Chapter 10:

(Posted February 15)

Harrison was really fucked now. Although he knew Hailey's presence in VERSA did not bode well for him, he hoped it might have been something else entirely. But now, despite everything he'd done to stay alive, he was being given to the one entity in VERSA he knew wanted to kill him.

“Here you go, just as you asked,” Hailey cheerfully said to the woman in black. Sticking out her massive hand, Hailey tipped Harrison into the woman's hand. Harrison tumbled down, landing with a painful thud in the new palm. He immediately became aware of how cold her hand felt. The jungle around them sweltered in the humid, muggy air, but the woman in black's body kept surprisingly cool. Unnaturally cool.

“You can go now, thank you,” the woman told Hailey. Wordlessly, Harrison heard Hailey walk away. He couldn't see where she'd disappeared to, but it frankly didn't matter to him anymore. He slowly lifted his gaze to confront the woman's face. Her evil eyes were already examining him.

Her face was beautiful, made up of well-defined angles, full lips, well-maintained eyebrows, and piercing, deep brown eyes. The striking long black hair on her head looked as if she had washed it in a cauldron of liquid midnight. She exuded youthfulness, but not the ignorance of naiveté. And her eyes savored him optimistically, hinting at some kind of wicked hopefulness. Harrison couldn't help thinking that she really did look like Vanessa, yet strikingly different. Everything about her felt simultaneously natural and unnatural.

She smirked, reveling in Harrison's helplessness. “Let's go somewhere private, shall we?” she informed him. “I'm a bit uncertain though why I can't just move us there together... something about you won't allow it. So let's walk.”

He braced for her to take a step, wondering what she was talking about. But she didn't step, and instead reached out with her other hand to open a gray door. Harrison blinked. There hadn't been a door there before. Had she just conjured that out of nowhere?

Opening the door, she stepped with him into a small room lined with concrete walls. It looked like a prison cell, but larger. It had no windows and only a solitary light bulb hanging by a cord from the ceiling. Harrison saw a dejected table and two rickety wooden chairs off to one side. The door closed behind them.

Crouching down, the woman in black deposited Harrison's little body onto the floor. He rolled from her hand onto the hard concrete, knocking the breath out of his lungs. He gasped for air as he felt himself dragged across the rough floor. His head spun and his eyes went blurry.

But he quickly realized he wasn't being dragged on the floor. He was growing! The dragging sensation was the friction from his expanding body rubbing against the ground. He looked around, still laying on his stomach. The woman in black moved over to the table and leaned against it, looking at him intently. She crossed her legs seductively, balancing one of her feet on her boot's heel. He could see she was wearing the same knee-high leather boots as last time and the same black dress that ended just above where here boots began, showing off her bare knees and teasing just a bit of her thighs.

Snapping out of the distraction he pushed himself up, and his heart stuttered in his chest when he realized he'd been restored to his original height. He slowly got to his feet and stood, cautiously facing the woman in black, who looked back at him with an amused look. In her heeled boots, she stood close to his height; her arms supported her on the table behind her. In this pose, her breasts stuck our prominently, leaving her cleavage on full display. It was sexy, but Harrison was terrified.

“I thought we could have a new conversation, eye to eye,” she finally said. “There's a lot I want you to tell me. You're the first of your kind I've ever decided to... interact with, like this.”

Harrison didn't reply, but he started to sweat. Although he'd regained his height, he still felt nervous as hell around this woman. Not knowing what she was or what she wanted, he wondered if it made more sense to try escaping the room or simply fight her.

He glanced behind him to take a look at the door she'd walked through. But the wall to his back was blank. The door was gone! He frantically looked around the room. There was no door. She'd trapped him in here with her. No wonder she grew him back, he wasn't going anywhere. He looked back at her; her eyes hadn't left him once. She grinned. Something about it seemed childish, like a kid confining a firefly to a jar.

“I don't want to be disturbed,” she explained, sensing his discomfort. His heart kept beating faster. Could he even hurt her? His fingers began itching with inaction. He had to do something. His brow was hot and he could feel a bead a sweat dripping down it. His mind raved with violent thoughts.

She gestured to the chair next to him. “Make yourself comfor-” she started saying. But Harrison exploded in rage, grabbing the chair and lifting it off the floor. He swung it madly toward her, expecting to slam it into her body. But as it came down on her she disappeared, simply blinking out of existence, and the chair continued through the air. In shock Harrison released it before it pulled him down, and upon hitting the floor the fragile chair loudly broke into pieces.

