Salma is sipping on a green smoothie through a straw when her FaceTime camera activates. She’s sitting in a trendy juice bar, sunlight streaming through a window next to a wall shaggy with hanging mosses and vines, presumably in Toronto, where she lives.
Yes, I know. I have a girlfriend in Canada. Get all your jokes out of the way now.
Her face lights up when she sees me, which never fails to light me up too. “Ray, you’re back! You dream of me?”
“Always,” I laugh. Technically, it’s not a lie. For all I know, I dream of Salma all the time, but my short-term sleeping and waking lives both get wiped away every time PRS restarts me for a new mission.
“Well, it’s great to have you back.” Salma sort of knows about 20 percent of what the deal is with me. I can’t be totally honest with her, for the obvious reasons. She knows I live in some kind of government facility with my dad. She knows I get put under for long periods of time, but we’ve told her it’s because I am not entirely cured of leukemia and need to be put into a medically induced coma periodically. Fortunately, Salma’s own blood disease is in near-total remission. Her olive skin glows, her eyes are bright, and her glossy black hair has almost completely grown back.
We had adjacent rooms in the cancer ward of this specialist clinic on Long Island, and when we first met, we were convinced we were the last friend either of us would ever make, and that instantly bonded us. The facts that chemo had robbed us both of our hair and we had both wasted away to the point where if you combined our two body masses, you’d barely have enough for a single person helped too. We fought the cancer wars together, and survived. So we didn’t need to bother with a lot of hey-how-are-you, what-have-you-been-up-to chitchat. She’s alive, I’m alive. There’s nothing better than that. Just her face filling up my laptop screen is enough. We don’t need to ruin moments like this with words.
Still, just staring at each other across Wi-Fi would be weird. “Only twenty days to my birthday,” she says.
“Yeah, I’m only mildly terrified.” That’s not a lie. I really am worried about meeting her parents, who I barely remember from the clinic and have only caught blurry waving glances of in previous video chats. It’s just shy of three weeks till June 1, her birthday, and I am supposed to fly to Toronto to meet her mom and dad in person for the first time, stay in their guest room, and do tourist things in Toronto, whatever those might be. Her parents emigrated when they were adults and can only really speak Farsi, so if I say anything really stupid, Salma can just edit it out in her translation. That fact is the only thing that mitigates my nervousness somewhat.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” It’s out of my mouth before I can stop it.
“You just did.”
“Ha ha, yeah, I never heard that one before. But I was just curious—do you ever think your life is made up?”
Salma blinks. “What?”
I’m wringing my hands together and I can’t stop. “You ever wonder, like, maybe everything is too perfect? And you don’t have any control of it? Your life is just like a museum, a series of set pieces, and you’re just walking through it, observing, but not really, uh, allowed to touch anything? Or rearrange it at all?”
“Oh, jeez, Ray. Do you feel like that a lot?”
“No, I actually just started feeling like this today. But I am feeling it really, really strongly.”
“Damn, babe, I wish I could reach through this screen and hold on to your hand.”
“Me too.” I chuckle uneasily.
She thinks for a second, finishing off the smoothie with one long, loud slurp through the straw. “I was watching this TikTok the other day from this yoga instructor, and she told this story, I think it’s called a ‘koan,’ it’s something the Buddhist wise men tell each other to, like, shock themselves into enlightenment or something. It tells the story of a monk who dreamed he was a butterfly. But then, when he woke up, he realized he couldn’t be sure whether he was a human who was dreaming he was a butterfly, or this was the dream, now, and he was really a butterfly who was dreaming he was a man.”
“Cool. So when did he figure it out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Which was he, man or butterfly?”
“Well, that’s the point. He didn’t figure it out. You never know. Lots of people have felt like you. Whoever came up with that koan did it thousands of years ago.”
“Wow, so deep.”
“You’re such a jerk.” Salma laughs. “That’s what I get for trying to help your lame ass.”
“Admit it, you love this lame ass.”
She leans in and kisses the camera. “I just wish you were here.”
“I’ll be your next birthday present.”
“Yeah. Can’t wait.”
* * *
“What you’ve got here is Zahn Enterprises’ top-of-the-line wingpack, the Osprey,” Dodge is yelling over the roar of jet engines as he straps me into a giant graphite arrowhead almost as tall as I am. “You’re jumping out of here ten kilometers in the air with no parachute, just this. You should have about forty klicks of flying ahead of you. Slow down when you have a visual on the island, using this toggle.” He indicates a button on the strap on the underside of the wing where my hand will go. “The Osprey is completely buoyant and has about twenty kilos of gear in it, including a mobile Screamer and a long-range sniper rifle. You’re coming in on the side of the island with the highest cliffs, low enough so spotters looking for aircraft approaches should miss you. Land in the surf below, using the Osprey’s retractable mooring line to hide it in some coastal shrubbery or whatever, so you can come back to your gear if you need to.”
He steps back and appraises me, strapped into the wingpack. “You look like a complete tool. Any questions?”
“Yeah, where are you going to be while I’m taking all the risks? Leaving racist comments on websites as usual?”
