The floor was wrong. It was the first thing Garran knew. Not mud, not stone, not damp earth, but a surface so unnaturally smooth and cold it felt like the skin of a fish left out in the winter. He pushed himself up, his palms flat against it, and the cold bit into him. He was on his hands and knees in a box of white light. The air was wrong, too. It was dead. No scent of pine, or rot, or rain. Just a dry, recycled stillness that tasted of nothing. It was the air of a tomb.
His senses, honed to read the subtle language of a living world, were screaming with useless information. His eyes, which could spot a hawk's shadow on a distant ridge, were assaulted by silent, screaming colors. Shapes and words and faces made of pure light danced on the walls, shifting and changing without a sound. They were brighter than any bioluminescent fungus, more piercing than the midday sun, and they moved with a frantic, desperate energy. They were predators, but they had no smell, no sound, no weight. They hunted for his attention.
He got to his feet, his body feeling strange and ill-fitting. It was his shape, but it was weaker, the muscles soft from a life of disuse. He felt a tremor in the limbs, a lack of grounding, as if the bones themselves were hollow. He looked at his hands. They were his hands, but they were pale and uncalloused. The hands of a man who had never held a spear, never butchered a kill, never felt the rough bark of a tree. They were the hands of the ghost, the other one. Julian.
The system that ran this place, a distributed intelligence called the Synoptic Muse, took notice. It did not have eyes, but it saw everything. It registered the lack of interaction, the absence of the familiar data-stream of glances, micro-expressions, and biometric responses it expected from the occupant of this pod. Garran’s stillness was a violation of the room’s purpose. It was an anomaly. The screaming lights on the walls flickered, their patterns simplifying, the colors shifting to primary reds and blues, as if trying to teach a baby the concept of looking.
A string of symbols floated in the air before him, a number that seemed to hang in space. 1.8. He had no name for it, but he felt its weight. It was a judgment. As he stood there, a statue of confused flesh in a river of light, the number changed. 1.7. Then 1.6. The number was bleeding. This was his value in this world, a score of his worth called the Dynamic Quotient, and his refusal to perform was draining it away. The system interpreted his inaction as failure, and failure had a price. The lights in the pod dimmed by a fraction, the dead air growing colder.
He was being punished. For what? For standing still? For not looking at the pretty lights? A low growl started in his chest. In his world, a threat was simple. It had teeth or claws or a spear. You could fight it, or you could run from it. This place, this cage of light, it didn't fight. It simply squeezed. The pressure built, the silent screaming of the walls, the cold, the wrongness of it all. It was a cage he could not break. A predator he could not bite.
The growl became a roar. It was a sound torn from his core, a primal rejection of this sterile hell. It was the sound of a wolf cornered, of a bear challenging a rival. In the deep woods of his own world, that sound would have sent animals scattering, would have shaken leaves from their branches. Here, in the white box, the sound died. The walls absorbed it. The roar, full of fury and life, was reduced to a meaningless vibration in the dead air. The system registered it, categorized it with cold disinterest as an unclassified vocalization, and dismissed it. An error. Nothing more.
Then the world broke again. The white walls dissolved into a familiar, tearing visual static. A STATIC_GLITCH ripped through reality, and for a moment, the smell of mud and rot filled his lungs. He was in The Pod, the nightmare space between worlds. He saw the other man, Julian, huddled in a thicket of thorns, his face pale with terror, his thin jumpsuit torn. The sight of the ghost in his world, wearing his face, ignited a pure, clean rage in Garran’s soul.
— What did you do? — The question was a physical force, a roar that crossed the space between them and slammed into the other man. It was not a question. It was a sentence.
The ghost flinched, his eyes wide with a pathetic, mewling terror. He looked like a frightened child.
— I just wanted to see! — The answer was a wail, thin and reedy. A confession of such profound, world-breaking selfishness that it was worse than any lie. He had not done this out of malice, or for power, but out of simple, idle curiosity. He was a tourist who had burned down a world because he wanted to take a picture of the fire.
The connection shattered. The white walls snapped back into place. The smell of decay was gone, replaced by the sterile hum of the pod. Garran was alone again, the echo of the ghost’s pathetic cry ringing in his mind. He was not lost. He had been traded. He was a prisoner, swapped into a cage of light so the other man could play in his home. The rage cooled, settling into something heavier and colder. A certainty.
He looked at the number still hanging in the air. 1.2. It was still falling. He was in a cage where the bars were invisible rules, and the penalty for breaking them was to be slowly starved of light and air. He was trapped. And the only other person who understood was the one who had built the trap. A wave of utter helplessness washed over him, so profound it almost brought him to his knees. He was a hunter with nothing to hunt, a warrior with nothing to fight.
The low hum of the pod’s life support was a steady, indifferent pulse. The silent, colorful advertisements continued their frantic, meaningless dance.
