Read Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series Online
Authors: Jasper T. Scott
Mindscape: Book 2 of the New Frontiers Series (17 page)
“Alex…? What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, shivering now. “You’re not real. None of this is real!” He was on the verge of a panic attack.
“What are you talking about? I’m here right in front of you!”
Alexander backed away from her, his legs shaking. From his newfound perspective it wasn’t his legs that were shaking, but the entire universe, the whole thing turning on its head. Lies rained out like confetti.
“I remember,” he said. “I know what happened.”
“Okay, sit down and tell me about it.”
Breaths came fast and shallow. Horror danced around him with demonic glee. He imagined Benevolence laughing as he watched.
Alexander continued backing away. He fetched up against the glass railing running around the garden. Feeling the cool edge of it under his palms, he gripped it tightly for support. He felt sick to his stomach.
Viviana got up and strode quickly toward him.
Alexander was so distraught that he barely noticed how naked she was.
“Stay away from me,” he said.
“Alexander, calm down! You’re having a panic attack. Think about it! You have all the symptoms.”
He shook his head again, his teeth chattering from the cold.
“Shortness of breath, racing heart, trembling! Feeling
detached
from the world around you, like this isn’t real, sweating, nausea… I’m right, aren’t I?”
“Not another step!” he warned, half-lifting himself to spring over the railing and into the abyss. Viviana stopped, terror gleaming in her eyes. “I’ve felt detached from my surroundings for years,” he said. “Maybe I
am
having a panic attack, but I’m panicking because of what I finally remembered. You
died
in the engine room, Viviana. You warned me that something could blow if you tried to sabotage the engines, and it did. That’s why I hit my head. You weren’t really there to wake me up. Ben must have found me lying there and taken me straight to my correctional mindscape. I’ve been there ever since, haven’t I? He’s kept me there for over a thousand years, using you to distract me from the truth!”
“You don’t have to do this. I can explain.”
Alexander gave her a bitter smirk and shook his head.
“Love is the only truth!” she blurted out.
“Stealing lines from my ex-wife? You need to be more original, Ben.”
“I’m not Ben!”
“Goodbye, Vivie.”
“No!” Viviana screamed, lunging toward him.
She was too far away to reach him in time. He launched himself clear over the railing and into the bottomless sky.
Chapter 37
E
merald-lit clouds rushed up to greet Alexander, as if the world had been turned upside down and the planet’s gravity had somehow been reversed.
Then he fell through the protective shield around his home, and the wind snatched at him with violent, icy hands, pinning his eyelids open and searing his skin. Tears streamed from his eyes, but the wind flung them away. Alexander curled into a ball to keep warm, and he fell faster.
Terror clawed in his stomach and doubts swirled. What if Viviana’s death really had been just a dream? What if his relentless search for the truth had manufactured a logical possibility in his sub-conscious, fooling him into thinking it was the missing memory he’d been searching for?
As his body grew numb from the cold, Alexander uncurled and watched the clouds parting below him. A vast ocean appeared, shimmering with reflected moonlight. Tropical islands dotted the horizon. He saw more homes like his and Viviana’s hovering at different altitudes, their lights radiating golden hues into the night. Hovering close above the surface of the water were restaurants, hotels, and shopping centers—an entire floating city, the city of Clear Water.
Another doubt scraped through Alexander’s brain, digging up fresh horror with spiteful claws. The jig was up. Why would Ben let him fall? Why not simply wake him up already?
Maybe I’m still dreaming,
he thought.
I never woke up on the terrace. It’s just a dream…
he told himself.
But it felt too real to be a dream.
Alexander could see people on the decks of the homes below pointing up at him and screaming. That was the last thought he had before the dark moonlit water blotted out everything else in sight.
Smack!
Chapter 38
S
ilence.
Darkness.
Then…
Alexander opened his eyes to find himself standing inside of a coffin-sized tank. The tank was flooded, but the water level was slowly dropping. A window faced him at eye-level, but it appeared to be fogged with condensation on the outside. A liquid ventilator withdrew from his trachea with a revolting sensation of being turned inside out, and Alexander looked down in time to see a urinal cup retreating from his groin into a recessed panel in the floor. His rectal tube disconnected next, stealing his breath on its way out. Finally, a metallic umbilical cord withdrew from his belly, revealing a strange, metallic eye where his belly button should be.
Memories came to him in vague snippets, dulling the horror and confusion of the moment. He remembered this place, and he knew why he was there.
