Then, as fast as I had lost it, Carl locked back on. Energy exploded in my legs and I twisted around, feeling the centrifugal forces tugging at my cheeks as I spun. My ankle cracked across the fresh guard’s skull, pushing his head toward the ground as, somehow, my feet ended up back under me.
The bloodied guard, I have to respect it, he stayed in the fight. As he lunged at me, I leapt straight into the air and tucked my knees up to my chest. His face crashed directly into my left knee. He fell backward, limp and unconscious.
And then, like that, my body was mine again, and the music faded.
“Jesus … Jesus Christ,” I heard Peter’s voice say. I had forgotten, in those moments, that he was in the room.
“Same,” I said, breathing hard, “that was wild.” My heart was thrumming. Whatever Carl had done hadn’t bypassed my stress response.
“He shot you,” Peter said. And I remembered that he was right. The bullet had hit under my left arm, but that entire half of my body was covered in the Carl Stuff. I felt at it with my hand and, sure enough, the blazer I was wearing was in tatters under my armpit. The bullet must have shattered when it hit me, shredding the fabric.
“I guess he did,” I said. And then took out my phone and opened the camera.
“Hello, I’m here at Altus, where a bunch of people just tried to kill me. I came here because a friend of mine, Miranda Beckwith, got a job at Altus, but has, for the last month, completely ceased any communication with us. Until we found a note from her inside the Altus Space saying that she’s been imprisoned here. I have not yet found her, but I did find Peter Petrawicki.” I turned the camera to him. “Peter, why don’t we have a little chat … on the record while you take me to my friend.”
“Might I remind you we found you trespassing here at Altus and you assaulted several members of my staff just now.”
“Oh,” I said, turning the camera off, “so that’s how we’re going to play this?” I jumped over the conference table to where Carl had thrown the gun when they were inhabiting me. I picked it up off the floor and then jumped back over.
Peter’s eyes were wide, and every muscle in his body clenched when he saw I was holding the pistol.
“You’re going to take me to Miranda,” I said, crouching down beside him with the barrel of the gun in my left hand, “because otherwise I will absolutely break every single one of your fingers.”
I squeezed the gun’s barrel, and the metal groaned and snapped as it yielded to the power that Carl had given to me.
“What are you?” Peter said, his voice quavering.
“Ugh,” I said, standing up, “I wish I knew.”
MIRANDA
Altus had forgotten about me. They would let me work, but they also didn’t care if I didn’t. I had given up on getting a message out. I had given up on everything. I thought if I made it clear that I knew I was inside of the Altus Space that they would take me out. I assumed they were monitoring my heart rate at least, and that must have told them that I was in distress. But hours and days and weeks kept passing, and nothing happened. I walked the halls of the building that they had constructed for me to exist inside of, and then I ran through them, and then I ran up the walls, I tore things from shelves, I screamed, but always I knew I was just rearranging synapses in my mind and nothing more.
I hadn’t spoken to another person in, how long? How would I even know? But the thing that kept me locked perpetually on the edge was that I knew my friends had not forgotten me. My mind had always wanted me to believe they weren’t really my friends, but when faced with the question of whether they could abandon me to this, I found something solid. They couldn’t. I believed that, even if they didn’t find my note, they would come for me eventually.
And so I went into the Altus Space inside my Altus Space and I tried things out. I looked to see what the most popular experiences and sandboxes were, and sometimes I was disappointed, but sometimes I found some freedom in them. I was trapped, and I had to fight constantly not to wonder what was being done with my body, but I put it out of my mind and I waited. I had done the work, and I believed the gang would fight to free me. It would happen.
And so it was that I was experiencing a young woman playing with a kitten in the Altus Space, when my eyes suddenly filled with the light of ten thousand suns.
“Wha … what …” My mouth felt gummy, not, like, dry and sticky, but just weak and slow.
As my eyes adjusted, in front of me, I saw Maya’s face, and as much as I knew it was always going to happen, the relief that slammed down into me was so heavy that I nearly broke under it.
“OH GOD,” I said, and I lunged forward at her, not yelling, just without any volume control. “OH GOD THANK YOU.”
She held me so tightly and whispered into my ear, “It’s OK. You’re out now. I’m sorry it took us so long.”
I pulled back as I had a sudden and terrifying thought. How did I know this was real? How would I ever know anything was real ever again? I looked at her through my tears and saw her own cheeks stained. It was too perfect. Did they just build my fantasy for me?
“Did …” My mind tossed around. “I need to know you’re real.”
She looked at me, confused and then sad. “Oh, OK, that makes sense. Well, April told me about the dresses, and I thought that was a very mean way to tell you. But she didn’t want to risk the news being intercepted. I don’t think anyone else would know about that.”
I started crying again then, both with the relief that she was real and also with the shame. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
“About what?”
“About sleeping with April.”
Her laugh was like a thunderclap. She gestured to the situation, smiling. “OK, I accept your apology, I guess, let’s talk about it more a different time. Right now, I need to take some video footage of this bullshit, if that’s OK with you. We’re trying to spook all of Altus’s investors into selling us controlling interest in the company, and this room seems pretty spooky.”
I looked around. I was in the AltaCoin mine, sitting in a hospital bed like the hundreds of other people. Except those people weren’t doing anything but mining AltaCoin twenty-three hours a day.
As Maya took out her phone and opened the camera, I had a thought. I had been in the Altus Space for, at minimum, weeks of time. But looking down, I felt fairly fine. I hadn’t just been kept alive; I’d been kept healthy. I stood up out of the chair and did some quick squats. My muscles hadn’t atrophied at all. A wave of goose bumps moved over my body. There was only one way I could imagine that my body had been kept healthy during all of that time that I couldn’t move it.
Maya was just walking down the rows and rows of humans, filming. And then she turned to me and said, “Miranda Beckwith came to work at Altus”—the sound of her voice bounced around the giant room—“but she violated one of their rules, so, without her permission or knowledge, they imprisoned her inside the Altus Space.”
“That’s true,” I said. If my body had stayed fit after a month of bed rest and I didn’t move it, someone must have been moving it for me. “But, Maya, we should leave here.”