As Worlds Drifted Page 8

  "Ah, Lily, I can't say how pleased we are to see you back amongst us," Woods said sincerely, I think, as he pulled in three chairs around one of the front desks. "Why don't we sit."

  Rancetti closed the door behind me, muffling the sounds of the high school hallway. "How are you, Lily?" She moved in to give me an awkward hug before my body language persuaded her otherwise. "I am so sorry for everything you have had to go through. I can't imagine...”

  "Should I get a lawyer or something?"

  "Hah!" Woods let out a forced laugh. He pulled out a chair, which I reluctantly sat down on. I had basically not spoken to anyone outside Alphacore for the past two months, and now, on my first day back, I was caught in a maelstrom of inter-human communication. I should have phased this thing in. "We thought it would be good to have a chat to set out a plan for the rest of the school year."

  Rancetti took over. "First things first, how are you holding up? We have the school psychologist on standby if you need to talk to someone—"

  "Competent?" I suggested.

  "If you will, yes, someone competent," she continued, not taking the bate, "someone trained to talk to survivors of suicide in family settings."

  My jaw tightened and my hands turned into fists. I wound up so tight that the words coming out of me had the volume squeezed out of them. "Let's get one thing straight, right off the bat... My father did not kill himself."

  Rancetti and Woods looked at each other as if sharing a moment, like my denial was expected—typical behavior for a kid in my position. I wasn't having it. I stood up. "This conversation is over," I said, regaining my composure. I pushed in my chair and walked out, not giving them a chance to stop me.

  There Will Be Blood

  My dad used to make the best sandwiches—whole rye, smoked turkey breast, rucola, mustard mayo. It was Tuesday, my second day back. I hadn't bothered to make any lunch, knowing full well that our fridge was devoid of any useful lunch components with the possible exception of the jar of mayo. George and Jamaal came to the rescue and let me pick from theirs—some carrot sticks from one and half a sandwich from the other. I didn't eat much nowadays anyhow, running mostly on fumes. In addition to the stubble on my head, the dark half-moons under my eyes, and my pale, almost translucent, skin, my cheekbones had been given a new prominence… a faint resemblance to some starved movie actress.

  Jarno took a bite out of his sandwich, "You know, George here has a Twitch channel, he's been trying to build traffic for the past two years."

  This was nerd-speak again, and it was passing way over my head. My failure to understand was compounded by my inattentiveness. On the far side of the lunchroom, Sarah, Carl, and Fenton were in their usual spots. My old seat was taken. It felt like an eternity since I sat at that end of the lunchroom. Sarah sat with her back to me, her golden hair swaying in animated conversation.

  I turned back to Jamaal, "I didn't understand a single thing you just said."

  Nick entered his mansplaining mode, his least attractive trait, but, admittedly, I had asked for it. "Twitch is similar to YouTube, but specifically meant for streaming online games. The more people who watch your games, the more money you can make through subscriptions, ads, donations, and for the lucky ones, sponsorships."

  "Anyhow, I checked your subscription numbers yesterday," Jamaal said.

  "Good for you," George said, taking a sip from his red coke. I couldn't help thinking that he should switch to diet—he was a type 2 diabetes time bomb.

  "How many subscribers do you think you have now, George?"

  "I really don't know, Jamaal. It's not like I check every day."

  "Would you be surprised to hear that it's 800?"

  "I would indeed."

  "In fact, yesterday evening, it was 814, to be precise."

  "Wow, astonishing."

  "Astonishing, indeed."

  I hadn't talked to Sarah yet since returning to reality. I looked back over to the far end of the lunchroom. Fenton, balancing on his chair, couldn't help himself and made furtive glances my way. I avoided the glances as best I could, but I failed once and our eyes met. For a second, I felt like I was spiraling back to the party on the beach… to another time, another life, when I was my father's daughter. The invincibility, the hope, the sense of entitlement even, were all so foreign to me now, they had been obliterated. But Sarah, Carl, and Fenton were still on that beach. We were forever separated.

