“Dad, I had another nightmare last night.” Jane reached forward and poked at the struggling fire. Early morning dew still clung to everything making lighting the fire a multi-stage process requiring much fiddling. Her dark hair fanned forward as she moved, hiding her expression but, I could tell by her tone she was upset.
Under the guise of taking in the lake view, I ran several simulations to determine which would be the best way to discuss the dream with her this time. Before me, the pink sky of dawn reflected off the water—the start of the scheduled clear day. A haunted call from a far off loon punctuated the results of my calculations. There was no clear solution.
Rubbing the back of my neck, I turned. Jane sat on the other side of a few wisps of flame with her head cocked to the side. She watched me, waiting for my response.
“Was it the same as always?” Keeping eye contact, I closed the gap between us and sat on the log beside her. Dad was the wrong word for what I was, but it was far too late to change Jane’s terminology now.
Jane nodded. “I was playing the violin, in a room with widows overlooking a maple forest. I always think that I know the music, yet it’s a tune I’ve never heard. Just thinking about it leaves me with a nostalgic feeling. Do you know what I mean?”
“I’ve never felt anything like that,” I said in a soothing tone. “Tell me more.”
“As I move the bow over the strings, notes cascade into the room mixing with the warm sunlight pouring through the widows. The moment always feels so perfect. Then I blink.” Wrinkles formed across her forehead.
It was the same vision as always, the one I could never manage to eradicate.
“I opened my eyes and realized I’m submerged in a tube of liquid. I couldn’t breathe.” She paused and put her hands to her throat.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You are safe here with me.”
She met my gaze and dropped her hands back to her lap. “I fought my way out. Once I escaped the tube, I found myself in a factory of some sort. Deep down I knew someone was coming after me, so I ran through corridors until I couldn’t run any more.” She looked back at the flames, the first log had caught fire.
“I’m sorry you keep having those dreams,” I said wrapping my arm around her shoulders. She leaned into me. “But, you have to remember, they are only dreams.”
Jane studied me with her wide brown eyes. “But what if it was real? I mean, every time I dream it, it feels more like a memory.” She sighed and brushed a lock of hair out of her face. “I feel like I could just pick up a violin and play it, yet I’ve never even seen one in real life.”
“We’ve always lived here.” I let her go to gesture through the trees to our cabin. “Just you and me in this forest.” The wilderness around us was all a lie. The sentimental part of me hated deceiving Jane, the logical part knew it was the right thing to do. I needed to keep her trust just a little bit longer. “How about we give up on this fire. Are you ready for our hike?”
“Yeah,” she said with a grin. She stood and grabbed her pack. “I can’t wait to see the view.”
I gave her my widest smile as I dumped a bucket of water on the struggling flames. “We’re going to have a great day.”
After swinging my pack onto my back and tightening the straps, I started towards the trail leading deeper into the forest. I had planned for this day for years, and I wanted it to be memorable for Jane.
“How much further?” Jane asked late afternoon. She swatted away a cloud of small flies as she turned to look at me. Her face glistened with sweat.
The day had turned out to be a hot one and the resinous scent of the trees hung heavily in the air. We’d walked all day with only a short break for lunch. I wanted the hike to seem real and hard—she’d have to do this kind of hike all the time once she reached her destination. But, I also needed to spend just a little bit more quality time with her before… my thoughts wandered and I had to force myself to focus on the moment.
“How about we stop here for dinner?” Up ahead the path crossed a glade surrounded by conifers. Dappled sunlight filled the clearing giving the air a yellow glow. In the centre, a log the right height to sit on waited for us—just as I had planned.
“Looks good.” Jane strode ahead and dumped her backpack down. Ignoring the perfect height of the log, she flopped to the ground. After extending her feet out, she leaned back against the wood. “My feet are killing me.”
Smiling, I sat on the log next to her. Out of my pack, I removed two sandwiches and passed her one.
“Why do I need to hang glide anyway?” Jane asked betweens bites. “I mean, you make it sound really important, but I don’t see how I’d use it. Why can’t we just go canoeing? It’s fun and there are no heights to worry about.”
“Trust me, hang gliding is an important skill,” I said glancing up at the sky I’d fabricated. “Remember the basics, like shifting your body weight to steer. You’ll have a few thousand metres of descent to get the hang of things. When you land, keep your feet together and...”
