Spirits in the Wires

  As soon as she was connected, she typed the Wordwood URL into the address bar near the top of the screen. After a moment’s pause, a new window opened with a still picture of a forest rather than the streaming video that used to normally be there. There were no options to click on and no matter where she moved the cursor, it never changed from an arrow to the hand with a pointing finger indicating a link that could take her elsewhere.

  She stared at the screen for a while, then returned the cursor to the address bar where she typed in the URL that would take her to her Hotmail account.

  Besides the usual spam, there was only one new message.

  Her pulse quickened when she saw whom it was from: Webmaster® TheWordwood.com. But her happiness dampened as she read through the businesslike list of what had been provided for her:

  The apartment was now in her name. Rent and all utilities were covered and would continue to be covered if she decided to move elsewhere.

  A bank account had been opened in her name. A debit card was on its way to her by mail. If she needed money now, she could go to the bank to withdraw it from a teller. There was also some cash in the nightstand drawer on the left side of the bed.

  She blinked when she looked at the amount that was in the account. Where had all that money come from? As though Aaran had expected the uneasy feeling rising up in her, the source of the funds was described in the next paragraph, something about skimming fractions of interest accrued on hundreds of thousands of accounts—each on its own amounting to nothing, but collected together it became a very tidy sum indeed.

  The e-mail ended with the hope that she’d be happy in her new life and was simply signed “the Webmaster.”

  It was like getting a letter from a lawyer. Just the facts, ma’am.

  Her first impulse was to walk away from it all. But reason prevailed. Yes, it made her feel like she was a kept woman, but there were no strings attached here. And really, did she want to go back to the streets and its dangers?

  You never really lived on the streets, a part of her argued. That was only an implanted memory.

  True. But that didn’t make living on them any safer or easier.

  She reread the e-mail and sighed, remembering an early conversation with Aaran when they’d decided that maybe they were each other’s guardian angels.

  He was certainly hers now.

  Her distant, unapproachable guardian angel.

  Because there hadn’t been any warmth in the message. She supposed she should take comfort in the knowledge that seeing to her welfare had been one of the first things he had done once he’d established contact with the world outside the Wordwood, but why couldn’t there have been something personal?

  Something. Anything.

  Because Aaran needed to cut himself off from human concerns, she realized. It would be the only way he could survive in the alien symbiotic relationship of which he was now a part.

  She supposed she understood.

  But it was small comfort, alone as she was in the world.

  In the days that followed, she avoided everyone who’d been involved with the events that had led up to Aaran’s disappearance into the Wordwood. Mostly, she stayed in the apartment. Reading, watching TV. As often as not, she simply pulled a chair up to a window and sat staring at the view. No one knew she was here—no one besides the Wordwood’s Webmaster, she supposed—so no one tried to contact her.

  But eventually she had to get out more often than simply slipping off to the corner store for staples.

  She knew her past wasn’t real—she was an active person, not a reactive one, no matter how the memories she was carrying around in her head said otherwise. The Wordwood spirit might have created a background for her in which she had docilely accepted Darryl’s abuse until finally standing up for herself, but that wasn’t who she was. Or if it was—if that was how she was supposed to be—then the conditioning had failed.

  Or she had overcome it.

  There was no point in looking for a job. Aaran had provided enough money for her to make the simple earning of money not an issue, and she had no burning desire to follow any particular career. At least not yet. That might come, but for now she thought it best to concentrate on experiencing more of the consensual world firsthand. Build up a store of her own real memories.

  So she visited museums and galleries. She went into cafes and ate out, watching people as they interacted with each other. She tried shopping, but she didn’t need much, not with everything Aaran had in his apartment. She did shop for clothes, but found that after picking up some new cargo pants and T-shirts, a nice jean jacket, underwear and even a couple of dresses, she wasn’t mentally equipped to do any more. She carried around a pocket full of change and parceled it out to panhandlers and buskers that she passed on the street,

  She discovered libraries and found them fascinating, both for the people-watching they provided as well as for the books. Aaran had a whole spare room devoted to his own personal library, but it held mostly fiction and she was more interested in nonfiction. How things worked. How history unfolded. How people, famous or not, lived their lives.

  It was on one such expedition to the Crowsea Public Library, walking by the computer room, that she spotted a familiar face. She stood in the doorway watching Christiana, her face bathed in the light of the monitor, her fingers tapping away on the keyboard. She almost turned and walked away, but at that moment Christiana sat back from the computer and looked up. Their gazes met.

  Suzi hesitated. Christiana smiled a greeting, but she seemed to sense how close Suzi was to bolting and she made no move to get up and come over. Finally, Suzi closed the distance between them. She pulled an unused chair from another table and sat down beside Christy’s mysterious shadow, not sure why she was doing it. Not sure she even liked the woman. Christiana was the only one of them, other than Aaran, who had argued to stay behind. She was the one who should have stayed behind.

