Root Two - Part 6/9

How about now?

This is Part 6 of “Root Two,” a serialized novella about a hauntingly familiar near future. If you need to catch up, you can find:

• Part 1 here

• Part 2 here

• Part 3 here

• Part 4 here

• Part 5 here

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[Est. reading time: 8 minutes]

I showed up 40 minutes early, and honestly it was a miracle I was able to wait so long. Anyway it was enough time for me to get good and bored by every aspect of my environment before she got there.

And then she got there.

Oh my god.

KrisLove was a nat! I looked her up and down, I couldn't help it. The only — the ONLY difference I could spot between her avatar and her flesh-and-blood incarnation was that instead of actual bird bones in her face, it was just a tattoo. Maybe that's how she avoided getting rendered as a Natural in VR.

Holy, holy shit.

I became deeply self-conscious, imagining she knew exactly what I was thinking as she sat down across from me. No wonder she agreed to meet me in person, face-to-face. This was probably her favorite hobby. Who could blame her?

Nobody I knew looked like that. Nobody.

"Hi again," she said.

I hated her. I loved her. I was intimidated and defensive and deferent. I wanted to kill her and I wanted to follow her into the yawning, molten mouth of an active volcano.

"Hey." I said.

"So what's up."

I took a beat to recapture the presence of mind required to answer.

"Yeah, um — do you...are you one of those people who records your VR activity?"

"Excuse me?"

"That night, um — the night we met —"

"Yes."

I shook my head. "This is going to sound crazy, but...do you remember the candle on the table?"

She frowned at me. "Sure."

"OK, well, so -- the reason I wasn't — not that this is an excuse, it's not, I'm a bitch, but —"

"Got it."

"— the thing I was — distracted by...was...it was actually a pattern in the flicker of that candle."

She blinked. "OK."

"I'm sorry. I know it's — it sounds —"

"Crazy. You said that."

"Yeah, well it does. I realize it. But I'm not crazy. I actually wrote it all down, and took a video. And here's the thing — I SENT that video to Bao Lee."

"Bao...Lee?"

"Well, I sent it to CrossWorlds, because they own the rendering we were in that night, and somehow it wound up getting all the way to Bao Lee, who actually hired me to figure out what was going on."

"Really."

"I know. Wild. But also, in addition to being a bitch, I'm a titanic idiot, because I accidentally deleted the video I took. And everything else — everything else I've tried has turned out to be a dead end. I cannot figure out how that message got into that candle."

"Message?"

“Right. Probably not a message. I don't even know. It was 42 digits way down in the square root of two. I could recite them to you by heart."

She had her arms folded, evaluating, tapping a finger. Then she smiled. "Do it."

"What?"

"Recite the numbers. I want to see."

"Oh. No you don't."

"I do." She pulled out her phone and tapped something in. "Go ahead."

What the hell.

"It starts with the forty first decimal. Seven, one, eight, seven, five... you got it?"

She peered at her phone's screen, then nodded.

"So then it’s a… three…seven…six…nine, four, eight, oh, seven, three, one, seven, six, six seven nine seven three seven nine nine oh-seven-three-two-four-seven-eight-four-six-two-oneohsevenohthreeeighteight."

By the time I finished, she had set her phone down and was staring at me again.

"Neat trick."

"Yeah," I said, feeling like a slime-covered alien.

She stared at me for a long time. I couldn't keep eye-contact, so I looked around for an alternative until she finally said, "I do have a recording."

My eyes shot back up. "You do?"

"I only backlog five days, so you're lucky."

"Can you send it to me?"

"You really think it'll help?"

I raised my shoulders high. "I don't know. I have to try."

She nodded. Chewed a perfect lip. Glanced down at her phone. "I can't access the recordings from here."

"No, I get it."

She scrutinized me again. "You can come over and look at the file. Copy it if you want."

"That would be...thank you."

To my total astonishment, she wanted to keep talking. Not about the numbers, not about that night, but just about...stuff. She asked me questions about myself, seemed genuinely interested, and then it was pretty natural for me to ask her similar questions about herself. Exactly like a normal conversation, which was not something I had a lot of experience with.

Apparently, when she was younger, she moved out to the big city to get famous. After all, she was smart and pretty and people seemed to like her. The way she talked about her younger self was full of affection and pity.