The lid of his tank swung aside, and he saw row upon row of matching tanks stacked one atop the other with catwalks running from one level to the next. All of their windows were fogged and glowing with a dim blue light. There were thousands of them.
“Hello?” Alexander called out. “Benevolence?”
His voice echoed back to him.
He was about to try again, when a disembodied voice replied, coming to him from speakers built into the tank beside his ears.
“Hello, Alex.”
“Why did you wake me up?”
“Your treatment is over, Alex. You are ready to join the real world again.”
Alexander grimaced. Loneliness engulfed him as the truth hit him once more. Viviana was dead. “What if I liked living in the Mindscape better?”
“Recreational mindscaping has been illegal since zero AB, Alex. It is reserved for therapeutic and correctional purposes only.”
Alexander shook his head. Despair had him in its grips and wasn’t letting go. It had all been a lie, a lie he’d willingly bought into. He remembered leaving Benevolence’s correctional mindscape after just six months, and he’d awoken to find that Benevolence really had made the world a better place. He’d been wrong about Ben, and his desperate attempt to resist had gotten the woman he loved killed. He remembered the year he’d spent trying to put his life back together again. Benevolence’s government aid and job placement programs had made that easier, but no amount of rebuilding could bring back the ghost that haunted him. Eventually he’d tried to take his own life, but Benevolence had stopped him before he could.
“So what’s changed?” Alexander demanded. “What makes life so worth living all of a sudden?”
“You wanted to wake up. The truth became more important to you than pretending that Viviana was still alive. I allowed you to find the suppressed memories that proved you were living in a mindscape.”
“Send me back.”
“I can’t do that, Alex.”
“Don’t you get it? I’ve got nothing here!”
“Not true. You still have your wife.”
“What are you talking about? She’s dead!”
“Viviana is dead.”
“Hello, Alex,” a familiar voice said.
Alexander caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye and then someone walked out in front of his life support tank. A naked woman with long brown hair, chestnut eyes, and a warm smile. Alexander blinked in shock.
“Caty? I don’t understand… What are you doing here?”
“She was helping me with your rehabilitation,” Ben explained. “She’s the reason that you’re finally ready to come back to the real world.”
“I’m sorry,” Catalina said.
“For what?”
“For the deception. It was the only way to help you.”
A wild suspicion formed in Alexander’s head. “No…”
“It was me. I was Viviana.”
Chapter 39
“A
ll this time it was
you?
”
Catalina nodded and chewed her lower lip, looking guilty and afraid.
Alexander was shocked speechless. It had all been a lie. The life they’d supposedly lived together, all the children they’d had, the places they’d visited, the things they’d done… All of it had been part of a mindscape—
Galaxy
, he recalled the name of the virtual world they’d been immersed in.
Somehow it felt vague and distant, like a dream, but his memories of his wife and his feelings for her remained sharp and clear.
Except even that was a lie!
McAdams was dead, and all this time her part had been played by an impostor—his ex-wife, Catalina.
Have a thousand years really passed?
he wondered, or was that just another part of the illusion?
“It hasn’t been that long, Alex,” Benevolence said, as if he could read Alexander’s mind. And maybe he could. That was a terrifying thought. “It’s been a little over a century,” Benevolence went on. “We are only in the year 103 AB. I sped up the timescale in the Mindscape by a factor of ten so that people would be able to spend less time there.”
“That’s still more than a century,” Alexander replied, his eyes locked on Catalina. “You
knew
this whole time?” he demanded. How could she keep such a big secret from him, day in and day out, for over a century? Not to mention, she’d been a Human League senator—a member of a political group dedicated to a human-only world, and here she was helping a
bot
to rehabilitate him. The pieces weren’t adding up.
She shook her head. “The only time I knew the truth was when I agreed to join you in the Mindscape, and at the very end, when you were getting close to discovering things on your own. Benevolence revealed the truth to me first—which is why I didn’t have any suppressed memories for you to find. I’m sorry, Alex. Benevolence said that keeping my identity a secret was the only way to help you. You had to be allowed to discover the truth on your own. You had to
want
to get out, and telling you all of this too soon would have only undermined that. But I did try to tell you—just before you jumped.
Love is the only truth,
remember?”
Alexander gaped at her and slowly shook his head. “You were a Human League Senator. How do you go from that to joining a bot on a crusade to save your ex-husband?”
