The Reality Thief Read online

  “Sharon would want to give our baby the best chance possible,” Paul said. He could hardly believe he was discussing these things, that he would consider going against his wife’s known wishes, and that he would be living without her by his side. It was impossible to imagine carrying on without her. The arrival of a baby, their baby, without a mother was not something he could grasp emotionally right now. He was numb; he wanted to fade into nothingness.

  He realized Dr. Holden had been speaking, dragging him back to reality, “…the risks involved in that.”

  “Sorry? What risks are you talking about?” Paul felt himself teetering on the verge of hysteria, “I mean, she’s dead, right?”

  “I was referring to the baby.”

  “Of course,” he looked at his feet, ashamed.

  “That’s okay,” the doctor consoled him, “I wouldn’t even discuss this with you so soon after…well, so soon, if it weren’t absolutely necessary.”

  “No, please, continue.” Paul inhaled deeply, “I’ll be alright.”

  “Okay. A short time after brain death, the other organs in the body start to shut down. We can keep your wife breathing with the ventilator but if the organs start to fail, we’ll have to do a C-section. We’ll be monitoring the baby closely and if we see significant signs of distress, we’ll get him out right away.”

  “And the risks?”

  “Well, your wife was very healthy and the baby seems to be developing normally, but….” Dr. Holden stopped and pursed her lips so tightly that they all but disappeared.

  “But what?”

  “Well, as I said, we really don’t know how these dendies might affect the baby or the mother. It’s possible that they could spread or affect the organs or the baby, or both, in ways we might not be able to detect in time.”

  David jumped in before anyone could speculate further, “There’s never been any indication of anything like that happening.”

  Dr. Holden regarded him coolly, “There’s never been anything like this before, though, has there?”

  David held silent, contrite for the moment.

  Dr. Holden’s face softened as she turned back to Paul. “So, I just wanted to say that there are unknowns here, plenty of them. We know that the baby would have extremely limited chances if we delivered today. We think they’ll improve considerably in a month or two but, given this mess of complications, we can’t really know for sure. So, it’s all a bit of an unknown. We can’t really say for sure whether it’s best to continue the pregnancy or not.”

  Paul slumped under the weight of the situation. He didn’t feel he could deal with this decision right now, even though it had to be made. His wife was gone. Their baby might still have a chance. Was there more risk to delivery now, or later? What if the dendies were to somehow compromise the baby’s health?

  “Nick, help me out here. I don’t know what to do.” He struggled to maintain his composure; the baby needed him. The baby. We’d only started discussing names last week. I wanted Frederick, after her father. She’d had other ideas.

  As Sharon had dashed out of the house one day last week, keys in hand and already half out the door, she’d called back, “Hey, how about Darian? I always liked that name.” She’d given him no time to reply, just blew him a kiss and started jogging down the street.

  Nick could see Paul’s struggle, and his heart went out to him. “Paul,” he started, not sure what he was going to say. “I know two things about Sharon. She was a scientist, and she was brave. And I believe that she would have taken on the role of motherhood just as courageously as she took on everything in life.”

  Paul blinked back his tears.

  “I think she would have said that we know the risks of delivering the baby today are high; its chances of survival are not good. The only thing we know about tomorrow is that it scares us. We have no idea if there are real risks to the baby because of the dendies but Sharon believed in what she was doing.”

  He shot Dr. Holden a look and held it for a couple of seconds before returning to Paul with renewed confidence. “Sharon would have said not to be afraid, to give the baby its best chance. Continue the pregnancy.”

  Paul sobbed loudly into his hands. He needed his full concentration just to breathe. “Thank you, Nick,” he managed.

  “Dr. Holden, we should do what Sharon would have wanted. Let’s give our baby boy…Let's give Darian his best chance to survive. Continue the pregnancy; do whatever you need to do.”

  Sharon, I’m so sorry. I hope this is what you’d want—he said silently to himself. He couldn’t hold back any longer. He turned to Nick and hugged his friend in their combined grief.

  David looked at the doors to the OR and blinked back his tears.

  “There will be some paperwork,” the doctor said to Paul. “Once we have her stabilized, we’ll move her to a private room. You’ll be able to visit her there.”

  She turned to the two scientists. "I'm going to need a detailed report from you by noon tomorrow. I want to better understand what we’re dealing with here."

  The two men nodded, neither one daring to utter anything aloud.

  10

  Princess Darya drew her sword and held it high. Sunlight glinted off the adamantine blade. I might as well get this over with. She filled her lungs and commanded, “Summon the dragon!”

  The trumpeter stepped forward and unleashed a series of ear-splitting notes that emulated the Securitors’ call code for dragon assistance.

  She liked to think that her quick thinking, superior skills, knowledge, and sheer determination to win would prevail against any of Alum’s inworld Dragons, but she wasn’t a fool. Victory was never assured. Dragons were dangerous, unpredictable.

  A ten-meter chrome-plated titanium beast popped into existence a few hundred meters above the dais. The crowd cheered.

  The beast was exquisite. Polished scales dazzled and mesmerized. The front edges of the wings narrowed to razor-thin blades that culminated in deadly hooked claws at the tip of each fold. And if that weren’t sufficiently threatening, the creature’s diamond teeth and talons were eager to shred anything they met.

