by Jason Segel
I crouch to look into the capsules on the lowest row and jump for a view into the ones on top. The capsules are all the same. Stainless steel interior, blinking green monitors, wires and tubes. The bodies inside the capsules couldn’t be more different. They come in every size, age and color, and they’re all mostly naked. Each is bathed in a strange orange light that must play some role in keeping them healthy. Every single one of the patients is wearing a black visor.
This is the proof I’ve been looking for, I realize. I pull out my mom’s phone and start snapping pictures. There’s something big going on, and the Company is at the center of it. Helpless people are being falsely diagnosed with locked-in syndrome, and their families are being tricked into accepting the Company’s virtual reality therapy. Then the patients are brought here. The Company is using people’s bodies to beta test the disk and work out the bugs. And as hard as it is to believe, that douchebag Milo Yolkin must be behind all of it. Everyone knows he’s a control freak. Nothing ever happens at the Company without his direct….
A piercing sound nearly shatters my skull. Just around the corner from me, an alarm is going off and red lights are flashing overhead. I hear a door open somewhere and footsteps rushing to the scene. I freeze and back up against one of the capsules, doing my best to disappear. I have no idea what would happen if I got caught, but I do know what would happen to my friends. Nothing. They would stay here. Eventually it would be their bodies in the transport van to the funeral home.
I can hear multiple people running down a nearby corridor. Then they come to a sudden stop. Someone is barking commands. There’s a loud thump, followed by a monotonous beeping, and then a second thump.
I tiptoe toward the action and sneak a peek around the corner. A few dozen yards down an identical corridor, a second doctor and a team of nurses have gathered around the male patient I saw being examined. One of the nurses steps away from the patient’s side and I finally get a good look at him. I’d guess he’s in his early thirties, and aside from all the tubes coming out of him—and the fact that a doctor is using a defibrillator to restart his heart—he appears to be an excellent physical specimen. From what I can tell, there are no visible injuries to his body, so it’s strange to witness the flurry of activity around him.
I raise my phone and hit Record. To their credit, the doctors seem to be making a valiant effort to save the guy’s life. But only a few minutes after they begin, it’s all over. The doctors pull off their gloves and disappear into the maze. A nurse rolls the defibrillator cart away and two of his colleagues follow behind him. Eventually only a single nurse is left with the lifeless body. As I put my phone down, I hear doors open and shut somewhere in the distance, and it suddenly occurs to me that I’m trapped. The nurse is probably my only way out, and I doubt she’ll want to help me. I’d rather not force her, but I may not have a choice. I have footage on the camera that can free my friends and take the Company down. But only if I can manage to get out of here alive. Right now, that’s a really big if.
I wait as the nurse unhooks the man from the various tubes and wires that were connecting him to the life-support machine and shifts his lifeless body onto a waiting gurney. Then I approach her. I don’t tiptoe this time. I want her to hear me coming, and she does. She glances at me without a trace of fear. Up close she’s unusually pale, with dark circles beneath her eyes. The corpse on the gurney in front of her looks a hell of a lot healthier.
“Hi,” I say, trying to sound cheerful. “I’m John from maintenance. I’m afraid I got lost down here. Think you can show me the way out?”
“Nobody gets lost,” the nurse says, still staring at me. She knows I’m not supposed to be here, but she doesn’t seem worried. If anything, she appears completely resigned. If I pulled out a machete and threatened to hack her to pieces, I doubt she’d so much as flinch.
“Well, I guess there’s a first time for everything,” I tell her.
“What do you want?” she asks, getting down to business. “Tell me now before someone else comes.”
I realize this is my chance. “I’m trying to stop this,” I say. “But first I need to get out of here.”
I wait on edge. This could go one of two ways. One of them ends with me punching out a female nurse. I’ll just have to make peace with that when and if the time comes.
“Then climb under,” she says, pointing to the gurney. There’s a long metal shelf between the mattress and the wheels.
I look all around. “Are there cameras watching?”
“Surveillance systems can be hacked. They don’t want cameras down here. They’d rather track us instead.” The nurse taps the smart watch on her wrist. “This thing doesn’t come off. They know everything I do. I can’t get away. My movements are monitored twenty-four seven.”
I bet they are. The Company wouldn’t want news of their body farm getting out.
“What happens if you do something you’re not supposed to?” I ask. Like help an intruder escape.
“I don’t know.” Her voice trembles a little. Once again, she points at the shelf underneath the dead patient. “Get on. Quickly. Before one of the doctors walks by.”
I cram my giant body onto the shelf, lying on my side with my legs tucked up under my knees. The nurse spreads a sheet over the corpse above me. The ends of the fabric are just long enough to hide me. My brain bounces around in my skull as the wheels of the gurney roll across the concrete floor. I hope like hell I know what I’m doing.
The journey lasts less than three minutes and ends in a room that’s freezing cold. The nurse whips the sheet off the corpse.
“You can come out,” she says. “There are no cameras here, either.”
