Cole Delaney stood on the porch of his twenty-six-room house overlooking Lake Willoughby in Vermont. The sunset was sublime as ever. He couldn’t believe his good fortune finding this place for his retirement. He sold off his software company two years ago and had enough money in the bank to buy fifty houses like this one. It was not just the location that made Lake Willoughby the ideal spot to enjoy the autumn years of his life; the people were so lovely here too. He’d spent the afternoon helping a neighbour build his thirty-foot sailboat. The keel was finished; they were now constructing the deck with hardwood teak. The physical work was highly satisfying. Cole felt tired, but it was a wholesome kind of fatigue that came with a sense of accomplishment. After dinner with his beautiful wife — Cole did not know how she did it, but Alice looked even hotter than when he met her for the first time, thirty years ago — he’d go to another neighbour’s garage, where they’d rehearse for a couple of hours. Cole had played the guitar when he was a kid. His professional life left him little time to keep up his hobby, but since a few months, he’d taken it up again with a vengeance. Cole played lead guitar in a Frank Zappa tribute band. Tonight, he’d astonish his friends by playing the entire guitar solo from Willie the Pimp. They bet their buddy could never do it. Well, he’d show them wrong.

‘Hot meat, hot rats, hot zits,’ he sang in a growling Captain Beefheart voice, playing air guitar as he went inside for dinner.

Alice had cooked brilliantly, as always. She served pan-fried trout with fiddleheads, morels, and wild scallions — all of which she’d foraged herself in the woods. Cole uncorked a crisp Sauvignon Blanc they’d discovered in Hamilton, Ontario, when they visited Niagara Falls last summer. Cole originated from Florida and had no idea they made such great wines so far up north.

When he complimented her on her cooking, Alice told him she had a call from Laura, who lived half a mile down the road.

‘She sounded upset,’ Alice said. ‘She claimed she’d seen something unusual in the lake.’

‘I hope it wasn’t an alligator,’ Cole joked. ‘After all our efforts to get away from the swamps. Has global warming caught up with us?’

‘No, it wasn’t an animal she was referring to,’ his wife said with a smile. ‘Laura said that as she was looking at the lake, its colours seemed to be bleached out.’

‘Like in a fog bank?’ Cole asked.

‘That was what I asked her too,’ Alice nodded. ‘She didn’t make much sense. She said the colours disappeared until it looked as if she was watching an old black-and-white television screen with lots of static, and then, all of a sudden, the colours were back on as before.’

‘She should lay off the WhistlePig until after dinner,’ Cole remarked, referring to Laura’s drinking habits. Her husband, Matt, had been a big shot in advertising. When she told them about her pre-Vermont days, it seemed as if their married life had been one long, uninterrupted cocktail party. Laura lived alone. Matt had died of cirrhosis fifteen years ago.

‘I don’t know, Cole,’ his wife said. ‘This morning, when I was foraging, I felt something too. A thing with the trees. I can’t put it into words. They seemed to blink off and on a couple of times, very rapidly. It was over before I had a good look. If Laura hadn’t called, I’d have thought it was my imagination or that I had a dizzy spell. Now, I’m not so sure anymore.’

‘A dizzy spell sounds a lot more reasonable than trees “blinking off and on” if you ask me,’ Cole patted her hand. ‘Why don’t you make an appointment with the PCP and have your blood pressure checked? You know you’ve got to be careful with that lazy bum thyroid of yours.’

Cole got up and went to his garage, where the custom-built, 23-fret ‘Baby Snakes’ Gibson SG was waiting for him in its travel case. He loaded it, together with a Pignose amp and his guitar effects pedalboard, in the booth of his 1969 Chevy Camaro SS 396. For their daily transportation needs, they used a modern SUV; the Camaro was for Cole’s nights out with the boys. The straight-six roared satisfyingly as he rode down the driveway. It was only a six-mile drive to his friend Leonard’s place, but Cole was determined to enjoy every minute of it. He was thinking about buying a vintage hot rod to do some dirt track racing. Cole had always liked to tinker with cars. Alice wasn’t keen on that particular hobby of his; so he had to bide his time until the opportune moment presented itself.

Four miles later, he saw a pickup truck parked on the soft right-hand shoulder. The skid marks on the asphalt indicated the car had swerved off the road, probably because of a blowout. A woman was standing next to the truck and hailed him. He didn’t know her. Cole stopped and got out of his car.

‘Hello, Miss,’ he greeted her, ‘how can I be of assistance?’

