The Invisible Girl
Lucid, the breakthrough of the millenia. A place where you can live while your body rests. It used to be my safe place. A place where I could be more than just a sixteen year old girl. The real world is full of pain. The real world doesn’t see me.
Well, it didn’t. Not until now. The image of seeing myself in that hospital bed stayed with me. I never looked as alien as I did there, so helpless in that bed. I wish the real world saw me as I see me. The strong man I feel I am, Cade not Candice.
When I first started I was so afraid of losing my own identity. Scared that Candice would disappear from me forever. The more I lived as Cade the less concerned about that I’ve become. But out there is the grave I made for her.
If the bugs are looking for me, they’ll find it, they’ll find her. I have to know what they want. Better even to know who they are. Some security team for the hospital? Or some actual police force. A lot of what I do isn’t exactly legal.
This could most certainly be a trap. But I have to know if they found her. Her spawn point is random. I did that in hopes they’d never catch on. The only way to get there was through Stan.
Stan was one of the first programs I’d written. He’s a guide of sorts. He can navigate the back access of just about any server. He can also lock on to a few key avatars in the system.
I walked out to the street and whistled. The program loaded in immediately. And Stan’s cab pulled up next to me. I got in and set my destination: The Grave of Candice Lamont.
About ten seconds later we pulled up to a park in some remote part of the server. I’d never been here but that wasn’t saying much. The server was almost infinite.
I leaned against the cab and lowered my hat. I opened Private Eye and began looking around. About five yards away sat a girl reading a detective novel. She was invisible. Her face and eyes were mine.
I created her first, when I was learning to code here. She’s a doppelganger designed to hide my entrance into the server. It was working just fine. But I had to see her, to be sure.
I shook off the feelings of sentiment and let the paranoia sink back in. Glancing around the park I didn’t see a single bug. Did they already identify her and move on? I slowly started walking across the field. Everything seemed normal.
I bent down when I reached her to get a better look. The book she was reading wasn’t a detective novel. It was a Doctor Seuss book. Someone had changed some of her code. Then it hit me. Trap!
I stumbled backwards. Scanning wildly around. I noticed it as it crawled out from under her skirt. A bug, with it’s anteni pointed right at me. I sprinted for the cab. But the bugs were already destroying it.
I considered just logging off. But I was equally afraid of what I might find in the real world. The bugs started to turn towards me. I needed to hide, give myself a chance to figure this out. I teleported back to my office.
We don’t teleport in Lucid. Sure, it sounds like a wonderful way to get around. But the simulation running in our heads doesn’t do well with things like that. The phone booths overcome this by giving you fixed surroundings to focus on. Full out teleporting left my head spinning, and I was pretty sure I wasn’t safe.
The bug on my wall noticed me right away. It leapt onto my desk and started to scurry toward me. I ran out the door and downstairs. The Chinese restaurant was mostly empty. But I didn’t create it to be a real restaurant.
I ran into the kitchen while bugs seemed to swarm out of the cracks in the walls. I made it to the walk in freezer and locked myself inside. The freezer was a panic room, designed to hide me from any tracer or tracker.
I sat down trying to gather my thoughts. I needed to see if I was alone in my hospital room. The Hive Vision glasses would tell me if WnDy was standing over me, but I couldn’t use them in here. The panic room wouldn’t let me.
I had planned for this. Well, not exactly this, but something like this. I opened the back door of the freezer. This allowed me to connect to the world without being noticed. At least, I hoped I wouldn’t be noticed.
I put on the bug eyed glasses and recalled WnDy’s view. She was working in another patients room. With a sigh of relief I took the glasses off. I could just log out. No nightmare waiting for me in the real world.
I checked my surroundings through my hat brim just to be sure, no bugs. Out of curiosity I put the glasses back on and started scanning the other bugs views. They were all outside the freezer. Every view was just waiting for me to open the door. Every view but one.
I was looking at a leg, my leg. I pulled the glasses off and looked down through the hat. Wrapped around my leg was one of the bugs. I don’t know when it latched onto me. But it was here now.
Out of panic I logged off. The real world came back into view. I pulled the hood off and sat up in bed. Across the room sat an man. I’d say he was about fifty or so. His white hair circling a bald peak on his head. He wore a lab coat and name tag. But I couldn’t make out the name.
“Candice”, he said.
“Y-yes”, I stuttered.
“I am Doctor James Liccardi. It wasn’t easy finding you.”
“Couldn’t have been that hard. I’m stuck in a hospital bed.”
“Well, not you, but Cade.”
All the color faded from the world. No one has ever known my secret. Suddenly, I felt exposed. I pulled the covers up to my neck to protect myself.
“What do you want?”, I whispered.
“Your help. I’m looking for someone. And I’m told you are the best at finding people.”
The blanket was now almost over my head. It engulfed me in the emptiness I felt as my world dropped out from beneath me. Cade was fiction. He was my fiction. And here I sat with the creator of Lucid. And he was seeing past the broken girl in the bed. He was seeing Cade.
“How could I say no.”
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