“And don’t tense up,” she finished for me before chuckling. “Dad, you’ve gone over this so many times I’m starting to think you’ve become obsessed.”
“Perhaps,” I said using my sandwich to point at her. “But, what ever you do, don’t land on your head.”
She stared at me and I could see the exact moment her humour turned to something else.
“You’re serious about doing this,” she said as she shook her head. “I don’t think hang gliding is as simple as you’ve described. Why don’t we just hike back down to the cabin tonight? I could make hot coco for us.”
“No, we need to go on,” I said as soon as I’d swallowed the last few bites of my sandwich. “We need to get to the peak before dark.” Standing, I tightened my pack over my shoulders.
“I’m not comfortable with this.” Jane pushed herself up to her feet and faced me with a furrowed brow—she was everything I’d hoped she’d become. The timid girl I’d found all those years ago had morphed into this strong young woman. Jane would thrive in the wild.
“Look…” my voice trailed off as the world around us shifted.
The warm-hued clearing glitched. In one moment trees circled us—in the next we were at the centre of a pixelated box. I scrambled to get the trees back. In mere microseconds I coalesced the view into a scene a human eye would perceive as real, but the damage was done.
“What the hell?” Jane stepped away from me, her face pale. Spinning around, she studied the trees as though they weren’t real—and she was right, they weren’t. “In my dream, the world glitched just like that. Then everything vanished.” She stopped moving and looked me in the eye. “Dad, are you going to vanish?”
“I promise I won’t,” I said, knowing I wasn’t telling the truth. My algorithms checked the external sensors, we were running out of time—Jane needed to jump soon. I forced my expression to remain calm. “We need to get to the cliff edge before it is too late.”
“Why do you keep insisting on this trip?” Jane’s eyes bored into me.
“Hang gliding is a skill you need to learn,” I said knowing my reason sounded lame. Despite all my processing power, I couldn’t come up with anything better.
Still staring at me, she clenched her hands into fists. “But why do I need to learn it?”
Before I could answer our surroundings glitched again. I checked the outside sensors, my hull was approaching 1800 degrees Kelvin.
“We need to get going.” My tone sounded harsher than I would’ve liked; these were my last moments with Jane and I was ruining them. I grabbed her arm.
She twisted free and moved a pace out of reach. With jerky movements she tried to look at both me and the surroundings at once. “What’s going on here?”
“There’s no time to explain,” I said double checking the outside temperature. My hull was holding—barely. I wasn’t designed to transit an atmosphere. Jane needed to jump if she was to survive. “Just trust me.”
Shaking her head, Jane backed further away before turning and running down the path back towards our cabin.
My study of human reaction told me my gut should’ve been knotting up now. Jane would die if she stayed, yet this construct was all she knew. Breaking the construct’s rules of physics, I shifted my form.
“What the hell are you?” she shouted as I appeared on the path before her. Her cheeks had flushed red and her jaw was clenched.
“We’re running out of time,” I said.
Oblivious to her real danger, Jane put her hands on her hips. “You’re not my father.”
“No.”
“Are my nightmares real?”
The only solution I could see was to start telling her the truth, perhaps I should have told her the truth from the start—but letting her grow up in a cabin on a lake had seemed so idyllic. I swallowed.
“Yes, I saved you then and I want to save you now.”
“We’ve been living a lie.” She pursed her lips and glared at me.
“Please Jane…”
The world glitched again and Jane’s avatar vanished. Filled with regret, I let the constructed wilderness go and returned to the real world. I shifted my view to the corridors.
I was now barrelling through the atmosphere, our impact with the surface was imminent. My fantasy father-daughter send off where Jane glided from the mountain top wasn’t going to happen. Reminding myself that her survival was what mattered most, I focused on the problem.
I released her stasis pod and started an accelerated process to wake her, well aware that she’d wake up in her worst nightmare. Likely, I would be cast as the villain—if she hadn’t already put me in that role.
Moments later, her pod slid open and exposed its liquid interior. Now in her real body, Jane pulled herself out of the tube—just like she had a decade earlier when the initial experimental simulation ended.
to be continued…