So Man, who here seems principal alone,
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown.
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal,
’Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.
--Alexander Pope, Essay on Man
WESTWOOD, SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA
"AUGUST 6, 2043"
“SO WE’RE GO for alpha?” asks Roma Aaliyah Cowan.
Junel replies, “It’s gonna take four hours to boot up. Gundersen’s leaving the complex at nine and you’ll take Thad home at ten?”
Roma nods distastefully.
“Siui will amp the AC as soon as you’re gone and I’ll do the pre-load. We haven’t a trace of smoke. When you think you’ll be back?”
“Eleven,” Roma sighs, “if it goes like I hope.”
“Good-good,” Junel says.
Mock-ups of the TruLife Augmentation program have been dry-run countless times, to the exhaustion of the Exerotech staff members, but Roma Cowan, being the last of the five neuronauts to have her brain mapped, will be the first to test the finished artificial world. After four months of ramacode optics and neuronal feedback testing the white box phase has been closed. They will perform a second, public verification only if tonight’s secret alpha test meets with approval from Roma, the chief “360” visual engineer of TruLife—the first to fully visit the virtual city that contains, for the more adventurous neuronaut, an endless nesting doll function to its architectural features.
SHE FINDS THADDEUS Carmichael is easy with her in the limousine before his mansion. He’s got a Lakers game holo-taped. No invitation inside, no extended kissing in the driveway beside the portcullis as the driver waits. Goodbyes, and out.
The limo takes her back down Mulholland. She thinks about the disparaging things Thad had said about her ex, his wry disbelief over her spending three years “with that goon” and the unspoken charge that it reflected a deep naïveté on her part and somehow, by osmosis, a judgment upon himself as the immediate successor. He believed his casual dismissals of her past entirely immunized him from such petty rivalry, but it was there. Thad had gone to high school with her ex, in the farthest possible social bubbles any Venn diagram would show--but he remembered him vividly as the school fighter, eyes down, fists ready, willing to take solid punches in a mix-up because they propelled him into crazy.
He wasn’t like that now, she knew. Time’s attrition. She knew. But she didn’t try to explicate, to rationalize, to soothe. Thad was beyond any such challenges to his opinion. He’d been promising her a big shindig for her 31st birthday on December 23rd. She dreaded it. Anyway it was only one item amongst a hundred of his daily-dosed chores in submission to the Schedule his committee had laid out for him on January 1, 2043. Thad the uber-booked. Thad the impaler. Thad the social network unto himself, tied into local economies, shadow Pacific Rim cabals, the flows of potential.
This had to stop. Despite the secret mission her boss Ted had put her on. None of her friends believed her capable of such a relationship.
But Thad’s friends surely did.
Fondling her wrist, she studies the caduceus-like TruLife bracelet. Three small shunts hold the device in place, the wiring within them attached to her median nerves that by hand gestures control everything. Each half of the bangle, the two paired mating “snakes,” is a 3mm titanium tube containing counter-spinning mercury and iron particles, its outer shell encased in real gold. Four green diode-eyes glow steadily at her wrist.
It will soon become alive.
BY THE TIME Roma returns, the 20-acre complex hums with the chord of eleven mainframes of processors—more computing power than has ever been attempted, the equivalent of 20,000 server farms. She tightens her leather jacket against the air-conditioning and her solar plexus vibrates with a mixture of elation and grief. Her ex-boyfriend has been gone now sixteen days on a six-month trip to Asia. For three years he’d endured ad nauseam her talk about the TruLife Immersion project, but now he is thousands of miles away. She misses him.
The launchroom is a black barrel-vaulted chamber dotted with performance-capture and match-moving lights. But these are for the full haptic-suit version of TruLife. Roma won’t be physically moving, but reclining in the throne style and using the Snakes; it is a test of the system’s ability to respond to prefrontal cortex commands that her headset will read. As her movement-decisions instantly evolve out of the “quantum Zeno effect” within the cortex, the TruLife program should respond just ahead of the conscious willing of her actions and thus match her expectations with an input lacking any feedback lag time at all.
Donning the haptic suit takes 30 minutes of fine-tuning. This improved version is simply a set of large wraparound spectacles inside a black bubble-helmet. Siui and Junel attach her bracelet into the armrest and she feels the current course through her body. She lays prone upon the Barca although muscles across her body will respond as if moving to mental commands.
