“It is a bit unusual,” said Diana, and laughed, a soft, girlish sound that sounded oddly disproportionate coming from her adult face. “We tried the traditional routes. Individual therapy, family therapy, anger management. We even discussed pharmaceutical solutions.”
“If there was a pill that could make you love your sister when you didn’t want to, we would have found it and taken a handful,” interjected Kim.
Diana didn’t seem to mind. That was another point in favor of Dr. Webb’s technique, however invasive and downright terrifying it might be: Diana was actually smiling when she continued. “We were close to the end of our ropes. We were starting to discuss the possibility of letting it go, just declaring ourselves orphans with no living family and letting the state handle any complications which might arise.”
“Meaning they’d unplug us as soon as it got expensive, but still better than giving each other medical power of attorney,” said Kim. “It would have been a long, slow form of suicide, and we’d reached the point where we were willing to consider it.”
“What changed?” asked Esther.
The sisters exchanged a look. “Don’t laugh,” said Diana defensively.
“I assure you, I’m not laughing,” said Esther. “Please. If I’m going to report about this fairly, I need to know everything.”
“I’ve always been a horror fan,” said Kim. She and Diana exchanged another glance. This time, it was Diana who touched Kim’s hand, lending her sister just that fragment of resolve. Kim took a deep breath, and said, “I went to a local horror con. They’re fun, you know? Meet a couple of B-list celebrities, get some books signed, maybe buy a T-shirt. Dr. Webb was there, giving a talk on how she developed her software, how she put together the therapeutic scenarios, everything.”
“When we were kids, the only thing we could agree on was that Saturday night was horror movie night,” said Diana. “All the basic cable channels had something with blood and gore and screaming. We’d sit on the couch, and share our popcorn, and feel almost like we liked each other. Like we were…like we were…”
“Sisters,” breathed Kim.
The rest of the story was so simple that Esther could have written it without talking to them. It followed the expected beats: it contained nothing new, no dark, unexpected secrets that would cast the whole thing into a new light. Esther would have been happier if it had. At least then, she could have understood how two women, lost without the anchors of their parents, could spin a shared love of horror movies into a reason to rebuild themselves from the ground up rather than keep working through conventional means. Instead, she was left with someone who had seen a…a fringe scientist at best, and a quack at worst, speak surrounded by men in rubber masks and women in bloody lingerie, and had thought “yes, she can save us.”
But Dr. Webb had made good on her promises. Despite the shadows in Diana’s eyes, she’d agreed to go along with the procedure, hadn’t she? After another few sessions, Esther had little doubt those shadows would be gone. The sisters would have each other, forever. It was the cost that had yet to be revealed.
“Do you have any regrets?” Esther asked.
There was that shadow again, sliding across Diana’s face like a cloud moving in front of the moon. She put her hand over Kim’s, and squeezed, and laughed nervously.
“I don’t think I’ll ever go to a corn maze again,” she said.
___2. Hunting.
“DID YOU get the files?” The phone was a heavy weight in her hand, old-fashioned, neither connected to the internet nor capable of communicating with her headset. One of the Institute’s long list of restrictions had involved limiting photography and recording devices, as well as access to the local wireless. Esther had a camera that weighed as much as a brick, an internet connection that traveled through more firewalls than the NSA would have demanded, and a phone that was only good for making calls, receiving texts, and smashing spiders.
It was like they were slow-walking her into their horror movie, one piece of surrendered technology at a time.
“I did.” Her editor sounded unsettled, like something about the material had disturbed him. “Esther, are you sure you want to go through with this? The drugs—”
“Are all cleared for use in this process. It’s no more dangerous than dental sedation.”
“People die during dental sedation.”
“Then it’s less dangerous than dental sedation. No one has died during one of Dr. Webb’s ‘procedures.’” Esther rifled through the release forms on her temporary desk, giving them one last quick review. “One man did have a stroke, but he had filled out medical disclosure forms ahead of time indicating that he had a pre-existing condition. He accepted the risks.”
