She did as she was told. “That it?”
The young man looked puzzled. “What d’you mean? What else?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just this package? I thought… Never mind.”
He slipped the PDA back into his coat pocket. “Y’all have a nice day,” he said, moving off.
Lulu waited for the young man to disappear before she picked up the package.
“What the hell?” Decker said. “I thought we were busted.”
“Me too,” Lulu said with a grin. She began to tear at the paper. “But I have a hunch we’re about to find out why Mr. X sent us here.” Inside the wrapping was a large bundle of bubble wrap. Lulu tore it open with some effort and a pair of goggles slipped out. There was a note at the heart of the package. “Look familiar?” she said, pointing down at the goggles.
They did, Decker realized. They looked just like the VR goggles they had spotted in Zimmerman’s house and in Braun’s cabin — with dark wraparound lenses and an odd circuit board over the nose section. Two thin electrical cords dangled down from both arms leading to a pair of earbuds. Lulu plucked out the note. She read it and began to look around the lab.
“What is it? What’s it say?” Decker asked.
“We need to connect them somehow. Hold on.” She spotted an electrical transom at the far end of the lab. A similar pair of goggles lay on a table nearby. She examined the console and flipped a couple of switches. “Bluetooth or WiFi, I guess,” she suggested, handing the VR goggles to Decker. “He said you were the one to jack in.”
“Me? Why me? You’re more of an expert on these sorts of things. Clearly.”
Lulu shook her head. “Read it yourself. It says you.”
Decker took the note from her hand. That’s what it said, alright. He watched as Lulu flipped on a switch, powering up the controls.
“Are you ready?” She held out the goggles.
Decker put the note back on the counter and stared at the goggles. “I’m not so sure about this.”
Lulu sighed. “What is it now? They’re just VR glasses.”
“Are you sure that they’re safe?”
“Nope.”
“That helps.”
“Look, I’m not going to kid you. But what choice do we have? And why would Mr. X tell you to put them on if they’re dangerous. He’s been nothing but helpful so far. If he’d wanted to hurt us, he could have done so already. It’s up to you, John.”
Decker took the goggles from Lulu. He looked down at the lenses, at the flat circuit board over the nose bridge. A whole series of contacts was arrayed along the arms of the glasses, near the temples, as if to send electrical signals directly into the brain. Two earbuds hung down from the arms. “I just don’t feel very comfortable doing this.”
“Then, don’t do it.”
“You saw Braun. He wasn’t all there. What if whatever happened to him was a result of wearing these glasses?” He shook his head. “I know that when you die in your dreams, it doesn’t mean you die in real life. Obviously. What I mean is, I’ve died in my dreams hundreds of time. I’ve fallen from skyscrapers, been shot. I’ve even been blown up a few times. Yet I’m still here. Like Groundhog Day. You may not die in real life when you die virtually but you may do some real and permanent damage to your brain. Frankly, you may wish you were dead.”
“Then, don’t do it, for crying out loud. If that’s what you’re afraid of, don’t—”
“It’s not.”
Lulu didn’t respond. She simply stood there and waited.
“That’s not what I’m afraid of,” Decker continued. “It should be, but it isn’t. You were right… what you said before. I do have PTSD. From my car accident when I was a boy. And because of other events, from the job. You know. Bad things.”
“And?”
“And Doctor Foster, the shrink at the Center where I work… where I worked, he used to prescribe VR simulations to help me get over them. At least, that’s what he said they would do. Help me. He said that if I lived through them again, I’d be able to make them less scary so I could handle them better.”
“Did it work?”
“Sort of, I guess. They use the same thing for soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. Simulations of driving along some dirt road in a Humvee. An IED going off. Some even have sensory simulators: the ground shakes and they emit smells like smoke and burning rubber and… Well, you know.”
“Are you going to put them on or not? I don’t know about you, John, but I want to go home. I’m tired of being chased and attacked and blown up. I’m fussy that way.”
Decker sighed. He looked down at the goggles in his hand. “Me too,” he said. He put the earbuds into his ears, slipped the goggles over his head, and the whole world went dark.
CHAPTER 42
As his vision cleared, as the landscape fell into focus, Decker found himself in a traditional-looking, Southwestern American suburb, with row upon row of neat little white houses, each with its own patch of grass, its own driveway and two-car garage. They unwound in a fractal suburbia, forever unfolding, forever unfolding, forever unfolding. For a moment, he felt dizzy. For a moment, the world started to spin. Decker reached out for support from a mailbox nearby, black with white stenciled numbers, nearby, but his hand missed. It was still a few feet away. He closed his eyes for a moment and the world seemed to settle. He opened them again when someone shouted his name.
“John. John, over here!”
Decker turned. The houses went on to the distant horizon, each almost identical to the one right beside it. It was Christmas, he noticed. Many of the homes featured Christmas decorations: faux-snow-covered trees lit with tiny red lights; reindeer and snowmen; and Santas, some resplendent in full-blown regalia, decked out in fur, felt and filigree.
“John. Over here. John!” The voice was insistent. He knew that voice. Mr. X?
Decker spun about. There. It was coming from just past that hedge, right there, between those two houses. He moved closer when the voice said, “That’s far enough.”
“Who is that? Mr. X, is that you?”
“Welcome home, John.”
“What?” As Decker took another step closer, he sensed more than heard the figure start to slither away. “What are you talking about? Wait, come back! I won’t hurt you.”
The man on the far side of the hedge seemed to laugh. “That’s not what I’m worried about.”
Decker turned and looked back at the street — when he realized he was no longer anywhere near the street. The street was a good hundred yards distant, and he was now poised on the edge of a playground chock-full of colorful see-saws and slides, monkey bars and plastic tubes of all sizes, in impossible shapes and contortions, twisting back and forth, slipping in and out of themselves in vexing regurgitations, like an Escher drawing gone mad. Once more, Decker felt dizzy. He closed his eyes. The playground was empty, devoid of all life.
Not a fly, not a bee, not a single black desert wasp.
Not a sparrow nor starling.
No infants. No toddlers.
Not a soul.
“You were right, John. Ali Hammel’s Jihadist cell is not who’s behind this. Never was. And not the Koreans.”
Decker spun about and the hedge lined the playground again. It was just out of reach, on the far side of that sandpit. He could see the dark shape of a man obscured by red leaves. They were impossibly lurid, like buckshot of blood.
“Who is it then?” Decker asked. He sat on the edge of a roundabout — a huge spinning wheel. He pushed himself forward and felt his whole body pitch to the side. Although he was spinning quite leisurely, the world whirled at breakneck speed, a veritable blur. He dragged his right foot on the ground and the suburb fell back into focus. “Is it our guys? NSA? Is it Riptide, some private enterprise group?”