[Issue 2023.66]

‘Out of Bounds’, Anna Ziegelhof

Art © 2023 Cécile Matthey

---

I watched my hand, blurred by the turquoise ocean. I imagined a vast unseen world beneath. Nothing down there would deign to pay attention to me. I was unnoticed and insignificant. I moved my hand, palm up, back toward me and said goodbye to the ocean for today. I paddled the board back to the beach. It was nice to move my muscles against the resistance of the water. It felt good to carry the weight of the board and feel the sand under my feet. An evening breeze ruffled through my wet hair. Goosebumps rose on my skin. So real.

I had some time left. I was going to stay a while and watch the sunset.

A beachcomber strolled along the shore. They stopped, picked something up, studied it, pocketed it. Sweet detail. I raised my hand in greeting to see if they would interact. They turned to me but stayed still, a sharp silhouette against the orange sky, long hair moving in the breeze. I received a nod in response to my greeting, then the beachcomber walked on. A ray of fading sunlight glinted off the slow-lapping waves, blinding me. When my vision cleared, the beachcomber was gone. Time for me to leave, too.

---

I sat on a chalet’s doorstep in winter sunshine, fingers wrapped around an earthenware mug. Hot chocolate steam rose from it, thick, rich. The snow glistened. The sky was endless, the ridges of the mountains distinct against the cloudless expanse. I had never breathed air so pristine. When I opened my eyes again after focusing on nothing but breathing for a moment, a familiar outline had intruded into the scene. The beachcomber had appeared again. I recognized them by their long hair. I raised one hand in greeting. They nodded in response, hidden by their own shadow. I got up and took a few steps into the powdery snow. The beachcomber turned, hastened down the hill and disappeared from view.

---

At a Saturday morning market, the taste of a waffle, its sugary texture and the feeling of its warmth still lingered in my mouth. At the produce stand, my eyes caressed the palette of green kale, orange carrots, yellow bell peppers, and red tomatoes, when the beachcomber met my gaze from across the market stall. I had never seen their face clearly, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that it was the same person.

I placed a perfect apple back into a basket and made my way toward the beachcomber. I was going to get to the bottom of this glitch. A lady pulling a shopping trolley blocked my way and while we negotiated a friendly ‘you first,’ ‘no, please, after you,’ I saw the beachcomber trying to get away, ducking between the tarp of a stall where pickles were sold and the wooden hut where a baker had rustic loaves on display. The beachcomber wasn’t running, merely striding, throwing teasing glances behind them, nearly allowing me to catch up.

I must have unlocked a game.

We left the market. The beachcomber disappeared into a narrow alley between timber-framed houses with red geraniums in window boxes. I took a few running steps to catch up. Backlit by morning sunlight flowing through the alley, there they were again. They pointed, up and above me. I turned. They chuckled, a mellifluous triad. They had pointed toward the top of a hill outside the small town. I noticed a structure up there. A wayfarer’s chapel, maybe.

“Worth a visit?” I asked and turned back around. The beachcomber was gone. I laughed. A game, alright.

A paved path led into the forest and sloped up the hill. It was quiet here on a Saturday morning. My breath went heavier, my heart beat fast, my leg muscles worked as I ascended the hill. The paved path turned into soft forest floor. The birds sang. I caught glimpses of the view, here and there, between the trees. A small town, beyond and around it green fields of early summer. The landscape stretched, clear, to the horizon.

There was a final switchback, then I arrived at the structure, a sandstone chapel. Three well-trodden steps led to a gothic oak portal. The chapel’s narrow stained-glass windows must be beautiful from the inside, daylight winking in. On a bench in front of the chapel, turned toward the view below, there was the beachcomber. Their hair, long and thin and moved by the breeze, hung down across the back of the bench. Their arms were spread across the backrest in a gesture of comfort and confidence. They turned around to me and grinned, mischievous, tight-lipped, and content.

I presented a small basket of plump strawberries from the market. The beachcomber reached for one.