(And hadn’t that just burned? She’d called his doctor, hoping to find a little underhanded manipulation of events, something that would point to a secret graveyard of buried secrets clawing at their coffins, yearning to break free. Instead, she’d found a doctor who was glad, if regretful, to confirm that his patient had undertaken the procedure against medical advice—and that he had been happy to sign off on it, although he had refused to tell Esther why his now-deceased client had been seeking Dr. Webb’s services. Some stories wanted to stay buried.)
“Dammit, Esther, I—”
“Sent me here knowing that Webb was going to give the hard sell, and that I was going to crumble, because you have my psych evaluation from before I left on this assignment.”
Silence from the phone. That was answer enough, really, and the only one she’d been expecting.
“You knew I wasn’t going to be able to resist seeing her system from the inside. It’s just one more form of repressed memory therapy, which means it’s bullshit, which means I need to understand it well enough to tear it down.”
“You promised to be objective.”
“You sent me for a full observer’s report on their program and methodology, to go along with Sunnie’s report on the tech they’ve been willing to share. You knew what you were doing.” He’d known she was a scorpion since the day he’d picked her up, young and hungry and toiling in the click-bait gossip blogs, turning out article after article in the hopes of that one big break that would change the world.
When the big break had come, it hadn’t changed the world. It hadn’t even changed her address. All it had changed was the typeface on her byline—and the place her articles appeared. Now she was print as well as electronic, a hyper-evolved modern journalist diving back into the den of the dinosaurs, trying to drag them kicking and screaming out of the path of the oncoming comet. So many of them seemed content to sit in their corners and die quietly.
Esther wasn’t having any of that. The future was coming. The future was here. The future was not evenly distributed, and was never going to be, but people could at least keep writing about it, could keep pointing to its flaws and bellowing for the world to turn and open up its eyes. She had as much of an agenda as anyone else she knew. She simply thought, in the usual mammalian way, that her agenda was the right one. Her ideas were pure, and would protect people from those who would exploit them. All they had to do was let her show them.
“Promise me you’re being careful.”
“I’ve read all the documentation. I’ve spoken to my doctor.”
“Have you spoken to your psychiatrist?”
This time, the silence was on her end, offended as much as stumped. On the other end of the phone, her editor sighed.
“When you took this assignment, you agreed to acknowledge that what had happened to your father would be a factor, and to remain in constant contact with your psychiatrist. That was our deal.”
“Deals can change.”
“Esther—”
“The window for gaining access to one of Dr. Webb’s therapy pods is narrow. They’re set up to run three scenarios at a time, for up to six patients.” They were planning to expand, of course; that was part of why the historically press-shy doctor had agreed to the article. The I
nstitute hoped to expand their pod system, keeping the current dual system while also adding multiple “family size” pods, allowing them to enroll up to eight people in the same scenario.
(“It will help people who’ve experienced a shared traumatic experience to move past it,” Dr. Webb had explained, smiling coolly for the camera, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Esther would have given a great deal for the name of her public relations coach. No one was this effortless on film without someone teaching them how. “Plane crashes, acts of terrorism, even more regrettably common incidents, such as abuse by a trusted coach or teacher, we’ll be able to guide the people who come to us past that terrible reality and into a fiction that might teach them how to forgive themselves. How to forgive the world.”)
Without a partner going under with her, Esther would be effectively locking up a two-person pod system for between six and sixteen hours, depending on the complexity of her scenario and how she chose to interface with it. During that time, the Institute would be limited in the number of patients they could see. It was hard not to feel smug about how she had effectively cut their available systems by one-third, all without doing anything beyond promising them a little press.
“I’m still not fully comfortable with this.”
“Are you going to tell me not to do it? Or is this exactly what you hoped I’d do?”
Again, her editor sighed. “Just…please be careful.”
