“I just want to see it, Luce. Will you please tell me how to work it?”
“Fine,” Lucy huffed. But she didn’t snatch it out of my hands. Which made me remember that we needed to have a sister movie night sometime soon.
I hooked the holoset over my ear like I’d done with Devin’s, though the fit was a little snugger, and she nodded. “Then you push the button to turn it on.” When I lifted my hand, she jumped up.
“Wait!”
“Yes?” I said, my finger poised on top of the button.
Lucy came around the table to the chair beside mine. She whispered, “You won’t tell Mom and Dad, will you?”
Our parents weren’t around. Dad had already left for work, and Mom was upstairs changing so she could take Lucy to school.
“Tell them what?”
“On me, how I use it.”
“Now I can’t wait to see,” I said, and hit the button.
I blinked in confusion. I was inside the game world, but I wasn’t sure what I was seeing.
Just as the day before, a scene popped into being in front of me. The way holosets worked meant the details of the 3D holo projection were visible in detail only to the gamer, who felt like they were inside the game world, which felt so vivid it almost replaced the real one. But to someone looking on it was just a small blur of light and movement sprayed from the earpiece in front of the user’s face.
This was definitely different than the Worlds War Three landscape. It was all pastels and bright colors and nothing was on fire. The grass was princess pink.
“Trippy,” I said, attempting to get my bearings.
“Try not to talk. People in the game can hear you.” Lucy’s hand clutched my arm. “The holoset tracks your pupil movements and that’s how you’ll move.”
But I didn’t want to move, because I noticed the unicorns standing around me.
The biggest one neighed and trotted in front of me, batting enormous sea-green eyes. She was trailed by three others who each had dangerously sharp-looking horns.
“Hey, Deathmetal,” said the unicorn who stopped in front of me. A black ribbon was wound around the right foreleg it lifted to high-five me. Or high-foot me. Whatever you called it when a unicorn did that.
I glanced down. My own unicorn leg was wrapped in the same renegade style, as were the others’. One even had a black bandana knotted around its pearl gray horn. They might have once been delicate pristine versions of the imaginary creatures who represented the players doing word mini-games and running races and visiting castles as part of mastering Unicorn University. But these unicorns had gone bad.
“This feels so real, Luce,” I said. “You can customize it, I take it?”
But even getting the words out was hard. It felt like what was in the game was realer, almost more than reality, than Lucy’s hand on my arm. Or her voice near my ear.
“When you get enough points to graduate,” she said, low and worried.
“What did you do with Deathmetal?” the first unicorn said, taking a menacing step closer.
Lucy ripped the holoset off my ear and put it onto hers. “That was my sister. You see what I mean, right? She’s terrible. Gotta go.” She took off the holoset slowly, but I was having trouble watching her. The kitchen swam in and out, the odd sensation of coming out of the game worse than the day before. It must be because I’d spent a little longer inside.
I’d done some reading on the manufacturer’s website the night before. The more used to the real-sim tech your brain got, the easier it coped with entering the game—and the more careful you had to be when leaving. Some critics questioned whether it meant the technology might be dangerous, capable of making unintended changes in the brain’s neural pathways.
The kitchen stopped swimming after a few moments, and Lucy didn’t seem to be suffering any ill effects. Because she took her time removing it.
Lucy didn’t say a word, staring down at the holoset as she turned it over in her hands.
When she finally looked up, I’d recovered completely. I crunched a bite of toast and raised my eyebrows. “Lucy,” I said, “are you a killer unicorn?”
“You promised you wouldn’t tell.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” I set the toast back on my plate. “Who are those unicorns?”
“They’re from all over,” she said. “They didn’t want to play stupid unicorns either.”
“So you formed a gang.” I was glad she’d made friends in there. Our many moves hadn’t been easy for her either. “Why Deathmetal?”
She shrugged, sheepish. “It was the least unicorn-y name I could come up with.” She bit her lip, and then blurted, “You’re not really terrible, Lois.”
“Thanks for that, sis. Neither are you.”
*
Thirty-five minutes into first period, I breezed into the admin office. The blond assistant was behind her desk, wearing another flowered ensemble and appearing far less frazzled than she had been yesterday.