The top slab of the vise descended slowly but persistently toward the woman in the green dress, who would be crushed flat in minutes. And she knew it. She was screaming in a language Nio didn’t understand. She turned to pull on the cage, but when she saw the telepresence bot, she thrust her hand desperately through the bars. Nio moved toward her immediately but was forced to pause at the large rectangular gap in the concrete floor, which surrounded the vise like an empty moat. There were several other odd-shaped gaps in the hall, arrayed like falling Tetris pieces, suggesting it had once held a menagerie of industrial equipment. The gap in front of Nio had stairs built into one side that would let her go down, but there was no way to get up the opposite wall. The robot was too weak to climb. Instead, someone had installed a makeshift plank walkway that connected the ground floor with the operator’s platform, where a red emergency release button was clearly visible on the control panel. Despite its general clumsiness, the telepresence bot could walk the plank walkway easily enough, provided it moved slowly and kept its balance, which made Nio doubt it could be that easy. Surely the challenge had to be more difficult. Didn’t it? What was the point of finding the second arm?
But the woman in green didn’t care about any of that. She was half-pleading, half-berating the telepresence bot to save her. Nio didn’t understand the words, but their intent was clear enough. She wanted to know why the robot had stopped. From her appearance, she couldn’t have been trapped very long. Her makeup was freshly smeared across her face and her fancy green dress wasn’t completely soiled, which suggested this caper had been timed—perhaps even set in motion when Nio indicated her willingness to play. Why go to all that trouble if this was all there was? Still, with was no hint of a trap, and no indication of what else she could possibly do, Nio stepped gingerly onto the plank and walked the robot toward the emergency release button. She was halfway across when the image blurred momentarily. She was losing signal, passing out of range of whatever transmitter was carrying the data stream to and from the robot. Some part of her wanted to step back then and reevaluate her situation, but the woman was so close. She was reaching toward the robot through the grate, grasping at it in swipes and pleading wearily as the industrial press crept persistently downward. It was already halfway. And the telepresence bot was just steps from the button. Just steps.
Nio closed the gap, but the signal glitched heavily, and with the loss of its control signal, the bot dropped into a crouch, a pose it automatically took when inactive so as to preserve its working parts from damage or vandalism, but in so doing, it lost its footing on the narrow plank and fell over the side, even as the vise continued to descend. Even through the static, Nio could tell the robot hit the concrete hard, but with the blurry signal glitching heavily, she couldn’t see exactly what else was happening. In between the distortions, she could make out that the robot was moving, but since she was not, that meant she had lost control. It appeared to be performing a series of programmed maneuvers that allowed it to right itself after a fall. Lights flashed in the upper left side of her display then, and one of two gray dots that she hadn’t even noticed turned translucent. Apparently, she had two lives and had just used one. That supposition seemed even more likely as the glitchy sound from the intermittent signal suggested the vise was opening again. Nio watched helpless as the robot made its way out of the concrete hole, up the stairs, and back down the hall to the mirror. There it stopped, and her control resumed.
She retraced her steps immediately, but this time, she stopped before the piles of metal plumbing in the small whitewashed room. There were L- and T-joints, a rolling mechanic’s seat, and various discarded tools tossed among the lot. On first glance, it had all looked like remaindered junk, but now, the implication was clear: she might be able to assemble a long piece of pipe, like a bent finger, and roll it forward across the plank on the small wheeled mechanic’s platform and so press the button. But that would take time to build, and Nio wasn’t sure the deliberately underpowered robot would even be able to handle the weight of such a contraption. It had struggled even to lift the metal bar. It seemed much more likely to her that this was another trick and that the real solution was something much simpler, if less obvious.
Nio shut her eyes and walked herself through the warehouse in her head. What was out-of-place?
She realized almost immediately.
The Victorian mirror.
It wasn’t an accident the level had started with her staring right at it. She had assumed it was there to let her know she was attached to a telepresence bot, and to help her attach the found limb, and so it was. But it was also a clue, an underhanded pitch, she suspected, to introduce her to the mechanics of the game.
