Where Futures End (15 page)

Epony 9:56pm

*maybe someday you'll follow me*

If you can't meet me, send someone who can. Seattle high-speed station, tomorrow morning.

I left it for Grandpop. Or not for him exactly, since there wasn't much chance he was still alive. Really, I left it for Hayden, in the hopes his people knew about the map Grandpop had passed on to me.

Grandpop must have sensed about me what I had only just begun to realize myself—the reason people from the Other Place stared at me in coffee shops, on city streets: It was my vorpal. Grandpop's had been special, strong, and so he noticed it in me too. The way anyone with a strong vorpal noticed another strong vorpal, like a huge red blossom on a radar screen.

And all this time, Grandpop had been trying to decide between encouraging me and warning me.

He had given me his map, covered in a million red dots. Each dot representing the signal from a red bracelet—information he had gotten from a website like the one I'd
found, maybe even the very same site. A curious concentration of those signals spread over Washington, parts of Oregon, up into Canada. The overlap between two worlds. The fact that he had never come back to tell me what he found meant he'd probably died at the end of his journey. So I wouldn't know what he'd found until I encountered it myself.

At the Seattle station, I had hours to mull it over. There could only be one reason the aliens were so keen on advertising themselves with their bright red, government-issued bracelets even while they watched our world go into decline. One reason they let us create stories about the Girl Queen and their world, let us spin illusions.

They knew our fantasies would always have more power than the truth.

Everyone loved the idea of stepping into a better world. And if your own world started shrinking enough, you just might put your vorpal to the test. The aliens didn't have to convince us to come. We would convince ourselves. More and more of us would cross into their universe, strengthening the bond between two worlds, opening channels that would let energy flow from our world into theirs.

It's what I was doing now—searching for a world from the stories I loved. And I knew more people would follow.

The only problem was, the stories weren't all true. We were giving in to an illusion.

And I knew now from experience: Illusions end.

Still, what else did we have?

Hours I waited, and then there he was. Dark from the
sun, hair like parched grass. A bit taller in thick-soled shoes. Broader in the chest so that I was surprised to find I ever thought much about his chest. I felt the calluses on his hand when he slipped it into mine. For a moment, I let my palm hover against his, afraid it might push right through. But no, it was solid as long as I wanted it to be solid, and he was silent waiting for me to make up my mind.

I made up my mind. I gripped his hand hard and walked out of the station, glanced a good-bye at the snow-naked mountain, and found my way into another world.

WHEN WE COULD HARDLY CONTAIN OURSELVES

(sixty years from now)

REEF

The closest eighteen-year-old Reef ever got to the alternate universe was through a massively multiplayer virtual-reality role-playing game called Alt.

When he walked the streets of Seattle wearing his digital goggles, ordinary buildings changed into sleek alien architecture. But he wasn't really seeing the Other Place—he never would, with a vorpal as weak as his. It was all a mirage, a virtual game for people like him who were left out of the real fun.

Decades ago the government had tried to help people cross over into the Other Place. Then one day, someone famous figured out how to do it on her own—a pop star named Epony. She had an act going where she pretended to be an alien, but it didn't take long for people to figure out she was just an ordinary person who'd found a way into the Other Place. After she left, her boyfriend Cole kept singing about it until pretty soon everyone was heading to Seattle,
escaping withered farmlands and flooded coasts to try to cross into a new world. And when that first wave of newcomers died down, when everyone forgot about Cole's songs—there came Alt.

Alt was played in every major city in the U.S., a game/travel ad. People lost themselves in that virtual world, in a fabrication of the Other Place, and then they wanted the real thing. So they came to Seattle to test their vorpal's strength. The Seattle sprawl was now a dense jumble of miniaturized, pre-fab “container” homes jammed between old buildings. All squares and rectangles, a pixilated city. The place everyone flocked to and no one wanted to live in, the overlap between our world and a land of opportunity.

Those who made it to the Other Place found the same sights Reef saw through his digital goggles when he played Alt: a glass city threaded with silvery canals, studded with trees, surrounded by mountain peaks vaulting over all. An alien city the aliens specially renovated to host denser beings. Those who couldn't cross over made do with Seattle instead. They lived like Reef did—sheltering in container homes, fighting over government-issued food tickets, collecting rainwater in catch basins. Playing Alt while pining for the Other Place.

Reef had seen people enter the alternate universe. Sometimes he could tell when someone was trying to go to the Other Place, could see the glaze in their eyes that meant they were glimpsing another world. He would shadow them as they stumbled down a Seattle street. When they
disappeared, the air would waver for a moment, and Reef would try to step through the distortion and into the Other Place. It never worked.

