“Briefing concluded. Any questions?” I looked over my team. I had two squads this time, all of whom had been at the reality engine for months now and should be nearly done training.

Arjun’s data mining efforts had indicated this reality engine fragment was much stronger than the first one we had encountered. Will and Hester, my new best friends, had joined.

Sage was clamoring to be allowed, but she was busy with school, and since we had no idea how long these conquests would take, Grandpa and I put our feet down and told her she had to focus on her studies. She pouted a lot, though I thought she was enjoying her school overall. She'd spent lots of out-of-class hours with her new squad of, well, I'm not going to say friends, from how she talked about them. I'm not sure that she actually liked all of them, but her school apparently did a lot of team projects, and she'd been doing almost everything with her squad.

In addition to Will and Hester, I had three new recruits from the pool I was dubbing "homeless and hopeless," i.e., the cancer victims, severely mentally ill, and others who'd been brought to the reality engine for a new chance at life. All three of them were eager to try out some real combat. They had much more versatile classes than did my team of soldiers.

There was a lady I remembered from that very first batch of dying patients I had helped induct. Her name was Thelma. She was 85 years old and had been dying of lung cancer from smoking too many cigarettes. She had a cigarette dangling from her lips now. The smell repulsed me, but tobacco and nicotine couldn't actually hurt any of our bodies anymore, so I ignored it aside from making a quick note to find out where she'd gotten them. If there was a black market in smuggled goods from Earth, I wanted to know about it, and if she'd found some way to get cigarettes out of the reality engine, that might be worth looking into as well.

Thelma was a [Crazy Cat Lady]. She could summon up to ten different cats, apparently all spitting images of pets she'd once had. The cats all granted different kinds of buffs, and working together could manage some pretty good DPS.

Jason was one of the former homeless. I didn't know his story, but his eyes were haunted. He kept twitching as he looked at Thelma, his fingers rubbing against each other. I suspected he'd had an addiction to cigarettes as well as other substances. His class was [Recycling Expert]. Given elements from the world around him, he could craft weapons, fortifications, even vehicles. In theory, it was a powerful class, but I waited to hear how it worked.

Su-Yong had been cured of a brain tumor. He was actually young, not rejuvenated, probably around my age. He had a class of [EMS] - emergency medical services. I was glad to have a dedicated healer, though one of my 16 uniformed recruits had a medic upgrade attached to his basic [Soldier] class. Honestly, I was disappointed just how many of our military recruits were taking the same basic class choices. I suspected [Soldier] was a very basic re-skin of the [Warrior class most of the galactic contenders used.

Nobody had any questions. I took a deep breath. I needed them to understand this mattered.

"We don't have a whole lot of information about this one," I said, meeting their eyes. I was glad to have Chavez, Ling, Dorman and Weeks back with me. The rest were newcomers. I'd met them all in training, of course, but this was the first time we'd worked together. "I'm just going to remind you, the most important thing is to be flexible and quick to adapt. This won't be like anything you've experienced back on Earth. Even if it occasionally reminds you of a Call of Duty level, it's not, and it can shift at any time."

"Ask them," I said, pointing at my veterans.

Chavez nodded. "Captain Williams is right. Stay alert," he said. I had made him my second in command, mostly because I was worried the soldiers wouldn't take orders from Hester. She had probably a better head for strategy than I did, but her personality was a little abrasive, befitting her weird class. Her very goth look contrasted with the clean-cut, government-issue aesthetic most of my people sported.

"All right, let's go," I said, and stepped through the portal.

I studied the landscape around me. It was overly bright. The colors were wrong somehow, like they were missing a bunch of neutral shades. Ahead of me was a building. It was starkly black and white, with a bright red door on it. The door was a little too square somehow. The edges of the building too sharp.

I was on a street lined with two and three-story buildings, all jarringly not quite right. The street itself was smooth, gray asphalt, without a crack or manhole anywhere to be seen. A little farther along was a car.

That's when I realized just what was wrong here. The car looked like a bubble with big, blobby tires. This whole scenario was like a video game from the 90s. Not enough polygons. 16-bit color. Once I'd figured out what was bugging me about it, I wrote it off as another reality engine weirdness and turned to face my team.

They were nowhere in sight. I'd come into the zone at least a minute ago. They should be here.

"Chavez?" I shouted. “Ling? Hester? Where is everyone?"

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No one replied. I opened my message tab and found Chavez screaming at me, Captain! Captain, are you back? Get back here! Captain?

What was going on?

Chavez: are you all right? Sir?

All right? Of course I am, I replied in confusion. What's going on?

You died.

A priority message from Juana popped up. Put your earpiece back in so I can talk to you.

I'd had it in a minute ago, hadn't I? I fumbled it out of my inventory back into my ear while Chavez’s words sank in. I died.

"I died?" I said.

Juana's voice was in my ear, warm and worried-sounding. "Yes, Shad."

"How? I just entered…. Oh, right."

It hit me then, like a semi-truck to the face. I'd just lost my memory of everything that had happened since the first time I set foot inside this level. Chavez was sending me increasingly urgent messages.

