OtherEarth Read online

  BOOKS BY JASON SEGEL AND KIRSTEN MILLER

  Otherworld

  OtherEarth

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by The Jason Segel Company

  Cover art copyright © 2018 by The Jason Segel Company

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Segel, Jason, author. | Miller, Kirsten, author.

  Title: Otherearth / Jason Segel, Kirsten Miller.

  Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2018] | Series: Last reality ; 2 | Summary: “After discovering terrifying information about Otherworld, the Company’s high-tech VR gaming experience, Simon and his friends are on the run, searching for Simon’s old roommate. He may just be the key to shutting the Company down, although if they don’t find him in time, it may be too late for not only them, but for all of humanity”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018022930 (print) | LCCN 2018029060 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-101-93938-3 (el) | ISBN 978-1-101-93936-9 (hardback) | ISBN 978-0-525-70794-3 (intl. tr. pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Virtual reality—Fiction. | Internet games—Fiction. | Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Conduct of life—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S4533 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.S4533 Otd 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9781101939383

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.3.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Jason Segel and Kirsten Miller

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Badlands

  The Phantom

  Maverick

  Show-and-Tell

  The Petting Zoo

  The Game

  The Wrangler

  Back to Reality

  Milo Returns

  The Dinner Party

  The Mastermind

  The Homebody

  Desperate People

  The Headset

  The Plunge

  The Inner Circle

  The Captive

  The Virus

  The Hunt

  Reunion

  The Kiss

  The Diamond

  Elvis Impersonator

  Goodbye

  About the Authors

  None of this is happening.

  I’m standing in the morgue at the Company’s facility. I should see my own image in the gleaming metal cabinets where they store all the bodies, but I have no reflection. I don’t know if I’m real.

  There are corpses laid out on the autopsy tables, crisp white sheets pulled up to their chins. On the far side of the room are Brian and West, two guys from my high school who were victims of an accident that the Company orchestrated. In front of me lies Carole, the soccer mom turned fearless warrior who sacrificed her own life to save mine. Blood seeps through the section of sheet that covers her abdomen. That’s where the sword that killed her went in.

  She thought I was the one who could save the others. All it takes is a look around the morgue to know Carole was tragically wrong. There are at least a dozen bodies here; most of their faces I don’t recognize from the real world. Who knows how many cadavers are tucked away in the morgue’s metal drawers? The dead here come in all sizes and shapes and colors. But they all died as guinea pigs, their brains tinkered with and their bodies broken. All to beta test the Company’s new virtual reality technology. All to debug a goddamn video game.

  The man who started it all is on the table next to Carole’s. Milo Yolkin, the Company’s boyish CEO and the inventor of Otherworld. Now he’s just another shriveled-up corpse. The mind that was hailed as one of the century’s greatest turned out to be no match for its own creation. Otherworld may have given Milo everything he’d been missing, but in the end, the game killed him.

  I pass a computer monitor on my way to the door. I can see the room reflected in its screen, and I’m still not there. I glance at the floor behind me—I don’t even cast a shadow. Whatever this is—dream, hallucination or memory—I know only one thing for certain: Kat’s here somewhere, and I have to find her.

  I don’t know who needs to be rescued. Maybe it’s her—but it might be me. The panic keeps building. It’s pushing me forward. I rush out of the morgue and into the main part of the facility, then skid to a stop. Ahead of me is a wall of boxes with hexagonal windows. These are the life-support capsules where the Company stores the people whose minds they’ve imprisoned in Otherworld. It looks like the corporation has expanded its operation since the last time I was here. There must be hundreds of thousands of capsules by now, stacked on top of each other and rising up into the sky.

  In the center of the wall is an opening—the entrance to a maze. There’s a middle-aged man lying on the floor in front of it, blood gushing from a bullet wound in his arm. As I close in on him, I notice that his eyes remain open. The man doesn’t see me, but he might not be dead. He works for the Company, though I have no idea what he does. All I know is that his name is Wayne Gibson. He’s Kat’s stepfather. And I was the one who shot him.

  I step over Wayne’s body, resisting the urge to give it a kick, and enter the maze. Walls of stacked capsules tower over me on either side. Inside each capsule is a human being. I glance into one as I pass by and recognize the swollen, purple carcass of a guy my age. The car accident the Company arranged for Marlow Holm and his mother must have been brutal. Mrs. Holm’s corpse is probably back at the morgue. Somehow Marlow survived. Now they have his mind trapped in Otherworld. I wonder which of the Holms was the lucky one.

