I knew I would have to be careful. Everything surrounding the system’s protocols was now considered a matter of national security. The gaming conglomerate was now operating as an official arm of the federal government, and it wasn’t easy to hack anything that had to do with it. But I made some decent attempts and after months and months of struggling on my own, I made contact. The Greys found me. They were a lose collection of people like me who were trying to take on the system. We were working together to get people out who’d gone in and to shut it down. Some were so close that they were able to plant bugs. Some were double agents. No one had met in person. I knew the Greys would be successful and bringing a reckoning, but I had one big problem: Casey’s birthday was in a week and she was seriously considering signing the Forever Contract. We needed more time.
I have to find a way to make her see—see the truth without hating me.
CASEY
“I think we should at least do some more investigating before you make your decision,” James said one day after school ended. We were supposed to be helping to dig a new well, but it was easy to get out of it when you were close to your birthday. Everyone understood if you’d rather spend time looking at the past for clues about how to build your own perfect future. The libraries were packed. Everyone loved these big glossy books that said Pottery Barn on the covers. They were preserved with clear plastic so the pictures wouldn’t fade too much from all the greedy fingers pawing at them.
“Investigate? Investigate what?”
“The system. Let’s find out where your brother is being stored and see if he’s okay,” he suggested casually. A little too casually. James didn’t do things unless they had a specific purpose. He wouldn’t build a sandcastle at the beach unless there was prize money involved.
“I’m not sure I want to do that,” I said. I knew it would be really weird to see my brother’s thin body in the warehouse on the edge of town. That wasn’t really him anymore. He was his avatar now, the one I had big plans to hang out with as soon as I signed my papers and went in. Ben had chosen to live in a city environment, in a gorgeous sky apartment filled with tropical plants. His living room was circular and it looked out over a beautiful blue sky filled with zippy little flying cars. He had watched a lot of this old cartoon show called The Jetsons online before he’d gone in. There were a bunch of Jetsons freaks in there. They’d combined the best of retro space age style with touches from their favorite modern movies to create their habitat, and they all loved the hell out of it. I couldn’t wait to join them. Ben always showed me the room he’d set up for me and promised that I could change it however I wanted when I arrived. It had its own minibar stocked with every kind of fruit juice I’d ever heard of. And lots I hadn’t.
There was even an orange tree waiting for me—right there in my bedroom. I had dreams about what it would smell like.
“C’mon. I want to know where you’ll be. Maybe I’ll visit you,” James kissed my wrist and looked at me with sad eyes.
“Visit my body? That’s weird. And I don’t think it’s allowed.”
“How is that weird? I like your body,” James said slyly, pulling me close for a kiss. I was tan and lean like all kids my age, from working in the sun. I thought about giving him a lecture about how I wasn’t my body, but then I forgot about it and closed my eyes. He stopped, however, because he was serious about his little mission. “I don’t care if it isn’t allowed. The government isn’t everywhere. Those warehouses are fully automated—as long as I don’t trip a laser, no one will see me. See us, I mean. Let’s go now.”
“How do you know this stuff?” I asked, incredulous. “How do you know they aren’t filled with cameras?”
“I read a few things. I’m good at research.”
James liked to know everything. He didn’t use his screens to play games, he used them to gather information. He knew the whole history of the Forever system, how it had begun as a MMOG that his mother had helped design and gotten so good that people had stopped signing off. How a few people had died of thirst while playing until the developers came up with a life-support system you could use when you signed on. How the government had purchased it and changed it and started building the warehouses when the water wars had gotten too bad.
“Fine,” I agreed. “We’ll go. But it’s going to bum me out and it’ll be your fault.”
