The Far Dawn (4 page)

“He said Vista,” said Lilly. “That sounds familiar. Have you heard of it?”

“If I have, I might not remember it,” I said.

“I don't think it's something I know about from Eden. More like, from pre-cryo.”

I tried to think back, but the fog was particularly thick at the moment.

As we neared the light, I could make out a structure, small and square and sticking out of the side of a barren slope. The light flashed through windows on either side of a door. Up a gentle rise from it five large radar dishes stood on a long plateau.

“It's maybe a radar telescope,” I said. “Or used to be.” There was a long flat strip extending along the plateau, like a runway.

“I'm having that feeling again . . . ,” said Lilly. “Like this is a bad idea but also like we're going to check it out anyway.”

I shrugged. “I still feel like we're flying blind. It might be a lucky break.”

“Yeah,” said Lilly, “but it might be the terribly-horribly-bad-and-we-end-up-dead kind of luck.”

I slowed and hovered a few hundred meters away. “We could just keep going.”

“Hold on.” Lilly closed her eyes and pressed her palms together in front of her. She breathed in deeply.

“What are you doing?”

“Sshh,” she said, then whispered, “I'm feeling the presence around us, feeling for other life-forms in it.”

“You can do that?”

Lilly shrugged, eyes still closed. “I think I can.”

After a minute, she opened them. “Weird. There's no one in there. Not as far as I can tell. Could it be a recording?”

“Or maybe the telescopes are boosting a signal from somewhere else.” I lowered us toward the structure. “Let's at least take a look.” I tried to smile at Lilly. “It's what we do, right?”

Lilly's smile was forced as well. “Don't drink the horchata,” she said.

“Agreed.” I landed and put the knife in my belt. We gripped each other's hands, and stepped out of the craft.

3

WE FOLLOWED A WINDING DIRT PATH, FAINTLY outlined by moonlight, up to the door. A metal sign in the center read:

 

Welcome to

VISTA

An Exclusive Post-Terrestrial Sentient Holotech Community

Powered by GenSoft and Quarkle

 

“What is this doing up here?” I wondered.

“Well, no danger of flooding,” said Lilly. “I remember Quarkle. Weren't they one of the big holotech companies?”

“Sounds kinda familiar.” I tried the steel door handle, but it was locked. “Do we knock?”

There was a pleasant ding of a bell from inside, and a click from the door. I tried the handle again and it opened.

As soon as we were through the door, lights flicked on. We were in a small room. Leather couches lined the walls to either side. A cabinet of glassware and dusty liquor bottles against one wall, an ornate deep-red carpet over the middle of the hardwood floor. In another corner was an area of kids' toys, neatly stacked. Ahead of us stood a desk beside a massive steel door that looked like a bank vault.

The walls were adorned with pictures of people, all healthy adults, some with children, smiling out in the sun, playing golf, or dancing in a club. Another showed two people wearing slim jet packs and arcing through the sky, hand in hand. Someone riding on the back of a dolphin, another with his arm around an old guy with wild white hair.

“Is that Einstein?” Lilly asked.

“I think so.” These were activities you could do inside this holotech world. There was a slogan on the wall between two photos:

VISTA: The Good Life, but Better!

Another ding sounded, this time followed by the humming of machinery. A final click, and the vault door yawned open.

“Somebody knows we're here,” I said.

“This way!” urged the haggard male voice that we'd heard in the vortex. It hissed from unseen speakers. “Hurry!”

I started forward. “Wait,” said Lilly. She lugged the desk chair, a heavy wood-and-leather thing, toward the door. “This has
lock us in
written all over it.”

“Good point.” We wedged the chair in the doorway.

The next room was larger, still square but with a higher ceiling and clean white walls made of rectangular panels that were slightly convex. It was empty except for a single glass case, a cube about a meter tall, floating in the middle of the room, suspended on about twenty red wires that extended out to hooks on the walls and ceiling. The wires vibrated with our footsteps, absorbing the shock so that the cube stayed still. Inside it was a crystal cylinder with pale white light glowing from the center. The only sound in the room was the humming of air conditioners.