Junel and Siui enter the control booth and check the screens.
“You want us to start where you said?” Junel asks, near whisper. “Your apartment?”
“Please, yes.”
“All set.”
Junel recites the countdown as Roma Cowan closes her eyes. It elates and comforts her to know that this world they’ve created might exist as long as electrons could be wrangled—while she sleeps, marries, has children, grows old and passes on. TruLife would always be here for everyone, she hopes, a black cube monument in each home casting a second skin remotely from these air-conditioned chambers, a magical carpet, a magic carapace, a testament that would evolve year by year and generation after generation, mutating and taking on the one unseen quality of Human Being missed by all philosophers and scientists down the ages: the creation of a second reality from electrons and interface.
She opens her eyes. The transition is even smoother than she’d imagined. There isn’t the least sensation of pitching in her inner ears, or to the gyroscope of her viscera. Surrounding her is a version of her apartment near Pacific Palisades with her assortment of relics from the past century, her vinyl chairs and couch, her plants, her Byzantine icons, a curio cabinet full of rare crystals. Her avatar, barefoot, stands wearing a frilly white sundress. A fully embodied version of self, made of memory feeding back into itself. She turns her head. Having used hundreds of different AR rigs, she is accustomed to all phantom vestibular nerve fluctuations and the somatosensory chaos a hapsuit and its helmet could inflict. There is not a trace of lagging. She imagines spinning in a circle and it happens. She pirouettes, rocks her heels up, down, ping-pongs her eyes. She jumps up and down then allows herself to fall back onto the leather couch. The homunculi effect is perfect, the Zeno anticipator perfect. The visual and inner ear and muscle activity feeds back perfectly and delivers the phantom sensation a split second’s free-fall onto the cushions.
It is then that she notices the light's dull quality in the balcony windows. “You’ve got a shiner running, right?”
“Yes,” Siui replies. “Not a cloud.”
“Well, it’s dark out there. Cloudy.” She wills her avatar to rise from the couch and walks towards the window. “The sky’s green.”
Siui and Junel are in the booth seeing a schematic mockup of her journey in real time. “That’s not what we’re running,” Siui replies. “The sky’s four hundred ninety-six nano band.”
“The wind’s blowing, too.” Roma gapes at the representation of the sidewalk and cul-de-sac before her building: it is a blurred white-grey swath, a river of blurred trees and strumming right-angles. The buildings across the street flop in the gale. “Oh futch! The street’s a glitchglom. It’s a blurstorm.”
Silence, then, “Roma, we’re reading it fine.”
“Really—the sky’s about a five-forty nan and dark.”
The sound of panting enters her brain. She turns and a small dog, some kind of terrier, is staring up at her from the shag carpet. It’s the grin staked upon its face: her skin ripples with goosebumps at the sight of it. The dog’s back distends upward and it stands, elongating into a deer-like creature with slanted brown eyes that unmelt and shape themselves in the upper portion of a tapering brown face.
Warmth emanates from the creature, a compassion and tickle of a white light at the center of her brain. Those eyes that do not belong on any living creature. Cannot possibly.
Junel: “Your heartrate’s shot up. What’s wrong?”
Roma is hearing syllables, garbled and flanging. Not from the creature’s mouth but from its head. The warmth intensifies inside and her head feels like a blood-starved limb. The grotesque voice approaches coherence then descends into moaning and cooing. The creature waves long floppy arms and its legs haze out but this is peripheral to intense glare of those two dark portals on its face; nothing exists but the brown-black eyes as it flows closer and its lower jaw opens and stretches impossibly.
The figure fades into a mist.
Dizziness. At once she is upon the Street, near the Arcades, in sunlight now, far from her apartment. She blinks in the glare. The warmth and numbness are gone.
“Roma, what just happened?”
She stays silent a moment. “Did you throw me?”
“Not at all,” comes Siui’s indignant reply.
“There was a deer…thing in my apartment and now I’m…where?”
“You sound spooked. Want out?”
“I’m alright,” she manages. “What just happened?”
“Nothing,” Siui explains. “You walked out of the apartment.”
“How long have I been walking?”