“I know. But I think being bummed out is an important part of the human experience,” he replied. I narrowed my eyes at him. But even though I didn’t want to admit it, I too had an appetite for information. I had doubts about the system, even though I didn’t particularly want to share those doubts with my pig-headed boyfriend. Visiting Ben wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
I went into my dad’s files and found out which warehouse Ben was being stored in. It felt wrong to dig through his things—I completed the task as quickly as possible and relocked his desk when he was at work. I knew that if I had just asked him for the information he would have given it to me, but I didn’t want my parents to know what I was up to all the time. I wanted to make my own decision.
We took a bus to the warehouse district, an hour-long dusty trip I didn’t ever want to repeat, and found the huge gray doors on Ben’s warehouse, number 3, locked. They didn’t even have door handles—it was just a huge flat metal set of doors with a security panel next to it. The panel had an old-fashioned keyhole, but that didn’t make me feel any better. I was about to unleash a few choice words, but James was prepared. He had a tiny tool kit and used one of the instruments to begin picking the lock. I was impressed—it was all so spy novel. He was making good progress when I heard something behind us.
“Hey! Stop there!” A security guard hurried over to us. We were in the middle of nowhere because they liked to build the warehouses on real estate with no value; it was a total shock to hear another human voice. “You don’t belong here,” he said in a harsh voice when he got a better look at us. My heart dropped and James looked scared. At least he’d managed to slip his lock pick into his jeans pocket before the armed man had seen it. I reached slowly into my purse, my eyes on the guard.
“Sorry, mister,” I said, as calmly as my racing heart would allow. “We’ll leave.”
“There’s nothing to see here anyway. And no accessible water,” he said. “You’ll get to sign the contract soon enough.”
“Yeah, okay,” I nodded. “My birthday’s next week. I just wanted to check it out a little, I’m sorry. I have to call my mom.” My hand was fully in my purse now, clutched around a small object. I wanted the guard to think it was my phone. As if I could afford something like that.
“I need you to leave the premises.” He took a step toward me and I had my opportunity. I pulled out a small Taser and touched it to his chest. He went down like a sack of potatoes.
“Oh my God! I’m sorry!”
“Jesus!” James said at the same time. It was his turn to be impressed. “Where’d you get that?”
“From Ben. Oh God, I didn’t expect it to work that well! Shit shit shit shit…he worried things were going to get bad out here before I’d have a chance to get hooked up. He didn’t expect me to use it on a security guard.” I was shaking. I’d never hurt anyone on purpose like that before and I didn’t like it. I had a sudden vision of myself as a small child at my dance recital. I was wearing pink and forgetting my ballet steps. I wanted to be her again. “What should we do with this guy?”
“We can’t leave him here. He’ll burn. We’re so screwed once he calls this in.” The sun was intense. Together, we hauled the security guard’s limp body to his little electric golf cart and made sure his face was shaded by the roof. “I wish I had some water for him or something,” James said.
“I know, me too. I have an extra gel pack. I’ll give him that.” I put the pack in the man’s hand, but it slipped out again. I had to settle for leaving it in his shirt pocket. I hoped he see it when he woke up and forgive me for what I had done to him. Fear made my head p
ound. I swallowed.
“C’mon, we don’t have a lot of time before he wakes up and calls someone.” James hurriedly picked the lock to the security panel next to the door. When it opened, he entered a series of codes onto a touchscreen and the door in front of us opened. I didn’t even ask how he did it. James was always doing things other people couldn’t.
We snuck inside. The space was lit by low blue lights. My eyes took several moments to adjust in the cool air. It felt like we were inside a massive airplane hangar. Beyond an entrance area with a bank of computer screens manned by a robot, there were bodies lined up at little individual stations. Each one had a cot, a monitoring screen, and scads of tubes and sensors. It looked like an old picture I’d seen once of a chicken egg factory, with birds stacked to the ceilings. Only these weren’t birds, they were people. It was hard to remember they were all experiencing contentment as they lay there in metal recliners. Everyone was on their back and wearing the same standard issue white paper hospital gown. Their hair was allowed to grow as long as it wanted. When we finally found my brother, it didn’t look like him at all. His hair had gone grayish and gotten longer than I’d ever seen it. His body was thin and his cheeks were sunken. There were sensors all over him, just as there were on everyone. He was hooked up to a feeding tube, but breathing normally.
