They started waking up one by one.

The pretty girl was the first one. She opened her eyes and moved her hands as if she was trying to swim backwards, then rectified her body as she realized she was back in the real world. She pressed the button inside the tank and waited for the levitator to do the turn off dance. A few seconds later she opened the tank door and looked around, puzzled. Sumiko guessed she would be wondering why she was waking up at a police station instead of at the company’s building.

“Uh...” she said, but her voice came out weak and aphonic after who knows how long. She had probably spent weeks inside the game, the Asian girl thought.

An officer made a quick exit through the door to warn the detectives about the news. A woman in uniform stayed in the room, watching.

The second one to wake up was a chubby guy in his fifties. He grunted as he stepped off the vertical tank, and looked around, also disoriented. Then he saw the girl.

“Hey,” he said. “Undaya. You look just like in the game.”

The girl didn’t answer. She looked worried. She looked even more worried when Veggips entered the room with long, energetic strides, drilling them with his eyes.

“I am... was... Gervain,” the chubby guy said. His words lingered, unanswered.

The third and forth sleepers to come back to life were a guy and a girl in their thirties or late twenties. Then three or four others. Mike didn’t, though. And Sarah, the only one lying in a horizontal tank, remained asleep as well.

“Well, this is interesting,” Veggips said. He was about to add something when Clooper entered the room, accompanied by a medic. “Oh, of course,” he said then. “Let’s get you all checked first. Then we’ll talk.”

* * *

This other room was dark and the only light came from the two fluorescent lamps hanging low above the large table located in the middle. They had made them all sit down at one side of the table, while Veggips, Clooper, and two agents sat down in front of them. Sarah and Mike hadn’t come back yet. The girl whose player name was Undaya still looked worried, maybe even frightened; the others had barely talked since they woke up. They all seemed pretty disoriented, after two hours of being awake. Nobody had eaten anything.

“Here’s the thing,” Veggips said. “All of you, except one, have spent some time as hostages in a virtual world. You know it as the Anderverse, because the guy who tricked you all into entering the game is so full of himself he doesn’t even need to eat. Now,” he said, speaking over the gasps and shocked reactions, “some of you weren’t just victims. At least one or two among you all got in there with, let’s say, unholy intentions. You know who you are. We know, too.”

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Sumiko glanced around, trying to determine who was the hacker who had been inside the game. But everybody looked equally shocked. The whole situation made it impossible to differentiate who was just surprised and who was hiding something.

“As you are now realizing, that was useless. Once you got in, your memories were temporarily suppresed, so anything you were trying to do inside the game was forgotten. The hackers got hacked.” He chuckled at his own forced joke. “But don’t worry. We’re good. If you cooperate, that is.”

As nobody said a word (the hacker or hackers for fear of outing themselves, unsure about Veggips’ honesty; the others out of curiosity), the detective grunted irritatedly and spoke again. Sumiko had just met him that day, but she knew he wasn’t fond of talking too much. He had said enough words in five minutes to fill a whole week. He wasn’t pleased. He didn’t look pleased.

“As it happens, all of you, hackers and non-hackers, could help us. We need you to tell us everything you did and saw inside the Anderverse. There are still people trapped inside, and they could die at any moment. So we’re willing to forget the whole hacking thing if you act like good boys and girls and help us.”

“Do you... do you mean Victor Anderen is the one who trapped us?” the chubby guy, the one who had been Gervain, asked.

“For how long have we been trapped in there?” the pretty girl added.

Veggips drummed his fingers on the table, impatiently.

“We are asking the questions here,” he said. “And we’ll keep asking questions for a while.”

“I’d like to call my wife,” the chubby guy insisted. He didn’t know when to shut up.

“After you answer all our questions,” Veggips said sharply, “you’ll be able to make that call. If your answers are satisfying. If not, maybe we’ll call her instead.”

* * *

In the end, it all boiled down to cooperating. It turned out that the feds had already basically solved the case with clues given by the hackers. They had found Victor Anderen lying in his tank, and a small team of people keeping the simulation up and running for him. Veggips had put two agents there to watch and make sure the technicians didn’t do anything crazy, while he and the other detectives went searching for Sarah and Sumiko. They had nearly all the pieces now; they knew the story, and it was fucking insane. Victor Anderen had built a version of the game just for his own private use so that he could be the king of his own virtual world upon his physical death. But he had decided to just get several people trapped inside his game, as players without memory. Some of them had entered the simulation willingly but didn’t know they would lose their memories or be unable to log off; others, namely Sarah and her boyfriend Mike, had been kidnapped. It was so sick that Sumiko felt nauseated.

Sumiko lived up to her name and was a smart girl. The hackers had been spared as a reward for pointing the detectives to the parallel Anderverse and helping them understand what was going on; now it was her turn telling them about what she had found when breaking into the code and how Sarah had entered the game. Sumiko lived up to her name: she was a smart girl. And Veggips seemed satisfied.

“It’s a shame we can’t put the bastard in jail,” he said. “He’s dying. He might be already dead. But if he lives, he will live inside the game. We can’t reach him there.” He twisted his lips. He had a very expressive way to twist his lips to express displeasure. As if he were chewing on a lemon peppered with bile or something.

A minute later, Mike woke up.

And he had the craziest story to tell.