“Do something!” Margaret Carlson screamed. “For God’s sake, someone do something!”
Instantly, Josh went to work, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he tried to restore the programs that were dropping out of the computer’s memory banks and the systems that were grinding to a halt as their supporting programs disappeared.
The keyboard failed to respond.
As everyone in the laboratory watched helplessly, Amy Carlson finally died.
EPILOGUE
Josh had been back in Eden for almost a week, and as he started home from school, his mind returned once more to what had happened at Barrington only a few days ago.
He found himself thinking about it more and more, despite the fact that his mother—and everyone else, too—had told him it was better not to think about it, but just to try to forget it.
But how could he just forget it?
He’d been there! He’d seen it!
Seen Hildie’s body in the elevator, and then Dr. Engersol and Jeff, lying on the floor down in the lab.
Adam’s brain, sitting in a puddle of water, dead.
And Amy’s brain, still alive in its tank, still hooked to the computer.
He’d even seen Amy’s brain die.
He’d never seen anyone die before, and the images on the monitors were still vivid in his mind, all their displays gone flat. He’d stared at them for a long time, then his eyes had drifted away from them, fixing instead on the mass of tissue suspended in the tank.
It hadn’t looked any different at all. The folds in the cortex all looked the same, the color was still the same gray hue shot through with the bluish network of blood vessels.
It didn’t seem right.
If Amy was dead, her brain should have looked different.
But it hadn’t, and finally, feeling Alan Dover’s hand on his shoulder, he’d looked up.
“Is she really dead?” he’d asked, his voice shaking.
“I’m afraid so,” the policeman had told him. “Come on. Why don’t you and I go outside? They don’t need us down here anymore.”
Riding up in the secret elevator, Josh had felt a chill go through him as he thought about what had happened to Hildie that morning.
Would he always think about it, every time he got into an elevator for the rest of his life?
When they’d gotten to Dr. Engersol’s apartment, he’d ignored the clanking old elevator that was still waiting at the fourth floor landing, choosing to go down the stairs instead.
“Someone called your mother, Josh,” Alan Dover had told him. “She’ll be here tonight to take you home.”
Josh had barely heard the words, for the emotions he’d held in check all morning had finally overwhelmed him. He began sobbing, throwing his arms around the police officer, despite the fact that all his friends were watching him.
“It’s all right,” Alan Dover had told him. “It’s all over now.”
But it hadn’t been over. He’d spent almost the whole day talking to the policemen, and the doctor, and a lot of people whose names he didn’t even remember. He’d answered all the questions he could, and explained over and over again what had happened when he’d put on the virtual reality mask and seen Adam in the computer. He’d even tried to show them, but when they’d gone up to his room, and he’d set up the computer and put on the mask and the glove, it hadn’t worked.
He knew what had happened: before she’d died, Amy had erased all the programs that Dr. Engersol had set up, all the programs that had let him actually see inside the computer.
For that, he was almost certain, had been what he’d been doing.
It hadn’t been a simulation at all.
The program had been set up so that Adam could show him what it would be like to be inside the computer, to have been part of the world that he and Amy had been taken into.
The world that had given him nightmares and made him feel that he was going insane.
When Josh had finally told them everything he could, and his mother arrived to help him pack his clothes and books, he’d said good-bye to the few kids who were still there.
All day long parents kept arriving at the school, packing things up as quickly as they could, taking their children away. Josh knew why they were doing it, but it still seemed strange to him, since the experiment Dr. Engersol had been working on was destroyed, and Dr. Engersol was dead.
Most of the kids hadn’t even been involved in the experiment. But their parents took them home anyway, saying the same