Rightie—I still didn’t know his name—slid a steaming plate of scrambled eggs across the table toward me. I nodded to him.

The dining room chairs had that antique, carved, wooden feel to them. You know what I’m talking about. It looks like a fancy piece of architecture but it feels like a torture device.

Or maybe that’s just me. I’m skinny. I’ve always been skinny. I was blessed with the ability to eat as much junk food as I wanted and never gain a single pound. It’s something of a perk, but there are drawbacks. The worst one being: bony butts. My butt was pretty bony. Especially after being locked up in Aberdale for so long.

Luckily, my chair did have a seat cushion, tied to the back of the chair by little strings that wrapped around the cylindrical wooden spires. But because of the way I was slouching in my chair, the cushion kept sliding around. Straightening my back just caused it to move again.

Both Tanya and Sater were completely focused on their breakfast already, sipping between bites. Rightie brought his own plate of eggs to the table and started digging in himself.

I glanced around at the kitchen, which was right next to the dining room area. There was a small window just above the sink. It was dark out still, with a faint hint of blue light beginning to emerge. A clock above the window said it was about four-ten in the morning. Twenty minutes until they’d decided it was time to synchronize.

It made me tense, nervous, apprehensive. But also excited. It was all jumbled together, like a hot, bubbling stew of emotions. It was enough to make me feel sick. Though, maybe that was just the hunger talking. I’m never quite myself when I’m hungry.

What about when you’ve been kidnapped and forced to participate in...whatever the hell this is?

I forced myself to take a bite. The eggs had that puffy, fluffy texture you get if you mix in the right amount of milk or cream before cooking.

I swallowed, and held in a groan. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. A low rumbling echoed in my stomach. My next several bites came quicker.

Sater flicked open a switch-comb and started slicking back his hair, like a school bully in an eighties flick. He was looking at his reflection in the screen of his phone, which he’d propped up against his empty plate. There was a tie laid out neatly on the table next to him. A dark suit jacket hung on the chair next to his.

“Seriously?” Tanya said, turning toward him.

“Forgive me,” Sater said, still combing intensely, “If I don’t want to die in Hello Kitty pajamas.”

Tanya gave him the middle finger while she took another bite. Then, after a few seconds: “I’m giving you the finger.”

“I know.” Sater said. He put the comb away and was carefully adjusting his hair with his hands, eyes still on his phone. “I have great peripheral vision.”

A few moments of silent eating passed. I glanced at the clock. Fifteen minutes.

I had that feeling of unease, again. Or was it impatience? And not just to get back into Rithium, though that was a factor. Time was ticking down, now. Everything was coming to a point.

“I just had a thought.” I said.

Nobody responded to that, except Tanya, who just gave me a dismissive, derogatory glance between mouthfuls.

“You doxxed us.” I said to her. “Told people what you believe to be the truth. Won’t somebody come for us? Do something?”

Tanya smirked. “Who? Politicians? Journalists? Perhaps the general public will band together to help us?” She leaned forward in her seat. “Does that seem like something that’s likely to happen, to you?”

I frowned. “No.” I admitted. “But I was thinking more like your internet audience.”

Tanya laughed. It was a high, girly laugh, but there was disdain in it. “Those nerds on the stream?” She shook her head. “They wouldn’t get far. Though I do get some satisfaction out of the fact that it’s going to take some serious manpower to keep this under wraps, between leashing the media and setting up a perimeter around this place. No one’s getting in or out of here. And that’s exactly how we want it.”

“What about Rithium?” I said.

Tanya shook her head, again. “Even the stream viewers with Rithium access don’t know where or when it’s going to go down.” She pointed her fork at me. “This plan requires timing and precision. Besides, I can’t risk any more people getting involved in this.”

“Anyone besides me.” I said. “You don’t care if I die.”

I said it matter-of-factly, and she didn’t argue the point. She just gave me that same penetrating look I’d become so familiar with.

“Is it my face?” I said. “A lot of people say it’s the face.”

Tanya straightened. “Eat your eggs, Winter.”

She turned to here as well. Oh, is it intentional and I’m just dumb?Rightie. “Everything ready to go?”

