(Originally published in Divergent Realms:
Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories About Neurodivergence.)
Nelly’s preteen body slumped against the rig’s contours, which were shaped like an ebony-black, hollowed-out egg. The heavy visor covered her eyes and pimply forehead, and her hands melded with the button-laced joysticks embedded in the armrests. As she played Frontiers, her favorite game, transparent haptic memory-gel oozed around her body until only her hands and face remained uncovered.
Losing my wife had hit me like a freight train, but I saw no signs of pain on Nelly’s face, no tears. Where did she go in there? What could so effectively insulate her from losing her mother?
“Everyone’s gone home now, Nell. Come and eat,” I said.
She didn’t respond, spinning the joysticks. The rig pivoted a little on its gyroscopic axis, indicating that, wherever she was, she was moving at great speed.
It was odd to see the gel cradle her. Nelly had always cringed from skin-on-skin contact. I hadn’t held her in ten years, since she was old enough to crawl away from me.
“I put aside some food. Nobody’s touched it. Chicken tenders and peas, with extra ketchup.” One of the meals from her short list of acceptable fare. “Come on, there’s nobody around.”
I took a step into the room, the agreed symbol for enough is enough. The haptic gel retreated into the rig’s innards, and the seat swung upright to deposit her on the carpet. We looked at one another, and I knew that I was supposed to say something comforting.
I’ll take care of you. It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.
But fresh pain pounded in my chest, cutting off contact between my body and my brain.
Nelly turned on the hallway light as she shuffled off downstairs, illuminating the mess that had been half-hidden by the gloom. I cringed at the abandoned heaps of dirty clothes, empty chocolate wrappers, clusters of glasses of flat coke. The room smelled of mold and stale sweat. Even with the live-in nurse helping, I hadn’t been able to keep up with the cleaning while taking care of Rachel.
Stung by the sight of the mess, I picked up Nell’s headset and glanced inside at the display, noting the antiquated graphics of Frontiers on pause. The complexity of the menu startled me.
Most other games had inbuilt AIs these days, anticipating what a player wanted and serving it up to them before they were consciously aware of it. Frontiers was much older, a bare-bones crafting game advertised as being infinitely configurable—Minecraft reimagined by the world’s worst pedant. It was notorious for its complexity and cumbersome interface, by all accounts a chore to play. When I first bought the game, I quickly wrote it off as a needlessly intricate sandbox.
I couldn’t remember how to even unpause the game, let alone look around. I heard Nelly coming and hastily put the visor back where I found it.
“We need to get you something else to do, Nell. I’m sorry that I haven’t had much time for you since Mum got sick. But now…” My throat clamped shut and I struggled for a moment. “Drawing. Drawing is good. I used to draw all the time when I was your age. Much better for your brain than whatever they’re piping into that rig.”
Nelly didn’t answer me. The only things she ever said to me were “Can I have a snack?” or “Can I play Frontiers?” When Rachel forced Nelly to write me birthday cards, she had addressed me as Jack instead of Dad. But somehow, I really thought that in that moment she might burst into hot fat tears and come running into my arms.
I was embarrassed by the strength of that fantasy, how much I needed it.
But Nelly simply brushed by me, carrying a plate of chicken tenders. I noticed that half the peas were missing, probably strewn all over the stairs. In moments she wolfed down her food and returned to Frontiers, leaving me alone in the room.
The curtains were drawn, leaving only an inch gap for the intrusion of a few spears of dusty sunlight. It was my daily ritual to stride into the room to throw the curtains open, as though the act might turn Nelly into a normal girl who spoke full sentences and lived in the real world and cared about her sick mother. But today the sunlight seemed to mock me. I couldn’t imagine how the sun could go on, warming skin and nourishing life. Didn’t the world know what I had lost?
Except for the click-clack of the joysticks on Nelly’s rig, the room was as silent as the rest of the house. That silence had reigned over the wake for hours, until the final stragglers fled. The whole thing had been a sorry sight—fifty people crammed into our living room and lean-to extension, eating limp catering that all smelled vaguely of a three-day-old gym bag.
Rachel deserved a better send-off than that.
Nelly had managed only a few minutes downstairs after the first guests arrived, before she slunk away to sit on the stairs with her head buried between her knees. I did my best to smooth things over while friends and family tried not to look at her askance over their sausage rolls.
Her desperation to get upstairs and play hung over the day like a heavy shawl. I felt it snag at my every effort to give the ordeal a shred of dignity. Now, she jerked the joysticks violently in all directions, her fingers a blur on the embedded buttons and spinners.