  “So, how are you finding the consensual world?” Christiana asked.

  Suzi shrugged. “It’s interesting.”

  She glanced at the screen. It showed an in-box from a Yahoo account with as many messages as her own. None.

  “Funny how that word’s changed,” Christiana said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, people used to say something was interesting when it really did grab their attention. It’d be something remarkable. Or appealing. Or at least out of the ordinary. Now it’s just a polite way of being noncommittal and usually means you don’t find it interesting at all.”

  Suzi blinked.

  “So which is it for you?” Christiana asked.

  “A bit of both,” Suzi admitted. “There are a lot of things that can keep my attention, but at the same time I feel distanced from it all.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “Mostly just watching people.”

  Christiana gave her a knowing look.

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Suzi asked.

  “Absolutely nothing. But when I was learning how to be real, the first thing I was told was that I needed to interact with people.”

  “I don’t have to learn how to be real.”

  “I didn’t say you did.”

  Suzi smiled. “No, but you inferred it.”

  “I suppose I did. I guess I just assumed you’d be experiencing some of the same problems with self-identity that Saskia and I have.”

  “You don’t think you’re real?”

  “I don’t know. I was born as the cast-off shadow of a seven-year-old boy. How real is that?” Christiana smiled suddenly, but the humour didn’t reach her eyes. “But it’s funny. Until I first ran into Saskia and we had the long talk that got us involved with this whole Wordwood fiasco, I never really questioned where I came from. That’s just who I was.”

  “And now you do.”

  Christiana nodded. “I feel kind of adrift. Rootless.”

  “Well, I may not be so good at interacting with the
world at large,” Suzi said, “but I’m sure about this much: It doesn’t matter where any of us come from, or even what we look like. The only thing that matters is who we are now.”

  Christiana didn’t say anything for a long moment. Her gaze traveled away from Suzi’s face, and Suzi wasn’t sure if she was looking inward or across the library.

  “That’s pretty good,” she said finally, looking back at Suzi. “It puts the onus on yourself, instead of on where you came from. It suits what I like to think of as my independent temperament with the added bonus of making good sense. How can your genetic history or your past even begin to compete with who you are today?”

  Suzi took that as a rhetorical question, so she didn’t worry about an answer.

  “But you’re also right about my needing to interact more with people,” she said instead. “There’s something weird about living your life in a cocoon. There’s only so much you can get out of books and art galleries.”

  Christiana nodded. “How are you doing for living expenses? Have you got a place to stay yet?”

  “I’m in Aaran’s apartment. He set it up so that everything of his is in my name, plus he’s opened up a bank account for me with a ton of money ink.”

  “Probably ill-gotten gains,” she said, but there was a smile in her voice that let Suzi know she wasn’t not supposed to take it seriously.

  “Only semi-ill-gotten,” Suzi told her.

  “Do you ever hear from him?”

  Suzi sensed more than simple interest in the question.

  “Just one e-mail that first day,” she said. “It was very businesslike and just signed ‘the Webmaster.’ “

  “That’s harsh.”

  Suzi nodded.

  “Have you ever run into any of the other … scouts the Word wood sent out with you?” Christiana asked.

  Suzi smiled at Christiana’s momentary hesitation. She’d probably been about to say “spies.”

  “No,” she said. “I can’t sense their presence any more than I can the Wordwood’s, but then I haven’t been looking for them.”

  And she realized she wasn’t particularly interested, either. That was all part of an old life. She wanted to concentrate on the new one. What she had now.

  Christiana was looking at the monitor. “Funny to think how we were all right in there only a few weeks ago.”

  “In where?”

  “The Wordwood. The Internet. Where it was a place instead of pixels on a screen.”

  “But it’s nothing we have to worry about now,” Suzi said.

  Christiana nodded.

  Suzi decided that she liked sitting here, interacting with someone other than the voice in her head. She also liked Christiana, even if it should have been her that stayed behind in the Wordwood.

  “Do you want to go and grab some lunch?” she asked, surprising herself.

  Christiana pretended she had to think about it. “But only if you’re paying with those ill-gotten gains. It’ll make me feel more piratical.”

  “And that’s good because … ?”

  “It means I can finally get a parrot and who knows? There might even be a treasure map tied to its leg.”

  “Except you’ll have to change your name to something like Long John Silver.”

  “I suppose,” Christiana said. “Say, did you ever wonder if he got that name because he always ran around in his underwear?”

  That made them both giggle. The woman sitting at another computer station nearby shushing them only made it worse. So they got up and left before a librarian came over and threw them out, the two of them leaning against each other, bending over from having to stifle their laughter.

  Christiana

  So, remnants of our journey into the Wordwood continue to impact on my life.

  I’ve got a new friend in Suzi—I love her observations about other people when we’re out at a cafe or a concert, or just walking down the street. She can be serious and funny and she never hesitates at the thought of trying some new adventure. In that way, she’s more like my friends in the border-lands than most of the people I meet here in the consensual world.

