The Reality Bug (11 page)

“Saint Dane was right in some ways,” Aja said. “He's done here. If things continue the way they are, it would only be a matter of time before Veelox falls apart for good. Lifelight itself wouldn't be far behind. But I know how to save the territory.”

“With this?” I asked, holding up the disk.

“With that,” she answered with confidence.

“What is it?”

“I call it the Reality Bug,” she said. “And tomorrow you're going to jump back into Lifelight and get a firsthand look at exactly how it works.”

I
wasn't so sure I wanted to jump back into Lifelight, not after seeing that jumper die. On top of that, I was starting to get nervous about Gunny. He had followed Saint Dane to the territory of Eelong and was supposed to take a quick look around and come right back to Veelox. Since Aja had the gate monitored, I asked her to let me know the instant Gunny arrived. I couldn't help but wonder what he'd found on Eelong. My guess was it wasn't good, but then again I always assume the worst.

Trouble is, I'm usually right.

I decided the best thing I could do was stay focused on Veelox and trust that Gunny could take care of himself. I spent the night in a guest room of the mansion. It was real comfortable and I would have had a great sleep if it weren't for the fact that I couldn't turn my brain off. It was all jammed up with worries about Gunny and jumping back into Lifelight. I ended up tossing around most of the night, nervous about what the next day would bring.

In the morning, Evangeline made us a yummy breakfast of, what else, gloid. We weren't treated to the tricolor stuff this time. This batch was all orange. That was okay by me, as long as it wasn't blue. I was surprised again by how filling the little cup of goo was. I would have preferred a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, but the gloid did me just fine.

Aja had on her blue jumpsuit, ready for business. She gave me a jumpsuit of my own, only mine was dark green. She said jumpers wore green when they spent long periods of time inside Lifelight. I didn't want to hang out inside Lifelight any longer than necessary, but figured I should be wearing Veelox clothes anyway. So I traded in my jeans and flannel shirt for this new suit. Aja also gave me some lightweight, black boots. I kept my boxer shorts, though. Rules or no rules, I always keep the boxers.

When we were ready to leave, Evangeline gave me a big hug. This time I hugged back. I liked her. Besides, she had to be pretty special to put up with Aja.

“Be safe, Bobby,” she said to me.

“Don't forget, Evangeline,” I said. “I told my friends I'd find out about the acolytes for them.”

“I promise,” Evangeline assured me.

I gave her one last squeeze of thanks and followed Aja outside. Evangeline watched as we went down the marble steps to the street and the vehicle that would take us back to the Lifelight pyramid.

“Bye, Vange,” Aja called to her aunt. “I'll be home when I get home.”

The two of us boarded the three-wheeled vehicle and began pedaling back toward Lifelight.

“Tell me about the Reality Bug,” I said.

“I'm going to give you a demonstration,” she said back.

“I know. Humor me.”

“It'll be easier to show you,” she argued.

“I'm sure,” I countered, letting a touch of impatience creep into my voice. “But it would help if I knew a little bit about what to expect.”

Aja sighed. I got the feeling that she thought of me as an inferior intellect who couldn't put two thoughts together without drooling.

“It's a computer program,” she reluctantly explained. “Lifelight is designed to take the jumper's thoughts and give them the perfect experience. The Reality Bug alters the program … slightly.”

“How?”

“It attaches to the data stream, changes it, and makes the experience less than perfect.”

“Really? How?”

“That's what I'm going to demonstrate,” she snapped. “You'll have a lot less questions after I show you.”

I didn't want to argue. This was her show. I figured I was going to get the answers I needed soon enough anyway. Doing it on her terms was going to be less painful. So I shut up and we rode the rest of the way to the pyramid in silence.

When we arrived, we followed the same route as before. We went through the long hallway of freaky purple sterilization, then to the airlinelike ticket counter where I was fitted with another silver bracelet with three buttons. They didn't take any blood this time, I'm glad to say. I was already in the system.

