Jeffrey A. Carver - Reality School in the Entropy Zone

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Reality School: In the Entropy Zone

Jeffrey A. Carver

First published in SCIENCE FICTION AGE, March 1995.

free to download this story for your own enjoyment. You may print a copy, if you like, for your own use,

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Reality School: In the Entropy Zone

As we walk through the entropic boundary, I expect to feel...I don't know what...some startling

physical sensation. Instead, it's more like walking into the shadow of a towering building. A draft

of cooler air passes through my blouse.

Then everything changes...

Looking back, it seems almost impossible to believe. Reality School, from matriculation to retirement,

was supposed to fill seven of my best years--years of learning and challenge, and perhaps even

occasionally danger. The time I actually spent cannot be measured; it was a time in which the world

almost changed beyond recognition--and I changed into something, someone, I hardly know.

For my first day at school, my parents had gotten us up at dawn and piled me and my older sister into

our ancient station wagon, Woodie. We drove for a long time, before turning into the entrance to the

school. I remember this clearly, even though I was a girl only six and a half at the time. My parents told

me later that I'd complained so much about the length of the trip that they very nearly turned around and

drove me back home. They wouldn't have, of course; they knew how important the reality school

was--not just to us, but to the whole world. Why else would they have put me through all that testing,

and cried when I was accepted?

I remember this, too: my complaints vanished the instant we passed through the reality school's

continuum-bubble. A great shock wave hit the hood of the car and flashed past the windows in rainbow

colors, and suddenly everything around us changed. Everything--including Woodie. Our station wagon

was transformed from a sagging road-barge into a shining fuselage, powered by glowing fusion thrusters

and floating on a magnetic cushion. I screamed with joy and amazement, deafening my mom and dad.

Marie was screaming just as loudly. At the same moment, the school grounds changed from scorched

desert grass to a fairyland setting of whipped cream lawns, cotton candy trees, and gingerbread buildings.

I hopped up and down with delight.

It was all window-dressing, of course--not just for the kids, but for the parents, who were preparing to

leave their children with a school that few of them could really hope to understand. The parents believed

in the school's mission, or they wouldn't have been there; but it probably helped to have the special

effects to ease the transition. The effects had little to do with the real function of the school, of course,

but it would take us a while to understand that.

Daddy drove up to the parking area, where a centaur with an armband directed him to a space that

looked as if it had been saved just for us. We all piled out, Daddy warning me not to touch the fusion

thrusters, whose glow was slowly fading to chrome silver. We had a good laugh, walking around our

gleaming spaceship-car. Then a team of whinnying ponies drew up, pulling a cart for my bags. We

loaded the cart and headed into the administration building.

I have no memory of registration, but I vividly recall the "reality-view" posters that glowed in the walls,

and the clots of strange kids gathered around gawking at them. The posters looked like moving

holograms, and at first I thought they were just pictures made by artists. It turned out they were actual

images of reality-threads that "shapers," as graduates of the school were called, had encountered and

safely sealed off from our timeline. Marie and I gaped at a world where everyone lived in clouds, where

the whole world seemed to be clouds, and nothing looked quite solid, including the people. "Wow," I

said, feeling the kind of thrill that I got from my favorite stories.

Then we turned to an image filled with stalactites and stalagmites that flickered and slowly changed color

as if under a black light. That one stumped us, until an older boy stepped up and explained that it was

microscopic metal crystals: a world where everything was solid-state, and all life took the form of

electrons and photons. Phew, I thought. Why bother?

The boy, though, seemed to actually like the idea, the way I'd liked the clouds. He grinned, and told me

his name was Ashok. And I began to wonder if kids like him were about to become my friends.

It was only a little later, at the dorm, that Mom and Dad and Marie had to say good-bye to me. I flashed

from giddy pleasure to tears, and starting bawling, "I don't want to stay! I don't want to! I want to go

home!"

