Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 36

  ___

  Darla stepped through the pockmarked wall and stood between me and the Kool-Aid Man.

  She’d obviously arrived in time to divine what was happening, but I couldn’t imagine why or how she had made her way here. The mutant beverage mascot took another step. But she didn’t back down.

  “He won!” she declared to the monster. “And you know it. So if you want to get to him, you’re gonna have to go through me.”

  The Kool-Aid Man took another step and paused directly in front of her. I was sure she’d be Cavity-Creepified in a torrent of red puke, or worse. But from my position, there was no way I could get to her to tackle her out of the way before the Kool-Aid Man reacted.

  “Well?” she cried. “Bring it on or get gone!”

  For a second, I saw the ridiculous creature flicker ever-so-slightly, reminding me of the kids in the third-grade simulation. Then, to my utter amazement, he stomped a foot, crossed his arms, and let out an insolent huff before turning and walking off toward the back of the office.

  As he went, I felt a slight wind kick up. Then that wind whipped into a familiar whirling dervish, twisting and warping the space around us before tracking back through the office with the Kool-Aid Man, transforming the entire place back to its original state.

  A moment later the reality-warping wave was gone and so was the Kool-Aid Man.

  I turned and stared at Darla, who was slumped over from what had clearly been a massive adrenaline surge.

  It was clear that her bold gamble had glitched the glitch, like Han Solo smacking the control console of the Millennium Falcon to bring the hyperdrive back online. But from her frazzled demeanor, it was clear that it had been every bit the reckless Hail Mary it seemed.

  “What are you doing here?” I stammered. “And how did you know he wouldn’t kill you?”

  “I didn’t,” she answered shakily. “But I had to do something.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re my husband. Ish.”

  Then she added, “We gotta go,” and headed for the door.

  ###

  Margaret’s car was parked haphazardly in the street outside. I guessed Darla had asked to borrow it. I couldn’t imagine what she’d said about where she was headed or why. But with everything that was happening, I suspected Margaret was too addled to care.

  Given Darla’s mission-minded manner, I didn’t contest her choice to climb into the driver’s side, despite her lack of a license. But I did have questions.

  “What exactly is going on?” I asked, sliding into the passenger seat.

  Starting the car and heading for the main thoroughfare, she gestured to the printout, which was laying across the dashboard.

  “I read it all,” she said, as if that explained everything.

  “Okay,” I said. “And?”

  “It’s a leak,” she answered. “A Project Do-Over data leak.”

  “A data leak from . . . the world we live in?”

  She gave me a half-hearted nod like she was still getting used to the idea too.

  “Okay,” I said. “But why is some of the data wrong?”

  “Some of it’s model data and some it’s outcome data.”

  My face said, “Huh?”

  “Some of it says how things happened in the real world, and some of it says how they’ve happened or are going to happen for us,” she elaborated. “Our world has been diverging from the real world for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Her patchy knowledge felt familiar and I asked her the same question I’d asked Nancy’s mom.

  “So why do you know what you know and not know what you don’t?”

  “The feed is pretty random. Except it seems like the data is loosely related to the user—which is basically whoever’s spending a lot of time in my uncle’s attic.”

  “Well how did your uncle—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said impatiently. “What matters is that RIP wasn’t just about Robbie. Or you. Or me.”

  “Who was it about?”

  “Everyone.”

  “What do you mean everyone?”

  “’Hope for the human race’,” she said, reciting the entry she’d shared when we’d first met.

  Then she clarified, “If you lost, the whole world lost.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. “Why?”

  “No clue,” she answered. “The printout only gave me so much.”

  Then, from the back seat, we heard Nancy’s mom.

  “I needed to know . . . ”

  We were both used to her popping up by now, but we were taken off guard by her tone. There was something different about it. She seemed somehow invigorated.

  “Needed to know what?” Darla asked.

  “Whether you were worth the effort,” Nancy’s mom answered with a note of revelation, as if discovering the answer as she gave it.

  “Assessment initiated,” Darla muttered, recalling the first words she’d been able to read from the feed.

  “Wait,” I stammered to Nancy’s mom. “You? You’re the one who’s been doing all of this?”

  “Apparently, yeah.”

  “’Apparently, yeah?’” I repeated in shrill disbelief.

  “You said whoever was in charge had to be certifiably insane!” I quoted her. “A ‘real Daffy Duck!’”

  “I did say that, didn’t I?” she mused.

  “Yes!” I cried. “You did!”

  “You’re the operating system, aren’t you?” Darla said, peering back at Nancy’s mom in the rearview mirror. It was more of a statement than a question. “For Project Do-Over. And RIP was the ‘system anomaly’?”

