by Vic Connor
He knew this place. He knew the tall windows with their gauzy curtains, looking out onto the sleepy Seattle neighborhood with its postage-stamp homes and Lego-brick apartment buildings. He remembered its high ceilings. But also, he knew the little kitchen, and he remembered cabinets left open, songs hummed over the heat of the stove. He knew those stairs, stacked up all on the north side of the house. He knew what this room looked like lit only by birthday candles.
This was the house where he grew up; the house where he had, apparently, unknowingly killed his own parents.
“How is that possible?” he asked aloud. His parents had left him. Why would they have been in that same house when they died? And why hadn’t he recognized it when he woke up here and found their bodies? Why didn’t he remember?
“How did they get my Vat here?” He kept talking to the empty house; to its missing furniture and barren closets. “Is someone just messing with me?”
Niko threw open the cabinets, tugged out the drawers. “Clark!” Niko moved around to the coat closet, tugging the few remaining hangers off the bar and throwing them on the floor. “Is this real, or is this still your damn game?” He reached for the front door and yanked it open.
The sleepy neighborhood stood waiting for him. A breeze reached in, brushing his still-wet suit; cooling his shorn head. It stood on a hill, the neighborhood, and from Niko’s vantage at the doorway, he could see at the bottom of it lay a far-reaching, unspoiled stretch of evergreens.
Run, his mind told him.
Assuming he was in the real world, he wasn’t in the penitentiary. He could walk out of this door and disappear; away from Territoria, away from the Queue, away from everything and to freedom. The system might never look for him again, assuming he’d met with a needle in the pen, or died in one of Clark’s experiments. After all, many people saw him jump to his death out the dorm window. He took a tentative step onto the sidewalk, feeling its rugged and inviting surface against the thin fabric of his suit.
What will happen to Hunk? His mind asked the question and answered it just as quickly: They’d kill him, if they haven’t already. They’d experiment on him until he had nothing left, and when he died, he’d be mourned in Territoria and utterly forgotten here. Who would they come for next then? Tim? Cal?
Jeny?
Niko squeezed his eyes shut, stepped back inside, and slammed the door closed. I’ll come back, he told himself. When he knew his friends were safe, then he could leave.
But he couldn’t help Hunk from here either. He’d have to find a way to wake up in the penitentiary. He didn’t know how he’d get past the guards, but no matter what, he’d have to go back in the game first. Niko returned down the basement steps, locking the trap door behind him.
With a sigh, he hefted himself back into the tank, and with a deeper sigh, he shoved the feeding tube down his throat, securing the breathing mask over his nose and mouth. He tugged the lid down to close the door, then lay, exhausted, on the bottom of the tank as it filled up. He closed his eyes when the liquid crept over his face, then opened them again, peering up and wondering if he was making a stupid mistake.
The Vat clunked and whirred as it started up. There, on the lid, was a name and number printed in black, block letters. It read: SOMOV 000002.
The blue lights went out.
24
Out of the Vat
Niko awoke in his bed with a start, sheened in sweat, his body aching. Hunk was still missing.
Have to try again, Niko told himself, pushing out of bed. He wanted to know why he hadn’t woken up in the Territoria facility, who had moved his Vat to the house of his parents—if it was even his Vat—but there wasn’t time to worry about that now. As he got up, Niko’s joints creaked like an old man’s. His head wasn’t hot, but he felt nauseated.
The hallway was even busier than before, crowded and noisy people, chattering with nerves. Though this was the boy’s dorm, some girls crowded here too, covering their gasping mouths. They all faced the window at the end of the hall. He spotted Erica’s feathery, bleach-red hair trying to peer over the crowd.
“Hey, Erica?” Niko tapped her on the shoulder. “You seen Hunk?”
Erica spun, then gaped at him. “N-Niko?” Her bell voice clanged over the din, and the whole hallway turned to look. Niko realized his mistake and regretted not sneaking away when everyone was distracted. How was he going to log out now?
The whole group started talking all at once, some grabbing Niko by the arms and screaming into his face. He tried to pull away from them and their worried expressions, feeling like tentacles were grabbing at him.
