Chapter 10

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The nymph gave Nick a flirtatious glance before dropping her towel and diving into the pool of clear water. He watched her perfect naked form swimming away from him until she reached the island in the center of the pool.

"I think she smaaks you, bra," exclaimed Kobus. Even as a bear, he was licking his lips and breathing heavily, the way he always did when excited by some erotic adventure in the ether.

Nick saw that Kobus was right. The nymph had sprawled herself suggestively on the grassy ground of the island and was beckoning to him.

"Nick," came her voice.

"I'm coming," said Nick, stripping off the heavy leather armor he wore.

"Nick! I'm talking to you!"

The voice was no nymph. It was his mother.

Nick pulled the network cable out of the back of his MindWave and became more aware of his surroundings in the real world. He smelled the musty odor of his bedroom, and heard his favorite music compilation playing. He blinked his eyes open, flinching at the bright sunlight streaming through his window.

"Ah, so you're finally back inside the real world," said his mother with a tone of cross satisfaction. "What on earth were you doing with your MindWave?"

"Sorry, Mom, I was hanging out with some friends," he sputtered.

"Friends?" asked his mother with raised eyebrows. After a pause she gave him a friendly nudge. "Well, you'll do much better with your friends if you socialize on a full stomach!"

"OK, I am really hungry, let's go eat," allowed Nick, trying not to let his impatience show. He would much rather shove a handful of food into his mouth and be done with it than have a long, drawn out meal with his parents.

He followed his mother down the grand staircase that dominated their massive duplex penthouse and through the maze of hallways, a Bach concerto following him wherever he went. Finally, they arrived in the dining room, where the family cook had just laid out a finely prepared meal with dishes including Punjabi curries, Brazilian filés, and freshly baked Italian bread on the heirloom cherry wood table. Of course, none of the cook's ingredients came from his parents' food factories. His mother would never settle for eating the artificial nutrients she had developed to feed the rest of the world.

Throughout lunch, Nick was distracted. He could barely stomach looking at his parents. His mother's eyes had dark circles under them. And Nick's enhanced vision spotted hundreds of blocked pores on his father's nose. So many imperfections, he thought with disgust. In the ether, no one ever looked tired or had oily skin.

He barely noticed what he was eating, and only made feeble attempts to keep up conversation with his parents.

"So, your father tells me you're thinking about moving into your own apartment?" asked his mother.

"Uh, yeah, I'm kind of thinking about it," responded Nick absent-mindedly.

"Aren't you happy living with us?"

"Yes, mom, I'm very happy here," he said, suddenly exasperated. "But I'm eighteen years old and I shouldn't rely on you and dad for everything anymore."

"Well, now that you've dropped out of school, and you don't have your old classmates to spend time with, won't you be lonely if you live on your own? And who will take care of you?"

"I'll hire a maid to take care of me. I'm sure my new maid will be able to take care of me as well as the ones who take care of me here."

His mother ignored the implied rebuke. "You'll still be terribly lonely, won't you?"

"No, don't worry, Mom," he responded irritably. "I have plenty of friends."

"Friends?" asked his father, finally looking up from his computer pad and taking an interest in the conversation. "You mean your MindWave friends?"

"Yes, Dad, MindWave friends. We spend a lot of time hanging out together. So don't worry, I'm not lonely."

"What do you normally do with your MindWave friends?" pursued his father. "You all have so much potential, but I haven't seen any of you do anything constructive yet."

His mother interjected, "Oh, honey, don't give him so much pressure. He's still learning how to use the device."

"Nonsense. It's been almost half year," responded his father testily.

"We can't all save the world like you did, Dad," Nick said through clenched teeth.

"I didn't save the world," said his father dismissively. "First of all, it was half your mother's work. And secondly, we just delayed the inevitable."

Nick grimaced at his father's habitual false modesty and wished he could make the dispute go away. Instead, he equivocated. "We're working on a few projects, Dad. I don't want to talk about them until they're ready."

He glanced at the gold-trimmed digital clock on the wall. The lunch was taking too long. The gourmet food was tasteless compared with what he could eat in the ether. And the company was tiresome.

