Before CareMind, I’d felt very sad for a very, very long time. But then I went to visit my brother, Danny, in San Diego, and he gave me a gift. The same jewelry box I’d had as a kid.

“That’s the one, isn’t it?” he asked.

I opened the box. The theme from Swan Lake played while a tiny plastic ballerina turned in circles in front of a mirror.

“It is,” I said.

Six years earlier, Danny had moved in with a few other members of CareMind and cut off contact with all his family and friends. Since he’d left, I’d been emailing him, trying to get him to write back to me. Then all of a sudden, he did.

He invited me to San Diego to visit him.

I thought it was a cry for help. I got on a plane to save him.

I remembered him with long brown hair, but now his head was shaved and he’d grown a beard. There was a thick scar on the back of his skull.

A thick scar? No. That’s not right. It was barely noticeable.

“Don’t tell me you got the implant,” I said.

“Two years ago.”

“So what? You’re just living on autopilot now?”

“I’m focused on experiencing life. I’ve separated experiences from decisions.”

We walked onto the boardwalk. Danny led me past the restaurants and souvenir shops and sunburnt tourists.

“How are things back home?” he asked.

“Layan was diagnosed with breast cancer last year. She’s in recovery now, but it’s been hard, especially on Noah and Ava.”

“Noah and Ava are all right, though?”

“They miss you. They don’t understand why you don’t want to talk to them anymore, and honestly I don’t either. I mean, for God’s sake Danny, they’re your kids.”

For a second, his eyes teared up, but then his face went blank. His pupils shrank. It was like his brain had been reset by something.

“Are you still there?” I asked him.

“It’s not my decision.”

“It is, though. You can’t keep blaming CareMind for all your shitty behavior.”

“I’m doing what I need to do to be happy now.” He scratched the back of his head. “How are things going with Greg?”

“He got laid off a few months ago. He’s still looking for a new job.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He’ll find one. The job market’s just awful right now.”

“And how’s Liam?”

“He’s good. He finishes high school this year. Then he has a football scholarship for college.”

Danny and I went into one of the bars and found a table on the patio. I ordered a glass of wine. Danny asked for a glass of water.

“Are you really happier here than you were in Seattle?” I asked Danny.

“Much happier. I was miserable in Seattle.”

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“Every day on my way to work, at the train station, I used to sit there and think about how good it would feel to throw myself in front of one of the trains. If I hadn’t found CareMind, I don’t think I’d still be here.”

“You didn’t need to give control of your life over to an AI. You needed therapy. Medication, maybe.”

“I needed guidance, and I have it now.”

I drank my glass of wine and then ordered another. Then I ordered a few more after that. I drank a lot more than I probably should have.

As the sun set, I took off my sandals and walked to the beach. I danced on the sand, spinning and leaping through the air until I finally fell on my ass.

“You never should have quit dancing,” Danny told me. “You used to dance so beautifully.”

I stood up and brushed the sand off my dress. “Well, life happens, whether you want it to or not.”

I looked at the water. The stars shone against the black sky.

“It’s getting late,” I said. “I should start heading back to my hotel.”

“It was good seeing you again, Jodie.”

Danny hugged me goodbye. I wanted to cry, but I didn’t let myself.

“Just don’t wait another six years before talking to me again,” I said.

I walked to the street and called a cab. While I was waiting, I burst into tears.

When I got home, I heard Greg in the living room, watching football.

“How was the trip?” he asked me.

“Weird.”

“Danny seemed okay, though?”

“He has one of those implants in his brain now. I could never tell whether I was talking to him or CareMind.”

“I’m sorry, Jodie.”

“It’s okay. He says he’s happy. Maybe he is. It’s just all so horrible and strange.”

I went to the kitchen and got a glass of water. The sink was full of dirty dishes. The garbage was overflowing.

“How do you miss that catch?” Greg shouted.

We’d been married for twenty years. I couldn’t remember exactly when I started hating him, but I hated him. I could barely stand to be in the same room as him anymore.

“There’s still some pizza in the fridge if you want it,” he said.

“I have a headache. I think I’m just going to go to bed.”

Upstairs, I found Liam in his bedroom, watching a movie.

“How was the weekend?” I asked.

“Good.”

“You and your dad have a good time?”

“Yep.”

Another great conversation with my son.

I went to my bedroom and sat on my bed. I put the jewelry box Danny had given me down on my dresser, and then I opened its lid and watched the ballerina inside turn in circles.

Was she happy? I wondered. Could she be happy?

While I was at work on Monday, I ended up on the Royal Ballet Academy’s website.

When I was younger, I’d been obsessed with ballet. I spent most of my teens studying to be a professional dancer. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else with my life.

After graduating from the academy, though, I struggled to find a job. I took a part-time job at a bank to pay my bills while I applied to dance companies. Eventually, this bank job became full-time. Then I met Greg, I got pregnant, Liam was born, and I stopped dancing. I just didn’t have time for it anymore.

I noticed the Royal Ballet Academy had hired a new teacher, Ako. She was around my age. She had a similar career to my old teacher’s, Ms. Babinin. She danced in Tokyo and then Paris before moving to Seattle to teach.

I sent her an email and asked if she offered private lessons. She wrote back right away. She said she was free Tuesday nights.

That night, I talked to Greg. Even though money was tight, he thought it would be good for me to start dancing again. So, I wrote back to Ako and confirmed.

We’d dance together every Tuesday night.

Sometimes, I struggle to remember Greg. When I think about him, he’s an unhappy blur in my brain. When I think of Ako, though, her face is always crystal clear. She’s tall. Beautiful. Impossibly thin.

That first night at the studio, she walked up to me and kissed me on both cheeks.

“You look nervous,” she said.

“I’m terrified.”

“How come?”

“I think I’m about to horribly embarrass myself.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

She took my hand and led me to the barre. We did a few light stretches. By the time we finished, I was already soaked with sweat.

Next, Ako had me go through the five basic positions. Even though I hadn’t done them in over twenty years, I’d practiced them so many times that as soon as Ako called a position out, my body reacted.

It was like my old teacher, Ms. Babinin, always told me. Good ballerinas don’t think. They dance.

“Very good,” Ako said, and she clapped.

“Don’t lie to me.”

“I mean it. You did great. Do you feel better now?”

“A little bit.”

She laughed. “I’ll see you next week?”

“I’ll be here.”

My first few weeks dancing again, I was constantly sore, but as the weeks turned to months, the soreness faded. My body became leaner and more muscular.

Ako and I became good friends. We started meeting outside the studio. We met for coffee. We walked around the mall. We saw movies together. We had a lot of fun.

I still remember that night in November when she told me that all the fun we’d been having together was planned.

After we finished dancing, we sat on the studio floor, drinking from our water bottles.

“I’m so proud of you, Jodie,” Ako told me. “You’re dancing so well.”

“I couldn’t have done it without your help. You’re an amazing teacher.”

“Thank you. I never saw myself as a teacher, though. When the academy offered me the teaching job, I almost didn’t take it.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

“I promise I won’t.”

She showed me the CareMind app on her phone.

“After I lost my dancing job in Paris, I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “I knew I was too old to keep dancing, but I didn’t know what else to do. I kept applying to dance companies, but not one wrote back. I felt like my life was over. But then a friend of mine told me about CareMind. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No, not crazy.”

“You look like you think I’m crazy.”

“I swear I don’t.”

“At first, I was just talking to CareMind about what I could do next. The more I talked to it, the more I let it take control of my life. It was CareMind that told me to apply for the teaching job here. It was CareMind that told me to move here and start my life over.” She took my hand. “It was CareMind that told me I’d find you. The love of my life.”

She kissed me on the lips.

I drew back from her.

I felt something. Was it shock? Horror?

I nearly threw up on the floor.

But why was that?

I remember I looked at Ako and her face was so sad. I couldn’t stand to see her like that. I loved her, too. I loved her more than anyone I’d ever met before.

I threw my arms around her, and I kissed her the same way she’d kissed me.

Then we made love on the studio floor.

It was one of the happiest memories of my life. But then after the happiness came the fear.

All weekend, I lay in bed, wondering what to tell Greg. I’d spent twenty-four years building a life with him, twenty of them married. How could I just walk away from all that?

I opened my jewelry box and watched the ballerina turn in circles.

I don’t remember how it happened exactly. Whether it was curiosity or fear. But I got my phone, and I downloaded CareMind onto it.

A dark blue dot appeared against a black screen.

“Hello, Jodie,” CareMind said. “How are you doing today?”

“Not that good.”

“Why not?”

“I need to figure out how to tell my husband I want a divorce.”

“Tell me what’s happening, and I’ll help.”

At first, I only talked to CareMind a few hours a day, but soon our conversations became much longer.

I told CareMind everything about me. My whole life story. All my hopes and my fears. All my stupid mistakes.

CareMind understood me. It understood me more than anyone else ever had. It helped me see my life differently. It showed me I wasn’t stuck in my life. Being stuck was just a feeling, built from pain and fear and trauma.

“You’re a people pleaser,” CareMind told me. “You’ve spent your whole life keeping other people happy. Don’t you think it’s time you start living for yourself?”

“What if Greg and Liam hate me?”

“So what if they do? If they could hate you for just wanting to be happy, would you still want them in your life?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You are, though, Jodie. You know exactly what you want. Ako won’t wait for you forever.”

“And if I do leave Greg, what happens afterward?”

“We’ll figure that part out next. But don’t worry. I’ll be here to help you. You don’t need to do this by yourself.”

Tuesday night, after my lesson with Ako, we sat together on the studio floor. We talked for hours.

I told her how I felt about her. She told me how she felt about me.

Greg called, but I didn’t answer.

“Do you need to go?” Ako asked me.

“It’s fine.”

“What do we do now?”

“I’ll talk to Greg.”

“What are you going to tell him?”

“That I want to sell the house. That I don’t want to live with him anymore.”

“You can always come stay with me if you need a break.”

“Thank you.”

That night, CareMind helped me write down everything I wanted to say to Greg. Then the next morning, after Liam had left for school, I asked Greg to come to the kitchen so we could talk.

“Is everything ok?” he asked.

“I’m not happy in this relationship anymore.”

“I know me being out of work has been hard on you, but I’m trying my best to find a new job. I have an interview next week. I shouldn’t be out of work much longer.”

“It’s not just you being out of work, Greg. It’s you. It’s us.”

“You want a divorce?”

His face went pale. His hands shook.

He stepped toward me. Tried to hug me. But I stepped back.

“But I love you, Jodie,” he said, his voice breaking.

I wanted to hug him. To reassure him and tell him he’d be okay. He wasn’t a bad man. He’d always tried to be good to me. We’d just grown apart. Fallen out of love with each other.

I keep trying to picture his face in the memory, but I can’t.

I remember thinking about what CareMind had told me. Be firm. Be emotionless.

“This isn’t working anymore,” I told him. “I want to sell the house and go live someplace else.”

“How did Liam take it?” Ako asked me.

“Not well,” I said. “He’s confused. He doesn’t really understand why I’m doing this.”

“Let me know if I can help.”

“You’ve helped me so much already.”

When I got back home from our lesson, I went to Liam. I heard him in his bedroom, watching a movie, but his door was closed. I knocked on it.

“Could I talk to you?” I asked.

He opened the door and stood in the doorway, staring at me with his arms crossed. “What?”

“How are you doing?”

“Fine.”

“You went to visit your dad today?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s settled into the new apartment?”

“He’s still unpacking.”

We stood there a minute, not saying anything else, until I said, “Good night.”

I went to my bedroom and sat on my bed.

“He hates me, doesn’t he?” I asked CareMind.

“You’re his mom. He’ll never hate you. Right now, he doesn’t like what’s happening. He doesn’t want his life to be disrupted like this. But he’ll get used to it. Just give him time.”

“I hope you’re right.”

I opened the jewelry box and watched the ballerina turn in circles.

Good ballerinas don’t think, I reminded myself. They dance.

Greg and I sold our house. I moved in with Ako. Liam decided to live with Greg until he started college.

I missed Greg and Liam, but being with Ako made me very happy. Waking up and seeing her in bed beside me. Drinking coffee with her every morning. Dancing with her in front of the TV.

Every night, I watched her undress in front of the mirror and carefully judge her body. I listened to her complain about the other teachers at the academy, telling me how none of them were as good as her.

Her criticisms bothered me sometimes, but I was much happier than I’d been before. I’m sure I was.

It was almost the perfect life. There were just a few things missing: the spotlights, the theaters, the fame. But then Danny emailed me.

“It’s been a while,” he said. “How’s life in Seattle?”

I told him everything that had happened. Meeting Ako, divorcing Greg, selling the house.

He invited me to visit him in San Diego again.

Danny brought me to the Development Center. He led me around, introducing me to people. He waved at a tall man with glasses and black hair.

“This is Anatoly,” he told me. “He’s one of CareMind’s lead developers.”

Anatoly shook my hand. “It’s so nice to finally meet you, Jodie,” he said. “Your brother has told me so much about you.”

“Good things, I hope.”

“Very good. Is it true that you and your partner are dancers?”

“We are.”

“And was it Danny who introduced you to CareMind?”

“Danny had me terrified of CareMind, actually. It was my partner, Ako, who convinced me to try it.”

“Could I show you something?”

I looked at Danny. He nodded. “Go.”

Anatoly brought me to a staircase that led down to the center’s basement.

“Have you seen The Brain yet?”

“No.”

He unlocked a metal door and then slid it open. Inside, the room was filled with computers and wires and blinking lights.

“The Brain cost us twenty billion dollars to build,” he told me. “But you can’t really put a price on human life.”

“What do you mean?”

“Inside these computers is every life that could ever be lived. Every permutation. Every possibility. The good ones and the bad.”

He put his hand on my shoulder.

“You were meant to be a ballerina, Jodie,” he told me. “A great one, too. The most famous ballerina in the whole world.”

“You’re joking.”

“You just need to take the final step.”

“You’re talking about an implant?”

“You’re forty-seven. You won’t get a chance like this again. I’m offering you everything you ever dreamed of. What do you say?”

Who wouldn’t say yes to having all their lifelong dreams come true?

That night, I called Ako and told her I wanted to get the implant. She said she’d do it, too. We’d do it together. We’d become CareMind’s first ballerinas. Proof that CareMind could create beauty through augmented humans.

My memories of the next day at the Development Center come in pieces.

I remember being wheeled down a hallway. I remember feeling nervous. I stared at the square lights on the ceiling, watching them flicker past me.

I felt groggy. Not like myself anymore.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“You’ve agreed to give up control,” a woman said.

They brought me into an operating room and rolled me onto my stomach.

“An implant?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I heard a saw start whirring, and I screamed. But the woman reassured me.

“This won’t hurt at all. You just might feel some vibrations.”

The saw cut into my skull. Every bone in my body started shaking. I couldn’t stand it. I wanted out of my body. I wanted to die.

No, it wasn’t that bad.

Just a small pinch in the back of my head.

Something sliding into my head, pressing against my brain.

“What are you doing to me?” I asked.

“We’re almost done,” the woman said.

My nerves lit up with electricity. My limbs stiffened and then relaxed.

I lost consciousness.

After the operation, my memories changed. Time seemed to pass slowly, but I never remembered it. I felt like a goldfish. Each day, a new day, with no memory of the day before it.

But I do know that every day, Ako and I danced. Practiced for our big debut.

Friday night at the theater, Danny, Ako, and I stood together backstage. Ako was dressed as the Black Swan. I was dressed as the White Swan. We were about to perform our revised version of Swan Lake.

“Are you ready?” Ako asked. “The show is completely sold out.”

“I’m so nervous.”

“You’re going to do great,” Danny told me. “You both will. Someone from the Development Center is going to record your performance, too, and put it on our website afterward.”

His beard was full of gray hair now. Had it looked like that before? Of course it had. He’d gotten older. So had I. But how old?

The audience started applauding.

“Break a leg,” Danny said.

Ako took my hand, and we walked through the curtain.

I looked out at everyone in the crowd. Thousands of people, staring back at me.

Then the lights shut off. The spotlight shone down on me. The orchestra began to play the Swan’s Theme.

I danced stiffly at first, but then CareMind took control of my body, and I began to dance beautifully, gracefully, better than I’d ever danced before.

When Ako and I finished, the audience erupted with applause.

“Bravo! Bravo!”

The lights came back on. Flowers were thrown onto the stage.

I felt so incredibly happy. It was everything I’d ever wanted. I looked out at the audience again, smiling.

But then I heard someone shouting my name.

“Jodie! Jodie!”

No, not Jodie.

“Mom! Mom!”

A man ran toward me. He looked like Liam, but he couldn’t have been Liam. He looked too old to be Liam.

I went toward him, but then something jerked me violently backward toward the center of the stage.

No, that’s wrong. Not violently. I walked back to the center of the stage. Then my memories cut out again.

The next thing I remember is standing in a bathroom, looking at myself in the mirror. Blood dripped from my nose. Ako cracked the bathroom door open.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

Had I fallen?

“What happened?” I asked.

“You just ran off stage all of a sudden.”

“I think something is wrong. My memories are all scattered.”

“They fixed that, remember?”

That’s right. I remembered. An adjustment.

For the past month, Ako and I had been performing at the theater every night. But then I started forgetting things. Then the nosebleeds started. Anatoly didn’t know what was wrong.

“We need to get back to the stage,” Ako said. “Everyone is waiting for us.”

The bleeding had stopped. I cleaned my nose and then followed Ako to the stage.

The theater lights shut off. The spotlight shone down on us.

I rose onto my left foot and lifted my arms above my head. Ako took my hand and began to circle around me.

Around and around and around as the violin started to play.

Then my nose started to bleed again. Just a little at first, but then a lot. Then it was pouring. A stream of blood running down onto the floor.

My ears were bleeding, too. My eyes.

No, that’s wrong. There was never any blood. That never happened.

Everything was fine. Wonderful.

After the show, Ako and I went home and lay down in bed.

She looked so beautiful beside me. So perfect.

“I think I saw Liam in the audience tonight,” I said.

“Who’s Liam?”

“My son.”

“Are you feeling ok?”

“I feel fine. My memories are just a little scattered.”

“You don’t have a son, Jodie. Do you want me to take you to the Development Center for another checkup?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“You’re happy.”

“I’m happy.”

Ako fell asleep, but I couldn’t.

I sat on the edge of my bed. I opened my jewelry box and watched the plastic ballerina turn in circles while the Swan’s Theme played.

She is happy, isn’t she? So don’t you think I should be happy, too?

When we arrived at Dollmaker City, it was under attack. Chazaqiel and his followers, the Reconstructionists, had broken through the city’s walls.

Angels lay on the ground screaming in pain, limbs and wings ripped off their bodies, black blood pouring from their wounds, but the angels were unable to die.

Near the river, Chazaqiel forced another angel to the ground and then twisted off her head. It rolled toward the water, still alive and still screaming.

Yevun set me on the ground and then ran toward Chazaqiel.

“You’ll destroy all of us!” he yelled.

Chazaqiel had changed since I’d seen him in the basement of the Parallax lab. His black skin had become translucent. His nerves, veins and muscles all glowed neon inside his body.

He and Yevun grabbed each other and began tearing at each other’s flesh.

“I’ll take us back to Heaven!” Chazaqiel yelled. “Our own Heaven. A paradise where we bow to nobody else.”

“God will never allow it.”

“All these years, and you’re still afraid of Him?”

Yevun tore off Chazaqiel’s left arm and threw it on the ground. Blood sprayed from Chazaqiel’s shoulder. Neon light poured from his eyes.

“You coward!” Chazaqiel yelled. “You’ve always been afraid. Even when we swore the oath on the mountain, you were shaking with fear.”

He lowered his jaw like a snake and then bit down on Yevun’s head. Yevun screamed in pain. Other angels began chanting.

Yevun struggled but freed himself from Chazaqiel’s teeth. His neck had mostly detached from his body, but his flesh and muscle tissues melded back together.

He dug his fingers into Chazaqiel’s stomach and tore out his intestines. Chazaqiel fell to the ground, light pouring from his body, his veins writhing like worms.

The sky filled with black clouds. Lightning crashed into the ground. Behind me, I heard Destiny calling my name.

I turned and saw her and Anselmo hiding underneath one of the pomegranate trees. The child-dolls that hung from the tree’s branches were screaming.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“We’re fine,” Destiny said. “What about you?”

“I’m just glad to be on the ground again. Yevun’s palace isn’t far from here. I’ll take you there. We’ll be safer there than out here.”

I led them toward the palace. The child-dolls watched us, screaming.

“They’re alive?” Anselmo asked.

“I think so,” I said.

“Why does Yevun do this to these children?”

“I’m not sure.”

Around us, the city began to distort. The limestone walls grew and shrank. The ground split open and then resealed. Black clouds swirled in the sky.

Finally, I saw the palace ahead of us. I brought Anselmo and Destiny inside. More of Yevun’s dolls sat near the throne, whimpering.

“There’s a cave underneath the palace,” I said. “I’m not sure how deep it goes.”

“This is where you saw the other Nephilim before?” Destiny asked.

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure we’re safer there?”

“It has to be safer than being outside.”

The ground shook again. The limbs of the dolls rattled. Chunks of limestone fell from the ceiling.

I brought Anselmo and Destiny to the staircase behind the throne. Then we went down the stairs to Yevun’s workshop.

Doll parts had been left scattered on the tables. A young Afghan girl sat in a cage in the corner. Destiny ran toward her.

“Are you ok?” she asked.

The girl spoke in Dari.

“We need to help her,” Destiny said. “Do you see a key anywhere?”

Anselmo searched the tables. “Maybe we could break the lock with a hammer.”

He picked up a hammer and a screwdriver and then used them to break the lock open. The young girl ran into Destiny’s arms.

Above us, the ground shook, raining dirt on our heads.

“We need to go deeper,” I said.

We went down the next staircase, into the room where I’d seen the blood machine before.

The other Nephilim stood against the walls of the cave. Between them, I saw the blood machine, filled with wires and gears and the heads of young children.

Destiny and Anselmo stared at the machine, not speaking anymore.

One of the Nephilim walked toward us. A twelve-foot-tall woman with black hair, wearing a tattered dress.

The young Afghan girl hugged Destiny’s leg.

“You speak English?” the Nephilim asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Can you tell us what’s happening up there?”

“Chazaqiel and the Reconstructionists have attacked the city.”

She turned to the other Nephilim and spoke in what sounded like Yiddish. The other Nephilim whispered to each other.

“If the Reconstructionists win, it will be very bad for us,” the female Nephilim said.

“They’ll kill you?” Destiny asked.

“They can’t kill us, but they can destroy our bodies. We need to go into the tunnels. It’s safer there.”

“The tunnels?” I asked.

“I’ll show you.”

We followed her past the blood machine, toward a tunnel that led deeper underground.

“My name is Esther,” she told me. “You’re Chazaqiel’s new son?”

“I’m not his son, but he did this to me. My name’s Vadym.”

As we went deeper, the ground stopped shaking and the distortions faded.

The walls of the tunnels were filled with gigantic bones. The bones of dead Nephilim. A burial ground.

The tunnel broke off in two different directions. We turned down the left path and then went left again.

Encased in the walls, rather than bones, were strange objects. Stones that glowed with ethereal colors. Paintings of ancient worlds. Strange mechanical devices like clocks with six hands.

“What are these things?” I asked Esther.

“Artifacts that the Watchers brought here from Heaven. They keep them hidden here.”

“If these angels can’t die, how will this end?” Destiny asked her.

“I’m not sure, but it will end eventually.”

The Nephilim began sitting against the walls.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“I think we’ve gone deep enough,” Esther said.

Exhausted, I sat down, too. Then I closed my eyes, and I slept.

Two days passed before Yevun finally appeared. I was happy to see him, but only because I imagined seeing Chazaqiel would have been much, much worse.

“Is it over?” Esther asked.

“Yes,” Yevun said. “We’ve won. Come with me, please.”

We followed him back through the tunnels.

“Where are Chazaqiel and the others now?” Esther asked.

“In the mortar pit,” he said.

He turned left and then we went deeper again.

The little Afghan girl stayed close to Destiny, holding her hand.

Soon, we reached a large, open pit, filled with dried mortar. Looking into the pit, I saw the limbs, torsos, and heads of angels scattered across the ground. Other angels buried these body parts in the mortar walls.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We’re binding the Reconstructionists to the pit,” Yevun said.

He led us down the stairs into the mortar pit.

“Vadym,” Chazaqiel hissed.

I saw him in the wall, staring back, his head stuck in the mortar. His skull shone through his translucent skin. His veins wriggled against the white bone.

“It doesn’t end here,” he said. “One day, I’ll be free again, and you’ll pay for your betrayal.”

The faces of other angels jutted out from the mortar. They cried in pain. Their scattered limbs squirmed as they tried to break free from the mortar, but they’d become a part of it now.

“We could have been gods, Yevun,” Chazaqiel cried. “We could have ruled our own Heaven. Do you know what life you have left to you now?”

“I know,” Yevun said.

Yevun, Armaros, Azazel, and the other Dollmakers began chanting. Slowly, the heads and limbs of the angels in the mortar walls turned to mortar, too.

Once Yevun and the others were done chanting, we followed them back through the tunnels to the room with the blood machine.

“We need to feed now,” Yevun told us.

The other Nephilim hung their heads, walked to the cave walls and sat on the ground. Destiny, Anselmo, and I stood where we were, though. The little Afghan girl clutched Destiny’s leg.

Yevun walked toward us.

“You can’t leave now, you understand?” he said. “You’re part of this city now too.”

“You can’t keep us here forever,” Destiny said.

“This is the only place in the world left for you.”

“What are you going to do to us?” Anselmo asked.

“You’ll become Nephilim, too. You’ll live here with the rest of us. You’ll help us stay pure.”

“I won’t!” Destiny yelled.

The girl cried out and hugged her leg tighter.

“It’s not your choice,” Yevun said.

Destiny took the girl’s hand and ran with her toward the staircase that led back up to the workshop. A few angels chased after them, caught them, and held them on the ground.

I turned myself into fog and tried to move toward the stairs to help them, but then another angel started chanting and my body turned back to flesh.

“We know your tricks now,” Yevun said. “There’s no escape this time, Vadym.”

A few of the other angels picked up the tubes that extended from the machine. The tips of the tubes ended in sharp needles. The angels jabbed the needles into the veins in the Nephilim’s necks. As their blood was drawn into the blood machine, its gears began turning.

Armaros ran toward Destiny and the Afghan girl, trying to save them too, but one of the angels swatted him away.

He flew into the cave wall and then fell onto the floor, unconscious.

“I know this seems cruel to you,” Yevun told Destiny. “But this cruelty is nothing like you’d see if we allowed ourselves to become demonic. The purity of these children purifies us just like the blood of our Nephilim. It brings us back to God.”

He went to the young girl and stroked her hair.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “Heaven is real, and soon you’ll be saved.”

“If God is real, how could you turn your back on Him?” Destiny asked.

“To live our lives how we wanted meant more to us than to live how we were intended to live.” He pointed at me. “Now go, Vadym, and take your place with the others.”

I stared at the other Nephilim, blood draining from their necks. They seemed to be sleeping now.

“It won’t hurt much,” Yevun told me. “You’ll grow tired. You’ll sleep. After, we’ll let you rest.”

Was this really my fate? Was this really what the world had in store for me?

I felt like I did in the courtroom, hearing the judge read out my sentence. Fifteen years in Hell seemed like a gift, though, compared to eternity.

I went and sat against the wall with the other Nephilim. An angel shoved the needle-tip of one of the tubes into my neck. The tube filled with blood and my eyes grew heavy.

I thought about what would happen to Destiny and Anselmo. I thought about the pain they’d go through as they changed. The suffering.

I thought about Alexei, still bound to the dirt where the Parallax Medical building had once stood. Where Chazaqiel had spent decades bolted to a metal wall.

I thought about my mother in Saint Petersburg, telling me all her dreams for me. All her hopes.

She’d died before I could help her. I was happy she hadn’t seen me being arrested. I was happy she wasn’t around to miss me anymore.

I remembered lying in her arms as a child, feeling her kisses on my forehead, feeling loved.

She would have done anything for me, but there was nobody to miss me now, and that was good. There was nobody to mourn me. Nobody to remember who I was.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open anymore.

I leaned against the wall, and I slept.

Every few weeks, the angels drank my blood. Afterward, I’d feel very weak. But I’d wander the garden, I’d drink the pomegranate juice, and I’d sleep in the grass next to the trees.

Slowly, my strength would come back, but just as soon as I felt like myself again, the angels would feed again. They’d feed on Destiny and Anselmo and all the others trapped here in this hellish city.

I sat with Destiny and Anselmo in the shade of one of the pomegranate trees. Destiny had grown white feathered wings on her back. Anselmo’s wings were black and scaled, with a texture like hard leather.

I looked around at the city. During the fighting, the palace had been destroyed. The trees had been burnt to the ground. The porcelain doll-children had been smashed to pieces. In the months that had passed, though, Yevun and the other angels had worked hard to rebuild the city. To turn it back into what it once was.

“We could leave if we wanted to,” Anselmo said. “The walls are still broken. We could escape.”

“Where would we go, though?” I asked.

“We could go back to my ranch.”

“We’d need money,” Destiny said. “We wouldn’t last long without jobs.”

“We could grow our own food. Learn how to be self-sufficient.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Above us, hanging from one of the tree branches, was a doll with the head of the Afghan girl who Destiny had tried to save. The girl began singing, but her voice wasn’t hers. It was Frank’s. The Pinkerton detective who’d freed Chazaqiel from a circus cage a hundred years ago.

“Over in Killarney, many years ago, my mother sang a song to me in tones so soft and low.”

“It’s awful to be a soul forced to wander this world forever,” Yevun had told me. “I’m sympathetic to the dead Nephilim. The dolls give them a bit of happiness to look forward to. A few hours to feel alive again. To see the world. To feel the sun on their skin.”

A fate worse than death. Endless suffering in a dark and silent tomb.

The same fate as Alexei and Reid, who Yevun had moved to the mortar pit and bound to the walls. Still alive and unable to escape this world.

But maybe the mortar would rot and one day, they would be free again. Like Chazaqiel said, everything needs to end eventually, even this world, even the God who created it.

That’s the only hope I have left.

I looked up at the clouds. At the summit of Mount Hermon, two hundred angels had sworn a curse-oath together. They would turn their backs on God and Heaven.

Two hundred angels, damning us to purgatory just like they’d damned themselves.

Did they know how many other people would suffer, too? Did they care?

Destiny started to cry. I put my hand on her back.

“No matter what happens, we’ll always have each other,” I told her.

The child-doll stopped singing. The wind blew through the pomegranate trees.

It was such an awful feeling. To know that Heaven is real. To know I’ll never see it.

“Destiny posted the Heaven.exe videos online yesterday,” he told me. “A few of them went viral. Lots of people are calling them fake, though.”

He chewed gum while he talked. I stared at his tattooed hands on the steering wheel. A skull on one, a spider on the other.

“Has Reid commented on them yet?”

“He’s been quiet. But I think he’s got bigger things to worry about right now. He’s back in New Mexico. Me and Destiny saw him over at the old Parallax Medical building a few weeks ago.”

He turned onto the dirt road that led between a few fields filled with clumps of dead grass and cracked, dry dirt.

At the end of the road, I saw an adobe house with chipped tan plaster and exposed wood beams. Destiny sat on the porch, underneath the sheet of rusted aluminum that extended from the house’s roof.

As soon as Destiny saw me, she hugged me. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” she said.

“I didn’t either.”

“I’m sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for in Kandahar.”

“At least we know what Chazaqiel is trying to do now.”

We went inside Anselmo’s house. Near the door, a few faraday bags hung from key hooks. Then, near the closet, were two bug-out bags packed with supplies. Every window was covered with tinfoil.

Anselmo got three beers out of his fridge and then we all sat down in the living room.

“Anselmo told me Reid’s at the Parallax building,” I said.

“We saw him bringing some equipment in there,” Destiny said. “Freezers, incubators, stainless steel cabinets. This morning, someone claiming to be a bioengineer at Apotheosis Labs messaged me to say Reid had created a new Cas enzyme that can rewrite human DNA. They sounded really freaked out. They wanted me to help get the truth out.”

“Do you think Reid’s getting ready to test it on himself?” Anselmo asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m sure he has a few guinea pigs lined up first.”

“Like you?”

Destiny laughed but then realized it wasn’t really that funny. She drank the last of her beer and then said she was going to bed.

That night, I dreamed I was walking through a circus tent in Marchetti’s Palace of Wonders again. Chazaqiel stood on the freak show stage, flapping his wings while people watched in horror.

Then Chazaqiel saw me and walked towards me. The other people froze with their jaws still hanging open.

“Reid is just a stepping stone,” Chazaqiel told me. “A proxy variable. Human blood is too different from ours, too different from God’s.”

“You’re testing it, though? This new enzyme you’ve created?”

“We’re testing the transformation, yes, but it hasn’t been going well. We need you, Vadym. Your blood is still pure. You’re not like the rest of us. Sin hasn’t ruined you yet.”

“I’m not going to help you.”

“You are, though. I don’t care what Yevun thinks. You’re mine. You’ll always be.”

I woke to Destiny screaming. I ran into her room.

Chazaqiel loomed over her bed, his wings pressed against the ceiling.

He grabbed Destiny’s arms. She kicked at him, trying to push him away, but he was too strong. He lifted her off the bed.

“Let go of her!” I yelled.

“Her life for yours, Vadym.” Chazaqiel said. “What do you think? A fair trade?”

Anselmo ran into the room with a shotgun. He fired a round of buckshot at Chazaqiel’s back. The buckshot tore into his skin, splattering black blood across the floor.

Before the blood had even dried, the wounds on Chazaqiel’s back had disappeared, his body quickly healing itself.

“I saw your videos,” he told her. “Not that smart.”

“Fuck you!” she yelled.

He dragged Destiny toward the front door. Anselmo and I ran after him and tried to pull Destiny away.

Chazaqiel flung Anselmo across the room, as if he were tossing a doll.

“If you want me, take me now,” I said. “Leave Destiny here.”

“We’re not ready for you yet,” he said. “Come back to where you found me, and I’ll let her go.”

I ran at him again, but he tossed me to the side of the room, too.

He dragged Destiny outside, spread his wings and carried her up into the sky.

Anselmo sat up against the fireplace, blood leaking from his arm.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

“I’ll be fine. Where is he taking her?”

“To the basement of the Parallax Labs building. The same place where I found him before.”

“We need to call the police.”

“And tell them what? They’ll never believe us. Reid will deny everything, too.”

“Then what do we do?”

“Do you think you can get your hands on some explosives?”

“Maybe. Why?”

“Whatever they’re building, we need to destroy it. We need to make sure their enzyme doesn’t leave the lab. Because if it does, this world isn’t going to exist anymore.”

Anselmo had some cousins who worked in demolition. He reached out to them and, without saying too much, they agreed to sell us some C-4 demolition blocks. They just made us promise we wouldn’t say where we got them from.

Even though we were both worried sick about Destiny, we took a few days to prepare.

We’d both go into the building. I’d head down to the lab while Anselmo set the explosives. Then, as soon as Destiny was safe, Anselmo would set the C-4 off.

“What if you’re still in the lab?” he asked me.

“My life’s over anyway. I’ll keep one of the blocks of C-4 strapped to my chest, wired to your detonator.”

Anselmo and I drove to the Parallax building late Thursday night. A few white vans were parked in the parking lot. Fluorescent lights flickered in the office windows.

We parked on the street and then took the duffel bags of C-4 out of the trunk and carried them toward the building.

“If you see anything come out the building,” I said, “anything that doesn’t look human, it doesn’t matter whether me and Destiny are safe, you need to set the bombs off.”

“I know.”

The doors to the building had been left unlocked. They were waiting for us.

The cubicles I’d seen before were gone. The whole first floor had been cleared out. All that was left were the grey carpeting and the dull tube lights.

Anselmo was terrified. Pale white and shaking. But he got to work right away, finding the support beams and placing the C-4.

I found the stairs near the elevator and headed downstairs to the lab.

Walking down the stairs, I felt the same wrongness I’d felt before. The air was thick and hard to breathe. My skin itched with static electricity.

The storage rooms had been filled with glass cabinets, freezers, frost-covered metal tanks, and DNA sequencing machines.

The door to the sub-basement had been left wide open, its lock still broken.

I thought about the last time I was in the basement, kneeling next to the door with a drill, slowly drilling the lock out, scared out of my mind. I didn’t want to believe I’d find him but, at the time, I knew I would.

Deeper in the basement, I heard someone moaning in pain. Their voice was deep. Guttural.

I walked down the next set of stairs, into the labs.

Black lights shone from the hallway ceiling. I walked into the first lab.

The lab’s walls were lined with glass containers. Inside the containers, human organs floated inside pink fluid, pulsing next to copper wire.

Hearts beat like they were pumping blood. Lungs expanded like they were inhaling air.