A childish part of me wished she could at least pretend to be upset, force herself to shed a single tear. Show in some way that she noticed Rachel’s absence.
The rig’s gel had grown up around her black funeral dress. I hadn’t noticed the big rip running down one side. Seeing it made me feel exhausted. All I had asked was that she sit still during the service; I knew she found it difficult, but she could have tried, just once, for me. Instead, she had shuffled her knee all day, filling the church with the swishing of polyester.
Looking at the dress, my patience frayed, then snapped.
“What’s so important in there that it couldn’t wait a day? Even a few minutes,” I hissed.
Nelly paused and pushed up her visor, peering at me with watchful confusion.
All the fight drained out of me. I always felt like such a bully when I confronted her. Humiliated, I avoided her gaze, glancing along the tabletop. I noticed that Nelly had taken one of the red petunias we draped over Rachel’s casket.
“You took a flower from mummy’s service? That’s, uh, that’s nice, honey. That’s good. She’d have liked that.” I didn’t know who I was trying to convince. I fled the room, hiding my face with my wrist. “Put it in water or it’ll die, okay?”
I spent the day cleaning up, trying and failing to remember where Rachel had kept everything. The house seemed to thrum with silence, so much that the rig’s click-clacking seemed deafening.
•••
Frontiers was going to be a problem. With Rachel gone, I needed to focus on Nelly’s wellbeing. We needed to eat right, get some sunlight, process our grief, reconnect. At least, that’s what the internet said.
If I stood a chance of keeping Nelly out of that rig, I had to know where she was going—what was so worth ignoring reality for. I went to my computer and accessed the network logs. She had been in a single Frontiers session all year. Glancing over my shoulder, I used my admin privileges to join the session.
An endless grassy field under a blue sky appeared on the screen. In the distance stood a single mountain, so high it vanished into a haze. Without the visor and chair, the game was hopelessly clunky. After a lot of grabbing at nothing and jumping in place, I found the key to walk forward.
After minutes, nothing seemed to change. I held down the key.
Between bouts of walking in a straight line, I experimented with the controls, but struggled to map my keystrokes to any resulting actions. It took almost an hour before, without warning, my avatar crested a rise, and I spotted Nelly.
Her hands were lost in a cloud of rainbow-colored tendrils. Her brow was creased with concentration. After a minute something emerged from the cloud and shot away up the mountainside. I glimpsed wood, nails, a triangular pane of glass. Nell watched it go, then resumed her work. By the fifth time an object emerged from the cloud, I guessed that she was crafting pieces of a building.
My mind reeled. I had mashed the keyboard hundreds of times to no coherent effect. How was she doing that?
Eventually a last block zipped away, and the cloud dissolved. Nelly gave a casual flick of her heel and flew away in pursuit of her creations.
There was no way for me to follow. I logged off and sat staring at the black screen.
I looked up the game wiki, hoping for a quick tutorial. Instead, I found tens of thousands of pages of documentation, managed by a cult following of only a few dozen people. When I looked for controls on crafting materials, I found not keystrokes, but equations.
Knowing me, I’d need a calculator and a Bunsen burner to craft a simple, untextured cube. But Nelly had been crafting photo-real materials. I had seen grit on that window.
And apparently, she could fly. There was nothing in the wiki about that at all.
The whole thing was clearly a waste of time. But I had to admit that whatever she was doing was mentally demanding. All I had to offer outside Frontiers was a few crayons. I shuddered to think of the tantrum if I pulled her away from the game without something to keep her occupied.
•••
Over the next few days my head rang with muttered condolences. Rachel was such a treasure. Taken from us too soon. You’ll get through it, Jack. Just take it one day at a time.
All of it mixed with Rachel’s pleading. Nelly’s every bit as normal as you and me. She just plays by different rules. No loud noises. No touching. Stick to the rules. It’s not asking for much.
I scrambled for routine, but gravity seemed stronger now—an overwhelming impetus to sink to the floor and stay there.I slouched in front of the TV for endless hours. It wasn’t enough; I found myself playing mobile phone games at the same time, holding the screen inches from my nose, slicing cascades of virtual lemons and grapefruit. I was hiding from the world just like Nelly, from the silence of our home and the gaping hole in my life. Most of all, I hid from the fact that I could barely remember what things had been like when Rachel had been healthy.
