Continue Online (Part 4, Crash) (5 page)

I held onto the food and waved with a shoulder while mumbling around the next bite. Being in shape had done funny things to my desire for food.

“Grant?” My sister sounded slightly upset. Worry flashed through me, I knew she had been talking to one of the AIs but didn’t have all the details yet. Maybe there had been a breakdown in communication.

Still, Liz didn’t look as if she was angry. Her face had the same downward tilted eyes that I saw so often in the mirror. I put down my sandwich and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“Dad’s dead,” she said, then sniffed. “He’s dead, Grant,” Liz said it a few more times, probably because I didn’t react right away. The food in my hand dripped down. Hal Pal moved and asked a question that didn’t register.

I wasn’t close to my father. Neither of us twins were, but he was still our father. He was a stern man of few words that loomed over every punishment in our lives. He was the ruling force in our house, regardless of any social liberations. Mom had always been content to support us and preferred to leave the more manly problems to dad. And that man, that central pillar, was dead.

“How?” I managed to get the word out without stuttering. This had happened to me before. Mom must have been, Voices, I understood. We needed to be there.

“A massive heart attack, last night. Mom just told me, she’s, she’s been dealing with paperwork and the hospital all morning to try to keep us from having to deal with it.”

“He was taking medicine though? After the first one four years ago?” Back when I really kept tabs on our family. These last three years without Xin had really seen me cut ties with nearly everyone. Voices above, had this been what Mother meant in her letter? She, the overlord AI, had offered condolences upon my losses. Did that mean my dad and Lia? Or were there more to come?

Liz spoke while I pressed buttons. “We need to make sure dad’s taken care of. I don’t know if they saved anything for this sort of thing.”

She was being rational, how like Liz. She always kept it together in the face of my problems in the past. Even now my twin was trying to get everything in line. It felt as if we all did that to some extent, compartmentalizing problems, working through things while our minds stayed sane. I heard my sister’s words break up for a bit.

“Little brother?” Her words sounded hurt.

“Only by a few minutes,” I pretended to grumble.

“How are you so calm?” Liz had her eyes narrowed and an edge to her voice. There was a faint redness in her eyes and a slightly muddy looking spot of smeared makeup, she paused and sucked in a breath. “Damn, sorry. Right.”

I thought about it for a moment. There was a certain level of shakiness to my body that hadn’t reached the surface. Part of me hadn’t processed the news. When Xin died it had taken time for the realization to set in.

“It’s okay. Let’s just get through this. We can meet, are you talking to mom?” I tucked a cheek back and tried to smile in a manner that felt reassuring.

“Yeah. She’s busy trying to call a funeral home, but they’re going to gouge her.” Liz nodded. “Plus Beth’s still in her classes so she doesn’t know yet.”

I wrapped the food up and waved a hand toward my sister’s image while talking. “Alright, tell mom that price isn’t an issue. I’ve already set aside funds to help in case something happened.”

“What do you mean?” my twin asked.

Voices. I was an idiot just announcing the issue like that. Before my second attempt, I had been stable enough to set aside funds for everyone’s funerals, bills, homes, enough to keep the surviving family comfortable while trying to recover. At the time, I had intended it mostly to cover my own wake, but at some point money was put into multiple locations.

I hadn’t checked on it recently and my old firm managed most of it. They were good people, or else I would never have worked with them to begin with.

“I have enough money to take care of it. Whatever mom needs, tell her I’ll help.” Playing those games, facing of monsters, and my own sister still got my heart racing with worry. I tried not to sweat under the glare of a family member and nearly failed. Plus the smell of food made my belly growl more than once.

“Fine. You know she won’t accept it though. Mom and dad never did.” Liz sounded defensive for our parent.

They were perfectly accepting of the two ARC devices I bought them outright. Technically dad tried to turn me down once, but I refused. I called it paying him back for all the university classes. When he wasn’t looking, mom, Hal Pal and I installed the king sized bed version that fit up to three people.