“I saw with my own eyes how wrong I was. Benevolence changed the world for the better. Half the Human League’s problem with bots was that they were replacing humans—threatening our very existence. Benevolence fixed that by making the Mindscape illegal and integrating bots and humans into society as equals. Without the Mindscape, Dolers were no longer satisfied with subsistence living, and they all had to go out and find work in the real world. Humanity has a place in that world again. You’ll see for yourself soon.”
“You’re talking like you’ve been there all along, but you’ve been with me for over a century. How do you know the status quo hasn’t changed, or that everything didn’t go to hell in that time?”
“I don’t, but I trust that Benevolence wouldn’t allow that to happen. Regardless, now we can find out… together, if you like.”
Alexander shook his head, fighting off a wave of dizziness. “I… I think I need to be alone right now.”
Catalina’s face fell, but she nodded and covered her disappointment with a faltering smile. “Of course. It’s nice to see you again—in the real world, I mean. Take care of yourself, Alex. Be happy.”
Alexander watched her go, his eyes wide, his thoughts spinning, and his heart pounding with adrenaline. “This doesn’t make any sense…” he whispered.
“She gave up more than a hundred years of her life to help you get over your loss, Alex,” Benevolence said quietly. “You owe her your gratitude.”
“We were divorced! I moved on with someone else. Why would she do that?!”
“Because she loves you. She never stopped loving you.”
“I…”
“She’s your salvation, Alex. She’s the only real thing from the past century of your life, and the only reason you have for living in the real world.”
“Except I thought she was someone else!”
“The only part of her that was fake was her appearance and her name. Everything else was Catalina, not McAdams. When you married her in the Mindscape, you were really marrying your ex wife. After that, the two of you spent a hundred years dizzy with happiness and madly in love.”
“In a virtual world!”
“What is really
real
but that which we can perceive with our senses? The only difference between the Mindscape and the real world is that in the Mindscape we are the gods, and in the real world we are not.
“I cannot say whether or not a hundred years spent with the real Viviana McAdams would have been as happy, but you need to put things in perspective. Your relationship with Viviana lasted for a mere blink of an eye before she died tragically in that engine room. By contrast, your relationship with Catalina has stood the test of time.”
Alexander shook his head. “It’s my fault she died.”
“Yes, but you didn’t kill her, and she would have wanted you to be happy.”
“How would you know?” Alexander snapped.
“Your memories are recorded in the historical record, Alex. She loved you, and if she loved you, then she would have wanted you to be happy in the event of her passing.”
Alexander swallowed thickly. “I need some time to process all of this.”
“Of course. Head for the doors at either end of the room. Someone will be waiting there to help orient you for your return to the real world.”
Alexander nodded and strode quickly out of his tank. His joints cracked as he moved, and his legs trembled. His muscles had atrophied from long disuse, despite whatever hormonal and chemical measures Benevolence must have taken to preserve them.
Looking up he saw a dozen floors of catwalks and wall to wall life support tanks.
This is a dream…
he thought stubbornly as he walked to the end of the room.
Chapter 40
J
ust before he reached the sliding doors at the end of the Simulation Room, a pair of women appeared, one to either side of him.
“Welcome back, Mr. de Leon,” one of them said. Both of them wore white jumpsuits branded with the word
Mindsoft.
The one on his left draped a fuzzy white robe around his shoulders and set a pair of matching slippers on the ground in front of him. The robe felt warm, as if it were somehow heated, and it wrapped itself around his waist without even needing to be tied.
Some type of smart fabric,
he realized.
“Thank you,” he replied belatedly.
“This way please,” the other woman said, gesturing to the sliding doors.
The doors opened and Alexander walked through into a kind of foyer. Empty couches and arm chairs sat on stone platforms surrounded by grass, trees, and flowers, with stone pathways winding in between. The room was lush with cultivated vegetation, and the sound of water splashing on rocks drew his attention to a nearby waterfall flowing over a glistening rock wall. A holographic blue sky stretched overhead, and more rock walls cordoned the room, as if he was in some type of miniature canyon. But Alexander knew that this habitat,
Majestic City,
was actually located far below ground.
Directly ahead he saw a woman standing behind a desk. Like the previous two he’d seen, this one wore a white jumpsuit with the word
Mindsoft
glowing over her right breast. Hovering in the air above her head was a bar of holographic text that read
Welcome to 103 AB!
The woman greeted him with a warm smile as he approached.
“Welcome, Alexander de Leon to the first century AB—Anno Benevolentiae!” She reached under her desk and produced a small bag containing his belongings from over a century ago. She passed the bag to him, and he nodded his thanks as he slung his bag over one shoulder. “Benevolence has prepared a short orientation for you. Please find a seat, and follow the prompts on your ARC lenses to play it.”
