Pi in the Sky Read online

  “What is it?” she asks, exasperated. She leans around him so she can keep an eye on the dancers.

  “That’s not really your grandmother,” Ty says.

  Annika’s attention snaps back. “I’ve seen old pictures. I know my grandmother when I see her and that’s her.”

  I can tell by the way Ty’s left eye has begun to twitch that he can’t believe he has to explain something as basic as how the Afterlives work. “I’ll try to make this as easy to understand as possible,” he says slowly, like he’s talking to a four-year-old. “This is your grandfather’s sim, so everyone you see is created from his memory. He is the only real person here. And by real, I mean his essence is still here. His body, of course, isn’t still alive. Following me?”

  Annika’s brows furrow in confusion. “So if I go up to my grandfather, he’ll know who I am, but my grandmother won’t?”

  Ty shakes his head. “Neither of them will. Your grandfather is truly reliving his day exactly as he experienced it the first time. You won’t be born for another forty years, so he doesn’t know you yet. He will only return to his present self for a brief juncture as the sim gets reset for the next event.” Ty pauses to grab a mini hot dog from a waiter’s plate. I grab one, too, and pop it in my mouth. It melts in the perfect combination of warm dough and salty meat. Delicious!

  Annika taps her foot. “And how long till that happens?”

  Ty swallows and dabs at his mouth with a napkin. “In your time frame? Let’s see.” He cups his holoscreen carefully in his hands so no one in the sim will see it. “In about a kilosecond. You’ll be able to talk to him then.”

  She gets ready to run again but Ty puts out his hand to stop her. “Wait. I said we still have a whole kilosecond.”

  “Well, how long is that?”

  Ty looks thoughtful. “Let’s see… if every time a human blinks, three hundred million billion attoseconds have passed, then—”

  “Attoseconds?”

  “You know, the time it takes light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms. About a billionth of a billionth of a second. Isn’t that how you tell time on Earth?”

  “No! We use this.” She holds up her arm. Then, seeing her watch has been replaced by a dainty pearl bracelet, she lets her arm drop. “Well, you know what I mean. Hours, minutes, seconds. That’s about it.”

  “Oh. Then it’s about sixteen minutes and forty seconds.” Ty’s screen beeps and he glances down to read the message. “I need to go attend to a small glitch in a new arrival’s sim,” he says, shoving the holoscreen back in his pocket. “Apparently in her sim it’s supposed to rain pebbles, but instead we’ve got rotten fruit. Making quite a mess, to say nothing of the smell.”

  “How can it rain pebbles?” Annika asks me.

  “The planet she comes from must be very close to its sun. If the ground is molten, it would rain tiny pebbles instead of water droplets like on your planet.”

  “You’re making that up. There’s no—”

  Ty cuts her off. “Stay out of the way until I get back. The Afterlives have rules even I don’t know about. I’m sure we’re breaking at least a dozen of them by being here and I have no idea what would happen if you were to interact with anyone, especially your grandfather. Please do not repay my kindness by trying to find out. Dad will get me demoted to stable detail on Orion Five.” He shudders at the thought.

  “But Ty, wait,” I say, stepping forward. “What if Annika dries off? Is the water in that pond real?”

  Worry crosses Annika’s face and she quickly reaches up to feel her hair. “It’s totally dry!”

  “Don’t worry,” Ty replies. “Just like the people and the food, we replicate the water in the sims. But you won’t need it because the molecules in the air are real, too. You can breathe in all the oxygen you want. For slightly less than a kilosecond longer, that is.”

  “Oh,” Annika says, inhaling deeply. She lets it out slowly and smiles. “Cool.”

  He turns to leave again, but this time it’s Annika who stops him. “Wait! What if my grandfather disappears before this simulation or whatever you call it ends?”

  Ty glances at the dance floor, then shrugs. “We’ll hope for the best.” With a quick salute, he points to a recently vacated bench by the pond, takes one step backward, and disappears.

  Annika shivers. “I’ll never get used to that.” We head over to the bench and sit. Annika positions herself so she can still watch her grandparents. They are now feeding each other pieces of yellow cake and laughing. “Okay, Joss, I’m giving you fair warning. If I’m not distracted really well, I’m going up there no matter what might happen to your brother. Cleaning stables might be good for him.”

  “Trust me, the stables on Orion Five aren’t anything you’d wish on your worst enemy. The smell alone would take a few hundred years to wash off.”

  Annika stands up.

  I pull her back down. Ty may not be my favorite, but no one deserves that fate. And he did bring us here, so I owe it to him to make sure we follow his rules. “All right, all right. How should I distract you? My juggling skills are subpar at best.”

  She shrugs innocently, a gesture I’ve learned to fear. “How about you explain the whole life-on-other-planets thing?”

  I was afraid she’d ask about that. “I can turn my legs into wheels,” I suggest. “Want to see that instead?”

  She shakes her head. “I’ll take you up on that sometime, but this probably isn’t the place.”

  Good point. That would definitely bring us the type of attention Ty warned us against. My only hope may be to stall her until the sim is over. “Well, what do you know about life on other planets already?”

  “Only what my dad’s told me,” she says. “I know astronomers have found lots of planets around other stars, and I know the planets have to be the right distance from their sun so the water doesn’t boil away or freeze. They’d go crazy if they knew about The Realms. Now tell me, who else is out there?”

  I hesitate. The people of Earth have only taken the first baby steps toward exploring space and understanding how to use the materials available to them. They are ahead of a lot of civilizations, but really, REALLY far behind others. Some have figured out how to use the natural resources available on their planets, like humans have, but others can harness the entire energy output of their sun, or their entire galaxy, or have left their home planet long ago. “Just so you know,” I finally say, “I’m really not supposed to tell you anything. We can’t interfere too much with primitive civilizations.”

  She bristles. “Primitive? It’s not like we’ve only recently invented the wheel! We’ve walked on the moon! We have antibiotics and computer chips as small as a grain of sand! We have video games where your body is the controller! Really! You just stand in front of it and—”

  “Okay, okay, maybe primitive was a bad choice of words. You’re more like, not advanced?”

  “That’s just saying the same thing, only slightly nicer! And how can you say you don’t interfere too much? You destroyed a perfectly good planet! Sure, we had our problems, but seriously, to pull us out of time? Who does that?”

  I hold up my hands. “Again, that was not our fault.” I stop short of saying it was her fault.

  “But I don’t understand why it had to happen at all,” she says. “Why does it matter what I saw? No one would have believed me if I told them. They would have thought I had been dreaming, or was making it up.”

  It’s no use telling her I’d already argued her case and lost. “My dad would say it’s the natural order of things. An action has a necessary reaction. The planets aren’t supposed to know about The Realms. Maybe the whole universe would come apart if Earth had been allowed to survive.”

  “Then why would Gluck be telling you to rebuild it?”

  I lean back and shake my head. I’ve been asking myself that, too. I have no answer for her, so I watch the ducks go by in the pond. They’ve sure got it easy. Just bobbing along on the gentle cu