by Robert Onopa

Bob Onopa retired from teaching at the University of Hawaii in January, an experience, he reports, that brought back those euphoric moments at the beginning of summer when he was a kid. Childhood has its darker moments too, as this new story suggests.

After a fitful sleep he lay awake in the darkness listening to the house creak, to the furnace cycling. Outside, a heavy snow held the world in silence.

Then a faint spreading gray at the window and something else—down the hall in the living room, where the tree’s lights had glowed dimly all night—a movement. When he heard quiet voices for a while, his mother’s laugh, he eased himself out of bed—he did not want to be disappointed—and padded into the living room.

And there it was, under the tree, silver track winding through the gifts, the headlight of the streamliner punching out from behind the mountainous tree skirt, its dome car catching red and orange and green lights in frosted windows. He could see from a glance at the open pods among the wrapping paper that his parents had given him the big hybrid set, the one with the state-of-the-art monorail rig and, more to the point, well, his point, all that retro stuff, starting with the steel streamliner coming his way again. From down at the level of the rug the detail was amazing—you could see little pipes and bolts, springs and couplings on the cars. On the third pass he took in the Santa Fe diesel, a double-ender, like strong jaws back to back, and, in its forward cab—he could see a little guy!

He glanced at the packing pod again. Almost everybody else was getting the Mars Habitat thing, you could sit with a holo of astronauts in a Rover, whatever. This one had a Virtualizer AI chip too, but that wasn’t what he’d wanted. He couldn’t take his eyes off that train, from its bright headlight through the intertwined fists of the couplers—you could hear the running gear rumble—car by car back to the vista dome. When it passed, the track looked like it had been laid over weathered brown ties on tamped tiny gravel. Green tufts grew wheel high in a living miniature world.

He looked up. His dad was beaming. His mom, her hair loose and pretty, had that great smile. “What do you think, kiddo?” she asked.

“It’s perfect,” Matt said. “Thank you.” He looked at his dad with new respect. “It’s just what I wanted, exactly what I wanted.” So he wasn’t going to be punished after all, not for reprogramming the house lights, not for hacking his sister’s page. He took in the other pods in the set, the other bright wrappings. “Mom!” he remembered. “I have a present for you.”

His dad was already reaching for the box. In it lay, beautifully folded, the silk nightgown his dad had helped him pick out, all blue and smooth, like water.

He was on the rug again, watching the locomotive coming at him, headlight at eye level. He took in the high cab.

Matt blinked. You could see a little guy in there! An engineer! With an engineer’s cap and a mustache! You could see his brown eyes! As the train passed by, the little guy waved!

* * * *

The house smelled like bacon substitute and coffee and hot chocolate. They’d unpacked a mid-sized passenger station, some mining trestles along a spur, a group of houses, and one of those old-fashioned black water tanks. His dad explained about the two-part expanded set, which he already knew, by pulling out a block of suburban-looking townhouses for the monorail section. Its golden cars matched the futuristic city’s curved glass terminal. Time and again as his father unpacked, his attention would drift back to the retro train. It was so cool.

The train looped through his sister’s Virtual Field Hockey Tournament, passed his mom, and drove his way again.

“Hey, Dad,” Matt observed. “The engineer only waves when he passes by me. Just me.”

His dad thought for a bit—he was a professor, ran a busy lab, usually had the answer to anything. “The train set’s AI locates you through your GPS bracelet,” his dad said. Then he grinned. “Part of the upgrade package. You’re the registered owner. President of the railroad. He’s paying his respects.”

His dad knelt to shift a hardware store into position near the old-fashioned passenger station. Power cells kicked in, windows glowed. “When I was a kid,” his dad said, “we lived in Grandma Jean’s old apartment. I had the planet’s dinkiest train.” He laughed. “Half-HO, all nano. Still, I used to dream about the people in the little houses. I used to dream about a set like this, three engines....”

His mom came in, very pretty in blue silk, carrying mugs for each of them.

