6. Idle Routine
Idle Routine
Isaak
The word PAUSE hung at the centre of the television in bold capital letters, drawing his eyes away from the phone’s screen.
Dylan’s panicked call had interrupted his evening gaming session.
He’d managed to calm her down a little now, but her face was wide-eyed through the vidphone, her blue-blonde hair swaying back and forth as she pointed animatedly at something on the ceiling of her bedroom.
He took an unfamiliarly deep breath. “What are you pointing at?”
“The stars!” She sounded calmer now. “You can’t see them?”
Isaak couldn’t see her stars – only the pastel-pink ceiling of her bedroom and a model constellation of the Solar System in hanging rose-gold wire.
He should have been happy to receive a call from the cute girl he’d met in a club the previous night, but this wasn’t how that type of call should go.
He’d given her the key to a strange new frontier – the Tapeworld – and he’d been too shy even to send a quick message to warn her about it.
As his hangover had worn off that morning, he was more and more certain she’d thought him a loser and would probably have thrown it away.
Now, instead of butterflies, he felt only tremendous guilt.
“Is this VR?” Dylan asked in an excited whisper, now a little calmer again, trying to make sense of the thing. She was lying back on her bed, the camera’s framing slightly intimate, her blue-toned blonde hair bright as the sun on the sea.
He let a moment’s silence happen naturally, broken only by her nervous laughter.
She kept her face close to the phone as she got up and took her tentative first steps out of bed.
“It looks like the movie Contact. A moonlit beach, easily a hundred stars in this impossible sky, and I’m walking to where my door should be—”
“Careful, you’re actually—” he started as he saw her move, but it was already too late.
“Shit!”
The phone screen in Isaak’s hand showed blurred action, directed by Dylan’s haphazardly moving arm, culminating in its flying back towards her bed again. The angle showed her bending over her foot, which she had presumably banged against the very real door.
“Sorry, I tried to tell you. Your mind is somewhere else, but your body is still in the physical space where you taped in. If you move like normal, you’ll end up injuring yourself. You’ll need an idle routine.”
He started carefully explaining the technical details of the trip she’d just taken. Isaak wasn’t sure if she was taking it all in – how you could fool your body into doing a different thing IRL than it was in there.
“Can you meet me in this place?” she interrupted.
That was a surprise. “Uh, yes. If you summon me.”
“What, like a demon?”
“Sort of. You have to think about me. Say my name and fill your mind with my face—”
She snorted with laughter.
“Uh… and I’ll appear,” he said. “And don’t walk around anymore until I get there, unless you wanna end up with a bruise.”