Characters: Sophia, Jesse, Alyssa
Location: On a street in Firona, NJ, near the local police department
Time: Day 4 - 4:20 PM
“We can’t go to the police!” Sophia cried for the third time, grabbing the wheel from Jesse. They struggled for control. He tried to fight her off, but she threw her shoulder into his and the car rattled down the road. Drawing skid marks with its wheels, the car suddenly veered into the other lane and into the headlights of an oncoming SUV. They were blinded for a moment. Then, with a honking screech, the van shot past them and sprayed water against the windows.
“Get the hell off me!” Jesse screamed, throwing Sophia back into the passenger seat. A howling clap of thunder knocked them both backwards. The car spun on its tires. Kicking up mud, it rolled off the road and bounced alongside a ditch. Alyssa fell from her seat. She hit the floor, banging her head against the back of Sophia’s seat, and the car nearly flipped over.
Jesse slammed his foot on the brake. The car skidded through the ditch. The tires shrieked. Wind whipped rain parallel to the dark horizon. With a crack, a bolt of lightning lit up the sky and a mailbox post was split into two from the car’s hood. Shaking like a blender on high, the car hit a bump, whirled out of the ditch, and did a complete 360-spin before coming to a dead stop on the side of the road. Jesse and Sophia fell back against their seats, gasping, and Alyssa rubbed her temples. Her eyes rolled about in her head.
When he could breathe again, Jesse unbuckled his seat belt and grabbed Sophia by the shoulders—almost by the neck—and shook her. “What is wrong with you!? You almost got us killed!”
“We can’t go to the police,” she said again, wriggling out of his grasp. “They’ll arrest my father. Neverquest will never reach the open market. It will be destroyed. The whole project will be destroyed.”
“Good! I hate Neverquest! I hate what the game has done to you and your father and everybody else. It’s made you all insane. You’re not the same person, Sophia. Not since your dad gave you that damn job at CNN. It’s changed you.”
“My father and Tony put their lives into their work! Their lives, Jesse—they spent their lives and fortunes ensuring that Neverquest was the perfect game. Don’t you realize what virtual reality could mean to this world?” This time, she grabbed him by the shoulders and tried to shake him, but her tears were falling too hard for her to put up a good struggle. “Tony lost his life trying to protect Neverquest! It meant that much to him. It meant the world to him. He loved his creation. He loved it… Don’t you see…?”
“See what!? What do you want me to see, Sophia?”
“We can make new realities… That’s what Neverquest is… We can make our own realities. We can change this one. We can make everything right. We can’t let the police take that away… We can’t… They always take everything away… Just, for once, let’s keep our fantasy. Let’s keep it real. Let’s make it right.”
Alyssa checked her head for bumps, found she was bleeding a little, and put her feet up on the back seat so that she could recline. “What have you guys dragged me into?”
“Shut up, Alyssa,” Jesse said. “This isn’t about you.”
She stuck out her lower lip in the poutiest way she could muster, but nobody was watching, so she shrugged and reached for the door handle. “Fine. Then I’ll just leave.”
“We can’t let her go,” Sophia said. “She’ll go to the police.”
“No, I won’t.”
“No, she won’t,” Jesse agreed. “Because we’re going there. We’re going to the police and you’re going to tell them everything that’s happened since this morning and you’re going to let them handle it. That’s their job. They’re the ones who make things right. Not us.” He buckled his seat belt and adjusted the rearview mirror. “After that, I’m taking you home and you’re going to bed. You look exhausted.”
“No, I look pissed. Can’t you tell?”
Alyssa poked her head in the front seats. “She does look pissed.”
“Shut up, Alyssa!” they both screamed
Then Jesse looked at Sophia and sighed. “…Sophia, I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not doing this because I have something against your father.”
“Ha, that’s a first.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve never liked him. You’d like to put him behind bars, wouldn’t you?”
“Damn it, Sophia…” He looked out the window, checking for cars. Even though the road was clear for a mile both ways, he didn’t pull forward. “…I was on my lunch break when your father called about Tony. I didn’t believe it at first. I think your father was still in shock, too, because he kept repeating himself. He must have said how worried he was about you a thousand times. Or maybe I just heard it a thousand times because it’s all I could think about. You, Sophia—you had us both worried. You might not think I like your father, but I do. He cares about you.” He paused for a moment. “But he also cares about his game. Too much. You were right. He did put his life into Neverquest. He put so much into it that he forgot about you. I don’t want to forget that.”
“Wouldn’t be the first thing you forgot,” Alyssa muttered from the backseat.
“Now we find that Gibbers has been murdered,” he continued. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd, Sophia? Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing the police would believe.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Would you believe it?”
He didn’t respond.
“…There’s definitely something wrong here, I know. But let’s try to solve this ourselves. We can stop the virus and save Neverquest without involving the police. We can’t let Tony’s death be in vain. We can’t let all that work go to waste.”
Jesse’s eyes went wild and he squeezed the steering wheel. “Do we look like the fuckin’ Hardy Boys? Do we live in a damn boxcar? Does this look like the Mystery Machine to you? Have you forgotten who and what we are, Sophia!?”
“If we find Marcus, we find the solution to the virus!”
“You don’t know that!”
“Marcus killed Gibbers!”
“You don’t know that either!”
“Are you blind!? This is all so painfully obvious.”
“Then why the fuck doesn’t anybody know what is going on!?”
Taken back by his sudden outburst, Sophia shrank into her seat and quickly looked away. Her blurred reflection in the window shimmered with raindrops or tears. But she said nothing. Rain poured from the darkest clouds and the dirt under the car’s wheels turned to mud. It was late afternoon, but it looked like night.
“…Why would Marcus kill Gibbers?” Jesse asked after a rumble of thunder rolled by overhead like tumbleweed. “What motive could he have?”
“Maybe he stole Marcus’ girlfriend,” Alyssa said, eyeing Jesse in the rearview mirror. “I think that’s a good enough reason to kill anyone, don’t you?”
“…Gibbers knew something,” Sophia said. “Something he wasn’t supposed to know.”
“Something worth killing him over,” Jesse added.
“Something about the virus.”
“Something…like what?”
“I don’t know… But Marcus will.”
“Assuming he killed Gibbers.”
“Why would he run from me if he didn’t?”
Jesse spun the wheel, turning the car back onto the road. “Why don’t we go find him and find out?”
“But we don’t know where to look.”
“He could be headed back to CNN.”
Sophia put her hands over her lips. “Oh, God… He could try to kill the rest of them.”
“I doubt that. He wouldn’t have left the gun with Gibbers if he planned on killing more.”
“But he knows we’re on to him! He saw me. He knows.”
The windshield wipers thrashed back and forth. “Do you have a better place to look?”
“No…” she said slowly and then reached for her cell. “But I’ll call up CNN and warn them.”
“That’s a start.”
Sophia started to dial the number and then stopped on the last digit, looking up at Jesse. “…Thank you.”
“This doesn’t mean I agree with what we’re doing it. But I’m doing it for you.”
“I know.”
Nodding to herself, Alyssa touched her fingers against the window and looked out. “You can just drop me off anywhere.”
“You’re not leaving,” Sophia said, locking the doors. “You know too much now.”
“What? This is kidnapping, you know.” She looked at Jesse with frantic eyes, but his face was hard and resolved. “Tell her this is kidnapping, Jesse. Go on and tell her. Tell her, Jesse. Tell her!”
When he didn’t respond, she dropped back against her seat and let her fingers trickle down the window, one by one, like raindrops. The clouds were never so low to the ground.
Giantess World
