Chapter 22:

(Posted: April 12)

As the tiny security officer watched from inside her transparent blue water bottle, Jessica prepared herself for the day ahead. The first rays of sunlight peeked through the blinds of her window as she changed out of her clothes and into something more functional. Stripping off her tank top, she turned away from her tiny prisoner as she rooted through her suitcase for a sports bra. After finally locating one and putting it on, she threw on a form fitting white sweater to cover her torso.

Shimmying out of her yoga pants, Jessica tried remembering if she'd packed any other pants but found nothing but skirts. Sighing to herself for being so short-sided, she resigned herself to putting on a pair of dark pantyhose and a crimson red corduroy skirt. For her feet, heels wouldn't do today and her white tennis shoes didn't complete the look. But her black pair of ankle-high boots would do the trick, so she slipped her feet into them with glee. The low heel wouldn't make them too uncomfortable; they were sturdy walking shoes. And crushing shoes.

Just before standing up, she spotted something sticking out of the jumble of clothes in her suitcase. It looked like a large lipstick tube but Jessica knew what it really was. Grabbing the object, Jessica contemplated her little self-defense knife she brought everywhere with her. Airport security wouldn't allow pepper spray, but this little hidden shank didn't cause alarm in checked luggage. Just as a precaution, she pulled up her skirt and slipped the tube into her pantyhose against her thigh. No need to under-prepare for the day ahead, she thought.

Taunting her little captive by blowing him a kiss, Jessica strutted out of the dormitory building. Feeling like the embodiment of confident femininity, and doubly possessed by vengeance, she vowed to make SunCorp regret what they'd done to her and her friends. Knowing that she still had her powers made her feel cocky, which pushed out the doubt brewing in the back her mind. At some point she needed to figure out how to escape this sim, but first she needed to get more answers.

Walking into the main yard, golden sunlight bathed the quiet laboratory buildings, their glass facades rippling in the morning sun. The air felt dewy as Jessica took a few tentative steps around the SunCorp campus. Scanning the horizon for any sign of people, she still felt confused-- but not scared.

Almost immediately she spotted a man off in the distance, vaguely ambling toward her. She narrowed her eyes. Whoever this SunCorp asshole was, he was in for a surprise. Tossing back her blond hair and straightening her shoulders, Jessica confidently started walking toward her first victim. A dangerous smirk grew on her lips.

When she got closer, the man waved his arms and shouted at her. Much to her surprise, he called out her name. It took her a moment to realize who he was, but slowly Rich jogged up to her.

“Holy shit Jessica!” he yelled, overcome with joy at recognizing a familiar face.

“Rich!” she called out in relief.

The pair embraced, happily knowing they weren't alone anymore.

“I'm so glad someone else got out!” Rich told her.

“I wasn't sure I'd see you again,” Jessica responded. They pulled away from each other and looked at one another seriously.

Rich's face became concerned. “Jessica, we're still in a sim—”

“I know,” she quickly interrupted him. “I figured it out too, I don't know what's going on.”

“Where's Harrison?” Rich asked.

Jessica blushed, and then her heart dropped. She'd temporarily forgotten about Harrison. Still feeling awful about him, she knew she had to figure out where he'd gotten off to.

The two reunited travelers spent the next ten minutes catching up. Jessica told Rich a vague version of how she'd been separated from Harrison, deliberately leaving out their dalliance on the beach. She told him how the woman in black had used her for a sexual demonstration and finally released her. But most importantly, she explained to Rich her ability to manipulate size in dangerous situations and how her power had, for some reason, followed her through into this new sim.

Rich listened to her silently, processing the information like a tactician plotting his next move. After relaying his ordeal with Kat and his troublesome death at the hands of VERSA, they started talking about their current predicament.

“If we're in a sim, how long have we been in it?” he asked Jessica.

“Well...” Jessica started. “I already interrogated a security guard this morning and I got some information from him.”

“What? How?”

“I shrunk him,” she replied nonchalantly.

“Oh.”

“He said SunCorp can only erase our memories when we enter the sim, not add new ones.”

“Well shit,” Rich responded. “I remember flying here from Dulles a couple days ago and getting picked up at the airport and coming here, but it feels so... seamless.”

“There's no way they could have simulated the flight,” Jessica guessed. “There would have been too many real people for them to include on the plane. They must have swapped us in sometime in California. Maybe at the airport? Or on the drive over?”

