******
Vincent leaned in close to the scanner with his right eye opened wide. He held it there until the screen blinked its usual shade of green, then pulled away as the door slid open. He was about to step into his room when he saw movement to the left. Beyond where Jessica stood in front of her own scanner, a second transport was approaching the balcony. Jessica noticed it as well, and she cast Annie’s door a nervous glance. Suddenly eager to get inside, she tapped impatiently on the screen of her scanner.
“Hello there!”
The voice was much deeper than Annie’s, and its owner – the burly man climbing out of the approaching transport – was familiar.
“Derek?” said Vincent.
“How are you, Ben?” Derek climbed the rest of the way out of the transport and brushed himself off. “Lena?”
“Uh…hi,” said Jessica. She glanced at Vincent before turning back to the pod. “Is something wrong?”
“No, no, nothing at all,” said Derek. As he spoke, a bright-faced woman in a white dress followed him out of the transport. “But you both missed maintenance yesterday at school. I thought I would bring the maintenance to you.”
“Maintenance?” said Jessica.
Derek motioned to the woman behind him. Vincent was sure he had never seen her before, but the woman’s young features and tight, curve-hugging dress were oddly familiar.
“Hello, children,” the woman said, smiling.
“Kara will be ensuring your Lenses are in functioning order,” said Derek. “The school reserves Wednesday mornings for this purpose. We wouldn’t want you falling behind already, would we?”
The woman in the dress didn’t wait for their answer. “Which one of you would like to go first?”
Vincent stepped forward automatically. Jessica, after all, had gone first last time.
“Very good,” said the woman. “Step inside please.” She motioned Vincent inside, and he obeyed. Jessica, to the woman’s annoyance, followed. “Derek tells me your Lenses are newly activated,” said the woman. “From a malfunction. Is that right?”
Vincent nodded.
“Then maintenance is even more important,” the woman continued. “Especially given the recent hack.”
“The hack!” exclaimed Derek. He was forcing his oversized frame through Vincent’s small door. “That’s what I was going to ask you about on the way here, Kara. Surely Newsight is going to do something about it. It’s terribly embarrassing.”
The woman smiled, sweetly. “We’ve received similar feedback,” she said. “It will be taken care of.” She turned to Vincent and sat the small white case she was carrying on the foot of the bed. “Sit please.”
Vincent did as he was told. He watched as the woman unzipped the case and dug inside. She emerged with a silver, needle-tipped device. To Vincent, it looked a bit like the gun that had been pointed at him back in the Hole.
“Open wide,” said the woman. She held her finger around the trigger of the device as she raised it up. Vincent glanced at Derek. The man nodded. Taking a deep breath, and bracing himself for the pain, Vincent opened his eyes as wide as they would go. The woman leaned closer to him – he could smell her overpowering, flowery perfume – with the device raised. She lowered the tip down onto the surface of his right eye. It began to water. His reflexes told him to blink–
She pulled the trigger. With a flourish, she shifted to the left eye, then pulled the trigger once again.
“There we are,” she said. “Good as new.” She turned to Jessica. “Next?”
Frowning, Vincent stood up. The process hadn’t hurt in the slightest. The worst of it had been no more than a tickle.
Jessica turned to him before sitting down. He nodded reassuringly. Moments later, the woman had pulled the trigger twice more.
“And we’re done,” she said, placing the device back in the case. “Quick as that.”
Derek clapped his hands together. The noise sounded like an explosion in Vincent’s box-sized dormitory. “Perfect,” he said. “Allow me to call you a transport, Kara.”
The woman shot Vincent and Jessica one last winning smile, then turned to Derek. He helped her, quite unnecessarily, through the doorway and out onto the balcony. When they were out of earshot, Jessica breathed a sigh of relief.
“I didn’t feel anything,” she said. “Did you?”
“Nothing,” said Vincent. He glanced out the door. A transport was already lowering onto the balcony. “At least it wasn’t like the activation.”
Jessica shuddered at the thought. “I don’t think I could do that again.”
Vincent nodded in agreement and started to say something back, then stopped – Derek had reentered the room.
“Well that wasn’t so bad, was it?” he said. Neither of them responded. Derek’s smile faded.
“I know your hopes for this couldn’t have been high,” he said, “after last time. It was wrong of me not to warn you about the activation process, and I don’t intend to make that mistake again.” He glanced out the door to make sure the woman’s transport had gone. He lowered his voice. “I came with Kara today because I wanted to warn you about something else.” He paused here to make sure they were both looking at him. “Newsight has been monitoring you,” he said. “And you’ve been flagged.”
“Flagged?” repeated Vincent. He looked at Jessica – she was wearing the same, puzzled look he was. “What does that mean? Did we do something wrong?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” said Derek. “These things usually amount to nothing at all – they’re just precautionary – but you should be careful all the same.” On these last words, his voice had turned casual, unworried, but his expression didn’t seem to match. It was grave, just on the border of afraid. “Do you understand?” he asked.
Vincent and Jessica looked at one another, then back at Derek. Vincent answered for them. “Yes, sir,” he said.
