“You found it,” she said softly. “The old simulator. They used it to train drivers. But it shows you the roads you never finished.”
He drove. Through intersections that felt like childhood memories. Past a school he’d been expelled from. Past a park where his father used to push him on a swing—his father, who left when Alex was twelve. The GPS wasn’t showing streets anymore. It showed dates. March 14th. September 3rd. December 22nd.
No installer wizard, no license agreement. A single green progress bar filled in three seconds, and then the icon appeared on his desktop: a weathered, slightly faded image of a blue city bus. Not the glossy, fake-looking render he expected—this looked like a photograph taken through a rain-streaked window.
The bus pulled into a depot that didn’t exist in any real city. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. And there she was—his mother, younger than he’d ever seen her, sitting in the driver’s seat of a parked bus identical to his. She wasn’t crying. She was just waiting.
He clicked.