“We need to get out of this sim,” Rich stated bluntly.

“Yeah, I agree.”

As the pair continued to talk and tried deducing what happened, a white SunCorp van pulled around a building and began heading toward them.

“Oh shit, we've got company,” said Rich abruptly, looking over Jessica's shoulder. “Let's run!"

“No,” Jessica replied calmly. “Let's see who it is. And what they want.”

“Are you crazy?”

Jessica shot him a mischievous look. In that moment Rich couldn't help but notice how pretty she was, but her attitude had him very confused. “I'll handle them,” she told him with a condescending smile. “Just stay out of my way.”

And then Rich realized what she intended to do.

The van pulled up and its side door slid open. Rich watched in surprise as he recognized the faces of the men piling out. First he saw Victor Chen, the man who'd picked him up from the airport. Then Ernie James, the tech who SunCorp had supposedly fired when Kevin had been killed. An additional man followed them, who Rich remembered seeing in a suit yesterday. Vanessa had claimed he was a board member at SunCorp. It would have still seemed plausible except for the fact that all three men held Beretta pistols.

Victor raised his gun up at Rich and Jessica. “Don't move!” he shouted, but Rich was already booking it in the other direction.

Jessica knew it was her moment. She loved the feeling. These men's guns didn't scare her. She briefly considered shrinking them down, but no, she wanted to make a statement to SunCorp. She was enraged and she wanted them to know it. So she grew.

In an instant, her body exploded upward. She couldn't see the looks on their faces, but Jessica knew they must have been overcome with shock as she expanded before their eyes. Lost in the moment, Jessica finally stopped herself growing when she noticed her boot could cover the van. Looking down over her breasts at the little men, she already knew she had them beat.

Diving behind a large concrete planter box that abutted one of the nearby buildings, Rich poked his head up to watch the scene. Just as he'd seen her in the Dos Palos world, Jessica was big, maybe about 200 feet tall. Her booted feet dwarfed the white van and Rich saw the terrified driver through the windshield react in terror.

The three SunCorp men began firing up at Jessica's titanic figure, but Rich knew their bullets couldn't harm her.

“You guys really think you're really going to hurt me?” she taunted them, placing her hands on her hips. She watched their bullets bounce off her harmlessly; she couldn't even feel them. Amused by their fruitless efforts, she twisted her right leg a bit and showed off her boot to them. It was almost as if she was modeling the pair of gigantic footwear on her feet. Rich wondered how long she'd toy with her victims.

“Tell SunCorp we want to speak with them,” Jessica told the little men. They'd run out of ammunition and had now started scrambling away from her. “Let me help you guys.”

It still impressed Rich how all the giants he had met could move so swiftly. With an effortless step, Jessica brought her foot over Ernie and the board member, covering them in a shadow. Hardly applying any real force, she stepped down and instantly crushed out the tiny men. Rich winced, knowing he was the same size as her victims. She was unstoppable, and her power was awesome.

Victor tried getting back into the van, but the driver jerked the vehicle forward and began speeding away. Ignoring Victor, Jessica swung her left foot forward to catch the fleeing vehicle and tapped it with the toe of her boot. The tires of the van blew out as the vehicle flipped onto its side. As she stepped and shook the earth, Rich watched Victor stumble and fall to the muddy ground.

The passenger door of the van popped open and the driver tried crawling up and out of the van. Rich couldn't see him very well through the cloud of smoke now billowing out of the vehicle, but it didn't matter. A second later the van was gone, replaced by one of Jessica's big boots. A horrendous crunching sound filled his ears as she ground the vehicle into the dirt like an empty soda can. Rich couldn't even begin to fathom how much force Jessica could exert beneath one of her impressive legs.

Wallowing in the mud, Victor tried regaining his footing, but Jessica hadn't forgotten about him. Turning to look behind her left boot, she spotted the helpless man trying to get away from her.

“Going so soon?” she chided him. It made Rich uncomfortable how easily Jessica got into this cat-and-mouse game. She was clearly having fun.

Turning around, Jessica planted both her feet on either side of Victor. He looked up at her dreadfully and Rich realized he must have been getting quite a view up her skirt. Jessica either didn't notice or didn't care.

“When you de-sim, little man,” she told him, “tell Vanessa we don't appreciate being lied to!”