  Jamaal's gibberish came back into focus. "Funnily enough, the correlation coefficient between Lily here," Jamaal indicated me with his open hand, should anyone be confused as to which one of us was Lily, "joining the team and the surge in subscribership of your Twitch channel, is perilously close to one."

  While George was fumbling for a response, Nick intervened to explain again. "People are joining George's channel in droves, not to watch George, no, they are joining to watch you."

  "What?!" I said, startled out of my near-coma.

  "It seems that your totally reckless, death wish, kamikaze style is popular nowadays," Jamaal said. "What it also means is that the 800 times 2.5 dollars that George will rake in this month will have to be split between the four of us."

  "What the hell!" George protested, pieces of baloney and tomato spurting out of his mouth. "It's my channel!"

  "To think of all the gear I could get for 500 a month," Nick said, staring off into space.

  "I'm not as stupid as I look," I said calmly. "It seems pretty clear to me, boys, that you're trying to screw me over. If I'm the main draw of the channel, the star so to speak, it stands to reason that I should be apportioned a majority of the revenue."

  George glanced at a fictitious watch on his wrist, "Wow, time flies." He stood up. "We gotta cruise."

  Nick and Jamaal followed suit. "See you after class," Jamaal said, grabbing his lunch detritus off the table.

  "You don't look stupid," Nick mumbled almost to himself as he pushed in his chair.

  I was suddenly alone at the table. The lunch crowd was thinning out. When will I ever feel like a part of all this again and stop being an outsider looking in? Over at the other side of the room, my old table stood empty. Sarah, Fenton, and Carl were gone.

  I was in my first gym class since I got back. The whole thing just felt totally surreal and pointless. I used to be a starter on both the school volleyball and field hockey teams, in addition to my sailing. The gym used to be my element.

  The team sat on a bench, the four of us in our shorts and t-shirts, waiting for Mr. Rockford to get the show rolling. I'd been allowed to borrow a kit from lost and found. My legs stuck out of the oversized shorts like ivory chopsticks. I looked down at my sorry limbs and realized that they hadn't seen the business end of a razor for months. Dark hairs lay stark against the pale skin of my shins—not many, and not thick ones, but it wasn't a pretty sight. I pulled up my socks as high as they would go, surprised that I cared, and could only hope that they would go unnoticed. I became acutely aware that Sarah, Carl, and Fenton were a mere two benches to my left. A coincidence that all seven of us were in the same class. A coincidence that I did not relish.

  "George, hadn't your parents implemented a forced Wi-Fi vasectomy?" Nick asked as we continued to wait. "Don't get me wrong, we're thrilled and all that you're still with us, but—”

  "He's hooked up to the neighbor's Wi-Fi," Jamaal explained.

  "A felony? Great start to your new life," Nick said.

  George held up his hands in resignation—his parents had sent him off to gamer rehab this past spring to try to wean him off his gaming addiction. The success of the rehab was mixed, to say the least.

  For a second, Nick's bare arm brushed against mine and goosebumps rushed along my arms and up into my scalp. I was so not used to anyone touching me that I would probably have had the same reaction if I'd been touched by a dead skunk, at least that's what I told myself. As if he sensed something, he leaned in. "How are you?" he asked.

  "Fine, why?"

  "It's just,
you know, finding that stuff in that globe of yours, we haven't really talked about—”

  "And you chose now to talk about it?"

  "Concerned citizen, that's all."

  "Yeah, right," said George as he stood up and stretched awkwardly. "Whatever happened to upholding the eighth amendment?" George grumbled to no one in particular as he lumbered onto the gym floor. My teammates had never been much for regular sports in general and PE in particular. The system of picking teams in PE based on popularity seemed wholly archaic and cruel. In egalitarian, enlightened, socialist some would say, Sweden, the PE teachers were instructed to pick teams at random, and collective punishment was illegal.

  The dodge ball swooshed past me, mere inches from my ear. Sarah didn't let up, her anger still palpable as she tried to mow me down. Fenton, on the other hand, seemed to deliberately avoid even noticing me, focusing his ire or disappointment on George, Nick, and Jamaal instead—with a particular inexplicable vehemence reserved for poor Nick.

