Michael Grant - Hero

“I don’t want to look like . . . ,” Cruz began, then veered away into a low, abashed mutter concluding with, “I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him, geez.”

Dekka sat down opposite her in the place Armo had vacated and leaned forward to keep her conversation with Cruz private. “Sweetheart, Armo is a good guy. Just whatever you do, don’t ever try to order him around. Other than that, though? The boy is pure Malibu beach bum, mellow to the bone. Just, again, and I cannot stress this too much: don’t tell him what to do.”

Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I got that. He mentioned he was ODD. It took me a while to figure out he meant Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”

Dekka smiled affectionately. “Oh, Armo’s regular old odd , too, but he’s good people. When things get hairy, you want Armo nearby.”

Armo. Crazy, fearless, and reckless. I have a type, Dekka thought dryly, even if it isn’t always a romantic type.

She moved to the far end of the vast living room, where Shade was now in earnest conversation with Malik.

“Hey, Dekka,” Shade said, waving her to a seat. “Malik is theorizing.”

Of all the internal relationships within the Rockborn Gang, none was more emotionally loaded than Shade and Malik’s. Shade had been present four years earlier when the FAYZ had at last come down, releasing its traumatized young inhabitants, Dekka among them. Shade had lost her mother that day, killed by Gaia, the monstrous alien in human form who had terrorized the last days of the FAYZ. That death had spawned an obsession in Shade, an obsession that had dragged Cruz and Malik into this new nightmare world with her.

Malik was what he now was because of Shade. He lived with the constant presence of the Dark Watchers because of Shade. They had been with him as he had spent the night with her, seeing what he saw, feeling his emotions.

What must that have been like for Malik? Dekka wondered. And the same phrase she’d applied to Cruz came to mind again: you poor kid.

“Once upon a time the most sophisticated computer game on earth was just a virtual tennis ball and two virtual rackets,” Malik said, talking between bites of blueberry muffin. “We moved up to Pac-Man and Galaga. Then Mario and Donkey Kong. Then the Sims, where human players could create and control avatars meant to represent humans. That was the turning point, right there. That was the point when the gamer became a god. The gamer wasn’t just a happy face gobbling up power dots and chasing ghosts; the gamer was creating virtual people and manipulating their world.”

“Talking Dark Watchers?” Dekka asked in a low voice. Shade nodded.

“If you created a perfect sim, so perfect, so sophisticated that it encompassed millions, even billions of individual people,” Malik went on, animated as he often was when prosing on about either science or great guitarists, “a simulation so advanced that each of those simulated people acted independently, so real that the game pieces, the avatars, experienced what felt like reality—”

Dekka held up a hand. “Is this going to involve math?”

Malik winked at her, and Dekka was caught off guard by the almost maternal feelings she had for him. Shade might be a manipulative brainiac, but the girl had excellent taste in men.

“I’ll stick to English,” Malik said.

“Proceed,” Dekka said. Her gaze shifted to Shade and she thought, If you break this boy’s heart, I will personally administer a beat-down.

“The point is that simulations can be reproduced like any other computer program. So if we suspect that there is a single simulation, we have to suspect that there could be millions. One reality and a potentially unlimited number of sims. Simulations might outnumber reality by billions to one. Which would mean statistically it’s likely that we are not in an original, evolved reality, but in a sim.”

Cruz returned from the bathroom and flopped down, spilling a bit of her coffee. “Oh, God, are we doing this again?”

“He promised no math,” Dekka stage-whispered.

“Basically there would be no way to ever know if you are living in a sim or not. Unless something goes wrong. A glitch. Or maybe a hack.”

“You think the Dark Watchers are the hackers?” Shade asked for the benefit of Dekka and Cruz, since she knew almost as much about it as Malik did, give or take a college-level physics course.

Malik shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe we’re a TV show. Maybe we’re a game. Maybe we’re something our three-dimensional brains can’t even describe.” He winced, closed his eyes as if in pain. Sometimes the attention of the Dark Watchers was so intrusive it felt like a kind of pain. After a moment Malik continued. “The question is: Francis.”

“I can hear you,” Francis said, coming back in, reaching for the overflowing platter of pastries, and pausing to ask, “Can anyone have these?”

“Francis, eat,” Cruz said.

“You’re an anomaly,” Malik said, turning to address Francis. “Everyone else who has taken the rock has three things in common.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One: they’ve been changed physically, given a morph, sometimes vaguely animal, other times . . .” He shrugged. “Second: a power, an ability that defies conventional physics. And third, the Dark Watchers in your head any time you’re in morph.”

“All except Francis,” Shade said. “Morph? Yes, that whole prismatic, rainbowy thing she does. Power? Definitely. But no Watchers. Why?”

Malik sighed. “Well, babe . . .” He froze for a moment and shot a guilty look at Shade. “I mean, Shade, that just, um . . . slipped out.”

Shade smiled, a rare occurrence, especially recently. “You know, bunny , I kind of don’t think our secret is much of a secret.”

“What?” Cruz erupted in mock surprise. “Shade and Malik?”

“I’m shocked,” Dekka said in a perfectly flat voice.

“Anyway,” Malik said, too loudly.

“Don’t ever try to stop Malik once he’s got his lecture on,” Shade said.

“As I was saying—”

“So? How was it?” Cruz interrupted, batting her eyelashes.

Malik gaped at her in shock, his mouth open.

But Shade, in a low, marveling voice said, “Like you’ve fallen off a cliff and you’re going to die and then, suddenly, a hand grabs you and hauls you back up.” She made a face meant, belatedly, to make it seem like a joke.

Well, well, she’s human.

“ So ,” Malik persisted, his voice a bit desperate, “The point is if we are living in a sim, then what we always saw as the immutable laws of physics are just so much software, the OS of this universe. And software can be rewritten. The fact is, none of this superpower stuff is possible, not under the laws of reality we’ve always accepted. Someone, some thing , has rewritten the program that defined those laws of physics.”

Francis had kept well clear of the gentle teasing. Dekka knew she did not yet feel like she was really part of the group, and probably felt young besides.

“If we’re just some program, then . . . well, what?” Francis asked.

Malik shrugged. “Nothing changes, really. We cannot help but feel real because we are real, subjectively. I think, therefore I am, as Descartes said.”

“Who’s day cart?” Francis wondered aloud.

“No, no,” Shade said, shaking her head. “Whatever you do, don’t get him off on a tangent.”

“We experience real emotions, real pain, at least it’s real to us,” Malik went on, trying to float above the constant interruptions. “At one level it all doesn’t change anything, real or sim. But . . .”

“But?” Dekka prompted, trying to resist a croissant and wondering if she could use the Caesars gym without being interrupted by people wanting to get a selfie with a Rockborn mutant freak.