Chapter SixGhost

Soph had spent the last three weeks lying in bed, deep in depression. Atom had been spirited away by his father after his condition had stabilized and she hadn't heard anything from him. Max had assured her that Atom was going to be okay, that they were doing all they could, and that she should be patient. Her professors were understanding enough of the situation. Everyone left her alone.

She thought of her father then. She didn't remember him very well, but she tried to recall a memory of him now.

Max had told her about him once, when Soph was old enough to ask and not yet old enough to understand the answer. "He was a great artist. I've never known anyone like him. He wasn't for this world, unfortunately. It was sad, watching him go."

There was a painting of his in the hallway, a lake that wasn't any particular lake, in a blue that didn't exist, and she had walked past it every day of her life without looking at it. He lived now in a facility in Napa with a garden. Soph never went to see him. If she ever had a dark secret, that was it. She was terrified of the thought of insanity, terrified that if she went to see him she might catch his disease, terrified that she'd caught it already. She looked up at the ceiling, tracing the lines of the tiles. She traced back the other way, trying not to let her path of tracing overlap itself. She closed her eyes. Opened them. Closed them again. Traced the lines. When she felt happy and whole such quirks weren't bothersome, and she hardly noticed them. But in the gloom of recent tragedy she felt like she was teetering on the edge of an all-consuming darkness.

Another week slipped by before Max called from The Lab with the promise of good news.

"What is it? Is it about Atom?"

"Yes."

"He's okay? He can walk and talk?"

"I'll be home in a few hours, we'll talk then."

Soph was immediately hopeful and excited for a moment. Then she fell back into her fog. Better not to expect too much. If he could walk, he'd probably come see me. Or maybe Atom wants to surprise me. But could he have recovered so quickly? No, not possible.

Hours passed and Soph heard a car pull into the driveway. She got up, put some pants on and turned on her lights. Don't want them to think I've been sleeping all day. She wanted to believe it was Atom. She heard the rustling of keys in the door, and she opened it. Max was alone.

"Oh, hey mom."

"Hi." Max gave her a hug, and held on a little longer than usual. "Put on your suit and frames, I've got a surprise for you."

"Atom?" Soph asked, surprised.

There he was, standing in front of her in the living room. She took her frames off– he wasn't in the room. She put them back on. "Where are you right now? I mean, it's good to see you."

"You too. I've missed you so much. Oh, man. It's so good to talk to you. I'm at The Lab right now. Or, my body is at least. I've been cooped up learning how to speak with my mind. But I'm here now, with you."

He looked exactly like Atom, thin and blond and standing with his weight on one hip, and he was faintly transparent, so that she could see the bookshelf through his shoulder.

"So you're connected with the Link?"

"Something like that, this one is way more advanced. I'm hardwired in. Hey, don't be sad babe. I'm here now!"

"I'm… I'm not sad. I mean, I'm really sad. But I'm also really happy that you're alive." Soph fought back tears, lost, and wiped her face with the back of her glove.

"Are you okay with this?"

"Yeah, it's just, it's weird. I want to touch you, I want to kiss you so badly."

Atom walked over to her and hugged her. Electrodes in her G-Suit fired. Vibrators vibrated. Actuators tensed her joints. It was a good, long squeeze. She squeezed back.

"Can you feel it when I hug you?" she asked.

"Yeah. Oh, wow. It feels so real. Way better than the suit. What about you?"

"Well, I've never hugged someone virtually. It feels good. It's just good to see you."

Atom held her by the shoulders. "So, what are you up to?"

"Honestly, I've just been waiting for you to come home."

"Well, I'm here, aren't I?" Atom smiled. "Hey, let's go find some mobs, I have to practice moving around."

"You can do that? I thought you could only ghost around."

"Nah, I've got a bunch of cool new tricks."

Max had been standing in the kitchen doorway the whole time, watching her daughter hug the air. Now she came in and sat down on the arm of the couch.

"Before you two go anywhere. Atom, you've heard this already. Soph, I need you to hear it too."

"Okay."

"What Atom has is not the Link that we showed at the party. It's a prototype, and it's implanted. Nobody outside The Lab knows it exists, aside from Jeff, and it needs to stay that way for now. There are a lot of reasons. Some of them are business and some of them are legal, and some of them, frankly, are that we don't know how people are going to feel about it, and we can't afford to find out yet."

"I'm not going to tell anyone."

"I know. But it's more than that. In the game Atom is a ghost, a mentalist. He looks like every other Link player, and that's fine. But other players can't see him do anything a ghost can't do. He can pick things up. He can feel things. He can hit things. Nobody else can see any of that. If you two go out there and he's swinging a sword and taking hits, someone's going to notice that the ghost is playing wrong, and then they're going to ask why."

