Sia closes her eyes and grinds her teeth as a loud siren erupts from the ceiling. After a few seconds it ceases and Sia blinks away tears. She studies the viewing screen. The first thing she notices is that the water is no longer spraying, but the next moment she gasps. 

Glaring up into the camera are dark brown eyes. The familiar eyes trigger a jolt up Sia’s spine. “Is this a live stream?” She presses the device to her knees, but lifts her chin to quickly consider checking the other visual prism floating in the air. When she returns her gaze to the device held tightly in her grasp, Dernel’s eyes are shut. “Dernel? Apex? Can you hear me?!”  

The Underling lay limp across the chair he is strapped to. Sia almost wants to toss the prism as far away as possible. Knowing that this is someone she’s related to, no matter how strained their correspondence, brings a whole new wave of feelings into her mind. Is it always this bad? Oh god. I gave him so much mess for taking over and it’s like this?! Who the hell are these people?!  

She squares her shoulders. “I have to pay attention to this…There could be—” She bites the corner of her lower lip as her eyes dart across the screen. When she drags her finger down the screen the camera follows with a short delay. When it stops as far left as possible, Sia spots a glass wall with several documents taped to it. 

Some of the documents have photographs stapled to them of…  

Are those organs?! She zooms in to get a better view of one of the documents and spots a company insignia printed at the left corner of the page. ExplorerTech Industries.  

She gapes at the image. “What?”  

A second later, immersive mode is submerged in darkness. The visual prism in Sia’s hands goes dark as well. She reaches out for the wall to her left, but her hand passes through empty space. “Woah!” She drops the prism and keels over, falling sideways onto the hard ground. 

“What the hell is going on?!” Sia rubs a hand down her arm from habit, no pain came from the fall. Pain from reality may leak into immersive mode, but nothing in immersive mode has ever hurt her. When she tries to rise once again, intense dizziness strikes her mute, she stumbles and falls to her knees. 

She rubs a hand across her forehead, up into her hair, dragging her nails along her scalp. “Ugh.” Is this motion sickness? What the hell is going on? The dizziness subsides, but Sia remains on her knees and calls out toward the ceiling, an endless plain of darkness. 

 Terror creeps up her throat as she recalls a memory of a terrifying abyss and an orb of pleasure, but there are no orbs of light here. Behind her is nonexistent for the most part. There isn’t even a hum, something is wrong. 

“Hello?” The silence is unnerving. Sia presses her hand to her lips, to muffle the sound of her breathing as if the sounds of her panic might make a reply difficult to notice. 

“Is this that program…that Dark mode thing?” She drops her hand to clench at the fabric on her legs. 

“Did it switch us out again? Apex? S.I.D.? Hello?!” There isn’t even an echo.  

She takes a moment to calm down. It’s not real. This is all inside my head. She’s still alive, or else she wouldn’t be able to…think?  That’s how this works…right? 

This isn’t new. This has happened before…and she survived it. The thought comforts her a bit, and the build-up of tension abates momentarily as she tries to think of a solution. She sweeps out her arms at what used to be walls but doesn’t make contact with any solid structure. 

“A…Apex?…S.I.D.? Computer? Hey!!” 

Silence. 

“Don’t do this…Stay. Calm… This is…This is…” I don’t know what this is… 

“Hello?!” She holds her breath, waiting for a reply, but nothing happens. “I need help, S.I.D..!!” 

Her newest prison without walls, absent of all signs of life, furnished by absolute silence and unceasing darkness. She’s experienced this before, but this feels more final. Why did she give in and give up control of her body?! They were trapped in that underground base with countless enemies, but she’d overlooked the enemy within.  

What if they were tired of her continual failures? What if this had been their plan all along? She sits her head on her knees and squeezes her arms around her legs. No. No. Dernel said we were a team. Why would he lie?  

But after what she’s seen and heard so far, it was clear why he would be dishonest. I would do anything to get away from them. Anything.  He’s hurt. S.I.D. must have switched us! Dammit! It tricked me again! But for how long this time? An hour, a day, a week? How does time work in this place? 

This might be another body snatching moment, but the last time had not been like this. Not this void. Before she’d been unaware of what was happen, switching back had been like waking up from sleep. This feels as if she’s been curled up for hours, but it could have been minutes…seconds?  

“Hello?” 

“Let me out!” 

“Please?” 

“Let me out! What is going on?! Let me out!”  

She crawls in a random direction, bracing herself for any possible collisions, but she never bumps into anything. Her lips mumble nonsense statements to calm her nerves as her hands and knees slide across the smooth terrain beneath her.  

“This always happens. I don’t mean anything in the end do I? I’m just a stepping stone, huh?! Something to hold his place.” She drops her head to the ground. “You said we were a team! Allies! Then you do this? Fuck you!” She vigorously shakes her head then rises to continue crawling, fury charging each new movement. “Ya think I can’t do anything about it! But watch! Watch! And you! You faulty electronic piece of shit. Watch the next time I’m out there! You’ll see!” 

The shouts are sucked into the vacuum of absent space. 

It feels like an eternity passes before she stops several meters from a cloud of blue particles. 

The cloud drifts closer and closer to her position until it surrounds her in a mist of blue flakes. Curious, she reaches out to touch it and the particles seem to pass through her fingers. After a moment, the small flakes emit a strange pulse.  Sia shields her eyes from the increasingly blinding light. When they’re bright as starlight, they pulse once more before swirling around her form. 

The first few circuits around her body are slow, but as they continue to circle her the speed increases until Sia’s lost in a thick neon, blue tornado. Her skin is riddled with tiny stabs of pain, gradually the feeling expands from along her spine to her shoulders to down both of her legs until agony radiates throughout.  

She’s deaf to her own screams. It feels as if acid is circulating within her veins, incinerating her from the inside, beneath her skin, deep within her bones. She’s blind and thrashing against the ground, unable to contemplate how she’d gotten to this moment. 

“Aaaaaaaaah!”