Glenda and Manoj stood at the window for a long time, just looking down toward the village in the foothills of the mountain, waiting for movement. They would have accepted anything: a flicker of light as a pair of car headlights swept around a corner, the blinking of a storefront sign, the pinwheels of emergency spinners as rescue crews flocked to where the snow-covered service road used to empty out onto the town streets. Anything. But everything was paralyzed, stilled. Only the wavering mirage effect, caused by errant drafts of temperature changes between there and here, convinced them that they weren't looking at a world-spanning snapshot.
"I live down there," Glenda said, whispering as if she didn't want to run the risk of her breath fogging the glass and obscuring the town's lights. "My family is down there."
Manoj turned around and took another look at the bed. At first, Glenda had stared at the strange hollow lumpiness of the sheets almost as intensely as she was now staring out the window. Card-carrying nerd that he was, he couldn't stop thinking of a particular scene from a Star Wars movie, which happened to him even more often than he admitted even to his co-workers. In particular, the scene where Yoda dies and passes into the Force.
Like so many other characters in that saga failed to do, he dies in his bed, a heavy blanket pulled up over his tiny 800-year old frame. As the light goes out in his eyes -- a moviemaking feat that Manoj could appreciate even as child, because puppets have no light in their eyes in the first place -- he fades out of existence, and the blanket hangs dome-like in the air for a fraction of a second before settling into the empty space where the Jedi master's body used to be.
The sheets looked almost exactly like that. Once filled, now empty. As if the people under them had evaporated.
He looked back at Glenda, saw her eyes searching the panorama before them even more desperately. He could almost see the fear ratcheting up in her mind. She was putting the pieces together just as he was: the disappearance of guests she was sure were had been assigned to this room, the oddly frozen quality of the town, and the implications for what that would mean for the people living in that town, perhaps even for the world beyond...
Manoj lifted his hand, went to place it on her shoulder and speak some soothing yet-to-be-determined words that would put her mind at ease...
"Dale!" Glenda called, loudly enough to make his hand recoil. He hadn't yet recovered when the second yell came, even more panic-stricken than the first. "DALE!!!"
Manoj actually took a step back, fearing a third volley. But Glenda didn't feel the need, or maybe was no longer thinking of what was happening around her. Her gaze remained fixed on the lights spread out in a loose grid before them. He imagined that on any other night, it would have a been a beautiful sight, a small town alive with light and life on a weekend night. But the stillness they were witnessing was just... unearthly.
Heavy footsteps came thumping down the hall, growing closer. Apparently the message had been received. Dale's form came bursting into the room, a term that was almost literally appropriate because of the way his shoulder slammed hard into the doorjamb as he entered.
"What is it?" Dale asked, skidding to a stop. Glenda turned and walked toward him, her arms rising in need of an embrace, which the security guard provided without hesitation. As her head rested against his collarbone, Dale looked over her and to Manoj for answers. "What happened?"
Manoj shook his head, unsure of where to start. He wondered how long it had been since the walkie in his hand had made any noise. "We don't know where anyone else is," he said after several false starts.
"What are you talking about?" Dale asked, his frustration already visibly starting to build. Manoj already knew this wasn't going to sit well with the guard; he suspected they were two men with similarly rational minds, and he wasn't processing it well, either. It didn't help that the desk clerk Dale cared about was visibly upset.
"There are no other guests," Manoj said. They had only checked one room, but somehow it seemed a fair assumption to make. "And there's nothing moving down in the town."
"Nothing moving," Dale repeated, clearly disbelieving.
"We've been watching for a while," Glenda spoke up, her voice partly muffled because it was pressing against Dale's uniformed shoulder. "There's *no* *one* *down* *there*."
"That can't be," Dale uttered, his arms moving to pull Glenda even more tightly to him. "A whole town full of people can't just--"
"Then where are the cars?" Manoj asked. "Where are the rescue teams? And where are *they*?" He pointed to the empty heaps of sheets behind them.
Dale turned to look, having to swing Glenda along with him a little to get a look. He stared at the rumples for a long time. "There are lots of other explanations," he said flatly.
"Such as?" Manoj replied. He waited, honestly wishing that some plausible alternatives would come forth.
Dale just stood there, unable to provide any answers. Before he had to sputter something out, Glenda spoke, her voice rendered acoustically flat by Dale's fabric-covered chest. "I was okay with taking this job because I could see the whole town from the front door," she said. "If I was worried about my kids, I could just take a look and at least tell myself that things looked okay down there. But I never, *ever* thought..." Suddenly, she looked up into Dale's face. Manoj thought she might be moving to kiss him again, but instead she whispered, "I've got to get down there! I need to see them, to hug them--"
"Okay," Dale said. All trace of uncertainty about leaving the lodge was suddenly gone. "We'll get you home. Right now."
