by P. J. Hoover
Zachary actually smiles, like this is some moment of levity. It’s annoying and kind of cute all at the same time.
“Don’t you trust me?” he says. His eyes meet mine, and there is something almost boyish in them. Something hopeful and vulnerable.
The thing is that of all the minor gods and people we’ve met so far, I do trust Zachary. I don’t know why, but deep down, I don’t feel like he’s trying to lead us astray. Yet I’d trusted Cole, too, and look where that had gotten me. Still, Cole and Zachary are not the same person, and just because Cole betrayed me does not mean Zachary will.
I place my hand on the flashing blue globe. Even though it’s a hologram, it’s solid against my palm. I look at Taylor and raise an eyebrow.
“Hell no, you’re not leaving me here,” she says, and she puts her hand on the globe also.
Then the flashing stops and the spinning globe sucks us in.
When it spits us back out, I know immediately where we are. We’re home. Really home. My house is there in front of us. Except it’s fallen into ruins. But it’s not just my house. It’s the entire world.
We’re too late.
HOME
III
My house is ruined. The apple tree out front has fallen over and broken through the front bay window. Part of the roof has been torn away, like a giant hurricane ripped through Florida and destroyed whatever was in its path. The garage door lies in the middle of the driveway.
The street we stand on has giant chunks of asphalt torn from it and tossed around everywhere. I live—lived—in a cul-de-sac, and of the four houses around me, mine isn’t even in the worst shape. Next door, the Prall’s house looks like a giant has come along and smashed half of it flat with a titan-sized baseball bat. All around us, trees have been ripped from the ground, shrubs are dead. Two cars sit abandoned in the street, doors open, occupants long gone.
“I saw this,” Taylor says. She points to the Oculus. “When I looked through, I saw this layer of the world.”
I’d seen it, too. Not my house, but other parts of the world. But seeing it through the lens of the Oculus and seeing the reality of it are two very different things.
Zachary whips around to face Taylor. “You got the Oculus?” He reaches out, almost like he wants to touch it.
Taylor swats his hand away. “You can’t try it out.”
“How did you get it?” Zachary says. His face is filled with awe.
“None of your business, god boy.”
“This is my house,” I say, pointing to the ruin ahead of me. My voice sounds really funny, and I realize that I’m shaking all over. I wrap my arms around myself to try to keep it together, but while we’ve been inside the simulations, fighting for our lives, trying to gain the power, the very world that we’ve been trying to save has been destroyed.
“What happened?” Taylor asks, fixing her uneven gaze on Zachary. The piece of metal she’d grabbed in the Nether Zone is gone, left behind when we moved through the transporter. But the look she gives Zachary conveys enough emotion to be a weapon itself.
Her words sound far away. They break the silence of the world. Aside from us, there is nothing around. No birds. No planes. No cars. Only a faint rumbling in the distance.
“It’s like this all over,” Zachary says. He puts his hand on my arm, in an awkward attempt to comfort me. But I’m numb. I want to blink and make it go away. I can’t believe this has happened.
“Not all over. It can’t be all over.” I turn slowly and try to accept what I’m seeing. But the level of destruction is beyond hurricane damage. I step forward, toward my house, stopping at the fallen apple tree. The last time I’d seen this tree, it had died in front of me. “How long have I been gone?”
Zachary shrugs, trying to make it sound not so bad. “A couple years maybe.”
I shake my head. I’m no older. Neither is Taylor, Hudson, Cole. We’re all the same. “That’s not possible.”
“Edie, don’t you get it?” Taylor says. “None of this is possible. But it’s still reality.”
Reality? After the simulations, is it possible that we’re really back? “So this is the real world?” I ask.
“The globe,” Zachary says. “It’s what brings us back here. Out of the simulation. It’s hidden in the simulations, like a secret escape code. A way to break out.”
I try to process the words, but they don’t add up. So many things. There was an escape code? All that time and we could have gotten out of the simulation that way? And if Simulation Avine had an escape code, then the labyrinth simulation must have also.
Now we’re back. We’ve left the simulation. But letters still float in front of my vision. My heads-up display is still active. Taylor still has the Oculus. It all confirms one thing.
“Everything really is a simulation,” I say. “The world where we grew up. It’s nothing but a simulation.”
Zachary brushes a hand along the bark of the fallen tree, picking a piece of it off and rubbing it between two fingers. “It’s easiest to think of it that way. This is reality—the original reality—but it can also be changed and affected by the programming team. Except it’s been locked away forever. That’s why getting the key and getting into Main Control Room Alpha is such a big deal. Whoever gets in there gets control of not just the other simulations but of everything. That’s why Chaos doesn’t want to give up control.”
Control of everything. “And if I get this key, I can fix this,” I say.
“When you get this key,” Zachary correct. “Yes, then you’ll be able to fix this. Or start over. Or make changes. You can do whatever you want.”
“Yeah, but who did this?” Taylor asks. “Chaos?”
