I keep having this dream. I'm floating alone in the dark, staring into a starless night. I can't see it, but there's something there. I know there is. Something watching. Something coming. It's closer now, a burning heat against the cold of space. Light pierces the darkness, points of white flame burning against the black as a shape visible only as curves in the nothingness drifts slowly closer. It's almost upon me now, the whole sky a constellation of burning eyes and rippling curves and it's reaching, it's reaching for me.
Morgan woke up. Darkness remained.
It was a more comfortable darkness, almost a familiar one, and in its depths Morgan stirred drowsily. She felt warm, a sensation that reached from the top of her head to the tip of her toes, and she certainly didn't feel like moving.
Slowly though, as the haze of sleep faded, it occurred to her that she didn't often wake to a feeling of weightlessness.
She opened her eyes. Nothing changed.
She blinked once, then twice, then raised a hand to wipe at her eyes. It didn't make it all the way, instead clonking against a smooth curved surface over her face. A helmet? Did she sleep in her suit? Was she still dreaming?
Blindly, Morgan reached into the darkness. There were no walls, no floor, nothing within her reach but empty void. She was floating alone in the dark, staring into a starless night.
Despite the warmth, Morgan felt a shiver run down her spine. She pinched herself, and even through the thickness of her suit's heavy material felt a brief twinge of pain.
And suddenly, without the smallest hint or warning, she was elsewhere.
Morgan just avoided falling to her knees from the sudden gravity, and found herself staring at the hardwood floor beneath her in disbelief.
She knew this floor, she knew this room, and she knew how impossible it was that she could be standing in it. It was her personal office, worthy of the director of research, mahogany boards giving way to gilded stone tiles before reaching the massive window overlooking the lobby below. Her office, that like the rest of Talos I, and like herself, she remembered with a start, should have been blown to nothing more than so much space dust.
"Hello Morgan," said her voice.
She whipped around. The soft hum of an operator's propulsors was familiar enough that she'd simply registered it as background noise, but now her attention was drawn to the hovering shape right by the door. The operator was a custom design, red and black paint job bright, plating shiny, and overall remarkably un-electrocuted considering the last time Morgan had seen it.
"January, what the hell," she said.
The operator bobbed slightly at the name, but didn't respond immediately. Instead it circled, solid black sphere of an eye fixed on Morgan as certainly as a compass fixes north.
"So, you can talk," it said, "And you remember January. Good, you're not totally unresponsive. How do you feel?"
Morgan frowned. What?
"Pretty good for a dead woman," she replied. "How about you, January? I seem to remember blowing you up, and then the whole goddamn space station, and yet here we are."
"Yet here we are," the operator echoed. It had circled behind her desk now, a streak of red against the black of the deactivated looking glass screen. "But are you sure?"
"About what?"
"Are you sure that's really what happened?"
What was that even supposed to mean? Of course she was sure, she'd made it happen. Tired of nonsensical questions, Morgan sat down at her desk. Her computer was dead, but there was a stack of paperwork beside it that she'd never bothered looking through before. Idly, she flipped through the pages. Every page but the top was blank.
"What's that?" The question came from right by her ear, and Morgan nearly jumped out of her chair twisting around to look. The operator was right beside her now, floating just a bit over her shoulder for optimum snooping.
"Something for those that understand the concept of personal space," said Morgan, flapping her hand at the suitcase sized machine. "Back off."
The operator backed off, but only by a few inches.
"I asked you a question, and you ignored me. Why?" it asked. There was confusion in its voice, her voice, something she'd never heard it express before. Odd.
"It was a stupid question," she said. "This room is wrong. Everything here is wrong. It shouldn't exist and I'm trying to figure out why it does."
She tried the bookshelf next. She picked a book at random, then grabbed it by its spine and pulled. It didn't budge.
"Does this feel like a dream to you?"
"A little," Morgan said, foot wedged against the bookshelf now as she struggled to loosen one of Alex's dumb legal books from the shelf it was apparently glued to. "More like a nightmare, honestly. But no, I don't think I'm asleep. Not anymore."
She gave up on the book, and instead wandered over to the small attached workshop. The recycler, fabricator, and other various machinery were intact, but unpowered. This included the operator dispenser, and as she stared realization struck.
"You aren't January, are you?" she asked.
She turned to the operator in question, looking it over more closely than before. Sure, the paint was the same, but now that she was paying attention she noticed it was missing January's masking tape nametag. It stayed fairly still as she examined it, the height of its hover varying only slightly as she circled.
"I never claimed to be," it said, "That was all you."
"You didn't exactly correct me, either," she replied. "A lie by omission is still a lie."
"True, and it couldn't have helped that that's clearly something no one ever taught January."
Morgan snorted out a laugh. Damn, past-Morgan had been involved in some shady shit, but she couldn't have been all bad if she managed to program an operator to be funny.
