Young Gabriel buzzes him through the foyer. The boy holds out one sullen hand for Russell to high-five. “Happy Persian New Year.”
Stone’s mouth is slow to thaw. “It’s Persian New Year?”
“Well, I think it was like yesterday or something.”
“How do you know that?”
“I don’t,” the boy confesses.
A high-pitched ululation, and Thassa comes flying at him from down the hall. “Ween ghebtu, ya ustadh? Russell, where have you been?” Her momentum rocks Stone. She squeezes his arms to his ribs. He reminds himself that she’d give the same greeting to a cashier just back from a week’s vacation. She releases and inspects him more shyly. There’s something different about her, some shadow of reserve: the article he’s been summoned here to read.
Candace trails down the hall, smoothing her face and dusting off her flour-spattered teal shirt-dress. Her cheeks flush as she nears. “You’re all ice!”
She strips him of coat and hat, shoes and socks. Over his objections, she pushes him down the hall and into a bathroom, instructing him to dry off his jeans with a blow dryer. She slips in a pair of men’s heavy woolen socks, which just fit. Whose toe space is he taking?
He emerges into one of those casual, upholstered living rooms that experimenters strew with pillows and games and books, then watch from behind two-way mirrors as the inhabitants imitate their normal lives. His three hosts converge on him again, all talking at once. It’s like he’s been dropped down into a time-share burrow somewhere underneath the Shire. And for an instant he’s stabbed by the feeling that the world might be far from over, that life might still have plans for him, that domesticity might yet survive the worst that knowledge can throw at it.
The preprint sits on a cleared edge of the cluttered coffee table, waiting for him. It looks like something that might come in a registered envelope: injunction, medical notification, summons. He glances at Candace. She’s already read it, and her face shows.
“You promised,” Gabe accosts him. “You said you would, back when I was at your house.”
“Go,” Candace instructs the mystified Stone. Discovery can wait. “We’re busy in the kitchen anyway.”
Thassa, too, shoos them off. “Don’t worry. But get ready for the amazing!” It takes Stone a moment to realize: she means the meal. Only then does he smell the travelogue aromas issuing from down the hall.
“They’re making something foreign,” Gabe warns. “Zero stars.” With the right male ally, he might be emboldened to make a break for it.
He pulls Stone into a back room that’s a cross between a Hindu temple and NORAD’s facility under Cheyenne Mountain. If some newly mutated virus were to decimate the race tomorrow, a fair chunk of civilization’s id from the Paleolithic to the Nanotech Age could be re-created out of this room’s strewn treasures. The overflowing dragon’s hoard of Wi-Fi medieval castles, interstellar Monopoly sets, speech-recognizing ant colonies, and GPS-ready counterterrorist dolls seems to contain a total of three books. Stone picks up one: Danny Dunn and the International Clone Cartel. “Don’t you read?”
Gabriel is already booting up Darth Sauron’s Personal Quantum Rearrangement Center. “Uh ye-ah? Like all the time? Hey! Put that down and come over here.”
Stone does as ordered. On the screen is something like the animated Saturday-morning adventures he and Robert used to watch back in the day, only sharper, richer, and much more deeply realized. Also, there’s the little matter of Gabriel actually moving around in the animated universe and leaving behind footprints.
“I’m sorry about the quality,” Gabe says, mostly to the screen. “The frame rates on this piece of junk are pretty much down the toilet. You should come see it on my dad’s machine sometime.”
“Sure,” Russell says. What they move through on-screen is as smooth and textured as waking life.
“This is Chaoseeker. The character I was telling you about?”
Only then does Stone realize: they’re in Futopia, the persistent, massively multiplayer world that Candace’s son and millions of others around the globe find far more rewarding than anything the less persistent real world has to offer.
Gabe in Futopia looks much as he does in Edgewater, aside from the steroidal body mass and the wings. He circles in the air, a lazy spiral over a megalopolis that-unknown to either boy-is modeled on the most futuristic wards of Tokyo.
“Where do you want to go?” the flying child asks.
Omnipotence-induced nausea washes over Stone. He shrugs, paralyzed, but the angel doesn’t wait for an answer. It peels over the cityscape, banking across a harbor filled with frenetic activity. Alter-Gabe heads over an ocean of deepening blues. Small craft toss on the stormy waters. The horizon offers a spectrum of available weather from sunburst to squalls.
The boy flies in a trance, beyond speech. They skim over monstrous islands, mashups of ancient cultural memories and historical nostalgia-medieval bestiaries, frontier romances, Victorian steam-punk, and recombinant hybrids of everything from spell-casting spacemen to Panzer-driving elves.
Gabe mistakes his visitor’s vertigo for thrill. “Can you believe my mother doesn’t get this?”
“How big is this place?”
“Which? The whole Endless! You can even create new lands, if you gather enough power.”
Stone nods, for no one. When we run out of resources, we can always move here.
He breathes easier when the flying boy touches down in a desolate landscape. The coast, a plain of ocher rocks, a stone farmhouse. “One of my homes,” Chaoseeker explains. The only moving things are birds and the occasional large mammals, off on the rim of olive-riddled mountains.
“Where are we?”
But the reward centers in the boy’s brain spark so fiercely it degrades his power of speech. “I built this here I’m a quest There’s a relic from the Old Ways I have to ”
He trots up into the foothills, ducking into hidden canyons, fending off the occasional assaults of hungry creatures under the remorseless sun. Now and then he finds a sparkling artifact, which he pockets. “We can trade this for great stuff, back in the village.”
It’s something out of colonialist fantasy literature. The boy’s real jaw hangs panting and his eyes dart in heightened alert. Futopia taps into more of the child’s legacy nervous system than Chicago ever will. Candace’s boy is a junkie, addicted to something that can match any narcotic floating around the public school system.
Futopia spreads before Stone. He, too, might wander forever in mysterious mountains in search of hidden relics, driven by a pleasure as much in need of constant renewal as sex. After each momentary injection of success, always another goal. A little repeated exposure and Russell could easily become as enslaved as this child.
Years ago, in a different desert, under a rock face filled with petroglyphs, Grace cut him his first line of cocaine on a pocket mirror. It terrified him, but she offered up the rite in such innocence-an exploratory lark required of all aspiring writers-that he gave himself over to her and breathed in the dust. It did almost nothing. It made his two front teeth glow and numbed his gums. Yes, the afternoon was glorious; yes, he felt full and funny and grateful and even powerful. But that’s what an afternoon with Grace always made him feel.
A week later, he asked, offhand, How hard is it to get that stuff? She laughed so long at his casual pretense that he realized: he would do this chemical never again, or he would do it forever. Something in his cells had come into life pre-addicted, as it had for his father and uncle and great-aunt and probably his brother. And the only cure for him was never to take the first taste.
“She hates this,” the boy says. “She thinks it’s fake. But it’s no faker than her phone life.”