Rightienodded, set his fork down on his empty plate. “Cloudbox is upstairs. I’ll go grab it.”

Cloudboxes are integration kits for Rithium access. It’s not quite accurate to say that a Cloudbox runs the simworld. It’s more like a key that opens the door.

Or is the Cloudbox the door that opens to the simworld, and your mind is the key?

Whatever. All metaphors break down eventually.

The point is, you need a Cloudbox. And they’re not easy to find. They were hard enough to get a hold of in the early days, before they became illegal, and the common enemy of well-meaning busybodies everywhere. You’d have an easier time smuggling heroin across the border. Supposedly, they even have dogs trained to sniff them out. Though what exactly a Cloudbox smells like, I have no idea.

I took my last bite and pushed my dish toward the center of the table.

Scrambled eggs: not exactly my first pick for a last meal. But it hit the spot.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Tanya walked around the table, picking up all the dirty dishes. She set them in the sink, turned on the faucet, and began washing and rinsing. For that poignant moment in time, she actually seemed domestic. Her back was to me, her shoulders hunched, arms moving slowly, methodically.

Evelyn hadn’t had a dishwashing machine at the farm, and for most of my childhood I was the designated dishwasher, on top of all the other chores I’d been assigned. Which meant me spending a lot of time bent over in front of the sink, scrubbing frantically.

Tanya wasn’t that kind of dishwasher. She enjoyed the process. She was scanning the surface of each plate, gently running her sponge over it, wiping away grime in an easy, satisfying way that reminded me of dish soap commercials. She held each washed and rinsed plate up to the kitchen light, admiring it, before setting it in the dish rack to dry.

When she was done, she shook her hands twice, spraying water droplets into the sink. She shut off the light above the sink. She turned to leave, but stopped at the edge of the kitchen and spun back around. Her head rotated slowly, studying the space, taking it in. She was looking at the room as if there were memories there, in every nook and corner. She was savoring those memories, as if for the last time.

She must have had some long-term connection to Sater. That much was obvious. She knew this place. Had a relationship with it, in the same way I had a relationship of sorts with Evelyn’s farmhouse. Perhaps Tanya was a longtime friend of Sater’s family.

“Don’t take too long, boys.” She said, before disappearing into the parlor.

Ten minutes.

It was so close. The feeling of immediacy was tangible. It was going to happen. It was coming, and whatever it was, it would be irreversible.

Sater seemed to feel it, as well. He was staring off into space, like a man on a hangman’s platform, looking at the world through a noose. His eyes drifted and, in a moment of frantic awkwardness neither of us had predicted or could seem to break, met mine.

It was that feeling of being left alone at a wedding with someone you don’t know but feel obligated to talk to, because he’s “a friend of the bride”, or an estranged “uncle who traveled twelve-hundred miles to be here”, and wouldn’t her father “have loved to see her on this day, so beautiful.”

“Alone at last.” I said through dry lips, breaking the silence.

Sater didn’t answer, instead returning to his hangman’s brood. He stood, whipping his tie off of the table. He turned up his collar and put his tie together in a half windsor with practiced efficiency. He wasn’t someone who had to dress up with a tucked in, button-down shirt and tie every Sunday morning. He did this every damn day.

What a freak.

Sater slipped into his suit jacket. He pulled it tight, running a hand here and there over the cloth, looking for wrinkles, making sure it was smooth as silk.

Seeming satisfied, he left the room, without another word or look.

Five minutes.

I rapped my knuckles on the table. For luck, maybe? I wasn’t sure. Probably just nerves.

Am I breathing? The thought echoed suddenly in my head, like a text notification. How long since I last took a breath?

I exhaled, long and heavy, expelling carbon so I could breathe in again. Shouldn’t this be automatic? Shouldn’t this—

I was in a loop. Like the first time I went in for my driver’s test. Even though I wanted to pass, so badly, I wasn’t thinking about driving while I sat in one of those DMV chairs, waiting to be called up. I was thinking about Steven Seagal, trying to figure out what the hell people saw in that guy. I was thinking about how when I got home, I’d have to move the hay bales in the barn again, to make room for the new barrels of feed. I was even thinking about a misplaced tile on the floor, and how much a person got paid to do something like that, and how every tile floor always seemed to have something just a little bit off about it. I was thinking about everything except the act of driving, my thoughts moving in erratic circles, avoiding the present moment.