“How much danger can I really be in?” Esther put the paperwork down. “It’s not like the horror movie will be real.”
“WHILE IT'S happening, the scenario will feel completely real,” said Dr. Webb. She wasn’t behind her desk anymore, or operating a bank of complicated controls: she was sitting on the edge of the table supporting the unused pod, hands folded between her knees, attention fixed on Esther. “If you eat, you’ll feel full. If you drink, you’ll feel hydrated. We’ll be tending to your body’s needs throughout the process, if it goes long enough. We’ve found that there’s surprisingly little correlation between hunger felt inside the scenario and hunger felt outside the scenario.”
“Meaning someone could starve to death in one of these things?” asked Esther.
“Meaning they’re not intended for recreational use,” said Dr. Webb firmly. “Our VR technology is and will remain proprietary. We can’t prevent people from making the same breakthroughs we did, but we can at least slow down the process.”
“I see,” said Esther. “You know, progress is historically difficult to slow or stop.”
“I’m a scientist,” said Dr. Webb, with a flicker of humor. “I’m fully aware of the hubris inherent in saying ‘oh, we’re just going to keep this to ourselves.’ But that doesn’t mean I need to hand out my blueprints like candy. Someone was always going to develop fully immersive VR, whether for therapeutic purposes or because they really, really wanted to enjoy their favorite video games. Honestly, I was betting on porn driving this particular scientific advancement. No one is more surprised than me that my little research center was able to beat them to the post. We’re getting away from the point. No one will be starving to death in one of my pods, because no one will be using them without medical supervision. A technician is assigned to monitoring both the vital signs of the user and the stability of the scenario at all times.”
“How detailed are these scenarios?”
“It depends on the needs of the user,” said Dr. Webb. “In the case of Diana and Kim, whom you’ve met and who have consented to my discussing their treatment with you, we didn’t need much detail at all. They had a clear problem which they wanted to have fixed, and we were able to create a basic narrative which they then embroidered upon. You…”
“I’m a tourist,” said Esther.
Dr. Webb looked faintly uncomfortable. “You can’t think of yourself that way. No one is a tourist once the scenario begins. Whether you intend it or not, you’re going to receive the full therapeutic experience. We’re not set up for anything less.”
“I don’t have anything to fix,” said Esther. She yawned. “Damn. Those pills work fast.”
“They have to, if they’re going to be effective,” said Dr. Webb. “And everyone has something to fix.”
Esther opened her mouth to say something else. The words turned into another yawn, and by the time it was over, her eyes were closed. She sank slowly down into the body of the pod, curled like a kitten, chest rising and falling in a steady, even rhythm.
Dr. Webb stood, all trace of geniality and concern bleeding out of her face as she looked down at the sleeping Esther. An onlooker would have been easily forgiven for finding something foreboding in her posture, which was more that of an undertaker than that of a doctor.
When she turned, her head technician was waiting behind her, backlit by the bright halogen glow through the open hallway door. She smiled at him, thin as a razorblade. He smiled back. His teeth were very bright.
“She’s ready,” she said.
“Yes, Dr. Webb,” he replied, and reached for the waiting cart, loaded with syringes and bags of pharmaceutical solutions that would work their own strange magic on the sleeping woman.
It was time for the adventure to begin.
THERE WAS no sensation of falling, of fading from one reality into another: Esther closed her eyes on one world and opened them on another. There was a faint, nagging sense at the back of her mind that something was wrong. It faded, replaced by the sense that she had moved from one tense into another, that everything around her was—is—happening with a reality, an urgency, that she has never felt before.
She is standing in the living room of an empty house, floral wallpaper and exposed ceiling beams and carnival glass windows greeting her in every direction. She puts a hand against her sternum to still the pounding of her too-anxious heart, and the curve of her breasts has been reduced from a sentence to an epigram, barely present. She is thirteen years old, in the summer before puberty will hit her (did hit her? Might hit her? Present and future and past are tangled together like eels in a bucket, impossible to pick apart) like a freight train. Right now, she is still more child than woman, for all that she is technically a teen.
