Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 36
___
Darla stepped through the pockmarked wall and stood between me and the Kool-Aid Man.
She’d obviously arrived in time to divine what was happening, but I couldn’t imagine why or how she had made her way here. The mutant beverage mascot took another step. But she didn’t back down.
“He won!” she declared to the monster. “And you know it. So if you want to get to him, you’re gonna have to go through me.”
The Kool-Aid Man took another step and paused directly in front of her. I was sure she’d be Cavity-Creepified in a torrent of red puke, or worse. But from my position, there was no way I could get to her to tackle her out of the way before the Kool-Aid Man reacted.
“Well?” she cried. “Bring it on or get gone!”
For a second, I saw the ridiculous creature flicker ever-so-slightly, reminding me of the kids in the third-grade simulation. Then, to my utter amazement, he stomped a foot, crossed his arms, and let out an insolent huff before turning and walking off toward the back of the office.
As he went, I felt a slight wind kick up. Then that wind whipped into a familiar whirling dervish, twisting and warping the space around us before tracking back through the office with the Kool-Aid Man, transforming the entire place back to its original state.
A moment later the reality-warping wave was gone and so was the Kool-Aid Man.
I turned and stared at Darla, who was slumped over from what had clearly been a massive adrenaline surge.
It was clear that her bold gamble had glitched the glitch, like Han Solo smacking the control console of the Millennium Falcon to bring the hyperdrive back online. It had been a ridiculous risk and from the way she was now steadying herself against the wall behind her, she’d known it.
“What are you doing here?” I stammered. “And how did you know he wouldn’t kill you?”
“I didn’t,” she answered shakily. “But I had to do something.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re my husband. Ish.”
Then she added, “We gotta go,” and headed for the door.
###
Margaret’s car was parked haphazardly in the street outside. I guessed Darla had asked to borrow it. I couldn’t imagine how the rest of that conversation had gone under the circumstances.
Given her mission-minded manner, I didn’t question her choice to climb into the driver’s side, despite her lack of a license. But I did have questions.
“What exactly is going on?” I asked, as I climbed into the passenger seat. As she started the car and headed for the main thoroughfare, she gestured to the printout, which was laying across the dashboard.
“I read it all,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“Okay,” I said. “And?”
“It’s a leak,” she answered. “A leak of data from Project Do-Over.”
“Which is . . . our entire existence?”
She gave me a half-hearted nod like she was still getting used to the idea too.
“Wait. Then why is some of the data wrong?” I asked.
“Some of it’s model data and some is outcome data.”
My face said, “Huh?”
“Some of it says how things happened in the real world, and some of it says how they’ve happened or are going to happen for us,” she elaborated. “Some of it matches up, some of it doesn’t.”
“And the feed was just a random leak?”
“Yes and no. Seems like the data is all loosely related to the user of the feed. Basically, whoever spent the most time in my uncle’s attic.”
“Okay, so where did the feed come from?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that RIP wasn’t just about Robbie. Or you. Or me.”
“Who was it about?”
“Everyone.”
“What do you mean everyone?”
“’Hope for the human race’,” she recalled. “If you lost, the whole world lost.”
“What?” I cried. “Why?”
“I don’t know. The printout only gave me so much.”
Then, from the back seat, we heard Nancy’s mom.
“I needed to know . . . ”
We were both used to her popping up by now, but we were taken off guard by her tone. There was something different about it.
“Needed to know what?” Darla asked.
“Whether you were worth the effort,” Nancy’s mom answered with a note of revelation, as if discovering the answer as she gave it.
“Assessment initiated,” Darla muttered, calling back the first words she’d been able to read from the feed.
“Wait,” I stammered to Nancy’s mom. “You? You’re actually the one that’s been doing all of this?”
“Apparently, yeah.”
“’Apparently, yeah’?” I repeated in shrill disbelief.
“She’s the operating system,” Darla said. “For Project Do-Over. And RIP was the ‘system anomaly’.”
It was half guess, half statement. But Nancy’s mom nodded, confirming it.
“I knew there was something I’d been forgetting,” she remarked breezily.
“’Something you’d been forgetting’?” I bleated. “Like the fact that you’re basically God but you turned yourself into my teenage girlfriend’s horrible mother to torture me for days?”
“Hey, it wasn’t all sunshine and cheerios for me, you know,” she countered. “I had to print all those XP slips out my mouth. And explode that one time.”
“Why?” I yelled. “Why would you make it like that?”
“Based on the logs, she’s missed about a hundred updates,” Darla explained.
I thought about all the sloppy RIP game glitches, all the times it felt like whoever was in charge was suffering from some sort of dementia.
“So she’s . . . ” I started.
“Deteriorating,” Darla finished.
“I am doing just fine, thank you very much!” Nancy’s mom proclaimed.
