‘Are we going to the voice?’ Coil asked as they ran.

Fuse glanced back at him for a moment, hesitating ‘Yeah, we’re going to the voice,’ she eventually replied.

Coil picked up the pace, falling in line with Fuse and the cyclops. He had never been in this part of the arena complex before. It reminded Coil of a hospital. Brightly lit, sterile hallways, with the occasional rack of mysterious electronics to one side or another. The alarm was growing distant. Coil couldn’t hear any kind of pursuit. Was it really that easy to escape? Coil hoped the answer would be yes as Fuse led him through identical hallway after identical hallway. They had passed dozens of doors with frosted glass windows, but Fuse didn’t seem interested in any of them. Coil let his mind wander back to the voice. He daydreamed the moment when he would meet its owner. Strangely, he couldn’t at all picture what the voice’s owner would look like, but Coil didn’t really care. He just wanted to hear it again. The desire was all-encompassing, all-consuming. Was this how Battery felt about escaping the box? Coil could almost laugh at the idea of leaving the box now. Why would he ever want to leave when the voice was here? He heard Fuse say something, but he wasn’t paying attention. Why should he have to listen to her voice? Did she think hers was somehow superior to the unnamed one that had treated Coil with such kindness? What was he even doing? Would the voice want him to escape the arena? Surely, if the voice had wanted Coil to see its body then it would have let him. By going with Fuse, Coil was actively betraying the voice’s wishes. Coil stopped running and dropped to his knees. Fuse shouted something in her inferior voice. Coil curled up in a ball and began to sob. His core ached with shame. The outer world became a blur; a baseless dream. He couldn’t distinguish shapes or colours, or light from dark. Sound simply came into his head as a featureless static. He felt as if he was floating in water without short circuiting. He had no acute sensation or specific feelings. All of his world and everything in it; his perception of reality, melted into a meaningless, abstract puddle of ideas and motions, and in the centre was the voice. Coil’s world. The only thing he was. All he could ever hope to be. Without the voice, Coil did not exist. And then the voice vanished, and Coil continued existing.

In an instant, Coil’s mind rewound itself into some form of cohesion. He was lying in a clean, tiled room of cabinets and shelves. Sitting on a plastic folding chair was the cyclops. He gave Coil a little wave.

‘Good, you’re awake,’ said Fuse. ‘I’ve never seen someone get so severely affected like that before.’

‘Affected?’ Coil asked. He jumped a little in surprise. His voice sounded foreign to him. Deeper and richer.

Fuse walked around from behind where Coil lay so he could see her. She sat on the floor beside him. ‘They, the ones who run this place, use the voices as a kind of interrogation tool. It’s a form of advanced telepathy. Makes you more suggestible; agreeable to what they ask you. Sometimes the technique backfires and well… this happens.’

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Coil had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. ‘Voices?’ he asked.

Fuse blinked. ‘Oh. I guess I must’ve snagged some of your memory coils. We had to mess around in your head for a while to get the telepathy junk out. You might experience some sudden character development as a side effect.’

Coil tried to sit up, but something was holding him down by the top of his head.

Fuse waved her hands frantically. ‘Woah woah woah! No moving yet!’

Coil reached up and felt his head. It was wide open. Both his outer and inner plating had been meticulously stripped away, and several large tubes led directly from his head to some unseen machinery behind him.

‘Can you please close my head?’ Coil asked.

‘Needs another half hour at least,’ Fuse replied. ‘Your oil and cooling agent is way low.’

Coil flopped onto his back and sighed. ‘So, I was possessed?’

Fuse shrugged. ‘If that’s how you wanna look at it.’

‘Who possessed me, exactly?’

‘My bosses,’ Fuse replied. ‘All I know is that they’re from outside. I mean really outside. Outside the outside.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means there’s a lot more to this world than the Pyschobox, and even more than that?’

Coil perked up. ‘Like what?’

‘Ever heard of a human?’

‘A what?’

Fuse sat back, leaning against one of the shelves. ‘It’s like a robot, but made from living stuff instead of metal.’

Coil chuckled. ‘How’s that work?’

‘I don’t know, but the bosses are terrified of them. There’s more. These guys called Greys. Friends of the humans, apparently. Even scarier. And there’s others too. A lot of others.’

‘So are the bosses robots, or others?’

‘Couldn’t say. Never seen ‘em.’

The conversation broke off and Coil thought for a while. He had a lot to think about. Aside from these voices Fuse had mentioned, Coil’s memory was otherwise intact. His days with Battery, and the end of them too. All the people he had killed afterwards simply by being unkillable himself. He struggled to process it all, but he still felt remarkably calm. What Fuse was talking about interested him. He felt no fanatic lust after the knowledge like Battery would have. It was merely trivia to him. However, mild interest was really the most positive he felt about anything right now, so he figured he might as well set learning more as his priority. What else was there to do? He didn’t want to wallow in the past. He just needed to move forward in whatever direction was available.

‘What am I?’ he asked.

‘That’s what the bosses want to know,’ Fuse replied. ‘All robots have psychic energy in them. It’s how they function. The oil and motors are peripheral. The energy is how the magic really happens. Taking more of it on just lets you spare more for crazy stunts like you see in the arena.’ Fuse jabbed a finger at Coil. ‘You are different. You have no psychic energy. At all. The bosses have no idea how you even move, but what they do know is how no one can hurt you. For some reason, and you gotta trust me on this, having no psychic energy means you’re also somehow impervious to psychic energy, and since all robots run on psychic energy, it means you are immune to all robot attacks.’

‘That makes absolutely no sense,’ said Coil.

Fuse sighed. ‘I know, but that’s how it works. I’m probably oversimplifying it. Got any more questions that need answers?’

‘Just one,’ Coil said. ‘Who are you, really?’