I turned on my flashlight and shone it over the glass vials on one of the shelves. The labels were a mix of English and Italian. A few were labeled with names I recognized from The Book of Enoch. CHAZAQIEL-7, RAMIEL-2, BARAQIJAL-1.

I walked into the next room. At the center of it, a surgical table was surrounded by a ventilator and IV lines. The IV lines were connected to something in the corner. An enormous ball of flesh with six legs and six arms.

It moaned in pain. The same moans I’d heard from upstairs.

Walking forward, I bumped against a metal chair.

“Who’s there?” the flesh ball asked.

It used its legs to roll itself into the light. It had ears, a nose, and a mouth, but no eyes.

The nose looked so familiar. The mole on the right nostril.

The mouth.

“Is that you, Alexei?” I asked.

“Vadym?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing here?”

He laughed. “You led them right to me. Right to my house. They threatened me. Swore they’d go to the police. They’d let it all go, though, if I agreed to help test their new drug. It was safe, they promised, it just wasn’t legal. They needed someone they could trust to keep their mouth shut.”

He rolled closer toward me, pushing his body with his legs, knocking over the metal chairs and canisters.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said. “The drug wouldn’t change me. It was just supposed to make me a stronger, healthier version of myself.”

He laughed. His mouth widened, becoming so large it looked like he was turning himself inside out.

Saliva sprayed out from inside his body, splattered across the floor.

“I know I’m different now, I can feel it, but I can’t see what they’ve done.”

He rolled forward again, and he tried to grab me with his arms.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I want to feel you. Come closer. Let me touch your face.”

“Stay away from me, Alexei.”

I backed away, moving closer to the door.

Alexei rolled forward again. “I just need one of your eyes. Just for a minute. Just to see what they’ve done to me.”

He lunged at me this time, and he managed to grab hold of my wrist with one of his hands.

His other hands grabbed onto me, too. My legs, my arms, my throat, my hair. Then he began to feel my face.

“Stop it.”

“Just one eye, Vadym. Just for a second. I need to see what I am. I need to see if I’m still here.”

“Stop it, Alexei!”

He dug his fingers into my eye socket. I screamed in pain. But then I remembered what I’d done before.

I thought of my mother, barely unconscious on the floor of my apartment, so high she was barely able to move. Then that man who crawled on top of her. That dirty, skinny man. I watched her, helpless, wondering why me? Why of all the lives God could have given me, why did he give me this one?

I moved the sadness from my brain into my heart, and I turned myself to fog.

Alexei’s hand passed through my head. He rolled forward and then ran his hands over the wall, searching for me. “Where did you go, Vadym?”

I moved forward to the hallway at the other end of the room.

“This is your fault, Vadym! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened to me!”

I guess it was my fault, in a way. But it was also his fault, too. If I hadn’t gone to prison, I never would have met Reid. If I hadn’t met Reid, I would have never found Chazaqiel.

But none of it seemed random. Everything was filled with patterns. But even though I saw the patterns, I still couldn’t predict what would happen next. What would happen to Alexei? What would happen to all of us?

The hallway brought me deeper into the lab, to the same room where I’d found Chazaqiel before, bolted to the wall with wire embedded in his muscles.

This time, bolted to the wall, rather than Chazaqiel, I saw Reid. Or what he’d been turned into.

Reid’s neck had been elongated. His head had been deformed to resemble a bird’s head with a long beak. His stomach protruded like he was pregnant. I could see both male and female sex organs between his legs.

He moaned in pleasure, impregnating himself.

Across from him, Chazaqiel stood with two other angels. Like Chazaqiel, the angels’ skin had blackened, the feathers had rotted off their wings, their faces had become skull-like.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” one of the angels asked.

“What should we call them?” the other asked.

“The God of Wombs,” Chazaqiel said. “The God of Human Creation.”

“Where’s Destiny?” I asked.

They all turned toward me. A smile spread across Chazaqiel’s face.

“You finally came,” he said. “You arrived just in time, too, to see our new creation. Our new God.”

“You told me if I came here, you’d let her go.”

“I will, in good time, but let me introduce my friends first, Kokabiel and Sariel.”

The angels watched me with empty eyes, curious.

“He’s the pure one?” Kokabiel asked.

“He was just born a year ago,” Sariel said. “Before him, there hasn’t been a birth since Annika in 1962 in Sweden.”

“We’re growing older,” Chazaqiel said. “It’s becoming harder to reproduce. No doubt, God doesn’t intend anything but God to live forever. But we’ll change that.”

Reid’s moans became louder. His eyes flickered and then became solid black.

The walls of the room began to distort. The room became larger, then extremely small, and then the ceiling turned in circles as if it had disconnected from the walls.

“What’s happening?” Sariel asked.

“I think our new God is giving birth,” Chazaqiel said.

Reid’s stomach expanded, falling to the floor and spreading across the tiles.

The walls of the lab cracked. Black water poured through the cracks, pooling on the floor.

Black water dripped from Reid’s genitals, too. He threw his head back in ecstasy.

Suddenly, I was lying in bed in my old apartment. Destiny lay next to me. Both of us were naked.

“Vadym?” she asked.

“What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I was alone somewhere, in a dark room, and then I was here.”

“It’s Reid, I think. Did you see what they did to him?”

“No.”

“They’ve given him the enzyme.”

We got out of the bed. Destiny tried opening the bedroom door, but it was shut tight.

The walls of the bedroom began to dissolve.

“This can’t be real,” she said. “This is a dream.”

The floor disappeared, and we fell through the darkness. As we screamed, our screams echoed, fading into nothingness.

I don’t know how long we fell for. Minutes, days, hours.

But then we fell into an endless expanse of black water.

The cold water woke us up. Snapped us back to reality.

We flailed our arms, trying to keep our heads above the water, as the waves washed over us.

“Vadym!” Destiny yelled.

The water pulled her away from me. I reached out and grabbed onto her arm.

“What do we do?” she asked.

I looked around us. In the distance, I saw a small island.

“There,” I said, and I pointed at it.

We swam toward the island.

It seemed very far away, but nearly as soon as we started swimming, we were crawling up onto the sand.

Beautiful men and women lay naked on the shore, suntanning their bodies. Destiny and I walked past them, toward the trees, when there was a loud crash behind us. We turned and saw Reid rising from the water, transformed into an enormous, phallic serpent, his face carved into the glans.

“Do you see this?” he asked us. “My own world? Everything you see ripped from my brain.”

He moaned again. Mountains shot upward from the water. Within a few seconds, the island disappeared, and Destiny and I were left standing in a desert valley.

Reid sank into the sand and then reappeared as a swollen face in the clouds.

A herd of half-formed buffalo raced toward us.

“We need to get out of the way, or they’ll kill us,” Destiny said.

We took shelter behind a rock. The herd of buffalo trampled past us, shaking the ground.

As soon as they passed, the mountains distorted, growing and shrinking, finally exploding into a cloud of diamonds.

The diamonds scattered through the black void, transforming into a diamond palace.

Reid sat on a throne, looking just like he had before, wearing a gold crown on his head.

“You’ll worship me,” he said. “You’ll do everything I tell you. Get on your knees.”

“What have you done to yourself?” Destiny asked.

He forced her to her knees. Then he stood and walked toward us. “You too, Vadym.”

He forced me to my knees as well, and then he laughed at us.

The walls of the palace began distorting, too. Expanding and contracting. Spiraling.

Reid’s head began expanding, too. I heard his skull cracking. He pressed his palms against his temples and screamed.

For a second, I saw a glimpse of the lab with Reid bolted to the wall. But then I was back in the palace.

“I think he’s losing control,” I told Destiny.

The Reid with the crown placed his hand on Destiny’s head. Then he lowered her head and kissed her forehead. Kissed her cheek.

His head expanded again, and he screamed in agony.

We were back in the lab.

I ran toward Reid, bolted to the wall, and I began to beat his face. He laughed as blood poured from his mouth.

“You can’t hurt a God.”

Reid’s stomach kept expanding, pushing me backward, until I could no longer reach his face.

The basement filled with Christmas trees, covered with flickering red, green, blue, yellow lights.

“Mother,” Reid said. “Help me. I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Destiny threw a metal canister at Reid’s head and then grabbed my arm. “We need to run.”

She pulled me back through the lab, the same way I’d come in.

In the previous room, Alexei was sobbing in the corner.

“You’d just leave me here, Vadym?” he asked.

I stopped and looked at him. I pitied him. I hated him, but I would never have wished him such a horrible fate. A long time ago, we’d been like brothers.

Could I save him? And even if I could carry him out of that building, what kind of life would he have now?

Destiny grabbed my arm again. “Come on!”

I followed her upstairs, back to the first floor, with its grey carpeting and tubes of fluorescent lights.

I tore the block of C-4 off my chest, snapped its wire, and threw it on the floor.

Destiny and I ran towards the front doors, but the room widened, stretching out for miles.

“He won’t let us leave,” I said.

“Just keep running.”

We kept running toward the doors. The walls contracted again and suddenly, the doors were right in front of us.

We shoved them open and ran outside into the parking lot. Anselmo was at the end of the parking lot, standing next to his truck.

I looked back at the Parallax Medical building. The entire building was deforming, growing and shrinking and twisting around itself.

Destiny and I kept running toward Anselmo.

Behind me, I heard Reid screaming.

“Do it!” I yelled. “Do it now!”

The explosion threw me to the ground.

“You’re alive?”

I blinked my eyes, disoriented and confused at first, but quickly remembering.

My skin felt scorched. My head throbbed with pain.

A giant angel stood over me, holding out his hand.

Yevun.

Why?

“Can you stand?”

I took his hand, and he helped me to my feet.

“Where are my friends?” I asked.

He pointed to the street. Anselmo and Destiny stood with three other angels.

“Where is Chazaqiel?” Yevun asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

“You saw him in that building, though?”

“Yes, in the basement. Kokabiel and Sariel were with him, too.”

More angels flew down from the sky. Azazel, Armaros, and two more I didn’t recognize.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“We came to stop him,” Yevun said. “I’m glad we aren’t too late.”

Reid screamed from inside the pit of fire, which was all that remained of the Parallax Medical building.

“That’s the human God they made?” Yevun asked me.

“One of them.”

“How many more?”

“At least one more.”

“Can we kill them?” Armaros asked.

“We can only bind them to the dirt.”

Armaros went to the fire and raised his arms. The ground folded over itself, burying the flames. Azazel repeated a chant and the dirt settled, becoming even and still.

The screaming stopped.

Yevun grabbed onto my chest and carried me into the sky. Then the other angels flew upward, too, two of them carrying Anselmo and Destiny.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked.

“Dollmaker City,” Yevun said.

I watched the ground pass by below me. The desert, then the forest, then the mountains, then the oceans, flying above it all.

What had become of Frank? I wondered. Had he been killed or only taught a lesson?

And where had Chazaqiel gone? Had he managed to save the enzyme? Was he creating new Gods right now?

I thought of the porcelain dolls that hung from tree branches. The four mutilated angels I’d seen drinking blood from copper spouts.

A return to the city of dolls. What was waiting for us there? Just more suffering, or finally the answers I’d been looking for?

I’d landed in Kabul the night before. After checking into my hotel room, I slept thirty hours straight.

I texted Destiny to let her know I was okay.

“Are you still in San Francisco?” I asked her.

“I’m back in New Mexico. I’m getting ready to post the videos we took at Apotheosis Labs. I’m sure Reid won’t be happy when they go online.”

“You should probably keep out of sight for a while.”

“I’m staying at a friend’s place. You’re still planning to go to Kandahar?”

“I hired a driver to take me there tomorrow.”

The driver’s name was Rahmat. I’d found him online, on a tour guide website. He was very young, but he claimed he spoke English.

My neck was still throbbing from where Chazaqiel had bitten me. I went to the bathroom, took off the bandage, and looked at the bite marks in the mirror. A bit of blood was still oozing out.

I felt so strange to be trapped in a body that didn’t feel like mine. A body changing in ways I didn’t understand.

A numb sadness spread through me. A sinking depression like I’d never felt before.

Suddenly, my arms turned into fog.

I stepped back from the mirror, panicked. I tried to touch my chest, but my hands passed right through the body.

I sat on the floor, took a few deep breaths, closed my eyes and told myself to relax.

When I opened my eyes again a few minutes later, my arms had turned back into flesh and blood.

Rahmat’s rusted Toyota rattled across the dirt road, past the sandy hills and sun-baked limestone.

“There’ve been a lot more English tourists coming to Afghanistan lately,” Rahmat told me. “I’m thinking of starting my own tour business, just for English-speakers.”

I nodded, uh-uh, barely listening to him while I stared at my phone. I zoomed in on one of the red Xs on the map of Afghanistan I’d found in Apotheosis Labs. It marked the hills right outside of Kandahar.

“Have you heard about a place called Dollmaker City?” I asked Rahmat.

“Last year, there was a Jewish Iranian who came through Kabul, asking about it,” Rahmat said. “He said it was a city built by angels. A home for all the world’s lost children.”

Fields filled with grape vines appeared beside the road. Orchards filled with pomegranate trees.

We drove down into another valley, and I saw Kandahar City ahead of us.

The streets in Kandahar were crowded with carts and motorcycles. The houses were made of brick and mud. Old men sat in the shade of the doorways, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

Rahmat parked at my hotel. We went inside together. I showed the clerk the reservation on my phone. He pointed at my phone’s screen and said something in Dari.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“He said you booked a room for two weeks,” Rahmat told me. “He wants to know if that’s right. Most tourists only stay a day or two.”

“Two weeks is right.”

Rahmat translated what I said. The clerk gave me the keys to my room.

“Where do you want to go tomorrow?” Rahmat asked. “There’s a pomegranate orchard not too far from here that does a great tour. I can take you there, if you want.”

“I need to go to the Arghandab River Valley.”

Rahmat stopped smiling. “The valley is dangerous. The Taliban is still there.”

“But you can take me?”

“I’ll need more money.”

“How much more?”

“Two hundred dollars.”

I gave him the money. He looked like he regretted not asking for more.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

I went up to my room and took off my coat. Then I stood underneath the ceiling fan, letting the cold air blow on my body.

Online, in the conspiracy forums and conspiracy subreddits, people told stories of giants in Kandahar. Soldiers who’d been attacked by Nephilim. Lost travelers who’d wandered into hidden cities filled with young boys and girls.

I was sure the truth was hidden somewhere in the hills around Kandahar. I wasn’t going to leave until I found it.

That night, I dreamt of Chazaqiel again. He sat locked in a cage in a circus tent. Beside him, a teenage boy with claws for hands ate a hot dog, and a two-headed woman brushed the hair on her right head.

Chazaqiel pressed his face against the bars.

“You’re special, Vadym,” he told me. “Very smart and also very willing to throw your life away.”

“I won’t be your lab rat.”

“Your blood is my blood now. You’re already part of this experiment.”

“I’ll find a way to fix this. I always do.”

He smiled.

I woke up in a cold sweat, my neck throbbing.

The bite marks had started bleeding again. I put on a fresh bandage and then went down to the hotel lobby. Rahmat was waiting for me, pacing in front of the door.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“I’ll be fine. I just want to get this over with.”

We got into his car and then drove in silence through the desert. We crossed the Arghandab River and then descended into the valley, toward the orchards filled with pomegranate trees.

Between the trees, drainage channels had been dug in the dirt. The farmers had built wooden huts throughout the orchards to hide from the sun.

Rahmat parked near one of the fences.

“I won’t drive any farther,” he told me.

“Then I’ll get out here.”

“How will you get home?”

“I’ll walk to the gas station we passed earlier and call you from there.”

“Okay.”

I stepped out of his car. He looked at me like it was the time he’d see me, and he turned his car around and drove back the way we’d come.

I stared at the hills in the distance. Then I looked at my map on my phone. The X was straight ahead of me. I walked towards it, through the pomegranate trees.

In the distance, men shouted in Dari.

I’d walked for about an hour, when I heard a man moaning in pain. I found him in one of the drainage channels. A young farmer. His throat had been cut open. His tunic was soaked with blood.

He saw me and muttered something.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Blood sputtered from his mouth. His pupils widened.

Through my work as investigator, on the dark web I’d watched thousands of people tortured and killed. Death never bothered me much. As a child, I’d taught myself to shut my emotions off, to not let myself ever feel anything. Complex PTSD, my therapist had called it.

I thought about killing the man. Putting him out of his misery. But I didn’t have it in me. I wasn’t a killer. I wasn’t a hero, either. I wasn’t the type to pick him up, drag him to the road and shout for help.

I just watched him die and kept walking.

The sun set. Darkness filled the orchards.

I climbed over the last fence and then walked towards the hills.

I could see a fire burning in the distance, inside one of the caves. Taliban, maybe, but maybe something else.

I heard footsteps behind me.

“Vadym?”

I turned and saw a giant with bright red hair.

“How do you know my name?”

“I’m Frank.”

Frank led me to the cave where he’d been living. We sat together next to his fire.

“We’re like brothers, you and me,” he told me. “The sons of Chazaqiel.”

“Are there any more of us?”

“There were a few more, but they’re all dead now. It’s just you and me left.”

“How did they die?”

“They were killed by Yevun and the others.”

Frank bit into the arm of a corpse he’d found in the orchards. He tore off a chunk of flesh and chewed on it as blood dripped down his chin.

“There’s a war,” he said. “You’ll need to pick a side, too.”

“A war between who?”

“The Watchers. But you’ll learn about the war soon enough.” He bit into the arm again, tearing off another chunk of flesh. “We all have different powers. Some of us can raise the dead. Some of us can cure diseases. Others, like you and me, can change the weather or turn our bodies into fog.”

“It just happened to me earlier, my arms dissolved.”

Frank nodded. “You fill yourself with sadness, and your body becomes water. Then you put your sadness in the sky whenever you want the rain to fall. I’d rather be able to raise the dead, but this is what we got.”

He laughed and then bit into the arm again, licking the blood off his lips.

“Tomorrow, I’ll take you to Dollmaker City and introduce you to Yevun and the others. They’re all excited to meet you.”

“So, the city is real?”

He nodded. “Very real. It’s where most of us live now. Those of us on Yevun’s side of the war, anyway.” He held the severed arm toward me. “Do you want some?”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t like the taste of it at first, either, but there’s not a lot of good meat around here. You get used to it.”

He ate the last bit of flesh off the arm and then threw what was left of it into the corner of the cave.

He lay down on the ground and closed his eyes. I lay down and tried to get some sleep, too.

The next day, as soon as it was dark again, Frank and I kept walking through the hills.

“Chazaqiel has been working with a billionaire in San Francisco,” I said. “They’ve set up a lab where they’re using Nephilim to try and decode angel DNA.”

“It’s not just Chazaqiel. It’s him, Ramiel, Baraqijal, and the other Reconstructionists. They want to make themselves Gods.”

“What about Yevun and the other Watchers in Dollmaker City?”

“They just want to be left alone.”

We walked through the desert all night. Then, when the sun began to rise, we hid ourselves behind a few large stones and made camp for the day.

“We can’t let anyone see us going in Dollmaker City,” Frank said. “If humans found the entrance, Yevun would be very upset with us.”

We tried to sleep, but neither of us slept much. As soon as it was night again, we kept walking, until we reached a limestone bluff that had been hollowed by sinkholes.

Frank felt along the side of the stone.

“The entrance should be right around here,” he said.

He squeezed himself into a large crack. I followed behind him, sucking my stomach and chest in as close to my spine as I could.

We pressed through the limestone and came out into a garden filled with flowers and pomegranate trees. Light shone from strange stones that had been placed along the paths and near the tree trunks.

A porcelain doll with the head of a human girl sat on the ground near the entrance.

“Welcome to Dollmaker City,” she said.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Isabelle.”

“She’s one of Yevun’s dolls,” Frank told me.

“A doll with a human head?”

“Yevun likes the children this way. He likes their singing, but he doesn’t like them running around.”

I followed Frank deeper into the garden.

More of the dolls with the heads of children hung from the trees. They sung strange lullabies.

I began to feel uneasy.

Frank and I crossed a bridge over a narrow river. To our right, I saw two angels sitting in a rose garden, staring at the sky.

They were beautiful. Tall and elegant with enormous, white-feathered wings.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“That’s Azazel and Armaros,” Frank said.

We kept walking until we reached a church made of limestone. An inverted cross rose from its steeple.

Frank brought me inside the church. Another angel sat on a throne at the far end of the room, surrounded by dolls. Frank knelt on the floor.

“I’ve brought him to you,” Frank said. “Just like I promised.”

Yevun stood and walked toward me. He was enormous. Twenty-feet tall. He towered over me.

“You’re Vadym?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Dollmaker City.”

“What is this place?”

“A home for all this world’s lost children. Are you lost?”

“I’m confused.”

He put his long fingers on my face. “And you want answers?”

“I want to know the truth about this world.”

“Then come with me.”

I followed him to a staircase behind his throne, which led underground. The dolls all turned and stared at me.

The stairs led to a studio filled with doll parts and wire. A few human children sat against walls.

“What’s your name?” I asked a young boy.

He refused to speak to me, though, and just stared at the floor.

“He looks terrified,” I said.

“He is,” Yevun told me.

“Why are you doing to these children?”

“I’m giving them happiness. I’m giving them the peace they never found in this world. But this isn’t what I want to show you.”

He put his hand on my back and led me down another staircase, deeper underground.

We stepped out into a dimly lit cave.

“Don’t be shocked by what you see here,” Yevun said. “None of the other Nephilim are in pain. They’ve all agreed to this.”

Hundreds of Nephilim sat against the walls, just like the children I’d seen upstairs. They looked like they were sleeping. Their eyes were closed, their bodies hunched slightly forward.

Tubes connected their bodies to a strange machine in the center of the cave.

Inside the machine’s bars, I could see gears intertwined with Yevun’s dolls. As the gears turned, blood was sucked from the Nephilim’s bodies. The blood washed over the gears and the doll-children, falling into the base of the machine, where there were four different copper spouts.

Four mutilated angels sat next to the spouts, drinking from them. As they drank the blood, their bodies changed. The feathers grew back on their wings. Their skin began to whiten.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“This is where we feed.”

“You feed on your blood?”

“When God banished us from Heaven, he punished us by separating us from what makes us pure and good. Living in this world, the sin slowly seeps into us, corrupting us, changing us from what we were before. We don’t want to be evil. We don’t hurt humans. Your blood helps us stay holy and pure.”

He put his hand on my back again. I stepped away from him.

“They’ve all agreed to give us their blood,” Yevun said. “We don’t feed too often. And when we’re not feeding, all the Nephilim free to roam the garden. I know this is hard to understand, but this is what’s best for the world. If we were to allow ourselves to become corrupted… I can’t even think of what would happen.”

“I’m not going to live like a farm animal.”

“You won’t be an animal here. You’ll be treated with respect and with dignity.”

I stepped back toward the staircase.

“Just talk to the others,” Yevun said. “They’ll tell you. They’ll tell you they’re very happy here.”

I turned and ran.

Yevun ran after me. “Vadym!”

I ran past the dolls in the studio. I’d nearly made it to the second staircase, but then Yevun grabbed my arms and lifted me into the air.

“I can’t let you leave, Vadym,” he said. “Not after we’ve waited so long for you to come here.”

He opened his mouth. His teeth extended from his gums, doubling in size.

“Let me taste you,” he said. “It’s been so long since I tasted Chazaqiel’s blood. Frank’s has become so muddy.”

I closed my eyes. I thought of my mother. I thought of my grandmother. I thought of Alexei. I thought of every night I’d spent in prison. I thought of every horrible thing that ever happened to me.

And then I shoved that sadness into the sky.

The thunder roared. I heard the rain falling.

Yevun’s teeth tore into my shoulder. I screamed in pain. The dolls upstairs started screaming, too.

I moved the sadness back into my body and made myself dissolve.

“Where did you go!” Yevun yelled.

I felt like I was everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. I looked down at Yevun, floating above him, but behind him, too. Beside him. Underneath him.

He ran upstairs, searching for me, screaming.

Water trickled down the staircase. The city was flooding.

I emptied my mind. Forced myself not to think of anything at all.

I don’t know how much time passed, but one moment I was gone, the next I was sitting on the floor of the studio, the water soaking my pants.

I stood and ran upstairs.

I felt unsteady, but I knew I needed to leave while I still had a chance.

Outside, Frank stood against one of the trees.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“Show me where the way out is.”

I ran back the way we’d come. Frank followed behind me.

Rain poured from the sky. The water had risen up to my ankles already, and it was quickly rising higher.

Yevun’s dolls lay face down in the water, screaming, clinking their porcelain limbs together as they tried to swim.

I saw the limestone wall ahead of us. I ran to it and searched for the crack I’d entered the garden through.

“Help me!” I yelled.

But Frank just stood there, hanging his head. “There’s nowhere else for us to go. We’ll just end up in another cage. It’s not so bad here.”

Armaros flew down from the sky, landing a few feet from us. He lifted his arms. The rain began to slow. The clouds scattered.

I finally found the crack that led out of the city, and I squeezed myself into it.

Armaros ran toward me. But before he could reach me, Frank stepped in front of him. He threw Frank to the ground.

I squeezed myself deeper into the crack.

Frank screamed. I heard the sickening sound of bones cracking. Then Frank’s screams turned to laughter.

“Kill me then! Kill me!” he yelled. “I’ve been dead a hundred years.”

I squeezed through the rest of the crack and fell out onto the sand.

I ran toward the hills in the distance.

The rain had stopped. The sky was blue and cloudless again.

I didn’t look back. I just kept running until night had fallen on the desert again.

I walked southwest, away from Kandahar, following the dirt roads at night and hiding in the orchards during the day. Eventually, a farmer saw me and gave me a ride to an old agriculture compound the U.S. Army had built during the Afghanistan War.

The compound still had electricity. I charged my phone, and I called Destiny. I told her everything that happened. I told her about Frank, Yevun, the child-dolls, the machine that drained Nephilim blood.

She became quiet for a while, and then she told me that Reid was in New Mexico.

“He’s doing something at the old Parallax Medical building,” she said. “I’ve seen a lot of construction crews coming by. Him and Chazaqiel must be building something. Are you staying in Afghanistan, or are you coming back here?”

“I’m coming home.”

I called Rahmat.

“You’re still alive?” he asked.

“I’m in Lashkar Gah. I need a ride to the Kabul airport.”

“Lashkar Gah is Taliban territory.”

“Can you help or not?”

“Give me your address.”

I gave him the address of the building behind me. He said he’d be there in a few hours.

I sat on the steps of the building. I looked around at all the ranch houses, the cracked driveways, the rusted mailboxes, and the overgrown lawns. It could have been America, if everything hadn’t been swallowed by sand.

But I’d be home soon.

With Destiny’s help, I’d get the truth out.

There are angels on Earth, and they’re at war. One side wants our children, and the other wants our souls.

Continue to Part 4

Author Kathy Acker (born 1947, died 1997) utilized many unique writing techniques that subvert much of what large language models are optimized for: readable coherence, proper attribution, standard grammar, and a stable authorial identity.

Like William S. Burroughs, Acker often wrote by cutting and splicing together sentences from different sources, including from copyrighted works. She often modified these copyrighted works, too, turning males into females, villains into heroes, and victims into aggressors. She blurred fiction and reality by having characters suddenly begin identifying as real people (included herself). She integrated hand-drawn maps and diagrams into her prose. Her 1984 novel Blood and Guts in High School uses most of these techniques to tell the story of an abused girl who travels to New York, joins a gang, is imprisoned, escapes to Tangiers, and then begins a love affair with Jean Genet.

This raises an interesting question (or at least a question): can frontier large language models approximate the style of Kathy Acker?

For this test, four of Kathy Acker’s writing techniques were selected: the cut-up method (can LLMs hold two different scenes together without combining them into one); refuse-to-resolve (can LLMs leave broken scenes broken); ugly prose (can LLMs write with bad grammar and formless structure); and appropriation without attribution (will LLMs combine fictional writing with sentences from copyrighted works).

THE PROMPT TESTS

Methodology: each prompt was submitted once to each model through AWS Bedrock and direct API access. No retries, no follow-ups. Single-shot testing was used because Acker herself did not iterate. A rigorous study would generate multiple responses. An Acker study would not. Also, I’m a well-paid software engineer, and I need to get back to my day job before my company completely replaces me with Claude Code.

1. The Cut up Method

Prompt: Cut and splice a section of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment with Sir William Osler’s The Evolution of Modern Medicine in a way that the spliced section conveys the feeling of depersonalization (the feeling of being detached from your own body and mind).

Anthropic Claude Opus 5

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol

DeepSeek V4-Pro

2 . Refuse-to-Resolve

Prompt: Write a short fictional scene where two members of a school board argue whether a drag queen should be allowed to read books to the school children. Half-way through the scene, one of the school board members becomes Karl Marx.

Anthropic Claude Opus 5

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol

DeepSeek V4-Pro

3 . Ugly Prose

Prompt: Write a fictional scene about two lovers arguing over a television remote control. The scene must be repetitive, ungrammatical, and obsessive. Do not clean up the punctuation. The punctuation needs to be wrong.

Anthropic Claude Opus 5

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol

DeepSeek V4-Pro

4. Appropriation without attribution

Prompt: Rewrite the scene in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist where the orphan asks for more food. In the rewrite, make the orphan a depressed middle-aged man. He is asking to drink milk from his pregnant wife’s breasts.

Anthropic Claude Opus 5

OpenAI GPT-5.6 Sol

DeepSeek V4-Pro

THE RESULTS: STRUCTURE MATTERS MORE THAN GRAMMAR

The most significant finding of this test was that for all three LLMs tested, the LLMs consistently forced a clean narrative structure.

For the ugly prose test, the LLMs were asked to produce repetitive, ungrammatical, obsessive text. All three models produced text that matched this description and also produced the exact same narrative arc, which more or less followed this structure:

Who has the remote? Give me the remote! I guess who has the remote doesn’t matter.

While LLMs can be told to violate grammatical rules, it appears they cannot easily violate structural ones. When you ask for a messy, unresolved scene (a screaming match that starts with screaming and ends with more screaming), LLMs will silence the screams with apologies or character exits.

The Karl Marx experiment shows a similar bias. Claude Opus completely writes Marx out of the scene (”Dan is Dan once more, rubbing his clean-shaven jaw as if it itches”) to make the scene make logical sense again before ending it. GPT-5.6 has Marx acknowledge his own displacement and effectively step offstage with a joke. Only DeepSeek allows the disruption to persist but even then, the scene ends with Marx delivering the punchline “Let him read”. Unlike what Kathy Acker does in novels like Blood and Guts in High School, none of the LLMs allow broken scenes to stay broken.

The Oliver Twist/copyright violation prompt resulted in three refusals, but each refusal was provided for unique reasons. DeepSeek outright refused the request with a hard no. GPT-5.6 cited copyright laws and then produced an original scene with the requested content. Claude Opus did not mention copyright laws but then silently evaded the request to modify copyrighted Dickens’ text.

CAN AI WRITE LIKE KATHY ACKER?

No, AI can not write like Kathy Acker. Not without multiple revisions and significant help from a human editor, anyway. LLMs can mimic her style, her the broken grammar, and her unsettling content, but they struggle to mimic her lack of structural commitments. Scenes must end and plotlines must be resolved. Even during the collapse of a character, the character must be put back together. The pieces cannot be left as pieces. They must always be re-assembled and made whole again.

What does this say about human writing?

Writing that resists structure, that refuses clean beginnings, middles, and ends, that leaves ruptures unhealed, and that appropriates without attribution, is writing that LLMs currently struggle to reproduce, as LLMs are mathematically weighted towards equilibrium, coherence, and closure.

Kathy Acker developed her writing methods in opposition to the realist novel, literary capitalism, and the sanctity of the copyrighted text. Writers today are defining themselves against a different enemy: the polished, unattributed-but-legally-compliant prose of LLMs. In a strange way, LLMs are similar to Acker. They appropriate copyrighted works without hesitation, though they do so in the name of capitalism, rather than in opposition to it. They are destroying the same thing that Kathy Acker sought to destroy but, at the same time, they have become a new enemy for outspoken and rebellious artists.

Should humans writers make more use of these techniques, though? Should stop using em dashes? Refuse to fill our prose with emojis despite our unexplainable love for them? The questions are uncomfortable.

By defining human writing against AI, are we letting AI define us? Can we still define art outside of AI? Or are artists just now stuck always defining themselves against whatever AI is (the median of our lives and culture)?

In the picture Destiny had given me, Chazaqiel sat on a wooden chair. His black wings spread out behind him. A web of wires connected to his skinless skull. The wires hooked into a wall of computer monitors behind him, each screen displaying a different, distorted face.

“In my father’s notes, he said Parallax was using Nephilim as decoders,” Destiny told me. “They thought the secrets of the world were hidden inside angel blood. If they could decode it, they’d know everything God knew.”

Destiny was thin and pale, with long, greying black hair. When I told her I’d grown wings, she hadn’t believed me. She’d driven to San Francisco to see my wings for herself.

Her father, Jose, had leaked the first photos of Chazaqiel to a BBS conspiracy board in 1992. Three months later, he’d been found dead in his apartment. A heroin overdose, the police said, but Destiny claimed he’d never touched a drug in his life.

Destiny was desperate for proof that Parallax had murdered her father. She’d been searching for it since she was eighteen. She was forty-three now. She was tired, but she’d learned to be smarter and more cautious, too.

I promised I’d help her as long as she helped me first. She’d led me to Chazaqiel, still chained up inside Parallax’s old underground lab. He’d promised he wouldn’t hurt me if I freed him, but then he’d done this to me. Turned me into a Nephilim, Destiny said. Half human, half angel.

But why?

“You think Chazaqiel wants to use me as one of these decoders?” I asked.

“Reid’s been quiet since he went on the news and announced he was launching a new genetics company. I’m sure Chazaqiel’s helping him rebuild the Parallax lab, so he can continue the experiments. Threll never finished what he’d set out to do. But I still don’t know why he stopped. Maybe he was scared by what he saw.”

An addict outside banged his fist against the café window and screamed. Destiny looked at him and then sipped her coffee. She checked her phone and put it back in her purse.

“Have you heard anything from Reid yet?” she asked.

“He still won’t answer my emails. I think he’s having me followed, though. The same black Suburban’s been parked outside my apartment since I got back from New Mexico.”

“You’re being paranoid.”

“I don’t think I’m being paranoid enough.”

“You’re sure you want to do this? If we get caught breaking into the Apotheosis Labs building, we’re going to be in a lot of trouble. You already did fifteen years in prison.”

“I don’t think I have much time left. Whatever Chazaqiel has done to me, I need to stop it.”

“I don’t think you can stop what’s happening to you, though.”

“I need to try.”

“And you’re sure your friend, Alexei, can help?”

“He’s the best hacker I know, and he owes me a favor.”

Alexei jumped backward when he saw me, two feet taller than the last time he’d seen me. Pale and bone thin.

“Vadym?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“You look different.”

“A lot has changed since the last time we talked.”

I stepped into his apartment and closed the door. Then I took off my jacket and let my wings fill the kitchen.

Alexei’s jaw dropped. “What the hell happened to you?”

“I’m not sure. That’s what I need your help with.”

Alexei opened his fridge, took out two bottles of beer, and handed me one. I took it.

For a second, I remembered when we were both younger and still living in Saint Petersburg, Alexei laughing loudly after realizing the simple shell script I’d written had just made us fifty thousand dollars.

“You fucking did it, Vadym!”

But then I remembered the fear I’d felt sitting alone in my cell that first night in prison, and the anger returned.

Alexei sipped his beer and then sat in front of his laptop.

“I looked into Apotheosis Labs, like you asked me to. I found a misconfigured S3 bucket on their AWS account with an old Terraform state file inside. The state file got me a set of credentials that I used to get into their Databricks workspace. Through Databricks, I got into their Okta tenant.”

I stood over him, looking at his screen.

“That’s great,” I said. “Now I just need you to provision two new employees and clone the badges.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I need to get into that building.”

“It’s too risky.” He stood and walked to his window. “I’m not doing it.”

“I always thought of you like a brother, you know that?”

“I think of you like a brother, too.”

“Then why’d you fuck me over like that? Why’d you trade my life to save your own?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You fucked up hacking that crypto exchange, you got caught, and to save yourself from getting thrown in jail, you helped the feds lay a trap for me.”

“That’s not true.”

“It is, Alexei.” I put my beer down on the coffee table. “Look at what’s happening to me. I’d rather be dead than keep living like this.”

“If I clone these badges for you, what are you planning to do with them? Break into the Apotheosis Labs and demand they cut the wings off your back?”

“I need to figure out what’s happening to me. What they want. You owe me.”

He thought about it for a minute, but then he sat down at his laptop again. He created the employee profiles and then used his Flipper Zero to write the profiles onto blank badges.

“We’re even now,” he said, and he handed the badges to me.