  During that first lunch we had together, she asked me to teach her how to travel between the worlds. I knew why she wanted to learn, but I couldn’t argue her out of it. She needed to talk to Aaran. So did I, but going back into the Wordwood didn’t strike me as the answer.

  Why did I teach her?

  Partly because if I didn’t, someone else eventually would. But mostly because I didn’t see her getting into the Wordwood anyway. Even if Aaran—or what was left of Aaran in the Webmaster he’d become—wanted to let someone in, I doubt the leviathan would allow it to happen.

  So I taught her how to find the borderlands by tricking them into existence in her peripheral vision. It’s easy, really. What we actually observe is such a small part of what’s going on around us.

  Try this some time. Hold your hands out at arm’s length and make a circle with your index fingers and thumbs that’s about the size of a dinner plate. That’s all you really see at any given point. Everything around it your brain makes up from its memories of what your eyes have taken in as you generally scan your surroundings. And that’s why it’s so easy to find the borderlands in your peripheral vision. All you have to do is to trick your mind into believing that they’re actually there and then step sideways into them.

  Though I guess that doesn’t explain how you can catch something in your peripheral vision, like someone approaching, or a car as you’re about to step off a sidewalk. But mostly it holds true. And I know for sure that the borderlands are always there, waiting for you.

  The otherworld’s tougher—at least crossing over to it from this world is. But it’s simple to reach once you’re already in the borderlands. The membrane, veil, whatever that lies on the edges of both our world and the spirit realm is so much thinner when you’re looking through it from a vantage point inside the borderlands.

  It took Suzi awhile to get the hang of it, but before too long she was moving through the worlds like a seasoned pro.

  “I love this,” she said the first morning she appeared in my meadow apartment.

  She was polite enough to stand outside in the cedars and clear her throat, waiting for me to notice her and invite her in.

  I smiled at her and beckoned her in.

  “Yeah,” I told her as she sat on the end of my bed. “It never gets old.”

  Christy and I treat each other more like brother and sister now. He’s stopped putting me on a pedestal, and I try to be more straightforward with him and not feel like his weird little shadow. But there are still things I won’t tell him. Like Galfreya’s name. I side with Geordie on that one because when it comes to Faerie, names are a big deal. It’s like that in most of the borderlands and the otherworld, too. Giving someone your name is a gift; it says “I trust you.”

  How come I know her name? That’s a whole other complicated story involving whiskey and Maxie—never a peaceful combination—and this is neither the time nor the place for it. One thing at a time, Mumbo always tells me.

  So as I was saying, mostly I try to be more forthcoming with Christy. We’ve even had these family dinners—Christy and Saskia, Geordie and me. I enjoy them more than I thought I would. There’s none of the awkward tension of needing to make conversation that I was expecting. We just sit around and yak, stuffing our faces with some new wonderful meal that either Saskia or Geordie has put together. Neither Christy nor I can do much more than boil water and burn toast, though we make a fine clean-up team when the meal is done.

  When Bojo’s in town, I’ll often hang out with Holly and him, though most of the time when I go by the bookstore I spend talking to Dick. We’ll sit up into the middle of the night and talk about obscure books long after the others have fallen asleep. He loves the fact that I actually know a lot of the characters that started out their lives in the pages of those mostly forgotten stories. I think I’ve actually got him convinced to tag alon
g with me to the next party at Hinterland, which is a big deal for a stay-at-home fairy man like a hob.

  As for the others …

  I never went back to see Jackson. He came through in the end, back there in the Wordwood, but I think knowing me would just cause him more problems than not. Every time he’d see me, he’d have that weird feeling of unwanted memories pushing up against the calm complacency of his life.

  For some people that would be a good thing, but Jackson struck me as someone who expects to find order in the world, and knowing me tends to put a little chaos in your life instead. Look what happened to Saskia within a day of introducing herself to me in that cafe.

  I didn’t even meet the other Wordwood founders, but Holly tells me that they and Raul are fine. I did get her to ask if any of them had heard from Aaran, but they didn’t know who he was and none of them will have anything to do with the Wordwood site anymore. When Holly asks why, they don’t really have an answer and she doesn’t press them.

  I remember liking Raul—maybe because he was gay. He looked at me like I was an individual instead of evaluating my attractiveness the way so many men do with women. It’s weird how refreshing a lack of sexual energy can be in this overly-charged world where even kids’ cartoons seem to be selling sex, though it’s not something I’d ever want to give up in the long term.

  And it’s not like I think Raul’s some kind of prude. He’s just got a different orientation. If I was a guy, he’d probably have been checking me out.

  The only one I never met before the Wordwood business began was Robert Lonnie, but both Christy and Geordie talk so much about him that I’ve been keeping an ear out for that guitar playing of his wherever I go, whether it’s wandering through the city or in the borderlands.