Chapter 1
I’m perched on a brown metal folding chair in the middle of a giant nest of neon wires running from panel to panel all around me. The blue glow from the screen in front of me tints the skin on my arms and hands a sort of unnatural, dead gray. The air in my garage is a mix of sharp smells: solder and flux; electricity burning; old, dried sweat.
I run my tongue around my mouth to get some saliva flowing and wash away the sour taste of amphetamines, but I’m dry. I swirl a mouthful of lukewarm coffee around my mouth and spit it back into my cup, which helps for a minute.
The magnifier goggles on my head focus my eyes, but my mind is totally scattered, and the goggles can’t do anything for that. That’s what the speed is for. Until it hits, I’m not good for much, so I sit and wait.
I could always sleep. That’s what people do at three in the morning. But I’m on the verge of a breakthrough—the breakthrough—and I’m not about to sleep now. Anyway, I’d have to eat a bunch of sleeping pills to combat the speed, and that doesn’t sound healthy.
I’ve been on the verge of the breakthrough every night for the past month. Kate, my fiancée, says she misses me. I can’t blame her. We’re getting married soon, and I’ve hardly seen her lately. I spend my days at work punching a time clock to pay the bills, and my nights here in Fletcher’s garage writing code to reinvent the world. It’s not that I don’t love Kate; this is just really important. I’m making history. She doesn’t understand that, though.
Tonight is it, though. Tonight is really it. I just need to get my brain focused.
This is not simply software. This is something much bigger than that.
The speed hits, and all of a sudden my brain can’t stop. Zero to sixty in no time flat, instantaneous acceleration. Zero to a hundred, two hundred, infinity. Kate and my job and the wedding and the bills and all the rest of it are gone, blown out of my head like exhaust from a muscle car. The string of code on the screen takes on meaning again as my mind slams back into motion. I adjust the lenses on my face to a nice, tight focus on the green circuit board, and I solder my last two connections. Before my hands can finish, my mind is tracing the tiny, intricate paths of silver to make sure all is kosher.
I plug the board into the system and turn my attention to the screen. While I was gone, Fletcher made some changes to my code. It’s what he does: takes the chaotic beauty of what I’ve created and cleans it up, sweeps all the dirt out and puts everything into the right drawers all nice and neat. I suppose there is a certain kind of beauty in clean floors and neat rooms, but I prefer things to have a little more life in them. The code is not as pretty as it was when I wrote it, but it works, and that’s something. What it has lost in beauty, it has gained in functionality.
This is not simply the Internet. This is something much bigger than that.
And then, like a flashbulb popping in my face, a neuron in some dusty back corner of my brain fires off and I see how to make it all work. I don’t know if it’s the amphetamines, my natural intelligence, or actual inspiration, but the answer is there, and my hands are flying over the keyboard, translating my brain’s electric impulse into code.
I’m a little out of breath as I finish, not from exertion but from anticipation. Seven years of work is about to turn real. I consider waiting, letting Fletcher tidy up my code after he wakes up, but the consideration is fleeting.
I want to fire this puppy up.
I pull the magnifiers off my head and flex my eyes, giving them a second to readjust to normal vision. Really, I’m just savoring the anticipation. I wait an extra few seconds before I pick up the Nexus mask and fit it over my face. This is a prototype, built for functionality, not comfort. The plastic edges of the mask dig into my cheeks and the copper tips of the receptors scrape my scalp.
This is not simply virtual reality. This is something much bigger than that.
I reach up to the side of the mask and press the tiny switch with my thumbnail, activating ready mode. My scalp tingles as the receptors go live, and then a strange, euphoric sort of vertigo washes over me as the receptors interface with my neurons. I realize I am gripping the edge of the table to keep from falling and I let go, but then I decide that perhaps it is for the best, and I hold on.
I suck in a deep breath, hold it, and power on the interface unit.
Fletcher’s garage disappears and what spreads out before me is a world of surpassing beauty.
The Nexus.
It’s what Fletcher and I have been calling it for years, but now that I finally see it, now that it finally exists, the word seems wholly insufficient.
I am surrounded by explosions of thunderous violence and breathtaking beauty. A billion tiny points of light burst into nebulous clouds of swirling, pulsing colors. Clanging orange beams scream through sticky purple clouds, trailing weightless silver bubbles that burble and pop. Drops of rotting yellow and fetid green plop into an ocean of sizzling red. Burning white blazes belch greasy, brown smoke that twists on itself and leaves trails of cold teal. The colors fade out of existence as quickly as they appear, to be replaced by new explosions of new sensory stimuli: every imaginable sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, all swirling together into one chaotic sensory symphony.
The sky flickers and breathes.
This is an infinite galaxy of information, waiting for me to reach out and create out of it what I will, an untouched universe, waiting only to be acted on and formed into a world of my design. I reach out with my mind to mold this primordial soup into my own new reality.
This is not our world. This is something much bigger than that.
But this is only a scouting mission, and I pull back. I cannot begin without Fletcher. He has suffered and sweated and dreamed about this as long as I have, and he deserves to be here with me. I take one last look before going back to the natural world of fleshy bodies and human limitations, and then reach up to flick the disengage switch. It takes some concentration to move my actual, physical arm, since my mind is totally engaged with this brand new world it has called into existence, but after a moment I feel my arm moving, a sensation coming to my brain from light years away. It feels like trying to swim through a sea of thick, heavy fluid, but with patience, my hand reaches the switch.