“Don’t you worry about me, Junior. As usual I’m your secret weapon, ready to be sent in whenever stuff goes pear shaped. Also, if Harada personality cultists do decide to show their ugly faces, I’ll be a nice little surprise for them. Nina will be your eye in the sky.” He nods at her, sitting on the far side of the cabin with a military-reinforced tablet computer and headset. “She’ll have full visual of your left-eye HUD and maintain verbal contact throughout. Your communicator is attached behind your ear and to your throat. It uses bone to send vibrations to your ear canal without the need for actual sound. With that diode thingy over your larynx, you won’t need to speak out loud either. Just sound out the words in your head, and the comm will send it back to her in spoken language.”
Nina mouths into her microphone across the cabin, and I hear her clearly in my ear: “We have a substantial amphibious presence about twenty kilometers offshore. Once you’ve neutralized the guards and subdued the more hostile psiots, we’ll send in the extraction team.”
“Copy that,” I silently mouth, and Nina gives me a thumbs-up from her seat: She heard me fine.
“You done stalling?” Dodge punches a button on the cabin wall and the bomb bay doors in the floor begin to open. Whale-sized clouds hang below. I can see the misty jet stream speeding across the outline of the plane. There’s no land to see. I might as well be jumping into a bottomless gas giant, like Neptune. This high up I can literally see the curvature of the Earth on the glowing horizon. The cold makes me grit my teeth.
I turn back to yell something to Dodge, but he plants his boot in my ass and pushes me out the hatch. “Time to earn your allowance, Junior!”
The hollow laugh through his respirator is almost immediately cut off by the flapping roar of the air around me as I drop, as if he’s been carried away by the wind. I should be so lucky.
Most paratroopers have to strap on a full-body wingsuit with an oxygen mask to survive the high altitudes. I’m strong enough that I can hold my breath until I hit a breathable level of atmosphere. For all I know, I’ll be meeting resistance the second I make landfall, so I’d rather not be struggling out of a nylon body condom while taking heavy fire.
The clouds pull back like curtains ripped away until finally exposed beneath me is the grand prize: the sea, rolling and rippling away in every direction. The AR, augmented reality, in my left eyepiece kicks in, identifying Twyst’s island far in the distance and telling me inside a blinking hexagon that I have about thirty-eight kilometers to go before I see it on the horizon, like I’m playing a video game.
I blink.
A video game.
It does feel like I’m playing a video game, doesn’t it?
I’m a badass unkillable mercenary who still plays catch with his dad and who has a loving girlfriend. I have a bully I need to deal with, but I find him sadder and more pathetic than threatening. I didn’t just beat leukemia; I laid it over one knee and paddled its butt cheeks bright red. I’m not a cancer survivor; I’m a bona fide cancer champion.
All seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?
“Hey, Ray,” Nina says into my ear, “everything okay out there? Your heart rate is weirdly elevated.”
I’ve started breathing, well, hyperventilating, really, as the water gets closer and closer. It’s about an hour before dawn, and I can start to see the moonlight glinting on individual waves. The AR is very strongly beeping at me that I should start pulling up on the throttle now, let the wings level out my descent.
But the waves below look made-up. A constantly undulating fluid plain that doesn’t even seem like the sea to me anymore, but a computer-generated texture map. They can do that, right? Inject simulated images right into my brain.
How do I know any of this is even real?
“Ray, c’mon, please talk to me, kiddo.”
Altitude alerts join Nina’s breaking voice in my ears: My drop will become terminal if I don’t deploy the Osprey’s wings in the next few seconds.
That would settle the argument once and for all, wouldn’t it? If I just let myself drop. You fall into the ocean from ten klicks in the sky, forget it, game over. At that velocity, hitting water is no different than hitting concrete. I’d be a stain on the Mediterranean for a few minutes before what little was left of me sank beneath the waves.
Then I’d wake up in my nutrient bath in Fresh Kills, laughing at myself for believing any of this was possible in the first place.
Or, you know, I’m wrong, and this is real, and I’ll never really know since I won’t wake up from this at all. My pieces would be scattered too far and too deep across the sea for all the king’s special forces and all the king’s scientists ever to be able to put me back together again.
The AR is making all sorts of danger, danger sounds and blinking arrows at me: Open your wings. Fly this way. Or die.
“Dodge,” I can overhear Nina saying, voice cracking, “I think we’ve lost Ray. He’s passed out from the altitude or something. Get ready to deploy in five.”
The idea of being replaced by Dodge, even in a dream, fills me with such revulsion that my hands tighten around the wing straps and find the controls. I ease out the rudders on the edges of the wings, and my drop stops being completely vertical.
“I’m fine,” I say louder than I need to. “Just had to get used to the controls, is all.”
“Oh, thank God,” Nina breathes. “Dodge, belay that.”
“Yeah, sit your ass down, Dodge.”
The warning chirrups subside as I glide into the blinking bracket laid out in the AR. I level out over the waves at approximately 160 kilometers per hour, and soon the top of Douchebag Island pops up on the horizon.
“Ray, I am going to need you to do me a favor, and if I ask you for proof of life, you’re going to have to give me some goddamn proof of life pronto, you got that?”
“Sorry, ma’am, I copy that. Won’t happen again.”
“You mean like you calling me ma’am?”
“Right. Sorry.”