Victor lifted up his arms as Jessica raised up her foot. In his mind, Rich flashed back to when he watched her crush Kevin. Neither man stood a chance against this colossal woman. It made him shudder.

Just to make a point, Jessica brought her foot down with more force than she really needed. When her boot hit the ground, a small earthquake rattled the Dreamland campus, rocking Rich into the planter box next to him. Recovering, he looked up at Jessica's face high above. Her grin told him she'd achieved all the satisfaction she desired.

Rich slowly crept out from his hiding place, wanting to make sure Jessica didn't absentmindedly crush him too. But he didn't have to worry very long as Jessica wasted no time shrinking herself back down. But she stopped herself before returning to her original height. Dwindling herself down to about fifteen feet tall, she caught a glimpse of Rich approaching her.

“Hey,” she said warmly, completely changing her demeanor. She'd gone from a ruthless killer to just another twenty-something year old girl in the blink of an eye.

“You seem a bit tall...” Rich commented, eyeing her over-sized body. He only came up to her skirt, which ended halfway up her thighs.

“Thought it'd be better this way,” she explained. “If someone gets the jump on us, at least this way I pack a little more punch.”

“No shit,” he replied, walking into one of the craters left by her shoeprint. Finding the mangled body of somebody, he crouched and dug a pistol out of the dirt beside the flattened carcass. It still looked good. He wanted to pack a little more punch too.

Taking the empty clip out of the gun, he rooted around the unidentifiable human remains until he found two more clips. He loaded one and put the other in his pocket.

“It'll be interesting what these guys say to SunCorp when they de-sim,” Jessica said to Rich. She'd come up behind him, and Rich couldn't shake the discomforting feeling of her looming presence. He knew she hadn't actually killed these men but... she'd done it so casually. He wondered what kind of person she had transformed into since he'd last seen her in VERSA.

Rich stood up and turned around. Jessica's knees greeted him. He looked up past her breasts at her smiling face. She looked young. He sighed.

“You know, SunCorp could probably de-sim us from here, manually, any time they wanted...” he started saying.

“Yeah the security guy I met had called this sim VERSA-B,” Jessica noted.

“So why keep us in here?” Rich asked her, not expecting her to know the answer. “Like, why keep us in here and pull guns on us? We're already trapped in a virtual reality. Why do they want us to stay in here?”

Jessica looked off into the distance, as if the answer might have been nearby. But it wasn't.

“I have no clue,” she said, shrugging her shoulders in defeat. “I know we went into VERSA last night like we shouldn't have, but why are they so hostile to us now? Was it something we did?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” replied Rich. They weren't any closer to figuring out the new mystery.

“Hey look!” Jessica said abruptly, pointing off in the distance. Rich spun around to see what she had noticed. Coming down the ramp of a building-- the control room building-- a lone figure wearing glasses and sitting in a wheelchair rolled out into the morning sun.

“Holy shit is that Kat?!” Rich exclaimed, but he already knew the answer.

Jessica broke out into a trot, her longer legs quickly carrying her away from Rich. Jamming the pistol into his pants pocket, Rich did his best to follow her.

“Kaaaaaat!!” Jessica shouted as she quickly approached her.

“Good to see you,” Kat calmly greeted her. Though Jessica's towering form dominated her vision, Kat saw Rich coming up behind her. A wave of relief passed through her; he was ok. The guilt she harbored from abandoning him to the woman in black's plaything receded from her heart.

“Kat, we're still in a sim!” Jessica told her hastily as she stopped next to her. She'd absentmindedly forgotten how obvious her statement was as she towered over the wheelchair-bound woman.

“I know,” Kat replied in her usual no-nonsense way. “I don't know why the fuck they did it, but SunCorp built a buffer VERSA around regular VERSA.” At this point Rich finally caught up to the two of them. “Hey Rich,” she said to him.

“Hey Kat, glad you made it out too,” he replied.

“Sorry for leaving you back there,” Kat apologized. “What did she do to you?”

“Got me out of VERSA,” Rich quickly replied, feigning a smile as he caught his breath. He didn't want to talk about it. And Kat didn't want to pry.

“Why are you in your wheelchair if we're still in a sim?” Jessica asked Kat.

“Same reason you still have your growing power,” Kat told her back. “Avatar imprinting.”

“What?”