"Alexandra, we've been planning this a long time," my dad started to say, all rationally. Only he couldn't

get it out; he started crying, too, and turned away so I wouldn't see. You'd think it would have been

Mom crying, but she was the one who tried to calm me down, "Honey, the tests said you were one in a

million. Now, you go show them how you can do this! It's so important--"

No no no I don't care...!

That was when the school's departure routine kicked in. My dorm room suddenly blossomed out into a

beautiful little sun porch, where some of my favorite characters--Peter Rabbit and Eeyore and Maxine

the bunny and Berlioz the bear were all having tea together, and one after another, they beckoned me to

join them. That broke the cycle of tears, for the moment; it was enough to make me let my parents go.

And from then on, life was never to be the same...not even in the ways we'd expected.

I am utterly alone--in a steaming jungle. Animals shriek in the distance. Where has everyone

gone? "Rober-r-r-ta?" I cry, shivering. "Lisa? Danny?" I stumble back the way I came, searching

for them. But where the entropic boundary stretched a moment ago, a jungle now goes on

forever.

I teeter on the edge of panic. If I'm to find my world again, I can only plunge ahead. I have a job

to do. An adult's job, even if I am only six and a half. I have already grown beyond my calendar

age.

But I seem to have forgotten what exactly I am supposed to do.

Lisa Hoopner, my roommate, became my best friend right from day one. She was just a few months

older than me, and one of the things I liked about her was her laugh, which was a kind of whoop that

came out at the funniest times. Another thing I liked was her Bahhston accent. We didn't talk with

accents in California, I said; and every time I said it, she gave a whoop and talked to me in a bubbling

upbeat voice that was supposed to sound like people from around here. I didn't think it sounded much

like me, but it made me laugh anyway.

Lisa and I were both pretty homesick, but it helped having each other to be friends with. For one thing,

we both liked Berlioz and Maxine, and we both thought Mr. Playstead, the head teacher, was nice but

kind of stuffy, and we both liked Mrs. Randolph because she made us laugh, and we both thought the

cafeteria was awesomely yucky. Once we'd agreed on all that, everything else seemed pretty minor. Oh,

and we both liked Danny Hutton, a boy from Iowa who we could tell was putting on a brave front, even

though he was obviously even more homesick than we were.

Most of the kids were pretty nice. We had a lot of counseling sessions, some by ourselves, and some in

groups where we talked about the things that we liked, and the things that scared us. That helped us get

to know each other, I guess. I understand now that they'd selected us not just for our imaginations, but

for a certain sociability and a certain toughness of mind, not that I would have put it that way then. They

didn't want any wild-eyed or selfish individualists getting hold of the reins of reality. It was risky enough

with the people they did choose.

The teachers had lots of activities to help us get to know each other--games and stories and plays. But

the main activity was learning to shape reality.

In the beginning we shaped storybook landscapes and scenes. Try to imagine a roomful of six-, seven-,

and eight-year-olds bubbling with imagination, perched under strange helmets of silver and glass, with

visions of stories taking form right before their eyes. (None of our creations were permanent, of

course--and they were strictly confined within the shielded training rooms. But if a leakage had occurred,

the continuum- barriers around the school grounds would have kept anything we did from reaching the

world outside.)

We learned right away that our mind's eye views of such magic places as Oz, Middle Earth, Peter

Rabbit's forest, and Barsoom differed wildly from one another. Sometimes that caused arguments, which

we were supposed to settle among ourselves. But other times we just had fun building one vision upon

another, castle upon cloud upon ocean upon desert--until our landscapes grew into something that was

as much us as it was the stories that had inspired us. We were learning to create. Later, we would learn

to choose realities from the crazy chaos that the universe offered up to us. But in those days, we were

consumed with building.

We were also learning to share...

One day Lisa and I worked together on a special play cottage made of clouds. It was delicate, puffy, and

ethereal--and it had lightning bolts flashing across the doorways, and only Lisa and I could make the

lightning go away to let us in. Even so, we made sure the point got across by patrolling the area in our

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