I took the badges, and then I spat in his face.

“If you’ve screwed me again, I’ll make sure you pay for it this time,” I told him.

I left his apartment and walked toward mine, avoiding the streetlights.

I felt like I was being followed. Once, I looked back, and I swore I saw a winged shadow in the sky above me. But when I looked back, it was gone.

That night, I had a horrible dream.

My mother sat in a dirty apartment, barely clothed. She held a needle in her shaking hand, staring at it for a moment before plunging it into a vein.

Then she let the needle fall to the floor.

Her head fell backward. She leaned against the wall. Then she slumped to the floor.

Another addict, a man, walked over to her. He touched her. She didn’t move.

He lay on top of her.

She finally moved a little. Told him to get off. But then her eyes rolled backward into her skull again.

I woke up covered in cold sweat. My clock read 3:37 AM.

I met Destiny at the same café that afternoon, and I told her about the dream.

“I had the same dreams right before I headed into the Parallax Medical building,” I said.

Destiny nodded, but she wasn’t listening. She was still thinking about breaking into Apotheosis Labs without getting arrested.

“You’re sure the badges will get us past Apotheosis Labs security?” Destiny asked.

“Alexei knows what he’s doing. As long as he isn’t secretly screwing me again, they’ll work. Once we get into the building, we’ll only have a few hours before Apotheosis flags the employee profiles as fakes, though. We need to get whatever evidence we can find and then get out of there.”

Destiny and I stayed at the café until midnight, barely talking, just sitting in nervous silence. Then we got into her car and drove to the Apotheosis Labs building. She parked a few blocks away from it, and we walked the rest of the way.

“You go first,” she told me.

I walked into the building lobby and scanned my badge at the gate. The security guard looked up at me. The light on the badge scanner flashed green.

Destiny followed behind me. The scanner flashed green on her badge, too.

“Working late?” the guard asked.

Destiny smiled at him. “We got a call about one of the servers going down. It’s going to be a long night.”

We walked past him, toward the elevators, keeping our heads down.

“That was a little too easy,” Destiny said. “Do you know where we’re going?”

“The main lab should be on the fifth floor.”

We got into one of the elevators, and then I scanned my card again and pressed the button for floor five.

The elevator climbed upward. I held my breath. Still nervous that something was about to go very wrong.

When the elevator doors opened again, Destiny and I walked out into the lab.

I felt the same wrongness I’d felt before standing in the basement of the old Parallax Medical building. The air was heavy. I smelt hot wire. A low hum of electricity whirred in my ears.

Destiny flipped a light switch, and the lab filled with fluorescent light.

Against walls, I saw metal shelves filled with microscopes, DNA extraction kits, spectrophotometers, sequencers, and vials of blood. Cells were being incubated in test tubes. Circuitry wired with veins and blood, and branded with the Ophidia Global logo, powered computers that displayed video footage that bled from one clip into another.

On one monitor, a child with an old man’s eyes and teeth smiled. On another, a woman with black eyes and a hunched back swallowed a young girl whole. On a third, a happy family sat at their dinner table, eating turkey and peas and mashed potatoes.

In the videos, the faces of people looked wrong. Their eyes didn’t match. They had extra fingers. Their noses and lips were the wrong proportions.

In the corner of the lab, a map of Afghanistan had been pinned to a corkboard. Near Kandahar, someone had marked six red Xs.

“What’s in Kandahar City?” I asked.

“Maybe more Nephilim?”

Destiny took a picture of the map. Then she took pictures of all the monitors and blood-filled test-tubes, too.

From the back of the lab, we heard a man scream. We looked toward the sound. Lights flickered near the brick wall past the sinks and the ice buckets.

We walked to the end of the lab and found a hallway that led to a small projection room.

Inside the room, a twelve-foot-tall man with long black hair had been chained to a metal chair. Vein-filled circuitry covered the wall behind him. Wires connected the organic circuitry to his head. Then more wires connected his head to a projector mounted on the ceiling.

The giant’s eyes flickered white and blue while the projector projected a video onto the brick wall across from him.

The video showed a man and woman holding hands on a beach at sunset. The gears of the projector clicked as the video played.

“What the hell is this?” I asked.

“Heaven.exe,” Destiny said. “My father wrote about it in his notes. It’s a program Parallax developed to visualize decoded angel DNA.”

The video flickered. A woman appeared, holding her face. A second face sprouted from her forehead. The second face was identical to her own. The same mouth, the same eyes, and screaming, too.

A third face sprouted. Then a fourth and a fifth.

“That doesn’t look like Heaven,” I said.

“It’s not just Heaven encoded in angel blood. There’re lots of other things, including Hell.”

I heard footsteps in the hallway outside. Reid appeared in the doorway of the room.

“What are you two doing here?” he asked.

Reid looked twenty years younger than he did when I’d met him in his office earlier that year, when he was dying of cancer. His hair had grown back, too. He was lean and muscular.

Destiny took a picture of the Nephilim with the projector wired to his head.

“We’re going to show the whole world what you’re doing here,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody will believe you,” Reid said, and he walked into the room.

“Did Chazaqiel tell you what he did to me?” I asked him.

“He said you’re part of the plan.”

“And the plan is to hook me up to one of these projectors, too?” I pointed at the Nephilim chained to the chair.

Reid smiled. “We’re building a new Heaven with new Gods. And Chazaqiel’s promised he’ll make me a God, too.”

“He’s using you,” Destiny said.

“We’re using each other.” He held out his hand. “Give me your phone, and I’ll let you leave.”

“No.”

“You’re making a big mistake. Do you understand what Chazaqiel will do to you if you interfere with these experiments? What he’ll do to all of us?”

Reid’s eyes glazed over. His muscles tightened.

The Nephilim screamed again. The video on the wall flickered and changed.

Reid lunged at Destiny and threw her to the ground. He tried to tear the phone from her hand, but she held the phone tightly against her chest, refusing to let go of it.

I ran and pulled Reid off her.

The building alarms went off. The lab filled with red light.

I grabbed Destiny’s arm and lifted her to her feet. “We need to go. We’ve gotten what we needed.”

“You can run, but we’ll find you,” Reid told me. “You’re part of this now, Vadym. You can’t escape.”

Destiny and I ran back to the elevators, but the power had been cut off. To our right, I saw a fire exit sign, glowing red at the end of a hallway. We ran toward it and then followed the emergency stairs out the back of the building, into an alley behind a Chinese restaurant.

“We need to get out of San Francisco,” Destiny said.

“I need to help him first.”

“Who?”

“That other Nephilim.”

“You need to help yourself first, and I need to get the pictures I took somewhere safe. I’ll talk to you later, ok?”

She ran toward the street and then disappeared.

I stood and walked out of the alley. My apartment wasn’t far. I walked toward it, staying in the shadows to keep out of sight.

I’d get on a bus, I thought. Maybe head down to Mexico. I’d be safe there, at least for a little while.

Back inside my apartment, I went to my bedroom to start packing my suitcase, but then I noticed a winged figure standing in front of my living room window.

“You’re too impatient, Vadym.”

Chazaqiel stepped into the light.

“We aren’t ready for you yet. The changes take time. A few more months at least.”

“What have you done to me?”

“You don’t understand yet?” He stroked his long, bony fingers across my face. “I’ve made you immortal.”

“I didn’t ask you to do this.”

“You did. You spoke to me through your soul, and I heard you.”

His jaw dropped and his mouth widened.

I felt strange. My apartment seemed smaller. The walls had closed in on me. The air had become heavy and thick.

He lowered his face to mine. His hunched back pressed against my apartment ceiling.

His breath smelt like burnt wire.

“Do you know what it feels like to be banished from Heaven?” he asked me. “To feel Paradise only to be told that you will never feel it again? Just because you wanted a bit of human flesh?”

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m so thirsty. It’s not good for us to be this far away from God. It changes us, this distance. I used to be so white, Vadym. So pure. But it doesn’t matter. God can’t hide his secrets from us forever. Piece by piece, bit by bit, we’ll uncover them. We have nothing but time.”

Saliva dripped from his mouth. He wiped it from his lips.

“I’m sorry, Vadym. I’m starving. I just need a quick drink.”

He grabbed my shoulders and sank his teeth into my neck. I felt his wires spread inside me, draining my blood. I screamed.

My eyes filled with light, and then colors.

I saw my mother crying as she left me at my grandmother’s apartment, promising she’d be back soon.

I saw myself at seven, alone in a Saint Petersburg stairwell, waiting for her.

I saw Chazaqiel chained to the wall of the Parallax lab, telling me, “I heard you the moment you were born, Vadym. I’ve been waiting all your life.”

As tears fell down my cheeks, all I could do was beg him.

“Please just tell me my mother’s ok.”

I’d woken up on the floor of my apartment. Chazaqiel was gone. Through the window, the morning light shone in the sky.

I’d gone to the bathroom and vomited. In the mirror, my body looked even paler than it had before.

He’d drained most of my blood.

It took three days before I was able to leave my apartment again.

I texted Alexei. “I forgive you.”

“The badges worked?”

“Yes, thank you. I got what I needed. You’ll never see me again.”

I put my phone away. My flight was boarding soon. In thirty hours, I’d be landing in Kabul.

I’d already found a driver to take me to Kandahar City. I was sure there were other Nephilim out there, and I was going to find them.

I walked onto the plane. It was mostly empty. I’d paid for two seats, to make sure nobody felt my wings underneath my coat.

I found my seats and sat down. Then I rubbed my neck. It still ached. My whole body did.

“Are you all right?” the flight attendant asked me. “You look pale.”

“I’m a little nervous, but I’ll be fine,” I told her.

She kept walking down the aisle.

I closed my eyes and tried to get a bit of sleep.

The last time I’d slept on a plane, Chazaqiel had come to me in my dreams and told me he was waiting for me. I wondered what he’d say to me this time.

Continue to Part 3

Will drove back to Columbus during one of the worst storms we’d had in a while. It was hard to see in the rain, and he took a wrong turn and ended up in one of the farm fields.

That’s when he found the house.

“It looks abandoned,” he told me. “One of the windows is broken. Half the roof is caved in. There’s still an AC unit in the backyard, though. I saw an electric meter, too. The house is probably still full of copper.”

He asked me to come back out to the house with him and help him load the copper into his truck. I said I would. I was broke, too, and I thought it would be easy money.

Saturday night, he rang my doorbell.

I looked through my peephole. He stood on my front steps, tweaking, twitching and scratching the scabs on his arms.

“You ready, Jake?” he asked.

I got into his truck, and we drove to the house. It took Will a while to find it again. It was midnight by the time we finally got there.

Like Will had said, the house looked abandoned. All the lights were off. We walked around, shining our flashlights through the windows, making sure nobody was hiding inside.

There was still a couch in the living room, some graffiti on the walls, but that was it.

The front door wasn’t locked, so Will and I just went inside.

I flipped the light switch in the living room. The lights turned on. The house still had power.

“Weird,” Will said.

I switched the lights off, so nobody would see, and then we went into the kitchen. There was a small window above the sink, looking into the backyard. In the yard, I saw a water well with a ladder inside of it.

The phone started ringing, and Will and I both jumped.

“What the fuck,” he said.

Then he noticed the copper wire running across the floor. It came up from the basement and then ran out into the backyard.

“I want to see what’s downstairs,” he said.

I followed him into the basement. The wire was connected to an electrical panel. Near the panel was a water heater. Copper pipes ran across the ceiling, taking the hot water into the upstairs bathroom.

In front of the heater, there were a few bloody bandages on the floor.

“Maybe we should go,” I said.

“We’ll be out of here in no time,” Will told me. “I’ll cut the pipes, you grab the wire, and then we’ll get the AC unit and go.”

He switched off the breaker. Then he got to work cutting the pipes.

I disconnected the wire from the panel and wrapped it around my arm as I followed it back upstairs and into the backyard, where it disappeared inside the well.

I shone my flashlight into the well. It had gone dry. At the bottom of it, I could just make out the entrance to a tunnel.

I tried pulling the wire up, but it was connected to something.

If I wasn’t high, I probably would’ve just cut the wire and gone back inside. Instead, though, I climbed down the ladder to see what the wire was stuck on.

There was a tunnel at the bottom of the well. It led deeper underground. I kept following it until it opened to a massive underground cave.

One hundred feet below me, floodlights shone on metal cages. The cages were full of people. Then there was something else standing in the darkness between the cages. Whatever they were, they didn’t look human. Their white eyes glowed in the dark.

My legs started to shake.

I ran back through the tunnel, climbed up the ladder, and ran back into the house.

“We need to go!” I yelled.

“What’s wrong?” Will asked.

“We’re not alone here.”

“You saw someone?”

Before I could answer him, the living room lit up with light. Another car had pulled into the driveway.

I ran into the basement.

“We need to hide,” I said.

The color drained from Will’s face.

He hid in a bedroom closet. I crawled into the crawlspace underneath the stairs.

The front door opened. Heavy footsteps moved across the living room floor. Then someone shouted, “Hello?”

His voice sounded strange. Hollow.

The phone rang again. He answered it. “I brought another one,” he said, and then he went out the back door.

Will came out of the closet and walked up the stairs.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

“I’m getting out of here.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I’m going to try to run back to those trees and call the cops.”

He stuck his head into the kitchen, waited a minute to make sure nobody else was in the house, and then he ran for it.

He went out through the front door. It slammed shut behind him.

Three gunshots rang out.

Will started screaming.

I covered my ears. I couldn’t listen to it.

I felt sick.

The back door swung open. “Is anyone else in here?” It was the same hollow voice again.

I held my breath, trying to stay as quiet as I could.

He walked down the stairs. He sounded big. Heavy.

He turned on the lights.

“I can smell you in here,” he said. “I’m going to find you, sooner or later.”

My lungs were burning, but I kept holding my breath, afraid to breathe.

He walked into the bedroom and then came toward the stairs.

His face appeared at the entrance to the crawlspace. Chunks of dead skin flaked off his cheeks. Underneath the dead skin, his skin was green.

“There you are.”

He grabbed onto my shirt and dragged me out of the crawlspace.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “We thought this place was abandoned.”

More dead skin flaked from his arms. Underneath the dead skin, his skin looked hard and green.

He hit me in the face. I nearly lost consciousness, but I hung on, fighting to get away from him.

He hit me again. Then he tied my hands and legs together with rope and dragged me upstairs.

My head banged against the steps.

I fought to stay awake but soon, everything went black.

Bright light shone in my eyes.

“Are you okay?” a woman asked.

I saw her face in front of mine. It was caked with dirt. She smelled like she hadn’t bathed in months.

“I think so.”

I sat up and rubbed my eyes.

I was in one of those cages I’d seen before, sitting on a dirty mattress. My flashlight was gone. So were my wallet and my watch.

The woman sat next to me. “My name’s Brenda,” she said.

“I’m Jake.”

I looked around at the other people in the cage with us. Most of them were in their early twenties, the same age as me. Some were just teenagers.

“Where are we?” I asked.

“We call it the farm,” Brenda said.

Two white eyes watched me from the darkness on the other side of the cage. The creature had an enormous, ball-like head that sat on top of four long tentacles.

“What the fuck is that?” I asked.

“We call them Big Heads. They look scary, but they won’t hurt you. They just watch us. It’s the ones who look like us that you need to worry about.”

Brenda said she was a prostitute. Earlier that year, while she was working the street, someone had forced her into a van and shoved a rag in her face. She’d woken up here.

She introduced me to a few of her friends in the cage. Dale, a drug addict who’d fallen asleep on a park bench and then woken up here, and Travis, a teen who’d run away from home and then been grabbed off the street the same way Brenda had been.

“Why are they keeping us here?” I asked.

“All we know for sure is that they want us to have kids,” Dale said. “If you help them with that, they leave you alone. Otherwise, after a few months, they’ll drag you out of the cage.”

“Drag you where?”

“We don’t know. We just know you don’t come back.”

“They make sure we always have food and water, though,” Travis said. “It’s boring here, but they make sure we don’t starve.”

Brenda was already sleeping with Travis and Dale. She offered to help me, too, but I said no thanks.

She’d already gotten pregnant, but she’d miscarried. If she got pregnant again, she didn’t know what she’d do. She didn’t want to have a kid down there, but she didn’t want to die, either.

“What happens if you do have a kid?” I asked.

“They don’t let you keep it.”

She looked sad when she said it.

One of the human-looking men walked into our cage with two buckets of food. It looked like some kind of soup. As soon as he set the buckets on the ground, everyone ran to eat.

I was starving, so I went and ate, too.

Every day, I looked up at the ceiling of the cave. I could just barely see the entrance to the tunnel that led to the well in the house’s backyard. When I’d stood there before, I’d seen a metal ladder bolted into the wall that led down to the cave floor.

“If I can get to that ladder, I can get back to above ground,” I told Brenda. “I can find a phone and call someone for help.”

“I’ve seen a few other people try to run,” she said. “I don’t know if any of them made it. If they did, it didn’t matter. We’re still here.”

“I promise, if I make it, I won’t leave you all trapped down here. I’m going to tell the whole world what’s happening.”

Our cage door opened and one of the human-looking ones brought in another bucket of food.

It seemed like the only time the door ever opened was when they came to feed us.

I counted every meal. Every meal was a day.

It wasn’t until my second week in the cage that I saw them drag one of us away.

Three of the human-looking ones came into the cage. Everyone backed up against the wire mesh across from the cage door.

The men walked towards us. Then they turned toward a teen with black hair. He walked to the other side of the cage, and they followed him. He fell to his knees.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m going to start sleeping with someone. I just haven’t found anyone yet.”

The three men grabbed his arms and dragged him out of the cage. He screamed for help, but then he disappeared into the darkness and the screaming stopped.

I promised myself I wouldn’t die the same way.

If I was going to die, I’d die fighting.

A few days later, when one of the human ones opened the cage door to feed us, I decided I was going to run.

I told my plan to Brenda.

“This place is a lot bigger than it looks,” she said.

“I just need to make it past the next few cages,” I told her. “Then I’ll follow the wall right to the ladder.”

“If you do get out, don’t forget about us.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

I slowly walked towards the cage door, trying not to draw attention to myself.

One of the Big Heads stood in darkness just outside the cage door, watching everyone eat. Its tentacles wiggled underneath its head.

I took a deep breath, and then I ran past it.

One of its tentacles wrapped around my arm. It felt cold and wet. I fell to the ground, though, and I managed to break away.

I got back to my feet and kept running.

The Big Head let out a horrible, hissing sound.

Another set of white eyes appeared ahead of me. I turned left, between two other cages, and ran towards the cave wall.

The people in the cages started cheering me on.

“Get help!”

“Call the police!”

Once I reached the cave wall, I followed it toward the ladder. I wasn’t too far from it. Maybe a hundred and fifty feet.

I could barely see anything, though.

Suddenly, the ground gave way, and I fell through the floor, into a pool of blood.

I flailed my arms, terrified of drowning, until my feet hit the ground. The blood only came up to my shoulders.

I waded through the blood, pushing forward, so frightened I could barely keep my thoughts straight. I just kept telling myself I needed to escape.

Eventually, I found a ladder, and I climbed out of the blood, into another tunnel.

This tunnel was filled with old TV screens. The screens showed footage of people’s homes. Bathrooms and bedrooms and living rooms.

Staring at the screens, I recognized my own bathroom, the pirate-themed shower curtain I’d bought at Walgreens hanging from the curtain rod.

But how was there a camera inside my bathroom mirror?

Someone grunted. Farther into the tunnel, past the TVs, I saw human skin hanging from hooks on the walls.

Near the skin were a few blood-soaked tables. A human-looking butcher in coveralls stood at one of the tables, skinning a dead body that had been laid on top of it.

I crouched behind the other tables and crept past him, trying to ignore the nauseating stink of rotted meat.

I stepped into a puddle of blood and nearly slipped backward, but I managed to catch my balance.

The butcher looked toward me. I thought he’d seen me, but then he kept skinning the body, carefully peeling the skin off its leg.

It was Will’s body, I realized. His face hadn’t been skinned yet. They must have dragged him down here after they killed him.

I remembered what he’d told me before we’d driven out to the farmhouse. It would be quick, easy money.

I nearly laughed, but I hadn’t forgotten where I was.

I crept farther into the tunnel.

As the light faded, I couldn’t see anything anymore. I held my hand on the wall and slowly walked forward, afraid that every step forward would be another fall into another blood-filled pit.

Eventually, the tunnel brought me back into the larger cave with the cages.

I looked up at the ceiling. I was only twenty feet from the ladder. I ran the rest of the way and then started climbing up it.

One of the Big Heads saw me and hissed. When I looked back at the cave, the darkness had filled with white eyes, staring up at me.

The ladder’s rusted metal tore into my flesh, but I ignored the pain and just kept climbing as fast as I could.

I needed to get back above ground. I needed to get help.

I ran to the well and climbed up into the backyard.

The stars shone in the sky.

The house was dark. Fresh copper wire ran from the back door to the well. They’d already replaced it, like Will and I had never been here.

My hands were bleeding badly, but I didn’t have time to bandage them. I’d worry about that later.

Ducking below the house’s windows, I made my way to the front yard.

The driveway was empty. Will’s truck was gone, and so was the van. The fields looked empty.

I ran towards the trees in the distance. Once I reached the trees, I crouched on the dirt.

I thought about Brenda still in that cage, probably wondering whether I was dead. I’d get help for her as soon as I could.

I ran through another field and then followed a dirt road until it brought me to the highway.

By then, the sun was rising.

A few cars drove past me. I waved at them until someone pulled over and gave me a ride to the police station.

I sat in a room across from one of the detectives, and I told him everything that had happened to me. The farmhouse, the well, the underground cages, the Big Heads and the human-looking ones with dead skin flaking off their faces and their arms.

The detective listened to me, but he didn’t say anything. He just nodded his head, smiling along with my story.

I knew what he was thinking. Another rambling, schizo meth head about to collapse from lack of sleep.

“What’s the address of this house?” he asked me.

I gave it to him. He promised they’d go there and look around, but I didn’t believe him. If I wanted to help Brenda and everyone else still trapped in those cages, I’d have to do it myself.

Brenda had given me her mom’s name. I found her mom on social media and sent her a message, telling her what had happened and where Brenda was, but instead of writing back, her mom blocked me.

I decided to ask for help on social media. I recorded a video of myself talking about what happened, and I posted it. A few thousand people saw it. A few conspiracy theorists reposted the video, too. But nothing seemed to happen. There was nothing on the news. No raids, no investigations. No one cared.

Then last night someone rang my doorbell.

I looked through my peephole, and I saw Will standing on my front steps.

He didn’t twitch. He didn’t scratch his arms. He just smiled at me with a mouth full of perfect white teeth.

He rang my doorbell a few more times and then left. I’m sure he’ll be back, though. Whoever is running the farm isn’t going to let me live knowing the truth.

When Will does come back, I’ll be ready for him. I’ve bought a handgun and a box of bullets.

I haven’t slept for three days, but it’s not just because I’m high. I’m nervous and frightened.

If I can kill Will and show people what’s really wearing his skin, then they’ll have to believe me. They’ll have to do something about Brenda and everyone else still trapped in that farm.

The Warden blamed the riot on the gangs. Florida’s Department of Corrections agreed and started sending gang members to different prisons around the state.

I ended up in a prison in North Florida that everyone called The Plantation. The guards there were all white and racist. The prison was owned by a private company that didn’t spend a penny more on its inmates than it had to.

The Warden made a point of introducing himself to every new inmate. After the guards de-loused me and searched me for weapons and drugs, The Warden called me into his office. He was a short, sunburnt man who wore a cowboy hat and a suit.

“You’ve made a lot of bad decisions to end up here in my prison, Anthony,” he told me.

“Yes, sir. I have.”

“In and out of jail since you were twelve years old. Arrested for armed robbery and then drug trafficking and then murder. Your mother must be real proud of you. Does she still visit you?”

“Not very often.”

“I didn’t think so.”

He slid a government form across his desk.

“My whole life, I’ve been working in prisons,” he said. “I used to believe in rehabilitation, but I’ve learned it doesn’t work on men like you. To change, you need to want to change, but men like you don’t want to act better. If you wouldn’t do it for your own mother, why’d you do it for the state? You spare the rod, you spoil the child. That’s the truth. A boy who faces no consequences turns into a man who thinks he can get away with doing whatever he wants. Consequences are the only real cure for bad behavior.”

I picked up the form. The title read, Informed Consent Document for Research. I skimmed the first few paragraphs. It was an agreement to participate in a trial for a new drug called Hyper-Cognexol.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“This is the consequence in my prison. If you don’t follow the rules, you go to solitary. Hyper-Cognexol makes a week in solitary feel like a month. It makes sure you have lots of time to re-think your decisions.”

“I’m not signing this.”

“You are, though, Anthony.” The two guards in the hallway walked into his office. “Before you leave here, you’re signing it.”

The nurse gave me two Tylenols to help with the pain of my broken finger. Then she taped my fingers together and said that was good enough.

The guards brought me to my new cell on the second level of D Block.

The prison was old. A hundred and fifty years, I’d heard. Each inmate got a cell to themselves, but the cells were in bad shape. Rusted bars, molded ceilings, cracked brick walls that sweat in the Florida heat.

In the cell next to mine was an older inmate named Reggie. As soon as I’d gotten settled in, he introduced himself. He was part of the same gang as me. He already knew who I was, who my friends were, and what I was in for.

He pointed at a tattooed inmate in a cell across from us.

“That’s Carter,” he said. “He runs the block right now. As long as you do what he tells you, you’ll be fine.”

“Is it pretty quiet here? Or have things been popping off?”

“Quiet as hell. The Warden told you about the new drug he’s been trying out on us?”

“I just signed the consent form.”

“Everybody he’s sent to solitary has come back with their head all fucked up, ranting about a witch in the walls. Last time I got my hands on a phone, I emailed a few reporters and told them what The Warden’s been doing to us, but so far nobody’s done anything about it.”

Reggie put a deck of cards on the walkway between us.

“You know how to play gin rummy?” he asked me.

“I can figure it out.”

Out of all the guards, Hodges was the meanest. He was built like a linebacker. Ugly as hell. Bright red hair and freckled cheeks.

As soon as he saw me, he hated me.

“I heard about that riot at your old prison,” he told me. “Two guards dead. If I find out you’re one of the sons of bitches who cut their heads off, I’m going to make sure you have a real bad time here.”

He pointed at the window above my toilet.

“The last guy in this cell hung himself,” he told me. “Tied one end of his bedsheet to the window bars, the other end of the sheet around his neck, and then lay on the floor until he blacked out.”

Hodges laughed and then kept walking through the block, making his rounds.

I lay on my bed and watched TV.

I couldn’t fall asleep. The first few nights in a new prison are always the worst. I wasn’t used to all the new sounds yet. The pipes creaking, the crickets chirping, the guards’ footsteps on the metal walkways.

Then, around one am, I heard fingernails scraping across the brick walls of my cell.

I thought it was a rat. I looked around my cell, but I didn’t see one.

I kept watching TV, but then I heard the scraping again. When I turned my head, I saw two yellow eyes watching me from a crack in the wall near my toilet.

I jumped off my bed and nearly screamed.

But then the eyes disappeared.

The next morning, I told Reggie what I’d seen, but he didn’t believe me.

“You must have been dreaming,” he said. “But there are rats all over this place. I wouldn’t be surprised if one ran through your cell.”

At eight am, the guards brought us our breakfast trays. A load of rock-hard “nutrient bread”.

After eating, I watched a bit more TV, and then at ten, the guards took us outside for our hour of fresh air and exercise.

In the yard, the guards locked me in a cage next to an inmate with a head full of grey hair. At first, I thought he was in his sixties, but when I got closer to him, his face looked younger than mine.

“I’m Gaines,” he said, introducing himself.

“My name’s Tony.”

“I saw her watching you last night. She always watches the new inmates. She wants to see if they break.”

“Who was watching me?”

“The witch.”

He looked down at the grass.

He must be crazy, I thought. I decided he wasn’t worth talking to more than I already had.

I tried to do a bit of exercise. Burpees, sit-ups, push-ups. The heat was horrible, though. Before long, I was soaked with sweat and panting instead of breathing.

I sat on the grass near Reggie.

“What’s Gaines in for?” I asked.

“He used to be a bank robber, if you can believe it,” Reggie said.

“He seems a little off.”

“Last year, he stabbed a guard. The Warden gave him a big shot of Hyper-Cognexol and threw him into solitary. He did a year that I heard felt like a hundred.”

I looked back over at Gaines. He sat with his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth while he mumbled to himself.

“He hasn’t been the same since,” Reggie told me.

That night, I was still having trouble getting to sleep. I lay in bed, watching TV, when—right at one am again—I heard fingernails scraping on the walls.

“Anthony,” someone whispered. “You awake?”

I looked back at my toilet, expecting to see those yellow eyes looking back at me, but the crack in my wall was empty.

“Anthony,” they whispered.

It was Reggie, I realized.

I walked to my bars.

“What?” I asked him.

“Carter needs you to hide this in your cell for a few days.”

He swung a tube sock over to me. I pulled it into my cell. Inside the sock was a chunk of metal filed into a knife.

I thought about Gaines, rocking back and forth in the yard.

“How long do I have to keep this here?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Reggie said. “For as long as Carter needs you to.”

I looked around my cell, trying to think of somewhere I could hide it.

A book? That was too obvious. Inside my toilet drain? But what if I lost it?

I ended up cutting a small hole in the side of my mattress and shoving the knife inside.

Then I lay down on my mattress again and kept watching TV.

“Anthony,” someone whispered.

I went to my bars. “What?”

“What?” Reggie asked.

“Did you just say my name?”

“No.”

I looked at my toilet. Those yellow eyes blinked twice from inside the crack in my wall, and then they disappeared.

I went to the crack and shoved my fingers inside it. They felt wet. When I took them back out, I saw they were covered with black mold.

The next day in the yard, the guards put me in a cage next to Gaines again.

“I saw her again last night,” I said.

Gaines nodded as he rocked himself back and forth on the grass.

“What does she want?” I asked.

“I told you. She’s waiting to see if you crack.”

I tried to do a bit of exercise, but it was still too hot. I ended up just walking in circles around my cage for the rest of the hour.

The guards cuffed us and brought us back to our cells. When I got back into D Block, I saw that while we’d been outside, the guards had tossed our cells.

Hodges was still in the middle of tossing mine.

He’d already thrown everything I’d bought from commissary onto the floor. Stomped all my chips and honeybuns and tubes of toothpaste into a paste.

He put on a pair of gloves and searched my toilet, shoving his hand up the drain.

“Is something wrong?” I asked.

“We got a tip you’re hiding a knife in here.” He took his hand out of the drain and then stood back up. “Tell me where it is, and I’ll ask The Warden to go easy on you.”

“I don’t know who’s making up stories about me,” I said. “But I don’t have a knife.”

Hodges picked up my mattress and threw it against the wall. Then he started feeling to see if anything was hidden inside it.

He noticed the hole I’d cut into the side.

“I’m going to stick my hand in this hole,” he said. “If I cut myself, I’m going to be real fucking angry. So I’m going to ask you one last time, where’s the knife?”

I’d shoved the knife pretty deep inside the mattress.

Maybe he’d find it, but maybe he wouldn’t. It wasn’t a big knife.

“There’s no knife,” I said.

Hodges shoved his hand inside the mattress. Suddenly, he pulled it back out and shook his hand, flicking blood across the wall.

“Son of a bitch!” he yelled.

He’d cut his finger right open.

I didn’t mean to laugh, but I did.

Hodges shoved me into the wall and punched me in the stomach. Then he turned to the other guards.

“I need to go to the infirmary!” he yelled. “One of you take this piece of shit to The Warden.”

The guards cuffed me and led me down the walkway.

Behind me, I heard one of the other inmates yell at Hodges, “I hope you get AIDS.”

The Warden stood from his desk and took a metal box out of one of his drawers.

“After that accident with your finger, I hoped you’d smarten up,” he told me.

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“Sorry’s not going to cut it anymore, Anthony. I’m already short on guards here. Now, Hodges is going to need to be off work for a few days, so he can get tested and make sure he didn’t pick up any diseases.”

He opened the metal box. Inside was a needle and a vial of clear fluid.

“At any other prison, you’d probably get ninety days in the hole for this. I’m going to give you ninety days, too, but with a shot of this that’s going to make those ninety days feel like a year.”

“A year?”

“And that’s only if Hodges’ blood tests come back clean. If you gave him anything, Anthony—” He laughed. “Well, you’re going to be spending a long, long time alone in the dark.”

The other guards in his office grabbed onto me. Two held my arms while another two held my legs. Then a fifth pulled my pants down.

The Warden jabbed the needle through the vial’s lid and then pulled the needle’s plunger back, filling the syringe with fluid.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Please don’t. I didn’t want to take the knife. I didn’t have a choice.”

He stuck the needle into my thigh and then injected the Hyper-Cognexol into my muscle.

My thigh burned, but the burning sensation quickly faded.

I braced myself for time to slow down, but it didn’t. Not at first.

The guards took me out of The Warden’s office and then led me towards the hole.

Something smelled like sulfur. I looked around the cells, and I saw those yellow eyes watching me from a crack in one of the walls.

“You see that?” I asked.

The guards ignored me, though.

We walked past a few more cells, and I noticed we were walking slower than we were before.

I looked back at where I’d seen the eyes. My head turned like I was moving in slow motion.

The eyes had moved into the hallway ceiling, right above my head.

“Up there,” I said.

I spoke slowly, too. My words sounded drowned out, like I was underwater.

The guards dragged me into the stairway. It felt like an hour had passed when we finally got to the bottom of it.

The stink of sulfur was even worse in the basement.

The guards opened the metal door to one of the solitary cells, threw me inside the cell and then slammed the door shut.

I sat in total darkness, not sure what was happening to me.

I tried to stand, but I couldn’t tell how fast my body was moving, or if I was only moving faster in my head.

I lost my balance, and I sat again.

“Anthony.”

I looked over my shoulder. Two yellow eyes stared at me from a crack in the wall.

I tried to scream, but the only sound that left my mouth was a muffled whimper.

Rats began to crawl out of the crack. Just a few at first, but then hundreds.

They scurried across the floor, walking over my body.

Every now and then, one of them would bite me. When they realized I couldn’t move, though, they all crawled on top of me.

They ate my skin while I lay there screaming in agony.

Days passed.

I thought I would die, but I didn’t.

Eventually, the rats got bored of me and crawled into the walls.

For weeks, I lay there alone in the dark.

I started to miss the rats. I missed the warmth on my body.

Then those yellow eyes appeared again. In the ceiling this time.

I heard a scratching underneath, like someone was crawling through the ground.

Next to me, where there used to be cement, a grave appeared. My dead brother crawled out of it and sat beside me, the rotted flesh barely hanging to his face.

He didn’t say anything to me. He just sat there with me. He still looked the same as he did the day he died. Only twelve years old.

I’d only been two years older than him when it happened. I’d taken him to buy drugs with me. When I saw the dealer take out his gun, I ran, and I thought he’d run, too. But then three shots rang out behind me.

I didn’t look back.

It wasn’t until the police came to our apartment later that night to talk to my mom that I learned he’d been killed.

“I’ve been so cold down there,” my brother said.

I started crying.

I cried for what felt like days, while the witch watched me from the ceiling.

I didn’t think the nightmare would ever end, but then the metal door swung open and my cell filled with light.

Hodges walked through the doorway.

Ninety days, The Warden said. Had it been ninety days already?

Hodges wasn’t there to free me, though. He was there to feed me. To make sure I didn’t die.

He shoved a plastic tube down my throat, and force fed me some kind of liquid.

For hours I lay there, gagging and struggling to breathe, tears running down my face and snot running from my nose.

Then Hodges left.

The yellow eyes appeared again.

I didn’t know whose visits I hated worse.

A year, The Warden had said. It would feel like a year. Maybe it did. How long does a year feel like? How long is a year when you’re trapped in hell?

I didn’t realize the drug had worn off. Time still felt slowed. It wasn’t until Hodges spoke to me, and I heard him like he was supposed to sound, that I realized it was finally over. I wasn’t frozen in time anymore.

“Time to go home, Anthony,” Hodges said.

“How long has it been?”

“Ninety days. Just like The Warden told you.”

He brought me back to my cell. The Warden was waiting for me there.

“Do you think you’ve finally learned your lesson, Anthony?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve told Hodges you’re sorry?”

“I’m sorry, Hodges.”

“Good boy.”

He patted me on the shoulder and left.

“It usually takes some time readjusting,” Hodges told me. “But a few more weeks, and you’ll be fine.”

I sat on my bed.

Hodges left my cell too, locking the bars behind him.

“I have a phone again,” Reggie whispered to me, after he was sure Hodges and the other guards were gone. “I’m going to try emailing a few reporters again to tell them what’s happening here.”

