“It’s inhumane! Look at where they’ve put us! What are we, the worst, disgusting, dredges of society? We’re down here in this shit while the rest of them are living like kings up in those castles with thousands of rooms? This is despicable! Our government should be ashamed of themselves.”

Unknown woman interview on the Barracks.

“Clay, you’re awake!” my mother cried as two planes of reality came into view—the horizontal and the vertical, sets of lines finding each other’s coordinates and linking together and allowing me to see. My head hurt.

“Huh,” I muttered. Sitting up on one elbow, I gazed around and recognized what I believed to be my room. Things were a little fuzzy, and when I blinked, I saw the lamppost on the back of my eyelids.

“Oh, God,” my mom exclaimed, slapping a hand across her forehead. “I thought I’d lost you! What were you thinking sneaking into my room like that!?”

“Rey,” I replied. “Rey is trapped inside, mom.”

“And you think you can change that? You want to go in there and get stuck with her? What are you going to do?!”

“I can get out!” I screamed, the words out of my mouth before I realized I was going to say them. After all, I hadn’t even realized until that moment that I was able to get out. But how? I hadn’t pressed the logout button or anything, and even if I had, why would it have worked for me and no one else?

“Yeah, because I was hitting the off button for the last hour!” my mom shouted. I shook my head. “I was getting ready to call the hospital!”

“No…no, that’s not it.”

I didn’t know how I knew—I just did.

“Oh, what is it then, smartass?”

Smartass? I thought. She must be really pissed.

Mom never used bad language around me or called me names unless she was super upset with me. I understood—the thought of her son being lost from her, trapped in some virtual world he couldn’t escape from, was probably terrifying. After all, I’d seen how Rey’s parents had reacted.

“It was something different,” I said slowly. “I just kind of…thought my way out.”

“Well, that’s nice,” she replied, snatching the Crown from my head and lifting the Fount into her arms. “Now you can think about what you’re going to do while you’re grounded for two weeks!”

“Mom, wait!” I shouted, leaping to my feet as she strode quickly from my room. “Stop! Rey is still in there!”

“That is not your job! Let the authorities handle that!”

“Authorities!? What authorities? The internet police?”

Mom kept an old fashioned Louisville Slugger by the door—just in in case she said—snatched it up as she booted open the door to the house and strode outside.

“What are you doing!?” I panicked as she swung her arms and hurled my precious Fount into the air like one of those strong men on T.V. would do with those enormous rocks.

“No!”

The sound of my Fount cracking against the concrete was worse than the sound of a baby crying. Shards of plastic sprang into the air as its body cracked from the impact. I raced forward in a desperate attempt to stop my mom from completing her mission, but she was an unstoppable force and the world seemed to slow as she raised up the baseball bat and brought it down on my most prized possession.

Pieces of plastic, printed circuit boards and resistors flew into the air like hideous fireworks as she beat the poor thing to death. Each blow did more damage, but it didn’t matter; the first impact and subsequent swing had been enough—my Fount was totaled. Like a defeated warrior, I dropped to my knees in despair.

Images of the Weeping Hills flashed through my mind. Rey’s smiling face, Rathborne’s look of approval and Wilhelm’s eyes as he sat beside me in the cart on the way back to town.

“Mom…” my voice was barely a whisper as she turned to me, brushed an angry tuft of hair from her face and looked at me with a proud sense of finality.

“You know they’re starting to move kids to the hospitals?!” she asked angrily. “People who can’t log out of that game! They said they were lucky this is a niche game, because if they had a hundred thousand people in there, they wouldn’t be able to handle it—people would die!”

“But, I can get out—”

“They’re bringing in emergency stasis units, Clay!” she roared, taking a step forward. “Like the ones they use for the Mars missions!? Yeah, that’s how bad it is! Do you have any idea what those cost!?”

“Mom, I’m not going to be stuck there—!”

I started to say, but it was no use. Mom had her mind made up and there was no debating her. Without another word, she stormed past me, arms crossed, and marched back into the house, slamming the door behind her.

“Shit,” I muttered, gazing at the wreckage that had once been my most prized possession.

What do I do now!?

I felt a rage boiling within me, threatening to take me over—not because my Fount was gone, but because I no longer had any way to help Rey. She was stuck there, one of the Bloodless, her mind a held captive by some unknown force, or glitch, and there was nothing I could do about it.

I knelt there a long time, racking my brain for a solution. My “friends” all had Founts, but there was no way any of them would let me borrow one—not now—not after the great betrayal. I could steal one of them, but unlike me, who came from an area of hopeless security, they all lived in big hopes with state of the art security, and being thrown in jail would definitely rule out any other possible options I had for getting back to her.

But, what other options?! I thought furiously. I realized my right fist was clenched down tightly, feeling for the hilt of an axe that wasn’t there.

“Shit,” I muttered, rising and kicking a quarter of my Fount that lay battered and broken on the ground. I suddenly hated the thing for being broken. It clattered away from me before splashing down in a shallow puddle.

When I went back inside, my mom was in her room with the door closed. Obviously, she wasn’t in a mood to debate me. There wasn’t anything to talk about anyway. My Fount was gone and she wasn’t buying me another one, even if she could afford it right now. Part of me wanted to burst in and scream at her, but that would have been childish and wouldn’t get me anywhere anyway. Instead, I went back to my room, closed the door, and slumped down in my desk chair.

“Think, Clay,” I muttered to myself, rapping my forehead with the middle knuckle of my left hand. “What can you do here?”

Nothing…

That was the answer, and I knew it. I was genuinely, 100-percent screwed.

My tower PC chirped beside me. The monitor was off, so I switched it on, and instead of my wallpaper of the Mars Base-B settlement, I found myself staring at a blank screen with a simple line of text:

You are not alone, Rand.