“Then she can pay me back once everything’s settled, for now though, she shouldn’t worry about funds.” I used my recently rediscovered assertiveness on Liz. She glared at me again, then nodded.

We kept talking for a bit longer then settled on meeting at her house. That way I could be there to talk to Beth. Hopefully, the Auto-NAV could get me there before class let out. She might stop and do homework first, or skip straight to Continue. Maybe that boyfriend of hers would be waiting in some dungeon. I had only seen them play a few times, what exactly did they do?

“Are you sure, Grant?” my sister asked.

“Yes, just tell her it’s taken care of. It’s… the least I can do for dad, whatever happened.”

“Are you sure?” her words echoed again.

My mind was chasing multiple threads. Beth’s online habits felt confusing to me. Three years ago I wouldn’t be able to understand an online only relationship. They didn’t engage in some virtual sex. That seemed oddly un teenager-ish. Then again Beth wasn’t really a good teenager to begin with. Her science degree stuff was way off the charts versus what I had learned as a child, but her social interactions were almost lower than anything Liz did. Internet relationships and the ARC must have skewed an entire generation.

I nodded to my sister while thinking along a completely different line. There was a good portion of my brain wondering exactly how well those virtual feedback mechanisms worked, especially now that Xin was back. I didn’t want to sound like a desperate teenager, but there were parts of a relationship that I missed with a fierceness that had been unexpected until holding her two weeks ago. How had I existed for three years this way? Emotionally I existed in a near void until starting Continue. After that it was a matter of being poked in one emotion after another until reaching her.

“Okay. I’ll talk to mom.” Liz sniffed once and nodded. “Can you meet us here? We should probably go together.”

“Okay,” I said while trying not to feel self-centered. I wanted to be home and logging in but going to help my mom needed to be done. Family derailed my desire to once again prove to Xin that I was worth all of her attention and time. She meant everything to me, and I would suffer any setback to demonstrate those feelings.

Still, dad was dead. How could I let my wants override that? What kind of son would I be? In my mind, there was this feeling of what a child should be, but part of me felt no attachment to the man who had thrown me into the deep end, literally, just to ensure I listened to his lesson on how to swim. I didn’t want to tell Liz, who had disconnected somewhere during my automatic babble, that I almost couldn’t bring myself to care.

Trillium’s van went forth while I tried to eat the rest of a nearly tasteless meal. My friends inside Hal Pal stayed thankfully quiet. It took a lot of work to wrap my brain around the lack of single consciousness when talking to the AI. My head shook, now I was just looking for ways to avoid thinking about the problem.

I pressed a few buttons and pulled up an image of my father’s online profile. He looked a lot like my sister and I. The generally downward tilt of our eyes came from him, along with the lip chewing. He had been quiet though, rarely did he ever look at either one of us dead on. He often spent his time with a nose facing into some digital device’s text, or watching a video on how to replace portions of our house.

An hour later I was at Liz’s house. Her split-level home had too many rooms for two people, with Liz mostly staying upstairs and Beth running around the bottom floor. Knocking on the door got me invited inside rapidly. The ladies were upstairs in the front room and my niece had already halfway broken down.

“Did you hear hear about Grandpa Jack?” Beth asked me. I mourned the hopefully temporary loss of her normal bubbly self. How much nonsense did these last few months expose her to? Continue Online prodded me constantly, adding in Xin’s digital existence, that letter, watching me dive off a cliff, the squad of people with Carver’s Legacy, and now Jack dying.

“I heard. How are you doing?” I asked her. Jack was my father. It had been so long since I actually thought of his name.

“I don’t feel good,” Beth said while wiping at one eye. Liz stood off to the side with her arms crossed. I walked over and gave my sister a hug, marveling at how oddly backward everything felt lately.

“We’ll be okay,” I told the two girls. “We should go see how your grandma’s doing.” Mom’s house was an hour away to the north. Dad’s body apparently sat in a hospital until she made arrangements for cremation or burial. Putting a body down in a plot cost a lot in today’s market, but there was more than enough set aside to make it work if mom wanted to.