Then, like a shot, someone exploded from the crowd and crashed into him. If not for the people standing behind him, he would have toppled over.
“Whae on the two planets are you thinking of, you daft-minded…greasy-headed…slack-jawed…beetroot!” Jeny punctuated each of her insults with punches.
“You weren’t worried about me or something, were you?” Niko said, managing a small grin.
“Augh!” Jeny roared in frustration and hit him again.
Niko’s grin faded when Cal peeled out from the crowd. Her dreads were up in a knit cap, and her eyes looked swollen and glittering.
“Come with me,” Niko said to Jeny and Cal. “I need to talk to you. Hunk’s missing. Like his old roommate went missing, I think.”
They both looked struck. The crowd murmured. Jeny recovered first. “So yer first idea is to go and jump oot the window?”
Niko looked past them to the crowd of assembled students, gawking at him. He whispered, “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
Despite myriad protests, Jeny managed to bark everyone back enough for the three of them to get into Niko’s room and shut the door behind them. Niko sat on his bed. Jeny dropped cross-legged onto the floor. Cal sank onto Hunk’s mattress, looking at the sheets.
“Something’s definitely wrong. Hunk wouldn’t leave his bed unmade like this.” Cal’s voice was scratcher even than usual, dull and quiet, as if all the energy was drained from her.
“Are you all right, Cal?” Niko couldn’t help but ask. Cal had always been a black box, emotionally—cool and calm, sometimes annoyed but always in control. Crying was something he could have never imagined her doing.
“I’m just…” Cal wiped an errant tear from the bridge of her nose. “This whole thing with Kiele, who isn’t back from the hospital yet, then Jeny came to my room and said that you…” She shook her head, took a breath through her nose like she was resetting. “I know death is part of life, but all this feels so…wrong to me. Life shouldn’t be…” She choked up, “…shouldn’t be like this.”
“You’re right,” Niko said. “It shouldn’t be like this. Because this isn’t real.”
Jeny made a face. “What?”
“We’re in a simulation. A video game. I know it sounds nuts, but I can prove it to you.” Niko stood up, then grabbed Hunk’s desk chair, thinking ridiculously that it was sort of quirky and cute that Jeny had sat on the floor instead of in the empty chair. He carried it to his long, thin window, and slammed it against the glass. It left a round chip in the glass pane. Niko brought the chair back again.
“What are you doing?” Cal gasped.
“If you think we’re going to let you jump oot a window again, you’re doaty!” Jeny said. Niko crashed the chair against the window the second time, and the glass spiderwebbed. He turned when Jeny grabbed his arm.
“A dozen people saw me go out the window in the hall,” Niko said. “Tere was no emergency extraction, no revival, and Hunk wasn’t around to heal me. And yet I’m here. Should that be possible?”
Jeny and Cal’s expressions soured as they looked to one another.
“I can’t die because this isn’t real,” Niko said. “I’ll just pop back into this bed when I log back in. Watch.” Niko slammed the window once more, and this time it shattered, shards of glass exploding out, jingling down the side of the dorm.
&nbs
p; “No,” Jeny cried out, grabbing his arm again. “You’re mad, Niko. I’m not letting you do this, I wonnae sit by and watch you kill yer bloody self!”
Cal got up now, as if snapped into action by Jeny’s protests. They were going to hold him down if didn’t go right now. Hunk didn’t have that kind of time—if he had any kind of time.
Niko pressed his eyes shut, as if to physically push the thought from his mind. Hunk wasn’t dead. Niko was going to save him. “Watch when I hit the ground,” Niko said, then used ABIL_EditValue, snapping out of Jeny’s grasp and out into the cold morning air. Jeny gaped at him as he plummeted to the ground.
When he opened his eyes again, Niko was surrounded by the familiar viscous liquid. He sucked in air from the mask, a mix of fresh oxygen and stale plastic, then pounded the inside of the Vat until it clunked. The blue lights came on and the liquid started to drain. He checked the name on the lid.