“What the Hell?” I muttered as I stared at the message. I expanded my Holoboard and went through a few keystrokes and gestures, but nothing happened. A blinking cursor sat on the line below as if waiting for my reply. Slowly, I typed.

Who are you?

The next message was almost instant.

Someone like you.

Before I could respond—

Follow the red woman, Rand.

Red woman?

I started to type my reply, but before I could, a knock came from the front door. I jumped, and spun quickly in my chair to face the unexpected sound as my heart rate skyrocketed. We never got unexpected visitors in the Barracks. Neighbors knew better than to go knocking at someone’s home, and outsiders—well, we didn’t get many of those either. That feeling you get when something is just a little bit off, or someone might be watching you, ran up the back of my legs like a cold snake.

I glanced back at my computer screen, but the messages were gone, replaced by my wallpaper image.

“What the…?”

Knock, knock, knock!

“Ju—just a minute!” I called out. Slowly, I got to my feet and made my way to the surveillance screen in the living room, the wide-angle camera giving a perfect view of the outside of the house. I saw my Fount, smashed to pieces on the ground, and standing at our door, was a woman, black hair pulled back in a pony tail, tapping her fingers aimlessly like everything was normal as she looked up above her like she was watching non-existent birds. She wore a red delivery suit.

“What is this…?”

She raised her hand to knock again, but I thumbed the button for the microphone.

“What do you want?” was all I could think to say.

“Delivery.” she replied as though my question made no sense whatsoever.

“Delivery for what?”

“Uh—I just deliver the packages,” she stated. “Can you open up? This requires a signature.”

I kept looking at the camera, scanning the rest of the area around her to see if there were any others with her, lurking in the shadows, ready to clobber me with a pipe if I opened the door. But she seemed to be alone

To say I was a little freaked out would be the understatement of the year. Between the impossible message on my computer and now the stranger girl standing at my front door, I was starting to question whether or not I’d actually returned to my real world, or had been sucked into some alternate dimension where logic and reason had no part.

“Open up,” the girl asked again. “Rand.”

My heart skipped at least three beats and my mouth fell open when I heard her say that name. Only a few people knew my in-game name; Rey, and my false friends, but definitely not any girl who looked like the one growing tired at my door. I pressed the button to speak to her, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I tugged the door open.

She smiled at me with bright blue eyes and held out the package and a small screen to sign on.

“Here you are,” she said cheerfully, but there was something else behind her eyes—something hidden, as though she was trying to tell me something. The package felt like and was more of an envelope than anything. I carelessly signed my name and she handed it to me. “Have a nice night, sir.”

“W-wait!” I called out as she turned and walked away from me. She stopped and looked up at the sky for a moment, then brought her eyes back to me.

“Do you like my jacket?” she asked, running a hand down her rose colored sleeve. Before I could respond, she whirled on her heels and walked quickly away.

“Wait!” I called out after her, but she didn’t, and within seconds she was out of my tiny courtyard and gone, vanished into the rows and rows of houses. I looked down at the envelope in my hand, then back the way she’d gone.

Follow the red woman, Rand.

“It can’t be…” I muttered to myself. But could it really be a coincidence that after getting a message like that, a girl in a red delivery uniform shows up at my door with a random package?

I glanced back at the house where my mom was sleeping, and down at the shattered Fount lying spread across the ground like a desiccated corpse. There was nothing for me there now—not if I was going to find Rey, discover the mystery of the monolith.

“Fuck it,” I grumbled, tossing the envelope back into the house and shutting the door behind me, I raced off in the direction of the red woman.

Slum water splashed beneath my shoes as I ran, ducking a low-hanging braided cluster of cables that slumped from a stack of three homes like an anesthetized snake. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way she’d gone—there was only one street heading in the direction she’d taken, but it led even deeper into the Barracks, not out to the freeway…

I jumped a waterlogged pile of cardboard, my eyes scanning in front of me for the strange woman, when I heard a feint buzzing overhead. I knew before I even looked.

A quad rotor drone hung in the sky, perfectly balanced, the lens of its on-board camera aimed straight down at me. As I moved, it moved, tracking me easily as I raced deeper and deeper into the bowels of the Barracks.

Someone’s flying that thing, I thought as I took a hard left and vaulted over a fallen set of printed orange trash barrels. I glanced up again and the thing stopped impossibly quickly, then darted left through a crevice and out of sight. I slowed down and looked back, waiting to see if it would reappear.

“Rand,” a voice called from behind me. I spun around to see the red woman standing under the vaulted eave of one of the ancient factories the Barracks had been built around. “Over here.”

“Who are you—?” I blurted out loudly, but the girl calmly placed a single finger over her lips, and for some reason, I quieted down.

“I’m like you. Come with me.”

She turned and tugged a piece of printed polymer from the wall beside her. She waved her hand casually and I heard something shift deep beneath the ground. With a solid click, a square piece of concrete behind her sank, then slid back to reveal an almost pitch black stairwell.

“Come.”

Without waiting, she stepped down into the darkness. I heard that dragonfly hum above me and looked up to see the drone emerge from a drainage pipe three stories above me, then dip down with blinding precision, and follow her.

This is so stupid…I thought as actually contemplated taking the stairs after her. It was an old government factory she’d gone into. Those were supposed to be sealed up and completely off limits.

I moved up to the concrete mouth and the set of simple stairs lit by a series of exposed light bulbs that hung from a power line that snaked across the ceiling like it had been put up in a hurry.

Definitely a bad idea…I thought.

But there was nothing waiting for me at home—not anymore. Taking a deep breath, I took the first step down.