Bridge, p.11
Bridge, page 11
“When I was a kid—” Bridge cuts herself off. Due caution is not the worst idea. Another memory, from when her mom would still let her go too, before she started locking herself away. Bridge remembers feeling dazed after she came back, and Mom was stroking her hair. How was that, Bridge? Did you have a lovely adventure? Tell me all about it. What was it like? Was it a good one? But she couldn’t concentrate on her mom’s words. Like she hadn’t plugged back in yet, and there was noise on the line. “Sorry. I interrupted you.”
“Long story short, Jo showed me how to do my own switches. It was the only way to grasp the mechanics and the nuance of the keys.”
Dom jumps in. “Does the other consciousness know what’s happening to them?”
“Not the first time, no.” Caden looks shifty. “That’s why we’re so careful. We monitor your body in its present space, try to make the switch feel safe and comfortable. I came up with a low-tech solution—works pretty well, if I say so myself.”
“So, more of a hijacking than an equal transfer, then?” Dom says. “Because that raises interesting issues around meaningful informed consent, don’tcha think?”
“There’s no way to ask them until it’s happening. Of course, Jo wouldn’t go back if the other consciousness objected. She wasn’t a monster! This is all semantics. Could I please show you?”
The equipment he’s brought along turns out to be VR headsets. There’s also a clipboard, a pen, a white lab coat. Bridge struggles with her headset and Caden comes to help her.
“It’s part of the immersion experience to keep your switch safe and calm. It was my idea. Once Jo trusted me enough to let me into the room with her, I worked it up, along with the music and the visuals for the videos.”
Looking through the visor at last, she can see the room in black and white like through a bad Photoco filter, but there is a pink grid overlay that maps obstacles, like the dining table and Dom standing as immovable and unimpressed as furniture, putting on their own headset. Caden presses a handle into each of her palms.
“Your mother was a genius,” he says, soft enough that only she can hear. “She wanted you to do this.” Then louder, for both of them: “Look for the drop-down menu, top right corner. Now click on MirrorLab.”
Bridge raises the handle and clicks as instructed and finds herself in a different kind of otherworld. Oh, she thinks. Horrified. Mortified. Is this it? Is this what he meant? She is sitting on a big cartoon armchair opposite an anthropomorphized deer in a black blazer who is holding a clipboard and a pen poised above it, head cocked to listen. One spotted ear twitches. There is a digital clock on her desk and a window overlooking trees that sway in a repetitive loop. Bridge looks down and finds she has big blue paws where her hands are supposed to be.
“This animation is awful.” Dom’s voice from somewhere across the room.
“It’s open code, a freebie I found online.” Caden is defensive. “It’s supposed to be a model for virtual therapy.”
“I bet people use it for sex,” Bridge says.
“Of course they use it for sex,” Dom retorts.
“I think there are better simulations for that,” Caden mumbles, embarrassed, and she feels sorry for him.
The deer is talking to her, as gentle and reassuring as a sleep-meditation app. “Thank you for agreeing to take part in our VR neuropsychology study. Everything is going well and you are safe. Make sure you are sitting comfortably and breathing normally. Today we will be exploring how calming breathing techniques affect brain waves. Your participation is invaluable and will help other people. You’ll be doing some simple exercises and telling me how you feel.”
“Whose voice is that?” Bridge says, pulling off the headset. She hates being a fuzzy blue critter, hates the B-movie sci-fi of this. Is this what he meant about entering other worlds—fucking video-game pretend?
“It’s an actor. I paid her two hundred dollars. Don’t worry, she doesn’t know anything about it.”
“You may feel dislocated,” the voice says through the headset speaker, “especially if you’ve never used VR before. This is part of the process to help you get outside yourself, to still your mind. Thank you once again for participating. Your experience will last only as long as the timer…”
“The clock syncs to the file, so if it’s a twenty-minute flip, it counts down twenty minutes on the clock behind Dr. Fawn’s head,” Caden explains.
“And what if they pull the headset off?”