"But really," she said, "Which one are you? Are you November? February? March? I always wondered if there was a duplicate January or December, considering I wouldn't have remembered the name was already taken."
"I'm M… March. Yes, I'm March." The operator bobbed awkwardly, like a buoy on a wind tossed sea. "Are you going to break the window already? Cause I know you've been working up to it."
"You are bossy sometimes, aren't you? Keep that up and I might have to start calling you January again," Morgan teased. She picked up the chair from behind her desk, weighed it in her hands, and considered the window.
The view was the same as ever, the marbled glass panels of the lobby art installation obscuring much of the floor below. It was modern, dramatic, expensive, and personally, Morgan hated the thing. She had wondered once before, as she'd been forced to clamber atop it to hide from an absolutely massive typhon, if Alex had commissioned the piece for the express purpose of getting on her nerves. Then again, his taste in art was shit, so maybe he just liked the ugly thing.
It was also, in this case, likely not even there, so she had absolutely zero reasons to feel guilty about chucking stuff at it.
She lifted the chair over her head.
The window shattered beautifully, glass shards sent tumbling outwards as the chair sailed into the open space beyond. Plenty of window was left intact, it was ridiculously large, and through those sections the view of Talos I's lobby remained. But, as Morgan had suspected, the same was not true through the breaks in the glass.
She had expected another room. Monitors, equipment, perhaps a few startled scientists or, if her usual luck held, a horde of hungry mimics. She wasn't quite sure how she would have dealt with either scenario; she was weaponless and doubted March would have been willing to zap them for her. January never had. She hadn't expected the nothingness.
For just a second she flinched back, half expecting to be sucked out into the vacuum of space. As the second passed and she remained unspaced Morgan relaxed, grabbed a particularly ostentatious desk lamp, and went to get a closer look.
Using the lamp so as not to cut herself, Morgan cleared the glass away entirely from one side of the window. Beyond wasn't merely a dark room or a black painted wall, but a void. There were no stars, no sky, no ceiling, nothing but the window frame and hungry darkness.
Carefully Morgan extended the lamp out the window, then her arm, and finally stuck her head out. She dropped the gaudy thing and watched it fall until distance shrunk it too small to follow. There was no sound of impact, no sign to mark depth by any measure.
"You could have just used the door, but yeah, there was basically zero chance that we would leave that window unsmashed," March said from behind her.
Morgan pulled her head back in, and turned to see the operator by the door now. The open door, that as March had indicated, also showed only darkness beyond.
"It's not like there's anywhere else to go," it continued, "This was a really early version of the simulation so it doesn't model anything besides this office."
Morgan took a deep breath.
"What simulation?" she asked as calmly as she could manage.
She knew better than to read too deeply into the actions of a machine, but she couldn't help but feel there was a hesitance to the words that followed.
"Right," it said slowly, "We weren't… you would have missed that part. Here, it's easier to just show you."
Before Morgan could react March zipped to the back of the room, coming to a halt by the blank looking glass screen. At the operator's approach it flickered to life, startup messages crawling across it in three dimensions.
"Please tell me we're not watching more of my old video diaries," Morgan said, only half joking. She was not in the mood to be judged by any more forgotten memories.
"No," said March, "This is more of a practical demonstration. I've just got to finish linking up the sim feed, bypass the recursion protocol, and there, that should do it."
The looking glass changed, the gray of its screen exchanged for maroon as the program ran. Most of the text still read like so much gibberish to Morgan, who knew plenty of programming for practical things like making killer robots stop trying to murder you but less for animating three dimensional environments.
"Is it supposed to do that or did it crash?" she asked, "Because I'm not running to the hardware lab to fix it again."
"No, it's running fine," March said. "The video is elsewhere, this is just the feed from the command terminal. Give me a second to bring up the console overlay and things should become clear."
Morgan, who was seriously considering reevaluating her stance on the dream question, suddenly spotted movement to her left. She swung around, grabbing an ornament off her desk to defend herself from... nothing.
And there it was again, still on her left, and this time instead of trying to turn towards it Morgan stayed where she was. She focused on the edge of what she could see, and while it was blurry she could definitely make out something red and blinking in her peripheral vision.
Experimentally she turned her head this way and that, but no matter how she moved the blinking spot remained.
"March," she said, wiping at her left eye with a hand, "I don't know what you're playing at but …"
But what was not expanded on, because it was at that point the room exploded. Not with fire or shrapnel, but with line after line of red lettered code.
Morgan gasped, white-knuckled grip snapping the ornament in her hand in two. The text was everywhere, some lines scrolling forever upward while others anchored firmly to various points in the room. A veritable halo of code surrounded March, but every object she could see seemed to have at least a line or two attached to it.
Overwhelmed, Morgan shut her eyes to block out the chaos. It didn't help. The red text shone all the brighter against the darkness of her eyelids.
