Lizard Girl & Ghost Read online

  © 2018 Olga Werby

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Printed in the United States of America.

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  Werby, Olga

  Lizard Girl & Ghost : a novel / by Olga Werby

  ISBN-10: 1720912157

  ISBN-13: 978-1720912156

  San Francisco

  www.pipsqueak.com

  To my marvelous readers

  especially those who care to leave a review.

  You are so important to every indie writer.

  Table of Contents

  1. Zombie Princess

  2. Twelve Days Ago

  3. Nine Days Ago

  4. Six Days Ago

  5. Three Days Ago

  6. The Far Cinct

  7. Two Days Ago

  8. I’d done nothing!

  9. The Third Message

  10. Cyber Dreaming

  11. Options

  12. Second Dream

  13. Keeping Secrets

  14. What’s Up Doc?

  15. Daddy’s Little Princess

  16. Reality is so Relative

  17. Wake Up

  18. Wake up, Jude

  19. Worlds within Worlds

  20. They Be Dragons

  21. The Glass Castle

  22. Crystal Memory

  23. Dead Beauty

  24. What Do You Want?

  25. The Memory Castle

  There’s a word for that?

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books

  Suddenly Paris: 1. Wednesday

  Suddenly Paris: 2. Thursday to Sunday

  Suddenly Paris: 3. Sunday

  Suddenly Paris: 4. Sunday to Monday

  lights too bright

  severe intracranial swelling

  unresponsive

  nausea

  MRI stat

  CE confirmed

  high white blood cell level

  patient’s critical

  head hurts so bad

  critical

  endotracheal intubation

  life support

  patient is unconscious

  brain damage?

  blackness

  1. Zombie Princess

  So that’s me—lying here in some secret facility in a glass coffin with tubes and kabelsalat sticking out of me. You might have a hard time telling, but I’m only sixteen—yep, that’s too-young-to-die sixteen, beauty-queen sixteen, really-just-a-kid sixteen, daddy’s-little-princess sixteen. And perhaps that’s where I should start explaining my predicament and suspicions. If I die, I want someone to go to jail for murder. My evil stepmother, perhaps? The evil Ms. Claudia is high on my list of suspects.

  But allow me to start at the beginning—I have plenty of time now. The days are long and full of dread and nights are no better—I no longer sleep. And there’s not much for me to do. I went from daddy’s-little-princess to zombie princess in a matter of a few days. Or was it hours? Mind you, I’m trying to keep my spirits up about all of it, but that’s probably because I’m so ignorant of my own prognosis. Although by the looks of my dad—he’s been crying, crying—and the lack of evil eyes Ms. Claudia usually throws my way, my life expectancy isn’t too good. But I digress—easy to do when there’s nothing to keep my mind from wandering.

  So back to the beginning. My mom died when I was just a toddler—I’m practically an orphan. As in all good Disney fairy tales, the heroine loses her parents (one or two, depending on how the writers feel that day) early in life. My dad raised me. It was a good arrangement. Happy childhood—ballet classes with pink tutus, ice cream cones in the park, shopping trips in New York City, vacations in London, Rome, Paris—you know, the usual.

  We met Claudia in Paris a year ago. I told my dad he should have bought an expensive red car or something to deal with his mid-life crisis, but he picked her—twenty-two years his junior—Ms. Evil Queen, a fako-artist.

  And now I’m here, in some lab. Sorry, as I’ve said, my mind wanders. I don’t see things in a linear way anymore. My life just sort of jumps at me randomly. I wonder what drugs they have me on? Oh, what would I give for the Café des 2 Moulins’ Venti, sugar-free, non-fat, vanilla soy, double shot, decaf, no foam, extra hot, peppermint white chocolate mocha with light whip and extra syrup… Okay, enough of that. I’ll try to stick to some semblance of a story for you.

