Xanadu

Margaret scooped up the brown paper box from her doorstep and tossed it in a pile with the others. It had grown tall, nearly touching the ceiling, but she thought she could stuff a few more up near the top. She figured she knew what was in each and every one of them, and she only wished that they would stop arriving, but her family would not give up, and Margaret had to respect that. There must have been 400 of them stacked, looking like a Mayan pyramid.

She took her coffee with her onto the back porch. The sky was purple, the grass magenta with a strange billowing frost that drifted across the vast plain like fog on a morning pier. Pretty soon the twin suns would rise and burn it all away. Her lunch guest was late again, and so she rifled through films on her device, trying to pass the time. This habit had a way of clearing her mind, taking the pressure off choosing to observe; sometimes a curated, pre-recorded slice of existence was just what one needed to relax.

A man in a black suit alighted on her walkway in front of her old country house. He dipped his hat by way of greeting and took a seat beside her. His face was featureless, his age difficult to determine.

“Any coffee for me?” he asked.

“Depends,” she said, “are you going to ask me to open a box again?”

He sighed, “No coffee for me, I suppose.” He glanced backwards into the house, eyeing the stacked boxes. “Pretty neat sculpture you’re building,” he said drily.

Margaret laughed. She served him lunch, the usual—a cucumber sandwich with a side of fruit salad. They ate mostly in silence. When he was finished, he set the plate down, then mounted his air scooter, and departed into the sky.

Margaret felt a mix of emotions watching him disappear into the clouds. He was her only companion, but he was horribly boring, and there was the matter of the boxes. In 24 hours, he would return, and they would repeat their lunch ritual just like they did every day. She returned to the house and started her stretches. God, her body felt powerful—lithe and quick, like a tigress. She cartwheeled up the wall onto the ceiling, then back down again. Bored, she decided to take a quick trip to The Field.

Her air scooter hummed to life, and in a moment she was catapulting into the sky, parting the clouds like balls of cotton, their fluffy wisps frosty against her perfectly complexioned face. Other riders drifted in and out of view, some of them wearing clothes from last season. Margaret felt sorry for them. Once they got to the Field, they would surely be ridiculed.

Down in the Field, a small crowd of about 50 people had gathered. Teams were forming. Margaret was selected to be part of the yellow team. She had played with some of these people before, had even slept with a few of them, not that they would probably remember. The alarm sounded, and she was off, her rifle across her back, her nimble feet making tracks in the simulated soil.

She liked to start near the creek. She staked out a small little space beneath a tree trunk and waited. A faint rustle in the weeds on the opposite bank gave away the enemy position. She selected a small grenade and launched it towards the bushes. Limbs, clothes, and rifle fragments exploded upwards—bits tangling on tree branches and splashing into the creek. Margaret wiped what appeared to be an ear away from her visor. A good start.

Before she could reload, she felt a sharp blade press between her neck and midsection.

“Sorry,” a voice muttered behind her.

God, how boring it was to be killed like this.

Respawning at the entrance to the field. Margaret waited for the other players to appear. Some were muttering about another round, some were muttering about a party that had just sprang up in the 10th Ward. Margaret figured she’d tag along, and soon she was dancing in a room full of people, sipping a drink she had never tasted before.

“It’s new,” a man in a silver vest, black goggles, pink pants, and white trainers told her. “You like it?” It tasted like diesel and sherry. She drained the glass and followed the man upstairs. The sex was boring, but quick, giving her plenty of time to find another option at another party, and soon she was off, back on the hunt. Her usual haunts were quiet—it must have been a Sunday. That was the day people usually visited with their families. God, she was bored.

Margaret returned home to play some VisionGames. How strange…a simulation within a simulation. Losing interest, her gaze fell upon the stack of boxes. They had been arriving every morning for over a year. Every morning she heard the soft thud of the box hit her doorstep followed by the air scooter of the postal worker as he vanished into the sky, and every day she stacked it in the corner.

