“And you’re wondering if that’s all he did for you,” Regine says.
“That’s the big question, isn’t it?” Seth says. “And that was my big mistake. When I remember it, when I see it clearly, like what I just told you, I know that wasn’t true. H said so, Monica said so, and I couldn’t hear it. Gudmund loved me back.” He brushes his cheek again. “It was everywhere, in everything he said and did, every memory I’ve had of him since I’ve been here.”
“Which does not make it easier,” Tomasz says.
“Except it does, though, in a way. For one minute I stopped believing it and that was enough to make everything seem impossible, but it wasn’t impossible. And that isn’t even all. I mean, in those last days, my dad apologized to me, said he was sorry he hadn’t been there for me. Something I chose to forget because it didn’t fit in with how shit everything was. And even H on that very last morning.”
“He was offering you friendship,” Regine says.
Seth nods. “He was lonely. He missed me, missed his friends, and telling me about Monica was probably, for H, the biggest act of friendship he could have done.” Seth has to clear his throat again. “I wanted so badly for there to be more. I ached for there to be more than my crappy little life.” He shakes his head. “And there was more. I just couldn’t see it.”
Regine sits back. “And that’s why you’ve got more to tell us, isn’t it?
Seth doesn’t respond.
“Tell us what?” Tomasz says. No one still answers. “Tell us what?”
Regine never stops looking at Seth. “That’s why he’s about to tell us he’s going back.”
“He is WHAT?” Tomasz says, standing up.
Regine just keeps a challenging gaze on Seth.
“Is she right?” Tomasz demands. “Tell me she is not right.”
“Yeah, Seth,” Regine says, “tell Tommy I am not right.”
Seth sighs. “She’s right, but –”
“NO!” Tomasz shouts. “You want to go back? You want to leave us? Why?”
“I don’t want to leave you,” Seth says, firmly. “That’s kind of the whole point –”
“You want to go back, though!” Tomasz’s face crumples. “You always have. Since you arrived. One way or another, you have always wanted to leave us.” He makes a frown so sad, Seth can hardly bear to look at it. “I do not want you to leave us.”
“Tomasz,” Seth says, “when Regine went back, she remembered. She remembered who she was and how she got there.” He turns to Regine. “Didn’t you?”
She looks uncomfortable. “Vaguely, though. Not enough to change anything. Not enough to not make anything happen.”
“Are you sure?”
She opens her mouth to answer, but then stops. “I never even thought about that. I just knew what had to happen and that I had to do it.”
“I think you had some Lethe,” Seth says. “It was starting to work but hadn’t got very far. But if you were to go back there with no Lethe at all –”
“It is too late,” Tomasz says. “You are already dead there.”
“What’s dead there, though? There was a malfunction. A simulation of me died. A simulation that knew a whole lot less than I do now.”
Tomasz is shaking his head. “I do not see how it can work. How you will not just go back and die there and then die here and be lost to us.”
“I’m not sure, either,” Seth says, “but doesn’t it feel like it might work? Regine went back and remembered who she was. And then, Tomasz, we got her out again.”
Tomasz starts to argue, but then his eyebrows raise, in surprise and a little delight. “You mean, you would come back?”
Seth looks at him, then looks at Regine, who’s still staring at him, hostile, he can see, but maybe hopeful, too.
“Absolutely, I’d come back,” he says.
Tomasz licks his lips, and Seth can almost see him thinking. “But how would you do it, though?”
“Well,” Seth says, starting up the display on Regine’s coffin, “I’ve been thinking about it. This one’s broken. Regine must have damaged it when she came out of it.”
“I thought I was fighting someone,” Regine says. “Lots of kicking and pushing.”
“Yes,” Tomasz says, “that sounds like you.”
“But I’ve been reading this,” Seth says, tapping the display. “Half of it doesn’t make sense, but it looks like putting someone back in there isn’t actually all that difficult.” He presses a box, and the coffin creaks open, not smoothly like the ones in the prison did. Regine and Tomasz come round to look. Seth picks up a particular tube. “This is Lethe, I think.”
“You think?” Regine says.
“You had it in your mouth. I think you breathe it in. And when I interrupted the process, you didn’t get the full amount. You got just enough to make you aware without being able to fight it.”
“But if you went back without breathing in the tube . . .” Tomasz says.
“Maybe you’d remember everything. Maybe you’d remember who you were and where you were and maybe, maybe, you’d be able to do what you used to do when the online world first started. Go in and out as you pleased.”
But Regine is already shaking her head. “There’s no way you can be sure that’d happen. You’d probably just go back and die over and over again like I did, and even if you didn’t, how do you know you wouldn’t get stuck? I don’t remember any doors marked EXIT.”
“I’d have the two of you here,” Seth says.
“We could pull you out if anything went wrong,” Tomasz says.
“You don’t know that we could,” Regine says. “Not if you were all the way in. We had to die to get here.”
“I got you back. And people used to go back and forth all the time. We could try really brief trips to start –”
“If you could even get it to work. And why? Why go back at all? It’s not real.”