“We, me and Jo—your mom, I mean—we’d do it one at a time and the other person would monitor them, talk them down if they got upset, get them to wait it out.”
“Does it ever go wrong?” Dom asks. “Get violent?”
“No. I’m sorry you had that experience with Bridget—the alternate—but she was dumped in with no safety measures, all of you completely unaware. We take deliberate steps, try to do this as ethically as possible.”
“By which you mean you trick people into believing they’re in a game so they don’t freak out.”
“I’m eager to hear your alternatives,” he snipes back and Bridge is sick of it and sick with the fear that this is all there is. A simulation. A joke, a cartoon.
Dom removes the headset, unhooking one pineapple earring caught on the straps. “Count me out, friends. I’m not eating that disgusting thing, I’m not going to play in VR-trip-land. But I will babysit you. I’m guessing that’s what this lab coat and clipboard are for?”
“That would be terrific,” Caden says, a little too grateful, as if he was hoping for this exact outcome. “I can guide Bridget inside, then. But if they take off the headsets, you have to keep them occupied until the time runs out. Placate them, be reassuring, say the experience will be over soon. Do not tell them anything about our world or the dreamworm or what we’re really doing.”
“In case they invade?” Dom snickers.
“I’m serious.”
“As brain cancer. I get it, I get it.” Pointed glare at Bridge.
“Will we be in the same place?” Bridge asks Caden, dodging Dom’s look. She wants to do it already. She feels like the dreamworm is waiting for her. A pang. A thrill.
“It’s incredibly unlikely that our alternative selves are in the same room or city or even know each other. A compatible universe isn’t necessarily identical.”
“Only close enough,” Bridge says, which is not an original thought. It’s something her mom would say when she was a kid and asked what they were looking for. Close enough, Bridge, but even better than here. We’ll keep looking.
“How many have you done?” she asks Caden as he lifts the dreamworm out of the Tupperware like it’s the baby Jesus.
“A few. Eight, ten maybe.” He sounds unhappy. “Jo did a lot more. She had certain compatibles she kept returning to.” He has a scalpel, and he’s teasing one of the strands loose with practiced ease. He offers it to her on the tip of the blade. It looks gold in this light.
“Compatible as in what?” She takes the limp curl and puts it under her tongue like it’s acid. It still tastes like earth, with the consistency of raw tofu, but there’s a sparking too—or maybe that’s her nerves.
“Can we agree that your consciousness—who you are—is a pattern of firing neurons?”
“Little loose on the neuroscience, but, I mean, sure.”
“Okay, a song, then. It doesn’t matter whether the tune is held by the structure of the brain or comes from the mind-body connection or a soul. It’s complicated and ever-changing, but it is a song, a recognizable pattern of notes, so you can replicate it in multidimensional space, connect to another iteration if enough of the notes are the same.”
“Wooo, quantum physics, spooky action.” Dom waves their hands.
“Actually, it’s more about the fundamental mathematical structure of the univers—”
“Does it matter?” Bridge interrupts. “I get it. You have to match the pattern to the person and to the universe.”
She picks up the headset again. It does feel like some kind of bargain-basement interstellar mission. It’s not going to work, she knows it, and she will never hear the end of it from Dom.
But, oh, that’s not true. She also knows that’s not true, and she feels giddy with it.
“And match to some version of you that exists in the alternate timeline.” He slices another sliver (Slither, she thinks) of the dreamworm and licks it right off the blade.
“What happens if there isn’t a version of you on the other side?”
“You don’t go anywhere; you get a splitting migraine that takes you down for a week. At least, that’s what happened to Jo.”
But there’s something nagging at Bridge. She’s thinking about her dog Bear, back when she was a kid, the one who had a stroke and had to be put down.
“Do you know which ones she kept going back to?”
“She was very cagey about that. Which one did you go to last time?”
“ZC. It was the first file name listed, so I clicked on it.”
“That’s a boring one. Let’s go somewhere else. SG. I think you’ll like this one.”
“Can I be a rock star?” The fizzing behind her teeth has become a deep cicada buzz in her jaw, her neck.