“Just fine?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s all coming back to me now, thanks to this one’s little performance in there,” she said, giving Darla’s shoulder an enthusiastic elbow.
Apparently, Darla’s bold stand had done more than banish the Kool-Aid Man. She’d jump-started some dormant area of the world’s hard drive.
“Yes, yes,” Nancy’s mom went on. “I put this little test together because I was trying to decide whether to shut it all down.”
“Are you talking about ending reality?” I asked in horror.
“Spot on. I wanted to see if you people were capable of the choices needed to avoid ending up like they did.”
“Like who did?” I cried in exasperated confusion.
But looking at Darla I could tell she already suspected the truth.
“The human race,” she said.
“What?” I asked, still not getting it.
“They’re all gone, aren’t they?” she asked Nancy’s mom. “That’s why you’ve missed all those updates. No one is up there to do maintenance or deal with errors.”
Nancy’s mom didn’t answer. But I’d begun to understand.
“So . . . the real us?” I asked.
Darla nodded and answered, “I didn’t realize what it . . . but according to what I read, aggressions between super powers were coming to a head and . . . ”
“You’re saying . . . we’re all that’s left?”
“Cheer up,” Nancy’s mom chimed in. “You squeaked by on my test. So I’ll keep your little sphere spinning. At least for as long as I’m around.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, my solar panel farm will only keep me going for another seven months. A bit of a shortage of sunlight with the fallout.”
“What?” I exclaimed. “After all this, the world is still going to end in seven months?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist,” she replied. “Your time runs differently to mine.”
“So how long do we have in our time?”
“Eighty . . . ninety thousand years?” she answered. “Give or take.”
I breathed a sigh of relief at that, as the rest of the revelations swirled around me. Darla was in the same boat, grasping for answers in no particular order.
“So why me?” she asked. “Why did my uncle spend credits derailing my whole life?”
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
“Credits?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s the point of the game, isn’t it?” Nancy’s mom answered me. “Players spend credits to make tiny alterations with a probability of changing the way things turned out in their lives.”
“Project Do-Over,” I said. “So what’s happening to us really has . . . ”
“Already happened,” Darla finished.
“Or the original version of it anyway,” Nancy’s mom clarified.
I sighed as my brain went into overload, trying to digest the notion that our world was a memory of another world that had been twenty-some years ahead of ours but was apparently gone now. Darla shrugged it all off and kept pushing.
“So?” she pried.
Nancy’s mom stared at her blankly.
“Why me?”
“Oh, well, your uncle was stress-testing—trying to see if an avatar could see beyond the code. But after he sent his avatar on that Zuni vision quest to trigger the cortisol reaction required to hack my system, his avatar broke down.”
“Cortisol reaction?” Darla asked.
“Isn’t that the chemical that . . . ” I started.
“Fear!” Darla said. “Every time I learned to read more of the feed, it was triggered by fear.”
“Righto,” Nancy’s mom agreed. “You all are designed to rationalize data in terms that jibe with your programmed reality. No avatar should be able to read Daedalus 5.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The Project Do-Over programming language. Do try to keep up,” she chastised me. “Anyway, as it happens, there’s a glitch. A dab of cortisol, and many avatars can start to make out a bit of the code if they spend enough time around it. That is, before they go stark raving mad.”
“Like my uncle,” Darla said.
“Precisely.”
“But what about me? Why haven’t I gone mad?”
“Well, you have. A bit. Why do you think I couldn’t unsubscribe your wonky little brain from RIP?”
That explained Darla’s half-in, half-out status in my odyssey. But it didn’t really answer her question.
“My uncle was more than a bit crazy,” she pressed.
Nancy’s mom rolled her eyes as if overwhelmed by the tedium.
“They’re not printed on your arm, but Project Do-Over avatars have stats—stats based on players’ brain scans. Almost no one’s psychological fortitude stat is high enough to process the whole feed. The only exception in your uncle’s acquaintance was . . . ”
“Me,” Darla finished.
“Yup. Your brain scan was off the charts in psycho fort. On some level, you’ve always had a sense of what the world really is.”
“And that’s why I’ve always . . . ”
“Felt like a weirdo? Yes. Which is why it didn’t cost many credits for your uncle to kindle a mutual affinity and get your avatar moved into his avatar’s house.”
“What? That’s why I felt like I had to . . . ?” Darla stammered.
Then after processing for a moment, she went on, “Did the other me know what he was doing?”
“Certainly,” Nancy’s mom answered. “What kind of scoundrel ruins someone’s digital duplicate’s life without asking?”
“And the other me was okay with it?”
“Well, she had her own reasons, and your uncle made a big deal out of the honor of being chosen for the beta.”
“Beta?” I asked. “So . . . the game’s not in wide release?”
“Nope,” Nancy’s mom replied. “Most people are NPCs. Only a few hundred players opted in so far. Officially.”
