D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

“He’s a jerk,” Aja explained. “But he’s the best phader there is. Next to me, of course.”

“So then why aren’t you going to be the phader for my jump?” I asked.

“Because we’re jumping together. Didn’t you hear what I said?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t know that was possible,” I said with total surprise.

Aja didn’t explain. Instead she entered another control room. This one was empty. Nobody sat in the control chair and all the screens were dark. She gave a quick glance back to the corridor to see if anyone was watching, then sat in the control chair and expertly hit a few buttons on the control pad that was built into the arm. Instantly a small section of the console in front of us sprang to life with indicator lights. Aja reached into the pocket of her jumpsuit and took out the tiny, silver computer disk she called the Reality Bug. After another quick glance outside, she stood up, went to the console, and inserted the disk into a slot in the board. She quickly sat back in the chair, hit a few more buttons, then ejected the disk and popped it back into her jumpsuit. Another few keystrokes and the console went dark. The whole event took a grand total of twenty seconds.

“It’s loaded,” she announced, and left the control room.

She either knew exactly what she was doing, or knew how to put on a good show.

“What did you just do?” I asked.

Aja shot me a quick look that had “Shut up, idiot” written all over it.

We entered the center of the pyramid and I was once again stunned by the enormous size of the place. We took the elevator up, made the scary walk across the bridge to the far side, and found an empty cubicle. This one was different than the others I had seen. It was bigger, with two silver disks on thewall rather than just one. Aja went right to the control panel and started to program our jump.

“How does this work?” I asked. “I mean, how can we jump together?”

“It’s your jump,” she explained while programming the panel. “Lifelight will take all of its cues from you. I’m just along for the ride.”

“Can you control anything that happens?”

“No, I told you. It’s your jump. We’ll experience everything the same way, though. We’ll be in this together.”

With a few more keystrokes, the two silver disks on the wall slid open, and the two tables slowly ejected.

“There’s something I don’t get-“

“There’s a lot you don’t get,” she interrupted.

I ignored the insult. “If people spend months and years in here, how do they eat? And go to the bathroom?”

Aja pointed inside the tube. “See those two pads?”

There were two black squares that were flush with the top of the white tube. “If there’s going to be an extended jump, those pads drop down and the vedders attach them to the stomach of the jumper.”

She showed me that there were two zippers on the front of our jumpsuits. They were about four inches long, the exact same length as the black pads.

“Attach? That sounds gruesome.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Aja assured. “They rest on the skin. One pad excretes a form of gloid that gets absorbed into the jumper’s system. The other pad removes waste.”

“So you eat and, well, do your, uh, business through those pads?” I said, totally disgusted.

“Business?”

“You know what I mean.”

“The system bypasses the body’s normal metabolic processes. It’s all about breaking everything down into its base chemical structure so it can pass through the skin. I’m not exactly sure how that happens. It’s not my field. But I do know this much: perfecting the feeding system was the last piece in the trouble puzzle. Once people could stay alive inside the tubes for long periods of time, they had no reason to come out.”

The idea of lying in a dark tube, being fed through my skin by a pad that took away waste was kind of gross. I was glad our jump was going to be quick.

“Let’s go,” Aja said, and climbed onto one of the tables.

“What do I do?” I asked while climbing onto the other one.

“Same as last time. Think of a place you want to be, and that’s where we’ll go.”

“But the Reality Bug is going to make it different?”

Aja chuckled. “Oh yeah.”

I didn’t like that. I wanted to know exactly how much different it was going to be, but I didn’t get the chance to ask. A second later Aja hit a few buttons on her wrist controller and our tables slid into the tube.

“You know what you’re doing, right?” was all I could get out before my head went inside.

Aja answered with a laugh. I hoped that meant yes. A second later I was all the way into the tube, and the door closed behind me.

I was in the dark again. In more ways than one. Where was Lifelight going to send me this time?

(CONTINUED)

My body started to feel heavy, like I was being pushed into the table. I felt a little sleepy too. This was pretty much what happened the last time I was in here, so I wasn’t worried. But my heart was starting to beat faster with anticipation.

I felt something dry and scratchy brush against my face. It didn’t scare me or anything because even though I didn’t know what it was, it somehow felt… right. I reached up to find out what it was, and discovered there was something covering my face. It felt like a towel. How did a towel end up on my face? I grabbed hold of it and pulled it away as…

The roar of the gymnasium crowd came flooding back like someone had just swung open a soundproof door. I pulled the towel away to find myself sitting on the bench between Petey Boy and Jimmy Jag. I was back at the basketball game at the exact same moment where I’d left it. Yes! It looked like I was going to get my extra twenty minutes after all.

It took a few seconds for me to get my head back into the situation. I glanced up at the scoreboard. It was all tied up at fifty-eight and we were headed for overtime. I had just sunk two free throws and the crowd was going ape. Coach

Darula came over and knelt down in front of us.

“We’ve been here before!” he shouted over the noise of the crowd. “Five minutes of OT. We’ve got the experience, we’ve got the conditioning, and now we’ve got them scared. All we have to do is keep our poise and the game is ours. Bring it in.”

We all brought our hands together and Coach shouted, “One, two, three…”

We all answered with “Win!” then dropped our hands and jumped up to take the court. I was back up to speed, warmed up, and ready to go. Oddly, I even felt a little tired and sweaty, as if I had just played a full regulation game of basketball… which I had, in my fantasy. As we trotted out onto the court I heard a lone voice calling from the stands. Though it wasn’t very loud, it cut right through the noisy crowd.

“Good luck.”

I turned back and saw Aja sitting in the stands behind the bench, dressed like a high school kid with jeans and a sweatshirt. She was holding a red pennant that said “Cardinals” and waved it with absolutely no enthusiasm. She really stood out against the rest of the crowd that was going totally nuts.

There was something about the way she said “good luck” that gave me an uneasy feeling. There was more. I looked up into the stands where I remembered you guys, Mark and Courtney, were sitting. But you weren’t there. Odd. Everything was the same as when I left the fantasy before, except that the two of you were gone. Another look told me my family wasn’t there either. I figured this was the kind of thing Aja was talking about when she said the Reality Bug made the jumper’s experience less than perfect.

As soon as I got to the center of the court for the tip-off, I noticed something else had changed. The players from Easthill High seemed bigger than before. It wasn’t like they were sundenly giants or anything, but they definitely had more muscle and a few inches of height. They didn’t look all that tired, either. I wasn’t sure of what was going on, but there was one thing I felt certain about.