| Generated by Google Flow text-to-video AI software, powered by Veo 2 |
Leona, Olimpia, and Romana were on a trip together in Portland. They checked
into a hotel for one night, but then they left to rough it in a cabin in the
woods far outside of town. This was a bonding experience meant to strengthen
Leona’s relationship with Olimpia, and create a relationship between
Olimpia and Romana. The former seemed to be okay with the three-person
arrangement that her parents had, but she hadn’t spent much time with their
third. They weren’t intending on her becoming a second mother—especially not
since Romana was approaching adulthood—but it was important for them to get
to know each other better.
“Do you still know where you’re going?” Olimpia asked. They were on a hike
now, straight away from their cabin.
Leona checked the satnav on her watch. “Absolutely, I do. Not far now.”
“I hear the highway,” Romana said. “We’re not in the middle of nowhere
anymore. If we need to stop and ask for directions, I’m sure it’s fine.”
“That you can hear the highway is a good sign,” Leona said. “The surprise
isn’t remote.”
“What is it?” Olimpia asked for the umpteenth time, knowing that she would
not receive an answer this time either.
“Just be patient.” We’re really close. She wasn’t wrong. Ten minutes later,
they were passing through the trees, and onto the edges of some town.
“Welcome...to Kansas City.”
“We walked all the way back to Kansas City?” Olimpia questioned. “What did
we do, teleport?” She laughed.
“Kansas City...Oregon,” Leona clarified.
“Is that even a thing?” Romana asked.
“Clearly. You may now look at your phones.”
They both pulled them out, but Romana was faster. “There’s, like, fifteen
people here.”
“I know. Cool, though, right?” Leona said with her hands on her hips.
“This was the surprise? A few people moved here from Missouri, and were too
unoriginal to come up with a new name.”
“Well, I thought it was interesting.”
Olimpia turned around. “I’m headed back.”
“Oh come on, there’s a pool hall,” Leona whined.
“There is a pool hall,” Romana confirmed, still looking at her phone.
“It’s pretty much all there is at this point. There isn’t even a
restaurant.” She dropped her hand, and stood there with a blank face.
“There’s a school too.”
“No, it closed down.”
“Since when?”
Romana lifted her phone again. “Today.”
“Oh.”
“They had to finish up some summer schooling, but now it’s over.”
“Well, I’m sorry I wasted our time. I thought we could take a picture in
front of the town sign. Ya know, like what people do when they go to a small
town that shares its name with their surname?” She looked out, and blocked
the sun with her hand. “It should be somewhere on that other road over
there.”
“No, they took the sign down too,” Romana explained to her. The county
stepped in, because it’s an unincorporated community, instead of a real
town. So they weren’t allowed to have a sign anymore.”
“Fine,” Leona lamented.
“It’s all right, I still got my steps in today.” Olimpia looked at her own
watch. “Eleven kilometers, not bad.” She patted Leona on the back. “That’s
reason enough to come here.”
“Can we just take some pictures at least?” Leona begged.
“Sure. Let’s walk closer and get some more steps.”
They took a few photos of each other near one of the few buildings, which
must have been a barn, or something. They went to check out the pool hall,
but it was very smoky, and gross, so they didn’t even play one round. They
just left, and started hiking back to the cabin. Leona was more upset than
any of them at how anticlimactic this was. She kept walking with a frowny
face, which the other two kept trying to pull back up at the corners.
Eventually, she was able to forget about the whole thing, and get back to
normal. It was only one day, and the hike was still lovely, so it wasn’t
like it was a total waste of time. Besides, they would be able to laugh
about it later, and tell a decent story at parties. Or so they thought,
until Olimpia fell.
They were on a narrow trail on a ridge, switching their order organically
and unintentionally. Each new leader would warn those behind of obstacles or
dangers awaiting them. Unfortunately, this meant that one of them would not
enjoy any given warning. Before Olimpia had the chance to inform the other
two of a loose rock in the soft dirt, she became the victim of it. At first,
she believed that she was okay. She caught herself on a whip tree, and even
had enough time to say, “I’m good” before the pole trunk snapped under her
weight, and dropped her over the edge. She fell so far, Leona and Romana
couldn’t even tell how far it was. She kept tumbling and tumbling down the
hill, ultimately disappearing through the forest, but they could hear the
sounds of her knocking against things as she kept going, and her screams.
“Stay here,” Leona ordered her daughter.
“You’re not going after her.”
“Of course I’m going after her.”
“You’ll die too! You think it’s gonna be easier for you to get down than
her?”
“She started on her back, and gained too much momentum,” Leona reasoned as
she was dropping her pack. She took out her trekking poles, which she so far
hadn’t bothered using. “I have the luxury of being more careful. We can’t
just leave her.”
“I’m not saying that. We need to call for help.”
“Yeah, you do that,” Leona said as she was starting down the hill. “We don’t
know how long that’s gonna take, though. I need to go assess the situation.
That’s why we brought radio transceivers in addition to the sat phone. I’ll
stay in contact from down there. Call S&R.”
“Be careful,” Romana warned, as if that could ever help.
“Yeah.” Leona cautiously walked down the hill with her four appendages, but
it was taking too long. If she were going up, she could just keep climbing
and climbing, but facing forwards, she had to be mindful of where she placed
the tip of her pole. It could sink into mud, or slide on a thick leaf, and
then it would literally be downhill from here. Momentum was Olimpia’s
problem, but it was going to be Leona’s solution. Now that Romana probably
couldn’t see her anymore, she started to slide—not uncontrollably, but more
like she was on a snowboard. She went as fast as she could, leaning back to
keep herself from tipping over. She still used the poles to slow herself
down a little, and occasionally catch herself on a tree. As she got the hang
of it, it actually started to be less like snowboarding, and more like
skiing. She could just about glide down like a pro, like this hill was
designed for it. Then she hit an invisible root, which reminded her why boot
skiing wasn’t a real thing. She did tip over, and fell right on her face.