A knot of fear blossomed in the pit of my stomach. Was this how it was going to be from now on? I had never learned how to talk to Nelly. Rach had been the one who reacted when the doctors gave us Nelly’s diagnosis, had bought all the books and signed us up to night classes.
From upstairs came the same incessant noise.
Click-click-clack.
Frontiers. Always that same pointless, impossible game.
At night, I stood in Nelly’s bedroom doorway, watching her play. The cartoon elephants painted on the wall grinned in mockery. They were the reason we stopped calling her Isabel and started calling her Nelly. Rachel had paraded her around on her shoulders, singing Nelly the elephant packed her trunk and said goodbye to the circus!
Nelly squealed if anyone else touched her, including me, but Rach had that way with her. She spoke about another person inside Nelly, who was creative and kind and funny, but spoke a language nobody else knew.
Rach had always been an optimist like that. I loved my daughter, but I had never seen that other person; I couldn’t imagine anyone surviving such a prison.
Even after several doctors gave the same diagnosis, I had rejected it. We were going to be rockstar parents, raise a well-adjusted, self-actualized young woman. Charismatic, tough as nails, with a wicked sense of humor.
I had dyslexia as a child, but my parents hadn’t lowered their expectations, even if once or twice it meant beating the spelling into me. This was no different.
But it didn’t go that way. Instead, we woke every day to fix Nelly’s pills and make the same meals. I went to the office, and Rachel took Nelly to school, working from a nearby cafe in case Nelly had a meltdown. Rachel would try to play with her in the evenings, but Nelly couldn’t deal with skin-on-skin contact. Once she was old enough, she disappeared upstairs every night to play Frontiers.
The game had stolen her from us.
Clack-clack-click.
•••
Nelly seemed to sink only deeper into the game. I worried that she might vanish into it altogether. I couldn’t risk her health going downhill. How had Rach charmed her?
I didn’t remember. I remembered so little of our life together. I spent long nights thinking on it, but I kept coming back to that simple horror. At some point, I had surrounded myself with a carapace of work, food, TV marathons, uh huhs and yes honeys.
I had to find a way to fix things, no matter how ugly things got. Rach had treated Nell like glass, but she could handle a little tough love. Her condition wasn’t as bad as some kids at her school—though Rach was always telling me there were no conditions. Just words made up to spotlight people who don’t fit in to a world designed for minds like ours.
Whatever that meant. Life was hard for everyone, and everyone had to adjust.
My sister came to visit. Like me, she never knew how to act around Nelly. We drank tea while looking in at her playing Frontiers. “Jack, it isn’t my place, but look at her. How are you going to get her to stop?” she said.
I didn’t have an answer. But only days later, Nelly sat on Frontiers for twelve straight hours. After she ignored countless instructions to wrap up, I shut down the home network.
Bad mistake. She started screaming before I could begin to explain.
“Nell, stop it. Time’s up!”
She scratched me. She bit her nails a lot, and the jagged edges sliced the back of my hand like a cheese grater. She bared her teeth, and I thought she was about to bite me, but then I realized why she was making that face.
I released her wrist, which had grown pale from my grip. “I’m sorry, Nell. Please, don’t do that. It’s okay, I’m here.” I kissed her clammy palms, but she recoiled.
I stood to leave and caught a glimpse through her visor: a grass-covered mountainside, golden sunlight, patches of red. Beside the visor lay the petunia from the funeral, limp and sad. Nell hadn’t put it in water.
I retreated before she could explode again and checked the Frontiers session from my PC. Nothing seemed different, but she had been in-game for hundreds of hours, and I had seen what she could do with a few minutes. I itched to know what could shield her from the pain of losing Rachel—I couldn’t help but crave that same oblivion.
For the next few days, I let the routine continue, studying her. Nell slept, ate, and played Frontiers. When she wasn’t playing, she stared at the dying flower on her desk. I implored her to put it in water.
I worked when I could, handled condolence cards, and made meals. And now I played Frontiers too. It took me a week to go fifty meters up the mountainside, and I felt every step of the climb. Not in aching legs but in throbbing fingers, as I stabbed the keys over and over. I scoured the net for a workaround and came up with nothing. Frontiers offered no shortcuts.
The steep rock-face diverged into passages that split further into some kind of maze. My mind reeled: she had the capacity to make a three-dimensional puzzle in a game so complicated that I could barely walk in a straight line.
After the maze came a tunnel filled with traps. Then false floors, revolving walls. Beyond that lay a gorge a mile deep with an invisible bridge and a dark shadow that followed me.
