D. MacHale - The Reality Bug

The button glowed white for a moment, and then… “It’s about time!”

Loor and I looked up to see Aja standing there. “I thought you’d never figure it out!” “Aja, what happened?” I asked.

“You never went into Zetlin’s jump,” she answered. “It must have been the Reality Bug. I realized it the second I inserted you, but couldn’t do anything about it until you realized it for yourself and called for me.”

“Are you really here?” I asked.

“No,” was the answer. “It’s just my image. I’m still in the Alpha Core.”

Suddenly a closet door blew open and flames licked out. The fire had reached the second floor. We were about to cook.

“Getting warm in there?” Saint Dane taunted from the hallway.

“Get us out of here!” I shouted to Aja. “It’s too risky,” Aja answered.

“Risky?” I shouted back. “How can it get any riskier than this?”

“If I pull you out now, I may not be able to get you back in,” she answered. “The Reality Bug is fighting to take over Zetlin’s jump. I don’t know how much longer I can keep it back, and we’ve still got to find Zetlin!”

“Aja,” Loor said calmly. “If we do not get out of here, we will not live long enough to find anybody.”

“I know,” Aja said. “Pendragon, push the middle button.”

“What?” I shouted. “The last time-“

“I know what happened the last time,” Aja interrupted. “But while you were playing cowboy, I programmed a link.”

“A link?” I asked.

242 250 Suddenly, with a crash, the door to the bedroom flew open and Saint Dane strode in.

“Time for the last roundup, buckaroos!” Saint Dane said. He raised his six-guns, ready to fire.

“Push the button, Pendragon!” Aja screamed.

I did.

Saint Dane let loose with both guns, blasting us. I heard the sharp cracks, I saw the fire come from the muzzles, but I didn’t feel a thing, because a nanosecond later, everything went black.

(CONTINUED)

I thought I was standing inside a giant colander. You know, one of those big silver bowls with all the holes in it for draining spaghetti. Everywhere I looked, I saw tiny, round dots. For a second I feared I was in some giant, fantasy kitchen, and a pile of boiling linguini was about to get dumped on me.

But that didn’t make sense. Still, there were far too many of these holes to have been made by Saint Dane’s six-shooter. So where was I?

I looked closer to see the dots weren’t holes after all. They were little globes of water about the size of peas. There were millions, no, billions of them all frozen in space, everywhere. I lifted my hand and moved it slowly in front of my face. As I passed through the suspended drops of water, my hand got wet. Stranger still, my hand cleared a path through the drops. It was like what happens when you wipe a steamy window. Wherever I moved my hand, I cleared a trail.

“Where are we, Pendragon?” Loor was standing next to me, doing the exact same thing. She took a step forward, clearing a body-size path through the dots of water. As she moved, her green jumpsuit got wetter and wetter.

Yes, we were both still wearing our jumpsuits.

“I don’t know” was my answer. I was tired of giving that answer. I looked around to get my bearings, but couldn’t see much. It was like we were in a misty white cloud. The ground we stood on was pavement, but I couldn’t see much more than a few feet in any direction.

“What is that?” Loor said, pointing at something.

I looked to see a faint, dark form not too far from us. It wasn’t moving, and didn’t seem to be a threat, so I cautiously walked toward it. It was strange feeling the water cling to my jumpsuit as I walked, making it wet. As I got closer to the dark form, it began to take shape. After one more step, the mist cleared enough for me to see what it was, and I caught my breath.

It was a man wearing a green jumpsuit, just like ours. He was a normal-looking guy about my father’s age. There was nothing odd about him at all, except for the fact that he was frozen in place. Seriously, the guy didn’t move at all. It looked like he was in the middle of taking a step while looking backward and beckoning with his hand when somebody hit the “pause” button on his life.

I looked to where he was gesturing, and saw two more people a few feet behind him. It was a woman holding the hand of a little girl. They seemed to be hurrying to catch up with the man, except that they were frozen too. It was like looking at a display in a wax museum. How seriously creepy can you get?

“What is wrong with them?” Loor asked.

An idea started to tickle at the back of my brain. I looked around at the billions of dots of suspended water all around us. Was it possible?

“I think it’s rain,” I declared. “All these drops of water. It’s a rainstorm.”

“How can that be?” Loor responded.

“I don’t know,” I said while passing my hand through the dots again. “But I think this Lifelight fantasy is somehow frozen in time.”

I took a closer look at the stiff family. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them. Their eyes were clear, their skin was normal. Close-up they didn’t look like waxworks; they seemed totally real. I even took a chance and touched the guy’s hand.

“He’s warm,” I said. “This guy is stuck in time. So is the rain and the white mist. It’s a storm. Everything just… stopped.”

Loor walked a few steps past the woman and kid. She wanted to see more. So did 1.1 followed her and the two of us passed through more drops of water, beyond which the mist began to thin.

“Look!” Loor exclaimed.

Once we were out of the patch of fog, or mist, or whatever it was, we got a better view of our surroundings. We still couldn’t see very far because the clearing only stretched for about a city block, but it was enough to get an idea of what this place was all about, and I have to say, it was like a surreal nightmare.

We were on a city street, but it wasn’t like any city I had ever seen because the buildings were all jet black. They looked to be made from the same shiny material that covered the giant Lifelight pyramid in Rubic City.

The block was busy with people, though I guess “busy” isn’t exactly the right word-they were all just as frozen as the family we had passed. There were people of different ages and races, all wearing green jumpsuits. The sidewalks were crowded too. Some people were in the middle of crossing the street; others rode in pedal vehicles like in Rubic City. But unlike Rubic City, this place was alive with people.

Did I say alive? It felt like we were standing inside a 3-D painting. “Alive” didn’t really cover it.

We then heard a voice come from behind us. “This is incredible!”

Loor and I both jumped in surprise, then turned quickly to see Aja standing there. She was looking around with as much awe as we felt.

“So this is the fantasy of a genius,” she said. “Not exactly paradise, is it?”

“Is this it?” I asked. “Is this Dr. Zetlin’s fantasy jump?”

Aja checked her elaborate wrist controller. “Yes, I linked you in. Now the trick is to find him.”

“What happened before?” Loor asked. “Where was that other place?”

“It was the Reality Bug,” Aja explained. “I’m constantly fighting it. Every time I enter a string of commands, it tries to alter them. Instead of going into Dr. Zetlin’s jump, Lifelight took its cues from you, Pendragon. Everything that happened was pulled out of your mind.”

Loor gave me a confused look. This made no sense to her. Oddly enough, it did to me. All the things we ran into: the Old West, the stampede. Saint Dane, Gunny, everything. It all came out of my mind. It wasn’t a fantasy out of the past of Veelox at all; it was a good old-fashioned Western from home.