That her own age should be a revelation is less confusing to her than the scene around her. The house is older than any other house Esther has ever seen, except for maybe on television, where it seems like every house is an old one, like nothing has been built in the world since her grandparents were young. That’s something else this house has in common with the ones she’s seen on TV: her grandparents used to live here, before they died (passed away) and left the property to her—
To her—
“Esther, what are you doing? You’re supposed to be carrying those boxes up the stairs!”
Her heart hammers even harder in her chest as she turns, and there he is, there he is, her father standing in the doorway, a stern expression on his beloved, bearded face. She runs to him before taking the time to think about the action, flinging her arms around his waist and burying her face in his shirt. He smells like cedar chips and sweat and leather, the scents she will always associate with him, until the day she dies.
(In a small, closed pod, miles and years and realities from this moment that never existed, the woman Esther would grow up to become bit down on her mouth guard, back arching away from the foam surface beneath her, every muscle in her body protesting this monumental lie. On the other side of a glass window, a technician in a long white coat frowned and adjusted the doses on her medication, sedating her until she subsided, relaxing back into the illusion of a home that never was, a moment that never happened, back into the now.)
“Esther, what’s wrong? You’re shivering.” Benjamin Hoffman lets his daughter go and takes a step back, looking at her carefully. “Is it too cold? Do you need me to turn up the heat?”
Esther doesn’t know why she’s shivering—didn’t even realize she was until he said something. She shakes her head, and answers, “No, Daddy. I guess I’
m just a little overwhelmed with…everything.” She waves her hands, encompassing the house, the two of them, even the town outside.
“Ah.” Benjamin never expected to be a father: thought that blessing was reserved for someone else, someone better and wiser and luckier than him. Now that he has his little girl, he’s going to do as well by her as he can. He made that promise the day she was born. He’s never broken it. “You know, peach, if you need to go stay with your Aunt Shira…”
“I don’t want to stay with Aunt Shira,” says Esther firmly. “I want to stay with you. I promised Mom I wouldn’t let you be alone. She said you wallow.”
Benjamin grimaces. “I suppose that’s true,” he says, in the careful, fragile tone of a man who is still adjusting to the idea of being a widower: still coming to terms with the existence of a world where his wife is not waiting in the next room, ready and even eager to step in and make the business of parenting a little easier to bear. He has so much to learn. He has so much motivation.
Esther’s face is turned toward his, the light that slants through the carnival glass windows painting her skin in pinks and greens, and it doesn’t matter that he’s a simulation drawn from her own memories of her father: he loves her so much he could fill the world with loving. She has never been more beautiful, and he has never needed her more.
Benjamin Hoffman, dead for nearly twenty years, resurrected by a computer program that had barely been conceived of when he was still among the living, takes that girl in his arms, and holds her like he never, never wants to let her go.
“AND SHE'S under,” said the technician, sounding profoundly satisfied with himself. He leaned back in his chair, cracking his knuckles theatrically, like a conductor getting ready to start his finest symphony. “Dr. Webb?”
“Esther Hoffman, age thirty-four,” said Dr. Webb. Her tone was distant, almost clinical. It sounded like she was reading from a file, despite her empty hands. “Her father, Benjamin Hoffman, was convicted of child abuse and kidnapping when she was fifteen, leaving her in the custody of her maternal aunt. All charges were later dropped and his conviction overturned when it was discovered that his accusers had been guided by an unethical psychologist helping them to recover ‘buried’ memories. Unfortunately for Mr. Hoffman, vindication came too late: he had died in prison the previous year. Esther never forgave the system for failing her father, or the psychologist who’d effectively painted the target on his back, marking him as a stranger and a danger to the people of their new hometown.”