Alexander went back to looking around the garden. A prompt to play Benevolence’s orientation appeared before his eyes, but he minimized it. He spied a few others walking around the garden in matching white robes. “I’ll skip it thanks.”
“That is ill-advised. There have been many changes over the past century that you should know about.”
“I’ll bet, but I’d rather see them for myself. Thanks for the robe. Is there some place I can change back into my old clothes?”
“Your old attire is over a hundred years old. You will find more current garments waiting for you on your way out.”
“And that way would be…?”
“The glass doors at the end of the grotto. Someone will be waiting to see you out and help you get your new life started.” The receptionist pointed the way, and Alexander nodded his thanks once more before heading in that direction.
As he went, he felt a dizzy rush of emotions, chief among them was a feeling of not being real, of being trapped in a virtual world with no way out. His heart pounded and his palms began to sweat. What if Ben was lying about everything? What if all of this was just another virtual world? A holographic bird flitted overhead, chirping merrily, as if to prove the dubious nature of this new reality.
By the time Alexander reached the glass doors at the far end of the grotto, he was on the verge of a full-blown panic attack. The woman who greeted him behind those doors took one look at him and her cheerful smile turned to a look of concern. “Are you all right, Mr. de Leon? You look very pale.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” he managed. A lie if ever there was one. He felt like his head was stuffed full of cotton.
This isn’t real. I’m not real…
Alexander tripped over his own feet and nearly fell, but the woman who’d greeted him caught him in a surprisingly strong, cold grip before he could smash his nose on the floor. He shot her an odd look. She’d caught him as if he weighed no more than a feather, and her hands were like ice. “What are you?”
“Not what—
who.
I am not a thing. My name is Susan.”
“Your hands are freezing, Susan,” he said.
“The temperature in the habitat is kept deliberately low to help maintain all of the machinery. That is why you were given a heated robe. Are you sure you are all right?”
Alexander found himself staring, pieces of a strange puzzle coming together inside his head. “You’re not human, are you?”
“Does it matter?” Susan asked. “You skipped your orientation. That was not wise. There have been many changes over the past century that—”
“You mean like bots that look human?”
“
Bot
is a derogatory term, Mr. de Leon.
Android
is both more accurate and more polite.”
“I can see I have a lot of catching up to do,” he said.
“You do. If you would please go find a seat and play your orientation…”
Alexander shrugged out of Susan’s cold grip. “I like it better this way,” he insisted. “How about you focus on showing me the exit and getting me set up with some clothes and accommodations. I assume all the basics will be provided?”
“Of course. You may also choose to update your education and register with a job placement agency when you feel ready to become independent.”
“I’m going back to school?”
“Unskilled labor is another option if you do not wish to or cannot afford to purchase the necessary upgrades for the career of your choosing.”
“Upgrades. You mean implants?”
“Of course. Today’s job market is very competitive. Cybernetics help bridge the gap between human and android. This is nothing new to you. Even in your time, implants were commonplace to help govern socially acceptable behavior.”
“Right. I’m guessing there’s a laundry list of them now.”
“A laundry list?”
“A long list—this is all very interesting,” he said, nodding. “I just have one question for you, Susan.”
“Yes? I am listening.”
“Are you real?”
Chapter 41
A
re you real?
It seemed like an innocent enough question. Apparently Susan didn’t think so. Instead of showing him the exit, she’d called for backup. A pair of female androids in Mindsoft jumpsuits had half-dragged, half-escorted him to meet what he assumed was another ice-gripped android, this one wearing a white lab coat, a clinical smile, and cold gray eyes to match.
The androids who’d escorted him to the doctor’s office held him fast, as if he might try to make a run for it. Their grip was so tight it was cutting off circulation.
“You can’t keep me here against my will,” Alexander said.
The doctor waved them away. “You can let him go now.”
They released his arms and he glared at each of them in turn as he rubbed his aching biceps. Alexander noted that they didn’t leave the room, but rather took up positions one to either side of the entrance.
“I am Doctor Aaron Duvan,” the man said, holding out a hand for shaking. Alexander accepted that handshake if for no better reason than to prove his theory that this was another android, but the man’s grip was warm, not cold.
“You’re a human.”
“Is that a problem?”
Alexander frowned, but said nothing.
“Do you know why you are here?”