  I pick up my pace and try not to look into any more of the capsules. The path in front of me keeps branching in different directions. I don’t know where I’m going, so I stick to the left. After a while, I start to think the maze might be unsolvable. Every new bit looks the same as the last. I’m about to collapse from exhaustion when I turn a corner and find myself at a juncture. The path ahead has split again, but this time there’s a statue blocking the left side. The tall Clay Man has a Bedouin scarf wrapped around his head and a glowing amulet dangling against his chest. One of his arms is raised, with a finger pointing toward the passage on the right.

  “It’s you,” I gasp. The Clay Man is Busara Ogubu’s Otherworld avatar. I’m so relieved to find her that I almost forget that she can’t be trusted. Busara was the one who got me into this mess. She risked my life and others for her own selfish reasons. Still, it’s impossible to hate her. If it weren’t for Busara’s scheming, there’s little doubt Kat would already be dead.

  “Busara,” I say. If her avatar can hear me, he shows no desire to communicate. Then it dawns on me that the finger may be the only message I need.

  I choose
the path to the right.

  I try not to think morbid thoughts while I run. I try not to imagine what might be happening to Kat. I try not to envision my life without her.

  Then, all at once, I find myself at the center of the maze. There’s a wide-open space here, and it’s packed with remarkable beings. Some are giants, others tiny and delicate. A few look almost human, but most can only be described as hideous. No two of them are exactly alike. These are the Children, the creations of Otherworld, the digital offspring of parents whose DNA wasn’t meant to mix. When they first appeared, Milo tried to get rid of them—until he realized the Children were every bit as alive as he was.

  Above, thousands of captive humans are looking down from the capsules, their faces pressed up against the glass. I came here to find Kat; now I won’t be able to leave without helping them, too. There are now thousands of people and an entire species depending on Simon Eaton, fuckup extraordinaire, to rescue them.

  And yet no one notices that I’m here. They’re all staring at a spot on one of the walls. Somehow I know that whatever is there is what I’ve been looking for. I weave through the crowd, and when I reach the front I see guards standing on either side of one of the capsules. Their faces are blandly handsome, their bodies buff, and both of them are armed to the teeth. They look a lot like the non-player characters in Otherworld.

  No one in the crowd dares to challenge them. It’s clear they’ll die if they do. The guards can’t see me, though. If Kat’s in there, this is my chance to save her.

  As I walk up to the glass, I pray I’m not too late. It’s not until I’m standing between the two guards that I realize everything is all wrong. The person inside the capsule isn’t Kat. The body doesn’t even belong to a female. Lying on the stainless steel shelf is a tall, pasty kid with a giant nose. I suppose I’m still not used to seeing him with no hair. It takes me a moment to recognize myself.

  I spin around to face the Children who are staring straight through me. I see why they’re all here. They came for me. I was supposed to help them. But now that they’ve found me, I’m just a huge disappointment. They’re all going to die. I won’t be saving anyone.

  “Why are you so upset?” A man wearing a garish 1960s suit and a brown fedora steps forward. He’s the only one here who can see me. It makes sense, I suppose. I’m the only one who ever sees him. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised,” my dead grandfather snorts. “You always said you weren’t the One.”

  I’m about to respond when something whizzes through the air past my ear. I hear an oof and a thud. One of the NPC guards just hit the ground. I’m looking straight at the second guy when an arrow gets him right through the temple.

  I catch sight of Kat’s hair in the crowd. Her camouflage bodysuit leaves the rest of her little more than a blur.

  “Kat!” I call out to her, but she must not hear me.

  She rushes past me to the capsule and yanks open the door. Kat slides out the shelf with my body on top. I stand by and watch as the girl I’ve loved since I was eight years old bends over my motionless body.

  “Simon,” she whispers. “Remember who you are.”

  I see my body twitch as if it’s coming back to life.

  “Simon,” Kat says. “It’s time. Open your eyes.”

  * * *

  —

  I open my eyes. I’m in a hotel room in Texas. Kat is asleep beside me.

  I zip my fly and look up from the weeds I’ve been watering. The sun has risen over the hills in the distance, and there’s nothing but sand and scrub as far as the eye can see. I could be anywhere. There’s no way to tell what century I’m in—or what planet I’m on. If I’ve traveled back in time, I’d never know the difference. And though I’d rather not think about it, there’s a chance I’m being held captive in a capsule somewhere, with a disk attached to the back of my skull and my brain imprisoned in a computer-generated world.

  My eyes detect movement in a patch of dead brush. A scorpion emerges, and I watch it scuttle across the sand toward my shoe. The thing is a monster—at least six inches long—but I don’t even flinch. My startle reflex has been dialed down to zero. I’ve seen much worse in recent days. There’s one thing that worries me, though. It’s the color. I didn’t know real-world scorpions came in iridescent green. If I had a phone, I’d look it up. I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever have a phone again.

