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Dekka tuned her out as the description of the wonders of the shower went on. Truth was, it actually was an amazing shower. It was the shower Dekka might have expected when she got to heaven. She was momentarily distracted by the notion of Saint Peter, like some real-estate guy on HGTV, saying, And wait till you see the shower!
Armo stood up, adjusted his pajama bottoms, and announced, “It’s already ten thirty, and unlike you people I’ve been up since eight. I’m going down to the pool. Who’s with me?”
No one was interested aside from Cruz. Dekka saw her dark eyes zeroing in on a dab of cream cheese clinging to Armo’s chest and thought, You poor kid.
Finding no takers, Armo disappeared into a bathroom and re-emerged in a bathing suit. “Call me if something happens.”
“Cruz, I thought you liked sunbathing,” Shade said once Armo was gone.
Cruz shrugged. “I don’t know what to wear. It’s a problem.”
“Oh, right.” Shade winced.
“You could always do what I do,” Dekka suggested. “T-shirt and shorts. That’s kind of gender nonspecific.”
Cruz looked uncomfortable, and Dekka hoped she hadn’t said anything stupid. She’d had years of people assuming various things just because she was gay, or because she was black, and even the innocently curious inquiries got to be tedious after a while. Or in Dekka’s case, instantly.
“I don’t want to look like . . . ,” Cruz began, then veered away into a low, abashed mutter concluding with, “I don’t want him to think I’m stalking him, geez.”
Dekka sat down opposite her in the place Armo had vacated and leaned forward to keep her conversation with Cruz private. “Sweetheart, Armo is a good guy. Just whatever you do, don’t ever try to order him around. Other than that, though? The boy is pure Malibu beach bum, mellow to the bone. Just, again, and I cannot stress this too much: don’t tell him what to do.”
Cruz grinned. “Yeah, I got that. He mentioned he was ODD. It took me a while to figure out he meant Oppositional Defiant Disorder.”
Dekka smiled affectionately. “Oh, Armo’s regular old odd, too, but he’s good people. When things get hairy, you want Armo nearby.”
Armo. Crazy, fearless, and reckless. I have a type, Dekka thought dryly, even if it isn’t always a romantic type.
She moved to the far end of the vast living room, where Shade was now in earnest conversation with Malik.
“Hey, Dekka,” Shade said, waving her to a seat. “Malik is theorizing.”
Of all the internal relationships within the Rockborn Gang, none was more emotionally loaded than Shade and Malik’s. Shade had been present four years earlier when the FAYZ had at last come down, releasing its traumatized young inhabitants, Dekka among them. Shade had lost her mother that day, killed by Gaia, the monstrous alien in human form who had terrorized the last days of the FAYZ. That death had spawned an obsession in Shade, an obsession that had dragged Cruz and Malik into this new nightmare world with her.
Malik was what he now was because of Shade. He lived with the constant presence of the Dark Watchers because of Shade. They had been with him as he had spent the night with her, seeing what he saw, feeling his emotions.
What must that have been like for Malik? Dekka wondered. And the same phrase she’d applied to Cruz came to mind again: you poor kid.
“Once upon a time the most sophisticated computer game on earth was just a virtual tennis ball and two virtual rackets,” Malik said, talking between bites of blueberry muffin. “We moved up to Pac-Man and Galaga. Then Mario and Donkey Kong. Then the Sims, where human players could create and control avatars meant to represent humans. That was the turning point, right there. That was the point when the gamer became a god. The gamer wasn’t just a happy face gobbling up power dots and chasing ghosts; the gamer was creating virtual people and manipulating their world.”
“Talking Dark Watchers?” Dekka asked in a low voice. Shade nodded.
“If you created a perfect sim, so perfect, so sophisticated that it encompassed millions, even billions of individual people,” Malik went on, animated as he often was when prosing on about either science or great guitarists, “a simulation so advanced that each of those simulated people acted independently, so real that the game pieces, the avatars, experienced what felt like reality—”
Dekka held up a hand. “Is this going to involve math?”
Malik winked at her, and Dekka was caught off guard by the almost maternal feelings she had for him. Shade might be a manipulative brainiac, but the girl had excellent taste in men.
“I’ll stick to English,” Malik said.
“Proceed,” Dekka said. Her gaze shifted to Shade and she thought, If you break this boy’s heart, I will personally administer a beat-down.
“The point is that simulations can be reproduced like any other computer program. So if we suspect that there is a single simulation, we have to suspect that there could be millions. One reality and a potentially unlimited number of sims. Simulations might outnumber reality by billions to one. Which would mean statistically it’s likely that we are not in an original, evolved reality, but in a sim.”
Cruz returned from the bathroom and flopped down, spilling a bit of her coffee. “Oh, God, are we doing this again?”
“He promised no math,” Dekka stage-whispered.
“Basically there would be no way to ever know if you are living in a sim or not. Unless something goes wrong. A glitch. Or maybe a hack.”
