His lungs wouldn’t open because they remembered what they were standing inside of, and the remembering was happening at the level of his body, beneath the place where his brain could give an order to push through it.
Paul was behind him. He had stopped at the threshold. He had not stepped into the room.
Levi closed his eyes. He pressed his palm harder against the doorframe. He counted — not breaths, because the breaths weren’t coming, but the cold spots on his hand where the metal touched it, the four points of contact, the four facts he could hold against the layered hiss-click that wanted to be a flatline and wasn’t, wasn’t, wasn’t yet.
This is not Ethan. This is not Ethan. These ones are still in their bodies. Open your eyes.
He opened them.
He took one step in. Then another. His breath came back in pieces — small and shallow, but his. He walked into the room.
Six beds lined the walls, and each bed had a body in it and each body had a ventilator beside it and each body —
Each body had a headset on.
Older than Levi’s. Bulkier. The neural ribbons thicker and visible against the temples. The headsets wereon.The visors covered their eyes; their lower jaws stayed clear for the breathing tube, and the visible part of each face was the mouth and chin and the soft stillness of a face whose owner was somewhere else.
Levi’s hand went to his own temple.
The first bed was on the left. The body in it was large — broad shoulders, the build of an athlete even in atrophy, the buildof a man who had once put on a mocap bodysuit and grinned at a camera and saidsomebody’s gotta take the hits.The face below the visor was Tyler’s face. His chest rose and fell with the ventilator’s rhythm. His hands were at his sides, palms up, the fingers slightly curled.
The second bed. Owen. His glasses were on the bedside table — folded, set aside, the way someone would set them aside who expected to come back for them. Without them the visible part of his face looked younger. Softer. The kind of face that disappeared in a crowd.
The third bed. Zoe. Her hair was loose around her shoulders, her nails were trimmed. The fourth bed. Maddie. The fifth bed…
Jasper.
The man who vaped on a couch and talked about teaching a machine to learn. The man who offered Levi gummy edibles in a safe room. The man whose grin was the grin and whose voice was the voice and who had been, through so many lives in a simulated horror game, the closest friend Levi had out there.
Levi stopped at Jasper’s bed.
Jasper’s face was thinner than the documentary. His curly hair was shorter — someone had cut it. The vape pen was not on the bedside table. The bedside table had a chart and a cup of water with a straw that nobody was going to drink from and his face was filled with tubes to keep him alive. He couldn’t grin at Levi with all of that.
“Why?” Levi asked. His voice was steady. He didn’t know how. “Why haven’t you gotten them out.”
Paul stood in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, his face the color of paper.
“The game was designed for one player at a time,” Paul said softly, as if volume might wake them. “When Elliot pushed for the multiplayer distribution model, Asher insisted on a restriction. Any player who entered the game could notdisconnect without the consent of player one. He said it would be unfair to enter a system that targeted a person’s deepest fears and then abandon them inside it.”
He built a system nobody could leave without his permission. And then he forgot he was the one who built it.
A cold shifted up Levi’s spine and settled at the base of his skull.
“Zoe objected,” Paul continued. “Ethically. She wrote a formal dissent. It’s in the files. But the code was Asher’s and the company was Asher’s, so the restriction stayed.”
“When did they go in?”
Paul exhaled. “When Asher became stuck — or refused to leave, we were never sure which — we waited a week. We tried to remove his headset manually, but his vitals crashed within seconds. We tried powering down the system, and he seized until we powered it back up.” He paused. “At the end of the day, whether from dying in the game, or completing his objective, he was supposed to encounter a white room that would initiate an exit, but he started bypassing it entirely. The conclusion was that the only way to get him out was from the inside.”
The white room. Levi had been in the white room. Asher’s hand in his and the cut-offI lov—. Asher hadn’t bypassed it that time. Asher had beeninit, with him.
“So you sent people in?”
“They volunteered…it was all of their work, too. They felt responsible. So Tyler, Owen, and Zoe went first. Tyler said he could physically subdue Asher if needed; he’d done the combat testing, he knew Asher’s patterns. Owen went because he understood the system architecture. Zoe…well, she was the psychologist. She thought she could reach him.”
Levi looked at Tyler’s bed. Owen’s bed. Zoe’s bed. “What happened to them?”
“Asher killed them, over and over. The system resets every six hours. They would die and reset and die again. And with every reset, Asher forgot them more. They became strangers to him.” Paul stopped and swallowed audibly. “The trauma of being killed over and over, by someone who used to be their colleague, was too much. Their brains stopped sending information the AI could interpret. They went into a kind of mental stasis. A shutdown. The AI took their neural data and essentially piloted their bodies after that. The system was running the NPCs you interacted with — using the scans of people whose minds had stopped responding.”