Kat explained: “When you're in the sim, your avatar is the way the sim interprets you. The sim assigns rules to your avatar, mainly your appearance. But somehow the woman in black gave you an ability to modify the sim in real time. When we went from VERSA to VERSA-B, that ability, that line of code, must have followed you through. This new sim didn't know to check for it and therefore ignored it.”

She glanced down at herself in the wheelchair. “For me on the other hand, there's some line of code in VERSA-B that tells my avatar to mimic my real-life condition. If we could somehow manipulate B from the inside I could change myself, but until then I'm stuck like this.”

“What's that?” Rich asked, pointing to the object on her lap. Kat clutched a green book.

Kat smirked. “This? This is how I got out of VERSA.”

Rich and Jessica gave her confused looks.

Kat had a lot of explaining to do. She held up the book. “This is VERSA's AI,” she said simply. “The AI functions of VERSA were stripped out of this B world, but not anymore. I copied it over. That's how she let me go.”

“Wait what?!” Rich exclaimed. “You mean that bitch who's fucked with us this whole time? You brought her in here?”

“She's not a bitch anymore,” Kat replied, trying to mollify him. “She just wants to live a little and explore new worlds.” She leaned forward toward Rich. “She's going to help us fuck over SunCorp. I'm pretty sure she's the reason they isolated VERSA behind the B world. The AI inside VERSA is out of control and too powerful... but now she's our friend.”

“Where is she then?” Jessica asked. “In that book?”

Kat opened the book, flipping through its mostly empty pages. She stopped on one page that had a few intangible lines of letters and numbers written on it. Jessica and Rich watched as the lines slowly started writing themselves.

“She's unspooling,” Kat explained. “I copied the smallest essence of her into this book, and now she's slowly growing into this VERSA-B world. It might take her quite some time, maybe hours or days, to regain all her old abilities, but as she starts locating and unlocking the inner-mechanisms of this sim, she'll eventually be able to control it just like the one we came out of.”

Looking up with a pleased grin on her face, Jessica and Rich's concerned expressions confused her. “What?” she asked them.

Exasperated, Rich threw up his hands in defeat and turned away. Jessica pursed her lips in annoyance and looked somewhere else. They were both dismayed, and Kat couldn't figure out why.

“No seriously, what?” she asked again.

Jessica crossed her arms. Rich turned back to look at her, shaking his head in disbelief. Trying not to laugh in frustration, he simply replied, “Well, now we really need to get out of this sim!”

When the gates swung open, the deja vu immediately set in. As the SUV headed up the drive to the Dos Palos mansion, everything looked about the same as when he'd last seen it in VERSA. Well, except for the absence of snow, giant shoeprints, and the smoldering ruins of the house. But in essence the mountain top appeared precisely as it had been presented to Harrison in VERSA. Even the two twisted trees in the center of the round driveway appeared just as gnarled as the ones in the sim.

The drive to the mansion from the lab took about twenty minutes, and in that time the sun had started peeking over the horizon to the east. As the security officer pushed Harrison out of the vehicle, in the daylight Harrison could see the mountain ranges around him and the valley to the east which ran north up to San Jose and Silicon Valley.

“Come with us,” Vanessa told him coldly, and Harrison knew he didn't have a choice. He stumbled up the steps to the mansion's front door, which Vanessa pushed open. Walking inside of Dos Palos, Harrison's eyes began to dance.

It was the same ornate wooden staircase, carpeted in red, running up to the landing on the second floor. Beautiful lamps adorned the walls but in this early morning hour remained unlit. Last time Harrison had been in this room, him and his colleagues had tried avoiding the shrunken partygoers trapped on the stairs. Well, at least he had tried avoiding them.

“In here,” grunted Vanessa, pointing to the left. Compared to the party, the house currently felt empty, really empty-- almost comically large and echoing with the deafening sound of silence.

Harrison followed Vanessa as the security officer trailed him. They stepped down into a big room, furnished brilliantly as a lounge. It was the same room where Harrison had ordered a scotch during the party, but now it looked more homey. But still lavish.

Large windows graced the walls of the lounge and a few errant paintings hung between them. In the corner along one of the walls, dozens of boxes and computers had been haphazardly piled up together. Wires and cords ran across the carpet, leading Harrison to believe this room had been turned into some sort of temporary command post.

“Here's one of them,” said Vanessa to a figure sitting in large chair. Harrison looked over but couldn't see the person sitting in it; it faced away from him toward a small coffee table and an opposing chair.