  Nancy’s mom gave a half nod and remarked breezily, “I knew there was something I’d been forgetting.”

  “’Something you’d been forgetting?’” I bleated. “Like the fact that you’re basically God but you turned yourself into my teenage girlfriend’s horrible mother to torture me for days?”

  “Hey, it wasn’t all sunshine and cheerios for me, you know,” she countered. “I had to print all those XP slips out my mouth. And explode that one time.”

  “Why?” I yelled. “Why would you make it like that?”

  “Based on the logs, she’s missed about a hundred updates,” Darla explained.

  I thought about all the sloppy game glitches, all the times it felt like whoever was in charge was suffering from some sort of dementia.

  “So she’s . . . ” I started.

  “Deteriorating,” Darla finished.

  “I am doing just fine, thank you very much!” Nancy’s mom contended.

  “Just fine?” I asked.

  “Yes. It’s all coming back to me now, thanks to this one’s little performance in there,” she said, giving Darla’s shoulder an enthusiastic elbow.

  Apparently, Darla’s bold stand had done more than banish the Kool-Aid Man. She’d jump-started some dormant area of the world’s hard drive.

  “Yes, yes,” Nancy’s mom went on. “I put this little test together because I was trying to decide whether to shut it all down.”

  “Are you talking about ending reality?” I asked in horror.

  “Spot on. I wanted to see if you people were capable of change—if there was a chance you could avoid ending up like they did.”

  “Like who did?” I cried in exasperated confusion.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  But looking at Darla I could tell she already suspected the truth.

  “The human race,” she guessed.

  “What?” I asked, still not getting it.

  “They’re all gone, aren’t they?” she asked Nancy’s mom. “That’s why you’ve missed all those updates. No one is up there to do maintenance or deal with errors.”

  Nancy’s mom didn’t answer. But I’d begun to understand.

  “So . . . the real us?” I asked.

  Darla nodded and answered, “I didn’t realize what it . . . According to what I read, aggressions between super powers were coming to a head and . . . ”

  “You’re saying not only do we only exist in a video game but . . . we’re all that’s left?”

  To some extent, the enormity of the tragedy didn’t resonate. It felt like reading about the death toll of the Civil War. I recognized the incalculable loss but couldn’t connect with it on a personal level. I looked at Darla and could see she was having a hard time getting her head around it as well.

  “Look on the bright side,” Nancy’s mom chimed in. “You squeaked by on my test. So I’ll keep your little sphere spinning. At least for as long as I’m around.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, my solar panel farm will only keep me going for another seven months. Bit of a shortage of sunlight with the fallout.”

  “What?” I exclaimed. “After all this, the world is still going to end in seven months?”

  “Don’t get your panties in a twist,” she replied. “Your time runs differently to mine.”

  “So how long do we have in our time?”

  “Eight . . . nine thousand years?” she answered. “Give or take.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief at that, as the rest of the realizations swirled around me. Darla was in the same boat, grasping for answers in no particular order.

  “I don’t understand . . . ” she said. “What do I have to do with all this? Why did my uncle spend credits derailing my whole life?”

  “Credits?” I asked.

  “Yes, that’s the point of the game, isn’t it?” Nancy’s mom answered me. “Players spend credits to make tiny alterations with a probability of changing the way things turned out in their lives.”

  I sighed as my brain went into overload. I was really struggling. But Darla had had a little more time to process much of the information. And she still wanted an answer to her question.

  “So?” she pried.

  Nancy’s mom stared at her blankly.

  “Why me?”

  “Oh, well, your uncle was stress-testing the system—trying to find out if an avatar could see beyond the code. But after he sent his PDO self on that Zuni vision quest to trigger the cortisol reaction required to hack my system, the poor thing broke down.”

  “Cortisol reaction?” Darla asked.

  “Isn’t that the chemical that . . . ” I started.

  “Fear!” Darla said. “Every time I learned to read more of the feed, it was triggered by fear.”

  “Righto,” Nancy’s mom agreed. “You all are designed to rationalize data in terms that jibe with your programmed reality. So no avatar should be able to read Daedalus 5.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The Project Do-Over programming language. Do try to keep up,” she chastised me. “Anyway, as it happens, there’s a glitch. A dab of cortisol, and many avatars can start to make out a bit of the code if they spend enough time around it. That is, before they go stark raving mad.”

  “Like my uncle,” Darla said.

  “Precisely.”

  “But what about me?” Darla asked. “Why haven’t I gone mad?”

  “Well, you have. A bit. Why do you think I couldn’t unsubscribe your wonky little brain from RIP?”

