Chapter 48
Paragon or Renegade
Paul came back to the office holding a coffee he wasn’t drinking.
He’d been gone forty minutes. He set the cup on his desk without looking at Levi and his eyes went to the screen, which was paused on the last frame of Elliot’s introduction, a half-laugh frozen in pixels.
“You watched it,” Paul said.
“I watched it,” Levi gasped, still hugging the trashcan to his chest.
Paul sat down. His hands were on the desk, shaking. He looked at his coffee. He looked at the door. He looked at every part of the office except Levi.
“Take me to them,” Levi insisted, pushing the trashcan away.
“Levi —”
“Take me to them, Paul.”
“You shouldn’t see this. Asher will know. He’ll know I —”
“Paul.” Levi used the desk to pull himself to his feet and his voice was steady in a way that surprised him — flat, the register he’d found in the game when things were bad enough that panic stopped being useful and the only tool left was the blade-edge of calm.
He hadn’t heard this voice come out of his own mouth in the real world before. “Take me to them.”
“I can’t. I’ll be honest, I’m scared of what he’ll do, but it’s more than that, it’s that you shouldn’t have to —”
Levi grabbed a letter opener sitting on a stack of unopened mail at the corner of Paul’s desk.
Brass, the handle smooth from years of use, the blade dull because it was a letter opener and letter openers were not supposed to be sharp.
He picked it up the way he’d pick up a knife in the game, his body deciding before his mind. He held it loose at his side.
Paul went still. “Levi.”
“Do you know what I did in that game, Paul?” Levi’s voice hadn’t changed. The flatness sat in it the way the brass sat in his palm. “Do you know what I was willing to do to myself in there? What I was willing to let happen to other people? Do you know how much pain I endured in there?”
Paul’s hand drifted up to his scar.
“I’m asking you nicely, and I am asking you politely.
I have not raised my voice and I have not raised this.
” He lifted the letter opener — only an inch with a shift in the angle of his wrist — and Paul flinched.
The flinch was a small one and a complete one, and it landed in Levi’s chest with a coldness that was new.
He believes me. He believes I’ll do it. Which one of us is right?
“Paul. I like you, but if you do not take me to them in the next thirty seconds, I will hurt you. I won’t kill you and I won’t enjoy it. But I will hurt you enough that you take me. Do you understand?” Levi took a step closer to him.
“You sound like him,” Paul whispered.
“I know.”
“I —” Paul’s voice cracked. He looked at his coffee again. The coffee that was getting cold and that he was never going to drink. “I’ll take you. Put the — please put it down.”
Levi set the letter opener back on the stack of mail.
He had not realized, until he set it down, that his hand had been steady the whole time.
The door to the fifth floor had a keypad lock. Paul’s fingers shook when he punched in the code. He tried twice. The first time he got a digit wrong and the panel chirped; he closed his eyes and started over.
“You don’t need to see this,” Paul warned, his voice wavering.
“Open the door, Paul.” Levi felt numb from the ends of his hair to the tips of his fingers. He could turn back. He could pretend he never saw the video. He was good at pretending.
The door opened.
The sound hit first.
Mechanical breathing — the rhythmic hiss-click of ventilators, more than one ventilator, the sounds layered on themselves the way an echo layered, each machine slightly out of sync so the rhythm was almost a rhythm, but not quite.
The hiss of pressurized air entering a tube.
The click of a valve cycling. The soft mechanical exhale that came back out.
Six of them, overlapping, filling a long cool room with the chorus of artificial respiration.
Levi’s chest closed. His feet stopped moving.
The air in his lungs went somewhere that wasn’t his lungs and his hand found the doorframe, palm flat against the cold metal arriving as a fact his mind could hold on to while the rest of him stopped working.
I know this sound. I have heard this sound.
I have stood in a room where this sound was the only sound and my brother’s chest was rising and falling and his chest had nothing to do with it.
He couldn’t breathe.
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 were on. 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 build of a man who had once put on a mocap bodysuit and grinned at a camera and said somebody’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 not disconnect 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-off I lov—. Asher hadn’t bypassed it that time. Asher had been in it, 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?”