They stood in silence for a moment before Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose, his brow furrowing in pain.
“My head,” he groaned. “Can I get some water?”
“Of course,” Betsy replied. “And might I suggest a shower afterward? We can also give you something for the headache.”
“Thank you,” Ethan replied.
He took a step forward to the hallway he knew led to the bathrooms, but his leg gave out for a moment and he needed to steady himself. Tera swooped in and put a hand under his arm.
“I gotcha,” she said. “Let me help you down the hall.”
He thought about protesting, but kept his mouth shut and nodded graciously.
She let him use her as a crutch as they clanged down the metal walkway. She could feel some of the muscles under his skin spasming, like his brain was sending them a million contradicting signals at once.
“What did they do to you?” she asked. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper.
“They made me think you weren’t real,” he replied. “They made me think everything was a lie. And I believed it. They broke me, Tera. They fucking broke me.”
She said nothing, gazing at him with sad eyes as she helped him around the corner to the washroom. He stopped at a water fountain and drank for over a full minute. He rose with a content sigh, water leaking down to his chin.
“You got it from here?” Tera asked.
He nodded. “Thanks, Tera,” he said. Then he slipped into the washroom, leaving her alone in the hallway.
Ethan stumbled into one of the shower stalls just to the left of the entrance, twisted the knob until water came out, and stepped into the stream. It was freezing cold; the air caught in his lungs while his muscles protested the temperature. He exhaled hard as he embraced the water, doing nothing to move the knob to a warmer position. He let his skin grown cold, then numb while the clumps of simpod mucus fell from his body.
He looked down and watched the largest of the clumps slowly shrink under the stream of water. And, for a moment, he swore it blinked in and out of existence.
Faithless
King Hum was falling. He no longer had any control over his flight. Instead, he plummeted straight down into the valley he was just peacefully drifting above. He tried to alter his course, but nothing he did had any impact. He was powerless.
The young monarch wanted to scream out for help, to raise his arms and shield his face from the approaching ground, but he could do nothing. Nothing but watch. Before long, he crashed into the earth below, a cloud of dust rising up to the heavens around him.
With strain, he tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move. It was like he was wearing a suit made of dark matter, impossibly heavy. He could still feel everything, but he was powerless to do anything with it.
He felt a presence return above him. It was the redheaded man, appearing in the sky again.
“We’re trying to get you out of the simulation now, Hum — ”
“King Hum,” the young monarch interrupted.
“Right, King Hum,” Gauge corrected himself. “I have some bad news, though.”
“As long as it gets me out of here, I’ll hear it.”
Gauge took in a deep breath before continuing. “Your body is dead,” he said.
King Hum waited for a moment, expecting the redheaded giant to elaborate. After a minute, Hum asked, “It’s dead?”
“That’s right,” Gauge replied. “Nidus and the Council, they — they installed your brain onto a computer and destroyed your body. We can bring it out of the simpod, but at this point, it’s just a corpse.”
“I don’t understand,” King Hum said. A tinge on panic worked its way through his veins.
“You’re an installed intelligence now,” Gauge said. “They tricked you into shedding your body. Now you’re like me and my friend Tera.”
King Hum didn’t reply. The world felt like it suddenly shrunk around him, like it was a plastic bag being pulled over his face. He needed to breathe but didn’t feel like he could. Like he had no mouth to take air in through, no nostrils. He felt the terror grip every part of his body — or rather, his consciousness. Being unable to stand up only made it worse.
Everything went dark.
Vision returned to King Hum’s eyes. The colors and forms around him were so different from the valley and the giant redhead he had just been surrounded by. It took him a moment for his eyes to adjust to the lighting. It appeared that he was inside a windowless room, or deep underground.
“Where am I?” he asked.
“You’re in the Furnace,” a familiar voice said. Turning, the young king saw a robotic man, but the voice was indistinguishable. It was Gauge. “Welcome to the headquarters of the People’s Union.”
King Hum looked at the ceiling, which towered so high above their heads that he half expected there to be clouds between them and it. Lowering his gaze, he recognized Ethan and Tera, who watched him with concerned expressions. There was another woman there he didn’t recognize. She was a bit older than the others and had a strange device embedded into the side of her head. He eyed her with such fascination that he almost missed Adviser Orram standing in the corner of the room.
“Not the welcoming party I was expecting,” he said. “I must have missed a lot.”
As he spoke, something caught his attention from the corner of his vision. At first, he thought it was another bodyshell standing behind him that he hadn’t noticed, about to wrap its arms around him. Then, with an icy drop of his heart, he realized the motion came from himself. Looking down, he didn’t see the Opesian clothes he was used to wearing, nor his own naked flesh. Instead, he saw a machine. A bodyshell. His bodyshell.
With an expression of horror, he looked up at the others. None
