sort of game? I swallowed and reached forward. My fingers broke through the numbers that formed her face, but didn’t interrupt her train of thought. Like her words, they didn’t stick; they were only mist.
“We coded pulses to the medulla to make your experience inside the game truly immersive. We put safeties on the pulses, of course, so they would never go anywhere near high enough to really hurt any of you. But they would let you know when you’ve been struck, allow you to feel the sunlight, speed up your heart during action scenes.”
My stomach knotted. I shook my head, but the mist was getting into me now, blurring my thoughts.
“The safeties regulating those pulses were part of the initial programming, buried deep inside the code. But when we launched the game we found a stowaway program. Someone added something to the neural net and it’s corrupted the source code. The safeties on the pain receptors were the first to go.”
I didn’t understand what she was saying, but my pulse sped up like my heart understood before the rest of me caught on. My feet itched to run away, but how could I run from a vision?
My hands balled up. I didn’t understand any of these words. They didn’t mean anything to me. They couldn’t.
Wake up.
The voice didn’t stop for me; she spoke on like a rock falling downhill, growing speed until a crash.
“And we can’t pull you out. Now instead of sending an electrical pulse into your brains, your brains are sending information and neurons back through the neural network. It’s locked us out, and now we can’t break you free.”
I crumpled to the ground.
Her voice cracked. “What we know is that your brains and my game are linked. And those initial electrochemical pulses tightened the walls of the system. You’re stuck there. Your brains are convinced it’s real so you’ve forgotten you’re in a video game.”
My heartbeat thrashed behind my ears.
Video game.
Those words didn’t exist, but I still knew them. How could I know them?
Those two words rocked through my whole world like a hurricane, every inch of my brain stimulated, a rush of memories blowing back into the empty spaces, and only wreckage was left behind.
I’d wanted Lady Tomlinson to be real—her life, her family, the whole world. I’d wanted it to be mine.
But it wasn’t.
No. It couldn’t be true. If it was true … I didn’t want to let this go. This world was kinder, this world made more sense. Wake up. Wake up. I covered my eyes with my hands but I could still hear the voice echoing with static and scratching feedback.
“We never meant for this to happen. We had safeties in place. Dagney, tell Ryo I would never have put him in this position if I’d known it was dangerous.”
I dropped my hands. Ryo?
“I’d never put any of you in danger.”
Ryo was in on it. His face was slightly different, but I could remember him now. From before.
I froze. There was a before.
Was it possible? I opened my eyes, and I remembered more than sitting in the game pod, more than the impact into a locker. Every moment of my life seeped in, trickling in flashes of memories. The taste of ice cream. The whispers of my classmates before PE as I got dressed. My third grade teacher’s name. Cruel names and fists. I remembered my life until I remembered how much I wanted to forget.
The game wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. It was supposed to be something else. A vacation from my real life.
The voice, this vision, was real.
That meant my memories of my life as Lady Dagney Tomlinson were planted in my brain for a video game.
“We’re doing everything we can to help you from our side, but you’re going to have to break yourself out. The only way out is to win the game. Place an heir on the throne, dressed in the armor, and then the neural net should release the door. Please. I need you to help my son. Get as many players as you can and work together to crown him. I programmed his path through the world first, so as the source code damages further, his path should be the last to corrupt.
“I hope.” She pressed her fist into her stomach. “If you can’t get out before the source code breaks down more … the neurologist says you all could die. I’ve spent the last seven years envisioning every detail of this project, and now