Another tube went into his torso to collect waste, but a third access point confused me.
“What’s this?” I asked James, terrified.
“Looks like a dialysis machine,” he said. “They must have taken his kidneys.”
“His…but why?” The thought of them—whoever “they” were—taking my brother’s organs made me want to murder someone. What right did they have?
“I guess they figured he didn’t need them anymore. It’s in the contract, I believe. This is why they don’t let you out, Casey! At least he still has his corneas, unlike this poor asshole.” James pointed to Ben’s neighbor, whose eye sockets were bandaged. “Talk about the have-nots.”
“Get me out of here,” I gasped. This was too horrible, and James was too unsurprised. It made me hate him, but I needed his help—I could barely walk. He put my arms around his neck and guided me back into the unrelenting sunlight, carefully avoiding the occasional red beams of motion-sensor light that scanned the warehouse as we stumble-walked out. We both held our breaths as we constantly looked around and behind us, convinced that at any moment we’d set off an alarm. A small red beam came our way at the end of one of the corridors. As it got close, we watched it, preparing to jump before it could touch our legs. I was so tense I was worried I’d freeze.
“Jump!” James hissed a split second before contact. We jumped. No alarm sounded.
As the thick gray doors closed behind us, I collapsed into the dry ugly dust and started to cry.
James was quiet, letting me grieve. Finally, he whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” I admitted. He was the only one who’d seen the true colors of all of this. I couldn’t blame him for that. “I don’t know what I expected. I knew Ben wasn’t coming back. It was just horrible to see him like that.”
“I know.”
“I don’t get it, though. Why would they take his kidneys?”
“I think they take what they need. He must have been a match for someone.”
“But someone who? I thought all the terminally ill went into the system. You don’t need kidneys if you’re an avatar.”
“Casey, not everyone is going in. I’ve been convinced of it for a long time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, not everyone is going in. The powerful created the system for suckers, for the poor, for the suffering. There’s a whole other world out there, a real world, and it’s perfect. They made it perfect. Then they put a bubble around it and they take what they need from us and that’s it. No avatars for the pirates. Real life, for a long time. All the resources the planet has left, and we didn’t even fight them. We just signed on the dotted line.”
“You’re saying…”
“I’m saying that’s there aren’t just two options. There isn’t just this shitty barren life or the Forever system. We could fight them, Casey. Take what’s ours. Get it back. Be happy, and not just as avatars, as people, living in a real world.”
I sniffed and dug around in my bag for a tissue that wasn’t there. “What proof do you have that this, um, bubble even exists?”
“No proof. I need you…I need help figuring out what’s really going on here. We have to learn who is in charge.”
I started crying again. I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to find out the truth. I wanted to sign on the dotted line, to join my brother, to live like The Jetsons in the sky, with no suffering and no thirst. I wanted what was promised me and was too scared to ask for more.
But then I thought of my own body, my strong muscles deflated, my hair graying, my cheeks sunken in, my organs stolen.
“Okay,” I said finally. I felt so tired, exhausted. Devastated.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” I whispered. “I believe you. I won’t go in. What do we do now?”
“I love you, Casey,” James said. “Are you ready?”
“Nope. But I love you, too.”
“Me neither.”
We looked at the horizon, not sure what we’d do or how we’d do it.
I was still thirsty.
*
By the next morning, I was waffling on my pledge to James not to sign the contract. The night had been a particularly hot one, and the single fan we had in our adobe house wasn’t working. I’m an insomniac in the best conditions, so I don’t think I even got a full two hours of sleep. When I did finally doze around four a.m., I kept dreaming of Ben’s reduced body, his avatar pulling me away from it, away from the warehouse, away from the desert, into an ocean where dolphins swam. When I finally woke up, I immediately went online to talk to him. Almost all the power we were allotted for the month went towards keeping our screens alive.