“For about two minutes.”
Adrenaline spikes in her chest. She considers aborting. But she could examine the recorded feed later. Perhaps someone had coded that disturbing thing in her apartment as a joke...
She loses herself in the surrounding scene, wondrous, supernal, real. She turns her head and the street synchronizes with the movement, the kaleidotrees and countless building edges and surfaces conforming. The sun hangs bright blue over her shoulder and she kneels to examine her own dim shadow on the shiny granular surface.
The penumbras shade perfectly into the pavement, just as she’d designed. She slides on her knees to peek at the shadow of a car parked nearby and finds the same precision of appearance in its edges.
Yet despite the Zeno-effect feedback working perfectly—the sim’s far beyond her expectations—she feels a disturbing presence. “It isn’t right.”
“What’s wrong?”
She pauses. “I can’t say. The optics are solid. More than solid, it’s fantastic. Perfect proprio. It just feels—doesn’t feel anything like, well, I thought it’d feel like.”
“Spooked?” Siui asks again.
“Nooo,” Roma chuckles.
“You in the uncanny valley, girl?”
Roma chuckles. “Not even. Everything is as real as meatspace.”
Junel says, “Well, I wish I could be in there with you.”
“That’s both of us,” Siui lisps.
“I’m going into Mat 7. The Lascaux swirl.”
Siui and Junel know she loves this creation, a “Matrioshka” building, a replication of a 17th-century Dutch household with recursive features. Roma enters its oval threshold and oak antechamber and gazes down at the checkerboard floor work: Each square sparkles with a different color. A user is supposed to leap and land on a square with no conception of the destination they would enter: a rain forest, the lunar surface, a Paleolithic Cro-Magnon commune, a clipper on the South Pacific, a Los Angeles circa 2100, an equally detailed simulation of a 1860 Shanghai or 1900 New York or Tokyo or a dozen other cities. Being randomized, even she didn’t know where the board would transport her in seconds if she jumped.
But past the Platform is the series of Escher rooms, each containing Easter eggs only she can access with a series of gestures, “open sesame” widgets she’d programmed and only she knows about. Call it a compulsion. She passes a hand over the chandelier buttons and deactivates the checkerboard Platform and crosses the High Dutch room. The hallway issues by smoothly and she admires its flickering sconce lights that required months of 10-hour days for the team to perfect. Getting the dance of flames right once meant getting combustion right a billion times all throughout TruLife.
The corridor twists and turns and the first Escher room comes into view, an homage to “Print Gallery.” But the best egg is not in this one. Nor the Infinite Penrose Staircase. She’d buried it in the Circular Waterfall, three doors further on.
The coursework of Escher’s structure stands high, appearing to tower fifty feet at least, the sound of water pushing the waterwheel. An iron-schist smell here. Gingerly she strides onto the stone blocks, the water rushing above and below in its zigzagging yet circular path. The cold stone tingles upon the balls of her feet.
These concoctions were Ted Gundersen’s idea, to put human consciousness inside the Dutch artist’s impossibilities.
“Wanna get yourself dizzy, Rom?” comes Junel’s voice.
“Nah, just checking.”
What Siui and Junel will next see will not make sense to them, a series of static tableaux on their monitor screens and minimal somatic reactions from her hapsuit.
For a moment she watches the waterwheel, then walks down the aqueduct’s stone ramparts, stepping down each level yet rising in space. The surrounding misty terraced landscape remains stationary, impossibly. Don’t look at those steep-assed embankments around you as you move and you won’t get dizzy is the rule Gundersen discovered in the mock-up. She steps around the third set of tower pillars and approaches her egg—one of the larger stone blocks marking each course. She bends down and traces out the letters JVA on the stone and whispers, “John Valentine Arkenseele.”
The waterfall vanishes to whiteout, a brilliantly shining cyclorama.
Junel’s voice: “Roma, what’s going on? Your feed’s vanished.”
“Really?” she replies. “Huh. Sure?”
“Why’d you say John’s name?”
“I dunno.”
Siui snaps, “The tracker’s gone.”
Roma, tone pitched higher in her prevarication: “How’s your bio-screens look?”
“Fine. You’re still at the water mill?”