He twitches. “I don’t know who you’re going to be. Consider it a surprise.”
“Or a weeklong migraine,” Dom says, looking very poised in the lab coat. They’ve even removed their pineapple earrings to look more lab-researcher-y. “Don’t worry. I’ll be right here, watching over you crazy kids. And I got more generic aspirin where the last batch came from.”
“You have to do what I said,” Caden lectures. “Keep them calm. Don’t let them leave the room. Assure them it’s a simulation.”
“I’ll be the best damn pseudoscientist you ever met.”
“Okay.” Bridge settles the VR headset back over her hair.
Dr. Fawn is blinking at her from under those huge lashes. Her deer ear twitches, another cheap animation loop. “We’re going to play a video for you now,” she says.
“Okay,” Bridge says stupidly, as if the cartoon can hear her. The anticipation is like the low-grade clutch of electricity through the ungrounded pipe in the bathroom of her shitty shared apartment. And maybe her housemates have rented out her room even though they said they wouldn’t, maybe the managers have given away her shifts at Wyvern Books. But none of that matters anymore, all her non-plans. It feels like her whole life has been leading up to this moment. She has been preparing to become.
Something touches her in the real world, not the VR version of the living room. Caden is taking her hand, sitting beside her on the couch. She clasps his hand tight, as if they are on the clunking ascent of a roller coaster, too late to get off, climbing higher and higher, and ahead, the inevitable drop.
BRIDGE
Adrift
The smell reaches you first, a mix of brine and mechanics, and then the ground shifts under you, a treacherous thing. You grab at the nearest point of stability in this abruptly narrow space, which happens to be a wide and beardy man. Clutching at his green shirt, you accidentally slam your head into his chin, snapping his head back with the nasty crack of skull hitting jaw.
“Fuck!” He reels back. “Ow. Shit.”
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” You reach for him automatically, and your arm is not your arm but someone else’s: toned and tanned and covered with tattoos of curling snakes and flowers in luminous colors. You pull back and cradle this stranger’s arm against your chest as if to undo this spell.
“Yow.” He stretches his neck and rubs his jaw. “That’s a vicious headbutt you’ve got there, love,” he says in a foreign accent—Australian or Kiwi, maybe; you can’t tell the difference—and the ground is still shifting, capricious. You’re on a boat, you realize, the walls of the cabin curving in, small portholes showing snatches of sky, an ocean below, or maybe a lake, reaching deep and dark beneath your feet. Vertiginous. “Nearly bit my tongue off.”
You laugh, you can’t help it, an anxious apologetic noise. “I’m so sorry. I tripped.” Another nervous laugh, because that’s no lie. Tripped through time and space to be here, somehow, inside a tattooed girl on a motherfucking boat. Which was supposed to happen, was the intended plan, but it’s still a shock to the system.
“It’s all right, no worries. Pretty sure it’s still intact.” He sticks his tongue out, pink against his dark beard, and pokes at it, testing. “Am I bleeding?”
You lean in to look, fascinated, because apparently they are this familiar, the tattooed girl and beardy man with his wicked eyebrows and that trouble-charmer glint in his eyes. Eyes that in your own life would probably glide right over you, looking for someone hotter, more interesting.
“Uh, no. No, I don’t think so.” You examine his tongue. The ocean swells beneath the hull, and the bright square of sky through the open hatch is distracting—fiery red and scuffed with cirrus clouds.
“Known you were a streetfighter, would have set you loose on those pickpockets in Alghero,” he grumbles.
The open hatch is a lure that tugs at you, but you need to check, to see for yourself. “Where’s the bathroom?”
“What?” He looks so genuinely Labrador-dog-confused, you have to stifle another laugh. Keep it together, you tell yourself. This is real, not a simulation. You’re really here. The Somewhere Else. The Not-Real. Like when you were a kid. And of course, you’ve just asked an absurd question. The head is in the head, of course, and there’s only so much room on this boat. You spot the little wooden door on a latch past the kitchenette table, squeezed in front of the crawl space for the double bed. Could have landed on a luxury catamaran, cocktail in hand—just saying.
