WHAT LIES BEYOND
Chapter 20- Interface
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Violated, so degraded
The show has just begun
Dominated by all you've hated
This will make you ULTRA numb...
"ULTRAnumb" by Blue Stahli
The show has just begun
Dominated by all you've hated
This will make you ULTRA numb...
"ULTRAnumb" by Blue Stahli
??Day 00??
Kai shook.
He shivered and he trembled. Hot, searing pain crawled up every limb, ligament, and bone. He kept his fists clenched, if just to stop his fingers from twitching uncontrollably. Every breath came out quick and jagged. He lay curled up on the ground, trapped in agony. All he could see was the ground, and a dark gray expanse above his head--- an expanse centered by a pale, swirling vortex.
And the expanse was made of... t-shirt fabric?
Some of the pain died away, and his vision began to clear. Kai blinked the clouds from his eyes. That was no expanse... that was Adam. Faithful Adam, right by his side. "Hold steady, dude." Adam placed a firm hand on Kai's shoulder and held him in place; it helped at first, but Adam's hand burned--- as if he, not Kai, was the one made of fire.
Kai jerked his arm away--- almost involuntarily--- and screamed when a new wave of electric heat blazed up his arm. For a moment, he couldn't feel his arm at all--- but the agony returned worse than before.
Mira gasped. Adam muttered something to himself; he sounded scared. They both did.
Kai's breathing quickened; his heart beat faster. "Oh... oh no no... M... My arm, did it..." He stared up into Adam's frightened eyes. "Don't tell me... am... did I...?"
Adam swallowed a lump. Kai wanted to scream.
"Easy," Mira cautioned, holding out both hands. She gently lay them on his shoulders. Her hands were cool, soft; they stilled his violent tremble, if for a short moment. "The last thing we need to do is to panic." Her tone made Kai believe she was trying to convince herself of that.
Kai took several short breaths, squeezing his eyes shut. "Really? I say this is a great time to panic!" He stared up past the single black tree into the flickering, undulating green sky above. "HEEEEEEEEELP!" he shrieked. "Help us, please! I don't wanna die!" He sobbed, hot tears like embers building up in his eyes. "I DON'T WANNA DIE!"
"I don't wanna die... I don't wanna die..." Kai mumbled the same four words to himself, rocking back and forth in the grass. But the grass below turned into flat carpeting, and the pain racking his body ebbed away and disappeared. A gentle hum pulsed through the air--- the hum of the AARC's central computer, which stood a few feet from where he lay.
Kai blinked his eyes open, puzzled. How had he teleported from his pod to the control room? Oh... now he remembered. He'd never gone back downstairs; he'd fallen asleep working on that interface chair. Worth it; he was certain the thing was operational. Nothing was amiss... but it had needed a thorough cleaning.
Kai sat up with a groan, mildly sore from lying on the hard, cold ground. Carpet. What a joke. He may as well have slept on the raw metal plating! He rose to his feet and shook himself. As sore as falling asleep on the floor had made him, it was nothing compared to the agony of that horribly vivid nightmare, and he was happy it was over.
Although he knew he may revisit it before the day ended.
He stood before the holosynaptic interface, hands planted on his hips. He sighed. "OK. Here goes nothing."
Day 56
Moving on that week as normal, as if an existential danger was not currently looming beneath their feet, was quite the task for Adam. It felt dishonest. It wasn't quite denial, but it was close. Like the proverbial elephant in the room that nobody wanted to discuss.
If Kai could fix that transmitter in less than a week, then the elephant didn't matter much. But until they actually sat down and sent out a message, Adam wasn't going to let his guard down. Especially since Kai could only work on the transmitter an hour a day before Reeve made him go back. After all, the longer Kai worked, the higher the chances were that Vanessa would catch him in the act.
Reeve didn't want to take any chances at not getting home. Adam respected that. But he still found it annoying. Kai could've finished that transmitter in one day given the chance, and since time was of the essence, Adam wished Kai had that choice. Every time the broken stairwell creaked, Adam feared the worst.