“Check.” But no, it’s like being inside a brightly illuminated ping pong ball. Even her avatar is invisible. She wants the sense of disembodiment, the endless glow in all directions, catching only the floaters in her physical eye’s surface.
“Roma, you’re neuros are still gone. Are you moving around?”
“I’m still at the waterfall, June,” she manages, “I’m just standing very still.”
“Your somatics are frozen…I mean, there’s no variations at all. It says your eyes are fixed. Myosis PLR is at max and there’s no saccading. You can see?”
“It’s okay. Don’t do anything. I’m fine. Please be quiet. I’m listening to the water.”
Just this burning light. The absence of lines and volume. Just a blank field for imagination. She lets swirling patches with amoeboid aspect congeal in the light then expand and move about. The pareidolia induced by an isolation tank's total darkness was nothing compared to this limitless bodiless womb of light.
A series of sculptured curves struggles into form. She blinks and defocuses but they remain. She turns away and the familiar red-green compensation of her eyes’ rods begins. But the thickening curves follow her attention. Almost exhibiting intention in tracing her eye movements. They look delicate as thickening spider silk against the field and they wiggle. One rapidly grows an ovoid bubble, then another accretes a bubble, and a third…Did someone discover her Easter egg and dump these phantoms here—stick-like figures of an increasing silver radiance, not quite of the whiteness?
“Roma should we abort?” Siui says. “You’re still showing flatline saccades and coordination.”
“No it’s, it’s fine. Really. I feel…fine.”
“You don’t sound fine,” Junel snaps. “Well how’s the waterfall look? Had enough of it? There’s so much more out there, chief.”
She can hear her coconspirators conversing over the feed. The ovoid forms are now upside-down teardrop shapes connected to solidifying silver forms beneath them. She expected mild hallucinations here, but not this quickly, nor this detailed. Her heartbeat increases. She blinks but the visor and helmet prevents her from rubbing her eyes.
This surely cannot be happening.
The shining is now flashing just inside a totality. She knows the difference. It is strobing very fast but slowing. Six then nine forms congeal from the light and twist to produce eyes and articulated limbs. They dance and vibrate with the flashing. Wrinkles drip from their faces.
The strobe accelerates. It stabilizes at a frequency that appears blue. A coldness shocks the back of her cranium and flows down her spine. Pressure builds inside her head and her hearing vanishes.
Something is reaching out from the simulation. No programmer could have placed such things here. They are beyond this TruLife frippery. Although she has proprioceptive feedback, her sense of embodiment is now gone and she cannot reach down to the stone edge at the aqueduct in which the trace of her avatar must still be standing. She tries to speak but her throat is full. There are three groups of three before her and she senses the same warmth as in the apartment, almost a playfulness emanating from them. Her fear subsides. They keep their distance, like marionettes hanging half grown from the light.
Then all aswirl.
Roma.
The voice is androgynous, harmonically rich, stark in the aural vacuum. They wiggle inside tapering, soft, diamond-shaped lozenges. Behind their heads, like hoods, are curving shapes like cardsuit spades, leaf-like and silver.
We visit your time cycle now.
Fascination overcomes her fear.
We meet you on this field you created.
They answer her thoughts. They are living beings. She fights to remain conscious yet the buzzing in her spine keeps her barely alert. She senses, somehow, that what sits before her is a council who have known her since before she was born. Her cranium tingles. Spikes of pain recede just as fast as they manifest.
The thin forms before her expand and contract. A veil flutters apart in the intense glow: Their bulbous heads shrink to human dimensions. They are now dark-skinned, with flat heart-shaped faces and black almond-curved eyes and jet hair in variations of a bowl cut. Black bodysuits cover them to their jaws. But just as she fully perceives this concession to humanity the nine figures blur back into their—what would she call them, avatars? They return to skeletal pale furrowed skin and ovoid skulls. Is this their true form, and the humans she’d just glimpsed a glamour of some kind?
The center being’s rhomboid throne moves forward as a dessicated hand rises from its lap holding a crystalline globe. Its surface swirls with white-grey Jovian clouds.
You have been chosen to facilitate us. It is your faith and your understanding that makes it so. Through you, much will be properly adjusted during the Purification that is soon coming.
Her attention fixes upon the granules agitating within the globe. The thoughts she receives are less propositions as impressions, non-linear ideas…
You made a vow to us.
