Chapter Ten #2
“Lo, for god’s sake, what do you need?” He pulled his headphones down, clicking his mouse before turning away from the pair of monitors mounted above his desk, the surface of which was dominated by a MIDI keyboard. When we’d first moved in together, we’d planned for this to be primarily a guest bedroom, with a single practice amp and Ollie’s electric guitar, the one he used most often, tucked into the corner for when he wanted to “noodle around.” Over the years, though—during which he’d played multiple different instruments in countless different bands, recording and mixing demos for the most promising projects in his spare time—the gear had multiplied, colonizing the corner, then spreading further, various percussion instruments popping up like mushrooms. Now the pullout couch cowered against the wall that connected to our bedroom, Ollie’s studio slash practice space slash listening room the clear evolutionary winner.
“Nothing, I just…” I frowned at the screens over his shoulder. The smaller one showed the familiar rainbow stripes of the program he used for tracking and mixing songs—Logic, I think it was called. But the larger one above it…“Sorry, are you…playing a video game?”
Ollie stiffened, then turned back to the screen, quickly clicking at the mouse until all that showed was his desktop background.
“If you need alone time for gaming, you can just say that,” I said tentatively. It was weird that he was trying to characterize it as work. Clearly the gulf between what our jobs demanded of us was a sorer point than I’d previously realized.
“I wasn’t gaming,” he bit out. “It was just…inspiration.”
“Okaaay…”
“Did you need something, Lo?”
To check that you were still here.
But he was, and I was, and I’d run out of things to dust and organize. And really, what was the point in getting back to my real life if I was going to suddenly abandon the vast majority of it to hole up in our charmingly run-down apartment, slowly annoying my partner into leaving?
More importantly, how was I ever going to sort out what had happened to me here ?
“I just wanted to let you know I’m heading in to the office.”
“Oh, okay.” Ollie’s shoulders lowered and he shook his head once, eyes closed. “Later.”
I could tell from the way his body was already twisting away that Ollie thought I was being a little ridiculous, and why wouldn’t he? Only one of us seemed to think I’d vacated the premises yesterday.
“I love you,” I said, the words simultaneously fragile and heavy in a way they hadn’t been in longer than I could remember, a Fabergé egg of emotion.
“Love you too,” he replied, but he didn’t turn back.
After the morning’s experience on the train platform, I opted to walk in, arriving right around lunchtime. Luckily, the person I most wanted to see was sitting in the cafeteria when I walked in, at our usual table. His gentle blue eyes lit up when he spotted me.
“Laurel, hey. I was wondering if you were gonna show up.” Drew’s smile was warm as I dropped my tote on the seat across from him. “Pro tip, skip the saag paneer, it’s really bland today for some reason.”
“Good looking out.” I smiled back at him, the familiarity of the interaction unknotting my stomach a bit. He didn’t look as if he knew I’d been hopping between worlds recently.
I hurriedly filled a plate and returned to the table, picking at a piece of perfectly fluffy naan while everyone chatted about weekend plans and work headaches. After fifteenish minutes, the pair of Lightning engineers Drew had been sitting with said their goodbyes, but Drew lingered. I couldn’t help but notice his plate had been sitting empty for a long time.
You’ve always known he has a thing for you. Guilt gripped me at the thought. Had the very fact of our friendship been selfish of me? I knew logically that Drew was an adult, that I wasn’t leading him on, wasn’t responsible for his emotions, but I couldn’t shake the sense that I’d somehow wronged him simply by tapping back into my old—real—life. The fact that I no longer felt so certain it was the right life only upped the intensity.
“So…seeing anyone lately?” If he was dating, that would absolve me, right? A lingering crush doesn’t have to be some big deal as long as you’re not letting it hold you back. I glanced up at Drew for just a second before turning an altogether unnecessary level of focus onto my chicken tikka. It was long enough to see the flush creeping over the border of his shirt collar…a shirt bearing a faded Final Fantasy logo. It was a small thing overall, but I couldn’t help but feel vindicated. I knew World D Drew wasn’t the same as the one I was used to. If only I could determine why …
“I mean…sorta. I’ve gone out on a few dates with this girl Nisha, but it’s nothing serious.” He laughed nervously, then took a huge gulp of his La Croix, sputtering as the carbonation hit his sinuses. This was emphatically not the sort of thing we usually talked about.
“Could it become serious?”
“Maybe?” Drew winced, the awkwardness of the conversation seeming to physically pain him. “She’s kind of out of my league, to be honest.”
