Forever Forever Forever Summer
Chapter 6: Freefall (Remember At Your Peril)
It came back to him, eventually. Like waking up from a fugue state. Phineas found himself sat at a drafting table in the backyard, suddenly feeling wrong, and suddenly remembering what this really was.
His first instinct was to turn around and tell Ferb, but he stopped himself before the logical part of his brain fully caught up with why. Don't forget.
Down on the drafting table, his hand toiled away on a rough blueprint for some unknown contraption. He easily recognised his own handwriting supplemented by Ferb's, and it definitely looked like something he and Ferb would design, but it was only distantly familiar. Briefly lifting his pencil off the page, he scans it to check what on earth he was apparently making. Thankfully, he’d already labeled it “MEGA HAMSTR WHEEL POWR’D CAR”. A car with wheels powered by hamsters, easily scalable to work with other animals, even humans, for clean travel and a good aerobic workout.
Ferb stood over his shoulder but Phineas wouldn't need to see his shadow to feel he was there. Pressured by his presence, Phineas returns his pencil to the page, letting his subconscious work. The rest of his mind was elsewhere.
If he didn't know any better, perhaps he would have been able to write off what he saw as a particularly strange dream. Maybe he’d be able to kid himself into believing that it really was Ferb and that everything was wonderfully ordinary, and a piece of him desperately wanted to. What little he remembered of his visit to the real world was fuzzy and scattered enough to be a dream, but he knew, even if he couldn't fully articulate why, that this is no simple nightmare.
He stands up and stretches, finding no relief in doing so.
“Hey Ferb, could you check everything over? I need a snack break before we get working.”
Ferb gives a thumbs up, and Phineas turns and speedwalks into the house.
~
It was quiet. Gurgling distant memories attempted to resurface but he pushed them back down. He was becoming uncomfortably aware of the unseen eyes watching his every action. If he did something out of line, whatever they considered that to be, they had the ability to play god and pull him back in. How many times had this happened? How many times had they made him forget? His head spun. Why him? What did he do wrong to deserve being held captive like this?
He looks through the cabinets and tries to fight his trembling hands, finding everything artificially neat and tidy. It was the kind of perfect organisation that only lasted from when mom put the groceries away to the first time someone needed something. Another memory filters through, and he painfully remembers she’s not here.
There was a way out. There had to be. There always was. He’d made it off a deserted island in the middle of the Atlantic with nothing more than a giant rubber band and paper plane, he’d realigned the earth’s orbit to save it from another ice age, he’d stopped a zombie apocalypse, no matter how much desperation rose and rattled in his head Phineas Flynn does not give up. His friends had taught him that. His real friends. Here he’s alone, truly alone, maybe for the first time in his life he’s completely alone with nowhere kind to turn. Every conscious part of his mind was screaming at the mere idea of not trusting his friends. It was against his nature, it was burning him up from the inside. Every time he habitually tried to find a silver lining, a little something, anything, to give him hope it would all work out, all he could think was that he was the only real thing here.
He grips the bottom edge of the cabinet and reels as the fears he was trying to keep down all surface and fight for attention. He was alone in hell, he couldn't even trust his own brother because that wasn't him, he had to look at his friends and lie, and, and-
“Keep it together...” He says, out loud, realising too late why he shouldn't.
Stop. Stop it, stop remembering. His head drops onto the counter, his arms following behind. He wraps his hair around his fingers and pulls, wincing at the lack of pain that only makes him pull harder and harder until he should be pulling out hairs, and he should be-
“Phineas?”
Isabella.
Chin up.
“Isabella!” Phineas responds with the expected glee and smiles, ruffling his hair back to normal as he stands straight again. “I didn't hear you come in.”
“Are you okay?” She asks, sweet and innocent as candy.
“Yeah!” It's not really her but he grins anyway. His autopilot pushes him out of his own head and he’s left to watch from the background as his body acts on its own. “A little tired, maybe. I don’t think I slept great last night.”
“Still plenty of energy to work on your latest project, I’m sure!”
“Always! It takes a little more than a bad night's sleep to keep me and Ferb down.”
As if everything was real and everything was fine, they hop back to the yard together, no snacks in hand.
