And there she stood, in front of Barcelona’s red-brick, elaborately tiled Music Palace, the Bug that runs around in a rabbit costume. Robert walked slowly toward Alexandrine from the side street, just out of her periphery. He couldn’t see her eyes. This Bug could be more dangerous than her appearance and apparent youth led him and probably many others to assume. If she was trying to hide or be inconspicuous, afraid or less secure about her abilities and powers, would she wear such a conspicuous outfit every day? If she felt confident of her invulnerability, she might. But then maybe she’s just a kid, and his paranoia only proves his adult-bias about those damn kids running the streets out of control. He stepped into the street in her direct line of sight.
“Hey, Alexandrine!” Uh oh. She looked a little glum.
“Hey!” She perked up. “What’s up?”
“To the point as always.” Robert reached his hand out to shake one of hers, but she stepped in for a hug. He hugged her back. Kids. They released. He noticed tracks of her tears. “Okay?”
“Yeah.” Eye wipe. “Just everything is so complicated!” Cracked high pitch.
“Sure. Yeah. Mom okay?”
“For now. Did you see that story?”
“That story? Which story? Mine?”
“The one about the AI going to put Sim Kids in rockets and blast them out into space.”
“Oh. That story.” He fell in beside her as she stepped down the sidewalk. “Yeah. I read it.”
“Think it’s true?”
“I know the guy who wrote it. I bet it’s true as far as he knows. Weird that Celestine showed up like that. I wonder what that’s all about? Some sort of SuperBug.”
“What’s really freaking me out is being uploaded into some dead Bio’s body. I mean, this shit is bad enough.” She grew an ostrich neck and head out of her back. It fell off and flopped around behind them on the sidewalk, as if severed from a live creature.
“Yeah. There’s that.” Robert watched the long neck and tiny head flop as it melted into the concrete. “So, why I called …”
“Who blew up Celestine’s trance?”
“I’m sure you read my story.” Robert did want to connect with this kid. She reminded him of all those lost, smart, earnest and tragically fucked street kids he’d hung out with in his earlier reporting years. “The Twins did it, somehow. No. Mostly I’m worried about a friend of mine …”
“Marsel.”
“Marsel.”
“Wondered when you’d put us together.”
“Been working on some other projects.” They approached a crossroads he hadn’t noticed before. “Where are we?”
“Platform nine and three-quarters.”
“Nice.” Of course he’d read the kids’ fantasy novels to his little sister. “We’re all wizards now …”
“Some more than others.” She waved toward a train platform he had not noticed.
Could she make something so intricate so fast?
“I didn’t make it.”
“Oh. Right. Mind reading.”
“I did help The Twins capture Marsel … here’s our train!” She sprinted toward the platform as a steam-engine train screeched, puffed and boiled to a halt. “Come on!” She disappeared around the front into the steam and screeches.
Robert hesitated. Has she been reading my mind since we first met? Did distance mean anything for her? Come on! She said in his head. We’re keeping everyone waiting! Okay! He trotted into the steam and up the black metal steps into a section of the train. Alexandrine grabbed a window seat in the middle of the empty car. He walked to her, hands grasping seat-backs as the train lurched forward. He dropped into the seat next to her. The train pulled away, slowly after the initial tug, with plumes of steam and the engineer’s whistle.
“Where does this train go?” He leaned forward and looked across her through the window. Doorways, windows, streets and pedestrians fell slowly by.
“That’s an interesting question.”
The train gathered speed, collecting miles an hour. Barcelona swam past outside in an increasing blur. He watched with curiosity at the speed and, well, weirdness of it all. He felt the gravity, the motion, the flow of time, even the rackety tracks under the iron wheels, but something didn’t add up. The city’s edge shot by and fields laced with telephone poles and cultivated rows of short plants, vegetables or peanuts maybe, began spinning by as if they were at the center of a disc. Cluster of bushy green trees. Farm house with cattle and a horse. Robert sat back in his seat and looked over his shoulder. People in all manner of kid-party clothes, like an old-school rave of his youth, filled the compartment, sprawling over seats, clustered in the aisle. Splashes of color. Flecks of glitter. Vibrant halos. But no odd body forms. No alien shapes. Just goofily dressed kids, behaving as if gravity still existed.
“Where did everyone come from? I’m a bit baffled. How did you know about this train? I’ve never even heard of it.”
“Mostly Bugs, but Sims like you can ride if they can get on.”
“Do you know who built it?”
“We did.” She jumped up out of her seat and spun around. She flipped off the entire compartment with both middle fingers to a chorus of groans. She laughed in high-pitched delight and plopped back into the seat. “God I love these people! Bugs did it. It’s our home. Ride it long enough and you can trick yourself into thinking it’s Real Earth, like when I was a kid.
“You miss that?”
“Being able to grow up biologically?”
“Right.” He nodded.