  Claudia Elisabeth von Reichenstein—pretentious, isn’t it? I wonder if it’s even her real name? Ms. Claudia—she hates it when I call her that, she prefers mom, can you believe it? She’s almost six feet tall, a Nordic blond-bombshell of epic proportions. Ms. Claudia stands out. I think her real job is to look good. And it worked. She had my dad wrapped around her finger in under a week. What can I say? Men are easy prey for women like that. And I know she trapped quite a few. Her first husband, for instance, was Dr. Tom Blake. He won the Daedal Design Award, DaDA, when he was just a junior in high school. He developed some sort of cool molecule augmented with a computer code. Or was it computer code embedded into a molecule’s DNA? Cyber biology has never been my thing. The point of his invention was to make it easier for people with physical disabilities to communicate with the outside world and live fuller lives…in cyberspace.

  Tom got scholarships to every university known to man and tons of publicity. And in every news or publicity photo, there was Ms. Claudia, standing next to this gangly nerd. They got married about a year and a million photo-ops after the DaDA ceremony—as soon as Tom was of legal age to do so. Subtle, huh? Somehow, she managed to take Tom’s genius and turn it into her own personal PR machine. The Evil One is not without talent, and social engineering is her specialty.

  Ms. Claudia left Tom when he didn’t propel her to fame as fast as she had hoped he would. I don’t think the poor guy understands what happened to this day. Now, he’s a twenty-nine-year-old molecular cyber-physicist—or was that physical cyber-moleculist?—with a ten-year-old son, Bartholomew Blake. She did give him that, together with a nasty divorce. At least she didn’t keep Tom for too long—in and out, that’s her motto.

  Bartholomew is a cool kid. I call him Doc. He’s more like his dad than his mom. He and his munchkin friends have been very helpful.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. I do want to say that Tom and Doc have been the best part of my dad’s second marriage experiment. And if I am to survive my current zombie affliction, it will be because those guys did something.

  I know they’ve been here. I can feel it. Smell it? My senses are so muddled now. And my thoughts are like overcooked spaghetti—mushy, confused, and lacking any structure. I think I’ll just give you a chronology of the events that put me here in my crystal sarcophagus.

  2. Twelve Days Ago

  I had a date at a local cyber arcade. All the cool kids at my school were going on virtual dates now—no need to get parental permission, just plug in and go. It wasn’t my first time at the arcade. I wouldn’t trust some guy from my school to take me to a weird place without conducting a careful reconnaissance first.

  So I took Doc. Like I’ve said, he’s a cool kid and he worships me. Whenever Ms. Claudia gets stuck with him for the weekend, she drops him off in my room like he’s some sort of useless pet or something. The first time, I really resented it. I have my own life, you know? My dad wants to date a
n idiot and I get stuck babysitting her cub. No, thank you! But Doc was patient with me and I grew to like him. He’s nothing like his mother, and I was starting to believe I was seeing a reflection of my own future. So we bonded, and I learned that he has some useful skills.

  Doc knew all about the cyber arcade. He was even doing some hacking work for a few of the vendors to supplement the meager allowance Ms. Claudia gave him. So when this dude from my history class asked me out on a date, I turned to Doc for help. I wanted to check the place out, you know? I’d been to a few playground rides out there with my dad, so I knew something, but not much. And while I assumed there was no physical danger in cyberspace, I wanted to come across as worldly, not some naive inexperienced schoolgirl. The dude was older than me, and probably took dozens of girls on their first cyber arcade dates. I needed to be cool about it. So Doc took me before the date. Our initial plan was to buy me a custom-fit virtual body—an avatar.

  When one first visits the cyber world, one is given a rental avatar: a generic humanoid body of the sex and age of one’s choice. It works sort of like shoe rental at a real-world bowling alley. But I feel it’s always better to own your own shoes—just picture it; I know you’d agree with me. Anyway, that loaner cyber body works for about two hours then you’re simply zapped home. I’ve tried those out with Dad. It works as expected—eyes, fingers, toes, the works—all on a limited scale, perfect for a little kid or a cyber noob.

  I wanted something permanent and uniquely mine. Some geeks at my school specifically purchased generic avatars so they didn’t have to be bothered picking out something good…or perhaps they thought that a fresh-off-the-shelf avatar was the perfect match for them? Whatever. I was going to buy my avatar and take my time doing it, too. Well, my full two hours, then it was pumpkin time.

