Ethos Read online

  “Dad! Dad, Dad, listen,” Malcolm cut him off urgently.

  “No, you listen to me,” David continued, not even sure where he was going with this but beginning to gather steam. “This is not what I had in mind when I bought you a virtual reality system—”

  “Dad, seriously,” Malcolm said urgently, “we can leave here any time we want!”

  “And I sure as hell never imagined—” David pressed on, ignoring Malcolm.

  “Dad,” Malcolm said again, “we can leave.”

  “Wait, what?” David said. The wind came out of his sails in an instant.

  “In fact, we should leave. This is a lot to take in—it was for me when I first came here,” Malcolm said, his voice steady and assured. Once again, David felt a curious sense of vertigo. He was so used to thinking of Malcolm as barely more than a child, a gawky teenager who needed sheltering and protecting, and here he was, speaking with such authority and knowledge. As if he were caring for David.

  David realized with a jolt that Malcolm was caring for him. After all, Malcolm understood this world, whatever it was, and David sure didn’t. Not only did Malcolm seem to understand it, he seemed to be running it.

  David felt Malcolm’s hands gripping his shoulders firmly, and he refocused on his son’s steady, deep-brown eyes.

  “Let’s go home, Dad,” Malcolm said.

  “Yes,” David breathed. “Thank God. Yes. Let’s get out of here. What do we need to do?”

  “Easy,” Malcolm replied, his adolescent casualness flickering back briefly. “There’s a safe word.”

  “A safe word?” David repeated, dumbfounded. He felt a laugh surge in his chest. All this time he’d felt completely trapped and imprisoned here, and he could have gotten himself unstuck by uttering a syllable or two?

  “Yup. I’ll go first,” Malcolm said. “You just have to say the word, and it’ll take us back to 2024. Ready?”

  “What, now? It’s that easy?”

  Malcolm laughed. “Come on, Dad,” he said. “I thought you wanted to go home.”

  David shook his head, hardly able to accept what he was hearing. “Yes, of course I do. What’s the word?”

  “Well, Dad, as soon as I say it, I’ll be pulled instantly out of this time,” Malcolm said, a hint of exasperation tingeing his voice. There was the Malcolm David knew so well. “I can’t tell you the word out loud without vanishing from Ethos. So I need to know you’re ready first. I’ll say it, then you say it.”

  David nodded slowly. “Say it,” he said.

  Malcolm stepped back, still holding David’s gaze. He took in a breath—and spoke.

  There was no flash of light, no clap of thunder.

  Malcolm simply vanished.

  One moment he had been standing before David, real and solid and living as ever. And the next moment, David was entirely alone in the room.

  Just then, there was a hollow pounding on the door.

  “Chancellor!” A young man’s tenor called through the door. “Chancellor!”

  David gasped. Panicked, acting on blind impulse, he choked out the safe word he had heard Malcolm utter.

  There was a rushing in David’s ears, and then everything went black. He felt as if he were falling—the exact same sensation he’d felt as he tumbled down the long shaft under Church Street hours before. Wind howled past his ears and he flailed his arms wildly.

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” a voice said from very far away. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  There was something intensely familiar about that voice . . . about its soft, feminine timbre . . . even about the exasperation just beneath its surface.

  “David!” The voice repeated.

  And then, the rushing wind in David’s ears disappeared. He felt his feet firmly planted underneath him.

  “David,” the voice said again, this time not coming from a vast distance at all but from directly behind him.

  It was Lila.

  David blinked. He felt an odd weight against his temples. He put his hands up to his head, and immediately found the VR headset strapped there. He realized at the same time that his hands were encased in the heavy, black VR gloves.

  Almost gleefully, he tore the gloves off his hands and pulled the headset from his eyes.

  “I ask you to do one thing, one thing,” Lila was saying, “just the simple task of coming down here to get your son ready for your weekend, and then ten minutes go by and nothing!”