“So real,” they said.

I sat down next to them. So real.

“Are you supposed to be here?” I asked. “I thought the destinations were private.”

They shrugged. We didn’t say much. Every once in a while, the beachcomber—Micaiah, they said, was their name—reached for another strawberry. We enjoyed the view and grinned about each other’s presence.

“Where to next?” Micaiah asked when my time was nearly up.

“I haven’t done ‘Sheltered Canopy’ and ‘Afternoon in Paris’ yet. And ‘Cozy Canoe.’ That’s all the ones I get.”

“Midlevel?”

“Yes. I’m a mining engineer.”

Micaiah smiled in a way that made my heart flutter. Their self-assuredness, their teasing, the playful chase across destinations… was I in the presence of someone who outranked me significantly? Sent for surveillance, perhaps?

“And you?” I asked.

“Sheltered Canopy,” they suggested and got up from the bench.

---

I lay on my belly on a perfectly luxurious bed. Way up high in a bamboo treehouse, my view of rice fields at dusk was framed by tropical vegetation. The natural world sang its evening song, the tropical heat was broken by a breeze, and solar glow lights had lit up on the balcony surrounding the house. I softened my gaze until the world turned into a blur of dark greens and blues. I rested my cheek on the silky sheet. I was awoken from slumber by a touch so real it sent fire through my body. Micaiah was kneeling on the bed next to me and finished running one finger down my spine.

“Good choice, Kaita.”

I pulled them close.

---

“Is your body true, Kaita?” Micaiah asked me, in restful darkness, dotted by the glowing globes around the treehouse of Sheltered Canopy.

“More or less. Can’t complain.”

“Mine isn’t. The details are default.”

I propped myself up on my elbow.

“Seems like you want to tell me something. I don’t know what.”

“I’m a bit rougher than this. Not as pretty. Only, you know, in case we ever meet, outside. To adjust your expectations.”

“Do you think it’s likely for us to meet, outside?” I asked, trying another line of questioning to get to the bottom of the lovely mystery of Micaiah’s appearance in my environments.

“We have some time yet,” they mumbled into the pillow.

“Sure, some time yet.”

---

We pulled apart buttery croissants in Paris. We had afternoon wine in our favorite ivy-covered courtyard. We pretended to be rich and giggled in expensive boutiques. We lost track of time.

“Oh,” I laughed and showed Micaiah my timer. “About time to go.”

Micaiah blanched when they saw the display. “I have to get back. Don’t look. You’d be reminded.”

“Reminded?”

“You’ve been so content, Kaita. Don’t look.”

Confused and worried, I did not look away as they’d told me, and so I saw how Micaiah broke the world. It looked like someone searching for a lost earring, perhaps, in a cobblestone alley in Paris. Then it looked like someone lifting the cobblestones like a carpet and stepping into a blank hole that had been covered before. Then Micaiah was gone.

I stared at the broken illusion, at the fake cobblestones in fake Paris, the taste of fake wine and fake croissant still hovering in my manipulated brain, and suddenly I understood fully the sadness that dwelled underneath Micaiah’s every gesture. The illusion had never been as perfect for them as it had been for me. Before going back into unconsciousness, I was prompted to select my next waking destination. We hadn’t had time to agree on our next meeting place. I chose Sheltered Canopy. It had become our favorite of the six waking destinations available to mid-level personnel.

---

My consciousness spawned at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the treehouse. I took two steps at a time and found Micaiah already there, in foggy daylight. I hugged them tight. So real.

“What’s going on? Tell me!”

They avoided my eyes. I reached out and touched their cheek. So real.

“I’m one of the prisoners,” Micaiah said.

“Prisoners!” I repeated the word, certain I didn’t know what it meant.

“To work in the mines.”

“Technicians,” I said. That was the correct word for people who were going to do the hands-on work.

“That’s your word and that’s my sentence.”

Maybe the interface was glitching, because my consciousness couldn’t react for seconds, until Micaiah blessed me with their familiar mischievous smile.