For all her power and street smarts, this kid’s simple desire was to be among friends and understood. T’was ever so. Her innocence made her alignment with The Twins more understandable. They were very keen to draw people in, give them a family and then use them in some crazy scheme, like blowing up stuff.
“I’ve noticed that everyone is, well, human. Just regular shapes and while the train is odd, it seems to run based on the rules of Real Earth. Why not fly or stack or something weird?” Farm land turned past the windows on both sides. A trendy mix of tech, rap and heavy metal pounded out of a portable cassette player, a boombox. The guy running the ancient-styled device, shirtless and muscled, ejected the cassette, turned it over and put it back in. Someone had done their research.
“It’s an unwritten rule, I guess is how you would put it, that nothing abnormal to Real Earth happen on the train. No one acts inhuman on the train.” She pushed her rabbit-eared hoodie back on her head, bounced to the thundering beat.
Robert yelled, “What happens if someone does?”
“I don’t know,” she yelled back. The music grew louder but still in the boombox range. “Try it.”
Robert thought about it. The kids around them, cheerful and happy, behaved like Real Earth older teens heading into the city on a Saturday night. He had a decade on them and the experience resonated back to his own youth. He felt relief, glad that the kids had made this for themselves. They had a place to be normal, to discover themselves. “I really just don’t want to, you know? Like you guys, I’m enjoying the normalcy of it.” He sat back in his chair and listened to the yelling, laughing and music. Alexandrine stepped over him and into the crowded aisle.
The train approached a city, its outskirts rising quickly up to the bizarre towers shaped by limitless architecture. They approached the low outskirts—elaborate homes in the middle of jungle yards, grass fields, shrub-mazes—at Real Earth speeds that would take twenty minutes to get through, an eternity in The Sim. A Real Earth-like field of corn, 20-foot-tall stalks growing right up to the tracks, scattered light in pulses. He dozed. A light sensation of dreaming, of being on the crowded, boisterous train in India he rode during his first college travel abroad. He felt as if he had muscles and they had relaxed, melting into the hard seat. Life had been so overrun with pleasures of the most extreme, that this moment’s pleasure surpassed them all because of its simplicity.
He woke to a chorus of goodbyes and see you later honeys, but the train didn’t slow down. He turned and watched a group of young men, including the guy with the boombox, step to a door. It slid open and they stepped out. Robert scooted to the window to see the pile up or whatever might happen when a group of twenty kids all stepped off a moving train together. What he saw torqued his brain: The kids stood on a stationary platform, neither keeping up with the train or falling behind. Directly out his window, the city and its people scattered by. He looked back at the train doors. The last guy, lean bare arms reaching through the door, jumped. The kid landed in the middle of the crowd and the platform zoomed away, like looking at it the wrong way through a telescope.
“Now that is easily the trippiest thing I’ve seen yet.”
Alexandrine plopped down in the aisle seat. “ ’Sup reporter man?” Her eyes glittered with endorphins or what used to be endorphins and wild teen spirit.
“Trying to fugue out how this train works. How did they get off like that?”
Alexandrine slouched in the seat. Thinking to herself … he realized she had not been in his head since getting on the train. They really did stick to Real Earth rules. Knowing what was in another teen’s mind, no matter how much he would have wanted to know back then, would have ruined his youth. How did these kids figure that out? It’s like they decided to keep their innocence, to hold the worst of adult life off as much and as long as possible. How wise.
“I met a philosophy professor once,” Alexandrine studied her dirty fingernails, “and we talked for hours about everything, but mostly about the multiverse. Familiar with it?”
“Some sort of physics, uh string theory I think, idea of the nature of the universe?”
“Right.” She gave him an encouraging nod, Robert once again wondered just how old she really was. Once again the train cleared the city. He wasn’t sure what city since they’d all been mutated in The Sim. New York, maybe.
“The philosopher …”
“What made him a philosopher?”
“He taught philosophy at a college, I guess. But he noticed several people listening in, hanging over the seat back. Digging what he was saying, so he started getting on the train and teaching seminars. He moved from physics, as you say, to what he called existentialism. He said before The Simulation everyone assumed existentialism to be a dead philosophy, but it fits in here. That we alone make up our own world, our own reasons for being alive and staying alive. He said it was as if existentialism was created a hundred years ago to give us all a way of understanding our lives now, here, to make sense out of life in here. It’s like they knew something like this would happen to us.”
“Interesting.”
“He recreated the books, and we read them and talked about them for weeks.”
“Just riding the Real Earth train and talkin’ existentialism.”
“Yeah. It’s really helped me see that I don’t have to live according to how the AI set this all up.”
“If it did set this up.”
“If it did or even if it just happened like The Twins said it did: A natural evolution toward one mind.”
“Or like Celestine said: A piece of programming carved out of the AI’s vast resources.”
“Like we’re parasites? I’ve never liked that idea. …”
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