The oxygen alarm had even gone off a second time, while they were in bed. Adam wasn't alone in his sleeplessness that night.
For days, it seemed like all they had done was get up, pretend everything was normal, then go back to bed and hope the stairwell wouldn't snap away their oxygen supply in their sleep. Kai's work crawled forward at a snail's pace. Reeve was impatient. Vanessa was asking all the right questions, and it wouldn't be long before she successfully found out what was going on with the transmitter.
No wonder Adam's stress level was on the rise again. He could feel it creeping up his spine, eager to hook its fangs into his neck once again. He tried to shake it, but it wouldn't leave.
Even more stress-inducing was Kai's insistence on using that 'holosynaptic interface' in the name of "finding answers". Adam failed to see the point. Why did Kai want to waste valuable time on something that could ultimately turn out to be futile? The clock was running out, and Adam had never cared less about why they were here, especially since the answers they craved probably lay back on earth. To Adam, the interface project was a waste of energy--- a fruitless endeavor that would get them nowhere.
He didn't want to be ungrateful; Adam knew full well that Kai had been working his hands to the bone, spending all night up in the control room looking over the interface and making sure it worked right. "If it's broken, using it might mess our brains up even more," Kai had warned them both.
A valid concern, to be sure. But Adam could not wrap his head around why Kai wanted to use the thing so badly in the first place. Wasn't getting home more important than fine-tooth combing through a handful of weird dreams?
But Adam wasn't about to argue; he was outnumbered two to one. Trying to force his will down their throats would no doubt reopen a wound that had just begun to close. So he kept his mouth shut and hoped for the best.
Mercifully, Kai's work on the interface had not taken long at all, and he'd blasted that victorious news over the intercom, while Adam and Mira shared a late breakfast. Now the two friends stood in the control room with a disheveled and underrested but enthusiastic Kai. The boy was eager to get started, if his body language was anything to go by. Kai rubbed his hands together, grinning from ear to ear.
"So again, to go over what we're doing here..." Kai clapped once and began to pace. "I've... had some really weird dreams. And, because some of those really weird dreams relate to this place, they might be important, or they might be repressed memories, or something. And this baby," Kai patted the arm of the bizarre steel chair, "is gonna give you guys a front-row seat to as many of 'em as I can think of." He shuddered. "For as long as I can stand..."
Kai handed each of his friends a particularly slim VET headset which resembled high-tech safety goggles combined with old 3D glasses. There was a clear face on the front, and built into both sides of the plastic were miniaturized HoloRIFT discs, smaller versions of the ones built into the Hollow's game chairs.
"I haven't tested this yet cause I can't do the machine and the goggles at the same time, but... here's how this is supposed to work." Kai patted the interface chair once. "The chair will send the visual signals from my helmet to your headsets. You'll see the same things I do... if this works."
Kai sat down and lowered the helmet onto his head. It fastened in place with a solid 'click'. "When I turn this thing on, you'll be able to see anything I imagine, or any visual memories or thoughts I focus on. You won't be able to hear anything, but I'll say something if I remember words."
Adam fiddled with the headset. "So, we just watch?"
"Yep," answered Kai with two thumbs up. "Movie night, a la Kai's brain. Pull up a chair and get comfy."
Mira slipped on the goggles and sat down in one of the rolling chairs, smirking slyly. "Can't wait to see what the inside of your head looks like, Kai."
Kai snorted. "Sure, if you like a big mess."
Adam sat down too, slipping on the headset with some lingering hesitance. The moment Kai booted up the chair, Adam's sight lit up with iridescent color. After a moment or two, the visions began to shift and undulate into shades of blue and orange, faster, until they looked like flames flickering in a fireplace.
"Are your headsets working?"
"I'm seeing something," said Mira. "It looks like fire."
"We're all set, Kai," Adam stated, sending a thumbs up.