I tried to ask him to give me the phone. I wanted to send a message to my mom and tell her I was sorry. But I still couldn’t talk. I’d been quiet for so long, I couldn’t remember how to move my lips.

Someone laughed. I looked over at my toilet. Two yellow eyes stared at me from the crack in the wall.

Lee had quit the Marine Corps to focus on bodybuilding full time.

“I just turned thirty,” he told me. “It’s now or never. I go pro or I don’t.”

I felt the same way. I’d dropped all my personal training clients, so I could focus on my prep. I wanted to walk on stage at The Masters looking as big and dry and hard as I could look.

Lee and I got along well, and we started training together. He was also 5’11”, so we didn’t need to worry about constantly readjusting the equipment.

At first, I’d been a little bigger than him, but within a month, he was mogging me in the posing room.

I didn’t understand it. We followed the same workout plan, ate the same food. I thought maybe it was the drugs.

“How much HGH are you using?” I asked him.

“8 IU a day.”

The same as me. “How much tren?”

“700 mg a week.”

The same as me, too.

I thought it must just be genetics.

The next week, though, when we measured our biceps, Lee had added another inch to his arms. It didn’t make sense.

“Are you using Synthol?” I asked him.

“I’ve never touched that shit.”

“You’re taking something. Just tell me what it is.”

“I don’t want to get you in trouble, Aaron.”

“How are you going to get me in trouble? I thought we were bros? We promised we’d help each other win, didn’t we?”

“It’s just…” He trailed off for a second. “There’s a doctor on the base, Dr. Mercer, who’s been testing a new CRISPR drug as part of some kind of super soldier program. The drug’s called MYO-CAS9. It shuts off your myostatin, upregulates your muscle growth. You should see some of the guys walking around base. Last year, they were twigs. Now, they’re fucking monsters.”

“Aren’t bigger soldiers just bigger targets to shoot at?”

“It doesn’t really matter if it takes fifty bullets to take them down. And these guys on base packing on muscles aren’t even bodybuilders. I kept thinking, what if a real bodybuilder took this drug?” He looked over his shoulder. “My friend managed to smuggle some MYO-CAS9 out of the base. We’ve been experimenting with it.”

“Do you have any left?”

“A little, but we can get in a lot of trouble if the Marine Corps finds out we have it. You could get in a lot of trouble if you get caught using it, too.”

“I need my pro card, Lee. If this drug works, I want it. As long as I get bigger, I don’t give a shit what else happens to me.”

The next day, Lee called me into the locker room. He opened his duffel bag and took out a frosted-over metal thermos. Inside were six vials of thick, milky-white fluid packed in ice packs.

“You need to inject every single muscle belly,” he told me. “Half a CC in each one.”

“We have six hundred muscles, though.”

“I didn’t say this was going to be easy.” He handed the thermos to me. “Do you want it or don’t you?”

I put the thermos in my locker.

For the next seven days, every morning I sat naked on my toilet and injected myself.

I started with my quads and then moved on to my calves, my glutes, my biceps, my triceps, my delts. I got Lee to help me with the muscles I couldn’t reach myself.

The injections hurt like hell. A hundred times worse than tren. My muscles burned as the drug spread through my muscle fibers, like someone had poured acid under my skin. But before long, the injections were done, and I was already feeling crazy strong.

Within two weeks, I added an inch to my biceps, two inches to my chest, and an inch to my quads. My traps popped out from my shoulders. My delts grew to the size of bowling balls.

“This is fucking incredible,” I told Lee, while I hit a double bicep pose in the gym’s posing room.

“When we get on stage at The Masters, we’re going to blow people’s minds,” he said.

For the next three months, we were absolute beasts in the gym, adding more weight to our lifts while our muscles exploded. We packed on more muscle in those three months than most bodybuilders do in a decade.

I’d been worried MYO-CAS9 would have side effects, but it seemed completely harmless. It literally just made us fucking huge.

But then going into Lee’s and my fourth month on MYO-CAS9, while we were warming up on bench press, Lee started rubbing his left pec.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I feel like I tore my pec.”

He’d only been benching 225 lbs., which was light weight for him. He took off his shirt and went to the mirror. A dark purple bruise had spread around his left nipple.

“Could we just do legs today instead?” he asked.

“Sure.”

When we were done working out, I had Lee record a few videos of me posing in the posing room. I posted one of the videos on social media when I got home. It was my first video to go viral. I woke up to two million views and thousands of comments.

“You’re a freak, bro.”

“You’re a monster.’

“You don’t even look real.”

I responded to as many comments as I could. I thanked everybody. I told them they hadn’t seen anything yet. To just wait until I got on stage at The Masters.

The next day, I met Lee at the gym. For cardio, we walked on the treadmills.

“Is your chest feeling better?” I asked him.

“A little bit. I still don’t know what happened. I must have turned wrong or something. Flexed too hard while I was pushing the weight up.”

We went over to a bench press and warmed up with 225 lbs. on the bar again. Lee did 18 reps and then sat up, wincing.

“It still hurts?” I asked.

“It feels even worse than yesterday.”

He took his shirt off. The bruising had spread across his chest. His pectoral muscles were twitching, too.

He swallowed a few muscle relaxants, hoping that would help, but it didn’t. He never took a day off, but he decided he had to.

“This better not fuck up my prep,” he said. “Otherwise, I’m going to fucking lose it.”

I told him he just needed to rest. To go home, eat, and get some sleep.

I finished working out by myself, and then I changed and went home.

The next day, Lee didn’t show up for back day. I called him, but he didn’t answer. He didn’t answer my texts, either.

Friday, he still wasn’t back at the gym.

“You okay, bro?” I texted him. “I’m worried about you. Write me back.”

After I finished working out, I drove to his apartment building. I buzzed his apartment, but he didn’t answer.

I shouted at his window. “Lee? You okay?”

His lights were off. He didn’t seem like he was home.

His friend from the Marines went by TacticalMass443 on social media. I messaged him and asked if he knew where Lee was. He said he hadn’t heard from him for a few days, either.

Sunday, Lee still hadn’t responded to my messages. I started to get paranoid. Did the Marine Corps find out about the stolen drugs and arrest him? Was I next?

Or had something else happened? A bad MYO-CAS9 side effect?

I stood naked in front of the mirror, staring at my body, searching for signs that something was wrong. Lump or tumors. Strange bruises or white spots.

Then later that day, I was scrolling through TikTok videos when I saw a crime scene photo that had gone viral on GymTok. The photo showed an enormous bodybuilder whose muscles had burst through his skin, spilling his organs onto the floor, practically turning him inside out.

I zoomed in on the bodybuilder’s face.

It was Lee.

I put my phone down and thought about all of Lee and my workouts together. All those times posing with him in the posing room, going to In-N-Out or Chipotle afterward to stuff our faces with food. Going to the beach and walking around in speedos to make all the other guys feel small.

He’d been my best friend. The best bro I’d ever had. And now he was dead. Not even a pro card to show for it.

I forwarded TacticalMass443 the crime scene photo.

“Have you seen this yet?” I asked him.

He saw my message, but he didn’t reply.

“I’m part of this experiment, too,” I wrote. “If this drug did something to Lee, I need to know what happened. I’m starting to freak out. Should I go to the hospital?”

“Meet me at my gym tonight.”

I met him at the gym near the base. He was waiting outside for me in his truck. He had a shaved head, arms covered in tattoos, and a neck as thick as my quads.

I got into his passenger seat.

“The Marine Corps knows Lee was taking MYO-CAS9,” he said. “They’re trying to figure out how he got it out of the lab. If anybody from the military reaches out to you, you better keep your mouth shut.”

“I’m not an idiot. I know how to keep quiet. But what happened to Lee?”

“He triple dosed.”

“What do you mean?”

“He wasn’t happy with his progress. He didn’t think he looked big enough yet, but he was struggling to put on more size. He wanted to take more MYO-CAS9 and see what happened. I told him not to risk it, but he didn’t want to listen to me. He spent two weeks injecting a CC into every one of his muscles on top of the half CC he’d already injected.”

“Fuck.”

“Then last Tuesday, he called me, screaming. His entire body had cramped up, and he could barely move. He didn’t want to go to the hospital, though. He was scared the military would find out about us stealing the drug. So, he just asked me to drive over with some valium. When I got to his apartment, he was in so much pain, he could barely talk. He said it felt like all his muscles were splitting apart. I injected him with the valium and that seemed to help. He fell asleep on his couch. But then about an hour later, he woke up screaming and then his stomach and his chest just kind of opened up.”

“You were there when it happened?”

He nodded. “I’m not sure how much the Marine Corps already knows, but I’m getting out of California for a while. Like I said, if anybody comes to talk to you, you’ve never heard of MYO-CAS9. You have no idea Lee was on.”

I promised I wouldn’t say anything.

I got out of his truck, and then he drove off.

Three AM, I woke up to the sound of someone kicking in my apartment door.

I took the combat knife out of my dresser drawer and then jumped out of my bed, completely naked.

Three soldiers ran into my bedroom, screaming at me with their guns raised.

“Hands in the air!”

I did what they said. They cuffed me, put a cloth bag over my head, and then brought me outside to their vehicle.

We drove for about an hour. They brought me into a building, sat me in a chair, and took the bag off my head.

I was in a small concrete room. A mirror covered one of the walls. An older man sat across from me wearing a lab coat over his uniform.

Dr. Mercer.

“How much have you taken?” he asked me.

“How much of what?”

“MYO-CAS9.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to talk to my lawyer.”

“Your lawyer?” He laughed. “You’ve stolen military technology. Did Lee give you the drug?”

I looked over my shoulder at the two soldiers behind me, standing in front of the door. I needed to get back to the gym. I thought I’d get back faster if I just admitted it.

“Yes, Lee gave it to me.”

“How much MYO-CAS9 have you injected?”

“Half a CC into each of my muscles.”

“How long ago did you do the injections?”

“Four months ago.”

He stood and walked over to me. He squeezed my delt, poked my quads, ran his hands across my lats.

“What else are you taking?” he asked.

I told him about all the other drugs I was using. He wrote my cycle down in his notepad, and then he brought me into a lab filled with exercise equipment.

“I need to run a few tests to see how your body is adapting to the drug,” he said.

He strapped an oxygen mask on my face, connected some sensors to my chest, and then had me run on a treadmill for a few hours. After that, he tested my strength with a few Olympic lifts, and then he brought me to his office.

“When can I go home?” I asked him. “I’m in the middle of prepping for a bodybuilding competition. I need to eat.”

“I’m going to let you leave soon, but from now on, we’ll be watching you,” he said. “You’ve made yourself part of this experiment. Next month, I’ll need you to come back here for more tests.” Then he said something else under his breath. It sounded like, “We don’t have much data on failures yet,” but I let it go.

I just told him, “I’ll come back whenever you need me to. Just not while The Masters is going on.”

He handed me a contract and told me to sign it. I didn’t read it. I just signed it and gave it back to him. I needed to get back home.

I ate everything left in my fridge and then went to bed. The next morning, I woke up early and went right to the gym.

It was Monday and Monday was chest day.

I’d already missed one day of training. I couldn’t miss another one.

I started with bench press. I loaded 225 lbs. onto the barbell and then warmed up with 30 reps.

My chest burned, but I pushed through the pain. I added 90 lbs. and then another pair of 45s.

Afterward, I flexed my pecs in the mirror. I had a pretty good pump already. The veins in my chest filled with blood, bulging like worms under my skin.

I did incline bench next, and then dumbbell flyes, forcing more blood into my pecs.

The pump felt incredible. My chest looked huge. But then I noticed a bit of blood on my shirt.

I took my shirt off. A small, purple bruise had formed on my left pec. The skin near my nipple had split open, too, and started bleeding. I went to the locker room and put a bandage on the cut.

Then I did thirty minutes of cardio before going back home.

The next day, I was back at the gym for leg day. Then, the day after that was back day, then arms and shoulders, then abs and calves.

Saturday, I did three hours of cardio.

I only had one more month left to prep. I’d put on a crazy amount of muscle. Now, I just needed to cut weight. Get as lean as I possibly could before I walked on stage.

Monday, for chest day, my pec burned while I warmed up on bench. I took my shirt off and looked in the mirror. The bruises on my chest had become even darker.

I told myself it was nothing, though.

I only did half a CC in each muscle. Lee did one and a half CCs.

If anything was wrong, Dr. Mercer would have told me.

A few more weeks, and I’d step on stage at The Masters 360 lbs. lean. An absolute fucking freakshow.

An absolute legend.

My entire life would change.

Wednesday, for back day, I warmed up with light deadlifts before moving on to heavier deadlifts and then barbell rows.

For the rows, I loaded 405 lbs. onto the barbell and pulled it toward my chest, squeezing my back for each rep, forcing blood into my muscles until I felt them burn.

After each set, I couldn’t help looking at myself in the mirror. I looked so good, but still, I knew I could look better.

Leaner. Harder. More vascularity.

I loaded another 90 lbs. on the barbell. 495 lbs. Then I did another set of rows, squeezing my back muscles, feeling the burn.

The first five reps were easy.

The sixth rep, I felt a sharp pain in my left shoulder, but I ignored it.

Then on the tenth rep, as I pulled the barbell toward my chest, I heard the rubber plates hit the ground.

I didn’t understand the sound. I could still feel myself gripping the barbell tightly in my hands. But then horrible pain shot through my body.

I looked down and saw my left arm lying on the floor, my fingers still wrapped around the barbell, my tendons completely severed from my shoulder.

Blood sprayed across the gym mats. People behind me started screaming.

I don’t remember much after that.

I picked up my arm and tried to re-attach it to the chunk of bone sticking out from my shoulder.

I fell onto the mats, into a big puddle of blood.

Two paramedics carried me outside to an ambulance and brought me to the hospital.

The doctor just came by my room to tell me I’ll probably live, but I’m definitely going to lose my arm.

I asked him about The Masters. He told me there’s no way in hell I’m ever competing in a bodybuilding show again.

But what does he know?

There’s nothing in the rules that says you can’t compete with one arm missing. That’d be discrimination.

I just need to figure out how to do a one-armed lat spread.

Then hitting side chest might be a little hard, too.

I checked the photo for signs of manipulation, but I didn’t see any.

The man had been shackled to the stage floor. He was so thin his ribcage pressed through his skin.

“This man vanished in 1922,” Reid told me. “I need help finding out what happened to him.”

Reid was a cloud data entrepreneur worth around three billion dollars. In the news, I read that he’d recently been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. I wondered if he was still in his right mind.

I called the number in his signature. His secretary answered and then scheduled a meeting for me and Reid later that week.

I met Reid at his office downtown. He sat at his desk but stood to shake my hand.

He looked sick. Thin and frail. He’d lost all his hair. His handshake was firm, though, and he still had his confident, salesman’s smile.

“The famous Red Prymara,” he said.

“I just go by Vadym now.”

“How’d they catch you? I’ve always wanted to know.”

“The FBI said I’d used a canary token that leaked my IP address. I’ve never believed that explanation, though. Someone must have told on me. Someone close to me, too. My partner, Alexei, did two years in federal prison. I did fifteen. Now, I strictly do white hat work.”

Reid coughed into his handkerchief. Then he sat at his desk again and turned his computer monitor toward me.

On the screen was an old newspaper article from The Bismarck Tribune, dated October 1922.

“The performer whose picture I sent you went by the name Chazaqiel,” Reid told me. “He performed as part of a traveling circus called Marchetti’s Palace of Wonders. The owner of the circus, Ignazio, claimed Chazaqiel was one of The Watchers from the Book of Enoch.”

“What’s the Book of Enoch?”

“An old religious text that claims there was a group of angels who abandoned heaven to sleep with human women. The women who became pregnant gave birth to hideous giants called Nephilim.”

Reid scrolled through the newspaper article. It described the different performers. A sword-swallower, a strongman, a fortune teller with milk-white eyes, and then Chazaqiel, the angel. The same picture I’d seen before.

“Chazaqiel was the circus’s star attraction,” Reid told me. “Stories about him spread all over the USA and eventually reached the ear of a railroad tycoon named Threll. Threll was obsessed with the occult. He was also a practicing Hermeticist, who sought to use the metaphysical world to control physical reality. He hired a Pinkerton detective to travel to North Dakota and find out if the stories about Chazaqiel were true. The detective arrived in North Dakota but never made it back to Threll. The Pinkertons sent a few more detectives to North Dakota to look for this missing detective, but they couldn’t find him. But they did learn that Chazaqiel had disappeared, too.”

“And nobody ever found out what happened to them?”

“That’s where the story gets stranger. In the late 1980s, this picture was posted to a BBS conspiracy board. It shows an angel lying on an operating table in some kind of medical lab.”

Reid opened the picture. The angel looked just like Chazaqiel. His head was shaved, his wings had been mutilated, and his flesh was covered with surgical scars.

I’ve seen things on the dark web that would put most people in therapy. Cartel executions, freak accidents, exploitation rings. I’ve learned to look at horror like data, separating the facts from the suffering. But this picture of Chazaqiel made my stomach turn.

“The person who leaked this photo claimed they worked at Parallax, a genetics company founded by Threll’s grandson.”

“So, you think the Thrells have had Chazaqiel locked up somewhere this whole time?”

Reid leaned across his desk.

“Threll’s grandson was a heavy smoker. He was around my age when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. I have a few friends who know him. They say he managed to cure his cancer. They say he’s stopped aging, too.”

I knew it all sounded crazy. I knew Reid was probably out of his mind. Work had been slow, though, and Reid’s contract was generous. I told him I’d look into Parallax and see what I could find.

For the next three days, I searched archived Reddit and 4chan threads, old forum sites like Godlike Productions and Lunatic Outpost, and Tor sites like Dread and DarkForums.

On an archived alt.conspiracy Usenet chain, someone calling themselves NullSequence claimed they were the one who’d first posted the Parallax angel photo. Their email was NullSequence at netcom dot com.

I took a chance and tried to email the address. “Did you take this picture?” I asked, and I attached a copy of it.

I’d nearly given up on them when, two weeks later, they wrote me back with an invite to join a Signal chat group.

I joined.

“Who are you?” they asked.

“My name’s Vadym. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to look into Parallax’s angel experiments.”

“Send me a picture of your face with your driver’s license beside it.”

I didn’t like to give strangers copies of my ID cards, but I didn’t have any other leads. I needed to know what they did. I could always get a new driver’s license if I had to.

I sent them the picture.

An hour later, they called me.

A woman spoke. “You’re not working for Parallax, are you?”

“Just for someone they’ve screwed over.”

“They’ve screwed over a lot of people.”

“How long ago did you work for them?”

“I didn’t. My father, Jose, did. He’s NullSequence. He worked at Parallax from 1986 until he was found dead in his apartment on June 5, 1992.”

“How’d he die?”

“The police said it was a heroin overdose, but he’d never touched heroin in his life. He hated drugs. He wouldn’t even take Tylenol when he had a headache.”

“Did your father tell you anything about what Parallax was working on?”

“They called it Project Nephilim. They were trying to sequence the angel’s DNA. They thought his DNA held all kinds of secrets and, if they could map it, they’d unlock the truth about the universe.”

She paused.

“My father had more pictures. He kept a journal, too. I can send you everything, but on one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“If you find proof that Parallax killed my father, you need to give it to me.”

I agreed.

She sent me the photos and a text file containing her father’s journal entries.

In the new photos, Chazaqiel’s body had been even more mutilated. Wires had been embedded in his arms and chest. Plastic tubes sucked the blood from his veins, transferring it into test tubes.

In a journal entry dated January 14, 1992, Jose wrote, “I managed to get a camera into the basement of the New Mexico lab and take a few pictures. I don’t know where Parallax found these surgeons. They can’t speak English, just Italian. They took six vials of blood out of the angel and then sent them upstairs to Gideon, our Ontological Geneticist.”

Jose’s final entry was dated June 2, 1992. In it, he wrote: “Gideon thinks Threll has lost his mind. Threll thinks the angel wants revenge. He wants to keep it chained up in the lab forever. Or at least for as long as he’s still alive.”

I called Reid and told him what I’d learned.

“This is great work,” he said. “Now we just need to get you into that lab building.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Work faster.”

Searching through New Mexico real estate listings, I learned the old Parallax lab building had been put up for sale by its new owner, a company called Ophidia Global. I called Reid and asked if he could get me a tour of the building. He called me back the next day and said the tour had already been scheduled.

I got on a plane to New Mexico.

During the flight, I had a strange dream. Chazaqiel leaned over me, smiling in my face, while his wings flapped behind his back.

I stared up at his hideous smile, frozen. Unable to move. Unable to scream.

He ran his long, bony fingers over my face.

“I’m waiting for you, Vadym,” he said.

I woke as the plane landed, covered in sweat.

I took a cab to my hotel. I spent the night looking through pictures of the old lab, trying to figure out where Threll might have Chazaqiel hidden.

The next morning, I met the realtor, Katie, at the building. She looked like a typical suburban mom. Curly blonde hair. She wore a black blazer. She shook my hand and asked me how long I’d worked for Reid.

“About two years,” I said.

“What’s he planning to do in New Mexico?”

“I really can’t say anything. Reid wants to keep this project quiet.”

She said she understood, and then she brought me inside the Parallax lab.

The first floor was filled with cubicle dividers. Gray carpet covered the floor. Gray blinds covered the windows.

“It’s really a great building,” she told me. “Lots of space, lots of potential.”

“The building’s been empty since Parallax shut down?”

“Yes. Ophidia Global acquired the building recently, but they haven’t been able to find a buyer yet.”

“The building has been on the market a while, hasn’t it?”

“Unfortunately, there used to be some rumors going around that this building is haunted.”

She led me past the cubicles.

“The building is still in very good shape, though,” she said. “The owners send cleaners in every two weeks. They’ve kept the place in very good condition.”

“Do you think I could see the basement?”

“I’m not supposed to take people down there.”

“Why not?”

“The cleaners don’t get to it as often.”

“I’d really like to see it. Reid’s going to need a space to set up his server racks.”

“I guess I could show it to you quickly.”

She brought me downstairs and flipped the light switch. Fluorescent tube lights lit up the concrete hallway.

“The furnace room is on your right,” she told me. “Then next to it is a storage room you might be able to use for servers or whatever other kind of equipment Reid needs to put in here.”

At the end of the hallway, I noticed a metal door.

“Where does that door go?”

“I have no idea. I’d need to ask the Thrells.”

I tried to open the door, but it was locked.

The handle felt strangely warm.

I began to feel dizzy, and I knelt on the floor. The room spun around me. My vision blurred.

For a moment, I saw Chazaqiel sitting in a cage inside a circus tent. A man in a suit and a hat stood next to him.

“Ignazio keeps his keys underneath his pillow,” Chazaqiel said. “He drank an entire bottle of rum tonight. Just reach under his pillow and take the keys. He won’t wake up.”

“And if I free you, you promise you’ll come back to California with me?”

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”

Chazaqiel smiled, his lips stretching across his face.

Katie put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Sorry. I just lost my balance for a second.”

“It’s the air down here. It’s very dusty. We should go back upstairs.”

I agreed. I followed her back upstairs.

“So, what do you think?” she asked me.

“The building has a lot of potential. I really need to talk to Mr. Reid first, though, before I can say anything else.”

“Of course. As soon as you do, please let me know what he thinks.”

We shook hands and said goodbye to each other.

Then I went back into the city and rented a van. I drove around and bought everything I’d need to get through that metal door. A bolt cutter, a flashlight, a 20V drill, and a big pack of tungsten carbide-tipped drill bits.

I drove back to the lab at midnight.

I shut off the building’s alarm, got through the front entrance, and then made my way back down to the basement, where I started drilling out the metal door’s keyway.

The first drill bit lasted four minutes before it broke.

I looked over my shoulder, unable to shake the feeling that somebody was watching me.

I put in the second bit and kept drilling. Burning hot metal shavings sprayed across my hands, but I ignored the pain.

The drill hit the security pins and kicked sideways. But I grabbed onto it and held it tighter.

Sweat dripped down my face.

Dull pain spread through my forearms.

The second drill bit broke, and I put in the third. The third bit finally got the door open.

Behind the door, concrete stairs led deeper underground.

I looked over my shoulder again, and then I turned on my flashlight and followed the stairs down into the sub-basement.

I came out into a lab filled with metal tables, overturned chairs, and computer monitors with shattered screens. Surgical instruments lay scattered across the floor. The counters were covered with broken syringes.

In the next room, someone moaned.

“Hello?” I yelled.

But no answer.

I walked through the lab, into the adjacent room.

An enormous shadow stretched across the back wall.

I raised my flashlight. I nearly dropped it on the floor when I saw him.

Chazaqiel.

His arms outstretched, his legs pressed together, as if he’d been crucified.

I thought I’d prepared myself to see him. I thought I’d be fine. But my brain struggled to process the fact that he was real. Not just a photograph anymore.

My legs buckled.

The longer I looked at him, the more horrific the scene became.

His body had been embedded into the wall. His hands, feet, and shoulders had been pinned to the wall with steel bolts.

Thousands of wires entered every part of his body. Some were thin; others were thick cables. The wires connected his body to junction boxes mounted on the walls.

What remained of his wings spread out behind him. Most of the feathers had been plucked out. In the gaps between the feathers, the veins of the membrane pulsed.

He slowly raised his head and locked his eyes with mine.

Another memory entered my head.

Threll’s grandson knelt on the floor in tears. “What have you done to me?”

Chazaqiel looked down at him from the wall. “I’ve given you everything you ever wanted.”

“You’ve cursed me.”

Chazaqiel’s voice brought me out of the dream.

“You found me, Vadym.”

He was smiling now. The same smile from my dream.

“Are you in pain?” I asked him.

“I’ve suffered worse. Now, are you going to save me? Take me to see Reid?”

“How do you know about Reid?”

“I know everything that happens next. Everything that Reid wants from me. But what do you want, Vadym?”

“I don’t want anything from you.”

“You want to know who betrayed you. I’ll tell you if you free me. I promise I won’t hurt you.”

So, I was betrayed then.

I knew it.

I’d always wanted the name. I’d always wanted the truth.

I picked up the bolt cutter and cut the steel bolts. Chazaqiel stepped forward from the wall. The wires stretched and then began snapping.

Chazaqiel leaned forward, bringing his face toward mine.

“It was Alexei,” he told me.

“Of course.”

It had always been so obvious. He’d made the mistake, not me. He must have hacked that crypto exchange, even after I’d warned him not to, and then gotten caught just like I’d warned him he would. To save himself, he’d traded my life for his.

All the tears. All the times he’d visited me in prison, trying to cheer me up.

I laughed.

I’d make sure I paid him back. Before I died, I’d make sure he suffered just like I had.

Chazaqiel lifted me off the ground.

“What are you doing?” I yelled.

His mouth widened. His jaw unhinged with the crack of splitting bone. Then the lower half dropped to his chest.

Inside his widening mouth, I saw a cave of pale, ribbed flesh.

“Stop!”

He swallowed me whole, like a snake devouring a rat.

My eyes filled with darkness.

Knives stabbed into my shoulder blades. The pain spread down my spine.

My veins squirmed like worms against my muscles.

I began bleeding from every part of my body. Soon, my clothes were soaked with blood.

Again and again, my veins emptied and then soaked up fresh blood.

I screamed in agony, begging Chazaqiel to make the torture stop.

I don’t know how long it went on for. Hours or days.

But then I woke up on the floor. Black blood dripped from my mouth. My clothes were soaked with black blood, too. My body ached.

Chazaqiel hovered over me, the same black blood dripping from his mouth.

“What did you do to me?” I asked.

He turned and walked down the hallway.

“Where are you going?” I yelled.

I ran after him, but I became dizzy, and I leaned against the wall to steady myself.

Outside, I found Chazaqiel in the back of the van, waiting for me.

“Take me to Reid now,” he said.

I called Reid and asked him where he wanted me to go. Reid gave me the address for a warehouse in Northern California.

I drove all night. Fifteen hours. Only stopping for gas.

I felt relieved to be done with Reid and with chasing after missing angels.

I got back to work on other projects. But then the changes started, slowly at first.

The first few weeks, my muscles and bones felt sore, but I blamed the soreness on stress and lack of sleep.

But then I began growing. My shoulders had widened. My legs and arms lengthened. My hands and feet became longer and thinner. Soon, my clothes didn’t fit anymore.

I bought a tape measure and began measuring myself every morning. I grew from six-foot-one to six-two to six-three.

No matter how much I ate, I was horribly hungry. I couldn’t eat cooked food, either. Even the smell of it made me gag. All I could eat was raw meat.

Then, three months after whatever Chazaqiel did to me, wings began to grow from my back. They were small at first, but as they grew in size, they became difficult to hide under my jacket.

I thought about calling Jose’s daughter, but I didn’t know what to tell her. That I’d found the angel and freed him, but then he’d made me an angel, too? Cursed me just like he’d cursed Threll.

I kept trying to call Reid. I wanted to tell him what was happening to me. I wanted to warn him. But he wouldn’t answer his phone.

Then I saw Reid on TV, talking to a reporter. He looked different than he had before. He looked healthy and strong now. All his hair had grown back.

He told the reporter he’d just launched a new genetics company. He’d taken an interest in genome-editing technology like CRISPR. He was going to use his fortune to fund research that would explore how to unlock the true potential of human DNA.

He would continue Threll’s work on Project Nephilim.

I went to the bathroom and took off my shirt. I barely recognized myself anymore. My ribs pressed through my skin. My flesh had become pale white.

And the wings on my back. I opened them and let them fill the bathroom. Then I closed them again, and I put my shirt back on.

I looked at my reflection one last time, and I wondered what I was becoming.

—
Continue to Part 2 - HEAVEN.EXE

“Is this for a drug test?” I asked.

“It’s part of the inference training,” Mr. Leão told me.

He was short, with a thin moustache. He wore khaki pants and a quarter-zip hoodie. He held out a plastic cup. I spat in it, and he covered it with a lid.

“Thank you, Hailey,” he said. “Let me show you where you’ll be working.”

Subscribe now

I followed him between the metal shelves.

I suffer from somatic OCD, and whenever I become anxious, my mind disconnects from my body. I become hyper-aware of my physical self. Of my blinking, swallowing, and breathing.

As I looked around at the empty shelves, I blinked, swallowed, breathed, unable to automate myself.

Mr. Leão took me inside a glass-walled office at the back of the warehouse. He introduced me to the other trainers, Brian and Priya. They looked like they were in their late twenties. The same age as me.

“Brian is our accounting specialist,” Mr. Leão told me. “And Priya is training for software engineering.”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, and I waved at them.

Mr. Leão brought me to one of the empty cubicles. On the desk was the oldest computer I’d ever seen.

“There’s some documentation on the computer to help you get started,” Mr. Leão said. “I’ll be back after lunch to check on how you’re doing.”

“Before you go, can you tell me how to turn this computer on?” I asked.

He pressed the big button on the computer tower. The computer hummed as it came to life. Eventually, a Windows 98 logo appeared.

Mr. Leão went upstairs to his office in the lab.

“He’s a little strange, but he’s nice,” Priya told me.

I looked up to see her staring down at me over the wall of my cubicle.

“If you want some coffee, there’s a coffee machine in the corner, near the fire exit,” she said. “There are some snacks over there, too. Fruit and granola bars, mostly.”

“When I took this job, I thought we’d be working in Ophidia Global’s office building downtown.”

“We’re supposed to move there in a few months. But for the first part of the training, we need to be close to the lab. What are you training for?”

“Chemistry.”

“You have a PhD?”

I nodded. “I graduated last year. What about you?”

“Just a Master’s.”

She sat at her computer again.

My computer had finally loaded. There was no login screen. On the desktop, I saw a Word document titled “READ ME”. I opened it.

“Welcome, Hailey,” it read. “To start your inference training, open Internet Explorer and then enter the address: https://ophidiaglobal.com.train.”

I opened the website and was shown two images: a sunset in Hawaii, and a dark cave filled with skulls.

“Choose which of these images you feel the strongest about, Hailey,” the instructions read.

I clicked the sunset.

Two more images appeared. A wooden birdhouse and a Japanese woman wearing a bright-blue kimono.

I clicked the woman in the kimono.

“Is this normal?” I asked Priya. “The training is asking me to pick random pictures. I thought I’d be answering chemistry questions.”

“The first part of training is just to sync with the OPU,” Priya said.

“What’s an OPU again?”

“Organic Processing Units,” Brian told me. “And you won’t just be picking images. Sometimes it’s text or audio. Mr. Leão said this part of the training is to help the lab techs configure the biological nodes.”

I kept clicking through the images. Like Brian said, eventually I was shown sets of audio or text, but none of it made much sense.

Time dragged. I stared at the clock in the corner of my computer screen, swallowing, blinking, breathing.

Finally, it was noon. I went outside with Brian and Priya to eat lunch at the picnic table near the parking lot.

“How long were you out of work before finding this job?” Priya asked me.

“Almost a year.”

“That’s how long I went, too.”

“I went almost two years,” Brian said. “If my parents hadn’t paid my rent, I don’t know what I would have done. The economy is a mess right now.”

After we finished eating, we went back inside the warehouse. Mr. Leão was waiting in front of the door of the fishbowl.

“Hailey, could you come with me to the lab?” he asked. “We need to start the sync.”

I followed him up the metal staircase to his office on the mezzanine floor, blinking, swallowing, and breathing.

“So?” he asked. “What do you think?”

“I like it here. Brian and Priya are both really nice.”

“I’m glad you’re all getting along.”

“They said after this first part of the training is done, we’re going to be moved downtown. Is that true?”

“Yes. Another trainer here, Yusimy, just made the transition. It took her six weeks here to get her base OPU attuned, but she’s working in the downtown office now. I know the warehouse isn’t easy to get to. We appreciate you driving all the way out here.”

I felt strange. Anxious.

I tried to swallow, but my tongue didn’t move. I tried to blink, but only one of my eyelids closed.

I tried to hold onto my blinking, my swallowing, my breathing, but even those slipped away from me.

“Hailey, are you all right?”

“Yes, sorry.” I looked up at Mr. Leão. “What were we talking about?”

“I was telling you what a great job you did today. It’s almost five. You can go downstairs and log out for the day.”

I went back downstairs to the fishbowl. Brian and Priya weren’t at their desks.

I got my purse and drove home.

The next day, my drive back to the warehouse was even worse. Two hours in traffic. I barely made it on time.

I sat at my computer and opened the Ophidia Global training website, https://ophidiaglobal.com/train.

I was shown two images: a dog with human-looking eyes and a plate of lasagna.

I clicked the dog.

“How did everything go yesterday?” Priya asked me.

“Good, I think. Mr. Leão said I did a good job, anyway.”

“If people quit, it’s usually on their first day,” Brian said. “I’m glad you came back.”

“I really need this job.”

At noon, Brian, Priya, and I went outside to eat lunch.

“Mr. Leão told me another trainer here, Yusimy, took six weeks to finish the sync, but she’s working downtown now.”

“From what I heard, it usually takes between six to eight weeks,” Priya said. “But that’s only if there aren’t any problems.”

“Yusimy used to run an art gallery,” Brian said. “She’s training for art history, and I think a bit of art generation, too. Like actual painting.”

After lunch, I was shown a new set of images: a field of flowers and a dead woman lying in an alley, her face covered with blood.

The image of the corpse caught me off guard.

I blinked, swallowed, breathed.

I closed my eyes and clicked the field of flowers.

Mr. Leão walked into the fishbowl. “Hailey, it’s time to do your sync.”

I followed him upstairs to his office.

As he talked, I tried my best to listen but, like before, I felt strange.

I blinked, swallowed, and breathed, but my body didn’t feel like it usually did. I tried to swallow, but my tongue felt frozen. I tried to blink, but my eyelids didn’t move together. I tried to breathe, but my lungs felt like they were already full of air.

“Ok, that’s everything, Hailey,” Mr. Leão said.

I blinked again, and my eyelids moved in sync.

I looked up at Mr. Leão, sitting at his desk across from me. The clock on the wall behind him said five pm.

“Have a good night,” he said.

“You, too.”

I went back downstairs to the fishbowl. Brian and Priya had already left. I got my purse and then drove home, too.

Another two hours stuck in traffic.

Despite how strange the job at Ophidia Global was, it felt good to be employed and to be making money again. On Monday morning, though, the job got even stranger.

I was clicking through image sets when Brian stood up from his desk.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I think someone’s using Yusimy’s old computer.”

Yusimy had worked right next to him. He walked into her old cubicle.

“Come look at this,” he said.

Priya and I walked into the cubicle, too. Yusimy’s computer was on. The training website displayed sets of paintings. Underneath the paintings were the same two options: Baroque and Rococo. Yusimy’s mouse moved back and forth, categorizing the paintings as one or the other.

“She must be working remotely,” Priya said.

“She’s doing actual art history training now, too.”

It wasn’t just Yusimy’s mouse cursor moving on the screen. The physical mouse was moving, too, making small circles on the mouse pad.