"So no fighting?"

"Fight. Just fight where nobody's watching. Ring Mountain is usually empty on a weekday. And if anyone asks, he's using a Link and he's bound to you, and that's all there is to it."

"Okay."

"And Soph." Max looked at her. "He's still in the chamber downstairs. He's still hurt. This isn't a cure, it's a very good bridge. I need you to know that."

"I know."

"Okay." Max stood up. "Go. Get out of the house. You've been in it for a month."

Max drove Soph to the entrance to a trail that led up to Ring Mountain. Atom sat in the back seat. Soph was amazed to look back and see him there, and he waved at her every time she did.

"Alright, I'll leave you two here. Give me a call when you want me to come pick you up. Before it gets dark, okay?"

Soph opened her car door. "Okay. Thanks, mom."

"Say goodbye to Atom for me. Tell him I'll see him tomorrow."

"Okay, I will."

Atom sublimated into a ball of mist and rematerialized beside her on the gravel. "Pretty cool, right? No need to tell me, I can hear her through your audio feed."

"Oh, right. Can you tap into anyone's audio?" asked Soph.

"Just the people that I'm bound to, which is you. I spent a lot of time with Jeff, that guy we met at the party. We worked on a whole bunch of new features together, and he gave me some new items. Some of them came out with the Link patch, some of them are stuff he made just for me."

"Cool, like what?"

"I don't want to spoil the surprise. C'mon, let's go, we only have a couple of hours of daylight left."

They climbed. The trail went up through grass and rock with the bay opening out behind them, and the game laid its own weather over the real weather, a sky a shade too blue, and the shadow of something large moving over the hillside above them that was not, when she checked, a cloud. Atom walked beside her with his hands in his pockets, the way he had always walked up hills, except that he didn't breathe hard. His chest didn't move at all.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. "The, whatever it is."

"No. It's weird. I don't hurt anywhere. I can't feel my body at all, my real one. Max says that's the point. It's like it's not there. It's like I'm just here."

"Do you like it?"

He thought about it. "I like being here. I don't like the part where I'm not there. Ask me again in a month."

They came around a bend and there were three of them in the grass below the summit, big and green and arguing over something in a bag. Soph pulled her dagger and started reciting, and Atom put a hand on her arm.

"Let me."

"Mom said."

"Nobody's here. Look. Let me."

He walked down the hill toward them like he was going to ask for directions. The shaman saw him first and raised its staff, and Atom raised his hand, and then the staff was in Atom's hand instead, and then it was in the shaman's face. The raiders charged. One of them went straight through him and fell over on the far side, confused, and the other one hit something that was not there for anyone else and stopped dead, like it had walked into a wall. Atom took its axe away from it. It was over very quickly, and Soph had not cast a single spell.

"Pretty good for a ghost, eh?" Atom was standing over the body of a slain orc.

"You might be better than ever," said Soph.

"I wouldn't go that far."

She looked at the sky, and at the far ridge, checking. Nobody. Just a hawk that might have been real.

"So where do you go when I log off?"

"Back to Alius. I've gotta make my way up the Great Mountain and fight the dragon at some point, but I don't feel like it tonight. I've got some coding projects I'm working on."

"Oh, like what?"

"Well, part of my new life is that I can taste and smell everything in the game. Except most things don't have a taste or smell yet, because nobody ever needed one. I'm working on an intelligent way to create tastes for every food and drink in the game. And some things that aren't food or drink."

"Oh yeah? Like what?"

Atom kissed her passionately on the lips. She felt his embrace through the suit, but her face didn't have any kind of senses for it.

"I'm going to have to work on that one. The real thing is way more delicious. Come on, let's go home."

They held hands as they waited for Max at the mouth of the trail. The sun was going down behind Tam and the bay had gone the color of a nickel.

"Soph," said Atom.

"Yeah?"

"I'll try to get you a tasting prototype."

"That'd be great."

"It'll get better."

"What do you mean?"

"You should see what they're working on at The Lab. In a year, we'll be so much closer to the real thing. All of the senses, everything."

"Well, I look forward to it."

"Soph."

"Yeah?"

"Do you still love me?"

"Atom, I love you no matter what. I'll love you forever."

"You too. I mean, I do too, you know. Just… thanks, thanks for, you know, being here."

"Even if we didn't have all this stuff, even if I couldn't talk with you like I'm talking with you right now, I would be there for you, by your side, you know?"

"Yeah." He looked out at the bay. "I know."

Max's headlights came around the bend. Atom turned to mist and went into the back seat and Soph got in the front. When she looked in the mirror he was there. When she took off her frames to rub her eyes, he wasn't. She put them back on quickly, before her mother could see.