"Awesome!" A waveform of yellow shot through the flames. "OK. I'm gonna think of something. When you see it, tell me what you see, OK?"
"OK," Adam and Mira agreed.
"Lemme see..." The flames burned faster as Kai's focus intensified. Brief flashes of objects and faces--- some recognizable, others mere shapes or too distorted to make out--- flitted across Adam's sight in rapid succession. It was enough to give him a headache and a twirling stomach, but he squinted through the slideshow, swallowing the nausea.
"Oo! I got it!" Kai yelped. In an instant, the flames and images split apart into a single still shot of a fuzzy white, gray and green cube. A second later, the image cleared up, transforming into a vision of a little white house. Vines crawled up one side and the paint around the front door was badly degraded, flaking off in large chunks. The front door itself was terribly sunfaded, but still recognizably red.
Mira barked a stunned laugh. "It's your house! That's amazing!"
While the house itself was decrepit, the memory of the house had a warmth to it. Adam had seen Kai's house plenty of times during their Hollow days, but he'd never seen it in this light before. It felt like a refuge--- a place where Kai knew he'd be safe and taken care of. Kai's home wasn't perfect, but it was happy. Suddenly, Kai's mom stood on the porch, waving her son home.
"And your Ma," Adam added.
Kai laughed, delighted, as another shot of yellow brightened the whole scene. "I'm seeing it too! I mean... obviously, I'm seeing it, cause I'm thinking it, but it's in my headset too. What else can I think up...?"
The image of the house whisked back into a blended batter of colors. "Hmm... how about..." Two mushy piles of white appeared, one taller than the other. The image sharpened into two snow people, one tall and one short. The short one had a pile of dead red maple leaves on its head, while the taller one had a pair of red lips--- Play-Doh, maybe? But the modeling compound had destabilized in the snow, dripping (like blood) from the snow lady's mouth and making one sickening mess. Adam shut his eyes, trying not to puke.
"Ma and I built these together when I was a little kid," said Kai. "Hers ended up being total nightmare fuel." He chortled.
"Aww, Kai... did you make the little snowman?" asked Mira.
"Yep!" Kai clipped. Adam re-opened his eyes. A flash image of a toddler-sized pair of mittened hands holding a big, messy snowball flickered over the top of the snow people. "First snowballs I ever made!"
"OK. This is gonna sound crazy, but your mom's snow lady reminds me of strawberry shortcake for some reason," Mira remarked.
At once, the snow morphed into an advertisement-worthy, rose-tinted vision of a triple-stacked strawberry shortcake, covered in the fluffiest, most delectable whipped topping Adam had ever seen. He wondered whether whipped topping that fluffy even existed.
Kai sighed. "Mira, did you have to say that?"
Mira snickered. "Sorry. I wasn't trying to distract you."
"It's OK. I just haven't had breakfast." Kai chuckled as the vision of shortcake faded back into the flames. "Just... don't mention food again until after we're done here." The colors re-focused into an imagined scene of the three of them sitting around a table, sharing the incredible shortcake. At least, that's who the table's occupants were supposed to be, but Kai's nose was enormous, Mira's eyes were particularly large and exaggerated, and Adam knew for a fact he had never had such broad shoulders in his life. He raised an eyebrow. Kai giggled. "Hey. I wonder if I could make some to celebrate going home?"
"Let's focus, Kai," said Adam.
Kai cleared his throat, and the image again disappeared. "Right. Sorry."
"Let's start with the trees," said Mira, calm. "Focus on the trees."
For a few long seconds, nothing changed. The flames merely burned faster, twirling into different sizes and shapes as Kai's mind worked. "Trees... trees..." he murmured, over and over again. The flames flickered out, then began to burn in sync with one another--- like a rhythm. It synced with Adam's heartbeat. "Trees... trees..."
The flames turned bright green.
