Seventeen
Rick found Becky without too much trouble. There
were few dark corners in a building with automatic lighting. Passing a
door with its pane of frosted glass glowing from within, Rick peeked
inside and found the girl seated in a front row desk.
He let the door close noisily to warn her of an
intruder. She looked around, still near panic, but she relaxed and turned
away when she saw who it was.
Rick walked along the wall and sat across the room
from her. "I'm butting in for your own good," he said. "Marla wasn't
threatening you with that bat. Mort accidentally burned her with a
torch. He's trying to melt the locks
on the doors and get us out of here. He didn't have much luck with the
front doors, so he's trying the side entrances. Nobody was trying to hurt
you, Becky."
"I know," she said, her voice so soft, he could
hardly hear her speak in the absolute stillness. "I'm sorry I
overreacted. I can't help myself."
Now what? Rick didn't want to push too hard. When
she had nothing more to say, he rose and started back toward the door. At
least she had spoken to him. Maybe later she would want to confide in him
a bit more.
"Don't go."
Rick paused, inwardly overjoyed. He sat at the
nearest desk and remained carefully silent.
"Something terrible is happening to us," Becky Marple
said.
"How terrible?" Rick wanted to know.
She turned in her seat to face him. "This is more
than just an evaluation. My parents worked on a task force that wrote
interactive software for a psychiatric therapy experiment. I think we've
been caught up in something like it."
Rick was startled by the notion. "Psychiatric
therapy?" He gestured wildly, searching for the right questions to ask.
"Why? Why us? What for?"
Becky captivated him with her dark Asian eyes. "I
don't know," she said. "I know that the experiment failed. Some patients
volunteered to try it out. Two of them committed suicide afterwards, so I
know it's really dangerous."
Rick tried to rub the gooseflesh off his arms. "Is
that what happened to us?"
"I think so."
"Maybe this is something new," he suggested
hopefully.
Becky shook her head. "It's only made things worse
for us."
Rick had to agree. "But why would the school want to
harm us?"
"I don't understand it myself," Becky said.
"Evaluation programs are a good way to see what makes us tick inside. Our
fears feed on themselves and grow out of proportion. How we react tells
the whole story. The problem is, you can't help people by letting it go
too far. It causes permanent emotional damage."
"It doesn't make sense that they'd let us get hurt,"
Rick said. "Our parents are involved. This all came out of that
parent-teacher conference this morning."
Becky stared at her hands folded in her lap. "I
don't care how it started. I know that it's gone too far."
"But it's over now," Rick said anxiously, forgetting
his own argument. "Maybe Mort can burn out the locks and we can go home."
Becky shook her head.
"Then all we have to do is to wait until morning,"
Rick said in growing irritation. "We're right in a middle of a semester.
This place is going to be swarming with three and a half thousand kids
in..."
"Rick, look what time it is."
He looked up at the wall clock.
And continued to stare at it.
Becky went to door to look across the corridor and
out the bronzed window into the moonlit night. Rick followed. "There's
something wrong with the clocks," he said lamely.
The digital clock read eight-thirty in the morning.
"You're wearing a watch, aren't you?" Becky said.
"What does it say?"
Startled by his oversight, Rick glanced at his
watch. The time agreed with the wall clock. It was eight-thirty in the
morning.
But how? The school was still deserted. The moon
was still in the same spot in the sky as in his dream. "The security
system isn't working right either," Rick reminded her. "And the
computers..."
"Do you think it possible that all of this could
be happening at once?"
He had picked up on that himself. Mort and Marla had
chosen to ignore his observation, trying to keep everything within their
ability to understand and control.
"I didn't think so," Rick said.
"Then there has to be another explanation, one that
explains all the discrepancies."
Rick sighed in despair. He had to force the words
out. It was the one possibility he least wanted to accept. "We're still
dreaming," he said. And fear surged within him like a revved engine.
Becky turned to face him. "Does that scare you?"
"I'm scared to death," Rick admitted. "I feel like
I'm going to come apart at the seams and just lose it entirely."
"Mort and Marla will. I think whoever is doing this
to us is going to let this scenario run its course. We could all be
killed."
Rick eyes widened with dread.
"Except that even getting killed wouldn't be real,"
Becky added.
"If we can't be hurt," Rick said, "maybe it's just
part of the psych evaluation after all."
"We can still go crazy." Becky shook her head
decisively. "The virtual reality thing was just an excuse to get us
going. We've been in some kind of virtual reality from the beginning,
from when we met outside the school and couldn't remember where we came
from. We're still in it. It can't be for just an evaluation. Something
else is going on."
"But why? Why would the school want to hurt us?"
Becky looked at him. Rick had thought Asian eyes
exotic. They were mysterious as well. "We don't know for sure that the
school is involved," she said. “The school is just a stage.”
Then what? He was afraid to ask aloud.
Becky cocked her head to one side. "Have you ever
heard of a memory web?"
"I don't know about things like that!" Rick cried in
frustration.
"A virtual reality as convincing as this would take
the biggest computers you can imagine," Becky said softly. "I didn't
think anybody had technology this sophisticated. In fact, I know they
don't. If I'm wrong, then they may be using memory webs as well."
Rick found himself a seat. What had he expected of a
genius educated in private schools? Becky had himself and Marla and Mort
outclassed by a light-year. Rick was suddenly very frightened of her. "I
don't know what a memory web is," he confessed.
"A memory web means they can give us memories that
aren't real," Becky said. "That's why we have that moment of amnesia
before we remember anything. We tried to access a memory that doesn't
exist. It takes a moment for some computer to provide it for us.
Memories are like a spider's web, because they are all interconnected, but
they don’t preexist. They’re generated as we need them."
"But why wouldn't we remember our own memories?" Rick
protested.
"We might not have any," Becky said. "We might not
be who we think we are."
Rick rose to his feet and went to the door, careful
not to trip over his own clumsy feet.
"We're not accessing memories from our own minds,"
she called after him. "They're being fed to us."
Her voice followed him out into the hall. "We don't
know who we are for sure! We can't be certain of anything!"
Now it was his turn to try to find a dark corner in
which to hide in a building with automatic lighting.
"I can prove it to you, Rick Kaiser!" Becky Marple
called after him. "I can show you that I’m right! There’s a way to do
it!"