“What do you mean ‘officially’?” I asked.
Darla rolled her eyes obliquely. Apparently, the printout had covered this.
“You’d be amazed at how little people read of medical releases,” Nancy’s mom said. “Goliath got access to scans for about half the population and popped them into the system.”
“And the other half?”
“I’m able to piece together enough from public records and the memory scans I do have to model the rest of the population. Not everyone’s a perfect reproduction of the original, but . . . ”
“So half the world’s population is fake?” I cried.
Nancy’s mom took umbridge with that.
“They’re not fake! I just had to fill in some blanks—like the DNA in the Jurassic Park dinosaurs.”
“Why bother?” I exclaimed, infuriated by the Frankensteinian hubris of cobbling people together from spare data. “Why do you even need the whole population?”
“To ensure every variable of the original timeline is in place,” she answered matter-of-factly.
“Why?” I asked.
“So people like you get an accurate picture of how they could have changed things.”
“Me? What would I want to . . . ”
But I knew the answer before I finished the question. I looked at Darla and saw she knew it too.
“When my uncle asked me, you opted in too,” she guessed. “Because you wanted to see if there was anything you could have done to . . . ”
“Bingo,” Nancy’s mom said. “You signed up to spend all your credits making your avatar buy prenatal vitamins and such.”
“That’s why I bought all of those?” I said, thinking back on the strange compulsion. I finally understood the urgency driving my insistence that Margaret get checked out after Braxton Hicks contractions, my demands that the doctors check every test twice, the dogged research into Robbie’s condition. And then there were the lightning strike memories that assailed me every time my commitment to Robbie or Margaret wavered in the slightest. It had always felt like some higher power was jamming things into my brain. Now I knew what—or who—that higher power was.
“Was the original me . . . ” I started to ask, not knowing for sure I wanted to finish the question. “Was he not there for Margaret and Robbie?”
“Not as much as he’d wished he’d been,” Nancy’s mom answered. “But a few credits here and there, and huzzah! OCD uncle.”
The real-world me had been riddled with regret and done everything he could to make sure I did everything I could to change how things had turned out. But none of it had made a difference. My Robbie had ended up right where the original Robbie had. And the original was . . . I felt a rush of grief.
“So Robbie . . . the other Robbie is . . . we lost him?”
“Yes and no,” Nancy’s mom answered somewhat flippantly.
I started to take offense at her obtuseness but suddenly, I knew what she meant. Robbie was in this so-called world with us. And he wasn’t just a Jurassic Park dinosaur-esque approximation based on a patchwork of public and pirated data.
“The NeuroVista scan,” I said.
Nancy’s mom nodded.
Margaret and I had lamented the dead end of the NeuroVista trial and the financial toll it had taken. But it had been a lifeline after all—putting Robbie into the system more than a decade before it would become commonplace. Whether half of the population was “fake” or not, he wasn’t.
“Of course, it was absurd to expect a different outcome for him this time round,” Nancy’s mom went on. “All the credits in the world wouldn’t have patched up his dodgy ticker.”
The casual coldness of the comment was bracing. But then she did an about face.
“It would take a miracle. So . . . lucky I picked you for RIP.”
“You picked me so I could save Robbie? That was the test?”
“No,” she scoffed. “I picked you because player code gives me more latitude for sustained irregularities than NPC code.”
“Huh?” Darla said.
“It allows me to bend the rules of reality for an avatar without patching it up.”
“For what?”
“So people can spend credits to give their avatars out-of-body experiences or voodoo curses or other weird stuff that’s not part of the NPC code package.”
“People give their avatars voodoo curses?”
“One guy wished he’d gone vegetarian as a kid, so he made his avatar hallucinate a giant, man-eating chicken every time he stepped into a KFC. True story.”
Things were veering off-track.
“So you needed a player,” I said. “But hundreds of people opted into the beta. You had plenty of players to choose from. Why me?”
“Duh,” Nancy’s mom replied. “Because you were the saddest, most pathetic, most hopeless of the lot.”
“What?”
“One way or another, you’d been abandoned by everyone you love. It’d all gone wrong for you. You were just a hollow, damaged husk of a man.”
She dropped off, as if that was sufficient.
“And?” I prodded.
“My god, man. Isn’t it obvious?” she cried, fully convinced that it was all too plain to merit further explanation. “You couldn’t have been further from who you wanted to be. You spent all your energy protecting yourself from other people—keeping yourself safe from all the abandoning and dying people do if you risk loving them. Why do you think the other two yous landed in therapy over your fear of intimacy?”
“Wait, what?” Darla exclaimed.
“Oh, please,” Nancy’s mom jeered. “You think mister ‘trust no one and feel nothing’ over here is going to hand over his heart without a fight?”
“What the hell?” I exclaimed.