  But it was more what you couldn’t see that made the dragon a formidable adversary. Its blue electromagnetic beam could rip your inworld body apart. While you were distracted by the pain, its tracker software would hunt your trueself in the outworld, penetrate your security, and immobilize you to await processing by Securitors.

  Darya let out a blood-curdling battle cry and launched into the air to meet her adversary. Violet flames erupted eagerly along both edges of her blade.

  The dragon observed the tiny violet flare streaking toward it, and bellowed. Tucking its lethal wings against its body, it dove to meet the challenger.

  Darya narrowly dodged the stream of fire the dragon shot ahead of its dive path and headed for its underbelly, careful to avoid the forward-stretched talons. As she sped by, she cut a meter-long gash in the metallic flesh.

  The dragon shrieked and twisted away, its self-healing skin already closing the wound. The beast stopped a couple hundred meters below Darya and turned for a better appraisal of the little insect that had stung it.

  Darya sensed the telescopic lenses behind its black eyes scanning her, running facial recognition and avatar prediction algorithms against her. It was unsettling, but she’d made sure her appearance in Lysrandia was unique to this inworld and gave no hint of her trueself’s outworld identity.

  The dragon, frustrated with its largely uninformative scan, spread its wings and roared, sending forth a blast of shimmering blue electromagnetic fire as it accelerated upward, straight at her.

  Darya plunged into a tight evasive course restricted to an imaginary ten-meter cylinder that would give her a 99.9% probability of avoiding the flames and talons and, hopefully, situate her right beside the beast’s vulnerable neck.

  Fifty meters before her killing blow, a second dragon popped into existence below and off
to one side. It sped directly toward her, spraying fire across her erratic flight path, strategically shooting blue flames back and forth, behind and in front.

  While the second beast caught her attention, the first launched another fiery blast. By equal parts of luck and skill, she narrowly avoided the blue flames. The arrival of the second dragon complicated her calculations and reduced her options. As she pulled out of her dive, she frantically recomputed possible scenarios to kill or at least critically damage one of her two pursuers.

  Revised chances of success without forfeiting myself? Below ten percent. Ouch, not so good. Time to get away to safety. She mapped an optimal escape trajectory and veered off. Both dragons turned to follow.

  She swerved and swooped, alternately climbing and diving. Again and again, she dodged the metallic beasts and their deadly blue flames. She flew above the granite wall, recklessly weaving in and out between the towers and columns. They followed.

  Using her enormous inworld strength she kicked and threw gigantic granite blocks from the wall into the dragons’ paths. No matter what she tried, she could not gain advantage over the pursuing terrors. They followed her relentlessly. Their wings sliced through the jade columns and quartz towers as if they were made of smoke. Their talons pulverized the granite blocks.

  For the first time in millions of years, Darya was truly afraid. With each desperate maneuver, she was growing more fatigued. It was clear she couldn’t defeat the dragons using only her inworld magic; they were too strong, too fast, and they were closing in with every lunge. She needed some outworld assistance.

  Reaching back through the connection to her trueself, Princess Darya activated her quark-spin lattice. The lattice was among her deepest secrets; accessing it from within Lysrandia was risky.

  By decree and design, inworld visitors ran their instantiations on the resident hardware. Maintaining any vestige of trueself attachment at the same time was not permitted; it broke the ban on Cybrid cloning. It wasn’t even supposed to be possible. Well, they can add it to my long list of crimes.

  She had used the lattice before to hack into the Lysrandia simulation code and bestow herself with special powers. But that was done at her leisure, and she'd been able to hide her trail completely. This was different. Securitors would investigate immediately; a Shard could be sent. She'd managed not to reveal any hint of her true computational power to anyone in ages but she needed a better weapon, and she needed it fast.

  She tasked the quark-spin lattice’s superior computational capability with constructing a virus to penetrate the Lysrandia inworld baseware and the dragon simulation. It wasn’t a great plan. Tapping into the lattice’s capabilities took enormous power. Her body’s reserves would become critically depleted at a time when she needed all the power she could get. And the dragons were only the first challenge, she was sure of that. But seconds away from certain death, she could see no other way out. It would have to do.

  Her lattice completed the program and sent it out toward the two dragons. She bathed them in the wide cone of weak light from her sword. Come on! Come on!

  For a nerve-wracking three-tenths of a second, the beasts’ internal coding struggled to resist, before becoming overwhelmed. They broke off their chase and turned on one another, ripping and shredding titanium armor with tooth and talon as they sought to destroy one another’s primary neural centers. Locked in a mutual death grip, the attackers plunged toward the ground.

  Weak from the battle and from the effects of using the illegal lattice, Darya made her way back to the dais. I just want to end this spectacle and get out of Lysrandia as soon as possible.

  She circled the castle and approached her throne. Instead of triumphant cheers, she was met by loud blasts, widespread panic, and fearful cries. What the…?

  The Securitor response had been faster than anticipated—faster than she'd ever seen. A battalion of inworld units smashed through the onyx gates and pushed into the crowd.