“Doesn’t matter,” they said. “Not yet. Right? We have some time yet.”

“But how…?”

Micaiah grinned. “Out of bounds. Noclip. You know?”

I had a faint memory that had to do with gaming, but I wasn’t sure I understood.

“The programmed environments,” Micaiah explained, “are like a building: Sheltered Canopy, Oceanside Breeze, Afternoon in Paris, Alpine Chalet. They’re stacked, a little like a skyscraper back on Earth. Each floor contains rooms with waking destinations. As a midlevel mining engineer you get access to six private ones. Every day, they wake my consciousness in a cramped prison yard with all the other prisoners. Technicians. They like us to remember what we are. But I started looking for glitches. I used to do that for fun, in games, back on Earth. I found some. If you know where and how, you can slip through the cracks. The more complicated a system, the more can go wrong. Now I can go out of bounds. I can walk up and down the façade of the skyscraper. I know where to drop through floors.”

“How many destinations are there?”

Micaiah grinned again, the melancholic kind I liked best. “I’m starting to think pretty much all of Earth.”

I lay my avatar’s body down on the mattress of the treehouse, suddenly lightheaded.

“I heard a rumor that some people live on the transport ships,” I said. “They never get off, never wake from stasis. Shuttle back and forth, until they die, permanent residents of the stasis pods.”

“Sounds expensive. Not an option for you, I take it.”

“For you neither, I take it.”

“If I had money, I wouldn’t have to serve my sentence.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer to my next question to intrude into the serene setting. “What was your crime?”

“Fell behind on living taxes.”

The silk sheets felt prickly suddenly. A few years on a journey into deep space, with perfect waking destinations from a happier past on Earth the only thing to bother your consciousness, it was easy to forget reality.

“That would have happened to me,” I breathed. “Only I managed to get a traineeship in the mining program before I owed too much.”

“Not available to people like me,” Micaiah said. “People like me fall behind. Then we go to the mines, if we get lucky. It’s the way of the world.”

My stomach cramped. So real. Micaiah made me meet their eyes, details default for prisoners.

“But we have some time yet,” Micaiah repeated. “Wanna see?”

---

“Remember, your body isn’t real. Nothing can happen to you.”

Micaiah pulled me toward the bamboo wall of the treehouse. Micaiah’s body slimmed impossibly and then disappeared between two bamboo poles. A yelp escaped me when my avatar’s hand, pulled along by Micaiah, flattened and vanished into a tiny gap. Then the rest of my body was pulled after it. But there wasn’t any pain; there wasn’t even a sensation of compression. Next, we seemed to hover in a bottomless void. Next to us there was a structure that did resemble a skyscraper. It extended as high as I could see and as low as I could see. My hand cramped around Micaiah’s in panic.

“Not really your body,” they reminded me, and we walked along the facade. Colorful, distorted pixels flickered beneath our feet. Micaiah seemed to be able to read the contents of each floor we passed.

“Oh, I remember this one,” Micaiah said and pointed to an inconspicuous corner where two environments met at an odd angle. We were swallowed up fast.

I found myself in a noisy, dark place. Throbbing basses and writhing dancers, strobing neon lights in one of Earth’s legendary night clubs. Micaiah spun me around and our bodies were close and sweaty as we moved together, entranced.

I was pulled through the broken corner of a floor tile. We dropped a small way, then spawned by an infinity pool on a rooftop overlooking a metropolis. Quiet here, sophisticated. My ears still felt the reverberation of the club, my heart still pumped in the rhythm of the basses. I was trying to read the skyline to figure out where we were, but I noticed a woman giving me a suspicious glance from across the rooftop terrace, her outline somehow sharper than the rest of the environment. She picked up her bejeweled gown and stalked toward us. She pointed. She began shouting words. I alerted Micaiah.

“Whoops.” Micaiah giggled and we dove to the bottom of the pool and slipped through an unfinished opening of stray pixels in its deep end.