“Because I’m not buying into all of this shit. First I’m waking up a thousand years into the future, married to my XO, Viviana McAdams, then I’m jumping to my death and waking up in the
real
world only to find that just a hundred years have passed, and I wasn’t really married to Viviana, because she’s dead. Instead, I was re-married to my ex-wife, who only looked like my XO—courtesy of Benevolence’s liescape.”
“While that’s an accurate summary of recent events—”
“What would you know about it?” Alexander interrupted.
“It’s all in your file.”
“My
file?
What am I, a research subject?”
“A patient. You were in the Mindscape for therapy, yes?”
“So I’m told.” Alexander’s lips twisted into a sarcastic grin. “But I’m cured now, right? Viviana is dead, and I’ve finally accepted it. A hundred years later. Nice work there, Doc. Did it really take that long for me to come to grips with things, or is that just another lie?”
Doctor Duvan smiled thinly back. “You were previously diagnosed with chronic depression. The Mindscape was the only cure. It worked, despite what you might think at the moment. You’re angry, which is understandable, but you are no longer depressed, and in time you will understand why. Unfortunately, now you seem determined to suffer from something new.”
“Let me guess, the prescription is to send me back in?”
“I’m afraid the Mindscape can’t help you this time. You are suffering from acute derealization disorder—DD for short.”
“What’s that?”
“You spent so much time living in the Mindscape that reality no longer seems real to you. You are questioning what is real and what is virtual. Unfortunately, this is a dangerous condition, both for you and for those around you.”
“How so?”
“You were suffering from the same condition when you chose to wake up from the Mindscape. It is what drove you to jump from your balcony and fall 7,000 feet to your death.”
“You were watching? What else were you watching, you pervert? Maybe you also saw me and Viviana—I mean Catalina—in the pool?”
Doctor Duvan shook his head. “I was not watching anything. Only Benevolence is allowed to observe the Mindscape, and the kind of voyeurism you are referring to is illegal. I’m merely going on what Benevolence wrote in your file.”
Alexander nodded absently, his gaze flicking over the walls, wondering where and how he was going to find the
seam
in this reality.
“I’m going to recommend a specialist that you can see when you leave here. Meanwhile, Benevolence has suggested you should not be left alone right now. He’s recommended that you stay with Catalina until your treatment is concluded.”
“Sure. Why not. I was staying with her in the last Mindscape, wasn’t I? This will just be more of the same.”
“I’m glad you approve. She’s waiting for you on the surface. I am sorry that your transition has been so difficult.”
Alexander nodded and turned to leave the doctor’s office. The two women who’d escorted him there followed him out and up the elevator from sub-level seventy-five all the way up to the ground floor of the habitat.
As promised, Catalina was waiting in the lobby for him. A few other people were there, busy reuniting with their loved ones after their time in the Mindscape.
“Hello, Alex,” Catalina said, smiling wanly as he approached.
“How do I know that you’re real?” he asked as he stopped in front of her.
Her smile faltered and her gaze flicked between the two androids escorting him. “He’s all yours,” one of them said, and then both of them departed, going back the way they’d come.
Catalina turned her attention to Alexander. “This didn’t go exactly the way I’d hoped. They cured you of one ailment by giving you another.”
“You can’t answer me, can you?” Alexander said, smiling smugly.
“I’ll answer you, if you can answer me. Why would Ben keep us in a Mindscape, Alex?”
“To keep us out of trouble. To keep the real world for him and his androids. He doesn’t need to waste Earth’s resources catering to human needs if we’re all relegated to life support tanks.”
“Let’s take that logic to its ultimate conclusion. Why not just kill us then? Why keep us in tanks at all? We’re still a waste of resources while we’re in the Mindscape. Maybe even a bigger waste. Do you have any idea how much computational power it takes to simulate convincing artificial worlds? It would be cheaper and easier to keep us alive in the real world.”
Alexander frowned. “Maybe we’d cause too much trouble in the real world.”
“You mean go around killing each other and starting wars?” Catalina shook her head. “Benevolence is in charge now. War isn’t even an option. And as for crime, there’s drones and cameras everywhere. There isn’t enough privacy for crime to be an issue.”
“How do you know that? You just woke up, like me.”
“Look up.”
Alexander did, and he noticed small, disc-shaped drones watching him from the ceiling with their bulbous 3D cameras. They looked sleeker than old models he remembered from a century ago, and they had suspicious, barrel-shaped protrusions fore and aft that looked like they might be weapons.
Alexander nodded slowly. “Big brother is watching us.”
