Chapter 4

"You think the city downstairs is real?"

Mr. Sterling led me to the floor-to-ceiling window.

Outside was the street I had lived on for ten years. The grocery store, the convenience store, the tree where I had hung a swing with a rope in my third year of isolation.

He pressed a button on the window frame.

The entire city shuddered.

Like a TV with a bad signal, the image tore for a split second.

Then it returned to normal.

"What is out there?" I asked.

"What do you think?"

He pressed it again.

The city vanished.

Outside was pure black. Not the black of night, but the black of absolute nothingness. A hollow, terrifying void.

At the edges of the darkness, faint purple grid lines stretched out into the infinite.

Like graph paper.

Like an unrendered video game world.

"Every street you walked, every grocery store you entered, every wall you touched over the past ten years," Mr. Sterling stood behind me, his voice devoid of emotion, "was a projection."

I grabbed the window frame.

The glass was fake, too.

My hand passed right through it.

"You have never left this building."

His voice sounded like it was coming from a great distance.

"You thought you were wandering the city for ten years, but in reality, you have always been on the 47th floor. Your bedroom was Room 4712. Your kitchen was Room 4708. The hallway you walked every day was the entire physical boundary of your world."

"That's impossible."

"What about your cat?"

I froze.

"The stray cat you found in your second year. You named him Colleague. When he died, you buried him in the garden of your apartment complex, right?"

"Yes."

"That garden was the green zone on the east side of the 47th floor. And the cat wasn't a cat."

He pressed the remote, and the big screen changed.

A video played.

I was pacing around a tiny, enclosed space, talking to myself. The walls were stark white. I thought I was picking out items in a grocery store, but in reality, there was nothing in front of me.

My hand reached into the air, mimicking the motion of grabbing a can.

A look of relief washed over my face.

But my hand was empty.

Director Vance was taking notes next to the screen.

"See? That is the overlay effect of the projection environment on consciousness. Extremely successful. She fully believed she was outdoors. In truth, for ten whole years, her physical movement never exceeded the boundaries of this single floor."

"You guys are experimenting on me."

"Not an experiment," Mr. Sterling returned to his seat. "An evaluation."

"Evaluating what?"

"Your species' adaptability under extreme constraints. Compliance. Execution. And—whether you will execute a termination command on your own kind when instructed."

He pointed to the scorecard on the screen.

"As of now, among your species' samples, the percentage of individuals who autonomously executed the termination command is..."

He paused.

"Ninety-four percent."

I took two steps back.

"You mean you've done this in other places too?"

"Not other places. Other samples," Director Vance interjected. "Your batch is the final group. Code name: SH-0714. The previous six groups completed the entire process within seventy-two hours on average."

"What do you mean, 'completed the entire process'?"

"It means someone picked up the scissors."

Mr. Sterling spread his hands.

"Hazel, you have dragged this out for eighty-seven thousand, six hundred hours. You are the most hesitant subject we have ever recorded."

He stood up and walked over to me.

I noticed it for the first time—he hadn't blinked once.

Not since I walked through that door.

His pupils weren't black. Around the edges was a ring of tiny purple veins, identical to the grid lines outside the window.

"Hazel, don't you find it strange?" He looked down at me. "Over the past ten years, you have never gotten sick. You have never been injured. Your hair grew to a certain point and stopped. You lost weight, but you never starved to death."

"..."

"Because you cannot die. Until the evaluation is complete, you are not permitted to die."

I let go of the scissors.

They clattered to the floor.

But they made no sound.

They were absorbed by the floor itself.

Mr. Sterling bent down, picked them up, and placed them back in my hand.

"Twenty hours left." He squeezed my fingers, forcing them around the handles. "Hazel, make a choice."

Director Vance raised her coffee cup and smiled.

"If you can't make it, don't worry. The system will make it for you."