I slip out of my hiding place and I can see why. We’re in an autopsy room. There are three bodies of various sizes laid out on metal tables. Thankfully the cadavers are all covered with sheets. On my left is a wall of metal drawers. On my right is a giant refrigerator with glass doors. Its shelves are lined with jars filled with floating human brains.
I take out my phone and start snapping more pictures. My eyes pass over the brains and focus on one of the covered bodies that are waiting to be autopsied. A dirty-blond dreadlock is sticking past the edge of the sheet. West, the druggie Kat used to hang with, had hair just like that. I don’t need to see his face to know it’s him. He survived the collapse at the factory just to end up here. I never liked him, but I would never have wished this upon him.
“Holy shit.” I look over at the nurse. “What are you doing to these people?”
“The patients die in the capsules. The pathologists are trying to figure out what killed them,” the nurse says. “That’s all I know.”
She seems so small and frail standing there next to the gurney, but I know that what she’s doing requires incredible strength. “Why are you helping me?”
The nurse shakes her head helplessly. “I can’t escape.” She taps the device on her wrist. “But you can. End this.”
“I’m going to try.” That’s all I can promise. I shove my mother’s phone back into my pocket. “But first I have to get out of here.”
“This is the only way out,” the nurse says, holding up a long black bag.
—
My gurney enters an elevator. I hear the doors shut. I can’t feel the car rising, and I can’t tell when it’s come to a stop. But I hear the doors open and Angela’s voice in the background. She seems to be flirting with yet another driver from another patient transport company. I try to stay perfectly still as the guy takes control of my gurney and pushes it down the hall. At some point, he’ll open my body bag and check to make sure he’s got the right package. The nurse figured she might know a way around that, but she also made sure to warn me that nothing was certain.
I hear the bag unzip. “Sir, they got a sheet covering this one’s face,” says a young man. “Should I remove it?”
If they do, I’ll have to bust out and make a run for it. My face won’t match the picture on their
patient file.
An older man grunts. “Only if you got a strong stomach,” he says. “They do that to the ones who haven’t made it out looking pretty. I took the sheet off once, and I swear I’ll never do it again.”
“Then I think I’ll pass, if that’s okay, sir,” says the young guy. I can tell from his quavering voice that he lacks the balls for this kind of work.
“Are we sure the cadaver’s male?”
“Yes, sir. It’s way too big for a female.”
“Then it’s okay with me if you pass on the inspection.”
The zipper goes up again. I’m rolled inside the van and I hear the young guy clamber in behind the gurney. Suddenly I pity the kid. He’s going to be sitting right beside me when the corpse he was too squeamish to look at decides to rise from the dead.
—
I feel the van turn right onto Dandelion Drive, and I mentally chart the course it’s likely to take. If we continue in a straight path, there will be a patch of woods on the left side of the road soon. If I reach them, I can disappear. With my finger positioned on the body bag’s zipper, I wait until the van rolls to a stop at a streetlight. Then, with one quick sweep, I open the bag. The shrieking begins the second I sit up and slip the plastic away from my torso. By the time I break free, my escort is already cringing in a corner of the van, his body tucked into a tight little ball and his hands over his face.
“Sammy! Sammy! What the hell is going on back there?” the man in the driver’s seat shouts. The kid answers with a piercing scream that doesn’t seem likely to end.
I throw open the back doors of the vehicle. There’s a car right behind us at the red light, and I watch its driver react as I emerge, naked from the waist up. The dickhead lifts his camera to snap a photo right before I make a break for the trees at the side of the woods. Unless he’s a virtuoso at action shots, it’s unlikely he caught me. I’m deep in the forest in a matter of seconds.
Unfortunately, I quickly realize, I’m miles from Elmer’s. Fueled by a mixture of panic and rage, I start hiking toward my destination. Branches are slapping at my sides, and every bug in New Jersey seems drawn by the scent of my exposed flesh. I trudge through the forest and sprint across the countless roads that cut through it. I’m covered with scratches and speckled with bites, and I still have a few miles to go when I take my mom’s phone out to check my location on the map. The caller ID for my home phone flashes up on the screen. I let it go to voice mail. When I check, there are a dozen missed calls from the same number. Five have come in the last ten minutes. I play back the most recent voice mail.
“What have you done?” she whispers angrily into the microphone. It immediately catches my attention. Irene Eaton doesn’t whisper. “The police are here searching your room. They say you were seen trespassing at some kind of medical facility. And they think you may be in possession of stolen goods. Simon, you have to turn yourself in right away. If they catch you, you could end up going to jail for years. And they will catch you. When they find out you have my phone, all they have to do is trace it.”
I don’t listen to the rest of the message. Maybe I’m wrong, but I have a feeling my mother just saved my ass. I think she knew someone might be listening. She was trying to tell me to destroy the phone. I’ll do it in a second, but I need to send the photos and videos I took at the facility to my own email account for safekeeping. I open the photo folder. I’m selecting images to send. Then suddenly they’re gone—they’ve just disappeared. The Company’s already hacked the phone. I drop the useless device and grind it into the ground with the heel of my shoe.