“Not Chaos,” Zachary says. “It’s—”
“The Creators,” I say before Zachary can finish. We’d visited their zone and I’d seen the destruction they’d caused when I looked through the Oculus. “But I stopped them. I added the game subroutine. They should all be trapped in it, not worrying about destroying or creating or whatever they do.”
“You only slowed them down,” Zachary says. “And they’re not the only ones. It’s why places like the Nether Zone exist. The Creators take bits of code and make new things out of it. Like you with the power. You create also, just like them. But in order to create, you need to destroy.”
“I haven’t destroyed anything,” I say. Yet his words make perfect sense. Like the world gate. To create it, I pulled bits and pieces of everything around it. Am I really no better than the creatures who’d tried to devour us?
“Not intentionally,” Zachary says. “But when you make new things, you have to tear down old ones. That’s all simulations are except on a bigger scale. Creating and destroyed bits and pieces.”
“Does it matter?” Taylor says. “I mean, yeah, this is really messed up, but talking about it isn’t helping anything. Why are we here?”
I blink a few times. She’s completely right. We need to get back on track. Seeing the destroyed world only makes that more evident.
“Yeah, how do we get into Simulation Omega?” I ask. “Because all we’re doing now is wasting more time.”
“I have a plan,” Zachary says. He points off toward the bay, away from my house. “We need to go that way.”
“Why?” Taylor asks. “Where are we going?”
Zachary tries to hide the proud look that crosses his face. “I work that way. That’s where we need to go.”
Sometimes it’s hard to remember that Zachary is not really a teenager like me and Taylor. He’s a god.
“We’re going to your office building?” Taylor says. “What? Do you need a coffee break?”
“Maybe,” Zachary says. “But I’m thinking more that if we go there, I’m pretty sure I can get you guys into Chaos’s simulation.”
Pretty sure isn’t one hundred percent confident,
but if it’s our only chance, then we have to take it.
“Where do you work?” I’d seen Zachary here in Florida before everything changed. He’d said he’d been assigned to watch me. Creepy, yes, but what this implies is that maybe he was close by. He’d also been one of the lead programmers on the labyrinth simulation.
“Ocular Technologies,” Zachary says.
It’s like someone punches me in the stomach. Ocular Technologies is the gaming company where Owen’s dad worked. It’s the place with the cutting edge VR goggles. The ones that put us into the entire simulation, or at least triggered my entry.
“Oh,” I say.
“Yeah. I think you can get in from there,” he says.
“So what are we waiting for?” Taylor asks.
A horrible sucking sound stops my next words. The noise has been there, low and in the distance, but it amps up, making the hair on my arms stand on end. I immediately place it. Or place what it’s supposed to be.
“What’s wrong with the ocean?” I ask. I’ve heard the ocean my entire life, its smooth regular tidal pattern. This is different. Worse. It’s like something is fighting against it, trying to suck it up through a giant straw.
Taylor gazes toward the sound, angling her head so the Oculus is forefront. Her lips curl up as she listens to the mockery of what has always been such an integral part of my world.
She doesn’t speak for a long moment as she sees whatever Zachary and I don’t through the Oculus. Then finally she replies. “It’s being drained.”
IV
"Drained how?" I ask. The ocean is vast and limitless. There is nowhere for the water to go.
She narrows her eyes and leans forward, in the direction of the sound. “I can see the level going down. And there’s something coming out of the water. Something growing from a crack in the ground. Like a mountain.”
A mountain. Or . . .
“A volcano?” I ask.
Her eyes widen. “Yeah. That’s it. A volcano. There’s lava. But the volcano isn’t what’s draining the ocean. It’s something else, underwater.”
I think of the simulation with my parents, of their last moments. We dug too deep. The hook from their research ship had embedded itself in the glossy egg beneath the surface of the water, cracking the layer between our world and the world of the gods.
“Are my parents responsible for this?” I ask.
Zachary considers my questions. “Not exactly. I mean, yeah, sure, they were messing around in places that were dangerous. But that could have been said for any of your parents.”
“Not mine,” Taylor says.
“Yep, your parents, too,” Zachary says. “But the point is that it was all fated to be that way. Even if they’d known what was going to happen when they went out on their ship, it still would have happened.”
Over and over again it had happened, back when I’d visited their ship via the compass rose. I’d tried to stop them. I’d tried to warn them. Even when I thought they were listening, events had still played out the same. It was like a game simulation that ended the same way no matter what I did.
“We have to repair the crack,” I say. If we don’t repair it, it will suck down everything until there is nothing left.
“Definitely,” Zachary says. “And the only place it can be done is in Main Control Room Alpha.”
“But Chaos is there,” I say. “Why can’t he do it?”
Zachary laughs. “He’s not going to try to fix the world. But even if he wanted to, I don’t think he currently has the power. He’s weak. That’s why he set up the simulation. He needs to steal the power back. Doing something like repairing a layer of the world takes immense power, power I don’t think he has. So yeah, the layer between the world of the gods and the human world was torn away. The only thing to do is to create a new layer and keep the worlds separate.”