And in the fraction of a second before I can get my fingers to throw the switch, I hear a voice.
The Nexus powers off and I claw the mask off my head and face. Between the amphetamines and the shock of what I heard, my heart feels like it is about to shatter my sternum, and I briefly wonder if I am having a heart attack. There is no possible way I can have heard what I just heard. How can someone else be in the Nexus, in that world I just called into existence two minutes ago, that nobody has entered but me?
How can a woman be in there?
Why did she beg me not to leave?
This is not reality.
This is something much bigger than that.
When Fletcher wakes up, I’m crouching by his head, looking down at him. Understandably, he startles awake and shoves me off his bed.
“What the hell, Paul?” he says, rubbing his eyes.
“I was waiting for you to wake up. I have to talk to you. I got it working.”
Fletcher’s eyes pop open and he sits up. “Really? Did you...”
“Come look,” I say.
Fletcher is on his feet and out in the garage in seconds. I flip the monitor on and show him the code I wrote last night, the last plank in the bridge between this world and the new one we created. He scrolls through the code, reading it faster than I ever could.
“It’s brilliant,” he says. “You’re a genius.”
“It came into my head fully formed. Suddenly, I just knew how to finish it.”
“I’m serious, Paul,” he says. “You’re a genius. I could never have come up with that. No matter how long I stared at the screen, I never would have found the answer.”
“Well, you’re the one who invented it,” I say.
“But it never would have worked without your programming,” he says.
“Great,” I say. “I think we’ve sufficiently stoked each other’s pride.”
“What’s it like?” Fletcher says.
“Beautiful. Amazing. Incredible. Words can’t describe it. You have to see for yourself.”
“It’s all ready? We can go in?”
I nod.
“So why are we standing here? Let’s go.” He reaches for the second Nexus mask.
“There’s something else I have to tell you before we go in,” I say. “There was a surprise.”
“A surprise? How could there be a surprise? We programmed the whole thing. Nothing exists in there that we didn’t put there.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s certainly the theory.”
Fletcher watches me expectantly. It takes me a second to get the words out.
“There’s someone else in there,” I say.
Fletcher looks at me for a second. “Are you joking?”
I shake my head. “A woman. Right before I disconnected, she said, ‘Please don’t leave. Stay here with me.’”
“That’s impossible.”
“I know. But somehow it is simultaneously impossible and true.”
I see the moment Fletcher thinks he has figured me out. His wide eyes narrow and his jaw snaps shut. “You take too much drugs. I told you, that stuff will eat your brain, Paul.”
“You’re probably right, but that’s not what this is. I think there’s really someone in there.”
“Well, fine then. Let’s go meet her.” Fletcher puts his mask on and shivers a little as the receptors hum to life and buzz his neurons.
I hesitate. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to go back in yet.
“What, did you die out there?” he says. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Okay, just a second,” I say. Against my better judgment, I put my mask on.
Whoever she is, this woman who cannot exist but somehow does, she doesn’t show up for Fletcher and me. Fletcher is sufficiently blown away by the beauty of what we’ve created, and we spend some time in the Nexus, just taking in the feast for the senses. We are not ready to begin the real work of creation that lies before us. We’re going to create a universe from scratch, one that we will then invite the whole world to share with us once we can take care of the business end of things and get our Nexusware on the market. That’s not the kind of thing you jump into without a plan. Even I can see that.
Fletcher watches the information pulse around us with inhumanly wide eyes that take up half his head like a Saturday morning cartoon. The lower half of his face looks like it is melting off. The version of Fletcher’s face that I’m seeing is his subliminal projection of what he looks like. It’s more about subconscious urges and emotions than it is about representation of any kind of physical reality. That’s how the Nexus works; it interfaces with your brain on levels that you don’t know about and don’t always have control over.
I run a mirror program, which allows me to see myself from a third-person perspective. My limbs are overly long and skeletal, and I barely have a face. There are facial features, but not well defined, like I’m looking at my face through a dirty window. I wonder what this says about my inner psyche. Whatever it might mean, I feel eerie looking at it, so I turn the mirror program off.
“Maybe it was just a random combination of noise that sounded like a woman’s voice,” Fletcher says. “There is a lot of noise in here. Maybe your brain just tried to translate it into some form you could recognize.”
“Maybe,” I say. “It was clear as day, though. Her voice was perfect, and I could hear her words just as well as I can hear you right now.”
“How much speed did you take?” he asks.
“A lot.”
“Well maybe it-”
“It didn’t. The voice was real.”
“Paul, none of this ‘real,’ in the strictest sense. It’s all just code, programmed to interface with our brains. Behind it all is a string of ones and zeros. Don’t forget that.”
“I don’t see how this is any less real than the world out there. We’re made of meat out there; we’re made of ones and zeros in here. They’re both real.”
“Then where did this mystery woman’s ones and zeros come from?” Fletcher asks.
That’s the question. I wish I could answer it, but instead I stay silent, watching and listening for her to come back. As time passes with no appearance from her, I lose some of my fear and begin to relax.
“How could this all come from our code?” I say. “I know we’re good, but this is amazing. Awe-inspiring.”
“We’re really, really good at this,” Fletcher says. “That’s all there is to it.”
I laugh because it’s true and it feels good. We both lose track of time as we watch the Nexus pulse around us, enamored with our creation. Deep down inside, I don’t know which of us is right.
Is this a program or a world?
Are we programmers or creators?