Once again, my avatar is right where I left it—inside the cramped chamber in Gina’s house where Carole, Gorog and I were imprisoned while we awaited our fate. Only now the door’s open and I’m alone. If Carole and Gorog have been eaten, I’ll never forgive myself. The Clay Man sent me to the facility so I’d focus on my original mission. But after visiting the place where their bodies are stored, I feel even more responsible for the two of them. I need to get them to the exit. I need to find Kat. And then I need to figure out another way to take the Company down.
I step into the hall and see Gina smiling at me. Her lifeless avatar has faded to indicate it’s inactive. I guess the headset players’ avatars don’t disappear completely when they take a break from the game. This must have been where she left it when the plug was pulled on Everglades City. I’d love to beat her avatar to a bloody pulp, but instead, I walk away.
I retrace my steps through the house, passing several off-duty NPC guards who pay me no mind, and finally locate my friends in the only furnished room in Gina’s mansion. Gorog is fiddling with a tablet that must control the house’s decorating menu. The room’s décor keeps flipping from Medieval Fortress to French Chateau to Kountry Klassic.
Carole has a tablet too, and I can see the screen from over her shoulder. She’s studying a menu that allows users to custom-design NPC companions. “Hey, it says here that thirty NPCs come with this house,” she tells Gorog. “Each of them can be totally different, but Gina just made the same boring Ken doll thirty times. Can you believe it? What a waste! I figure I’ll make a few changes, if that’s cool with you. You got any requests?”
“Just make sure your new boyfriends are all wearing clothes,” Gorog grunts.
“We don’t have time for any of this,” I say, and suddenly their eyes are on me.
“You’re back!” Carole cries merrily, dropping the tablet and hopping up to greet me with a hug. She’s traded her chinos and polo shirt for a sleek black yoga outfit like Gina’s. On a table in front of her is a glorious feast. “You hungry?”
I am, damn it. I forgot to eat while I was back in the real world. And while Carole’s feast is amazing to behold, none of it’s going to do my real body much good.
“Oh, man, you’re not going to believe what happened,” Gorog tells me. “Gina came to get us and feed us to her friend. Then suddenly her avatar just goes totally still, like she’s been turned to stone or something, and her guards all wandered away.”
“Get up,” I tell him. “Both of you get ready. We’ve got to go.”
“What? Can it wait a little bit? Just for a few hours?” Gorog groans. “I really need a break. I’m still sore from those arrows, and Gina’s got a Jacuzzi upstairs.”
“No. We can’t wait.” Not another second.
Carole realizes there’s something going on. “What is it?” she asks. “What happened to you back in the real world?”
I open my mouth, but I can’t tell them. I can’t. What the hell would I say? Would I tell them that the world’s richest corporation has kidnapped their bodies? That they’re unwilling participants in an experiment that would make Dr. Death proud? That a single wrong move in Otherworld could kill us?
I can’t say any of that. So I say nothing at all.
Gorog and Carole look stunned by my silence. The horror must show on my face.
“That bad?” Carole asks. I nod in reply.
“Okay, then,” Gorog says softly. “Let’s go. You got any ideas about how we’re going to make it out of this city?”
“We need to get to the temple on the other side of Mammon and we’re less than halfway there,” Carole adds. “And if Gina was…well, Gina, can you imagine how bad the people farther up the ladder are going to be?”
“We’ll have plenty of weapons this time,” I point out. “Gina’s got hundreds of garbage bags full of everything we could possibly need.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Gorog says. “Someone’s always going to have more.”
“If we try to fight all of them, it will take forever to leave,” Carole adds.
They’re right. Fortunately everyone in this city shares a weakness. And I think I know just how to take advantage of it.
“Where are all Gina’s NPCs?” I ask. “I saw a few wandering around the house. Where are the rest of them?”
“Most of them are outside.” Gorog points toward the front lawn. “We kept mak
ing them leave because they were freaking us out. They all have this same weird blurry patch right here.” He points to a spot under his left ear. “It’s like a robot mole or something. But once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it.”
We’re struggling to stay alive, and the ogre’s talking about robot moles. There’s something seriously screwed up with him. “Find the NPCs that are still in the house and send them outside. Then gather the best weapons—take as many as you can fit under Carole’s invisibility cloak.”
“But I thought we just agreed that we can’t fight our way out,” Carole says.
“We won’t fight unless we have to,” I tell her. “Be ready to leave in thirty minutes.”
—
I was hoping to avoid any more killing, but my new plan leaves me no other choice. Before I do anything else, I’ll have to dispose of Gina’s avatar. I return to the hall and execute her from a distance by sinking a crossbow arrow through the center of her skull. Her avatar only flashes, but it counts as a kill. With her death at my hands, the house, its contents and Gina’s digital slaves all belong to me.
I head out to the lawn, where the thirty identical NPC clones are loitering.
“Visit every house in the city,” I order them. “Tell all the guests that the gates of this mansion will be opened in thirty minutes and all booby traps will be deactivated. Everything inside the mansion will be free for the taking. But only Otherworld guests will be allowed inside. Any NPCs they bring with them will be slaughtered on sight.”