After all, it wasn’t as if I needed it to buy Xin a house, or to follow through with my other mad plans. At one time all those funds had been specifically to help fund my venture to Mars behind her on a corporate ticket.

The three of us got into Liz’s car and drove to our parents. No, parent, singular. Those days of thinking of our home, for Xin and I, had taken months to get around. Words like our, our parents, only applied when the other party was still alive.

My mom, Sharee, looked torn up. She wore fairly decent clothes, in preparation for going out. I remained in my work suit and felt out of place. Neither my sister or I had really reached mom’s height or complexion.

“Thanks for coming,” Sharee said. Her voice sounded so frail and small. As always it struck me just how weird the world was when we stood eye-to-eye. Part of me would never be more than three feet tall looking at her.

“Of course. How are you holding up?” I asked while studying her. Gray hairs littered her head. There was a tired expression and a tremor to one arm as it held her purse. Time was going by in awkward blurs. I felt as though this was happening to someone else. There was no room for the happy version of me in these events.

“Terrible. Just terrible. Your father is such an asshole for doing this to me.” Mom shook her head. There was a draw her shoulders that spoke of intense stress. “He couldn’t just go see a doctor, or remember his own pills.”

“It’s okay, Mom,” I said and tried to sound supportive.

“It’s not, it’s not okay.” Liz sniffed behind me and pretty much summed up our situation.

My own thoughts were all scattered. Family issues were hard enough. I couldn’t even look at dad’s body when we made it to the morgue an hour later. I knew, I knew with a sinking feeling that made me zone out, exactly how it would appear. Lifeless, soulless, devoid of all the things gave a human that spark of awareness. It would be a melted puppet version of the man that I knew. In the same way that Xin’s body had been a destroyed and broken version of the love of my life. In the same way that our child together had amounted to nothing more than a few more ashes in the cremation remains.

We talked a few times during the entire process. I knew words were coming out of my mouth in response to the others. What they were escaped me. Paperwork, money, promises to pay it all back once the accounts were settled. Mom wanted to check the house, too much of it had been left in dad’s control.

All I could do was be there for my family. Between us we talked and settled some paperwork. I stayed behind to pay the bills when no one looked, and my family wasn’t in a state to ask. It was odd how mechanical everyone acted about the situation. At some point mom looked at me and smiled.

“Go home take care of yourselves. I’m going to catch a cab home after I make a few calls.” She tried to be upbeat but was falling apart.

“I’ll stay with you if you want,” my niece, Beth, offered.

“If you want to, sweetie,” Sharee said. “But I’ll be okay.”

“Are you sure, Mom?” Liz asked. “Beth’s all caught up on her coursework, a day or two is fine.”

“Of course. You’ve done all you can, the rest takes time.” Her face twisted slightly. Both eyes wavered and a cheek drooped. The oldest remaining Legate was not in good shape.

“We’ll at least wait for you, and take you home,” Liz said trying to remain calm.

“Just go!” Mom actually shook while yelling. It set us all back a few feet. “Get out of here!”

“You two wait for mom, and I’ll call my van over. It shouldn’t take long.” The funeral home and Liz’s house were fairly close together in the grand scheme of things. It had mostly been us talking and trying to get ideas sorted before meeting with mom, who lived just a town over from my sister.

Beth nodded then went after Sharee. Everyone looked worn and I wasn’t even sure what had happened. Part of me felt along for the ride. Liz and I moved out much slower, and near the front door, my sister asked the bombshell I had been afraid of.

“Grant, could, dad be, like Xin?” she asked.

I shook my head then said, “Probably not? I’m not even sure how Xin is like Xin.” There were lots of possible reasons, but William Carver hadn’t achieved the same sort of status, and he spent years in Continue Online. There had to be other factors, plus dad only used his ARC for movies or vacation programs. Had, used his ARC.