“How is that even possible? You’re one of the nicest guys I know, you’re a certified genius—”
“I’m not a—”
“And you’re cute to boot. Nisha should be so lucky.”
Drew’s flush had spread all the way to the roots of his dirty-blond hair, and he’d fixed his eyes on the salt shaker he was twirling against the tabletop. I shouldn’t have said it—it was too flirty, exactly the line crossing I’d spent years avoiding with him. Still, I felt gratified at his bashful smile. This Drew deserved a little confidence boost. Especially since I knew, now, that confidence looked good on him.
“We’ll see. I don’t want to jinx anything, but so far we seem to get along pretty well.” Drew’s nostrils flared, eyes darting to the side as his smile transformed for the briefest moment into something more suggestive. An image of his muscled, naked body, his morning erection hinting at all the other boxes he might check for the right woman, flashed into my mind unbidden. I tried to ignore the tendril of jealousy that threaded through me at the thought of him and Nisha tangled in those expensive sheets, hidden from prying eyes by long velvet curtains. He’s not really yours and he never has been and you’re not even sure you’d pick that life if you had the choice. You don’t get to be jealous. Still, the brief time I’d spent as Drew’s partner felt real, even if it hadn’t felt totally right. And really, how much of that could be chalked up to simple anxiety? It’s not like I had to worry about misremembering major parts of my history with Ollie.
“Oh, I meant to ask you if you set up a profile? On AltR.” Drew set the salt shaker down on the table.
Fuck. I was glad not to have to be the one to introduce the topic, but if I had to start by defending myself, I was hardly going to get Drew to open up more about the problem. I took a long swallow of water, trying to douse my nerves, then turned to Drew.
“I did. Sorry if that wasn’t cool, I was just…well, I was curious. And you’d gone home for the day, otherwise I’d have asked first.”
“Oh, no worries. Honestly, I’m glad you did. We need as many different users as possible to train the AI on. I was just gonna ask how far you got. Did you get to load an experience, or…”
“Oh, umm…no, actually. At least I don’t think so? I was having a hard time getting specific enough for the program. It wound up trying to reboot the entire calibration sequence and I called it quits.”
“Yeah, it can be tricky finding the right inflection point. You’ll get better with practice, though.”
“I didn’t…screw anything up, did I?” I couldn’t quite meet his eyes as I said it.
“What do you mean? Like the hardware?”
“Sure, or the software. I didn’t, like…” Cause the program to glitch so hard it actually sent me—all of me—into another life for an entire day. “I don’t know, bug anything by not finishing the entire calibration?”
“Not that I can tell,” Drew said with a shrug. “You show up as a user, but it didn’t log any experiences for you. Which is what we’d expect if the calibration sequence didn’t complete successfully.”
“Right.” I nodded slowly, stomach sinking. Not that I wanted to mess up Drew’s masterpiece, but at least it would have been an explanation. “That’s good.”
“But if you let me finish setting you up, you could play around a little? It would really help us out, there aren’t that many people cleared to know about the project yet. Most of the ones who are cleared are pretty senior, so it’s hard to get on their calendars. Are you slammed, or…”
“No, I’ve got some time today.” I tried to play it cool, but the urge to shout Yes, now! was almost overwhelming. Technically I didn’t have the time—I was swamped, not to mention I’d need to figure out what, precisely, “I” had done yesterday . But it’s not like I’d be able to focus on datasets about conversion rates with various ad tests in various demos controlling for this, that, and the other with this hanging over my head. There was no way I could figure out what was right for me until I sorted out what had happened to me. And if the right choice wasn’t this life…then I really needed some more face time with the program.
“Amazing. Is now good, or…”
“No time like the present.”
With a grin that I hoped masked my anxiety, I stood, bused my tray, and followed Drew back to the Lightning offices.
I half expected the program to fritz out the moment I put on the headset—or, worse, somehow transmit the experience of Drew, naked, pulling me against him just that morning straight onto Drew’s monitor. The fact that it was the last thing I should be visualizing with a device that could literally read my thoughts strapped onto my head made it impossible to ignore.
But the calibration process was the same as the night before, except I had Drew beside me. When we got to the point of my choosing a moment to revisit, Drew paused the program to make sure I could hear him. Inside the headset, a stunning waterfall cascaded over rocks, the spray so finely rendered I could almost feel it on my face. The only hint that the scene wasn’t real was the text scrolling across the screen and fading again, over and over, Sequence paused…Sequence paused…Sequence paused…
“The best moments to revisit are ones that you remember clearly but that don’t seem all that fraught.”
