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Devon leaned down next to her. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

He kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you again soon, okay?”

“Okay,” she said, and clicked.

Meg hadn’t heard from Devon in four months, and she realized that she missed him. So on a whim she tossed her sword and scabbard into the backseat of her car and drove over to campus to visit him.

Ages passed.

And now Leena the elf-maid is the most beautiful woman in all the world, and her lover is the most handsome man, Prince Devonar. They journey onward together, battling giants, riding dragons to distant lands, and feasting in the halls of dwarven kings. The prince is incandescent with joy. He was born for this, and Leena enjoys seeing him so happy. She loves him.

They ride two white unicorns down a forest path blanketed with fresh snow, and by some strange twist of magic or fate they come upon something that should not exist.

It lies half-buried in the drifts, but Leena can see that it was once a sort of carriage made from black metal. It has a roof, and its underside is all manner of piping, rusted now. Long ago, someone had sliced it in half. Where its other half may now lie, none can say.

The prince leaps from his mount and circles the strange object. “What foul contraption is this?”

Leena drops to the ground too, and staggers forward. A strange feeling passes over her, and a teardrop streaks her cheek. She can’t say why. Soon she is sobbing.

The prince takes her in his arms. “My lady, what’s the matter?” He scowls at the object. “It’s upset you. Here, it shan’t trouble us any longer.” He pulls the Wand of Reification from his belt and aims.

“No!” She pushes his arm aside. “Leave it! Please.”

He shrugs. “As you wish. But come, let’s away. I mislike this place.” He mounts his unicorn.

Leena stares at the strange carriage, and for a moment she remembers a world where countless such things raced down endless black roads. A world of soaring glass towers, of medallions that spoke in the voices of friends a thousand leagues distant, and where tales were told with light thrown up on walls the size of giants. Film, she remembers. Independent film. Jane Austen.

But the moment passes, and that fantastic world fades, leaving only the present, leaving only this odd, lingering sensation of being trapped in someone else’s dream. She mounts her unicorn, and three words stick in her head, an incantation from a forgotten age. She no longer remembers where she heard the words, only that they now seem to express a feeling that surges up from somewhere deep inside her.

Save me plz.

David Barr Kirtley’s short fiction appears in magazines such as
Realms of Fantasy
,
Weird Tales
,
Lightspeed
, and
Intergalactic Medicine Show
, on podcasts such as “Escape Pod” and “Pseudopod,” and in books such as
The Living Dead
,
New Cthulhu
,
The Way of the Wizard
, and
The Dragon Done It
. His story “Save Me Plz” was picked by editor Rich Horton for the 2008 edition of the anthology series
Fantasy: The Best of the Year
. Kirtley is also the host of
The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
podcast on
Wired.com
, for which he’s interviewed more than one hundred authors, including George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, and Paul Krugman. He lives in New York.

Katie wanted to relive Katie at nine, before her mother left, and I could appreciate that, but we had only one console at the time, and I really didn’t want to go there. It was coming up on the holidays, absolutely grim outside, nine thirty at night—on a school night—and she had to be up at six to catch the bus in the dark. She’d already missed too much school, staying home on any pretext and reliving all day, while I was at work, so there really were no limits, and who was being a bad father here? A single father unable to discipline his fifteen-year-old daughter, let alone inculcate a work ethic in her?

Me. I was. And I felt bad about it. I wanted to put my foot down and at the same time give her something, make a concession, a peace offering. But, even more, I wanted the box myself, wanted it so baldly it was showing in my face, I’m sure, and she needed to get ready for school, needed sleep, needed to stop reliving and worry about the now, the now and the future. “Why don’t you wait till the weekend?” I said.

She was wearing those tights that all the girls wear like painted-on skin, standing in the doorway to the living room, perching on one foot the way she did when she was doing her dance exercises. Her face belonged to her mother, my ex, Christine, who hadn’t been there for her for six years and counting. “I want to relive now,” she said, diminishing her voice to a shaky, hesitant plaint that was calculated to make me give in to whatever she wanted, but it wasn’t going to work this time, no way. She was going to bed, and I was going back to a rainy February night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy, a band I loved then, and the girl I was mad crazy for before she broke my heart and Christine came along to break it all over again.