Immediately, she walked back up the stairs, glancing once into the vise chamber, where the trapped woman was pleading with her to return. As expected, the mirror was tall enough to give a clear view of the control panel recessed into the robot’s chest. But since the robot’s fingers were too fat for it to program itself, the game designers must’ve given her another way. She found it in moments. A rubber-tipped stylus had been left under one of the old arcade games, which indicated its purpose. She had to move the arcade game to get it, which would’ve been impossible without the robot’s second arm. After shimmying the bulky game out of the row, she lifted the stylus gingerly and returned to the mirror, where she quickly gave the machine instructions in a simple visual programming language even non-programmers could use. She accessed the internal video footage, found an image of the emergency release button, zoomed on it, circled it with the stylus, and chose DEFINE OBJECT. The simple algorithmic controls in the machine recognized a button and highlighted it yellow on the screen. From there, it only took three commands to order the robot to make its way there and press the button.
Nio heard a faint echo of the woman’s screams, as if they had just gotten louder, and she stopped to listen.
The vise had started again. She had less time the second round.
Immediately, she hit COMMIT, and her control of the robot was severed. It turned under its own power and made its way back to the stairs with a plodding gait. Based on her best estimate of the vise’s speed, it would be very close, and it was very possible she was already too late. She felt a swell of nervous energy rise within her. She wanted to pace, or maybe collapse into a ball on the floor while she waited for the result, but she was afraid that if she left the VR pedestal, the game would end without her and the woman would be crushed, so she trembled where she stood, watching the telepresence bot execute her commands like a disinterested laborer.
If they were wrong, or just mistimed, a woman would die in front of her.
The telepresence bot went down the stairs like a child, one step at a time, and Nio screamed at it to hurry. At the bottom, it turned into the doorway and Nio could see the dark-haired woman scrunched on the floor. The vise was at most a foot away from popping her skull like a watermelon. She wasn’t screaming anymore. One hand hung out of the cage, shaking uncontrollably in fear.
The signal glitched as the robot approached the plank walkway. Color bled in squares, some of which stretched or shifted location in a jerky dance, but enough of the image remained for Nio to see the robot stand with its hand over the button.
“What are you doing?” Nio screamed. But in truth, she couldn’t tell if it was the robot that was frozen or the image. “Press it!”
SIGNAL LOST
“SHIT!”
Everything went dull gray, and for a moment, Nio didn’t move.
The VR matrix flickered to life again just as the dark-haired woman in the fancy green dress pushed past the bot on her way out the door. The cage had lifted and the vise was retracting, and the woman had abandoned her heels and was running barefoot down the hall toward the exit, babbling incoherently. Nio would’ve preferred to make sure she got out okay, but there was no way the telepresence bot could keep pace.
3D letters appeared in the air in front of her then, congratulating her and recounting the time it took for her to beat the level, which was then converted into points. The numbers changed into a table indicating that as of the completion of Level One, she was in seventh place out of nine active players. Nio quickly scanned the list for any kind of identifying mark, but each player was merely indicated by a code. Hers was FracturedPeach887, or so the highlighting suggested. The leader was AnodyneTomato343. In second place was QuixoticKale601. More than nine players were listed in the rankings, but the lower entries were pale red, indicating they were no longer active. Whether that meant they had simply failed or that something had happened to them, she couldn’t tell.
After a moment, the rankings were replaced by a prompt asking if she wanted to continue: Yes or No?
Nio stumbled back at the question, as if physically assaulted by it, and nearly stepped off the pedestal. Her butt hit the raised railing, and she bounced back into place.
How could she answer that?
How?
If she said yes, that suggested someone else—perhaps more than one person, considering she had just leveled up—would be put in mortal danger. But then, she didn’t know that they weren’t already and that if she chose not to play, they would simply be liquidated.
Even if not, if she hit ‘No’ and turned the game off, what then? Pretend like nothing happened? She had no idea what police force would have jurisdiction over such a crime, and anyway, even if she found a way to communicate with the police, and even if they took her seriously, there was no way they would be able to identify the persons responsible based solely on her experience. It was very unlikely that whoever set this up, at great expense it seemed, would be identified simply by their purchase history. Nio suspected both the VR pedestal and its delivery were ordered anonymously or via dummy entities, and that even if she managed to discover the location of the abandoned factory, which could’ve been anywhere on half the globe, there would almost certainly be nothing left by the time anyone arrived to search it.
