THE HAZARD ZONE IS like the best virtual reality game ever, except that on occasion—or even most of the time, really—it will try to kill you. It’s the Holodeck and the Danger Room combined, with five stages of different variables and conditioning. It’s not that stage 1 is entirely harmless and stage 5 is real danger—the different levels merely indicate how badly things will hurt you. Some of the challenges are real, some of them are illusory, and all of them are programmed with random or hidden variables: A rock appears under your foot as you’re trying to dodge a series of spears, or a swarm of hornets is stirred up by the particle blast you’ve just diverted into a tree.
Getting hurt in the Hazard Zone is like a rite of passage. Everyone does it at least once. You’re not really one of us until you’ve been sent to the infirmary with a third-degree burn because there was the tiniest bit of doubt in your mind that the fire-breathing salamander that just leaped out of the cave could really hurt you.
You learn fast. I did.
My first Hazard Zone injury was better than some (J/O had broken a servo when part of the ground had actually caved under his weight) and worse than others (Jerzy Harhkar’s only injury had literally been a paper cut during an “attack on the school” scenario). I’d stumbled onto a spinedog variable while training in a jungle simulation. If you’ve never met a spinedog, don’t feel bad; I hadn’t, either. It seemed likely that they had those spines for a reason, and that they knew how to use them—what I hadn’t known was that part of the reason (aside from the obvious) that they were called spinedogs was their choice of habitat. Not wanting to disturb their nest, I’d ducked around the nearest tree, putting a hand on the bark to steady myself—
—and nearly jumped out of my skin as the tree swelled up like a puffer fish. Hundreds of tiny, wooden needles stabbed into my palm, and not only had I stumbled back into the path of the simulated HEX agent I’d been playing cat and mouse with, I failed the sim because I couldn’t draw my blaster with my arm numb to the elbow.
It was hardly the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, but having those needles removed was no fun at all, and using my hand was difficult for two weeks afterward. It hadn’t even left me with any cool scars to show off.
Acacia was looking at the empty room with the kind of interested skepticism we all start out with, but I really didn’t want to drag her to the infirmary after her first session. “It doesn’t seem very big,” she commented finally, crossing from one wall to the next in about twenty-five big steps.
“Not until you’re running for your life from a cyborg velociraptor, no. The floor is made of anisotropic treadmills that move with you when you run. The scenery moves around you. Makes it feel pretty real, once you get over the fear that it’s gonna malfunction and send you smack into a wall.”
Acacia giggled. “Has that ever happened?”
“Not that I know of, but I’m always afraid it will.”
“I would be, too.” She paused. “Can we…?”
I hated having to tell her no. I wasn’t sure why, but I did. “Nah. Only a few people have the codes, and they’re all…not here. Right now.” I was also hesitant to remind her of the meeting—which was most likely about her—going on upstairs, even though she hadn’t seemed particularly concerned. I just wanted her to feel welcome…after all, she might be staying. “Probably tomorrow, though. Peop
le use it all the time, and you’re a guest, so I’m sure we could fit you in.”
“That’s okay. Is there a kitchen around here? I’m starving.”
“Yes,” I hedged a little. Kitchen meant mess hall, and mess hall meant people, and people meant awkward. At least in this situation. “But it’ll probably be pretty full…”
“I don’t mind. Which way?” She smiled cheerfully at me, and I felt my heart and stomach collide. I was pretty nervous about having to introduce her to everyone who’d been calling her my girlfriend.
“Uh, back the way we came.” I turned to go, offering a hand to Hue as he met us at the door. Hue didn’t like the Hazard Zone. He’d popped in to see me once in the middle of a simulation, and I thought he was going to have a coronary—if mudluffs even have hearts. He’d turned a confused grayish, then a few different shades of red or pink, all of which seemed to mean alarmed, then he’d basically turned into a multicolored disco ball. If anyone in the room had been prone to seizures, Hue would have done them in right then. Then he’d vanished, and I hadn’t seen him for almost a whole week. To tell the truth, I’d been getting worried by the time he finally showed up again.
I’d tried to ask him about it, but hadn’t gotten much of a response. He seemed confused any time I’d brought it up. The one time I’d been sort of “linked” with him, I’d gotten an impression of the In-Between making perfect sense, from his point of view. I suspected that, for Hue, being in the Hazard Zone was like how my mom used to get sick on virtual reality rides at theme parks; she’d say that because her body wasn’t doing what the world around her was telling her it was doing, it caused a weird dislocation. I guess being a multidimensional life-form in a room full of 3-D special effects and things that weren’t actually what they looked like must have been a little bizarre.
Walking through the halls with a girl on one side and a mudluff on the other was, as I’d mentioned before, a little weird. I mean, I knew I was the odd one out as far as many things went—and let me tell you how much fun it was living with a bunch of people who are as similar to you as people could get and still being the odd one out—but this only served to reinforce it. I was the one who’d gotten Jay killed. I was the one who’d been captured by HEX. I was the one who’d made friends with a mudluff. I’d stumbled into a HEX trap a second time, lost my entire team, been kicked off InterWorld, and somehow regained my memories and found my team again. And I was the first redheaded J-named person to bring someone new to the base. No one else here could say any one of those things, let alone all of them…and here I was again, standing out, with my girl friend (not “girlfriend,” mind you) and my mudluff friend, wandering through the halls like I hadn’t a care in the world.
Really, it was no wonder some of my para-incarnations still disliked me.
“Deep thoughts?” asked Acacia, and I realized I was neglecting my duties as tour guide. We’d passed through several hallways without my saying a word, not that there’d been anything interesting to say about them. They were hallways. Some of them had doors that led to other hallways.
“No, sorry. Just thinking about…the mess hall. You’re gonna get swarmed,” I warned her, unsurprised when she merely assured me she’d be fine.
“I can handle it,” she said—and then I opened the door.
Okay, so I’d like to say a mob of redheaded, freckle-faced Walkers surged forward like paparazzi, asking questions and clamoring for our attention. It’s what I was expecting, honestly. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure Acacia would have been able to handle that, no problem. What actually happened was like something out of one of those old horror movies, or teen chick flicks where there’s the dreaded embarrassing school scene.
I opened the door, and all noise stopped.
Just stopped. Everyone stopped talking. One after the other, everyone trailed off in the middle of a sentence, all eyes turning to Acacia and me.
Then, like a wave rolling slowly over the shore, the chatter started up again—muted, hushed—from one end of the room to the other. Slowly, most of them turned back to what they were doing—eating or chatting or reading or enjoying some kind of handheld media—and the noise level rose again, though nowhere near to what it had been before.
It was probably one of the most unnerving things I’d ever experienced, and that’s saying a lot.
Acacia seemed to be of much the same opinion. I didn’t think anyone could tell from inside the room, but she was leaning slightly toward me. Hue was practically settled on my shoulder like a parrot, but he tended to do that when we were around a bunch of people.
“This is the mess,” I said to Acacia, not bothering to raise or lower my voice. I was just giving her a tour; it didn’t need to be a big deal. “Kitchen’s open. It’s not gourmet, but most of the stuff tastes okay when you get used to it.”