-13-

Virginia had barely started tidying up the kitchen when she heard the email arrive. She brought her laptop out to the table where the light was better and sat down to read.

  I had my mouth full of sandwich when I noticed a flurry of activity at the front of the bus, centered on the driver, although I couldn’t see him from where I was. The next thing I knew, a different voice came over the loudspeaker. “All right, folks, don’t panic. The situation is under control. We have taken over the bus and will be redirecting it. Everyone stay in your seats. Do not get up for any reason. We’ll let you know when we arrive at our new destination.”

The bus has been hijacked! Who could it be? I was wondering how much action we could have if the real people couldn’t interact with the virtual ones. I even thought that if I asked Steve, he might tell me that action is passé, and these days novels are all about—what? I don’t even know.

  Everyone was trying to figure out what was going on. I looked at the girl next to me, and she shook her head that she had no idea. “Who are you?” someone called out. We could see the woman with the microphone, but she looked just like one of us. In fact, I thought I remembered seeing her sitting in one of the forward seats when I boarded. The driver’s back was to us, and his face was hidden. He had his hands raised and seemed to be obeying instructions from a guy with a gun.

Oh great, someone’s going to get shot. I would say it’s not realistic, but it is. People get shot all the time for no reason at all. But do we have to read about it? Can’t we leave it out of the virtual world? And what happens when a virtual person gets shot, anyway? Does it matter if the gun is virtual?

  The woman didn’t answer the shouted question, so we all had to keep on wondering who they were. She turned to confer in a low tone with her confederate. Nobody budged. We waited to see what was happening. The driver moved out of his seat, the woman sat down in it, and the bus, which had been idling, began moving slowly forward. “Where are you taking us?” called another passenger. Then someone asked the question that was on all our minds. “Are you real or virtual?”

  The guy with the gun, who had immobilized the driver somehow—I couldn’t see how—took over the microphone. “Why do you want to know?” he asked with some heat. “So you can feel superior? Anyway, what makes you think you know the difference? And what the hell is the difference? Haven’t you read the Bible? ‘When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.’  What is that if not virtual? You’re all a bunch of imitations, but you walk around pretending to be the real thing. Imposters!”

  “I don’t believe in God,” muttered my companion.

I don’t believe in God either, but it does show that people have been wrestling with the issue for thousands of years. And here we thought it was a recent problem! But it’s true, isn’t it? I didn’t make myself, no matter how much I feel as if I did. Real Paris is long gone, but how much less real is virtual Paris? I should look it up.

  We drove along the riverbank for a while, that one that loops through the center of Paris and has all those bridges over it. We finally took one of the bridges and got into a high traffic area, but eventually we reached a circle kind of thing with some kind of monument in the middle. The bus pulled to the side and stopped. “Everybody out!”

I like this narrator being such a flake. Probably anyone else would give you detailed historical background, or at least a description, of all that Paris stuff. But after all, he’s just been taken hostage, you can’t expect his brain to be working normally. In fact, I’ve heard people sometimes forget everything in a situation like this. Although I suspect most readers don’t care how accurately you depict the mental state of your character, they just want to get the story.

  People were looking at each other, making low comments, deciding what to do. Once we started getting off, it was quite orderly and went pretty fast. I made sure I followed the person in front of me and did as little as possible to draw attention to myself, because I didn’t want to find out the answer to my question about what happens if you get shot with a virtual gun.

Wait a minute, that wasn’t his question, that was my question. What is going on here?

  They sent us down some steps into a tunnel that led to a metro stop. I couldn’t imagine this virtual Paris deal could be a big enough operation to reproduce the entire Paris metro system, especially if they couldn’t handle the Louvre, which after all was only one building, whereas the subway was under the whole city. In some ways, I kept expecting to run up against a wall that would mark the edge of the virtual world. Maybe there would even be a sign saying something like, YOU ARE NOW LEAVING. COME AGAIN SOON.

  There were other people in the tunnel, but they didn’t make eye contact with us, and they didn’t seem to notice that we were being herded along by a guy with a gun. When the tunnel opened up and we came out to where we were looking across the tracks at the platform on the other side, a bell rang, and a door closed off the tunnel behind us to prevent anyone else from coming out. A train was arriving. The gun guy was on the other side of the closed door, presumably on purpose, and I figured he was hightailing it for the exit at that moment.

So, hold it, I mean, why did they hijack the bus?

I don’t know. I guess they wanted a bus. Most of us got on the train, because really we just wanted to get out of there. I think a few people might have hung around, but the rest of us were really anxious to get away from those folks who took over the bus. Even though we had no idea where the train was going or how we were going to get back to our own world, we kind of instinctively kept moving. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, all things considered, but what would you have done?

Hard to say without being there, but I’m thinking about what they always taught us to do if you’re lost: sit still and wait for someone to find you.

Sure, hindsight is 20/20. But I have to admit that we must be fairly closely related to sheep, and I for one just followed the flock. The last thing I wanted was to be waiting next to the train car all by myself. So there we were all crowded together in the car, which immediately took off. We were still kind of looking at each other suspiciously, wondering if the person next to us was a virtual plant, ready to pull a gun on us. I was standing hanging onto a shiny metal pole, bracing my feet against the movement of the train as it gathered speed. It wasn’t too noisy, considering how old it looked. I glanced around to see if I could find anything posted about which line we were on or what stop was next. Up near the ceiling there was a long sign with a horizontal list of names that I figured had to be what I was looking for, but since I had no familiarity with the underground system, it was incomprehensible to me. Anyway, it turned out not to make any difference whatsoever, because when we got to the next station, the train didn’t stop; it just kept going.

Uh oh. They haven’t escaped at all; they’ve been taken hostage. I wonder where they’re going to end up. Somewhere within virtual Paris, do you suppose? or maybe some place virtual that’s not Paris? Is that possible? but of course, this is just fiction, it’s not real, it’s made up—anything is possible.