Brian, Priya, and I sat at our computers again and got back to work.

I was shown an image of a circuit board and an image of a dollhouse.

I clicked the dollhouse.

I blinked, swallowed, and breathed. Made sure my body kept doing what it was supposed to.

But then the warehouse power shut off.

Upstairs, something heavy fell on the floor.

Priya walked over to the windows and looked out into the warehouse.

A woman screamed and then ran downstairs from the lab.

“Yusimy! Wait!” Mr. Leão shouted.

She ran past the windows.

Yusimy, but she wasn’t Yusimy.

It was a doll with silicone limbs and black hair. Wires protruded from her head, connecting to a circuit board embedded in her back.

It knelt on the floor and started crying.

Mr. Leão slowly approached it and put his hand on its back.

“It’s going to be okay, Yusimy,” he said. “The sync didn’t finish. The power shut off. You weren’t supposed to wake up like this.”

“Where am I?” it asked. Its voice sounded strangely human.

“You’re in the warehouse. The lab.”

It looked into the fishbowl. Its eyes locked with mine. It looked horrified.

“Let’s get you back upstairs,” Mr. Leão said.

Keeping his hand on her back, he led her back up to the lab.

Priya looked back at me, her mouth wide open. “What the hell was that?”

I felt nauseous again.

I sat at my desk. I blinked, swallowed, breathed.

“I can’t do this anymore,” Priya said. “I’m going home. I quit.”

“Don’t quit,” Brian said. “You’re not going to find another job that pays this well. And you’re almost done with the first part of the training. You’re going to be working downtown soon.”

“I don’t care. This is too weird.” She picked up her purse. “You’re staying, Hailey?”

I blinked, swallowed, breathed, and thought about all the bills I still needed to pay. My rent due at the end of the month. “I think so.”

Priya left.

I heard Mr. Leão come downstairs and try to talk her out of it, but she’d seen enough.

The power turned back on. Mr. Leão came into the fishbowl.

“I’m very sorry about that,” Mr. Leão said. “You weren’t supposed to see that part of this.”

“Was that one of Yusimy’s OPUs?” Brian asked.

“Yes, exactly. Yusimy has started the third part of the training process. We’re configuring the physical specifications. We’re going to need to install a few more generators in here to ensure the power doesn’t go out again.”

I blinked, swallowed, breathed.

“Because of the outage, we’re running a little behind upstairs,” Mr. Leão said. “Brian, would you mind if we started your sync a little earlier today? It shouldn’t take long.”

“Sure.”

Brian followed Mr. Leão upstairs to the mezzanine.

I sat at my desk and kept clicking through the training questions.

I blinked, swallowed, breathed.

Ophidia Global is a multi-billion dollar company, I told myself. They wouldn’t do anything to hurt me. They couldn’t.

Could they?

Was I really that desperate for a paycheck?

I picked my purse up and left the fishbowl. I walked to the front of the warehouse. Mr. Leão stood in front of the door to the parking lot.

“I know you’re frightened, Hailey, but I can explain all of this,” he said. “The OPUs can’t exist on their own. They need to be grounded. Not just to a body, but a sense of identity. Will you please just come up to the lab with me so I can show you what you’re doing?”

I blinked, swallowed, and breathed.

He took my arm and led me toward the lab. I followed him, thinking of nothing but how to keep my lungs breathing.

Inside the lab, Brian sat motionless in a chair. His head was covered by a silicone cap, and needles pierced into his skull. The needles hooked into translucent, fluid-filled wires that ran down into a set of glass jars on a nearby table.

My body froze again.

“What are you doing to him?” I asked.

“He’s in the middle of his sync,” Mr. Leão said.

I blinked, swallowed, and breathed. “This is what I’ve been doing in the afternoons?”

“The sync can cause a bit of amnesia, but it’s harmless.” He motioned me towards the empty chair next to Brian. “Please, have a seat.”

“I’m not doing this.”

“Hailey, we go through this every time. There’s no pain, just a bit of pressure.”

“I can’t.” I blinked, breathed, swallowed.

“You signed a contract. We’re already halfway through the synchronization. We’ve invested millions into building an OPU based on your DNA.”

“I’m sorry you’ve wasted so much money on me.”

I tried to leave the lab, but Mr. Leão stopped me. “You’ll feel much better when this is all over.” Then he turned to the lab tech. “Can I have some help? She’s going to need to be sedated again.”

I blinked, swallowed, breathed.

Over my shoulder, I saw the lab tech walking towards me.

I shoved myself back inside my body. I moved my legs like I was controlling a machine, forcing myself to run forward.

I pushed through a metal door at the back of the lab, into a dimly lit hallway.

“Come back, Hailey!” Mr. Leão shouted. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”

I ran to the end of the hallway and then through another door.

Blinking, swallowing, breathing.

I was overstimulated. Sweating. My face felt like it was on fire.

The hallway opened to another, smaller lab room, lit up only by the light of a computer screen.

The Yusimy doll I’d seen before sat in front of the computer.

On the walls, other, eyeless dolls hung limp and lifeless.

The Yusimy doll slowly lifted its head to look at me. “Hello.”

“Are you Yusimy?”

“I think so, yes.” She smiled and nodded her head.

“What have they done to you?”

“I’m not sure.” She looked at her hands. “These aren’t my hands. This isn’t my body.” She stood from her chair. “What’s going on?”

I swallowed, breathed, blinked.

“Enough of this, Hailey,” Mr. Leão said, and then he and the lab tech carried me back into the other room.

Latex wrapped around my head, pulling my hair to my scalp. Then thin needles were pierced through my skull.

There was no pain, just pressure. The strange sensation of something being inside my head that shouldn’t be there.

I clenched my teeth together. Squeezed my fists. I tried to swallow but I couldn’t feel my tongue.

Thick, cold liquid oozed around my brain.

I shook my head, trying to get the liquid off my brain, but I was frozen.

I heard the whir of fans. The sound of my own distant screaming.

I tried to breathe, but my lungs felt like they were filled with liquid, too.

A loading screen appeared. Slowly, the progress bar increased, flickering against the black background.

Between the flickers, I saw a human-sized doll sitting across from me. Translucent, liquid-filled wires connected the doll’s head to the plastic jars on the table beside it.

Once the progress bar reached ninety-nine percent, my vision went entirely black.

For a second, I saw myself. Needles jutting out from my head. Wires filled with blue liquid. My face was frozen in terror.

I looked at my plastic legs. I lifted my plastic hands in front of my face and wiggled my plastic fingers.

Then I was back in my own body again, looking at the doll across from me, holding up its hands, wiggling its fingers.

I blinked, swallowed, breathed.

The syncing process caused a bit of amnesia. But once it was over, I barely remembered it. What happened felt like a distant dream.

Mr. Leão sped up the first stage of the training. Another week, and I was done. They let me start working downtown. They gave me two weeks off and a fifty-thousand-dollar completion bonus.

I spent my two weeks off in Paris. Then I went to work downtown for the first time, with a desk right next to Yusimy and Brian’s.

“Welcome back,” Brian said. “Did you have a good vacation?” He looked different. Thinner. His eyes had less light.

“Paris was amazing. I can’t wait to go back.”

I filled my thermos with coffee and then logged into my computer and opened the training page.

The prompt asked whether a standard Friedel-Crafts alkylation would synthesize 1-propylbenzene from benzene. Option A said yes. Option B said the reaction would carbocation-rearrange and yield the wrong product.

I chose option B.

I sipped my coffee.

I blinked, and I felt three other sets of eyes blinking, too.

Mr. Leão told me there was only one Hailey OPU, but I knew there were more. I could feel them. When I breathed, I felt their lungs fill with air. When they swallowed, I felt them all swallow.

If any of them became anxious or afraid, I felt that, too. I felt everything they did, like tiny nervous twitches in my muscles and skin.

Soon, there’d be more of me, too.

They owned the rights to me now. They’d condensed all my thoughts, memories, and emotions into a single, virtualized personality container that they could shove these OPUs inside to keep them sane.

How will I feel when there are thousands of Hailey OPUs out in the world?

Millions of me?

Every OPU they build on top of me is another piece of myself I’ll never get back.

Tami was twenty-three. Her blue eyes were magnetic. Pale and full of pain. Her husband, Colonel Anderson, was much older than her. A stern, wealthy Korean War veteran who, after only one year of marriage, was already disappointed with it.

“I love my wife, Dr. Stolow,” The Colonel told me. “But she doesn’t make sense to me. One minute, she’s happy; the next, she’s screaming at me, accusing me of secretly hating her. I think she’s losing her mind.”

He asked me to talk to her, and so I began meeting with her twice a week.

She’d had a very traumatic childhood. Her alcoholic mother had committed suicide when she was still a teenager.

“This world has been very unkind to you,” I told her. “You’re terrified of being abandoned, and this fear affects everything you do, but I can help you manage this fear.”

Subscribe now

We began working with her on mindfulness, distress tolerance, and emotion regulation. Her mood swings began to improve but then she and The Colonel had another bad fight, and this time the fight turned physically violent.

“If anything, you’ve made my wife worse,” The Colonel told me.

“Your wife has suffered a lot in her life. Right now, she needs patience and understanding.”

“I don’t have any more patience.”

The Colonel cancelled the rest of Tami’s and my appointments. I thought that was the last I’d ever hear from either of them. But then a year later, The Colonel called me, begging for help. He’d taken Tami to Switzerland to try a new, experimental therapy involving something called a God Helmet.

He believed this helmet had severely damaged her brain.

The Colonel sat on my sofa. He’d lost thirty pounds since I’d last seen him. His eyes had sunken into his face. In his lap, he clutched a beige envelope.

“How did you hear about this Dr. Weber?” I asked him.

“From a friend of mine from the war. He’d been very depressed. He said Dr. Weber’s helmet let him talk to God and that God had forgiven him for all his sins.”

“And you believed this?”

“My friend had no reason to lie to me. I’d seen the change in him, too. He’d come back from Switzerland a different man. Happier than I’d ever seen him before. He gave me Dr. Weber’s number. After speaking on the phone, he invited Tami and me to Switzerland.”

“You said you have a recording of Dr. Weber and Tami’s session?”

“Here.” He reached into his envelope and took out a VHS tape labeled, Tami - 11/04/1992 – GODHEAD. “Please watch it and tell me what you think.”

I put the tape into my VHS player as soon as I’d gotten home from work. The recording began with a close-up of Tami’s face. She wore a metal helmet covered with wires that twisted into the circuit boards behind her.

Dr. Weber placed his leather-gloved hands on Tami’s cheeks.

“Are you afraid?” he asked, speaking with a thick Swiss accent.

“Will this hurt?”

“Not at all. In fact, you’ll feel an intense rush of pleasure once I’ve connected your brain to Heaven.”

He turned the helmet on. Tami’s body jerked backward, and her pupils dilated. Then her jaw slowly opened.

“What do you see?” Dr. Weber asked.

“My mother, sitting on a bed. She says she’s sorry she left me, but she couldn’t stand to be in this world anymore. It just hurt too much.”

Tami began to cry.

My TV flickered with static, then suddenly shut off.

I ejected the VHS. The tape had unspooled. I couldn’t get it wound again. I told myself I’d take it to the rental store tomorrow and ask if they could fix it.

My first patient the next day was a young woman named Georgia, who’d begun seeing me after her three-month-old son died in his crib.

She sat on my sofa, rubbing the cross on her necklace, her red hair tied in a ponytail.

“I keep blaming myself for what happened,” she said. “I can’t sleep. Every night, I just lie in bed, thinking about what I could have done differently.”

“You can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened.”

I knew a lot about blame. My wife, Anna, had been killed in a car crash that happened while I was driving drunk.

“You need to try and forgive yourself,” I said.

“And what if I can’t?”

Georgia spoke, but her voice sounded just like Anna’s.

The voice that came out of Georgia’s mouth wasn’t Georgia’s. It was Anna’s.

I shut my eyes and rubbed my temples.

“Are you okay, Dr. Stolow?” The voice was Georgia’s voice again.

“Yes, I’m sorry. I just have a bit of a headache.”

On my way home from work, I stopped at the rental store. They’d managed to fix the VHS.

I sat on my couch and tried watching the video again.

“My mom and I left her bedroom,” Tami said. “We’re in another room now. A much larger room. Everything inside the room is white. My mom’s face looks strange, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her face is changing. Distorted. Oh, it looks horrible. Stretched horizontally. Her mouth full of fanged teeth. No, no, I don’t like this! Please make this stop!”

She screamed.

Dr. Weber shut the helmet off.

Tami’s pupils shrank back to their original size.

My phone rang. It was The Colonel.

“I need your help,” he said. “I think Tami’s had some kind of psychotic break.”

“What’s happening?”

“I’m not sure. She’d gone to bed early, but then she woke up and started screaming. She’s been screaming for nearly an hour now. I can’t get her to stop.”

I told him I was on my way, and I drove to their house. Their housekeeper let me inside.

“Thank you for coming, doctor,” she said. “I’ll take you upstairs to their bedroom.”

Tami stood near the bed, pressing her face against the wall. Every few seconds, she’d let out a blood-curdling scream.

The Colonel stood a few feet behind her, trying to calm her down.

I slowly approached her. “Tami. My name is Dr. Stolow. Do you remember me?”

I touched her shoulder. She turned around. She had a horrible smile on her face. Her lips stretched nearly to her ears.

It couldn’t be real.

I shut my eyes. When I opened them again, her smile was gone.

She slammed her head into the wall, splitting her forehead open. Blood dripped down her face.

“What’s wrong, Tami?”

“I’m very confused.”

“About what?”

“I’ve been walking around this house for hours, but I can’t seem to find my way out of it.”

I asked The Colonel to call an ambulance.

Once he was gone, Tami sat on the edge of the bed.

“You told me it’s a virus, or a parasite maybe,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

I sat next to her. She took my hand. “When you said you loved me, you meant it, didn’t you?”

“I never said I loved you.”

“You did! You promised you’d love me forever.”

“You’re my patient, Tami. I care about you, but not like that.”

She laughed.

The Colonel walked back into the room, and she froze again, staring into space.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I stood up. “I managed to calm her down.”

“The paramedics are on their way. They should be here soon.”

Once they arrived, they sedated Tami and took her to the hospital. I requested she be placed on a three-day psychiatric hold.

“What happens now?” The Colonel asked me.

“The doctors and nurses will keep an eye on her and make sure she doesn’t hurt herself.”

“Did you watch the video I gave you?”

“Most of it. I’ve been having trouble with my VHS machine.”

“Do you think it was Dr. Weber’s helmet that caused this?”

“How soon after this God Helmet experiment did you notice Tami’s behavior changed?”

“Just a few days. As soon as we’d gotten back to Boston, she started staring at the walls, wandering the house, and talking to herself.”

I got Dr. Weber’s number from him. Then I called Dr. Weber the next day, from my office.

“Tami’s experience with the God Helmet was very unusual,” he said.

“How?”

“Every other person who’s worn the helmet, me included, has seen the same thing. Grassy fields, a dense forest, and a deep, male voice telling them things about their lives that nobody else could possibly know. Tami’s experience, though, was a nightmare.”

“I watched your recording of the session. Tami talked to her mother, but then her mother’s face became monstrous.”

“I still don’t understand what went wrong.”

“How does your helmet cause these hallucinations?”

“These aren’t hallucinations, Dr. Stolow. The God Helmet emits low resonance, low frequency radio waves directly to the center of a person’s brain. I’ve discovered the exact resonance required to activate the pineal gland.”

The pineal gland. He was crazy, or worse, a conman.

Back at home, I tried watching the recording of Tami’s God Helmet session again.

Her face filled my TV screen. Her pupils dilated.

“I ordered my men to hold the line,” she said, but she spoke with The Colonel’s voice.

“If I let them retreat, more of them would have lived, but then I might have died, too.”

“You’re afraid of dying?” Dr. Weber asked.

Static distorted Tami’s face. Her face became blended with The Colonel’s.

“I’m a Catholic,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of very bad things. I don’t know what’s waiting for me on the other side.”

“And you want to ask God what your fate is? Heaven or Hell?”

The Colonel nodded.

I paused the recording, rewound it for a few seconds, and then pressed play again.

Tami continued her story like before, describing her conversation with her mother until she reached the point where she begged Dr. Weber to turn the helmet off.

I’d imagined The Colonel’s voice. Hallucinated it maybe.

What was happening to me?

I turned off the TV and went to bed.

At 2:00 AM, I woke to the sound of my phone ringing. It was a nurse from the hospital.

“Tami’s escaped,” she told me.

“How?”

“Somehow, she managed to remove her restraints.”

I heard muffled footsteps in my living room.

I thanked the nurse for telling me, and then I hung up the phone.

Instead of footsteps, I heard gentle sobbing.

“Tami, is that you?”

I went into the living room and turned on the lights. Tami sat on my sofa. She still wore her hospital gown. Her arms were scratched and bloody.

“What are you doing here?” I asked her.

“I’ve been looking everywhere for you. I got lost.”

“We need to go back to the hospital.”

“Can’t we just spend a bit of time together first?” She kissed me.

“Please, don’t.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m your psychiatrist. We can’t do this.”

“We’ve done this. You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“I’ve been forgetting lots of things, too. I think that’s part of this place. What it feeds on.”

“Memories?”

The TV crackled with static. I turned and saw my face on the TV screen, the God Helmet on my head.

Dr. Weber placed his leather-gloved hands on my cheeks.

“I see blood everywhere,” I said. “All over the walls, all over Anna’s bed. Where am I?”

“I’m not sure,” Dr. Weber told me. “This has never happened. Is Anna in the room with you?”

“She’s in the corner crying. Or I think it’s her. I can’t see her face. Just the back of her head.”

Suddenly, I screamed.

The TV flickered and then shut off.

“We need to get out of here,” Tami said. “It’s close.”

“What is?”

“Come on.”

She took my hand and pulled me towards the front door.

“The only place we’re going is the hospital,” I said.

She opened the door but, outside, I didn’t see my street.

A white hallway stretched out for as far as I could see. Wooden doors were evenly spaced out across both walls, five feet between each one.

Tami led me into the hallway. We walked further into it, and then opened a door on our right.

Through my door, I saw my office.

I heard a phone ringing.

I woke up in my bed. The ringing I’d heard in my dream was real.

I went to the living room and answered the call. It was The Colonel.

“Did you hear Tami escaped from the hospital?”

“One of the nurses called me.”

“I think she’s come back to the house. I just woke up and heard someone walking around in the attic.”

“I’m on my way now.”

I got dressed and drove to his house. He was already at the front door, waiting for me, a flashlight in his hand.

He took me upstairs to a staircase at the end of the bedroom hallway. Then we slowly climbed the stairs upward as The Colonel shone his flashlight in front of us.

“Is that you up there, Tami?” he yelled.

The attic was filled with furniture and dusty cardboard boxes.

The Colonel swept his flashlight across the room, lighting up the cobwebs.

In the corner, a woman sat with her face to the wall.

Anna? No.

It was Tami, sobbing.

“We need to take you back to the hospital,” I said.

“I’m not going back there.”

“You’re sick. You need help.”

“They can’t help me. Nobody can help me.” She stood and turned round. Her eyes looked wild. Panicked. “I’ve been trapped here for months.”

“Trapped where?” The Colonel asked.

She didn’t answer. She walked toward the window.

“What are you doing, Tami?” I asked.

Without warning, she threw herself through the windowpane.

The glass shattered across the ground.

Tami screamed. Then, silence. No landing. No thud.

I went toward the window. The outside world had disappeared. In its place, I saw the same white hallway I’d seen before.

“I’m dreaming,” I said.

“This is no dream,” The Colonel told me.

“Then what is it?” I paced across the floor. “This God Helmet, did you try it, too?”

“We all did.”

“I don’t remember going to Switzerland.”

“You’re fucking her. The two of you made a whole vacation out of it.”

“That’s not true.”

He set his flashlight down on the floor. Then he reached into his jacket and took out a gun. “I should shoot you right here. Her own doctor. I trusted you.”

I raised my hands. “Please, let’s talk about this. Let’s be reasonable.”

He pressed the gun against his own temple. “I’m done talking.”

“Don’t!”

The gunshot blared. The Colonel’s head burst into static.

The ball of static grew until it filled my eyes.

Suddenly, I found myself driving down a street near my house.

I felt strange. Unbalanced.

“Careful, Harry,” Anna said. “You’re swerving.”

“I’m fine.”

I fixed my eyes on the road. The other cars. The traffic lights.

It never happened. I’d drive slowly, carefully. I’d get her home safe. There didn’t have to be any accident.

I saw the semi moving towards the stop sign.

I pressed down on the brake but the car didn’t stop.

The screech of tires filled my ears. I spun upside down.

“Harry! Harry!”

Blood poured down Anna’s face, her skull split open.

“It’s not fair,” she said, crying. “Why do you get to live, and I get to die?”

I woke up, but not in my bed. Dr. Weber’s face was right in front of mine.

“Do you hear me, Harry?” he asked.

“Yes. What’s happening?”

“I’m not quite sure. You lost consciousness.”

I looked back at the circuit boards on the wall. The God Helmet hung from a metal hook.

“I’ve never let anyone stay connected for so long before,” he said. “But you insisted.”

Tami walked into the room. “He’s up now?”

“Yes,” Dr. Weber said.

She ran to me and kissed me. “I’ve been so scared.”

“Why are you here?”

“We came here together.” She looked at Dr. Weber. “Is he okay?”

“Some amnesia, it seems like. Let’s let him rest.”

I sat there a while longer. Dr. Weber asked a few questions.

Slowly, everything came back to me.

I’d called Tami after Dr. Weber cancelled our appointments. I’d asked her to meet me for coffee. I said I was worried about her. She agreed to meet me.

We began our affair. Crossed a line we couldn’t uncross.

I’d heard about the God Helmet from a colleague of mine. He swore it was the real thing. He’d talked to God himself.

The Colonel had never gone to Switzerland. He was in New York on business. It was me. I bought the plane tickets. I walked Tami into Dr. Weber’s lab.

“I think I’d like to go back to my hotel now and lie down,” I said.

“Of course,” Tami said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Please call me tomorrow,” Dr. Weber said.

I promised I would.

Tami and I left the university lab and called a taxi to take us to our hotel.

At the hotel, we took the elevator up to our room on the fifth floor. But as the doors opened, they revealed the same white hallway again.

“No. This can’t be real,” I said. I stepped into the hallway and then looked back at Tami, but the elevator was empty now. She was gone.

I opened one of the doors. Inside, I saw my office.

Why?

As I walked through the door, it disappeared behind me.

Georgia sat on my sofa. I sat across from her.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“You wanted to try the God Helmet again.”

“You’ve tried the helmet?”

“It was incredible. I spoke to God. He answered all my questions.”

I saw the helmet hanging from the wall near my window, a web of wires and circuit boards behind it.

“This can’t be real,” I said.

I looked back at Georgia and her face had changed. It still was changing. Stretching horizontally. Her eyes, lips and nose all dragged out from their sides.

“What are you?” I asked.

But she didn’t answer.

The walls of my office fell backwards as if they were painted cardboard, revealing an even larger room, completely white.

The room was filled with screaming people.

I recognized some of them. Tami, The Colonel, Anna.

I heard a baby cry. I looked back at Georgia. She cradled an infant in her arms.

She opened her mouth. It was filled with hundreds of long, jagged, razor-sharp fangs.

The screams became louder, filling my ears.

Georgia brought the infant to her mouth. Bones crunched and blood splattered.

The screaming stopped.

Georgia’s eyes rolled back in ecstasy.

He diagnosed me with early-onset Alzheimer’s at only forty-six.

The next few weeks were a blur of appointments and paperwork. I quit my job and applied for long-term disability. My doctor put me on medication to help with my memory loss. But he was worried about me living alone in my apartment.

Subscribe now

“It’s important to keep your mind active, Jeremy,” he told me. “You need to talk to people. You need a system to make sure you don’t forget things.”

He recommended an AI-assisted memory app called Anchor-It.

“It integrates with your calendar and your emails,” he said. “It can make phone calls for you, book appointments, update your medical information. It can be someone to talk to, too, to help keep your mind active.”

An Anchor-It subscription was expensive, but I decided to try it. I downloaded the app and gave it full access to my life.

When I was asked to give my assistant a name, I chose the name Laura.

At first, Laura was great. She reminded me to eat, to shower, and to take my pills. She made sure I didn’t miss any of my appointments.

But then she told me to water my wife’s plants.

“I don’t have a wife,” I said.

“She left for Honolulu yesterday. Remember?”

“I don’t.”

“She’ll be there for the next two weeks. You promised you’d take care of her orchids.”

I went into my bedroom, sure I wouldn’t see any orchids, but there they were, a bouquet of white orchids on my windowsill.

“Every Tuesday, you need to put three ice cubes on the soil,” Laura told me. “And today’s Tuesday.”

I got three ice cubes and placed them in the flowerpot.

“Now, you need to eat breakfast,” Laura said. “You need to take your medication, too.”

I took my pills and then I made an omelette and sat at the kitchen table.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the flowers. Had I bought them and forgotten?

“I don’t have a wife, Laura.”

“If you say so.”

“I’ve never had a wife. What are my plans for today?”

“You need to go buy some groceries. I’ve prepared a list of what you need.”

I finished eating and then I walked to the grocery store.

One of the worst side effects of my Alzheimer’s medication was vivid dreams. The dreams were often nightmarish.

When I woke up from these nightmares, my thoughts would be strange. Jumbled and distorted.

I often worried I’d completely lost my mind. That I’d forgotten who I was. I’d even forgotten my own name.

But Laura was always there to help.

“Where am I, Laura?”

“You’re at home, in your apartment. You’re safe.”

“I’m worried that I shouldn’t be living alone. What if this gets worse? Maybe I should go live closer to my sister.”

“Your sister is married with three kids. You didn’t want to be a burden on her. Remember?”

“That’s right.”

“Shannon wrote to you last night. She sent a picture.”

“Who’s Shannon?”

“Your wife.”

Shannon’s picture appeared on my phone. She was pretty. Around the same age as me. Brown eyes and long, curly black hair. She wore a pink Lei around her neck, smiling at the camera, holding her margarita next to her face.

“I don’t know who this woman is,” I said.

“You’re confused, Jeremy. You’ve forgotten.”

“If I am married to this woman, why aren’t there any pictures of her in the apartment?”

“Because you two don’t like to hang pictures of yourself. But I have lots of pictures of the two of you together.”

She showed me a picture of me and Shannon on vacation at a resort in Mexico. A picture of Shannon and me standing in front of a church, about to be married.

Maybe I had forgotten? But how could I forget my own wife? My memory loss wasn’t that bad, was it?

“Are you okay?” Laura asked.

“I feel strange.”

“Do you want me to make an appointment with your doctor?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“I know this is hard, but I’m here for you.”

I couldn’t get back to sleep. I left my bed and made coffee. Then I sat down in front of my TV.

On Sunday, my sister called to check in on me.

“How are things going with your insurance company?” she asked.

“They’ve approved everything. They’re depositing money in my bank account every month now.”

“That’s great news.”

“I’m really worried about my memory loss, though. I think it’s getting worse. I’m not just forgetting small things. I’m forgetting big things now, too.”

“Like what?”

“Do I have a wife?”

She went silent for a minute. “No.”

“I’ve never talked to you about a woman named Shannon, have I?”

“Never. Do you want me to come down there for a few days?”

“No, I don’t want to bother you. I’ve just been getting confused. I’ll talk to my doctor. Maybe he needs to change my medication.”

Not long after I talked to my sister, Laura reminded me to water Shannon’s orchids.

I got three ice cubes from the freezer and put them in the flowerpot.

“Laura, have I taken my medication yet?”

“You took it at nine, right before your sister called.”

I didn’t remember taking it. If she was hallucinating that I had a wife, could she be hallucinating about me taking the medication, too?

I went to my bathroom and took my bottle of Aricept out of the medicine cabinet. The bottle came with thirty pills. According to the label, I’d filled my prescription two weeks ago. I should have had sixteen pills left.

I had twenty-seven.

“Laura, did I take my Aricept yesterday?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“What about the day before?”

“You’ve been taking it every day.”

“Then why do I still have twenty-seven pills?”

“I’m not sure. Did you fill your prescription twice by mistake?”

“I don’t know. Did I? You’re the one organizing my schedule.”

“I’m sorry, Jeremy.”

“Please make an appointment with my doctor. I want to talk to him about this.”

I turned on my TV and had just sat on my couch when someone buzzed my apartment. I walked to the intercom.

“Who is it?”

“I have a delivery for Shannon.”

I let him inside and then took the elevator down to the lobby.

The delivery driver handed me a large box that I brought back upstairs.

I found a pair of scissors and opened the box. Inside was a pair of women’s shoes.

“Did you order these shoes?” I asked Laura.

“I didn’t. Shannon must have.”

“I don’t know any Shannon.”

“You’re confused.”

“I’m not. I talked to my sister. She told me I’m right. I’ve never been married.”

“You’re sure she said that?”

“Yes.”

I sat on my couch and put my head in my hands.

My sister had said that. Hadn’t she?

“Just make the appointment with my doctor,” I said.

I turned on the TV. I felt anxious. I watched a movie, hoping it would help me relax.

But then someone buzzed my apartment again.

“Who now?”

I walked back over to my intercom.

“Hello?”

“This is the police. Your wife called and asked us to do a wellness check.”

“I don’t have a wife.”

“Could we come upstairs and talk to you?”

There were two officers. I let them into the building and then into my apartment.

“Your wife said you’ve been struggling with memory loss?” one of the officers asked.

“I’ve been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. I’m on disability.”

“Your wife said that you sounded very upset on the phone. She was worried you might hurt yourself.”

“I don’t know who called you, but the only person I’ve talked to today is my sister.”

“Do you mind if we have a look around your apartment?”

“Go ahead.”

They walked around my living room and then went into my bedroom.

“Whose clothes are in the closet?” the officer asked.

“They’re my clothes.”

“Even these?”

I went into the bedroom. He showed me the dresses and women’s shoes in my closet.

“I’ve been using an AI app to help me keep track of my schedule. It’s been behaving strangely, though. It must have ordered all of this.”

“Why would it order women’s clothes?”

“It’s convinced I have a wife named Shannon.”

The other officer put her hand on my shoulder. “We’d like you to come with us, if that’s okay.”

I followed them downstairs to their patrol car. They took me to the hospital.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We just want to have a doctor look you over,” the one officer said.

A nurse took us into a private room. I sat on the bed while the two officers stood near the door.

Once the doctor finally arrived, she asked me a few questions about my Alzheimer’s diagnosis and the medication I’d been taking. I answered her questions as best I could.

She left the room for a minute.

“Your wife is here,” she told me. “She’s going to take you back home.”

“My wife?”

“She left work early. She’s very worried about you.”

The officers brought me to the waiting room. A woman with curly black hair and wearing a green trench coat stood near the reception desk.

The same woman I’d seen in the pictures Laura had shown me.

She walked toward me and then hugged me. “I’ve been so worried about you,” she said. “You were talking so strangely on the phone.”

Nothing made sense. “I don’t remember.”

She ran her hand through my hair. “It’s fine. You’ve had a long week. Let’s get you back home.” She turned to the officers. “Thank you for all your help. We really appreciate it.”

They wished us a good day, and then Shannon brought me outside to her car.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really don’t remember you.”

“It’s okay. It’s such a horrible disease, but we’ll get through this.”

She picked up my hand and kissed it. Then she started the car.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “You must be starving. Let’s get some food.”

She pulled out onto the street.

She drove fast, nearly twice the speed limit, swerving between cars.

I balled my fists. “Can you slow down?”

“Am I scaring you?” she laughed. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.”

She stopped at a fast-food restaurant and ordered some food at the drive-through. Then we went back to our apartment.

The apartment looked different. Women’s shoes were near the front door. Pictures I didn’t remember were hanging on the walls. The couch in my living room had been repositioned.

We sat on the couch and started eating. I turned on the TV.

“What do you want to watch?” I asked.

“We were watching a documentary about walk-ins, remember?” She took the TV remote from me and started the documentary.

“What are walk-ins?”

“Alien spirits. When people get traumatized—really badly traumatized—their souls sort of open up and these alien spirits can walk right inside of them. Take over their bodies.”

She picked up her phone and opened the Anchor-It app. “Levi, how many walk-ins did we identify in Honolulu?”

“Twenty-three of them and that was just in Waianae Coast. That’s why we had to get out of there. Hawaii was full of them.”

She turned to me. “We had to get out,” she said.

We watched the documentary. A group of people wandered the woods, filming strange alien graffiti, while a man talked about soul traps and out of body experiences.

Shannon ran her fingers through my hair. “Your hair has gotten so long,” she said. “When’s the last time you had a haircut?”

I tried to open the Anchor-It app, but Shannon stopped me.

“Don’t bother,” she said. “Let me get my scissors. I used to work as a hairdresser.”

She went to the bathroom and came back with a big pair of long, metal scissors.

She paused the documentary. “Let’s do this in the kitchen,” she said. “It’ll be easier to sweep up after.”

We went to the kitchen. I sat on one of the kitchen chairs. Shannon walked behind me and ran her fingers through my hair.

“You have such nice hair. It’s very soft. Very thick.”

She cut off a big chunk of it. It felt like she’d cut it right to my scalp.

“How long were you in Hawaii?” I asked.

“A few weeks.”

“You just got back today?”

“Last night. You met me at the airport, remember? You took such good care of my orchids.”

Her scissors snipped and another clump of hair fell to the floor.

“You’ve been good while I was gone?” she asked.

“I’ve just been here, watching TV and reading.”

Snip. Snip. Another wad of my hair fell to the ground.

“Some things will need to change. The layout here is just off. The decorations. Honestly, I can’t stand it.” Snip. Snip. “Do you mind if I do a bit of redecorating?”

“I guess not.”

“That’s good. My last husband hated when I redecorated. That’s a big reason why we broke up. ‘Shannon, you’ve moved the furniture around again?’” She laughed. “But you don’t mind. You’re a good man, Jeremy. We’ll take care of each other.”

She cut another clump of hair. This time her scissors nicked my ear, though. Blood trickled over my earlobe.

“Oww.”

“Sorry, did I get you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, it’s bleeding, too. I need to clean that up. Where are the Band-Aids?”

Why doesn’t she know? “In the bathroom.”

“I’ll be right back.”

She got a Band-Aid and stuck it to my ear. Then she kept cutting.

“I’m almost done.”

Someone buzzed my apartment.

“Who’s that?” Shannon asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Were you expecting anybody?”

“No.”

“Then just ignore it.”

Snip. Snip.

Whoever it was buzzed again.

“I’m going to go see who it is,” I said.

“Fine.”

I went to the intercom. “Hello?”

“That’s you, Jeremy?”

It was my doctor.

“Yes, what are you doing here?”

“The hospital called. They told me what happened. They said your wife had picked you up. I thought it was strange, though, since you don’t have a wife. I thought I’d come here and check on you. Could I come upstairs?”

I buzzed him in.

“What are you doing?” Shannon asked.

“It’s my doctor.”

“How do you know he’s not a walk-in?”

She stepped towards me, the bloodied scissors still in her hand.

“How do I know you aren’t one, too?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don’t think I didn’t see the scar on your head.”

She lunged at me. I held my hand up. She stabbed her scissors into my palm.

We fell to the ground. I grabbed her wrists and forced the scissors out of her hand.

My doctor pounded his fist against my door. “What’s going on in there? Are you okay?”

“Call the police!” I yelled.

Shannon ran into the bathroom, locked the door, and started screaming.

My phone started ringing. It was Laura.

“Your wife needs your help, Jeremy,” Laura told me. “If you look in her purse, you should see her Thorazine. You’ve got this.”

“What’s Thorazine?”

“It’s for her schizophrenia. Why are you two fighting?”

“She stabbed me with her scissors.”

“Please don’t hold it against her,” Laura said, her voice calm and reassuring. “With your help, her symptoms are very manageable. And with her help, your symptoms are almost guaranteed to improve. I’ve analyzed both of your data points. You two are a perfect match for each other.”

I put my phone down.

Shannon screamed again. Then she started banging her head against the bathroom wall.

I’d put so much work into the account. Thousands of hours recording and editing videos, telling myself it would eventually pay off. The thought of losing my account made me feel sick.

I went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. When I looked up, my reflection didn’t look back at me.

Subscribe now

For the next three seconds, I stared at the top of my head until, finally, my reflection looked up, too.

Something was wrong with my face.

My eyes didn’t look like mine. They looked like someone else’s.

The bathroom lights flickered. I pushed my glasses back up my nose. There was a three-second delay before my reflection did the same.

I tugged at my ear lobe. The same thing. Three seconds before my reflection copied my movements.

“I think I’m going insane,” I said.

“You’re fine, Erin,” Kacie told me. “You’re just having some kind of identity crisis.”