He had a better look at her now. She was Asian, early forties, chubby, short hair. Cole couldn’t see anyone else around. The woman didn’t seem dangerous; he was two heads taller than she.

‘Hi, Mister, thanks for stopping,’ she welcomed him, laughing nervously. Apparently, she had the same misgivings as he about talking to a complete stranger along an empty forest road at dusk. She pointed at the left rear tyre of her car.

‘It blew up, and I don’t have a spare,’ she said. ‘Is there a garage in the neighbourhood that could help me out?’

‘Sure, there’s Coulthart’s two miles down the road,’ Cole answered. ‘It’s already late; Sam will have closed shop for the day, but he lives above his garage. He’s a nice guy; he’ll help you. Do you want a lift, Miss—’

‘Oh, I’m Mei. Nice to meet you, Mister—’

‘Hi there, Mei. Cole’s my name.’

‘Well, thank you, Cole, and, yes, I’d like a ride, if it’s not too inconvenient for you.’

‘I’m heading in that direction anyway; no problem. Hop on in,’ Cole invited her.

On the way to Coulthart’s, they got to know each other a little better. Mei had been living in nearby Newport, on the southern shore of Lake Memphremagog, where she ran a pet fish store for ten years. She had to close shop a month ago and was travelling to Portland, Maine, where she had relatives. Cole told her about his software company. The initial awkwardness between them had dissipated when they came to a fork in the road. Cole hit the brakes abruptly and stared at the surroundings in amazement.

‘What’s going on?’ Mei asked, her misgivings about travelling with a stranger resurging in full force.

‘Sorry to have scared you, Mei,’ Cole said, ‘but this is the place. This is where Coulthart’s ought to be. I drove by his garage only the other day, and now it’s gone.’

Cole got out of his car to inspect the spot where Coulthart’s used to be. There was not a trace of it left. The place was covered in low shrubs and weeds.

‘This can’t be,’ Cole muttered, poking around aimlessly.

Mei stayed in the car and observed him with distrust through the half-wound-down car window. She seemed anxious to get away from this place.

‘There was a garage, a gas station, and a small convenience store on this very spot, I tell you,’ Cole called out to her, still looking for traces on the ground to support his claim.

‘If it’s all the same to you, Cole, I’d like to get out of here,’ she said. ‘Somehow, it doesn’t feel safe.’

Cole nodded and got back into his car. He drove off in the direction of Leonard’s house, half a mile down the road. Leonard’s place was lit up, and Cole was relieved to see the cars of his other music buddies — Kirk, Elmore, and Wayne — parked on the driveway. At least, this looked normal. Leonard opened his front door and stepped on the porch to greet Cole. When he saw Mei getting out of the car, he raised his eyebrows.

‘Finally found us a vibraphone player, Cole?’ he asked half-jokingly.

Cole introduced Mei to his friends and filled them in about what happened at where Coulthart’s used to be. Leonard laughed in his face. He told Cole to pull the other one because he’d gassed up there that very morning. Kirk added he’d stopped at Sam’s convenience store only half an hour ago to buy tonight’s beers. Cole got angry, called Mei as his witness, and insisted his friends go look for themselves if they didn’t believe him. Kirk and Elmore took him up on that, and the three of them jumped in Elmore’s Ford Explorer. Fifteen minutes later, they were back. Coulthart’s had disappeared, they had to admit. Leonard scowled at them, suspecting his three friends were playing a practical joke on him.

He winked at Wayne and said, ‘I don’t believe these clowns. Do you? Let’s go have a look and get this over with, so we can still play some music tonight. I think Cole’s trying to weasel his way out of his Willie the Pimp guitar solo. You’re gonna lose that bet, Cole, no matter what.’

Half an hour later, Leonard and Wayne were still gone.

‘What’s keeping those two idiots?’ Kirk asked, looking at his watch for the twelfth time.

‘They’ll be back; don’t you worry so much. What could happen?’ Elmore shrugged. ‘I’m going inside; do some drumming warm-ups.’

As Elmore turned around and reached for the doorknob, he blinked out of existence. An instant later, the entire house was gone. Mei screamed, and Kirk scrambled towards his car in a panic. He roared down the driveway, pedal to the metal. Before Kirk reached the first bend, he disappeared as well. Then the surrounding trees started to vanish one by one. Cole grabbed Mei by the hand and pulled her towards his Camaro.