Her ass flew up over her, and sent her rolling farther down, and just like
Olimpia before, she couldn’t stop herself. She kept going and going until
she felt a sharp crack in the back of her neck, and the lights went out.
“Mama! Mama!” Leona could hear. It was Romana.
Leona fluttered her eyes open to see that pretty face looking down at her.
“Roma,” she whispered.
“She’s awake,” Romana said to someone out of view.
Olimpia’s equally pretty face appeared above her. “How is that possible? Her
neck was broken. I swear, it was broken.”
“Clearly not,” Romana argued.
“Help me up, daughter.” With Romana’s aid, Leona got into a seated position.
She leaned back against a boulder on the edge of a creek, and looked up at
Olimpia, who was absolutely covered in blood; not quite like Carrie White,
but not entirely unlike her either. “How are you alive?”
“I don’t know,” Olimpia replied. “I guess we’re both lucky.”
“Where’s the rescue team?” Leona asked.
“They’re not here yet,” Romana answered. “They said that it would be a
couple of hours.”
“That’s funny,” Leona began. “They would be your only way down here since I
explicitly ordered you to stay up there.”
“I’m younger than you two,” Romana reasoned. “I have better balance. Even
with these things.”
Leona scoffed. Ever since Romana’s boobs came in, she was always talking
about them...like Leona ought to be jealous. “You’ll get sick of ‘em.” She
struggled to stand up all the way. “I’m all right, I can do it,” she
insisted when Romana tried to help again. She looked up at the sky as if she
would see a helicopter on its way. “You need to wash yourself off. You
survived something that you probably shouldn’t have, and we don’t need
people asking questions.”
“What are we?” Olimpia asked. “Superheroes, or something?”
“I’ve never saved anyone in my life,” Leona replied.
“Yes, you have, you’ve saved trillions,” Romana said.
“What?”
Romana flinched, and took a beat. “What?”
That wasn’t true, yet it did sound right somehow. Leona turned back to
Olimpia. “Get in the water.”
“I don’t wanna get dysentery.”
“Just don’t get any in your mouth, you’ll be fine,” Leona assured her.
“You could also use these,” Romana countered. She removed a pack of wet
wipes from the side pocket on her pack, which she managed to keep on her
person.
“Thank you,” Olimpia said, graciously accepting them from her. “I’m gonna
need them all, I think,” she decided, looking down at the mess. “And a
change of clothes?”
“I can afford it,” Romana told her, “and certainly. How do you feel about
pink crop tops?”
Olimpia stripped down and cleaned herself up. In the meantime, Romana tried
to cancel search and rescue, but that went against protocol. They said that
they couldn’t just turn around and erase the mission from their logs. She
could be under duress, or suffering from a concussion that made her
confused. They received a distress call, and were obligated to go out and
investigate. Welp, they would have to lie and say that it wasn’t as serious
as they thought. Romana wasn’t lying about the crop top, though. For
Olimpia’s larger frame, however, it was extra croppy; more like a bra. They
opted to climb back up the ridge. It wasn’t safe, but they seemed to be some
kind of invincible, and they were hoping to find Olimpia’s bag along the way.
They did, which allowed her to change into her own extra set of clothes
instead.
They found Leona’s bag back up on the ridge trail. After taking a stop to
drink water, they simply continued on their way. Oddly enough, the rescue
team didn’t show up, and never called back. Concerned, Leona called them
again an hour later, but the line was dead. “The phone number you are trying to reach is unavailable, or has been
disconnected. Please check the number, and try your call again.” They tried a few more times, and still got nothing. That was super
bizarre, but not their problem anymore. They just returned to the cabin, and
collapsed on their respective bunks.
The next day, they got back in touch with the boys back in the regular
Kansas City area. They immediately confessed what happened to them on that
ridge, which prompted Mateo to admit that something similar happened to
them, though less accidentally. There was something going on between the
four of them, and their neighbors, the Walton twins. Even though they had no
clue what was happening, their instincts were telling them that Romana was a
lot more fragile, and her durability should not be tested with stabbings,
falls, or surge protector strikes. Still, she was one of them, and other
than Boyd, and maybe Pacey, no one else was. The more they thought on it,
the more convinced they were that they were in a simulation. They had
customers and clients and employees, but none of them could relate any
specific story about one of them. They couldn’t remember the last time they
were at the dentist, or a conversation they had with a classmate. There was
something wrong with their memories. That was what it all came down to. And
Pacey. He knew something. They could feel it.
The girls boarded their plane, and went back home, or at least that was what
they believed. They didn’t have any memory of that either. Not clearly. They
returned with the impression that a sufficient amount of time had passed
between Portland and Mission Hills, and it seemed like they were at the
airport, and then on a plane, but they had no recollection of it. They
needed answers, and they needed to find a way to get those answers without
their memories being messed with again, if that was really what was
happening at all. They didn’t know. They didn’t know anything. Maybe
confronting Pacey wasn’t the right call. Maybe all they could do was go out
and push the boundaries. If none of this was real, there would be clues.
There would be little rendering mistakes, and coding copies. Ramses called
this geometry instancing. If they were in a virtual environment, each blade
of grass would probably just be a copy, repeated from a single block of
code. Through enough examination, they should be able to detect this, even
though they obviously couldn’t read the code directly. Hopefully, whoever
was watching over them—if anyone—wouldn’t catch them in the act. Perhaps a
distraction was in order?
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