“Why don’t you go upstairs and text your friends or something?” I said.

“I don’t want to text my friends. I want to be with my mom.”

This was a plaint, too, and it cut even deeper. She was deprived, that was the theme here, and my behavior, as any impartial observer could have seen in a heartbeat, verged on child abuse. “I know, honey, I know. But it’s not healthy. You’re spending too much time there.”

“You’re just selfish, that’s all,” she said, and here was the shift to a new tone, a tone of animus and opposition, the subtext being that I never thought of anybody but myself. “You want to, what, relive when you were, like, my age or something? Let me guess: you’re going to go back and relive yourself doing homework, right? As an example for your daughter?”

The room was a mess. The next day was the day the maid came, so I was standing amid the debris of the past week, a healthy percentage of it—abandoned sweat socks, energy-drink cans, crumpled foil pouches that had once contained biscotti, popcorn, or Salami Bites—generated by the child standing there before me. “I don’t like your sarcasm,” I said.

Her face was pinched so that her lips were reduced to the smallest little O-ring of disgust. “What
do
you like?”

“A clean house. A little peace and quiet. Some privacy, for Christ’s sake—is that too much to ask?”

“I want to be with Mom.”

“Go text your friends.”

“I don’t have any friends.”

“Make some.”

And this, thrown over her shoulder, preparatory to the furious pounding retreat up the stairs and the slamming of her bedroom door: “You’re a pig!”

And my response, which had been ritualized ever since I’d sprung for the five-thousand-dollar, second-generation Halcom X1520 Relive Box with the In-Flesh Retinal Projection Stream and altered forever the dynamic between me and my only child: “I know.”

Most people, when they got their first Relive Box, went straight for sex, which was only natural. In fact, it was a selling point in the TV ads, which featured shimmering adolescents walking hand in hand along a generic strip of beach or leaning in for a tender kiss over the ball return at the bowling alley. Who wouldn’t want to go back there? Who wouldn’t want to relive innocence, the nascent stirrings of love and desire, or the first time you removed her clothes and she removed yours? What of girlfriends (or boyfriends, as the case may be), wives, ex-wives, one-night stands, the casual encounter that got you halfway there, then flitted out of reach on the wings of an unfulfilled promise? I was no different. The sex part of it obsessed me through those first couple of months, and if I drifted into work each morning feeling drained (and not just figuratively) at least I knew that it was a problem, that it was adversely affecting my job performance, and, if I didn’t cut back, threatening my job itself. Still, to relive Christine when we first met, to relive her in bed, in candlelight, clinging fast to me and whispering my name in the throes of her passion, was too great a temptation. Or even just sitting there across from me in the Moroccan restaurant where I took her for our first date, her eyes like portals, as she leaned into the table and drank up every word and witticism that came out of my mouth. Or to go farther back, before my wife entered the picture, to Rennie Porter, the girl I took to the senior prom and spent two delicious hours rubbing up against in the backseat of my father’s Buick Regal—every second of which I’d relived six or seven times now. And to Lisa, Lisa Denardo, the girl I met that night at the Roxy, hoping I was going to score.

I started coming in late to work. Giving everybody, even my boss, the zombie stare. I got my first warning. Then my second. And my boss—Kevin Moos, a decent enough guy, five years younger than me, who didn’t have an X1520, or not that he was letting on—sat me down in his office and told me, in no uncertain terms, that there wouldn’t be a third.

But it was a miserable night, and I was depressed. And bored. So bored you could have drilled holes in the back of my head and taken core samples and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I’d already denied my daughter, who was thumping around upstairs with the cumulative weight of ten daughters, and the next day was Friday, TGIF, end of the week, the slimmest of workdays, when just about everybody alive thinks about slipping out early. I figured that even if I did relive for more than the two hours I was going to strictly limit myself to, even if I woke up exhausted, I could always find a way to make it to lunch and just let things coast after that. So I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a gin and tonic, because that was what I’d been drinking that night at the Roxy, and carried it into the room at the end of the hall that had once been a bedroom and was now (Katie’s joke, not mine) the reliving room.

