The first thing Julian knew was the taste of mud. It was thick and sour, coating his tongue and the back of his throat. He coughed, a wet, hacking sound, and spat a brown slurry onto a bed of what looked like glowing green moss. His head lifted from the muck, a slow, heavy thing attached to a body that didn't feel like his own. The air was not the dead, recycled oxygen of his pod on The Grid. This air was alive. It was a thick, humid blanket that smelled of a thousand things growing and a thousand things rotting, all at once.
Strange sounds pressed in on him. Not the managed hum of the network or the synthesized chimes of the Synoptic Muse, but a chaotic symphony of clicks, chirps, and deep, guttural croaks. The humidity was a physical weight, making his standard-issue jumpsuit cling to his skin like a wet shroud. His senses, so long anesthetized by curated data streams, were being firehosed with raw, unprocessed reality. He was disoriented, a program running on incompatible hardware. He had wanted to see The Wild. Now he was drowning in it.
Something moved in his peripheral vision. A flicker of iridescent color. Then another. A low, chittering buzz rose from the gloom, a sound like scissors snipping rapidly. A swarm of insects, each the length of his hand, descended from the canopy. Their wings were membranes of oil-slick color, their bodies long and needle-thin. They were not coming to investigate. They were coming to feed. The local fauna had identified him as a foreign body, a new item on the menu.
Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. All thought dissolved into a single, primal command: run. He scrambled to his feet, slipping in the mud, and bolted. He didn't know where he was going. He just moved, crashing through giant ferns that slapped his face with wet, heavy leaves. He swatted at the knife-sized insects as they closed in, their buzzing a high-frequency scream in his ears. One landed on his arm, and he felt a sharp, piercing pain before he slapped it away, leaving a smear of black fluid on his sleeve. This was not an algorithm he could outsmart. This was teeth and hunger.
His flight was mindless, a series of panicked reactions. He saw a wall of tangled, dark vines ahead and plunged into it, hoping the density would deter his pursuers. It did. The buzzing faded behind him. But the vines were not vines. They were a thicket of thorns, each one long and sharp and coated in a glistening, oily sap. They tore at his thin jumpsuit, ripping the synthetic fabric. The thorns scraped and punctured his skin, and a low, burning itch began to spread from the shallow cuts. He had escaped the insects only to blunder into a different kind of weapon.
He huddled in the center of the thicket, breathing in ragged gasps. The thorns pressed in from all sides, a cage of living barbs. He was temporarily safe, but he was trapped. Pain radiated from a dozen small lacerations. He was bleeding. He was poisoned. He was an idiot. The romantic notion of the wild, the pure, authentic world he had dreamed of from his sterile pod, was a murderous joke. The reality was mud and pain and things that wanted to eat him.
Then the world broke.
For a flicker of a second, the green wall of thorns was overlaid with a familiar, sterile white. A visual static glitch, sharp and painful, tore through his vision. The smell of rot was replaced by the scent of recycled air. The Pod. The shared mental space, born of their shared trauma, had flickered into existence. He saw Garran, on his hands and knees on a polished chrome floor, surrounded by screaming holographic ads. The man’s face was a mask of rage and confusion.
— What did you do? — The voice was not a sound in the air. It was a roar inside Julian’s skull, a raw transmission of fury. It was an accusation. It was a verdict.
Julian had no defense. The question pinned him, stripped him bare. All the self-justification, all the intellectual curiosity, all the romantic escapism—it all collapsed into a single, pathetic truth. He was a tourist who had set the museum on fire.
— I just wanted to see! — he screamed back into the glitching vision, his voice a thin, terrified wail.
The connection shattered. The white walls vanished. The smell of rot and mud flooded back in. He was alone again, shivering in the cage of thorns. But the echo of Garran’s rage remained, a poison more potent than the sap on the thorns. He had not just escaped. He had forced a swap. He had pulled a man from his home and thrown him into the sterile hell of The Grid. His desperate, selfish choice had not freed him; it had doomed them both. The weight of that knowledge was heavier than the humid air, colder than the mud. It was the feeling of a debt that could only be paid in blood.
In a sterile cage of light and data, Garran faces a different kind of predator.
