After several hours, Zed still didn’t feel any closer to understanding this strange sim. It just didn’t seem that useful. Sure, it worked as a sort of surveillance system, which was creepy, but beyond that, what was the point?

  He’d tried everything he could think of to interact with the caveman copies of the colonists, but nothing had worked. Not that it would have made sense if it had. If it was just a virtual representation of a real person, then nothing he did should matter. It wasn’t as if the CIG was some form of brain control, but he had to be sure.

  Maybe I’m thinking about this wrong. I’ve been assuming this is about the people. What if that’s just one piece?

  If you were trying to get away with something, knowing where people were would certainly be useful, but not nearly as useful as being able to interact with Naug itself.

  But how? In the sim, everything was just rock. Zed made his way to the virtual version of his room and moved near the door.

  “Let’s start with something basic.”

  In the real world, there was a small panel to the right of the door that controlled it. Nearly every door in Naug could be sealed in case of a breach, so Zed knew it was at least possible for the doors to be activated remotely.

  The door in the simulation didn’t have a door at all. It was just an open entry in the rock wall, but the position and proportions were more or less identical.

  “How do you interact with something you can’t see?” Zed wondered aloud. As he had done far too many times before, Zed reached out to lean on the virtual wall. He felt the wall for just a moment before reaching straight through it and nearly falling off his bed onto the very real floor.

  Zed knew he had found the missing piece of information as Unen went into overdrive in the back of his mind. That final bit of information, the feel of the wall, had been all that was needed to bring all the pieces together. Or at least, it felt that way. Time to test that theory.

  Zed went to the virtual door and reached out toward the cave wall where the door controls would be in real life. He moved his hand slowly, hoping to feel what he couldn’t see but somehow knew was there.

  His fingers made contact with something. There was a click, and his real-world door popped open on the other side of the room.

  Using his CIG controls, Zed brought the virtual world's transparency down to 50% so that he could see both it and the real world at the same time. He pressed the invisible virtual door switch again and saw the real switch by his door react. The door closed.

  A smile spread across Zed’s face. It felt like having telekinesis as he sat on his bed, interacting with real-world objects that were out of his reach.

  He moved in virtual space to the front door and felt for those controls. He was rewarded with the sound of the front door opening. He closed it quickly. No need to freak out some passerby with a ghost door.

  Zed wanted to see how far this extended. Would it work in an area that he didn’t personally have access to?

  With a few gestures, Zed flung himself through virtual Naug until he arrived at a caveman version of the medical bay. Like a ghost, he descended on what he knew to be Isaac Roth’s office and saw a caveman seated at a stone desk. "Seated" wasn’t quite the right word, because it looked as if he’d fallen asleep with his head resting on his arms as he slumped over the desk.

  Zed knew all too well that there was a bed alarm switch by his former cot that would set off a rather annoying blare in the CIG of the doctor on call.

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  Win-win, Zed thought. I can test the limits of this thing and get a little payback for all the poking and prodding over the last few weeks.

  Zed floated over to his old bed. The virtual version wasn’t stone, but rather a pile of grass. This was going to be tricky as it was only generally shaped like the real bed.

  He reached out, being careful not to press anything he didn’t mean to. At the edge of the grass pile, he felt what had to be one of the railings and followed it by touch to the head of the bed. From there, it was easy to find the emergency call button.

  Zed pressed it and floated back to the caveman version of Isaac Roth as quickly as he could. He arrived just in time to see him bolt upright, nearly flipping over backward. He raced out of the room and around the corner to the bed. Expressions didn’t translate into the sim, but body language alone was more than enough to communicate the good doctor’s confusion.

  Zed couldn’t help himself. Just as the doctor made it back to his chair, Zed hit the button again. The doctor’s clear frustration fit the caveman skin perfectly.

  “Alright, Douglas, that’s one mystery down, but what does it mean?”

  Just as soon as he asked the question, he could feel Unen stitching the pieces together. It felt a bit like having a personal assistant that lived in the back of your brain, just waiting for a problem to solve.

  Up until a few weeks ago, information would have been the only thing worth stealing on Naug. Whoever had created the bubble in the time hack certainly had the skills and access to get at whatever digital information they could have wanted, so why hadn’t they acted?

  Or maybe they had. Zed really had no way of knowing what information they might have been taking, or for how long. What he did know was that in the last few weeks, something had changed. Information was no longer the only thing worth stealing from Naug.

  Zed got up, walked to the front door, and locked it. Unen had just given him an insight that he’d rather it hadn’t.

  When Zed had brought back the Martian plant, he’d introduced one of the rarest things known to man. Regardless of its scientific uses or merits, it had to be insanely valuable. Even just to a collector, it would probably bring in a fortune, let alone to some pharmaceutical company.

  Based on Zed’s test results, most governments would probably be eager to get a sample as well. If he, with no real experience, could qualify as some kind of super spy or analyst, then there was real motivation to make a lot more people like him. People with far more information in their heads for Unen to work with.

  That was the true horror of this revelation. The plant was valuable, yes, but the only thing more rare was Zed himself.

  Zed sat down at the tiny table in their entryway-sized living room and stared at the now-locked door.

  “Douglas, close the Bubble in Time program.” He wasn’t sure if anyone could tell that he was using it, but it was better to be safe than sorry. The potential danger of the situation made Zed reconsider how careless he’d been when he’d accused Andy in front of the Commanders. It was a good thing he hadn’t gotten a chance to mention the Bubble in Time program after all.

  He had to be smarter this time. He had to prepare. But who could he trust?

  It seemed unlikely the Commanders were involved. They probably wouldn’t need this elaborate hack to get the access it offered. Regardless, that was a risk he was going to have to take. There was no one else he could take this to anyway.

  What about Janice? He hated even having to ask the question. She had been the one to tell him about Alina’s Bubble in Time suspicions in the first place, so it seemed unlikely she was a suspect either.

  Zed thought through the short list of people he considered friends. Regardless of whether or not he could trust them, it was best to involve as few people as possible. He still couldn’t be sure if Alina’s death was an accident or not, but he couldn’t take the chance of putting anyone else at risk if he could help it.

  Zed jumped as a passerby burst into laughter in the hall just outside the door.

  He was going to have to trust someone, though. It hadn’t gone well the last time he’d gone to the Commanders, and with his altered state, it wasn’t likely that trust in him would be any higher.

  There were still so many unknowns and so many things he was assuming. But was he wrong? He knew Unen could only work with the information he had, but it still seemed to be more than enough to be worried.

  He couldn’t risk being right and not being believed. Before he did anything, he needed to prepare. If whoever was doing this found out he was onto them and decided to make a move, he had to be ready.

  An idea came to him. Whether or not it was from Unen or himself, he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t even sure what the difference was anymore, and maybe it didn’t matter.

  Zed smiled and started opening his collection of art programs and generators.

  “This might actually be fun, Douglas. Assuming I don’t get myself killed.”