My mother’s identical backpack was hanging right beside it. I tried to avoid looking at it, but then I went right ahead and looked at it anyway. Including the word stitched onto the back flap in cursive with pink yarn: Mama.
I hit the emotion-suppressing software on my HUD, so Art3mis wouldn’t see me start to sob. I managed to keep moving. I put my own backpack on my avatar’s back. As I did, it automatically enlarged itself to fit my twenty-one-year-old frame. I turned to follow the others down the staircase. But Art3mis was standing there, blocking my way. The emotion-suppressing software was working—there was no way she should have known I was crying, but somehow she did. I tried to go around her. But just like the first time we met, she refused to let me pass.
Instead, she opened her arms and wrapped them around me—something I had long ago accepted that she would never do again. She held me tight, until I finally got my sobbing under control.
Samantha knew all about my mother, and how I found her dead of a drug overdose on our couch when I was eleven. It was heroin mixed with some other stuff, I think. That was the reason I’d avoided all ONI recordings made by heroin users for the entire first year the ONI-net was online. Then curiosity finally got the best of me, and I went all the way down the ONI-net heroin-addict-high rabbit hole. I wanted to experience what my mother had experienced firsthand. To find out exactly the sort of high my mother had been chasing when she’d unwittingly overdosed. I’d always assumed that it must be a pretty great feeling, if my mother thought it was worth losing her life for it. Doing a drug via ONI playback wasn’t the same as shooting it into your own bloodstream. It felt the same, but it didn’t cause the same long-term damage or physical addiction symptoms. And it removed the risk of accidental death. So ONI recordings allowed me to experience the same high my mother had, without destroying my brain and my body in the process. I didn’t find it all that enlightening.
I wiped my eyes and took several deep breaths until I got myself back under control. Then I gave Art3mis a forced smile and a thumbs up. She nodded and took me by the hand, then she led me down the spiral staircase. Once we reached the bottom, I pushed open the heavy wooden door, and together, we stepped outside, into the Friendship Forest, where Aech and Shoto were waiting for us. The two of them were standing side by side in a beam of sunlight breaking through the treetops, illuminating tiny insects and motes of dust floating in the air around them.
I thought Art3mis would let go of my hand before Aech and Shoto saw her holding it, but she didn’t. She let them see. And Aech and Shoto pretended not to notice.
I pointed to a path leading south, through the dense forest of treehouses all around us.
“The MoreStuff Mountains are that way,” I said. “Just follow me closely, single-file, and only step where I step. Don’t stop to talk to anyone—avatars or NPCs. Also, don’t touch anything, and if you can help it, try not to look at anything either—not for longer than a second or two. Otherwise you might trigger some educational minigame or side quest that you’ll be forced to complete, and we’ll have to go on without you. We don’t have time to stop and play Blue’s Clues. Understood?”
They all nodded, and the four of us took off, running north along the path at top speed.
* * *
Once we reached the edge of the Be-Free Forest, we entered Holden’s Field—a large, flat, open field of rye, perched precariously on the edge of the Cliffs of Salinger, a place where I had completed several different book-report quests at several different grade levels. I had also played countless games of tag in this field, with other kids from around the world. Kids I had never met and would never meet in the real world, with usernames that they had probably changed long ago.
Art3mis rested a hand on my shoulder, bringing me back to the present.
“We need to keep moving,” she said.
I led them along the edge of the rye field, onto a narrow paved road that snaked to the north, through a rolling countryside and toward the MoreStuff Mountains in the distance. My surroundings seemed even more vibrant and realistic than I remembered—then I realized it was because this was the first time I had experienced this place with an ONI headset.
I heard a gleeful shriek and glanced overhead. There were a few kids flying around in their spellicopters. I had one in my inventory, but they only had room for one person, and that person had to keep spelling new words to stay airborne. We had to find other transportation.
We followed the road until it led us to a small farmhouse with a red barn behind it. There was a wooden wheelbarrow out by the road, with a rake leaning against it. I led Aech, Shoto, and Art3mis to the wheelbarrow and stood on a specific spot on the road beside it, then began to sing at the sky, as loudly as I could.