“Are you here?” Each time the voice spoke, there was a click like a microphone being activated.

“We're here,” I said.

“You heard my signal?”

“Yeah.”

“How? How did you hear it?”

“We were passing by,” I said.

“Passing by . . .” One of the wall panels suddenly flicked to life as a video screen. It showed a distorted image of Lilly and me standing there. I looked up and spied a single camera eye in the ceiling above the cube.

“You two . . . I've seen you. In APB reports from Eden. You are the fugitives wanted for murder.” His voice lowered. “
The Threee . . .
” He sounded excited, almost hungry. I felt my mistrust growing. “But where is your third?”

“Dead, in Desenna,” I said.

“Ah—” His voice was cut off by an eruption of static, then a buzzing. He moaned. “Sorry, I need to relocate. Be right back.”

The microphone clicked off, leaving us in the humming stillness.

I saw Lilly looking back at the door. “Let's make it quick.”

The mic clicked on again. “Okay.” He sounded out of breath. “Where were we?”

“What's your name?” I asked.

“You can call me Moros,” he said. “A name that means—”

“It's the Greek god of doom,” said Lilly, almost bored, but also eyeing the glass cylinder suspiciously. “I know my myths. That's not your real name.”

“Well, no . . .” Moros's voice faltered. He was still breathing hard. “It is my name in Vista. Moros was born here in Vista.” His tone thickened. “Born in blood.”

Lilly flashed me a glance. “This is an upload colony, right? You're a digital version of yourself, and Vista is a holotech world, like a program that you inhabit?”

“Yes. We all uploaded a few decades ago. Ziiiip! My dad was a programmer for Quarkle. He helped build the Vista environment. It runs on a fusion battery that should last for as long as the sun lights the earth. The idea was utopia forever, no aging unless you wanted to, no dying, no— Guh!”

There was some kind of snarl and clangs of metal. Feedback whined over the mic, followed by a grating sound and something like wailing in the distance. When Moros returned, he was panting.

“What's going on in there?” I asked.

Moros sighed. “Dying. Chaos.”

“It doesn't sound much like a utopia,” said Lilly.

Moros laughed between deep breaths. “No. It was, in the beginning.” There was a rumble like a distant explosion. “I will show you, but I warn you not to look for too long.”

“I'm not sure I want to know,” said Lilly under her breath.

All around us, the wall panels came to life, each displaying a camera view of the virtual world inside Vista.

Lilly was right.

Everyone was screaming. Either in terror or in rage. Each screen was like a scene from a different nightmare, combat footage from the end of the earth: a city on fire, smoke everywhere; meteors hurtling to the ground and blowing up homes; a man, screaming, being eaten alive by a pack of zombies or vampires—they were maybe somehow both; another scene of screaming and terror that involved chains and naked bodies; two children crying in a corner, a shadow falling over them. . . .

Lilly shut her eyes and shoved her hands against her ears. I tore my gaze away and focused on the cube, trying to unsee the images and yet I felt them burning into my brain forever.

“I'm over here.”

I tried to pick out the whispering voice among the horrors and found a face on one of the screens, up close to the lens. “Yeah, here.” He was a few years older than us, his face gaunt and streaked with ash and blood. One eye was swollen shut. The other hid deep in a hollow socket and darted around like a frightened animal. His chest was crisscrossed with straps of ammunition.

“The problem with Vista was that everyone got bored,” said Moros. “After about ten years in here, utopia just wasn't that interesting anymore. So, the programmers started adding these survival challenges to spice things up—like an asteroid hit, a zombie uprising, and also twisted stuff, perversions—but they were just games and each one had an end. The last survivor would be declared the winner, and then the system would reset back to normal ol' Vista. So, you'd maybe get your face eaten off by a demon, but then in what seemed like a blink, you'd wake up and find life back to the way it used to be. And then we'd read about what had happened and who had won and watch replays and it was all kind of a rush.

