Page 155 of Life Out of Order

“But what if that’s just my avatar? Maybe I’m really an ogre? Or an otter.”

“I’m not that far gone. I can still tell the difference between reality and the Interstices.”

“How?” It seems urgent to know. “Nadia, can it go the other way? If you can live in the virtual world, can something from there use you to cross into this world?”

She looks perplexed. “No, I’ve never heard of that. It’s just code, you know?”

“But when you showed up here today, you claimed to be someone named Isadora. Do you remember that?”

“No.” She looks startled, frightened.

“You gave me a message for Alba. You knew some very personal information about us; I don’t think it’s something you could know. You claimed to be delivering a message that had been given to you in 2013.”

“That’s ridiculous. I was eleven years old in 2013.”

“The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that I was talking to an AI. You don’t remember any of this?”

“No,” Nadia says in a small voice. “Isadora? Are you sure?”

The look in her eyes tells me that she knows what I’m thinking and she is afraid that saying it will make it true. So I say it. “Nadia, is it Beck’s Isadora? Is there any way that Beck’s Isadora could access the Interstices?”

Nadia sits very still. We stare at each other. She says, “Tell Beck I didn’t understand, at first. I didn’t put it together for a long time. Years.”

Now I’m even more confused. “Years? What didn’t you understand?”

“So, you know that Beck was married before she met Clare?” I don’t see what this has to do with anything, but I nod. “Okay, so her ex-husband was a man named Jasper Williams. Beck and Jasper were pioneering VR designers back in the late ’90s and early aughts. He was the public face of their partnership, the more brilliant programmer, but she was the artist, the visionary.” Nadia frowns. “May I have something to drink?”

I get her a Coke and pour myself a glass of water. She continues, “They were making incredible things together. One of my favorites was a world based on Max Ernst’s collage novels. You could play as a bird or a demon; it was like being trapped in an old engraving, black and white and two-dimensional. Another one, you made music by braiding hair in all these different, impossible patterns. I’ve seen people do amazing things with that one, but I could never get my head around it. So to speak. The last environment they made together was the Museum of Lost Souls.”

“I thought that was just Beck?” I say.

“They worked on it together for about a year,” Nadia says. “But things got weird. Jasper started behaving strangely: He was having trouble sleeping, he stopped taking care of himself, he couldn’t organize his thoughts. Then he started to hear voices, and the voices told him that Beck was stealing his mind, that all these frightening things were her doing, and that the Museum was in danger.”

“How do you know all this?” I ask, but Nadia hushes me with a raised finger.

“I don’t know what happened then; something extreme enough to send Beck into hiding. I think Beck must have alerted Jasper’s parents to the situation, because they stepped in and had him hospitalized.”

“Is Jasper alive?”

“No. He died two years ago. Stop interrupting.” Nadia finishes her drink and I offer her another, but she shakes her head. “When Alba and I were kids, Beck used to let us hang out with her while she worked. We used to play with Isadora in the Museum back when she was still a cat. That’s how I got interested in programming. Beck would show me stuff, how to build a website, do little animations, why writing code a certain way was more elegant than another way.” Nadia pauses. “Do you remember driving me to the house in Miller Beach?”

“Yes.”

“We didn’t talk much on the way.”

“No. You were sleeping. And maybe a little in shock.”

Nadia sighs. “I was frantically trying to figure out what to do, where to go. I couldn’t stay with my family; it wasn’t safe. I remembered something Beck said to me once, that Detroit was a good place to disappear. Lots of empty houses, lots of artists and entrepreneurs. So when Nick arrived, that’s where we went.”

“How did you know where to go, when you got there?”

“I’m going to be vague about that, if you don’t mind. We moved around a lot at first. Then we met some people. Then I did some favors, and someone saw what I could do, and recruited me for the Tulip Farm. And that’s where we met Jasper.”

“What was he like?” I ask.

“Very quiet and polite; he seemed uninterested in what the rest of us were doing, whereas the rest of us were hyper-sociable. I didn’t make the connection from Jasper to Beck for a long while, and it was lucky that I didn’t, because Nick and I had come up with new identities, new backstories, everything, and if I’d let on that I knew Beck I’m not sure what would have happened. Anyway. At first Nick and I were put to work on the commissions; the Tulip Farm takes on just enough paid work to keep us fed and warm, and somebody’s got to do it. We thought that was the whole thing; it took them more than a year to decide we were okay, because our aliases’ hastily thrown-together web presence looked so flimsy to them. Our biggest fear was a DNA search, but either they didn’t do one or it didn’t get them anywhere. We’d never been arrested, so fingerprints weren’t a problem.”

“We could see you vanishing. Every time we googled there was less of you online.”