I wandered The Commons in a daze. A hundred competing thoughts and emotions swirled about in my confused brain. I didn’t know where I was going, I just needed to keep moving, like a shark.

I carried the chest of Crystals with me, lid closed of course. The smart thing would have been to go straight to the Data Forge. But I didn’t care.

Eventually, my absentminded roaming brought me in the vicinity of Spawn Alley. To my surprise I noticed a yokocho with a blue neon sign. The kanji for fish in a closed circle. A stoic chef served seafood to scant, miserable customers.

The shop! The contact point! It was open again.

I quickly took a seat on the only available stool and waved to the proprietor.

▶ I’ll have the fugu.

If Antisoc didn’t trust me, they could ‘flatline’ me. Go ahead. Remove me once and for all from this neon hellscape!

Instead, minutes later the cat with the Cheshire grin appeared and nuzzled against my leg. I reached down to stroke its fur, but it darted indifferently out of reach.

Holding the chest, I got up and followed the cat through the usual winding tangle of alleys and grim side streets until once again I stepped through a flat pane of light into the pocket server instance of the terrorist / hacker group known as Antisoc.

Fawkes, Tank Man, and Q. They were in full glitch-face mode, and their headquarters looked radically different. Instead of an abandoned laboratory setting, they had set up shop in some industrial plant. Large water pipes and air ducts violated the space from every angle, and electric breakers lined one entire wall. Antisoc’s portable screens, grid hacking connections, and barely controlled chaos were the same.

The grinning cat leapt up on one of the horizontal pipes. Tank Man, I think, stroked its fur and whispered: >Good girl<

▶ I didn’t think I’d see your faces again. Or lack of faces, I should say.

>Just a standard precaution. We apologize if our absence caused you any undue stress<

▶ I didn’t know what to think. Still don’t. The heist… was it a success?

>The less you know about it the better, for your own safety. But you successfully executed your part of the plan. And you stood tall in your interrogation with a Stasibot. Impressive<

Two of them stood before me. The one with the lab coat hung back, typing rapidly on a panel. Because of the masks and the modulated voices, I was not sure who was speaking. At times it felt like all three were speaking simultaneously.

▶ But I lost your thermal goggles.

>Unfortunate, but not a dealbreaker. We needed to pivot and cover all our bases, but we have failsafes within failsafes. Can’t be too careful, especially with Volunteers like you running around with highly suspicious energy signals. Q, what is the current number?<

>382<

I didn’t have patience for all this cryptic Shiva. Not after what I’d been through.

▶ You promised you would share what you know about The Collective if I helped you. I did my part. Time to do yours. What is really going on? What is this world?!

The one in the lab coat kept typing away furiously. The other picked up the cat and stroked her fur. The one in the middle, I assumed Fawkes, nodded in agreement and took time to gather his thoughts before answering.

>So we did. So we did…

We can’t share everything we’ve discovered, but here are some of the prevailing theories about what is going on. The true nature of this reality. We and others have frequently debated the merits of these competing theories. We’ll let you reach your own conclusions.

Theory #1 - The Collective is a mind prison, and we are prisoners for political crimes committed in the real world. There is no escape. No contract to fulfill. Volunteers will be reborn and reborn for an eternity with their memories wiped. You’ve done this same thing a hundred—maybe a thousand times before. The system creates false objectives and conflicts to keep us occupied and distracted. As the saying goes, you can always hire half of the poor to kill the other half.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Theory #2 - The Collective is one giant cryptocurrency farm. Every action we take, as part of this complex system, is helping to generate cryptocurrency being used in the real world. Volunteers are slaves, cogs in a machine, forced to grind out profits for supermassive corporations. The more intense our experiences, the more profit we generate. Fear, pain, longing, anguish, confusion, despair—these emotions power the engines of wealth.

Theory #3 - The Collective is a mind-control simulation and Volunteers are sleeper agents, operating without awareness in the real world. When a Volunteer takes a bounty, they are in reality assassinating a political opponent or target in the real world, obscured through an impenetrable AR / VR veil. Each cycle change or ‘system reset’ could be days, weeks, months, years—who knows, until we are awakened again to kill on behalf of the elite political cabals of the world.