“Anyway, this railroad’s for you,” his dad said. “I’ll help you build a layout downstairs. Then you’re on your own. It’s going to be your responsibility, Matt. The license agreement is in your name. You’re going to run a railroad.”

* * * *

After a long day visiting Grandma Jean, his dad was watching the vidwall news in bed. Matt crept out to the tree in his pajamas.

What his dad had said was true. No matter where he lay, the little guy waved at him each time the Santa Fe passed by. The way you could see his expression, his cheeks bunched cheerfully, was amazing.

It occurred to him to stop the train the next time it came by.

When he did so, the little guy waved and shouted, “Hi, Matt.”

He’d said his name! “Wait’ll I tell my dad,” Matt said breathlessly.

“Hang on there, Matthew Pike,” the engineer said. “The advanced features of this unit’s AI are available only to a single licensed user.”

“Oh, right. Only one account.” Matt chewed his lip, disappointed he couldn’t share the experience with his dad, but thrilled to have the engineer launch into a welcome speech that seemed written especially for him. “And, Matthew Pike?” the engineer concluded, “thanks for initializing us. I’m ready to run this EMC-E1 diesel through its paces.”

“Uh, anything I’m supposed to do?” Matt asked. That was the question his friend Chris had used to start the setup on his Rover.

“Always keep water in the tank,” the engineer said, waving at the old-fashioned high black tank. “We actually use it. We’re a wetware AI, Matthew Pike, totally organic.”

“We?” Matt said. “There are more of you guys?”

“Welcome aboard.” The engineer grinned.

“This is great,” Matt said. He could hear his mom putting dishes away. The pictures on the pods merged into a vision of his future layout. When his mom called, he pulled the power cable and started repacking the rolling stock so they could move it downstairs. The little window in the front cab slid closed.

* * * *

True to his word, Matt’s dad got a couple of big pieces of plywood, painted one side green, and set them up on sawhorses in a corner of the basement, under the winter light of the garden window. For a couple of days, his dad worked with his laser saw and driver, framing hills, installing prefab cliffs and tunnels, laying out roads and farms and blocks of buildings from the pods, connecting them by yellow-lined streets with little autos and trucks that were another miracle of realism. The spray-on landscape was organic, only needed periodic misting, you could already see minuscule tendrils of bushes uncurling.

The two boards overlapped to form a wide V. On his left side, by the window, a small modern city took shape beneath the loop of its sleek golden monorail. On his right, toward the furnace, the Santa Fe’s passenger and freight terminal anchored a storefront-and-bungalow town. Outbound for the Santa Fe was a country village with a covered platform and a church and a square. A stubby steam engine shuttled from the terminal to a mine along the furnace.

Where the boards overlapped, his dad terraformed a mountain range that divided the lines. From the far side, an excursion spur of monorail pylons swooped up to a flat spot below the far peaks, a meadow, a kind of high-altitude lookout, before it disappeared into a tunnel and back down. The retro railroad’s track ran up long switchbacks over trestles and waterfalls to its side of the meadow before a long rocky grade took it down to pastures along the back wall.

What with all the prefab building and landscape units, they were finished in a week. His dad helped him verify the cable runs, power up, and bring each section carefully on line, using the little steam engine as their test vehicle. It was funny—for a while, as he worked, his dad was like a kid, too, you could see it in his face, what he probably looked like when he was a kid.

But just after New Year’s, things got really busy at the university again and his dad disappeared. “In his lab, like every spring,” his mom shrugged, leaving him to run the railroad.

* * * *

He hadn’t logged on to the Mars site Chris had put up in days, even though Chris had loaned him the special headset. There were a lot of little adjustments to make, crossing gates to calibrate, track to align, so much to admire.

When he finally had all the signals installed and picket fences set, he upended the red and silver Santa Fe diesel, pushed the toggle from “demo” to “auto,” set its wheels back on the track, coupled it to three passenger cars, then fired it up from his remote. As he did so the golden monorail slipped by on its pylons against the cliffs in the far background and disappeared into the tunnel.

