The Academie (30 page)

“
On the back of the
building,” I said. “I don’t have any idea where any of it goes. The
door could be anywhere in there.”

“
More likely though, it’s
somewhere in plain sight, just totally overlooked,” he
said.

Suddenly it hit me.
“I know where it is.”

“
You do?” Ruby looked
surprised.

“
I wandered into it—well,
almost—on our first full day at The Academie—the day we took all
the placement tests. I was so tired and lost—.” I looked to Ruby
for support “Do you remember?”

She nodded.

“
I opened the door and
there was…” I trailed off, searching for words.

“
Nothing?” Bryan
asked.

I nodded.

“
That’s it,” he said,
looking to Ruby.

“
It has to be,” I replied.
“Sergeant Murk found me there, and she was
no
t a happy camper.”

“
When is Sergeant Murk
ever happy?” Ruby asked, still skeptical.

“
I’m telling you, that
place was weird. Unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.”

“
That’s got to be it,”
Bryan said.

“
So what
is it
?” Ruby still
looked unsure.

“
It’s the unwritten part
of the program. You walk in, your consciousness is jarred to
reality, and you wake up. Back in the real world.”

“
What about you?” I
asked.

“
I don’t need to go
through the door, so I’ll make sure you two get through safely, and
then I’ll disappear.”

“
How?”

“
He’s a
program
,” Ruby reminded.

I had almost forgotten. I reached out,
touching his face, his hair. He felt so real.

His eyes looked sad. “I’m sorry; I
wish I were there for real. But I am here, in some way.” He reached
out and stroked my cheek.

The fine line of reality had become so
blurred; my mind was starting to swim. “But you’re real…” The ache
in my chest made it difficult to breathe.

“
I’m still here. It’s
going to be okay.”

I stared back blankly,
uncomprehending.
What’s real?
If something could walk and talk and feel and
look and act real, does that make it real?

He reached over and
grasped my hand. Somehow, it felt different to me now.
He can’t feel any of this…

“
So who’s
programming
us
?”
Ruby asked.

“
Well, it’s different….”
Bryan sighed again. “I mean, I think you’re still in control,
except you’re not….” He struggled to explain. “I’m sitting at home
at my computer, programming everything. But you….I think they have
you somewhere… unconscious. I think you’re hooked into the
computer.”

“
He’s right.” The words
came out slowly, almost as if they weren’t my own. “I woke up there
before.”

“
You did?” Bryan looked
concerned.

“
Twice. Once in math
class. The other time, I was meditating.”

He turned, grasped my shoulders
lightly, and looked at me intently. “What did you see?”

“
I didn’t. But I felt it.
There were wires. Lots of wires. And I heard things. Beeping….Men.”
I looked at the ground, struggling to remember. “Two men were
talking. They saw me wake up. He—one of the men—he made me go back
to sleep.”

I looked at Bryan. “That was the first
time—in Algebra. I thought I passed out and had a weird dream. But
later, I wasn’t so sure.”

“
Why? What else do you
remember?” he asked gently.

I shook my head. “The last time I just
remember the muscles contracting in my legs. It hurt so
bad…”

“
They may have you hooked
up to machines to keep you in shape. They must,” he said,
realization dawning on him. “Otherwise they could never keep you
there so long.”

I looked at him blankly.

He explained. “Your muscles would
atrophy from not being used. But if you send the right electrical
impulse to a muscle, you can make it contract.”

Shivers ran up and down my arms. I
shook my head, trying to shake the image from my mind.

“
That’s where you’re going
to wake up, so you gotta be ready for it,” Bryan said, looking from
me to Ruby.

Ruby had stopped pacing. Her face was
white. She stared expressionless. Finally, she gathered herself and
nodded. “So we wake up, rip out the wires—hopefully—and make a run
for it?”

I shrugged, then nodded.

“
Those guys you mentioned.
Can I kick their asses before we go?” The color was coming back to
her face.

I grinned. “Oh, most definitely.” I
didn’t think she was serious, but even joking about it seemed to
make us both feel better.

“
Okay, an angry mob of
teachers….” She’d moved back to the previous dilemma and resumed
her pacing.

“
Well, technically we
don’t know they’re still there,” I said. “We’ve been gone for—how
long you think we’ve been gone?”

“
An hour?”

“
They’ve probably
positioned themselves throughout the grounds, to be ready for your
return,” Bryan said.

“
That’s if they think we
will return,” I said. “What would make them think we
would?”

“
The program doesn’t go
very far,” he answered.

“
What, they didn’t
program—” I glanced around me. “Oh right, yeah I guess they
couldn’t program indefinitely. So wouldn’t there be doors out here
then?”

“
There’s no need for one
out here. The door inside the Academie is an emergency exit for
faculty—in case they need to get out before their shift is over.
Out here,” he looked around him, “the program ends. It has walls,
boundaries written in. When you reach them, you know.”

I glanced back at the shops and the
cars driving past. “The people out here don’t need emergency
exits,” I said as reality set in. “They aren’t people…. They’re
programs.”

“
Right.”

“
I think I knew that. It’s
just…my mind’s still making sense of all of it.” I took a deep
breath and then looked at Ruby. “I think I’m ready.”

“
But—”

I interrupted her protest. “We do have
a plan. We fight.”

I turned to Bryan. “I’m going to need
a sword.”

“
Excuse me?” He looked as
shocked as I expected.