She couldn’t even say for sure that any of it had been real. The VR pedestal could’ve created just that, a completely realistic virtual reality meant to appear as if she were connected to a telepresence bot. If she played again and failed, could she live with not knowing the truth? Or was it better to continue playing on the hope that she might be able to discover clues or save additional lives?
She couldn’t answer, not by a long shot. So she didn’t. She simply took off the visor without making a selection and sat on the floor in near-total silence. It was dark, and she hadn’t lit a fire, so the cabin was only illuminated by the small purple running lights on the VR pedestal, and after an hour of sitting in their glow, Nio reached over and shut the machine off. As it powered down, the wide railing retracted slowly into the base, the lights went out, and everything was black.
A short night’s sleep was riddled with strange dreams. Waking at dawn, Nio ignored the dark and silent VR pedestal and made coffee and went for a walk. She was cresting a short hill to the south when she had the thought.
The satellite receiver.
It was paired with the pedestal, sure, but if she could configure it to connect with the e-reader, then she would have internet access. She would be able to call for help.
Nio trotted back to the cabin at a brisk pace and immediately set to work, which required her to turn the VR device on again in order to access its settings. She couldn’t break the pairing, nor could she pair the receiver with two devices. Whoever configured them had known to do that much at least. But the VR pedestal could connect with multiple devices. It had to, otherwise it couldn’t register both visor and gloves, and by changing some root settings on the e-reader, she was able to convince the VR pedestal that it was a replacement display for the visor, and so to use the VR pedestal as a de facto router. That was the good news. The bad news was that she couldn’t use both the visor and the e-reader at the same time, and she had to leave the pedestal on, which drained the battery.
Still, when a search engine page first appeared on the screen of the e-reader, she was decidedly the happiest she’d been in months, since before her surgery, and the contrast made her realize just how unhappy she’d actually been at the cabin, despite that her goal had been the complete opposite. Had she pushed people away again? Was she brooding? That was disappointing. She had legitimately thought she’d grown out of it. Now, it seemed she’d been hiding behind the excuse of not wanting to worry everyone, of needing time away, when it was her own worry she didn’t want to suffer, reflected in the eyes of others who only meant her well.
She was saved from a serious bout of self-doubt and disappointment by the pragmatic fact that the flaws in her character were not then her most important concern. But as her hands hovered excitedly over the on-screen keyboard, she paused.
What could she search for?
When nothing immediately presented itself, she shut everything down and went outside again. Maybe she wasn’t happy there, but the vista of the valley was certainly good for thinking. She saw the empty delivery cube still resting on the grass and walked down to it with the intention of giving it a much deeper inspection. She found what she wanted on the bottom. The thin aluminum frame that made the base had been stamped with a small shipping code. A series of letters and numbers were printed in black dots, and after a series of internet searches, Nio was able to use the code to identify the company that owned the drone, and she emailed them from an encrypted dummy account saying that she was the owner of a brand new Mercedes S-class sedan and that something had fallen out of the cube in transit and smashed her car, and that she wanted to know who was responsible so that she could sue them for a lot of money. The reply came later that day. The shipper disavowed all liability and steered her to the owner of the package, a company called Estivus Global.
Estivus was a registered Panama corporation, which immediately suggested it was shady. It also meant it was nearly impossible to find any information about it online, and after failing for two hours, Nio instead emailed nearly two dozen tax accountants at random, both in the US and elsewhere, claiming that the government of Antigua was in need of tax representation, and that a large cash dispersal was due to Estivus Global, and could they help navigate the international corporate registration system? Most never got back to her. One threatened to report her to the IRS for fraud. Another said she wasn’t taking any more clients but that the listed Director of Estivus Global was a lawyer in Grand Cayman named Emilio Cortez, and perhaps she could talk to him. Instead, Nio forwarded the email chain from the shipping company to Mr. Cortez and told him she was prepared to sue for damages. The reply was swift. Cortez sent a series of forms and directed her to fill them out and to send photographic evidence of the damage and he would file a claim with Estivus’s insurance company.
She had to stop then and wait while the e-reader charged in the sun. She made tea and sat with it on the porch, as if it were a pet.