It was a beautiful dance, the trains moving by and around their curves. There was still something of Christmas in it, a strand of leftover tinsel among the colored lights, evergreen above the meadow. He’d programmed the Santa Fe to run on its long route, switchbacking up the mountain and then back down. On cue the stubby steam engine shuttled down from the mine trestle to bustle around in the yard. He parked it under the water tower, and with a little flash of embarrassment realized he had forgotten to fill the tank.

He got a cup of water from the laundry sink. He was watching the Santa Fe on his way back and saw a little movement, the engineer waving at him when the train looped close.

He stopped the Santa Fe on its next pass.

“Hi, Matt!”

He looked carefully at the little guy. He could see lines on his face, his mustache with curls at the end. The instructions said you could set voice commands by using the engineer to name the file. “Um, what’s your name?” he asked.

“Great question. As you’ve probably figured out, I’m your interface, Matt, the way you communicate directly with your layout using the virtualized AI. Call me Chief!”

Matt took in the tiny engineer, the silver train, the town beyond it, the hills rising, it seemed, miles away. “Awesome,” he said. What was the second thing he was supposed to ask? “Chief? Rate this layout?”

“Great question. Needs some people.”

Matt squinted and looked at the little figure.

“Great question,” Chief said again. “Needs some people.”

Matt laughed and sure enough, among the smaller pods, along with a few highly realistic zoo animals, were whole sets of figures—more than a hundred yellow-jacketed ones, the city people with their silver- and bronze-uniformed gardeners and security. They had six perfect, tiny cats.

The ten dogs belonged to Chief’s world, along with the blue mailman and bright shoppers and farmers and school kids—at least a hundred more figures. As he set the retro people in place, they seemed more real to him. The monorail city was not for him. It was too generic, too perfect, like the private school he went to, like the Mars Habitat at Chris’s, all titanium and polymers and touchscreens, like the holo-ized shows his mom watched.

He let the trains run as he placed the figures. He liked feeling them flex under his fingers, setting them down on sidewalks before houses as the trains danced in the background. The passing windows of the observation car caught his eye. They were opaque, and their blankness troubled him. Was there something else missing?

“Great question,” the engineer said. “We could use some food, Matt.”

Matt blinked. He hadn’t read that far. “Food?”

“Grains of rice. Just fill that mining hopper with grains of rice.”

* * * *

One night in January he crept down the stairs to the basement, halfway down to where the stairs turned and it was shadowy, and from that spot he watched the layout under racing moonlight from the garden window.

It looked like a real place, a countryside, seen from far away, from a high glider, perhaps, and he half-dreamed of the sleeping world below under shifting clouds.

Then, all of the railroad’s signal lights popped on, tiny red and green lights, and from the now illuminated station the Santa Fe’s headlight beamed and the double-ended diesel started a slow crawl.

Crawl is what he felt at the back of his neck. He shook with cold. What had turned the layout on? The Santa Fe stopped, then reversed to its starting position at the platform. The steam engine pushed its tender slowly beneath the water tank. What the snap?

He thought about it. Obviously the layout was maintaining itself, the equipment keeping itself clean and lubricants distributed. A lot of stuff had those routines. This one was particularly cool.

He wasn’t sure when all the lights went off, wasn’t even sure how he’d gotten to bed, but the next day during geometry it seemed like a dream.

* * * *

By March he was using a juice pitcher for water and even so he had to fill the tank once a day. And now there were two rice hoppers; his mom had bought a big sack at Walco. As the days passed, the farm crops were peeking up as if they had been watching the calendar, and, as he misted, grass rose higher in the pastures. In the golden city, monorail pylons sported new greenery by a lake alive with paddleboats and canoes. The steam engine had started shuttling flat cars stacked with straw-sized copper pipe into the mine.

One afternoon, as he watched the monorail swing up its long loop on the pylons, the chain of golden cars stopped on its side of the mountain clearing.

