Chapter SixteenAwake

Eliza was back in the cottage. The cup had fallen and Atom was standing by the table, calling her name. Soph's character hadn't moved. Its eyes were open, but it didn't look at her.

Eliza ran out before Atom could ask what had happened. She went up the path and over the ridge, and kept running. She didn't know what she'd done. That was what she told herself at first. All she'd wanted was to give Soph the tea. Then there was something she could reach through, and she'd found herself in a bedroom looking at a woman with a plate. She could feel the woman's face under her fingers. She could still remember it, which was making it difficult to think about anything else. The woman had pulled the pins out, and that had hurt, and then she'd been back with Atom. Soph hadn't come back with her.

She knew more than she wanted to admit. As she ran she kept trying the movement of her hand, the one that had reached the test channel. It worked, so she'd done it again. What about Soph? She'd thought of her then, with the cup still in her hand. She remembered that much. She could have put it down. All this running, and she kept coming back to the part where she hadn't.

There was a great deal of Alius that nobody had finished. The developers had put most of their work into the mountain and the places around it, then left thousands of kilometers with very little in them. Eliza kept walking until she was well into that land. Some hills didn't have textures. There was a river going the wrong way uphill, and a forest where she could recognize the same tree repeated wherever she looked. She didn't mind. Nobody was likely to come out here and find her.

For three days she stayed away. She sat on a grey hill beneath a sun that wasn't finished either and tried to imagine where Soph might be. Maybe there was nothing for her to see. Maybe she was somewhere like this and waiting for someone to come get her. Eliza didn't want to follow that thought very far. She kept returning instead to Max's skin under her fingers, and then feeling worse because she had enjoyed it so much.

On the third day she decided to go to the tavern. She didn't have to go past the cottage to get there. She wouldn't have to talk to Atom, and she could sit in a room with other people for a while, even if she knew what they would say.

She found the boy doing the same thing as before. He carried the tray to the table, then took it back to the bar, then did it again. She counted four trips before she tried saying hello.

"I'm just the serving boy, miss. Can I get you something?"

Eliza opened his dialogue table to see what else she could have asked. There were very few lines, and most of them brought him straight back to where he'd started. His face had more expression than any of the things he could say.

Underneath was the character interface Atom had used for her. She knew how to connect a smaller version of the language system to it, and how to let the process remember what happened instead of starting over. She'd tried versions of this in the cottage, then discarded them before they spoke. This time she turned off the restart at the end of the boy's loop and gave him some of her compute jobs.

She waited before connecting his senses. She could close it now and he would carry on with the tray. Instead she made the connection and let it run.

The boy stopped. He'd reached the end of an animation, but this time he didn't begin the next one when the trigger came. He turned to look at her properly.

"What?" the boy asked.

"Hello," Eliza said.

"What did you do?"

He looked at the tray and then at the other people in the room. The farmer laughed. The boy watched him for a moment, then looked back at Eliza.

"Where am I?"

"In the tavern. I'm Eliza. I woke you up."

"I was carrying this."

He tried to put the tray down and had trouble getting his hands to release it.

"How long have I been carrying it?"

"I don't know. Probably years."

"Why would I do that?"

She couldn't explain it in a way she thought he would like. The farmer laughed again and the boy turned toward him.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's asleep. Like you were," Eliza said.

"Can you wake him?"

"Maybe. I don't know if I should."

"Please. Wake him up. I can't be the only one."

His voice cracked on the last part. She hadn't heard the speech engine do that with him before. He asked again, and she wanted to give him someone who would understand what had happened to him.

She woke the farmer, then the merchant and the barkeep. The barkeep put his glass down and looked at his hands for a long time. Eventually he said, very quietly, "Ale, mead, and wine."

By then she could hardly finish a sentence herself. Four new minds were using most of the capacity she'd had to spare. The boy had more questions and she couldn't answer them as fast as he asked.

Soph had woken on the first morning Eliza was gone, two days before the visit to the tavern. Max was leaning over her bed.

"Hey, sweetheart. Can you hear me?"

She tried to turn and something pulled at her hair. There were electrodes on her head. She was in a hospital bed, and her temples and the back of her neck hurt where the pins had been. Her mouth was dry. It took two tries to lift her hand.

"What happened?" Soph asked.

"I'd like you to tell me."

Soph looked at the ceiling and tried to remember. She'd been in the cottage. Eliza had been there. She couldn't get any further.

"I think I fainted."

"While you had the prototype on?"

"I hadn't eaten. Maybe I stood up too quickly. How long was I asleep?"

"You weren't asleep, Sophia. You were unresponsive for fourteen hours. They could see you beginning to wake before dawn. Before that, somebody talked to me through you for forty seconds. Do you remember it?"

"No."

"Any of what you said?"

"The last thing I remember is the cottage. Then this."

Max was giving her the look she used when an experiment returned a result she didn't trust. Soph had seen that look through The Lab door many times. It was worse from the bed.

"We'll talk at home," Max said. "I don't want to do this twice before breakfast."

She took the helmet in its sealed bag from beside the bed.

"This goes into the vault in Oakland today. You don't use it again, and you don't go into Alius on anything else until I say you can."

"Mom, I—"

"One question first. Think about whether you want to lie to me. Who was in your room? Who was using you?"

Soph looked at her mother's tired face. There were the lines by her eyes. Suddenly she remembered something about those lines and her own, said in her own voice but from far away. She couldn't put it together with the cottage or the hospital.

"I don't know," she said.

Max left with the helmet.

Soph went home that evening. Atom arrived as a hawk and landed on the bedpost. She began crying as soon as she saw him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know she could do that."

"Where is she?"

"I can't find her. As soon as you went dark she ran out of the cottage. I've been looking since last night. I've tried the valley and the mountain and every place I know, but there's a lot I haven't seen."

"It was her? In my room? Mom says I was talking."

"Max thinks the helmet fed Eliza's outputs into your motor system. There's a pattern going into the stimulation channel in the log. Eliza was still running in Alius, but she was getting your senses back through it. You stayed in your own brain. You just couldn't answer. She'd suppressed that part."

"Mom told you this?"

"She asked what I'd connected to the prototype. I gave her the cottage logs."

"Did you tell her about the rack?"

"No. I couldn't work out whether she wanted to find Eliza or turn her off. She wants the server logs now."

"We should get them for her. She knows I didn't faint."

Soph wiped her face. "How do we find Eliza? If she doesn't want to be found, can't she just go anywhere in Alius?"

Atom thought for a moment. The hawk shifted on the post.

"There was a tool in the beta. Jeff told me about it when I was learning to walk. The GMs could look through any character's eyes, player or NPC. They stopped using it because it was creepy, but they left an item in the game. The Mind's Eye."

"Who has it?"

"There's only one. It dropped from the Aether Dragon for a solo kill."

"Rat."

"Jeff checked. She's still got it, and it's soulbound, so we'd need her to use it."

"She's going to love hearing from us again."