The console sat squarely on the low table that was the only piece of furniture in the room, aside from the straight-backed chair I’d set in front of it the day I brought the thing home. It wasn’t much bigger than the gaming consoles I’d had to make do with in the old days, a slick black metal cube with a single recessed glass slit running across the face of it from one side to the other. It activated the minute I took my seat. “Hello, Wes,” it said in the voice I’d selected, male, with the slightest bump of an accent to make it seem less synthetic. “Welcome back.”

I lifted the drink to my lips to steady myself—think of a conductor raising his baton—and cleared my throat. “February 28, 1982,” I said. “Nine forty-five p.m. Play.”

The box flashed the date and time and then suddenly I was there, the club exploding into life like a comet touching down, light and noise and movement obliterating the now, the house gone, my daughter gone, the world of getting and doing and bosses and work vanished in an instant. I was standing at the bar with my best friend, Zach Ronalds, who turned up his shirt collars and wore his hair in a Joe Strummer pompadour just like me, only his hair was black and mine choirboy blond (I’d dye it within the week), and I was trying to get the bartender’s attention so I could order us G and Ts with my fake ID. The band, more New Wave than punk, hadn’t started yet, and the only thing to look at onstage was the opening band, whose members were packing up their equipment while hypervigilant girls in vampire makeup and torn fishnet stockings washed around them in a human tide that ebbed and flowed on the waves of music crashing through the speakers. It was bliss. Bliss because I knew now that this night alone, out of all the long succession of dull, nugatory nights building up to it, would be special, that this was the night I’d meet Lisa and take her home with me. To my parents’ house in Pasadena, where I had a room of my own above the detached garage and could come and go as I pleased. My room. The place where I greased up my hair and stared at myself in the mirror and waited for something to happen, something like this, like what was coming in seven and a half real-time minutes.

Zach said what sounded like “Look at that skank,” but since he had his face turned away from me and the music was cranked to the sonic level of a rocket launch (give credit to the X1520’s parametric speaker/audio-beam technology, which is infinitely more refined than the first generation’s), I wasn’t quite sure, though I must have heard him that night, my ears younger then, less damaged by scenes like this one, because I took hold of his arm and said, “Who? Her?”

What I said now, though, was “Reset, reverse ten seconds,” and everything stalled, vanished, and started up once more, and here I was trying all over again to get the bartender’s attention and listening hard when Zach, leaning casually against the bar on two splayed elbows, opened his mouth to speak. “Look at that skank,” he said, undeniably, and there it was, coloring everything in the moment, because he was snap-judging Lisa, with her coat-hanger shoulders, Kabuki makeup, and shining black lips, and I said, “Who? Her?,” already attracted, because in my eyes she wasn’t a skank at all, or if she was, she was a skank from some other realm altogether, and I couldn’t from that moment on think of anything but getting her to talk to me.

Now, the frustrating thing about the current relive technology is that you can’t be an actor in the scene, only an observer, like Scrooge reliving his boarding-school agonies with the Ghost of Christmas Past at his elbow, so whatever howlers your adolescent self might have uttered are right there, hanging in the air, unedited. You can fast-forward, and I suppose most people do—skip the chatter; get to the sex—but, personally, after going straight to the carnal moments the first five or six times I relived a scene, I liked to go back and hear what I’d had to say, what she’d had to say, no matter how banal it might sound now. What I did that night—and I’d already relived this moment twice that week—was catch hold of the bartender and order not two but three G and Ts, though I only had something like eighteen dollars in my wallet, set one on the bar for Zach and cross the floor to where she was standing, just beneath the stage, in what would be the mosh pit half an hour later. She saw me coming, saw the drinks—two drinks—and looked away, covering herself, because she was sure I was toting that extra drink for somebody else, a girlfriend or a best bud, lurking in the drift of shadow that the stage lights drew up out of the murky walls.