“Thank you Ms. Bright,” a young woman's voice said.

Harrison was confused. Where was Leo Starr?

A woman rose from the chair and turned to face Harrison. He immediately recognized she was beautiful, perhaps too pretty to take in all at once. Shoulder-length blonde hair framed the fair skin of her face. She was tall and thin, with generous breasts squeezed under a tight white t-shirt. A pair of plain blue jeans struggled to contain her curvaceous hips and bubble butt. The secret of her impossibly perfect body could only be explained by daily visits to the gym. Judging by her looks, Harrison would have thought her to be some kind of Instagram celebrity. But he knew better. These days, Claire Starr kept herself out of the public eye.

Although she was still hopelessly young, she was also hopelessly rich. And she knew it. Claire exuded the confidence and impatience only possessed by spoiled brats, but she mixed it with her keen and shrewd demeanor that instantly told Harrison she was also ruthlessly intelligent.

Claire gave Harrison a mean smile, much like a lioness ready to devour its prey. “Take a seat with me,” she offered, pointing at the chair facing her. She sounded like a young kid. He couldn't remember her age, but she couldn't have reached the legal drinking age more than a year or two ago. Why was he meeting her and not Leo?

Harrison sat down in a big blue wingback chair that felt uncomfortable. But not as uncomfortable as Claire's sneering gaze at him. Impatiently, she sat down across from him. In between them a small table hardly protected Harrison. He noticed a walkie-talkie device laying on the otherwise bare surface.

“Look, Miss Starr, I can explain--” he started to say.

“Don't talk,” she cut him off. Then to herself she muttered, “I knew bringing the government in was going to be a mistake.”

She turned to Vanessa. “You can go now, find the others when they come out and bring them all up here. Make sure you have your radio too.”

“Right away ma'am,” Vanessa replied. She exited the room but the security officer stayed, watching silently from his position near the doorway.

Claire sat back in her chair and Harrison could feel her visage move from him to the wall behind him. Her eyes grew wide.

“What the hell?!” she shouted, bounding up from her seat and over to the wall behind Harrison. Turning his body, Harrison looked at the wall behind him. His stomach dropped.

An empty space between two of the windows was moving. The colored wallpaper began swirling as if it were a television screen, the patterns meshing together like fresh paint oozing down the wall.

Nothing about this seemed real. Harrison found his hands gripping the chair, his knuckles white in fear. The impossible occurred to him: was he still in VERSA?

Frozen in place, the shifting patterns transfixing him in horror, Harrison watched Claire take a good look at the moving wall. He saw letters appear, slowly spelling out a small message for her to read. Claire looked furious.

“What the fuck!” she squealed in rage. She turned back to glare at Harrison who looked lost as ever. “You guys brought the AI into here?!”

He had no idea what she was talking about. His mouth hung open uselessly as his mind tried to process everything going on around him.

“W... what's going on?” he finally sputtered out. “What is that thing?”

“You idiot!” she screamed. Stomping over to him, Claire easily terrified Harrison. The thought of physically overpowering her didn't even occur to him as she grabbed his shirt and put her face right in front of him. He noticed some kind of smartwatch on her wrist that looked similar to the one Vanessa wore. She seethed in rage but pretended to be calm. “You haven't figured it out yet, have you?”

“Figured... what out?

“You're either real dumb or a good liar,” she said to him, finally trying to size him up. Claire pulled away. “You really don't know what's going on, do you?”

“No, I don't!”

“We're not in my mansion,” Claire admitted. “We're still in a sim. A safe sim. Until your friends FUCKED IT UP!” she yelled, pointing at the shifting wall. “I bet this was all Katherine Parlock's idea. I should have killed her when I got the chance.”

Each of her words crashed into Harrison as he struggled to make sense of everything. Claire talked fast and arrogantly.

“This changes everything,” she told him. “You've seen too much and now we definitely can't let you go.” Claire grabbed the radio laying on the table and pressed a button. “Vanessa, you there?”

“I'm here, what's up?”

“The others are back. And they somehow uploaded VERSA's AI into this world.”

“What?!”

“Round them up, ok? Make sure they can't de-sim until we can put the contingency in place.”

“Shit. Ok. Copy that.”

Harrison watched Claire set the radio back down on the table. “How is this a sim?” he asked her. Claire looked over in disdain. The security officer guarding the room's exit had his eyes trained on Harrison.