That was new, stopping in the middle of a run. How long had it been doing that? To his further surprise, golden doors slid open, and figures with jackets in different shades of yellow moved stiffly out.

Men and women, a girl his age. In their awkward movements was the signature of one overheated robotics chip. Wait till he told Chris.

The driver of the mono stepped off, identifiable by a golden helmet. The driver’s movements were smoother, the wave signaling the passengers back into the cars even and natural.

The next day he brought the Santa Fe up to the pass. He stopped it at its side of the meadow, on its parallel track. Sure enough, the car doors swung open, a set of silver steps dropped down, and retro figures moved out, a group of boys, two young women, men in suits. He recognized the family with the dog from figures he had set out at the main terminal! The figures milled around and reboarded one by one. It was awesome.

People had started moving around the retro town, too, he realized, stepping from the store across the street to the station and back, from the firehouse to the diner, little robotic steps.

But when he stopped both trains at the meadow at the same time, all the figures did was mill around beside their cars and then reboard. Time after time, all he got was the same result.

* * * *

“Hey, kiddo,” he heard his mom call from across the basement, “how do you start this thing?”

He was at his dad’s workbench, lost in sorting out tiny farm equipment—which was the posthole digger? He looked over and there she stood, her blonde hair falling over the shimmering blue shoulders of her robe. She’d wandered over from the laundry. She held the remote in her hand like an empty plate.

The layout was completely dead. Which was funny, because he’d been over there five minutes before and he had left the lines on demo routes, low-consumption moves that kept the equipment cycling.

Chief had said he loved them.

He had trouble booting up, too. Finally, he did a complete cold reset. But now only the steam engine moved.

The Santa Fe diesel sat at the station like a beautiful museum exhibit. Beyond it children walked stiffly by the firehouse and old men sat on benches by the square. He couldn’t remember setting them out. The little town was becoming more populated somehow. So was the city. Finally, the diesels moved.

“Why don’t you build a little station up there?” his mom suggested when he told her about the meadow. “Maybe they’ll make friends.” They talked about school and then both watched the trains’ graceful dance, his mom sitting at the far end of the layout, resting her chin in her hands, a dreamy look in her eyes.

It was the Christmas gift of all time. It was so cool.

* * * *

He turned to his father’s workbench again. He started with a platform wide enough to reach both tracks and a shelter. With miniature construction materials from the pod he added an outdoor café with its own deck, a cabin for the owner, and a stable on the retro side.

The figures still just kept by their trains. Over at Chris’s, they got into a dust-up with an Aussie Rover—the Mars thing was looking more like a vid game, but it was cool the way it had gone global. Within the week they bumped into a Japanese unit whose probes had been weaponized, and he could barely get a turn.

Then it was Spring Recess and his dad was downstairs saying good-bye before he headed off to the airport for a conference. The night before, his dad had tweaked the robotics chip to run a subroutine that made the animals move.

“Very clever,” his dad said. “Very, very clever.” His dad was over by the furnace, tracing a run of copper tubing just beneath the vegetation that led to the layout’s water tank. The tubing had been routed through the mine from the furnace dehumidifier.

“Jeez,” Matt said. “I’ve been forgetting to fill the tank.”

“I guess we can afford the water bill.” Matt’s dad laughed.

Beyond the diesels standing idle on the roundtable, Chief waved his arm cheerfully back and forth, like a signal. The light shifted, and he saw his mom’s legs at the window, among green tongues of rising leaves. There was a splatter of dirt and she disappeared.

* * * *

Passengers from both trains were walking along the meadow platform to the shelter now, sitting in the café. Their motions had become as smooth as wind, couples had formed, and groups of like-sized boys coalesced.

In the retro town, a kneeling figure turned a yard into a thriving garden the next day. Chief walked home from the station at the end of the day to a house with a red door from which spilled a wife and two children. The house had a white fence and a teeter-totter in the back yard made up to look like a steam engine.