Seth takes a deep breath. This is the big question. He wonders if he’s as sure as he thinks he is. “Because I know more now,” he says. “It felt like the world had closed down to nothing, but that wasn’t true, was it? I mean, it’s not perfect, but I was wrong about how hopeless it was. By accident, we all got a second chance. I want to take it.”
“And you want to see your Good Man again,” Tomasz says.
“Yes. I can’t lie. My body is here, but he’s across an ocean and a continent, so if I want to see him again, I have to go back. And I want to find him somehow. Tell him I understand. Find H, too. Even Monica.”
“But you’re dead there,” Regine insists. “You died last week or whenever it was. I’ve been dead there for months –”
“But it’s also winter where I live there. It sure as hell isn’t winter here. Like I said, maybe time doesn’t work the same way. You went back before your death. And if you could go back knowing enough to change things –”
“Then all of those people who went to your funeral are just going to go, Whoops, our mistake?”
“They changed the memories of everyone who knew my brother to make it seem like he hadn’t died. Don’t you think it could be re-adjusted even easier for a real live person? I mean, there’s got to be glitches all the time, people remembering stuff they shouldn’t –”
“Could we go back to any time?” Tomasz interrupts. “I could go back before my mama talked to the bad men. I could save her. . . .” He falters. “But of course she died there properly. She would be dead for real for a very long time.”
“I’m sorry, Tomasz,” Seth says. “I don’t think it would work, anyway. There was a specific time on the panel when the Driver put Regine back in the coffin, and it’s the same one here.” He turns on the display again and points to a date. “I can’t find any way at all to change it. I think we’ve only got a loophole because it needed to fix a mistake. That’s what its job was, after all.”
“You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Regine says.
“If you’ve got a better explanation, I’m
willing to hear it.”
She sighs. “I wish this was all happening in your head.”
“Look,” Seth says, “I may be completely wrong, but don’t you think it’s worth a try? Can you imagine what it would be like if we could go back and forth from there to here? We could tell people. We could remind them of who they were.”
“They wouldn’t want to hear it,” Regine says.
“Some of them wouldn’t, but others might. And if we found a way to wake them up –”
“They wouldn’t want to come,” Regine says. “Why the hell would they want to leave a world where everything works for one where everything’s dead?”
“Your mother might want to. If we could find a way in and out, maybe –”
He stops because she looks like she wants to hit him. “Don’t you talk about my mother,” she says. “Don’t you promise things about her that can never be.”
“I didn’t mean –”
But she’s sitting back down in her chair, blinking away angry tears. “People are harder to save than you think. And you keep forgetting they went there for a reason. The world is over.”
“It is not over,” Tomasz says. “The world is healing itself. There are deers. There is us.”
“The world is half a burnt-out neighborhood and another one covered in mud,” Regine says. “No, what’ll happen is Seth’ll get back there, everyone will be so happy he isn’t dead, and he’ll have all his real friends back, his real family, and he’ll just –”
She stops dead, frowning ferociously.
“I’ll just what?” Seth asks. “Forget about you? Is that what you think?”
“Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t anyone?”
“Because, you idiot,” he says, finally snapping back. “The reason I killed myself was because I was certain there wasn’t anything more. That there was never going to be more. That I was alone and unhappy forever.”
“Yes, yes,” Regine says, acting grandly bored, “and now you’ve learned your valuable lesson about how people aren’t spending all their time just thinking about poor old Seth and all his terrible, terrible problems.”
“No,” Seth says, firmly, “what I’ve learned is that there actually is more. There’s you guys. You guys are my more.”
“Oh, now, see,” Tomasz says to Regine. “This is very nice thing for him to say.”
“Saying it is all well and good,” Regine persists, “but what if you go back and die? Are we supposed to give you a nice funeral because you like us?”
“Look, I know it’s a risk –”
“A risk with your life.”
“A risk worth taking. Look, I want both. I want them and I want you. Now that I know there’s more? I want to have more. If there really is more to life, I want to live all of it. And why shouldn’t all of us? Don’t we deserve that?”
There’s a long silence while Tomasz and Regine exchange looks.
“It may not even work,” Seth says again.
“But it may,” Regine says.
Seth sighs. “Make up your mind, Regine –”
“It would change everything, wouldn’t it?”
“And what’s wrong with that? Don’t you think things need changing? Don’t you think people need to wake up? Literally? If we could figure out a way to get in and out, maybe we could figure out ways to change other things, too.” He looks at her. “Make it better.”
But Regine looks skeptical. “Well, you’ve gone all heroic.”
“You’re the one who’s been trying to get me to face reality. You yell at me for thinking this is all in my head –”
“Oh, you’re finally believing this is real, are you?”
Seth makes a scale-like motion with his hands. “Sixty-forty.”
“What if I told you it was all in your head?” Regine says. “And that we were just making it easier for you to accept your death?”
“Then I’d keep my eyes open, remember who I was, and go in swinging.”