Roma senses the junction bangle on her wrist pulsing.
Another shall receive that device as well.
What you have created allowed this moment into which we have folded here.
Again—answers as fast as she dimly poses them.
Many moments of your life and many a decision were made without volition. You may allow that each moment is a splitting path. This means you are still but the half-created. Certain ideas have found your mind. You have cultivated them. Just as all those minds that lived before you, whose discoveries laid the foundations of this womb, you perfected this end creation we and you both labored to bring to fruition. What you have created allowed this moment into which we have folded here.
The coldness tingles through her skull and spine. Her ears fill with a buzzing sound. She cannot pull from the black eyes of the center figure in its rhomboid throne: oil shining in a falling void.
The mineral form of the planet is dying; you and many others know this.
But each being whose mineral shell ceases leaves a trace of its energy. The humans of this time-cycle have injured the planet beyond its regenerative ability in both a mineral and energetic sense.
The source of human imagination that led to the creations around you is also the planet’s immune system. It is present human destiny to destroy the vitality of its own mineral creatrix—but the higher energies, that have increased through the demise of so many living beings, will burst forth in compensation.
In time, you will have the impression of departing your mineral-based shell, but it is only the transformation process. All will come over and be redeemed.
The white globe elevates from the being’s palm and floats towards her and in a brilliant flash dissolves into a dust that engulfs her head.
We have now seeded you.
You will once again return to this device you created in 34 days. We will demonstrate and speak at length of who we are through others beside you. They long ago volunteered and we will make ourselves known to you through them.
The humnaoid beings blur and return.
The beauty of those dark faces!
Then a familiar male voice, baritone with a slight raspiness to it chants, “We have been with you forever. Remember during the Quickening to be upon the pier, after the mourning doves sound at sunset.”
It is, of all things, the singular voice of the vanished actor, Ryan Tyler. The nine beings seemed pleased, as if she has received something important.
“Think deeply of the one who returns penitent,” Tyler says soothingly. “The winds will blow and lightning scorch, but the mourning doves will call you to the pier.”
You will not remember us, until it is necessary. You will not remember this until the time comes, the nine say.
Her body now vibrates in the Barca, and beyond it a place she’s intuited before, in moments of sex, at orgasm, like a second Roma, this one a nested doll of earlier versions of herself, each unfolded within the other.
In those last seconds, like the coming to consciousness from a dream. She sees a blurry pointillist surface. Then she is entering the Exerotech simulation within TruLife, representations of the very rooms and superdrives that surround her cocooned body. In the control room sits not Siui or Junel but herself. Someone is in the hapsuit in the black chamber. She knows with a dream conviction that it is Ryan Tyler. She gazes upon herself in the communication headgear. Bile rises in her throat. Her face is wrong. The simulation gazes at her and steps from the control chair and forward with unblinking eyes locked upon hers. She cannot look away nor step back. The being’s clothing glitches and swirls at the bottom edge of sight but the caramel skin and dark eyes are frozen. “I will slumber here until the grey day appears.” The voice is a hoarse, high growl. “The Transubstantiated will return on that day and you will be ready. By post, the wayward one with receive the other ring. We shall do the rest.” The sim’s hand slowly, achingly reaches up and presses its palm upon Roma’s forehead.
At once the scene whites out.
SIUI AND JUNEL are detaching terminals on the helmet. Through watering eyes Roma can see Junel has a scarf tied across her nose and mouth and Siui has wrapped a shawl about the lower half of her face. They are speaking frantically but Roma catches little of it; her inner ears are still undergoing compression as if at the bottom of an ocean. Her blurred eyes blink as she fights sleep. She is cold. She coughs and sees the two women leap back. Breath rattles in her throat and she moans. Siui is saying her name and then steps forward to continue the process of tightening the shawl to her jaw. Junel warily follows.
She closes her eyes and sleep finds her.
Fingers tighten upon her wrist. A blanket now covers her shivering body, still in the throne, but unhooked. The caduceus bracelet’s two sets of eyes have returned to the green sleep mode. She has been mumbling to the two women for a moment but has not yet possessed entirely the self that mutters.
“We nearly called an ambulance,” she hears Junel say, “then we were gonna call Henderberg.”
