A nurse entered the ward. Working quickly but not rushing, with the cool demeanour of a medical practitioner with decades of experience. He wore a plastic frock covering their normal clothes instead the full smock, and Yeung-Sung the frustration in the curl of his eyebrows over his surgical mask, that deepened and lightened to his breath.

Presenting his oozing arms, Yeung-Sung was about to thank him when he was pinned back against the bed with a pressure that seemed excessive. The nurse’s eyebrows curved further down like a laden twig. Finding his bearing among this new level of pain, he looked closer at him, growing more familiar with each gravelly breath that he took.

[Oh] said MEDB in his head.

Oh no, thought Yeung-Sung alongside her.

The nurse eased off as the bleeding began to subside, saying,

“The experiment was a success, fully approved by the officials. They’re congratulating the runner now. Your friend, if I recall -Wil? Yes, that’s right.”

As the bloody holes petered out and began to clog up, Yeung-Sung’s eyes widened with terror as the nurse removed his mask.

“Thank you for you all your help,” said Jordan. He walked back towards the open door and peered into the hall.

“I doubt we could have achieved these levels of results for this deadline without your contributions.”

He shut the door, making no noise.

“Even you last manoeuvre, “he said with a soft applause, “Taking yourself out of the picture; You motivated everyone else to work together at last, genius!”

Locking the door with a firm squeeze, Jordan disposed of his gloves.

“-What a showing!”

The CEO of GLI turned back to Yeung-Sung, eyebrows raised at the foot of the hospital bed.

And now what?

Yeung-Sung’s mind swam with warbled noise; like a recording of MEDB re-sampled a hundred times.

[He’s turned me off!]

[~owly being wiped off~~ listen to me~~

~~I’m sorry]

He shook his head, trying to free himself from the lying machine’s tenacious echoes. This was an opportunity to get some answers. And as he currently had Jordan’s praise, this might be his only chance to have them truthfully solved.

Though, maintaining focus enough to draw out the words and consolidate them into a proper question was fighting for breath in a blaze of smoke.

“If we failed,” Yeung-Sung asked Jordan as he looked disapprovingly down at the bloody hospital frock that he was wearing, “Would you really have killed us? All of us?”

Jordan paused, folding his hands together. He looked at Yeung-Sung while he deliberated for the right answer. It was a gamble which truth was selected, his hands rolling around together like the spool of a slot machine.

I need to know.

Jordan settled his hands, answer rolling around his teeth, and pushed off the end of the bed towards the heartrate monitor. “I’m not sure,” he answered.

He swiped through the screen with broad strokes, periodically referring to Yeung-Sung’s body. “But,” he continued, “do you think this was our first experiment? The only colony?”

“No,” Yeung-Sung admitted. Jordan smiled down at him like a proud father.

It didn’t matter at all.

MEDB blipped her way back, her voice scathing, scratching through his grey matter.

