Chapter 5-3
1811 Words
Tanner holstered his g*n. “So you can kill her again?”
“No.” Obolus shook his head once. “I love her too much to hurt her. Well, I mean, hurt her that way.”
“I won’t summon her so you can hurt her in any way.”
“Summon? Like, a demon?”
Tanner c****d his head. “You don’t know who she is?”
“What she is. In this one. Is she pretending to be a succubus or something?”
What“You’re full of shit.” Tanner drew his g*n again.
Obolus sighed dramatically. “Go ahead. I’d hoped to get her to do it, but I can shut this one down without her.” He rose, leaning over his desk.
Tanner fired twice at Obolus’ center mass. The double-tap banged in his head, the powder burned his nose, as he saw papers jump on the credenza behind Obolus’ chair. A cloud of dust blossomed there.
Obolus sat and spun in his chair, showing the ragged holes blasted through the leather, then spun back. “Ready to call—to summon her now?”
Tanner tried to think of a next move, failed to think of a next move—any move.
“Next move, you summon her, or I just put this one out of my misery,” Obolus said. “And I think—I mean, I think and feel—that she’ll handle this better if she has a chance to say goodbye to you.”
“Where do you think I’m going?”
“You don’t want me to tell you.” Obolus snapped his fingers. “Believe me—you want her to tell you. So, call her.”
“Where do you think you’re taking her?”
“Out of here.” Obolus sucked in his lips. “Think? This thing really is amazing. Look—I sent everyone here to lunch and I’ve got all your cop friends busy with other crises, but it won’t be long before they figure out my diversions. Then this thing starts falling apart randomly and all of you have to suffer.” Obolus tilted his head. “You seem like a decent fellow, so I think you want to avoid that.”
“I don’t—”
“She’ll explain.”
Tanner holstered his g*n to buy time to consider different moves, consider how Obolus might react. He felt he was doing everything underwater, against slowly yielding resistance.
“Chop chop, Tanner.” Obolus snapped his fingers twice. “You’re already starting to lose resolution.”
Tanner’s nephew complained about resolution when they played video games together. Tanner had so much trouble surviving monsters and aliens and enemies that he saw nothing but the immediate threat the game showed him. The immediate threat of Obolus. But he noticed the sound of Obolus’ snaps didn’t correspond to the action, the way you saw lightning before you heard thunder.
The immediate threat of Obolus. “It’s not me causing that,” Obolus said. “It’s you, figuring out why you’ve been on two streets in your precinct that you didn’t know existed until today. So, call her.”
Hating Obolus for telling him his next move, Tanner stepped into the hall and whispered, “Vocato.”
D shimmered in, right before him, eyes down. “I’m sorry.” She clutched at his hands. “Tanner.”
He jumped at her touch. Warm, electric charges shot up his arms and deep into his chest. “I didn’t—” He choked. “You never—”
“If you don’t tell him,” Obolus said from the office, “I will.”
D tried making herself small.
“Hey.” Tanner lifted her chin. “I know you’re not—I mean, I can’t—” He gazed into her curiously emerald eyes, noting again the specks of gold and crimson there. “Can I protect you from him?”
D straightened then, made herself big, squaring herself and smoothing her clothes. “No.” She stroked back her shockingly red hair, then pulled it over her left shoulder. “It’s my job to protect you.” She looked past him. “To protect your world.”
“From him?”
“From discovering the truth.” D shook her head. “I failed.”
She strode into Obolus’ office.
* * * *
“That’s your avatar?” Obolus’ voice mixed astonishment with laughter.
Tanner followed D.
“There are a dozen of us in here,” Hannah said. “You can’t ruin all their—our—work.”
Obolus threw a disgusted arm in the air. “I’d be using, too, if I made myself look like that.”
“How did you hack my credentials?”
“Do you know how many simsects I had to kill to get your attention?”
“Don’t call them that!” Hannah shouted. “They’re as real as—”
“As you in that ridiculous get-up?”
D abandoned her big squareness when she processed Obolus’ words, and she shrugged a sheepish, helpless shrug. “I just wanted to—you know.”
“How many people have you killed?” Tanner thought about the stack of cold cases they’d linked to the Blue Sky Killer.