“MARAUTA 000001”
Niko gagged around the feeding tube, pushing on the lid of the Vat until it opened, spilling liquid out onto the floor. He pulled the feeding tube out, gagged again, then crawled out of the Vat, slipping and stumbling to his feet. No guards. He was in one of the long, alphabetical storage rooms. He looked at the Vat’s screen. All the stats were offline, and the name read “MARAUTA, KIELE.”
Niko choked. He’d woken in Kiele’s Vat. How was that possible? He looked down at his body, but aside from being too thin, he was still himself. Did that mean Kiele was…? His head started to jitter.
Calm down. You don’t know anything about how the game works, y’know, like what they do when a test subject gets hurt. The best you can do is look for her while looking for Hunk.
The low-ceilinged room, with its endless row of Vats hooked up to the wall, could have been the same one his own Vat was in, save for the fact that the last names on every screen started with “M.” Reading through the first names, Niko was fairly sure they were all women.
I’m in the wrong wing. How is it possible for me to wake up in different Vats? Niko felt the room swim around him. There was no time to suss it out; he had to find Hunk. He jogged along the Vats until he spotted a door. When Niko cracked it open, light stabbed in, and he had to let his eyes adjust before checking to see if the corridor was empty.
The hall looked the same as every other hall in the building—the stripes painted on the wall, the concept art and TV screens showing Hunts, mostly in the Phaeton League stage. The door he’d come out of was labelled “M.” He followed the doors alphabetically, hoping the closer to “A” he got, the closer he’d get to stairs or an elevator. He passed a door, briefly sparing a glance at the letters, then stopping. It read “H-J.”
I wonder…
Niko carefully opened the door and sneaked inside. It was another row of Vats, identical to every other save the names. It felt like a factory. Niko followed the alphabet down to the J’s, then slowed, scanning them more closely. There it was, her action-hero name written last-name-first in all caps on the screen: JONES, CALLOWAY.
Niko tapped through the screen’s convoluted interface until he found the command to open the lid. The clunk of the Vat draining was quieter than it was from the inside. With a hiss, the lid opened. Despite her unpointy ears, shaved head, and the mask on her face, it was definitely Cal, reposed in the draining liquid. She had a worried expression and her lips moved around the feeding tube, but otherwise she looked like she was sleeping. The screen beeped, and her eyes shot open. She gasped, choked, convulsed.
“Cal,” Niko said, grabbing her shoulders, “Cal, it’s okay.” Cal reached for her throat and gagged, whimpering. “Sorry about this,” Niko said, then grabbed the mask and yanked the tube out. Cal retched as she sat up in the tank, gasping in real air.
“What’s going on?” She choked. “Where am I? Who—Niko?”
With a sigh of relief, Niko nodded.
Cal wiped some of the goopy Vat liquid from her face. “You’re bald.”
Niko chuckled. “So are you.”
Running a hand back along her shorn head, Cal looked forlorn. “My hair.” Her voice was squeakier than he remembered. It was still a scratchy croon, but it would pitch up and hollow out when she emphasized something. “Where are we? You jumped and… Jeny said you disappeared when you hit the ground.”
“We’re in the real world. See this thing? That’s what simulates Ravenscroft for us.”
Cal ran her hand along the lip of the Vat. “Is it magic?”
“It’s tech,” Niko said, “but for as little as I know about how it works, it may as well be magic.”
Cal waved a hand before her face. Her expression darkened. “Wait, what happened to my UI? Niko, someone is blocking my abilities.”
“We don’t…have abilities here, Cal. We’re just people.” In the face of Cal’s wide-eyed horror, Niko put a hand on her shoulder. Unlike in Territoria, there was no muscle there. She wasn’t toned, but gaunt and thin like he was. Waking her up had been a bad idea. “Cal, I wish I had time to explain it all, but we need to find Hunk. He’s in trouble, I know it.”
“Ah…all right.” Cal looked stricken, dull, like she had in the game. Waking her up had definitely been a very bad idea. Niko helped her out of the tank, but when they tried to walk, Cal managed just one weak and wobbly step.
Niko said, “I get winded easily in the real world, too. We’re doing nothing but laying in the Vats day and night. It, y’know, like weakens us.”