“Wait!” I pleaded when we found ourselves between places, out of bounds, in the blank space. “That woman saw us! Was she a higher-up?”

“Probably, but I don’t think most people understand what they see. Did you understand when you first saw me?”

“I thought it was a game, part of the environment. What happens if someone finds you out?”

Micaiah shrugged. “What can they do? Send me to the mines?”

Nothing was real except for our destination.

“They could keep you unconscious until we get there. They could take this from us.”

Micaiah’s hands found mine. “Right. Yes. Let’s be more careful.”

“Can we just go back to the treehouse?”

We spawned in the tropical night. I regarded Micaiah’s avatar, their silky hair, their patient expression. Details default for prisoners. I had been melancholic, now I was sad.

---

I nursed my sadness in Lijiang and in the flowering ‘hofjes’ of Leiden. We found ourselves on a boat in the glimmering Waitomo caves; we hiked through the clouds in the Andes; we breathed in the hushed atmosphere inside the Mezquita-Catedral in Cordoba, wandering through columns, under arch after arch, in reverential silence. We toasted the distinct sensation of being alive with shimmering cocktails in rooftop bars in Singapore and with cheap bottles of beer in basement clubs in Berlin. So real.

We didn’t need to look at the timer counting down to our arrival. Its countdown had been singed into our hearts. We sat in Oceanside Breeze at sunset. We shared a final basket of strawberries in Merry Market. We returned, for the last time, to Sheltered Canopy, on a glowing tropical night overlooking the rice fields.

“I’ll find you,” I whispered. “When we get there, I’ll find you.”

---

I awoke, gagging. I threw up nutrition fluid. I sat up, gooey, shivering, naked, in my stasis pod that had opened. We had arrived. I practiced breathing air again for a few moments. Then I followed the orders that were barked over intercom: pick up assigned clothing, shower off stasis gel, report for disembarkation. The cargo hold that held stacks of pods was dim and cold. Its aisles were already busy with people in paper privacy gowns staggering toward the shower area. I got in line for the showers, unsteady on my feet. People pushed and shoved and hissed at the slightest suspicion that someone might try to cut in line, even though there was nothing to be gained from going first, nothing to be lost by going last. So real.

I regarded my real hands, my real skin, my real body. Close enough, I’d told Micaiah. Utter desolation gripped me. I sobbed as the shower pelted me with icy needles.

Dressed in an assigned uniform, I was marched alongside the other mid-level engineers into the transport ship’s disembarkation room. Packed in tight among other people, at least it wasn’t so cold.

The airlocks opened and metallic voices herded us into the facility. We were to find our assigned quarters, then report to orientation. We shuffled through gray hallways. Underground, above ground, who knew?

I found a door with a number corresponding to the one on my uniform. My cell was furnished with a cot, a desk, a lamp, a bathroom stall. I found a change of clothing and a basic tablet to carry out my tasks. I made my way among my coworkers to another icy hall, to be introduced to the rest of my life. So real.

After lights-out, I was visited by a half-dozing dream about disappearing into a crack between the door and the metal wall. Out of bounds in my dream, I only found more of the same: an icy facility so large and remote it might as well be the world.

---

On day one, we mining engineers were taught how to oversee the mining technicians. Our supervisors showed us strategies to keep our assigned technician cohort’s efficiency at peak. We might, our supervisors suggested, try having lights-out right after dinner, as inefficiency might be due to technician-exhaustion. We might, they suggested, regulate nutrients in the technicians’ food to counteract the effects of darkness and adjust for increased caloric needs that came with their physically active lifestyle. There were going to be repercussions, the supervisors said, if a technician cohort were to experience an unusually high number of permanent losses; the next personnel transport wasn’t due for another twelve months, Earth-adjusted.

In my cell after lights-out, I logged into the technician management system on my tablet, ostensibly to do my onboarding homework. Technicians were referred to by numbers, not by names. How was I ever going to find Micaiah?