  I send the creature flying with a kick and head back toward the car. Kat’s there soaking up some early-morning sun. The sight of her pulls my thoughts back from the darkness. She’s wearing a Budweiser T-shirt and a pair of hot-pink jogging pants with the word DIVA printed across the butt. She picked up the ensemble at a Walmart in West Virginia, and somehow she makes it look amazing.

  Kat’s reading a large sheet of paper that’s spread out on the hood in front of her. “Is that a newspaper?” I ask as I approach. I can’t even remember the last time I saw a print edition.

  “Nicked it from the hotel before we left,” she tells me. “Says here there’s a pig-picking in Darwin next week. And Charlie Jones was arrested for stealing three chickens and a pregnant goat. I guess that’s what passes for front-page news here in southwest Texas.”

  “Nothing about Milo? Or the Company?”

  She looks up from the paper and snorts. “Are you kidding? Darwin, Texas, hasn’t made it out of the twentieth century,” she says.

  A gust of wind sends Kat’s copper curls flying. I feel a twinge as she pulls her hair back and twists it into a bun. It suddenly occurs to me that the two of us may be alone. “Where’s Busara?” I ask.

  Kat folds the newspaper and points to an identical stretch of desert on the other side of the road. There’s a tall, dark figure strolling through the brush. From a distance, she looks just like her Otherworld avatar. I’m an idiot for never noticing the resemblance.

  While Busara’s communing with nature, I grab Kat and draw her toward me. We’ve only had a few minutes to ourselves since we sped out of Brockenhurst two days ago. We were officially a couple by the time we hit I-95.

  Being on the run would be so much more fun if we didn’t have a chaperone along for the ride. Instead I’ve had to make do with furtive kisses. When I slide my hand around the back of Kat’s neck, I feel the shaved patch at the base of her skull. Her hair is beginning to grow back in. She wraps her arms around me, and my head spins. I pull her closer and she loses her balance, sliding off the hood and landing on her injured leg.

  “Awwww, man,” she groans.

  “Shit, I’m so sorry, Kat.” I pick her up and gently put her back on the hood. She tries to smile but her face is ashen. She says her leg is getting better, but it still can’t bear her full weight. She was injured in Otherworld right before we made our escape from the facility, and her real-world body suffered the effects. I’ve been trying to convince her to see a doctor, but she won’t run the risk. I suppose it’s a moot point anyway. We don’t have the money to pay one.

  “It’s okay.” I know the pain must be fading when Kat plants a kiss on my lips. Then she gazes over my shoulder at the wasteland I was just contemplating. “What were you thinking about out there?”

  “You were watching me urinate?” I lift an eyebrow. “I had no idea you were into that sort of thing.”

  Kat rolls her eyes. “I was just making sure you didn’t step on a snake.”

  The green scorpion scuttles back through my thoughts. This time it’s my turn to wince. Since I returned from my last trip to Otherworld, I’ve been having trouble believing that everything I see here is real. This world and the other keep blending together. Maybe it’s just my way of avoiding reality. It’s still hard for me to accept the fact that, less than two days ago, I shot my girlfriend’s stepfather. And it wasn’t in a video game.

  “Do you think Wayne is dead?” I ask Kat. It’s the first time either of us have uttered her stepfa
ther’s name since we left New Jersey. As I wait for Kat’s answer, I realize I honestly don’t know what I want it to be.

  “No,” Kat replies with conviction.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because we’re not that lucky.” I was hoping for more of a medical opinion, but Kat’s definitely got a point there. Our luck hasn’t exactly been stellar.

  We shouldn’t be hanging out on the side of a road. It’s time to get going again. The paranoia hits us both, and we look for Busara. She’s headed back in our direction, as if the same alarm just went off in her head.

  “How many miles until we get to New Mexico?” Kat asks.

  “Hard to tell,” I say. “Three or four hundred, maybe? This is the first time I’ve ever used a fold-up, paper map. They don’t make it easy to judge distances.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure we’ll find Elvis when we get there?”

  I laugh—and remind myself that Kat never had the pleasure of meeting my former boarding school roommate. “Oh, that part’s going to be easy,” I tell her. “I doubt we’ll be able to miss him.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s illegal for me to be driving. My license was taken away last year after my brush with the law. But the odds of being stopped by a cop here seem pretty slim. We haven’t passed a human on the road for at least two hours. The only living being I’ve seen in that time was a monstrous hog standing by the side of the road. I picked up speed to get past it. My companions didn’t spot it, and I didn’t point it out. The beast’s tusks brought back memories I’d rather not share with them. And if I’m being completely honest, I’m not a hundred percent sure it was really there.