The mingling was getting more intense. Over at Chris’s, the Japanese had broken his solar array and he was looking for help from the Aussies, but his console had to be sent back for repairs.

* * * *

Trouble, he saw, at the meadow.

The crowd from the retro train had been backed into the shelter by yellow-jacketed passengers from the monorail, pushed into the shelter like trash in a trash can, even though there was plenty of room on the platform behind them.

His hand trembling, he ran undo functions for the monorail and the Santa Fe. The passengers moved back to their cars, and the trains pulled away.

What he hadn’t counted on was the Santa Fe leaving a half-dozen passengers behind. He hadn’t noticed. They were a family, a mother, father, and three kids. When the monorail looped back up, its passengers swarmed the family. This time it looked ugly, like a fight.

“Chief!” he yelled. Where was the Santa Fe?

Up on the mountain platform, one of the retro figures, the father, had been knocked over. His leg was twisted into an unnatural angle. Matt tried to run another undo function for the monorail line but the toggle wouldn’t engage. More yellow figures were surrounding the fallen father.

“Hi, Matt!” A voice registered from the gingerbread station.

“Chief! Something’s wrong. We have an emergency. The layout is acting wrong!”

“Coming up,” Chief said grimly.

Chief climbed into the cab of the steam engine in a heartbeat and it was climbing the grade, spewing black smoke and chugging up the trestles.

Up at the meadow platform, the monorail driver had stepped out of the train and moved to the fallen retro figure. The driver knelt on one knee as the yellow-jackets moved away.

Then the driver’s helmet rose. Blonde hair spilled over the driver’s shoulders.

Matt blinked. The monorail driver was a woman. As she set down her golden helmet and tended to the father, he could clearly see that the driver was a young, long-haired woman with a calm, perfect face. In his parents’ room there was a picture of his mother when she was in college; she looked like that.

As the steam engine chugged up the last stretch of track before the meadow, the monorail passengers filed quickly back into their cars. The driver helped the fallen father to his feet—his leg still twisted—and walked back to the lead car. Her door closed just as the steam engine pulled up and the monorail slid away.

His remote was showing a half-dozen error codes.

“Thanks, Chief,” Matt said as the engineer stepped down from the cab.

“Kiddo?” his mom called down from the top of the stairs. “Is everything all right down there?”

* * * *

Even with the trains scheduled to stop at different times, few passengers disembarked at the meadow anymore. His sister teased him. His new snack bar, the platform, the little café, were rather forlorn. He misted the vegetation, adjusted the signals, and tamped the tracks, but that only reminded him of the fight.

That night, he didn’t even want to log in to Chris’s site. As he lay in bed, he replayed the sight of the monorail driver tucking so much blonde hair back into her helmet, rising from her knees, hand extended to the retro male figure.

“Chief!”

“Hi, Matt.”

“Chief, analyze error.”

“Simple error,” Chief said. “Your new platform is undocumented in setup. The meadow station development is undocumented. It defaults as a lawless place, a no-man’s-land. Potential bug in the hybrid set? The platform complex needs some rules.”

His head spun a bit. Whose fault was that? His? The AI’s?

“Security infrastructure options include: a police station, TSI presence, community development sequences.”

He shut the layout down to its demo routes and headed back to his dad’s workbench. The pod of building materials he’d opened was his only hope now.

* * * *

When he rebooted it was already May. He’d cobbled together a little sheriff’s office, a TSI post with surveillance cameras, and manned them with passenger figures from both of the trains. He converted a little storefront into a hotel flanked by two cabins to give the place a lived-in feel. Following Chief’s instructions, he held off running the trains to the meadow until Saturday afternoon. Chief said he was working at something too.

When he went down to the basement Saturday afternoon, Chief was standing on a little stage at the café end of the platform—where had that come from? Blue and gold bunting surrounded the stage like a skirt.

Then both trains arrived simultaneously at the platform.

