A Crack in the Sky (13 page)

He sank lower in his chair. “No. I guess you’re right. It’s pointless.”

Even as he said it, it was hard for him to shake the feeling that something was going on that nobody was admitting. But why didn’t anyone else seem alarmed? What was the matter with everyone? What was the matter with
him?

He slammed his fist on his desk. “I don’t care what the
CloudNet says!” he said. “Something bad is happening! The sky never acted this way before, and the cooling systems never used to give out all the time! Why can’t anyone tell me what’s going on?” He glared hard into the sphere.
“All I want is the truth! Can’t anybody give it to me?”

There was a momentary hiss. Heather, whose jaw had dropped at Eli’s unexpected outburst, suddenly froze in position as if somebody had flipped a switch and halted her processor. It was freaky.

“Heather?”

She didn’t answer. Stranger still, a moment later her nose split clean off from the rest of her face. Eli watched, wide-eyed. The nose floated slowly to the top of the sphere and then broke into thousands of pieces that drifted in all directions. Her eyes were next. They moved apart and melted away.

Eli’s breath caught in his throat. “Marilyn! Marilyn, wake up. You gotta see this!”

In the drawer behind him, Marilyn must have heard the urgency in his voice, because she stirred. Her orange eyes peered over the edge.
What is it, my love?
Eli didn’t need to answer. She could see for herself.

Heather’s entire head was disintegrating.

Soon all that was left was a cloud of movement, tiny cubes of color that swirled inside the sphere like confetti. If Eli hadn’t been so aware that Heather was a simulation, he might have screamed. Then he heard voices from inside the confetti. They were ghostly soft and their words were unclear, as if a crowd of people were murmuring to each other all at once. They got louder. Eli squinted into the blur.

“Hello?”

“Your request has been noted, Eli Papadopoulos,”
the voices whispered, blending together into a single breathy chorus.
“In a complex fabric of illusion, a single thread of reality can be hard to distinguish. Do you understand what it would mean to disentangle it? Are you sure you’re ready to accept the consequences?”

Eli hesitated. What on earth was this? Another program bug? Some crazy stream Heather found for him on the CloudNet?

“What if you disentangled the truth only to discover that your whole life has been a sham?”
continued the voices.
“Would you really want to know? What if you were the last chance to save a dying world? Would you take that chance even knowing it would be the hardest thing you ever did, and that you would probably fail?”

“What kind of a crazy question is that?” Eli asked. “If I were the last chance, then of
course
I would. Who—?”

But the voices interrupted him.
“But how can you be sure? What if it meant you would have to give up everything important to you? Everything you love?”

“Sebastian, is that you? This isn’t funny! Why can’t I see your face? Where’s Heather?”

“Heather is on pause. We must speak quickly. In seconds this patch will be noticed and we’ll be disconnected.”

“So you’re saying we’re … off CloudNet? You
hacked
into my sphere?”

“That is correct.”

Eli’s mouth went dry. He’d heard about off-CloudNet connections, but nobody had used them for years. There was no
need for them anymore because InfiniCorp’s gigantic systems took care of everything for everybody. The only people who even tried to go around the system nowadays were criminals.

Foggers.

Marilyn’s voice echoed in his head.
You don’t want anything to do with this, Eli. Shut them down!

Eli spoke into the confetti, struggling to keep his voice calm. “This conversation is over. I’m turning off the sphere, and then I’m reporting you to my father.”

“We have the answers you’re looking for, Eli.”

He felt a sudden tightness in his gut. His hand stopped in midair. Even Marilyn stayed quiet. There was something very wrong here, something that could get him in serious trouble. And yet now he couldn’t bring himself to touch the sphere and send the voices away. If they really knew what was going on, he wanted to know.

“Who are you?” he whispered.

“Who we are doesn’t matter. We can help you disentangle the fabric of lies.”

There was a sudden static pop. For an instant the cloud of tiny colored cubes froze. Almost immediately they began whirring around again, only faster now. Something was wrong.