"You know what people are calling you MindWave users?" asked his dad. "They're calling you cyber barbarians. Cybarians for short."

"So?"

"They call you that because you have nothing to add to society."


***

"Sarah," gasped her mother. But it wasn't her mother's voice. It was Michael. "Help me, Sarah!"

Her mother was dead. Michael was not. Sarah had failed her mother, but she could still help Michael.

She saw a tennis ball lying on the linoleum next to her. She grabbed it and looked across the room to the can. It seemed to be right in front of her. She knew just how to throw the ball. She didn't even need to stand up.

The pain stopped the instant the ball settled into the can.

She stood up, dizzy and trembling. Michael was no longer screaming, and he was struggling to sit up but his arms were too weak to support his weight. Sarah looked to Jaeger pleadingly.

"Better take your friend, Maggot, to see Dr. Lee," said the Colonel, as he rubbed his hands together firmly.

Sarah supported much of Michael's weight as she led them back to the underground clinic, where a frowning Dr. Lee quickly examined him. "He's suffering acute exhaustion, but no physical harm," she concluded. "I'll keep him here for a few hours to be safe. You go get yourself cleaned up, Sarah."

Sarah took a few moments to calm herself down. Michael would be fine. He wasn't hurt. There was no need to panic.

As her concern for Michael faded away it was replaced by anger at Jaeger. She knew she should be humiliated at the stench that was coming from her shorts, but she was too furious to care. Without even stopping to change, she ran through the compound and pushed open the door to Willy's office.

When she burst into his room, Willy was looking at a document on a computer tablet, which he quickly slid into a drawer when she entered. Before he'd had a chance to rise from his desk, she blurted through tears, "Why can't you train us anymore?"

"I'm sorry, Sarah, Colonel Jaeger has insisted—"

She cut him off. "I don't understand why he punishes us. I tried as hard as I could, but he kept punishing me for failing. He made the training impossible to complete without being punished!"

Willy looked away as a guilty expression crossed his face. "Sarah, the punishments are not for failing the training. The punishments are the training."

Sarah felt the world close in around her. She backed out of Willy's office without speaking. She made her way through the underground tunnels to her room and sat down on her bed, holding her head in her hands.

How can I survive this? she wondered. She wanted to leave, to go back to the orphanage. But she was afraid to quit, terrified of admitting her weakness. Why had she come here? She should have just refused to get on the plane with Willy all those months ago. In her mind she cursed Jaeger for abusing her, Willy for bringing her to the ranch, Principal Kim for signing her over to the government, and her mother for dying.

Mom. How could she curse her mom for dying? It had been Sarah's fault. She had left the door open, allowing the bandits to enter the house. She'd been old enough to know better, and her mother had warned her of the danger countless times.

Mom, I'm so sorry.

As she recalled her mother's dying face, that last desperate embrace that spoke all the words her mother's slashed vocal cords would never again pronounce, Sarah recalled what she'd realized while crippled by pain and fear just several minutes ago. Her mother was already dead, and beyond help. But she could still help Michael. And she could still help herself.

She could help herself because she was not a victim.

Everything she had worried about for the last several years suddenly sloughed away; all of her obsessions about social status, her looks, her wants. In a moment of insight, she saw how superficial these preoccupations had been. All these years, there was something deeper, something stronger, something more elemental buried at her core, and now it was finally returning to the surface.

She wiped away her tears. She had never let go of the pain she'd felt at her mother's death, because she had never overcome her guilt about it. And fear of confronting that pain had led her to distract herself with frivolities, to create and live in a façade of personality that was not her own.

But there was no more time for distraction. Suffering and loss were simply a part of life, a part she needed to accept without alarm or self-pity.

"I'm sorry, Mom," she said calmly into the silence of her room, "I'll see you again when all of this is done." And then she slipped into a deep sleep, untroubled by the dreams that normally disturbed her.


***

Nick was playing blackjack with Kobus in Abril's casino.

Laura had been increasingly hard to find in recent weeks. But she had joined today's game, and was puffing on a cigarette. She looked at Nick with an impatient scowl and asked, "Nick, I have a lot of work to do. Can you stop wasting my scarce free time?"

Nick shook away the memory of his father's admonitions and looked up. "Sorry, family stuff on my mind."