Captain, can you get back? I'm not sure how long we can hold out.

I looked around wildly. "Where do I go?" I asked Juana.

"I'm putting Arjun on." Juana's voice cracked as she spoke. She sounded like she was really worried. It couldn't be because I'd died. She'd watched me die and respawn more times than I could count. I pushed that thought aside as Arjun's comfortable monotone filled my ears.

"Captain Williams, good to have you back. All right, we should be able to avoid most of the wrong turns this time."

"This time?" I said sharply.

"Shad, you're wasting time," Juana said. “Chavez and the others are holding the control point. If they're pushed off it, you lose. You've got the key. If you don't get back to them before they're overrun, you lose the whole level.”

"Got it," I said. "All right, Arjun, tell me what to do."

He directed me into the first building on the left, up a flight of stairs, and out onto the roof. "Face north, then jump to the next roof," he ordered.

There was a ten-foot gap between buildings. "I don't think I can make it.”

“Do you see the spot marked X? Launch from there. You need to double jump," Arjun added. "Stand on the spot, hop, and then do a real jump."

"All right," I said, doubtfully.

I did as he told me, racing over to the X, hopping, and then, to my surprise, finding myself springing through the air across to the next rooftop. I landed, tucked and rolled, tumbling over and getting up, all in one smooth motion.

"Next building, same," Arjun said.

I followed his orders. He led me on a meandering jump through the city, first heading north, then east, then south, before turning east again, resuming my course northward. There were more than one X on some of the buildings, showing it was possible to make other jumps, but Arjun seemed to know what he was doing, so I followed him forward, wondering just how long it had taken us to figure this out.

The last jump took me down into a big, circular garden plaza, filled with spiky-looking plants in an overly brilliant shade of green, with bright red berries on them. In the center of the plaza were a set of six concentric rings. The innermost ring had four circles each with a different design on it. Each subsequent ring had two more, for a total of… I did some quick math… 54 distinct symbols.

Arjun groaned. "The puzzle's reset. Let me confirm that it's going to be the same solution as last time. Yeah, it looks like it should be. Alright. You need to start by standing on the circle in the middle. Then walk to the third ring out. Go two designs to the left. The one that looks like a butterfly? Stand on it."

I followed his instructions. The circle turned green under me. Seemed like a good sign.

"Now, go another two rings further out. Circle clockwise this time. Eight patterns."

I counted off and found myself looking down at a mushroom symbol.

"Stand on that. Now, one ring in toward the center. Go two spaces clockwise."

I followed Arjun's explanations precisely, tracing out a complicated design that had me visit every single icon on the circles, one at a time. Minutes ticked by. Once I nearly stepped on the wrong plate and Arjun shouted. “No! No! That will reset.”

Finally, after close to an hour, I activated the final symbol

"Now, stand on the center and the puzzle will unlock," Arjun said.

I did. Gears whirred under me. The piece of pavement where I stood, a circle about ten feet across, began to sink down into darkness.

"Juana?" I said. "You there?"

"I'm here, Shad."

"How long did that take us to figure out the first time?"

"It took a little while," she said.

"Juana, how long did I lose?"

She paused. At last, in a small voice, “You've been in there for eight days."

Eight days. I had lost eight days. On the other hand, I had a feeling it was eight days of incredibly tedious work solving puzzles and jumping all over the city.

"Should I be watching out for enemies?"

"They don't seem to have respawned. The first time through it was a pain," Arjun said. "You lost most of your team a couple of times over doing that puzzle because the dragons just kept respawning."

“Dragons. Great."

The stone circle ground to a halt. I was in a sewer. Radioactive-looking bright green sludge poured through a tunnel to my left.

"Please tell me I don't have to walk in that stuff."

"There's a catwalk," Arjun said. “There were turtles and alligators attacking before, but I don't think you're going to have to worry about those now. You do have to redirect the flow to get it to the end point, though. I'll tell you which valves to open as we go.”

I hurried off down the sewer. Drips fell on me. I tried not to worry about what was in them. A tunnel branched off to my right. Arjun had me follow it, turn a valve at the far end, then retrace my steps. I went another dozen paces, then had to cross a six-in-wide wooden board forming a bridge over the green stream to open a valve on that side. I raced along the sewer, opening valve after valve.

Chavez was updating me every couple minutes.

We beat back that wave. No casualties. Hester wants to sally out but I’m negative on that.

I'm in the sewer, I replied, hoping that would mean something to him.

Hurry, please, sir.

At last, I came to a place where the contents of the sewer vanished into a dozen long snaking pipes.

"Those are what we opened before," Arjun told me. "The sludge should be going where it needs to. Now you'll be able to get out through the main opening. Step down into the channel and through that next lock."

The tunnel was dry. Ahead of me, an opening gaped. It glowed with a red force field.

"You sure?" I said. "That thing looks like it's going to disintegrate me."

"It won't," Arjun replied.

I hoped he was confident. It was hard to tell with him. He rarely had much inflection in his voice, but he also never, to my knowledge, had lied to me. So I took a deep breath, leapt over the edge of the railing, and strode through the red force field.