Glenda rested her forehead against his shoulder again, and a look passed between Dale and Manoj, one that conveyed twin feelings of utter bewilderment, about the lodge, the world beyond, and what Dale had just promised.
Manoj turned around and looked down the slope again, toward the town. It was hard to do with Glenda standing beside him, but he tried to clear his mind and look at the situation analytically. He did this all the time at his job, and when he took a moment to consider it, this wasn't all that different. He had been uniquely trained to look at a simulation and determine what was wrong with it, and how to fix it... so what was the issue here?
He took a long look at the scene while Dale and Glenda continued their embrace behind him, then closed his eyes. He redrew the town in his mind's eye, trying to add in all the details he would expect to see from this vantage point. What would a living town contain that this one did not? He mentally conjured what he should be seeing... the flow of cars, the faint waves of traffic-light red and green that would sweep across the orangey arc-sodium background light permeating the streets, the on-off wink of cell towers, the rotating wedges of light that spun as they led to the runway at the tiny airport on the fringe of town.
Once he had visualized this ideal, he opened his eyes and looked for the changes. He found them very quickly. He had been thinking in terms of artificial illumination, because at that moment so soon after midnight, there was nothing else of the town that could be seen. Everything was outlines. Aside from the temperature shimmering between here and there, that light did not shift or move. It was as if...
"You can't go down to the town," he said without turning.
Dale's rational voice answered from behind him, perhaps after a long enough pause that he might have been removing his lips from Glenda's. "Of course we can. There are snowmobiles in the shed--"
"No," Manoj said. "I mean you will be physically unable to get down there."
A longer pause. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"The town's not really there," Manoj said. "Come on." He turned and left the room without looking at them. There were others who would be easier to convince than Dale and Glenda, and he would need them on his side first.
-7.4-
"Can you see where Harmon is?" Kelly was asking Kerren, who still lay across the sofa, her legs necessarily bound and looking around with less confusion every passing second.
"Not exactly," she was saying. Even though she was talking to Kelly, she seemed not to want to look away from Sheryl, who was still clutching her hand. She seemed to not want to look at the author crouching closest to her head. Her eyes pointedly never turned anywhere toward that direction.
For some reason, Kelly didn't want Bruce to be that close to Kerren either. She couldn't exactly put her finger on why -- was it the way his ears seemed to perk up every time something about the injured woman's condition changed? He just seemed too eager to be near her, to touch her, or look at her. It had been endearing at the beginning, when Kelly had thought that he was just a man caring for a stranger, but the longer she was around him, she suspected that there was something else going on. It was still just a hunch, but since she was the only one who had spent enough time with him to know him at all, she felt she should be the one to keep tabs, and run interference if necessary.
Kerren seemed to be searching for words to say. "He was here... well, not exactly here, but in my mind. I think he did... something... that let me wake up, and it's like... he left a part of himself behind. I think can follow back to where he really is."
"It's okay," Sheryl said, smoothing her wife's hair back from her forehead. She seemed not to be listening to Kerren's words carefully. "Just rest. We'll have time to find him later." She kept smoothing Kerren's hair, even after it appeared to be as smoothed as it was going to get.
After a few silent moments had passed, Bruce leaned in close, his voice low and measured. "What else did you see, Kerren?"
Alarm bells were going off in Kelly's head. She had to get this guy away from the injured woman, regardless of how much she admired his work. She was about to say something, anything to stop him from trying to probe any further into Kerren's unconscious visions. Fortunately, she didn't have to speak up, because at that moment they heard Manoj coming down the stairs, followed closely by Dale and Glenda, who were following in step, their hands entwined.
"Did you find anyone?" Kelly asked, loudly enough to drown out any answer that Kerren might be starting to reply with. Everyone's attention refocused, and Kelly breathed an inward sigh.
Manoj didn't speak right away, giving Sheryl enough time to interject, almost panicked with joy, "Kerren's awake! She's okay!"
In the relieved reactions that followed, Manoj managed to get close enough to the couch so that he could only be heard by Kelly. "I need to talk to you and Mr. Chase for a moment. Can we speak over by the desk?"
Kelly's eyes furrowed, not because of her boyfriend's strange request, but because it included the author whose conduct she was finding more and more suspicious. "What is it?" she asked.
His brow furrowed, Manoj just nodded toward the wooden counter on the other side of the room. "Over there. Could we?"