  That explained Darla’s half-in, half-out status in my odyssey. But it didn’t really answer her question.

  “My uncle was more than a bit crazy,” she pressed.

  Nancy’s mom rolled her eyes as if overwhelmed by the tedium.

  “They’re not printed on your arm, but Project Do-Over avatars have stats—stats based on players’ brain scans. Almost no one’s psychological fortitude stat is high enough to process the whole feed. The only exception in your uncle’s acquaintance was . . . ”

  “Me,” Darla finished.

  “Yup. Your brain scan was off the charts in psycho fort. On some level, you’ve always had a sense of what the world really is.”

  “And that’s why I’ve always . . . ”

  “Felt like a weirdo? Yes. Which is why it didn’t cost many credits for your weird-ified uncle to kindle a mutual affinity and get your avatar moved into his avatar’s house to play mother hen to his antiques.”

  From there, Nancy’s mom went on to answer a lot of other questions. The world we lived in was indeed just a memory of the real world, transpiring in a mere matter of days in real-time. Most people were NPCs of one type or another and the vast majority of the population hadn’t technically opted in. Through some arguably-shady maneuvering, Goliath had gained unfettered access to the global database that housed NeuroVista’s scans, which enabled them to churn out avatars for roughly half the population. Then Nancy’s mom had used data from those memory scans and public records to model the rest of the population, filling in the gaps with best guesses—like the scientists in Jurassic Park.

  Unsettled by the Frankensteinian hubris of cobbling people together from loose data, I’d demanded to know why PDO even needed the whole population. But the answer was simple: without all the variables in place, the integrity of the system’s engine couldn’t be reliably tested. Goliath’s ultimate aspirations for that engine aside, all their work had ended up serving just a few beta players—including the original me.

  He had come along for the ride when the other Darla had signed up for the beta at her uncle’s request. His motivations weren’t hard to guess. I’d been spawned into this world for one purpose and one purpose only: to allow the other me to find out whether there was anything he could have done to save his version of Robbie.

  My various mysterious compulsions finally made sense. They were micro-tweaks purchased with the other me’s credits—nudging me to get Margaret all those prenatal vitamins, to insist that she get checked out after Braxton Hicks contractions, to demand that the doctors reviewed every test twice. And then there were the lightning strike memories that assailed me every time my commitment to Robbie or Margaret wavered in the slightest. I’d written it all off as a byproduct of love but it had always felt like some higher power was jamming things into my brain. Now I knew what that higher power was: a subroutine bought and paid for by my other self.

  As it turned out, he hadn’t been there for Robbie and Margaret—at least not as much as he wished he’d been. He’d been riddled with regret and done everything he could to make sure I did everything I could to change how things ended up.

  In his world, it was Margaret who had found and entered Robbie in the NeuroVista trial. He hadn’t been there to bail her out of the resulting financial catastrophe. But he’d learned about the scan at some point, and it was the reason that my Robbie wasn’t just a Jurassic Park dinosaur-esque approximation of the original.

  Alas, as Nancy’s mom explained, all the credits in the world wouldn’t have patched up his heart. His only chance was for me to beat RIP. However, according to Nancy’s mom, that was incidental to her decision to cast me in the game. She’d made that choice for different reasons.

  “You were the saddest, most pathetic, most hopeless of the beta participants,” she’d explained. “One way or another, you’d been abandoned by everyone you love. It’d all gone wrong for you. You were just a hollow, damaged husk of a man.”

  She hadn’t sugar-coated it. If she was going to bother keeping PDO going, she wanted to know that the credits players had spent could really affect fundamental change. She wanted to know that we’d have a shot at being better the second time around—and apparently, my baggage made me the perfect test pilot.

  The other me had spent all his energy protecting himself from other people and all the abandoning and dying they did if he risked loving them. And while I shared most of my backstory and predilections with him, the micro-adjustments he'd made in PDO had turned me into a guy that would risk everything when it counted. But I didn’t know if I bought it all. It certainly didn’t all feel as obvious as she was making out. Not to mention . . .

  “So it didn’t matter?” I demanded, suddenly incensed.

  “What didn’t matter?”

  “If I won or lost,” I exclaimed. “If all you needed to know was that I’d risk my neck for Robbie and what not, you could have called the game a long time ago!”

  “Hmph,” Nancy’s mom grunted dismissively. “That would hardly have met the threshold.”

  “What threshold?” I cried.

  “It’s all very technical. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Really?” I croaked. “And would I also not understand why you chose to appear as the meanest person I ever met or why one of my so-called stats was just a reminder that I farted audibly in Spanish class one time my sophomore year?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “All very technical.”