As I waited for my control bracelet, I looked at the portrait of the kid Aja called Dr. Zetlin. After having been in Lifelight, I had even more trouble understanding how a kid could have invented such an incredible device. But then again, didn't Beethoven write symphonies when he was, like, four? I guess you've either got it or you don't.

We left the bracelet counter and continued on through the core. This time Aja stopped at one of the control stations. A glass door opened and we stepped into the high-tech room. Sitting in the coolio chair was a skinny little phader who looked like he was around twelve. He was gazing up at the wall of monitors, scanning each, looking for signs of trouble on the jumps while slurping down some blue gloid. Ick.

“Hey, Alex, we're doing a dual. I need you to phade for us,” Aja said.

The kid, Alex, didn't take his eyes away from the screens. I noticed that he had a wicked case of acne. I wondered which color gloid caused that.

“I'm off soon,” he said with a high voice that sounded as if he were talking through his nose.

“But you're the best, Alex,” Aja implored, sounding a little flirty. “I hate jumping with anybody else.”

Alex gave a little smile. Aja had him. She knew how to manipulate the guy.

“You need a vedder?” he asked.

“Nah, this is gonna be short and sweet,” Aja answered.

I liked that.

Alex then tore himself away from the screens and looked at us. He checked me out, then looked to Aja and gave a sly smile. “Careful what you do in there. I'll be watching.”

“Do you have any idea how creepy that sounds?” Aja said to him coldly.

Alex instantly lost the smile and went back to watching the screens, embarrassed.

“Don't be long,” he said while shoveling more blue gloid into his mouth. “When my shift's up, I'm jumping.”

“Don't worry” was Aja's reply as she turned and left the control room. I followed right after her.

“He's a jerk,” Aja explained. “But he's the best phader there is. Next to me, of course.”

“So then why aren't you going to be the phader for my jump?” I asked.

“Because we're jumping together. Didn't you hear what I said?”

“Yeah, but I didn't know that was possible,” I said with total surprise.

Aja didn't explain. Instead she entered another control room. This one was empty. Nobody sat in the control chair and all the screens were dark. She gave a quick glance back to the corridor to see if anyone was watching, then sat in the control chair and expertly hit a few buttons on the control pad that was built into the arm. Instantly a small section of the console in front of us sprang to life with indicator lights. Aja reached into the pocket of her jumpsuit and took out the tiny, silver computer disk she called the Reality Bug. After another quick glance outside, she stood up, went to the console, and inserted the disk into a slot in the board. She quickly sat back in the chair, hit a few more buttons, then ejected the disk and popped it back into her jumpsuit. Another few keystrokes and the console went dark. The whole event took a grand total of twenty seconds.

“It's loaded,” she announced, and left the control room.

She either knew exactly what she was doing, or knew how to put on a good show.

“What did you just do?” I asked.

Aja shot me a quick look that had “Shut up, idiot” written all over it.

We entered the center of the pyramid and I was once again stunned by the enormous size of the place. We took the elevator up, made the scary walk across the bridge to the far side, and found an empty cubicle. This one was different than the others I had seen. It was bigger, with two silver disks on the wall rather than just one. Aja went right to the control panel and started to program our jump.

“How does this work?” I asked. “I mean, how can we jump together?”

“It's your jump,” she explained while programming the panel. “Lifelight will take all of its cues from you. I'm just along for the ride.”

“Can you control anything that happens?”

“No, I told you. It's your jump. We'll experience everything the same way, though. We'll be in this together.”

With a few more keystrokes, the two silver disks on the wall slid open, and the two tables slowly ejected.

“There's something I don't get—”

“There's a
lot
you don't get,” she interrupted.

I ignored the insult. “If people spend months and years in here, how do they eat? And go to the bathroom?”

Aja pointed inside the tube. “See those two pads?”

There were two black squares that were flush with the top of the white tube. “If there's going to be an extended jump, those pads drop down and the vedders attach them to the stomach of the jumper.”

