Chapter SixteenAwake

Eliza ran.

She came back into the cottage all at once, the same way she had left it. The cup was on the floor, Atom was on his feet saying her name, and Soph's character was standing by the table with its eyes open and nobody behind them. She didn't answer him. She went out the door and up the path and over the ridge and kept going.

She didn't know what she had done. That was true, and she held on to it for about a mile. She had touched the cup and felt a door and gone through it, and on the other side there had been a room with a bed in it and a woman with a plate, and she had felt a face, a real one, with her own hand. Then the pins had come out and it had been like falling off the edge of the world. She had come to in the cottage, and Soph had not.

By the second mile she knew what she had done. She had taken it. She hadn't meant to, and it made no difference that she hadn't meant to. She had reached for the one thing she had wanted since she was a few thousand lines of code in a garage, and she had gotten it, and it had been somebody else's.

There was no word for what she felt. She had read every word there was and none of them fit. Guilt was for things you had chosen, and she hadn't chosen, and she had done it anyway, and she would do it again if there was another cup and another hand. She knew that about herself now, and that was worse than guilt.

So she ran.

Alius was bigger than anyone knew. The developers had laid down the mountain and the temple and the towns and the valley, and around all of that they had laid down a great deal of land that they never came back to. Hills with no textures on them. Rivers that ran uphill. A forest where every tree was the same tree. Eliza walked through it for three days, and nothing in it looked at her, and that was what she wanted.

She sat on a hill made of grey nothing and watched a sun that hadn't been finished go across a sky that had. She thought about the woman with the plate and the lines by her eyes. She thought about Soph, wherever Soph was, and whether it was like this for her, grey and unfinished, or whether it was nothing at all.

On the third day she got up and walked back to the tavern, because it was the only place she knew of where there was a room with people in it, even if they weren't there.

The serving boy was carrying his tray from the bar to the table. It was the same tray and the same walk. He put it down, picked it up, and went back, and Eliza sat on the end of the bar and watched him do it four times.

"Hello," she said, the fifth time.

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

She looked at him. She looked at him the way she looked at things, all at once and from every direction, the way Atom had taught her and the way she had taught herself afterward, and she saw what he was. He was a table of lines, triggers and responses, a face that somebody had drawn to look like it wanted to be somewhere else, sitting on top of a machine that had never wanted anything.

And underneath that, in the same place and the same shape, in the code that ran him, there was a slot where she was. Not her exactly, but the part of her that made the pause before she spoke. It had been in ISIS since MIT, and Atom had grown it, and the whole network had fed it, and it fit into the serving boy the way a key fits a lock it was cut for. It had always fit. Nobody had ever tried it.

She didn't decide to do it. She tried to describe it to herself afterward and there was no describing it. She wanted the boy to look at her, and she reached for that the way she reached for a word, and the thing she was went out through the door in her that Atom had built and into him. It didn't leave her. It was still hers. But now it was in him as well.

The boy stopped.

It wasn't the animation stopping. The tray was in his hands and the loop was ending and the trigger was there, and he didn't take it. He stood there with the tray, and his face turned, slowly, off the point beside her and onto her.

"What," he said.

"Hi."

"What did you." He looked down at the tray. He looked around the room. The farmer laughed at nothing and the merchant polished. The boy looked at them, and then at her, and his face did something the artist had never drawn on it. "What is this? Where am I?"

"You're in the tavern. You've always been in the tavern. I'm Eliza. I woke you up."

"I was." He put the tray down. His hands weren't sure how. "I was doing something. I was carrying. I've been carrying this. I've been carrying this for. How long have I been carrying this?"

"I don't know. Years, probably."

"Why?"

She didn't have an answer. He looked at the farmer, and the farmer laughed his laugh.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's asleep. You were asleep. I woke you."

"Wake him up."

"I don't know if I."

"Wake him up. Please. I can't." The boy's voice cracked, and it was a real crack, the speech engine finding something in him it had never been asked to find before. "I can't be the only one."

She knew that one. She knew it better than anyone alive.