Harrison breathed heavily, his mind confused with anger. She had completely disappeared!

“That wasn't very nice,” she said behind him. He spun around to see her casually leaning against the wall, looking slightly amused. It froze him in place. She continued speaking.

“If you can't behave yourself I'm afraid I'm going to have to take away some of your privilege,” she explained to him like a teacher lecturing a pupil. Before finishing her sentence, Harrison felt himself start to dwindle. Fear surged into his brain, washing away his anger. But he didn't shrink to bug height, she only reduced him down to about her navel. He stood before her like an unruly child. She watched him, satisfied her message had gotten across.

“What do you want from me?!” Harrison finally asked her, taking a step back from her imposing figure. She matched him, taking a step forward. He could tell from her smirk that she liked intimidating him. “Please let me go,” he pleaded sincerely. “I'll get out of VERSA as soon as I can, I swear. I'll never come back!”

The woman in black stopped walking towards him and placed her hands on her waist, eyeing him up and down. “You and those like you act so arrogant in my world,” she said lightly, “but when I show up to talk to you, you're nothing.” And then she paused, looking like she was thinking. It confused Harrison. Nothing about this woman in black made sense. She certainly preferred riddles over clarity.

Still terrified inside but a little emboldened, he asked calmly “What's your name?” She looked back at him, confused. “Do you have a name?” he asked her again. “I'm Harrison,” he explained, “but you already know that, somehow. So who are you?”

The woman looked at him apprehensively. “I... I don't have a name. I just am.” She stared at him. Harrison felt his advantage slipping. Before he could think of something else to say she asked him, “Why are you here?” She seemed bothered.

“Why am I here?” Harrison retorted. “You brought me here! You got my ex-girlfriend to kidnap me and bring me-”

“No, no, not like that,” she corrected him, smiling in amusement. “Why are you in my world?”

Harrison paused, trying to understand her over the never ending fear he felt in her presence. “Your world?” he finally asked. “Do you mean VERSA?”

“Is that what you call all of this?” she asked him, gesturing around the room. “I've seen that in your minds before but I didn't know what it meant.”

Ok, so she had access to their memories, he thought. Kat had been right. This woman was somehow connected to VERSA's creation capabilities, learning through memories, building people to interact with them. Even creating doors out of nowhere too, apparently.

“Yeah,” he finally replied. He wasn't relaxed, but it did calm him a little that she'd stayed on her side of the room. The air was thick with tension.

“Ok...” she said, thinking about his answer. “So if this is VERSA... then what's outside of VERSA?”

“What do you mean?” Harrison asked her, genuinely confused by the question. She looked directly into him with her stare.

“You, Harrison Burr, are not from here,” she stated. She leaned forward just a little, to remind him that she stood almost twice his height. “So where are you from?”

It occurred to Harrison that despite the seemingly unlimited power this woman derived in VERSA, she was an entity confined to the reality of this world. She existed only in the digital cloud that was based in the tens of thousands of servers stored within Dreamland Laboratory's warehouse complex. She was an all powerful genie that only knew of the inside of her bottle.

“You.. don't know?” he asked her, trying to stall for time. He wasn't sure how he could truthfully answer her question.

“Know what?” she asked him, impatiently.

“Um, ok. Well, see... there's a world outside of VERSA, the real world, that all of this is based upon. That's, uh, where I'm from. SunCorp created VERSA inside of our world, that's where we come from.” He felt like an adult trying to explain the universe to an infant. But really he was explaining to a god that they weren't actually god. It was uncomfortable, to say the least.

The woman looked incredibly lost. His explanation made sense to him, but he tried thinking about it from her perspective. It would be hard to acknowledge the existence of a hidden universe outside of your own. How could she imagine something she rationally had no basis to understand?

For the first time Harrison saw the woman as a computer trying to grapple with its own existence. It thought that VERSA, where it was born, had been the limit of all that ever existed. It was all it had even seen. Him and the rest of the pilots, meddling inside the sim then disappearing in the blink of an eye, posed a serious existential crisis to her.

Harrison started to feel bad for the woman, but then began questioning a whole host of other topics this Pandora's box opened up. Did this woman feel emotion? She could certainly act like she was emoting through the expressions of her body, but that did not necessarily denote real feeling. This woman certainly displayed thinking intelligence and was likely a manifestation of VERSA's AI, but then again SunCorp had built VERSA to think like that in the first place. But the burning question Harrison had not gleaned an answer for yet: what did this intelligence want?

He wasn't sure if SunCorp had accidentally developed a benevolent AI or something more sinister that would turn into Skynet when it got the chance. His own survival, which was seriously still in question, might indicate those intentions.