Passengers poured out from the trains and formed a crowd before the stage. The monorail driver, shaking her blonde hair out as she removed her helmet, climbed up to stand beside him, and they hugged, then raised their hands together. A faint cheer swept down the mountain. Chief delivered a speech Matt couldn’t hear, followed by the mono driver. Then they were shaking hands, there was another cheer, and all the figures on the platform began shaking hands, figures in yellow jackets, retro figures in casual clothes, all shaking hands.

The monorail driver, when she faced the crowd—you could see she was so pretty, perfect in her golden jumpsuit, smiling as she raised Chief’s arm.

* * * *

Even Chris was impressed with the layout, though all he wanted to talk about was weaponizing his digging tools when his console came back. He went home early.

Up at the meadow the figures mingled. The trains looped through their routes and the steam engine shuttled very realistic loads of dirt from the mine. The cars moved and the tractors tilled the country fields. Kids swung on a jungle gym in the schoolyard (very cool). The little world seemed peaceful again.

Then one day he was outside looking for a wooden glider in his mother’s small vegetable garden, which was bordered by the plantings outside the basement window. Two yellow-jacketed figures darted out from the end of a lettuce row. At first he couldn’t figure out what they were, it was so strange. They disappeared behind the carrots and he traced a path that led to a packed-earth tunnel alongside the foundation. It stopped at the window frame.

On the basement side there was dirt and plant debris on the floor, spattered on the layout. He was shocked. He checked the rice hopper and it was empty. He had neglected the layout lately. It had been running so beautifully.

“Chief!” he yelled as he brought the Santa Fe diesels around. There was no response. To his surprise, in Chief’s cab sat the fireman, a mute figure who usually stood stiffly at the controls of the steam engine.

Matt scanned the layout in the late-afternoon light. Chief was nowhere to be found. Matt looked up along the steep-faced mountain—it was an hour before trains were scheduled to stop. He searched the empty meadow.

Then he saw them. In the trees, behind the café, Chief was walking with a figure in a gold suit who was holding a helmet. Her blonde hair was spilling over her shoulders. The two figures were holding hands. They passed behind the TSI shed and up the walk to the little hotel, the rustic stone walk he had meticulously laid.

Chief held the door open and followed her in. The door closed behind them like a circuit switching off. Then there was a glow in a rear window.

Matt waited, but they didn’t come out.

After dinner, light still glowed in the window. Matt sat at the control console all evening, the layout quiet, staring at his unfinished geometry homework. Near their house by the station, Chief’s wife stood beside the picket fence. She was dark-haired, had a round, moon face, like the child who held her at her knees.

Matt tossed and turned in bed. When he slid toward sleep, his mind was filled with her, her train from the perfect city, her blonde hair swirling across her shoulders and down her back, her movements so smooth she seemed made of silk.

* * * *

Matt was up before breakfast and downstairs even as his mother called from the kitchen that he was going to be late for school.

He found Chief dozing in the diesel’s cab at the gingerbread station.

“I don’t think the AI is supposed to do stuff like that,” Matt said thickly.

Chief was not smiling. He looked older and mean. Chief gazed around the terminal before he looked directly at Matt. “It’s you,” Chief said with a leer. “The AI is configured on you. It’s your imagination, Matthew Pike.”

* * * *

He couldn’t concentrate in English. When he got home that afternoon, there was a crowd at the monorail terminal. There were more children than he’d ever seen, ten times as many as he’d put out. Little mounds of dirt surrounded the bases of trees flanking the suburban stop. Tiny green fruit hung at the end of the branches.

His face flushed. His hand shook as he reached for and tripped the main power switch for the console.

A yellow light flashed on his panel. His dialogue bar blinked:

DO NOT DISCONNECT

Matt keyed in the command for a cold boot. He waited, but the kill command just triggered a backup.

The monorail moved along the back of the layout, swinging around its golden loop on the far side of the modern city, all right angles and trees in planters. The steam engine shuttled loads of dirt from the mine.

* * * *

His mother complained that he wasn’t paying attention, but he was. The Kennedys were going to drop off his father from the airport.

He went downstairs after dinner.