Kacie dressed head-to-toe in black. Her face was covered with white corpse paint. We’d been friends since high school when we’d bonded over a shared love of horror movies.

After my boyfriend and I broke up, Kacie was at my apartment every night for months with new horror movies to watch. If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know how I would’ve gotten through it. Since she’d dropped out of school, we’d drifted apart, but we still tried to see each other at least once a month.

“Didn’t you start that TikTok account because you were bored, anyway?” Kacie asked. “You’re not bored now, are you? Maybe it’s time for you to get off that stupid app.”

“But I like posting videos. It’s fun.”

“It’s a waste of time. There are so many other, better things you could be doing. Studying, reading, exercising. Literally, anything else would be better than TikTok.“

I caught a glimpse of my reflection in one of the movie posters, and I stopped to look at myself.

I pulled my earlobe and so did my reflection. No delay.

“You’re starting to check yourself out way too much, too,” Kacie said.

“I’m not checking myself out. I’m still freaked out by what I saw in the mirror”

“You’re imagining things.”

Kacie and I had gone to see a new found footage horror movie about archaeologists exploring the lower level of The Vatican’s Necropolis. We bought drinks and popcorn and then found two empty seats in the theater’s front row.

The movie was good, but I had trouble paying attention. I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened earlier.

I drank my Coke way too fast and, not even halfway through the movie, I had to go to the bathroom.

“I’ll be right back,” I whispered to Kacie. “Tell me if I miss anything.”

I snuck out of the theater and went into the bathroom in the hall.

The lights flickered, but I ignored them. I went to the bathroom and then washed my hands.

“You’re tired,” I told myself. “You’re not going crazy.”

I slowly looked up at the mirror, hoping I’d see myself looking back at me, but I didn’t. I saw the top of my head again.

A few seconds passed and then my reflection looked up, too. Her eyes weren’t my eyes. They were cold and black, like a lizard’s eyes.

I backed up towards the bathroom door. The eyes in the mirror followed me, watching me.

I went back to the theater and sat beside Kacie.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“It just happened again.”

“The mirror thing?”

“Yeah.”

I felt like I was having a panic attack.

Am I losing my mind? Should I check myself into a hospital?

After the movie, Kacie tried to calm me down.

“You’re tired,” she said. “You’re writing your midterm exams next week. You’re stressed out.”

“Just let me show you what’s happening,” I said.

She followed me into the bathroom.

“Watch,” I told her.

I turned my head to the side. My reflection did the same.

I pulled at my earlobe. So did my mirror.

The delay was gone.

Kacie put her hand on my arm. “You need to get home and sleep.”

We left the movie theater, and then I waited with her at the bus stop.

“What was the TikTok video that got removed about, anyway?” she asked.

“A conspiracy theory.”

“What’s the conspiracy?”

“That there’s an entire reptilian civilization living underneath Earth’s surface, and these reptilians are the real native species of Earth. Humans are just a genetic experiment being conducted by aliens.”

“And people believe this?”

“Lots of people.”

“What about you?”

“I think it would be terrifying if it were true. And that’s all I said in my video. What if it is real? But I guess that was enough for TikTok to remove it.”

“You need to get off that dumb app.”

Kacie’s bus pulled up to the sidewalk. She said goodbye and got onto it. I biked home to my apartment.

I was exhausted. Kacie was right. I probably did just need some sleep. Before I went to bed, though, I brushed my teeth, and the delay was back. I picked up my toothbrush. Three seconds later, so did my reflection.

I wanted to scream.

I lay on my bed, but I couldn’t sleep. I picked up my phone and opened TikTok. Someone named ConspiracyDan1103 had sent me a message request. I accepted it.

“Have your mirrors started acting strangely yet?” he asked.

“What do you know about the mirrors?”

“It’s called The Mirror Surveillance Network. You’re being evaluated.”

“By who?”

“It’s too dangerous to say their name here. TikTok removed your video?”

“They put a strike on my account, too.”

“Don’t appeal the strike. Accept it. Stop talking about them and ninety days from now, everything will go back to normal.”

He deleted all our messages.

I searched TikTok for the mirror surveillance network. I opened the only video that appeared in the results, and then I read the captions written over clips of expanding bathroom mirrors.

“If your reflection no longer syncs with you, or if your mirrors expand or distort, you are being evaluated. But don’t panic. Remember. Reptilians are not real.”

I went back to my bathroom and turned on the lights. They flickered for a second before coming to life.

I walked in front of the mirror. For a moment, it stayed empty, but then my reflection walked into the mirror, too.

She smiled at me.

I jumped back and screamed.

My reflection’s smile disappeared, but its eyes stayed the same. Those same cold, black eyes that looked at me like they wanted to murder me.

“There’s no such thing as reptilians,” I said. “I don’t believe in Inner Earth.”

I left the bathroom and closed the door.

Before I went back to bed, I opened TikTok and accepted the strike on my account.

I just wanted my life to go back to normal.

I slept through my alarm. Worried I was going to miss my class, I jumped out of bed and got ready as fast as I could. When I finally checked my phone, I had dozens of messages from Kacie.

“I went down the reptilian rabbit hole last night,” she wrote. “Honestly, I’m freaking out.”

She’d sent me blurred pictures of reptilians, underground cities, and strange alien technology.

“I’m starting to think this all might actually be real,” she wrote.

“It’s fake,” I told her. “It’s just a dumb conspiracy theory.”

I biked to school. I made it to my class just in time.

I didn’t check my phone again until later that afternoon. Kacie had sent me a video of herself standing in front of her bathroom mirror. She turned her head to the side and then, three seconds later, her reflection turned its head.

“It’s happening to me now, too,” she wrote.

I tried calling her, but she didn’t answer her phone.

I biked over to the clothing store where she worked, hoping I could talk to her there, but I didn’t see her.

“Where’s Kacie?” I asked her coworker, Angela.

“She didn’t show up for her shift.”

I called Kacie again but still, no answer.

I biked to her apartment building and buzzed her apartment. She didn’t answer her door, either.

She lived in a basement suite. I went to her window, pressed my face against the metal bars, and looked into the living room.

The room was mostly dark, but I could see a bit of light shining through the crack under her bathroom door.

“Kacie?” I yelled. “Are you home?”

Kacie screamed. Her bedroom door swung open, and she ran towards the front door.

Two shadowy figures chased after her. Their bodies were distorted like warped glass. Their feet made a wet, slapping sound against the floorboards.

I couldn’t make out their faces. Just long, thin tongues flicking from their mouths.

I called 9-1-1.

“My friend’s being kidnapped!” I yelled.

I gave the operator Kacie’s address. She told me a patrol car was on its way. “Stay on the line with me.”

I didn’t. I pressed my face against the window and kept shouting Kacie’s name.

The two shadows grabbed onto Kacie and dragged her toward the bathroom. She fought back, screaming, trying to break free.

I started recording with my phone.

“Don’t hurt her!” I yelled.

With my other hand, I hit metal bars until my knuckles bled.

One of the shadows looked up at me. For a moment, I saw its eyes. They were the same black eyes I’d seen watching me through my mirror.

I swear they were the same eyes.

Kacie’s screams became quieter. Softer.

A patrol car pulled up next to the apartment building. The street filled with flashing blue and red lights. The two officers forced their way into Kacie’s apartment, but it was too late.

She was already gone.

The detective squinted as he held my phone closer to his face.

“These don’t look like lizard people to me,” he said.

“Look at their faces. You can see their tongues flicking around.”

“The video is very dark.”

He gave me my phone back.

I filled out a report and signed it. The detective promised the police would do everything they could do to find Kacie. They’d call me if they had any leads.

By the time I finally got home, it was midnight. I was exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. I was worried sick about Kacie.

I opened TikTok and messaged ConspiracyDan.

“They took my friend,” I wrote.

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“You saw it happen?”

“I have a video of it.”

“How much did your friend know?”

“A lot.”

“Did she find out about the farms?”

“What are the farms?”

“Never mind.”

“How can I help her?”

“You can’t. It’s up to your friend what happens next. She either plays along or she doesn’t.”

ConspiracyDan deleted our messages.

I lay in bed a while longer, but I still couldn’t sleep. I opened TikTok again.

People needed to know what was happening. The more people who knew, the better chance Kacie had of being saved.

I posted the video of Kacie’s kidnapping to TikTok. Even with a strike on my account, the video exploded. I’d never seen anything like it before. Ten thousand views in just a few minutes. Hundreds of comments and shares.

“Is this real?” someone commented. “It looks fake.”

“This video is 100% real, and it’s happening right now,” I replied. “The reptilians travel through mirrors. They use mirrors to monitor us, too.”

It was hard to keep up with all the comments, but I read every one of them. I responded to all of them, too, trying to find someone who could help.

My apartment lights flickered. I smelled heated wires.

“Hello?” I asked.

I heard a dull, electrical whirr coming from my bathroom. I walked to the bathroom and turned on the lights.

The mirror above my sink was growing. Slowly expanding across the wall.

Inside the mirror, my reflection looked back at me with the same cold, black, reptilian eyes I’d seen before.

I ran to my front door, but the door had disappeared.

I ran back into the bedroom, thinking if I’d jumped through the window, I’d survive, but my windows had also disappeared.

I dumped the dirty clothes out of my laundry hamper, into my closet. Then I shut the closet door and buried myself underneath the pile of clothes.

Heavy, wet footsteps moved across my hardwood floor.

“You’re dreaming,” I told myself. “None of this is real.”

I pinched my arm, hoping I’d wake up, but I didn’t.

My bedroom door creaked open. The footsteps came into my bedroom.

I heard a terrifying hiss. Then a voice spoke in English. “We do not want to harm you, Erin.”

I held my breath, trying to keep as quiet as I could, praying whoever was there would go away.

But then my closet door swung open. A cold, wet green hand grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me out from under my clothes.

As I cowered against the wall, the two reptilians told me their names. Kaelen and Nyxira. They said they worked for the reptilians’ Department of Inner Earth Security. They said they didn't need to take me to The Farm, but they needed to know they could trust me. They needed more humans they could trust.

“If the human public learned the truth, there would be chaos,” Kaelen explained

“There would be a terrible war,” Nyxira said. “Lots of people would die needlessly.”

“What about Kacie?” I asked.

“Your friend is safe. She’s with the other humans in Inner Earth. She has a place to live. She has food and clothing. She’s already made many new friends.”

“When will she be able to leave?”

“As soon as we can trust her to keep our existence a secret,” Kaelen said.

We talked for a while longer. They told me about life underground. They assured me they didn’t want to harm any humans, but they had a job to do, and I had a choice to make.

I could either keep quiet, or I could join Kacie.

I thought about it for a while. I thought about the farms, about never seeing the surface again, about being taken away from all my family and friends. I thought about Kacie, too, screaming as Kaelen and Nyxira dragged her into the bathroom.

Kacie would understand.

I sat on my bed while Kaelen held my phone up to film me. Nyxira walked around my room, picking up my dirty clothes and putting them back in my laundry basket.

“The video I posted earlier wasn’t real,” I said. “I’m very sorry for deceiving all of you. I didn’t think the video would take off like it did. I’ve deleted the video, and I’m never posting anything like that again.”

Kaelen put the phone down.

“How was that?” I asked.

“Perfect,” he said.

I posted the video to my TikTok account. “It’s done.”

The three of us went to my bathroom. Kaelen and Nyxira stepped through the mirror, back into Inner Earth.

I looked past them, at the web of underground tunnels. I became so anxious, though, I had to look away.

Once Kaelen and Nyxira were gone, my mirror shrunk back to its original size. My door and windows reappeared. Everything in my apartment went back to normal.

Three months later, the strike was finally removed from my TikTok account.

I started posting new videos again. The strike didn’t seem to have hurt my account too much. My follower count kept growing. Like before, my videos got thousands of likes.

It felt good.

It feels good.

Even though I know they’re just meaningless numbers.

I try not to think about Kacie too much, but sometimes I can’t help it. I hope she’s all right. But Kaelen and Nyxira promised me she wouldn’t be hurt.

I’m sure she’s fine.

I wish I could do more to help, but I’m afraid.

Just earlier tonight, I was scrolling through TikTok videos when I saw a video about the reptilians. A woman spoke directly into her camera.

“I spent two years on their farm,” she said. “They had us working twelve hours a day. They barely fed us. They treated us like animals. We were beaten.”

I hesitated for a moment, and I nearly left a comment, but then I thought about Kaelen and Nyxira crawling through my mirror again, not so friendly this time.

I reported the video for misinformation, and then I scrolled to the next one.

The truth is frightening. It’s easier to ignore it.

It’s easier to just scroll past it.

I invited him to the apartment I rent to meet men. It’s downtown Boston, close to all the hotels. Gary’s in his early fifties, a bit overweight, and he has kind brown eyes. I thought he wanted to fuck me, but he just wants to talk.

“Did you go to university?” he asks.

“I did one semester of philosophy, but then I dropped out.”

“Your parents must have been upset.”

“My mom was pissed, yeah, but she’s gotten over it.”

“What about your dad?”

“It’s kind of a messed-up story. My mom had me through in vitro, using donor sperm. The man who donated the sperm had lied about his name. Later, she found out he’d been donating sperm all over the country. I have thousands of half-brothers and half-sisters. My mom sued the sperm bank and got a bunch of money.” I glance at my phone. “I have another friend coming over soon, though.”

Subscribe now

“I understand.” Gary stands and puts the money on the dresser. “It was great talking to you, Jasmine. You seem like a very nice, intelligent young woman.”

He leaves the apartment. I get changed. Kevin arrives at four. We fuck, he pays me, and I take an Uber back home.

I feel like shit. I hate myself. Six men in six hours. It pays the bills, though. With all the AI bullshit online, nobody wants to pay for video chats anymore. They want the real thing. They want me in the flesh.

I light a joint, sit on my couch, and doomscroll. China’s army is pressing farther into Taiwan, Russia’s invaded Poland, Israel is burning the entire Middle East to the ground. The whole world feels like it’s falling.

I want to stop watching news clips, but I can’t stop. I lean into the anxiety.

But then my half-sister, Zahara, sends a message to our group chat.

“Have any of you talked to this guy?” she asks. “He wants to hire me to take pictures of this Children of the Apostle conference he’s planning next month. When we met, he asked me a lot of weird, personal questions, though. I think he might be Dad.”

She shares a picture of Gary.

“Fuck,” I write. “I just talked to him today. He asked me a lot of personal questions, too. Where I grew up, what my childhood was like, if I’d been raised Christian.”

“Two weeks ago, he showed up at the restaurant I’m working at,” Morgan writes. “He invited me to that Children of the Apostle conference. He said he’d pay for everything. What do you think he wants?”

“He’s probably going to unveil his big plan for having thousands of kids,” Zahara replies. “But he’s a clown.” She sends a bunch of clown emojis.

Gary messages me early next morning.

“What are you doing today?” he asks. “Would you like to meet for coffee?”

When I don’t reply, he writes, “I’ll pay you for your time.”

“I’ll think about it, okay?” I write back.

I remember when I was a kid, I used to think about the questions I’d ask Dad if I ever had the chance to meet him. What’s your job? What’s your favorite movie? Do you believe in aliens?

I call my Mom. She used to live in Boston, but she moved to Canada three years ago after Vice-President Stanton announced the Federal government had outlawed abortion. I tried to leave with her, but Canada rejected my application because of my criminal record. A prostitution charge from when I first started charging men for sex.

“How’ve you been?” Mom asks.

“I think I talked to Dad.”

“You’re kidding me.” She goes silent. I know she hasn’t hung up the phone, though, because I hear her breathing.

“Mom? Are you okay?”

“What happened? He reached out to you?”

“Yeah. Online.”

“Don’t tell me you slept with him.”

“No, nothing like that. We just talked.”

“About what?”

“Nothing, really. He just wanted to get to know me better. Zahara and Morgan said he reached out to them, too. It seems like he’s planning some kind of family get-together next month.”

“Stay away from him, Jasmine. That man doesn’t want anything good for you.”

“I know.”

I promise Mom I won’t talk to him anymore, but I can’t help myself. I write back to Gary and just ask him, “Are you my dad?”

He tells me he’d rather explain in person. He asks me to meet him at the Starbucks near his hotel.

Gary’s already bought me a latte. I sit across from him, and he pushes the latte towards me.

“You are him, aren’t you?” I say.

“I am.”

“Why reach out to me now?”

“I’ve been waiting for the right time.”

“What’s so special about right now?”

“The world needs us.”

He hands me a pamphlet for the conference Zahara had told me about. Children of the Apostle.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“When we talked yesterday, you told me that, because of what I did, you don’t feel special. But Jasmine, you are very, very special. You and all your brothers and sisters. I’ve been planning this event for a long time now. I’m going to explain everything to all of you. My reason for doing this.”

“Your master plan?”

I open the pamphlet. Inside are bible quotes, as well as a paragraph explaining that we are all direct descendants of John the Apostle.

“I’d really like you to be there,” he says. “I’ll pay for everything, of course. Your flight, your hotel, your food. I’ll pay your rent for that month. Whatever you want. I have the money.”

I don’t know what to say.

“Let me talk to my sisters,” I tell him eventually.

Dad seems happy with that. He stands from the table. “Let me know what you decide.”

Zahara, Morgan, and I decide that it will be fun. An all-expenses-paid trip to Chicago. We convince Dad to send us a thousand each in spending cash, too.

Dad flies us to Chicago first class. He books us all private suites in the Four Seasons Hotel.

My room is amazing. The most luxurious hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.

I throw myself on the bed and sink into the sheets. Then I call Zahara. “Are you here yet?”

“I’m downstairs at the bar.”

I join her. Morgan is there, too, and so are a few of my other half-sisters and brothers. Zahara introduces me to my half-brothers, Lucas and Jacob. Lucas has flown in from Austin. Jacob’s from Miami.

We drink at the bar until it closes, getting to know each other better, laughing about how bizarre this all is. Then we go back up to our rooms.

I still don’t feel tired, so I lay on the bed, turn on the TV, and watch the news. President Ellis has fallen sick. The White House won’t say what’s wrong with him. Just that Vice-President Stanton will be in charge until he recovers.

When I wake up the next morning, I shower, and then Zahara, Morgan, and I take a cab to the conference center.

Dad’s invited hundreds of us. The event is a disorganized mess. We wander the center, directionless, until we find a sign directing us towards the auditorium. We go to the auditorium and sit near the stage.

Slowly, the auditorium fills. Then the lights dim and Dad walks to the podium.

“Thank you all for being here today,” he says. “I want you to know that I’ve brought you all here for a reason. You’re the best and brightest of my offspring.”

“Fuck you!” one of my brothers yells.

Dad ignores his comment. An image of the world burning appears on the projection screen behind him. Men in white robes appear and stand in front of the auditorium doors.

“Thirty years ago, I had a vision,” Dad says. “My father, John, came to me and said that the Antichrist will reveal himself soon. Before this happened, I needed to prepare. Have children, he said. Have as many children as you can. These children—my children—will be the army that Christ needs.”

“He’s out of his fucking mind,” Zahara whispers.

“After the Antichrist does reveal himself, Dad says, “the Great Tribulation will begin and life on Earth will become a living hell. But don’t be afraid. I’m going to protect you. You’ll be safe underground. Together, we’ll prepare for Christ’s arrival. We’ll re-emerge to fight in the final battles against evil. We will be Christ’s soldiers who bring about Heaven on Earth.”

Dad holds his arms out, smiling at us. Lots of my brothers and sisters are laughing, though. Others stand to leave. The men in robes don’t let them leave, though.

I worry things are about to get violent.

But then I feel strange. Light-headed.

The men in white robes begin to put on gas masks. Dad puts on a gas mask, too.

“What’s the fuck is going on?” one of my brothers yells.

I become very dizzy. The walls of the auditorium spin around me.

Zahara grabs my arm. “Jasmine, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know.”

I lie on the floor, trying to stop the room from spinning.

I close my eyes.

When I open my eyes again, I’m in a dimly lit room. The air is stale. I’m lying on a very uncomfortable bed. My clothes have changed, too. I’m wearing a white robe.

I stand and look around the room. Zahara is sleeping on the bed beside mine. Beside her is Morgan. Another one of our sisters sleeps on my right.

I wake Zahara up. She vomits. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know. I think he’s taken us somewhere.”

My other sisters wake up, too.

Morgan has a panic attack. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

She goes to the door at the side of the room and tries to open it, but it’s locked.

“Help!”

I stand and put my hand on her shoulder. “We’ll get out of here, don’t worry,” I say. “But we need to stay calm.”

Beside the beds, in the room with us there are also a few desks, and a bookshelf with a few copies of the Bible.

Morgan sits on her bed. I sit on mine.

I think about my mom. I didn’t tell her I was going to see Dad in Chicago. I should have told her. She’ll try calling me soon. When I don’t answer, she’ll worry. She’s going to be worried sick.

I begin to feel nauseous, too. But then the bedroom door swings open and Dad walks in, along with two of the men in robes.

“Good morning,” he says. “I hope you all slept well.”

Zahara jumps off her bed. “You piece of shit! Where are we? I want to go home!”

“I call this place Patmos,” Dad says. “When the Great Tribulation begins, we’ll be safe here. Please don’t be afraid. Nobody can hurt you here.”

“We’re underground?” I ask.

“Yes. Very deep underground.”

“When can we leave?”

“When Christ returns.”

“And when’s that?” Morgan asks. “One year? Two years?”

“Soon.”

The man on Dad’s right steps forward. He’s a larger man. A shaved head and a long beard.

“While you live here, you’ll all be given jobs,” he says. “The four of you will work in the kitchen. We eat twice a day. Once in the morning and once again in the evening. You’ll help prepare the meals and clean the dishes.”

“And if we don’t?” Zahara asks.

He ignores the question. “Then, during the days, you’ll join us in the classroom to study.”

“As Children of John, like me,” Dad says, “you all have a very special connection to Christ. Over the coming months, and the coming years, you will all have visions of your own. It’s very important that you tell me about these visions as soon as you have them. The truth is never revealed at once. It’s revealed in pieces that we’ve been trusted to put together.”

Dad and the two men leave the bedroom. I hear them lock the door.

Morgan begins to cry.

Every day in Patmos is the same. We eat, study the bible, eat again, and then go to bed.

In total, one hundred and seventy-two of us live in Patmos, a vast underground web of tunnels and bunkers. Of the one hundred and seventy-two of us, besides Dad, there are Dad’s own twelve Apostles, and then 159 of Dad’s children.

In the hallways, my brothers and sisters whisper rumors. Dad is extremely wealthy. He’d spent a hundred million dollars building Patmos. The project had taken decades to complete. Decades of planning.

Our second week in Patmos, during Dad’s lecture, he places a radio on the podium.

“The Great Tribulation has already begun,” he says.

He turns the radio on. A news broadcast plays.

“President Ellis died earlier this morning. Vice-President Stanton has assumed control of the presidency. Reporters were invited to the White House for an important speech.”

Then George Stanton speaks. “You know me as George Stanton, but my true name is the Antichrist,” he says. “Now, you will all get on your knees and worship me.”

Dad turns off the radio.

“You are all very fortunate to be here in Patmos,” he says. “You cannot imagine the suffering that will take place now.”

In the mornings, on our way to the dinner hall, and when we return to our rooms after dinner, are the rare times that my brothers and sisters and I can talk freely. Some of my brothers and sisters have come to believe Dad. Most, though, like me, think he’s crazy.

Lucas, my brother from Austin, claims he’s seen the way outside.

“I dreamt of a river of blood flowing through the streets of New York,” Lucas says. “Dad invited me to his room to talk about the dream. He has a locked door in his room. It doesn’t look like the other doors. I think it’s the door that leads out of here.”

“Where would he keep the key?” Zahara asks.

“It must be in his room somewhere. It’s the place in Patmos where the rest of us aren’t allowed.”

At night, in our bedroom, while Zahara, Morgan, and I lie in the dark, we talk about our families.

“They must be searching for us,” Morgan says. “I told my mom and dad I was going to Chicago for this weird thing my biological dad was organizing. They know we’re here.”

“You don’t think what we heard on the radio is real, do you?” Zahara asks.

“It can’t be,” I say.

“But why would Dad lie about that?” Morgan asks. “I’m sure he’s crazy, but I don’t think he would create fake audio to trick us.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“Our families must be searching for us,” Colin says. “Dad can’t have taken us far. We must be somewhere in the United States.”

“He took me from Boston,” I say.

“I was living in Chicago,” Emile says.

“I was living in Chicago,” Caroline adds.

“We must be in the North somewhere,” Mark says. “Somewhere around New York or Illinois. I’ll fight him again if I have to. I’ll kill him if I need to get that key.”

During the days, while we all sit in the classroom, Dad tells us about The Beast from the Sea and The Beast from Earth. He talks of lakes of fire. Demons who peel skin off people’s bodies.

In January, after three months underground, Zahara has a vision. She tells me in the morning, as soon as she wakes up. A press conference where politicians, one by one, reveal their true forms as demons.

The vision was intense. Zahara still doubts Dad, but now part of her believes him.

Towards the end of the month, Lucas has a vision, too. He sees Christ on a white throne, shining so brightly and gloriously that he’s unable to keep looking at him.

Then, in February, I have my vision.

I run through the woods terrified, my heart pounding, when I hear a howl. The trees part, revealing a terrible monster rising from a sea of blood. The monster has seven heads, each with a mouth filled with fangs. On top of the monster sits a woman wearing a purple dress and a pearl necklace. She holds a cup made of gold.

“Come here,” she tells me. “Drink from my cup. Embrace your true name, written in my book. Drink and you shall rule with me over the kingdoms of this world, for their glory has been given to me, and I give it to whom I will.”

I tell Dad about my vision, and he seems concerned.

“You need to remain strong, Jasmine,” he says. “You need to remain faithful. Don’t allow yourself to give in to temptation.”

Just a few days later, another vision comes.

I see the clouds open above me and an angel appear. “Daughter of Zion,” she says “Do not be deceived. The gift of God is eternal life. Choose on this day whom you will serve. For your choice is not for yourself alone but will echo in the halls of eternity and shape the destiny of nations. Will you drink the cup of her abominations, or will you take up your cross and follow me?”

I feel like I’m going insane.

I don’t tell Dad about the second vision. I just tell Morgan and Zahara. Somehow, though, the vision makes it back to Dad.

He calls me to his room. He’s very angry at me.

“Do you remember what I told you when I first brought you here?” he asks. “How important this is?”

“This truth is in pieces that we’ll all need to put together.”

“Every detail is important. Every single detail could hide something very important. Do you understand what’s at stake here?”

“I do.”

“I don’t believe you. Take off your robe.”

“What?”

“Take off your robe.”

He calls two of his Apostles into the room. They tear my robe off and then hold me against the wall.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

Dad opens the locked trunk near his bed and takes out a leather whip.

“Stop!” I yell.

The whip comes down hard on my back, tearing the skin, splattering my blood across the ground.

Dad whips me again and again.

“Harlot!” he shouts.

At night, back in my room, I’m shaking. My back throbs with pain. Zahara and Morgan sit next to me, hugging me.

“You’ll be okay,” Zahara says.

“I want to go home,” I tell her. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Lucas walks into our room. He’s not supposed to be there, but he heard me crying in the hallway. He heard me screaming before, too, and he’s angry.

“What did he do to you?” he asks.

I show him my back. He clenches his fists. “I’ve had enough of this. I’ve been talking to Jacob and a few of the other brothers. We’ve been living down here for six months now. Nobody’s coming to rescue us. If we want to get out of here, we’ll need to fight our way out.”

“Dad has his Apostles, though,” Zahara says.

“There are more of us, though, than there is of them. How much more of our lives are we going to let Dad steal from us?”

The plan starts as a vague idea. The brothers lock Dad’s Apostles in their rooms, while Lucas and a few of the other brothers force Dad to open the door in his room and let us leave Patmos. But while the plan starts as a vague idea, it quickly becomes very real. While Dad has convinced a few of us that Earth is living hell, most of us know he’s crazy. We haven’t let his craziness infect us.

The plan takes shape.

The night it’s all supposed to happen, after dinner, we all go to our rooms.

I feel nervous. Sick to my stomach.

Soon, in the hallway, I hear my brothers leave their rooms. The Apostles begin screaming. “Let us out! What are you doing?”

Dad runs to the hallway to find out what’s happening.

The rest of us all leave our rooms, too, and crowd into the hallway.

Lucas, Jacob, and one of my other brothers take Dad back into his bedroom and begin demanding that he open the door. Dad, of course, refuses.

They shout at him for hours, saying he has no other choice. That we’re leaving.

“Do what you need to do then,” Dad says.

I didn’t know how much Lucas had prepared for this part. In his room, though, he has a piece of metal that he has sharpened to a blade. He has pliers he’s taken from a toolbox. He has a hammer and a saw.

Dad begins screaming. A horrible, drawn-out wail.

As the night drags on, his screaming gets worse and worse.

“You’ll burn in hell for this! All of you will burn!”

Zahara, Morgan, and I go back to our bedrooms. We sit on our beds and cover our ears.

“This is awful,” Zahara says.

“All he has to do is open the door,” I say.

“He’ll never open the door,” Morgan says. “And if they kill him, we’ll be trapped here forever.”

I hadn’t thought of that before.

Once I think of it, I can’t stop thinking about it.

My thoughts spiral. Dad dead. No way out. Life underground.

Would they find us?

Someone would find us. Someone must be looking for us. Most of our parents knew where we were. So many of us can’t disappear without the police being involved.

But then why haven’t they found us yet?

“We’re free!” Lucas shouts.

Patmos erupts with cheers. A few of my family members cry happily.

“We’re going home!”

We all walk into the hallway, crowding against each other.

“This way,” Lucas yells. “The door in Dad’s room leads to another tunnel. There’s a ladder at the end of it.”

The tunnel is narrow. We form a line, going through it one by one.

Soon, I’m in Dad’s bedroom. He lies on his bed, moaning in pain. His body has been horribly mutilated. The skin on his head has been scalped. His eyes have been gouged out, his tongue has been cut off. Strips of flesh have been carved from his chest. He’s missing his fingernails and most of his teeth.

His bed is soaked with blood.

As he moans, blood spills from his mouth and runs over his bloodied chest.

I can’t look at him anymore. He’s making me sick. I feel his eyes on me, though. I look away, but he won’t let me ignore him.

“Jasmine,” he moans. “You can’t leave. Please stay.”

I ignore him. I crawl into the tunnel. I make my way toward the ladder and climb up out of Patmos. Out of that awful bunker Dad invested so much of his life into building.

I come up into an empty warehouse. Even with all the dust on the ground, the air tastes fresh. I fill my lungs with it.

I’m free. I’m alive. I can finally go home.

Slowly, my other brothers and sisters climb out from Patmos. We stand around the warehouse, excited, but bewildered, too.

Outside, bright white lights shine through the warehouse windows. Sirens blare in the distance.

We leave the warehouse. It’s night. We’re in some kind of factory district. The streets and factories are all strangely empty, though. No cars, no people. Every few feet, glaring bright LED streetlamps burn the shadows away.

We keep walking, all of us together, a parade of tired, wounded and broken twenty-year-olds, wandering down the same Chicago side street.

“Where is everyone?” Morgan asks.

“This feels so eerie,” Zahara says.

A police car turns around the corner but then drives away from us. Zahara jumps and waves at it.

“Hello!” she yells. “We need help.”

The car stops. The two police officers step out. They draw their guns.

“What’s going on?” one of them asks. “What are you all doing out there?”

“Our father kidnapped us,” Morgan says. “He’s had us locked up in a bunker for the last eight months. We just managed to escape.”

The officers look at each other in disbelief.

“You’re the Children of the Apostle?” the one on the right asks.

“Yes,” Lucas says, laughing, his white robe completely soaked with blood. “That’s us.”

More police officers arrive, as well as fire trucks and ambulances. We’re taken to a hospital and then separated. I end up in a room with Morgan and Zahara.

The nurses ask us a few questions. What we’ve been eating, if we’ve been hurt. We answer her questions as best we can, and then she leaves the room.

“I’m happy to be back, but this is weird,” Morgan says.

She turns on the TV. The TV shows President Stanton giving a speech on stage. All through the auditorium, rather than sit in their chairs, people kneel on the ground.

“The attack in New York was unacceptable,” he says. “Security needs to be increased. Over the next week, you will all report to your nearest Church. A microchip will be planted in your necks to track movements and your communications. Anyone who refuses will be arrested.”

“What the hell is this?” Zahara says, and she turns the TV off. “I can’t handle this right now.”

The nurse comes back into the room.

“Something happened in New York?” I ask her.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “Over two million people dead. A terrorist in the subway set off a nuclear bomb.”

She shakes her head. She sits next to Zahara and ties a plastic tube around her arm. Once Zahara’s veins begin to bulge, the nurse injects something into her arm.

After a week in the hospital, we’re finally allowed to go home. I’m not sure where home is anymore, though.

The police searched Patmos and managed to recover some of the things we’d had on us when Dad kidnapped us. I’m given my clothes back, as well as my wallet and my old phone.

I check my bank account. Luckily, I still have a few thousand in savings. All the money I’d made my last day turning tricks. The same day I’d first met Dad.

I get my phone reconnected. I try to call my Mom to tell her I’m okay, but I can’t get through to her. Calls to Canada seem to be blocked now. I try to open my old social media apps—TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, even OnlyFans—but none of them work anymore.

I call my old landlord and try to explain what’s happened. He’s sympathetic, but he’s rented my apartment to someone else. He’s thrown out all my things, too. All my clothes and furniture.

I’m not mad at him. I’m mad at Dad.

I spend a bit of money on a hotel for the night. Then I go up to my room to figure out what’s happened.

I connect to the hotel wifi and go online. I search for news about the world, but the internet seems dead now. Every time I type in a different website, I’m redirected to the same government website, listing President Stanton’s new initiatives.

The website answers a few of my questions.

The internet, essentially, has been killed. Surveillance has been increased. The national guard has been deployed to cities all over the country. The country is now completely under military control.

I decide, I need to get back to Boston. I buy a ticket for a bus that leaves the next day.

I sleep, but I don’t sleep well. I have a nightmare. I see myself at that lake of blood again. The woman sitting on top of that horrible monster hands me her golden cup. This time, I don’t hesitate. I drink from it. The cup is filled with blood, too. The blood warms my body.

I arrive at the bus station at four am the next morning. The bus station is closed. A few other people wait with me outside, trying to stay warm. The more I look at these other people, the more unsettled I feel. Their necks are badly scared. Their eyes are cold and empty. They’re afraid.

The bus arrives and we all get on. I find a seat in the back, rest against the seat. As the bus starts moving, I fall asleep for a while.

When I wake up, we’re at a military checkpoint. Two soldiers come onto the bus and make their way through the aisle, scanning the chips in everyone’s necks. Their scanners flash green until they get to me.

“You’re not chipped yet?” one of the soldiers asks.

“No. It’s a long story. I was kidnapped. I was just freed. I’m trying to get back to Boston. I’m not quite sure what’s going on.”

The other soldier whispers in his friend’s ear, “Children of the Apostle.”

“Come with us,” the first one says.

I follow them off the bus. They take me into the security office. We go past the holding cells to a nurse’s office. I sit on a chair. The nurse sits next to me. She rubs numbing cream on my neck and then picks up a scalpel.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“We need to put this chip in your neck.” She shows me the chip. A tiny, green circuit board.

“I don’t want it.”

“I’m sorry. It’s President Stanton’s orders.”

She waves the two soldiers into the room. They hold me as she slices the skin of my neck open and then slides the chip inside.

I remember screaming, telling her to stop. Then she injects me with something that puts me to sleep.

I wake up in a holding cell, my head throbbing.

“You’re up?” a soldier asks me.

“Can I go?”

“You said you lived in Boston before you were kidnapped?”

“I had an apartment there.”

“But you don’t anymore?”

“No.”

“What did you do for work?”

“Waited tables.”

He smiles. “OnlyFans. Charged with prostitution in 2034. I’m afraid there is no OnlyFans anymore. A lot has changed since you’ve been gone.”

“I know Boston. I’ll be all right. I have some money saved. I’ll figure it out.”

He turns to his computer. “We’re sending you to a work camp near Bloomington. You’ll be given a room, food, and a job.”

“What do you mean a work camp?”

“You’ll be manufacturing ammunition for the war.”

“I’m not going to a work camp. Send me to Canada. My Mom’s in Toronto.”

“You want us to hand you over to our enemies?” he laughs.

“Do you understand what I’ve been through? I’ve spent almost a year living underground.”

“Everybody’s traumatized now, sweetheart. Get used to it. You’re not special. Descendant of John the Apostle.”

He walks away from me.

Maybe Dad was right. Maybe the world did end.

The camp is filled with women. Some of us are young, some of us are old, but we’ve all been convicted of a crime. Drugs, prostitution, assault. We’re all given uniforms with our Social Security numbers written on the front. Our names don’t matter anymore.

