Rhodes threw back his head and inhaled a deep breath of the warm breeze blowing in his face. He sat at the edge of a rolling field dotted with wildflowers.

The wind smelled of grass, fresh soil, and savory food all mixed together. He would have liked to shut his eyes to revel in that smell a little longer, but the countryside offered too great a temptation.

He gazed across the fields at snow-capped mountains in the distance. The setting sun glittered on the snowfields and lit them up with pastel colors.

The blue sky shone with vibrant streaks of clouds lit up by the sunset. Birds soared and flocked up there, dove for the ground, and zoomed past Rhodes in majestic flight patterns.

He didn’t recognize which planet he was on. He wasn’t on Preinea. He knew all its wilderness areas, mountain ranges, and remote spots.

He couldn’t place which planet he was on, but it sure was beautiful. He didn’t really care which planet it was.

The hill on which he sat sloped down over miles of fields to a little town in the distance. Smoke curled from the chimneys down there.

That on its own gave it away that he wasn’t on Preinea. Preinea had electricity.

No one on Preinea would light a fire in their house. No one on Preinea had done anything like that in a thousand years. The civilization was too advanced.

He also spotted people tending livestock down there. That was another clue. Wherever he was, he must be somewhere primitive—somewhere without technology.

He couldn’t think where that might be. It was definitely nowhere in the Treaty of Aemon Cluster.

That was the whole point of the Treaty of Aemon—apart from the military alliance, of course.

All the planets, species, and civilizations that belonged to the Cluster shared their technology and their information. That was the best way for everyone to advance and stay advanced.

No one in the Treaty of Aemon Cluster would let any other world slide back into this primitive state.

Still, this planet sure was peaceful, beautiful, and enticing precisely because it was so primitive. These people didn’t have any technology at all—no space fleet, no food production particle aggregators, no fusion generators for power and heat—no nothing.

That town down there sure looked nice, though. Voices drifted on the breeze….and they were happy voices—contented voices. They didn’t need Preinean technology to be happy.

The primitive nature of the place made those people happy. They enjoyed this peace undisturbed because they didn’t have space travel. No one bothered them and they bothered no one.

Rhodes relaxed into the serene environment. When was the last time he fully let himself relax like this? He tried to remember, but the overwhelming bliss erased everything before this moment right now.

He leaned back and propped his hand on the ground to look up at the birds. Their flight patterns fascinated him. He could have watched them for hours, but something else distracted him—his hand.

The grass didn’t feel right. He looked down and saw his hand. The implant that replaced his right arm from his shoulder all the way down to his fingertips—the implant wasn’t there anymore. His hand was organic.

He picked up his hand and rotated his fingers in front of him trying to remember. He was a member of Battalion 1….so what happened to his implants?

He touched his face. His implants were gone. He was a man again. The rest of his body was back to the way it was before.

He wore a pair of thin light cotton pants, brown leather boots, and a beige cotton shirt. The clothes felt comfortable, but they also felt strange against his skin. He wasn’t used to the sensation of being….normal.

He glanced around again. He didn’t understand any of this, but right at that moment, he noticed a man walking out from the town. This person strode up the hills heading straight for Rhodes.

Even then, Rhodes couldn’t bring himself to stiffen or tense in any way. He was too relaxed and happy.

The man came from the town. He must be one of those people—the people who lived down there.

Rhodes got a better look at him the closer the man got. He had a tall, bony frame, but he moved well with plenty of muscle.

His height stretched it out and gave him the appearance of thinness, but he carried himself like a country boy who works hard every day.

He wore plain, rough, handmade clothes just like Rhodes’s. A messy thatch of brown hair topped his head and his blue eyes sparkled out a rough, angular, bony face.

He stopped in front of Rhodes and blinked his eyelids. This stranger had a unique, rapid way of blinking. His long nose, pointed chin, and strong cheekbones gave him a distinctly birdlike appearance.

Rhodes stared at him in amazement when he recognized the guy. “Fisher? What are you…..how did you…..What are you doing here?” Rhodes glanced around. “What is this place?”

“We’re in The Grid. The Masks sent you here….and they sent me here to talk to you.” Fisher waved up and down in front of his body. He really was a man, but he didn’t show any surprise over the way he looked. “They made me like this so I would be able to talk to you better.”