A heartbeat after he should have, Kobus commented, "Ja, your parents are jealous because you've pulled a jabu pule into the ether, ne bra?"

Laura was in Los Angeles, Kobus was in Cape Town, and Nick was in New York. Their connection had an annoying lag in it. Despite their power to enter the ether at will, MindWave users were still reliant for communications on existing public networks, with their inherent problems of limited bandwidth and susceptibility to failure, leading to lags and disruptions in the signal. Just months ago, when Nick was first becoming adept at using his MindWave, paying broadband companies for multiple elite-status accounts was sufficient to get a good signal. But now, even that tactic wasn't fully reliable anymore.

"Yeah," said Nick. "I've pulled a disappearing act into the ether. My mom's worried sick about it. How do you guys know?"

Laura sighed and a cloud of smoke came out of her mouth. "Nick, we know everything. That's what it means to be an Aeon. The sooner you figure that out, the sooner you'll stop being surprised by it." She gestured at the cards in his hand. "Now, are you hitting?"

"Hang on, Laura," interjected Kobus with a growl, as he reached for another of the blueberries he was snacking on. "I'm interested in my bra's parents. Their company makes half the food in the world."

"It's not as if you actually eat that food," said Laura in a shocked tone. She quickly turned to Nick. "No offense, Nick. I only eat organic gourmet food."

Kobus laughed, which came out as a deep polar bear roar. "I dunno what I eat. I always have my body on autopilot. It eats whatever the maid leaves out for it. Maybe I'm eating brak chow."

"Yes, dog food would certainly be a lot worse than bear food," said Laura dryly.

"Whoa, wait, you can put yourself on Autopilot? How do you do that?" interrupted Nick, blinking in surprise.

Kobus looked at Laura in disbelief, and Laura responded with a shrug. Finally, Kobus explained: "Bra, you gotta get yourself on autopilot. It's fokking awesome. You let your MindWave guide your physical body through all the boring parts of real life. Like, showering, going to the kakhaus, uh..."

Laura gestured with the cigarette she was holding. "My body goes to the gym for three grueling hours a day, and I never feel a thing." She squinted. "In fact, I'm there now, doing squat lunges." She took a theatrically long drag from her cigarette and exhaled luxuriantly. "That's a good use of autopilot mode."

"Wow, that's amazing. I have to start doing some autopiloting," said Nick.

"You know, Nick, there's an owner's manual for your MindWave that explains all this stuff," remarked Laura with a disdainful shake of her head. "You don't even have to read it... it's preinstalled in your memory. Now, are you hitting or not?"

Nick hit, receiving a ten of hearts that forced him out of the game. He sighed.

"Your turn, Kobus," intoned Laura impatiently.

"This is befoked. You're running the probability generator today. You can just determine the outcome of any bet I make," Kobus growled.

"Kobus, I'm insulted," said Laura in mock outrage as she stubbed out her cigarette. "I'll have you know I've set all of these games to operate under the rules of chance."

"Chance? As in, you take any chance to steal my kroons?" Kobus dropped his cards. "This is getting boring anyway. Let's go make kroons for real."

"I was afraid you'd never ask," responded Laura. "Where shall we go? Bargain hunting in the financial markets again?"

"Nah, that's getting boring," piped in Nick. "I've already made a fortune doing that this month."

Kobus raised his eyebrows. "Ja no, what do you suggest, bra?"

"Why don't we try to build a real company? A company that does something useful?"

Laura said "I've told you our destiny is to save the world. What could be more useful than that?"

Nick had a ready answer. "There wouldn't be a world to save without my parents' company. That's pretty useful."

"What, growing food in laboratories to feed the poor?" Laura's disdain was clear.

"They did save humanity from a global famine."

"Ja no, I'm curious to see how a food vat works," interjected Kobus. "Let's go see a Langar Foods lab!"

"Fine," said Laura resignedly. "Let's go. Since we know the great Vinicius Lal, we might as well take the VIP tour."

Please don't hesitate to leave comments or vote! I always appreciate reader feedback.

False Idols (and its sequel Do No Evil) are available for sale elsewhere but this novel is free on Wattpad.


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