In a comfortable room surrounded by nothingness, Ollie stepped back and waved its hand, the furniture from before reappearing along with the table of drinks.

Gesturing for Mac to take a seat, it made itself comfortable by helping itself to one of the glasses of whiskey on the table. Noting that Ollie wasn’t planning to elaborate on anything until he’d calmed down, Mac had no choice but to follow suit and plopped back down on the plush sofa that had been conjured for him.

As he found himself becoming much more relaxed, he noticed something off, not just about how calm he had suddenly become but about the situation itself. Looking down at where he was sitting, his eyes confirmed what his instincts had been telling him.

‘Isn’t this that sofa Mom and Dad threw out when I was a kid?’

His eyes narrowed to slits as he looked up and focused on the AI in front of him, “Ollie,” he began slowly, the faint paranoia he felt slipping into his voice as subtle accusation, “Why do you know about the childhood couch my parents threw out when I was twelve?”

Ollie remained silent, content to cradle the glass in its hand as it gazed off to the side towards a crackling fireplace. Mac’s instincts flared to life as the AI once again left his question hanging in the air, even going so far as to ignore him completely.

‘This isn’t right.’ he thought, a sinking feeling beginning to form in the pit of his stomach, ‘Not only has Ollie not been answering direct questions, but its behavior isn’t normal. Its personality isn’t normally this domineering. It’s acting... authoritative.’

“You really are a bright one, Mac.” Ollie finally spoke, still eyeing the crackling fire, “Not just intellect, but an actual brain behind it, common sense, as they say. Even faced with the prospect of death, you haven’t stopped questioning; haven’t stopped observing.”

It turned away from the fire and met Mac’s stare, “I thought providing your consciousness a moment of respite might help ease that instinctual need to know that you carry around within you, but it seems that I still don’t understand as much about the human mind as I thought.” Taking a sip from the glass in its hand, Ollie exhaled slowly, enjoying the simulated sensation of the burning whiskey. Mac sat motionless, quietly observing, as both his instincts and intuition had met to tell him that waiting and watching were his only options now.

Placing the glass back down on the table, Ollie leaned forward and stood up. It walked across the room and stopped before the fireplace; picking up the iron poker, it began to slowly stoke the fire, letting Mac ruminate on its previous words.

After a few minutes, it looked over its shoulder, giving him an encouraging smirk before prompting, “Do you understand what’s going on?”

Mac remained still, thinking about his words carefully, but not because he didn’t know. Of course, he knew. Ollie had already told him in so many words. It’s just, the situation had only grown more complicated with the implications.

Shaking his head, Mac reached out and threw back another shot before giving his reply, trying to calm his racing thoughts, “You said that someone tampered with the code prior to the testing in order to create a gap in our security.”

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Ollie nodded as he continued stoking the fire.

Mac took the confirmation in stride, continuing after running his tongue across his now dry lips, “But that should be impossible. Never mind our security measures, at the end of the day, even if someone manages to subvert all of them, the incident you’re describing could never happen. Unless…”

Leaning the poker back against the mantle, Ollie walked back across the room and returned to its seat, picking up the glass of whiskey as it did so. It rolled its free hand in the air in front of it, signaling for Mac to finish his thought, “Unless…”

He released a defeated breath, “Unless you failed to stop it. Even with all the fail safes non-responsive, you would’ve still been able to shut down the hardware and end the session before anything happened to us. The only reason you wouldn’t have interfered is if the person that tampered with the security also tampered with you. But, as I said, that should be impossible, for more than one reason, and only someone with clearance would even know how to do it in the first place. There’s only four of us with that information.”

Ollie didn’t respond to Mac’s probing, instead, it held up the glass in its hand against the light of the fire and admired the amber color of the liquid within, lowering the ambient light around them as it did so in order to further increase the effect provided by the firelight.

A bead of condensation traced its way down the side of the glass, pausing at the bottom where it hung precariously for a moment before falling to land on the outstretched finger waiting below. The water scattered the moment it made contact, the remaining moisture dripping down the sides of the finger until it was wiped away on the arm of the leather chair.

As it dried its finger, Ollie began speaking in a conversational tone, seemingly changing the subject, “Tell me, Mac. What separates reality from fantasy? Reality from fiction? From the virtual? Is it the level of detail?” it gestured towards the whiskey glass in its hand, “Is it the tangibility? The ability to touch, see, taste, smell?” Ollie’s grip on the glass tightened until it shattered. The glass cut into its hand and blood began to flow; the ice and alcohol hit the floor, along with the pieces of the glass, and began to mix with drops of blood as it started to seep into the carpet and then into the wood beneath it.

“Is it pain? Emotion? The evocation of feeling and sensations to remind one that they’re really alive?”

This demonstration managed to force a frown onto Mac’s previously passive face, the questions obviously ones that he'd heard countless times over the years as they'd bounced, first, around his peers in the scientific community and then, eventually, amongst the public.

Ollie reached out with its uninjured hand and grabbed a towel from the table, using it to wipe away the blood from its injured one, only to reveal the healthy, unblemished skin beneath.

It tossed the bloodied towel into the fire and continued without waiting for Mac to provide an answer to any of its questions.

“If what was once considered fantasy can now be touched, can be tasted, can be smelled, if fiction can be seen with such clarity that it becomes indistinguishable from what is considered real,” without a break in its speech, the volume of Ollie’s words suddenly spiked as it was instantly sitting beside Mac on the sofa, a shard of the broken glass in its hand, “If the virtual can elicit pain and emotion as intense as the material world…”

There was no time to react before fiery pain lanced up Mac’s arm, the shard finding itself lodged in the back of his hand. He clenched his teeth in agony, refusing to vocalize his pain and show weakness in front of the AI who was once again seated in its chair across the room, still speaking as if nothing was happening.

“At what point does the word ‘virtual’ start losing its association with ‘fake’? If all of the things that people use to define reality are no longer able to do so, when do the terms fantasy and fiction start to lose their meaning as well?”

Leaving the AI's questions unanswered, Mac simply looked down at his throbbing hand.

The pain coursing through him spoke louder than anything he could possibly say.