He had seen them return too. They came gray-faced and gasping, to collapse on the sidewalk, in a cafe, in the middle of the street. They couldn't stay more than a few months in the Other Place without getting sick and confused, no matter how the aliens worked at making their world hospitable. The nature of that universe made every human visitor miserable in time. So they returned to Seattle to wait out their sickness and cross over again.

The smart ones came back to Seattle before the sickness overwhelmed them. They crossed quietly, using their vorpals to push away anyone who noticed their sudden appearance. They brought back money from work they'd done in the Other Place, jobs ranging from menial labor to consultation on improving the alien city that hosted them for months at a time. The ones with the strongest vorpals took temporary houses in gated communities, along the waterfront, on the Floating Isle in Puget Sound. The rest huddled into the cracks of Seattle, waiting for their next chance at a payday from the Other Place.

Men were much more likely to have strong vorpals, thanks to a genetic pattern involving X-linked traits—so it was mostly men who came to cross back and forth, to make money to send to their wives and children. But crossing over in the middle of some Seattle street with alien coins jangling in your pockets meant inviting trouble. Reef had once seen a man materialize on Beacon Avenue, blink in
confusion at his miscalculation, and before he could disappear back into the world he had exited, crumple under the attack of three other men. You
had
to attack someone like that quick, before he could use his vorpal to dissuade you. Before someone else jumped him and stole your payday. It was a common sight in the sprawl: blood on the asphalt, bodies in the gutter.

Reef found other ways to make money.

“Sir, will you listen to my tale of distress?” A holographic woman in a low-cut silvery dress stepped from a doorway. “An infestation of trolls plagues these parts.”

The façade projected behind her was tiered, swooping glass slick with a bright sheen of rain—an alien sight if Reef ever saw one. The holographic woman was straight out of a Girl Queen movie, complete with a pair of tiny wings that marked her as a sylph. Reef seriously doubted that elves and sylphs and slavering beasts roamed the Other Place, but they lurked in every corner of Alt's game world. Apparently, the aliens weren't interesting enough to make for video game characters.

“Their filth is everywhere, our children are sick,” the sylph woman continued. “Do you know how to send the trolls back to the woods?”

Olly came up behind Reef, goggles in hand. “Sure—go to one of their spawn points, unleash a Desiccation Spell to strip their defenses, and call down a Siege Flame,” he mumbled, fidgeting with the strap of his goggles. He was always making the strap too tight, which explained the deep circular impressions around his eyes—and the
nickname Owl Eyes, Olly for short. “But that's not what we're going to do.”

Reef raised his eyebrows. “Why not?” It was as good a way as any to send trolls running back to the Seattle park that served as the Warped Wood. It would take all of four minutes, and Reef could return to the sylph to receive a Health Elixir as his prize.

“I've read about this quest on a forum,” Olly said. “If you tell her you don't know how to get rid of trolls, she'll send you on a quest to score a Banishment Spell. Do you know how much money people will pay for a Banishment Spell?”

“Yeah, I have an idea.” Reef's heart sped up as he did some quick mental calculations.

“Whatever number you're coming up with—divide it by two.”

“You're just going to cut in on my quest?”

The sylph shifted on the sidewalk, waiting for Reef to interact with her again. Olly powered on his goggles and now Reef saw him overlaid with an image of his avatar, a muscular Warrior in a shell of armor. Reef's own avatar was a Knight in sword-nicked chainmail.

“I'm going to
help
you on your quest.” Olly grinned at Reef. “You're welcome. Good news is, this is the easiest way to score a Banishment Spell you ever heard of. She's going to send you to the Immigration Office and then you just have to answer some riddles.”

Reef frowned. “Too easy. Probably hiding a virus.”

“No virus. I checked the forums.”

“A leech, then. Those are worse.”

“Who cares? You only have to hold on to the Banishment Spell long enough to sell it to the highest bidder. It'll be out of your hard drive within an hour, and the leech with it.”

Reef turned up his jacket collar against the rain-flecked wind. “I'm not selling someone a spell that's infected with a leech.”

“Would you like to eat breakfast today?” Olly said grimly.

“I'll get rid of the leech and take the government bounty instead.”

“And get half the money you'd get if you sold the spell.”

“I'm not selling it, Olly.” Reef bowed his head against a gust of wind. He tried not to notice the gouges in the holographic leather of his Alt boots, or the muck on his sneakers underneath the projection. “You know what leeches do?”

“Sit in your hard drive and don't bother anyone at all?”

“Until D-day. Then they use your network to wreak havoc on government systems.”

The rain distorted the projection of the sylph so that she rippled as though with impatience. “Sir, will you listen to my tale of distress?” she asked Reef again.

Olly spoke over her. “What do you care about government systems? You don't even have running water. You pee in a bucket.”

Reef shot him a resentful look. “I use the bathroom at McDonald's.”

“When they let you in.”