“How could you talk to me better than you did before?” Rhodes frowned at him. Rhodes found himself scrutinizing Fisher from head to toe. He really was a man—a human man. “Why did the Masks send us here?”

“You almost died. They experimented with your implants. I suppose they don’t really know enough about the battalion to understand how messing with the implants affects your vital functions. They’re trying to learn how you work—how all of this works.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“You mean they don’t already know?” Rhodes frowned at the man in front of him. “You’re…you’re human, Fisher!”

Fisher burst into a huge grin. He expressed much more emotion like this—positive emotion. His cheeks flushed with pleasure and his eyes twinkled. “Yeah! I am. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

Rhodes found himself smiling back at his friend. Fisher looked more like something or someone Rhodes could be friends with, but it still felt strange to be talking to a person instead of a projection in The Grid.

Relief overwhelmed Rhodes that he finally found someone he knew and could talk to. He could trust Fisher.

Rhodes studied the landscape. “So….the Masks did all of this? It doesn’t look like The Grid. There are no lines.”

“The Masks created it as a respite environment for you and the battalion. The experiments were causing you too much stress, so they sent you here to rest and recover. You just have to enjoy yourself. They’ll take their readings and study your responses to the environment. Don’t worry. You’ll be safe here.”

Rhodes’s head shot up. “They created this…to keep us as prisoners? So this whole environment is designed to keep us docile and satisfied while they….do whatever they want to us? We have to escape. We have to get out of here. Where’s the rest of the battalion? Are they here, too?”

“You can’t escape. Just cooperate with the Masks. The rest of the battalion isn’t in danger…..”

“How can you be sure? If the Masks’ experiments nearly killed me, they could be in danger of killing the rest of the battalion, too.” Rhodes got to his feet. “We have to get out of here. We have to form a plan. You sound like you know a lot more about this than I do. You can help me find the others. Rhinehart, Lauer, and Oakes might already be thinking of a way out….”

He took a step forward. He didn’t know where he would go or even where he could go in this Grid landscape.

He could only think about walking to the town, but Fisher dodged in front of him, straightened his arm, and stopped Rhodes from going any further. “You have nothing to worry about, Captain. Just stay here.”

Now Rhodes really did stiffen. Fisher called him, Captain.

That name brought Rhodes out of his trance. He wasn’t on some remote, primitive planet. He was in The Grid. He was the Masks’ prisoner and so was everyone else in the battalion.

All the horrific tortures the Masks put him through—they did the same thing to his subordinates. They might be back there in that lab right now.

In fact, Rhodes was certain they still were. He was probably back there right now. The Masks only tricked him into thinking he was on another planet by sending him into The Grid.

Rhodes narrowed his eyes at Fisher and lowered his voice to a snarl. “Get out of my way, Fisher. I don’t know what you’re trying to do…..”

“The Masks don’t want to harm you, Captain,” Fisher went on. “They just want to study you and your implants. The Masks recognize the SAMs as their own technology. The Masks want to incorporate the SAMs technology into their own systems. You can understand that, can’t you? They just want the same things we have. Why not cooperate with them? They can get what they want and you can get what you want. Everybody wins.”

“And what is it that they want?”

“I just told you. They don’t have SAMs technology—not like we do. They want to understand us and how we operate so they can integrate our processes into their systems. They’re using an incomplete version of the same system. They want to fill in the blanks they’re missing.”

“And we have that? How can we when we’re just barely surviving?”

“They just want to study you to figure it out.” Fisher waved at the countryside around him. “How can you argue with that when you’re here? Doesn’t this prove that the Masks want what’s best for all of us?”

Rhodes jolted at those words. “The Masks do not want what’s best for all of us. They’ve already wiped out millions of people. They’ll keep attacking the Treaty of Aemon Cluster as long as we’re here. They could have wiped out millions more just in the time we’ve been here.”

Fisher waved that away. “The Masks don’t want to hurt anyone, Captain. They just want answers.”

Rhodes opened his mouth to argue….and stopped himself. Something in Fisher’s face….it didn’t look right. He beamed at Rhodes in a very human way. All of Fisher’s facial expressions looked way too human.

