Things were starting to get weird. Wrong.

This is it. I thought, somewhat woozily, the sedative already starting to kick in. Pay close attention.

Not that I would remember any of it. Not if what Oscar said was true.

How had he described it?

It was like hacking. If people were machines, these people had discovered the computer terminal that controlled them. Just how difficult a process this was, or why it was only being used on Rithium users, I didn’t know.

Hacking people.

That was really what they were doing, wasn’t it? Analogy or otherwise, it was about to happen. And it was going to work. It always did.

No, wait. That actually wasn’t true. It had never worked on Oscar. At least, according to him.

The question was how. That is, why had the techniques never worked on Oscar, even though they had always worked on me. The answer to this question could not have been more pertinent. More-

More…

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Import...ant...

My neck lolled. My head had become both heavy and light at the same time, difficult to hold up.

“Hey.” The guy on the stool said, snapping his fingers. “Over here.”

What...what had Oscar...said?

It seemed hard to remember, now. And it wasn’t getting easier. My memories felt like they were quickly morphing into lines of computer code on an old monitor, scrolling across a black background, strange and indecipherable. Disconnected, even. Part of a word dump on a floppy disk that could be ejected at any second-

No! No it’s not. It’s me. These are my memories. They’re...who I am.

Still, the dissociative sensation persisted.

I blinked a couple times, and suddenly the room started to twist and turn, reality at odds with itself. Everything began to torque and narrow and elongate, like a piece of chewed up gum being stretched out.

“Looks like it’s working so far,” The man on the stool said. His voice echoed strangely, which in a way made sense because he was sitting at the end of a long, twisted, and vaguely undulating tunnel.

I laughed. A series of sharp, cackling chuckles that reverbed in an unnatural, electronic sort of way; more the product of a DJ than the wind-tunnel echo.

The man on the stool was writing on his notepad, again. His pen scraped against the paper, and the sound carried like quill-scratches on the far side of a canyon.

When he’d finished taking his note, he laid the clipboard flat across his knee, and the thump of the wood against the bone of his knee was unbearably loud, like a mic being struck hard by an open palm.

Following this was a strange, reverberating feedback sound, building in both pitch and intensity, culminating in a cork-like POP.

And suddenly, I was standing outside my own body.