Where Futures End by Parker Peevyhouse

Author:Parker Peevyhouse [Peevyhouse, Parker]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction,
ISBN: 978-0-698-16291-4
Publisher: Kathy Dawson Books
Published: 2016-02-08T16:00:00+00:00

4.

WHEN WE COULD HARDLY CONTAIN OURSELVES

(sixty years from now)

REEF

The closest eighteen-year-old Reef ever got to the alternate universe was through a massively multiplayer virtual-reality role-playing game called Alt.

When he walked the streets of Seattle wearing his digital goggles, ordinary buildings changed into sleek alien architecture. But he wasn’t really seeing the Other Place—he never would, with a vorpal as weak as his. It was all a mirage, a virtual game for people like him who were left out of the real fun.

Decades ago the government had tried to help people cross over into the Other Place. Then one day, someone famous figured out how to do it on her own—a pop star named Epony. She had an act going where she pretended to be an alien, but it didn’t take long for people to figure out she was just an ordinary person who’d found a way into the Other Place. After she left, her boyfriend Cole kept singing about it until pretty soon everyone was heading to Seattle, escaping withered farmlands and flooded coasts to try to cross into a new world. And when that first wave of newcomers died down, when everyone forgot about Cole’s songs—there came Alt.

Alt was played in every major city in the U.S., a game/travel ad. People lost themselves in that virtual world, in a fabrication of the Other Place, and then they wanted the real thing. So they came to Seattle to test their vorpal’s strength. The Seattle sprawl was now a dense jumble of miniaturized, pre-fab “container” homes jammed between old buildings. All squares and rectangles, a pixilated city. The place everyone flocked to and no one wanted to live in, the overlap between our world and a land of opportunity.

Those who made it to the Other Place found the same sights Reef saw through his digital goggles when he played Alt: a glass city threaded with silvery canals, studded with trees, surrounded by mountain peaks vaulting over all. An alien city the aliens specially renovated to host denser beings. Those who couldn’t cross over made do with Seattle instead. They lived like Reef did—sheltering in container homes, fighting over government-issued food tickets, collecting rainwater in catch basins. Playing Alt while pining for the Other Place.

Reef had seen people enter the alternate universe. Sometimes he could tell when someone was trying to go to the Other Place, could see the glaze in their eyes that meant they were glimpsing another world. He would shadow them as they stumbled down a Seattle street. When they disappeared, the air would waver for a moment, and Reef would try to step through the distortion and into the Other Place. It never worked.

He had seen them return too. They came gray-faced and gasping, to collapse on the sidewalk, in a cafe, in the middle of the street. They couldn’t stay more than a few months in the Other Place without getting sick and confused, no matter how the aliens worked at making their world hospitable. The nature of that universe made every human visitor miserable in time.

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