But today was different. She was so profoundly bored that she actually grabbed a box, selecting one from the middle. She sat with it on her couch and felt its outline. Pretty good detail, she decided—it almost looked real. She thumped the box against her knee and heard a rattle. Maybe it was an engraved plate? Fancy. Or maybe it was just encased with something? Should she open it?

Her lunch companion materialized beside her on the couch, his chin resting against the top of his hand, gazing at her intently. “Are you finally going to do it?”

This annoyed her. “Get me a knife,” she snapped.

He snapped his fingers and out of thin air appeared a long, thin filet knife. “Am I stripping a salmon?” she spat. He snapped his fingers again, and a box cutter appeared. “That’s better,” she said. Taking the box cutter, she held it low and slowly pulled it against the center of the box. It opened easily. Inside, a tiny light was growing. Margaret removed the silver orb and set it on the ground. It was vibrating. Then there was a popping sound, and a beam of light broke through its surface and cast a projection against the wall.

The face of her daughter Jessa staring at her from the wall startled her. It had been a very long time. She looked old, far older than Margaret. “Mother,” she said, “you have been gone long enough. Return to us. We have business to discuss.” Her daughter wiped a tear away from her face before the orb snapped shut and was again still.

“Well,” her companion said, “What are you going to do?”

Margaret leaned back into the couch. Clearly it was a ploy. There was no business to discuss, only a fucked up family that wanted their matriarch back, but she was done watching everyone at each other’s throats over the family fortune—all the scheming and lying and infighting. She wondered which of her five children was running the empire. Jessa was once a strong contender, but her daughter had grown soft after having children of her own. She tossed the box back into the pile. “I’m going to stay here and continue living my life in peace.”

The man shrugged and once again and blinked out of existence, leaving Margaret alone with her thoughts. If, and it was a small if, she returned, what would her body even look like? She anticipated she would be about 78 now and rife with creaking bones, bad teeth, and slow thoughts. Who the fuck would want to return for that when they had the virtual reality paradise of Xanadu? Still, it did sadden her to think that her children could do nothing but continue sending her daily packages, recording their futile messages every single day in the hopes that she would come home to straighten things out. In varying degrees, she despised her children, but she did not raise them to be so pathetic.

She made herself a cocktail—a little blue swirl with some lavender swirl with some green swirl and inhaled the bubbles as they rose from the drink to deliver her sip after sip. God, what had she become. She used to run the most feared private security force in the world, and now she was sitting here like one of the Lotus Eaters, wasting her days away in regret and forgetfulness.

If she went back, and it was a big if, how would she do it? Would she be safe? Where was her body? Was she even in her family’s possession? What if these videos were too old and she was…dead? She felt a cold shiver start in the pit of her stomach and ride her spine upwards. If she were dead, then what? Blackness? An error window sending her right back to the virtual reality house? Worse, what if she were in a coma? She could be trapped in there, watching her family squabble around her bedside for another 15-20 years with no ability to talk or move.

All this made her head hurt. She hadn’t come to Xanadu to ponder metaphysical propositions. She had come to escape, and that was what she was going to do. But the wrinkles on her daughter’s face kept flooding back into her consciousness. The strain in her voice too, like she was on the brink of crying throughout the entire message.

Margaret made another cocktail, but the buzz was subpar, and so she made a couple more, stiffer, with a little extra green swirl. Walking back from the kitchen, she accidentally tripped on her mountain of brown paper boxes, sending her to the ground and triggering an avalanche of little silver orbs, all activated and awake from within. Suddenly, the voices of her children filled the room, their separate plaintive messages fusing together. The words were garbled and unintelligible, but the tone across the voices was identical and unmistakable. Margaret remained still on her back, her mind fuzzy, letting the voices wash over her—a ghostly echo of a life she had left behind reaching for her like an arm from beneath the bed, trying to drag her back, and something, maybe guilt, maybe love, was trying to grasp it.

The man reappeared and helped her stand. “It’s time, he said.” He looked more like her husband now than he ever did before. She took his hand, and together they opened the basement door.