“Hi brother,” I said. Onscreen, he was chopping something at his kitchen counter. He wore a bright Hawaiian-style shirt and swim trunks. “What are you doing?”
“Making breakfast,” he said. The avatars did everything regular people did, like sleep and eat—unless they didn’t want to. “Want some?”
“Very funny. Why don’t you just conjure what you want to eat instead of cooking?”
“I like cooking,” he said.
“Oh.” It was hard to imagine. Here, we didn’t have a huge variety of ingredients, so making meals was repetitive and depressing. Some nights, Dad just combined a chicken-flavored gel pack with some white rice and called it good.
“Won’t be long now,” Ben smiled.
“Well…” I hesitated. Would telling my brother about what I’d seen yesterday be a mistake? It wasn’t like I could get his kidneys back if he started to freak out. It was forbidden knowledge, what I considered sharing with him. No avatar was supposed to give his or her real body any thought at all.
“What’s up, Case? I can tell you’re bugged. Do you have enough water?”
“Never, but that’s not it. It’s…you know…it’s James,” I stumbled.
“James? Is he still being a stubborn beast about your birthday?” Ben knew that James didn’t want me to go in.
“Yeah. Listen, I have to tell you something and I don’t want you to get upset,” I said. Before I could mull it over any longer, I let it spill out of me. “James and I went to your warehouse yesterday. We broke in. Your…you…someone has removed your kidneys, I think.”
It sounded ridiculous when I said it out loud. I lowered my eyes, suddenly ashamed to look at my handsome older brother’s face. He was so perfect. So happy. What was I doing?
He started laughing. Loudly. I looked up. “Casey, it’s fine,” he choked. “I don’t need them anymore.”
“But…did you know that would happen?” I asked. “It just looked so…bad.”
/>
“No, I didn’t know that exact thing would happen, but I don’t care. I live here now. I have a new body. A better one. It doesn’t matter what happens to my old kidneys.” He flexed his avatar bicep like a goof and kissed it for good measure. Then he winked at me. “You know some people in here are mermaids? Some have wings. The last thing anyone is thinking about is a kidney back home. It’s all good.”
I gulped. It was the first time since Ben had gone in that I’d heard him refer to where I was—to our dusty town—as home. It made me tear up. I blinked to hide it and pretended to cough.
“Okay…” I finally said. “Okay. I guess it just freaked me out a little.”
“Looks like it,” Ben agreed. “You know, I’d rather you not sneak around like that, Case. You’re so close to being done with that hellhole. Why risk getting in trouble now?”
“Who would I be in trouble with?” I asked. I felt both relief and curiosity. And underneath both, fear. Ben was too calm about everything.
“I don’t know. ‘Them.’ The people in charge.” He made quotes with his fingers, but I could tell he wasn’t taking me seriously.
“But aren’t you curious about who those people are?”
“Not really. Listen, Casey. I completely get it. Your whole life, my whole life before I got here—it was hard. It was difficult and unfair, and good things didn’t happen a lot. It’s totally natural to have doubts because you’re just not used to the concept of having enough—of contentment. But I’m telling you that coming here and letting go of all the fear and the pain is the best thing I’ve ever done. I just want you here with me. And Mom and Dad. Then I’ll be so blissed out I don’t know what will happen!”
He did an ecstatic little wiggle at the idea and I sighed.
I didn’t know what would happen, either.
*
On the day of my birthday, a police officer showed up at our door to arrest me.
“We have footage of your daughter committing felony assault,” the cop said to my mom. He was old and sounded tired. He handed her a small screen that showed James and I entering the warehouse after I dropped the guard. Why hadn’t we gone at night? The picture switched and showed us on the inside of the building. I guess it hadn’t mattered.