第47章
Environmental Design
The building looked normal from the outside.
Glass and steel, four stories, the kind of corporate architecture that existed in every business park in every mid-sized city.
A logo on the front was the Virtual Vice emblem, silver on dark glass, smaller than Levi expected.
A parking lot with six cars in it. A front door that Asher opened with a keycard and a code.
Inside was worse.
Not because it was scary, but because it was empty.
The lobby had a reception desk with no one behind it.
The lights were on but the light had the quality of light in a building that was running on a timer rather than for people.
Hallways stretched in two directions. Doors with frosted glass.
The hum of climate control and nothing else.
Levi wasn’t sure what he was expecting to come today, but he had his cane, and Asher had his brace, so he was expecting a lot of walking.
“It’s always been like this, we ran with a skeleton crew,” Asher said. He was walking ahead of Levi, his gait still uneven on the healing leg.
A man in a suit intercepted them on the second floor.
Levi didn’t catch the name, he just caught something about paperwork and needing Asher’s signature.
The man was nervous. Everyone was nervous around Asher.
The man spoke to Asher the way Paul spoke to Asher — carefully, watching the face, managing the proximity.
“I need twenty minutes,” Asher said to Levi. “Feel free to look around, my office is on the third floor. I think Paul is in too. Third door from the elevator.”
“I can wait…”
“Go see Paul. I’ll come find you.”
Asher followed the man down a corridor. Levi watched him go — the uneven gait, the shoulders squared, the posture shifting from Levi’s Asher to CEO Asher in the space of three steps. Two different people. Same body.
He took the elevator to three.
Paul’s office was small and overwhelmed with paper. Stacks on the desk, files on the floor, a whiteboard covered in timelines and names Levi didn’t recognize. Paul was behind the desk, reading something, and he looked up when Levi appeared in the doorway. “Levi. Is Asher —”
“Downstairs. With a lawyer.”
Paul exhaled.
Levi sat in the chair across from Paul’s desk.
The chair was uncomfortable, and the office smelled like coffee and paper and the staleness of a room someone had been working in too long.
But Levi had questions he wasn’t sure Asher would be willing to answer, and Paul seemed like the kind of person who would accidentally give him the nuclear codes if he had them.
“I have a question,” Levi said.
Paul’s hands went still on the file he was holding.
“How did Asher change the game from inside it?”
Paul looked at him, and he held the look for a long time — long enough that Levi could see him calculating. What to say. How much. Whether Asher would get upset with him for the telling.
“The system was built for him,” Paul said carefully, his eyes darting back and forth as if he were scanning his brain to make sure he was picking the right words.
“Originally. Before it was a product, before the distribution model, the system was designed to interface with Asher’s neural patterns specifically.
His brain. Nobody else’s. The whole point was to see if the AI could read a single person’s mind deeply enough to generate responsive stimuli. ”
“So the AI was trained on Asher’s brain?” That explains why everything was so fucking scary in there, at least.
“The original prototype was just to test if Asher could code the AI by thinking. That was the original test. Not fear, not horror. Just: can this system read a person’s intentions and modify its own architecture in response?
Asher would put on the headset and think about changing a variable and the system would change it. ”
It’s genius. Or it would be…
“So when he was inside the game,” Levi said. “When he’d been in for months and he couldn’t remember who he was anymore…”
“The system still recognized his neural patterns. It was trained on him. So when Asher started wanting the game to change and those desires were strong enough and sustained enough, the AI followed the oldest pattern it had learned. It restructured itself around what Asher wanted. He didn’t know he was doing it.
I don’t think he remembered he could do it.
But the system was built to respond to his wanting and the system responded. ”
Levi wasn’t sure what to do with that information.
He wanted me to stay bad enough he altered the game, back in the barbershop. And then again on the ship…it’s insane. It is actually insane.
But also kind of —
He didn’t finish the thought. Not yet.
“I’d like to meet the rest of the team,” Levi said. “The people who built this. I haven’t seen anyone else in the building.”
Paul’s face drained of color and his eyes flicked to the door, as though he were expecting Asher to walk through any second. His hands, which had been still on the file, went to the desk and pressed flat.