Regine is surprised into silence by hearing her words said back to her.
“There’s more than this,” Seth says. “So let’s go find it.”
“Well,” Tomasz says, after a moment, “I do not know about either of you, but I am feeling very stirred up!”
They decide to make a first try that afternoon. Seth is eager to go, but even he can see the sense of a nap after the morning they’ve had.
None of them can sleep, though.
“Forget it,” Regine finally says, rousting Tomasz and Seth from their bedroom. “Let’s just go and you can fail and then we can all get some proper rest.”
“That’s the spirit,” Seth says.
They start gathering things to take to Seth’s house, which seems the most likely place to try first. They’ll see if his coffin is less broken than Regine’s and go from there.
“I like what you say about changing the program, maybe,” Tomasz says. “I could learn to do that.”
“It’s pretty sophisticated,” Seth says.
“And I am very clever. I am sure I could figure it and shazam! Tomasz saves the world again.”
“You could probably save the world just by combing that hair,” Regine says, handing Tomasz a bottle of water. “It was shaved when I found you. How can it be such a briar patch?”
“Male hormones,” he says, knowledgably. “I am approaching my growth spurt. I will shoot up even taller than the two of you.”
“Yeah,” Regine says. “You just keep telling yourself that.”
Having lost or broken all of their bicycles, they set out walking.
“Just think,” Tomasz says to Seth as they go. “This may be the last time you see this house. If you die.”
“That’s kind of the point of the two of you coming along,” Seth says, “to try and make sure that doesn’t happen.”
“Oh, we will do our best, Mr. Seth, but it may not be good enough.”
“What happened to Tomasz saves the world again?”
Tomasz shrugs. “I am bound to muck it up one of these times.”
“Do you have a plan for when you get back there?” Regine says, crossing the main road. “What if you open your eyes and you have a broken shoulder and can’t save yourself?”
“You started there at the top of the stairs,” Seth says, “a little bit before the malfunction. Maybe I’ll start before I get too cold to swim. Maybe I’ll even start on the beach and can just not go in.”
“It may not be as easy as you think. I was overwhelmed by it. It’s hard to change something you’ve already done.”
“Would you really like me not to do this at all? Not even try?”
She pulls her mouth tight. “I just want to make sure you’ve considered everything.”
Seth grins. “I really came late to the guardian angel sale, didn’t I? To get the pair of you.”
“I think we have done just fine, thank you very much,” Tomasz says.
“I don’t believe in guardian angels,” Regine says seriously. “Just people who are there for you and people who aren’t.”
“Yes,” Tomasz says. “Yes, I agree with this.”
“Just people,” Seth says, finding he agrees, too.
They walk down the empty High Street where Seth first really saw this world, past the supermarket where he got so much needed food and the outdoor store where he got so much needed equipment.
And there is the thought again, never quite disappearing. How everything he needed to survive, food, shelter, warm weather, has been provided. How these two not-guardian angels have saved him at the last minute, over and over. How he’s learned vital information just when he needed it, to take just the right steps, toward . . .
Toward what? Acceptance? Going back? Dying?
“Well,” he says, almost to himself, “we’ll know in a minute.”
“We will know what in a minute?” Tomasz asks as they approach the sinkhole, the weeds growing out of it like slowly crashing waves.
“If this is my brain telling m
e a story –”
“Not this again,” Regine mutters.
“If this was a movie or a book, right?” Seth says. “If this was some kind of story I was telling myself, then it’ll be waiting for us.”
Tomasz and Regine stop when they realize what Seth means by “it.”
“This is not an amusing thing to say, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says.
“It’s dead and gone,” Regine says. “There’s no way it’ll be there.”
“All I’m saying is that’s what would happen if this was my brain trying to make sense of stuff,” Seth says. “The Driver would be there, half-burnt, insane with revenge, waiting for one last attack before we do whatever it is we’re going to do.”
“But that is okay, though,” Tomasz says, brightening. “Because in that story, there is always one last fight, and the hero always wins.”
“Hey, yeah,” Seth says. “I like that version.”
“The fighting’s over, do you hear me?” Regine says. “There’s not going to be anymore.”
“I’m just saying –”
“Well, quit just saying. You say way too much.”
Seth holds up his hands in surrender. “It was just a thought. Nothing’s going to happen. We killed it. It’s gone. The end.”
But they’re all quiet as they take the final turn into Seth’s street.
Which is empty. No van. No figure. Just the same old parked cars and weeds and mud. Regine exhales in relief, then she scowls at him. “Got us all scared,” she snaps. “Fool.”
Tomasz laughs. “For one moment there, I really thought –”
And the Driver steps out from where it was crouched between two parked cars. Its helmet is melted into a nearly unrecognizable shape, its missing leg replaced with a thinner, newer metallic lattice.
It grabs Tomasz with two melted, crackling fists, lifts him from the ground, and hurls him nearly all the way across the street, where he slams into the side of a car, tumbles to the ground, and doesn’t get back up.