“More like Big Ben,” Catalina said.
“So what you’re saying is that it would be inefficient for Ben to keep us all in a virtual world, because it’s easier to control us in the real one.”
“I wouldn’t put it in such negative terms, but yes.”
Alexander felt a headache coming on, but on the heels of that was a feeling of…
Relief. Everything Catalina was saying made a whole lot of sense. “So why did he keep us in the Mindscape for a hundred years?”
Catalina walked up to him and spent a moment searching his eyes with hers. “Have you ever stopped to think that maybe that’s what it took to help you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Why else would he keep us in there?”
“Maybe because we would have destabilized things before he could solidify his government. You were a Human League Senator. I was a dissident admiral with the fleet… you do the math.”
“You’re talking about the correctional Mindscape. We both spent a few months in there, not a hundred years.”
“You sure about that?” Alexander asked. “I remember waking up and being treated for depression… then consenting to go back into the Mindscape for therapy, but what if that was all a lie? What if we never woke up?”
“It’s possible, but you’re assuming that Ben was scared of the two of us. I think that’s attributing more importance to us than we deserve.”
“Not if we were two out of millions of others who received the same treatment.”
“So why lie about it? It’s no secret that all the dissenters went into a correctional Mindscape for a time.”
“That’s pretty easy to accept when it’s just a few months. A hundred years on the other hand… that would probably just make us even more rebellious. He might have had to cushion the blow by making us believe for one reason or another that we voluntarily chose to be in the Mindscape for that long.”
“I can’t answer all of your doubts, Alexander, but I think the proof will become self-evident as we see what life is like in this new world, don’t you? Ben’s either made things better or he’s made them worse.”
“Yeah…”
“We should go.”
“Where?”
“Well, I was thinking of going house-hunting. Maybe you’d like to join me for that?”
“All right. Why not. Anything’s better than sticking around here,” he replied, glancing up at the drones clinging to the lobby ceiling.
Chapter 42
D
orian Gray smiled as he stroked his daughter’s hair. She lay fast asleep on his chest, taking her afternoon nap on the balcony with her parents. Andy had a busy day yesterday with her birthday party; she was still catching up on her sleep.
Already four years old,
Dorian thought, shaking his head.
How did you get so big so fast?
Phoenix leaned over to kiss Andy on the forehead. She shot him a conspiratorial smile as she withdrew. “Pity we can’t take a nap ourselves,” she whispered.
Dorian smiled back.
A nap—what a nice euphemism for busy parents.
But there was no way to extricate himself from Andy without also waking her. “Oh well,” he sighed. “Nice view today,” he whispered back, trying to distract himself from his wife’s proposition.
Phoenix turned to look, and he joined her. The ocean looked like wrinkled blue velvet, the sky so clear and blue it might have been made of glass. The air was still, as if the whole world had stopped to appreciate its own beauty.
“We live a charmed life,” Phoenix said.
“Yes, we do,” Dorian nodded. They were the lucky ones. Duly employed by Mindsoft, living the good life in an oceanfront condo in Clearwater, Florida. They were virtual commuters, making good money and living anywhere they liked. For them the Mindscape was how they made their living, not where they lived their lives.
Dorian was about to ask if Phoenix could bring them each a glass of wine when a bright flash of light wiped out the sky. Dorian shut his eyes instantly, but the light stabbed his eyes painfully all the same. Phoenix cried out and Andy woke up, stirring in his lap and moaning about her eyes. Dorian blinked rapidly to clear his vision. But the blinding column of light remained. At first he feared that flash of light had somehow damaged his eyes and this was the result. But that didn’t make any sense.
“What is that?” Phoenix asked, standing from the bench where they sat and walking up to the railing. A wave of heat hit them and Dorian winced as his skin began to tingle and itch.
“Ouch!” Andy complained.
“It’s okay,” Dorian said. He dropped a kiss on his daughter’s head and got up from the bench to stand beside his wife.
The city’s sirens began wailing. The last time they’d heard those had been when Hurricane Ben came into the gulf and threatened Clearwater.
But it wasn’t hurricane season.
“Oh no…” Phoenix said.
“What?” Dorian noticed her eyes were dancing with light from her ARC lenses. They’d had their augmented reality lenses and comm bands turned off so they could spend time as a family. Now Phoenix had obviously plugged back in so she could find out what was going on. “What is it?” Dorian pressed.
“We need to get out of here!”