“Asher hasn’t told you?” Paul asked, his voice thin and reedy like Levi had heard his own voice so many times when he was scared out of his mind.
“Told me what?”
Paul looked at the door and the hallway beyond it, then looked back at Levi.
“I need deniability,” he whispered. “You understand? I need to be able to tell Asher that I didn’t show you anything.
That you found it yourself. Because he…” His hand drifted up to his face, towards the thin scar he kept touching during dinner.
“He frightens me, Levi. He has always frightened me and whatever he is with you, whatever version of him you see, the version I see is the one that —”
He didn’t finish. He clicked a few buttons on his computer’s keyboard, stood up, shaking his head, and walked towards the door. “I’m going to get coffee,” Paul said, his back to Levi as he lingered in the doorway. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
He left.
What the fuck just happened?
Levi sat in Paul’s chair. The seat was still warm. He put his palms flat on the desk the way Paul had, and the flatness helped ease some of the discomfort in his chest over the interaction, a little. This wasn’t how he thought today was going to go.
The screen hadn’t gone to sleep.
He looked at it for a long time before he understood. The desktop was cluttered the way the physical desk was cluttered: files everywhere, the digital version of the same paper avalanche, but there were three windows already open and stacked across the screen.
He left it on for me.
He left it unlocked for me.
Levi’s hands started shaking and he put them flat on the desk again.
The first window was a report. The header alone took up half the page, the formal kind of header with redaction bars in two places and a case number Levi couldn’t parse. He skipped past it.
Subject LM (Mercer, Levi) connected to system via consumer headset model VV-7 during a live-streamed charity broadcast. Platform: Twitch.
Subject rendered unconscious at minute 44.
External webcam continued broadcasting subject’s physical state for the duration of session — motionless in chair, recurrent epistaxis corresponding to in-system death events.
Stream flagged by platform after 18 hours and 2 minutes following viewer reports of subject distress.
Broadcast removed by automated systems shortly thereafter.
Subject retrieved from residence by recovery team at 19 hours post connection, during system reset interval.
They saw me sitting there.
He sat with that. The shaking in his hands was a different kind of shaking now.
He closed the window.
The second window was queued up behind it. He almost didn’t look at the third.
The third was a folder. One folder, pinned at the top of the screen, not labeled like the rest of Paul’s filenames — no project code, no system tag, no string of numbers. Just three letters and a word.
BTS_DOCUMENTARY
One file inside. Video format. Large.
He left this open. On purpose. He left this open and walked out of the room.
Levi clicked it.
It showed a garage. Asher’s garage — Levi recognized the workbench, the soldering equipment, the organized chaos of a man building something.
The footage was handheld, slightly shaky, the quality of a consumer camera held by someone who knew how to frame a shot but wasn’t being professional about it.
The voice behind the camera was male and warm, familiar in a way Levi couldn’t place — he’d heard this voice before but not like this, not with this easy humor in it.
“What are you working on?”
Asher was at the workbench. Younger — his face leaner, his hair shorter, the military posture still in his shoulders. He looked up at the camera with the flat expression Levi knew from inside the game when Asher looked at the NPCs. The you are bothering me expression.
“Neural interface calibration for the fear-response module,” he said.
“In English?”
“I’m making the scary part work. Fuck off.”
The voice behind the camera laughed.
Cut.
A different room. There was a desk covered in drawings: concept art, storyboards, character designs rendered in a style that was beautiful and disturbing. The drawings were of environments Levi recognized. A forest. A ghost town. A sanitarium hallway.
A woman sat at the desk. Her back to the camera. Dark purple hair pulled up in a messy bun. A stylus in her hand, working on a massive tablet, the screen showing a 3D model of —
“Hey — we need to document how incredible this is. Want to introduce yourself? What you do for the company, how do you know Asher?”
She turned around.
Levi’s hand went to his mouth.
It was Maddie. Not the NPC. Not the party girl from the horror game with the hidden, endless flask, but a real life woman in her late twenties with half a glove over her last two fingers and a VV Technologies lanyard around her neck and an expression that was bright and excited.