“None,” Obolus snapped. “Okay. Maybe I didn’t tell you that you’re beautiful enough. But I love you the way you really are. Not this way. I don’t need you to look like—like whatever this”—Obolus pointed at Tanner—“finds attractive.”
Tanner tried not to visualize the intricate swirl of ivy.
“Like you wore for Mardi Gras?” Obolus scoffed.
“What’s Mardi Gras?” Tanner burned with shame for giving away his secret thought. Her secret.
“It’s a big party in our world.” Hannah encompassed Obolus and herself with a broad motion. “People wear costumes.” Hannah turned back to Obolus. “This world evolved without it.”
Evolved. Tanner’s sense of being underwater returned, but this time it came with visuals: waves of light flickered over him, over them, over—“What is he doing to me?”
Evolved.“This one’s starting to fall apart,” Obolus said. “He’s as smart as you said. You’d better finish fast if you want to say goodbye.”
D reached for him again, but her hand passed through him as she passed through walls.
Tanner felt a tingle where she’d crossed him. “You’re not real.”
“I am. And as soon as I tell you what that means—as soon as you understand how that can be true—your world has to—to go away.”
“I’m having lunch with my sister tomorrow.” But he felt the waves now. “I have Evie next week.” Felt instead of just seeing them, and fought down the nausea he’d experienced the first time he’d sailed rough water. “My daughter. We—Salt and Spice need us.”
“I’m sorry for you.” Obolus drifted toward and away from them simultaneously. “She loves the world her advisor built more than she loves her own. This is the only way to rescue my wife.”
Tanner lurched for D and passed through her, warm and pulsing. “I’m the one who rescues—”
D shook her head. “He’s right. I’m—”
“Addicted,” Obolus howled. “She’s a sim junkie, and her kids need their mom more than she needs to defend her dissertation.”
The room spun around Tanner, though he knew from observation his feet were planted on—in?—what until recently had been carpet.
in?“I’m a grad student,” D told him from what seemed to be a great distance. “I study death and dying rituals. I’ve been observing you because no one sees more—more of the ways people die than homicide cops.”
Tanner tried to remember his stats.
“Two hundred and fifty-two clearances,” Obolus said. “The best rate in the metro, in the state. Maybe in the country.”
D framed Tanner’s face in her hands.
He couldn’t feel them, but craved them caressing him, anchoring him, knowing him, and for the first time he was glad to see a woman’s tears.
“In our world,” D said, “we create simulations of worlds like our own to conduct research. It’s more efficient and ethical to do our science—our double-blind experiments—if it’s not in the—”
“Real real world,” Obolus stuttered, shimmering out and in. “Our world is the real world world. This thing is—”
“Stop it!” D sobbed. “You’re killing him.”
And Tanner knew he couldn’t protect her. Knew the emptiness exploding inside him.
“I have to go,” D whispered into his ear. “I’ve been living in my simulation more than in my world, because I love—I love the way I feel about you.”
“But I have Evie.”
“Because I love the way you feel about me.”
“Are you doing this to Evie, too?” Tanner said. “To my mom and sister, and Britt—”
“I told you my name was Vishnu.”
“I hate how ugly that sounds. I couldn’t call someone as beautiful—”
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
“Worlds.”
“When you—when anyone—realizes their world is a simulation, the sim collapses.” D closed her eyes, severing their connection. “Then we have to start another one.”
anyoneTanner saw through the walls now, through himself. Through his world, this world. “How will I find you in another one?”
“Every sim is unique.”
The emptiness poured then from his heart. “Like Evie.”
“Like you.”
Tanner fumbled through words with no meaning. “Who.”
“Moira,” she said. “I’m Moira.”
He reached for Vishnu, his creator.
“I’m Tanner.”
Writing as dbschlosser, David B. Schlosser is an award-winning author and editor. He’s taught higher-education writing and crime fiction, served on boards for Mystery Writers of America, Editorial Freelancers Association, and Bouchercon, and delighted and offended people in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal as well as on Hard Copy and Inside Edition. A Kansas native now living in Seattle, he earned degrees at Trinity University and University of Texas.
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