Roma is glad they didn’t involve the staff physician.
“Roma, can you hear me? Understand me?”
She hums in reply.
“You feel okay enough to talk some more?”
“Yes.” Shivering, she pulls the blanket tighter. Siui throws another upon her and steps back. “My head’s killing me.”
Junel strides off into the booth.
Siui with the tight hanging shawl comes into full focus for a second. “Why you got that over your face?”
“You’ve got something in your lungs,” Siui’s muffled voice replies. “You coughed and you were breathing out white smoke. Like you’d taken a big hit off a vape or something. That’s when we aborted and came in here.”
“Is that why,” Roma rasps, “you’re standing back there like I have Ebola?”
Siui shrugs. She explains how they thought the hapsuit had shorted and caught fire and Roma had unknowingly inhaled toxic smoke—or worse, that the combined EM fields had vaporized parts of her bronchia.
Either way, it would mean the end of the TruLife Immersion Augmented Reality Agenda.
“Smoke? Out of my mouth?”
Junel returns with two pills and a paper cup filled with water. “What happened in the waterfall?”
She remembers the sound of the rushing waters. The glow of her white bubble. And then…
“There was a thing, like a deer, in my apartment,” she whispers.
“A deer?” Junel snaps. “Yeah, you said something about that before the Matrioshka.”
Nausea fills her as she hesitates to take the analgesics. “But it wasn’t a deer. Its face looked like a deer. A deer-man. But first, first it was a dog—a little dog? And there were others.”
“We got hacked?” Junel shouts.
Roma’s head shivers at her co-worker’s outburst. She answers, “You know that’s not possible.”
Siui hangs her head and pulls nervously at her lower lip. Junel says, “This is what happened. You said a storm was going on outside your apartment and the street was glitchy. Then you went to the waterfall in Mat 7 and your avatar disappeared.”
Roma Cowan remembers this. She confesses, “I made myself an egg in the waterfall. A cyclorama.”
Her coworkers exchange expressions. “That’s why you said John’s name?”
Roma nods. “I made a straight-up cyclorama. But…a bunch of people were in there with me. Talking to me.”
“You didn’t code them in?”
“No,” she drones. “Clowns, they look like circus clowns.”
“Eww…” Siui says.
“No, no they didn’t look like…they aren’t clowns…they’re…I can’t describe it…Did someone black box TruLife?”
Siui shakes her head, pulling at the metal ring at her lips’ edge. “Hell no, Rom...”
“Far as we know,” Junel adds.
Roma coughs. Her eyes are cherry-rimmed and she dabs with the blanket at the mucus flowing across her upper lip. She thinks of Thad Carmichael and secret meetings with their boss Gundersen. “The egg was filled with smoke. Or powder or something.”
Roma shifts in the plush throne and stands, dropping the two pills. Siui wraps her boss tighter in the thermal cloth and holds her shaking body close. Finally Roma says, “I’m okay, please!”
She hacks and a silver wisp of vapor threads straight from her mouth and left nostril. Siui gapes and steps back and firmly presses the shawl to her mouth. The areas beneath Roma’s eyes are puffing and darkening with broken vessels from the violent wracking. “It was—it was a...” With prolonged coughing she slides back upon the throne.
Junel circles the Barca in a widening circumference. The filtration masks and hazmat suits are two levels above but Roma will certainly take offense if they come back looking like astronauts. “Your last memory was your egg that was not in the City program and it was filled with smoke, and you just now coughed out—”
“Expelled,” Siui corrects.
“Coughed out...something. You saw that, right, Roma?”
Roma’s swelling eyes widen. “What?”
“You need to go to the doctor. Like, immediately.” Junel holds out a bottle of mineral water and Roma sips successfully, then gulps. She holds her breath a few seconds and exhales and breathes deep. “Did you tell Thad we were doing this?”
Siui says to Junel, “You’re not thinking Carmichael bugged us or paid off Henrik to spill and got hackers to—”
Roma scowls. “No fricking way.” She knows neither Siui nor Junel—nor many of her Exerotech coworkers—trust the investment neuroguru. “No,” Roma wheezes. “Ted didn’t pay seven million for triple firewalls, so an inside man...c-could spill. Henrik’d never do that anyway.” She again spasms and coughs and takes a short draw of water. “Thad might know hackers, but not for TruLife.”