  Those who couldn't escape the rush of the three-meter wide Securitor spheres were quickly tangle-tagged, frozen in place so they couldn’t flee the square and hide in the surrounding mountains. They’d be trapped here, inworld, at Alum’s mercy.

  The game was over in Lysrandia. There would be no more rituals, no more spectacles, no more sermons, and no more recruits.

  At least some of our people will be saved by our standing instructions. The acolytes and any others brave enough to join the movement today will have already left through the virtual back door before the battle.

  She scanned the dais area and crowd for familiar faces. Those she’d already convinced to join her on the path of Knowledge and Truth had no need to stay and watch the entertainment. If they followed instructions.

  Darya flew toward the main emergency exit in the central keep. Trying to preserve what little energy she had left, she landed near the base of the tower and continued on foot.

  The streets swarmed with masses of panicked people struggling to escape through the side gates. The Securitors coordinated their attack well, setting guards at the smaller gates in addition to the main exit at the far end of the plaza.

  People ran frantically from gate to gate to gate, searching for some unguarded route out. Once they realized the futility of heading for the gates, they dashed deeper into the castle, hoping to find alternative exits or somewhere to hide.

  Darya clung to the walls to avoid being carried along by the erratic surges of terrified hordes as they ran past her. As the crowd thinned out, she made her way toward the gardens at the rear of the main keep.

  She surveyed the area cautiously. It was heartbreaking to see the ornamental beds of cherished flowers and fruit trees completely destroyed, trampled by people running in all directions. A one-meter deep ring of red-robed figures—inworld soldiers assisting the Securitors—surrounded the keep, barring access to her private exit back to the outworld.

  Exhausted, Darya crouched behind a shrub against the corner of the stables and considered her options. She didn’t notice the hand, reaching out from the doorway behind her until it hauled her inside.

  11

  It was early August when the medical team finally agreed on a date to deliver Darian Leigh into the world. He was still a full ten weeks early, but at least he'd have a fighting chance.

  In spite of the sophisticated equipment, Sharon’s body was having a difficult time. The doctors had to take more and more drastic measures every week just to keep her alive.

  What should have been a happy day for all, a day for celebration, was unavoidably bittersweet. Darian's birth would mark the end of life for a vibrant woman who’d been nurturing him for seven months.

  Through the tortuous weeks while medical intervention kept Sharon’s organs functioning, Darian obliged the hospital staff by growing steadily. Unknown to all, a few thousand dendies found their way inside the boy’s developing brain, where they continued to multiply, and to grow new fibrous connections. No longer receiving the megadose of customized supplements Sharon had been taking, the neural lattice the dendies were forming grew excruciatingly slowly. Nonetheless, it grew.

  The dendies made efficient use of whatever building blocks and fortification they could from Sharon’s system and from the pre-natal supplements and steroids the nurses injected.

  They multiplied silently and unseen. They were too small to be picked up by the standard ultrasounds. A clear CT scan might have shown a bit of speckle, hardly enough to notice. When their numbers became sufficient, they formed stable associations with several thousand neurons. And they continued growing.

  During the first four days following Sharon’s accident, Paul spent every hour by her side as she lay unresponsive in her private room. He made a nuisance of himself, stubbornly insisting the doctors perform fresh neurological exams, EEGs, and cerebral blood flow tests every day.

  In fitful dreams, he imagined the mysterious dendies engineering some sort of miraculous recovery. Each time he woke up
, the doctors showed him that they hadn’t. He finally had to accept that she was gone.

  Reluctantly heeding Dr. Holden’s advice, Paul reduced his visits to a few hours a day, and then to once every few days. He needed to take care of himself, make funeral arrangements, and prepare for the baby’s arrival. The staff promised to keep him apprised of Darian’s status and contact him if there were any changes to either Sharon or the baby.

  Paul spent the next few weeks listlessly wandering around the house, unable to take care of the things that needed to be done.

  Sharon’s final assisted breath, and Darian’s first, were drawing slowly and painfully closer, and there was nothing he could do to change it.

  So it actually came as a welcome relief when his domineering older sister from Seattle showed up unannounced and took charge of getting his life back on track.

  Skizzits—the nickname he'd tagged her with when he was four—didn’t wait for instructions, and she didn’t fuss any more over his indecision than she did his preferences. She dragged him through a blur of shops. She selected a crib, a change table, a high chair, a car seat, and a cushioned rocking chair. In a whirlwind of activity not unlike the magical Mary Poppins, Skizzits picked out blankets and sleepers, diapers and bottles. She painted the nursery walls and arranged the furniture. She interviewed hopefuls, and hired a nanny. “With your job, there’s no way you’ll be able to take care of a new baby,” she explained. And she took care of the funeral arrangements for her sister-in-law.

  When he wasn’t busy resenting it, Paul was thankful for his sister's help. Deep down, he knew what he really begrudged was the situation that made it necessary. He just couldn't put his heart into welcoming a new baby when his wife lay dead, or legally dead, in the hospital. He wanted to love his son, to be excited about his imminent arrival, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how they’d be alone, and how Sharon’s final peace was being delayed by the equipment and the dependent fetus within her.