The Receiver

1 3 - D R E A M S

With May and the kids asleep in my old room, my bed and clothes moved into Iris's, my sister curled up on the couch watching a movie, and Frank on charge, Milo, Katz, and I walk through a Zen garden in the sim room lit with soft, fading light in the lavender sky. Tiny white specks of fuzz float on the breeze that brings a sweet scent our way, like a mix between candy and exotic flowers. With manicured hedges cropped into geometric shapes, taking a stroll in the garden feels like I've stepped into the technicolor pages of a children's storybook.

The wide path we walk is flanked by shallow shrubs and has spirals traced into the blue sand. Overhead, clouds float by like globules of lava, separating and reconnecting, great blobs of liquid magically suspended in the air.

"This is incredible," Katz breathes.

She and Milo haven't stopped spinning around since we walked through the door. Earlier, I caught them in the kitchen, each holding a cup under the spout that pours crystalline water from somewhere magical. They've been absolutely mesmerized ever since.

"Frank is the one who writes the codes," I say. "Not that I couldn't. He's just lightning fast compared to me. I just give him ideas."

"He can make any environment you want?" Milo asks.

"Yep. You tell him what you want, he codes it, then the room uses this huge 3D printer to make everything. In five minutes or less usually. It makes it more real, so you can touch stuff. And the rest, like the sky, is all lasers. There's an invisible grid that keeps everything proportioned correctly, blah blah blah. Frank can explain it better than I can."

My friends are content to stay silent, enjoying the beauty around them, while my mind drifts back down to Lower.

There's nothing stopping us from creating even bigger care packages and making a trip down every day to pass them out. Or it could be even easier than that if we attach little parachutes to each bin and drop them out of the cargo hold of a helipod. They'd just disappear past the sim at the floor of Upper and float down, eventually making it to the streets of Lower. We have no issue of money now, no issue of transportation. Aside from it supplying bottomfeeders with clean water, nutritious grub, and life-saving meds, it would give us something to do. I'm not sure how many more days Iris and I can take of eating, shopping, and watching the laserscreen on a loop. It's not as if we've already discovered everything. There are still nightclubs and spas and museums and zoos, even an amusement park I think, but once we've been to those...

I stop myself. There are people who would kill me with a smile on their face, then lick the blood off to be in my position.

"Did you hear me?" Katz asks.

"What?"

"How is the Receiving going?" she repeats.

"Oh. It's going."

I think back to the last thing that happened: the image of the triplets in Zoa's office.

I stay quiet for a minute debating whether to tell them about it or not, trying to gauge how crazy it will sound trying to explain it in words.

"What else?" Milo asks.

We've always told each other everything, so I'm not sure why I'm hesitating.

I start with the first incident and work my way up to the vision of the kids.

"The tradeoff was definitely worth it," I say when I finish summarizing. "I'm just worried about the future. Don't get me wrong, 'visions' or whatever I'm seeing are better than pain, I just... I'm not sure what I feel. You guys have never heard of something like that happening, have you?"