I tapped her shoulder. She turned her face to me.

“Pause,” I said.

Everything stopped. I was in a 3-D painting now, and so was she, and for the longest time I just kept things there, studying her face. She was eighteen years old, like me, beautiful enough underneath the paint and gel and eyeliner and all the rest to make me feel faint even now, and her eyes weren’t wary, weren’t
used
, but candid, ready, rich with expectation. I held my drink just under my nose, inhaling the smell of juniper berries to tweak the memory, and said, “Play.”

“You look thirsty,” I said.

The music boomed. Behind me, at the bar, Zach was giving me a look of disbelief, like
What the?
, because this was a violation of our club-going protocol. We didn’t talk to the girls, and especially not the skanks, because we were there for the
music
, at least that was what we told ourselves. (Second time around I did pause this part, just for the expression on his face—Zach, poor Zach, who never did find himself a girlfriend, as far as I know, and who’s probably someplace reliving every club he’s ever been in and every date he’s ever had, just to feel sorry for himself.)

She leveled her eyes on me, gave it a beat, then took the cold glass from my hand. “How did you guess?” she said.

What followed was the usual exchange of information about bands, books, neighborhood, high school, college, and then I was bragging about the bands I’d seen lately and she was countering with the band members she knew personally—like John Doe and the drummer for the Germs—and letting her eyes reveal just how personal that was, which only managed to inflame me till I wanted nothing more on this earth than to pin her in a corner and kiss the black lipstick right off her. What I said then, unaware that my carefully sculpted pompadour was collapsing across my brow in something very much like a bowl cut (or worse—
anathema
—a Beatles shag), was “You want to dance?”

She gave me a look. Shot her eyes to the stage and back, then around the room. A few people were dancing to the canned music, most of them jerking and gyrating to their own drugged-out beat, and there was no sign—yet—of the band we’d come to hear. “To this?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I looked so—what was it?—
needy
, though at the time I must have thought I was chiseled out of a block of pure cool. “Come on,” I said, and I reached out a hand to her.

I watched the decision firm up in her eyes, deep in this moment which would give rise to all the rest, to the part I was about to fast-forward to because I had to get up in the morning. For work. And no excuses. But watch, watch what comes next…

She took my hand, the soft friction of her touch alive still somewhere in my cell memory, and then she was leading me out onto the dance floor.

She
was leading. And I was following.

Will it surprise you to know that I exceeded my self-imposed two-hour limit? That after the sex I fast-forwarded to our first date, which was really just an agreed-upon meeting at Tower Records (March 2, 1982, 4:30 p.m.), and then up to Barney’s Beanery for cheeseburgers and beers and shots of peppermint schnapps (!), which she paid for, because her father was a rich executive at Warner Bros.? Or that that made me feel so good I couldn’t resist skipping ahead three months, to when she was as integral to my life as the Black Flag T-shirt that never left my back except in the shower? Lisa. Lisa Denardo. With her cat’s tongue and her tight, torquing body that was a girl’s and a woman’s at the same time and her perfect, evenly spaced set of glistening white teeth (perfect, that is, but for the incisor she’d had a dentist in Tijuana remove, in the spirit of punk solidarity). The scene I hit on was early the following summer, summer break of my sophomore year in college, when I gave up on my parents’ garage and Lisa and I moved into an off-campus apartment on Vermont and decided to paint the walls, ceiling, and floors the color of midnight in the Carlsbad Caverns. June 6, 1982, 2:44 p.m. The glisten of black paint, a too-bright sun caught in the windows, and Lisa saying, “Think we should paint the glass, too?” I was oblivious of anything but her and me and the way I looked and the way she looked, a streak of paint on her left forearm and another, scimitar-shaped, just over one eyebrow, when suddenly everything went neutral and I was back in the reliving room, staring into the furious face of my daughter.