“No, no,” Lewis said, shaking his head in the water. “That’s impossible, she was still in bed when I left.”
The technician laughed. “I know, that’s the beautiful irony about this thing! Had you stayed asleep instead of sneaking all the way back here, we would’ve come in and taken Jenna, then returned her by morning and you wouldn’t have known the difference. If you’d woken up, we would’ve just sedated you and left you there. You were never the one we wanted, Lewis. You even figured that out in the dream world.”
His blood pressure shot through the roof and he struggled in his restraints harder. The last of the Velcro on his right wrist wasn’t undone just yet.
Blackwell laughed. “It was pretty funny. The team we sent out there, Jackson, Katelyn, and the others, were all wondering why you weren’t in bed with her but they figured you’d gone off and had a late-night drink or something. Then, right after they got back, we found you snooping around here of all places!” He chuckled again. “But after your incident during the tour, it was clear you had played more Rogue Horizon than your girlfriend had. Not that that mattered, she didn’t need the preliminary brainwashing to give in to the programming. But we figured we’d take it as a two-for-one special. Now you can both snap and kill each other when you get back to L.A.!”
“You need to work on your sales pitch.”
The technician shrugged. “Eh, there’s a reason I’m more of a behind the scenes guy.” He turned back to the computer. “Now, unfortunately, comes the less fun part. Now that you know it’s a simulation, there can be no narrative. When I put you under again, I’m afraid I’m going to have to use everything in the Dream Machine’s power to break you. I will exploit every fear, every insecurity, and every traumatic memory until you become officially unstable enough to take you back to Vegas. You and your girlfriend will feel strange for a couple of days, but you’re back in L.A. on Sunday and when and where you snap is irrelevant to the things we’ll learn from how you each do it.”
Lewis forced a laugh, still fumbling with the Velcro underwater. “You people are mad. Completely. Fucking. Mad.”
Blackwell opened a small metallic case and withdrew a syringe and a vial of sedative. “It’s really all contextual, Lewis. It’s not a personal thing. I’ve got nothing against you, your girlfriend, or any of the patients I get here. And it’s not a business thing either, we’re not profiting from this. At least, not in cash.” He slid the needle into the bottle and drew the requisite amount.
Lewis’s fingers kept slipping beneath the surface, the last bit of Velcro restraining his right wrist remaining stuck. “Alright then, at least tell me one last thing. I’m not going to remember, and like you said, I’ll be dead soon anyway. Who actually funds all of this? The CIA? NSA? An organization so secret I’m not even supposed to know it exists?”
Blackwell approached him with the syringe and sat down in the seat with a sigh. “The thing is… I don’t really know. It’s above my pay grade. All I do know is that Andromeda Virtual Systems sends me a check every month and that that check clears.” He held up the syringe and smiled. “But it doesn’t really matter in the end, does it Lewis?”
Lewis stared up at the contraption that would soon begin beaming images directly into his mind. Reality would disappear, and he would slip into a nightmarish dreamscape from which he would never recover.
“No,” he said, as if accepting it. “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Then, as Blackwell bent down to administer the sedative, his freed right hand shot out of the water and grabbed the technician by the throat.
35
The syringe slipped from Blackwell’s fingers as Lewis yanked him forward and he toppled into the pool. The man was not as nimble or quick-thinking in dangerous situations as his simulation counterpart. He immediately began floundering and pushing off Lewis as he scrambled for the other edge of the tank.
Lewis turned to his other wrist and tore the Velcro strap away, then spun around and wrapped his arms around the technician’s waist just as he got half out of the water. He pulled back with all his might and both of them toppled backward and sank into the three-foot-deep pool, water cascading over the sides.
Blackwell struggled violently, but Lewis put him in a headlock and held him beneath the surface while he gasped for air above the water. He channeled the anger from everything he’d just experienced – the nightmarish chase through Vegas, witnessing his girlfriend’s fake death, reawakening the trauma from his brother’s tragic accident, tormenting him with the specter of the infected astronaut – and used it to push the technician deeper into the water.
He began struggling harder, nearly breaking free. Lewis thought of every person this sick fuck had tortured over the past half a year, the horrible deaths he had caused, the families that had been impacted, and forced Blackwell’s head back down. The technician’s right hand reached above the surface and began grabbing at Lewis’s face. After a moment, the arm retreated underwater to assist its left counterpart in attempting to break Lewis’s hold to little success.
It seemed to take forever, but finally, the last burst of bubbles escaped from Blackwell’s lips, and with a few last twitches, the submerged body went still. Lewis let go and scurried back out of the water, wanting to get as far away from the corpse as possible. He fell onto the tile floor, turned over, and crawled away to the far wall where he sat breathing heavily for a good several minutes.
He looked at his hands, unable to believe he’d just killed a man. It didn’t feel like slaying an enemy in a video game, not at all. There was something unnerving about the way Blackwell had finally stopped moving, his eyes remaining open aimlessly beneath the water. He didn’t regret it though. The man had deserved to die.
Beside the desk with the monitors was a stool with his clothes from Friday folded neatly on top of it. A towel lay on the floor beside them. Still dripping water and being careful not to slip, Lewis made his way across the room, took the towel, and dried himself off. Still shaking and nervous, he got changed out of the haptic suit back into his own clothing. He saw his socks and shoes sitting beneath the stool, retrieved them, and slipped them on.
Once he was ready, he looked around the room for a weapon. A pistol lay on the desk, its barrel pointing toward the wall. He picked it up and turned it over in his hand. It was weird holding one in real life; not even the simulation had prepared him for it. He was worried he wouldn’t know how to use it correctly if the need arose. In games, firing was always triggered by a hand-held controller or the click of a mouse. Nothing like this.
However, he supposed that even aiming it at someone could be useful. They didn’t know how good of a shot he was. There appeared to be a little switch on the side that he assumed was the safety, and he shifted it in the opposite direction. Well, at least he wouldn’t make that rookie mistake.
He wasn’t sure what his next move was at this point. Blackwell had said they were getting ready to take Jenna back to Vegas, that she’d already completed her brainwashing. But he hadn’t; they weren’t able to make him crack in time. If he could get out, he could alert the authorities. Maybe they could place Jenna in protective police custody to prevent her from hurting herself or others until they could get her psychiatric help to undo the psychological programming. There had to be a way.
He needed to get evidence and get out of here. There didn’t appear to be any security cameras in here watching him, but they would probably have a guard do rounds once in a while just to make sure things were copacetic. Lewis’s phone had been placed on the side of the desk next to his wallet, but the rental car keys were missing. They must’ve parked the vehicle in the lot; they were going to have to drive it back to Vegas when they left with him anyway. The keys had to be somewhere else, maybe in the reception of the Entertainment Center.