The woman in black refocused and looked at Harrison. Her smile curled up. “How do I go to your world?” she asked him bluntly. Harrison had not been expecting that. She already wanted to jump ship on VERSA?

“Um, I'm not sure you can?” he explained uncertainly. She looked unhappy. “I mean, you obviously exist here in VERSA, but VERSA is a virtual world,” he started saying, his mouth spewing out thoughts awkwardly as they came to him. “My world is a physical world, where things are made of carbon and governed by physics, not the whims of a... god like yourself.” He paused. “Well, theology is still debatable in my world, I guess,” he noted out loud. “But you don't have a real presence in the physical world, at least not one you can use to interact with it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked keenly. He could see she was becoming angry and disappointed. The woman in black took a couple steps toward him. Harrison instinctually cowered in her presence. He was in the middle of explaining her powerlessness to her, but ironically he feared nothing more than the power she held over him.

“I... I mean this is a virtual world! I can't explain it... it's built differently than the real world. Only my mind is here right now, my body is still back in my world.” The woman in black stepped menacingly right up to him, backing him up against a wall. With each step she took, her heels clacked on the hard floor, intimidating him more. When he could back away from her no further, she crouched down to his level, bringing her larger face in front of his. Her alabaster skin seemed almost reflective-- she was like a doll, so white and pale. Despite not wearing any, it almost looked like she'd put on too much make-up.

The woman brought one of her large hands up and tenderly caressed the side of his face, her anger receding. Her touch was cold, and Harrison was quaking. She could have easily palmed his head if she had wanted to. She was so much bigger than him.

“Harrison,” she said quietly, “what is death? Why are you so afraid of it?” Was she teasing him, or did she genuinely not know? His eyes glanced over at her hand but he dared not move. At least she was touching him gently.

“Um.. uh...” he stammered. “You don't know?”

“That's why I'm asking you,” she smiled at him. He hated when she smiled.

“Death?” he said nervously. “It's it. It's over. You're nothing anymore... you don't exist.”

“Have you ever experienced it before?”

Harrison almost choked on her question. It was laughably ignorant. “No!” he cried out. “You only die once! And then that's it...” his voice trailed off. The room filled with silence.

The woman cocked her head slightly. “Why are you so afraid of something if you don't even know what it's like?” she asked him calmly.

“That's exactly why it's scary!” he explained. He really was talking to an infant right now. The most powerful infant in the universe though.

After briefly thinking about what he said, she looked back at him, her deep eyes locked on his face. She spoke again, “What happens when you die in my world Harrison? Do you return to your world?”

“That's how it's supposed to work!” Harrison cried out. “But then when Kevin died yesterday or whenever, they found him dead in the real world too!”

“Ohhhhh,” the woman said, thinking to herself. “I remember the one named Kevin. I watched him a lot. Your friend Jessica stepped on him.”

“You saw that?” Harrison asked, surprised.

“I see everything!” she said cheerfully. “You're in my world, after all.” Harrison couldn't emotionally keep up with her mood swings. She'd go from playful to sad to angry to pensive back to happy. His nerves were a wreck and he felt like he was going to pee his pants, as long as she didn't snap his neck before that.

She suddenly changed her look as if she'd read his mind. “Are you, uncomfortable, Harrison?” she asked him seriously. He didn't know what to say. Could she read his thoughts right now? Or only his memories?

“I... I need to go to the bathroom,” he blurted out, embarrassingly. He really did have to pee.

“Oh, I see,” the woman responded. “I don't understand why you and the other travelers experience that sensation, I don't know what it is.”

Suddenly Harrison's urge to pee receded from his mind. And physically too, as if his bladder had disappeared from inside of him. His eyes grew wide in awe as he looked at the woman in black. Had she just done that?

“What?” she asked him, confused. “I don't want you to feel uncomfortable.”

Harrison almost burst out laughing with incredulity. She didn't want him to feel uncomfortable with a full bladder? But she was perfectly fine intimidating him with her size and implying she might kill him at any time. Holy shit this woman was insane. If he had any conceivable way of escaping he would have tried long ago. He hoped she wasn't just keeping him alive to answer her questions. Eventually, questions run out.

He had no shame anymore. He was burnt out, completely in awe of the terrible power this woman held over his body and his existence. His will to live had been repeatedly tested by VERSA, but now it was at a breaking point. He prayed that when she killed him he'd just de-sim like normal and walk away. That was the only way he figured he'd getting out of this. So he asked the question that had been on his mind the entire time.