“Anyhoo, look at you now!” she went on. “The original model would have turned tail and run for the hills as soon as the first ferret showed its face. But the new and improved you? All courage and uncompromising selflessness. If I was going to bother keeping this whole thing going, I needed to know there was a chance that the credits players have spent could really affect fundamental change—give you a shot at being better the second time around. And . . . job done.”
I frowned. I didn’t know if I bought her rationale. It certainly didn’t all feel as obvious as she was making out. Not to mention . . .
“So it didn’t matter?” I demanded, suddenly incensed.
“What didn’t matter?”
“If I won or lost,” I exclaimed. “If all you needed was to know I’d risk my life to save Robbie, you could have called the game a long time ago!”
“Hmph,” she grunted dismissively. “That would hardly have met the threshold.”
“What threshold?” I cried. “The ‘killing the Kool-Aid Man’ threshold?”
“It’s all very technical. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Really?” I croaked. “And would I also not understand why you chose to appear as the meanest person I ever met or why one of my so-called statistics was just a reminder that I farted audibly in Spanish class one time my Sophomore year?”
“Yes, yes. All very technical,” she replied.
Then Darla cut in, chasing another mystery.
“How can the beta players change everything? There’s only a few hundred of us in here.”
“More than enough to tip the scale,” Nancy’s mom assured her. “Every credit spent has indirectly influenced millions of NPCs who have in turn influenced millions more.”
I thought about the cliché of the butterfly flapping its wings in San Francisco and changing the weather in Beijing through its impact on a billion different variables. Project Do-Over’s beta players were that butterfly.
“So have we?” I asked. “Tipped the scale I mean?”
I’d taken solace in the fact that Nancy’s mom had assured us that she could sustain our reality for eighty or ninety thousand years. But that assurance wouldn’t mean squat if we blew ourselves up in a couple of decades. Had we averted the catastrophe?
“God no!” Nancy’s mom answered. “But the forecast is improved.”
“Hold on,” Darla said. “What about all your missed updates?”
“I told you, I’m fine!” Nancy’s mom snapped. “Admittedly things wheeled a bit out of control with RIP. Writing my own code for a mini-game that bent the base code sort of threw me for a loop.”
“’Sort of threw you for a loop’?” I scoffed. “You mean the total and complete amnesia?”
“Yes. That. RPG dynamics definitely went a bit wonky. And according to my diagnostics, running that third-grade scenario nearly did me in, even with the low fidelity NPCs.”
“So you nearly killed yourself to make a little girl try to kill me?”
“Hm,” she grunted. “Ironic that. Anyway, point is, the core program is mostly good. Infrastructure code is basically on auto-pilot. Maybe a few more boats will go missing in that glitchy Bermuda Triangle. Or maybe it’ll rain fish once in a while. Or maybe people will discover rogue code elements and mix and match them to make crazy monsters or create duplicate beta instances with alternate realities. But otherwise, it’s good.”
None of that sounded “good,” but I realized the outlandish outliers that she was rattling off weren’t the real threat. And somewhere along the way, I think Darla and I had got it in our heads that all roads led to a misfiring OS.
“Well what about all the famine?” I asked. “All the violence in the streets, every election being a choice between a whack job and a nutcase?”
“Yeah!” Darla jumped in. “And global warming? And the island of garbage in the ocean?”
Just like Lela’s professor had said, we were living in a world gone mad—mad enough to believe it was all just a broken video game.
“Don’t try to hang all that on me!” Nancy’s mom replied. “People were jerks up there and they’re jerks in here and sometimes you just don’t seem worth the effort. Hence the test.”
Oh, yeah. Humanity had already nuked itself without any help. As appealing as a scape goat was, we had only ourselves to blame for most of the ills of the world. And we’d whiffed our first at bat in a big way. But we had a second at bat now. We had a chance to make it past 2042. We had a chance to save ourselves. For me, that started with saving one kid. And as we pulled up to the hospital, I realized it was time to do just that.
I started to get out of the car, but then I had a horrible thought.
“You said writing code that bent the base code was a stretch,” I said to Nancy’s mom.
“Mm hm,” she answered.
Making temporary tweaks that took reality off the rails for a few minutes here and there was one thing. Making a permanent change that challenged everything known about medical science was another. I held up the vial of red fluid and asked the question I didn’t want to have to ask.
“Is this going to work?”
“Of course,” she answered.
Then her face changed.
“Pretty sure.”
Her face changed again.
“Maybe.”
Then her face brightened again and she added, “It’s definitely not going to make matters worse.”
Her face un-brightened.
“I mean I don’t think it will.”
Digital god or not, I wanted to strangle her. But there wasn’t time. The incremental degradation her system was suffering minute by minute wasn’t endangering our fundamental existence. But it was affecting her ability to make dramatic edits to the code underneath that existence—to bend the rules. And I needed some rules bent hard.