Ultra 85 by Logic

Author:Logic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2024-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The mood on the Aquarius I was tense in a way Kai and I had never experienced on the Aquarius III. We sat together in the mess hall not speaking. Kai’s med chair was set to recline, bare feet free in the air. His burns had mostly healed. Just some redness and scarring down the right side of his face.

I thumbed a rubber gravity training ball in the silence, tossing it to my hand every so often, watching its familiar slow descent. We were back in modified gravity and my bones could relax. My spirit, however, suffered the letdown. With the recovery from the firefight, the well-worn feel of a spaceship beneath my feet, and the sobering lecture from my dad, I deeply missed that sense of possibility I’d first felt on Paradise. My perception of a universe of potential had widened and shrank like a scope in the last seventeen-odd hours.

The longer Kai and I sat there not speaking, the more it felt like since we’d been shattered by the wormhole, we’d never truly finished re-forming back to our former selves. Sea change broke over us in ceaseless wave after wave.

Kai was messing with an Olde Earth Rubik’s Cube, and not getting very far.

“Crazy, man. We bust into a whole different galaxy, and manage to find your pops, and my moms’s old homegirl,” Kai said.

“It’s like when you dream,” I said. “Everyone is secretly also someone else.”

“It’s good to see your pops though, right? We didn’t quite make it to Paradise, but at least y’all got to reconnect.”

“Yeah,” I said vacantly. “Not quite what you expect, though.”

“Nothing ever is.”

“You ever think, maybe we goofed off too much with the Catalog?” I posed. I’d been thinking of ways to attack the topic, finally settling on the direct approach.

“What’s that now?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should have thought twice before uploading all that content to Atom.”

“All right, Thomas, man. Copy that he’s your father. But, he’s tripping. I mean, I get it, you know? I’d probably trip too, in his boots. He’s like that grizzled war-vet character from the movies, has a beard and hates robots.”

“He has a point, Kai. Look at Thalia.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t know that about Thalia when we uploaded the Catalog. Got to let all that go.”

“Everything looks different now.”

“That’s why I’m glad we spent all that time with the Catalog. Fam, all our realities have been simulated. At least the Catalog is something real.”

“I get that.”

“Think about where we’d be without it. Stuck on Babel. Following all their rules. Eating 3D-printed grains and plain yogurt.”

“Alive. And none the wiser.”

“Ignorant.”

“Faith in humankind intact.”

“You saying you prefer the lie?” asked Kai.

“It’s like you said. Our realities are a series of simulations. Who knows what flavor of ignorant we actually are, even now, Kai?”

“So, might as well just pick the life lie you like best?”

“Something like that.”

“It don’t work like that, fam. You don’t get to choose. The second you know something is a lie, you know it forever.

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