Somewhere, out of bounds, perhaps.

I imagined a skyscraper of data. I imagined that my access was limited to only a few rooms, as it had been on the transport ship. I remembered the lively months of slipping through worlds. Micaiah had a keener eye for glitches, but I had observed and learned. Sometimes glitches were due to laziness, or human error, or because something had gotten so big and complicated that people had lost track of details.

I thought back to my onboarding session that day. There had been a minor delay at the beginning of the session. The presenter could not log into their account and another supervisor had to be called. Hadn’t the other supervisor said something about resetting the password? And weren’t all log-in credentials structured similarly?

I extrapolated my supervisor’s credentials from their name and employee number. I entered the default password we had all been given. We had been asked to change it, of course. But my supervisor had seemed like they had something to prove to their supervisor; there had been such a delay, which had put them into such a bad light. They hadn’t gotten around to updating their password yet.

‘Welcome,’ the system said. I was logged in as an administrator.

I found a database. I found a table called ‘cohorts’, where technician numbers were listed.

Another table was titled ‘technicians.’ There I found what I needed: numbers matched to names. ‘Micaiah’—only one technician by that name. I combined tables. I cross-referenced information. I had learned such things during my traineeship on Earth. A few queries later I knew which of my engineering colleagues was Micaiah’s supervisor and which mine Micaiah had been assigned to.

My supervisor’s account had write-access to the database. A sour twang of exhilaration swept through me, related to, though far removed from, the elated feeling I had known while traveling waking destinations with Micaiah, out of bounds. I saved the changes I had made in the database and erased my traces as best as I could. I logged out and, over the course of the next few weeks, Earth-adjusted, I became a forgettable, diligent mid-level mining engineer.

---

I made a bogus case for having to visit my assigned mine. I asked permission at the end of a day when my supervisor was visibly annoyed and clearly busy. My request was approved, with irritation but without question. Humans, like systems, had exploitable glitches.

I descended on a clanking elevator. I took sublevel transportation. I arrived at the mine I had assigned to myself in the database a few weeks earlier. I entered the mess hall during dinner. I saw a sea of bowed heads and hunched backs in the metallic space where everything was bolted down. There was clanking of utensils, but barely any chatter.

Details default, I thought, while scanning the hall for long hair moving in an ocean breeze, a mischievous grin. The air was moved by industrial ceiling fans spinning sharp blades. Everyone’s heads were shaved. I passed through the rows of tables, feigning an air of supervisory superiority. I looked beyond default details at all the subtle specificities of all the specific humans.

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind when I reached out and placed my hand on the shoulder of one of hundreds in the hall. There wasn’t a doubt that the violent flinch had been Micaiah’s, though I had never given them reason to flinch like that.

Acting as if I had harshness in me, I jerked my chin to tell the technician to come along. I recognized their gait, even though it looked sore, not playful like on that day in Merry Market. We rode the elevator up in silence, covert sideways glances. Details had been default. I saw a world of detail: the lines around Micaiah’s eyes, long lashes, an old scar across their cheekbone, stubble where hair was attempting to grow back, chapped lips, pallor, a hint of fever, perhaps from darkness, from lacking restful sleep, from being kept in a cage that was our world.

There was no slipping through the cracks of the real world to shorten the journey. We had to wait for the elevator to arrive at the top level. The elevator’s door trembled open.

The observation garden was a clear dome on the mining planet’s inhospitable surface. Our feet touched black rock. The air was breathable inside the observation garden, but cold. Weaker gravity made us somewhat lighter. We sat down on a bench facing a distant mountain range blurred by an ominous sandstorm. The small planet’s sun was setting behind its jagged horizon.

Micaiah’s head came to rest on my shoulder, tentatively at first, then heavy and exhausted. I drew them close.

“We’ll find a way,” I whispered. “We’ll go out of bounds.”

Micaiah nodded. I felt their stubble against my cheek. So real.

© 2023 Anna Ziegelhof

[Issue 2023.66]

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