To Adam's creeping discomfort, the flames' steady, rhythmic movements soon more closely resembled an undulating, green and black, glitchy mass. Dividing the green stood several great monoliths--- black towers which barely resembled the trees Kai was trying to conjure. But as the image cleared up, grey bark appeared on the towers, and branches sprouted from the trunks. The sky remained a glitchy mess. The sky flashed brighter green for a moment. Then lightning struck.
Kai gasped. The scene changed to the floor in the AARC control room. Kai's arms were visible in the shot, shaking and jerking about. They flashed and glitched out of existence. Then he was in the woods again, beneath the green sky, with Adam and Mira staring down at him in fear. This time, their proportions were absolutely correct. Kai's breathing grew quicker.
"Kai, remember to focus," said Mira.
"I'm trying," said Kai. "You... in this dream, you told me not to panic too. Well, the third dream." In the vision, Mira's face, deceptively calm but with a deep fear in her eyes, gazed down at Kai. "I had it this morning. It... it looks like the same place as the trees."
"Why did it turn into the AARC for a second?" asked Mira.
"That was another dream," said Kai. "The computer..." The vision changed to a front-facing view of the AARC control center, lit up with the same green static as the sky. It shot out an energy pulse which sent Kai to the floor. The vision of Kai's arms repeated before fading into blackness. "It... did that. And you guys were screaming at me, but it hurt too much. I couldn't answer." Kai's voice broke. Cool blue dripped down into Adam's vision. "I was so scared!" Kai sniffled, choked up. Blue torrented past Adam's eyes like rain down a windshield.
Adam heard Mira set down the headset and stride over to where Kai sat. "OK. I think we've seen enough," she said gently. Adam took off his own headset. Mira helped Kai lift the helmet from his head, revealing tears building up in his glassy blues. One of them slipped down his cheek, freed from the confines of the headset.
"That was..." Kai sniffed and wiped the rebellious tear away. "That wasn't how I wanted that to go at all."
Adam's mind was already churning, trying to make sense of the information Kai had just presented. Something about the trees and the undulating green sky deeply disturbed him; he knew, and he feared, that he'd seen it before. And the fact that his face was in Kai's memory only amplified that fear.
"Do you think those were dreams, or memories?" Mira asked Kai, rubbing his shoulder to calm him down.
"They were all dreams," said Kai, a bit terse. He dabbed his eyes on the collar of his shirt, squeezing out the last of the tears. "I thought the point of this was to figure out what parts of the dreams were memories and which ones weren't."
"The last part of that dream, where you were... where Mira and I were standing over you," said Adam. Kai met his gaze at once, eyes wide and distressed. Adam mustered up all the strength of voice he could. "That's a memory. I'm sure of it."
Kai's throat bobbed.
Mira raised an eyebrow. "How can you be so sure?"
Standing straighter than he had in a long time, Adam pointed at Kai. "Kai. Earlier, when you imagined us with the shortcake, our proportions were all off. My shoulders aren't that broad and your nose is not that big."
"It isn't?" Kai mumbled, peering down at it.
"But in that dream, I looked normal. The way I used to look."
"And we were both wearing the same clothes we were during the Hollow," Mira added, her eyes lighting up. "I think you're right."
"So what does that mean?" Kai squeaked. "That the memory is from the Hollow? Cause I played the Hollow. We all did. I remember the whole game, start to finish, and that never happened."
"So do I," said Adam. "Then again, the game we remember might not be what happened at all, since... when we came out of it, we weren't even in the real world. We were in the world those pods made for us."
"But why rewrite our memories like that?" Kai scoffed. "Besides, the weird guy? Chris? We know he's a real person. The stuff in the digital world had to come from somewhere. They weren't just making crap up, were they?"
"I doubt it," said Mira, softly.
"We won't know until we're back on earth," said Adam. He stood up, drew a deep breath, and sighed. "Kai, how close are you to being done with that transmitter?"
Kai had never seemed happier for a change of topic. "I think I'll finish it tomorrow. Just a few more tweaks and I can screw it all back together."
Adam nodded. "Good." Hopeful for the first time in forever, he smiled. "Just let us know when you're ready to contact home."