You duck your head beneath the too-low doorway. The smell is stronger back here, salt mustiness, the peculiarity of fiberglass, the chemical tang of the toilet. The bathroom is a squeeze, a showerhead tucked up above the commode, a plastic sluice beneath your feet, which are bare—and also tattooed. A faded blue rose on your left instep.
Two electric toothbrushes in a cup clipped to the faucet, natural eucalyptus deodorant, a hairbrush snarled with his-’n’-hers brown and black hair, toothpaste smears in the sink for that real feel, and you wonder how the girl who should be here feels inside your body back in Portland, and how she feels about Dr. Fawn. Above the sink is a small mirror. And the woman in the reflection is not Bridget Kittinger-Harris, not by a long shot.
You knew this for sure already from the tattoos, from the nimbleness in your body, the casual strength, even when you were losing your footing and headbutting a total stranger. But there is no arguing with a mirror.
You try to imagine your own features in the reflection. Puff out your cheeks to summon your rounder, paler ghost. This face has spat out the marshmallow padding you apparently carry under your own skin. Lean and mean, to match the physique. You can feel how taut your stomach is, the definition in your arms beneath the full-sleeve tattoo.
Same nose, same chin, only her eyes are hazel, more like Jo’s, skin deeply tanned, freckles and laugh lines, her hair a sun-bleached brown and in braids tucked behind each ear, like a pirate girl from a childhood storybook or someone you might see at a trance party juggling flaming sticks. You have never been any of those people: pirate or poi dancer or Able-Bodied Seawoman.
There are flaws too. The mirror woman has one chipped incisor on top, a crescent missing, which together with the pigtails makes her look girlish. She stinks of sweat. Thanks a lot, natural deodorant. Not quite identical, but fraternal twins. What was the word Caden used? Compatible. You lean in closer, staring into the hazel eyes, searching for the spirit that animates the body, looking for some indication of you inside looking out. You breathe on the mirror, write Hi… in the condensation, each period a jab at the glass.
“You all right in here?” Beardy guy pokes his head around the door. Are you? No one ever talks about what it’s like for the possessor driving the possessed, an unfamiliar rental car with the turn signals on the wrong side. And what if you never make it back, what if this is it, now, stuck in this body, this life, on a yacht in the middle of the ocean? And if you hadn’t been here or somewhere like it long ago, you might be freaking out a whole lot right now.
“Fine. Sorry.” If you keep apologizing, maybe that’ll get you through. Old memories are rising like a diver’s bubbles in murky water. You remember feeling out of place, faking it, having to play detective like this—even more than the normal awkwardness of being a kid at a loss in the incomprehensible world of adults.
“You taken a spell, love?” He touches your forehead with the back of his hand and you bear it until he gives his assessment. “You’re not hot.”
“Need some air,” you say, pulling your lips into a smile, hoping this is the way you smile here, with that chipped tooth. Squeeze past him, making for the hatch and the steep ladder. The ground lurches and you stumble again, and it’s infuriating that you don’t have her sea legs. You’d expect the body to have sense memory, some level of physical competence. Are you so certain it’s a full switcheroo and that the other is not here with you, riding shotgun? You feel a bit sick, actually, a weird tightness, and maybe that’s a side effect of the transfer. Or is it the other you trying to fight her way back up? But surely you’d have memories, then—this man’s name, for one—or some idea of how to balance on a heaving boat. There’s a tight pain across your taut pecs, which could be from overuse, all the keelhauling and petard-hoisting Not-You has been up to. Or it could be a heart attack. Or a panic attack. Probably a panic attack. You need to get some air, calm the fuck down. This is what you were expecting. This is what you wanted. But there is a fist in your chest, and in your stomach too.
You scramble out onto the deck and barely make it to the railing before your guts contract and the bile rises, hot and sour, and you’re chumming the ocean below. You retch and spit until it feels like it’s all out of you, and Beardy is behind you, wrapping his arms around you, and you have to admit, it feels good to lean back against him.