  Doc and I stopped at the “c-Body Beautiful” mall—“c” as in cyber but also as in “to see”, get it? It was the sacred cyber shopping grounds of all my classmates. I had to drag Doc there. He’s one of those above it all kind of kids—he uses a black panther for his avatar. Doc didn’t get his avatar at the mall. But I didn’t want to be a panther, as cool as that is. I wanted an avatar that would work well on a date with a boy. A human boy, not a large cat. So Doc and I wandered the mall, looking at the c-body displays and different add-ons options. And I have to say it was all dismal, selection wise. The more I looked, the more ridiculous the Barbie and Ken-like models seemed.

  When I finally gave up on the mall, Doc took me out and down a few side streets, where the more discerning customers acquired their cyber bodies and upgrades, where it was also a lot more expensive to buy an avatar. I spent my secret birthday hoard on a green-skinned, orange-haired lizard princess number—cool and still dateable. It gave me exceptional flexibility, and my skin and hair tones could morph into any background color or pattern I chose, like a chameleon. I could completely blend into a graffiti covered wall, for example—passers-by could read messages right through my squamose skin and hardly notice my presence. Doc recommended this adaptive camouflage feature. I gotta give him credit for that. And, of course, my avatar’s figure was exceptional—why skimp on the mandatory minimums? But I also splurged on a rhythm upgrade—my body and hair could instantly move to any beat, no matter how complicated. And it didn’t even have to be music. The rhythm app was made to actively seek out acoustic patterns in my immediate environment and accent any gesture or even a slight micro-movement, like a flash of an eyebrow, to perfectly match the stochastic sound progression. Doc and I had a blast playing with that feature until I finally bought it. It made me into a super dancer, all grace in motion. Beautiful. Sensuous. Too bad it wasn’t transferrable into my real life. Although Doc said that over time, avatar traits could seep into the real world. One could learn grace, apparently, even via virtual experience. Good thing too, since I’m a total klutz.

  I bought upgrades until my money ran out. I got Aroma-Hue—a synesthetic simulant where smells were matched to colors. It worked particularly well with my chameleon body type. I added the Snake Hair app—my hair could choose to move independently of my body or the environmental conditions. I couldn’t afford the single strand autonomous version, but even at the low-level fidelity, where hairs bunched together into packets of hundreds per dreadlock, it looked fantastic. There was a Medusa quality to it. A high-fidelity version could, of course, arrange itself into any hairstyle, each hair placed perfectly, and execute any specified dance movement—dancing hair origami. But that was way out of my price range. Despite an imperfect coif, my avatar was still awesome. And Doc even bought me shape-shifting eyes! I was way over budget, but the kid treated me. I won’t forget that. If I live, I’ll pay him back with interest someday.

  After we squared away my appearance, it was time to do a bit of exploring. Just like anywhere, cyberspace had good hoods and bad ones. I needed to know where the school kids hung out, where the real bad elements lurked, and where the edge was—you know, The Edge. Back then, I believed that The Edge was where everything cool was happening. Dorks stayed away from The Edge. Trouble lay beyond, on The Far Cinct. I didn’t want trouble, but I also wanted to be cool. Doc showed me the boundaries, for there wasn’t an actual line demarcation labeled The Edge Starts Here, obviously.

  At the cyber arcade, I moved around like I knew things. Doc, of course, actually did know things—I had to fake it. But I looked good, and people are always willing to ignore a lot of awkwardness if the person being awkward was attractive. I was like honey or flypaper, making all eyes stick on me. That’s why we got my avatar body first—that and because I had to, of course. Doc had been using the same appearance since he was five or something. He’s smart like that. His big, slick, black panther had powerful moves. And Doc had this ability to suck the light out of any space, to create a personal shade to hide in. That was very useful because with my camouflage enhancement add-on I could become as dark as any shade too and hide inside it. This sucking light trick wasn’t anything anyone could buy, either. Doc programmed it himself. He’s unique in this way as well.