  David blinked as sharp white light seared into his pupils. He looked around himself with a wave of ecstatic joy. There in the corners were the two old floor lamps from his bachelor pad. On the far wall by the stairs was the simple light switch. Under his feet was the round treadpad, to which he was still strapped. And on the sagging couch behind him sat Malcolm, grinning broadly as if he’d never felt more pleased with himself.

  “Ten whole minutes go by, and I’m thinking, what could those two possibly be doing in the basement?” Lila was still talking. “So down I come, and I find you playing the same damn video game that I can’t get Malcolm off of. Like a kid.”

  David thought suddenly, half-crazily, that he’d never heard anything so beautiful as Lila’s voice, even angry as she was. He sprang off the treadpad, pulling Lila into a tight embrace against his chest.

  Lila was not pleased.

  She wriggled in his grasp and pulled away, pushing him backward.

  “Dammit, David!” She exclaimed. “What’s gotten into you?”

  David stood there, teetering a little from Lila’s push, smiling stupidly.

  “I—I’m really here,” he said out loud, fully aware of how insane he must sound to Lila.

  She gave him a quizzical look, her jaw working soundlessly, then turned to Malcolm, then back to David again.

  “Whatever,” she said finally. “I don’t know what you boys have up your sleeves, but I have things to do tonight.”

  And then she spun around without another word and marched up the basement stairs, her heels falling heavily on each step in her irritation.

  A few minutes later, David and Malcolm were alone in the car. As David clipped his seatbelt in place, he felt a wave of irrepressible exhaustion and noticed that his hands were trembling slightly.

  “Sabina,” he said, “activate self-drive.”

  “Yes, David,” the car’s console replied in its calm, collected female voice. “I’ll handle the driving. What’s your destination?”

  “Home,” David replied. Even though he’d lived alone in his divorcé’s condo for a few years, he still hadn’t quite gotten used to calling it “home.” Home was the place he had shared with his wife and son.

  The engine came silently to life, and the car, controlled by its computer, pulled smoothly out of Lila’s driveway.

  “Dad, I can explain everything,” Malcolm said, without prompting.

  “Please do,” David sighed. “In the last few hours, I’ve been shot at, attacked by a dinosaur, besieged by cops. And I’ve seen people die in front of me. Or disappear. Or something. I really do not approve of this virtual reality game.”

  “It’s not a game, Dad,” Malcolm said. “It’s Ethos. It’s the real world—our world—five hundred years from now.”

  David was in no mood to contend with adolescent fantasy. “I understand it feels very real,” he said. “It certainly felt real to me. But that’s the point of virtual reality, to create a whole sensory experience—”

  “Do you remember a few weeks ago, when I had that viral infection?” “Sure,” David said, unsure where this was going. About a week after he’d bought Malcolm the VR system and helped him set it up in Lila’s basement, Malcolm had been knocked flat for about five days with some kind of flu-like illness. He’d had a fever, chills, aches—a whole host of symptoms. Lila had gotten concerned and taken Malcolm to urgent care, where a doctor confirmed that the infection was viral; he said it would probably persist for another couple of weeks and that Malcolm should stay in bed and rest.

&
nbsp; But then, curiously, Malcolm had recovered the next day. Not gradually, but overnight. He had simply woken up the next morning in fine form. Lila had called David to say that Malcolm had rushed out to play basketball despite her protests. Both were convinced that he would soon crash hard, having pushed himself too far too soon after his illness. But he didn’t. He came home from his pick-up basketball game with the Wilder twins energized and strong. It was as if he had never been sick at all.

  “It’s because I got sick in Ethos,” Malcolm said now. “I thought it was a virtual world the first few times I went there, too. But then I noticed something weird. I could spend hours in Ethos, and I’d come back home, and only a few minutes had gone by. Ten minutes, fifteen minutes max. And then, still really early on, I got held up in Ethos by the Immortal Conflict—that’s a long story that I’ll explain in a minute—and two weeks went by. Two whole weeks, Dad. Days and nights. I was so scared that you and Mom were going to be furious. Or terrified. That you would have called the cops and filed a missing person’s report. But then when I was finally able to come back to 2024, Mom literally hadn’t even finished cooking dinner. No time had passed in 2024 at all. So then I really knew something was up.” David leaned back into his car seat, rubbing his sweating palms on his pants legs. He had stopped watching the scenery of Flint pass by as the car guided itself through the streets, adjusting easily on its own to the press of traffic.