With Niko supporting Cal’s every step, they exited the long, dark room of Vats into the hallway. Cal became quiet and withdrawn as they walked. She still appeared disoriented, dazed. Niko noticed a CCTV camera above them—but just like the last time, it seemed to raise no alarm.
Following the painted lines, they traversed the Territoria corridors unhindered until they saw the end of the hallway up ahead. It terminated with a transparent door, the letters “G-M” etched big in the glass. Someone pushed out from the door, coffee in hand. Niko and Cal ducked behind a corner until the person passed.
Standing very close to Cal, who was trembling and seemed unable to control it, Niko wanted to give her a hug, to warm her up, to calm her. “Do you remember your old life?” he asked. “Your real one, I mean. Why you came here.”
She shook her head slowly, her eyes large and unfocused—zoned out. “It’s like we’re in a bad dream,” she whispered.
“I wish. But no.” He gestured down the hall. “It leads to a kind of an entrance, y’know, like a lobby?” he said. “I remember it from my onboarding. Tons of people. It might be the only way out, but if we go that way it’ll be, uh, loud.”
“We should try and find a back exit,” Cal said weakly, catching her breath. “What’s the building layout like?”
“It’s huge. Connected to a prison. Multiple floors, and another hallway that branches out to all these areas.”
“Do you think Hunk and Jeny are on another floor?”
“Maybe. I’ve never woken up in this part of the building before.”
“There’s got to be a fire protocol for a place this big. Wait. I remember…” Cal trailed off.
“Remember?”
“I kind of…remember this,” Cal said, her voice shaky and unsure. “Weird stuff is coming back to me bit by bit the more I see of this place. I remember being taken through here and seeing a fire exit. Running for it, getting knocked down…” She shook her head. “I don’t know, man, it’s totally fuzzy. This is all so crazy, I can’t process it. How long have you known about all this?”
“Always. I was supposed to forget it when they logged me in, I think, but I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I tried when I first joined. You all thought I was nuts. Not that I blame you.”
Cal let out a shaky breath, then nodded. “Let’s look for this exit. I can’t… I just want to find Hunk; I can’t take all this right now.”
Yeah. Definitely a bad idea. “Do you remember if the exit was on this
side?”
“I think so.”
They turned, heading back in the direction of Cal’s Vat. They were silent, but when he wasn’t keeping an eye out for employees or guards, Niko saw Cal leaning against the wall, studying the matted artwork and video screens. “That’s a Phaeton League game,” she said, pointing to a mounted monitor. “They watch the games?” Her voice was still distant and colorless.
“I guess so.” Niko didn’t know what to say. Cal had always been solid as a rock, and now she seemed thin as tissue paper.
She turned, squinted, and stumbled past him. “There. I remember looking at this picture.” Cal wobbled toward some concept art of a sneaky Mythic who looked like a DPS to Niko. It could shape-shift into animals and wielded a crossbow. She ran her fingers across the name, and Niko froze.
“It’s the Djinn,” Cal whispered. “This is my Mythic.”
Now that she said it, it did look like Cal. Not precisely—the features were fast, vague strokes of paint and the skin tone, outfit, and hair weren’t quite the same, but the style and attitude were there. Niko had seen Jeny’s Mythic, the Selkie, in a similar piece of concept art during his onboarding. When he’d seen her during the Hunt, her hulking Mythic over her shoulders, he’d had the same gut reaction he was having now: a feeling of déjà vu.
“They show my ability icons here,” Cal said. “Did they know? Is that why they walked me here? Wait, no, I… I remember being in the tube. I…chose this. I saw it in the hall, and then during onboarding I picked it out, and then…then that’s who I was.” Cal shuddered as if from a strong cold. “Why did they do this to us?”
Niko opened and closed his mouth like a fish, unable to summon an explanation. “We’re…testers, I…”
Cal’s eyelashes fluttered. She had a far-away look. “Yeah. I remember… This guy, in this room, and I signed something…because…” She shook her head. “It’s still foggy. But it’s coming back to me, bit by bit. They’re testing this game on us. This alternative world.”