[There’s something that you need to know. He never cared about fixing~~~

~~~bring about change]

The voice could hardly be considered MEDB any longer. The sonority and tone had long faded, each syllable normalizing to a flat quality, to the value of 1, a repetitive attack on his brain.

[Una told me once~~]

Jordan snuck a look out the window, one hand leaning over the lip of the monitor’s desk. Not seeing a hint of any movement through the frosted glass, he proceeded to pull the bloody frock over his head.

“They’ll be wondering where I am by now,” he noted. “How do I look?”

Yeung-Sung did not answer. He wanted to spit on the stupid gold-lined black suit. He needed to push for more answers before Jordan left him here, alone again.

“So, what now? We all get our money from games?”

Jordan sighed, scrunching up the frock in a ball and stuffing it down a bin hidden in the corner.

“There needs to be more trials of course. Every culture should decide how they want to adapt the system to their needs, so they need time and staff and data to create their own types of Game Life Industry systems. It’ll be a steady process yet.”

He glared out distantly, envisioning the future, like the walls disappeared at his will, like the present and the people in it meant nothing.

“I’ve made this offer to all the coloners,” he said to Yeung-Sung while adjusting his sleeves, “but it’s you that I think will help win the public over.

That’s all he cares about isn’t it. That the people are happy? Can it be true?

“The governments won’t take it on board unless the masses demand it, unless they are crying out for it in the streets during business hours, for hours.”

Taking a step closer, at Yeung-Sung’s right side, he extended his hand down; the blotchy white-scarred knuckles not at all in line with the silver stripes that bled like metals veins down his suit. The effort worn on his hands made Jordan appear straighter, more rigid and stronger than he was. He looked like a man Yeung-Sung could entrust his life to. His hand drew closer, weaving through the air like a shark’s fin.

“Join us,” Jordan said, “Help spread the word. Help us to see change.”

In his loopy mindset, Yeung-Sung saw the words fly from his mouth like crows in the darkness, dropping the meanings into his open mouth from their disgusting talons. The word ‘sees’ turned to ‘seed’ and implanted itself into his heart.

To seed change.

But MEDB knocked it out off him, dislodged it, forcing it up into his throat and coughing it out. [You have to know] she said, what the crackling remains of her screeched as her worst fears were dragging her away from her only friend;

[It was Jordan who cause The Crash in the first place]

Yeung-Sung sat up with a cough and Jordan took back his hand, confused.

“What? That can’t be –” he said.

But he knew by the clarity of his thoughts that there would be no reply.

Blinking out a tear he looked to Jordan and said, “She’s gone. MEDB.”

Curling his fingers at his chest, Jordan nodded. “Indeed.”

“It was only temporary,” he said, then asked again, pulling his hand out, “Will you join me? Don’t you believe in change?”

In the newly relaxed state of mind, Jordan’s statement pinged about into his memory and pulled out the matching sentence Woo-Yi had asked him before.

“Don’t you believe in change?”

Yeung-Sung considered the question.

Do I, immobile in an infirmary, believe in the limitless offering of a man who ushered in an apocalyptic depression only to support the world through it and lead them to his version of a sacred land. To be the hero?

If that was indeed the truth. It was time to find the right answer to another question:

“So, crippling the global economy was ‘change’, was it?”

Frowning, Jordan withdrew the hand, but only a little.

“It was bound to happen eventually,” Jordan protested. For the first time, his words came out flustered. Yet he did not deny what he had done. “Taking down the banks was like -a controlled demolition; like chemotherapy. The corruption in society was too deep, too far gone to be overturned with simple politics.”

Grabbing the rail of the bed, Jordan twisted the metal, shaking Yeung-Sung in his bed. His nostrils flared as he tried to contain himself.

“I understand well what I had when I discovered fusion. I knew what the world would make of it -what they are still trying to make me even now, though they hardly have an idea of what it is, let alone understand the mechanics behind it.”

Yeung-Sung swallowed, squeezing his tongue between his teeth to ensure its silence at a dangerous time like this.

“Those ‘Champions’ or whatever they want to call themselves, they won’t find anything but an empty battery,” he said, chuckling at the thought with another vacant stare.

He thought through that too? This man; I thought his expectations for the colony’s progress were ludicrous, but now it makes sense. That was just the bare minimum required to meet him at his level. Our thinking really has to be completely reshaped in order to understand his far-seeing line od thinking.

It really will be a whole new world

“I can understand not trusting governments,” said Yeung-Sung, “But are you seriously going to disregard everyone’s feelings on the matter to force this system into place?”

Jordan laughed. It broke out of him an made him buckle, so innocently that he must have considered it a joke.

“You make me out to be so bad.” Jordan opened up his arms, silver under his cuffs sparkling even in the dim infirmary lighting. “When I am not the bad guy here.”

“No?” asked Yeung-Sung, glancing at the angled mess of steel at the side of his bed.

The familiar growl pricked up in Jordan’s voice, the voice that hounded Yeung-Sung the past weeks, the voice he heard whenever he touched his neck, the voice that straightened and focused him into desperate thinking.

“The bad guy here is the faceless mask given to corporations to allow them to grow and grow, an entity that is not real, taking all the credit for the hard workers.”

He seized another lungful of breath and pointed a nail to Yeung-Sung’s throat

“The bad guy is the company that owns a global monopoly on a market, and still drives to make profits? At what point is it enough? Why not just provide your service for free?”

“That’s insanity!” Yeung-Sung screamed back.

“Is it? Is it really?” Jordan asked, “With fusion, I can provide so much for so many, but the world is not ready for it. Free housing? Free food? That’s why what we’re doing her is so important! We need to detach our idea of what has value away from words like ‘money’ and ‘economy’. And direct towards people’s achievements. Merit, not money. That’s what I want the children of tomorrow to crave. What you call mere ‘games’ are challenges for you to prove your worth, show your value, show your merit. If you don’t like it, if you refuse to participate, then find a different one. Or create your own…

“But with no consequences! No base worries about a roof over your head, no unfed mouths. No need to bury your friends for your own chance at life. We are so far beyond that, that’s what I believe. Is that insanity? Insanity that I hate the concept of money so much that I murdered it?”

Yeung-Sung heard beeps continue underneath Jordan’s speech. His pain was gone, had long leaked out of him, and he was unable to rely on it to tell him what to say, what choice to make. And then the realization came.

“You’re going to let me die because I disagree with you. Like you let ‘old money’ die. Your ideas are not mad, Jordan. It’s you. Like I let Wil complete the Gauntlet, you should have allowed your ideas to be handled by someone more appropriate, someone not so close to the death of money.”

Jordan, lifted out of his self-fulfilling trance locked eyes with Yeung-Sung. “Excuse me?”

He rounded the corner of the bed and came to Yeung-Sung side -the side with the plug, just like in the dream, standing in the exact spot where he had gone into him for the kill.

“It’s a pity,” said Jordan, bending down to wind his finger against the socket’s coil, “You, and Una, and Simon, and MEDB…who else has to be stubborn change?”

With the heartrate monitor bludgeoning in his ears, Yeung-Sung thought back to entering the colony, certain of his own doom.

“You should have trusted your instincts,” Jordan said, and pulled.

“I accept death, I accept change Jordan, but I cannot accept you.”

Dying was like a tunnel. The very end of one.