to be an apparatus much like a jungle gym beyond the top lip.

  “Here’s the question,” Jason said. “Do we lift the handle to make it flat again and try to spiral the wall farther down in the dark, or do I attempt to boost you up over the wall’s ridge?”

  Kenna studied the vertical obstruction. “I’m not thrilled with the idea of working in the dark. We may not be able to get the lights back on again.”

  “I agree.” Jason turned to her. “Ready?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  As Kenna backed up as far as she could, Jason positioned himself near the wall, knees bent, hands linked. When he nodded, she raced forward, leaping with confidence, placing her right foot into Jason’s ready hands.

  She flew up—a fleeting freedom, birdlike and weightless—before grasping the top edge of the wall with her right hand, using what little leverage she had to swing her left arm up and over. Twisting like a gymnast stretching for the high bar, she strained every muscle in her body to swing her right leg up far enough to lodge her knee atop the hard wall.

  Panting, she managed to croak, “All good.”

  “Take your time.”

  “Okay.” She allowed herself to the count of ten to muster her strength. The drop on the wall’s far side was less than two feet. Drawing a deep breath, she rolled off the top of the wall and scrambled to stand.

  She waved to Jason, who stood at the center of the tall cylinder. He waved back.

  “It’s even hotter up here than it was down there,” she shouted.

  “What’s up there?”

  She turned. “Nothing.” This second level appeared to be completely empty. She shielded her eyes against the bright lights, trying to see deep into the depths of the dark that surrounded the hole. Nothing at all. The area beyond was like a wide, unending warehouse. Minimal light, no movement, nothing.

  Except for a box twenty yards away. She made her way toward it.

  “Kenna? What’s going on? Teamwork, remembe
r?”

  “Hang on,” she said.

  Like something a merchant ship might have had in its hold back in the 1800s, the box was wooden. About three feet by two by two, it was made of crisscross beams of gray wood, with a hinged lid.

  Inside, Kenna expected to find a rope or something similar to help get Jason out of the hole. Instead, she found a glittering golden globe illuminated from within. Kenna reached in to lift it, surprised by its weight.

  The moment she had it in her hands, the room disappeared. The cylinder she’d escaped dissolved, and Jason stood next to her, looking as perplexed as she felt.

  “What did you do?” he asked as the room’s walls morphed from a dark never-ending expanse into the familiar blankness of VR as it powers down.

  “I picked this up,” she started to say, but then the glass ball disappeared as well. Her words went quiet, fading into nothingness as Jason reached for her.

  But he was gone.

  And she was gone.

  A moment later, she was back in the VR capsule, facing a tech who’d begun removing her headgear.

  “What’s going on?” Kenna asked.

  FORTY-TWO

  Stewart stood outside Kenna’s capsule. He appeared older and more careworn than she’d ever seen him before. “Hurry,” he said to the tech.

  With deft fingers, the man finished his work freeing Kenna. She worked out the aches in her arms and legs, all the while keeping her attention on Stewart.

  “What happened?”

  He gestured with his head. “In my office.”

  Kenna looked back at Jason’s capsule. He, too, was in the process of being disengaged.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for him?”

  Stewart wrapped an arm around Kenna. “Later.”

  Jason emerged, shouting. “But we’re not done,” he said. “We didn’t complete that last challenge.”

  The tech who’d worked on Kenna answered him. “You guys got the seventy percent you needed. You passed.”

  “But I wanted to finish,” he said. “I don’t like leaving things undone.”

  The last thing Kenna saw before heading into Stewart’s office was Jason fighting to follow.