And Rithium. This thought was clearer than the others, and an intrusion. It was the prattle of a know-it-all.

You thought about it every day and night.

Rithium had just started to make waves. It was new, prototypical. People didn’t understand what it was; not yet. Perhaps they never would. Few had access to it. And lucky me, I was one of those people. It was my secret, and one I was damn well sure to keep to myself.

With one exception, of course. Oscar.

Oz knew. He understood Rithium. But that was because he was there alongside me, almost every time I synchronized. I wanted to share my experiences with other people. I needed a way to vent.

Instead, the thoughts, the excitement, just kept building. It swirled, revolving, mounting in pressure, like an engine without an exhaust valve.

I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps this was how serial killers felt. Secrecy is the key to a killer’s success, especially if they want to keep doing it. But how lonely it must be. To such a person, it seems as if they have just begun to discover who they actually are. When they kill, and/or commit other taboo acts associated with killing, to them it must feel like these brief moments when they are truly themselves. Even though there is no one else around to see it. To know them.

This wasn’t a prophetical sense of foreshadowing. I really had no idea of what my new hobby would become to the world, beyond the fact that Evelyn would be against it. She didn’t understand video games, after all. She called them “escapism”, and she always seemed to mean it in a bad way. To her, entertainment needed to have some kind of intrinsic value. Escapism is a sin; it requires redemption. I would describe something I liked, and she would say, “But what is the redeeming value?” Art isn’t something merely to be enjoyed; surely not. It’s not a way to escape into someone else’s head, to experience life from a different angle. It’s a transaction. Any sense of pure fun or excitement must be met with an equal, opposite, reactive force. In other words, there needed to be a point to the thing. If there were explosions, gunfights, or—God-forbid—sex scenes throughout, there had better be a good, long ‘What have we learned, kids?’ moment at the end.

It wasn’t hard to imagine what she’d make of experimental, neural-interfacing simulation technology. Not to mention a fact that would be even harder for her to understand, which was that the new interactive genre of “Simworld” wasn’t just an escape, for me. It was becoming life itself.

Still, beyond the feeling that Evelyn would be disappointed if she knew, there was no guilt, no real sense of foreboding. Only the thrill. Only the constant counting down of moments until I could go back.

And now you can. After all this time. After all this...bullshit. So what are you waiting for?

I didn’t know, and the fact that I didn’t know made me nervous all over again, because it meant I would be in another loop, circling, looking for an answer that, thanks to my own distracting, procrastinative thought process, would remain just out of reach.

I pushed my chair back from the table and stood. Chair was uncomfortable, anyway. Just keep moving. Stop thinking. Just move.

Three minutes.

It suddenly occurred to me, standing in the now dimly lit dining area next to the table, that I was alone and unguarded for the first time in...shit, six years. Sure, I could join the others in the living room and do as I promised. But I didn’t have to. I could leave. They weren’t forcing me, not anymore. I’d given them my word. Meant it, at the time. And to them, that had been enough. But if I left now, who could blame me? You say what you need to when your life's on the line. You’d think they would have known that much.

How big was the estate, anyway? A couple miles in diameter? That’s a lot of ground to block off. Full of tall pines and knee-height undergrowth, from the looks of those cameras. How hard would it be to disappear? It was possible that the property would be blocked off by now, but it was also possible that I could at least try to escape. That decision was open to me. I wasn’t bound to anything.

That’s where you’re dead wrong.

It was derisive now, disappointed.

For the same reason Tanya knew she didn’t need to keep an eye on you, anymore. You’ve always been bound. You always will. It’s who you are.

The room suddenly felt cold, inhospitable. I turned, making my way toward the living room.

That’s why, the voice continued, you screwed over Oscar. Jackie, too. You’re a pig. You can’t fucking help yourself. And you’ll screw over these people, too. You’re disgusting. I hate you. You’re—

I closed my eyes. My teeth locked together, making a loud tapping sound.

When I opened them, it was two minutes to go.