Derek nodded, then slapped his knees as he stood up. “Good,” he said. His tone had returned to normal. “I didn’t expect you to do anything that would raise further alarm, but I wanted to let you know regardless.” He glanced out the door. “That will be my transport,” he said. Vincent didn’t see any coming. “It was good to see you both again.” He started for the door, poising his hand over the button as he stepped through. “Also,” he said, pausing. “If you wouldn’t mind, just keep this between us.”
“Of course,” said Vincent. Derek nodded back to him, stepped the rest of the way through the door, and closed it after him. Vincent felt a pang of guilt for lying to the man. Their conversation, after all, had been far from private.
“Well,” said Jessica, standing. She glanced at the door where Derek had just disappeared. “I should go back to my room.” Avoiding the balcony, she started for the door to the hall. She had only taken a few steps when she paused and looked back. “I’m not tired yet,” she said. “I think I’ll have a sim.”
Vincent nodded. He knew what she was thinking. If they had indeed been flagged by Newsight, the simulations would only help them blend in. “I think I will too,” he said.
Jessica smiled at him – perhaps relieved – then continued the short distance to the door. She disappeared into the hallway a second later.
When she had gone, Vincent lay back on his bed with his feet still dangling off the end. He let his eyes slide out of focus. It wouldn’t have taken Jessica’s suggestion about the simulations for him to enter one. Thoughts of the small brown house and grassy backyard had plagued his mind ever since the first sim. If it helped rid them of Newsight’s flags, terrific, but that wasn’t why he let his eyes lead him to the simulation library; he wanted to go back. His Lenses seemed to sense it, too, because he didn’t have to scroll to the bottom this time – the black square labeled newsim was already at the top. Only now, there was a second label there as well: 1,200. Vincent sighed, letting his head sink a centimeter deeper into the bed. Derek hadn’t given them any spending money, let alone luxury money. Still,
on a whim, Vincent selected the sim anyway. To his surprise, it opened the same as it had before, and on the bottom of the screen, a few lines of text appeared as well:
114,000
-1,200
Balance: 112,800
Vincent let out a laugh. It felt odd coming out of him, but he couldn’t help it. Apparently, Ben and Lena Carlson had continued to receive an allowance – and a generous one, at that – in spite of their absence. Or, perhaps, their benefactor hadn’t noticed their absence at all.
The numbers cleared, and the same narrator as before welcomed Vincent to newsim. Moments later, the black screen began to fade, and he was sitting in the same house as before, only this time, they had traded the hard-backed chairs around the dining table for the soft, sinking chairs in the room over. Vincent and his grandfather both had their own seat, and in between them, Vincent’s parents were sharing a single, larger one.
“It would have been a catastrophe.” Vincent’s grandfather was speaking. “To give any one company that much. I never trusted them, anyway. Not a single one.”
“I’m with you, Rick,” said Tom. “The last straw for me was when they lobbied against the regulations. We knew then we had let them go too far. Almost all the way.”
“Things never quite felt right,” joined Sarah. “In the Seclusion…” she shuddered. “It was never home. And the things they tried to make me do in Incubation.” She shook her head in disgust. “Terrible.”
Tom nodded in agreement. “If only you knew what was going on in the cities,” he said. “That was the real reason we stopped things. I just don’t know how we let it all get so bad.”
“I think the kids saved us,” said Rick. “We finally realized the kind of world we were about to pass down to them. And,” he continued, smiling, “that simulation was a big part of it.”
“THE SIM?” said Tom. “It was all of it. And can you believe it was our Vincent who showed us?”
“Of course I can,” said Sarah. Tom squeezed her around the shoulders.
“So can I,” he said. He was looking at Vincent, eyes beaming with pride. “Why don’t we watch it again?” he said. “As a reminder.”
“Tom I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said Sarah. “We’re safe now. We can forget about all that.”
“The hell we can,” said Rick. “The second we forget is when it happens again. A different company next time. Maybe a government. I think they should show that thing in schools twice a week.”
Vincent’s father laughed, but he made no contradiction. “We don’t have to if you’d rather not, Sarah,” he said. “But it has been a while.”
Sarah pondered for a second, then relented. “Well all right,” she said. “Do you have it, Vincent?”
Vincent reached down to his front pocket on instinct, but there was no pocket there, only a column of buttons and a striped fold of fabric.
“Try your pants, sweetheart,” said his mother.
Growing hot at the cheeks, he reached inside both pant pockets. In his left, he felt the hard disc of THE SIM on his fingers. He pulled it out.
“Toss it here,” said Tom, standing. “I’ll plug it in.”
Hesitating as he looked down at the precious disc in his hands, Vincent tossed the thing to his father. He watched as Tom bent down in front of a large, flat screen at the front of the room. Just as he began to insert the disc into its slot, the air in the room went stiff and cold. Everything was still, even the curtains on either side of the backdoor had frozen in their flutter. It stayed like that for a full second before things returned to normal.
“Let’s watch a movie instead,” said Tom. His voice was cheery and warm, but something about it seemed out of place. He looked back at them. “How does that sound?”
“Great idea,” said Rick.
“Perfect,” said Sarah.
He looked at Vincent next. “I’ll pick your favorite.” Smiling, and without waiting for an answer, he turned back to the screen. Unsettled, Vincent grew tense in his chair. But when the screen began to play, and his parents leaned back to watch, Vincent forgot about THE SIM. His parents and grandfather were smiling, and the air was warm again.