I didn’t know much of Frontiers, but I knew enough to be certain these were not standard features. She had designed all this. Despite myself, I became intrigued, maybe even a little addicted. She had no idea I was there, but it almost felt like getting to know her.
Then we would eat together, or I would try to strike up a conversation, and she was the same old Nelly. The obstacles in the game almost seemed to beckon me forward, yet she couldn’t bear my attention in the physical world.
Frontiers kept me busy in the day, but I had the same dream every night: the time we told Nelly about Rach’s leukemia. Nelly had refused to look in our direction, even when we used the buzzword that meant she had to make eye contact. Then she asked for a Twix.
I knew it wasn’t her fault, but I couldn’t handle how much it hurt Rach. I never admitted it, but while I shepherded Rach to ward after ward, something cancerous also grew in me.
All that had to stop. I had to break down the wall between us.
I gathered my courage and went to Nelly’s room. Maybe if I asked her about the world she had built, she would open up.
Then I saw the petunia, still on her desk. A thousand times I had seen her staring at it as it mummified. All I had asked is that she put it in water—to not add to the number of things that wilted to nothing in our home.
My good intentions flash boiled. I bolted into the room and ripped the power cord from the wall. The rig sighed and became an inanimate lump of metal and plastic. Nelly sat motionless for a moment, then pushed off the visor.
I went to her, but she scratched at me. She screeched, making my ears ring.
“No, Nelly. You don’t get to do this. Stop it right now!”
We struggled until she wriggled out of the chair and we both fell to the floor.
“You were everything to her!” I yelled. “Why couldn’t you have given a flying fuck when she went away?”
Nelly screamed so hard that the tendons in her neck threatened to break the skin. I scrambled away. She continued to buck and flail and pull her hair. Not a tantrum, but the desperate wail of a person on fire.
I ran, stumbling through the house, knocking things over. I went to the computer, caught the monitor with the flat of my palm and sent it crashing into the wall. I staggered to the bedroom and fell face-first onto the bed.
•••
Nelly ran away some time in the night.
I had made a peace offering of pancakes drowned in maple syrup, a forbidden favorite. But when ten minutes of coaxing received no response, I went to her bedroom and found it empty. Her school bag was gone, along with stuffed toys, headphones, and the desiccated petunia.
I drove around the neighborhood in a panic. This wasn’t the first time Nelly had run away, but it had been Rach who had the knack for knowing where she might go.
I called my sister and regretted it; she insisted on sitting in the car with me. It didn’t take long for us to start yelling at one another. We drove all over town, posted on social media, and put in a report with the police.
We kept going into the night. In the morning my sister left to go to work, promising to come back later. I kept driving until I started seeing double, then headed home. I made a pot of strong coffee and ate some crackers. My head was pounding and my mouth was dry as sand.
I stood in the hallway and stared into Nelly’s bedroom. The silence of the house skulked at my heels. Fighting the urge to find relief in a bottle of whisky, I entered the room and collapsed into the rig. I touched the impressions that Nelly’s wrists had made in the armrests. Desperate for some clue, I slipped on the visor and, after a brief hesitation over the haptic gel, logged in using Nelly’s account.
For all I could tell, I was now standing on a steep mountainside. The view was like nothing reality could offer: the plain lay miles below, running to an impossible horizon thousands of miles away. The wind licked at my skin, and the activation of all my senses did what my computer monitor could not—reminded me of a family holiday to the beach in Devon. Nelly had been in her lazy phase, big enough to walk yet insistent on being carried. Rach had suffered aching shoulders and we’d bickered about it for most of the trip.
But there had been ten minutes when we stood in the dunes with the evening breeze tickling our sunburned skin. The shape of the dunes split the airflow into turbulent eddies, giving a peculiar feeling, like caresses from the hands of ocean sprites. The similarity of the sensations was uncanny.
But Nelly had been too young to remember such things.
I began to ascend. The mountaintop was still far away; I could only make out the outline of a structure, and a column of smoke. The ground was carpeted with red flowers, leading up in tiered terraces. I was so focused on reaching the peak that it took me a few minutes to realize what they were.
Petunias. I looked around at the endless copies, pristine and heavy with dew, perfect to the smallest detail.
I gripped the rock but a sense of falling persisted. I had felt such rage when Nelly watched the petunia on her desk fade away. But she had made countless more in here, and in here they would never die.