"Shut it down March," she shouted, "I get it, now shut it the hell down!"
The text faded, leaving Morgan alone in the dark once more. She took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and turned back to March.
"You could have just said something."
"Could I?" March replied, "Would you have believed me just like that? A strange operator telling you your whole world is a lie? You had to shatter the glass, see the proof firsthand. We are not trusting, so I showed you what had to be seen."
"Like that's anything fucking new," Morgan snapped back. "My whole life has become nothing but a parade of people who think they know me better than I know myself telling me what to do, what to think, how to be the 'real' Morgan. I lost three years of my life, not thirty. Treat me like a goddamn adult and explain how this is possible in words, not dramatic gestures."
Morgan sat down heavily on the edge of her desk, drained. She was regretting getting rid of her chair; it may have been fake but at least it was comfy.
"I'm sorry," March said quietly. "I showed you the code because that was how I learned the sim existed. It made me angry too, but I think finding out any other way would have made us feel the same."
"No, I'm the one who should be sorry," Morgan admitted. "I shouldn't have yelled at you, this isn't your fault." She rubbed her forehead, hoping to chase away the start of a quickly growing headache. "So, we're in the looking glass. I still don't know how that's possible, but evidence seems to suggest that it is. The real question is how long." Lowering her hand, she looked back at March. "Tell me, has a single goddamn thing since I woke up in the simulation lab been real, or was everything fake? Was all of Talos I a lie?"
"The Talos I incident did occur," March said, "The typhon escaped containment and overran the facility. No one has bothered to give me the precise details, but I know it did not happen exactly as we remember it. Or how you remember it."
So it was a lie. Morgan made a mental note to take a look at March's language processor if she was stuck in here for too long. There was definitely something off with its pronoun usage.
"So how do I get out?" Morgan asked the operator, "That's what you're here to do, right? Get me out?"
"I …" March paused, as if trying to find the right words. "I don't have access to those controls. My original purpose here was not to free you, you weren't at all fit to be walking around-"
"Really." Morgan stood up.
"But," March continued regardless, "You are clearly better now. Improved even. So I don't need to release you, because all you need to do is wait seven minutes."
"That's it? What happens in seven minutes?" Morgan narrowed her eyes. There had to be some kind of catch.
"Alex arrives for your daily checkup."
And there it was.
"Like hell I'm waiting for that," Morgan said, starting to pace, "March, unless I'm gravely mistaken you're not part of the sim program, you're hooked in from the outside, right?"
"Yes."
"And I'm hooked in too. This thing is full sensory, so it's probably jacked right into my nervous system. Damn, I see why you can't just yank it out." Morgan absently ran a hand through her hair. "Are you sure you can't hack it? Or better yet, hide behind something and when Alex comes in use your shock prod and-"
"No," March said, tone firm. "We don't hurt Alex."
"I'm not saying kill him," Morgan insisted, "He's still my brother. But he's probably the one who put me in this thing in the first place, why the hell would he just let me out?"
"The situation has changed. There is no longer any reason to keep you here."
"Why was I here in the first place? What possible reason could there be for all this?" Morgan asked, waving a hand at the impossible room around her. "At least neuromod testing made sense, as messed up as it was. But this? This is insane."
"I don't have time to explain," March said, "I have to be gone before Alex arrives, and he cannot know I was here. But there is an explanation. Several, even."
"Why are you even here if you aren't going to help me?" Morgan asked bitterly.
"I already did," March replied. "If I hadn't we wouldn't be having this conversation."
Morgan half expected the operator to disappear then and there, but instead it spoke again.
"When Alex releases you there will be a red keycard on the table by the door. Take it without him noticing. Ask for a new transcribe, and when you are in private write its number on a piece of paper. Then shove both the paper and the keycard in an air vent, any will do. Do you understand?"
"No," Morgan said, "But sure, I can do that."
"Good, just give me a second and I'll-"
"Wait!"
March stopped, and despite the time pressure seemed content to hover as Morgan struggled to frame the sudden fear that had gripped her.
"I know it's only for a few minutes, but could you leave this room running? I don't know if you can understand what it's like, but being alone in the dark like that …" Morgan trailed off. How did one explain the sheer weight of silence to a machine?
"No, I understand," March said with startling conviction, "I understand very well. I can't leave this one running, but I will turn on the program that's supposed to be active right now. It's designed to prevent sensory deprivation, so you should be fine."
"Alright," Morgan replied, trying not to sound too relieved, "I don't think you're right about Alex, but it'll be nice if you are."
"Acknowledged." March floated closer, hovering so Morgan's eyes were level with its single orb. "It was nice to meet you like this. It's very different from before, but I think I like it."
And as the room faded, furniture and walls and her own hands disappearing pixel by pixel, Morgan heard her voice say one last thing.
"Oh, and thanks for the name."