Chapter 48 #2
“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.”
The cold that had settled at the base of Levi’s skull moved down between his shoulder blades.
Every NPC. Every name. Every kindness felt real because it had been real, once, before the AI had skinned them and worn them.
“How long…” The words came out thinner than he meant. He tried again. “How long were they in before…?”
“Tyler lasted eleven days. Owen lasted eight. Zoe lasted six.”
Six days. Zoe — the psychologist, the one brought on to keep everyone’s brains safe — lasted six days before her brain shut down from being murdered by a man she was trying to save.
“Then Jasper volunteered,” Paul said. “He was the software engineer. He thought he could communicate with the AI directly, alter something from inside. Maddie said she’d go because she’d designed the fear assets and she wouldn’t be afraid of her own work.
And Elliot took responsibility, as VP. It was his push for distribution that created the multiplayer lock.
He felt — he said it was his fault they were stuck. He went in.”
Levi felt like he was going to vomit again. “And the same thing happened?”
“Within three weeks. Jasper lasted the longest, almost the full three weeks. He and Asher had always gotten along. But eventually —” Paul’s hand went to the scar. “Eventually, yes. The same thing.”
Levi stood between Jasper’s bed and the sixth bed. He hadn’t looked at the sixth bed yet. He was standing next to it and he hadn’t looked because he already knew whose face was below the visor on the pillow.
The cold had reached his hands.
He looked.
Elliot Kane. Asher’s half-brother. The sound designer.
The VP. The man who wanted to make Asher a billionaire.
The man who had Asher’s jaw — the same jawline, the same bone structure, unmistakable even with most of his upper face hidden under the bulk of the headset that he had never noticed because Asher always sucked all the attention out of a room.
Asher has a brother. Asher has a brother who is lying in a bed in a building Asher owns, wearing a headset Asher built, in a system Asher won’t shut down, and Asher has been sleeping next to me and cooking me eggs and tying my hands to a bed and he has not mentioned once that his brother is on a ventilator with the prototype on his face.
“We hoped they’d wake up when Asher came out,” Paul said solemnly, still in the doorway, like he was afraid to enter the room with Levi.
“That was the theory. Asher was the primary neural connection. If his brain disconnected, the system would release the others. But when he came out, they —” He gestured at the room.
“Nothing changed. The system kept them. The headsets are live because the system is still holding them — we can’t shut it down without killing them, and we can’t disconnect them individually without the same result we got with Asher.
The theory now is that someone would have to go back in and essentially — reactivate them.
Re-engage their minds inside the game. But we don’t know how and we don’t know if it would work and nobody —” His voice cracked. “Nobody is left to go in and get them.”
Levi stood in the middle of the room. Six beds.
Six ventilators. Six headsets blinking softly at six temples.
Six people who went into a game to save a man who killed them until their minds went somewhere they could not come back from, and the man was downstairs right now, talking to an attorney with Levi’s bite marks on his neck.
“The only change we have seen is from when you went in. The first scenario the system put you in, when you told them they were all going to die, Jasper’s monitors showed a brief surge — elevated neural activity for about four seconds. Then it diminished.”
He heard me. Jasper heard me say they were going to die and for four seconds something in there woke up and tried to —
“Can you leave?” Levi asked, because the lump was forming in his throat and he didn’t want anyone to try to comfort him in this moment. “I want to sit with them. Alone. Can you leave?”
Paul left. The door closed. The keypad beeped from the other side.
Levi pulled a chair from the corner of the room. A plastic chair, the kind hospitals put next to beds for visitors. He dragged it to Jasper’s bedside and he sat down.
Jasper’s hand was on the blanket. Palm up. Fingers slightly curled. The hand that had held a vape pen and a camera and a baseball bat and thrown camping supplies at a killer in the woods…it looked smaller than it should.
Levi picked up his hand. It was warm — alive-warm, the warmth of a body whose blood was still circulating, whose owner was still in the system somewhere, frozen between deaths. He held it the way he’d held Ethan’s hand: carefully, with both of his.
“I didn’t know,” Levi said. To Jasper’s face.
To the headset and the breathing tube and the hair someone had cut.
“I didn’t know you were real. I didn’t know any of you were real.
I thought — I thought you were code. I thought you were characters.
When you offered me those gummies in the safe room and I said no because I was trying to keep a clear head —” His voice broke.
“You were trying to be my friend and I was strategizing.”
The ventilator breathed for Jasper. The chest rose and fell. The headset light pulsed green.
“I’m sorry,” Levi said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know.
I’m sorry I watched you die and I — I got used to it.
I got used to watching you die and I made notes about the patterns and I — I treated your deaths like data.
Like game mechanics. And you were …you were a person who liked pot and didn’t have to pass a drug test and thought Asher was your weird friend and you were real the whole time… and you’re still in there.”
He was crying. He couldn’t feel when the crying had started — it was just there, on his face, in his voice, in the shaking of his hands around Jasper’s warm, still fingers.
He’s still in there. They’re all still in there.
There are six minds in this room and none of them are in their bodies and one of them heard me, once, for four seconds, in a forest.
He sat in the chair and held Jasper’s hand and cried and the ventilators breathed for six people and the room was full of sound that wasn’t human and Levi stayed.
He didn’t know how long. Long enough that the light through the window changed. Long enough that his tears dried and came again and dried again. Long enough that he heard footsteps in the hallway — Asher’s footsteps, the uneven gait — and heard them stop outside the door.
The keypad didn’t beep. The door didn’t open. Asher was on the other side of it. Levi could feel him there — the way he’d always been able to feel Asher’s proximity, the specific change in air pressure that meant he was near.
Asher didn’t come in.