  “I searched through the VR system manual like a maniac—no mention of Ethos. I figured I’d stumbled on some kind of user-generated game. Like, some nerd somewhere had bootlegged the software and made an experience even better and more real than the manufacturers could create. But I searched all the relevant blogs, all the message boards, and no one was talking about Ethos. No one had had the experience of suspended time. If they played on the VR system for forty-five minutes, then forty-five minutes passed in real time, too. Still . . . I told myself I was just lucky. Maybe I’d accidentally exploited the software in some way I didn’t understand yet. I thought I’d figure it out if I just kept playing.

  “And then, one afternoon, I was in Ethos and I got struck by a viratag. It’s a biological weapon that spreads disease. Not serious disease—viratags are more of an annoyance. It’s a way of just handicapping your opponents for a while. Knocking them down with a virus for a couple weeks. So I came down with this virus, and it was making me feel really s***—”

  “Language,” David said automatically.

  “Sorry, Dad,” Malcolm said. Despite the urgency of their conversation, they’d slipped easily back into the rhythms of father and son. “It was making me feel really awful. So I was like, I’m gonna get out of here for a while, I’m gonna go home. But when I came back to 2024 . . . I was still sick.”

  David swallowed hard. He couldn’t process the implications of what Malcolm was saying.

  “And then I got scared,” Malcolm continued, not noticing David’s silence and pallor. “This was a virus from 2524, something we’ve never contended with before. And it meant Ethos had to be real, right? What was happening in what I thought was virtual reality was affecting my actual body in actual reality. So I was in bed here in 2024 for a few days, and then the doctor Mom took me to said he couldn’t do much for me. And so when we got home, I went back to Ethos, thinking, ‘I’ve got to find some way to get better.’ I went to Flint Central Hospital—that’s the main hospital in Flint in 2524—and they had an antigen. I was better in a couple hours. Remember, Dad? How I got better right away?”

  “Yeah,” David said quietly. “I remember.” What Malcolm was saying was so incomprehensible, so horrifying that he felt as if he were drugged. Had his son really found a portal to another dimension of time?

  “Oh,” Malcolm said brightly, “I have to explain why Flint Central was even willing to treat me—because I wasn’t an Immortal yet then.”

  “There’s a lot you need to explain,” David said. It was beginning to sink in fully that if this world that Malcolm kept calling Ethos was a real place, a real time, five hundred years in the future, then David had actually been in danger of his life more than once that afternoon. What would have happened to Malcolm if David had been obliterated on the sidewalks of future-Flint by those guns that literally erased the bodies of the Bereft people he had encountered? How would Malcolm and Lila ever even know what had become of him?

  “Dad?”

  David realized that Malcolm was looking at him, his smooth, youthful brows creased with concern.

  “Dad, are you okay?”

  “I don’t know, son,” David said slowly. “I don’t know what to think.”

  Malcolm put a hand on David’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about this,” he said. “I didn’t know how to explain. And, listen, months have gone by in 2524, while only a couple of weeks have gone by here in 2024. A lot has happened in Ethos—they need me there. I’m Chancellor of the Immortal Council. There’s a war on, between Flint and Detroit. There’s the Bereft problem. I—I’m sorry, Dad, but I just didn’t think about how to tell you. Everything was so much more urgent in Ethos.”

  “A war?” David asked. He was struggling to keep up, and failing hard. “You mean a different war, besides the Great Genetic War?”

  Malcolm broke into a lopsided grin. It struck David as agonizingly inappropriate, given the circumstances.