He was overtaken by Dale and Glenda, the couple rushing forward to greet Kerren, now that she had returned to their little group. In contrast, he didn't seem the least bit interested. His eyes were fixed solely on Kelly's, and his intensity unnerved her.
"Sure," she found herself saying, and without thinking about it she reached around Sheryl and touched Bruce's arm. The older man's skin was cool, more so than she expected, even though he had no sleeves and the large room had grown chilly. When he looked at her, she got up. "Manoj wants to talk to us." She turned and walked away with no further explanation.
As she followed Manoj's white bathrobe across the lobby to the broken lobby desk, she considered his expression as he had spoken to her. She had seen it once before, when they were discussing a particularly knotty problem in the sports videogame they had met while collaborating on. It had been one of those moments where real-world physics and enjoyable gameplay butted heads, and she had watched as he had combined her thoughts on the problem and his, and turned them into a series of hand-drawn flowcharts and diagrams that spread out farther and farther across the conference room table they worked at. By the time they had worked it all through, she had been wishing that he would sweep them off with one quick motion and lay her across the table in their place.
A similar look of concentration was on his face now, but it evoked an entirely different emotion in her. Clearly, there were things that weren't adding up for him, and he needed to talk them through. That explained why he was asking for help, but what did they need Bruce Casey for?
She placed a hand on Manoj's shoulder after he had reached the front desk and stood, facing away from her, for several seconds. His head lifted and he turned, his puzzled look easing a little once he knew she was there.
"What's the situation?" Bruce asked, coming up to them. It was clear that he wanted to get back to the small group of people standing in wonderment around the resurrected Kerren, listening to her once again state that she might be able to find Harmon, and the subsequent start of another argument between Dale and Glenda, albeit one less passionate than before.
Manoj looked at both Kelly and Bruce gravely before saying, "We found a few things upstairs, Glenda and me. First of all, there are no other people in the lodge. The shapes they left in their bedclothes are still there, but their bodies are gone. Disappeared." When that was met with two pairs of silent, uncomprehending eyes, he blundered ahead. "It led me to my second conclusion, which is this..." He was steeling himself, and finally it came out. "Although we can see it from here, I don't think the town is really there anymore. I could see it from the second floor, but it's empty. Like the beds. I think what we're seeing when we look out the windows is mostly a simulation."
A silent moment passed, and then Bruce asked calmly, as if testing how the word felt in his mouth. "A simulation?"
Manoj spoke evenly, methodically. It kind of made Kelly want to tear her hair out as he went on. "I wondered if maybe I was seeing things. But it's clear that there's no motion going on down there. It looks normal, until you watch it for a little while. You realize that there are no moving lights. No cars going up and down the streets, no changing traffic signals, nothing. Once I saw this, I realized there were two possibilities: that what I was looking at wasn't the real town, or that it was, and it had just been ... taken outside of time."
"Outside?" Bruce asked. "You mean, stopped time? Is that what you're talking about?" He had the casual sound of a man who experienced this sort regularly, or at least thought about it, and Kelly realized it was his world-famous imagination that had made Manoj pull him aside as well as her.
"Right," Manoj said. "That's what I thought it was at first, but the lights do waver, because of the atmospheric disturbances between here and there. Like the motion of mirages in the distances. The cool air down at the snow level makes the warmer air higher up bend the light in strange ways."
"So that wavering is still there," Bruce said, now speaking as if he were trying to expand on Manoj's logic. Kelly understood, but just barely.
Manoj nodded. "Exactly."
"Are those really the only two options here? A fake town or frozen time?" she asked.
"I've tried to find another," Manoj said, "but it's the best I could do. Mr. Casey, I was hoping that I could have you think about this one, too. Is it possible that we -- us, the lodge, and some of the surrounding terrain, considering we can still communicate with Harmon, who got some distance away down the slope before he was covered -- that we all could have been *transplanted* somehow?"
God help them, Bruce seemed to be seriously mulling this over. His eyes roamed over his immediate surroundings as if the answers to all their questions were written there, scattered across the floors and furniture, and he his job was only to piece them together. "It would explain certain things..." he murmured, almost to himself. "Almost as if the force of the avalanche... moved us somehow..."
Kelly couldn't help but roll her eyes. "Come on, guys," she said. "Are we seriously considering this?"
Bruce looked as if she had just slapped him. "Of course. Even beyond the disappearance of the other guests, and what Manoj has said about the town at the base of the mountain, there are other things going on here that can't be easily accounted for."
"Such as?" Kelly asked, crossing her arms.
Bruce looked between the two of them, as if he had just been caught stealing something. She waited patiently, eyebrow arched, for his answer.
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