“But then . . . it warped everyone's minds. Made us monsters. The programmers started increasing the challenges, everyone feeding off it, until . . . I don't know what happened. Everybody lost it. I guess . . . who wants to play golf and raise your kids when you could be slitting the throats of your friends and tying up your neighbors? The system got overloaded, and all the terrors started happening at once. And now, the program won't reset. All the programmers are dead. My dad is dead. I've been on my own for . . .”

His gaze went blank. “Years. But I've figured out where the ports are for interfacing with the program—my dad had taught me some stuff before he died—so I can hide and . . . adapt.” Moros backed up, and I could see that one of his arms was missing. There was a blank gray circle where his shoulder ended that looked sort of pixelated. “I changed the code to keep from bleeding out,” he said. He also had a cyborg left leg.

Now that he'd moved back from the camera, I could see that he was hunched in some kind of closet, surrounded by circuitry.

Something thudded against the door behind him.

Moros sighed wearily. “One sec.” He stood and raised a weapon like a chain saw, gunned it to life, and then yanked open the door. A yellow-eyed being with boiled skin lurched forward, hissing, flicking a long lizard tongue. Moros decapitated it with a single stroke, then closed the door. He turned back around, his face still blank, and sighed. “I don't even know what that was. The program's been stuck for so long, it keeps degrading and producing weird artifacts. I got attacked by a bird thing that had my brother's head the other day. I don't know what's real anymore, which is funny to say in here.”

“I know the feeling,” I said over the screaming from all around. “Can you shut off the other screens?”

“Sure.”

Moros fiddled out of the camera's sight, and the horror show around us clicked off.

“What's your real name?” I asked.

“Peter.” He gazed into space below the camera.

I couldn't imagine being in a place like Vista, and yet I felt a connection to him, facing constant unknowns, having the world switch on him and show him terrible things.

“And how do you know about Project Elysium?” Lilly asked.

“Vista has gamma link,” said Peter, “and the program would download news so we could see what was happening in the real world if we wanted. Like I said, I know how to access the program code, and I've had a lot of hours on my hands these last few decades. I saw little mentions of the project here and there, especially in Nomad transmissions, so I started digging and piecing together what I could find—”

Another snarling creature lurched into frame behind him. Peter turned and cleaved it in two. Green blood splattered on his face, making him cough and spit. He wiped it away miserably. “Forgot to shut the door,” he muttered, closing it now.

“How do we get you out of there?” I asked. “Where's your body?”

“It was cremated when I uploaded. The ash is somewhere in Anchorage. It would be so nice to feel real air. In here, it almost seems real, but . . . you can tell.”

“So, is there anything we can do?”

Peter sighed. “Yes, actually. There's a manual reset button for the system. If you could do that for me, then I'd at least get to see my family again.” Shrieking screams echoed behind him.

“Where is it?”

Peter fiddled at controls out of sight. There was a hissing sound in the room, and a panel opened in the floor between me and the cube. A small electronic console rose up on a metal stand. “I'm feeding you the code now.”

I watched lines of numbers flashing by on a small screen on the console. There was a keyboard below this screen and a few other buttons around the side.

“Okay, there.”

A command line flashed:

 

Reset:

 

“Just press enter?”

“Yes.” Peter was breathing hard, like he was nervous. “That's all. It's so easy, but the way it's built, a real person, flesh and blood, has to do it.”

I was moving my finger toward the button when Lilly said, “Hold on. If we reset your system, won't you forget everything you've learned about Project Elysium?”

“Oh.” Peter paused, thinking. “No, the reset doesn't erase our memories. It just restarts the holotech simulation and reboots all the people to a living state. Unfortunately, everything I've seen is going to stay with me.”

I shared a glance with Lilly. I felt like I believed him, or at least wanted to.
Elissa, Aralene, Anna, Carey . . .
we couldn't erase what we'd seen either, but a reset button . . . that sounded nice.