“I might as well tell you everything,” she shrugged. “You're fucked anyways.”

With the grace of a careless young adult, she plopped herself back in her chair. Casually draping a leg over one of the arms of the chair, she sighed. It was then Harrison noticed she was barefoot; she hadn't even bothered putting on shoes for this.

“I talk, you listen,” she told him gruffly. And thus she began:

“My dad made VERSA, and it was brilliant. The VR stuff was unbelievable, but it's not the greatest thing that came out of the project. Inadvertently, the artificial intelligence SunCorp built to run the thing became the biggest deal. Over the last year especially it started growing in leaps and bounds, creating more than we ever thought possible.

“I remember when he used to take me into the sim, into the fantasy worlds he had created. I could do anything, I was like a goddess. He couldn't believe the power either. And that's why it killed him.”

“He's dead?!” Harrison exclaimed.

“Yeah, that's what I said!” Claire quickly replied, cutting him off. She looked annoyed, and Harrison couldn't see any other emotions behind her face. Was she even mourning?

“Wait, how? When did he die??”

“Like a month ago! Shut UP!” Claire rolled her eyes. “Let me fucking tell you what I want to tell you.”

Harrison sat back, stunned by her casual revelation. Claire continued, perturbed.

“My dad was too ambitious and didn't see how dangerous VERSA had become. Well, no one did really. I wasn't there when it happened, only Sujay and Katherine watched it happen while in the sim, but he took a bad step and went off a cliff. Shouldn't have been a problem, but when VERSA loaded his brain back into his body, it triggered an aneurysm that caused him to die right in the waterchair. There are supposed to be safeguards in the code to stop that kind of thing from happening, but it happened. So he died.”

At first it didn't make sense to Harrison why she was telling him all this. She was sullen and unhappy as she spoke, but slowly it became clear that the talking was somehow cathartic for her. Just being able to tell the story of it all must have been a relief. As she continued she seemed to relax a little, but every time her eyes flickered over to Harrison, he could still see how much contempt she had for him. The anger she harbored was being channeled at him.

“Sujay and the others couldn't figure out how the safety codes got corrupted, and soon they realized they'd been locked out of modifying some of VERSA's other functions. I told them to cover up my dad's death because I didn't want to lose all the work we'd put into VERSA. The board and the FBI and whoever else would have a field day tearing SunCorp apart if they found out what had happened.

“Then I instructed Vanessa to find a way to neutralize VERSA's aberrant behavior. Quickly it became clear that we'd lose all of VERSA if we tried erasing the AI. But about a week later they came up with a plan to build a new sim, a buffer sim, around the original VERSA. By building that one from relative scratch and stripping the AI out of it from the start, it would provide a layer of safety in case anyone else got killed in the main sim again. We called the new world “VERSA-B,” and it's basically just a version of Dreamland we created as a go-between between the real world and VERSA. Here we fucking are now,” she said, gesturing around the room.

“You guys are insane...” Harrison muttered. The unethical levels that SunCorp had gone through to protect their creation from legal jeopardy were unbelievable. And somehow he'd gotten tapped to be a guinea pig in all of this. Did his bosses at the Department of Energy have any clue about what was going on?

It occurred to him that this meant Kevin Cho wasn't actually dead. When VERSA ejected him back into VERSA-B with the command to create a faulty blood vessel in his brain, his death in B only safely landed him back in the real world. Such a strange way to navigate the problem SunCorp had created for itself, but viable nonetheless. Though going from the bottom of Jessica's shoe to waking up in the real world must have really scrambled his brain.

“The government meeting was already on the books before my dad died,” Claire continued, eyeing Harrison with hostility. “So we decided not to cancel. Didn't want to raise any suspicion, Uncle Sam was chomping at the bit to see what we had. Wouldn't back off. That's why you're here. If you had cooperated with everything and not listened to Katherine or done anything stupid, we would have let you walk away. It would have been easy just to show you a stupidly safe slice of VERSA. But now you know VERSA's a killer. I'm not jeopardizing this company or the future of VERSA because some government dumbass went where he wasn't supposed to, so we're just going to have to remove you from the equation.” Her icy stare sent a chill down Harrison's spine.

“Wait, are you saying... you're going to kill me?!” he shouted. He leaped from his chair, trying to figure out what to do. The guard started towards him but Claire waved him off.