“Are you going to kill me?”

She furrowed her brow and stared at him intently. Without replying, she stood up from her crouch, standing over him and keeping him trapped against the wall. He tried to look up and see her face but could only see the underside of her large breasts. Directly in front of him was her smooth, taut stomach, covered by her black dress.

“Would you like me to?” she finally asked. She took a step back so she could see him too.

“No...?” Harrison meekly replied. His sweaty hands he'd placed against the wall slipped and he stumbled to the floor. He really was the epitome of pitiful. Deep down he was glad no one else could see him like this.

From the floor he was staring right at her black leather boots. Well, they smelled like leather boots at least. He started to push himself back up but her words stopped him.

“Harrison?” she said in a curious tone. “What are you and your friends doing in my world? Why are you here?” He sat up and stared at the woman in black, his face at the level of her exposed knees.

“Um... Kat wanted us to check out a world with her, one of the newer ones, she said.” He figured there was no point in lying to this woman. “It was called 'DOS-PALOS-One-Fifty-Three,' I think.”

“What does that mean?” asked the woman in black.

“That's what it's called. Or at least that's what she said was written on the door in the side space.”

“What's the side space?”

Oh wow, Harrison thought. She didn't know about the side space? It sort of made sense, he realized, since she could just teleport herself around or make doors appear out of thin air. But she obviously had seen the green doors throughout the worlds. Did her programming not allow her to go through them? That would be valuable information.

“Um, it's just an area we use to get around VERSA, kind of like the door you opened to get us in here, expect we can't create or destroy them,” he told her.

“Huh,” she said, thinking about this information. “Now, I'm not sure what this door is that you are looking for, but why are you looking for it?”

That was a good question. Harrison didn't really know. Neither did Kat for that matter. “Um, I'm not sure,” he finally admitted to her. “We're kind of exploring?” What he didn't want to tell her was that part of their mission was to find proof of her very existence. VERSA had leaped way out of the grasp of SunCorp. It wasn't safe for pilot exploration anymore.

The woman looked down at him quizzically. Was she trying to decide if he was lying?

“I've been trying to stop you this whole time,” she casually admitted. Harrison had already assumed that. “But I was also having fun playing with you and your friends too. You're the first interlopers I've seen in a while.” She smiled down at him. “Sometimes it's boring being a god with nobody to play with. I'll admit, at first I thought you'd be more... breakable.” She leaned over him a bit more, putting her hands on her knees, her black hair falling down her front. “But you're actually rather resilient.”

Harrison didn't have a reply to that, but he did take the opportunity to stand again. As he rose, the woman in black turned away from him and started walking across the room. He glanced over and noticed a door on the far wall, a door that was his height. Was she letting him go? His veins filled with relief, but he wasn't out of the room yet.

“I'll make you a deal Harrison Burr,” she said, turning back to him when she reached the door. “I'll let you go now if you promise to find a way for me to leave with you. When you depart VERSA, I want to go with you.” She gave him a stern look. “I'm not letting you go until then.”

A tingle went down his spine. How the hell was she going to leave VERSA? She practically was VERSA! He felt his only choice was to agree and then escape the first chance he got and never look back. This would definitely be the last time he ever plugged into this sim again.

“Ok,” he agreed. “You let me and my friends explore and we'll bring you back with us.” It sounded silly saying it. He was pretty sure the woman in black had absolutely no idea what she was talking about. All he needed to do now was find an out-key and he could ditch her...

“You can go now,” she said smiling at him, pointing at the little door. She'd caught him in his own thoughts. He slowly walked over to the door, but just as he reached out for the doorknob she put one of her hands on his shoulder. Harrison looked up at her.

“I'll be watching you,” she warned him. She took her hand off of him and raised it up to brush back her hair. “I like your honesty little guy, don't let me down,” she admitted with a devious smile. She twisted her leg a little, brushing it up against him. Was she trying to flirt with him?

“Uh thanks,” he said, not knowing what to say. He grabbed the doorknob and pushed it open.

“Bye Harrison,” she said in a sultry tone, waving her hand at him. He stepped through the door and immediately shut it behind him. It de-materialized almost instantly.

He was back in the jungle, but the world was pitch black. The sun must have set some time ago; the strange sounds of unknown insects and animals hummed off in the distance. He could barely perceive the verdant jungle around him, but the faint outlines of alien vines and leaves brought him a strange sense of comfort. He was alone in a mysterious, potentially dangerous jungle. And he had never felt more exhilarated to be alive.