D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

“Ask!” I shouted.

Aja sighed and said, “It’s possible to jump into Lifelight and find Zetlin.”

“But I thought the grid was in suspense?” “Suspended,” she corrected.

“Whatever.”

“It is, but there’s another way,” Aja said.

She walked to the far side of the Alpha Core, where there was another door. She took out her green card and inserted it in a slot. Instantly the door slid open. I peered into the room beyond and was surprised to see a room similar to the jump cubicles in the pyramid. Only this one had three large silver disks on the wall.

“This is the original unit,” she explained. “The alpha grid. It operates independently from the main grid. I could bring it back online by itself.”

I gazed into the cubicle as the reality of what she was telling me slowly sank in. “Are you saying-“

“Yes. Dr. Zetlin is in there.”

Whoa. The father of Lifelight was lying only a few feet away. It felt like I was peering into a tomb. But it was no time to pay respects.

“So fire up the alpha grid and pull the old guy out of there!” I said.

“I can’t,” Aja said. “He doesn’t want to come out.”

“So what!”

“It’s the same problem,” Aja said, trying to be patient. “He programmed the jump so nobody could end it. He doesn’t even have a phader or vedder assigned to him. Without the origin code, I can’t end his jump.” She glanced into the cubicle and added, “But I can put somebody else in.”

“You’re telling me we could enter his jump, the way you were in my jump?”

“Well… sort of.”

“Tell me everything, Aja. C’mon!” I suddenly understood the term “like pulling teeth.” Sheesh.

“Yes, it’s possible to enter his jump. The trick then is to find Zetlin and convince him to give up the code.” “Then let’s do it!”

“We can’t! I mean, I can’t. I mean… I can’t go with you.” “Why not?”

“Because somebody has to stay out here and phade the jump or you might not get back out again. You’d have to go alone, Pendragon. That’s why I said it’s too much to ask.”

Gulp. A few minutes ago I thought Aja was going to sit down at that control console and make everything okey-dokey. Now I was faced with the possibility of going back into that crazy fantasy world.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “If Zetlin’s jump is on a different circuit-“

“Grid.”

“Yeah, grid, whatever, stop correcting me. Since it’s different, did the Reality Bug infect it?”

“I can’t be absolutely sure,” she said slowly. “But I would have to say… yes. The overall operating software is the same, and that’s what I designed the bug to attack.”

“So let me understand,” I said. “The only way we can get rid of the Reality Bug is for me to jump into Dr. Zetlin’s fantasy and get this code from him. But it might be a horror show if the bug is doing its thing?”

“Yes, that’s about it.”

Oh, man, no way I wanted to go. After what happened in my own fantasy with the quigs, the idea of jumping into somebody else’s fantasy was truly horrible. Worse, I was going to have to do it alone.

“I don’t want you to go, Pendragon,” Aja said quietly. “It’s too dangerous.”

“Yeah, me neither. But what choice do I have?”

Aja shook her head. “What you said before makes sense.

We’re stronger together. It’s way too risky for you to jump in by yourself. I don’t know what to do.”

The reality of the situation was beginning to sink in. I was going to have to jump by myself.

That’s when an idea hit me.

“There might be another way,” I said. “What if I got somebody else to jump with me?”

“Who?” Aja asked quickly. “You can’t ask one of those technicians out there. If they find out what’s really going on, there’ll be a riot.”

“I’m not talking about one of them,” I said. “I’m talking about another Traveler. Somebody who knows the bigger picture and how important this is. If anybody is going to jump with me, it has to be another Traveler.”

Aja let the idea sink in, then nodded. “Sure. I could send you both in. Do you have somebody in mind?”

“Absolutely,” I answered. “And I can’t think of anybody I’d trust more to get us out of a gnarly situation… alive.”

(CONTINUED)

“If I thought there were a better way of doing this, I swear I wouldn’t be here asking you to come along,” I said.

This was tough. I was asking a friend and fellow Traveler to go on a dangerous mission. In some ways it was more dangerous than anything we had faced so far, because we were dealing with the unknown. When we were in my own jump, the Reality Bug searched my brain for things I was afraid of and came up with those vicious quigs. As scary as that was, at least I knew all about the quigs and could figure out a way to beat them. But once we were in Dr. Zetlin’s jump, the dangers would be from his memory, and we wouldn’t have a clue as to how to battle the nastiness that might come flying out of his genius brain.

“I could go myself,” I said. “I will if I have to, but I think we have a better chance of pulling this off together.”

I could have asked any of the Travelers to help me, except for Gunny because I still wasn’t sure what happened to him on Eelong. But of all the Travelers, there was one I felt had a superior chance of helping me battle whatever boogeymen we found on the jump into Dr. Zetlin’s fantasy world. That was Loor.

“You have explained this Lifelight very well, Pendragon,” she said. “Yet, it is hard for me to believe it is possible.”

“Weren’t you the one who told me that after all we’ve seen, we shouldn’t think anything is impossible?”

Loor looked right into my eyes and gave a little smile. That didn’t happen often. Loor wasn’t the smiley type. But when she did, it made my heart melt. It wasn’t until I saw her again, here on her home territory of Zadaa, that I realized how much I had missed her.

Aja had taken me back to the gate, where I flumed to Zadaa. I have to admit, part of me wanted to flume to Eelong to find Gunny, but I needed to find Loor. I could only hope that Gunny was okay.

I had been to Zadaa once before, with Spader, so I knew the way to Loor’s home. I arrived at the gate on Zadaa and quickly changed into the white robe that was waiting for me. (Boxers stayed on, as usual.) I then made my way quickly through the labyrinth of underground tunnels that brought me out to the wide, subterranean river flowing under the city of Xhaxhu. Behind the waterfall that fed the river was a portal that I knew would lead me to the ramp up to the city. Everything was pretty much the same as I remembered it, except for a few disturbing changes.

Through the portal behind the waterfall was the giant giz-matron that controlled the flow of the underground rivers of Zadaa. It was a coolio-looking device with dozens of different-size pipes that ran floor to ceiling. In front of the pipes was a control platform with a series of levers and dials and switchesthey used to control the river water. Spader and I had watched a guy work this bad boy when we were there before. Well, when I entered the chamber this time, there was a guy working the controls again, but with one big difference.

“Stop right there!” a gruff voice shouted at me. “Where are you going?”

It was a big, beefy guard with a long, nasty-looking club that would do some serious damage if it made contact with any part of my body. In fact, three of these bad boys stood there, guarding the water controller. The people who lived underground were called Rokador. Loor told me that there was some tension between the Rokador tribe and the people who lived on the surface, the Batu. Whatever the tension was between these tribes, it must have gotten worse since I had been here. Before, the Rokador didn’t need guards.