The Reality Bug

VEELOX

Aja and I froze. The quig didn’t. It was back in control and madder than ever. It saw us and started to charge. All we could do was run.

That’s when I saw it. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of this before, and didn’t care. I saw it now, and we had nothing to lose by giving it a shot. So before we ran from the gym, I reached out next to the door and pulled the fire alarm.

Instantly the grating horn sound filled the gym, louder than the feedback from the PA system. Question was, would it be enough to bother the quig? Aja and I both turned to see…

The quig had fallen back down, clutching its head. We were back in business. Without stopping to think, Aja took off toward Alex. I was right after her. We dodged the squirming quig and made it to the body of the poor phader. I couldn’t bring myself to look too closely at him. His body was still. Blood pooled on the gym floor. That’s all I needed to know.

Aja quickly reached for his arm and pulled it toward her so she could have access to his elaborate wrist controller.

“Does it work?” I asked.

“We’ll know in a second.”

She expertly hit a few keys, and the strangest thing happened. I felt dizzy. It was like the whole gym started to spin. I wondered if all the sound of the feedback and the blaring fire alarm had finally gotten to my inner ear.

The next thing I knew it was pitch black. Was I back in the Lifelight pyramid? The odd thing was, I still heard the fire alarm blaring. But that didn’t make sense. Either I was back or I wasn’t. A second later I was bathed in light. The next thing I saw was my black boots. I was lying inside the Lifelight tube. I was back!

But why was I still hearing the alarm? The table slid out of the tube and I looked quickly to my left to see Aja was already jumping off her table.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Come on!” she shouted.

We ran outside the cubicle into the center of the pyramid. One look around told me the problem. There were hundreds of lights flashing red outside the cubicles. Phaders and vedders were running around like crazy. The alarm sounding here had nothing to do with the fire alarm I had pulled in my fantasy. This was a full-out emergency… for real.

“We gotta get to the core!” Aja exclaimed, and ran for the elevator tube. We sprinted over a bridge, jumped in the tube, and flew down.

In the glass corridor of the core, things were frantic. There were alarms blaring and red warning lights flashing everywhere.

A phader grabbed Aja and yelled, “We’ve got hundreds of jumps going bad!”

“Contact the directors!” Aja shouted at the phader, and ran past him down the by the control stations! saw that several of the screens showing jumps were flashing off and on. Phaders were in their control chairs, desperately hitting buttons on their arm controllers, but it didn’t seem to be doing any good. A few seconds later I saw where Aja was heading. She threw open the door to Alex’s control station.

‘Alex! What happened?” she yelled.

Alex couldn’t answer. He was sitting in his chair with blank eyes still staring at the screens.

Alex was dead. On his neck were bite marks. There was no mistake. The quig in my fantasy jump had somehow killed Alex out here in reality. Whatever the Reality Bug had done, it had turned Lifelight inside out. Right now, in cubicles all over the pyramid, all over Veelox, people were in mortal danger as they faced their worst nightmares in their own fantasies… for real.

“Shut it down,” I said.

Aja continued to stare at Alex, unbelieving. She couldn’t move.

“Aja, shut it down!” I shouted. “You gotta save those people!”

“This can’t be happening,” she said, stunned. “They’re just fantasies”

I grabbed Aja and forced her to look at me. “Not anymore they’re not!” I shouted.

“But it’s illusion!” Aja argued. “It’s not real!”

“Is that real enough for you?” I asked, pointing at poor, dead Alex.

“There must be some other explanation,” she argued.

“Yeah?” I shot back. “Then how do you explain this?” I let her go and turned my back to her, shoving out my arm. What I wanted her to see was proof positive that what was happening inside Lifelight was no fantasy. I showed her my arm. It was the arm that got sliced by the claw of the quig when we escaped under the bleachers. My jumpsuit was cut, with dried blood around the edges.

“That blood is real,” I said. “It hurts, and so does my nose. My injuries didn’t go away when we got back.”

Aja stared at my arm as if her brain wouldn’t let her accept what her eyes were seeing.

“Aja,” I said softly. “It’s not a fantasy anymore.”

She looked at me with confusion. Her orderly world had just been blown apart. Then the door to the cubicle flew open and a phader ran in.

“Aja!” he shouted with terror. “It’s happening all over Veelox. Lifelight has been totally corrupted.”

Aja forced herself to think. She blinked once, then her eyes focused. “Did you contact the directors?” she asked.

“They’re all jumping!” the phader answered. “Every one. We can’t get to them!”

Aja looked to Alex’s control board.

“Shut it down, Aja,” I said again.

“I can’t,” she finally answered. “There’s no such thing. People would die.”

“But we have to do something!” I demanded.

Aja was thinking fast. I saw a spark in her eye. An idea. She turned back to the phader and said, “We’ve got to suspend the grid.”

“What?” the phader shouted. “We can’t!” “Do you have a better idea?” The phader didn’t.

“Get your key!” Aja commanded him. She reached around her neck and pulled out a black-cord necklace from under her jumpsuit. Attached to it was a large, green card.

The phader hadn’t budged.

“Move!” Aja commanded.

The phader was shocked back to reality. He hurried to the control panel while pulling out his own cord necklace. He had a green card on it, just like Aja’s. The two stood at opposite ends of the complex array of controls.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” the phader said softly.

Aja shot the guy a look. “Insert!”

They both took their green cards and inserted them into slots on either side of the control array. Aja then flipped about a dozen switches, the last of which was behind a clear, plastic cover. She lifted the cover to reveal a red toggle switch. The phader was working a duplicate set of switches, with the final being a similar red toggle switch.

Aja took a breath and said, “On my mark. Three, two, one… suspend.”

They both flipped the red switches.

Instantly all the monitors went blank. The thousands upon thousands of images that were being displayed had been replaced by the same single, flat color of green. The alarms all stopped as well, leaving everything eerily quiet.

I looked to the phader. He was crying.

“What happened?” I asked.

Aja stared ahead blankly. Her voice was calm and even. “We just suspended the grid.”

“You mean, you shut it down?” I asked.

“No, the jumpers are still in Lifelight, but the jumps are frozen. Nothing will happen to them. All over Veelox. Millions of people are lying in the grid, waiting.”

“For what?”

Aja then looked at me. Her eyes were red and frightened. “They’re waiting for me to figure out what went wrong.”

(CONTINUED)