“What’s happening?”

“We’re out of time,”
the voices said, breaking up.
“Eli, you are in great danger. If you want the truth and are prepared for the consequences, tell no one about this conversation.”
The colors in the sphere started to vibrate.

“Don’t go! Tell me what you know! Is a terrible storm coming? What’s going on?”

Their reply was so faint that Eli could only just make it out.
“We’ll be in contact.”

All at once the colors shot together and formed the image of a burning sun, dazzling and orange. Eli had barely a moment to take it in before it broke apart again, but he recognized it right away. It was the same image as the one on the page he’d found tucked inside the
Alice
book.

“Wait!” He put his face up close to the sphere. He wanted to shake it, to somehow force the mysterious voices to speak again.

But it was too late. They were gone.

And then he felt Heather’s eyes on him once more. Her head filled the entire orb; her pretty mouth hung open in exactly the same expression of surprise that it had the moment she’d disintegrated. Eli and the Heather simulation were practically nose to nose.

“God, what bug got up
your
butt? No need to pop a neuron. Don’t you know I’m here to serve? Eli?
Eli?”

He was backing away from the sphere. His palms were covered in sweat, and he had no idea what he should do or say. Finally he shot out of the room. Marilyn was close at his heels. Even as they flew down the stairs, Eli could still hear Heather calling out to him, asking what the heck was wrong.

He sat hunched in the grass, his thoughts a blur. What had just happened? He tried to remember exactly what the voices had said. Something about saving the world and how he was in some kind of danger. But how could he save the world? And why would he be in any danger?

None of it made any sense.

“What do you think it all means?” he asked Marilyn, who was still trembling at his feet.

I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Mysterious voices. Hacked CloudNet patches. Whoever they are, they must be criminals. Eli, you need to contact your parents right away, before something terrible happens!

Eli wrapped his arms around his legs and squeezed them tight to his chest. Overhead, the sun blinked. For an instant, enormous multicolored bars filled the entire dome like a vast horizontal rainbow. Eli couldn’t help marveling once more at how peculiar the whole world had become in such a short time. He could almost hear the white-eyed Outsider again:
Why do you sleep, little mousey, when you should be sounding the alarm …?

He glanced back at Marilyn. “Deep down, aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to hear what they have to say?”

Her whiskers twitched.
Absolutely not. Let it go, Eli. We have a comfortable life. Why make waves? Anyway, this was pure foolishness and almost certainly a trick. They were Foggers, and reckless ones too. Just report it to your family and forget it. You have your future to think about
.

Eli knew she was right. How foolish for a group of criminals to contact him, a Papadopoulos, of all people. In any case, whatever message they had for him wasn’t the most important consideration here. The right thing to do was to tell InfiniCorp what had happened. The company would know how to respond.

With the cloud commercials once again drifting reassuringly overhead, he made his decision. He would contact Father. He would tell him everything, and right away.

But just as he was about to get up from the artificial grass and return to the house, he heard somebody calling his name.

“Eli! Eli, we need to talk with you!”

Marilyn sprang up on her hind legs. Eli glanced around the yard. Nobody. There was no one at the back of the house either. And yet he knew that gruff voice.

“Uncle Hector?”

“Up here, boy. Above you.”

Eli craned his neck. There was an unusual cloud hanging just over his head, a small holographic projection that must have been created by some hidden mechanism in the nearby trees. Inside this strange cloud floated three heads that stared down at him.

Uncle Hector. Father. Mother.

They were watching him, their expressions grave. Eli had a bad feeling about this. It was disturbing enough just to see his family looming down at him from his own personal cloud—he hadn’t even been aware the dome could do that—but Uncle Hector had never pinged him before. Not once in Eli’s whole life. This was a first.

Which made this sudden appearance all the more alarming.

“Eli,” Father began, “Uncle Hector just received a report we need to ask you about.”