‘I don’t know what’s happening, but we can’t stay here,’ he told her. ‘I need to get back home; see if my wife’s safe!’

Mei followed him and sat with a blank stare next to him in the car as he sped down the driveway. Cole floored it and drove the six miles back to his house like a madman. Mei’s pickup truck was gone. In the rear-view mirror, Cole saw the road behind them disappearing. The stars in the sky winked out as well. They wildly skidded to a stop in front of Cole’s house. The screaming brakes and screeching tires made Alice come out to see what was going on before Cole could run up the porch stairs. She saw the panicked look on his face and took his hand. He embraced her with both arms, sobbing with relief. Mei watched them, standing next to the car.

‘What’s wrong, honey?’ Alice whispered in Cole’s ear. ‘What happened to you?’

Before Cole could answer, they heard Mei calling out.

‘I’m sorry, Cole. You seem like a really nice guy. I want you to know this isn’t personal,’ she said.

The house vanished, and Cole and his wife fell to the ground, still holding each other tight. Then Alice went up in smoke. The trees blinked and were gone the next moment. The last, lingering red of the sunset over the lake turned dark; the lake itself became a black smear seeded with static. Finally, Cole disappeared into thin air.

‘I can’t fucking believe this!’ Cheryl Hartfield, CEO of Bliss, seethed. ‘This is the nineteenth system crash in six weeks. I’d expected you’d have found the damn bug by now! I have an investors’ meeting in two days. What am I going to tell them? If we don’t get additional seed money, we’re royally screwed, gentlemen.’

Brent Holloway, Chief Technological Officer, and Mandeep Buttar, Chief Software Engineer, bowed their heads. Their teams had been working round the clock to fix the recurring system crashes. They looked exhausted and were at their wits’ end. The three of them were co-founders of Bliss, a start-up company that promised eternal life to its customers. They’d developed scanning software that allowed them to upload the full consciousness of human beings, including all of their experiences, emotions, and memories, into a quantum mainframe that also ran a virtual reality experience designed to the customers’ specifications. They’d been beta testing the system for fourteen months with thirty test subjects who lived in a 3D CGI-recreation of a part of Vermont. All of their subjects were elderly, wealthy entrepreneurs and their families. Since the beginning of the beta testing phase, already four of them had passed away in real life; three others were in a terminal stage, with a life expectancy of fewer than two months.

‘We can’t find anything wrong with the software,’ Mandeep emphasised. ‘My guys have been pulling double shifts. The VR-environment should be stable. We stress-tested the shit out of it. It’s not even the most complex part of our system. Still, we keep losing it. Each time, one layer after another disappears, until there’s nothing left but static.’

‘Are we being hacked?’ Cheryl asked.

‘How could we be?’ Brent replied. ‘We run a fully autonomous private network. We’re not even connected to the net.’

‘Then it’s an inside job?’ Cheryl insisted.

‘We’ve got a team of two hundred bright young people working for us,’ Mandeep said. ‘They know they’ll all be multi-millionaires if this pans out. Why would they want to sabotage Bliss?’

‘All of the terminals are closely monitored,’ Brent added. ‘We perform a full system scrub at each reboot. If somebody was injecting malware into our systems, we’d have picked it up by now.’

Mei was on a plane from Hong Kong to Wenchang. In her briefcase, she had a signed contract with the Chinese Commission of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, which was also responsible for China’s space programme. Her technology allowed China to embark upon a deep-space exploration programme that would no longer have to rely on frail human beings with a limited life span. China’s space ships would be fully robotised and piloted by the uploaded consciousnesses of highly trained astronauts. Deep space voyages that’d take centuries or even millennia to complete were now well within China’s reach. Mei suspected the Chinese would be using her technology closer to home as well, to enhance their military striking power, but she couldn’t care less.

Cheryl had made a huge mistake trying to cheat Mei out of the ownership of her break-through technology. Mei left Bliss over a year ago after she uploaded her consciousness into the quantum mainframe under the name of one of Bliss’s test subjects. Her avatar in the CGI-environment had a back-door access into the virtual world’s code. She could, at will, manipulate or shut down Bliss’s VR engine, without running the risk of being detected. Her uploaded consciousness was not part of any of Bliss’s VR software and could not be scrubbed away before rebooting the system. She’d become an invisible virus, resistant to whatever cure Brent’s or Mandeep’s teams could develop.

All Bliss could offer its customers in the foreseeable future was a never-ending cycle of losing their loved ones and themselves over and over again.