“Let . . . her go.” The voice from the smartwatch was quiet, but as tight as piano strings.
“I could kill her now, unless you want to try and stop me,” my voice told Carl. I felt every word as it formed on my lips. “I think, actually, that I will.”
“NO!” April and Maya said together.
An arrow of pain sliced through my head from my eyes down through my back. I thought I was dying, but then it stopped and I realized I was free. My body was mine again. I looked down and saw that Carl no longer held my hand.
“Go now,” Carl said.
“Carl, no,” April pleaded, though I didn’t understand why.
“NOW,” the voice repeated.
I ran.
My legs pumped under me. I crashed through the first door, and then the second, and I was outside. I knew it was wrong to feel good, but I felt good anyway. Just the movement, the feeling of standing still while I pushed the world out behind me. Finally, again a resident of my own body, I tore through the courtyard to the dorms, the joy of it helped me forget the pain in my face. Also, I had some thinking to do.
—
Every piece of software has a way to let you know that something has changed. You have to have that system, both practically and legally. Altus could have done this the old-fashioned way, with a pop-up. But, y’know, they’re obsessed with themselves. So instead they used an injected experience. Basically, every time they changed the terms of service, they injected a tiny experience that let you watch a woman telling you that the TOS had changed, and then you skipped it. It was gimmicky, but the gimmick was their business, so they did it.
I didn’t know how these TOS updates worked, but they weren’t a security concern because there were standardized systems and those systems couldn’t be used to inject new code into a computer. They’ve been around forever. They’re a secure and stable technology. Except that nothing at Altus was proved to be secure or stable because none of this technology had even existed a year ago.
Best of all, I knew someone who worked on Altus user interface stuff. And if we were lucky, he’d pushed TOS updates before himself.
—
The run to the dorms was short, only minutes, but then I realized that I had been thinking too much of the big picture. It was the middle of the night—the whole campus was locked down. I stopped running, trying to think how I would get through the door, when something blurred past me and my heart leapt into my throat.
But then I made out the shape: It was April. Her fist connected with the door right where the bolt met the frame and it flung open.
She turned to me and said, “You thought I was going to let you do this alone?”
I ran inside, a little surprised to find that no one was up and awake. It seemed inconceivable that the whole world didn’t already know what was going on. Usually when something big was happening, we all found out together. But I guess that’s not really how it works. Actually, there’s always some person who knows first. This time, it was me.
“Why did that thing let me go?” I asked through my panting breaths as we moved into the dorm. My nose was throbbing, and talking made it worse.
“Because Carl attacked them, I think. I think they are fighting right now. I think we don’t have much time . . .” It sounded like she was going to finish that sentence, but then she didn’t. We didn’t have much time before Carl couldn’t protect me anymore and I turned into a bag of grape jelly.
I breathed a sigh of relief when Peanut answered his door.
“Diggles!” he said before registering anything else. “What happened to your face!?”
The moment he mentioned it, the pain, both sharp and broad, came back to me. I had forgotten about it.
“It’s a long story,” I said, but “story” came out like “sdory” thanks to my blood-plugged nose.
“Also, where the hell have you been?”
Oddly enough, that was a shorter story, but I didn’t want to tell it twice. “Is Sippy here? I need you both, badly.”
He looked . . . well, confused. It was the middle of the night, my face was swollen and smeared with blood, and he hadn’t seen me in over a month. He’d probably assumed I’d washed out. Maybe Altus even told them that.
He let me into the room and went to nudge Sippy—April hadn’t showed her face yet. Sippy blinked as he pulled off the VR headset and then looked down to check and see he was holding it in his hands, presumably because he was making sure he wasn’t still in the Space.
“Can you push a fresh TOS update?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Sippy said. “I mean, I’d need the identifier of the experience, but yeah, I’ve done it like twelve times.” And then he settled more into reality. “Where have you been?”
“Peter put me in the Altus Space with no way out, and I’ve been inside the whole time I’ve been gone. I figured out how to get a message to a friend and, well, here she is!” April walked into the room.
I saw her with their eyes, small, wearing a gray blazer over an off-white blouse, with a face made half of human skin and half of opal iridescence. Even to me she looked a little frightening.
“He took me because I guess he thought I was a threat and I’ve been inside the Altus Space and unable to disconnect for weeks.” I was rambling, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I don’t even know how long because they made it so that it felt like I was leaving, but I was really just sitting in a room on a chair peeing into a bucket and . . .”
“We have to go now,” April interrupted.
“What?” Sippy said.
“We have to go, we can explain somewhere else, security is coming.”
Now it was
