“I’m so happy we understand each other. Now, you have one hour to clean yourselves up, get dressed, and prepare for your first day of school. Good luck, students. You’ll need it!”
The hologram hadn’t explained much. If anything, I had more questions after her speech than I’d had before. But punishment sounded like something I wanted to avoid, so I followed Jenny Perez’s orders and suggested the others do the same. I took a shower. I found my schedule when I looked at my hand. There were clothes in my size in a footlocker with my name on it by the bunk I’d woken up in. I put on the first things I grabbed. I fell into the crowd and took the escalators to the surface for school.
It was surreal. I didn’t know where I was, but it looked like Earth. Blue sky, trees, clouds. Even the school buildings seemed like they’d been lifted right out of a TV show. But this wasn’t a program. Each of us remembered dying, we were all being held against our will, and our teachers were robots.
My first period was an orientation for new students where my Teacher played a video to show us what happened to anyone who broke the rules. All I’m gonna say about that is I’m glad I hadn’t eaten breakfast. What they did to anyone who got injured or sick was equally bad. Instead of punishment, they were sent for reconstruction.
I was determined to stay out of trouble, especially after a kid in my second-period class lost it, and a Teacher came in and dragged her away. Jenny Perez hadn’t been exaggerating.
For the rest of that day, I went to my classes, but I don’t remember what happened during any of them. I couldn’t help wondering if I’d died and gone to hell. The idea didn’t seem less rational than anything else I could come up with.
But I wasn’t in hell. I realized that when I spotted Nico on my second day as I was walking to third period. If Nico was there, maybe I was in heaven.
“Nico?”
When Nico saw me, he dropped his books and sprinted across the quad, shoving aside anyone who got in his way. He threw his arms around my neck and kissed me. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed since I’d last seen his beautiful smile, but it felt like it’d been forever. I melted into Nico’s arms. I cried. I sobbed so hard that other students stopped to stare.
“Hey,” he said, brushing my hair back. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re both here. We’re alive.” He kissed my forehead and led me to a quiet hall. “I need you to pull it together. I’ve got to get to moral philosophy, and while Production doesn’t mind a good crying scene, they don’t care for ugly crying.”
No one cried uglier than me. My face got splotchy and my eyes bloodshot. But Nico had to understand that I was crying because I was happy and because I was scared and because I’d been there when he’d died. A maelstrom of conflicting emotions was threatening to overwhelm me.
Nico kissed me again. “We are going to be okay.”
I wanted to believe him. “What do we do now?” I asked. “How do we escape?”
“Quiet,” Nico said. “I’ll find you at lunch, but I have to get to class. You’d better go too. You don’t want to be punished. Trust me.” Before I could stop him, he slipped into the stream of students heading away from me and was gone.
Losing Nico had been the worst trauma I’d ever experienced, and that included being trapped on a space station with zombies. Finding him again was like finding a lost piece of my soul. I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the morning. It was apparently so distracting that a Teacher threatened to punish me if I didn’t stop.
True to his word, Nico tracked me down at lunch and told me he wanted to show me his favorite spot. He led me to the football field and under the bleachers. The moment we passed into the shadows, Nico kissed me until I couldn’t breathe. He wrapped his arms around my waist and kissed me like our last kiss had only been practice. He kissed me like someone who had believed he would never see me again. And when he pulled away, he had tears running down his cheeks.
“What’s going on, Nico?” I asked. “We were on Arcas and you died. I died.”
Nico brushed his lips across my knuckles. “How did you go? You didn’t get sick, did you?”
I shook my head. “Cornered in an airlock by zombies. I blew the hatch, figuring I could pressurize it when they were gone, but I guess that didn’t work out so well.” I looked around. “Or did it? Where are we?”
“I don’t know where we are, but it’s not real.” Nico huffed like he was frustrated. “It’s real in that it’s actually happening, but it’s part of a program. Sort of. Production is watching us, but only so they can decide where to use us next. They’re not actually broadcasting what happens here.”
Nothing Nico was saying made sense, and he was talking so quickly that I had to wait until he took a breath to speak. “What happened to us on that station felt pretty real to me.”
“We were secondary characters on a program called Outbreak on Arcas. Our only function was to die.” Even as Nico was saying it, I could tell he didn’t quite believe it either. “Production keeps recycling us. We get assigned to a program. When we die or outlive our storyline, they bring us to a school where we wait for our next assignment. Then they rewrite our memories with whatever character they’ve decided we’re going to play, and it starts all over again.”
“I remember my parents,” I said. “And school.”
“Those aren’t your memories.” Nico held on to my hand like it was an anchor. “There’s more.” He kept going without giving me time to absorb what he’d already said. “I’ve been talking to people, and I think they also do something to us that slows down our aging. I heard a rumor about a student who might be in her early thirties, but they just assigned her to play a high school freshman.”
My knees were too weak hold me up. I sat on the dirt, not caring what might be in it. “So this Production just wipes our memories clean and pops in some new ones?”
“It’s slightly more complicated than that,” Nico said. “They can’t change our fundamental personalities, but they can swap out our memories with memories harvested from other students and create new backstories to make us more interesting.”
“I’m not real.” It was too much to process. I felt like my brain had disconnected from my body to protect itself. “None of this is real.”
Nico was crouching beside me. He cupped my chin in his hand. “You’re real. My feelings for you are real. None of this changes that.”
“How can it not?” I asked.
“Because we are who we are now.” Nico kissed my forehead, lingering. “I love you. Do you love me?”
I nodded, unable to speak.
“Then that’s what matters.”
My entire body shook as I fell into Nico, just holding him. He was alive, which was everything I’d wanted after he’d died. But I felt like we were in the eye of a hurricane, death and destruction swirling around us.
“What do we do?” I still had a lot of questions about the school and Teachers and who Production was and how they abducted us, but those could wait.
“I’m working on that,” Nico said. “Security is tight, and I don’t know where we are. I suspect we’re on a planet or a very large ship. With your computer skills, we should be able to learn more. But we have to be careful. If Production catches us—”