Needless to say, while I wanted to go off and experience everything all at once, I had this nagging feeling that staying awake a week wasn’t a good thing. I ended up asking her about the Tela race and if they needed sleep as well. She explained that they had, over time, developed a way to have the system continually replenish and restore their minds so that they could go without for long periods.

"I just get this feeling in the back of my mind that this is not good for me. It just feels like there is a slowly increasing weight the longer I don't get sleep." I said as I made up my mind. I was going to test different nap and sleep times to find out how long it would take me to get this weight to finally go away.

"I am going to take a nap Tutor." I said as I gripped the stainless steel railing and pushed away from it slowly while glancing first at the stairs up to my private top deck suite and then back to her for a moment. "Let George know please? Also, come get me if something is needed. I just... need to recharge for a little bit." I said as I tried to yawn. It was glorious, the first yawn in a week and it almost made my face cramp with how long it was.

"Interesting." She said as she watched and listened to me. "Also, you know that both George and I can hear you anywhere you are in your VR home, right? It is nice of you to consider us though." She said as she went towards one of the deck chairs and lowered herself down to lay on it, materializing a novel in her hand once she was comfortable.

I climbed up the stairs, taking one last moment to look off into the dark distance and to admire the earth from above. It was an unforgettable sight. When I got to my suite I tossed off most of my clothes and threw myself into bed. Oh, sweet luxury - was the last thought that went through my head before I nodded off to sleep.

I may have made a mistake. Being the first human to ever have its brain infused with cr nanobots, copied, and now contained solely inside a virtual reality space designed and intended for a race of aliens called the Tela. Dreams were something new entirely for the System. Dreams and nightmares.

I blinked and swore that I had just laid my head down on a super soft pillow in a satellite yacht. "What a strange thought," I chuckled to myself as I looked around. I was sitting astride my 21-speed bike and I was back at the driveway to my rented house. My mind tried to make sense of what just happened, I could swear that I was just somewhere else, a guest to something bigger, and yet I had been sitting here for the last minute trying to decide how far I wanted to ride my bike today as well. It was as if two realities were conflicting and one was starting to fade away. Like I had just woken up and the dream was disappearing.

"Why can't I remember? I swear I was just on a ship." I said softly as a gentle breeze blew some leaves across my lawn. I sat there, struggling to make sense of all the memories that I had just had inside my head, memories that quickly seemed to be vanishing the longer I sat there staring at the cracks in the concrete under my feet. A man. A man in the park! I remembered something happening to me when I met a man in the park.

"Disha tah!" I said as I remembered it being said today somewhere next to a man... sitting on a bench.... the more I thought about it the harder it was to draw out the sequence of events or the picture of the man feeding birds.

I quickly jammed my foot down on the pedal and raced down the driveway and out into the empty street. I had to get to the park to find this man before this fading memory completely vanished.

I pedaled down 1st street as fast as I could and almost got ran over by a squirrel with octopus arms driving a green 1969 El Camino.

"What the heck was that?" I said as I swerved to the side to avoid the car that ignored the stop sign. I watched as a cigarette flicked out the window as it sped away.

A brief but similar memory washed through my mind for just a second of a guy with a ragged beard and tattoos driving the same car and nearly hitting me on the same day. But that was a street down because I had decided to pick a different path to the park earlier.

"What the heck am I thinking? There is no earlier today, I just barely left my house." I said in exasperation as my mind seemed to be having trouble lining up events.

I stopped and stood with my foot on the ground, holding me in place as I tried to remember what I was doing. A rustling noise came from behind a large tree to my right. I was near the sidewalk to the neighborhood park and the old library was sitting a little off in the distance. The rustling of grass came from behind the tree and after a moment out stepped an ant the size of a small dog. It crept around the base of the tree before turning and taking a rather large chunk out of the base of the tree. It came away with a perfect sphere. The sphere locked in its jaws started to change colors and to take on the appearance of metal, a swirling and shifting array of metallic colors. The scary large ant started to walk towards me, carrying the sphere high as if it was offering it to me. The next instant, however, the sphere was slowly falling to the ground when something from above crashed through the tree limbs and chomped down on the ant, grabbing it and yanking it upwards into the sky.

I staggered backwards in fright, not only from the speed at which the ant was yanked upwards but from the shrapnel of dirt and tree branches that exploded everywhere. My shoe got caught on the pedal of my bike when I fell, wrenching my ankle and making me fall on my back hard on the asphalt road. I managed to not knock my head against the road but part of me wished I had knocked myself silly from what I saw hovering a good distance above me.

It was a giant moldy textured gray and green alien creature that was spread out across the sky. Whatever had grabbed the ant, was now retracted back and was busy chomping and chewing with massive hooked teeth. Around the center mouth, massive eyes were looking in every different direction for more prey. One such eye, adorned with a sickly green color and a spiky star-shaped pupil seemed to lock on me. The creature seemed to be held up in the sky by huge threads of crisscrossing webbing that attached to moons suspended off in the vast distance.

The sky behind the creature looked as if it was torn and beyond the tear was a black expanse of hungering darkness. Chunks of the blue sky were breaking off and falling upwards, to get sucked up and destroyed in the darkness.

I could hear my breathing, a rough panting as fear gripped me. I untangled my leg from my bike and got up to run away. I ran down a hall with brown carpet and old pink textured wallpaper covering the walls. "What the heck is going on?!" I shouted in fear as I looked back towards where I had started running from. I shouldn't have looked because this action caused me to see the creature and the deep darkness behind it, lowering itself in line with my forever hallway in an attempt to try to eat me. My already strained ankle rolled and I felt a sharp pain stab up my leg making my run turn into a slow hobble as I heard the creature start to chomp and eat the walls of the hallway. When I turned back to try to force my legs to move faster, trying my hardest to ignore the stabbing pain coming from my foot I saw that the hallway was now covered in metal-looking bubbles. All sides of the hall from the ceiling to the floor were now looking like bubble wrap and promised to make my running nearly impossible. I tried running on the surface of the bubbles and kept getting words popping up in my face with each step on their hard surfaces.

Would you like to enter the home of %#@#@%?

Would you like to enter the home of (###[email protected]@?

Would you like to enter the home of $$#@@A?

On and on text kept appearing the farther I tried to run.

I couldn't get away, the hallway was forever. I stumbled and fell.

My outstretched hand banged against the backside of a wooden park bench and I could feel my fingers just graze soft material. I looked up at my hand in wonder and found that it was now gripping the side of the same bench from my memory.

"Help Mr. Joe!" I shouted, drawing from my faded memories a name. The old man sitting on the bench slowly turned and looked at me. His face was one of those bubbles from the hallway. A cracked and broken bubble of metal with cracked wiring and for some reason, cabbage inside.

"Kevin! You need to wake up! You are doing something to the System!" Joe seemed to shout at me as his face, head, and body fell apart, crumbling to dust.

The park bench changed under my fingers, turning into large floating letters. I took my hand off of them and pushed my body back and away from them on the soft damp grass and dirt.

Remote key granted by the System.

Quarantining Guest's VR home and ejecting it from the Core.

Guest Kevin is now a remote Guest.

CR gained.