~
By the time he's aware of himself again, the hamster wheel car was fully designed and mid-construction. He teeters on the edge of the scaffolding he finds himself on, stumbling back slightly as he compensates. There's a rivet gun in his hand and a hard hat on his head. For a moment everything feels as it should be. The dread catches up with him and threatens to break him, but he breathes, slowly, easy, and pulls himself back together.
If he was making it out of here, assuming the people on the outside are halfway decent software engineers, he couldn't use a way to get out that he’d used before. Trying his best to scavenge through his hazy memories, he taps his free hand’s fingers on the rivet gun. He felt odd, he was trying to figure out what was wrong....
The words return to him, it had been a feedback loop. How exactly he created one escaped him still, but he knew the most important thing for sure; overwhelming the simulation from the inside was possible. He just had to figure out another way to do it.
Even then... what was he meant to do when he was out? He didn't have the faintest idea of where he was, who did this to him, why they did this to him... in the real world he could barely even stand and adrenaline only goes so far. For now, though, one problem at a time.
Phineas swallows the nausea and clambers down the scaffolding, finding more solace than he usually does in returning to solid ground. Looking up at their latest machine, his thoughts drift into normality.
“Maybe if it was a bike...” He ponders, speaking to no one in particular. “... it would be more efficient. Just need something to hold it up before it moves...”
Phineas is interrupted by Ferb descending on a harness in front of him, most of his gear in hand.
“Ah, are we all good to go?”
Ferb gives a thumbs up.
“Awesome!” Against all odds, a smile appears on his face. If it was really Ferb standing there, he’d know it was a ruse. “Who's driving?”
The world shifts around him, as if being squeezed through a bottleneck. His mind buzzes and he can’t think in this haze, yet it still felt concerningly familiar.
Trying to find his surroundings again, he turns his head just a fraction and everything opens up around him. Under the tree in the afternoon with only Ferb. He’d been here before. He’d done this before. He just had to concentrate a little harder...
The last time he escaped, to the best of his knowledge, it was a feedback loop that crashed the simulation. Something that spiralled so wildly out of control it took everything down with it. He couldn't do it that way again, too many risks, so had to think of something different. Something complex. Something big.
It was a dang good thing that thinking big was his favorite pastime.
Then, foodless dinner, bed, morning. Time to go around again, stay focused. He looks blankly at the grass, hoping his much more stressful than usual internal planning looked no different than his usual planning. Hoping for some inspiration, he begins mentally flicking through their project book, trying to not think about how long it had been since he’d written in it.
After a short while, he gets the hint of an idea, then physically stopping himself from turning to Ferb and telling him he knew what they were going to do today. He didn't know exactly what they was going to do, not yet, not that it's stopped him from announcing it before. In times like these Ferb was often enough steps ahead of him that he’d already filled in any blanks in Phineas’ idea before he said it.
But that wasn't him, no matter how much he looked and acted like his brother. Don’t forget.
“Hey Ferb, the weather’s so perfect and beautiful, how about another good ol’ do nothing day?” He says with his usual smile. “It’ll give us more energy to do something extra big tomorrow!”
Ferb looks at him, one eyebrow slightly raised.
“Like a... a super mega piece of everything ride, with flashy, and cool effects, and anything you can imagine! I remembered the plan we had for the end of summer that didn't end up working out, I think we can make it even bigger and better. We can even adapt our escape tower’s AI system to have it always build the next funnest thing! Of course, we’d have to fix the whole, y’know, tries to murder its creators thing, but I think we can do that.”
“Phineas, you know what we’re going to do tomorrow.” Ferb says, flat as ever. It made his skin crawl to know the phrase that was usually a comforting routine came out of a facsimile of someone he loved.
“Yes, yes I do!” His autopilot and encroaching brain fog claw at the edges to his psyche. If he could safely let them, if he could leave his body to live on its own, it would be perfect. He could sit and think about the plan he was concocting while hidden away in the back of his mind, but every time that fog got ahold of him-
He blinks. Afternoon. Evening, bed. Day’s over. Wake up. Morning, under the tree, blueprints he didn't remember creating in front of him.
Time to get building.