Roma coughs and a white haze again shoots from her mouth. Junel and Siui back away, speechless.
“It became a white room filled with a fog or smoke,” she croaks. “That’s the last thing I remember. With some skeletons that talked.”
The two women instinctively take another step back. “Roma we need to take you to the hospital. I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No, Ted’ll find out. There’ll be records. Bills. He’ll check all video tapes and the juice records and we’ll get slapped…Let’s watch the footage,” Roma whispers, standing.
“Inner or outer? The op-cam snowed out seven minutes into it. Just before you started coughing. Just after you entered the Matrioshka and your, your getaway.”
She clears her throat. The spasms have passed but her head feels vised. “I remember going in it…it wasn’t in the program but I can’t, I can’t remember it now.”
“You said clowns. Er, skeletons?”
“I saw Ryan Tyler.”
“You saw Ryan Tyler?” Junel chuckles, pointing to the crumpled hapsuit. “In there?”
“It was him.”
“In TruLife,” Siui snaps, “by himself.”
“It was him but it wasn’t him. And I was...”
She cannot complete the sentence.
“You were what?”
She cannot remember anything but looking into a mirror that was wrong. “Nothing.”
The throbbing spreads through her lungs, but remains at a manageable level. She walks from the throne and they leave the huge ebony room to the control booth. Roma puts on her clothes as Siui runs the monitor recording. Junel powers down the servers section by section. For the next hour they review the tape, yawning and watching repeatedly the non-appearance of a dog-deer-man or blur-swept city street, the 22 seconds of blank avatar feed, just her vital signs, when something had happened to her. Roma says, “Seemed I was there like a lot longer than twenty seconds, that egg. I don’t know why.”
Siui runs her hands through her spiky hair and presses them into her face. “We felt a, like a wind in here,” jerking a thumb at Junel. “And she says she saw fog. An orange fog near the door.”
“Whaaat?” Roma chirps.
Junel stares into the knobs and screens. “We both heard voices and there was a flash in here while your signal went down. Flash of light and a crack. Like a transistor blowing. I thought I saw a cloud of mist.”
“The voices were almost inaudible,” Siui explains. “Like whispering.”
Roma strokes her dark ringlets. “Tell me you’re just screwing my head around.”
“No.”
“Ted’s not gonna like this.”
“Got that right.”
“If we tell him. We still got the Beta test.”
“Let’s not tell him, then. Jeez.”
Junel gazes at Roma. “Should we destroy these tapes?”
Roma hesitates not a beat. “Wipe it.”
HOURS LATER, IN the dawn over Santa Monica, Roma Cowan steadies herself along the lamplit boulevard, alternately fighting and acquiescing to the nausea and vertigo and the leaden feeling beneath it all that the project was mysteriously flawed. She breathes deeply with every other step, her flats echoing in the deserted street. Early Pacific winds cascade her skirt and brush black ringlets against her cheeks. She stops to produce her compact and examine her watering eyes. Her lids remain swollen and the whites of her eyes still cherry red. A lingering bitter taste like rotten lime dusted in cinnamon fills her palate. She smacks her lips and rolls saliva and spits. She trudges on then steadies herself against a light pole.
The wheezing upsurges. Her blouse tightens like a clamp about her rib cage. A car engine has ignited in her chest, rumbling and revving. A revolving sensation, a bouncing. She gasps at this new hell. Draws short breaths. It is as if the full size of her lungs has gone absent.
The accelerator presses sideways in her abdomen and shoves through her stomach. Something is coming up. The cough, shakes her soles and the tingle that produces bolts straight up her spine and finds each rib and crushes what’s inside. Now warm and sticky at the back of her throat. She leans forward to vomit but whatever it is is locked in her throat. A horrible groan issues from her chest as she pushes with all energy to cough this viscous thing out.
What flies from her mouth smacks the edge of the planter like a pearly swirled paintball, starring the concrete with dark speckled blood. She can’t see it through her tears and the half-closed flaps of her swollen eyelids. She wipes at her mouth and spits again.
As she limps away, the substance adheres, then begins a slow roll upward into the loam.
Elsewhen will be published in June, 2019