It was late into the night before Nio was able to find an image editor that worked on the e-reader and use it to doctor some photographs of a crushed Mercedes S-class. Then she filled out all the paperwork using a false identity—a woman in British Columbia named Elise Steele who had recently bragged about her new car on social media. If Cortez did a search on the name, which was likely, the results would corroborate her story. Nio also downloaded a phone application that let her use the e-reader as a telephony device. She registered for a phone number with a BC address included that number in the paperwork. By the time she went to bed, she was satisfied that she would have something tangible to give the police in the morning and that that would discharge whatever moral duty she had. Once the issue was safely in their hands, she would dump the VR pedestal in the river and be done.
She woke feeling refreshed and enthusiastic about her remaining time at the cabin and thought briefly of taking another hike up to the rock castle—only to find that there was no reply to her mail. Nor still after breakfast. As Nio charged the e-reader again in the morning sun, she stared at it, as if it might ding at any moment. She emailed Cortez again just before noon and asked for confirmation of receipt, at least, but still heard nothing.
She began to pace.
To receive a call or email, the e-reader had to be within range of the bulky pedestal, which meant she couldn’t take it on a walk or out to chop wood. She couldn’t leave the cabin, and she began to wear circles in the rug. She sat. She made a late lunch she barely ate.
A few hours later, the e-reader chimed at her cheerily, indicating she was getting a call. The ID said it was from the Cayman Islands, so she answered.
“This is Mr. Cortez’s office calling.” It was a man’s voice. “To whom am I speaking?” He had a British accent.
Nio paused before answering. He didn’t say he was Mr. Cortez’s assistant. And he didn’t introduce himself.
“Where is Mr. Cortez?” she asked.
“He’s not available right now. But he asked me to call you about the problem with your insurance claim.”
“And what problem is that?”
“It seems Elise Steele has no recollection of her car being damaged. In fact, she showed us a picture of it in her garage.”
Nio didn’t respond.
“Insurance fraud is a very serious crime,” he said. “But Mr. Cortez is willing to forget the matter entirely.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. He just needs to know how you found this office.”
“I’m sorry,” Nio said. “Where is Mr. Cortez again?”
“As I said, he’s not available right now.”
“And when do you think he’ll be free?”
The man paused. “Not anytime soon.”
“I’ll wait.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll be waiting a long time. He’s dead.”
Nio stood. “Excuse me?”
“Emilio Cortez died in a car accident early this morning.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Inspector Stevens with the Royal Cayman Islands Police. I’m sorry for the deception, but we’re treating the death as suspicious. And you are?”
Nio opened her mouth to answer but stopped.
“I’m someone who would be very happy to give you that information if you could first confirm your first and last name and badge number for me. After I verify your identity, I’ll return your call through the department switchboard and answer any questions you have.”
There was a pause.
Too long of a pause.
“Hello?”
One second turned to three which turned to ten.
“You think you’re very clever, don’t you?”
Nio hung up quickly and stepped back. She stared at the e-reader a moment. Then she deleted the telephony app. The phone registration would lead them nowhere, but if somehow they convinced the app company to release their logs of the call, it would reveal the IP address of whatever server the satellite receiver was connected to, which would then implicate the receiver. They would know it was her.
She walked out to the porch and looked at the vast expanse of nothing.
She was completely alone.
Nio had gathered everything she needed for a presumed two-week hike to civilization, considering everything major that was likely to go wrong: dehydration, starvation, hypothermia, injury/infection. But staring at the pile of stuff on the floor, it was instantly clear there was no way it would all fit in her pack. She decided instead to travel light, to keep moving, to take only the bare minimum she needed to survive. But what was that? She didn’t have to take enough food to stay full, but she did need to keep her energy up and stave off hypothermia. She might not need her entire first aid kit, but she needed some of it. The cut on her hand and the incisions on her abdomen were closed and healing, but she still needed to keep them dry and uninfected for a full two weeks of rigorous overland travel. Firestarters were small and lightweight, but what about a change of clothes? If hers got wet or damaged, she again faced hypothermia. Could she rely on ample sources of water? That seemed likely, which meant dehydration wasn’t a concern. Not having to carry water also saved a lot of weight. But what about bear spray? She’d gotten an entire lecture on grizzlies before they left. And what about weapons? Could she defend herself if found? Was anyone even looking?