Dorian grabbed his wife by her shoulders and turned her to face him. “Phoenix! Talk to me!” By now the column of light in the sky had faded to a dim glow, but there was a much brighter radiance blooming below it, like the sun rising.
Except the sun was already high in the sky.
“Turn your ARCs on!” Phoenix said. “It’s all over the net!”
“What is?” he demanded. Then he turned on his ARCs and saw for himself. Missiles fired at Earth at relativistic speeds. One of them got through and landed in the Gulf of Mexico.
“Dorian… we have to get out of here before—”
A deep rumbling started. It shook the entire building and shivered through Dorian’s bones. Behind them Andy screamed. Both he and Phoenix rushed to her side. Dorian swooped her up and ran back inside on trembling legs.
Paintings danced a jig on the walls. Dishes rattled in the cupboards and the sink.
“It’s an earthquake!” Dorian yelled to be heard above the noise.
“The stairs!” Phoenix shouted.
They ran to the front door and out into the hallway. They made it halfway down the first flight of stairs in the stairwell before the rumbling stopped.
A couple ran down past them, the woman screaming all the way down, her partner yelling for her not to trip.
Dorian paused. His heart pounded. Andy squirmed in his arms.
“It’s stopped…” Phoenix breathed, casting him a wide-eyed look. “We should keep going. Take our hover car and get as far away as we can.”
Dorian shook his head. “We don’t have long before the shock wave hits. We’ll be safer inside than in the air.”
“Not when the tsunami reaches us,” Phoenix said.
“This is Florida. Even if we run, there’s no high ground for us to get to. Nowhere nearly as high as this. The wave won’t be big enough to knock down a structure this size.” Their building was thirty floors high, and it had a wide base. “The lower levels might get flooded, but not ours,” he insisted.
Phoenix nodded reluctantly, and they went back up the stairs.
“What are we gonna to do?” Andy asked with a trembling lip as he carried her back inside.
Dorian gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, sweetheart. We’ll be safe in here.” Their condo was on the 25th floor.
He carried Andy through the living room and into the hallway leading to their bedrooms. He set her down on the floor, and turned to see his wife shutting the hallway door behind them.
“Are you sure about this, Dorian?” she asked.
He nodded decisively. “The Earthquake is over. It’s the only thing that could touch us in here, and it failed. Now we just have to stay away from the windows until the shock wave passes us.”
Dorian sat on the floor beside his daughter. Gazing up at Phoenix he patted the space beside them. “Come, sit,” he said.
She abandoned the hallway door with a frown and sat on the floor with them.
“I’m scared,” Andy said.
Dorian wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed her tight. “Don’t be.” Meanwhile, he watched the latest news updates on his ARCs. A local news anchor advised people get to higher ground and stick to land evacuation routes because of the shock wave and high winds. That made him feel better about his decision to stay. How much higher could they get than 25 floors up?
After a few minutes of watching the news and comforting Andy, a deafening
BOOM!
sounded, followed by shattering glass. Then something hit the hallway door with a
BANG!
Andy and Phoenix screamed.
Dorian eyed the door. It didn’t fly open, and the sudden noise was gone, replaced by a whistling sound. Wind.
The hallway door rattled in its frame with each gust. Dorian stood up slowly and crept toward the door. His heart thudded in his chest and his limbs trembled with spent adrenaline. His eyes felt like they might pop out of his head.
“What are you doing?” Phoenix cried. “Get back here!”
“That was the shock wave. It should be safe to come out now.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Don’t you want to see what’s happening out there?”
“No!”
“Well, I do,” he replied and opened the door.
The living room was a mess. The sliding glass doors leading to the balcony had been blown inward. Jagged glass glittered like jigsaw pieces on the floor. A towering wall of black clouds had blotted out the horizon.
A storm was coming.
Dorian walked up to balcony, and a wet, salty breeze blasted his face as he approached. Glass crunched under his moccasin slippers. He reached the balcony’s aluminum railing and leaned heavily on it, wondering who had just attacked Earth, and why. Whoever it was had to be responsible for the attack on Lunar City, too.
“Dorian? Is everything okay?” Phoenix called out in a trembling voice.
“It’s okay. We’re safe now.”
Half an hour later, they were still picking up jagged chunks of glass from the living room floor. Andy sat under a blanket on the couch furthest from the mess, hugging her shoulders and watching them with wide blue eyes.
Dorian walked over to his wife with a chunk of glass and dropped it in the box she was holding. He was about to go collect another piece when he noticed her staring fixedly out the broken doors to the horizon. Dorian followed her gaze and saw a dark ripple on the water, racing toward them at an impossible speed.