Theory #4 - The Collective is a psychological and philosophical experiment about the true nature of consciousness, and we are the subjects. The Volunteers, you and I, are nothing more than AI constructs. Self-aware, sentient AI? Unknowable. But there is no humanity here. And there is no difference between us and the bots and the creatures and the Citizens. We are all programs, monitored and tested, poked and prodded, killed and autopsied and reborn, in a highly complex virtual laboratory<

I stood blinking at the Three Magi.

▶ Those… sound completely ridiculous. I don’t believe it. I didn’t ask for theories or conjectures. I asked for facts. Tell me what you DO know for certain. After all I’ve been through, I deserve that much.

Although, come to think of it, that Stasi bot had offered / threatened me with an ‘enhanced system refresh,’ effectively erasing my memory for a second time. Could there be something to that theory after all? Or bits of truth in all of them?

The Three Magi turned to face each other, their volume dropping and voice patterns growing indecipherable. They were conferring in coded distortion again. Finally, Fawkes turned back to me and visibly relaxed. Perhaps they were finally going to trust me.

>So be it. Here is what we are most certain of:

The Collective was built on top of a pre-existing system. Either these two systems are running concurrently, or one was built on the ruins and framework of an older, obsolete system<

▶ And what is your evidence for that?

>First, the cycles are irregular. The intervals between cycles are unpredictable and do not match any discernible pattern. We do not believe the rain that signals the change of a cycle is under system control. Currently, the System times their patches and refreshes with the rain, but they did not used to. They are disguising their lack of control over this element.

Second, there have been many instances of outside interference. Outside of the System, that is. According to the System, when a Volunteer dies, they respawn at the Restoration Point. But some Volunteers are permanently changed in a way the System cannot restore. Some Volunteers disappear and are never seen again. The current number of active Volunteers is less than the total awakened. Did they fulfill their so-called contracts and get released? Doubtful. And then there’s you—<

▶ Me? What about me?

>When we first scanned your History we noticed a disturbing error message you received. This error does not correspond to anything within the System of The Collective, or else it should be translated by the System. How do you explain that?<

▶ I can’t. I have no idea.

>You are not the first Volunteer to receive that error. And you yourself described an incident—an unexplained external influence taking control of you at the firing range. Enabling you to make a shot that you would not have been able to make on your own<

▶ That’s true…

>Third… well, Q will show you<

The Antisoc member known as Q walked to a folding table in their makeshift headquarters carrying an unusual looking high-powered microscope. He called me over. He removed a glass slide from his lab coat pocket and slid it under the microscope, projecting the results onto a large screen that was part of their portable equipment.

The object was something blue and delicate, and when Q zoomed in to extreme magnification the screen filled with an indecipherable wall of living code of breathtaking complexity.

>This is a sample taken from a {rare} fern flower, a piece of invasive flora you should be familiar with. When we examine the structure of its underlying code, we notice something strange. The code, the digital DNA if you will, underlying this flora does not match any known programming languages.

That’s right. The third evidence is that the code that makes up the invasive entities are comprised of bizarre fragments of ancient and dead languages. Sumerian, Ugaritic, Hieroglyphics, Runes. Other languages we cannot even identify and have no means of translating. No programming language on Earth looks like this. Not one, nor ever has<

I stared at the display. It was unexplainably beautiful.

▶ So what does this all mean?

>Have you heard of the Calabi-Yau-Weyland Defense Appropriations Act?<

▶ No…

>Do those words mean anything to you?<

▶ Not at all. Why?

>We found an obscure reference to that when we were digging in the Archives. The System has since been patched and we can no longer locate the reference<

▶ Sorry, I can’t help you there.

>But there is something you CAN do to help us. You’ve proven yourself more capable than perhaps even you thought possible. We have another task for you. Something that will help us get closer to solving the mystery of this place<

I was no closer to finding answers—not to who I was or what this world truly meant—but I felt I had grasped the end of a thread.

I have to keep pulling that thread until the whole thing starts to unravel.

▶ Sure. Why not? I’m game. What do you want me to do?

>We want you to capture an invasive entity–ALIVE. Smuggle it into The Commons and bring it to us to study<

Excellent.