“According to the list,” Said the woman standing in the front of the room. “The parents of 19 out of the 20 children are inside this room, we will start the briefing as soon as the parents or guardians of Anton Levi arrive.”

The woman was wearing a dark grey two piece suit with a blue shirt. Her blond hair was tightly packed on a bun and shimmered under the blue lights coming from the screen behind her.

If Anton had been there, he would have seen clear physical similarities between her and Alexis, the AI that he had found in the white room.

A woman sitting in the front row next to a man who appeared to be her husband, raised her hand, like a student in a classroom.

“Yes ma’am?” Asked the woman. “Can you tell me your name please?”

The woman lowered her hand and spoke with a broken voice. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying for a while.

“My… my name is Helga, Helga Duram, mother of John… Oh God…” She managed to say and began sobbing again.

A man in the back row rolled his eyes and poke up.

“Could you just cut the crap and tell my why my son can’t make it to tomorrow’s match?”

The woman in the front looked back at him with a bored stare and then looked back to Helga Durham.

“Miss, could you continue?”

Helga took the handkerchief her husband was handing him, cleaned her face and continued speaking.

“Sorry…” She said. “I’m the mother of John Durham. I just wanted to say that Anton doesn’t have parents, not anymore at least. He and my son are friends since they were little, so Anton and his older sister stayed with us for a while after their parents died.”

“See?” Interrupted the man at the back once more. “We don’t need to wait for the dead, can we just move to why you call us in the middle of the night, tell me my son is ‘unable to leave your facilities’ and that he won’t be able to go to tomorrow’s match? It’s a really important one. Or even better, can you tell us already how to sue your asses for reparations?”

The crowd of around 40 people started talking with themselves, some siding with the bald man and others saying that he had no soul for talking like that about the boy’s dead parents.

“No... No, what I wanted to say was that now he does have a guardian, she is just very busy but she should arrive soon, it’s her sis…”

She was once again interrupted as the conference room’s door slammed open. A guard flew into the room through the door and fell to the ground on his back followed by a young woman’s voice screaming.

“I’m his fucking sister, for fuck’s sake!”

As the guard was starting to get back to his feet, the owner of the voice stormed in and kicked the guard back to the ground, this time also stepping on his chest.

The wild, red hair in her head and incredibly white skin contrasted heavily against the black walls of the room.

“My name is Karen Levi, you fuckwit! Three times national Judo champion! You can write that on your silly little notebook afterwards!” She got closer to his face and growled in a lower voice. “And if you put your fucking hands on me again… I break them!”

She took her feet out of the man’s chest and he crawled his way out of the room with the same look on his face some soldiers have after coming back from a war zone.

Karen fixed her hair a little bit and moved her glasses a little bit before looking to the front of the room. The other woman had been looking impervious at the scene that had happened in front of her.

“Sorry, were you waiting for me?” Said Karen fixing her coat as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

The woman in the front looked down to the tablet on her hands and ticked on the last name of her list.

“Now that everyone is here, let’s proceed to the brief…”

“Ah! Auntie!” Yelled Karen, interrupting the other woman. “And Uncle Lucas too!

She walked up to front row and gave both of them a big hug.

“How have you been Karen?” Said Lucas Durham. “I see you are still causing trouble wherever you go…”

She laughed. Her strong presence had lifted some of the stress that permeated the room just a few minutes ago.

“I’m good, still looking for a good job though, would you happen to know if there is someone looking for a computer engineer?”

Lucas and Helga laughed for the first time since the day before.

The woman in front cleared her throat and made everyone turn their attention back to the front of the room.

“Miss,” Said the woman. “Could you please take a seat so we can start with the briefing?”

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The bald man in the back row also gave his opinion.

“Yeah, could you just shut the fuck up so we can get this shit show over with?”

But he was widely ignored.

“Sorry,” Said Karen, smiling. “I tend to get carried away without noticing.”

The woman scoffed and looked down to her tablet.

“Ok then, after a long wait, we can finally start with the briefing.” She said. “My name is Leena Kerst and I form part of the New Technology Research Team here at Bluelight Corp.”

She swiped up on her tabled and pointed to the screen behind her. The screen lit up immediately and showed a room with 20 coffin-like machines. Within each machine laid a person, small changes made it look as if they were sleeping. Some of the parents gasped when they recognized some of the sleeping people as their sons or daughters.

“I knew it…” Said Helga. “I knew something bad had happened…”

Leena looked at the parents and spoke in a soft voice.

“Let’s start by explaining the situation.”

She swiped once more on her tablet and the videos changed to a scene showing the front of the building.

“Yesterday at 9:00 am, a group of 20 students and 2 teachers from the “Chrono’s Institute” arrived at the building to enjoy a day in our facilities trying out our latest unreleased technology.”

The screen flickered and showed several short clips of the kids using different types of equipment, from new cell phones to computers and televisions.