“Chief!”

“Hi, Matt!” Chief leaned out of the red and silver cab of the Santa Fe.

“Chief, I’m going to tell my dad. I want to shut down the layout.”

“Security alert, Matthew Pike. Backup has engaged to save what you have created. To shut the line down with the main breaker will terminate the landscape, the plants and the animals, and all the new people. All the new children. It will destroy this little world.”

“I want this to stop.”

“When you want to start up again, some of your initialization materials will have been compromised, and the manufacturer cannot guarantee that the trains will operate. That’s what we’re trying to avoid. But if that’s what the license holder wants—”

“Hi, Matt!” a woman’s voice called out.

Chief’s wife walked beneath the cab window. “We can work it out, Matthew Pike,” she said. “That’s what we like about you. When you see something’s wrong, you fix it, Matthew. You fixed the meadow. You stopped the fighting.”

True. It was really a cool present, after all. “I did, I made new buildings, and....” Now he saw two figures on the floor, a tiny ladder on the cable run.

“So you don’t really have to worry,” she said, comfort in her voice.

“I just want a railroad,” he said. “A model railroad.”

“Consider it done,” Chief said.

“So first, everybody stays on the layout.”

“Done.” The figures on the floor moved up clever little steps on the sawhorse.

“See?” Chief’s wife said. “You can make it work. The AI is you, Matthew Pike.”

But the next night he crossed the back yard to run the trash out behind the garage. Somebody had left the door open, and as he went to close it on his way back he took in the smell of rubber and batteries and the sight of his mom’s car plugged in. A movement caught his eye. Along the stud above the outlet he counted five of the figures moving along like a centipede. Up in the corner, he saw a half-dozen more.

“Matt?” his mother asked as the sliding door thumped behind him. “Have you been in my closet?”

* * * *

He slept fitfully.

He was up at first light. He should have known better.

His father had come home late and his parents were still sleeping.

When he got some juice he saw figures by the back door. There were two in the kitchen cabinet. The little figures were all over the house now, like ants.

He went downstairs and looked. The layout seemed healthy, green and colorful, but he couldn’t see any people.

He studied the place, a lovely little world with its square fields, farm trucks on the roads, tiny boats at a dock on the monorail lake. As he scanned the retro town, a color caught his eye.

Hanging on the line outside the cottage was a blue piece of silk.

“Hi, Matt!” A stranger in a gold jacket spoke from the cab of the Santa Fe.

“I’m telling my dad. I’m telling him now.”

“Matt!”

But he had already turned away. He was climbing the stairs. Then at the head of the stairs he saw the crowd of figures. He would have to step on them to pass by.

He ran back down the stairs, slipping off his GPS bracelet. He pushed it into the tool drawer of his father’s workbench.

He watched the line of figures crawl back down the stairway. When they had gathered by the workbench, he tiptoed past and up the stairs.

“Dad!” he yelled. He heard a voice, his mom’s. He pushed open the door of their bedroom.

* * * *

His parents were bound by fishing line in the bed, swarmed by the tiny figures. The shock was numbing, like he’d been hit by a car.

His mother looked at him from her pillow with a wan smile. “Hey, kiddo,” she said. “Can you help us out here?”

He was transfixed by the pattern of fishing line that bound her to the bed. It began at her shoulders, crisscrossing down to her ankles, passing beneath her arms and between her breasts, like a web across her stomach and hips outlined beneath the sheet. His father had been gagged, trussed in the fetal position and wrapped in a blanket, utterly helpless. Maybe the main breaker, Matt thought. Maybe if he pulled the main breaker for the house?

“Kiddo?”

Well, now he had a plan. Too bad about the children. It was so cool, but.... Then he noticed a tugging at the backs of his calves, his muscles already tight enough so that when he turned to get a better look at the web forming around his feet, like a net, his knees began to buckle.

“Kiddo?”

“Mom! Dad!”

He was twisting, tumbling, falling.

The cold oak floor was hard against his burning cheek.