Ultimately, she decided it was better to be smart and pretty and regular than it was to be never quite as smart or pretty as the next girl in line. So she taught herself how to code, became a VR designer, and wound up doing pretty well.

I told her about my cold and broken family, and that I had moved here, far away, in an attempt to get away from them. That I had gotten into debugging probably to compensate for my inability to fix any of my own problems. That I had helped start PokkoDev to limit the number of interactions I had to endure with other people, and that I had been much more successful than was good for my mental health. She thought that was funny.

When we got to her apartment (clean, stylish, smelling of orange blossoms), she pulled up the recording of that night.

I turned the volume almost all the way down. And then she watched me watch the content of my nightmares unfold on the screen. The careless slouch, the impatient drum of my fingers. A total disregard for the present company. I couldn't believe she'd lasted as long as she did.

I redirected my attention to the candle. And there it was. The pattern in the flicker.

"Right there," I said. Startled by how much less it seemed to matter, now.

KrisLove leaned in and put on a squint.

"It's like it's...waving," she finally said.

"Yes! The up and down movement. Can you see the sets? Always four movements? Down-down-up-up, down-down-up-down, down-up-down-down..."

"Yeah, it's — now that I'm looking for it, it's obvious."

I reached over and fast forwarded past the point where she got up and left. The video ended.

"Oh. Right." I had forgotten this was HER backlog. The recording would have followed her out.

"Sorry."

"No, it's fine. I was...." I stared at that last frame, past-me watching past-her leave. "I sat there for a while after you left. Jotting down the numbers. Looking for the pattern."

She stood up and walked into another room. "Do you want anything? Like a drink?"

I blinked after her and turned back to the screen. "I'm alright," I said absently, as I sent a copy of the video to myself.

She came back in with two mugs of something and handed one to me. I held it like I'd been raised by wolves.

"Thanks," I mumbled.

"You're kind of a weirdo, aren't you."

I was speechless.

She sipped whatever was in her mug — something floral, if the vapors wafting up from my own was any indication — and leaned back.

"It's cool," she said. "It's what makes you interesting. It's why I wanted to meet you in the first place."

My hackles rose. "You wanted to meet me because I'm a weirdo."

"Because you're interesting. Not that many people are interesting."

I wanted to argue, but I came up short. Having avoided most other people so successfully, I didn't feel qualified to have an opinion about them.

"Well I'm happy you're amused," I finally replied.

She kept looking at me. It was goddamned uncomfortable. I squirmed like a guilty suspect. But what did I have to hide? NOTHING. That old sour feeling came up from my gut, into my nose.

"I don't think you're a bitch," she said softly.

Just like that, the bile was gone. Something else was there instead — an openness, a rawness. She kept unbalancing me, cracking my calcified defenses.

"Yes I am." I was weak, hungry, confused.

"I think I might be kind of a bitch, actually." And this time, she wasn't looking at me. She was looking into her mug.

"What do you mean?" It was a totally honest question, sprung from a craven desire to understand myself, latching onto a sudden faith that somehow this girl could help me. Somehow.

"That night. I didn't give you much of a chance to defend yourself, did I?"

Was I supposed to say something? I swallowed.

She went on.

"All I thought was, here I am, grasping to get a conversation going, and I guess I could have just asked you what you were doing. And you probably would have told me. Huh?"

My mind went wild. Would I? I think I would. I think I would have been surprised, just like I was surprised now, and I think I would have tried to explain. I would have tried because I didn't really know how not to, even if the effort would doom me. So I would have tried, expecting the worst, flinching at the opportunity, but taking it like a fish swallows a hook: whole, hopeful, hopeless.

"Would you have cared?" I asked. Not an accusation. She'd sunk a well into me, and kept pulling up truth.

She did a thing with her face that curled up the bird-bone tattoo, and then said, "I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not."

To have honesty returned was like a cool breeze. I looked back at the screen and smiled, a little less tight-lipped than usual. "How about now?"

She looked at me for so long, waiting. Eventually, I looked back.

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If you’ve made it this far, I assume you’re having an at least reasonably good time. If that’s true, then don’t you owe it to your two hundred closest friends to join you in this reasonably good time? Thought so.

Continue to Part 7…