The Wakeful Wanderer's Guide to Disillusionment

Drugged

At least they left her with her implants, Helen thought to herself. She couldn't reach out to Mem and Thirty from here, but she had her games and all of Marto's tours in personal storage. She was surprised to find a small network alive in Pittsburgh, but it seemed limited and strange. Helen didn't trust it.

She was being drugged, as usual. That was par for the course whenever she was captured during one of her escape attempts. They would eventually run out of medication or decide she was too docile to waste it on her or they might just forget about her. She was patient. She would find a way out, eventually. The medication wasn't so harsh as to leave her speechless and drooling, it merely kept her calm and quiet.

She was in a guest room in her father's old house. Her father was lying in his coffin downstairs. She had made an appearance in black the day before, dressed by servants, patiently waiting to go back upstairs and resume one of her games. She had almost never spoken to her father. He had pretended she didn't exist, like all the inconvenient realities in his life. He ignored them and focused on what interested him more. Father in name only, she thought with relief. His blood almost certainly did not flow in her veins. He spent his life in anger and jealousy, raging at his underlings and family members. His frightening charisma terrorized the western half of The Jersey. That was all over now. She might not even be asked to the burial. Once again, her family was forgetting her.

Soon, they would let her out for walks. The trick was to wait, quiet and agreeable. Her initial outburst at her mother would be forgiven eventually, aided by the accumulation of details crowding her mother's brain. Her brother Archibald could never be bothered with her comings and goings unless urged on by Mother. Vanessa was more cunning, but she seemed occupied lately. There would be a door or a window or a path before long, and she would be down it and away and make sure they never found her again.

She was more concerned about the strangers she saw at her father's wake. These were official looking people, wearing little pins with insignia on their blazers. They didn't look like any of the other families she was used to seeing from time to time. Nobody filled her in about the reason they were there, but now that she noticed them, she remembered a few of them hanging about the house in the previous weeks. They may have been associated with one or another church, sent to comfort her father in his final days. They looked like zealots.

The drugs were kicking in again. Her scalp felt numb and her mouth was dry. It would pass eventually. She took some time off on the island.

Helen sat on the beach watching the waves roll in. The sand extended only a short way to the left and right before ending in cliffs. Behind her were dunes rolling toward another beach on the other side. She'd been here before. The tide would roll in and in and then a tsunami would come and before then you needed to be up the cliffs and press the right characters on the wooden totems in the right order to get the drone to rise out of the cave and escape to the mountain on another island. She had it set to easy, however, so she had at least three hours to relax and enjoy the illusion of the water and listen to the waves while she thought about what to do next in the non-game world.

These games were in her own personal storage, independent of the Interconnected web. They were a gift from Tash, the head of security at Cos. It seemed ages since she had been there; another life, another Helen. She recalled her crush on Tash with some embarrassment. She realized now, looking back, that she was trying to find an anchor in the whirlwind of experiences that came with her journey to find Marto and deliver the message that made him want to run away and hide.

The unnatural movement of the tide had brought the waters' edge a half dozen yards closer to her feet in the time Helen spent lost in her reverie, away from this imaginary beach, twice removed from the drab room in her dead father's house where she sensed something was happening. Using a trick she had learned with some practice, she allowed her eyes to open only partially, so that her natural vision was obscured by her long eyelashes. A figure appeared with her on the beach. Her mind, assisted by the game interface, made adjustments to the light and position of the shoes in the sand.