  So we skulked near The Edge for a while. Weirdly ugly avatars sold illegal stuff in the distance. Passes to adult pleasure palaces, snippets of codes that robbed enhancements from unsuspecting cyberspace tourists, augmented body parts designed for deviant sex acts—all of it was right there beyond The Edge. (Doc had to explain things to me. Embarrassing!) “Everything is for sale beyond The Edge, out in The Far Cinct,” Doc said. And some of this illegal stuff filtered into the sunny and safe world of our local cyber arcade.

  Here, in our cyber arcade, the law ruled and authorities monitored all transactions. But The Far Cinct was a free for all. I really wanted to go exploring over there, beyond The Edge. But I couldn’t take a ten-year-old with me though and, frankly, I was too much of a goody-two-shoes to go to The Far Cinct by myself. The edge of The Edge was plenty exciting for a noob like me. And I was secretly planning on dragging my date here and telling him all about the crazy goings-on. Doc told me that he’d sneaked out there a few times—there was more money to be made over there. That’s how he was able to buy me all these cool enhancements.

  After we were done scaring ourselves silly, we went and played in the virtual amusement parks. All of the movie previews were free, of course, and we could shoot, fly, jump, and extreme-sport ourselves recklessly until our real bodies demanded nourishment. I had a blast with Doc. It was too bad Ms. Claudia had to take him away and give him back to his dad, Dr. Tom Blake.

  I would gladly go avataring with Doc anytime.

  3. Nine Days Ago

  That was the night. The dude called me after dinner. I told Dad that I wasn’t feeling well and locked myself in my bedroom. That’s a huge advantage of virtual dating—neither of our parents knew we were doing it. Doc knew, but he was the only one. I didn’t even tell my girlfriends at school. I was planning on springing it on them—all mature like—the following morning, laced with all of the juicy details.

&nb
sp; I told Dude I’d meet him next to the “What Lurks Down Below” movie experience. It was one of those horror smash up flicks so popular with boys at school right now. Not my thing, but I wanted to project a no-fear persona for this. Plus, my amazing avatar would rock against all the contrast and fast color changes on the ride. And it did. I leaned on the wall, waiting for Dude to show up. He didn’t see me at first, but when he did, I swear I blew his mind. His little off-the-shelf body, styled in virtual leathers and furs with distressed metal spikes and buckles, was nothing by comparison, just an ordinary guy-thinks-it’s-badass avatar. I figured he meant to impress me with his macho-ness, but next to me, he was just a boy playing dress up. Thank you, Doc!

  I dilated my eyes into six-pointed stars and winked at him. When he was able to walk and talk at the same time again, Dude managed to say something about how good I looked. I allowed my irises to explode in a kaleidoscope of colors—a little thing Doc sent me earlier. I didn’t even look to see Dude’s reaction. Just waited for him to recover.

  We enjoyed a ride, after Dude took me to this sweetchious rave palace with loud music and color vortex effects. He probably planned to crush me with overstimulation, but it just made my lizard avatar look better and better. At the end, the DJ did this hypno-tornado thing in tune with my chameleon display and snaky hair waving. I was the dancing queen of the night…not so hard with my rhythm app upgrade. But still cool.

  The date was uneventful after that. Dude “took” me home. We said goodnight. Dude didn’t even have the guts to ask me on another date until the following day at school. I felt a borderline eudaimonia all day. Look it up.

  4. Six Days Ago

  Ms. Claudia deigned to notice me. After we ate dinner, she asked me how I was doing and whether I’ve ever been to the cyber arcade. That was just a bit too close to be a coincidence. I didn’t know what Doc told her, so I just gave a noncommittal answer—yeah, sure, probably, no big deal. She told me that her modeling company was scouting locally for some talent, a girl or a nekama (a boy pretending—they didn’t care about real world gender in cyberspace). Yeah, whatever. But would I be interested? I told her that Dad wouldn’t really approve of me doing stuff like that and I had a lot of homework. But Ms. Claudia said I was missing out. That there was this sensation the other night at one of her clubs and she had seen the footage. But nobody knew who it was, and it would be lovely if I could help her out and ask about it at school. She even promised to take me to the cyber arcade and show me around as an incentive. I just smiled a lot and went to my room as soon as I could. I had a date with Dude that evening but now it was complicated.