“It’s draining fast,” Taylor says. Her voice wavers the tiniest amount. She’s always so strong. But even this, seeing our world destroyed, is too much.
“We’ll get the key,” I say. “We’ll fix it.”
But even if the layer is fixed, that doesn’t answer the biggest concern. It’s the thing I haven’t wanted to address. It’s right there in front of me. There is no ignoring it.
There are no people around.
V
"Where is everyone?" I ask Zachary. “Are they dead?”
“They aren’t dead,” Taylor says.
“How do you know?” Zachary asks.
“If they’re dead, where are the bodies?”
She’s right. We’ve seen destruction of houses, cars, trees. But we haven’t seen a single body. It’s like everyone has vanished.
Zachary scuffs his feet against the side of a giant pothole. “It is a little weird.” He’s intentionally keeping the emotion out of his voice.
I stare at him, trying to get him to look me in the eye. “A little weird. That’s all you can say about it? There should be thousands of people around, and them not being here is a little weird?”
“More than a little weird?” he says.
I grasp both his arms with my hands and look him right in the face. “It’s impossible, Zachary. There has to be some other explanation.”
He nods slowly as he tries to process my words. “They could have been taken by the Creators and repurposed,” he says.
I shake my head. I’m not willing to accept that. That would mean that everyone was erased. “Or . . . ?”
“Or . . . ,” he starts. “I guess they could have been stored.”
Stored. Like in racks and racks of data. Like the data racks that Cole and I found. Maybe they were everyone, everywhere. And when someone had pulled the racks out and smashed them, they could have killed people. Real people. Kids I went to school with. My neighbors.
Thomas.
No. Thomas is okay. I have to make sure he’s okay. We need to make things right.
I try to hold my voice steady, but it wavers as I talk. “When Cole and I escaped the labyrinth, we found this room with a bunch of circuit boards. Someone had come in and ripped some of them from their racks. They’d tossed them onto the floor and crushed them.”
Zachary’s eyes go wide. “Where?”
So I tell him about the whole thing, escaping from the volcano. And what we’d found. His face darkens with every second.
“You’re sure?” he says.
“Definitely.”
“Oh.”
I clench my hands into fists to keep them from shaking. “Is that what’s stored there? All the people?”
He bites his lip like he’s trying to figure it out also. “It has to be, Edie. I mean, I didn’t store them there. But it could have been Iva. Or Elise. Or one of the others.”
Or Chaos. He could have done it as some unknown part of his plan. Some motive not clear to us.
I take a deep breath and think it through. “Okay, so let’s say that the people got stored. That’s good, right?”
“Not if someone’s going around smashing them,” Taylor says. “Because unless I’m missing some vital information about computers, if the memory is destroyed so is whatever is stored on it.”
She got to have people she’s worried about also.
“No, you’re right,” I say. “But I mean good in that they aren’t out here. Look, I’m not saying it’s a great thing that people could have been destroyed. Trust me. I can’t even think about that.” A lump catches in my throat, but I go on. “But if everyone wasn’t stored away, then pretty much they’d all be dead.”
“Pretty much,” Zachary says.
It makes me think that maybe it wasn’t Chaos. That instead it really was Iva or Elise, protecting the people of the world, even if in secret. I focus on what our choices are. “So let’s say that Chaos learned about it and found a way inside and is resp
onsible for the destruction. Is there anything we can do to keep him out?”
He pauses as he thinks over my question. “Like security? Yeah, we could do that. I mean, maybe only a short term solution, but something could be done.”
Short term or long term, anything is better than nothing, because if people are dying, we need to stop it.
“So we go back to the volcano,” I say. When we’d originally gone to the volcano, it was way out west. And though there is no part of me that wants to make that trip again, if it’s what we have to do, then I’ll do my best to have a good attitude. But it had taken weeks, and that was with Cole hot-wiring the Jeep. Weeks is too long.
He runs a hand through his hair. “What about the simulation? The key?”
I glance at Taylor and unspoken words pass between us. She nods. Then I look back to Zachary.
“Getting the key won’t matter if everyone is dead,” I say. “We have to make sure the data storage is secure. Then we can go into the simulation.”
“You’re sure?” Zachary says.
I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. If I can’t protect Thomas, my parents, my friends, then I might as well quit right now.
“Definitely.”
VI
Taylor says, "Can you get us to the volcano, god boy. Maybe you can snap your fingers and transport us there.”
Zachary laughs. I’m not sure if it’s at the god boy comment or at him snapping his fingers. I’m hoping the former, because if there is some magical way he can transport us across the country, I am all for it.
“God boy?” he says.
Taylor fixes her eyes on him. “You got a problem with that?”
“Kind of,” Zachary says. “And just to be clear, I’m a minor god. Not a god boy. God boy makes me sound like a child,”
“A god is a god,” Taylor says. “You all act like children, and you’re all full of bullshit.”