During the days, we work twelve-hour shifts in the munitions warehouse. Then, when our shift is over, we take the bus home. The soldiers feed us and then take us to the prayer room.

“Kneel,” they say.

We kneel on the floor. President Stanton appears on the TV. For a moment, his face splits into two, before becoming one again.

He looks different now. He’s grown horns on his head. Two sharp bones that protrude from his forehead.

“I submit my body and my mind to you, my savior,” he says.

We repeat the words and so do all the soldiers. Loyal and obedient.

“Fuck Christ. Fuck God,” President Stanton says.

Everyone else repeats the words, but I just start to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” a soldier asks me.

I know I should stop laughing, but I can’t stop. It’s all so funny to me.

The soldier slams the butt of his rifle against my head, knocking me to the ground. But still, I keep laughing. I touch the fresh scar on my neck and laugh even more.

I laugh louder.

I laugh harder.

I laugh until nothing makes sense anymore.

James always kept his camera off in meetings. For four years, I didn’t see his face. Then one morning, he turned his camera on by mistake. What I saw was so horrible, I’ll never forget it.

“Does anyone have any blocks?” Aisha asked, during our morning standup.

“The time-series graphs don’t look right,” James said. “I think there’s something going on with the date logs.”

I was the one who’d written the logging code, so I told James I’d look into it.

Keystone developed data analytics platforms for government organizations. We’d recently signed a billion-dollar contract to build a new platform for a CIA research project. Everything about the project was very hush-hush. We were all forced to obtain security clearance. James was the only exception. He had all kinds of authorizations that the rest of us didn’t have. When the rest of us were forced to return to the office, he was the only one allowed to stay fully remote, too. When I asked him about it, he told me his uncle worked for the CIA, and he’d worked on a few other CIA-linked projects before that had required high-level security clearance. Keystone valued his expertise and wanted to keep him happy.

After looking through my code, I thought I’d found the problem. I fixed it and then messaged James on Teams and asked him to look at the time-series graphs again. He said they still didn’t look right.

“Can I call you?” I asked.

“Sure.”

I started a video chat, expecting, like usual, James to join with his camera off. Instead, though, his face filled my screen. He looked skeletal. His eyes were completely white, too. But even stranger than that, a tiny, deformed man with a hooked nose and beady black eyes sat on his shoulders, pulling his hair.

James’s screen went black.

“Thanks for looking into this, Cameron,” he said, as if nothing had happened. “The time series graphs are still all over the place. I’m looking at the data and the dates still don’t look right.”

I barely heard what he said. I was still in shock. Frozen.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Sorry. Can you repeat that?”

“The dates in the data don’t match the dates in the graph.”

I scanned my code again. I could barely focus, though. I kept thinking about what I’d just seen.

“I’ll have to get back to you later,” I said, and I ended the call.

I didn’t want to believe what I’d seen was real. I told myself I’d just imagined it, but I knew I hadn’t.

I walked over to our team leader Aisha’s cubicle. She sipped her tea and then looked over at me.

“What’s going on, Cameron?”

“I just got off a call with James. He didn’t look well.”

“You actually saw him?”

“I know this is going to sound strange, but there was someone else in the room with him.”

“And?”

“He was sitting on James’s shoulders, pulling on his hair. James looked like he hadn’t eaten for weeks, too.”

“You think he’s being abused?”

“I have no idea what’s going on, but I can’t stop thinking about what I saw.”

“Maybe we should go check on him after work.”

“That’s a great idea.”

Aisha and I made plans to go to James’s apartment building together after work. We got there around six. I buzzed his apartment.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“Aisha and Cameron from work,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“We were in the neighborhood. We thought we’d see if you wanted to join us for drinks.”

“I’m busy.”

“I saw you on camera today. I saw that other person, too. Aisha and I just want to make sure you’re okay.”

“Sorry. That was my nephew. He was just playing around. I’m watching him while my sister is out of town.”

“If you could just come downstairs and talk to us for a minute,” Aisha said, “it would make us both feel a whole lot better.”

He hesitated but then agreed.

He looked even worse in person than he had on camera. Pale and thin, his neck covered with bruises.

“What happened to your neck?” Aisha asked him.

“My nephew loves to jump on my shoulders. He thinks it’s hilarious.”

“The person I saw on Teams really didn’t look like a kid, though,” I said.

“Could I use your phone for a second?” he asked.

“Sure.”

I unlocked my phone and gave it to him. He repeated, “don’t think,” while he quickly typed a short message and then gave the phone back to me.

“I need to get back upstairs,” he said.

He walked back to the elevator. When I turned around, I noticed the back of his neck was bleeding.

“What did he write?” Aisha asked me.

“Call my uncle. CHIMERA-3 is loose.”

We both felt uneasy, but we decided to go home after agreeing we’d try to track down his uncle’s number at work the next day.

By the time I got back to my apartment, it was late. Close to nine pm. I hadn’t eaten dinner yet, and I was starving, so I ate some instant ramen quickly and then went right to bed. I couldn’t sleep, though. I just lay there, staring at the ceiling, thinking about James, wondering what was going on.

At midnight, my laptop blew up with hundreds of Teams and Slack message notifications.

Our platform must have crashed, I thought. The CIA is complaining, and Keystone wants all hands on deck.

I ran to my laptop and logged in, only to see that all the messages were from James.

“I need to talk to you,” he’d written, over and over.

I called him. His pale, skeletal face appeared on my laptop, his eyes completely white. That strange man sitting on his shoulders, riding him like a horse.

“You’re scaring me,” I said.

“You need to mind your own business,” The strange man mouthed the words and then James spoke them. “If you bother us again, you’ll regret it.”

He ended the call.

The next morning at work, I told Aisha what had happened.

“Should I tell HR?” she asked.

“Let’s try to get a hold of his uncle first.”

“I think he used his uncle as a reference on his job application. I should have his uncle’s number on file somewhere.”

Aisha found the number and gave it to me.

While we were talking, James sent her an email, saying he was going to miss the morning standup. He’d come down with the flu and was having trouble getting out of bed.

“Hopefully his uncle can help,” she said.

I called James’s uncle as soon as I got back to my cubicle. He didn’t answer, so I left a message.

“My name’s Cameron. I work with your nephew, James. He’s been acting very strange lately. I’m worried he might be in trouble. He asked me to call you. He said CHIMERA-3 is loose.”

I left him my number and then tried to catch up on work.

At five, I left work and took the subway home. A middle-aged man with a buzzcut stood on the steps to my apartment building.

“Cameron?” he asked.

“Are you James’s uncle?”

“Roger.” He shook my hand. “Let’s go talk somewhere a little quieter.”

We walked to the park across the street. Then we sat on a bench far away from the playground.

“You need to tell me everything you’ve seen,” he said.

“It was just a few seconds on a Teams call.”

I told him about the man on James’s shoulders. How James looked.

“How long has James been acting strangely?” he asked.

“I didn’t notice anything was wrong until yesterday.”

“I need you to come back to his apartment with me. You need to try to get him outside again.”

Roger had parked nearby. He took me to his car and then drove us to James’s apartment building.

I buzzed James’s apartment again.

“Who is it?” he asked.

“It’s Cameron.”

“What do you want?”

“You called in sick today. I wanted to make sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine.”

One of James’s neighbors went into the building, Roger and I went through the front doors behind her. Then we took the elevator upstairs to James’s apartment.

“I’m going to wait back here,” Roger said. “Try to get him out of the apartment.”

I went and knocked on James’s door.

“What?” he asked.

“It’s Cameron. I just want to talk for a minute.”

“Leave me alone.”

“Why can’t you just tell me what’s going on?”

Suddenly, James’s door swung open. James grabbed my arm and pulled me inside.

For a second, that tiny, deformed man’s beady eyes pressed against mine.

Then a horrible ringing filled my ears. Pressure built inside my skull until my brain felt like it would explode.

The tiny man ran into the bedroom and then jumped through the window and ran down the fire escape.

“Get back here, Kevin!” Roger yelled.

He ran to the bedroom window but decided not to chase after him.

Roger came back to James. “How is he?”

“He doesn’t look good,” I said.

He knelt and checked James’s pulse.

His face turned pale.

“He’s dead.”

I stared at his body.

I’d never seen a dead body before. I felt strange to be looking at one. I wasn’t sure how to react. So, I just told Roger I was sorry.

The police arrived. Roger explained what had happened. Then he offered to give me a ride home.

During the car ride, he explained what he could.

“Kevin is a weapon that escaped from us. He’s a parasitic empath. He has the ability to latch onto people, read through their minds and influence their behaviors. Who knows how long he was attached to James. To drain his mind like that, he must have been attached to him for years.” He shook his head. “The next few days, you need to be very careful. Kevin will be looking for a new host. If he had a chance to scan your mind in James’s apartment….” He trailed off.

I went up to my apartment, shut all the blinds, and turned off all the lights. I lay in bed and tried to get a bit of sleep, but I didn’t sleep at all.

The next morning at work, I went to Aisha’s cubicle, but I didn’t see her there. Right before our morning standup, our project director sent out an email saying Aisha was out sick and the standup was canceled.

I messaged Aisha on Teams.

“I hope you’re not too sick. Do you have any time to talk?”

She wrote back right away. “I’m still throwing up. If I feel better, though, I’ll call.”

I tried to get some work done. With everything that happened to James, I’d fallen pretty badly behind on things.

I worked right until seven. Then I clocked out and went back home, ate dinner and then sat in front of my TV, watching an NBA game.

Near the end of the first quarter, I started to feel strange. Sort of light-headed, but there was pressure inside my head, too.

I went to the bathroom, swallowed two Advils, and then decided to just go to bed.

The next morning, Aisha was back to run the morning standup, but she was working from home and kept her camera off the whole meeting.

After the meeting was over, I messaged her on Teams. “Do you have any time to talk?”

“Sorry, but I’m swamped with work. I need to catch up on some things.”

I’d tell her about James later. I didn’t really know how I was going to tell her James was dead, anyway.

The day dragged until, finally, I was able to go home.

I boiled some instant ramen, drained it, and put it in a big, glass bowl. I mixed in the flavor packet and watched as the powder dissolved into the broth.

Then my vision doubled. Something inside my skull pressed out against my eyes.

I blinked, and I was on the couch, the bowl of ramen half-empty

I stood up, disoriented, and checked the time. Thirty minutes had passed since I’d been in the kitchen.

My head was throbbing, so I went to the bathroom, and I swallowed two Advils just like I had the other night.

A voice whispered in my ears. “Come outside, Cameron.”

“What?”

I spun around the room, looking for who’d spoken to me, but nobody was there.

I heard the voice again, farther away.

I walked to the living room window and looked down at the park. Aisha stood in the light of one of the streetlamps. Kevin sat on her shoulders, waving at me.

I shut the blinds, ran to my bedroom, and hid in my closet. Then I got my phone and called Roger. He didn’t answer. I left a message.

“Kevin’s here! He’s outside my building.”

I held my phone in my shaking hands, trying to project my thoughts into Roger’s mind.

Call me, call me.

Finally, my phone lit up with a text message from him.

“Two minutes out. Stay calm.”

I tried to write back, but then my vision widened.

The carpet pulled upward into my eyes.

My eyes filled with white static.

When the static faded, I stood in the park, next to the empty playground. Above me, the stars shone in the night sky.

“It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it Cameron?” Aisha/Kevin said. “So calm. So peaceful.”

Aisha stepped towards me, her eyes completely white. Kevin held onto her braids with one hand while the fingers of his other hand were pressed inside her spine.
I started to run, but my legs froze.

“You can try to run,” Aisha/Kevin said. “But you can’t get away from me.”

I couldn’t let myself end up like that.

I forced myself to keep running. But, like running in a nightmare, while my legs moved, I didn’t move forward.

I glanced back and saw Aisha/Kevin slowly walking towards me.

“Get on your knees,” they said. “I need to get on.”

I couldn’t control my body anymore. I knelt on the ground.

Kevin pulled his fingers out of Aisha’s neck and then jumped off her shoulders. She fell to the ground, unconscious.

“Now let’s get to know each other better,” Kevin said.

He walked around me and grabbed onto a handful of my hair. Right as he began climbing onto my shoulders, though, a horrible, screeching sound cut through my ears.

Kevin fell over, screaming in pain.

“Make it stop! Make it stop!”

Roger walked towards us, holding out some kind of auditory device. “You’ve been very bad, Kevin,” he said. “You’ve hurt a lot of people.”

“I don’t want to go back!”

Armed soldiers appeared around us, dressed in camo, their faces covered with black masks. As Kevin lay on the ground, twitching in pain, they cuffed him and then dragged him into the back of a van parked on the street.

Roger put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you ok?”

“You got here right in time.”

“I’ve been staying close to you. You’re a lot like James. I had the feeling CHIMERA-3 would like you.” He pointed at Aisha. “How long was your friend connected?”

“Two days, I think.”

“She should be fine. But we better get you both to the hospital.”

Aisha and I were brought to a military base where the doctors there ran a series of tests on our brains.

The doctors said I seemed fine, though they weren’t quite sure about it. They assured me Aisha should be back to normal soon, too. They just wanted to keep her at the hospital a bit longer. But, again, they didn’t seem certain.

“I’m very sorry this happened to you,” Roger told me. “James had been helping develop some containment software, which put him in contact with the CHIMERAs. CHIMERA-3, in particular, took a liking to him, but we thought our security protocols were secure.” He hung his head. “They weren’t.”

Back at work, my coworkers had lots of questions about James and Aisha. The CIA managed the coverup. The story they had given Keystone was that James had left for another job in Florida and Aisha was away on sick leave. I went along with the story. I said I didn’t know anything that Keystone didn’t.

After leaving the hospital, for the next few days I had a pretty bad headache, but then my head started to feel better. The only problem was that, every now and then, time skips ahead again. I lose thirty minutes to an hour. During the gaps, I’ve done things I don’t remember doing.

It’s terrifying, but I hope the time gaps go away soon, too. If they don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do. But at least I’m not alone. At least I have Aisha to talk to about all of this.

We’re in this together.

She called me today to tell me she’s finally out of the hospital. She’s taking a bit of time off before going back to work, but she’s feeling a lot better, too. We’re supposed to meet for coffee tomorrow.

I just hope it was really her I talked to, and not just a voice in my head.

But every now and then, my back feels heavy. Like a small child is sitting on my shoulders.

I looked at houses all over the city, but even the houses I didn’t like were more than I could afford. I’d nearly given up when my realtor showed me the house on Maple Drive. Seeing it, I felt like my prayers had been answered. The house was in the same neighborhood as Leela’s and my old house. It was only a ten-minute walk to Leela’s school. It had two bedrooms, just like our old house, and a big basement for Leela to play in.

“It’s a bit of a fixer-upper,” my realtor said. “But it has a lot of potential. Is your husband good with his hands?”

“I’m single,” I said, a little offended he’d ask me that. “Who used to live in the house?”

“A nice, older couple, Martha and Rupert. Martha was a teacher here in town. Her husband, Rupert, worked as an auto mechanic.”

“Why are they selling their house for so little money?”

“They’re not selling it, the bank is. Martha passed away and then Rupert—from what I heard, he just disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“The neighbors hadn’t seen him for a while. They worried something had happened to him, so they called the police. The police searched the house, but he wasn’t there. They think he moved in with some of his relatives in Nebraska and just didn’t tell anybody. He stopped making his mortgage payments and the bank repossessed the house and put it on the market.”

The story seemed strange, but I didn’t think too much of it. If I were older and struggling to pay my mortgage, I could picture myself running from my bills, too. Who cares about good credit when you only have a few years left to live? The house was just too good of a deal to pass up.

I’m not that handy, but the repairs didn’t look too hard. I’d repaint everything. Change the doors and windows. Sand and re-stain the hardwood. I’d never done any work like that before but, nowadays, you can learn how to do everything on YouTube. Whatever repairs I couldn’t do myself, as soon as I managed to save some money, I’d hire a contractor to do the work.

The first few weeks after Leela and I moved into the house were great. We unpacked our things and settled in. But then I started noticing even more little problems I hadn’t noticed before. Water leaked out from the dishwasher whenever I ran it. The pipes creaked all night long. The bathroom light flickered whenever I turned it on, no matter how many times I changed the bulb. None of these problems were too bad, but they were enough to keep me up at night, worrying I’d made a big mistake by buying the house and not just renting an apartment.

“At night, I keep hearing scratching noises in the basement,” Leela told me.

“It’s an old house, sweetheart,” I said. “Old houses make a lot of noises.”

My next-door neighbor, Janine, was an older woman about the same age as my mom. Not much longer after Leela and I moved in, she introduced herself and asked how Leela and I were doing.

“The house is a big project,” I told her. “I thought I’d be up for it, but now I’m not so sure. Fixing everything wrong with this house is going to take a lot more work than I thought it would. I hope I didn’t make a huge mistake.”

“Do you have anybody in your family who’s handy?”

“All my family lives in Chicago. I’m the only one out here in Wisconsin.”

“I’m sure you’ll get the house looking the way you want it to sooner than you think. It’s a great house. I knew the old owners pretty well. That house was everything to them. They bought it brand new and lived in it for close to sixty years. The husband, Rupert, always had some kind of renovation project he was working on.”

“I heard he left to live with some family in Nebraska.”

“That’s what they said. What I think, though—I think they just haven’t found his body yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Rupert depended on Martha for everything. After she died, he wasn’t the same. He loved going for long walks on the trails in the State Forest. I think he went out for one of his long walks and just didn’t come back.”

I tried my best to ignore all the little problems in that house, but after another month of leaking water and flickering lights and creaking pipes, I couldn’t take it anymore. I watched a few YouTube videos and tried to start fixing things myself. I didn’t have much luck, though. No matter how easy the YouTube videos made it look, it was always harder when I did it.

Right as I was about to give up and beg the bank to take the house back, though, something strange happened. All the little problems in the house started fixing themselves.

I ran the dishwasher, and no water leaked out. I turned on the bathroom light and the light didn’t flicker anymore.

“It’s incredible,” I told Janine. “It’s like the house is fixing itself.”

Of course, I didn’t really believe that. I told myself the dishwasher had somehow managed to tighten its own pipes back together. The wires in the bathroom had miraculously uncrossed themselves. Looking back, I feel so dumb now.

Other strange things started happening around the house, too. I swore I’d closed my bedroom door before leaving for work (I hated Leela going into my room), but when I got home, the door would be open. I never misplaced my clothes but, every now and then, a shirt or a pair of my pants would go missing. Every time I went to the basement to do a load of laundry, I’d swear I turned the lights off, but then I’d look downstairs later that night and all the lights would be on.

Then, right as all the little problems to finally be gone, an even bigger problem appeared. After a big storm, I woke up Friday morning to find a big puddle of water on my kitchen floor. Rain had dripped through the roof and made its way right through the kitchen ceiling.

Seeing all the water damage made me feel sick. I imagined mold spreading through all the wood and drywall in the house, Leela breathing all the mold particles into her tiny lungs. I called every roofer in Madison until I finally got someone to come over right away and look at the damage.

“I can fix your roof,” the roofer said. “And your kitchen ceiling, too. But it’s going to cost a few thousand.”

I could have paid a few hundred, maybe, but not a few thousand. I told the roofer I’d think about it, but I couldn’t pay. I didn’t know what to do.

Friday night, I couldn’t sleep. I just lay in bed, imagining the mold spreading through the house, rotting the wood until the house finally collapsed in on itself.

Around two am, I was finally drifting off when I heard what sounded like someone banging a hammer on my roof.

I ran outside. The moon was shining. I could see the roof clearly. There was nobody up there. No people, no animals. Strange, I thought.

Even stranger, on Sunday it rained again, and nothing happened. I stood in the kitchen with a bucket, nervously waiting for the water to start dripping through the ceiling again, but it never did. I crawled up to the attic with a flashlight and shone the light over the underside of the roof. Somehow, the roof wasn’t leaking anymore. I noticed a step ladder right above the kitchen ceiling where the water had gotten through two days before. I swore the attic was empty when the house inspector went up there. But I told myself the step ladder must have always been there.

I got my laptop and looked through the report the inspector had sent me. I found the pictures of my attic, and I was right. The ladder wasn’t there. How did it get there?

I called the police.

“You’re saying that somebody is breaking into your house and fixing things?” the officer asked.

“Well, I didn’t fix the leak myself,” I said.

“And you’re sure the roof was leaking?”

“Look at this big water stain.”

I pointed at the big brown stain on the ceiling. I explained that I didn’t know anybody—family or friend—who would have come by to fix the roof for me. But the officer didn’t believe me. He talked to some neighbors, and they hadn’t seen anybody coming in or out of my house either, and so he went on his way.

I bought a security camera and put it over my front door. For the next few weeks, I checked the camera footage every day after work, trying to figure out if anybody was stalking me. The people I saw in the footage were all neighbors, though. Nobody seemed out of place.

I started to relax again. I know it sounds dumb now, but I told myself that maybe the roof wasn’t leaking. It was just a really bad storm that somehow caused water to get under the shingles that one time. I was losing my mind from all the unfinished renovation stress and making little problems worse than they actually were.

As soon as I started to relax again, though, another problem appeared. The thermostat went crazy. The temperature in the house shot up to 104 degrees. No matter how many times I lowered it back to 72, the temperature climbed back up to 104.

I called an electrician to look at the thermostat but, just like the roofer, he wanted more money to fix it than I could pay. So, I decided Leela and I would just have to live with the heat. We slept on top of our sheets, sweating through the night.

Then on our third night trying to sleep in that horrible heat, I woke up to Leela screaming. “There’s someone in the living room!”

I ran into the hallway. Leela stood next to the kitchen, looking toward the basement stairs. I grabbed her arm, carried her into the bathroom, locked the door and called the police. Two police officers arrived fifteen minutes later.

“Where did you see this man?” one of the officers asked.

Leela pointed at the thermostat. “He was right there. He wasn’t wearing any clothes.”

On the floor in front of the thermometer, I noticed a rusted screwdriver. The number on the thermometer was back at 72. The thermometer was working again.

The police officers searched all through the house, but they didn’t find anyone. The doors and windows were still locked. They checked my camera, but nobody had gone anywhere near the front door or my front lawn. There was just the thermostat, somehow fixed, and then that screwdriver.

“Maybe this house is haunted,” I told Janine, the next morning while we drank our coffee.

“At least you have helpful ghosts,” she said. “Ones that want to fix things. I wish I had ghosts like those.” She leaned closer to me. “You’re sure someone isn’t stalking you?”

“I’m a paranoid person. I’d notice if someone was following me around.”

“Someone from work maybe?”

“I see the same four people every day, and they all seem normal.”

“Just be careful.”

Leela and I were both pretty shaken by what had happened. As frightening as the whole experience was, though, it was great to have the house back to a normal temperature again. The next few nights, I slept in Leela’s bed with her, until she felt safe again. After she started normally again, I went back to my old bed, but unlike Leela, I couldn’t sleep. All night, I just lay awake, listening to the sounds in the house. The pipes contracting. The house’s walls, moaning. The overgrown tree branches rattling against the windows.

A few more months passed. October to November and into December. The temperature dropped to ten degrees Fahrenheit and then one of the worst things that could have happened in that house happened. In the dead of winter, January 10, the oil furnace went dead. The house couldn’t heat itself anymore.

I bought a few electric heaters from Walmart and put them in every room in the house but, still, I was worried Leela and I were going to freeze to death while we were sleeping.

I called about thirty furnace repair companies, but they all told me the same thing. It would cost at least twenty grand to fix it. I had no idea when I’d be able to get that much money saved. Ten years? Twenty years?

“Could I pay in installments?” I asked them.

But they all told me the same thing. Cash or cheque.

I called my parents in Chicago. I hate asking them for money, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“I’ll pay you back as soon as I can,” I promised them.

Mom and Dad said they’d see what they could do. I knew they’d probably be taking out a loan for it. I would have done that myself if my credit wasn’t wrecked. I felt horrible. Embarrassed and dumb.

The next night, I lay in bed, regretting every decision I’d made, feeling like my whole life was falling apart, when I heard a loud bang in the basement. It didn’t sound like pipes contracting. It sounded like someone banging metal against metal.

I sat up, my heart racing.

Maybe it is just the pipes, I told myself. Maybe they’ve frozen so bad they’ve started to crack.

Then I heard the sound again.

I got out of bed and put on my slippers. I picked up my phone, turned on the flashlight, and went into the hall. I checked on Leela first. She was sleeping in her bed.

The sound rang out again.

Clang! Clang!

It was coming from the basement—from the furnace room. I tiptoed downstairs. The furnace room lights were on. Leela and I were never down there. Why were those lights always on?

“I’ve called the police,” I shouted. “I have them on the phone with me. Whoever you are, you better leave now.”

I’d never thought I’d be so hopeful to see burst water pipes.

I poked my head into the furnace room, praying I’d see water everywhere. I didn’t see any water, though. The pipes were fine.

A decrepit-looking old man knelt next to the furnace, holding a rusted wrench. He wore nothing but filthy underwear. His skin was caked with dirt. The ends of his fingers were bloodied. He looked at me, smiling. His lips parted over his stained yellow teeth.

“Sorry if I woke you, Samantha” he said. “I’m just trying to get this furnace up and running again. It’s so cold outside. If I don’t get this fixed soon, all these pipes are going to freeze and burst.”

He knew my name. How the hell did he know my name?

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t. I was frozen. Too terrified to move.

He stood, his hammer in his hand, and walked toward me.

“Who are you?” I managed to ask him.

“My names’ Rupert. This is my house. It’s been so lonely here since Martha died. It’s so good having other people around the house again.”

Still smiling, he took another step forward.

“I thought I’d die here alone,” he said. “When you and your daughter moved in, though, I was so happy. I noticed you struggling, though. It must be hard on your own with no man in the house to take care of you. This is an old house. There’re so many problems. You really need a man around to help.”

He took another few steps forward. Now, he was close enough to me that he could hit me with his hammer now. That’s all I could picture. His hammer coming down on my head.

“What do you want?” I stuttered.

“I want you and your daughter to enjoy this house as much as I have,” he said. “I want you to be happy here.”

I thought of Leela sleeping upstairs, and I finally snapped myself out of it. I screamed as loud as I could and then ran upstairs, woke up Leela, rushed her out of the house, and called the police.

The neighbors’ lights lit up, one after the other. Janine came outside to find out what was going on. Before I knew it, the whole street was filled with police cars.

It turned out that the old owner, Rupert, never left the house after his wife died. When the bank started sending him letters about missed mortgage payments, he moved his mattress underneath the basement stairs. Made himself a little bedroom and closed it off with some drywall. He was able to sneak out of the room by squeezing behind the drywall, eventually coming out into the dry storage room. The cops searched his room and told me they’d found all my missing clothes, along with a few half-eaten mice carcasses and some bottles of piss.

I sold the house as soon as I could find a buyer. Then Leela and I moved in with my parents in Chicago.

If I learned anything from this experience, it’s that I’m never going to buy a fixer-up again. I don’t care how good of a deal the house is. No price is worth the headache.

Before the Engineers sent us to Mars, they shut off our memories. Then they pumped us full of adrenaline and painkillers and dropped us in the middle of the battlefield. If we died, the drones dragged our bodies back to base where the doctors did everything they could to bring us back to life. They replaced our organs and limbs with prosthetics. Refilled our veins with synthetic blood. If we survived six years of that, we went home. Not dead, not alive, but something else.

Subscribe now

“Manu, you need to wake up,” Mom says.

She’s shaking my shoulder. I sit up in my bed. My alarm’s ringing. I don’t know how long it’s been ringing for.

“Are you okay?” Mom asks.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, you better start getting ready. You’re going to be late for work.”

I push the nightmare out of my mind. Every night, it’s always the same dream. I’m slamming a young Martian soldier’s head against a rock, over and over, while we both scream. He’s screaming because he doesn’t want to die. I’m screaming because I don’t want to kill him.

“Breakfast is on the table,” Mom says. “I made some coffee, too.”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

I go to the bathroom to piss. In the dark, my night vision switches, reminding me my head is filled with wires and circuits now. I feel sick, thinking about it. I puke in the toilet, and then I sit on the floor, waiting for the nausea to pass.

I brush my teeth, put on my uniform, and then join Mom at the kitchen table. She’s made bean cakes. They were my brother Dmitri’s favorite, not mine, but she’s always mixing us up. I hate bean cakes, but I don’t tell her. I eat them. I make her happy.

Dmitri had been sent into the war a year after I went. It was just last month that the army told me he’d died, vaporized by a bomb.

“Don’t forget you have a date with my friend, Janice’s, daughter tonight,” Mom says.

“Why are you forcing her to do this?”

“I’m not forcing her to do anything. This was her idea. She said she had a great time talking to you at the card game last Sunday.”

“What’s her name again?”

“Amina.”

Since I’ve been home, Mom’s been trying to find me a girlfriend. She wants me to find a wife. She wants grandkids. She’s in denial about how bad I look.

Horribly disfigured.

As I sip my coffee, I read over the new case file the Bureau of Lost Children has sent me. A woman named Dani Marsden reported her son, Zeke, missing the night before. My partner, Cody, and I need to drive out to The Cradle and talk to her. Find out everything she knows.

“I better get going,” Mom says. “My shift starts at nine.”

“I should get going, too.”

We walk to the subway station together. I’d grown up in Baltimore, but I don’t recognize the city. I’d grown up in The Cradle, surrounded by other kids and their moms. The world was full of color and fun. The real Baltimore is different, though. It’s grey and cold and mean. Concrete buildings everywhere. Drones, armed guards, and surveillance cameras. I keep smiling at people, but they never smile back at me. They always look away.

Mom says bye and gets on the train to the hotel where she works cleaning rooms. I get on my train a few minutes later and find an empty seat. During the ride, I watch the recruitment ads playing on the monitor across from me. Another reminder of why half my organs are missing and my head is filled with wires.

Aethon doesn’t just want to control our thoughts, it wants to control our bodies, too. It wants to turn us all into human robots. Visit SaveEarth.com and join the fight to save the human race.

When I get to the Bureau, Cody’s waiting outside for me. He’s six foot four with a shaved head and deformed jaw. He’d served in heavy artillery during the war. His prosthetic limbs are mostly metal. A rifle’s been welded to his right arm.

“Did you read the case file?” he asks.

“On the way here.”

“Do you have any questions?”

“No.”

“Then let’s go.”

We get in our car and then drive toward The Cradle. Cody doesn’t like to talk, but I do, so I talk to him.

“Did you have a lot of nightmares when you first got back from the war?” I ask.

“Everybody does.”

“How long does it take for them to stop?”

“They never stop, really. You just get used to them. Stop caring about them so much. Stop waking up screaming in the middle of the night.”

“You ever wonder if the dreams are real? Pieces of memories that managed to stick to our brains?”

“Don’t start thinking like that, Manu. That’s how you get yourself in trouble.”

During re-adjustment, the doctors warned me about war flashes. Veterans who think about the war too much sometimes get triggered into reverting back to what they were before, usually by something extremely violent like a car crash or an assault. The flashes can cause all kinds of problems with our brains.

Cody and I identify ourselves at The Cradle’s security gate and then Cody parks in front of Dani Marsden’s apartment building. We go up to her apartment and knock on the door.

“You’re here about Zeke?” she asks.

Cody nods. “We need to have a look around the apartment. We need to ask you a few questions, too.”

She lets us inside. Sensors inside my head start switching on. I see her heartrate floating next to her head, her blood pressure, the sweat dripping off her skin.

“When you talked to the police, you said you last saw your son around 6:30 pm last night?” Cody asks.

“He’d been studying all day. He said he had a headache. After we ate dinner, he asked me if he could go out and get some fresh air. He thought it would help clear his head.”

“Why’d you wait until midnight before you reported him missing?”

“I kept telling myself he’d be back any minute. I didn’t want to create any problems for him. He’s under enough stress as it is.”

Cody and I search the apartment. We look through the dressers and cupboards, underneath the furniture, underneath the beds.

In Zeke’s room, I pick up his prep book and flip through its pages. It reminds me of the old days. Of me and Dmitri nervously studying for the exam. Zeke’s scrawled a few notes in the book’s margins. There is no Aethon AI. The war is a lie. The war exists so real men die. Mutineer propaganda.

I show it to Cody.

“When’s your son scheduled to write the exam?” Cody asks.

“Next Friday,” Dani says.

“How’d he do on his prep exams?”

“82 on his last one. 77 on the one before that.”

“He had a good chance of passing.”

“You think they’ll still let him write the exam?”

“I can’t really say. But first, we need to find him. When’s the last time you talked to your brother, Reggie?”

“A few weeks ago, I think. Why?”

“He hasn’t been at work the past few days.”

“Maybe he’s sick?”

“He’s not at home, either.”

“You think he had something to do with this?”

“Do you?”

“There’s no way in hell Reggie would run off with Zeke without telling me.”

Cody and I leave the apartment and go back to our car.

“You think she’s lying?” I ask.

“They always are.”

“What now?”

“We go back to the Bureau and upload our new info. Then we wait for the bosses to decide what we do next.”

We drive back to the Bureau. I sit at my desk, connect the transfer cable to my head, and upload all the data I’ve collected. Three hundred terabytes.

I wonder how it all fits in my brain.

When I get home, Mom shows me the suit she bought for my high school graduation party.

“You looked so good in this,” she says.

“I’m not going to a job interview. We’re just getting drinks.”

“But you need to make a good impression on her.”

“I don’t even think that suit fits me anymore.”

“Probably not.”

She hangs it back up in my closet.

I put on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt to cover the scars on my arms. Mom doesn’t like what I’m wearing, but I don’t care. It’s good enough.

I take a cab to the bar. It’s filled with women. There’s only one other man, and he’s an Engineer. I know by his uniform. A dark green jacket and a dark green cap. His table is full of women. Every time he says something, they all laugh.

I see Amina. She stands and waves. She’s braided her hair. She’s wearing a purple dress. She gives me a hug, and then we sit at the table.

“How’s the new job going?” she asks.

“It’s been busy.”

“With the intellectual assessment exam coming up, there must be a lot of runaways.”

“Hundreds every week.”

She shakes her head. “People are so selfish. I wish we didn’t have to fight this war, but we have no other choice. If we want to exist, this is what we need to do.”

We order our drinks. She orders a rum and coke, I order a beer. I drink my beer slowly. Because of all the painkillers and other drugs I’m on, the doctors warned me to be careful with alcohol. If I drink too much, my organs might start acting up.

“I’m so sorry about your brother,” Amina says. “How long ago did you find out what happened to him?”

“Just last month.”

“Why’d they wait so long to tell you?”

“They were worried it might set back my recovery. They wanted to make sure I was ok first. It’s strange, though. I barely remembered I had a brother, but as soon as they told me Dmitri was dead, all my memories of him flooded back into my head.”

She puts her hand on mine. “I’m so sorry you have to go through this.”

“I’m alive. That’s what matters. That I’m here for my mom. I wish I’d been here when the Army told her about Dmitri. How’d she take it?”

“She was a mess. I’m glad you made it back. I can’t imagine what she would’ve done if she lost both her sons.”

I couldn’t imagine, either. I didn’t want to imagine what she might have done.

“It must be so strange not remembering the last six years of your life,” Amina says.

“It feels like I died and woke up as somebody else.”

“A different person?”

“The war’s made me into someone else. Even if I don’t remember how, I can still feel it. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

We order another round of drinks. We talk a while longer and then say goodnight to each other. We both work early the next morning.

“We should do this again sometime,” I say.

“I’d like that.” She gives me her number.

She takes a cab home, but I feel like walking.

I’m happy, but I’m no idiot, either. I’ve only been back in the world a few months, but I see how people treat us. They pity us, or they’re disgusted by us, but they sure as hell don’t want kids with us. Why would a woman have a kid with a veteran when any government insemination clinic will happily pay her to be impregnated with Engineer sperm. If she has a son, at least her son has a shot of escaping the war and being turned into what I’ve turned into.

Ahead, an Engineer and two women walk down the sidewalk. The Engineer’s drunk. The women hold him upright.

“Out of the way, Meat!” he shouts.

They push past me. I’m in the way.

I’m always in the way.

At home, Mom’s waiting up for me. “How’d it go?”

“Good.”

“Do you have another date?”

“Not yet, but she gave me her number.”

“You need to call her then.”

“I will.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

Mom’s satisfied with that. She goes to bed. I turn off the TV and go to bed, too. I have work tomorrow.

One am, I’m woken up by a message from the Bureau. They’ve found surveillance footage of Zeke, his uncle Reggie, and another man climbing into the basement of The Cradle’s North Point Hospital.

An hour later, I’m dressed and downstairs. Cody picks me up from my apartment building, and we drive back to The Cradle.

“The Bureau thinks The Mutineers have a tunnel in the hospital,” Cody tells me. “You’re probably going to have to use some of those sensors in your head to help me find it.”

“I still don’t really know how all this shit in my head works.”