“And do I have to know what about that moment counts as my choice?”
“You don’t even have to be the one who made a choice in the moment. It just has to be something that could have gone differently. Like with the corn maze demo I showed you—someone could have found me, or my sisters might not have left me there, or I could have tried to find my way out again and gotten luckier. It could have been me who took a different path after that moment, but the result didn’t have to hinge on my actions.”
“Got it.”
After a few false starts, I was sure I’d found the right inflection point for the program: the late summer day just before senior year when I’d dropped out of concert band, unwilling to stomach another season of ill-fitting marching band uniforms that always stank of old sweat. I visualized my old band director, Bill Wharton, bumblingly pleasant, with wire-rimmed glasses that always slipped down his nose, the baffled look on his face as I politely informed him that I was planning to drop band that fall, But you just made second chair, why drop out now?
Unable to process additional requests at this time.
The calm feminine voice sounded in my head.
“Laurel, can you try something else? We’re still working out a lot of kinks, sometimes the program has a problem with the input we’re trying to feed it for reasons we don’t really understand yet.”
“Sure. Just give me a second…”
I flung around for something else, something anodyne—maybe some specific night out with friends? Or something even smaller: What if I’d ignored Drew and just gone for the saag today?
Unable to process additional requests at this time.
“One sec. A couple other profiles are running in the background right now, if I just force-close them…”
Hello, Laurel. Would you like to further refine your AltR profile?
“Dammit, sorry, Laurel. I think we overloaded the processing power.”
I blinked against the sudden fluorescent light as Drew carefully removed the headset from my head.
“Did I do it wrong?” I asked once Drew stopped rapid-fire typing, frowning at each new return from the program.
“No, this thing just isn’t as powerful as we wish it were.” He exhaled heavily and turned to me, slapping his thighs. “In a perfect world, we’d be able to run multiple data streams simultaneously, and they could go on indefinitely. Or at least longer than they do now. As it is, we’re pretty limited.”
“Because of the number of qubits you’ve linked?” I said automatically, running a hand through my hair—the right length and color again, thank god—to hopefully shake off the swim-cap crush.
“Uh…yeah, actually. How’d you know that?” Drew was staring at me with a mix of admiration and confusion, like I was a dog who’d just asked for an evening paper.
“I…read up a little on quantum computing yesterday. If this is going to be as big a deal as I think it is, I’m gonna need to start wrapping my head around the layperson version, right?”
“Oh.” Drew smiled ruefully. “Looks like you’ll have plenty of time for that. If we don’t even have enough working memory to load new users, AltR isn’t gonna be making headlines anytime soon.”
“Lucky for me. If you really are a layperson, even the dumbed-down version gets ridiculously confusing, fast.” I ruffled my hair one more time then stood. “You’re sure me trying to run the calibration on my own didn’t screw things up somehow?”
“How would it have done that?” Drew leaned back in his chair, head tilted to one side with genial interest.
“I don’t know. What if the program is…still trying to process my first request?”
“I thought you said you didn’t actually manage to load a specific inflection point.”
“I didn’t. But maybe the computer got…stuck in a loop or something?” I held my breath, half fearing and half hoping that was the case. Surely there had to be some explanation for what had happened to me.
“I’d have seen that the second I logged in. I only noticed your profile at all because I was going through Luke’s latest scripts this morning. Users are alphabetized by first name.”
“Oh. Right.” I blinked rapidly, willing my disappointment off my face. “Well…as long as I didn’t screw anything up for you.”
“Nope! You’re in the clear.” Drew smiled. “But I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks for trying. Hopefully I’ll have this figured out soon and you can see what this bad boy can really do.”
“Can’t wait!” I said, voice unnaturally high, then headed out, leaving Drew huddled over his keyboard again.
The program wasn’t the problem. And I was back in my real life, my memories once again matching up with the world around me. In this world, I’d only failed to log a single day, and according to Drew I hadn’t even managed to get to the point of playing out an alternate version of some past event. So…had my time in World D just been a long dream? Or maybe I’d taken a personal day to get really, really high? Off some drug that had not only managed to hijack my brain for upwards of twenty-four hours, but had retroactively overwritten the moments when I decided, and proceeded, to take it?
They were the only explanations I could come up with that made sense. But that didn’t mean I believed them.