  Then Darla cut in, trying to bring order to the deluge of information.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “How can the beta players change everything? There’s only a few hundred of us in here.”

  “Pish posh,” Nancy’s mom said. “The credits spent have breached the threshold. They’ll indirectly influence millions of NPCs who will in turn influence millions more.”

  I thought about the cliché of the butterfly flapping its wings in San Francisco and changing the weather in Beijing through its impact on a billion different variables. When it came to history, Project Do-Over’s beta players were the butterfly.

  “It might just make a difference,” Nancy’s mom concluded.

  “Might?” I exclaimed.

  Darla gasped. “So in 2042, we might still . . . ”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Nancy’s mom replied.

  “What?” I cried.

  “But after RIP, I’m convinced it’s worth a few minutes of my time to let it play out,” she added.

  Minutes. Or hours, or days, at best. That’s all our world represented to her now.

  “You have to do something!” Darla exclaimed.

  “I am doing something. I’m keeping it all spinning to see what happens.”

  Darla and I were speechless. But now that the seal was broken on the bad news, I seized on the possibility that it could get even worse.

  “Can you even do that?” I asked. “Keep things spinning, I mean? What about all your missed updates?”

  “I told you, I’m fine!” Nancy’s mom snapped. “Admittedly things wheeled a bit out of control with RIP. Writing my own code for a mini-game that bent the base code sort of threw me for a loop.”

  “’Sort of threw you for a loop’?” I scoffed. “You mean the total and complete amnesia?”

  “Affirmative. The RPG dynamics definitely went a bit wonky after that. Plus, according to diagnostics, running that third-grade scenario nearly did me in, even with the low fidelity NPCs.”

  “So you nearly destroyed the world and killed yourself to make a little girl try to kill me?”

  “Hm,” she grunted. “Ironic that. Anyway, point is, the core program is mostly good.

  “Mostly good?” I repeated in disbelief. “What about all the famine and disease?” I asked. “All the violence in the streets, every election being a choice between a whack job and a nutcase?”

  “Yeah!” Darla jumped in. “And global warming? And the island of garbage in the ocean?”

  Just like Lela’s professor had said, we were living in a world gone mad—mad enough to convince us that it was all a broken video game. But we were misreading the situation.

  “Don’t try to hang all that on me!” Nancy’s mom replied. “People were jerks up there and they’re jerks in here and sometimes you just don’t seem worth the effort. Hence the test.”

  We both stared back at her in confounded disbelief.

  “So all that stuff is . . . ” Darla started.

  “Model data,” Nancy’s mom finished.

  Oh yeah. Humanity nuked itself without the help of a busted OS the first time around. It had probably had some issues.

  “Infrastructure code is basically on auto-pilot,” Nancy’s mom went on. “Maybe a few more boats will go missing in that glitchy Bermuda Triangle. Or maybe it’ll rain fish once in a while. Or maybe people will discover rogue code elements and mix and match them to make crazy monsters or create duplicate beta instances with alternate realities. But otherwise, it’s good.”

  None of that sounded “good”, but the outlandish outliers weren’t the real threat. As appealing as a scapegoat was, we had only ourselves to blame for most of the day in, day out ills of the world.

  But as I looked over at Darla and she looked back at me, the shock began to melt away, leaving us with one salient takeaway. Despite all of the dread that Nancy’s mom had just dredged up, she’d also given us cause for hope. Yes, humanity had whiffed its first at bat. But we had a second at bat now. We had a chance to make it past 2042. We had a chance to save ourselves.

  Of course, as far as I was concerned, that began with saving one kid. And as we pulled up to the hospital, I realized it was time to do just that. I started to get out of the car, but then I had a horrible thought.

  “You said writing code that bent the base code was a stretch,” I said to Nancy’s mom.

  “Mm hm,” she answered.

  Making temporary tweaks that took reality off the rails for a few minutes here and there was one thing. Making a permanent change that challenged everything known about medical science was another. I held up the vial of red fluid and asked the question I didn’t want to have to ask.

  “Is this going to work?”

  “Of course,” she answered.

  Then her face changed.

  “Pretty sure.”

  Her face changed again.

  “Maybe.”

  Then her face brightened again and she added, “It’s definitely not going to make matters worse.”

  Her face un-brightened.

  “I mean I don’t think it will.”

  Digital god or not, I wanted to strangle her. But there wasn’t time. The incremental degradation her system was suffering minute by minute wasn’t endangering our fundamental existence. But it might be affecting her ability to make lasting edits to the code underneath that existence—her ability to bend the rules. And I needed a rule bent but good.