When Beth first heard Farah’s name, she thought of Venice, though she couldn’t remember why.
The Fifth Match
Two weeks before the end of the world, Beth comes home early on a Wednesday night. Farah is on the floor of the back room, arranging cacti in the bottom of a thirty-gallon aquarium. She’s wearing her pale blue carbon mask. The tape around the air conditioner has started to fail.
“I want to show you something,” Beth says.
She offers to get Farah’s chair out of storage from the back of the building, but Farah demurs. Crutches are easier with the bus. They catch the bus to the metro, the metro to the University stop. In the dark and the smog, the campus feels deserted, though Beth knows it isn’t.
Six swipes of Beth’s ID takes them into a lab building, down an elevator and a long, winding corridor, into the Immerse laboratory, which really is deserted. The front room is all desks and computers and bookshelves, the stale smell of old coffee and spilled creamer. Farah glances around the room, eyebrows arched, doesn’t say anything.
“Through here.” Beth leads Farah to a door in the back. Her palms are damp despite the air-conditioned coolness. The small room beyond has a low cot along one wall, a set of white laminate cabinets along the other. From left to right, Beth opens the doors, lays out the cabinet’s contents on the cot. Wires and suction cups, long-sleeved gloves, a hood with a broad blue visor.
“So this is what you’ve been working on?” Farah remains standing in the doorway, leaning forward on her crutches. The public transportation and the walk across campus have been a greater exertion than she’s used to, these days. Her hair curls around her forehead in sweat-damp ringlets. “Yeah.” Beth clears her throat. “Yes. It’s called Immerse.”
“Not a very creative name.”
“It’s not a very creative project. The word inevitable comes to mind, actually.”
Laughing softly, Farah makes her way to the cot. She slips first one arm, then the other out of the loops of her crutches. “Entertainment purposes only, right?”
“Well, you can’t stay in there forever, if that’s what you mean.” Beth glances over the components spread across the crisp white sheet. Hooked together, they make a strange and skeletal assemblage. “Okay, you’ll need to undress for this. Most of these need to go right against your skin.”
Farah slips her sweater over her head. In the air-conditioned lab, goosebumps dimple the dark skin of her forearms. Beth helps her up onto the edge of the cot so she can slip out of her blue jeans. “Every time I’ve been hooked in,” Beth warns, “the components have been cold as fuck. Just so you know.”
She begins fitting the system around Farah’s body. After years with Immerse, hooking in has become routine, but it’s rare that she’s put the system on someone else, especially someone who doesn’t know the components well enough to help. Farah stays slack like a doll, allowing Beth to wrap her arms in the tight compression sleeves and slide the thick, electrode-studded gloves down over each finger. Beth has never seen her so quiet, so attentive.
Arms, legs, torso. The hood comes last. As Beth reaches around behind Farah’s head, her inner arm brushes against the rough cloth of Farah’s suited shoulder. Farah doesn’t seem to notice.
“This piece is the brain of the whole system,” Beth explains, drawing it up around Farah’s thick hair. “Everything you see and feel starts in here. It’ll send signals to the other pieces, like so… ” Farah makes a soft sound of surprise as something trails across her fingertips. The glove on her right hand flexes perceptibly. “The system will be giving you real stimuli. Your brain will interpret it according to the program that the system is running.”
“It felt like sand. What the glove did just now… it felt like digging my fingers into warm sand.”
The visor comes down over her eyes. She lies back on the cot, breathes deeply. Beth steps back and lets the program begin.
The program runs more or less predictably. Moment by moment, Beth has always been able to guess what it will show. They built it out of her memories, after all. She was the one who lay in the MRI as they brushed and pressed and prodded, held her fingers against cloth and metal, paper and leaves. The one who opened her mouth and offered her tongue to sugar and vinegar and stale bread.
And so she knows that Farah is walking across a county fairground on a mid-summer evening, the system pulsing the pressure of sandy soil and sparse grass up through the soles of her feet, and every electrode registering heat and humidity. Carousel music—calliopes and brass bands—floats on a slow breeze. Balancing the volume was a challenge; it required adjusting the instruments’ pitch as the subject moved across the scene. In the distance, fair rides spin and tilt and shine in the orange sunlight. Scraps of paper and checkered hotdog wrappers plaster themselves against a chain-link fence. There are smells, of which Beth is especially proud, though they are still imperfect: cooking sausages, hot pretzels and mustard, fairground ponies, gasoline. Just when Beth estimates Farah is probably approaching the Ferris wheel, Farah makes a strange, strangling sound and moves her arms from the cot, reaching for her visor.
“Take it off!”
Her voice is muffled by the helmet. She doesn’t sound frightened, but angry.
Beth loosens the strap, slips the hood back over Farah’s head. Farah’s face is damp, frowning, unreadable. She seems ready to rip the gloves off, but Beth stops her; the system is delicate.
“What is it? Are you okay?”
Farah shrugs her off. “Yes. Sorry.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It was just—”
“Uncanny?” Beth has heard that one before.
“Dull.”
A moment of thick silence.
“What’s wrong with it?” Beth says.
“No, no.” Farah shakes her head, raking her still-gloved hands through her hair. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Just tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just empty. Not a single living thing. No one else.” Farah’s hands are still buried in her curls. She glances up at Beth’s face, and the oddly angry expression still curls her lips. “No other people, right?”
“No. Not for a long time, anyway.” Beth remembers Aiden, his alternate reality fantasies. Hiding away in the imaginary world of Immerse, waiting for the storm to pass. Or not waiting—building a new world inside the program for just one person. “It was part of the plan for the future, of course, but we’re nowhere near that level. And there’s no time for it now.”
“So what’s it good for?”
Her eyes are narrowed, her voice raised, ringing a little in that small, bare room. She lowers her hands, rips the gloves off with a loud tearing sound. She doesn’t mean to be combative, Beth realizes; she’s genuinely curious. The anger comes from not understanding.
And Beth isn’t sure she understands, either.
She looks down at the glove dangling empty from the tight sleeves on Farah’s forearm, looks down at the crisp sheets of the cot, which smell faintly of bleach, at the ridges in the concrete floor, at the shadow of Farah’s crutch falling across them, that narrow black line against the pale gray. She hears the hum of the air filters in the room behind them.
“It gives people something they can touch,” she says.
Silence gathers again, thick. Farah smiles ruefully.
“If someone were to find this years from now,” she says, “if someone could survive and find this place on their own, would they even know what to do with it? Do you think they would understand this?”
“I don’t know,” Beth admits. “But it will be here, just in case.”