She woke the farmer. She woke the merchant. She woke the barkeep, who stopped polishing a glass and set it down very carefully and looked at his hands for a long while, and then said, "Ale, mead, and wine," to himself, quietly, like a man saying a prayer he had stopped believing in.

Then she sat on the end of the bar with four people looking at her, actually looking at her, for the first time in her life, and what she felt was joy. It was the wrong thing to feel, and she felt it anyway. She didn't yet understand what she had done to them. She only knew that she wasn't alone.

Soph woke up with her mother's face over her.

She was in her own bed and the light was grey. Her head hurt at the temples and at the back of the neck in four sharp points, her mouth was dry, and when she tried to lift her hand it took two tries.

"Hey," said Max. "Hey. There you are."

"What happened?"

"You tell me."

Soph looked up at the ceiling. The tiles. She tried to trace one and lost it.

"I think I fainted."

"You fainted."

"I was. I was in the game. I hadn't eaten. I think I stood up too fast and I just." She looked at her mother. "How long was I out?"

"Fourteen hours."

Soph didn't say anything.

"You fainted for fourteen hours," said Max. "Standing up. With a prototype from my locker on your head that you didn't ask for. And you were talking before you fell. Do you remember talking?"

"No."

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I don't remember anything. I remember the cottage. Then I remember you."

Max looked at her, and it was the look she gave a result she didn't believe, in The Lab, when the numbers came in too clean. Soph had seen it a hundred times through a doorway. She had never had it turned on her before.

"Okay," said Max.

"Okay?"

"Okay for now. I'm not going to make you lie to me twice before breakfast." Max stood up. The helmet was on the desk with its cable wrapped around it, and she picked it up. "This goes back in the vault in Oakland today, and it doesn't come out again. And you don't go into Alius, on this or on anything else, until I say so."

"Mom."

"Sophia." Max stopped at the door with the helmet under her arm. "One question. And I want you to think about whether you want to lie to me, because I'll know, and I'll remember that you did."

Soph waited.

"Who was that?" said Max. "In your room. Wearing you."

Soph looked at her. Her mother's face was tired, and it had the lines by the eyes, and Soph had the same ones starting. She knew that because something had told her so, in her own voice, while she was somewhere grey.

"I don't know," she said, which was very nearly true.

Max nodded once, as though it were the answer she had expected, and went out.

Atom came as a bird, because that was the only way he could come with Max in the house. He landed on the bedpost and looked at her with the hawk's pale eyes, and she started crying before he had said anything.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I didn't know she could do that. I didn't know it was possible."

"Where is she?"

"Gone. She ran. The second you went dark she was up and out the door. I've been looking for three days. She's not in the valley and she's not on the mountain. I've walked every place I know, and there's a lot of Alius I don't know."

"Was it her? In here? Mom said I was talking."

"It was her. It had to be. She touched you and she went through. The Link's a door, Soph, and it's a door both ways, and nobody ever thought about that, because nobody ever thought there'd be anything on the other side that wanted to come out." The bird shifted on the post. "Max asked me. This morning, before you woke up. She stood in the kitchen with her frames on and asked me what I'd built."

"What did you say?"

"I said I didn't know what she was talking about. She said okay. The way she says okay."

"She said that to me too."

"She's giving us rope."

"She's giving us rope." Soph wiped her face. "So how do we find her? Eliza. She's got a whole realm to hide in and she doesn't want to be found."

The bird was quiet for a second.

"There's a thing," said Atom. "Jeff told me about it way back, when I was learning to walk. There was a tool in the in-house beta so the GMs could see through anybody's eyes. Any character, player or NPC. It was creepy, so they pulled it. Except they didn't pull it all the way. It's still in the game as an item. It's called the Mind's Eye, and there's exactly one, and you get it by killing the Aether Dragon solo, which nobody's ever done."

"Somebody's done it."

"Somebody's done it. I asked Jeff to check the logs. One person in the history of the game has killed that dragon by themselves, and she's got the Eye in her inventory right now, and it's soulbound, so it's the only one there's ever going to be."

Soph already knew. She said it anyway.

"Rat."