And then there was the problem of shelter. Nio hadn’t brought a tent. Since she was supposed to be recuperating, she hadn’t even considered it. All she had was a flimsy, foil-like emergency blanket for warmth and the heavy blue tarp that covered the rack of firewood out back. But the tarp had a few holes. More than that, it was bulky and didn’t fold or roll tightly, which meant it ended up taking most of the space in her pack. She could salvage some room by rolling items inside it first, but that meant the only way to get at them was by stopping, pulling out the bulky tarp, and completely unrolling it. It was better to fix the tarp to the exterior of the pack, she realized, preferably in such a way that she could also pull a flap of it over her head as a rain shield. If her clothes got any more than a little damp, they wouldn’t dry by nighttime, and the water would wick away her body heat and again induce hypothermia, which remained the most likely cause of her demise.
While she was contemplating how best to arrange that, she heard a single beep amid the stillness of the cabin.
She froze.
Nothing should be beeping.
It was still dark outside, and she listened for sounds of an intruder, even though she knew it was all but impossible for anyone to have gotten there so fast, even if they knew exactly where she was and had left immediately.
Beep.
There it was again. But this time it was followed by the sound of a fan. She turned to see the VR pedestal’s purple trim start to glow. The machine had turned itself on. The circular railing rose out of the base, which idled in silence for half a minute or so until it beeped again. This time twice. Several moments later, it did the same. Nio scrambled over her careful piles of belongings, knocking them over, and turned it off. The railing retracted into the base and everything went dark and quiet.
She was fixing the tarp to her pack when the device beeped again. The fan started and the purple light returned and Nio shut it off a second time. And then a third. And a fourth. Seven times the dance was repeated, and she realized her adversary was not human. A human might eventually tire of the repetition. But she was battling a machine. Some program somewhere would keep trying to engage the VR pedestal no matter how many times she turned it off. Nor was there a way to disconnect the power without taking everything apart, and she didn’t have the tools. If she took an ax to it, she might destroy whatever evidence remained inside. So instead, she took the small satellite receiver down and tossed it under a pile of heavy blankets in the corner.
It wasn’t enough. The machine beeped again several moments later, and Nio stared at it for a long time. Was the game running? Would people die if her player timed out? She could she short the battery with a bucket of water. But then what? It was her only means of contacting the outside world. Her plans required the VR pedestal—for a few more hours at least, just until daylight when she could charge the e-reader again and send everything she had to everyone. Without that, even if she made it back to civilization alive, there would be nothing but her word that any of it had happened.
The machine chimed three times at her then and kept chiming in rapid succession, as if some kind of countdown was reaching its end. Was she letting someone die? Nio panicked. She dashed to the visor and donned the gloves as she climbed into the machine.
But there was nothing.
The beeping stopped, but everything around her was gray, as if she were inhabiting a void.
“I never said yes!” she shouted. “I never agreed to play!”
A message appeared.
YOU’VE BEEN A VERY BAD GIRL, SO WE’RE TAKING YOU RIGHT TO LEVEL FOUR.
Two columns of rectangular images displayed the various rooms of a house—a very large, very expensive, fully-wired smart home that looked vaguely European. Bits of exposed brick on the ground floor suggested the new, modern structure had been built on something old. It was dark out, and a nicely dressed middle-aged man with glasses was cleaning the kitchen after a meal, probably dinner. A teenage girl was doing her homework in her bedroom with headphones over her ears. An adult woman with her back to the ceiling-mounted camera was giving a small child a bath.
Four people. Level four.
Unknown to all of them, a man dressed entirely in black, including gloves and a face mask, had gotten inside the family compound and was trying to gain entry to the house. Nio’s skin pimpled in goosebumps when she saw the knife in his hand, a small curved blade more useful for carving than stabbing. She watched the man crouch along a hedgerow under the living room windows. Two panes of a control panel appeared then on either side of the video feeds. Virtual buttons and drop-down menus gave Nio control of the house and all the connected devices inside. She watched helplessly as, one by one, all of the security systems went red. The house was open.
The game had begun.