  I wouldn't be letting them go silently into the night, and did what I could to keep the barbarians from the gate. That didn't stop us from getting hammered. I heard a smack next to me and one of us went down.

  "I see blood! Blood I tell you!" George cried as he sat on the gym floor holding his nose. George was being somewhat overdramatic—there was a minute amount of blood, nowhere near Game of Thrones or Macbeth quantities. Nick stormed over to the other side of the court and put his face inches from Fenton's, "You're a real ass! It's just a damn game!"

  "Back off, dweeb!" Fenton said, shoving Nick with both hands.

  "Make me!" Nick said as he retook his in-your-face position.

  This was infantile, but fearing it would come to blows, I inserted myself between the two, one hand on each chest, "Knock it off, you nutsacks." Magically, the two parted, both visibly uncomfortable.

  “Alright, enough drama for one day, hit the showers!" Mr. Rockford shouted. Fenton, as if coming out of a trance, turned and walked out of the gym. Sarah and Carl followed him.

  What the hell was happening? Why were worlds colliding?

  "Sorry about that," I said, looking at George still on the floor, holding his nose, and at Nick who was standing next to him, still trembling with rage.

  "You shouldn't apologize for that sob,” Nick said.

  I felt light-headed, almost like I was listing, like a ship taking on water. I took a deep breath. "We need to focus on the operation that lies ahead," I said, trying to redirect their attention. "We need to focus on Russia."

  Permafrost

  At first, George suggested sending the thumb drive contents ahead to his Russian hacker contact. This wasn't something I was ready to do. How could I trust anybody nowadays, let alone a hacker… a Russian hacker at that? George then offered to transfer the contents to a virtual thumb drive that Luna could carry with her into Alphacore. We decided to hedge our bets and only bring the video with us. Luna had the virtual thumb drive securely on her belt and could project its contents on any appropriate object.

  George managed to patch us into the Russian Alphacore using something called obfuscated servers—way over my head—but it was supposed to make us untraceable. The Russian authorities had an even stronger need to control the flow of information than the Americans. We spawned in together into Alphacore Russia, all from our four separate bedrooms.

  Jarno, ever knowledgeable, explained, “The Russians not only need to protect themselves from external and internal threats, but they also need to prop up a regime that is rotten to its core. These are the most corrupt bastards on the face of the planet."

  Girth continued, "Yeah, we're now entering the realm of the same bastards that blew up several apartment blocks in Russian cities in the 90s, killing more than 200 people. 200 of their own citizens."

  Jarno filled in, "I know, to create an excuse to start the second Chechen war. But let's not forget the Gulf of Tonkin when—"

  "Jesus! Will you all stop nerding out? We shouldn't be hanging out here in this shithole country any longer than we have to. State actors are probably already looking for us," Nuffian said. "Ok, let’s roll... beyond fear!" he cried.

  "Beyond fear!"

  In theory, there really shouldn't be a difference in the game rendering in the different Alphacore geographic zones, yet somehow, the difference was palpable as we spawned into Russian Alphacore. "Do you feel it?" I ventured as I pulled on a hoodie in real life.

  "Yeah, I feel it alright. It's cold as hell," Nuffian said.

  "Dreary is the word," Girth added. "Russia is the definition of dreary."

  We tried to stay clear of the most populated grids and keep to backroads as we made our way from our portal toward the coordinates George had managed to get off his mysterious hacker contact—one he assured us was on the good side. We didn't quite feel like being drawn into any unnecessary battles, or questioned by any FSB agents. George had patched in a real-time voice translator just in case. Like that would fool anybody.

  "This is it," Girth said.

  "This is what?" I asked, looking around me. We were in the middle of a field with nothing but grass, trees, and cows surrounding us.

  "We are where we’re supposed to be, according to the coordinates."

  "Get your weapons ready," Nuffian said as he scanned the horizon for incoming. "Seems like we've been duped."

  "Seems like your white-hat hacker friend just turned black," Jarno looked through his scope.

  "Let me check again, I must have gotten the coordinates wrong or something," Girth said apologetically.

  "I say we retreat to the portal now before all hell breaks loose," Nuffian said, turning to go back the way we came.