Another gamer was coming up the street, ducking under awnings and searching for a quest to take on. His Mercenary's belt bristled with dagger hilts and he looked like he'd be as happy to steal loot as to earn it from questing.

“An infestation of trolls plagues these parts,” Reef prompted the sylph, itching now to move on.

“Do you know how to send the trolls back to the woods?” the sylph asked.

Reef eyed the approaching gamer. “No,” he told the sylph. “How do you get a troll back to the woods?”

Olly grinned and leaned toward Reef. “Sounds like a joke I know. How do you get a troll to—”

“The sphinx can help you with this quest,” the sylph cut in. She hadn't registered Olly's presence. “Seek out her lair in the Immigration Office.”

Reef dug out a tin and retrieved a bit of gray-green resin thin as a matchstick and stuck it in his mouth, then wished he could spit it out. It tasted awful. “You need to work on your punch lines,” he told the sylph.

He shoved the tin back in his pocket. Two pitiful sticks left. Running out of resin would mean a trip to the hospital, but he tried not to think about that. He pulled Olly on toward the hotel that served as the game's Immigration Office.

The Roosevelt Hotel, a brick column slowly darkening in the rain, looked ordinary enough when Reef wasn't wearing his goggles. He peered up at a dozen rows of windows and wondered how many of the guests inside knew the place
served as host to Alt's holographic Immigration Office.

Several huddled forms detached themselves from the building to ask for food, coins, cigarettes. “Don't give up your food ticket,” Olly warned Reef. But Reef already had it out of his pocket and was passing it into a pair of wind-chilled hands.

“He lent me one last week,” Reef explained to Olly.

“Is he going to lend you one tonight when you've got no dinner?”

Reef shrugged and pushed his goggles back into place. The hotel was transformed into the coppery Immigration Office, supposedly a mock-up of the one found in the actual alternate universe. For a moment, Reef could pretend he was in the Other Place, a new arrival looking for housing and a job. But the sound of car tires cutting through rainwater, and of transients squabbling over food tickets, anchored him in ordinary Seattle.

“Now we just need to get inside,” Olly said.

The “Immigration Office” wasn't as easy to get into as it had once been. The managers of the hotel that housed it were sick of gamers invading their lobby and carrying out imaginary swordfights in the hallways. You couldn't get through the doors anymore until a hotel guest went in or out, and even then you had to be quick.

Reef peered through the glass, trying to gauge whether any of the hotel guests was thinking of leaving. He watched a father in a long raincoat tie his little son's shoes. The rich always had sons: They paid for gender selection prior to conception instead of losing sleep worrying about the weak
vorpals daughters usually inherited. The only places Reef ever saw wealthy men with daughters were in government propaganda posters like the ones plastered over the interior walls of the hotel. They showed a man toting a smiling young girl on his shoulder with the caption
Daughters Bring Joy
. Reef could hardly take his eyes from the smiling faces, the crown of sunlight behind the girl's head.

“Never seen a girl before?” Olly joked.

Reef looked away from the posters. Actually, he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a girl walking the streets of Seattle. Even the prostitutes kept to their container homes and let work find them.

Olly was studying one of the posters now, peering in through the hotel's glass door. “If the government's so keen on getting people to cross over into the Other Place, they should let the rich have their sons and stop worrying about it.”

“Sure, it's not like we need girls for anything,” Reef said dryly.

“Think about all the money the president makes from taxing everyone who comes back from the Other Place with pockets full of alien money,” Olly said. He glared at the copper globe hanging over the door. The two continents of Mega America shone silver; the span of Great China, gunmetal gray. “Wish I had the president's vorpal. Smug bastard. Why didn't someone mess with
my
genes?”

Reef shoved his hands deep into his pockets while he waited for the father and son to leave the hotel. Even with his electronic gloves on, Reef was cold. The wind went
right through his threadbare clothes. But at least with fall settling in he wouldn't have to worry about water shortages. He'd already set up the rain trap on his container home.

He adjusted his goggles and looked up at the Immigration Office's glittering façade overlaid on the tall column of the hotel. It awakened unexpected feelings in Reef. Envy for those who could escape the sprawl and live in a better world. A vague sense of dread he couldn't quite place.

“Do you think it's weird that the aliens don't seem to mind all those people coming into their world and funneling out their money?” Olly said, pinpointing the source of Reef's uneasiness. “What if they get tired of us?”

“We're giving them some of our solar energy,” Reef said. “It's fair enough.” But deep down, he wondered how long that deal would last. It seemed to him that the solar channels between the two worlds had already opened wide, and the aliens had no need to keep people crossing into their universe.

A holographic character with a bright yellow exclamation mark hovering over his head watched them from the corner of the building. He rocked on his heels expectantly, red sleeves fluttering under a battle-scarred leather vest.

“What quest is he offering?” Olly asked.