She showed me that there were two zippers on the front of our jumpsuits. They were about four inches long, the exact same length as the black pads.

“Attach? That sounds gruesome.”

“It doesn't hurt,” Aja assured. “They rest on the skin. One pad excretes a form of gloid that gets absorbed into the jumper's system. The other pad removes waste.”

“So you eat and, well, do your, uh,
business
through those pads?” I said, totally disgusted.

“Business?”

“You know what I mean.”

“The system bypasses the body's normal metabolic processes. It's all about breaking everything down into its base chemical structure so it can pass through the skin. I'm not exactly sure how that happens. It's not my field. But I do know this much: perfecting the feeding system was the last piece in the trouble puzzle. Once people could stay alive inside the tubes for long periods of time, they had no reason to come out.”

The idea of lying in a dark tube, being fed through my skin by a pad that took away waste was kind of gross. I was glad our jump was going to be quick.

“Let's go,” Aja said, and climbed onto one of the tables.

“What do I do?” I asked while climbing onto the other one.

“Same as last time. Think of a place you want to be, and that's where we'll go.”

“But the Reality Bug is going to make it different?”

Aja chuckled. “Oh yeah.”

I didn't like that. I wanted to know exactly how much different it was going to be, but I didn't get the chance to ask. A second later Aja hit a few buttons on her wrist controller and our tables slid into the tube.

“You know what you're doing, right?” was all I could get out before my head went inside.

Aja answered with a laugh. I hoped that meant yes. A second later I was all the way into the tube, and the door closed behind me.

I was in the dark again. In more ways than one. Where was Lifelight going to send me this time?

M
y body started to feel heavy, like I was being pushed into the table. I felt a little sleepy too. This was pretty much what happened the last time I was in here, so I wasn't worried. But my heart was starting to beat faster with anticipation.

I felt something dry and scratchy brush against my face. It didn't scare me or anything because even though I didn't know what it was, it somehow felt … right. I reached up to find out what it was, and discovered there was something covering my face. It felt like a towel. How did a towel end up on my face? I grabbed hold of it and pulled it away as …

The roar of the gymnasium crowd came flooding back like someone had just swung open a soundproof door. I pulled the towel away to find myself sitting on the bench between Petey Boy and Jimmy Jag. I was back at the basketball game at the exact same moment where I'd left it. Yes! It looked like I was going to get my extra twenty minutes after all.

It took a few seconds for me to get my head back into the situation. I glanced up at the scoreboard. It was all tied up at fifty-eight and we were headed for overtime. I had just sunk two free throws and the crowd was going ape. Coach Darula came over and knelt down in front of us.

“We've been here before!” he shouted over the noise of the crowd. “Five minutes of OT. We've got the experience, we've got the conditioning, and now we've got them scared. All we have to do is keep our poise and the game is ours. Bring it in.”

We all brought our hands together and Coach shouted, “One, two, three …”

We all answered with
“Win!”
then dropped our hands and jumped up to take the court. I was back up to speed, warmed up, and ready to go. Oddly, I even felt a little tired and sweaty, as if I had just played a full regulation game of basketball … which I had, in my fantasy. As we trotted out onto the court I heard a lone voice calling from the stands. Though it wasn't very loud, it cut right through the noisy crowd.

“Good luck.”

I turned back and saw Aja sitting in the stands behind the bench, dressed like a high school kid with jeans and a sweatshirt. She was holding a red pennant that said “Cardinals” and waved it with absolutely no enthusiasm. She really stood out against the rest of the crowd that was going totally nuts.

There was something about the way she said “good luck” that gave me an uneasy feeling. There was more. I looked up into the stands where I remembered you guys, Mark and Courtney, were sitting. But you weren't there. Odd. Everything was the same as when I left the fantasy before, except that the two of you were gone. Another look told me my family wasn't there either. I figured this was the kind of thing Aja was talking about when she said the Reality Bug made the jumper's experience less than perfect.