D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

‘Alex! What happened?” she yelled.

Alex couldn’t answer. He was sitting in his chair with blank eyes still staring at the screens.

Alex was dead. On his neck were bite marks. There was no mistake. The quig in my fantasy jump had somehow killed Alex out here in reality. Whatever the Reality Bug had done, it had turned Lifelight inside out. Right now, in cubicles all over the pyramid, all over Veelox, people were in mortal danger as they faced their worst nightmares in their own fantasies… for real.

“Shut it down,” I said.

Aja continued to stare at Alex, unbelieving. She couldn’t move.

“Aja, shut it down!” I shouted. “You gotta save those people!”

“This can’t be happening,” she said, stunned. “They’re just fantasies”

I grabbed Aja and forced her to look at me. “Not anymore they’re not!” I shouted.

“But it’s illusion!” Aja argued. “It’s not real!”

“Is that real enough for you?” I asked, pointing at poor, dead Alex.

“There must be some other explanation,” she argued.

“Yeah?” I shot back. “Then how do you explain this?” I let her go and turned my back to her, shoving out my arm. What I wanted her to see was proof positive that what was happening inside Lifelight was no fantasy. I showed her my arm. It was the arm that got sliced by the claw of the quig when we escaped under the bleachers. My jumpsuit was cut, with dried blood around the edges.

“That blood is real,” I said. “It hurts, and so does my nose. My injuries didn’t go away when we got back.”

Aja stared at my arm as if her brain wouldn’t let her accept what her eyes were seeing.

“Aja,” I said softly. “It’s not a fantasy anymore.”

She looked at me with confusion. Her orderly world had just been blown apart. Then the door to the cubicle flew open and a phader ran in.

“Aja!” he shouted with terror. “It’s happening all over Veelox. Lifelight has been totally corrupted.”

Aja forced herself to think. She blinked once, then her eyes focused. “Did you contact the directors?” she asked.

“They’re all jumping!” the phader answered. “Every one. We can’t get to them!”

Aja looked to Alex’s control board.

“Shut it down, Aja,” I said again.

“I can’t,” she finally answered. “There’s no such thing. People would die.”

“But we have to do something!” I demanded.

Aja was thinking fast. I saw a spark in her eye. An idea. She turned back to the phader and said, “We’ve got to suspend the grid.”

“What?” the phader shouted. “We can’t!” “Do you have a better idea?” The phader didn’t.

“Get your key!” Aja commanded him. She reached around her neck and pulled out a black-cord necklace from under her jumpsuit. Attached to it was a large, green card.

The phader hadn’t budged.

“Move!” Aja commanded.

The phader was shocked back to reality. He hurried to the control panel while pulling out his own cord necklace. He had a green card on it, just like Aja’s. The two stood at opposite ends of the complex array of controls.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the phader said softly.

Aja shot the guy a look. “Insert!”

They both took their green cards and inserted them into slots on either side of the control array. Aja then flipped about a dozen switches, the last of which was behind a clear, plastic cover. She lifted the cover to reveal a red toggle switch. The phader was working a duplicate set of switches, with the final being a similar red toggle switch.

Aja took a breath and said, “On my mark. Three, two, one… suspend.”

They both flipped the red switches.

Instantly all the monitors went blank. The thousands upon thousands of images that were being displayed had been replaced by the same single, flat color of green. The alarms all stopped as well, leaving everything eerily quiet.

I looked to the phader. He was crying.

“What happened?” I asked.

Aja stared ahead blankly. Her voice was calm and even. “We just suspended the grid.”

“You mean, you shut it down?” I asked.

“No, the jumpers are still in Lifelight, but the jumps are frozen. Nothing will happen to them. All over Veelox. Millions of people are lying in the grid, waiting.”

“For what?”

Aja then looked at me. Her eyes were red and frightened. “They’re waiting for me to figure out what went wrong.”

(CONTINUED)

“How could you do that?”

“What happened?”

“This is impossible!”

Aja was in the center of a storm of phaders and vedders, all screaming at her, wanting to know why she suspended the grid. Whatever that meant. No sooner had the two switches been thrown, than the blue- and red-suited technicians came flooding into the control room, demanding answers. Most of the computer screens now showed live images of phaders and vedders from all over Veelox who were demanding to know what had happened. It wasn’t until those faces started showing up on all those screens that I realized the full deal.

Aja hadn’t only suspended Lifelight here in Rubic City, she had suspended the entire territory. At that moment millions upon millions of people all over Veelox were lying in suspended animation.

“Everybody, listen to me!” shouted Aja. Nobody did. They were too scared. I can’t blame them. Their world was on the verge of crashing. Heck, if they weren’t scared, they should be.

“Please, let me speak!” Aja begged. But the questions kept coming.

“My whole family is on a jump!”

“We’ve got to get back online and get them out!”

It was borderline chaos. All I could do was stay out of the way and hope that Aja could handle this. Finally she went to the control panel and with a look of pure determination, pressed a large green button. A screeching horn sounded that forced everyone, including me, to cover their ears. I saw that the technicians on the monitors were cringing as well.

After a few seconds Aja took her finger off the button and the horn fell silent. The phaders and vedders went silent too. They must have been afraid Aja would blast them again. Aja hit another switch and spoke into a microphone on the console. Her voice was amplified throughout the pyramid and heard by the technicians on the monitors.

“My name is Aja Killian,” she said calmly. “I’m the senior phader on duty here in Rubic City. I’m the one who authorized the suspension of the grid.”

Everyone started shouting again.

Aja jammed on the horn. Again, everybody quieted down. She released the button, but kept her finger close, ready to blast it again if anybody got out of hand.

“We had an emergency,” she explained. “Jumpers were in trouble throughout Veelox.”

I looked at the wall of monitors and saw several of the technicians nodding. For the first time I noticed how young they all looked. I scanned the monitors, searching for at least one gray-haired, wise scientist who would save the day. There weren’t any.

“As best as I can tell,” Aja continued, “the processing code has been corrupted.”

People gasped. Whatever that meant, it must have been bad.

“How can that be?” a phader shouted, risking another blast from the horn. “That’s never happened before!”

I looked to Aja. This had to be one of the toughest moments of her life. She knew exactly how it could be. Things had gone whacko because she had introduced a bug into the system. A Reality Bug. Worse, it was a bug that Saint Dane had somehow made even more powerful than it was supposed to be.

“But it has happened,” Aja said firmly. “The jumpers are in danger. Suspending the grid was the only way to buy us time to solve the problem.”