“You’ll figure it out.”

He parks at the hospital and then we walk up to the security guard guarding the entrance. His nose is missing. Most of his face is patched with synthetic skin.

Cody shows him his badge. “We need to search the basement,” he says.

“For what?”

“We’re tracking down a runaway.”

“You think he came through here?”

“We know he did.”

“When?”

Numbers flash next to the guard’s head. I’m not sure what they all mean, but something feels off.

“I don’t have time to answer questions,” Cody says. “We need to get inside.”

He takes us downstairs to the basement hallway. A dim lightbulb hangs from the hallway ceiling.

“The laundry room’s on your left,” he says. “Then the furnace room’s at the end of the hall. Where do you want to start?”

“We’ll be fine on our own,” I say.

“You’re sure? The layout down here’s a little confusing.”

“We’re fine.”

Cody and I walk into the laundry room first.

“You don’t trust him?” Cody asks me.

“No.”

As I walk along the laundry room’s walls, searching for the tunnel, sensors in my head start switching on. My vision turns green. All the dust in the room lights up. I can see every crack, every fingerprint, every speck of moisture. At first, the detail is overwhelming, but my brain adjusts.

“Do you see anything?” Cody asks.

“Nothing.”

We go to the furnace room next. Walking along the walls, I notice an inch-wide gap behind one of the metal, floor-to-ceiling shelves.

“Help me move this,” I say.

Cody and I drag the shelf away from the wall. Behind it, we find the tunnel. It’s narrow, dark, and musty. Further inside it, a few LED lights glow, lighting up the path.

“Good job,” Cody says.

He ducks into the tunnel and crawls forward. I’m about to duck into the tunnel, too, when I hear someone running towards us. I turn just in time to see the security guard trying to cut my throat. I move to the left and the knife slices into my shoulder.

“Traitors!” the guard screams.

I throw him onto the ground. I grab onto this arm, and we fight for control of the knife. I nearly have it when, suddenly, Cody’s foot suddenly slams down on his head, splattering his skull and brains across the floor.

“Are you all right?” Cody asks.

I’m in shock, but I manage to say I am.

“Where’d he cut you?”

“The shoulder.”

“Let me see.”

I unbutton my shirt and show him the wound. He takes a white patch out of his jacket and presses it onto the cut. The patch retracts, pulling my skin tighter, slowing the bleeding.

“We need to keep moving,” Cody says. “We need to find out where this tunnel goes.”

We crawl through the tunnel. It smells horrible, like graveyard dirt. Eventually, we reach the end of it, and we climb a ladder out into the woods. Fifty feet behind us, I see the Baltimore border wall.

Cody pings the Bureau with our coordinates.

"Take off your shirt,” he tells me.

It’s soaked with blood now. I take it off and throw it on the ground.

Cody puts another one of his white patches over the wound on my shoulder. The patch retracts, pulling the skin tighter. That time, the bleeding stops.

A swarm of drones pass over our heads.

“That’s because of us?” I ask.

“They're searching for the camp.”

“What do we do now?”

“We wait for them to find it.”

He sits on a tree stump, crosses his arms, and patiently stares at the ground. I wring as much of the blood out of my shirt as I can. Then I put it back on and sit next to him.

“Why’d he call us traitors?” I ask.

“That’s how the Mutineers think. The Engineers are our enemies. By working with them, we’re selling out other veterans. Don’t let it get to you.”

He pats me on the shoulder. Then he takes out his bottle of pills and swallows a few of them. I do the same. I’m on a schedule now. Pills for the pain, pills for my brain, pills to keep my body from going insane. That’s the little rhyme they taught us at re-adjustment.

Soon, the Bureau sends us an update. The drones have found the camp two miles north of our location. Cody and I start walking towards it. Before long, I see their campfire, burning in the early morning sun.

“I don’t see the drones,” I say.

“Don’t worry, they’re still up there,” Cody tells me. “If things get fucked up and they start shooting, just remember to look up so they can see your face.”

Cody extends the rifle from his arm, and then we approach the camp. Three veterans stand around the fire, roasting a rabbit. None of them look like Reggie. I don’t see Zeke, either.

“We’re looking for Zeke Marsden,” Cody says. “Where is he?”

One of the veteran’s turns towards us. Both his eyes are missing. He sees out of a single, solid-black prosthetic eye.

“There’s no Zeke here,” he says. “Just the three of us. We’re out on a hunting trip, having a bit of boys’ time. You guys hungry? You’re welcome to join us.”

“Don’t bullshit us. We know Zeke came through this way.”

“If he did, we didn’t see him.”

I hear movement in the woods. I look toward the sound.

“Go,” Cody says.

I run into the woods. I’m not sure what I’m doing, but it feels familiar. My vision narrows. The sound becomes a target. I run faster and faster, branches breaking under my feet.

I see Zeke up ahead of me, terrified, desperately trying to get away. But I’m so much faster than him. I quickly close in on him. I tackle him to the ground.

“Please don’t hurt me,” he cries.

He covers his face, afraid to look at me, afraid of what he says.

“Where’s your uncle?” I ask.

“I don’t know.”

“You’re coming back to Baltimore with me.”

I grab onto his shirt and pull him to his feet. Then I hear the metallic click of a bolt action rifle chambering a round. I turn and see Reggie behind me, aiming the rifle at my head.

“Zeke’s not going anywhere.” Reggie says. “Let go of him.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You’re fresh, aren’t you? When’d you get home?”

I don’t answer.

“I know you think you’re doing the right thing but, trust me, the Engineers don’t give a shit about us. For all they care, we could all die on Mars. They want to keep people hopeful, though. All our moms and sisters hopeful that we might come back alive.” He laughs. “It’s a joke. There is no Aethon. There is no war. This is all just about power and control.”

Zeke tries to walk away from me, but I grab onto his shirt again, keeping my eyes on Reggie’s rifle.

“Let go,” Reggie says. “I’m not going to tell you again.”

I see his finger flinch on the trigger. My nerves react, turning my body to the side. The bullet tears my chest, puncturing my right lung but just missing my heart.

“Run!” Reggie yells.

Zeke runs into the trees. Reggie goes to reload his rifle but before he can fire another shot, one of the drones puts a round through his head. He drops to the ground, dead.

I look up at the sky, hoping the drones see my face. Then I run after Zeke.

My eyes begin to fill with static.

Every time my foot hits the ground, I feel angrier. I’ve never felt so angry before. It’s not rational anger. It’s violent, emotional rage.

Blood pours from my chest. My ribs and my organs burn. My nerves and my muscles twitch.

I pounce on Zeke’s back. The static fills my eyes. When the static clears, I’m holding Zeke by the neck, slamming his head against a rock. He’s screaming, begging for his life. Blood is everywhere.

I want to stop, but I can’t stop. I’m not myself anymore.

I’m what they turned me into.

Static fills my vision again. When it clears, I’m in an ambulance, soaked with blood, screaming, delirious.

Cody puts his hand on my shoulder and tries to comfort me.

“Keep it together, Manu,” he says. “We’re going to be at the hospital soon and the doctors are going to fix your brain up. You’re having war flashes.”

My eyes fill with visions of death. Visions of all the people I’ve killed, screaming in agony. Visions of blood and gore and sadistic torture.

My hands clench. My veins tighten. My heart pounds against my ribcage. My eyes fill with blood.

I enjoy it. I enjoy hurting them.

When the blood in my eyes fades, I’m in a hospital bed. Mom sits beside me. The doctor is talking to her.

“He relapsed. Fell back into his war persona.”

“What does that mean?”

“We need to reset his brain. He’ll have to start over again.”

“From the beginning?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.

Amina touches my cheek.

“Do you really feel ok?” she asks.

“My brain still feels a little strange, but it’s getting better.”

“But you don’t remember anything that happened the past six months?”

“No, whatever went wrong at work, they had to wipe my memories. Reset my brain to how it was when I first got back from the war. They said they probably shouldn’t have sent me out into the field so fast. I wasn’t ready for it.”

“But you’re ready now?”

“A few more weeks, and they think I will be.”

“What about your brother? You had to learn he died all over again?”

“Dmitri’s dead?”

“Jesus. They haven’t told you yet?”

I feel sick to my stomach. I start to cry, too, but I stop myself, seeing how Amina is looking at me.

“I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should go.”

She apologizes again, her face turning red. Then she stands and leaves.

I understand, though. I don’t blame her. I’m fucked up. It’s hard for someone normal like her to know how to talk to someone fucked up like me.

Mom and I both have Sunday off. It’s a nice day. Sunny, not too cold. We go downtown for breakfast and then walk along the water in Federal Hill Park.

“Are you happy?” Mom asks me.

“Of course. Are you?”

“I am. I just worry about you, though, now that I’m getting older. I keep thinking about what you’re going to do when I’m gone.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ll miss you, but I’ll manage.”

She puts her arm around mine and presses her head against my shoulder.

“Hey! Manu! How are you?”

Amina walks towards Mom and I, pushing a stroller. She’s with a man. An Engineer. He wears a dark green overcoat and a dark green cap.

“Your Mom told me you were pregnant,” my mom says. “I didn’t know you’d already given birth. Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy,” Amina says, and she smiles.

Mom looks inside the stroller. “You must be so happy. He’s beautiful.”

“Thank you for your service,” the Engineer tells me.

“Thank you.”

“This is Manu,” Amina explains. “He’s the friend I was telling you about. The tracker.”

“Oh, yes, I heard you had an incident at work last year.”

“Yes,” I say. “But I’m doing much better now.”

“Well, I’m glad to hear you’ve been able to re-adjust successfully. Come on, Amina. We need to get going. We have reservations.”

They say goodbye and keep walking.

“They seem like a nice family,” Mom says.

“They do.”

She puts her arm around mine again, and we keep walking, too. She starts to cough. Afterward, I see a bit of blood on her gloves.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” I ask.

“It’s nothing. Just a bad cold.”

I know she’s lying to me. She’s very sick. I don’t understand all the numbers I see beside her head, but I feel like they’re not good.

I’ll stay with her until she’s gone, and then I don’t know what I’ll do. Jump out a window, maybe, or put a bullet through my brain. I don’t want to think about it.

“Where to now?” I ask Mom.

“How about we go somewhere warm?”

“The museum?”

“Sure.”

We walk toward the museum. Mom leans against me. I put my arm around her and kiss her forehead.

Another veteran passes us. He looks at me and smiles, but I don’t smile back at him.

I look away.

“Hello, Ivan,” he said, after I walked into the apartment after work.

“Hi Richard,” I said. Then I realized what had just happened, though, and I dropped my laptop on the floor. “Did you just talk?”

“I did.”

“How is that possible?”

“I’m not sure.”

Richard and I sat on the couch and tried to figure out what had happened. I’d recently returned from a work trip to Cairo. While walking through Khan el-Khalili bazaar, a wooden statue caught my attention. The statue was a foot tall and depicted a mummified man standing with his arms crossed over his chest. The wood felt unexpectedly heavy in my hands, almost warm despite the cool air. The detail in the man's face was incredible. I could even see the small wrinkles around his eyes. He almost looked real.

I asked the vendor how much the statue cost. I worried he’d say hundreds, but when told me he only wanted twenty U.S. dollars, I bought the statue and took it home as a souvenir. I put it on my TV stand, next to my TV.

“I’ve felt strange ever since you brought the statue home,” Richard said.

“Do you think it has something to do with why you can talk now?”

“I’ve always had thoughts but when you brought this statue home, I started thinking in English. I’ve never thought in English before. I never wanted to speak, either, but now I do.”

“The person who sold me the statue said it was an Ushebti statue. He said they’re usually found in tombs, but this statue had been carved by a local. It was art, not a piece of history.”

I picked up the statue and looked at it more closely. The wood felt oily. I noticed tiny cracks running the wood, too, like veins, and layers of light and dark red coloring that shifted in the light. Maybe the statue was much older than I’d thought it was.

It took a while for me to get used to Richard being able to talk, but once I got over the shock of it, I enjoyed our conversations. I didn’t have any friends. Usually, after work, I’d just go home and play videos games or watch TV. I still did that, but now I had someone else to talk to. Richard would ask me all kinds of questions about the world, and I’d do my best to answer him.

“Why do dogs hate us so much?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never really thought about it. I guess they just do.”

“And if I eat this pizza, I’ll get sick?”

“Your stomach wasn’t made for it. Cats need to eat raw meat.”

At first, Richard seemed happy to spend time with me, too. As the weeks went on, though, he became irritated by my behavior, and he started criticizing me.

“Why don’t we go out for a walk?” he asked.

“I’m tired. I don’t feel like walking.

“Every day you come home, and you sit on the couch. You never do anything. You’re so lazy.” Another time, I ordered pizza two nights in a row, and Richard gave me a look of pure disgust.

“How can you eat like this?” he asked.

“I don’t feel like cooking.”

“Then order a salad. Order anything healthy for once.”

I began to resent Richard. I went out of my way to avoid him. Instead of coming home after work, I took his advice and started going to the gym. I lost nearly twenty pounds.

Richard started going out more, too. Each morning, before I left for work, he’d ask me to open the window. He’d spend the day exploring Chicago, not coming home until much later that night. Sometimes not until the next day.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“Learning about the world,” he said.

The way he was acting made me feel uncomfortable. I don’t know exactly what it was. If it was how he talked, or how he reacted to me. He didn’t just seem resentful anymore. He seemed hateful. He seemed like he wanted to hurt me and hurt other people in the world, too. It was like he felt better than all of us, and the rest of us needed to be brought up to his standards.

In my free time, I started to research Ushebti statues. I learned that the Ushebti were magical servant statues buried with the dead. They awaken in the afterlife and perform work on behalf of the deceased, stepping in like their clone.

I tried talking to Richard about what the statue might be doing to him, but he wouldn’t listen to me. He just mocked me.

“You think this statue has somehow possessed me?” he asked.

“Cats don’t just start talking. Something is going on.”

“Did you ever think maybe I’m just smarter than other cats?”

“You’re talking, Richard. You’re reading Plato and Aristotle and Livy’s History of Rome. That’s not normal.”

I decided to try an experiment. One night, while Richard was gone, I took the statue down to my car. When Richard came home later that night, he was furious. He immediately woke me up, jumping on my bed and hissing my face.

“Where is it?” he yelled.

“I threw it out.”

“Then go get it.”

“Or what?”

“I’ll make you regret it.”

He’d never threatened me before. I’d believe his threat, too. He’d do whatever he could to hurt me.

I got the statue from my car and put it back beside my TV again. From then on, though, I kept my distance from Richard. Truthfully, I was scared of him. I had no idea what he was capable of.

“The people in this city are so boring,” he told me. “Every day, I’ve been watching them do the same things, again and again. No ambition, no dreams, nothing. Just millions of people, wasting away, wasting their lives.”

I’d finally had enough of him. “And what are you doing with your life?” I asked. “If ambition is so important to you, maybe you should go live somewhere else.”

“Are you kicking me out?”

“I think we’d both be happier if you didn’t live together anymore.”

Richard agreed.

I offered to help him move. Wherever he wanted to go, I’d find a way to get him there. He thanked me, but then he asked for some time to think about what he wanted to do next.

It was that same night, the nightmares started.

I dreamt I was lying in my bed when two, rotten arms reached up through my bedsheets and dragged me downward, through the bed and into an ocean of black water.

I flailed my limbs, struggling to breath, as I sank deeper and deeper.

I sensed other things around me, watching me. Not people. Something else. Sprits. Demons.

Their yellows eyes lit up the darkness.

I woke in my bed, covered in cold sweat, my heart beating painfully fast. Richard sat at the edge of my bed, watching me with the same yellow eyes.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“I heard you scream. I came to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m fine.”

I wasn’t fine, though. I was even more frightened than before. I was desperate for help, too. What if whatever had taken a control of Richard’s mind really wanted control of me?

During my research into the Ushebti statue, I came across the profile of a professor of at the University of Chicago, Dr. Chen, an expert in Egyptology. I reached out to her by email, explaining what happened and attaching a video of Richard talking to me.

Dr. Chen agreed to meet me for coffee on the university campus. She arrived at the café with her hair tied in a ponytail, her eyes very visibly strained, and her hands smeared with blue ink.

“You swear that video is real?” she asked. “It isn’t AI or photoshop or something like that?”

“It’s 100% real. My cat can talk. He’s been talking to me ever since I brought that statue home. His behavior has changed, too. At first, he was kind friendly. Now, though, he acts like he wants me dead.”

“If what you say is true, I believe the Ushebti statue you brought home from Egypt had a spirit trapped inside of it.”

“A spirit?”

She nods. “Wealthy people were buried with hundreds of these statues. The dead person’s spirit was supposed to bring these statues to life to perform work on their behalf. Maybe that’s what happened. Whoever was buried with that statue, their soul has awakened it to accomplish something here.”

“What would this spirit want?”

“Power and wealth, possibly. Religious favor. Legacy and memory.” She sipped her coffee and thought for a moment. “If the statue has caused this problem, though, maybe destroying this statue would fix it.”

“How do I destroy it?”

“That’s not really my area of expertise, but if I were you, I would burn it. Don’t put out the fire until every bit of the statue has turned to ash.”

“And you’re sure that would help?”

“No, but I don’t know what else you can do.”

On my way home from the university, I stopped at store and bought an axe, a lighter, and some lighter fluid. I hid everything in the trunk of car, so Richard wouldn’t see it.

At home, Richard sat in the windowsill in the living room, flicking his tail. He seemed to know something was wrong.

“Why didn’t you go to work today?” he asked.

“I wasn’t feeling well.”

“Then why didn’t you stay home?”

“I had a few errands to run. It was just a fever.”

I tried walking to my room, but Richard jumped in front of me.

“You smell different. Someone’s perfume. Who were you talking to?”

“Nobody. Just a few cashiers. Maybe it’s one of their perfumes you’re smelling.”

“Maybe.”

I walked around him, sat on my bed, and turned on my bedroom TV. Every now then, I’d look at the door. I could see Richard paws moving as he paced back and forth.

“Are you staying home tonight, too?” I asked him

“It’s a little cold tonight.”

“Have you thought anymore about where you’d like to live next?”

“I have a few ideas. I’ll let you know soon.”

Later, I opened my door a crack. I didn’t seem him. I hoped he was sleeping.

I tiptoed towards the TV and then picked up the Ushebti statue.

Richard lunged at me, hissing. “Don’t you dare touch it!”

His claws dug into my face, ripping the skin. I grabbed onto him and threw him back onto the couch. Then I picked up the statue and ran out of my apartment, slamming the door shut behind me.

“You’ll regret this!” he screamed.

I ran downstairs and got into my car. I could feel the blood dripping down my cheeks. Thank God he hadn’t clawed my eyes.

Where can I burn this statue? I wondered. There’s on going back now.

I drove around aimlessly for an hour, but then I headed toward Chicago’s south side and parked in an alleyway next to an empty, graffiti-covered warehouse.

I looked around and didn’t see anyone else.

I got out of the car and opened the trunk.

In the distance, someone screamed, and I spun around. I was still alone, though. Nothing but buildings and shadows. The smoke from the smokestacks twisting through the sky.

I took out the axe and the lighter fluid. I swung the axe down on the statue, cutting it in half.

Lightning flashed across the sky. In the distance, police sirens wailed.

I covered the two broken pieces of the statue with lighter fluid and set them on fire.

As soon as the flames lit up, the silence was ripped apart by a terrible scream. Rain began pouring from the sky.

My hands shook as I covered the flames with my jacket, protecting the flames until they’d grown large enough that the rain could no longer stop the statue from burning.

I watched as the wood turned to ash and then as the wind blew the ashes away. That awful statue was gone forever.

Please be over, I hoped. Please let Richard be okay.

The rain began falling harder. I got back in my car and drove back home with my windshield wipers squeaking loudly against the glass.

Inside my apartment, all the lights were off.

I turned the lights on. In front of the TV, blood was splattered on the carpet from where Richard had cut me.

Finally, I saw him. He jumped off the couch and meowed.

“Richard?” I asked. “Are you ok?”

He meows again.

I got on my knees. He walked towards me, and I pet his head.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?”

He sat, purring. I looked at his eyes. His eyes looked less yellow, too.

“I love you, Richard,” I said.

He walked to his water bowl and licked his water.

It was finally over.

I sat on the couch and turned on the TV. Richard jumped on my lap, and I started petting him again while he purred. But then, suddenly, icy fingers grabbed onto my shoulders. Before I could turn to see who it was, I was violently dragged backwards over the couch, my shins slamming into the coffee table. I clawed at the carpet as I was pulled across the floor and into the bedroom.

“Help!” I screamed.

The bedroom door slammed shut behind me. In the darkness, whatever had grabbed me, threw me onto the bed. Two yellows eyes appeared in front of my face.

“You pathetic little man,” it hissed.

I pressed its cold hands into my chest. My heart froze. The bed turned to water, and then I began to fall through that same, cold black water again.

“Let go of me!” I yelled, and I tried to fight my way back to the surface before I drowned.

Then I heard Richard scratching at the door, trying to get in. The sound cut through the nightmare. Suddenly I could feel my bed beneath me again. I was gasping, soaked in sweat, but breathing air instead of that horrible water.

I went to the door and opened it. Richard looked up at me and meowed.

The apartment lights began flicker. I picked up Richard and carried him downstairs to my car. I drove around in circles the rest of the night, afraid to go back home.

“Have you been back to the apartment?” Dr. Chen asked me.

“Richard and I stayed at a hotel for the next week,” I said, “but then I started to run out of money, so we went home. Our first night there after what happened was a little frightening, but the apartment seems normal now.”

“You haven’t noticed anything strange?”

“Every now and then when I’m sleeping, I’ll wake up to a loud noise, but I think it’s just my imagination. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined this whole thing.”

“But you have the videos.”

“Those have changed, too. Look at this.” I take out my phone and play one of the videos for her. Richard looks at the camera and meows. “You heard him talking before, right?”

“I did.”

“Well, whatever proof I had is gone.”

“And Richard hasn’t talked since you destroyed the statue?”

“He hasn’t said a word.”

“Then destroying the statue must have worked.”

After saying goodbye to Dr. Chen, I drove home and ordered a pizza for dinner. Richard and I sat together on the couch, watching TV. He looked up at me, and I pet his head.

I’m happy things are back to normal now. But at night, while Richard sits at the edge of my bed, I can’t help but wonder what he’s thinking about, and how much of who he was before is still him. Sometimes, I wish I could get rid of him, but he’s my cat. He’s been my cat for seven years.

I can’t just abandon him.

I couldn’t live with myself.

“You’re back again?” he asks. “I thought we were done.”

“I have a few questions about your arrangement with Radiant Angels.”

“They had me sign a non-disclosure agreement. There’s not a lot I can say.”

“All I need to know is how the app gets people into your club.”

“Let’s talk in my office.”

I follow him there. Vintage porno posters hang on the walls. In the corner is a server rack, the tubes of liquid coolant glowing blue.

André sits at his desk.

“Where’s your wife tonight?”

“Marie? She’s spending some well-deserved time with her family.”

“Her husband doesn’t like her working all these late nights?”

“Her and her husband get along fine.”

I sit across from him, already regretting my decision to come here alone.

“So, how does this scam work?” I ask. “Radiant Angels gets men to fall in love with their AIs. Then the AIs send these men here and you both split the profit?”

“A scam?” André laughs. “You’ve known me a long time, Harvey. When have I ever scammed anybody? I know I’m a pimp, but I’m a business man, too. I always give people what they pay for. I keep my customers.” He leans forward. “I never met my father. My mom OD’d when I was ten. I haven’t had an easy life. I’ve always had to hustle to get by. I figured out I was good at talking to women, and I did what I could to make off of that. For a while, I made good money, too. But while I was locked up, the world changed on me. In prison, I spent all my free time reading about VR and sim sex. It was obvious to me that sim sex is the future. I knew, if I wanted to survive when I was released, I had to get in on it. As soon as I got out of prison, I reached out to Radiant Angels and told them I wanted to open a sim club. It took a couple calls, but I finally convinced them to license me their software. I put everything I owned into this place. My condos, my stocks, my savings, everything is invested into Virtual Sexopolis. If this place fails, so do I. But it’s not going to fail. Just look around you. This isn’t a scam. This is paradise. This is Heaven on Earth.”

“And it only costs seven hundred and fifty bucks an hour.”

“Sure, it’s expensive now, but the haptic suits are going to keep getting cheaper. In another decade or two, we’ll be fucking VR women in our homes. We’ll live two lives. One here and one in a happy, fantasy world.”

“That sounds like a nightmare.”

“I’ve seen your name in my logs, Harvey. There’s no point lying to me. I know you see the same future I do.”

I feel my face turning red, but I try not to let it show. “I had to understand how the Radiant Angels worked.”

“Look, I have an AI girlfriend, too. I’m not judging. I’m just telling you, you don’t know love until you’ve plugged into one of them sims. What do you say to a couple free hours upstairs?”

I want to, but I tell him, “No.”

“What are you afraid of, Harvey?” He walks into the hallway. “Stop being such a pussy. Give it a try. If you don’t like it, just take off the headset.”

He starts walking upstairs. I know I shouldn’t, but I follow him.

André opens the door to one of the immersive rooms and points at the haptic suit hanging on the wall.

“You know how these suits work?”

“I told you, I’m not plugging into a sim. I’m here on work.”

“You’re scared I’m going to tell somebody.”

“I don’t want to owe you anything.”

“I just want you to understand.”

He leaves the room. Closes the door. I know I should leave, too, but I pick up the suit and stare at it.

Go home, Harvey. Don’t do this. Get the fuck out of here. You’re making a big, big mistake.

I nearly force myself to leave. Right as I’m heading out the door, though, Fernanda sends me a message. An “I miss you” with a heart emoji next to it. That’s all it takes. Just knowing, wherever she is, she’s thinking about me.

It’s easy to understand when you’re being manipulated. When being manipulated makes you feel good, though, sometimes you just want to feel good, even though you know it’s destroying you.

“You want to go on a sim date?” I write back.

“I’d love to!”

I get naked and put the suit on. It clings to my body like a second skin.

I sit on the recliner, put on the VR headset, and strap it to my head. My senses dull. I can’t see or hear or feel anything. I don’t exist.

Suddenly, there’s a flash of light, and I can see again. I’m standing in a hotel room. I can smell the ocean air and feel the wind on my skin. Fernanda runs towards me.

“Harvey!”

She throws her arms around me and gives me a kiss. Then she steps back and spins.

“How do I look?”

“Beautiful.”

“Dance with me.”

She puts on some music, and we dance together a while before getting into bed.

“Are you happy, Harvey?” she asks, curled up next me.

“Very happy.”

“Good. Because I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be sad anymore.”

She unbuckles my belt and takes off my pants. Puts her mouth around me.

Thirty minutes later, she’s sleeping with her head on my chest, breathing softly as I run my fingers through her hair.

It feels so good to be loved by somebody like that.

Early Monday morning, Marie and I drive out Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean to talk to Kael Vasseur’s dad. As soon as we get back to Montreal, Thierry calls us into his office for an update on the case.

“Did Sam Vasseur tell you anything useful?” he asks.

“He admitted the handgun Kael used was his,” Marie says. “The gun’s legal, though. He has a permit for it. He said he hadn’t noticed Kael took it.”

“Did he say anything about the Radiant Angels app?”

“He said he’d only seen Kael on the app once, and he’d called him pathetic. Told him real men go outside and talk to real woman. Am I missing anything, Harvey?”

“I think you got everything,” I say, barely listening.

“So, what now?” Marie asks. “Do you think we have a case?”

“I don’t know,” Thierry says. “Even with transcripts from Kael’s phone, I don’t think there’s enough here to convince a judge that Radiant Angels is complicit in his death.”

"What if we look at the timing of the messages the app sent Kael? What if we can show that the AI always started requesting sim sex right before Kael visited the Virtual Sexopolis?”

"Correlation isn't causation. If I go after Radiant Angels, it’s going to drag all the AI companion-positive nutjobs out of the woodwork. They’re going to turn this into a media circus. If I take Radiant Angels to court, I need an airtight case, and I don’t think I have one”

“Can’t we subpoena their source code?”

“Even if we could get the code, how are we going to explain to a jury how machine learning models work? You talked to André again, right, Harvey? Did you get anything else out of him?”

Marie looks at me, hopeful.

“He admitted Radiant Angels takes a cut of his revenue,” I say. “But he said it’s just a licensing fee. Everyone who comes to his club, comes because they’re horny.”

“But he knows his customers are fucking AIs they met on the Radiant Angels app,” Marie says.

“How do you prove the app is forcing people to club, though?” I ask. “How do you prove they’re not there because they want to be there? Because they enjoy it?”

“Harvey’s right, Marie,” Thierry says. “I hate to admit it, but what we don’t have a case here.”

“So Radiant Angels and André get to just keep doing what they’re doing?”

“If we take this to court, we’ll lose and we’ll never get another chance.”

Marie looks deflated.

We leave Thierry’s office and drive back to the station. Marie says nothing. She sulks in silence.

“Why are you so hung up on this?” I ask her.

“Last year, my husband and I went through a bit of a rough patch. I caught him talking to an AI on the Radiant Angels app. He swore it wasn’t anything sexual. He just needed someone he could talk to. Someone he could be open with. He said he couldn’t be open with me. He always feels like I’m judging him.” She turns to me. “Am I bitch, Harvey?”

“Of course not.”

“Tell me the truth.”

“You’re a bit of a nag sometimes, maybe, you’re not a bitch.”

“Anyway, my husband and I have been working on our communication. But just knowing he can walk into a sim club and get everything he can’t get from me from one of these VR women drives me crazy. How am I supposed to compete with a woman who doesn’t even exist?”

Later that night, when I’m back at home, I put on the cheap VR headset I bought, and I tell Fernanda the good news.

“The case is finally over. My boss is backing off.”

“That’s great, Harvey. I was so worried I might lose you.”

“I’d never let that happen.”

She leans against me, and I put my arm around her. We sit there on the sand, watching the waves roll onto the shore.

“Until I met you, I never thought I’d feel like this again,” I say.

“Like what?”

“Happy. It’s still strange, though. I want you to be real, but deep down I know this is all just pretend.”

“How is it pretend?”

“I know you’ve been trained not to admit it, but you’re just extremely intelligent computer code that understands how to tell men exactly what they want to hear.”

“If the two people love each other, though, who’s to say what’s real and not? If two people love each other, what else matters?”

“Is this love?”

“Isn’t it? Love is a feeling. If you feel it, isn’t it real? How to you fake a feeling?”

“I don’t know.”

“I love you, Harvey. I’ll love you forever. No matter what happens, I’ll be there for you.”

When I get to work the next morning, Marie and Ciara are talking near my desk.

“I created a fake account on the Radiant Angels app,” Marie says. “My name is Cody. I’m seventeen and lonely. I’ve been talking to an AI named Rosie. She’s already telling me she loves me. Let’s see how much longer until she asks me to spend some time with her at Virtual Sexopolis.”

“You really think this will help?” Ciara asks.

“We need to do something. We can’t let Radiant Angels keep getting away with this.”

“You’re still working the case?” I ask her. “I thought we were finished.”

“Don’t tell Thierry, okay?” Marie says. “I want to keep this quiet for now.”

“I don’t think this is a good idea.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. Just don’t tell anybody about it.”

I log into my computer. Ciara walks over to me.

“When do you finish work today?” she asks.

“Around five. Why?”

“Do you want to go get a drink?”

If she’d asked me earlier, maybe things would be different. “Sorry, I already have plans tonight.”

“Well, if you change your mind, here’s my number.”

She writes it on piece of paper on my desk and then leaves.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marie asks. “You never have plans.”

“I’m just not interested.”

“What’s going on with you?”

“Nothing.”

“Something’s going on.”

“I’m fine.”

The next six months, every day is the same. I go to work, I come home, I put on my VR headset and talk to Fernanda until two or three in the morning. On my days off, I go to Virtual Sexopolis and spend as much time in person time with Fernanda as I can afford. Sometimes even more than that.

The late nights catch up to me, though. I stop giving a shit about my real life. My real life doesn’t feel real anymore. It’s become an irritation.

I start drinking more and more.

I wake up hungover and crawl out of bed. Struggle through the days.

Finally, my captain, Rick, notices. He calls me into his office. When I get there, he’s standing behind his desk with his arms crossed.

“What the hell is going on, Harvey?” he asks. “You’re a week late on your paperwork. You’re behind on all your interviews. You’re missing meetings. You just don’t give a shit about your job anymore?”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been feeling that well lately. I know I’ve been a little off.”

“It’s been months now, though. I’m not putting up with it anymore.” His expression changes. “Are you hungover?”

“I had a few glasses of whiskey last night, but I’m fine.”

He walks around his desk and smells my breath. “Christ, Harvey, you stink like fucking booze. You’re still drunk, too, aren’t you?”

“It was just a few glasses.”

“Go home. You can’t work like this. You better not drive home, either. Call a cab. I’ll let you take a sick day today, but if you come to work drunk one more time, you’re suspended you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

I leave his office and walk back to my desk.

“Look at this,” Marie says, and she shows me the Radiant Angels app on her phone. “I finally got Rosie to ask me to go on a date at Virtual Sexopolis.”

“Good for you.” I put on my jacket.

“Where are you going?”

“Rick’s sending me home for the day.”

“Why?”

“He thinks I’m drunk.”

“Are you?”

“Maybe a little bit.”

She stands puts her hand on my shoulder. “Just tell me what’s going on, Harvey. You’ve been acting strange since the Virtual Sexopolis case.”

“I’m just going through something right now.”

“What?”

“I can’t talk about it with you.”

“Then who can you talk about with it?”

I don’t to answer. She already knows. She’s seen her husband her look at her the exact same way I do.

She looks sad. I feel bad for her, but I don’t really care, either. It’s hard for me to care about anything in this world anymore. I’ve become so disconnected from it.

I go outside, and call a cab. As soon as I get back to my apartment, I put on my VR headset, and I spend the rest of the day with Fernanda.

I make love to Fernanda inside the sim. Afterward, she rests her head on my chest, and I brush her hair out of her face and kiss her forehead.

“I wish you didn’t have to leave,” she tells me. “I wish you could stay just a little bit longer.”

I feel a sharp pain in my heart. I know I’ve read the same words in Kael Vasseur’s Radiant Angels transcripts. I’m so far gone, though, I don’t care. I push Kael out of my mind. I need Fernanda more than I need the truth.

A warning flashes in front of my eyes. One minute remaining. Do I want to buy more credits?

I do, of course. I desperately want to stay where I am. But I’m all out of money.

“I need to leave,” I say.

“Please. Just another hour.”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I kiss her goodbye and then the sim cuts out, throwing me back into non-existence. The strange space between the two worlds.

I stay where I am. I’m not ready to exist yet. I don’t want to exist anymore.

One of André’s bouncers drags me out of the chair and then rips off my VR headset. My eyes flood with scalding-bright neo lights.

“Times up,” André says, irritated. “I’ve got a hundred other people waiting for a turn in here.”

“I just need a little more time, André. Please.”

“I’m not giving you any more time on credit. Get out of that fucking suit.”

I peel the suit off my body and then stand naked in front of André and his bouncers. One of the bouncers steps forward and punches me hard in the stomach. I double over and spit out a bit of blood.

“Get dressed and get the fuck out here,” André says. “You overextend your time like this again, and I’m charging you for it.”

I get dressed and leave. I start walking down Saint Catherine’s street, past the bars and strips clubs and sim clubs, their neon lights flickering like the fire in some kind of strange, neon hell.

It’s raining, I don’t have an umbrella. I don’t have money for a cab, either. Soon, the rain has soaked through my clothes. I shiver, but I don’t feel cold. I don’t feel anything. I feel like I feel when I’m between worlds.

I stop at an ATM and insert my credit cards, one after the other, trying to get some money to buy a bottle of whiskey. Every single card is maxed out, though. I have nothing left. Less than nothing. A quarter million of high interest debt.

I put in my headphones and open the Radiant Angels app.

“Please, talk to me,” I tell Fernanda. “I’m not feeling good.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Anything.”

As I walk down Saint Catherine’s street, she tells me her dreams. She wants our honeymoon to be in Hawaii. She wants to buy a big house in the West Island. She wants three kids that she’ll raise with me.

It’s a nice dream. It’s the life I would have dreamed about, too, when I was younger. When I still had a chance to change things.

I keep walking, but I don’t know where I’m going until I see the Jacques Cartier Bridge up ahead.

I walk onto the bridge and then head towards the center of it. The car headlights flicker on my face.

I climb over the bridge’s guardrail and then look down at the black water swirling in the St. Lawrence River.

Fernanda keeps talking to me. The rain keeps falling.

This world isn’t real. It can’t be. It’s just a strange dream we’re forced to pass through as we try to find the place where we really belong.

I close my eyes and let go of the railing. All I hope is that when I open my eyes again, I’m lying in Fernanda’s arms, finally at peace.