Mother peered down at him over her luminous glasses. “One of the CloudNet techs noticed a break in the stream. Oddly it turned out to be an unauthorized link to
your
sphere. It raises questions. Please tell us everything that happened.”

How had they found out so quickly? Eli had left his room only a couple of minutes ago, and yet, judging by their expressions, he was in trouble already. Eli couldn’t help remembering
once again what Spider had told him—that Uncle Hector was concerned about him. So the timing of this couldn’t be worse. None of this was his fault, though. Once he had a chance to explain, surely Uncle Hector and his parents would understand.

At least he hoped so.

“It’s true,” he began, doing his best to sound confident even though he felt like he might throw up. “Something weird
did
just happen. I was about to contact Father about it.”

So Eli told them. He started with how he was searching for information on the CloudNet when the Heather simulation had disintegrated. He described the voices and the strange things they’d said. The whole time, Marilyn stayed quiet. The three heads listened, their expressions difficult to read. When Eli told them how the voices had warned him not to tell anybody about the conversation, they seemed to relax. Eli guessed why. He hadn’t been a Papadopoulos his whole life without learning something about how his family worked. His loyalty had been in question. For now, it seemed, he’d passed their test.

Mother and Father looked relieved.

“I think you’re right,” Uncle Hector said at last, lighting a fresh cigar. “Those voices were indeed Foggers. It fits the pattern. The Outsiders want our resources, and this was a clear attempt to sabotage the CloudNet, possibly even to infiltrate the family. The barbarians are getting bolder.”

“The company has already plugged the CloudNet hole the Foggers utilized to tap into your sphere,” Father said. “They’ll never be able to get in through that back door again.”

“But why me? And why would they say I’m in danger?”

“Don’t try to find any logic with Foggers,” Uncle Hector said, blowing a cloud of smoke. “You’ll never find any.”

“You have to understand,” Mother said, “they can’t do any significant or permanent harm to our systems, but incidents like this are still a serious problem and a constant drain on resources. This is why everyone has to stay vigilant. And
you,”
she said with a significant look, “need to stop obsessing about dome-design problems and the end of the world.”

Eli felt his face go warm again. “I—I just had questions,” he admitted. “The sky seems to be getting worse, not better, and sometimes I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me.”

Uncle Hector frowned. “You’re being ridiculous. Some software problems are more complex to resolve than others, that’s all. I’m surprised you have so little faith in the company. Foggers look for people who are predisposed to paranoia. The way they recruit Insiders is by planting doubts that feed their fears. I don’t know what they’re looking for from you, but it seems they want to influence our family in some way. And we can’t let that happen.”

Father spoke up again. “Eli, you’ve been making good progress with your studies. Don’t think the company hasn’t noticed. But these questionable incidents of yours aren’t helping you.”

Eli had to look away. His cheeks were burning. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I guess I was being stupid.”

“Be sure to ping us if anything else happens, son. Anything at all.”

“Yes, Father.”

The three heads glanced at each other again. They seemed satisfied. “Now get back to your work, boy,” Uncle Hector said. “Go earn your place in InfiniCorp management, like your brother. We know you can do it. Have a productive day.”

The cloud blinked, and they were gone.

Eli let himself fall back into the grass. He closed his eyes. The last thing he needed was more trouble with his family. Why had he been moronic enough to share his worries with the CloudNet? Now not only did his parents have one more reason to be on his back, but he also had Foggers to deal with.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Marilyn seemed to sense what he was thinking.
Don’t worry. It’s all right
. She nuzzled him gently with her snout.
Let’s get back to the house, my love. You have work to do
.

“How am I supposed to act normal after that?” he asked.

It’s over now. You did the right thing
.

But Eli knew better. The truth was, guilt hung over him like a weight.
You’re wrong
, he admitted silently to her at last.
I didn’t do the right thing at all
.

The mongoose stopped nuzzling. She tilted her head to one side.
What do you mean?

He sat up and turned away.
When I told the story of what the voices said, I left out the ending. Didn’t you notice? I didn’t tell them how they promised to contact me again
.