He never looked like this in The Grid—not The Grid Rhodes was used to. That was the one simple factor that pushed Rhodes over the edge.

The Fisher Rhodes knew didn’t look human. He looked like a computer composite of a bunch of different animals, people, and creatures.

He didn’t use human facial expressions, either. The real Fisher would never smile or beam or twinkle his eyes like this.

“They hacked you, Fisher,” Rhodes muttered. “They’re hacking you right now to convince me to cooperate.”

“No one hacked me, Captain. You have to believe me. Once the Masks study you and the battalion, they’ll get SAMs technology for themselves and then they’ll let you go.”

“Now I know you’re lying.” Saying those words snapped something else in Rhodes’s mind. This wasn’t Fisher at all—not even a Grid version of Fisher. “Who are you? What do you want from me?”

“You know who I am, Captain. You can see who I am. I’m Fisher.”

“No, you aren’t!” Rhodes took a step back and braced himself in case he needed to attack this stranger.

The longer Rhodes stood here looking at Fisher, the more convinced Rhodes became that this wasn’t Fisher at all. His very humanity made him look so different from the real Fisher.

Rhodes might have been convinced that the Masks infiltrated Fisher’s programming and made him talk to Rhodes like this. That might be the Masks’ way of convincing Rhodes to cooperate.

This wasn’t Fisher at all. Rhodes was never more certain of anything.

If the Masks sent Rhodes into this Grid landscape, why couldn’t they send someone who looked like Fisher to talk to Rhodes?

What better way to get Rhodes to surrender than to send the one person Rhodes trusted more than anyone else?

“What did you do to Fisher?” Rhodes snarled. “I swear, if you hurt him, I’ll destroy you. I’ll destroy you if you hurt anyone in the battalion—including the SAMs.”

He cast a desperate glance around. He had to get out of this place. It wasn’t real.

The peace and relaxation he’d just been enjoying a few minutes ago—that was the trap. That was the gilded cage the Masks planned to use to keep him and the battalion sedated during these experiments.

“I am Fisher, Captain,” the image repeated.

Rhodes lost his cool and bellowed at the thing. “You are not Fisher! Do you think I don’t know Fisher when I see him? What did you do to him? Get the hell away from me! I’ll never cooperate with you! Never! You can keep me locked up here forever. I’ll never cooperate! I’ll never stop trying to escape.”

Fisher eased back and let his arms hang at his sides. He didn’t look anything like Fisher now. He was too human—too real.

Rhodes just wanted Fisher back—the Fisher he knew and liked and cared about—the Fisher he knew he could trust. This wasn’t that.

“Have it your own way, Captain,” Fisher murmured. “Don’t say I didn’t try. You could have stayed here in comfort. You don’t have to go back to the way it was before.”

“The way…..what do you mean?”

“The pain of the experiments. You don’t have to go back to that. You could spare yourself that by staying here.”

Rhodes snorted. “You’re lying. Every word out of your mouth is a lie. You lied to me just now by pretending to be Fisher. You’re still lying by making yourself look like him. Why don’t you show me what you really look like if you want me to believe a word you say?”

Fisher studied him, and in that moment, Rhodes knew with absolutely no doubt that this person was definitely not Fisher.

Fisher had been studying Rhodes every hour of every day since Fisher first came online. Rhodes knew all of Fisher’s facial expressions.

Rhodes knew the facial expression of Fisher studying him better than all the others. It was the one expression Fisher used more than any other.

This thing—whatever it was—it didn’t study Rhodes the way Fisher did. Fisher had an almost suspicious way of studying Rhodes.

Everything Rhodes did affected Fisher. Fisher’s life depended on the slightest shade of Rhodes’s mood. Fisher watched Rhodes like a hawk—literally.

This thing didn’t do that. It leveled Rhodes with a compassionate, almost condescending look of banal pity. It stopped just short of smirking in patronizing superiority.

“If that’s what it will take to convince you, Captain, then I will show you what I really look like.” Grid lines appeared all over Fisher’s face and body. “I didn’t think it would come to this, but I see you won’t believe me any other way.”

The grid lines morphed, snaked up Fisher’s neck, surrounded his skull, and changed his face.

End of Chapter 3.