  "Wait, wait, wait," I said. I pointed to the nearest cow. "There's something seriously wrong with that one.” The cow had what looked like a brass handle sticking out of its side.

  "That's probably just so they can make milkshakes," Girth said.

  "Who do you think you are, Shel Silverstein?" Jarno said, backing off. "Watch out, could be an IED,"

  "An improvised explosive device," Nuffian explained.

  "Thanks again for mansplaining the obvious to me," I said as I walked up to the cow and pulled the handle. The cow opened up to reveal a hatch.

  "See, I told you we could trust the guy," Girth said triumphantly.

  "Come on, get in the cow before anybody sees us," I said.

  The hatch door shut behind us. The silence was total. We were standing at the edge of a huge chamber. “It’s like Smaug's Lonely Mountain lair,” Jamaal said, “just without the gold, the Arkenstone, the hobbits, the dwarves, the dragon, the vaulted ceilings, or even just plain rock for that matter.” In fact, the chamber looked to be made entirely of brushed steel.

  I looked back. The doorway we had just entered through was no more, only seamless steel. I glanced over at Nuffian next to me, he looked like he was thinking the same thing I was—we're trapped.

  In the middle of all this gray steel stood a figure. The figure was either incredibly small, like a Lego, or very far away. It was impossible to gain any perspective in all the sameness.

  "We have nothing to lose," I said and took a step towards the figure. Or, to be precise, I tried to take a step towards the figure. I couldn't move my feet. Nuffian, Girth, and Jarno were all also struggling against an invisible force that held their feet to the ground like with some giant magnet.

  "Hey!" Nuffian yelled. "Let us go!"

  Jarno raised his sniper rifle, put an eye to the scope, and put his finger on the trigger.

  "Put the gun down," I said in a near whisper. "Something tells me this guy has a home-court advantage."

  "Hey!" Nuffian tried again. "You know why we're here! No need for all this crap!"

  Nothing.

  "The guy is obviously security conscious, to say the least," I said as I removed my Magnum from its holster and placed it on the ground in front of me. "Put all your weapons on the ground."

  Girth, ever predictable
, said, "I worked too hard for these to let some random Russian steal them."

  "Just do as she says… what, you don't trust your own contact?" Nuffian said as he pulled off his own holster and dropped his AK47 on the ground.

  Jarno reluctantly threw his arsenal on the ground, including a crossbow and the sniper rifle. Girth huffed and puffed like a little kid but finally placed the HKA5 at his feet.

  My MP5 was now in front of me, I felt naked without her, as was my combat knife, and my Magnum.

  My feet released and I could finally start the journey to the middle of the chamber.

  Nuffian and Jarno were right behind me. Girth wasn't. He hadn't budged.

  "You know what you have to do," Nuffian said without looking back. Girth grimaced as he pulled out a sword and, shaking his head, dropped it. He tried to move but his feet still wouldn't budge.

  "We don't have all day," Jarno sighed.

  Girth looked like he was about to cry, his lower lip quivered. For a second, I thought he'd rather stay put than give up his last weapon. With a great deal of effort, he brought out a gold-plated pistol and slowly placed it on the pile of weapons in front of him. His feet released.

  It felt like forever. We walked towards the figure in the middle of all this sameness, and then walked some more, and then some more. At first, we couldn't even tell if the figure was getting any closer. But finally, I could start to make out some of the details.

  "Who does he think he is, Ezio?" Jarno chuckled.

  The others chuckled. I chuckled with them, having no idea who this Ezio was—I learned later that he was some character out of a game called Assassin’s Creed. Nuffian seems to have gotten the message and stopped his mansplaining, just when I needed some.

  The figure was standing, facing us. He had a grayish cloak with a hood that threw his eyes into shadow. Only his nose and mouth were visible. After what felt like a mile, we stood face to face with him and I noticed that he was smoking. Ezio had a cigarette between his tight lips, the tip of which glowed in red. Two thoughts crossed my mind—is smoking conform with Alphacore policy, and what's the point? The ones and zeroes of Alphacore could carry with them kicks and addictions, just ask George, but it's not like they could deliver nicotine to the bloodstream.