Ever since she arrived at the Bluelight Corporation’s headquarters, Karen Levi hadn’t left for a moment, trying to help them as much as she could in order to release her brother and his friends from the technological trap they had found themselves trapped inside of.

After severe nagging from the staff and from the couple that had housed them after her parent’s death, Mister and Miss Durham, she accepted to take a night to go back to her house and sleep a good night of sleep.

‘You won’t be able to work at your fullest if you don’t rest.’ Had said Miss Durham.

She even gave her some sleeping pills that were supposed to help her sleep.

She went to her apartment, took a long, refreshing shower and went to bed early. A person that didn’t know her situation, would think that it was a pretty normal life, but if they were able to see inside her head, they would notice that, even though she was away from the computers at Bluelight Corp’s building, her mind was working on developing new possible ways by which to reconnect the machines and free their families.

That was the brain of the woman many people had called a genius, but even geniuses need to sleep, and after taking the pill she had been given, she fell into a deep sleep without dreams and woke up refreshed the next morning, ready to go back to continue helping the main team.

But, when she entered the immersion room, the place she had been working from with the main team, she found that the atmosphere was darker than the day before, something had happened overnight, something bad.

The room was in silence as a woman cried next to one of the immersion pods. Two men who looked like paramedics were disconnecting the machine from a girl’s body and moving her into a white stretcher.

A quick look on the girl’s body revealed that her arms were painted black and purple, as if she had hit them against something so hard some vessels had broken.

“No!” Cried the woman. “My Sabrina! Why!”

She was holding onto her husband, hugging him as tears flowed from her eyes. Even though he was trying to conceal his feelings and stay strong for his wife, it wasn’t a lie that you could see a mixture of incredible anger and infinite sadness within his brown eyes as they filled with the tears he refused to set free.

“You… you killed her…” He growled, looking at Leena Kerst, whose hair was messy and had the red mark of a slap on her left cheek. “You got her inside your bloody machine and killed her…”

The man tried to hold his anger as he talked, but the hands that held his quivering wife had turned into white knuckled fists as he talked.

“I’m sorry mister Mac Allister, we did everything we could do…” Said Leena. “We are not quite sure what happened yet, but we are investigating. Be sure that you and your family will be compensated.”

The man lost it and released his wife, who fell to the floor, still crying.

“Compensation?” He said as he moved towards Leena. “Compensation!? You think some money will make us feel better!? I want my daughter back God Damnit! Not some fucking money!”

Two guards stepped in and blocked his way.

“Sir.” Said one of them, whom Karen recognised as the one she had reduced days before. “I know you are angry right now, but don’t do anything stupid that you might regret afterwards.”

The man stopped and clenched his fists, obviously trying to contain himself. He looked at the guard and then to Leena.

“Words…” He said. “Words cannot begin to explain my anger right now… leave us alone…”

He turned around and put his hand around his still crying wife.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

“Common dear… let’s go see our baby girl…”

They walked together towards the door passing next to Karen, and followed the stretcher that carried their daughter outside of the room.

Karen looked on the scene in silence, her own nervousness almost showing, but she knew that if any of the parents broke right there, all of them would just collapse. The tension was just too much.

The guard walked up to one of the walls and sat down, putting his head down between his legs.

Karen walked up to him and gave him a little nudge with her foot.

When the guard looked up and saw Karen, a chill ran down his spine.

“What’s your name?” Asked Karen.

“Matthew ma’am…” He said.

“Well Matthew, thanks for that, you controlled the situation very well.”

“Thanks…” He said, putting his head back between his legs. ‘But did I…’ He thought. ‘If I was him, I would have reacted the same way… I feel like shit right now…’

Karen walked up to Leena, who hadn’t moved at all from where she was standing, her hands tightly put together.

“Hey…” Said Karen. “You ok?”

Leena blinked and looked at Karen blankly, as if she had been in some sort of trance.

“Ye-Yes… I’m ok…”

“Don’t lie to yourself, I can see this has hit you pretty hard, the same as all of us… but we need to improve now and work harder so this doesn’t happen again, let’s get to work.”

Karen patted Leena on her shoulder and walked into the development room, ready for many days full of work and filled with the fear of not knowing when the next kid would die.

And so, a month passed.

---------------------------------------

The room became silent when Leena stepped onto the podium as she had a month before.

“We’ve had a break through.” Said Leena to the group of parents in front of her. “Thanks to the hard work of the team and miss Levi, we have managed to develop a connection that will let us know the precise position of each of the children inside the virtual world they are in.”

The parents began whispering to each other.

“What? Just that?” Said Charles Hays “And here were we thinking that you had managed to find a way to take them out! You are wasting our time lady…”

“I know is not much,” Said Leena. “But this is the first step towards taking them out. Due to the nature of the security systems in play, we haven’t been able to get into the machines and release the children, but with this gadget, we will pry open a small tunnel, which we can enlarge afterwards.”

“Wait, a gadget?” Asked Kitaro Tsukushima. “Shouldn’t it be more like a program or something?”

Leena pressed a button and the image of a connector appeared on screen.

“Yes, it should be, but as I said, we are unable to mingle with the software due to security issues, but, we have managed to find a workaround. Each pod is connected to the mainframe with a thick fiber optic cable which carries the copies of the brain impulses and the computer’s information back and forth between the pod and the servers, and using this device, we will be able to take information out of said stream and using algorithms we will be able to know the location and even possibly the state of each one of the children.”

The parents gasped, it may be simple, but knowing how their sons and daughters felt was something very important for them.

“But…” Continued Leena. “There is a catch…”

“A… catch?” Asked Helga Duram.

“Yes, unfortunately, the only way to use said device, is by disconnecting the cable for a few seconds and then reconnecting it again with the attachment in place, and we don’t know what effects it may have on the children’s brain.”

“What!” Yelled a group of parents at unison

“This is why, Karen Levi has proposed we use his brother as the first subject to this procedure.”

“Karen?” Asked Helga. “Why put him in danger!”

She looked around, but was unable to find her in the room.

“Right now, Miss Levi is with her brother while the technicians connect the device to the machine, we should have the results in a few minutes, if it works, it should be fine to put it in the other pods, but we would still need parent’s approval for that.”

The parents whispered as they looked at each other.

-------------------------------------------------

Karen grabbed his brother’s hand as the vitals on the monitor started to weaken.

“Common little bro, hang on just a little longer. I promise I’ll take you out of there, but for now we need this, we need to know where you are…”

She heard a click to her left and one of the technicians appeared from behind the pod.

“It’s ready!”

Karen looked up to the monitor and saw that his brother’s vitals had begun to normalize once more.

“That’s it little bro, live… you gotta live…”

She pressed his hand against her face and tears of relief began to flow down her cheeks.