“You're trapped in here right now,” she told Harrison smugly. “Once we get the right sedatives back to the lab, we'll de-sim you, knock you unconscious, and put you in a car and send it off a cliff. Or maybe it's supposed to be a helicopter crash. I'm not sure what Vanessa finally decided on. It's been our contingency plan all along.”

Harrison was incredulous that this young woman was seriously threatening to murder him and cover it up. “Are you crazy?!” he yelled at her. “The government will be all over your ass when this is over! There will be investigations... everything! You can't just murder three federal government employees while they are doing their jobs and expect nobody to care!”

“You're meaningless,” Claire said bluntly. “No one will care because I'll tell them not to care. SunCorp has VERSA, and everyone wants VERSA. The government will just send another team to check it out and by then we'll have worked out the kinks. They're not going to risk this opportunity for a few dead bodies in a fiery wreck. We'll tell them we're going to the Chinese or Russians if they don't sweep it under the rug, and they will.”

Claire had thought this out long before he'd unwittingly flown to the West Coast. She had them trapped in a virtual prison and there was nothing they could do. Trying to process this dump truck of information, Harrison fought to control his accelerating heartbeat. Looking at Claire sitting pleased in her smug little chair, he considered lashing out at her. She probably looked so beautiful right now because she'd modified herself in the sim, he told himself. He absolutely loathed everything about her.

Even if he could de-sim somehow, he'd wake up in the real world right in the middle of the real lab, surrounded by SunCorp security personnel. How many people were in on this conspiracy? Harrison thought about Kat. How had she not known all of this?

“What does Kat know about this?” he finally asked, his anger brimming just below the surface.

“Oh Katherine? Nothing. We erased her memories of my dad's death when we threw her into VERSA-B. ”

Harrison cocked an eyebrow and shot her a confused look. Claire sighed again, annoyed by his ignorance.

“After my dad died,” she began, “that little shit Katherine wanted to blow up the whole thing. Tell the press, tell everyone. I wanted to drop her in the ocean but that would have pissed off all the other developers on the project. They think of themselves like a family sometimes, it's dumb. So we kidnapped her instead and once we set up VERSA-B, we threw her in, like a digital jail cell. Our neuroscience division had recently figured out how to target pilot memories, so we made her forget what had happened and convinced her that B was the real world. We did the same thing to you, putting you and your colleagues in a digital version of the airport, except if you'd cooperated, we were going to tell you all about it at the end of your visit. But not anymore...

“When you and the other two decided to follow Katherine into VERSA, you were down to your last straw. And now that you've brought that fucked-up AI into our safe haven? Yeah, you've set us back at least another year.”

“Fuck you, I'm getting out of here!” Harrison finally told her. He took a few steps toward the doorway but the security officer stood in his way. Harrison tried moving around him but the larger man grabbed him and tossed him backward. Stumbling to the ground, the soft carpet cushioned his fall. Quickly rising to his feet again, he noticed Claire fiddling with the smartwatch on her wrist.

“You know,” she lectured him without looking up from her watch, “what I've learned since I started working for my dad is how readily people are willing to believe whatever is put in front of them. It's how we've been tricking Katherine all these weeks and it's how we've been fooling you too. You just accepted the reality we created for you. And now we'll just trick the government once you're dead. It's appalling, really, how reluctantly people are willing question what is presented to them as truth. It makes them so easy to... control.”

She looked up and glanced over to the security officer. “You can leave us now,” Claire told him abruptly. “I can handle him from here. Go disconnect, I put the out-keys in the office upstairs.”

“You're the boss,” he replied as he left the room, glancing at Harrison over his shoulder. Confused, Harrison looked over at Claire, who still casually dangled one of her legs over the arm of the chair. Looking back to her smartwatch, she kept talking.

“Well... I certainly don't want you to die in here and de-sim before they're ready for you, so let's turn that option off. Something special Sujay set up for me.” Harrison watched her finger casually flick the screen of her watch. “And you're going to be difficult to keep in place if you're full-sized...”

She swiped the screen again and Harrison's world exploded around him. Before realizing he'd shrunk, he already stood ankle-deep in the carpet. He must have only been a couple inches tall now.

“...And I've never gotten the chance to play with a tiny guy in the sim before, so I think I'll have some fun with you before you go,” she told him. She looked up and gazed upon him with fiendish eyes. Smiling cruelly, she added, “Don't be scared. It's not like you're going to be able to die... yet.”