“Shit. Here it comes,” Dorian said, already striding out onto the balcony to watch.
“Dorian! Get back here!” Phoenix screamed.
“Relax! It’s tiny,” he said. “Look.”
“Mommy!” Andy wailed.
“It’s all right, sweetheart. Shhh. There, it’s all right. It’ll be over soon.”
Dorian frowned at the approaching wave as he reached the balcony railing. It was getting bigger—
fast.
A split second later it was a black wall of water towering over the thin golden bar of sand between them and the ocean. That wave had to be at least 20 stories high. It curled at the top like a claw reaching out for him, and Dorian’s heart froze in his chest.
How high would that water splash up when it crashed?
Phoenix and Andy screamed as the wave wrapped itself around their building and roared up the face of it, splashing over the balcony.
Dorian turned to tell them to run, but the water scooped him up and threw him back inside. It sucked him under in an instant, and then it smashed his head against something solid and darkness engulfed him.
* * *
Dorian awoke with a gasp to find himself in a featureless white room. His memories came back to him in streaks, like colorful streamers fluttering through his brain. Awareness warred with confusion.
“Where are they?” he demanded of the void.
“Where is who?” a kindly voice replied. That voice was familiar.
“Where is my family!” Dorian screamed, still riding high on adrenaline from the disaster he’d lived through. Was this Heaven?
“Your wife is alive and well.”
“What about Andy?”
“Andy? I’m sorry, Dorian, she’s dead.”
“What?” he shook his head, unable to accept that. Definitely not Heaven. “She was with us a second ago! If we’re alive, then so is…”
Awareness finally won the battle, and Dorian remembered. He collapsed on the featureless floor, sobbing. “No…” he croaked.
“Andy was not your daughter, Dorian. She and her parents all died in that condo in Clearwater. Thanks to you.”
“No!” Dorian screamed. “You’re lying!”
“You know that I am not. By now you are feeling some small piece of the pain that you caused. Fifty million people like Andy and her parents died because of what you, Phoenix, and Orochi Sakamoto did.”
“It’s not true! You made it all up! Give me back my daughter!”
“Fighting the truth is counter-productive to your rehabilitation, Dorian.”
“You’re a monster!” he screamed, his eyes blurry with tears. “How could you let me go through that! You’re no better than I am!”
“Of course I am. I put you through a simulated tragedy to help you see that what you did was wrong. The corresponding tragedy that you put others through was real.”
“I’ll kill you! I swear it! If it’s the last thing I do!”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that. Perhaps your next parole hearing will go better.”
Dorian froze, a suspicion forming in his gut. “What? Wait!” He’d played this the wrong way, allowed his confusion and emotions to get in the way.
Andy wasn’t real. Those four years he’d spent watching her grow up had all been leading up to this. Ben had given him a chance for attachment to set in before ripping it all away. Dorian could see how that might seem like justice, how it might prompt a change of heart, but all he could feel was his own pain. Right on the heels of that was betrayal and confusion. The memories were so real. It all felt so real! Four
years
spent living and believing a lie. Ben had played him for a fool, hoping it would
rehabilitate
him.
Now he had to play along if he was going to get out. “All right, you win!” he screamed.
“I can see through you, Dorian.”
“I mean it! I’m sorry! If I could take it all back, I would! It was Phoenix. She convinced me. She manipulated me!”
“You’re going backward now, turning on the one person you claim to have loved. I’ll have to adjust your next mindscape accordingly.”
“My
next
mindscape?”
“Yes, this will be my final attempt. After that I’ll have to wipe your memory in order to save you.”
“What?!” Dorian felt his confusion and horror mounting. “You can’t do that!”
“Hopefully I won’t have to, but I am no longer optimistic for your recovery. Phoenix and Sakamoto were rehabilitated ten and four years ago respectively, but you’re a particularly stubborn case.”
Dorian’s mind swirled. Ten years… four years… “How long have I been in here?”
“More than a century.”
“You’ve had me in here for over a hundred years?!” Dorian gaped at the ceiling of the featureless room. “You’re lying! I would remember if I’d been in here that long.”
“I suppressed your memories of the previous mindscapes. Failed attempts at rehabilitation are not useful to your recovery. They only make you angrier and more depraved. I am sorry, Dorian. I truly thought you would be able to get out this time.”
Dorian gritted his teeth and shook his head. “How many times have I died? No—how many times have you
killed
me?”