“
Preferably a small sword,
‘cuz, you know,” I gestured to my petite figure.

“
A sword,” he
repeated.

“
Small sword,” I
reiterated.

Ruby’s mouth slowly turned up at the
corners.

I smiled back.

“
Basic Fitness,” she said
to Bryan. “She’s become a legend for her mad fencing
skills.”

I grinned. “I’ll make them regret the
day they placed me in basic classes.”

Bryan was still looking at me with a
mixture of surprised confusion and awe.

“
You can write a sword
into the program, right?”

Finally, he smiled. “Yeah, give me a
minute. I’ll uh…be right back.”

He disappeared and my
heart sank.
What if he didn’t
return?
I immediately regretted asking for
the sword.

Ruby sat down next to me on the
sidewalk. “None of this seems real, does it?”

I shook my head.

We sat there in silence, watching the
cars driving past.

“
None of it
is
real,” I said
finally.

With that, the sky turned a deep gray.
Dark clouds formed overhead.

“
What the hell?”
I scanned the sky. It hardly ever stormed since I
began at The Academie. I never saw the sky turn black that
quickly.

Ruby looked concerned. “We should take
cover.”

“
But what about Bryan?” I
protested.

“
Just under there then,”
she said, pointing to the overhang on a nearby shop.

“
Fine.” I followed her
through the grass and parking lot. As soon as we reached the shop,
the wind began to blow. Just then, I saw Bryan reappear where we
had been. A long piece of metal glinted at his side. He looked
around, searching. I waved, and he ran to join us.

“
What’s with the weather?”
he asked as he reached the overhang.

“
Came out of nowhere,”
Ruby answered.

I was busy admiring my
sword.

“
What do you think?” he
asked as he held it out to me.

“
Perfect.” Our hands
touched briefly as I received it, and I didn’t know which gave me
the greater high: beautiful piece of weaponry or his skin against
mine.
None of it’s real,
I reminded myself.
Sure
feels real,
my mind protested.

“
I was going to get you
one of those King Arthur ones, but then I realized it’d probably be
way too heavy, so I just looked up ‘small sword’ and copied one off
a website.”

“
Guys? We have a problem.”
Gazing at the oncoming storm, Ruby looked anxious.

The wind kicked up hard. Bryan grabbed
my arm as the current attempted to take me with it. “Woa!” he said,
pulling me back.

“
Guys! The rain! Look!”
Ruby was frantic.

In the distance, I could see what
looked like streaks of rain pouring down from the sky. But where
the rain hit the ground…

Nothing.

Where there previously were shops and
buildings, birds and trees, now there were chunks missing. Perfect
squares of clean white, like a pixilated puzzle.

They
were erasing everything.

44.
subtle changes

“
We have to get back to
the school as fast as we can,” Bryan shouted over the storm.
Run!
” He pushed Ruby and
me away from the shop and back toward The Academie.

“
Won’t they delete the
school?” I yelled as we ran.

“
They can’t. They need it.
All of this is re-writable or disposable. Including us.” He looked
worried.

Ruby lead the way. I knew she was a
strong runner, but she had undersold her skills. Thanks to Basic
Fitness, I wasn’t doing a bad job of keeping up.

Bryan ran by my side. “Once we are
within the school grounds, we should be safe,” he
called.

We ran through Bryan’s artificial
neighborhood for what I now knew would be the last time. Knowing
he’d moved while I’d been in school meant that I’d never be here
again in real life either. I used the pain of this loss to push
myself to run even faster.

Behind us I could hear the rain. I
wanted to look back, but I knew it’d slow us down, so I didn’t
dare.

When we reached the fence, we found
Ruby panicking. “The opening. It was here, wasn’t it? It was
here.”

She was right. I’d been through that
place five times now. But now, it was nowhere to be
found.

Ruby paced back and forth along the
fence, searching. “What do we do?”

I looked to Bryan, hoping he’d have an
answer, but as I turned, he disappeared. “Where’s Bryan? He was
right here!”

We were trapped outside the grounds,
with sixteen-foot prison fences blocking our way.

I turned to see the rain falling ever
closer. Square chunks were missing from houses, mailboxes, trees,
shrubbery, and road. Pieces of sky were replaced by patches of
clear white. I watched as the rain erased the last squares of
Bryan’s neighborhood.

“
We have to do something!”
I yelled over the rush of the storm. I flung myself at the fence,
trying desperately to climb its mesh links, but they were too
tightly woven, leaving nowhere for me to get a foot hold. Each
attempt found me falling back to earth.

Ruby was now kicking and hurling
herself at the fence. When that didn’t work, she found rocks to
beat and cut at it with, but every attempt to damage it seemed
pointless. The fence stood unaltered.

Another gust of wind blew, and I
grabbed on to the metal links to keep myself in place. The sound of
the rain was now deafening. I looked behind us just in time to see
it wiping out the last of the world around us. Only a small section
of grass remained between us and the oncoming storm.

“
BRYYYANNN!” I screamed
desperately.

“
Over here!” His voice
came from a short way down the fence. I grabbed Ruby’s arm and
pulled her that direction. The wind was so strong now that moving
was difficult. We stayed close to the fence, hanging on to it and
each other for support.

As we reached Bryan, I
could barely make out his yelling over the noise of the storm.
“
I couldn’t stop the rain! But I made
this.”
He pointed to the fence, and I
could see that where there previously had been none, now there was
a break just large enough for each of us to fit through.