“They came here as a reward for placing on the top layer during the last standardized test in different areas of knowledge and expertise.”

The screen changed again, now showing the moment when the students went into the room from before and preparing to get into the machines. They looked happy, unaware of what was going to happen.

All of the parents present had been briefly told what had happened, so they already knew some details, but this was their first time watching these videos.

A woman started sobbing in a very low voice when the camera panned and showed a muscular boy with blond hair getting into the machine, probably her son. She was sitting next to the man from before.

“Shut up woman!” He said in a stern voice and slapped the back of her head.

Several people saw this reaction and gasped. Karen and a handful of others stood up, but before anyone could do or say anything, Leena spoke from the front of the room.

“Mr. Hays, if you won’t restrain from showing us your disgusting habits, I will have you escorted out of the building and into a police station…”

He only scoffed and looked away, trying to break eye contact with Leena, whose tone of voice was similar to that of someone talking with something lower than an insect and whose eyes were as cold as ice.

“Continuing,” She said “At 14 pm, after a lunch break in our cafeteria, they proceeded to the Dream Room, where the latest prototypes of the Deep Dream Reality Machines were waiting.”

The screen went back to the live feed of the room where the kids were sleeping.

Before she could continue speaking, a man raised his hand.

“Yes Mr. Tsukushima?” Said Leena.

“What is a Deep Dream Reality Machine exactly?” Asked the man of clear Japanese origin. “And please try to explain it with words we can understand.” He smiled.

“Sorry sir, I was going to explain that later…”

“It’s a type of VR Machine.” Interrupted Karen, looking back at the man. “You know, Virtual Reality? Like those ones that were introduced a few years back but never came into the mainstream, you’ve probably heard of them, The Occulus Rift, HTC Vibe, PlayStation VR…”

“Ah, yes, yes, thank you” Said Mr. Tsukushima. “Those do ring a bell…”

Karen looked back to the front and saw Leena glaring at her, she obviously didn’t like being interrupted.

“S-Sorry…” She said. “Force of habit…”

“Maybe you could also explain how they work and save me some effort…” Said Leena.

Karen felt the eyes of everyone looking at her. IT wasn’t always that she felt overpowered by someone else’s personality.

She laughed, nervously.

“S-sure,” She said. “I mean, probably I could say some things, but what I know is only based on public patents and things like that…

Leena smiled with a smile as sharp as the edge of a knife.

“Enlighten us…”

She felt a chill run down her spine. She never liked talking about things she wasn’t a hundred percent sure about.

“Oh, ok then… From what I’ve been able to understand, the Deep Dream Reality Machine, or DDRM for short, works by putting the user into a deep REM cycle, that being the deepest state of sleep you can go to and where dreams happen, and then it… it projects the game into the user’s dream, only letting the player control the body of the character… Basically it’s simulating that state of mind when you are aware that you are sleeping so you can control the world around you, just that the world is the game itself and you can only control your body… right?”

She looked at Leena, who was still smiling.

“Basically, and that is very basically, you are right… It is very impressive that you managed to get as much info from only reading patents…”

She went back to her neutral face and continued talking.

“Continuing with the topic at hand, soon after they entered the demos, there was a car accident outside which sent one of them crashing into the building and, to prevent further damage to both the personnel and the information, the building went onto total lockdown.”

A video of the accident played in the screen while she explained what had happened.

“This was set in place in case of a terrorist attack targeting our building, and as part of the program, the system creates a back-up copy of every file inside of it and locks itself off the grid.

“But due to some reason we are still currently investigating, this command managed to override the security systems put in place on the DDRM’s, virtually locking the student’s consciousness in the simulations.

“The failure was so catastrophic, that the servers from where the machines operate from went into lockdown too, cutting the AI we use to communicate between the servers and us from making contact with the kids, so right now we are on the dark about how they are, but we assure you the servers never stopped working, so they should still be inside the simulation without many problems.”

After she stopped speaking, silence took over the room.

A trembling voice came from the middle of the group, it was Hideo Tsukushima, his wife cried next to him.

“So… you are saying that you can’t… bring them out?”

Leena’s voice didn’t show any kind of emotion when she spoke.

“Yes sir, right now we are unable to wake them up.”

The parents began talking with each other.

A slam was heard at the back of the room when Leon Hays, the man that had slapped his wife, spoke.

“Why can’t you just… just take them out of these fucking machines then!? Wouldn’t they wake up after that!?”

“Sorry sir, but we cannot do that. We believe that, when the servers started the system copy, parts of their consciousness grafted with the machines, so unless we can find a way to undo said connection, taking them out of the machines could leave them with severe mental damage or even kill them.”

The man sat down, his face filled with rage. Even though most people there didn’t like him, most understood his feelings.

Silence took over the room.

Karen spoke.

“So, can we see them now?” She didn’t appear to be faced by what was happening, as if she knew nothing bad would happen. “I would like to see my brother.”