I started walking again, but the shock of brilliant red was inescapable. I broke into a run, almost fell from the terrace. I itched to tear the visor from my head and reach for that whiskey. Anything was better than those velvet-smooth petals, than knowing how much time and effort it had taken to craft them.
But then I reached the mountain peak and all thought was obliterated. When seen from above, the terraces, gorges and the plain much farther below formed a collage. All of it, a single titanic flower.
I had only experienced something similar at the Grand Canyon, something inside me stilled by its sheer enormity. I had the disturbing impression that I couldn’t have rivalled this if I spent a hundred years in the game.
I spun away from it. It was only because I was already reeling that I didn’t cry out the moment I saw what lay nearby.
The house perched on the summit like it belonged there, pine-clad and rickety and smelling of the sea. A mote of the mundane in an impossible place.
For a few vertigo-stricken moments I saw two houses: this glaring anomaly and the real house, as it had been, in those far-distant woods. A doomed camping trip to the Forest of Dean. We had stumbled on it in a glade while trying to calm Nelly, who couldn’t handle the tent or the sleeping bag or anything to do with camping. But when we walked into that house, she had gone quiet. We ate a cheap lunch from a plastic bag while sitting under the crumbling eaves.
I ran my hand over the cladding, paint peeling from the sun, wood made brittle by salt. My memory of the real thing felt like a dream, dredged up from the sludge of a neglected decade. We had eaten limp sandwiches and gotten sticky hands from spilled lemonade. There were spiders and broken bottles and cigarette butts.
But we had giggled ourselves giddy. I couldn’t remember what had been so funny, and the absence of that knowledge stabbed at me. Perhaps it had been some secret that could have made all the other days better, if only we had been able to preserve it.
I went inside and found that the house had more rooms than its real-world twin.
In one room lay the detritus of childhood memories: a favorite red ball, years of train tickets, a doll that had been left in a hotel by accident, the dining table from our old house.
The next room was warm. It took me a minute to realize the warmth wasn’t in the air but under my skin. Something I recognized by instinct; embryonic, timeless, nameless.
One room was filled with my own voice, overheard mean-spirited mutterings that filled my gut with shame.
One was filled with Twix bars from floor to ceiling, which made me laugh out loud.
The last room housed Rach’s laugh, which danced in the rafters and broke the last of me.
Dazed, I fled the house. Outside, I found a burning pyre. It hovered mid-air, a few feet beyond the cliff edge. The fire burned so hot it was almost white. On top lay a body, obscured by the flames but unmistakable in profile. By some optical illusion, the pyre seemed to be receding into open blue skies, though it never got any farther from the cliff. The overall effect was of a burning boat, floating endlessly out to sea.
I recoiled as another memory surfaced. A long weekend at Lyme Regis under a grim sky. The hotel could have been called second-rate by somebody in a charitable mood, but they had served good wine. Rach and I had been singing by sunset, and we’d pinched an extra bottle and staggered with Nelly down to the beachfront.
Delirious at the reprieve from doctors and support groups, we fell about and played silly games. We ended up sitting on the sea wall as the sun ducked below the waves.
“I’ve always wanted a Viking funeral,” Rach said. It would be years before she would hear the diagnosis, but in my jumbled memory her expression was touched with terrible knowing.
She waved the bottle and sank into the sand, slurring, “Don’t let me molder underground or sit in an urn. Put me to sea.”
Nell had promised. That made me mad because we worked so hard not to confuse her. It had been drunken nonsense. A fantasy of being freed from responsibility. Until this moment, like so much else, I had treated it like something to endure and forget.
But someone had remembered everything.
Drunk or not, Rach would have preferred this a thousand times over what I have given her: a cheap plot by the hedges and an awkward wake filled with people I barely knew. I thought I was alone, but the rawness and fury and desolation inside me was painted all over this mountain.
When I had the strength to stand, I took off the visor. I slunk downstairs and found Nelly in the living room, watching TV. Relief and shame washed over me—she was home and safe, but she must have also seen me in the chair, known what I had been doing.
I joined her on the sofa and we watched TV in silence. I waited for her anger, but it never came.
Later, I made dinner and then we went to bed. It took me a whole day to work up the courage to break the stalemate. I made tenders and fries for dinner with ice cream for dessert. Then, I joined her in Frontiers.
I took my time, crossed the wastelands, climbed the mountain. This time there were no traps, no puzzles. She watched my progress from the peak. Sometime in the early hours of the morning I reached the pyre. We stood side by side watching the flames.
“I miss her too,” I said.