  “You know about the Great Genetic War?” Malcolm asked, his voice filled with something like pride and excitement. “Dad, I gotta be honest, I’m actually kind of excited you know about Ethos. I really need someone to share this with—”

  “Slow down, Malcolm,” David said. Conflicting emotions were crashing insanely in his chest. He’d felt a surge of happiness to hear that Malcolm was excited to share something with him. He’d wanted so desperately to reconnect with Malcolm for years now; the divorce, coming at the exact same time as Malcolm’s budding manhood, had made him feel so agonizingly distant from his son. But this? Never in a million years would he have wished for this kind of danger, this kind of madness to be their point of reconnection. His kid, his innocent, happy Malcolm, was telling him about time travel and viruses and wars as if these were the most natural things in the world.

  “Okay,” David said haltingly, “so some time in the future, there’s going to be some kind of Great Genetic War, and then there’s going to be another war between Flint and Detroit, of all places?”

  “How do you know about the Great Genetic War, Dad?” Malcolm asked, ignoring David’s question.

  “Nev told me.”

  “Commander Nev?” Malcolm’s face clouded and something akin to the stony expression he had worn in Flint City Hall returned. “You shouldn’t be speaking to a Bereft Commander, Dad. You need to be wary. You can’t trust her—or any of them.”

  Inexplicably, anger welled up in David. “Listen, son, she saved my life. Several times. While you’ve been off gallivanting, making friends and becoming immortal, apparently, Nev literally kept me from being blasted into oblivion by some deranged cops with semiautomatics.”

  Malcolm laughed then, a short, humorless bark. “They aren’t semiautomatics, Dad,” he said with the condescension only a teenager can muster toward a parent. “Those are completely obsolete in Flint. They’re biotogglers. And those cops are far from deranged. They’re highly trained, highly coordinated—I’ve seen to it myself.”

  “Seen to it yourself?” David repeated in disbelief.

  “I’m Chancellor; I told you,” Malcolm said. A tension had sprung up out of nowhere in the car, and David felt himself losing his grip on the conversation, losing his grip on his own sense of reality.

  “Okay, okay,” David said, trying desperately to return to the feeling of connection with Malcolm, that moment when his son had said, so blithely, “I really need someone to share this with.”

  “Look, Malcolm, I believe you. I trust you. You’ve just got to give me time,” David said. “This is a lot. You’re telling me that we both traveled to
the future this afternoon. You’ve got to understand that this is a lot for me.”

  Malcolm’s face softened again. “Of course. I’m sorry, Dad. You’re right.”

  The car came to a stop, and David looked around himself for the first time on their drive through the Flint he knew so well, the Flint of 2024. They were in the semi-darkness of the parking garage underneath his apartment building.

  “You have arrived at your destination,” Sabina said. Her screen on the dashboard switched to black.

  “Why don’t we take a break?” David said. He reached to unbuckle his safety belt with still trembling hands. “Let’s . . . let’s just step back from Ethos for a minute. Let’s be here, today. We’ll get some food, and you can tell me what’s been going on with the Wilders and getting ready for Michigan State, and . . . and we’ll come back to Ethos tomorrow morning. Would that be okay?”

  “Of course that’s okay,” Malcolm said. “Let’s do that.”

  David and Malcolm were sitting in the kitchen of David’s small, two-bedroom condo. Mid-morning sun streamed through the blinds of the window at the far end of the narrow kitchen. Malcolm was leaning back in his chair, his feet pushing against one of the legs of the table, sipping his second mug of black coffee. David thought absent-mindedly that if Lila were there, she would never let Malcolm have coffee, let alone two cups, and she would never let him teeter so precariously backwards in his chair.

  Thank God she didn’t know just how precarious Malcolm’s life had become without either her or David suspecting a thing.

  Malcolm had just finished patiently, slowly, explaining to David everything he knew about the world five hundred years in the future that had become known as Ethos. It had a mysterious, shrouded history.

  The best that Malcolm had been able to glean was that some time around the turn of the twenty-third century, there had been a devastating global conflict. This war had been centuries in the making. International conflict had virtually vanished from the globe, and terrorism, which David was already well familiar with in the twenty-first century, had become the new normal. Governments no longer vied for power; instead, amorphous, extra-governmental organizations sought to undermine the very concept of nationhood. The world became increasingly hazardous and unsteady as governments lost their grip on civilization and terrorist networks infiltrated state after state.